The Continuity Girl

by Leah McLaren

  This is what Ozzie told himself.

  That night they poured more drinks and resumed their usual talk, a gregarious bluster of references to movies, mysterious business interests and actresses they’d like to screw. When the doorbell rang, Frank jumped up to get it. Just before he left the kitchen he paused, hands spread on the door frame.

  “One more thing, Oz.” He spoke very slowly, looking not at the script but straight into his friend’s eyes. “Be careful with that. It’s the only copy.”

  Jesus fuck!

  Ozzie stood in the booth and shook his head—once, twice, hard, like a person trying to get rid of water trapped in his inner ear. Goddamn memory. It’s like you spend the first two-thirds of your life as a walking, talking hard-on—sex constantly on the brain, all other thoughts a sideshow—then the last third you can’t even concentrate long enough to get it up for a decent wank.

  He resolved to start from scratch. The lube bottle farted out another dollop of goo. Ozzie picked up the magazine and looked more closely at the girl in the brown suede skirt. “When Dana isn’t playing for the camera, she likes fast cars and even faster men,” read the text. “‘I lost my virginity to my driving instructor when I was sixteen,’ says the Mancunian hottie, ‘and since then I always get turned on when I’m in the driver’s seat.’” Ozzie felt his mind lock in and begin to creep forward. He put himself in the passenger’s seat, reaching over and slipping his hand under the brown suede skirt. Ah, yes...hello, Dana.

  She couldn’t wait to see him. Could. Not. Wait. Another. Second. Meredith wished she could commandeer the plane and fly it over the ocean herself. And now, of course, because of her impatience, the flight was delayed. And not just a few minutes but an hour. Another whole hour to add to the thirty-five years she had already spent without him. Which was fine before she knew him—but not anymore. Now there was no time to waste. Meredith had never felt so insanely impatient to see someone in her life.

  The best of it was this: since Joe had seen her off in Florence she had not felt the Quest even once. Her sperm bandit days were over. Cured (dare she think it?) by love.

  “Look at you!” her mother had said when seeing her off with Jeffrey at airport security several minutes before. “You’re positively twitterpated.” She had squeezed Meredith’s cheeks and tousled her hair. “Mind you, don’t get too happy and start eating everything in sight,” she added, patting Meredith’s left hip. “That always used to happen to me when I fell in love. My bottom would grow to twice its natural size.”

  Meredith prepared to say something caustic, but before she could, her mother let out a theatrical whoop and slapped Jeffrey’s hand away from her nether regions.

  “Darling! I told you, not in public.”

  “Just checking to see if you care for me.”

  “Ooh, my little poopsie-woopsie.” Irma began nuzzling his ear and tickling him around the middle.

  Meredith rolled her eyes and took her place in the security line.

  Nearly an hour had passed since then and she was still no geographically closer to her own poopsie-woopsie.

  Why, she wondered, did infatuation turn people into such idiots? It was like Christmas—excruciatingly tacky unless you were in the middle of it, in which case there was nothing lovelier. She thought of Mish, staying behind with Barnaby and Shane to tend to the birds of prey in that wonky cottage in the Cotswolds. Life, she decided, was inexplicably weird.

  And of course there was Ozzie. Surprisingly he had made more than a token appearance at the wrap party. He was there when Meredith arrived with her mother and Jeffrey. The place—a new club near Irma’s flat specializing in film types (there was a retrofitted movie theater decked out with great leather armchairs and footrests)—was packed with people Meredith recognized from the shoot. Still smarting from the way she’d been fired, Meredith ducked Richard Glass and huddled at a corner table with Mish, sending Barnaby back and forth to the bar for more vodka tonics.

  “Your mother is in fine form,” Mish observed, and Meredith saw she was right.

