by Betsy Burke
I stifled my disappointment with some of the gooey sweet slice.
The morning crawled. No superheroes or spies materialized. The only interruption was a middle-aged Japanese couple, tourists without a word of English. They tittered and chattered over some etchings for a good half hour and then made their choice. You would have thought they were buying a Van Gogh, they were so pleased with themselves. They picked out a monster member in lurid pinks and purples, then with much bowing and smiling, they put it on their VISA and took it away. One less willy in my life.
I surfed the net for a while then e-mailed Sky, “Help, I’m a prisoner in a Gastown weenie factory.”
She e-mailed back, “Aye, there’s the rub.”
We agreed to meet for lunch at our usual place.
It was ten minutes to one when Nadine finally arrived. She wore dark glasses and when I said “Good morning” too brightly, she let out a grunt of disgust and retreated into her office. I was surprised that she didn’t send me out to get her something to eat.
“I’m going for lunch,” I yelled in the direction of the door. When there was no answer, I put on my coat and headed off to meet Sky.
Evvie’s Midnight Diner was one of those Naugahydebooth, dusty plastic aspidistra, twirly-stool-at-the-long-steel-counter kind of places near East Hastings. A hungry part of town. Evvie was actually a huge ugly-beautiful Lebanese man. His name was unpronounceable so everyone just called him Evvie. He had bought the place from the real Evvie back in Jeremy’s day, sold it in the eighties, gone home to Lebanon, seen what a Swiss cheese had been made of his home country, hightailed it back to Canada, bought his old diner back, and restored it to exactly what it had been in the seventies, right down to the liverish color of the booths.
Evvie’s Midnight Diner had been a well-kept secret for decades, a haunt for vanilla drunks, Korea crazies, fresh air inspectors and actors waiting up to read their reviews in the morning papers. Now it was becoming fashionable again simply because it was so unfashionable. The real thing. Sky and I had given up being virtuous and eating at those health food places with the nut rissole burgers and grass cutting teas. Evvie’s served cheap old-fashioned unhealthy food and piles of it.
Sure, there were salads on the menu at Evvie’s, too, but it would have been frivolous for a person in my financial position to bypass the mountainous, double-cheese, bacon and mushroom burgers with the side of fries for a sagging lettuce leaf and an anemic tomato slice. Or the platter of battered and deep-fried halibut and prawn with loads of tartar sauce. It was good dollar value.
Let’s be frank here. Only the rich can afford to starve.
And there was another problem. The food I left in the fridge at home disappeared mysteriously before I could get to it. I thought I was being clever, eating out, keeping my food out of the Viking’s mouth. She’d denied touching any of it, just as I’d denied touching her Glug. I asked her if maybe her conquests didn’t get hungry and thirsty in the night, and perhaps didn’t make a raid on the provisions, but her eyes and mouth narrowed into a sneering expression and she said, “You jealous.”
Sky was sitting in our booth at the end of the diner. She was not alone. With her, was a man whose hair was just a little too blond. His trimmed mustache lurked on his upper lip like a small yellow rodent. His face was buffed to an unnatural shine. He wore a lavender-colored Lacoste T-shirt, a preppy gray knit sweater knotted around his shoulders, and a pair of jeans that were so tight I wouldn’t have been surprised if he squeaked when he talked. He was fit though, and very neat. Nice and tidy right down to his fingernails. He must have been edging on forty—perhaps he was older—but he gave the impression of eternal forced youth.
He was running his hand up and down Sky’s arm and if he kept at it much longer, he was going to leave her with no skin. There was no doubt about it. He had taken possession of her. And Sky seemed pretty happy to be possessed. She had a slightly goofy expression on her face and a bruised, trampled look about her. When I sat down at the table, she held out her hand, palm up, in a Ta-da gesture and said, “Lucy Madison, Max Kinghorn.”
So this was the guy who had hired Sky to manage the store, the famous boss from Seattle. I peered rudely.
Max didn’t bother to stand up on my arrival as I might have expected from such a tidy polite-looking person. He must have sensed my hostility. He laughed a nervous, whiny, slightly nasal laugh and went back to the arm stroking as if his life depended on it.
I stretched out my hand to shake his, and to stop him from doing all that damned stroking.
“Sky’s told me all about you,” I said, forcing myself to smile.
He whinnied again.
She had told me all about him. She’d gone into quite a lot of gory detail.
Max Kinghorn was the owner of the Retro Metro Boutique, but he lived in Seattle where he had other vintage boutiques. He was a strange bird. A vulture, to be precise. He stocked his stores by reading obituaries published up and down the West Coast, from California to B.C. He was always ready to swoop down on the defunct’s family and offer to take the horrid burden of dusty antiquated clothing, furniture and knickknacks off their hands. As vintage vultures go, I gathered he was the best in his trade. But Sky, I wanted to scream, Oh Sky, what about that little thing you told me about Max, that one, really important detail?
