by SK Dyment
It was Ben who deduced his sister’s charge card number from a pile of receipt, and quickly comes to Jackie’s defense.
Vespa says she is tired of having her buttons pushed and then tells Ben not to jerk her chain. She is now certain that Jackie has been lying to her about not taking part in any more robberies.
Since Jackie has been spending countless hours in the shop compared to her brief, if passionate forays making love, she also feels that Jackie has threatened her sexual territory with yet more deceit.
Realizing she may have hurt her lover, expressively-challenged Jackie leaves the equivalent of two thousand British pounds in Vespa’s account as a gesture of goodwill. Ben coordinates the shipping of the Italian motorcycle and its various parts from Belgium to America by setting up a delivery account for his own motorcycle repair company.
He has decided to call it Didactic Motors and designates Alaska as the owner of the operation since he is not licensed to work in the U.S.
Alaska hires another lawyer to keep close tabs on the books, someone Ben reports to almost as often as Olesya reports to her bail officer. The company is quickly flooded with requests, and the money that he generates with his sister and Jackie, Alaska funnels back into legal expenses for Olesya.
Alaska thinks that for publicity reasons, it was wrong to spring Olesya, but now that Olesya is out, at least she is able to go to her gym again, spin on the stationary cycles, and tan herself an impossible umber. Alaska insists that Olesya has just been missing the sun. Jackie insists that Olesya is courting nose melanoma after seeing her bail officer and jogging around Central Park.
At her welcome-home party, Gus and Swan arrive with Arnica Montana and Wanda plays music by KISS and Queen and later, when the baby is tiring, Zappa and Patti Smith.
She tries to discuss the song, “Baby, Take Your Teeth Out,” with Swan, but Swan does not want to discuss Zappa. He wants to talk discreetly with Vespa instead. Gus tries to cross the room so that he can talk to Wanda, who looks almost spectrally pale as she stands shunned in the centre of the room. The doorbell chimes. Gus notices the noise, turns away from Wanda, and drifts to the door with the baby in his arms. It is the woman from the gallery, the one who works for the man in the blue sweater.
“Don’t open doors so casually in New York!” says Alaska. The young woman overwhelms her with an enormous bouquet of roses. “I quit,” says the woman.
“You quit? Why? Because of the stolen Indigenous artifacts and the photos of exploited underage girls?”
“Partly.”
Vespa, who has just been told by Swan that Donkely’s photos are hanging in the gallery where this woman works, rushes to the door. She is offered a single rose.
Alaska goes to look for a vase big enough to contain twenty-three fresh-cut roses.
“What is your name?” asks Vespa.
“Washington,” says the young woman shyly, “but some people call me Shinny.”
“Your last name?” Vespa asks her.
The woman draws her breath. This woman Vespa is more beautiful in life than the photos, she thinks. She stares at her and can barely speak. “My last name is Madison,” she tells her, and then feels as if her knees will sink under her and she will fall on her face in the hall.
“Well, so you quit?” says Vespa.
“Of course I quit. I had no idea what I was walking into, but I know what I want to walk away from now. He needs someone to help him when he sees spectres, but I didn’t feel I could help. I told him to go blow his dog, and I will go back to flower sales.”
“What was that?” Vespa asks her. She finds herself drawn to Washington Madison like a rose to pollination.
“Flower sales,” says the young woman. “I’ll need those back before I go, they’re my livelihood now. That woman just took them from my arms.”
“Oh shit.” Vespa turns to call Alaska back to the door, but she has disappeared into the kitchen.
“It’s okay, never mind that now. Vespa, I know that is you on the walls of the gallery. It was wrong the way you were exploited. I want to give you something.”
The young woman peers at Vespa through her intelligent-looking, non-corrective lenses. She reaches behind herself and hands her a large cardboard-wrapped package that is leaning against the wall.
“Remember Skip Donkely? Here are all pictures of you. I thought you should have them back.”
“Oh, holy fuck,” says Vespa. She takes the young woman, whose friends called her Shinny, and leads her down to Olesya’s storage lockers, where Vespa has a key.
