by Wayne Grady
You should have brought some wine with you, and the rest of Paul’s coke, and some money; that would have been thinking ahead. That would have been dignified. A woman needed money and a room of her own, and her dignity. What were you going to do without your phone? Or, shit, the keys to your apartment? You checked your purse again, your coat pockets, the bag you put your pills in. No phone, no wallet, no keys. Wait, Wendell had a key to your apartment. You needed to text him. You couldn’t borrow Mariela’s phone because she didn’t have one. You’d asked her before. No, I can’t afford. Shit, how much did Paul pay her? Sometimes when she was at work she borrowed yours to call her kids, so she obviously needed one. Paul should have got her one.
“After you drop me off,” you said to Mariela, looking at your watch, “you should go home to your kids, it’s late.”
“I’ll go back to the house and clean first,” she said. “Señor Paul asked me.”
“Whatever.” Such delusional loyalty to a shithead.
You got out of the car under the Hotel Vancouver’s brightly lit portico and she drove off. Not to your house, you reminded yourself archly. Your room of your own was across town, full of used books and unanswered phone messages. When Paul said he wanted a woman’s touch, he hadn’t meant on the house. And the cottage was even less yours, all that dark, rough wood, brass fittings, shiny black Italian marble countertops, no thought to the environment, still less to the workers who got silicosis from inhaling all that marble dust. You’d pretended to like it at first, just as he pretended to like it when you recommended books to him. That’s how you know the honeymoon is over, when you both stop pretending to like things about the other person you never really liked in the first place.
You pulled your coat tightly about you, walked up the hotel steps, tripped and fell on the top step and tore your new tights, the whole frigging knee this time. “Fuck!” The doorman looked offended in principle. He helped you up and looked down at your knee as he opened the heavy brass doors. You brushed through. He didn’t hold his hand out for a tip.
Paul would be expecting you to be at the house, helping Mariela clean up, looking contrite and waiting to earn his forgiveness when you went to bed. Yes, you’d known he was bringing people home for dinner. You forgot, you were sorry. Yes, you knew it had happened before, yes, you knew you promised it wouldn’t happen again, and next time it wouldn’t. How did he know it wouldn’t? Well, there wouldn’t be a next time. But how could he trust you? Well, if our relationship wasn’t built on trust, what was it built on? Don’t ask him that. You knew what it was built on. All you could do would be to promise to try harder. This would go on for an hour, maybe longer, after which you would say anything, do anything, to make it stop. You’d feel waterboarded.
He’d be in for a surprise when his little wifey wasn’t there. Mariela would tell him where you were, and he’d come after you. You pictured him in his SUV racing down Alberni, his grim face glowing in the dash lights. He’d leave the car running in the valet parking space and stride into the lobby, but you’d be in a stall in the washroom doing a line on the back of the toilet, or in the bar finding out what a Johnnie Walker Blue tasted like on Paul’s Mastercard. Or maybe, if Wendell showed up first, you’d be in a room. The top of your head tingled in anticipation. Wendell would clean out your hand first, and then the minibar. You’d take the rose-scented hand lotion and maybe the shower cap—your father the survivalist used to put them over bowls of leftovers in the fridge. There was a phone in the lobby and you could call Wendell and tell him where you were, then you remembered it was Thursday, and Thursday was Wendell’s poker night. He turned his phone off when he played poker, said even knowing it was on spoiled his concentration. Shit. No keys, no phone, no Wendell, no dope.
What to do? Paul would probably be there any minute. You went into the bar. Paul wouldn’t yell or grab at you in the bar. You took a table in the middle of the room and ordered a Johnnie Walker Blue. The waiter gave you the same look the doorman did, and you wondered what you’d done wrong this time. The bare knee, the inexpertly bandaged hand. Temporary setbacks. “Forget the Scotch,” you said conciliatorily. Maybe it was a bit much. “I’ll have a glass of malbec. The nine-ounce.” He went away. The people along the bar were sitting up like meerkats, executive directors with their committee chairs, unit managers with their new hires, lawyers with their interns. Wendell’s poker game was in Gastown, you didn’t know the address but you knew where he always parked when he was playing. On Powell Street, near the Gassy Jack statue. The wine came and you ordered another, keeping a fish eye on the lobby. This time the waiter looked at you longer and said he thought one glass was enough. He looked you up and down. You looked you up and down.
