by Glen Huser
“He’s lip-syncing,” she whispers.
“It works,” I say.
Siegfried is my favorite of the four operas, but I fall asleep midway through Act One. Tamara rouses me by poking my arm and hissing that I’m snoring. Ricardo fetches me a cup of coffee during the first interval, but I fall asleep again in Act Two, waking only toward the end when Fafner the dragon is killed.
“You’re just under the weather today,” Adrian says when we go outside for a smoke during the second interval. “It’s so hot I think we all felt as if we were right there in that blacksmith’s forge. You weren’t the only one falling asleep.”
“I hate people who sleep at operas,” I tell him.
25
So get this. Sitting in the Seattle Opera House with the Wrinkle Queen snoring away in the next seat. Her mouth open. Little piggy snorts, and then it’s like she quits breathing and I can see the two guys sitting next to us looking worried, like they’re wondering if she’s died. They’re watching her more than the dragon that’s ranting around the stage breathing smoke and fire. They look at one another and laugh softly when she lets out another piggy snort and we know she’s still alive.
Thank God there’s just one more opera to go. Götterdämmerung. Twilight of the Gods. The Wrinkle Queen says this is the one where the whole stage is on fire at the end.
Sometimes I think she might not make it. After sleeping through Siegfried, yesterday was a day off and she slept through most of that and didn’t seem to know where she was when she woke up.
I got scared and called Ricardo. He gave her some brandy on ice and sat and talked with her for about half an hour, and she turned back into the Miss Barclay we all know and love. Telling me to get out that swirly dress that makes you go cross-eyed when you look at it, make sure it’s not creased and press it if it is, and see that there’s smokes and brandy in her purse.
She says she’s determined to buy lunch for everyone tonight during the interval.
“I’m tired of packing that picnic basket around,” she grumbles (as if she ever carried it). “We’ll have Champagne.”
Ricardo helps me pin the dress around the waist before he combs her hair.
While he’s busy with the brush and hairpins, I decide to give Shirl a call.
“Honey, how’re you doin’?” Shirl says. I can hear the gremlins in the background. “I’m glad you called ‘cause I was going to call you later.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Lyle...” She’s covering the receiver and yelling. “Lyle, you let your sister have that...I don’t want to tell you again...
“Oh my,” she says. “We miss you, Tamara. Anyway, I don’t know if you remembered but it’s Lizzie’s birthday on Sunday and I was thinking it’d be so nice if you could come home — even for a couple of hours — if Miss Barclay can get along without you...”
“Oh...hey!” I say. “Lizzie’s birthday. Let me check with her.” I cover the receiver and count silently to twenty.
“Shirl?”
“I’m here, sweetie.”
“Miss Barclay planned for me to go with her to visit her nephew on Sunday. He lives out of town and she wants me to drive.”
“You’re driving her around?”
“Well, it’s not far. But a little far to take a taxi.”
“But —”
“It’s okay. She’s still got her license, and I have my learner’s permit. Maybe I can come over a little later in the week. I’d like to get a gift for Lizzie and I haven’t had time to go out shopping.”
“Sure, honey...”
“Give those two my love, and say hi to Herb.”
When I push the end button on the phone, it’s very quiet. Ricardo is looking at me. I realize he’s listened to the whole conversation — my end of it.
“They don’t know, do they?” he says.
“No,” I can barely hear my own voice.
“Ricardo...” The Wrinkle Queen is sputtering.
“Not my business,” he says, giving Miss Barclay’s do a final spray. As he leaves, I notice him shaking his head.
“You stupid girl,” she hisses at me.
“I didn’t know...”
“Stupid. Call a taxi. I’m not about to miss Götterdämmerung because you haven’t had sense enough to...” She doesn’t finish the sentence. “I think I want my white stole tonight.”
“You want a fur wrap!” I yell at her. “When it’s ninety in the shade?”