“Let’s lock these away safely in here for now,” she tells her, and then, because she feels at a loss to thank her, she leans forward and kisses Washington (Shinny) Madison on the mouth. Shinny responds, kissing the new, strangely older and not-a-photograph Vespa on the neck continuously until the two of them fall backwards into the mess of upside-down furniture, and undress each other fully.
There in the gloom, they each make love as a pure act of surprise, enjoying each other until they are exhausted and salty with sweat.
30.
ON A DARK ARTERY entering Manhattan, a rider is approaching. It is Mimi. She is seated on her two-stroke twin, Velocette gearbox, 1969 Scott Flying Squirrel. The motorcycle sports the classic Flying Squirrel duplex frame and the front suspension system of telescopic forks that is now standard among motorcycles, of which the Scott Motocycle Company had the first.
She is coming to investigate the new motorcycle repair company. Glancing at her own reflection as she passes the window of a closed down automobile showroom, she smiles. Mimi’s insistent electromagnetic force, which is more powerful than gravity, is empty and whole at the same time. She cannot help noticing that her 1969 Scott Flying Squirrel, looks very, very cool.
Upstairs in the apartment, the phone rings. It is Celeste, calling to see if Arnica Montana is doing okay. Baby Arnica is outside with Swan and Ben, who are talking about particle physics and Seurat. Swan is arguing that because Georges Seurat was a man who organized his paintings into planes of tiny dots, the dots demonstrated the subatomic structure of all things, including colour and sound.
Ben is interested in the idea that there are sounds emitted by Seurat’s colours, at a frequency no one can hear. Swan hears the rattling sound of Celeste’s telephone voice in Toronto talking to emptiness on the phone and reaches out to spare her the indignity of talking to no one. Arnica leans over the rail to look at the pretty shiny cars and begins to topple forward.
Ben, who once played football for Immaculate Conception High, throws himself through the air and catches Arnica as she begins to slide into nothingness and off the balcony. He is lying with his head underneath Olesya’s barbeque with Arnica safely in his arms, awhile Swan lies in a prone position on top of him. Swan tells Celeste in Toronto that everything is going great. Celeste says she is coming on the next flight down and renting a minivan to bring back her baby.
Arnica lets out a gurgle of delight at the sound of her mother’s voice and attempts to crawl away from Ben’s grip to see if she can put the pretty cars in her mouth. She has already attempted to put one of the pretty charcoal briquettes in her mouth.
Mimi arrives at West 108th Street and parks her Flying Squirrel underneath the storage area where Vespa and Shinny Madison are making love.
Jackie takes Arnica from Ben’s grip. The men continue to lie for one moment too long on top of each other in a mess of charcoal. Ben smiles, sits up, and, notices Wanda and Gus have retreated to the bedroom and closed the door. He lovingly paints pretty smudges like kohl around Swan’s benevolent eyes.
31.
ALASKA AND WANDA are feeling pretty good about the threat-to-disclose letter they have sent to Rudy. Alaska has photocopied every scrap and stolen memento in the large envelope and has even decided to withhold it from their lawyer.
She can no longer remember which o
ne of her lawyers is in charge of the Condo Owners lawsuit anyway, and she is starting to feel aroused by her conspiracy with Wanda. There is an energy between the two of them, perhaps because they both have always been directing the irresponsible life of another person, and now they have found a source of fun in an irresponsible but powerful act all their own. In some ways, Wanda finds Alaska attractive.
As a straight Christian, Wanda feels confused by her own desire to nibble the soft downy hair on Alaska’s tanned and lotion-scented face. Alaska has noticed this, and admits to herself that, like everyone who encounters Wanda, she also finds Wanda attractive, but she is too proud to tell a heterosexual woman how she feels.
Besides, she is involved with Olesya, a proud, out lesbian. And even if Wanda somehow looks more enticing and forbidding than her lover, she could never leave her side.
Olesya is her injured baby bird, and Alaska is happy in the position of nursing her sick little bird forever back to health. For both women, their desire takes the form of jealousy, and now, avarice in the form of blackmail. The letters offer them something they can get.
