The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

  “Tsing tao.”

  Connie glanced at Cyril. “Two?”

  He was desperately thirsty and not above taking refuge in booze. “Make it four.”

  “Right on,” growled Connie. “Give us four.” The waitress scuffed off toward the kitchen. Connie slotted the menu into the rack and then groaned and leaned her head in her hands. “I am so beat. But hey—” Her head popped up. “It’s so good to see you, man. I tried giving you a call. Or maybe I didn’t. I meant to. Honest. I think about you a lot. You were the only friend I had.”

  He was flattered and hopeful and embarrassed. “You vanished,” he said.

  She became apologetic. “I do that. It’s shitty. I do a lot of shitty things. I don’t know. I couldn’t handle it.”

  This came as a shock. Connie Chow unable to cope?

  “Hot in here.” She plucked the toque from her head and fanned herself.

  The waitress passed with something orange and gelatinous quivering atop something grey and gelatinous.

  “Hey, you still chew Black Cat?” he asked.

  “Black Cat. God. I could use some Black Cat gum. That’s what my life’s been missing. I’m gonna buy like fifty packs.”

  When their food arrived they dug in and soon their lips were shiny. At one point she broke into a drum solo on the tabletop with her chopsticks and said she’d been in a band but was the shits so quit.

  Afterwards, they walked up the street to an old hotel, three storeys, narrow and deep and weathered. “Trying to keep the Hong Kong mood going,” she explained. “Wanna come up?” They climbed two flights of spongy grey linoleum steps into the smell of decades-old dirt and stale air. An old man sat in a booth labouring over a crossword. “How’s it going, Milt?”

  “Four-letter-word for woman. Last three letters u-n-t.”

  Connie looked at Cyril who politely cleared his throat and declined to offer a suggestion. “How about aunt,” said Connie.

  Milt brightened. “That’s it!” He turned his pencil and began furiously erasing. “Ha!”

  They went down a hallway and she unlocked a door which sent pigeons clattering from the windowsill on the far side of the room. “Not much of a view,” she said of the brick wall opposite. She shrugged off her jacket. There was a metal-framed bed, a sink, as well as a chair and table that didn’t match. Snoring came from the next room; on the other side someone swearing drunkenly.

  “Nice.”

  “I think the word is character.”

  “Where’s the rest of the cast?”

  “Motel 6. Budget’s lean. The tour’s a risk. Chair or bed?”

  He sat on the ladder-back chair and she lay on the bed and propped her head on her fist. He noted the pleasing swell of her hip. Little Connie Chow had most definitely filled out. She jutted her chin and said he looked sturdier than she remembered.

  “And you look  . . . impressive.”

  “Impressive?” She mulled that.

  “Hollywood,” he said.

  “Please.”

  “You should be proud.”

  “You think so?”

  He shrugged, suddenly feeling naive, and told her how in carpentry a nail with its head sticking up above the wood was said to be proud.

  “All the better to get whacked down,” she said darkly, prying off her Daytons which bumped like bricks to the floor.

  Cyril looked around the room noting the wainscotting, the lumpy lath-and-plaster, the exposed pipes, the lino that curled against the walls. “This place looks like the real thing.”

  “1890. Ghosts coming out of the walls and everything. One looks like my granny.”

  Cyril had envied Connie having a grandmother who was so eccentric, although also wondered if the old woman was so fundamentally different from his own mother’s grimly whimsical obsession with funerals and icons. “How is she?”

  “The ghost?”

  “Your grandmother.”

  “Met a man in the Lonely Hearts and moved to Montreal. I’ll be seeing her in a couple of weeks.”

  He imagined Connie and her grandmother in some French café. He knew nothing of his own grandparents.

  Lying back, Connie put her hands behind her head and yawned. “I am so thrashed.”

  Cyril looked at his watch. 1:35 AM. He stood.

  “Sorry, I’m not very entertaining.” She followed him into the hallway. “Good seeing you, man.”

  “You too.”

