Читать книгу Lucy's Launderette - Betsy Burke - Страница 11

The next morning, I left for work at six-thirty, hoping the semidarkness would give me cover. I snuck out of my apartment dressed like an escapee from a black-and-white British movie. One of those dowdy sixties flicks. Georgy Girl. The Carry On gang. My hair was squashed under the kind of head scarf that you tie under your chin, a silk souvenir covered with sketches of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian urchin children. I wore a huge wooly coat with sloping shoulders, a pair of black gumboots and dark glasses. I had hoped to look a little like Jackie Kennedy sneaking past the paparazzi incognito, but in fact I looked more like Jackie Kennedy’s cleaning lady. Taking these precautions was exhausting, but I counted on the fact that Dirk could sometimes be thrown by small things.

Along with the Superman disguise, Dirk had a few other personas in his manic closet. One was a tatty spy. During one endless spring, Dirk had introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond,” then waved the plastic pistol in everyone’s face and told them he was off to squash Goldfinger. For this Bond personality, Dirk had a very grotty white tuxedo, a garment he’d acquired from a bum in California, who’d claimed he’d got it from Our Man in Havana. The suit was several inches too short in the pants and jacket cuffs, covered with stains whose origins I preferred not to think about, and so creased you knew he and a dozen other people had slept in it.

He also had several sporting personas. Sometimes he pretended he was Tiger Woods, roaming around with an old golfing iron, swinging dangerously in all directions. I’d mistakenly tried to reason with Dirk, telling him that he was the wrong color to start with, would always be the wrong color, and how he lacked the discipline to be a golfing champion. This enraged him. I still hadn’t learned that you can’t reason with a man who’s down on his lithium. I always hoped that I’d get through that thick, sick hide of his, get through to that other Dirk who had to be in there somewhere.

Maybe I was overestimating him. After all, Dirk had been no great shakes as a child either. He’d terrorized me when I was small by opening up The Wizard of Oz to the Wicked Witch of the West illustration. Her green face and clawlike hands had made my whole being curdle. Dirk used to chase me from room to room holding up the scary page and forcing me to look.

He’d drawn swastikas in indelible ink on the foreheads of every one of my dolls and hung them from the curtain rod in my bedroom.

He’d tormented me from the day I made my entrance into this life.

Was it any wonder I couldn’t get through to him?

I clumped to work through the gloomy streets, dodging in doorways and scaring myself every few minutes with my own reflection. My first stop was at La Tazza, the little café next to the gallery. Lunging through the entrance, I was hit with the rich, dense aroma of ten different kinds of coffee. Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice. Behind the counter, a plump purple-hued girl moved lazily, taking glass jars down from shelves and pouring coffee beans into cellophane bags, folding the tops, and smoothing on the little gold labels as if it were a kind of meditation.

“Hi, Nelly.” She looked miffed for a second. “It’s me, Lucy.”

Behind her back, we called her Nelly the Grape. She wore only the color purple, in every variation. Today, her skirt was a deep periwinkle shade, her blouse lilac—while her hair, angelized, glinted like garnets when it caught the light. Her nails, eyelids and lips were a similar wine shade.

“I didn’t recognize you. How’s it going? I don’t know how you can sit there all day in a gallery full of penises. I’d get worked up…you know…being reminded…thinking about it.”

“I’m dead from the neck down. Numb from disillusionment.” I shrugged. “But at least this way, I don’t forget what they look like.”

“Crappy love life, eh?”

“Nonexistent. Put one of those big gooey slices in a bag for me, will you, Nelly? What are they anyway?”

“It’s a Black Forest slice, double fudge and cream, cherry filling, layers of chocolate, whipped cream and cherry along the top as well.”

“That ought to make up for two love lives.”

Nelly prepared my double latte and put the huge sweet gooey slice of empty calories in the bag. “Here you are. Enjoy.” She unconsciously ran her tongue around her lips, like a big fluffy cat enjoying the cream.

I was ready to climb into the trenches. The enemy incursion would be hard to predict. It was silly to take chances.

I unlocked the gallery door, darted inside, locked it again, and got down to the serious business awaiting me.

I had to track down Paul Bleeker’s number and let him know why I hadn’t been at the Rain Room to meet him. Let him know that I hadn’t meant to ditch him. That I was interested. That I still existed. But his number wasn’t listed. I tried calling new listings, found nothing, gave up and opened the e-mails.