“Don’t you question me,” she says, her voice stronger than I’ve heard it in days. “I happen to be the benefactress, a detail you would do well to remember. All of this cozying up to Ricardo and gallivanting around Seattle. What did you expect? That he wouldn’t figure things out?”
“What was I supposed to do?” I ask her. “Stay here and listen to you snoring away all day long?”
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” She’s chanting.
“Oh, drop it.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m calling the taxi.”
Needless to say, things are still tense at the opera house. The Wrinkle Queen doesn’t fall asleep in this one. She’s too mad. There’s the big bonfire with Brunnhilde on her horse riding through the flames. And then the sky castle of the gods disappears. Everything’s back to water and the Rhine maidens.
Ricardo and Adrian don’t come to find us. No Champagne is ordered, and the Wrinkle Queen has a double brandy during each interval. I end up carrying her white rats, and I feel like everyone in the auditorium is looking at me.
When the final curtain comes down, she glares at me.
“What?” I’d like to throw down her stole and stomp on it.
“You’ve done your best to spoil it. But you haven’t. You can’t kill the music. You can’t destroy the Twilight.”
I look up at the ceiling of the auditorium and whisper, “Give me a break. Twilight!”
“Don’t you be muttering under your breath around me.” She thinks she’s whispering but it’s loud enough for everyone around us to hear. “I’ve put up with your lack of consideration, clothes strung all over the bedroom, all that clutter of stuff on the bureau...your hair in my hairbrush...”
“Yeah, well try putting on make-up with a glass full of false teeth sitting on the —”
“For what I’m paying you...”
“Big deal.”
“It is a big deal. I’m footing the hotel bill, Ricardo’s my friend, and you get him to take you out sightseeing with no thought —”
“I suppose we should have dragged you half dead out of your bed?”
“You should have stayed with me. That’s what a paid companion —”
“Give it a rest.”
We don’t speak to one another on the cab ride back to Pagliacci’s.
At least we’re leaving in the morning! I shout in my mind. Leaving in the morning!
The bedroom seems impossibly hot and, after the Wrinkle Queen finally falls asleep, hot and noisy with her snoring. I slip into jeans and decide to sit out in the courtyard for a while. I’ve plunked myself into the big peacock chair before I see Ricardo sitting in the darkness off in a corner.
“Hey,” he says. “So what did you think of Götterdämmerung?”
“Lots of fire. Lots of loud singing.”
He looks at me, his eyebrows raised. “Okay, so it was amazing,” I add. “Miss Barclay loved it, I think. She’s been dreaming about it for months.”
“Why...” He searches for words. “Why didn’t you just arrange with everyone for you to come with her?”
“I guess...she didn’t think they would let her leave the nursing home for such a long trip. Her nephew... She has some bad days when she’s kind of out of it.”
“And what will you do when she has one of those days?”
“I have her medications.”
Even in the dark, I can see Ricardo shaking his head.
“And your family?”
“They’re not my family.”
“Can I persuade
you to call them and let them know what’s really happening?”
I close my eyes. I don’t want to look at anything or anyone right now. Especially Ricardo, who’s been treating me like his own kid. Do all gay guys treat you like you’re their best friend, part of the family?
“It would all be finished then,” I say. “I’d probably be put back in government care. Go into some crappy group home.”
Ricardo has moved to one of the chairs closer to where I’m sitting.
“It’s only a week, Ricardo, the fashion course. Just a week and we’ll be back. Nothing’s happened to her so far. She’ll be fine. She’ll just rest in the hotel while I’m off at the course during the day.”
“You want it that bad?” he says.
I nod my head.
“I was going to do some phoning,” he says. “Instead I think I’ll do some praying.”
26
She’s packing. Skinnybones. Running around in shorts and one of those little bits of an undervest that teenage girls wear these days. But I don’t feel like getting up. All those hours, all those incredible hours of music and drama, I wrap to me. I won’t let it be over.
“Are you okay?” she says.
