by Bruce Barber
doors, someone was playing Rameau. He associated harpsichord music with a certain level of sophistication, perhaps of intelligence, so he tapped discreetly and waited patiently.
“Go away,” a voice called above the strumming of La Dauphine. “Whatever it is, I don’t want it.”
Keyes was unsure about the gender of the voice – tenor? Contralto? He decided not to try to find out. Instead, he groped further, found another staircase, another door. This one was opened by Sandra.
“My darling,” she said in her fine voice. “Did you have trouble finding me?”
I always have, he thought, but confined himself to telling of his brief encounter with Rameau.
“Oh, that’s the other tenant, Grace Lockhardt,” Sandra informed him. “She’s a dresser... my dresser actually. A nice girl, a bit flaky, but good at her job.”
Then she kissed him, pulled him into her apartment, and poured him a cup of tea.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “It’s been such a long time.”
Keyes didn’t know what she meant by “everything,” so he told her where he’d been and what he’d been doing for the past few years. As he told her, he thought his life didn’t sound very amusing. Her face told him the same thing.
“But how interesting,” Sandra lied. She lied several times as she refilled his teacup, and refilled it again. Her voice was low and world-weary. Even when Sandra was young, Keyes remembered, her voice had been like that, the voice of someone who had seen and done a lot, or rather more than a lot.
The day died without fanfare or applause while he was telling his story. No lamp had yet been lit. Deep shadow crowded the room. Only with difficulty could he make out the silhouette of Sandra’s form in the darkness, that body which he remembered as vividly as he did her face. She was an audible presence still, an emanation, but nothing more substantial.
Perhaps to demonstrate her palpable existence, Sandra shifted in her chair. Shadows prevented Keyes from seeing this movement clearly, but he heard the groan of a leather belt, the rattle of a chain, the hiss of silk or some other smooth fabric over even smoother flesh. They were sounds he interpreted as being signals, although he was not sure of what.
She made another movement, this time with her hand.
“The place is a bit of a mess,” she apologized not very sincerely.
“I’m used to a bit of mess in this life,” he said.
“This is Sheila Tarleton’s apartment actually,” Sandra continued. “She’s in Toronto, playing a mid-wife or something in a dreadful television thing. The money is excellent of course, but they’re shooting part of it in Kapuskasing.”
Keyes had no idea who Sheila Tarleton was, but that made no difference to Sandra. She assumed that he would know the people she knew, or at least that he would care to know these people. Are they all like that? he wondered, theatre people? Indifferent to all other worlds but their own? Was I like that? Is that one of the reasons I gave it up?
For a while they sat in the gloom saying nothing, then Keyes heard the groan of leather again, and the hiss of silk, as Sandra got to her feet.
“How did it get to be so late?”
She said it less to him than to herself, or to the murk about her. She put on a light but it barely brightened the room; its shade was draped with the coloured cloth of a scarf too frayed to wear.
Keyes surveyed the apartment. Its living room, where they were having their tea, looked more like a prop-room than a salon. There wasn’t much furniture but the space was crowded with things: hat boxes, umbrellas, boots, pictures, and other odds and ends, including a candelabrum seven feet tall, a cello, some moribund plants, and what once may have been a papier mâché bull.
“If I had known you were going to be in town, I would have tried to make the place more presentable.”
Keyes knew this to be patently untrue. Sandra had on occasion lived in “presentable” quarters, but she had never kept them that way herself.
“I wasn’t sure when I was coming,” he said, “not until a couple of weeks ago.”
Sandra wandered away to light other lamps. This activity, so daily and banal, became a performance as she did it, a sort of ritual, a slow stately progress from one beacon to the next.
Watching her, Keyes remembered the woman she had been when they were lovers. He found her very little changed. She had aged of course, but not unpleasantly. A few grey strands filigrained her auburn hair. She was heavier, her shoulders thicker and her hips more ample, but she had always been large – broad and thick and powerful. Her bosom, he thought, seemed less aggressive to him now.
Necessarily this close investigation of her person made him remember other parts of her as well, parts he could not see. He remembered too the uses he had made of them, and she of him, the intimacies they had shared.