  They hugged. She was shorter without her boots and felt smaller without her leather, more the way he remembered her. He was about to suggest getting together tomorrow but she had her hand on the door ready to shut it. “Okay, see you.”

  As he passed the office Milt shouted, “Aunt!”

  He was still living in the top floor suite of the house with the downtown view. When he got home he stared out the window at the city and thought over the evening. She’d seemed genuinely pleased to see him, but he was here and she was there, and in another day she’d be gone, and what had he expected anyway? Nothing. Everything.

  He stared at his latest drawings: boxes. He was drawing boxes. Not just any boxes: corrugated cardboard boxes. He thought of Connie looking at them and trying not to laugh. What the fuck was he doing drawing corrugated cardboard boxes? Rarely have corrugated cardboard boxes been rendered with such loving attention to detail, with such passion. This reviewer will never look at corrugated cardboard boxes the same way again  . . . Still, they were good boxes, the folds so well rendered they invited you to run your finger along their edges. And the boxes had something else: the question of what was in them, what they contained, or perhaps more significantly what they hid. He thought of Gilbert’s grandmother’s wooden box with the pistol in it. Surely a box with a pistol in it looked different than a box containing a rose, or a box that was empty. Cyril sat down and worked on the latest box until the sun was rising and when Connie called at eleven he was in a dead sleep.

  “You sleeping?”

  “No. Well  . . . sort of.”

  “What, you went out on the town after dumping me off?”

  “I did some drawing.”

  “Of what?”

  He looked at one of the boxes. Lies fast-forwarded through his mind. “Boxes.”

  “Boxes? Boxes of what?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, I’m figuring out what’s in each one as I draw it.”

  There was a silence as she thought about this. “Cool.”

  “It might be empty,” said Cyril, incapable of not undermining himself.

  “Or there’s a puppet inside,” said Connie, jumping on the idea. “Or a clown. Clowns’re so creepy.”

  “Or a sword jutting out from the inside,” said Cyril, remembering her collection of swords.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Or fire,” he said. “The box contains fire.”

  “Or a head. I’m thinking there’s a head in it.”

  “Whose head?”

  “Well, that’s the whole mystery,” she said, as though that was obvious.

  They met outside her hotel where she was studying the newspaper. “No review.” She pitched the paper into a bin and shook her head.

  Cyril assured her she’d been wonderful and she said be specific and he said her accent and she shrugged as if that was no great accomplishment, so he said she’d been compelling, and she said tell me more, and he said she was passionate and wholly convincing, and she said: “More.” And he said she was heartbreaking, at which she smiled and said: “Please sir, more.” And he said, “You sure did good rememberizing all them there lines, ma’am.” And she said, “Thank you, I feel better.”

  They walked from Chinatown to the West End, then into Stanley Park and along the seawall. Dense white clouds tumbled across a hard blue sky while the low tide beach seethed with barnacles. A black lab bounded about the sand scattering gulls that fled screeling into the air while the owner shouted haplessly.

  “So,” Connie enquired with mock formality, “how’s the fa
mily?”

  He mentioned that Paul and Della now had twin sons, Chuckie and Steve, a pair of evil six-year-olds bent on household and eventually world domination, and that his mother was devoted to them. He did not mention how maddening it was seeing both his mother and Paul make a point of speaking Ukrainian to the twins, though there was some small grim satisfaction in the boys’ refusal to learn.

  “Is Paul still a runt?”

  “A prosperous runt.”

  “Are the kids runts?”

  Chuckie and Steve were big, thick-necked, round-shouldered thugs, Steve so light-fingered his pockets had to be checked every time he left a playmate’s house; Chuckie, a bed-wetter, though each terrifyingly bright in a warped fashion, each habitual contrarians constantly fighting with each other and obsessed with winning arguments and delighting in proving Uncle Cyril wrong. He saw them at Sunday dinner each week where they regarded him with sneering scepticism. “They’re galoots.”

  “Galoots,” said Connie, enjoying the word. “That is some seriously fat pile of sulphur over there,” she said of a massive pyramid of yellow on the North Shore. “I don’t remember that.”

