The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  Denise was too busy digging into her salad and quizzing me to notice the effect she had on him. Or maybe she was so used to having that effect on people that she no longer paid it any attention.

  “So, the police were at the Festival rehearsal this morning?”

  “I think they’re likely still there. I was lucky enough to be processed early, probably because of Iain. Or more likely because he figured I would know nothing anyhow. There were still twelve actors and the design team waiting when I left.”

  “Was Kieran still there?” Denise was fiddling with the black olives in the bottom of her bowl, spearing them carefully on the tines of her fork and not meeting my eye.

  “Yeah, he was still there. Denise, how serious is it with you two? Are you being exclusive, as it were?”

  “You know me, Randy, serial monogamy all the way.” She smiled, a bit ruefully.

  What have we done in the twenty-first century that makes us ashamed of values our forebears held sacrosanct? It’s as if we’re all supposed to be too cool for school. Well, since school was my world, that term never applied to me. Of course, I had never been given the option of dating more than one person simultaneously. Maybe if I had Denise’s ability to attract every male on the planet, it would be more than an academic theorem.

  “Well, yes, I get that. What I meant to say was, is it serious? I wasn’t sure how much you were seeing him, that was all.”

  Denise pushed away her bowl, which still had a few tidbits of goodness in the bottom, but I restrained myself from reaching over with my fork to nab a neglected piece of steak.

  “I thought we were keeping it light and easy, but as the spring rolled on, Kieran has been seeming more and more intense. I honestly started to think he might be trying on the emotions as he was working through the staging notes in his book for the shows. I was a bit cautious, because after all, it’s me I want him to be kissing, not some amalgam of Beatrice and Desdemona. But then, when the rehearsals began, things got a bit more normal, and I thought we were moving into a deeper phase.”

  “The toothbrushes in each other’s cups?”

  Denise smiled. “Exactly. So things have been pretty easy for the last few weeks. Kieran’s been a bit less intense, and I’ve been having a pretty good time co-authoring this paper with Sarah about our theatre experiment. We have the evaluations back from the students, and the metrics are fantastic in terms of retention, understanding, enthusiasm and focus. We want to get the paper whipped into shape in time to present it in New Orleans in January. The Shakespeare Quarterly folks may be interested in publishing something like this, too.” Denise beamed at me, and I got a hint of why so many waiters did her bidding happily. “It would be amazing to have cross-discipline interest happening, with both the teaching focus and the scholarship ends appreciating the same work.”

  I noted that Denise’s conversation had segued from talk about Kieran, where she seemed uncomfortable and hesitant, over to her research area, where she was more at ease. It didn’t take a degree in psychology (thankfully) to figure out she was avoiding the topic of Kieran.

  I wasn’t sure why. While we were far from schoolgirls, Denise had never shied away from discussing her relationships with me, as I had with her from time to time. Of course, mine tended to be variations on the same theme, Steve, while Denise flitted from man to man, like a butterfly that had yet to find the right garden. She and Kieran seeing each other since early May of this year was probably the longest stretch of dating she had done in quite a while.

  I had a sense she didn’t want me prying into it any further, and since I had just been through my own inquisition this morning, I was in no mood to inflict that feeling on anyone else. We finished our lunch with less problematic conversational gambits, like whether it would be a good thing if the City sprayed the parks with insecticide and what we would haul in front of the cameras if the Antiques Roadshow ever came through Edmonton.

  We left the restaurant together but parted at the doors, because Denise had parked in the lot behind the building and I was on foot. She offered to drop me at home, but I waved her off. She would have an easier route to her place if she left the parking lot and kept going south, rather than twisting through the labyrinth of one-ways that kept traffic slow and reasonable through the residential student neighbourhoods bordering the university. Besides, I had frozen yoghurt to walk off.

  By the time I got to my apartment, I had two things sorted out in my mind. I would definitely want my grandmother’s purple vase evaluated by antique experts, and Denise was worried about Kieran.