  Irma swept among the clumps of people with the Earl of Dorgi in tow. Everywhere she stopped she seemed to cause a little scene of hilarity—uproarious laughter and spontaneous dancing broke out in her wake. Meredith smiled and, for the first time she could remember, took pleasure in the effects of her mother’s charm. Then Ozzie came into view. He and Irma air-kissed and then Kathleen took a turn. The actress leaned down and whispered something into Irma’s wig. From her vantage point Meredith could see something between them—either a bond had been formed or a blockage had been removed, or both. Ozzie had somehow facilitated a truce.

  He smiled and scanned the room with his eyes. Meredith froze, waiting to be spotted.

  “Is that him?” Mish gripped her forearm.

  “Who?”

  “Oh, fuck off. You know who. Whatshisface. The Wizard of Oz. Hugh Hefner. Donald Trump. Alpha-boy. Mister Fuck-Off Producer guy. The Italian mystery man.”

  “He’s not Italian; he just happens to live in Italy.”

  Just then his eyes fell on her. He began to push through the crowd like an unpenned bull.

  “Whatever. Oh my God, look, he’s totally coming over here.”

  “Ow!” Meredith yanked her arm away and examined it to see if Mish’s fingernails had broken the skin.

  “Hello, ladies.”

  Before Meredith knew it, Mish was having her hand kissed and giggling like a small-town deb at a Texas swan ball. Mish lived to have her hand kissed.

  “Ozzie.”

  “May I steal you for a moment?” he said.

  Outside on the roof deck he sipped his Campari and regarded her jealously. It was almost raining.

  “That was quite a dramatic exit.”

  Meredith shrugged. “I had to go.”

  “You might have left a note.”

  “Yeah. I might have. I wish I could tell you I was sorry.”

  They stood for a moment in the drizzly silence. The conversation limped on.

  “I suppose you think I should have told you earlier.”

  “Really?” Meredith felt her blood begin to rise. “Because I don’t suppose you should suppose to know what I’m supposedly thinking at all.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Actually no.”

  “Look.” Ozzie put a hand out toward her and then thought better of it and shoved it back into his pocket. He sighed, rubbed his eyes with his other hand, searching for better words. “Look, I should have told you earlier. About your father and my connection...to your past.” He choked a little, and she saw it was difficult for him to get out the next few words. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize!” Meredith half-shouted and then glanced around and lowered her voice. Ozzie looked as if he wished she’d spared him the trouble of saying he was sorry in the first place.

  “The point is, you bankrolled my entire childhood.” She felt a blockage in her throat. “I mean, what am I going to... How am I supposed to ever pay you back for that?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “But you shouldn’t think that, darling. That’s never what I expected. I never wanted for you or your mother to feel the least bit indebted to me. Not for one second.”

  “Why?” Meredith’s voice began to quaver—she would not cry. “Why would you do that?”

  “For your father.”

  “But why?”

  “Because...” Ozzie looked down at his shoes and up again. “Because I owed him.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s ancient history now. Just believe me when I tell you that I owed him. I still owe him.”

  “I just don’t understand.”

  “In this case, trust me when I tell you it’s not necessary. You don’t need to back-match the past, my dear.” Ozzie stepped back and looked at her. “You’re just like him, you know.”

  “Really?” She
softened.

  “Mmm. In looks, but also in your talents. You have his eye for detail. And his dramatic timing.”

  Meredith laughed and, emboldened by the moment, blurted out a question she’d been longing to ask. “How come you never had any kids of your own?”

  His eyes shimmered. “I didn’t need to. I had you.”

  Remembering the scene a week later brought on a tingling in Meredith’s breasts. They still hurt from the man who had jostled her in the security lineup. She pushed all thoughts of Ozzie from her mind and concentrated on what lay ahead. A fresh start in Toronto. A romance. Maybe even (she could barely even think the word) a boyfriend.

  The message on the screen changed again. BA Flight 92 to Toronto delayed to 12:00. She growled. Another precious fleeting hour of her youth to be wasted in the airport. Why was nothing ever on time anymore? Meredith tapped her foot, fumed, tapped the other foot. The rest of the world may have decided punctuality was a virtue of the bored, but she was always on time. She was like clockwork.

