What Rhoda had “done for her father” was two years in engineering, she’d explained after one of the book club meetings, when what she really should have been doing was throwing pots and drawing. “What makes you think Sara is having an affair?”
“Affair?” Again the trill of laughter. “Quaint word. Well, for one thing, she’s so mysterious. She’s asked me to take her kids after school three times this week and she never tells me where she’s been. Listen,” she said, “when you get home, write this down somewhere so you don’t forget I said it. I predict that Sara will split within a year. It’s the pattern.”
The muscles in my neck still hurt from the force of Hank’s hand and my nose was sore to touch. I had added little to the discussion around the book Surfacing and allowed Rhoda ownership of the idea that the protagonist rejected the label “victim.” I looked at the clay pots hanging crooked in Rhoda’s front window. Like my head, I thought. “What I like about clay,” Rhoda had said to me, “is that no two pieces are ever the same.” Wrong, I thought, they’re all lopsided.
When she’d asked me to stay on after the others had left so we could talk, I needed to talk but was reluctant. Sometimes I suspected that Rhoda had taken me on as a project of some kind, as though she were building a coil vase to ward off her own depression. She wanted to see if she could make something from nothing.
“Well, so, have you?” She said the words slowly, articulating each one dramatically. “Have you had an affair?”
Most of the women we’d read about had had affairs. They lay on their backs at the bottom of coal mines, on blankets in parks, or in empty or borrowed apartments. They seemed driven to give away little pieces of their hearts here and there for short amounts of time. I wanted to try and get mine back. I wanted to know the process.
“Don’t tell me,” Rhoda said when I didn’t answer. Her eyes went wide behind her glasses. “You’re not going to tell me that you married your first love and that there’s never been anyone else! Wow, what a can of worms,” she said. She tapped me on the knee. “Look, I don’t know whatziz very well, but from what I’ve seen I do know that you’re totally unsuited for each other. How in hell do you manage, that’s what I’d like to know? Hey,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “I’ll help you any way I can. Just tell me how.”
“I’ve got a job. This morning,” I said. “It’s just part-time but I may need someone to take Richard at night off and on.” Now that it had finally happened I was terrified, uncertain whether I could carry through what I had set in motion.
“Well, good for you! It’s a start, anyway. And you can count on me. He can spend the night here any time. Listen, people who stay in unhappy marriages, and who don’t do anything to get out, wind up choosing either alcohol or religion to cope.” This a quote, no doubt, from one of the many “survival” books she read constantly.
“Or art,” I said, and smiled.
“Yeah, art,” she said drily. She started at a noise and her hands flew up around her face. “You hear that?”
I’d heard it, too, a crash in the room above our heads. “Something fell.”
“Well, of course something fell. But what fell? And why?” She stared up at the ceiling. “You have to come up with me.”
I climbed the stairs ahead of Rhoda and entered her workroom at the far end of the hall. Beneath the window was a door set up on trestles as a work table and strewn across it were curled sheets of drawing paper covered with scraggly lines and smudges of charcoal. All along the window sills sat lumpy shapes of fired clay. Books overflowed from shelves and were piled in stacks about the room, and I ached with envy. Rhoda tiptoed through the clutter. “Look.” She pointed to a painting lying face down on the floor. I laughed and felt the release of tension as she bent and righted it, leaning it against the wall.
“What am I going to do?”
“Hang it back up,” I said.
“But you don’t understand. It’s an omen. A picture falling like that means something terrible is going to happen.”
I drove home through the residential streets, slowly, carefully, mindful of a group of children standing between a couple of parked cars. I slowed down as I approached them. There was a church on the corner and recorded church-bell music chimed a hymn I thought I recognized. I watched in the mirror as the children crossed the street safely behind me. When I pulled into our driveway I saw Richard rise up from his play corner in the garden. I saw the bald spot and the bandage on the back of his head. Something terrible has already happened, I thought. I saw my eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. Sharp, blue, hard.
