That time of night was when Katrina bid them goodnight and took a taxi back to the hotel to lock herself in the room she shared with Kisha. Her preferred pastime at this late hour was to stand by the window and survey the street below. First she switched on the bedside lamp. Its faint glow turned her into a mysterious shadow beside the blue curtain. She wore her hat as she stood there, waiting, in a state of readiness. Could she have chosen background music for the tableau she would have picked a softly wailing trumpet. Miles Davis, Générique. Had the fog rolled down rue Burcq, and had a strange man in a trench coat passed under the streetlight below, looking haunted, Katrina would have known what do to. As it was, she waited in vain, disappointed, yet not utterly surprised.
Well, she thought, peering down, pretending time had slid backward fifty odd years, Le Quai des brumes was set in Le Havre. No doubt it is foggier on the coast.
Still.
Her solitary afternoon became critical. She was now impatient to see if reality would deign to conform to her fantasies just this once when the setting was spot on. Parading her persona along the Seine that afternoon, she turned onto Pont-Royale where she stopped and rearranged her hat to offer a more suggestive contour. Exuding allure, she remained at the exact centre of the bridge, giving passing pedestrians a chance to admire her elegant profile. And she did not go unnoticed, it wasn’t that. Men eyed her. Men in suits. Less well-dressed men. None in a trench coat though, none of them right.
On boulevard de Sébastopol, too anxious to walk any further, she sat down on a bench to await Destiny. She did not expect Destiny to be punctual, but was fairly hopeful it would not let her down, not here, not now, not when taking into account her family history and the circumstances that had converged to deposit her on this very bench.
A man in a trench coat did amble by eventually, an old man in dire need of a bath, carting his belongings in two plastic bags. He was too busy having a querulous conversation with himself to notice Katrina. His coat was ripped. A very handsome man strolled by, making kissing noises with pursed moist lips into his cell phone while winking at Katrina. Three gesticulating Arabs passed by, dressed in kaffiyeh and long gowns. Students of various nationalities, Rastafarians, Nordic blondes, Slavs with bad teeth, Africans with impossibly white teeth, old codgers with no teeth. Young boys on rollerblades. Every male stereotype of Homo sapiens a tired evolution had coughed up. Many of them glanced at her, ready to connect, but she averted her eyes. None of them featured in the script. The right man would recognize her instantly. Having dreamt the same dreams he would know his lines.
Come on, she urged Destiny, don’t let me down! I only have four more days! Send somebody my way!
Please?
When the tall woman blazed around the corner, steady on four-inch heels, the colours of Boulevard de Sébastopol paled. To Katrina, the woman looked like the kind who normally sleeps during the day. That big red hair, that make-up prominent at twenty paces, those gregarious boobs half revealed so you knew they weren’t soccer balls shoved down her dress to grab the attention; every part of her spoke of lurid night time activities. She was brazenly out of place on a busy daytime sidewalk, yet looked as if she owned it.
When she noticed Katrina in solitary splendour on the bench, she stopped dead. A salacious grin ignited her face. Katrina turned around to see at whom the woman’s sudden lust was directed, but found no one. By the time she turned her head again, the woman was sitting next to her, pressing an affectionate thigh against hers. Her gaze held Katrina’s as her mascara coated lashes whipped meaningfully up and down.
Katrina stared unabashed. Her mouth hanging open gave her a certain slack-jawed charm. The larger-than-life woman parted carmine lips and released a flow of words. Judging by her purring dulcet tone and slightly raised eyebrows, she was proposing something. Alas, it was entirely unclear what she was on about, for Katrina spoke no French, apart from seven useful sentences memorized from her phrase book. None of them dealt with this kind of situation.
A second later the tête-à-tête was nipped in the bud. Before the woman could melt Katrina’s frozen shock, a third party intruded from somewhere behind her. Katrina became aware of the interruption only when the apparition’s passionate demeanor switched off. It was as though the woman’s grin had never been. Her thigh withdrew. Her face grew chilly and disapproving. Pointing to Katrina’s watch, impatient now, her gesture demanded to know what time it was, vite, vite!
