She has the kind of cigarette voice that gives me hope as she leads me to her office and gestures toward a chair.
Sitting on the other side of Evelyn’s desk I set my purse and CD bag on the floor and keep hold of my resumé. “Some crazy guy on the street just punched me in the back,” I say.
“Just out here?” She waves behind at her window.
“I think the police are coming for him.”
“Golly, I hope so!” Her eyes settle on the run in my hose. “You’re all right?”
The word golly has deflated my hope. “Just a little shook up. Crazy. Street guy.”
She sits forward in her chair and there’s a pained-but-curious expression on her face. Seems an unending moment that she looks at me that way. I hear the papers on her desk settling, the clock on her wall ticking. But that can’t be, the clock is electric.
Finally she speaks. “I’ve got an interesting letter here.” She pauses to harvest a bit of mascara from the corner of her eye. “It was faxed to me by Harriet Almond.”
Harriet?
She squints at me. “Harriet Almond. From Jasper Personnel?”
Right: Harriet, from my other temp agency. My eyes are stinging. Must be this dim office after that bright sun.
Evelyn gives me a kind of smiling grimace. “I know Harriet well. We had lunch today. She told me about a young woman they had to release from their roster.”
My fingernails flick against one another, loud and conspicuous. I fist my hands to shut them up.
“I guess you know where I’m going with this.” She picks up a page from her desk, begins to read a letter to Jasper Personnel from a firm where I temped two weeks earlier. I hear phrases: Hours surfing the Internet on company time … when confronted by supervisor, the employee responded with a tantrum … used profanity … threw files and paperwork to the floor, broke a desk organizer …
“That’s not entirely accurate. It didn’t break. I was researching—My mother had an artificial heart valve and a piece of it broke off. She had a stroke, massive stroke … My father says I’m just like her. In my heart.” I uncross my legs and hold my knees together, feeling the wet ache of that one bloody spot. “She was rude. That woman. Very rude. She didn’t have to—”
Evelyn lays the letter on her desk. She looks sympathetic. I am pathetic to her.
I feel an unfitting giggle in my chest and let it escape just as I glance at the clock. It’s not quite 2:20 yet. Feels like 4:00.
“Do you find this situation amusing?” she asks me, with an overly kind expression.
“A little,” I tell her. “Normally, I’d say I feel like I’ve been punched, but this doesn’t feel anything like that.” I jerk my purse up off the floor, along with the CD bag. I drop the resumé, and pick it back up.
“Would you like to talk about this?”
I shake my head and, just before I turn to leave, make what feels like the same sort of kindly face Evelyn just gave me.
Out front of the building, there’s a different commotion now. The two heroes who held my assailant are gone and in their place is a police cruiser and two cops. They have driven their car right up onto the broad sidewalk. The red roof light turns in a slow hot wink. I hesitate, then move slowly their way and see the wild man lying stomach-down on the ground, his hands cuffed behind his back, his head wedged directly behind the front wheel of the car.
One cop is squatting beside his captive’s head, telling him something. I stop a few feet away. Something about me must be giving off a glow of involvement because the second cop turns and approaches.
“Are you the girl he hit?”
“Yes.”
He juts his chin toward the car’s front tire. “Hear that, buddy?” he calls. “Here’s the lady you hit! Gonna tell her you’re sorry?”
I look at the woolly man on the ground; he is quiet, with just a light shuffle of his legs.
The cop, the one nearest him, speaks loudly as if to a deaf person or a foreigner. “You don’t deserve to be on this earth, do you, hitting this nice girl. I should back this tire right over your head. What do you think of that?”
The matted head mumbles. His legs shuffle again.
The cop chuckles, straightens up and meanders to where I am standing by his partner. “So you’re the one?”
“I’m sorry I left, I had a job interview.”
He grins. “Don’t you be sorry for god’s sake. He’s the one that needs to be sorry. He would be too if he had a goddamn brain in his head. You want to press charges?”