16
he Lounge: the light-hearted room in the Club Malibu where she worked for years, where everything was relax and sip your fears or tears away, until last call and the money was counted and in the bag and her tips in her wallet. People were given the bum’s rush then, and the lights came on, revealing the place for what it really was: one great big smouldering ashtray. There were walnut tables, the tops scarred with burns and alcohol and deep gouges, souvenirs from some of the less than light-hearted patrons. A perfect place for her to work, at night, when her scars were less visible, too, and she could be Amiable Amy; friendly, without suggesting anything more than good service. A good time to be had by all in the light-hearted room.
She embraced them with her generic smile. There was the Texan trucker, who graced them with his presence at the end of his haul and who calculated how many people were in the room before he magnanimously ordered a round for the house. He insisted that while he mingled with the people, back-slapping, shaking hands, saying “Howdy, you all,” to his Canadian friends, she use an adding machine so he could check the tape later, be certain that she had accounted correctly for the exact number of drinks.
She protected the Indian Prince, whose appearances at the Lounge were unpredictable. He might come twice in a week, or not for several months, always in native dress, white beaded doeskin shirt, eagle-feather bonnet. She collected the twenty-dollar bills that sometimes dropped to the floor beneath his table and stuffed them into his pocket when he left. When he didn’t sit in her section, she watched, ready to pounce on the vulture Selena, who might rinse her tray and set it down on his table while she pretended to fuss over him and then walk away with several bills stuck to the tray’s wet bottom. He seemed to her a bewildered silent child, and she wished he wouldn’t come.
Every so often the man in drag came in, and by the end of the evening, after he’d been sufficiently plied with drinks, he’d get up onto the stage and do his Marilyn Monroe impersonation, which always made her laugh. He was so outrageous, uninhibited. Lucky, she thought.
At first she really lived, to catch up for lost time. She slept with men whose names she can’t remember now, including the first one, a man who looked like a weasel and who used to be a drummer in Freddy Fender’s band. But he wasn’t special; he had no rhythm, she liked to say, honing the art of flippancy and accepting the gratuity of Selena’s ensuing laughter. And a lineman for the Blue Bombers, too, who liked to wear women’s corsets. There was a man who wore a silver suit and whose movements and hairless body reminded her of an iguana. But she knew she’d finally caught up on lost time when the South American tourist, a dark, anxious man, asked her through an embarrassed interpreter, “How much?”
She became close friends with the bartender, Lee, a Chinese immigrant who was working to bring his family to Canada. He encouraged her to study and so she took day courses at the University of Winnipeg. She moved from her dingy apartment on Stradbrook into Lee’s apartment and he taught her how to write essays. In return, she did his laundry.
Then she dated a certified general accountant whose name was Robert and who, one night, brought his entire family into the Lounge to meet her. He proposed in their presence, asking her to marry him and have a baby and call the baby John, after John Diefenbaker, “The greatest living Canadian,” he said. He was crushed by her revelation that she was already married and had a child and he f
led the Lounge in tears leaving behind his embarrassed and angry family. She never saw him again.
Eventually she became floor manager of the Lounge, scheduling the waitresses’ hours, handling the payroll, and accounting for the bar inventory and the nightly receipts. She shed her short shorts and knee-high boots for soft jersey-knit dresses, and during the day she took a camera operator’s course at the Public Cable Vision and eventually became a producer of a weekly half-hour program on local artists and their work.
She was well into writing scripts when her job at the Lounge ended. She was leaving Toots, a booze can on Selkirk Avenue, where she had taken the current talent for after-hour drinks, when she’d heard sirens echoing in the smoke-filled sky above city centre. Amy learned that the Club Malibu had burned to the ground. Later she would not be able to remember precisely where it had stood.
