Philip heard the telephone from a long way off. It was pitch-dark where he was lying; he couldn’t tell if it was morning or night. It rang and rang. He rolled out of the van. He had overslept, and the dummy was due this morning. As he picked up the receiver, he could tell that whoever was calling had done him a favour: it was nine-thirty. He had half an hour to get over to the set.
He barked his hello. Laughter came down the wire.
“I must have missed the joke,” he grumbled.
“It’s just so funny to hear you struggle to sound organized,” said Blair. “Did you sleep on the floor of your van again?”
Philip made a face.
“Listen,” said Blair, “I have something big to ask you.”
Philip crooked the telephone under his chin and began to remove his pants. He had a clean pair somewhere. Blair always told him to stop sleeping in his clothes, but it seemed weird to bed down naked in his van. In case he found himself on the road when he woke up.
“Hold on,” said Philip.
His workshop was in a converted garage behind a boarding house in Chinatown. The garage was brick—small and square. On top of the roof was a decorative box that might have been a weathervane, although it had no moving part. One entire wall was the garage door, convenient for moving props and materials in and out. Philip liked to open it and drive right in, in his white van with the California plates and the purple lettering and gold stars on the sides reading SPECIAL EFFECTS.
Last night he had done that, and shut the garage door behind him. He left the cab door of the van open and turned on his tape deck. He was going through his collection of old Broadway musicals. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying marked the end of the golden era, as far as he could judge. He had fallen asleep listening. Now it was morning, and he had Blair waiting on the phone.
“A Secretary is not a Toy, no my Boy, not a Toy, her pad is to write in, not spend the night in…” he sang to himself as he sped to the bathroom. When he moved his operations up here from L.A., he’d worried about getting enough work. It was a slow summer, but now he was busy. Before Hallowe’en, a special-effects artist was like Santa Claus before Christmas. People wanted giant stuffed pumpkins that yielded smoke and vapours, rubberized artificial limbs for costume parties, tombstones that creaked open. Philip was not busy enough or rich enough to turn down work. Probably he would never be. Sometimes he worked himself into a state of exhausted silliness. Yesterday, to try out his handcuffs, he went down to where a friend was getting a haircut. He walked up to the barber chair and, in front of the mirror with the barber looking on, said he was arresting James. James went along with it, and the barber didn’t figure it out till after he’d waved his razor and insisted Philip couldn’t do that. It got a big laugh in the shop, which Philip liked.
He peed, ran cold water on his hands, splashed his face and made his way more slowly across the workshop floor. Downstairs was where the large construction took place, and where he stored his cans of paint and his bales of wire and buckets of plaster, his bolts of cloth. He welded metal there, and nailed and stapled boards together to make the backdrops. He also made trick chairs, collapsing crutches, and designed electric wiring to lay over skin, which, when plugged in, set off a lot of little explosions that looked like gunshot impact. Upstairs he did the fine work—moulding masks and painting faces; there were mirrors and an easel, an industrial sewing machine, pots of make-up, buckets of fine clay. This was where he kept himself organized, to the extent that he did at all. He had a desk and a couple of filing cabinets, and a telephone with an answering machine.
He picked up the phone again. “Okay, shoot.”
“Good morning,” said Blair. “You’re up early.”
“What is it you want from me?” he said, with mock-formality.
“Simplicity wants to be Humpty Dumpty for Hallowe’en.”
“You gotta give the kid credit.”
“I can’t find a costume for her.”
He heaved an enormous sigh and looked around for his watch. “Why don’t people want costumes in February?”
She said nothing.
He located the watch right in front of him on the telephone table. “I’ve gotta get my dummy over to the set by ten-thirty anyway,” said Philip. He had pulled his trousers down over his knees and was stamping on them to pull them off the rest of the way.
“I know you’re busy. That’s why I’m asking early.”
“Early is June, not September.”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded sad. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
“Any word on Ruby?” said Philip. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” said Blair in a small, lying voice. “They’re talking about drug kingpins now,” she said gloomily. “People you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Whatever that means. They haven’t got any evidence though.”
“The cops couldn’t find a cow in a pasture,” he said. “I’ve gotta run.” He slammed the receiver and skidded across the floor on one foot, the other dragging his pants.