“What?” you said. “My skirt? It’s supposed to be rumpled.”
“You should go home, miss.”
“I can’t.”
“Okay, here’s your bill. You pay and you go.”
He looked toward the lobby, where the hotel must have kept its bouncer.
“Fucking right I’m going.” Too loud. Heads turned. You rummaged in your purse, pulled out Paul’s credit card, and handed it to the waiter.
The waiter looked at it closely. “Who is Paul Ogilvy? Not you, I think.”
“He’s my fiancé,” you said. “We’re affianced.”
“Where is he?”
“He’ll be here in a minute. He’s just outside, parking the car.”
The waiter put the card on his tray as though it was a specimen slide with some new strain of swine flu on it and took it back to the cash, obviously to call it in. You quickly drank your wine, gathered your purses, and left. The doorman was on the phone, probably talking to the waiter, stop that woman! Fuck him. No sign of Paul’s SUV, good, Gassy Jack wasn’t that far from there, you could take a cab.
You climbed into the taxi feeling exhilarated. You thought you heard a shout and the sound of footsteps behind you, it was either Paul or the waiter, so you slammed the door and the taxi took off. “Gastown,” you told the driver, “and don’t spare the horses.” You looked behind you and saw nothing, which was how you wanted it. You sat back and rested for a moment, eyes closed, imagining what it was going to be like without a father or a partner, to be unfamilied, unfamiliarized, a clean break, a fresh start, and when you looked up you saw Gassy Jack.
“Here,” you said, taking a lone twenty from your purse. “Let me off here.”
The snow was slippery but it softened your step. You were running on hot, white sand, you could have levitated over it on the thermals, and there was the sense that all of life’s complications were beneath you. Only good things ahead, like Wendell and Professor Curtis and Walter Raleigh, who wasn’t a very good poet but was courtly. Courteous to a fault. Your head was clear. Your legs were strong. Your breathing was laboured but steady, athletic. The bell captain and the parking attendants were behind you, the tumult and the shouting had died, all you could hear were your own heels on the sidewalk and the sound of pills rattling in their plastic tubes in your purse. A calypso beat.
Wendell always parked under a street light near the statue, and sure enough, when you reached Powell, there was the van. You stopped for a minute and looked back. A dark figure lurked about half a block behind you. Paul? Was he following you? You thought about charging into the poker game, Surprise!, but you’d had a long day and you didn’t need another look. All you wanted was to do a line and get some sleep. There was that strange chicken-skin sensation at the top of your head again, as though your hair follicles were reconfiguring themselves into a different cowlick. Either that or you had lice. You stopped to check your reflection as you passed a window: Litchfield, all lit up for Christmas, Bing Crosby making promises he couldn’t keep. Paul had bought you some perfume there. You wouldn’t be going home for Christmas this year, either, not even in your dreams. You looked okay. Your skirt wouldn’t straighten, but you could get away with a lo
t with high boots and a scarf. Wendell said the boots made you look like a Musketeer. When Paul wasn’t at the cottage you used to sit on the deck in your cut-offs with a glass of chardonnay and a book and watch Wendell working on the dock, shirtless, frayed ball cap, it was like the beginning of a porn flick. But he recognized the part of you that was more like him than like Paul. You were both there by invitation. To do a job. After that it was just a matter of time, and it wasn’t a long time. His van was parked by the cottage, Paul was in Vancouver figuring out how to destroy NGOs with forensic audits (you didn’t know that then). Wendell had his little silver straw that he’d bought in Oaxaca, an ancient Inca design, flared out at the top to fit snugly over the nostril. The Inca used to attach a pair of bellows to it to blow powdered coca up their anuses. A direct hit. The sensitive colonic lining absorbed the drug faster than the alveoli in the lungs. You and Wendell tried it and it was a fucking religious experience. It was like, is that God over there? No wonder the Incas saw talking animals, beaked jaguars, plumed serpents.
