Come two in the morning, Stewart took the keys back from the valet.
“Are you sure you’re okay to drive?” Audrey asked.
“Definitely. If we go fast enough, we’re bound to cut a straight path.”
Back at the house they drank more wine and jived to Louis Prima albums. Outside, the sky paled to blue and Stewart suddenly remembered. “Jesus, I rented Rita Hayworth for you.”
“Well, get her out here!”
“I mean Gilda. I got it at the same place I bought you the reel of Singin’ in the Rain. Stay there, I’ll go get the projector and we’ll watch it against the wall.”
Minutes later, the two of them lay on throw cushions staring at Hayworth.
The sun had begun its pink rise over the hills outside as Gilda’s melancholy voice strummed “Put the Blame on Mame, Boys …”
Lying in the cushions, her voice low and scratchy from too much time awake, Audrey sang along. Stewart looked over. “Hayworth once said, They go to bed with Gilda and they wake up with me.’”
“That’s sad,” Audrey croaked. “Do you think she was lonely?” Hayworth and Glenn Ford argued somewhere in the distance when her lids fell shut.
She opened her eyes to a foot nudging her ribs. “Get up.”
Her head throbbed. Early-morning sun lit the room and Hayworth was gone. The reel on the projector spun, loose film flapping. With Stewart’s arm around her, she couldn’t move. Suddenly he sniffed hard and sat up, glanced unsteadily about the room and up at his wife who stood in her overcoat, jaw clenched. “Get off my floor,” she said evenly.
“Mother. When did you get back? I thought you…”
“Five minutes ago. Caught the first flight out to make it home for your birthday.”
Stewart stood up and rubbed his arms. “Audrey wanted to watch Gilda for her birthday.”
“So I see.” Nancy’s arms were stiff, her mouth, her throat.
Standing too now, Audrey squinted in the hangover bright. Stewart picked up cushions, tossed them to the sofa. “Thought you were staying on till Tuesday. I could’ve picked you up.”
“Tough when you’re caught with your pants down, isn’t it?”
Audrey tried to focus, decipher her tone. Adrenaline coursed through her arms. The green dress? The outfit was too flashy.
“We’ll clean up, Nancy, don’t worry,” he said with a sigh.
“Please. Look at yourself, Stewart. And her with all that black makeup.”
Audrey took a step toward her. “Mother?”
She glowered at her daughter. “Think you’re clever, don’t you?”
“Nancy,” Stewart said. “What are you doing?”
“Opening my eyes and taking a good look around,” she said, turning to him. “What a ride you’ve had.”
“What’s going on?” Audrey finally asked.
“Get out of my sight,” Nancy said flatly.
Audrey paused. Her mother glared at Stewart, who suddenly looked thin and uncertain. Audrey moved past them up the stairs. On her bed she sat rubbing fingers over the Christmas-ball finish of her dress as she listened.
From Stewart: “What in god’s name are you thinking?”
The sound of a match striking.
“I’m worried about you, Nancy.”
Her mother gives a clanging fake chortle. Then says, “Stop saying my name, please. Out of your mouth, it sounds like a sickness.”
“Perhaps from your point of view, it looked peculiar—”
“That’s right.”
“We fell asleep like that because…”
“Do tell.”
“We went into town and had dinner and some champagne. It’s her sixteenth birthday after all. Then I brought us home and she was a little wound up still—she wanted to watch a movie.”
“So you thought you’d watch a striptease film with a sixteen-year-old girl?”
“It’s hardly a—Hayworth takes off her gloves. Look, Audrey really wanted to see Gilda. I didn’t want to be a crank about it.”
Silence. Then, “Audrey wanted to.”
“Yes. Her heart was set on it so I asked Eddie to see if he could get us a reel.”
“You were entwined. I came home to my husband entwined with my daughter.”
“Well, I—-Jesus—she cuddled up to me in the night, I guess—don’t make such a production out of this, Nancy.”