“What’s the matter with that woman? Why doesn’t she get a husband?” he ranted out loud. “Give the kid a dad.” He ripped off his sweatshirt (black) and found another black sweatshirt, this one with two silver elephants on the front and a written message saying “Elephant. The Last Decade.” Normally Philip enjoyed the sense that he gave Blair something no one else did—handyman services, half hours spent on the phone listening to her worry about Simplicity, or how she was going to lose her job. But that was when he wasn’t busy. “The woman has no sense of timing.”
He grabbed a pair of pants off the hanger and got into them, swung down the stairs and into the bathroom, where he started water running to wash his face and shave. He calculated the length of the drive to the set at Ontario and King from where he was. Fifteen minutes, at least.
He looked into the corner and saw that the dummy was looking fine, very fine; it was a good likeness of the actor, and well packed with blood. He found its jacket—a copy of the one the actor was to wear during the scene—and gingerly slipped it over the padded and stuffed shoulders and back, pushing the arms down the sleeves the way you would with a reluctant baby. He’d been working all weekend on this one. And now this panic to make the deadline. Blair wanting things at the same time. Ruby. How long had she been gone? A week? What kind of people didn’t you touch with ten-foot poles? He would think about it after.
“Come on now, down you come.” He tried not to speak to his creations. That way lies madness, he told himself. But sometimes he couldn’t help it. He had trouble enough with his landlady and the neighbours, what with all the monster heads and fake corpses going in and out. No need to start rumours that he talked to them. It was important, too, to keep his distance. Every one of his creations was sure to meet a dreadful end.
He put the stuffed man very carefully over his shoulder and, still crouching, made his way to the staircase. He had to be careful not to fall, or put undue pressure on any of his firm pouches: they contained theatrical blood the thick, opaque, non-staining variety. This particular fellow was to be stabbed repeatedly and had to bleed a great deal.
The back of the van was lined with carpet. He swung the dummy down into his arms so he was holding it face to face, climbed with effort up the two-foot step and laid the thing down on its back on the bench. There were ropes to strap it down, and pillows and blankets to protect it. At ten minutes past ten he pressed the button to open the garage door and gunned the van.
Down Spadina to the Lakeshore, and east: it seemed to take an hour but it was 10:27 when he drove up to the redbrick warehouse where the film was being shot. He could see the PA still running around with giant styrofoam cups of coffee so he figured he was okay.
“Somebody here who can give me a hand?” he said. She gave the coffee to a couple of guys and came after him.
“A lot easier if you’ve got two to do this,” he said, picking up the dummy under the arms and guiding him around so his back was to the door. “If you hold his feet we’ll avoid undue strain on the torso. That’s what I’m worried about. He’s well packed.”
The actors ran through their lines, received their instructions, soberly nodding. The actor for whom the dummy was a stand-in grinned broadly. They propped him up where he was supposed to be, sitting at the table, his back to the camera, his head turned slightly so that the light from the window fell on his cheek. The murderer was instructed to go mad, to stab wildly and uncontrollably all over the body, to dig and to cut with the knife, make a real mess. He nodded and nodded. You only got one take, that was it; the dummy would be ruined.
Watching the scene was his professional satisfaction, not the cheque that came in the mail, or even the occasional grateful letter from a director that accompanied it: “Dear Special Effects, you’re a genius, we couldn’t have done it without you.” No, results were what he lived on, and a good thing too, because the cheque was more often than not de-layed, withheld or gone astray. If he didn’t have his trusty lawyer to collect bills he’d have starved long ago. But he did love to see his tricks work: to grow cold and feel his heart clutch on fear; to forget that he himself had planted all those plastic bags full of blood under the Arrow shirt, inside the Harry Rosen tweed jacket (which, incidentally, would be his for the asking afterward, except that it would be utterly ruined from opaque, thick blood, which did stain).
Philip drained his coffee. The scene was underway. Man and woman seated at kitchen table in their loft. They have cut open a large green melon; the knife is on the table. The woman flings some angry words over her shoulder and leaves the kitchen table. She crosses the tiles and is heard to shut the outside door hard. The man taps his fingers; thinking, clock ticking. Cut. The actor goes out, the dummy goes in. This time they shoot from behind. The window opens. A crazy with-rage man crawls in the window. The husband, his intended victim, is incomprehensibly still. Doesn’t turn around. The intruder taunts him—still no movement. Obviously these two know each other. Suddenly the crazy one darts around in front of the dummy, seizes the knife on the table and begins stabbing, shouting, gouging. Blood spurts up from the chest and shoulder bags. He keeps stabbing. Blood runs and it flows and it gushes. The actor stabs and stabs until finally there is nowhere left to stab, just a sodden, deflated mess, the blood on the walls, the tables, the Harry Rosen jacket, the other actor, everywhere.