“I...am...wonderful. I’ve seen the Ring. All of it.” “Except ninety percent of Siegfried, which you slept through.”
“Ah...well. At least I got to see what a real Siegfried should look like. Those legs! Now I can die.”
She laughs. She’s in a good mood. I get her to help me up. She has my candy-striped blouse and a red flared skirt set out for me. And my straw hat with the red ribbon. Does terrible things to Ricardo’s hairdo, but...
“Tell Ricardo I’d like to settle the bill.”
He comes in. Smiling. And gives me a kiss on the cheek. The old marshmallow. I give him a hundred-dollar tip.
“No,” he says. “I couldn’t.”
“You can and you will. You’ve done our hair and fed us and gone out of your way to keep this juvenile off the paths of delinquency.”
Adrian, too, comes over to wave us goodbye. Tamara holds up the scrolled portrait, tied with a ribbon, for him to see before she stows it in the trunk.
And then we’re driving north. I’m very tired and I don’t say anything when Tamara finds a radio station playing that kind of frenetic music kids listen to today. As long as she keeps the volume low. After all, the Ring is over. Brunnhilde has forgiven Siegfried and plunged into the fire. The smoke has cleared.
I sleep until we get close to the border. Skinnybones remembers to pull over well ahead of time so I can get into the driver’s seat. But it’s drifted away from me. What to do.
“Put it in gear,” she says. “Keep your foot on the brake.”
My foot doesn’t do what I want it to do. My leg is numb.
“It’s okay,” she says. “If they ask, I’ll tell them I’m just driving for a little while until you’re feeling better.”
But the crossing patrol doesn’t ask, and I fall asleep again until we’re in Vancouver. On Granville Street, heading downtown.
“Where’s the hotel?” Tamara asks. “We need the Vancouver map.”
She pulls over and parks on South Granville.
“After the bridge, turn left onto Davie Street,” I say. “We need to go along Davie and then turn left again on Thurlow.”
“Why is it always left,” she groans. “I hate left turns.”
“Then it’s a right on Beach, and that’s actually just a few blocks along Thurlow, if I remember. The hotel’s right on Beach.”
It is one of the older hotels — old even when I first began coming to Vancouver on vacation — with south-facing windows peering out of a veil of ivy.
“Did I remember to tell you I’d like Suite 307?” I ask the desk clerk.
“Yes, ma’am,” she says. “It’s all ready for you.”
“Lots of memories,” I say. The elevator with its wrought-iron door, the cream-colored hallway with its wainscotting and worn Victorian rug.
“Look,” I tell Tamara when she’s got our bags in. “You can look out the window and see the ships anchored in English Bay.”
“It’s great,” she says. “You want to get some supper now? I’m not hungry.”
I can see she has other things on her mind.
“Nor am I,” I tell her, “but I could use a smoke.”
“It’s a smoking room. No problem.” A bundle of nerves, she can stay seated for no longer than ten seconds at a time. She paces back and forth, flips through magazines the hotel has left on the coffee table, flicks the TV channels relentlessly, checks out the window every couple of minutes.
“Settle down. You’re making me dizzy.”
She grabs the Vancouver map and drops into the wingback chair.
“Okay if I go and see where that school is?”
“You go ahead. I’m fine.” To tell the truth, more than anything in the world, I’d appreciate being alone right now. This suite is filled with ghosts. Mama liked to sit at that little writing desk. And Myra, who taught social studies and traveled with me a few years before the big C did her in — she’d sit in the wingback chair in the corner, reading or doing a crossword puzzle before we’d head out to a play or for dinner. It seems like her words hover in the room. That was quite the effect, a lightning storm across the bay — perfect backdrop for The Tempest. Can you think of a four-letter word for perspicacious? Would you like a nightcap?