“Uh …” I’m wondering if the wrong answer will get me in trouble. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m in it already. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”
“No point really,” Second Cop says. “As it is they’ll just ship him back to the nuthouse and he’ll be out tomorrow.”
First Cop nods. “Want to know why he hit you?”
I look to the car and then back at First Cop.
“He says he saw you steal that CD and he had to stop you.”
I look down at my music store bag in one hand and my purse and resumé in the other and wish I had a free hand to gnaw at. “Want to see my receipt?” I smile again, wishing I could stop.
The cop looks back at Wildman. “Did you get the job?” he asks me.
“Maybe. No, actually, no.”
“Wanna see if you can hit him hard enough to make yourself feel better?” he suggests.
I laugh nervously.
He doesn’t. “You’re not gonna see any justice out of this. Go on, go hit him.”
My jaw aches from clenching and I am afraid I’ll scream, so I laugh again. Second Cop laughs too.
First Cop calls toward his patrol car. “Hear that, you sorry bastard, this lady is too nice to hit you. Now I got no choice but to run over your head.”
Wildman’s cuffed hands scratch at the small of his back, trying to get to the itch just inside his old-man trousers. It’s the first time I realize how young he is; he couldn’t be more than twenty-five or so.
“Yeah. Yup,” he says.
“‘Yeah, yup’? You’re ready to die, then? You’d deserve it.” First Cop’s voice is friendly, as though he’s passing out candy to kids.
Second Cop smiles at me. “So, what’ll you do for the rest of the day? Go to the beach?”
I look back at the head behind the front wheel. I am struck with the urge to cover him with my body, cling to him and confess my sins. I shrug, screaming grin still plastered on my face.
Second Cop asks, “You got a bikini in that bag of yours?” He winks.
“Dave here’s a flirt. He wants to see you in a bathing suit.”
I try to think of something sharp, something that would poke a hole, let the air out of the bubble we’re in. I wish I were across the road for a moment to see if it looks the same from over there. No one is stopping. Nobody notices.
Second Cop glances down Pender Street. “Here comes the paddy wagon. Sure you don’t want to hit him?”
The wagon pulls up onto the sidewalk too.
Biting dry skin off my lips, I say, “Okay, well, bye,” in an undone voice that I despise. I back away.
The cops wave bye-bye, and tell me to take care. More men get out of the wagon.
I keep backing, drop my resumé and pick it up again. I turn and start to jog, high heels clacking like teeth up Burrard Street, past the steps of a cathedral. Stopping, I look back and up at the God-sized doors, two flights of cement steps from where I stand.
On the landing is a shaggy-haired woman in Jell-O green polyester track pants and a linty wool sweater.
“Hey,” she yells, and ambles down, stopping a couple of steps above me. “Got a smoke? Gimme a smoke?” She wiggles her fingers, crooked and bony like bird’s feet, as she comes a step closer. I dig in my purse.
As far as valuable objects go, there are a few dimes, some pennies and a credit card, cigarettes and a bottle of red nail polish. I step up and cram my pack of Matinees in her hand.
“Miserable,” she says, and stuffs the package in her pants pocket. “Miserable, miserable.”
I grab the polish next and offer it up. She snatches the bottle and twists off the top, sniffs and winces. “Miserable.”
“I stole it,” I blurt.
“Miserable.” She clamps her teeth on the tip of her tongue, concentrating, and reaches out with the dripping crimson brush.
I know what she’s going to do, so I close my eyes. A moment later, the reek of liquid enamel cuts up my nostrils as she slops the brush, cool and wet, across my lips, and calmly paints on a Cheshire cat grin.
As the brush moves away, I breathe the acrid scent into my brain as if I might get clarity.
When I open my eyes, hair is sticking to my lips, and Miserable is gone, up the block, attempting to pawn my cigarettes.