Oh, this two-faced place had been perfect for her. She had chosen its night side where she could stay undercover in the dimmed lights, watching the maimed and the sick and the beautiful people, receiving the best or the worst of them without any real involvement, without having to know the in-between.
As the cab speeds on towards the Club Malibu, where Amy now works, a metallic taste is thick on her tongue and a dull ache centres in her stomach. The cab passes by Central Park, where the grass appears to be greener, a lush carpet bordered by buff-coloured stone apartment buildings. She tries to imagine living in one of those apartments but she can’t. Her life at present makes no allowance for imaginings. Okay, Hank had said the day he tried to drown her, if that’s what you want, then go. See if you can keep this place going on your own. And then he walked out of the house. It has been two weeks and she hasn’t seen or heard from him.
She feels him, though. She moves through the nights at work as though he’s looking over her shoulder, proving to him, she thinks, by her unapproachable behaviour towards the male patrons, with her swiftness and efficiency, the harmless intent of wanting to work. She believes he watches when she returns home late to the empty house and showers the smell of cigarette smoke from her skin, soaks aching feet, and then, bone tired, sets the alarm for nine o’clock, when she will get up, skip breakfast, and ride the bus to collect Richard from Rhoda’s house. She is managing the three nights a week alone, which are only six hours long she reasons, because it’s usually three in the morning when her head hits the pillow.
Trees sway gently against the backdrop of stone in Central Park, sheltering a group of young people who gather on the grass around a wasted-looking man playing a guitar. The musician wears all black, a beret worn to the side of his head, and a goatee. The curves and angles of the people’s bodies – they are her age, she knows – seem perfect as they lie, chins cradled in hands or hands clutching knees, faces all turned to the man’s music and the setting sun.
When she reaches the Club Malibu, the heavy door swings closed behind her, shutting out the soft glow of twilight, and gooseflesh rises on her arms and legs as she steps into the air-conditioned interior. Her footsteps are muffled by thick red carpet as she passes by the coat check, the foyer, and she sees herself in passing in a large gilt-framed mirror. She’s twisted her hair up on top of her head and looks younger, wide-eyed, much like Richard. As she passes through the coffee shop, the spicy scent of carnations on the tables greets her. It’s been only two weeks, but already the smell is expected, familiar; like the people she works with, who are casual, accepting, as though they have known one another for years. She pushes through the doors into the fluorescent-lit kitchen and slides her card into the time clock. Fifteen minutes early. Rhoda had come by with the car to pick up Richard and so Amy has time for coffee before her shift begins. Cold air slams against her knees as the pastry chef steps from the walk-in cooler and closes the door.
“Well, hello,” Giorgio says. “Must be Thursday again. Here’s my girl with the big eyes.” He tickles the back of her neck in passing. “I’ve been telling the boss, ‘You make her come in every night. I think I’m in love.’ “
She smiles. She knows that Selena would have a snappy comeback but she’s being careful. She feels as though she’s still on trial, that eyes are watching and evaluating. “Any coffee on?”
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He grunts slightly as he leans across the bulletin board for a scrap of paper. “Lee left a message. Said to tell you to come up the minute you’re in.”
She walks back through the darkened coffee shop, across the foyer, to the back stairs. The hired help, she learned her first night, are not supposed to use the front entrance. This is in the event that MacDonald from MacDonald Carpets, or a member of the Blue Bombers football team, or Allsopp from Allsopp, Bamburk and Howard, should arrive at the same time and be offended. She’s learned since that none of the employees heed this restriction, and on the second night she worked she used the front entrance, too.
Soft music floats down from the Cabaret. In another hour it will give way to music of “The Four Fendermen,” a loud combo of sax, electric guitar, and piano, which blares down into the Lounge every time the door opens and closes. They’re an American group whose claim to fame is that two of the band members once played for Freddy Fender.