Upstairs, Audrey’s face was ashen. Cuddled? Heat prickled up the back of her neck. She couldn’t recall cuddling.
“Cuddled up? My daughter made a pass at my husband? Is this what you’re saying?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t a pass—”
“I told you. Spending the time you do with her is unnatural. I told you that—the pearls and the singing and carrying on at parties. And what did you say?”
“Listen, Audrey’s mature for her age and because of that, she often seeks more stimulating conversation with adults. It’s noth—”
“You said it was fine. I was crazy. Nancy’s always crazy. You brought this on!” She started to sob. “Why, why can’t things ever be right for me?”
“No, no. Come here, sweetheart.”
Audrey shook, her flesh red and jumping. I’m sure it wasn’t a pass. Why would he say it like that? His arm was around her.
Later, Stewart sat in the chair against her bedroom wall. He stared at the floor before he spoke. “Your mother and I think it would be best if you left the house for a while.”
Audrey’s eyes opened wider.
“Everything will be fine. We just need to take a bit of breathing time. Your mother’s cousin is in Brooklyn and my sister, of course, is here in Scarsdale. You might miss a bit of school if you stay in Brooklyn but there’s more room and you’d be closer to your rehearsals.”
It won’t be fine, she wanted to say. Why didn’t you tell her to shut up? Why didn’t you say she was wrong? You picked Gilda. But she stayed mute.
He looked away. “I know it’s hard to understand, but this is the best thing.”
The next morning, Nancy stayed in her room while Stewart drove Audrey and a small suitcase to the train station. Her aunt would be expecting her, he said. Handing her what cash he had in his wallet—twenty-seven dollars—he promised it wouldn’t be too long.
She sat down on a bench and let the train to Brooklyn leave without her. And the next and the next. She didn’t think of the ballet rehearsals themselves but she did think of that Italian girl in the corps with her. The one who lived all by herself in Little Italy. She knew something about everything. She would know.
Celia sits up suddenly from Annie’s lap. “I’m going to say yes,”
“To what?”
She reaches for her purse. Opening the small velvet box, she slides the gold band from its groove and slips it onto her finger, heads off to bed.
The next day they are up at noon. Celia, chipper and buoyant, has gone to the store for bacon, eggs, fruit, milk and bread and begun a whopping breakfast for the two of them.
Eyes catching on the diamond that glints off Celia’s finger, Annie tries unsuccessfully to make light conversation. She takes to reading yesterday’s paper and announcing snippets instead.
“Looks like Jacky-boy took another primary.”
“Uh-huh,” Celia says brightly as she scrambles eggs in a bowl and pours the whole mess into hot grease. Annie flips the radio on as Celia lays bacon, eggs and orange slices onto plates. The toast pops. And then, “In other news, theatre director Michael Stark has been arrested on charges of aggravated assault.” Celia’s hand stops in mid toast-grab. Annie turns up the volume. “Stark allegedly stabbed theatre critic Albert Warner late last night in Manhattan’s Stork Club. Warner is listed in satisfactory condition. Stark’s bail will be set pending psychiatric evaluation …”
Celia tosses toast on the table with something just this side of a slam before she slumps in a chair. A resigned blast of air through her nose, she thumbs the ring.
Annie pats fingertips to her lip
s a moment. “I think Warner had it coming.”
Fourteen
IT WAS 3:30 IN THE MORNING BY THE TIME I DRAGGED through the door of my apartment. It felt foreign, but then so did everything lately. Sticking my face into my bedroom, I flipped the light on, relieved the bed was empty though it looked slept in. Not that I make my bed much but the crumple right now seemed alien, impertinent. Catching some movement by my dresser, I let out a yelp and knocked my head against the doorjamb. It turned out to be me in my mirror, my short dark mop reflecting back as the most foreign thing of all. I watched my hand as it ran through my curls. Some part of my brain had expected my old self to resume where it left off before I drove south. I turned the light off.
