by Glen Huser
When he takes the tray, he leaves a bottle of Courvoisier on the table.
“This is some hotel,” Skinnybones says, checking out her hair in a fan-shaped mirror on the wall. The spikes have wilted a bit over the course of the day. She seems to be trying to revive them with a bottle selected from a congregation of toiletries she’s gathered on one side of the dresser top.
“Do you think I’d better phone Shirl and Herb?” she asks, unpacking my cosmetics and putting them on the other side of the dresser. In a minute she’s wandering around the room with the cellphone cupped to her ear.
“Yeah, great,” she says, catching my eye. “We watched a video and today she’s been teaching me all about some classical music she’s crazy about...you know, like opera...we might listen to some tonight...the medications aren’t hard to keep track of...No, she seems just fine. I haven’t had a chance to get bored...I made wild mushroom soup for supper...”
But the day — that drive through Vancouver and then Seattle — has pretty well done her in. She watches a few minutes of TV from her bed, and then she’s as dead to the world as Brunnhilde in her long sleep on the fire-shielded rock in Die Walküre.
I pour some brandy into a Japanese sake glass and sip it slowly. It seems to ease the pains in my hip and legs, and a small breeze comes in through the window Ricardo opened, a balm to the soul. Another glass and the aches of the world ebb away — the deaths of Mama and Raymond, the betrayal of that music professor who said he wanted to marry me. Gerald. Gerald with his sandy-gray hair and Clark Gable mustache. Gerald of New York, behind the lectern in that summer course in music appreciation. The light of August afternoons falling across his face. 1967. Half a life ago. Odd that it still surfaces. Like rheumatism.
And now Bernard gone. He can’t have been old. Sixty-five? A bit older than Ricardo.
I know Ricardo doesn’t like anyone smoking in the rooms and, since it’s late, I try not to make any noise getting out of the room and moving the walker down the hall to the back door and into the courtyard.
Ricardo is sitting out there, barely visible in the soft light from a couple of Japanese lanterns. Having another glass of wine. He lights my cigarillo from a tea candle sputtering in a small porcelain bowl.
“I think this is when I miss him most,” he says. “Eleven-thirty at night, when we’d finished up all the B and B work of the day and we’d sit out here and have a glass of sherry. Bernard would have a cigarette and we’d compare notes on the guests or just sit and listen to a bit of music.” He sighs and gestures toward the wine with a questioning look.
I shake my head.
“Now tell me about Tamara. How do you happen to be traveling with her?”
“A paid companion,” I confess. Ricardo, I know from experience, is one of those people who can sniff out fabrication like a hound on the trail of blood. Of course I leave some parts out.
“She’s been a bit troubled at home, so I think this trip is probably good for her and something of a relief to her family.”
“Wants to be a fashion model?” Ricardo says. “One of the great cellophane dreams. I’ll light candles for her at St. Joseph’s.”
“Light a candle for me, too,” I say. “I’m the one chaperoning her through that course she’s going to be taking.”
23
Trust the Wrinkle Queen to check us into some flaky hotel where she’s totally best friends with the gay guy who runs it. We’re in a room that looks like it’s been put together after a week of shopping in Chinatown. You can’t turn around without bumping into a spread-out fan or some little stunted pine tree in a china pot with pictures on it.
Ricardo treats Miss Barclay like she’s one of the royals.
But he’s a gay guy who can do hair, too.
“I was a stylist for fifteen years,” he says, “before I met Bernard and we bought this apartment building and turned it into a bed and breakfast.”
Once he’s got all the breakfast chores out of the way, and the laundry machines are going full blast, he sets to work on us in the kitchen, washing Miss Barclay’s hair, curling and combing it, spraying it back into place.
Then it’s my turn.
“Jean says something to go with an Audrey Hepburn dress.” He waves his scissors in the air and makes snapping noises with them. “How about a little trim? I can give it body and it’ll look very natural, very Sabrina.”
“Whatever. But don’t chop off too much.”