  “What’s your first memory?”

  “The sound of the Empress of India’s horn as we were crossing the ocean. Yours?”

  “The way the sheets in my bed had wrinkles and folds that cast shadows, and I could change them by tugging the sheet. It was like drawing, or sculpting.”

  She was looking at him wonderingly. “Huh. Actually, mine was puking up Cream of Wheat.”

  Cyril confessed that his was getting conked on the head by the ironing board that folded up into a closet on the wall.

  They passed under the Lions Gate Bridge and eventually reached Third Beach where they sat on a log and watched the sun and clouds compete for control of the sky. A woman threw a stick for a dog which plunged splashing into the water. Another cheered and clapped and threw stick after stick for her dog yet it refused to get wet. The air was rich with brine and foliage, English Bay dense with freighters, and across the water the heights of West Van showed scraped patches of new housing developments like so much mange on a bear’s back.

  “Hey, Picasso.”

  Cyril saw Chantal, the bead-haired native model from his drawing class, walking arm-in-arm with Novak. Chantal gave a jaunty wave and Novak a courtly nod, and Cyril could see why Novak would choose her over his mother—if indeed she’d have had him—nonetheless he felt, even now, years later, indignant on her behalf.

  Connie was impressed. “Aren’t you cool.”

  The light fled across the water as a cloud slid over the sun. “So, do you have a date tonight?” he asked.

  “Yeah, with Robert Lomax.”

  He smiled then gazed out at the changing sea. “I was thinking of after.”

  She regarded him as though looking through a window onto a room she was sceptical of entering. “That would be nice.” She held out her hand and he took it and they sat in silence. He felt her hand gripping his tightly, like a child fearful of losing her balloon, and he was happy.

  “You’re not seeing anyone?” she asked, pointedly looking away to the left.

  “Not really,” he said, pointedly looking away to the right. “You?”

  “Off on, on off. Mostly off. Not easy being a traveling player.”

  He nodded, cautiously encouraged. “You got a standing ovation.”

  “We got a standing ov. And no review.”

  “Four hundred people applauding isn’t enough?”

  “It’s never enough. That’s the trouble. I should go to AAA. Approval Addicts Anonymous. Hey  . . .” She found an ice cream wrapper, smoothed it on her knee and wrote her address in Los Angeles and gave it to him. “In case you ever, you know, pass through town.”

  Cyril nodded deeply and made a show of folding it away in his pocket even though the numbers were already stamped into his mind.

  That night he sat in the same row and watched the play again. It was a bigger crowd and there were people seated on either side of him. Last night he’d inhabited the world of a stranger, alone and anonymous and uncertain; now he knew things none of these people did and felt powerful in this new and special status, especially when he overheard remarks about Connie as people read the biographies in the program.

  “She’s from Vancouver.”

  “She’s the next Nancy Kwan.”

  “They say she’s better. She’s got edge.”

  “Edge?”

  “It.”

  “It?”

  “Positively oozes It.”

  But his calm confidence began to sour the more he listened. Where was he in all of this? She was passing through, pursuing her career, and he was banging nails and drawing boxes.

  The lights went down and the sounds of the Hong Kong bar rose and the curtain opened and there was Suzie Wong dancing with a sailor. Cyril slid deeper into his seat and crossed his arms tightly over his chest. She was leaving tomorrow, less than twenty-four hours. He imagined her life over the following weeks, Toronto, Montreal, New York, hotels, theatres, cabs, cafés, and all too many admirers who had all so much more to offer. At the intermission he left the theatre and walked the same streets he’d walked the night they—the night she—had seen Psycho.

  He was waiting at the exit when Connie appeared and the instant he saw her he knew something was wrong. He approached warily. “What?”

  She looked small and haggard and there were tears in her eyes. “What do you mean, what?”

  “It was too hot,” he said, thinking she was insulted that he’d left. “I went for a walk. I missed the second half.”

  But she wasn’t listening, she wasn’t even there. “I blanked,” she said, staring as if shell shocked. “Just flat out blanked. It’s never happened before. Ever.”

