“And what about Borzoi?” she says. “I never have lunch without him.” She smooths her thick glossy red hair back with one hand, thrusting her upper body forward slightly. Tom takes this in. Her hips swivel a titch. Tom reacts. He puts one hand on her shoulder.
“I think you’re really lovely,” he says, “marry me.” The dog growls. It’s a very soft low sibilant growl, not what you would normally think of as a dog growl at all.
“O not yet,” she says perkily, “shouldn’t we have some sort of courtship, go to Hawaii for a couple of weeks first or something like that? This guy over at the Buster Keaton Advertising Co. on 57th asked me if I’d like to go to Bermuda to go marlin fishing a couple of weeks ago. And I said, Marlin fishing? I don’t even know how to fish for trout. My father goes fishing,” she says sadly, as if this fact is a momentary blister on the otherwise perfect face of reality. She has a very fine line of light brown freckles across the bridge of her nose. Tom has a momentary semi, just a shift of emphasis, a faint bulge, nothing serious as yet. Besides he has loose pants on, must stop wearing jeans, no one else does any more, and the loose white jacket with the flap pockets is quite concealing, discreet.
He puts a hand on each of her trim black linen shoulders and kisses her, quite a long kiss, right there in front of everybody outside the washroom door. Hey, marry her, fella, somebody anonymous calls from out of the crowd.
She kisses back, this is true, mouth slightly parted, hips loose, hands half-raised, but doesn’t open her mouth, doesn’t put her tongue, no, that would be a bit much, in his handsome mouth.
Borzoi rises to the occasion and jumps up with his feathery white front paws on their shoulders, as if either trying to separate them or perhaps enter their embrace. Tom’s hand brushes her breast as they disengage. She kisses his hand.
Tom is not totally unaware of most of the party, exactly where they are, has forgotten about Whitney, who is obviously here somewhere, and has totally forgotten about the fact that they are going out of town tomorrow.
“It’s really hot in here,” says Tom uncomfortably, a little flushed, “why don’t we get some fresh air and a cool drink down the street?” He doesn’t know exactly where they should go, he simply has the automatic impulse that he would like the two of them, uh uh, 3, counting Borzoi, to get out to the freedom of the street. Freedom of the street, he thinks to himself, clichés, this is a cliché and I’m acting it out.
“I’ll be a second,” she says, “don’t go away, just wait here and I’ll be right back. Riiight back,” she adds. Borzoi trots dutifully behind Red’s gorgeous derrière as she sashays through crowds of people in the general direction of the improvised long table and planks and packing cases bar.
Of course she never comes back, and by the time that Tom realizes she was probably on her way home for the evening when she stopped for a quick pee in the first place, several other things have changed. He is a little soberer, a little dulled, and he has a small fierce little triphammer of a headache starting up somewhere in the far left side of his head.
He sees Mason standing a few feet away, leaning against the rough plaster wall and hopes he doesn’t look foolish.
“You are completely right, Mase,” he says. He slaps Mason on the shoulder. “Ok,” he says, “I think I’ve had too much to drink. I’m gonna get some air.”
“You’ve got to drink Lightning more slowly,” says Mason, as Tom ambles, turning this way and that, across the room to where Whitney is talking to Henner.
But when he arrives at the far west side of the room, he finds, by the big industrial window, the fiddler woman with a bright Peruvian vest, talking to a couple of girlfriends about how great Maria Muldaur is, and how stupid men are about cooking. “I mean,” she says, “they’re so beautiful, and you really try to love them in the best way you can; but, fuck, they don’t even wash up the pots, not even the pots, after they do simple things like steak and mashed potatoes.”
“I never eat beef,” one of her friends says, “chicken, I eat chicken once or twice a week. I don’t even like to see a chicken get killed.”
“Ok, then, chicken. They don’t even wash up the pots afterwards after they’ve done some chicken.” She turns to Tom. “You’re looking for somebody,” she says.
“Yeah, uh, tall slim dark girl, bright lipstick, sort of classy looking. She was standing right here talking to some old guy.”
“Some old guy?” the country rock fiddler says. “You mean hen-killer Henner? That hawk-eyed fart. Grover, my boyfriend, was in a group he managed. I think they split.” She says this with a gesture of vague hopefulness.
“Split?”
“I don’t know. I think they were heading for the front door.”