So, this is it. Wanda is caught in something wrong. But there are so many wrongs all around her that the only positive result has been a breakdown of her inhibition about wanting to ride a female, even if the female in question may be a high horse to hell.
They do not think about hurting Ben. Wanda even thinks Ben is now having a sexual liaison with Swan. It is ridiculous; last week she thought it was Jackie.
She wonders if she should go back to her therapist, Doctor Popair. Wanda wants to be a moral person and finds Dr. Popair’s words difficult to forget. She likes him not because, unlike real therapists, he is an opinionated big mouth destined to found his own movement and make millions.
“Relax, baby Wanda, unsqueeze your mind. Tension is making you avoid getting to the milk,” Dr. Popair is fond of saying.
She also found the physical touch of Gus at the party equally compelling—like a soul connection as opposed to the verboten feeling that Alaska creates in Wanda’s panties. Her self-estrangement is like walking through a blizzard calling for help, and no one comes. It always seems no one comes until she falls and is waiting to die. She knows Ben was a very close boyhood friend of Rudy, and she thinks he is in possession of Rudy’s strange papers because he is protecting him, and not because he wants them disclosed. Thinking this, she feels like a monster, but Alaska’s enthusiasm is now unstoppable. She considers buying a gun and forcing Alaska to burn every copy on the spot. She had watched Ben sift through the papers at the diner, after she brought them out from under her shirt. Then, because she had not take a leak when she told Betty she was going to—instead, she had been caught in the middle of an adrenaline-charged act, had a pistol pointed to her head, and then had to sit politely afterwards drinking a pina colada—she ran to the diner washroom when she could. She was happy to see that Ben had recovered his photo of the CZ, but the rest was tucked away. When she returned, there had been only a few choice poems by juvenile Rudy on the table and a glass of water.
Yes, Alaska is butch. She even phoned Celeste and talked to her at length about proper care for baby Arnica, winning her the go-ahead from Celeste, who is preparing to drive down, to take the baby away from the boys. Once Alaska took charge, the collaborated threat-to-disclose letter was simple.
It contained the names of every company Rudy had removed documents from, including notes scribbled in his hand at the bottom of poems that he had written. Wanda said that their threat-to-disclose the poems might be enough to activate Turner’s people right there. The two women had a good laugh. A sinister laugh, high-pitched but fun in that sophomoric, out of control way that Wanda has disapproved of in other women up until this point. But now, was caught up in herself, like a tight-fitting swimsuit that was too wet to pull back off. They realize that what they are doing is somehow very radical, or very criminal, or simply a departure from any sort of action that either one of them has taken before. Alaska pointed out that their loyalty to the hundreds of people housed in shoddy B.F. Turner buildings must take precedence. The email message to Rudy was simple:
“Your tenants have cracked the safe at Betty’s. We have all of your mementoes. What a scrupulous thief you were, but your nostalgia is your downfall today. We know you are hiding out in the Adirondacks, and we can and we will track you down. We also know you are involved in business more unethical than any of your contemporaries. As the new head of B.F. Turner, you are now fully implicated in making it your business to construct towers that will self-destruct like time bombs. In response, we are preparing a legal case that will smash your position, smash your company, and grind your bones to dust. If you do not believe me, see below references to various businesses you broke into, and the innumerable records that you stole. Jeezaroo, are we going to open a Can of Whoop-Ass on you. Comply with our demands and have Camelia deposit four hundred thousand dollars into the following bank account number by Friday or we will begin to release this material not only to the press, but to your colleagues as we see fit.”
Signed, “Society for Sellouts to get the Hell Out.”
They considered using Vespa’s bank account, since everybody knew her account number, and there wasn’t a law against depositing money into someone’s bank account behind their back. Then they worried that Rudy would have the account number traced, and think it was Vespa, since Vespa had a history with Rudy. They considered having the money into the Condo Owner’s Fund, but then they realized that they were the only two signers. Finally, they resolved to have the money deposited into Didactic Motor Company because all monetary activities were first to be passed by Alaska’s lawyers, and these were people that Rudy had never met.
