by John Metcalf
“What?”
“Well, as it’s still pouring, if we had dinner here together. What do you think?”
“No, I haven’t got anything planned.”
“So would you like to?”
“Why not?” she said. “Sure.”
“Good!” he said. ‘I’d like that.”
He glanced at his watch.
“It’s a bit early yet,” he said, “so if you think our bodies could stand the strain, we’ll sit for a bit over another drink. Okay?”
She nodded.
He wished he hadn’t used the word “bodies.”
He lighted a cigarette.
“I thought you’d quit,” she said.
He blew out a long, deep jet of smoke.
“I am in the process of quitting.”
“Is it—” she said.
“I think—” he said. “Sorry. What were you . . .”
“No,” she said.
“I was just going to say that I think there’s supposed to be a band.”
“Where?”
“In the restaurant.”
“What sort of band?”
“I don’t know. A dance band, I suppose. It’s supposed to be quite good. The restaurant, I mean.”
“Do you like dancing?” she said.
“Not much, I’m afraid. Do you?”
“It depends.”
“You look like a dancer.”
“What do you mean?”
“A professional dancer.”
She smiled.
“What’s funny?”
“I was thinking about you dancing.”
“So what’s funny about that?”
“I couldn’t imagine it.”
“Why not.?”
She shrugged.
“Well, in the gallery you always seem so . . . oh, I don’t know.”
“Seem so what?”
“Well . . . dignified.”
“What do you mean, exactly, by ‘dignified?’”
“I mean . . . I couldn’t imagine you dancing.”
“Let me tell you,” he said, “that in the days of my youth . . .”
“You’re not old,” she said.
“Well, of course I’m not old but . . .”
“You’re not,” she said. “You shouldn’t say that.”
She was staring at him with uncomfortable intensity.
He decided it would be a very good idea to go to the washroom again.
It was empty and echoey in the washroom and smelled of the cakes of cloying air-freshener stuff in the urinals, a smell that he was rather ashamed of not disliking. He examined himself in the mirrors and combed his hair. All he’d had for lunch had been a container of yogurt. He was beginning to feel the effects of the Scotch.
He thought of Polly’s eyelashes.
Like Bambi.
What else could she have meant?
To the blank tile wall facing him, he said in a deliberately boomy voice,
“Bum like a plum.”
In the farthest cubicle, someone stirred, shoes grating on tiled floor.
Paul coughed.
Facing them just inside the entrance of the Canadian Grill as they waited for the maître d’ stood a sort of Islamic tent.
It was octagonal. It was large enough to have slept two. But higher. It rose to an ornate finial. Or rather, it was tent-like. Gauzy, chiffony stuff was stretched over the eight ribs. The shape suggested something of the dome of a mosque or a Mogul helmet. On a platform inside stood a huge basket of artificial flowers.
Paul stared at this amazing thing wondering who could have imagined such a folly in a Canadian National Railways Hotel in a room whose decor seemed otherwise baronial.
Or it might have been intended to suggest a miniature bandstand.
Or a gazebo.
“I don’t think I’m dressed for this,” whispered Norma.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You look beautiful.”
He smiled at her.
‘’As a matter of fact,” he said, “you always look beautiful.”
He followed her down the acres of tartan carpet, the khaki army-surplus bag bumping on her hip. Sticking out of it towards him was the shiny, black handle of a hairbrush. The maître d’ was a short, gorilla-shaped man in a bulging tuxedo. He kept hitching at his white gloves. His face was battered and, as he walked, he moved his head and shoulders as if shadow-boxing.
At a table at the edge of the dance floor, the maître d’ heaved out Norma’s chair with his left hand and, raising his right, with his gloved fingers fumbled a silent snap. They sat and were overwhelmed by waiters. Waiters seemed to outnumber customers. The waiters wore tuxedos but the servers and their servitors wore brown outfits with orange lapels; the width of the lapels seemed to indicate gradations of rank. Narrow lapels poured glasses of water. Wide lapels placed baskets of bread. Tuxedos inquired if they desired an apéritif.
“Scotch,” said Paul.
“What a weird man!” said Norma.
“Which?”
“That head waiter.”
“He’s a retired boxer,” said Paul.
“How do you know?”
“Undefeated CN/CP Bantam Champion.”
“Really?”
“They use him for thumping temperamental chefs.”
“Oh, he isn’t!”
“Customer complaints a specialty.”
“I’ve never been in a place like this,” said Norma.
It was as if the decorator had attempted to marry vague notions of a baronial Great Hall with the effects of an old movie theatre. Diners formed islands in the room’s vast emptiness.
“Wine?” said Paul to the waiter. “Oh, I would think so but we haven’t decided yet what we want to eat.”
They opened the padded leatherette menus.
“L’omble de l’Arctique,” said Paul.
“Oh, look!” said Norma. “Behind you, look!”
“What is an Arctic omble?”
“Paul, look!”
Waiters were converging.
