The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Sure, watch me. Think I won’t buy a round?”

  Lee works swiftly, darting back and forth behind the bar, hands always doing two things at once. Amy sets the tab down and waits for him to fill her order. Glasses clink sharply as Lee slides the drinks across the bar to her, one after another. Amy senses that she’s being watched. She glances up. The hippie raises a glass of beer in a toast to her. She nods and smiles, forced and stiff-looking, she knows.

  As she serves the wedding party their round, the man drinking C.C. signals for her to come over. He nudges his drink. “I said I wanted C.C.,” he says.

  “I beg your pardon, but you are drinking C.C.” She hasn’t switched. Not yet.

  “I know my rye. And this isn’t Canadian Club.”

  Amy feels the pain in her stomach swell along with her anger. “Would you like to see your tab?” She shows him where she’s written “C.C.”

  “What does that tell me?” The woman beside him smiles knowingly. The other couple sitting at the table ignore him and appear unconcerned.

  “It tells you that you ordered Canadian Club and that’s what you’ve got.”

  “How do I know the bartender didn’t pour something else? I know what goes on in these places.” As she looks down at the top of his shiny bald head she imagines herself bringing the tray down against it. Hard.

  She smiles. “I would suggest then that you go down and speak to the bartender.”

  “Ahh, it’s not worth the trouble,” he says.

  “Do you want the drink or not?”

  “Not this shit,” he says, “I want C.C.”

  Good, good, Amy thinks as she walks away, still trembling with anger. The jerk obviously doesn’t know the difference. She will order the bar rye and make the twenty-five cents this round.

  When Amy returns, the wedding party begins to leave, pushing back chairs and gathering up handbags and shawls.

  “So sorry you folks have to leave us,” Patrick says from the stage.

  “Piss on you,” the fat man says. “Why didn’t you just say you didn’t know that song?” The woman he’s with pushes him hard in the small of the back with her clutch bag, causing him to stumble on the stairs. He turns and swears at her.

  “I wonder if they’re the bride and groom,” Patrick says. People laugh. “Anyway,” he continues, “I want to say welcome to an old buddy of mine. Used to live here in Winnipeg. Come all the way up from New York. I want you to meet one of the finest jazz guitarists in North America. Stu Farmer Junior!” The man sits at a table in Selena’s section. Amy recognizes him, it’s the same man she saw playing his guitar in Central Park earlier on. The same goatee and beret. He sucks deeply on a cigarette and smiles and nods.

  “I want to wait on him,” Amy whispers to Selena later. “I’ll trade you a table.”

  She shrugs. “Doesn’t drink much,” she says.

  He doesn’t look up as Amy replaces his overflowing ashtray with a clean one. “Would you care for a little porch-climber?”

  “Could do.”

  She can barely hear his voice. “Just what is a porch-climber?”

  He touches the empty wine glass with a tobacco-stained finger. No more than a bag of bones inside his black clothing. Of course he doesn’t recognize me, Amy thinks, but she desperately wants him to. “I married your back-up player,” Amy says. “Hank.”

  His black wing-shaped eyebrows shoot up. “Oh yeah, I remember him. What’s he at?” he asks, but from the slouch of his body and the way he avoids looking directly at her, Amy realizes that he isn’t really interested in her answer.

  “You say hello to him,” he says when Amy returns with a glass of wine.

  Whatever connection she’d felt she had with him is severed by the reality that she is Amy, a cocktail waitress, a failed parent and wife, who hasn’t really progressed at all since the day she’d met him. His presence is a sad reminder of another time when her limbs were infused with energy, with a brash hope, and as light as air.

  She stands at the end of the bar, back turned to the room, facing her work area. The ache in her stomach has grown sharper. A lipstick-tinged cigarette burns in a full ashtray. One of Selena’s, smoked on the run. Amy picks it up, sucks at it, sets it back down, turns, and meets the image of herself in the hippie’s sunglasses. He nods at her and his mouth twitches into a crooked grin and she feels the hair on the back of her neck tingle. She ignores him as Selena steps to her side, plucking up clean glasses, stopping to drag on the cigarette. “Feels like someone has lit a campfire in my stomach,” Amy complains and Selena suggests that Amy should take a break from the floor. “I can handle things,” she says.