  6.

  I cleared off the table in my dining room/office area and spread three sheets of manila board out for grid measurement. My best bet was to get 28 cards a sheet. Since I was figuring on 12 groups of five characters each, 60 cards per deck, and factoring in wreckage and error, the job was still going to require more patience than I was born with.

  I drew light pencil lines marking the grid and set the sheets on a pile of newspapers. Using a small X-acto knife, I scored the sheet along the long lines first. Wiggling the paper back and forth where I’d sliced, I managed to create a pile of long thin strips without much trouble. Bored with the repetitive nature of the task, and feeling my back begin to protest at leaning over the table for so long, I moved my industry to the front room. I could use scissors to cut the long strips into four-inch cards, and it seemed an easy enough job that I wouldn’t be ruining anything by multitasking. I reached for the remote control to the television, telling myself it was good to stay current with world events and secretly hoping for an Ingrid Bergman movie on TCM. I didn’t watch television in the daytime much, unless I was weathering a flu, so I wasn’t certain what was on offer. I flicked through the channels, trying to avoid the more abrasive talk shows, but stalled on what seemed to be a news channel. The camera was focused on a familiar outdoor scene, one of the wooden staircases dotted along our river valley.

  Used by joggers, commuters, and dogwalkers, the stairs that connected the deep river valley to the upper roads presented an aerobic challenge to one and all. I usually had to stop at the small decks every 65 steps or so, to catch my breath and step aside to let the athletic stair runners get by me. Denise had tried to get Steve and me to join her in a stair challenge one summer, whereby you had to head down the Kinsmen stairs on the south side of the river by the High Level Bridge, cross the LRT bridge, run up the stairs by Enzio Farrone Park, cut through the Legislature grounds to 104th Street and the stairs just east of McKay Avenue School, down again into the river valley and across the Walterdale Bridge and up the stairs in Queen Elizabeth Park. I tried to point out to her that this route would land you a mile away from where you had begun, necessitating a needless walk along Saskatchewan Drive, but she dismissed this inconvenience as bonus toning.

  Steve and I had joined her once or twice before I flaked out on intentionally raising a sweat. She herself had done the route religiously for three months, and while I had to admit her legs looked great that fall, I hadn’t been aware of a time when Denise’s legs didn’t look great. I had made my way through three Russian novels during the same time. My accomplishment couldn’t be gauged by a superficial look, of course, though I had taken to drinking strong coffee and pining for Moscow. I still think I came out ahead.

  The reporter’s voice was saying “the body was discovered under the stairs” and that police were not releasing any information, though they had confirmed the identity of the woman who had died of knife wounds.

  This had to be Eleanor they were describing. It occurred to me that I hadn’t learned anything from the police this morning about how and where she had been killed. If this report was connected, then Eleanor had been stabbed on or near the stairs in Queen Elizabeth Park and shoved under the stairs, to be discovered by an early-morning jogger. It was a very good thing the jogger likely had a strong heart from all that aerobic exercise.

  Denise had made me do those steps, too, and while I couldn’t bring them cl
early to mind, I had a hazy recollection of two or three stretches of wooden stairs with a wooden gutter on either side for people to push their bicycles up or down. Landings every 40 or more steps occurred, but unlike the steps near the Macdonald Hotel, there were no clever little benches built into the banisters. You could see through to the hill beneath as you trudged up, though that sort of readjustment of focus between the tread and the further depth usually made me nauseous. On the way down, you just had to rely on faith that no ghoulish arm would dart out to grab your ankle and send you tumbling to your certain death, or at least a bad sprain. Now that I knew it was also a place to wedge murder victims, the lure of the step circuit was even more unlikely as a means of exercising my way to living forever.

  I clicked through a few more channels before settling on a western marathon. It was easy to keep track of the action when it was measured in wagon wheel rotations, and I could concentrate on cutting the cards evenly.