Max shifted, gave a few last frenzied strokes, then pecked Sky demurely on the cheek. “Well, I’m sure you ladies have a lot to talk about. I’ll get going. I have business in Port Townsend.” Then he whispered to Sky, “Ciao, liebchen, I’ll call you.”
I could picture it already, Max hovering and slavering as he waited to pick over the corpse down in Port Townsend, offering condolences to the bereaved family along with his certified cheque.
I watched him leave then glared at Sky across the table. “That’s Max, Sky? The infamous Max?”
She glared back at me. “Don’t get worked up about it. I told you I thought he was interesting.”
“I didn’t realize you thought he was that interesting.”
“Just what do you mean by that?”
I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”
Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.
“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”
Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.
“He’s so…so…”
“Gay?”
“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”
“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.
Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”
“I think I need to start worrying about you.”
“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.
“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s
time you started listening to your mother, Sky. All those talks of hers about self-esteem and so on.”
“You’re not listening to me, Luce. Shut up for a minute. What I mean is, I’m something new for him. I’m exotic. By comparison, I mean. You know, by comparison to being with men.”
“Sure you are, dear,” I said in the voice my mother used on me when I was eight.
“And Christ, Lucy, you should see the way he looks in a suit.”
I wanted to see the way he looked in a suit. A suit of armor. Dropped into the ocean, with him in it.
Sky always had been a sucker for a nice garment. Her degree is in theatrical costume design. We met when the university theater department roped me into doing a little set painting for a production of Peer Gynt. During that particular show, she was fighting with the director, who’d slept with her then refused to acknowledge her. She took revenge by using weak seams in strategic places. A few belly dancers accidentally bared their nipples during the dance sequence and some trolls had codpiece problems while trogging around in the Hall of the Mountain King. We giggled like idiots from backstage. Apart from that, it was an uneventful production.
Sky had had a lot of boyfriends back in the university days, but none of them had left her with the day-after evidence that Max had.
“I can’t resist him.” She shook her head, then grimaced and stuck out her tongue at me.
“When are you seeing him again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Of course I don’t know. Why would I know? He’s a busy man. So stop asking me trick questions.”
I didn’t remind Sky of that drunken evening just after I’d gotten rid of Frank. The one where Sky and I started out delicately sipping white wine and ended up falling headfirst into gallons of tequila sunrise, sloppily guzzling and making a lot of drunken Never Again promises. Never Again would we go out with men who were lechers, men who were leeches, men who were misogynists, men who were polygamists—our list was quite long and we pretty much eliminated half the human race.
After all the Never Agains, and since Mr. Perfect still hadn’t shown up, it was just a question of choosing one of the guys off the Never Again list.
I said, “Let’s forget about him for a minute. Let’s not let men ruin our lunch.”
“Good thinking.” Sky suddenly looked like her old self again.
I launched into all my news. Jeremy’s funeral, Paul Bleeker’s big show and small advances, Connie. When she heard the Connie part, Sky said, “I think you need to talk to Reebee on this one. You might need a shot of voodoo.”
Reebee Robertson is Sky’s mother and my creativity expert. In her forty-seven years of life, Reebee has been Rolfed, Reike-ed, Shiatsu-ed, acupunctured, transactionally analyzed, regressionally analyzed, re-birthed, de-birthed, Jung-ed, Freuded, Adlered, Kleined and Winnicotted. These days she offered up her own kind of psychological hodgepodge. Her techniques may not have been highly regarded by the head-shrinking intelligentsia but they worked for me.
For a small painting, she would leave me thinking how wonderful I was and get me unstuck when I was blocked and unable to paint. Of course, I had to put up with Sky snickering on the sidelines at what she called all that New Age drivel.
Reebee had turned a life’s worth of experiments and hapless wandering into a psychology degree. Then she had added a whole lot of other elements—myth and superstition—to her treatment. In her New Age way, she had renovated and furnished her Kitsilano house with favors.
She traded her way through life, something that Sky couldn’t tolerate. “Give me the delicious feel of cool hard cash any day,” Sky was prone to saying, punctuated with, “I’m a material girl.” Sky lusted after clean sheets and her own pristine space. It was hard to blame her really. Reebee had dragged the protesting toddler from a Salt Spring Island commune to Victoria group house to a California Hari Krishna plantation to a hammock on a Maui beach, before finally dumping her with the grandparents back in Vancouver when she decided to go back to university.