The result is pretty cool, actually, and he tells us to be sure and come into the parlor so he can see how we look all dressed up before we go to the opera.
“You need to meet Adrian. And we’ll have tea and English sandwiches before we head out. It’ll fortify us for the first act.”
Ricardo’s friend Adrian is thin and middle-aged. Going gray. Trendy glasses. Simple black suit. He’s shy, too, and lets Ricardo, stuffed into a tuxedo that might have fit him a few years back, do the talking.
“Doesn’t Jean look stunning?” he says.
The Wrinkle Queen is in her beaded dress, which is way too long for her. She’s done some serious shrinking in the last few years, I’m thinking. We’ve hoisted it up at the waist and added a wide belt from one of the other dresses to cover where we’ve pinned it.
“I’ve always loved that beaded dress.” Ricardo serves tea from a silver tea set and bone china cups. These aren’t Royal Albert, though. Just white with gold trim. “And Tamara! Adrian, who does she remind you of?”
“Audrey Hepburn?” Adrian manages to say through a mouthful of cucumber sandwich.
“Yes! And I won’t tell you who did the hair!” Ricardo’s practically bouncing in his monkey suit and he’s got a camera out, taking pictures of everyone.
After he’s done in about half a roll of film, he phones for a taxi.
“Adrian and I will walk over but we’ll let you take the picnic hamper.”
It’s probably filled with stuff like smushed-up liver and diskettes of crusty bread and black fish eggs.
When the Wrinkle Queen tells the taxi driver where to take us, he shrugs his shoulders and says, “Jeez — why is it always me who gets the four-block fares?”
“What!” she screeches at him. “You, I believe, are a public servant. Such insolence! I want your number.”
“Don’t get your pantyhose in no knot,” he says. “Four blocks is more than enough for driving you anywhere.”
“Tamara,” she’s still screeching. “Get his number...”
“I haven’t got a pen with me,” I tell her. It’s really kind of funny. “Do you have a pen I can borrow?” I ask the driver.
He’s laughing now. “Sure, honey. In your dreams.”
“No tip,” Miss Barclay tells him as she fishes in her purse for her American money. “Exact change.”
“Aw, gee,” he says, “and I was hoping to retire on that one.”
“Taxi drivers,” she fumes. But the whole argument seems to have charged up her batteries. I practically have to race after her, barreling along with her walker. I feel like Red Riding Hood carrying the wicker basket filled with goodies.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s going to be kind of a weird crowd who will pay to listen to people screeching at one another in a foreign language. There’s old men who look like mad scientists in tuxedos, and a lot of old ladies, not all that different from the Wrinkle Queen, in fancy dresses that might have been in high fashion when Cher cut her first record. And then there’s some polished-up types in expensive summer clothes who look like they’ve just stepped off the pages of Vanity Fair. Throw in some guys with long hair and worn-looking jeans and Value Village suit jackets. And, hey, there’s some kids my age with spiked, colored hair, and they’re wearing studs and leather.
If I could catch the Wrinkle Queen’s eye, I’d glare at her. I could have gotten by without being Audrey Hepburn.
She’s busy arguing with an usher about our seats, though.
“I suggest you check y
our picnic hamper,” the usher says through a frozen smile as she’s taking us down the aisle.
“I suggest you mind your own business,” Miss Barclay tells her.
“You can’t set it in the aisle,” the usher says.
The Wrinkle Queen gives her a look that says, “What’s your point?”
I balance the basket on my lap as if this is something I always do when I go to the theater.
As the lights dim, Miss Barclay hisses at me. “Set it on the floor. The lunch gestapo have gone.”
It’s dark. The conductor comes out and bows, although you can hardly see him because the orchestra’s down below the stage. Everyone claps and then he turns around and waves his wand and the music begins. It’s the same music we listened to in the car but here, in this gigantic cave with a zillion people all hushed and hardly breathing, it does make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
And somehow they’ve made the stage look like there’s light shining through river water, and the Rhine maidens manage to fit their yodeling into all the right spaces in the music. When I look sideways at the Wrinkle Queen, I can see she’s right up there with them in her own glitzy outfit, ready to guard the gold and scare off love-hungry dwarfs. Every once in a while she clasps one of her bony hands to her breast as if her heart is going to bounce out of her dress at any minute.