“Cut.”
Congratulations all around. “Wonderful. It was wonder-ful.”
“Didn’t that work well!”
A general air of festivity took over. Philip, after receiving a nod from the director, who was busier with his actors than with the guy who produced this stuffed creature on whom the violence is wreaked, was edged away from the action. There was some delay and then the announcement: “It’s a take!” The clean-up team swept in. Philip strolled over to the open window.
It was just like summer, this third week in September. So hot and so limpid, with the golden light everywhere over the lake and the city. Airless: without fragrance, the air seemed to be a quantity unconnected with nature, a filler, an effect itself, and special, today, in its gilt. Squinting at the glass towers of the downtown over to the west, he felt the rough, red brick under his hands on the window sill. The two textures of the city: sleek and cold above, rough and earthy at his fingertips; these low, hangar-like brick warehouses still holding sway apart from that salt garden, that crystalline growth in the centre. It was what he liked about Toronto. This was east: unlike Alberta, unlike Los Angeles. Erupting fictions amidst the clutter of last century. But not for long. They were taking the old away, bit by bit, all of it. Straight below the window was a giant metal garbage bin. When the film crew finished in here the place was going to be demolished.
“Say, Philip, that was superb. Just wild. Wait’ll you see it on film. It worked just like you said it would.” The director shook his hand and moved back again into the circle of technicians. Philip watched the gofers shift the dummy off the chair and look around, wondering where to put him down.
“What do we do with this?” said one of them.
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“Pitch it,” said Philip, with a sad smile. Embrace the inevitable, that was his motto. He had learned this over long experience. He’d have loved to hang. on to all his creations, but he just had no space. Literally or figuratively. You had to chuck them or your creativity got blocked.
The two hesitated with their burden. The dummy was strained, sticky and still dripping.
“If we had a great big garbage bag…” said one.
“No plastic bag needed,” said Philip. “Just pitch it,” he repeated. “Down there.” He pointed to the bin one storey down from the open window.
“You wouldn’t mind?”
Philip shrugged.
“Who owns that thing?”
“I dunno, but when they start they’re never gonna notice it down in the bottom. They’re gonna be throwing in huge planks of wood and old radiators.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
The two took the dummy and put him up on the window ledge, buttocks first. Then they folded him neatly, chest toward knees, and pushed him out. The head was heavier, however, and as soon as the dummy cleared the frame it shot backward, so that the body opened dramatically, the head plunging downward, the shredded Arrow shirt flying upward, its red tatters like a Chinese kite in distress. The dummy did one complete ragdoll flip, head down and heels flying over the top, head flying over again and then leading the plunge downward. It struck the edge of the garbage bin; the head and torso draped down the inside, the legs down the outside.
“Sayonara,” said Philip. On the way out the door he got stopped by a make-up woman he knew. It wasn’t until he was shooting down Richmond Street, homeward, that he let himself think about Ruby again. If her disappearance was a trick too. A trick with mirrors. It was likely. Most things were. He didn’t like to consider the possibility she’d been murdered. That only happened in movies. Knowing Ruby, she’d gone off with some guy. That was what she was best at. He never said that around Blair, because Blair defended her. “Don’t be bitter,” she said to Philip. As if he had feelings about Ruby. As if!
He stopped thinking about it and instead thought about the Humpty Dumpty costume. He could do an egg-head with hinges that opened up with jagged edges to show her face inside. It could rest on pads on her shoulders; the body stuffing could hang from there too. He could do it easily if he could just get some light plastic, the kind they make kewpie dolls with, and get it moulded. Somehow. Somewhere. He imagined Blair breaking into a smile when he showed her. And Sissy too. It gave you a hit to see them both, identical smiles set in small, heart-shaped faces.
The principal’s office seemed smaller than similar rooms in Blair’s memory, though perhaps they had always been small and only loomed large. Blair’s schoolteacher mother had never given principals names, they were only “the office.”
Miss Rushton’s office had three leaded-glass windows with diamond panes looking narrowly down over stone balls set in enormous vases on the front steps. The walls were decorated with the usual drawings of lopsided houses with the usual many-pronged sun shining on them, and the usual renderings of dinosaurs. Considering they were extinct, dinosaurs had an incredible presence amongst kids. Blair wondered why. Was it identification in some macro sense: do kids know we are close to our end? Or was it more personal—they feel akin to creatures who are lumpy, misshapen and stupid.