The waitress brought our orders and just before Sky threw herself on the club sandwich, she said, “Really terrible about Jeremy. Easter’s going to be awful without him, isn’t it? God, I can still remember that year when we all went out to Cedar Narrows for the big meal. I nearly peed myself laughing, Jeremy making all those Jesus jokes, and your dad turning scarlet with rage.”
“That was Jeremy all over. A terrible tease.”
“Where are you spending it this year?”
“Don’t know. My parents’ place in Cedar Narrows as usual, I guess.”
“You could spend it with us. Reebee will probably be doing something obscene with tofu but there’ll be lots of good wine.” Sky became emphatic. “She really wants to see you. I’ve been keeping her up-to-date, but she wants to see you in person.”
“I don’t know about Easter.”
“Call her.”
“I will.”
“Promise you’ll call her today, when you get back to work.”
“I promise. But I’ve got to do something about the Dirk situation. I’ve got to see my parents and get this thing sorted out. He might show up. I should go out to Cedar Narrows and act as a decoy. Big holidays always bring out the worst in him. If only he’d just come out and behave badly and we could have him arrested. And there’s one other thing about going to Cedar Narrows for Easter.”
“What’s that?”
“Having to show up alone and unmarried when that walking hormone of my cousin and her perfect husband will be there. You know Cherry. She’ll be front and center with Michael and her entire demon spawn and probably pregnant with triplets if I know her.”
Sky nodded and then a wicked smile crept across her face. “You could ask Paul Bleeker to Easter at your parents’. I’m sure he’d appreciate your mother’s collection. All that marvelous sculpture.”
I swatted her with the menu.
I took my time getting back to the gallery that afternoon. Max was far from perfect but at least Sky had someone to stroke all the skin off her arm. All I had was a vague possibility that Paul Bleeker might, if he happened to remember, ask me out again. And even at that, there was no guarantee that he’d show up.
When I got back to the gallery, Nadine’s office door was open and she was moaning into the phone. “So did I, darling, so did I…so are you, darling, so are you…it was, darling, it really was…it was so…what, Night Porter?…no, I rather think Last Tango in Paris.”
I confess I haven’t seen these movies but the word-of-mouth rehashes of the important bits have a wide circulation.
Nadine stuck her head out of the office, glared at me, and continued talking. “Do let’s do it again. I’ll supply the champers and the toys. You supply the…yes, that. Yes, of course I will.”
I don’t know about you, but when I really want a man, I choose to ignore his past, even if it’s a very recent past, like a just-a-minute-ago-on-the-other-end-of-a-telephone past, just as long as it really is past and doesn’t creep into the present or the future. I couldn’t be sure who was on the other end of the line, but I wanted to be prepared for any eventuality. I mean, a man that came with no past, what kind of a man could he be? On the other hand, a man that sleeps with Nadine Thorpe? Nadine Thorpe was one big walking appetite. And Nadine looked flattened and mussed-up today. She had definitely had sex last night. Everybody—Nadine, Sky, Max, that middle-aged Japanese couple, possibly even my parents (repellent thought)—was having sex but me. It was time to take action. It was time to get therapy. I phoned Reebee and got myself invited for dinner that Friday night.
5
It took some courage. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. After the Frank episode, I was afraid to see her, afraid of what she’d tell me because I’d avoided her the whole time I’d been involved with him. I was like a Catholic who hadn’t been to confession in a really long time, and all my sins had piled up so that I was going to Hell for certain and
no priest could save me.
I rang the doorbell and waited. Reebee opened up and stood there nodding and smiling smugly. She was tiny, even smaller than Sky. Her long silvery-dark hair was pulled into a braid, and she wore an antique Chinese silk dress that hung to her feet. Her earrings were coin yen with ivory gambling sticks dangling from them. Although it was March, and still cold, she wore thongs on her feet. There was a strange musty odor to her, like closed rooms and incense.
Her first words to me were, “Your aura, Lucy. It’s very strange. Come inside and we’ll fix it.”
“Sure,” I said, “get out your aura repair kit. Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s full of anger and jealousy, with a little sadness thrown in.” She put an arm across my shoulders and said, “I’m sorry about Jeremy. But then it’s clear to see that it was his time. He had to move on. But I wouldn’t worry. His karma was good. He’ll be moving onto a higher plane. Do you want some tea before we start?” she asked.
“Uh…dunno,” I muttered. Reebee called it tea but the stuff she served was mulch in my opinion. “You wouldn’t have any real tea, would you, something with a punch to it like Twinings English Breakfast or Lapsang souchong?”
“Ah, Lapsang souchong. What memories. A remnant of another life.”
Reebee and her lives.
“Yes?”
“It seems I was a Chinese courtesan as well.” She said this proudly. It explained her new get-up.
“No kidding. When did you discover this?”