  She takes Selena’s suggestion and goes into the employees’ rest-room which is also used as a dressing room for the entertainers. She clears a spot in the clutter on the counter and pulls herself up onto it. Harsh shadows under her eyes show through the cover-up she applies in an attempt to hide her fatigue. Haggard, she thinks. Ugly. I have a big nose. She presses her hand against her stomach and hunches over her knees. She knows where she made her mistake. She’d been too busy reading books and forgot to think about the gopher and the maggots.

  Just then the door swings open and the noise and smoke of the Lounge rush into the room. Lee blinks in the bright light. “What’s keeping you? Selena says you’re sick or something. You okay?”

  “Not sick,” Amy says, “I’m or something.”

  He pulls a face. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what your problem is, but you’d better get back on the floor. The boss is looking for you.”

  Amy feels giddy and her stomach becomes a flaming torch.

  “What in God’s name is going on,” the boss snarls as she approaches. The hippie at the bar swivels around and watches from behind his sunglasses. Selena watches. The whole united family of the light-hearted Lounge watches.

  “Where were you?”

  Amy feels like vomiting down the front of his crumpled grey suit. I beg your pardon, sir, it just kind of slipped out. “Things dropped off and so I took a break.”

  “That’s why I want you to go upstairs,” he says. “They’re going out of their minds up there. We’re opening up the overflow room.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Look, honey,” he says. “Look, sweetie, if you want to work here then you’d better be prepared to go where I send you. You’ve got five minutes. And I want to see you tonight before you leave. I’d like you to consider coming on full time.”

  Amy mounts the stairs to the Cabaret. Teddy, a young man in his mid-twenties, who acts as both bouncer and doorman, rocks on his heels as he looks down at her through the plate-glass wall.

  “I don’t think I’m going to like this,” she says as she pushes past him and into the plush foyer with its cosy arrangement of velvet sofas and easy chairs. He follows. The room vibrates with the sound of subdued chatter rising above recorded piano music and the tinkle of silverware. She enters the room to the sight of a wall-to-wall mirror lined with glass shelving and bottles of amber, red, and green liquid glowing in the recessed lighting. She likes the white linen on tables, the clean lines of long-stemmed wine glasses.

  Teddy steps up to her side. “Better get a move on.” He indicates that she’s to go to the very back to another room where busboys rush about setting up tables. A pudgy hand pats her buttocks lightly. She turns and glares at him. “Watch it,” she says. “I’ve got teeth down there.”

  He frowns, his attention diverted by something in the Lounge below. He thinks he’s the shop cop, Amy thinks, and looks to see what’s going on downstairs. The hippie stands at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at them, as though debating whether to come up.

  “I dare you,” Teddy says and grins. “Come on.”

  She sets up her tray and watches as three go-go girls prance through the dark hall and into the room, each going into her own cage. They stand in the dark, poised, as the band, men in pale-blue tuxedos and white ruffled shirts, move like headless ghosts acr
oss the stage. Then the pleasant ambience of the room vanishes as a harsh spotlight cuts through the smoke at the first crashing sound of the drum announcing the band’s presence. Their music is deafening and reverberates in her ears.

  This is crazy, Amy thinks. She leaves her tray at the bar and goes out into the foyer. Amy senses the tension, hears the grunting and scuffling, before she actually sees Teddy and the hippie, whose head is pinned fast against Teddy’s side. “Say good night to the folks, pal,” Teddy says, clearly enjoying himself. The hippie struggles, and they move back and forth in front of the velvet furniture in a strained kind of dance. As they shuffle towards the door of the Cabaret, Amy sees the hippie’s face more clearly in the light of the chandelier hanging above the stairs. His skin is blotchy with what looks like make-up that has rubbed off here and there.

  “I’m not going anywhere without her!” he shouts, turning towards Amy. Teddy is surprised by this and caught off guard and the hippie jerks free from the headlock and swings wildly. His sunglasses drop to the floor. Amy stands rooted, shocked. She realizes it is Hank.