Traffic seems suddenly shrill, more shrill than my painted-on grin or the ache in my blood-pocked knee. A double-long city bus lurches to a standstill behind me and I turn as it brays over a stalled car. The bus driver flails his arms in the air, an insect at the helm of a water buffalo. He drops his hands on the wheel and something about the bus’s benign huff and grunt as it waits for the car’s motor to turn over is vaguely calming.
Candy From a Stranger’s Mouth
I FIRST MET PETRA WHILE STANDING in the rain at the scene of a serial murder. The notorious Pickton pig farm. Though it might be described more accurately as a sheep farm, the revulsion that reporters could instill in the public with an account of women’s bodies apparently hacked to pieces among pigs was infinitely more ghastly.
It was 2002 and I had been commissioned to cover the Pickton story by a women’s magazine whose readership was considered to be more educated than that of the magazines I usually wrote for, and I was eager to take on a topic of significance. Police had descended on the farm a month before, looking for a break in the case of sixty missing prostitutes from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and now the Port Coquitlam farm was being bulldozed, its earth sifted painstakingly for DNA evidence.
Swampy and littered with dilapidated barns and rusted-out cars, the farm was barricaded by a tall mesh fence. Mud-splattered yellow crime scene tape encircled the place. A sign on the fence, presumably placed there by the Picktons, said: this property protected by a pit bull with aids. Robert “Willy” Pickton denied any knowledge of the missing women.
The neighbours, loose-lipped in the first couple of days, were now mum. Police refused to speak with any media and presumably had told locals and family members of the missing to keep quiet or risk harming the case.
Standing in the gravelly muck, hunkered under my umbrella in the February drizzle, I watched other reporters pad up and down the fence like coyotes. A woman wearing a canary yellow rain slicker trudged my way, her pants tucked into gumboots. She stopped beside me and peered out from under her hood at the bulldozers.
“Why,” she wondered aloud, “would those womens come so far out to this ugly place?” Her accent was German.
“I guess he promised them a party.” Glancing at what I could see of her short chic hair, I assumed she was a tourist. Germans, I have heard, are fascinated by death. Death and shit. The Pickton farm reeked of both. “They were all from the same scuzzy part of downtown.”
“Scuzzy,” she repeated, staring across the sludge-covered ground to the nearest barn.
Mutually flattened by the rain and misery, we would meet later that day in Vancouver’s glass-encrusted, genteel downtown core to have a drink at Petra’s hotel.
Sitting by the fireplace in the Bacchus lounge, with its cherry wood panelling and plush burgundy velvet, she said, “Tourist brochures don’t say ‘Dead prostitutes are fed to pigs,’” by way of explaining her presence in Vancouver. “I cover dark travel.”
Petra had a monthly column in a German publication that sounded like a cross between true crime and a travel magazine. Her job was to expose the underbelly of popular vacation spots. Petra’s aim for next month’s issue was to bring her readers the unspeakable darkness that lay in Vancouver too.
“Port Coquitlam is not Vancouver though,” I said.
“The missing womens are from Vancouver. Nobody cared about these ones. And now the world is watching.”
I looked off to the bar where lawyers and finance sorts loitered, laughing animatedly as they shmoozed.
“I don’t think I can stand this.” I stared into my glass. “I’m starting to think I’m better suited to write about what it means if your lipstick and shoes match.”
She laughed: a staccato chortle full of deep throaty Ks and bits of tinsel.
Old enough to have given birth at thirty-two and have a grown son to show for it, she did not take herself too seriously. Her laughter knocked away my embarrassment. Petra’s skin was smooth and elastic and that, along with hands that looked as though they belonged to an eighteen-year-old, a bobbed nose and starry brown eyes, gave her a childlike quality. But it was clear there was nothing naive about her. Her mother had been in and out of mental institutions and had killed herself when Petra was twenty. The suicide note stated that having a daughter had been her mother’s worst mistake. She demanded that all personal effects go to Petra’s brother. Petra never married, and she raised her son on her own.
She had recently taken a married lover who spoiled her with adoration and appeared interested in her every word—why would she want a full-time man?