Miss Rushton coughed. She had a little mahogany desk with slim, curving legs, as if to underplay her power. Untidy stacks of envelopes for a fund-raising effort escaped their piles on the side table. Blair squeezed in along one wall, and Simplicity’s teacher, Miss Jasmine Boggs, filled the only other possible air space.
“Call me Jasmine,” she said, extending a small, dimpled hand. She wore a handknit sweater with a Beatrix Potter rabbit nibbling a cabbage on the front. The rabbit’s nose moved when she reached. Blair wondered if primary school teachers chose their clothes to entertain their students. Or if people who liked sweaters with bunnies on them just naturally became primary school teachers. She shuffled her chair so that she could at least see the open door.
“Got to see out, avoid claustrophobia,” she said. “Being in radio, I work in small spaces. You learn from experience.”
Miss Rushton looked fixedly at her and did not smile.
“As you know, we asked you to come because we’re worried about Simplicity,” she said.
“Yes,” said Blair. This was very official; she attempted to rise to the occasion. “Maybe it would be useful if you could repeat the kinds of things you mentioned to me over the phone. I was taken aback and didn’t understand.”
The long neck turned and twisted; opaque, teal-blue eyes took her in.
“Simplicity is very keen on work. We’ve noticed,” she said, “that given a choice, she will always pick up a pencil and paper.”
Blair crinkled her nose and began to nod.
“Yes,” she said.
“She goes into her workbooks, and won’t play in spare time.”
“Oh.”
“Furthermore, in regular class all she wants to do is read.”
“Oh,” said Blair, beginning to understand this was a problem. She wrinkled up her brow. “That’s bad?” she said, interrogatively.
“She’s hiding from other children. She’s using books as a retreat.”
“She does like books.”
Miss Rushton looked crossly out of her too-blue eyes. Tinted contact lenses were the only possible explanation. “We do ask parents to curtail their impatience over children’s reading. It will come later.”
“But if she wants to do it now—”
“Work, work, work,” said Miss Boggs, bursting forth. “She’s not like the others. She doesn’t laugh and giggle. She doesn’t push and shout.”
“She’s got her mind set on reading and it’s all she wants to do,” said Miss Rushton, with feeling.
Blair could see this frustrated them. Her voice began to rise. “Perhaps it’s because she’s ready?”
Miss Rushton carried on in her modulated tones. “I might as well be perfectly straight. To add to the problem, we’ve also noticed that she can read.” She paused for the effect of this scandal to be felt.
There were kids in Simplicity’s classroom who couldn’t sit still to listen to a story, who rolled on their backs and howled. Vangie sobbed herself sick because some raindrops fell on her new suede shoes. Alexandra cheated at Snakes and Ladders. This was accepted, “normal” behaviour. Being quiet and wanting to read a book wasn’t, apparently.
Blair leaned slightly forward in her chair.
“You know we haven’t taught her. You know the philosophy in this school. At present she is being encouraged to play. To socialize with the other children. That is the most important thing she can learn right now.”
“I certainly haven’t taught her,” said Blair. “She gets out her songbooks and follows the words along. She likes that Muppet dictionary, you know, the one where there’s a picture with each word…” Her voice trailed off. Miss Rushton remained unmoved.
“We think that she’s just decided she wants to read, and she’s going to do it, and she doesn’t care if she does anything else right now.”
There was a silence in the room.
“I’m afraid I don’t see the problem,” said Blair, firmly.
Miss Rushton’s eyes widened in exasperation. “You know the principles of the Simcoe School. All the parents do. Learning through play. Yet every year the question of reading raises its ugly head. You’re a reader yourself, I gather, Miss Bowker,” she said, trying a different tack. “You have books around the house? You sit down with them and spend an hour or so?”
“You see you like books a lot as well, don’t you? It must be very gratifying to you to have a child who also likes them,” Jasmine said, accusingly.
Blair began to feel heated. “I think we have to give Simplicity credit for her own obsessions,” she said.
“Perhaps you sit in the house with papers and pen, writing letters?”
Blair interrupted. “When you called and said she always chose a pencil I thought at least you were going to tell me she used it as a weapon.”
This attempt at levity went unnoticed.
“Just what is wrong with what she is doing?”
“I’m afraid she’s become a little isolated, socially.”