I got a jolt when I double-clicked on the incoming mail and there was a message from pbleeker@coastnet.ca— “Sorry, I couldn’t make it last night, Lucy Luv”—I lingered over the “Luv” for a bit—“Something came up. Cheers. P.B.”

The reptile! He hadn’t shown up after all. Well, it was a two-way dumping ground. I typed a new message. “Sorry I didn’t show yesterday. Unavoidable business. Perhaps another evening? Lucy Madison.”

He was supposed to believe that I hadn’t seen his message, that I didn’t even know he’d sent one? All he had to do was look at the time on my message.

What I really needed to know was why? Why had he stood me up in the Rain Room? But then I’d stood him up, too, thanks to Dirk. Whatever Paul Bleeker’s excuse was, if he even bothered with one, I’m sure that Nadine was to blame. She would have to add him to her list of scalps. It was impossible for her not to try. It came to her more easily than breathing. See desired object. Take desired object. It was as simple as that. And I knew from past experience that very few men could resist her allure. Translation: resist her money.

I stifled my disappointment with some of the gooey sweet slice.

The morning crawled. No superheroes or spies materialized. The only interruption was a middle-aged Japanese couple, tourists without a word of English. They tittered and chattered over some etchings for a good half hour and then made their choice. You would have thought they were buying a Van Gogh, they were so pleased with themselves. They picked out a monster member in lurid pinks and purples, then with much bowing and smiling, they put it on their VISA and took it away. One less willy in my life.

I surfed the net for a while then e-mailed Sky, “Help, I’m a prisoner in a Gastown weenie factory.”

She e-mailed back, “Aye, there’s the rub.”

We agreed to meet for lunch at our usual place.

It was ten minutes to one when Nadine finally arrived. She wore dark glasses and when I said “Good morning” too brightly, she let out a grunt of disgust and retreated into her office. I was surprised that she didn’t send me out to get her something to eat.

“I’m going for lunch,” I yelled in the direction of the door. When there was no answer, I put on my coat and headed off to meet Sky.

Evvie’s Midnight Diner was one of those Naugahydebooth, dusty plastic aspidistra, twirly-stool-at-the-long-steel-counter kind of places near East Hastings. A hungry part of town. Evvie was actually a huge ugly-beautiful Lebanese man. His name was unpronounceable so everyone just called him Evvie. He had bought the place from the real Evvie back in Jeremy’s day, sold it in the eighties, gone home to Lebanon, seen what a Swiss cheese had been made of his home country, hightailed it back to Canada, bought his old diner back, and restored it to exactly what it had been in the seventies, right down to the liverish color of the booths.

Evvie’s Midnight Diner had been a well-kept secret for decades, a haunt for vanilla drunks, Korea crazies, fresh air inspectors and actors waiting up to read their reviews in the morning papers. Now it was becoming fashionable again simply because it was so unfashionable. The real thing. Sky and I had given up being virtuous and eating at those health food places with the nut rissole burgers and grass cutting teas. Evvie’s served cheap old-fashioned unhealthy food and piles of it.

Sure, there were salads on the menu at Evvie’s, too, but it would have been frivolous for a person in my financial position to bypass the mountainous, double-cheese, bacon and mushroom burgers with the side of fries for a sagging lettuce leaf and an anemic tomato slice. Or the platter of battered and deep-fried halibut and prawn with loads of tartar sauce. It was good dollar value.

Let’s be frank here. Only the rich can afford to starve.

And there was another problem. The food I left in the fridge at home disappeared mysteriously before I could get to it. I thought I was being clever, eating out, keeping my food out of the Viking’s mouth. She’d denied touching any of it, just as I’d denied touching her Glug. I asked her if maybe her conquests didn’t get hungry and thirsty in the night, and perhaps didn’t make a raid on the provisions, but her eyes and mouth narrowed into a sneering expression and she said, “You jealous.”

Sky was sitting in our booth at the end of the diner. She was not alone. With her, was a man whose hair was just a little too blond. His trimmed mustache lurked on his upper lip like a small yellow rodent. His face was buffed to an unnatural shine. He wore a lavender-colored Lacoste T-shirt, a preppy gray knit sweater knotted around his shoulders, and a pair of jeans that were so tight I wouldn’t have been surprised if he squeaked when he talked. He was fit though, and very neat. Nice and tidy right down to his fingernails. He must have been edging on forty—perhaps he was older—but he gave the impression of eternal forced youth.