“Listen,” Petra said suddenly, after a third round of drinks and far too much confession on both our parts. “I don’t want to make this horrible pig man story either. I think I am tired of always these cynical worlds around me. Someone else can write it.” She sipped a quick breath.
“Just like that. You’re chucking your column?”
“Ya.” She looked at me, her mouth upturned but set. “I don’t feel happy to make it.”
I must have looked incredulous.
“This is how I do things. I make up my mind and I do it—But listen, we can’t be cruel to the editors, so I propose we make this last story together.” She raised her glass. “Do you say yes to this?”
Petra felt deeply familiar to me, as I suppose a person does when she fears or loves in a way that is similar to the way you do.
I picked up my drink. “Yes.”
Years later, when Petra called me in Vancouver, all I had in front of me was a deadline for a puff piece in a fashion magazine. It was summer and yet the drizzle outside continued unabated. From the pap of my employment to the sog of the city, I was beginning to question the consequence of my existence.
“I’m coming to your side of the Atlantic,” Petra said. “My lover and I, we are going to stay in this suite at the Waldorf for two weeks. Why don’t you get out of that rain and come see me?”
This article I’d agreed to write was a companion piece to a recent sex survey the magazine was publishing. The editor had just faxed me the survey questions, suggesting I might use one as a jumping-off point. I had been considering: Under what circumstances would you be most likely to have an affair?
When Petra first told me of her affair years ago, I thought I saw a brimming affection in her. Though she had never used the word love and said she had no desire for Andrew to leave his wife. The European affair, I inferred, was likely based more on pragmatism than on romance.
“You’re still with him, huh?”
“Ya. We’ve been together longer than most people’s marriages.”
Listening to Petra on the phone now, I felt a longing to escape from my own world. I checked online as we spoke and found a cheap, last-minute flight. “You talked me into it,” I said.
“Really? This is wonderful!” she exclaimed. Feeling wanted made me positively effervescent.
When I hung up, I called Felicia, a friend who lived in Greenwich Village, to see if her couch was available.
I met up with Andrew and Petra on Lafayette Street in the East Village, not far from where I was staying. They had reservations in a pricey rest
aurant that had seen its day a couple of decades ago and was now a bit of a kitschy hangout for twenty-somethings. Full of deep, thudding beats, horns and synthesizers, the music was turned up to a level that made it impossible to hear others speak unless you were all bent far into the centre of your table.
Two young women at the next table, Hepburn thin in their sleek dark dresses, bobbed their elegantly made-up heads as they glanced mutely around the room. Their men leaned in to each other, mouths open wide to get their big loud words into each other’s ears, oblivious to the women in their company. I resented them for it.
My gaze turned back to Petra and Andrew, but because it was so hard to hear any conversation we tried to make, I did more observing than normal. Though perhaps that’s a lie. I have been accused, in the past, of sitting back, busily thinking up pithy descriptors that I might later use in an article. To some people this is the behaviour of a scavenger. Others like to have a witness on hand—it gives them a feeling of importance and security. Besides, in a way I was working.
I searched her face that night, looking for joy, an irrepressible spark of glee that she was in New York City with a man who was married to someone else. But her smiles conveyed more diplomacy than pleasure. I scanned the lover too, hoping to catch sight of—I don’t know what—some keening sense of inevitability? Some suggestion of a trapped man who, though dutifully maintaining his role back home as husband and father, was tormented by the fact that his one great love was actually here, hiding out with him in the extreme public of Manhattan.
They did not hold hands; I saw no surreptitious brushing of fingers or feet. I saw no sign of their sultry need for each other. He seemed merely cordial.
Andrew had what was, to my ear, an unusual accent for a German. “My mother was a Londoner, you see. I spoke English at home first, and then, of course, German,” he explained. “I consider English my mother tongue.”
He seemed proud of that fact. His father spoke Swiss German, which, he said, had no formal grammatical rules and was not even a written language. “Only standard German is written,” he said.
Greedy Little Eyes Page 3