Lee isn’t behind the large horseshoe-shaped bar, although there are several customers there, men in suits. One stands resting his foot on the brass railing in a studied casual pose and at the far end of the bar, as usual, the hippie is there, a man with long blond hair parted in the centre. As she sets up her tray Lee crosses the floor and goes down the three steps that separate the table area from the bar. “Boy, I’m glad to see you,” he says. “I got hung up back there. A cruddy wedding party. Ten of them.”
“I see our flower child is with us again tonight,” Amy says and laughs. The hippie raises his head and turns to face her and she can see the reflection of the chandelier in his dark glasses. A biker in disguise, she thinks.
“It’s a free country,” Lee says, “as long as he’s drinking and paying and as long as he stays down here.” The Lounge allows for casual dress, the Cabaret upstairs is jacket and tie only.
She steps up into the room. Whoever designed the place with its multi-level floors, stairs leading to more stairs, hadn’t thought about the people who would work there. The people in the wedding party sit at two tables pushed together at the back of the room. Amy goes from table to table, lighting candles, satisfied with the look of soft red light spilling across dark walnut. Then she adjusts the overhead lighting until it balances with the glowing candles and the wedding party seems to come alive, their conversation more animated.
The room is supposed to be friendly, a light-hearted room, Mr. Broosier, the owner, had explained. One big friendly family, united by the gentle music and bantering of Patrick, head rooster for Patrick’s Trio, folk singers. Mr. Broosier had discovered them in Thunder Bay and signed them on for the summer and so far they have filled the Lounge almost every night. Two couples enter the room, seating themselves at a table directly in front of the stage. She waits for them to settle in and places coasters in front of them. Smile, she remembers, even through the persistent ache in the pit of her stomach. She stands poised with her pencil so they’ll get the message.
“What’s the bar rye?” one of the men asks.
She tells him.
“Better make it C.C.,” he says. “I can’t drink that crap.”
She stifles the urge to smile. They play big shot for twenty-five cents extra. After two or three rounds they don’t know what they’re drinking anyway and then she pockets the extra twenty-five cents. Selena had warned her, though, against doing it too often. One of the women asks to see a cocktail list, and when Amy returns with it several other people have entered the Lounge, and for the next thirty minutes she works non-stop.
The three musicians enter the Lounge through the back corridor. Patrick squats, and fiddles with the amplifiers. The two others in the trio tune their instruments. They look casual in their open-neck striped shirts, cotton vests, and pa
nts. The people at the table in front of the stage lean forward expectantly, waiting to be acknowledged.
“What kind of crowd we got tonight?” Patrick asks Amy in passing.
“Loud. Especially the wedding party.” One of the men at the table in front of the stage signals to Amy for another round.
“Good evening, good evening,” Patrick says, plucking at the strings of his guitar. His voice is smooth, soothing, and people stop talking to listen.
“It’s so very nice to see so many of you beautiful people here tonight. Welcome to the Lounge. We’ve got three sets lined up for you this evening. We’ll take requests, too, anything your heart desires. …”
“How about ‘Cotton Fields Back Home’?” a chubby man in the wedding party calls out. He begins to sing the song loudly and is shushed by the woman sitting next to him. “You know the one I mean,” he says.
“Sure do. But we always dedicate our first song to the little gals who work so hard to keep your drinks coming, and tonight, gals, here it is, just for you!” Patrick dips his guitar in Selena and Amy’s direction. Selena turns on the spotlights, and the three singers are enclosed in a warm yellow circle as they begin to sing “If I Were a Carpenter.”
Amy serves the two couples their drinks and waits to collect. Patrick sounds good tonight, she thinks, as she goes over to the wedding party table and begins clearing away empty glasses. It’s easier to work to music. “Hey, you,” the fat man says. “So what’s wrong with singing? Is there a law against it or something?” The woman at his side looks mortified. “I’m as good as those guys.”
“I think we’ve had enough,” the woman says.
“Come on,” he objects. “It’s early.”
“Hey, Fred,” someone down the table calls, “you going to buy this round or what?”
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