A party of nine, all of whom seemed to have ordered roast beef.
Narrow lapels were hurrying in bearing aloft silver-coloured covered dishes; servers were pushing up to the table wheeled heating grills; servitors were lighting the gas. Wide lapels were taking the dishes from the narrow lapels and were handing them to the tuxedos, who plucked off the domed lids and slid the dishes onto the flames, poking artistically at the contents with spoon and fork until the gravy was boiling briskly.
An atmosphere of muted hysteria gripped the drama. There was much tense French-Canadian cursing. Chafing-dish lids were left with an edge in the flames so that narrow lapels burned their fingers removing them; a Yorkshire pudding fell on the floor; lapel bumped into lapel; dishes forgotten on the flames sent up fatty smoke as the gravy burned onto them.
“Tell him!” said Norma.
“Monsieur?”
“Your napkin thing,” said Paul, pointing. “On your arm. Appears to be on fire.”
Norma was hidden behind her menu giggling.
“Value for money, eh?” he said.
He was beginning to feel merrily sloshed.
The smouldering napkin was rushed from the room in a covered dish.
The acrid smell lingered.
One of the waiters was touring the table with a gravy boat; his progress was sacerdotal. Each time he stooped to dispense horseradish, his abbreviated jacket rose, revealing under his rucked shirt the elasticized top of his underwear.
“You know what it’s all like?” said Paul. “It’s like a Fernandel movie or Jacques Tati. That film he made about a restaurant. What was that called? The one that came before Traffic?”
“Are th
ey French?”
“The reason is,” said Paul, “the reason it’s all a bit off-centre, is because it’s a railway hotel. All these Bowery Boys aren’t real waiters. They’re all guys off trains—the guys that put the hotdogs in the microwave ovens at the take-out counter place. The guys that are grumpy about serving you once you’ve passed Kingston because it takes them two hundred miles with their lips moving to fill in the sheets about how many sandwiches they’ve sold. Which are full of ice crystals anyway. And after years of loyal service on the Montreal-Toronto run, they’re all rewarded with a job here on land. Which is why there’s so many of them. And look! Here he is. He’s coming again.”
They watched the bobbing and weaving of the maître d’ as he led a couple to a nearby table.
“The Caboose Kid,” said Paul.
“What?”
“That’s the name he used to fight under. No. That’s not quite right, is it? Kid Caboose! That’s it. That’s better.”
“Honestly!” said Norma. “You’re so silly.”
Head on one side, she was considering him.
“You really get into it, don’t you?”
“What do I ‘get into’?”
“All this stuff you make up.”
He shrugged and smiled at her.
“Do I?”
He was beginning to find it difficult to keep his mind on what his lips were saying. For some moments, he’d been aware of her leg touching his beneath the table; this contact was generating a most marvellous warmth. The play of the matte-black material filled his mind, furling, fitting plump, furrowed. Through his lower body and down his thighs seeped a different kind of warmth—luxurious, languorous—as if he were bleeding heavily from the hot centre of a painless wound.
He knew that he ought to be saying something.
He glanced across at her.
“Oh! Are those new?”
“What?”
“Those earrings. Hadn’t noticed them.”
With the back of her hand, she lifted and steered away the weight of her hair. This movement and the cocking of her head, tensed the tendon down the side of her neck and raised her left breast towards him.
What he had intended as an mmmm! of appreciation broke from him as something closer to a groan.
“It’s lovely,” he said.
“Vous avez choisi?”
Startled, Paul glanced up.
“Pardon? Oh, I don’t know. Ah, Norma?”
“Oh,” she said, and opened the menu again.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d like a steak, I think.”
“L’entrecôte, madame?”
“I guess so.”
“Monsieur?”
“L’omble de l’Arctique à l’infusion d’anis,” said Paul. “What is it?”
“L’omble de l’Arctique,” said the waiter, “it is a fish.”
“What kind of fish?”
“That’s a pink fish.”
“Pink,” repeated Paul.
“Inside the fish,” said the waiter, gesturing with pad and ballpoint, “is pink.”
An arm removed the ashtray and replaced it with a clean one; cutlery was set; the sommelier performed upon foil and cork. Paul duly tasted the grotesquely overpriced Mouton Cadet, remembering when it had been available for the present price of a pack of cigarettes and not much of a bargain even then.
She raised her glass and touched it to his.
Bambi.
Light danced off the polished tops of the salt-and-pepper shakers, flashed off cutlery. He watched the wink of light inside his glass, the play of pinks cast on the tablecloth. He was aware of light and shadow above him. He was, he realized, more inebriated than he’d thought. He tried the word “inebriated” inside his head. It seemed to work perfectly.
The brown sleeve placed under him a shrimp cocktail.
He stared down into it.
“Et pour madame, les hors d’oeuvres variés.”
The shrimps were minuscule, grayish, and frayed. He speared one. It was limp and didn’t taste of anything at all. He would have sworn under oath that the sauce was a combination of ketchup and Miracle Whip.
