by Bruce Barber
the shouting. For Keyes, Venice meant the beginning of the end of their affair. He always remembered it with discomfort bordering on pain.
“Have you been to Venice, Bruno?” Sandra continued.
“I’ve been everywhere one time or another.”
“Claude’s still cross because I had a little flirtation while we were there.”
Bruno put Sandra’s drink before her. She sipped it, then smiled at him as if the drink was the best she had ever tasted.
“I’m not cross,” Keyes said, “and I still want a beer.”
“Of course you are, love. It’s not as if I did anything with Turiddu...”
“Turiddu!” Bruno said. “Sicilian?”
“Why, yes, now that you mention it. He was Sicilian. Dark, gloriously dark... all Angus bull and raven.”
“Oh, lord,” Keyes muttered.
Again Sandra sipped her drink.
“What was a Sicilian doing in Venice?” Bruno wanted to know.
“Don’t act dumb, Bruno,” Keyes growled. “He was doing Sandra, or trying to.”
“It wasn’t like that at all!” Sandra said indignantly. “All we did was slip away one afternoon to Torcello...”
O’Reilly appeared and pressed in between Keyes and Sandra.
“There you are, traitors! What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Another conspiracy?”
Bruno grinned. “In the theatre, there are always conspiracies.”
“You’re damned right there are,” O’Reilly said. “At the moment the conspiracy seems to be to cause my expiration by thirst.”
Already the bottle of Irish whiskey was in Bruno’s hand.
A boom of distant thunder rattled the walls of The Balls.
“I think I’ll be on my way,” Keyes said, rather than re-seating himself, “before the rain starts again...”
“Are you talking to yourself again?” O’Reilly wished to know.
“To anyone who’ll listen, I suppose,” Keyes said, stepping back from the bar and leaning to kiss Sandra lightly on the cheek. “If you need me for anything, you know where I am.”
Sandra smiled in the sad way she had on certain occasions, and Keyes missed her very much, suddenly, in spite of Venice and everything in between.
“Thank you, Claude,” she said. “You’re a nice man.”
“For all the good it does me...” he whispered as he wended his way to the exit.
(3:6) Ontario Street
Keyes stepped out into an operatic rainfall; even the word “torrent’ was more woefully inadequate than Curly Joe Howard would have been if cast as King Lear. A few over-dressed tourists huddled beneath awnings and in doorways, probably wondering why the hefty ticket prices didn’t include some sort of all-purpose weather insurance. After all, it was just a bit too much to be expected to boldly support the Arts in Canada, and get soaked to the bone for your cultural pains. The only active vehicles seemed to be cabs – Stratford, Keyes had noticed, had more taxis than it had doughnut shops, which, if you are at all familiar with the town, is quite a significant statistic. While it is possible to be disappointed here by a particular Portia or Benedict, or by your hotel accommodations, you can always get a taxi, with a double-dip cruller to munch along the way.
Keyes turned his collar up and hunkered down to present as small a target as possible to the elements. An impressive thunder-lightning combination joined the kettledrum rain, turning the whole scene into something perfectly Wagnerian. But, in his path was not Jon Vickers singing Siegfried; instead, on a bench by the curb, sitting quietly drowning in the downpour, was what looked to him like the saddest girl in the world.
Ophelia in T-shirt and jeans, Keyes thought as he approached her, drawn by the despair that hung around her as heavily as the rain. Her eyes were closed, and it wasn’t rain that leaked from beneath the lids, down to a pouty mouth trembling with repressed sobbing. Her straight, black hair was plastered smooth against her face, neck and shoulders, and she hugged herself as she rocked from side to side. Something about her...
“Are you all right, Miss?” he asked, keeping well outside of the “personal space” he’d heard so much about. She responded with a silent and vigorous nod which meant, “Go away and leave me alone, you old fool.”
Keyes did not go away. Ungenerous souls watching from windows might have suspected his creaking libido of unsavoury opportunism, but this was not so. His attitude was archaic, certainly, perhaps atavistic and a valuable lesson for all childless men of a certain age, but reprehensible it was not. Had he a daughter of his own, he would certainly want someone – even an old fool – to help her get in out of the rain, if only because even in this inventively damaged age, commonplace pneumonia could still be every bit as deadly as radioactive fallout or ultraviolet rays or overexposure to CBC situation comedies. And so he persevered with his ragged knight errant routine.