The two women set up a public account, then send off the email to Rudy. They kiss each other formally on each cheek, making it official.
Wanda is wondering where Ben is, and Alaska is late for a workshop on Ethical Management and has to stop at Olesya’s apartment first. Parting ways, one lady blackmailer trips off to a subway while the other lady blackmailer goes to the studio. Wanda wants to see if Ben is involved in another concept session with pencils and flow sheets and cigarettes and Jackie, the woman she cannot be. But there is no one at the studio and the door is locked.
Wanda presses her face against the cool surface to collect her thoughts. She has done something terrible. There is nothing to collect. Ben has not bothered to tell her where he is. This is because Ben is at the Carlton Arms, in a four-poster-bed next to a fresco of two women making love. He is lying there with Swan, a small fan stirring the curtains while Swan is lightly touching each one of Ben’s scars with his tongue. Ben is discussing wave-particle duality, and how a photon representing the colour red, travelling at 5.25 times ten to the logarithmic power of fourteen nanometres per second, would create a frequency just like a particle hitting a membrane, or a stick striking a drum, and there would be a sound.
“A sound like this?” asks Swan. But Swan makes no sound. Instead, he does something unexpected to Ben, and Ben cries out. The sound Ben makes is the sound that the most primary of colours would cry out to the sun and stars if they were being prepared to be thrown onto a canvas by an artist of considerable talent.
Wanda does not hear the sound, or the other cries of pleasure that follow. Instead, she unlocks the studio door and takes the Triumph 750V Trident on a ride, swerving through SoHo and not wishing to see any of the galleries, blurring past art and someone else’s passion, looking for her own.
32.
AS WANDA IS TRAVELLING through the streets of Manhattan, trying to silence a devil on her shoulder that tells her she is, at this moment in the rotation or counter-rotation or rotations per second of time, the biggest loser to ever straddle a Triumph, she believes she sees Olesya. Olesya is headed in the direction of her bail officer, and it is the right day and time, but she is mounted on the back of a 1969 Scott Flying Squirrel with
a man from her therapy group. Vim, that is his name; the one with the vivid childhood memories. But what are the chances, she is wondering, of that man being coincidentally on a motorbike with Olesya?
Wanda weaves through Little Italy, looking for a place to buy Indian curry, and is furious when nothing turns up. She admits she feels a little miffed because she heard Alaska talking in a long, romantic way to Celeste, and reminds herself that she is not the only one Alaska finds hot. She motors along West Broadway and is about to bully her way up crowded Broome Street, when she thinks she sees Gus, Swan’s friend. She feels as if snow is blowing in her eyes. It must be a look-alike as she can no longer tell people apart. But now she has met the eyes of this man, and she realizes he has not stopped looking at her.
A pedestrian steps out in front of her, and she slams the Triumph to a stop. She finds, to her dismay, that the force has thrown her forward and off balance so much that she is forced to redirect the bike. She collides with a traffic pole, then falls and strikes a hydrant. Her head has taken a knock from the hydrant, and the pedestrian has hurried off, as if Wanda was deliberately trying to frighten him.
She lies for a moment, and now the blizzard of confusion and uncertainty is circling her much closer than before. Shocked, she pulls herself up. She checks that the fuel tank is not punctured or leaking and then waddles the bike to the nearest sidewalk ramp to catch her breath.
There, she buries the ignition key deep in her pocket, kickstands the Triumph, and runs her hands through her hair. Her eyes are spinning like epicyclical gears, and she feels as if her heart needs a timing check, as if it is speeding up and slowing down in a way that does not seem normal.
To her horror, she realizes that the blood has raced to her most vital organs, and that she is standing with snow flying all around her in the middle of July. She supposes it is ash, just like she thought an air-conditioner trickle above her the day before was rain. But there is too much of it, too much for her to even move her legs. Her face is white as plaster when Gus catches up to her, and he takes her face in his hands.