So, Whitney has done one of her famous splits, this time with the vaguely degenerate manager of the group, an older guy, a coke user, and a guy Tom doesn’t particularly like, in contrast to the healthy 20somethings radical character of the Desperados themselves. Hayden is involved in some business deal on a different floor. Laura has apparently split also, with her impressive dog. And Tom himself feels strangely satisfied and also hungry. It’s about 10:30 or somewhere around there, the band is heading for Bloomington, Ind., and the Desperados’ farewell is beginning, for Tom, to collapse around his large handsome head like a crayon-coloured brown paper bag.
He hears the women’s laughter over his shoulder as he wanders through the group of people in the direction of the kitchen.
The scene in the kitchen, not a small room by any means, is not bizarre or spectacular, but, nevertheless, it knocks Tom for a loop.
The grey & orange tiled counter space around the double sink at the far wall has been supplanted by a long trestle table set up to accommodate a variety of plates and bowls eventually bound for the main room and hungry people’s happy mouths. A large plump French guy with marcelled blond hair in a tall floppy white chef’s hat and big over-size white apron is doing up 2 large frying pans of veal meatballs. An asst. sans floppy whites is washing mussels, or clams maybe, over by the sink. This is fragrant.
“Are the clams good?” he asks a young outofwork answer to Peter Townshend.
“Mussels. Fabulous,” he says, “they’re out of this world.”
He walks over to the main counter and gets a plate with a green stripe from one of 2 stacks that are sitting there. A guy with a pony tail, these guys must be ex sailors or navigators of something, gestures at a pile of clean forks & knives and Tom gets a helping of fresh mussels from the big cook Marcel. The mussels look nice and fat inside the black crusty shells with little bits of onion, black olives and pimento and lots of red juice steaming up from the plate.
He leans against the wall with the noises of the stove behind him and somebody’s bass starting up in the next room (several groups are sitting in fooling around blues mostly to provide some live music for the send off) and he eats about ½ the plate of mussels slowly and feels refreshed.
Wiping his mouth with a folded napkin from a stack by the side of one of the small ovens Tom looks up surprised and sees Laura standing in the kitchen doorway with a drink in her hand. He wonders vaguely if it’s the same drink, probably yes, perhaps not. She smiles as if with a great satisfaction, as if she has just accomplished some mission or endeavour of some kind. The dog is still with her, looking inquisitively at one of the tables on which presumably there is something that smells good.
“Come on in,” he says, “the water’s wonderful.” He wonders what the dog does all day when she goes to work, he has an image of her in the morning shower, caps of white soap tumbling from her bright red hair, her breasts. Then he wonders if perhaps some agency or person has actually sent her to New York.
“Hmmm, no,” she puts one hand on her trim stomach and shakes her head deliciously, “I couldn’t eat a thing. I’ll feel hungry later on. You’ve eaten.”
“Ah, sure, why? Do I have a food stain on my new shirt?” He’s wearing a pale blue denim shirt.
“No,” she
says, “it looks great.” When she says this and puts her hand against his chest he takes her in his arms and kisses her.
In the big yellow cab heading west on 59th to where she lives, somewhere around Columbus Circle, she leans back in the seat and puts her head on his shoulder. “I’m exhausted,” she says. The driver is fumbling around with the car radio and tunes in on an old 1977 song by Meat Loaf called “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Tom remembers the song, he feels almost nostalgic, he was still in college.
“Do you remember this song, ‘Paradise on the Dashboard’?” he asks her, misremembering the title, letting one casual hand flop on her white knee, in the dark of the cab her knee has an almost bright glowing colour.
“No,” she says mysteriously, “I was in the southwest …”
“Oh,” he says. The dog sits in the front seat head sometimes weaving from side to side, mouth open, panting.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these works have appeared in same or different versions in the following magazines and imprints: Canadian Fiction Magazine, 20th Anniversary Issue; Descant; Exile; This Magazine; Quarry; and a special limited edition chapbook by “L e t t e r s book shop,” prop. Nicky Drombolis. The author would like to take the occasion to thank these editors and various people like Peter McPhee, Ayanna Black, Gord Robertson, Lelah Ferguson, who have made intelligent suggestions, as well as Stan Dragland and the editorial department at McClelland & Stewart.
The author would also like to thank the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for their support.
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