“It’s not good?” said Norma.
“Try it,” said Paul. “Here. I’ll put some on your plate.”
“No,” she said. “Just give me some on your fork.”
Holding the fork poised, she said,
“Paul?”
“What?”
“You didn’t really think I’d mind, did you?”
“Mind what?”
“Using your fork,” she said. “I don’t.”
He watched her lips close over the tines.
From behind the stage curtains with their flounced valance, a tuning “A” sounded three times on a piano. It was approximated by a guitar.
She wrinkled her nose.
“It’s not special, is it?” she said, handing back the fork.
Three ascending trumpet notes sounded.
The last one cracked.
The curtains drew back to reveal the resident band. They all wore baby-blue blazers and blue shirts with blue ruffles. They looked dispirited. The trumpet player spoke too close to the microphone so that the only words Paul caught were what sounded like “block and tackle” and “for your dining pleasure” and then they launched into “The Tennessee Waltz.”
After they’d worked it through, there was scattered applause.
“Oh, groan,” said Norma. “Groan. Groan.”
“This place,” said Paul, “is beginning to make me feel about ready for my pension.”
“You know what we ought to do?”
“What?”
“Well, if you feel like it, I mean.”
“Like what?”
She paused.
“I think,” she said, “that you’re beginning to get spliffed.”
“Spliffed? Oh! Certainly not,” he said. “Here, in an amazing exhibition of total clarity, is precisely what you said. You said that you’d like to do something if I felt like it but you didn’t say what. You see?”
“Go somewhere where there’s some non-plastic music.”
“Where’s that?”
“I know somewhere. Would you like to?”
“A magical mystery tour?”
Accented with rattles, woodblocks, and a cowbell, the band started hacking at something vaguely Latin-American.
“Well,” said Paul, “nothing could be much worse than this.”
“Oh, look!” she said. “I think this is us.”
A wheeled grill was advancing on their table; domed dishes held on high were heading in their direction; servitors were congregating.
The mummery commenced.
When bits of this and clumps of that had been arranged and rearranged, the plates were set before them.
“Et, voilà!” said the waiter.
Beside the chunk of fish was a plump greyish thing whose outer layers were almost translucent; these translucent leaves were heavily veined; they looked like veined membranes, like folded wings; whatever it was resembled the cooked torso of a giant insect.
They studied it.
“Could it be one of those things you get in salads?”
“Oh!” said Paul. ‘An endive? I suppose it could be. Braised?”
It reminded him of the nightmare things he’d batted down with a tennis racquet in their bedroom in Port Harcourt. He pressed it with his fork and yellow liquid issued.
He pushed the plate away.
He summoned a waiter.
He studied the brandy’s oily curve on the side of the glass. Changing with the angle of the glass, the brandy’s colours reminded him of stain and varnish, of the small chest of drawers he’d promised to strip and refinish. He tipped and tilted the glass;
oak, amber, the colours in the centre exactly the colours of the patina on rubbed and handled carvings.
After the Makonde carvings, the Shona stone.
And after the Shona stone, Rosenfeld’s pre-Columbian pots, and after Rosenfeld’s pots . . . he looked down a dreary vista of crafts elevated to the status of art wondering if the honest thing wouldn’t be a return to teaching.
He thought of the years after his return from Nigeria, years no longer cushioned by a salary from CIDA and a government house, the years he’d spent languishing at Lisgar Collegiate. What with the compelling arguments of Martha, the baby, the mortgage payments, he’d tried to persuade himself that he cared about teaching and the minutiae of school life, but the future had yawned before him, mountains of exercise books in which, until the age of sixty-five, he’d be distinguishing with a red pencil between “their” and “there.”
Uhuru!
He grunted.
And after Rosenfeld’s pots . . .
He was startled by the applause.
A girl had come out onto the stage. She was blonde and pretty. She was wearing a long green dress, the sort of dress that Paul thought of as a “party dress.” Her voice was small but sweet.
He found that he was humming along audibly with the melody of “These Foolish Things.” And then began to find his phrasing diverging from hers. He was so used to Ella Fitzgerald’s version of the song that he was anticipating adornment and shading which this girl could never reach. Pretty but somehow asexual, she was a crunchy-granola girl, an advertisement girl, impossibly wholesome, a toothpaste girl, under her party dress and white immaculate undies as waxen and undifferentiated as a doll.
He breathed in the brandy’s rising bouquet. Opening the pack of Rothman’s King Size, his fingers fumbled to discover that there were only two left. He somehow had smoked twenty-three cigarettes since ten o’clock in the morning.
The girl was singing “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.”
When, he wondered, could he have smoked them?
Tried to recall; tried to count.
He was moved and moving with the melody, could feel his head swaying.
He closed his eyes .
. . . how strange the change
from major to minor
ev’ry time we say goodbye.
Behind the girl’s voice, he seemed to hear Ella’s voice, dark and brooding.