When I was in grade six, I went with my class to the Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton to something called Symphony for Kids, but it was nothing like this. At the Jubilee, Patty-May Tierney made a little pattern of gum wads on the back of the seat in front of us, and every time the tuba played she held her nose like someone had farted.
Here there’s a woman in front of us with a little diamond crown on her white hair. Maybe she’s a princess. An old princess with an old prince in a tuxedo beside her? Watching everything through little binoculars you hold with a fancy handle. Opera glasses. The Wrinkle Queen is still mad because I left hers on her bedroom dresser when we were packing.
Miss Barclay sighs when the music fades and then everyone is clapping madly like someone won the biggest race in the world.
“Oh, my, that was absolutely divine!” She flings her mohair shawl over her shoulders.
The usher scowls as I carry the picnic hamper past her when we go outside during the interval. Ricardo has been keeping watch and waves us over to a spot where Miss Barclay can sit down.
“I love the Rhine maidens,” he says, helping me unpack the basket. “They look like they’re fresh out of a circus act, and that’s what Wagner needs — a Ring with a resounding three-ring approach.”
“You’re right,” the Wrinkle Queen laughs. “A touch of Barnum and Bailey but just a touch. Let the music do its work.”
They yammer on about the first act, and Miss Barclay and Adrian light up their cigarettes. I was right about the picnic food and, of course, there’s wine. Ricardo put in a thermos of lemonade for me, though. It’s icy cold and not too sweet. As I sip it, I look around at all the people in their fancy outfits, and the sky shining with a bright gold sunset coming.
It’s hard to believe I’m sitting here, in the middle of all this.
I close my eyes.
What is it you’re supposed to do? Pinch yourself?
24
I have to sleep a fair amount during the day to have the energy for the operas in the evening. Ricardo has taken it upon himself to show Seattle to Skinnybones. They come back in the afternoon chattering about the Pike Place Market, the downtown stores, an excursion along Puget Sound.
On Tuesday, when there’s a break in the cycle and the opera house is dark, I go along with them to a fashion show at Adrian’s college. Students attending a summer institute are putting it on, mainly for tourists in town taking in the Ring.
The fashions are wild. Men in fishnet and silvery plastic; girls wearing hardly anything at all. But I can see Skinnybones is enthralled. In her mind she’s strutting right down the ramps with them.
“God,” she pokes my arm, “that one’s got bow legs.”
“A hazard,” I agree, “when you’re wearing no more than a couple of doilies and — what is it? — a tool belt?”
After the fashion show, there’s a reception. Fruit punch and pastries. Blackberry tarts! I’d forgotten about west coast blackberries. Tamara is flapping at me with a paper napkin, trying to get rid of crumbs that have fallen onto my dress.
As the crowd thins out, Adrian invites us to his office. His studio walls are covered with fashion sketches, figure studies and bric-a-brac. Skinnybones is drinking it all in like some kind of elixir.
“Would you like me to sketch you?” Adrian asks.
“Oh, wow!” Today is a spike hair day, and she’s wearing a little top that exposes a fair amount of stomach, and those jeans with scabs of costume jewelry. Adrian places a sheet of paper on a big easel and positions Tamara. He adds some bracelets above the hand that he wants her to rest on her hip.
“This’ll take about half an hour,” he says, brandishing a piece of charcoal. “Why don’t you and Ricardo nip out onto the grounds. You can smoke there, Jean.”
There’s a ramp for wheelchairs and it’s easy to move the walker along it to a bench beneath a huge tree that would never grow in Alberta.
“I think it’s wonderful.” Ricardo says, “that the two of you have found one another. It’s great that her parents are so accommodating.”
I can guess what Skinnybones has been telling him while they’ve been riding up and down the Space Needle.