  “Con’. Hey.” A couple of cast members including her leading man stood by the theatre entrance.

  She didn’t respond, she was looking at Cyril, not accusing but wondering, at herself, at him, at the predicament. “I thought of you,” she said. “On stage. I thought of you. And then  . . .” She put her fists to her forehead. “The reviewer’s gonna kill me. He was there. He interviewed Scotty just now. Oh, God.” Her hands dropped to her sides and for a moment Cyril feared she was going to fall to her knees.

  “Con’?”

  “Be right there,” she called, impatience edging her voice. She faced Cyril and took both his hands and he knew it was over.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “I meant—” But what had he meant?

  “I gotta keep my head on straight here.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s not just me. There’s others. This whole tour.”

  “Sure. I get it.” He nodded vigorously to show he got the idea, that he grasped how important this was, and that he wasn’t clinging, that he was not a burden.

  “It’s just like last time,” she said, wondering at some strange déjà vu, and Cyril saw them condemned to travel off through the night on separate paths perhaps to meet up again in another ten years. She touched his face as she had on the occasion of their last farewell, in the IGA, then she began to cry and they embraced and he felt the leather jacket crinkly and sensual, and he held her tightly and kissed her neck and she twisted in his arms and kissed him long and hard on the lips and then she was walking away.

  He watched her. “Hey.” She stopped and turned. “We’re not finished, you know.” His tone was not pleading or ominous but a statement, a calm observation of fact.

  Her voice was small. “I know.”

  TWO

  THREE DAYS LATER Cyril and Gilbert were on a bus heading for Mexico.

  Cyril was unshaved, unwashed, red-eyed, hungover. Gilbert was sporting his Fu Manchu and wore a half dozen candy necklaces of the sort they used to steal from the corner store.

  Gilbert had spent much of the past decade driving a taxi, losing on the stock market, losing at t
he racetrack, losing on pyramid schemes, failing at becoming a private investigator, failing at writing pornography, failing at selling real estate, and failing at marriage. Yet his optimism remained undiminished. As he pointed out to Cyril, his portfolio of life experience was growing ever richer and his potential all but unlimited.

  “And now we’re heading for Mexico,” he said as though it was the crowning achievement.

  Mexico, Antarctica, it was all the same to Cyril.

  At Bellingham a young marine got on. When he took his seat he nodded through the window to his parents and then faced forward and looked neither left nor right the entire way to Seattle where, exiting the bus he addressed the driver as sir and when asked said he was flying to Saigon. The driver saluted him and the marine saluted back and the driver said, “Do a job there, son,” and the marine said, “I aim to.”

  Cyril watched the fellow heave his duffel bag onto his shoulder and go out the station door. He imagined his life for the next year, or however long a tour of duty lasted, and wondered if he’d ever return to board a bus back up to Bellingham where his parents would be waiting. He envisioned training camp, the heft of a rifle, the feel of combat boots as he marched into battle and faced enemy fire, smelled cordite and napalm and maybe got hit, and he saw himself wrapped in bandages in a hospital in the jungle breathing the pinched smell of disinfectant.

  They stayed three nights in San Francisco and wandered the streets looking for free love and free drugs. The closest they came to free love was a come-on from a store detective with a five o’clock shadow and eye make-up in a Safeway; the closest they came to free drugs was the pot-thick air around the North Beach campfires. At San Diego they walked across the border into Tijuana where Gilbert got his picture taken holding an iguana. Their room at the Pensione Mondragon cost fifty cents and all night long dogs fought in the street. In the morning Cyril and Gilbert ate tortillas the texture of linoleum, red eggs, and peppered potatoes, all washed down with Fanta. Then they proceeded to explore the market with its bewildering variety of chili peppers and edible cacti, and various ornate madonnas, Cyril resolving that on the way back he’d buy a Virgin of Guadalupe for his mother, one encrusted in seashells and Christmas lights. By midday the streets smelled of pee and exhaust, and the very shadows seemed to cringe from the sun.