As Katrina held up her arm, displaying her wristwatch, she noticed the sagging skin beneath the woman’s chin, how brittle that skin. She looked like a cartoon ghost about to fade. Katrina tried not to stare as the woman nodded a formal merci and stalked off on her stilts, back to whatever dimension she’d escaped from.
Katrina glanced over her shoulder. A police car had pulled up to the curb. Two amused gendarmes were holding a mumbling exchange, staring in her direction through the rolled down passenger window. Recognizing an ingénue when they saw one, the young gendarme in the passenger seat leaned out and treated her to a lewd wink before his colleague depressed the throttle and eased the car back into the sea of cars that was rush hour Paris.
It was all too absurd. She was in Paris, for heaven’s sake. It was autumn. Golden leaves fell onto the sidewalks on cue. And this was all the city had to offer? She had been striding down miles of boulevard on sore feet, soignée in her new hat, autumnal grey and soft with just the right kind of bounce in the brim, purchased in a boutique on boulevard Saint Germain. It matched her angora sweater which came from a small boutique on rue de Rivoli. Both had cost a wad of cash so immense it did not bear thinking about, but she was convinced such fashionable items were well worth it. She looked gloriously sophisticated.
And then this.
Ordinarily she did not mind a solo existence, quite the opposite, but being alone in the world’s romantic hot spot, crammed with bars and cafés suitable for covert meetings, how could she feel anything but cheated? How could she not feel an abject failure?
Her adventure had been short and bizarre. Worst of all, it had been humiliating. As she had watched the woman’s lips, so big they could have swallowed her whole and kept on smiling, the revelation that had dazed her was that this would be the most astonishing event of her life.
She returned to Canada four days later, hurrying back to the place in her head where adventures played themselves out in soothing black and white.
Her daydreams continue despite the setback; she has grown too dependent on them. But for a while they were not as intense. They became blurred, slightly out of focus, the sound less audible. It took effort to get back on an even keel, but she managed.
She knows she will never wear the hat again.
Telling her new friend Doreen about the trip is out of the question.
Doreen has her own story to tell — should she choose to — for she too went looking for adventure. She travelled not east, but west, and at terrific expense. She clopped along on horseback under a sky as endless as she had known it would be, clopped along just like the feisty women that gave John Wayne no end of trouble, yes, she did, humming Feet in the stirrups and seat in the saddle, I hung and rattled with them longhorn cattle.
She clopped and she hummed, but only for two days.
A day and a half to be precise.
She paid more money than she will ever be able to justify to fulfil her need to take part in a cattle drive in Alberta. It was not the Wild West per se, but it was the west no matter how you looked at it. The west is not nearly as wild as it used to be, but why let that lessen the allure? The cattle were not longhorns, but the way Doreen preferred to look at it, cattle are cattle, a herd is a herd.
To look the part of her true self, she invested $248 in a lovely taupe Stetson, another staggering amount on a pair of to-die-for boots in a coordinate shade. And she did look the part. Her image in the mirror struck her as so authentic it was more than worth the expense. Had she saved up more money she would have bought a pair of chap
s too, but it had taken long enough to save for the trip and the hat. As it was, the boots wore out what was left of her credit card. Roughing it in the Wild West did not come cheap.
She flew west, rented a car at the Calgary airport and headed southeast for the ranch beyond the horizon, an open map beside her, hoping Destiny had saddled its horse and was ready to take her for a lope towards a suitable sunset.
The farther she drove, the bigger the land, the mightier the sky.
It looked wild enough.
Yes! yodeled her heart. This is it, this is it!
At the ranch the next morning, the sun lit an accommodating infinity of rolling grasslands and craggy buttes. This truly was a land that did not end. Doreen was thrilled to think she would soon ride across it on a real horse.
By then she and the other city slickers were hovering expectantly by the corral, trying to meld with the setting, leaning against the fence at what they hoped was the properly relaxed angle, scanning the ground for suitable straws to chew. They were all wearing spanking new hats and boots.