“You really should get inside,” he said in a not terribly suave or authoritative voice. “The rain doesn’t look like it’s going to let up for a while...”
“Who cares?” she snapped back, with a mature viciousness he would have expected from someone who had experienced the full five Shakespearean acts of human suffering rather than the mere prologue her apparent age suggested.
“Well, I suppose I care, or I wouldn’t have stopped to share this dry-land drowning experience, would I?”
She looked at Keyes straight on. It was the first time he’d seen her face clearly, but now that he thought about it her shape was unmistakeable – she was the dancer from The Gilded Lily, Alan Wales’... friend? No wonder she wasn’t worried about catching cold, he reflected – it was already an occupational hazard with her. He liked the face, more than the shape, which was a bit excessive for his tastes. She had thick black eyebrows, and near-black eyes as well; her cheekbones were high and pronounced; her lips were the same red as the dress she had worn the night before. A small scar ran down her left cheek – another occupational hazard?
“Look,” he persisted, “come inside and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee...”
“I can afford my own coffee... and I wouldn’t go in there if the offer was for steak and champagne!” Her emphasis on “there” was the same “den-of-iniquity” pronunciation more often applied to her place of employment. Having made the attempt at altruism, Keyes was about to move on before anybody caught him at it, but the girl continued to speak, as if she couldn’t help herself, as if it had all been pent-up and simply waiting for someone to ask.
“I know what they’re up to in there, crying in their beer about how he’ll be missed, about how much they respected him... but they all hated him!”
She wasn’t talking to Keyes any more; she was addressing the rain, the cold wind, and the “they” inside the bar. And it was obvious to Keyes that the subject of her tears was Alan Wales. He could have corrected her impression of the attitudes inside the pub concerning Wales: the phrase “he’ll be missed” was not among those he’d heard.
“Are you talking about Alan Wales?” he asked, if only to confirm his own deductive omniscience.
“You knew him?”
Keyes was becoming distinctly more uncomfortable by the second.
“I... it was me who found him... the body. I’m Claude Keyes.”
She was on her feet before he’d finished the introduction. Her eyes widened slightly in recognition, with a slight flicker of unjustified fear.
“I’ve seen you before, in the bar – I thought you were just another horny old fart, but you’re one of them, aren’t you?” she said.
Before Keyes could disavow any membership in whatever club she was referring to with so much venom, the girl was gone, half-running off into the storm. Thunder applauded her exit, then a showy bolt of lightning struck a street light on the corner; there was an intense flickering, more thunder, and the entire block went dark.
(3:7) Betty’s Bed & Breakfast
Keyes couldn’t get the girl out of his mind – who was she to Hecuba, or Hecuba to her? Any
liaison she might have had with Wales was unusual, to say the least. For all of their modern ways and open-minded acceptance of everything from actors to mutant turtles to Madonna, theatre people still maintained a kind of gypsy-clique style of living, not necessarily from snobbery (although this happens), but mostly for simplicity’s sake: those who understand who you are and what you do are easiest to get along with on a day-to-day basis, intimately or otherwise.
But he could speculate fruitlessly all night on Wales’ relationship with the rain-ridden stripper-girl... and the sequins she seemed to shed like a second skin; there was a much simpler way to find out what had gone on, since there was a horse’s mouth close to hand.
Betty was sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of restorative tea when Keyes got back. She had obviously been hard at work – her bare arms and face were splotched with Titanium White and Hooker’s Green. As usual however, there was not a spot of paint on her working clothes: pressed white jeans and an unwrinkled white T-shirt. Keyes believed it was a point of honour with her to paint her canvas and not her clothing.
After he had described his encounter to Betty, she sniffed as if someone in a plaid suit had been allowed through the front door.
“That one!” she said, reaching for the Scotch bottle beside the teapot, and splashing two fingers – thumbs, more like it – into her cup, while lighting a cigarette with the other hand; sometimes Keyes envied Betty her ambidextrous decadence.
“Are you going to tell me