  Meredith froze.

  She checked the date on her boarding pass and confirmed it.

  She was four days late.

  19

  Joe stood at the Pearson arrivals gate wishing he were somewhere else.

  Not that he didn’t want to see her—just the opposite. He was afraid of precisely how much he did. That and the news he had to deliver.

  It had been over a week since her train pulled out of the station in Florence. He warmed, remembering the hanky she’d waved out the window in an attempt to make light of the European romantic melodrama of the moment. After she’d gone he felt scooped out, but in a good way, as if he’d been emptied of all distractions and could finally appreciate his life for what it was. Joe had wandered around Florence for another day, sloping through galleries until his vision blurred and taking his espresso and panino standing up at the bar the way he noticed Italian men did. In the end he flew home a few days early. He had work he wanted to finish up before Meredith returned. And he needed time to think.

  How did you tell a woman you’d just fallen for that you couldn’t ever hope to make her pregnant? Joe wondered darkly if Meredith would break up with him immediately or put it off until after dinner (he’d booked a table at a little trattoria near his house, in honor of their Florentine adventure). Surely there was no way she would stay with him given his biological limitations. How could he reasonably expect her to, knowing so well the relentless, inexhaustible female drive to reproduce? He could make all the arguments he wanted about adoption and the joys of stepmotherhood and pet ownership, but in the end, physiology would triumph over psychology—Meredith’s body would find a way to leave him.

  He had to tell her that children were out of the question—and tell her sooner rather than later. Joe couldn’t begin to count the number of desperate women who had come to him during his career, having frittered away their window of fertility on some lunkhead who had, in their words, been “wasting their time.” Joe might have less than Olympian sperm motility, but he was still a gentleman. He wanted Meredith to have what she wanted (and arguably, needed) most, even if it meant being without her. He would not—much as he longed to—be the guy who wasted her time.

  People clustered around the metal barricades, waiting for familiar faces to emerge from behind the frosted glass partition. Beside him stood a bald man with three small children. They squealed with happiness when they saw their mother swooping around the corner in a canary-yellow sari. She stooped to kiss them on their heads and then stood and looked at her husband and placed a hand on his cheek. In some ways, Joe thought, the gesture showed more affection than a kiss.

  It took ages for Meredith to appear. A river of people poured past, each one identified in Joe’s eyes only as not her. By the time she materialized his entire body was pricked with anticipation. The sight of her—his Meredith. (He had already begun to think of her, slightly guiltily, in this way.) Hair tucked neatly behind her ears, a blue raincoat he had never seen before skimming the tops of her pretty bare knees. She lugged an enormous black suitcase that looked as if it must weigh twice what she did. He wished he could jump the gate and help her, and tried to call out, but although she paused and looked around with a curious expression (those cute little furrows on her forehead!) she didn’t appear to have seen or heard him.

  Joe pushed back into the crowd, determined to meet her when she emerged, but people crammed in front blocking his way. He kept pausing and scanning for a glimpse of blue raincoat. He should have warned her he was coming instead of making it a surprise. Surprises were emotionally risky. They only put people off balance, particularly people like Meredith. For all he knew, someone else was meeting her. Maybe he should just go home and call from there. As he was considering his options Joe felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find her standing behind him, cocking her head.

  “I came,” he said, the words backfiring out of him, “and then I couldn’t find— I was afraid you’d gone off on your own or that maybe you’d even seen me and didn’t want—” He stopped himself blathering by reaching down and taking her into his arms. She pulled away first, just as he was placing a kiss on the hollowed-out part between her collarbone and her shoulder.

  “Lovely to see you,” she said in an oddly remote voice.

  He felt suddenly self-conscious and wished they could be alone together. “My car’s two levels down.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What for?”

  “Picking me up.”

  “My pleasure. How was your flight?”

  “Fine. A bit exhausting. How was yours?”

  “Mine?”

  “When you came back. From Florence.”

  “Oh, fine. I guess. I slept most of the way.”