He was running his hand up and down Sky’s arm and if he kept at it much longer, he was going to leave her with no skin. There was no doubt about it. He had taken possession of her. And Sky seemed pretty happy to be possessed. She had a slightly goofy expression on her face and a bruised, trampled look about her. When I sat down at the table, she held out her hand, palm up, in a Ta-da gesture and said, “Lucy Madison, Max Kinghorn.”

So this was the guy who had hired Sky to manage the store, the famous boss from Seattle. I peered rudely.

Max didn’t bother to stand up on my arrival as I might have expected from such a tidy polite-looking person. He must have sensed my hostility. He laughed a nervous, whiny, slightly nasal laugh and went back to the arm stroking as if his life depended on it.

I stretched out my hand to shake his, and to stop him from doing all that damned stroking.

“Sky’s told me all about you,” I said, forcing myself to smile.

He whinnied again.

She had told me all about him. She’d gone into quite a lot of gory detail.

Max Kinghorn was the owner of the Retro Metro Boutique, but he lived in Seattle where he had other vintage boutiques. He was a strange bird. A vulture, to be precise. He stocked his stores by reading obituaries published up and down the West Coast, from California to B.C. He was always ready to swoop down on the defunct’s family and offer to take the horrid burden of dusty antiquated clothing, furniture and knickknacks off their hands. As vintage vultures go, I gathered he was the best in his trade. But Sky, I wanted to scream, Oh Sky, what about that little thing you told me about Max, that one, really important detail?

Max shifted, gave a few last frenzied strokes, then pecked Sky demurely on the cheek. “Well, I’m sure you ladies have a lot to talk about. I’ll get going. I have business in Port Townsend.” Then he whispered to Sky, “Ciao, liebchen, I’ll call you.”

I could picture it already, Max hovering and slavering as he waited to pick over the corpse down in Port Townsend, offering condolences to the bereaved family along with his certified cheque.

I watched him leave then glared at Sky across the table. “That’s Max, Sky? The infamous Max?”

She glared back at me. “Don’t get worked up about it. I told you I thought he was interesting.”

“I didn’t realize you thought he was that interesting.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”

Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.

“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”

Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.

“He’s so…so…”

“Gay?”

“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”

“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.

Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”

“I think I need to start worrying about you.”

“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.

“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s time you started listening to your mother, Sky. All those talks of hers about self-esteem and so on.”

“You’re not listening to me, Luce. Shut up for a minute. What I mean is, I’m something new for him. I’m exotic. By comparison, I mean. You know, by comparison to being with men.”

“Sure you are, dear,” I said in the voice my mother used on me when I was eight.

“And Christ, Lucy, you should see the way he looks in a suit.”

I wanted to see the way he looked in a suit. A suit of armor. Dropped into the ocean, with him in it.

Sky always had been a sucker for a nice garment. Her degree is in theatrical costume design. We met when the university theater department roped me into doing a little set painting for a production of Peer Gynt. During that particular show, she was fighting with the director, who’d slept with her then refused to acknowledge her. She took revenge by using weak seams in strategic places. A few belly dancers accidentally bared their nipples during the dance sequence and some trolls had codpiece problems while trogging around in the Hall of the Mountain King. We giggled like idiots from backstage. Apart from that, it was an uneventful production.

Sky had had a lot of boyfriends back in the university days, but none of them had left her with the day-after evidence that Max had.

“I can’t resist him.” She shook her head, then grimaced and stuck out her tongue at me.

“When are you seeing him again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course I don’t know. Why would I know? He’s a busy man. So stop asking me trick questions.”

I didn’t remind Sky of that drunken evening just after I’d gotten rid of Frank. The one where Sky and I started out delicately sipping white wine and ended up falling headfirst into gallons of tequila sunrise, sloppily guzzling and making a lot of drunken Never Again promises. Never Again would we go out with men who were lechers, men who were leeches, men who were misogynists, men who were polygamists—our list was quite long and we pretty much eliminated half the human race.

After all the Never Agains, and since Mr. Perfect still hadn’t shown up, it was just a question of choosing one of the guys off the Never Again list.

I said, “Let’s forget about him for a minute. Let’s not let men ruin our lunch.”

“Good thinking.” Sky suddenly looked like her old self again.

I launched into all my news. Jeremy’s funeral, Paul Bleeker’s big show and small advances, Connie. When she heard the Connie part, Sky said, “I think you need to talk to Reebee on this one. You might need a shot of voodoo.”