But despite feeling exhausted, I can’t fall asleep now. The remote to the TV is within reach and I click the power on. The picture congeals into one of those dreadful reality shows that everyone seems to watch in the lounge at the Triple S ranch. I quickly find the arrow for changing channels. Someone is making over a hideous room — wait, the makeover’s already happened. Whose idea was it, I wonder, to glue a floral bedspread onto a wall and surround it with bamboo framing? On the next channel, there’s a riveting game of lawn bowling in progress.
At least there’s concert music on Bravo. I close my eyes. Mendelssohn. So different from Wagner. I wonder if any of the music Tamara has listened to in the past week has managed to penetrate. She’d probably never admit it if it did, spiky as she is — and with that kind of shell around her.
She reminds me of that boy I taught back in the mid-1960s. Graham? Gordon? Answered an essay question on a grade nine final with a long poem that sounded like it had been written by Dr. Seuss. So clever. So bad. I remember laughing until my sides ached.
She’s back. Skinnybones. Trying not to make any racket as she comes in. Likely hoping I’m fast asleep so she won’t have to talk to me. When she sees I’m awake, she says, “Hey — thought you’d be dead to the world. After the day you’ve had.”
“Did you find the school?”
“Well...yeah,” she says. “But it doesn’t really look like a school. More like a church.”
“A church!”
“I think it probably was a church, and maybe it’s still partly a church. I mean, there’s a bell tower and it’s got those churchy windows that go to a point at the top. There’s a big bulletin board at the front, though, that lists all the things going on. Yoga classes. Ceramics. Alcoholics Anonymous. And Universal Style.”
27
The Wrinkle Queen laughs when I tell her the modeling course is being held in an old church. A laugh that’s half laugh and half cough — and, of course, she’s sitting up in bed, groping around for her cigarillos.
I don’t tell her that someone in the alley behind the church tried to sell me some dope.
She’s awake half the night smoking and coughing, turning the TV on and off. I think her hearing’s going. Someone pounds on the wall of the room beside us to get us to turn the sound down.
“Will you listen to the racket they’re making next door,” the Wrinkle Queen says. “I wonder what they’re doing in there?”
All of this, of course, means that I’m awake half the night, too. In the morning I have ghost eyes, dark circles on the white sheet of
my face. A great look for my first day.
The Wrinkle Queen’s asleep when I leave. To top everything off, it starts to rain when I’m a block away from the hotel, and by the time I get to the church, I’m soaked.
There’s a janitor watching me as I come in.
“Universal Style?” I say, pushing my wet hair off my face.
“Downstairs.” He points toward a hallway.
There’s a stairway at the end of it, and the first door I see in the basement has the same star and sign that was on the Whyte Avenue office door in Edmonton: Universal Style — Training for the Stars of Tomorrow.
When you go through the door, there’s kind of a little foyer and one of those church hall kind of tables — the ones with collapsing legs.
Jude Law model man is sitting there. Brad Silverstone.
“Hey, Tamara! Great, you got here okay.” There’s a couple of registration packages on the table. He fills in a receipt when I give him an envelope with the rest of the money.
“Just one more to come,” Brad says. “Ethan. He’s from Edmonton, too.”
A girl with long blonde hair pokes her head around the door.
“Alicia,” Brad calls to her. “Take Tamara in and introduce her around.”
“I’m an assistant,” Alicia tells me. “They gave me a deal on my registration, and believe you me I needed it after working at the McDonald’s in Nelson for the past year. First we’ll get you a name tag.”
Through the foyer, there’s a big room. Alicia takes me past some orange room dividers where there’s a couple of old sofas with coffee tables in front of them plus three tables you can sit at.
There are ten people. Three boys and seven girls. They have names like Madison and Mason and Brittany and Zachary.
I sit down at a table where a young man is sitting by himself. His name tag says Christophe. He seems scared to death to look at me or anyone else, and I’m thinking I kind of know how he feels. I wish I had dry clothes.
“Hi,” I say.
He blushes and says, “Hey.” And then he adds, “Can I get you some coffee?”
“Is there any juice?”
He lopes over to a counter under the basement windows and grabs a carton.