When it was Doreen’s turn to get teamed up with a compatible horse, the rancher picked a bay named Nelson. Nelson was a sure-footed quarter horse. Seeing as she had no prior experience, she and Nelson would make a fine match, said the rancher, hoisting a saddle over Nelson’s broad back. She’d have nothing to worry her purdy little head about.
“Sure-footed” was the term cowboys used to describe unambitious steeds past their prime who favoured static grazing over forward perambulation. It was another term for “mighty slow,” but the cowpokes saw no reason to burden Doreen with that fact.
Even so, on the second day, trailing the rest of the group, she managed to topple off her sure-footed companion. As soon as she hit the ground, Nelson stopped to graze, oblivious to his lost rider, content with life in general.
Afterwards Doreen reflected that her fall should not have come as a great surprise. From the beginning she’d had a niggling suspicion that nothing was going to turn out the way it was supposed to. Reality, indifferent to the authenticity of her costume, felt no obligation to conform to clichéd fantasy just because Doreen Riley had her hopes up.
First of all, the two cowpokes assisting the rancher were too short. And if that wasn’t bad enough, one was scrawny and had bad breath, the other was bald under his Stetson and had two ex-wives. The bald one, Willie, looked down on women as people, he explained during a philosophical moment, though he loved them as women. This was his idea of a compliment.
The scrawny quiet one, Frank, preferred equine company to that of the complex human variety.
Neither of them played the guitar.
Among the other city slickers were three women from Toronto, all taller and prettier than Doreen, though friendly enough. One knew how to ride and made sure they were all aware of the fact, until Willie pointed out that “ridin’ English don’t count for shit in these parts.”
The remaining two were men. One was a baby faced weasel of a lawyer from Kitchener who had come to get drunk outdoors. The other, a rotund fellow from Windsor, was too full of delusions of his own to notice Doreen and the Torontonian trio. Like Doreen, he clopped along on a sure-footed mount, clutching the saddle horn, bouncing madly, virgin chaps flapping.
The first evening it turned very cold. A mean wind came sweeping from the north howling a wintry tune. There was no lazing around the campfire that night, no camaraderie and singing of songs. They all took to their sleeping bags early, keeping most of their clothes on for warmth even after the cowboys got the wood stoves blazing in the tents. In the men’s tent somebody snored as if his life depended on it. He sounded like a Harley Davidson needing a tune-up.
Despite the Harley, Doreen must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next morning she woke up shivering in her sleeping bag. The ground had grown harder overnight. The stove was no longer blazing. Outside it was so cold there was no lingering around the campfire at breakfast either. An inch of snow covered the landscape. The rancher offered no apology for the sudden change of season.
It was down with the ham and scrambled eggs, anemic coffee in a tin mug, on with an extra layer of clothing, and up in the saddle where the wind seemed stronger. Doreen’s gloves were not warm enough so the rancher lent her a pair of knitted mitts to put on top.
Grabbing the reins with big red mitts just did not look right.
“Is the weather supposed to stay like this? It was not in the forecast.” The lawyer, chugging something out of a pocket flask, looked like he might sue.
“The weather changes awful quick in these parts,” informed the rancher, challenging any sissy to complain about nature’s way. Nobody said another word. The rancher hinted that they should have had the foresight to bring long johns. He himself had exchanged his Stetson for a fur lined hat with earflaps. Wielding a spatula by the chuck wagon, he looked disconcertingly like Elmer Fudd.
Two hours after setting out, Nelson’s sure front feet slid on an icy patch and Doreen found herself doing an involuntary somersault. She had not been paying attention, too busy thinking about how this ride was supposed to turn out, had Destiny bothered to keep the appointment. Before she knew it she lay sprawled atop a frozen prickly pear cactus. As she lifted her head from the harsh, hostile ground mumbling, “Oh God, let me die,” she watched Frank streak up a butte on his Appaloosa to head off some stray cattle. It looked exactly like the effortless manoeuver she had planned to impress Chuck, Buck or Wild Bill with.