In the bathroom the toilet seat was up. More impertinence. I looked at my reflection over the sink. I was a stranger in my own mirrors.
I left the light on and relit the bedroom as I passed. I turned on lamps in the living room. On the desk, my laptop sat open and an empty beer bottle loitered beside it along with a dishtowel tossed across a crumb-scattered plate. Some little gizmo was attached to the top of my computer screen. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a webcam. The machine was off, but the camera lens stared. Snatching the dishtowel, I threw it overtop.
In the kitchen, a couple more empty beer bottles sat on the counter. A chip bag. My shoulders jumped and warbled and agitated me. The bottles and bag agitated me. It’s not as if he wasn’t here all the time anyway—what’s the big deal? I went to the counter and put the empties in the cupboard under the sink, chucked the bag in the garbage.
I don’t know where to sleep, I thought. I can’t sleep in that room. I had a peculiar itch in the back of my mind that the girl in the mirror was going to watch me sleep. The webcam would watch me watch her. “This is what happens when you drive for sixteen hours,” I told myself. Sitting down on the couch, I reached for the remote and turned the television on, hoping commercial voices and canned laughter might soothe me.
My cell phone went. It was going on four in the morning.
“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” Leonard. “I figured you’d turn it off if you were sleeping.”
I told him that I’d just got in the door.
“I had a nightmare.”
“Me too. Or I’m about to. Want me to come over?”
“You will? Yeah.” He sounded so grateful, it made my heart ache a little. I rummaged in my mother’s trunk, picked up the heart and stuck it in my coat pocket. I looted some sweats and a T-shirt from my room, set the trunk in the hall closet and covered it with an old blanket before I left.
Leonard’s apartment door was unlocked and he sat on his bed. “I didn’t think you owned pyjamas,” I said from the entrance to his bedroom.
“Eunice gave them to me.” He looked up and his head jerked back. “Holy shit! When did you do that?”
I glanced upward at my bangs. “Couple days ago.” I shrugged. “I’m in flux.” I dropped my stuff to the floor and flopped on the bed beside him. “Eunice is Mrs. Whoserface?” Touching at the royal-blue piping of the shirt, I gasped. “Are these silk?”
“It’s not like that!” he said and hugged his knees.
“They’re nice.” I tugged the hem and let him go. “What’d you dream?”
“I was at the back of the bus and I had a coffin across my lap and you were inside and people kept turning around and looking at me. They wanted to take the lid off and I wouldn’t let them and there were only three stops to go. Three minutes, I kept saying, if I can just keep them away for three minutes.” Leonard has an obsession with threes. When his mother was three months pregnant she was diagnosed with some kind of uterine cancer. The doctors wanted to operate but it would have meant aborting. They told her there wasn’t any point in carrying to term anyway, that children in these situations usually die before the age of three. She was a devout Christian and she refused. Leonard was born, the cancer progressed and she died when Leonard was three months old. His father couldn’t bear to look at him and he was raised by his grandmother until he was three years old when his father remarried. I have a lot of recovering Christians in my life, it occurred to me.
“On your lap?”
He nodded. “It was like this.” He brought his hands out to his sides. A three-foot coffin. “And it had leather straps at either end so I could carry it.”
Laughing, I said, “That’s the trunk—my mum’s trunk.”
“Oh. Yeah,” he said softly. After a pause he took a sharp breath as though he was about to speak and then didn’t.
When Leonard gets like this, I stay quiet. It’s a delicate operation. It’s as though he’s a little kid on the end of a wharf with a fishing line in his hands, waiting for some bold swimmer to take the bait. He keeps trying until he catches one by the lip. It takes patience. After several yanks, Leonard said, “She’s mad at me for not staying tonight.”
“Mrs. Whosits?” I asked. He nodded. “Did you sleep with her?” A long pause, one fruitless yank and then, “Yes. But I didn’t want to stay there tonight. And now she thinks I only want to be there if she’s paying me. And that’s not true. I’m starting to think I … She’s beautiful, so it’s not that—but she’s twice my age, practically.”