  “That’s my wife and I’m not leaving without her!”

  Hank, dressed up. Spying on her. “Get him out of here,” she says to Teddy, and flees back through the Cabaret, down a narrow corridor, down several flights of stairs, until she’s in the basement and can go no further.

  All around her pipes drip with condensation, machines groan and vibrate as cold air churns upwards, rattling in tin ducts. She sits down on the bottom step, panting, and leans into the damp wall hugging herself. Every night she’s been at work, he’s been there too, sitting at the bar keeping tabs on her while Richard has been asking for him, wanting him. She thinks of Hank’s contorted features, the fake yellow hair parted down the centre, and she shivers. Sick, she thinks. She gets up and heads towards an exit sign at the end of a hallway, pushes the release bar on the door, and steps outside into warm, moist air.

  A car door slams. Hank’s maroon Chrysler is parked in the alley, and inside it she sees his silhouette against the harsh light of the street lamp, his tight curly hair creating a perfect circle. She crosses her arms against her chest as she walks towards the car. He hears the tap of her heels against pavement and his head dips as he looks into the rear-view mirror. The car window glides down.

  “Hi,” he says softly.

  Sick or desperate, it doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s a stranger. She vows to herself to never again assume that she can know all there is about any person.

  “What I want. …” he says, his voice trailing off. He swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, an angry gesture. Desperate, Amy concludes, and despises him. “What I want is for us to have a normal life,” he says, his voice stronger now.

  “I’m sorry. But I don’t think that’s possible,” Amy says, calmly, coolly. “You see, I’m not normal.” She turns and walks away quickly.

  “You said it!” Hank shouts. “You just said it! You’re not normal. You’re … you’re a. …”

  Will he give up trying? Amy wonders as she walks around to the front of the building to return to her shift.

  “You’re a bastard!” Hank screams after her.

  “What do you think of this idea?” Amy had once asked Piotr. “Why don’t I write a scene where the guy puts on a disguise so he can follow his wife around?” They were in California, in the J. Paul Getty Museum wandering through a dimly lit room where people walked slowly and spoke in muted voices. A sacrosanct room, Amy thought, the room that held a collection of illuminated manuscripts. But they could have been on the Columbia icefields in Alberta or at home sitting across the table from one another, the present script was always uppermost in their minds and open for discussion at every breath, even in bed after lovemaking.

  Piotr had stopped in front of a glowing block of plexiglass, inside it a page of a manuscript, The Adoration of the Seven-Headed Beast. “I like your idea,” he said. “It’s dark, quirky, but I don’t think we’d be able to slip it past the infantile minds at the CBC.”

  Amy wandered among the display of Byzantine manuscripts, awed by the intricate colourings, the use of real gold, the handwritten texts, by the pleading and sorrow-filled faces of the figures. I could write a scene, she thought, about a man arranging a wig on a pillow in a bed. Arranging along with it his wife’s pink chenille bathrobe, which he plumps with a blanket so that when she flicks on the light switch and enters the room she sees herself in bed, already asleep, or dead, and feels that she is standing outside the world looking in at herself. For another fearful second she believes that she doesn’t exist. And then she thinks that she does exist, but only in her husband’s careful arrangement of her body upon the bed.

  It is late in August and Richard is outside, pressing his hands and mouth against the screen of the back door, peering in at Amy as she squats, dabbing on the wall the last bit of paint from the can. He squashes his tongue flat against the screen, rubbing it back and forth. “Don’t,” she says, “there’s fly spray on that screen. You’ll get a sick stomach.”

  “The pool died.”

  Amy groans inwardly. He’s chewed another hole in his plastic pool, she knows. “Never mind. It’s almost supper time. Rhoda is going to pick you up today.”

  “I think Daddy’s coming home tomorrow,” he says as his lips move against the screen.