Then came the pain. It turned out she had broken her left ankle. The end of her career as a cowgirl was abrupt and inglorious. While she tried to get up and failed, the rancher got out his mobile phone and tucked it under the right earflap of his hat. He looked none too pleased. Forty minutes later Betsy, the rancher’s wife, came charging across the grassland in a pick-up truck to remove the troublesome Doreen Riley so the cattle drive could proceed the way a cattle drive should.
Doreen could tell they were happy to get rid of her. She was a liability. The rancher had no insurance.
Betsy drove Doreen straight to Calgary with Betsy’s Cousin Verna following in Doreen’s rental car. The cab of the truck was warm and cozy. Betsy was cheerful and sympathetic, offering hot coffee laced with rye from a thermos, talking non-stop the entire way, telling Doreen over and over not to cry, these things happen, heaven’s above, she was darn lucky to have an excuse to escape the weather, wasn’t she?
Considering the circumstances, Doreen felt it would be impolite to tell Betsy to shut the fuck up.
After waving good-bye to Betsy and Verna, and having had her foot seen to in a Calgary hospital, she spent the night in a hotel room overdosing on nachos and mini bar offerings while watching dirty movies. If she watched them for a treat or for punishment she never could establish, especially as they were showing Rio Grande on another channel. She fell asleep during a grunting group activity reminiscent of a picture she had once seen of a rattlers’ den. The painkillers combined with booze and all the limbs writhing entangled on the screen made her dizzy.
She had hoped to see a rattler while out riding, from a safe distance atop a palomino.
The next afternoon a kindly flight attendant rolled her onto an eastbound plane in a wheelchair, the taupe boots and hat shoved in the bottom of her suitcase. The Wild West had cast her out. The humiliation hurt more than the ankle.
Back home she stomped her feisty good foot on her Stetson until it was flat and shapeless, only to immediately regret it and try to reshape it. It did not comply. Like Doreen, it would never be the same. The boots ended up in the back of her closet.
Sometimes she releases them from their prison of shame and looks at them, sighs as she runs a defeated finger along the stitching. They are good-looking boots, made to last. There are still bits of mud and bits of straw stuck to the soles. They smell of the west and she sometimes hates them for it, but cannot bring herself to clean them and erase the sorry adventure.
Let’s face it, she began to r
ationalize, she did sit firmly in the saddle. And a very nice saddle it was. She did ride across a western vista on a horse, following the lumbering backsides of a herd of genuine cattle. Nobody can take that away.
Still.
It was humiliating, getting within sniffing distance of her dream, then failing to grab hold of it. People kept asking, “Sooo . . . how was it? And what happened to your foot? Fell off the horse, ha, ha, ha?” She lied and made up a story about a car accident somewhere outside Calgary. A woman named Betsy in a pickup truck, drunk as a skunk. A head-on collision. She was lucky to survive.
While her foot healed, she spent her evenings playing cowboy songs and drinking rye. Rye was what the cowboys had said they favored come sundown.
Enough rye will eventually alter a city slicker’s brittle hold on reality, and when it did, Doreen succumbed to the sloppiest form of sentimentality, which invariably ended with an inspired rendition of The Old Chisholm Trail. With her eyes closed she would hoist herself onto a horse, a palomino with the leaping grace of Nureyev. Her body became one with the loping horse as she lost herself in Come a ti yi yippee, come a ti yi yea.
Until one night, just as she got to With my knees in the saddle . . . the landlord came hammering on the door yelling, “Enough already!” He’d had it with her yowling. What strange goddamn medication did they give her for that broken ankle? Was she on illegal drugs? Self-medicating? He didn’t want no drugs in his house. Enough was enough.
That was how Doreen found herself evicted in the middle of her favourite tune, foot in a cast and all. Once again she had toppled off her horse.
The following week, through a stroke of luck, she discovered the gem that is the attic apartment where she now lives.
Leaving Berlin Page 10