  They were silent until they got into his car. When he turned the key in the ignition the stereo blared to life. He’d been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” on the drive up and then had forgotten to take it out of the tape deck of the Jetta. The chorus that had seemed so soulful just a dozen or so minutes ago now embarrassed him. He banged his hand on the volume knob a little too hard and the whole stereo came loose and hung from its hinges. They both stared at it for a moment.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said, starting the car. “With you?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  He glanced over to meet her eyes but her head was turned toward the window. He signaled to pull into the passing lane. Meredith inhaled quickly, as if she was about to say something. She turned to him, but as she did he flicked his head the opposite way to check his blind spot. She exhaled and stared straight ahead.

  Joe shifted in his seat, keeping both hands on the wheel. “So what is it?”

  “There’s something we need to discuss.”

  “I agree.”

  “You do?” She swung her head and looked at him.

  He wrapped his hands so tightly around the wheel that his fingernails dug into the heels of his palms. “I think so.”

  “What is it, then?” A slight challenge in her tone.

  “The baby...thing.” Joe glanced over. “Right?” She chewed her thumbnail. Faced forward. He took her silence as a grim invitation. “Look, maybe we should talk about this later.”

  “No. It’s fine. Let’s talk about it now,” she said.

  “All right. Okay, well, I’ve been...This is hard. I don’t know if I’ve experienced anything harder.”

  “Than what?”

  “Than what I’m about to say to you. But the truth...the fact is, things are complicated for me.” Joe exhaled and counted to three. “I could go into the whole story but I’m not sure the reasons even matter and it probably wouldn’t be much of a consolation to you anyway so I won’t, but the upshot is”—he paused—“babies are not in the picture for me at this point. I’m not going to have any more kids. I mean, I’m almost completely certain I won’t. I’ve known that for a long time now. I’ve come to terms with
it. I think in some ways, for Livvy and everything, it’s probably actually better.”

  A ragged sound from the passenger seat. From the corner of his eye he saw her hands cover her face.

  “This is exactly what I was afraid of.”

  “I know. Fuck.” He banged one hand on the wheel and his foot stamped down on the gas. The car accelerated roughly. “I’m sorry.”

  “I hope,” she said, “you don’t mind. But I need to go straight home. I need to not be around you right now.”

  “Of course,” Joe answered in his even practitioner’s voice. “Of course you do.”

  Meredith cried and she cried, and when she was done crying, she poured herself a bath but the smell of the lavender salts when they hit the water reminded her of their suite at the Savoy so she slid into the bath and cried some more. After a while she began to feel like a tragic amphibian. She had wept so much she could not tell the tears from the bathwater. The pads of her fingers, she noticed, were shriveled up like albino raisins, and it occurred to her that she might just die here, pickled in her own brine. Eventually the weeping exhausted itself. But she wanted to cry. When the current of tears began to slow, all she had to do was return to the source—the thought of losing him forever—and the floods would begin again, smashing through all the dikes in her chest and whooshing out over the landscape of her future—without him. It had been years since she had truly broken down and the force of it overwhelmed her. She had always secretly worried about her inability to cry as an adult and now it seemed she was making up for years of stoicism. She was secretly proud of herself, and of course she was also miserable.

  She badly wanted a drink but knew she shouldn’t.

  Getting out of the bath and drying herself off, she sneezed from the dust that had collected in the towels during her absence. The condo felt even grimmer and emptier than usual, as if it resented her return. The purple terry bathrobe hung limp on the hook where she had left it and she wrapped herself inside it. She was afraid to put on clothes in case she might have expanded suddenly somewhere over the ocean. After months of yearning, now that she might have gotten what she wanted Meredith felt alarmingly ambivalent at the prospect. It wasn’t supposed to have worked out this way. She and Joe had used a condom (at the crucial moments) and as far as she knew she hadn’t even been ovulating at the time. But as Joe had laughingly pointed out to her before any of this, that was the bitter irony of biology: the more you tried to control your body the more your body controlled you.