“You don’t want the other children to think she’s kind of—quaint…” said Miss Jasmine Boggs.
A gust of kids’ voices went by out in the hall. It was recess time. Through the window, Blair could see small bodies burst out from under the ledge and begin to run hither and yon, kicking balls, swinging arms, clawing their way up the chain-link fence, throwing themselves into piles of leaves. It had not occurred to her before to wonder what her daughter did at recess. How she spent her time, and with whom. Now it seemed to her mad that she had not considered this problem: the child had six complete hours a day at school, and came home to tell her mother nothing.
“The problem is that she is concentrating on work to the exclusion of play,” said Miss Rushton.
“Maybe she doesn’t see it as work. I think she enjoys—”
“She never likes to join a group of girls who are playing jacks or skipping. It’s almost as if,” said Jasmine Boggs won-deringly, “as if she doesn’t like them.”
“You don’t want the other children to give up on her.”
“Maybe she’s given up on them,” Blair retorted. But the image of a sad girl standing by the wall when her mother left her in the schoolyard seized Blair and quashed her defences. “Why would the other girls give up on her?”
“Well, she is rather unpredictable, Ms. Bowker.”
“Unpredictable? What does that mean?”
“She bites.”
“Bites? Who did she bite?”
“Rachel.” Gloom in the room, now that Simplicity’s culpability was so firmly established. “Rachel’s mother complained.”
“Oh dear,” said Blair. For the first time since Simplicity was born, Blair longed for her father. That half-crazed poet she’d married for all of sixteen months before he went back to Weddleston-on-Water, or whatever it was called, in his mildewed tweed coat with his foul tobacco. He would have been very good in here. He would pull his long jaw down and sideways to crack it, one of his unnerving habits, or rather habits to un-nerve.
“Excuse me, are you telling me she’s weird because she prefers books to these little cretins? On the contrary, I should think it shows very good sense,” he would say, and puff his healthy disdain out of the side of his mouth. “Bites, does she? Just make sure the kids get their rabies shots.” He had his moments, he did.
“That’s not acceptable,” said Blair. “The biting has to stop. But what—what makes her bite?”
Miss Rushton spoke obliquely. “You’re not doing your child any favours when you encourage her to become a world unto herself. She has to live with her peer group, ultimately, doesn’t she? Simcoe School children are all lively and out-going.”
“I don’t know about Simcoe School children,” said Blair, “if she has to live with them. I do agree she has to live in the world. But books are in the world, books teach you about the world. Frankly, I’d be a lot more worried if you came to tell me she wouldn’t read at all.”
Miss Jasmine Boggs said nothing, only moved her lips a trifle primly. All you egg-heads stick together.
Blair asked herself what Sissy was doing in this school. She had signed her up at the age of two, when she first moved to Toronto. What had she been thinking? When she visited, the children were doing English folk dances on the flat roof of the school annex. Remembering the hours spent squirming on a shallow pine bench in South ‘Hat Primary, Blair made up her mind: Sissy would have this. It was single mother’s guilt. Although she wouldn’t be able to offer a real family, at least she could provide a famous “free” private school, for which she paid $6,000 a year. (For the same reason, she paid too much rent on the house, on the edge of a good area.) So Simplicity went off to the Simcoe School looking like all the other girls and boys: Blair hadn’t known who they were. It turned out that Toronto was a city where corporate lawyers and petty mobsters wanted their darlings educated in a non-competitive atmosphere. Non-carnivorous too, apparently.
But who was Sissy Bowker? When Blair started out, she had no notions. She would have been content to bring forth one of those mouthy, fearless girls you saw on soccer pitches. A Rachel or an Emma. But what she’d got was a child who wanted to sit at a desk, danced to telephone messages and fell off slides and swings.
“I’m not sure she feels at home in this environment. When she’s upset she says ‘nobody likes me,’” said Blair, deciding it was time for a counter-attack.
Jasmine Boggs smiled ever so slightly. “All children say that at times,” she said, “and to a certain extent that’s normal. But with Simplicity there are additional reasons.”
“If you’re saying the kid’s off-track because she prefers hooks to kids I can’t agree. It shows perfectly good sense if you ask me. You say she’s stubborn. I’m delighted. She’ll need to be stubborn. If she doesn’t fit in, she’ll need to know how to be alone. Simplicity is different,” offered Blair finally. It seemed the truest thing she could say.