The van was locked but you knew he kept a spare key in a magnetic box in the exhaust pipe. You could start the van and drive somewhere, maybe Whistler or Harrison Springs. No, Kelowna. You’d be there in a couple of hours. Go down to Osoyoos, be there for breakfast. Get a room, buy some wine, call Wendell to beg forgiveness— Shit! You left Paul’s credit card with that Bandersnatch at the hotel. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch. You unlocked the van, got in on the passenger side, and sat for a moment with the dome light on, resting before getting on with the adventure. You took a deep breath. Casually, you opened the glove compartment and, what ho! a canister with “Strychnine” stencilled under a skull and crossbones and a rolled-up five-dollar bill beside it. Well, well. The canister had a nice heft to it. Wendell liked to keep it topped up. You opened it and peered in. White, shadowy hills, like flying above clouds, or looking down a ski slope. One winter when you were young, before he left, your dad rented a cabin near Mont Tremblant and took you and your mom there over Christmas. You’d never seen so much untrammelled snow, so deep, so powdery, so bluish in the sun, your skis gliding through it like hot knives carving two quick lines as you went down.
Two quick lines.
It was cold in the van. Where was Wendell when you needed him? For the nine hundredth time you reached for your purse to get your phone and then remembered you didn’t have your phone. How could you not have your phone? It must have been at the house. And your wallet. If Wendell called you now, Mariela would probably answer, ¿Hola? And then hand your phone over to Paul, with all those text messages on it. What had you asked him last time? “You got? Call me.” Your own personal WikiLeaks. Christ, you didn’t need a phone, you needed a life. Wrong, you already had a life. A new life. Just you and occasionally Wendell, whom you were now pretty sure you were extremely fond of, and your undergrad thesis on the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh. The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia. You and Professor Courteous. And, you supposed, Alyssa. Not bad for a new life. Wendell could stay in the picture but he couldn’t move in. You were going to establish boundaries, remember? You needed to be on your own for a while, that was what you told your dad. You still loved him but you needed a break. Some distance. You could tell that to Wendell, too. You needed to be able to make your own decisions about what you did and who you did it with. You could stay in touch with your mother, wasn’t that what women did when their lives fell apart? Maybe even go visit her? Not that she’d be much help, her marriage to the ex-mayor wasn’t exactly an inspiration. But you could use a change of scenery.
When you came back to Vancouver, you’d take your studies seriously. It wouldn’t be all word games this time. You’d have read the books you carried around. You’d come up with a killer thesis topic for your MA. The Modern Novel: A Contemporary Perspective. Or, The Age of Satire as Seen from the Age of Irony: Jonathan Swift to Jonathan Lethem. Wow, what did that even mean? You should write that one down. It’d take a lot of reading and some thinking, for example you’d never read anything by Jonathan Lethem, what if his work wasn’t ironic? Maybe you meant Jonathan Franzen. Irony as the new satire! Write that down. You’d remove all distractions. Confine Wendell to weekends. Cut down on the recreational drugs. No more oxys. You’d go cold turkey. Cook all your meals at home. Pack lunches to take to class. Drink only natural spring water. You were aware that your life could be seen as a satire, maybe even a farce, but that was the irony of it. You stared down Powell Street, thinking about your thesis. Shit, it’s goddamn publishable. No time to visit your mother now. You could phone her.
Oh no, you couldn’t.
Why not?
Because you lost your fucking phone.