“Practically. I assumed she was seventy or something, playing bridge.”
He looked perplexed a second. “They don’t actually play bridge. Her and her friends just say that. It’s code for, let’s get together and eat and get drunk and yak. It’s a euphorism.”
“Euphemism.”
“Can you not do that when I’m like this?”
“Sorry. That’s a good one, actually. All the nice words that mean drunk should be called euphorisms. Euphoria-isms? So, she’s not seventy.”
“She’s fifty-four.” He got up and went to his dresser, brought back a snapshot. “That’s her there.” In the photo, he stood in his full catering attire (tuxedo shirt, bow tie and black trousers) behind three women sitting at an umbrellaed patio table.
He pointed to a brunette, olive-skinned woman with large dark eyes and a full laughing mouth. She was beautiful.
“Has she had loads of work done?”
“No. She’s Italian. Her maiden name is Delucchi.”
“She’s married.”
“Widowed. I just feel weird. I’m scared I’ve got a mommy complex or something.”
I examined the picture again. “She doesn’t look mumish. And she sure doesn’t look like yours.” Leonard’s current mother, his stepmother, was married once before she met Len’s father. She divorced her first husband shortly after she found him in bed with a man. Which would explain why she chose John Wayne’s double for number two. She seemed perennially frustrated and wanting. Except to her face, Len never referred to her as Mother or any of its variations. Always Edna.
“I looked up Germaine Greer on the Internet,” I said, “and she’s got a thing for boys now. Young ones.”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She kind of slagged off dykes and fags a bit. I don’t why my mother was into her. I read somewhere that she wrote a sequel to The Female Eunuch because women had gone from having no cunt then to being all-cunt now. Something like that. Today’s girls are nothing but their sexuality …?” I waited for an argument and didn’t get one.
We slept in Leonard’s bed that night. As I closed my eyes, I reached across and squeezed his wrist, told him to have good dreams. “Just stay out of the box,” he whispered and left his wrist in my hand.
The next day I drove downtown to the library. Trudging up escalators through the cavernous, echoing pseudo-pantheon of the main branch, I headed to the political science department and asked if they had anything on Bobby Kennedy. The librarian pattered away on her keyboard and directed me to two sets of shelves, one with books and one with videos. Videos hadn’t occurred to me. I pulled three Bobby books and stood over the videos, agog, before I chose two on 1960s history—one on the relationship between Bobby
and Martin Luther King Jr. and one the mutual loathing between Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
On the way home my cell phone rang. According to the call display, it was me calling.
“Are you home?” Frank.
“I’m in town,” I said. “I’m on my way home now.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, incredulous. “Your bag’s here, you’re not.”
I didn’t feel like it seemed an inappropriate answer. I didn’t know why I didn’t feel like it either and I didn’t want to discuss it. “It was three-thirty in the morning when I got in. I was just about to call you. It was early when I got up and then I went to the library and there’s no reception in there. You’re not even allowed to use your cell.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry, Frank.”
“The only time you use my name these days is when you’re pissed off at me or you’re scared I’m pissed off at you.” He exhaled. It was silent again except for a faint clatter in the background. “So when are you coming home? I’m at your place.”
“I know. I’m about six blocks away. What are you doing?”
“Show you when you get here.” His tone levitated a little.
I shut my phone, turned off Burrard and detoured down West 5th. Toward my mother’s. Just to check.
Out front, the agent’s sign still stuck out of the ground like a tongue. The house stood in its comfy-yet-stately grace, patiently waiting for someone new to embrace it.
When I set the key in the lock of my apartment again, it still seemed as though I was entering alien territory. And yet I resented Frank’s being there. He was tapping away at the keyboard of my computer; that’s what he’d been doing when he called. “Hey!” he yelled as I dropped my books and movies by the door. “Viv.” He stopped at the top of the hallway. Flipping on the light to get a better look, he continued slowly toward me. “What the hell did you do?”
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