Reebee Robertson is Sky’s mother and my creativity expert. In her forty-seven years of life, Reebee has been Rolfed, Reike-ed, Shiatsu-ed, acupunctured, transactionally analyzed, regressionally analyzed, re-birthed, de-birthed, Jung-ed, Freuded, Adlered, Kleined and Winnicotted. These days she offered up her own kind of psychological hodgepodge. Her techniques may not have been highly regarded by the head-shrinking intelligentsia but they worked for me.

For a small painting, she would leave me thinking how wonderful I was and get me unstuck when I was blocked and unable to paint. Of course, I had to put up with Sky snickering on the sidelines at what she called all that New Age drivel.

Reebee had turned a life’s worth of experiments and hapless wandering into a psychology degree. Then she had added a whole lot of other elements—myth and superstition—to her treatment. In her New Age way, she had renovated and furnished her Kitsilano house with favors.

She traded her way through life, something that Sky couldn’t tolerate. “Give me the delicious feel of cool hard cash any day,” Sky was prone to saying, punctuated with, “I’m a material girl.” Sky lusted after clean sheets and her own pristine space. It was hard to blame her really. Reebee had dragged the protesting toddler from a Salt Spring Island commune to Victoria group house to a California Hari Krishna plantation to a hammock on a Maui beach, before finally dumping her with the grandparents back in Vancouver when she decided to go back to university.

The waitress brought our orders and just before Sky threw herself on the club sandwich, she said, “Really terrible about Jeremy. Easter’s going to be awful without him, isn’t it? God, I can still remember that year when we all went out to Cedar Narrows for the big meal. I nearly peed myself laughing, Jeremy making all those Jesus jokes, and your dad turning scarlet with rage.”

“That was Jeremy all over. A terrible tease.”

“Where are you spending it this year?”

“Don’t know. My parents’ place in Cedar Narrows as usual, I guess.”

“You could spend it with us. Reebee will probably be doing something obscene with tofu but there’ll be lots of good wine.” Sky became emphatic. “She really wants to see you. I’ve been keeping her up-to-date, but she wants to see you in person.”

“I don’t know about Easter.”

“Call her.”

“I will.”

“Promise you’ll call her today, when you get back to work.”

“I promise. But I’ve got to do something about the Dirk situation. I’ve got to see my parents and get this thing sorted out. He might show up. I should go out to Cedar Narrows and act as a decoy. Big holidays always bring out the worst in him. If only he’d just come out and behave badly and we could have him arrested. And there’s one other thing about going to Cedar Narrows for Easter.”

“What’s that?”

“Having to show up alone and unmarried when that walking hormone of my cousin and her perfect husband will be there. You know Cherry. She’ll be front and center with Michael and her entire demon spawn and probably pregnant with triplets if I know her.”

Sky nodded and then a wicked smile crept across her face. “You could ask Paul Bleeker to Easter at your parents’. I’m sure he’d appreciate your mother’s collection. All that marvelous sculpture.”

I swatted her with the menu.

I took my time getting back to the gallery that afternoon. Max was far from perfect but at least Sky had someone to stroke all the skin off her arm. All I had was a vague possibility that Paul Bleeker might, if he happened to remember, ask me out again. And even at that, there was no guarantee that he’d show up.

When I got back to the gallery, Nadine’s office door was open and she was moaning into the phone. “So did I, darling, so did I…so are you, darling, so are you…it was, darling, it really was…it was so…what, Night Porter?…no, I rather think Last Tango in Paris.”

I confess I haven’t seen these movies but the word-of-mouth rehashes of the important bits have a wide circulation.

Nadine stuck her head out of the office, glared at me, and continued talking. “Do let’s do it again. I’ll supply the champers and the toys. You supply the…yes, that. Yes, of course I will.”

I don’t know about you, but when I really want a man, I choose to ignore his past, even if it’s a very recent past, like a just-a-minute-ago-on-the-other-end-of-a-telephone past, just as long as it really is past and doesn’t creep into the present or the future. I couldn’t be sure who was on the other end of the line, but I wanted to be prepared for any eventuality. I mean, a man that came with no past, what kind of a man could he be? On the other hand, a man that sleeps with Nadine Thorpe? Nadine Thorpe was one big walking appetite. And Nadine looked flattened and mussed-up today. She had definitely had sex last night. Everybody—Nadine, Sky, Max, that middle-aged Japanese couple, possibly even my parents (repellent thought)—was having sex but me. It was time to take action. It was time to get therapy. I phoned Reebee and got myself invited for dinner that Friday night.