“How long has it been?” Sandra asked, breaking in on his thoughts from the far end of the room.
He surprised himself by knowing almost to the day, or night, as was in fact the case.
“It’ll be fifteen years,” he said, “next month...”
For a moment she looked puzzled, then she smiled the bittersweet smile for which she had once been famous.
“I only meant how long since you were last in Stratford. You haven’t changed much, darling.”
“I guess not,” Keyes said, trying to laugh, “not as far as you’re concerned, anyway.”
Her smile faded. Almost solemnly they looked at one another across the distance separating them. Then, abruptly, Sandra crossed to one of the room’s big dormer windows. She paused there – posed there, Keyes thought – dramatically framed by the night.
“Don’t you want to hear about my work?” Her tone was ironic, almost jeering.
“Lady Macbeth, you mean. That’s marvellous.”
“Yes, I’m pleased about that, especially since the cast is good and for once Porliss seems to know what he’s doing. But this is a repertory company, darling. I’m also playing Juliet’s nurse.”
Keyes started to say something, but thought better of it.
“Careful, darling,” Sandra said ominously. “Don’t tell me that Juliet’s nurse is a good part, an interesting role, and all that. It’s a bore, and worse, an elephants’ graveyard for elderly actresses.”
“Oh, come on, Sandra, you know better than that. The role takes maturity but...”
“The finest nurse I ever saw was done by a gay actor who was still in his twenties. Danny Fleet. Do you remember him? He had the time of his life.”
Keyes didn’t remember.
Sandra shrugged, massively. “It’s a bore. But that’s the way I’m cast these days – if I’m cast at all.”
“Still, Lady Macbeth...”
“Don’t try to make me feel good. I hate it when people try to make me feel good.”
She fixed him with a severe look while she tried to decide how much she hated being made to feel good. Then her mood changed again. She shook her head and launched into a description of the Romeo and Juliet – the R and J, as she called it. She spoke angrily, grumbling grandly and often, but through it all Keyes could hear the enthusiasm, the passion for play-acting, for putting on a show, that he remembered so well from the part of her past he had shared. She swung her
head away and stared out the window, offering him as she did her right profile, always her finest aspect. A siren howled in the distance, came closer, passed not far from the house, then faded into nothingness across the river – an ambulance on its way to the General Hospital. Still Sandra gazed out into the night. She seemed to have forgotten that Keyes was there.
Brooding, he thought, the way she used to. He knew better than to interrupt her when she was like this, so he made use of the gap in conversation to look about the room again, especially at the walls which were hung with theatrical memorabilia: costume drawings, programs, playbills – works from the Sheila Tarleton collection, he presumed.
One poster, however, surely belonged to Sandra. It had a battered frame and f
ingerprints on the glass. No doubt she travelled with it, took it along whenever she moved, which was often. Keyes knew it was hers because he remembered the play it advertised.
THE WHITE DEVIL
The Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona
Courtesan of Venice
Sandra’s name was there, too, and in larger type than any of the other actors’:
ALESSANDRA EDEL
Keyes looked again at her, remembering her most successful role. Could she, he wondered, still play the villainous Vittoria Corombona? It was not exactly a part for a girl, after all. With some good clothes she might manage it, proper make-up, a clever lighting designer...
Sandra must have felt his eyes upon her.
“Can you think of any reason,” she asked, as if there had been no break in their dialogue, “why we shouldn’t have a drink?”
Without waiting for an answer, she set off for the kitchen. On the way she passed close to him, brushing his leg with her skirt, touching his shoulder affectionately with her hand.
When she came back, she had a green-black bottle in one hand and two crystal flutes in the other.
“I get tired of Shakespeare sometimes,” she said, “and even of Racine, but I never get tired of champagne.”
Keyes considered offering to help with the cork, but thought better of it, which was just as well since Sandra opened the bottle far more deftly than he probably would have done. She filled their glasses just as proficiently.
“Chateau Mandragora!” she said with a certain muted gaiety.
They drank, and drank