You put the strychnine canister in one of your bags and the five-dollar bill in your coat pocket. What time was it? How long did a poker game take? You’d watched poker with Wendell on television, it took hours. The flop, the turn, the river. Sometimes he didn’t resurface for days. What if he drank too much and went home in a cab, leaving his van for the night? What if he texted you and you didn’t answer because you didn’t have your phone? What if Paul got the text and texted him back and told him he was going to kill you both? No, a lawyer wouldn’t write that in a text. He’d just come and do it. Jesus, how stupid was it for you to not have your phone? You needed to call both of them. You needed to find a phone and call them before they started calling each other. There was a coffee shop a little farther along, maybe the guy there would let you use his phone. You had five dollars, you could get a coffee, that would make you a paying customer.
You were a little shaky on your pins. You thought it was the boots. You kept to the shadows because you didn’t know if the figure behind you was still there and you didn’t want to turn around to look. The light above the coffee shop door was out, but you could see someone inside so you went in. Your hand hurt when you turned the knob. Wait, was this even a coffee shop? It looked more like a pool hall without pool tables. A long counter with three stools, and an open space in the back with two tables in it. The mirror above the counter was cracked in three places. No one there except the guy behind the counter, a hipster. Tidy beard, shirt buttoned to the neck, and not looking happy to be there when he could be across the street trying on Fluevogs. He looked at you.
“Yeah, I know,” you said. “I’m not dangerous. Look, do you have a phone I could use?”
Your voice quivered. You stuttered over the word “phone.” He looked balefully at you. He wanted to say no and was trying to think up a reason.
“I lost my cell in the snow. I need to call someone to come and get me. Please?” You’re not going to steal his fucking phone, or call New Zealand or hack his email. “And I’ll take a coffee.”
As if you’d said the magic word, he reached under a pile of papers beside the cash and came up with a cordless phone from, like, the eighties. It was huge and vaguely military. It was even pre-flip. It had an antenna. Where was this place, Hotel California?
“Thanks. Uh.” It also weighed a ton. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“Pour-through or Americano?”
“Excuse me?”
“The coffee. Do you want it poured through a filter or as an Americano?”
“I have not the pleasure of understanding you.”
“Pour-through takes longer, but in my opinion it makes a better coffee.”
“Okay, make it a pour-through.” Because your opinion matters to us.
“Do you want room?”
For a second you thought he’d asked if you wanted a room. It was not an unwelcome thought.
“No, I just take sugar.”
“Brown, cane, or white?”
“I like the sound of cane.”
“For here or to go?”
Jesus, did you have to be interrogated to get a cup of coffee? “I’d like to take it with me when I go.”
“Have a seat. I’ll bring it over.”
<
br /> You sat on one of the stools and stared at the phone’s keypad. At least it wasn’t a rotary. What was Wendell’s number? Holy crap, you didn’t remember Wendell’s number. Who memorized phone numbers anymore? You closed your eyes and tried to visualize the side of his van. Wendell Churney. Renovations, Something, Something and Docks. Or was it Decks? Docks and Decks? For a Free Estimate Call 604…Shit. What was it? You’d better go back to the van and look.
“Are you all right?” the coffee guy said.
“I don’t know his number.” You tried to laugh but succeeded only in filling your nostrils with mucus. You sniffed. “Do you have a tissue?” Your fingers were red from the cold. He handed you a piece of one-ply the size of a microchip. You set the phone on the counter and tried to unfold the tissue but it was already as big as it would go. It was like fairy tissue. You wiped your nose and looked at the result, an old habit. Yellow streaked with red. Not good. Of course the phone didn’t have Internet. “Do you have a phone book, by any chance?”
“Are you calling 911?” the guy asked.
“No. Why?”
“You’re bleeding,” he said, pointing. “Your hand.”
“Oh, that.” You looked at it, relieved. You thought it was coke nose. “No, it’s just a cut.”
“Looks pretty serious,” he said.
“No,” you said, looking up at him. “In my opinion, it’s fine.” You passed him back the phone. He held it up by the antenna.
“You should at least call a cab.”
“Never mind,” you said. “Thanks, though.”
He set the coffee in a paper cup in front of you. You tried to pick it up with your left hand and it felt like a hot blade had been shoved into your palm.