  By the time I had four sets of cards piled up in front of me, High Noon had given way to Bad Day at Blackrock, and my reverence for Spencer Tracey led me to curl up on the loveseat and watch it through to the end before I tidied things up and moved on to decorating the cards with their specific characters. That part was going to take concentration, anyhow. I had found a few cartoonish versions of Shakespeare’s plays in the Edmonton Public Library and thought I could cobble together a set of suitable caricatures based on those models.

  Finally the movie was over. I turned off the television, tossed the scraps of paper I’d accrued into the blue bag, and put the kettle on. While it simmered, I dug through my desk drawers for my sketchbook and a 2B pencil. I needed to practise a bit before committing to card stock.

  I was hoping for some strong-lined cartoons that would give a nod to each character’s idiosyncrasies. Malvolio, with his cross-gartered legs, would be simple, as would Juliet leaning over a balcony or Lady Macbeth cupping her hands full of imaginary blood. And of course, I would be printing their names below their portraits, just in case they all came out looking like versions of the wooden top family. On the whole, though, I figured I was up to the task. I’d been sketching and painting from an early age and enjoyed art classes down at the City Arts Centre every now and then. Nowadays, it amounted to so much doodling, but I occasionally pulled out the stops and created an original Christmas card. In fact, my rough designs and drawings in page after page of my notebook had been translated by a pair of amazing IT designers into the virtual museum Rutherford House was now proudly displaying on the Internet.

  I stopped to heat up some soup around six and tilted the Venetian blinds around the same time I was turning on the lights, but went right back to sketching my groups. I was fairly pleased with Falstaff and quite proud of Mistress Quickly, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to distinguish Prince Hal from Mercutio or Sebastian. I was also having a hard time drawing leeks that didn’t look like scallions, so I wasn’t certain that Fluellen would stand out from his Irish and Scottish compatriots. Ophelia looked like Betty Cooper drowned in the bath. I struck a line through that sketch.

  I was tweaking the books that Ferdinand of Navarre was sitting on when the burbly sound of a Skype call sounded from my desk, where my laptop was sitting. At one time, I had owned a desktop computer and a laptop, but after a break-in during which most everything of value had been broken or stolen, I refurbished minimally and decided to work completely from a laptop with an auxiliary hard drive.

  I moved to the desk chair and lifted the lid of my laptop. Punching in my password, I stole a quick look at my reflection in the glass cover of a print on the wall beside me. I had a pretty good idea who was calling me at 10:30 p.m., and if I was correct, I didn’t want to scare him into the arms of some Scandinavian fjord maiden.

  Pushing my eyebrows into place and checking my teeth for parsley, I pressed the little green phone button and Steve’s face bounced into place. He looked way too chipper for what would be 6:30 a.m., but he had always been a morning person.

  “Hey doll! How are you?”

  “Hey yourself! You’re wide awake. Nice to see you.”

  We then, as all Albertans seem to, descended into a convoluted discussion of the weather there, here, in the past at this time of year, what it was predicted to be, and how different it had been last year. Steve was the first to segue out into real conversation, which was his right, as the initiator of the call. There are rules, after all.

  “I read the news about a body being found.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve been talking to Iain.”

  “Guilty.” He laughed again. “So sue me. I wanted to know how you’re doing.”

  I shrugged. “It took over the rehearsal this morning, and I spent the afternoon and evening working from home, but that was probably just as well, since I think I’ve been really productive.” I hauled my sketchbook from behind me at the table and tried to position it so that the camera could capture some of my drawings to show Steve. He was suitably impressed and made nice noises as he slurped his coffee. “I am not sure, though, that this is going to affect me at all. I have no real connection to the actors, after all. It’s made Kieran have to rejig his casting, but I’m not certain he’ll be able to hire anyone else, given the tight strictures of the grants they play with, and the timing. I think he’s moving actresses around and making do, rather than starting over with someone from outside.”