  Amy feels an ache of sadness for Richard. His pile of “magic” stones has grown considerably over the past two months but she knows that Hank will not return as long as she continues to work at the Lounge. She steps back to view the kitchen wall. Pale blue semi-gloss enamel, to give the room the suggestion of ethereal airiness, of floating, of space. And to get her ass out of the sling with the landlord. She had stripped the scorched wallpaper off and now she’s run out of paint so that a two-foot strip is left at the bottom. Her hands sting and have turned white and rough from turpentine. “Get your things together and come in,” she tells Richard. His narrow silhouette drops away from the screen. She doesn’t have the energy to go out and buy more paint or search for holes in his pool to mend them.

  Richard enters the kitchen trailing a wet bath towel and bits of grass. “It smells funny in here,” he says and pinches his nose.

  “Yeah, well, this is pretty much your doing. Remember? So don’t complain.”

  Richard goes off into the living room. She hears wheezy music and Popeye stating “I duz what I can. …” The refrigerator clunks, and hums to life, vibrating at a pitch that always makes her feel weary. She decides that what she needs is to soak in the tub.

  She trickles rose-scented bath oil into the rushing water and watches it become a puff of crimson smoke turning the water pink. She lies back in the pink froth, sinking down until she feels it climb up the back of her neck, and she closes her eyes. “When is Daddy coming home?” he asks constantly. The bubbles pop, the sound an irritating one that makes her clench her teeth. She stays in the tub only minutes and then leaps up, suds sliding down her legs and belly as she reaches for a towel. She tries not to think about Hank spying on her. Creepy. Weird. She thinks instead what to make Richard for supper.

  At five past six, Amy is in the kitchen slamming cupboard doors. She smacks a plate down on the table, hoping it will shatter. “Supper’s ready,” she calls. “Come and get it. Now.”

  Richard enters the kitchen looking downcast as he slides in behind the table. “Yuck,” he says. “I would rather eat dirt than french fries. I hate french fries.”

  They go through this “I hate” routine each night she works.

  “You liked them before.”

  “But I don’t now.” His cheeks are flushed – too much sun? A fever? She touches his forehead. Then she rubs his arms and discovers that they too are warm. Don’t be sick, she pleads silently. She looks at their meal: swollen waterlogged wieners, overcooked fries, brown and tough. Her stomach closes down and, like Richard, she nibbles halfheartedly at her food. Several times a car passes by in the lane, and, unable to
stop herself, she turns to the window; her movement only a slight shift; imperceptible, she thinks, but Richard notices it every time.

  “I want Daddy,” he says. “Why isn’t Daddy at home?”

  “I have told you,” Amy says sharply, “I don’t know.” She hears herself in his question, Margaret in her answer. Hank’s absence is a separation in Richard’s chest, she knows, a wrenching open of the ribs. She pats his hand. She loves her son’s hands, his long, narrow fingers, which shift and slide across the table, touch, move away, return, tap, jiggle, poke, investigate. “You like it at Rhoda’s,” she says and squeezes his hand.

  “No, I don’t.”

  She kisses the pout of his wet mouth and says he doesn’t need to finish his supper and she sends him into the bedroom to undress for his bath while she rinses off their dishes. Richard is only five years old, she thinks, he needs an answer to his question, “When is Daddy coming home?” No more evasions or lies. It is time to confront it, she thinks, to break the news and make it real. She shakes her hands over the kitchen sink, reaches for the telephone, and dials her mother’s number.

  Margaret sounds cheerful and surprised. “Hello, dear. It’s nice to hear from you,” she says as though she’s reading lines from a script. “How have you been?”

  Amy’s heart thuds. “I’m okay. What have you been up to?”

  Margaret lists her week’s activities. The visits she’s made to the sick, the lame, the elderly, and the broken-hearted. She has delivered talks to “Women Aglow” clubs, speaking to women about the message in the booklet she has written, The Angels Among Us, which, she says, is selling out faster than it can be printed. She blesses these women with her presence. She teaches them how to study passages of scripture that will give them hope and courage or enlighten. She explains how the gifts of the Holy Spirit are still for this time and this day. She encourages all whom she can to be born again, only this time “in the spirit”; to raise their hands and pray with their new language, the tongues of angels. At healing services, she lays hands on the supplicant and too-short legs grow longer, arthritic aches and pains vanish, and nervous bladders become calm. What she does for Amy is pray. Every day.