“Your generosity...” Ricardo is smiling at me as if I were Eleanor Roosevelt or Mother Teresa. “I mean, to experience the entire Ring — what an introduction to the world of opera and, well, really a whole universe of art and culture that wouldn’t be accessible to... Her parents are not especially well off, are they? Pretty blue collar?”
Ricardo’s on a roll. The Seattle sunlight and the cigarillos are soothing, too.
“...and sponsoring her for that little course in Vancouver that she has her heart set on. Adrian thinks it may not be much of a school, but what’s important is how much it means to her.”
Skinnybones emerges from Adrian’s studio with her portrait. She’s beaming. He’s made her appear even taller and thinner, if that’s possible. But she does look like something from a Saks ad.
When we get back to Pagliacci’s, Ricardo lets her pin the sketch on the wall of our bedroom between two Japanese fans.
He invites us for dinner but today’s excursion has played me out, and it seems like I’m falling asleep even before Tamara has rolled back the kimono bedspread.
When I wake up, the sun is still shining, though, filtering through a bamboo blind. Maybe it’s not too late to join them — or at least for an after-dinner coffee.
As I try to get up, though, I see a note propped against the lamp on the night table. It’s in Tamara’s scrawl: You were sleeping so I didn’t wake you up. Ricardo is taking me to Pioneer Square and we’re going to grab lunch there. He says to ring the kitchen and Matt will have a tray for you. He’s the cleaning guy. See you this PM.
God, I’ve slept through until noon. And no one around to help me get up. I decide it’s time to have a little talk with Miss Skinnybones and remind her about the duties of a paid companion.
I can hear someone vacuuming in the hall. When the noise stops, I call out, “Hey, you!” I have to yell three times, though, before the housecleaner comes.
It’s a tall, gangly young man, barely out of his teens, I’d guess, with a mop of straw-colored hair and a ring through the side of his nose.
“Miss Barclay?”
“I could use a hand getting out of bed.”
He’s strong and does a passable job of getting me sitting up on the side of the bed.
“My walker,” I say, and he gets it set up and helps me to the bathroom. Skinnybones has hung an outfit on the bathrobe hook. Not what I’d choose to wear today, but I don’t really want nose-ring poking through the closet for some
thing else.
“Ricardo left lunch for you in the kitchen,” he says. “You want it here — or there?”
“In the courtyard, if you don’t mind.”
I can’t believe it, but after lunch I fall asleep again in a wicker chair beneath a monkey puzzle tree. It’s Skinnybones’ scratchy hand that wakes me.
“Do you want to get dressed for the opera now?”
“Where have you been?”
“Pioneer Square. I left you a note.” She looks like she could use a nap herself.
“Very thoughtful,” I say. “The note was a great help to me getting out of bed and getting dressed.”
“You seem to have managed.”
“Damn right,” I say and light a cigarillo.
She’s impatient when she does help me get ready.
“What’s the big show tonight?” she asks, trying Mama’s diamond brooch in different places on my white knitted gown.
“Quit fiddling,” I tell her. “It’s too important a piece to wear on a belt. Pin it where it’s supposed to go, close to the neckline on the left side.”
With a sigh, she positions it and closes the clasp.
“It’s Siegfried tonight. Wonderful music, but Siegfried is supposed to be a lithe, handsome, Germanic superhero, and they’ll likely cast him with some middle-aged overweight tenor. He’s the son of the brother and sister who fell in love in the last opera.”
“Inbreeding,” Tamara declares. “That’s how you get idiots. We learned that in Health.”
“Except for gods and heroes. Above the law — even the laws of genetics,” I say as she redoes my eyebrows.
That evening, though, before the curtain goes up, there’s an announcement that the singer playing Siegfried has had an accident and will be unable to move around the stage. He’ll sing, but there will be a stand-in actor playing Siegfried.
When he appears, it’s as if a sigh ripples through the whole auditorium. This is what a Siegfried should look like.
Tamara looks at me open-mouthed.