  “Iain said he was going to be talking with Denise tomorrow,” Steve remarked. “I couldn’t quite follow his reasoning for that.”

  “Oh, I can. They’re an item these days.”

  “Really? Denise and Kieran Frayne?” Steve smiled, and as he did, the picture of him froze for a bit, making me miss him even more. I hit screen capture, just to grab the moment. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  I laughed. “Well, she is really enjoying the connections between the Drama and English departments at the moment. She and Sarah intend to present their paper about the joint production at the International Symposium for the Teaching of Humanities in New Orleans this coming year. I heard all about it at lunch today.”

  “Sounds intriguing. Well, I guess if I could swing a trip to New Orleans out of it, I could come up with any number of paper topics.” Steve was animated again, and looking as if he was getting ready to be off.

  “How is your work coming along?” What I really wanted to ask was when he was coming home, but I didn’t feel right about it somehow. The last thing I ever wanted to be was whiny when it came to our relationship. It seemed to me that Steve had put up with a lot from being associated with me over the years, and I wanted him to have this time without any worries that I was pining for him. The trouble was trying to ride that fine line between sounding okay and making sure he knew I was missing him.

  Steve filled me in on his itinerary, which seemed to be full of interviews with station minders, chiefs of police, training officers, and city councilors whose portfolios included pubic safety. One of the most interesting things he’d learned was the correlation they were making between the relative cleanliness and brightness of the station and the lowering of crime levels. Apparently, instilling a sense of pride in the locals was enough to dissuade petty criminals from working that particular beat.

  “The problem lies in the more urban central stations, where there is a lack of ownership of the site. No one actually lives in the centres where we have the biggest problems, so we have to start to figure out ways to create more civic connections there. Possibly shops and businesses in the concourse levels, maybe some school art displays.” I could tell he was thinking out loud, but it was fun to be in on the way his brain worked. “Anyhow, the stats are amazing here. Honestly, pretty much everything is amazing. It is sort of tough to see some of the stuff they can do here, with citizen buy-in and strong government support. It’s not the nanny state that libertarians and neo-cons would have you believe it is when they talk about how much taxation takes place. It’s more as if everyone in the country
is invested in how the country operates. You get way more political debate and far more community interest in anything that city hall proposes than what we are used to at home.”

  We talked for another ten minutes, winding down into general pleasantries and promises on my part to water his plants and make use of his washer and dryer if I wanted, since he was going to be in Scandahoovia for at least another two weeks.

  I was the first to click off as we said our goodbyes. I hated being the one hung up on, I always had.

  I considered going back to my sketching but decided against it. I could start up again in the morning. I left my kitchen table covered in books and sketches, and my coffee table piled with cardboard card sets, and went to bed.

  It was probably the events of the day working themselves into bizarre patterns, but my dreams were wild and disturbing. At one point, Steve was wandering through, dressed in a doublet and hose, saying, “Everyone has to be invested.” And the next thing I knew, I was looking down on a body in the weeds. I knew it was going to be Eleanor, but I was scared to turn her over. All of a sudden, Detective Jennifer Gladue was there, officiously telling me not to touch anything, and reaching out a long hook, like the ones they used to pull bad performers off the vaudeville stage, she turned over the drowned body. My dream scream woke me up and I found myself sitting up in bed, shivering. The body in my nightmare hadn’t belonged to Eleanor Durant. The drowned girl in my dream was my best friend, Denise.

  7.

  There is nothing like a police investigation to make any sort of schedule turn into chaos. While I was feeling pretty secure in the work I had completed and what I still had to do, I could tell that tensions were running pretty high among the cast and crew. Kieran was exhorting people to run their lines and continue to develop their characters in between the times everyone could be together. He and Detective Gladue had been through the rehearsal schedule and come up with a compromise for how to keep scene rehearsals flowing while various actors were invited to the police station to formalize their interviews and sign off on their statements.