It was a word Miss Rushton couldn’t resist. “That’s what we’re here to foster…the individuality in a child…”
As long as it’s the type of individuality you have in mind, Blair thought. As she left, she caught Miss Rushton and the teacher looking at each other: unco-operative mother. She knew what she was being accused of. She was accused of that awful crime: trying to bring up her child in her own image. Trying to force her own values on a kid. Never mind that this was the history of civilization. It was not done in 1989. And besides, it seemed she had signed this right over to Miss Rushton. “You can’t help her,” were the principal’s final words. “You love her too much.”
Leaving the school, Blair felt sunshine on her face, painting her, masking her with its warm colour. She walked south of St. Clair on Spadina Road.
Blair walked everywhere now, searching for Ruby. As she walked she scanned the cars, the faces in the restaurant windows, the crowds at crosswalks. She was certain that Ruby’s face was somewhere, suspended in the city, that she still moved and walked among them, unaccountably distracted from her own life, her own name even, but still going about the business of living.
She sat on the curved bench that protruded from the Baldwin steps halfway down the steep hill. The grind and roar of distant earth-moving equipment came from below, the high whine of a tamping machine. The Sealtest factory had gone, and with it the streets of shabby houses owned by the city and rented to students. New mandarins and the masters of the universe were soaking up the soil, turning it and paving it and making it into their territory. The less rich had now moved off, farther downhill, past downtown. Where to? To Parkdale, perhaps, where people crowded row after row on top of the last cliff before the lake.
She thought about Sissy. “She doesn’t protect herself,” said Berenice. This to explain the lumps on her forehead from when she fell. “She never puts her hands out to stop the fall.” Berenice was sweeping the porch as she said this, sweeping the beautiful leaves up and putting them in Loblaws bags, which Blair didn’t want her to do but didn’t have the heart to tell her not to. She doesn’t protect herself.
It was one of Berenice’s profound utterances. But why didn’t Simplicity protect herself? Berenice didn’t know. Blair didn’t know. Nobody knew. Her reflexes had been tested; they were all right. Perhaps she had been too protected? Had Blair, with her single-minded, single mother attention, made her this way? When she was small she was bruised from her forehead to her knees, purple and black, she looked as if she had been beaten. Now at six she still fell, over and over, a dozen times a day.
Simplicity was different. Her fingers had the touch of corn silk; her nose was so sensitive she could identify the callers at the door by smell. But she sometimes could not seem to hear, or to see; sometimes she grew dizzy easily; sometimes she had so little energy she just lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She was so pale. A fairy child, a mushroom child. In her mind’s eye, Blair saw her fall on the sidewalk and slowly, awkwardly, place her feet back flat on the pavement, push herself back up on her spindly, long, weak legs, and teeter before she began to walk again, more carefully this time.
She doesn’t misbehave. Wasn’t that what Miss Rushton was saying? You couldn’t make her. She would not find it interesting. What if Simplicity had been an eighteenth-century royal child, destined to be Queen at the age of nine? She would be perfect, except for the fact that her enemies would do her in, in the time it took to do a minuet. She had no aggression. None. She did not cheat, push or shout. She didn’t protect herself.
Three Japanese tourists with a disposable camera climbed to the bench. “I-take-picture-you-sit-there?” She nodded agreement. Blair, a picturesque Toronto person. One of the tourists, a woman, came to stand beside her. She put her arm over Blair’s shoulder. Here I am in Toronto with a picturesque Toronto person, and we are friendly. Snap went the camera. Then the photographer gave more direction to the models—closer! Heads together! Really close friends now! The woman put her hand on Blair’s shoulder this time. Snap! Thank you very much.
They went off, taking something of Blair, her image which, unknown to her, would establish itself on a dresser in Osaka, or in a paper wallet squeezed in a pocket on the Tokyo subway. Perhaps it was that easy to transfer her body, too. Maybe that’s what Ruby did.
She stood, and continued walking. She was on her way to Max Ostriker’s office. He had called her yesterday, ten days after Ruby had vanished, and said they should talk. Walking south, she passed Bloor, then College. The El Mocambo, where she used to drink with Ruby. There she was, outside—jeans and leather, her hair all gone—but—no, it was not. The streets in Chinatown were crowded, full of people with tight, calculating faces. Farther down the folks looked crazed and shambling, smelling of drink or piss and sweat. At Queen Street she turned straight east, crossing University Avenue and the corner of Osgoode Hall where Torontonians always pointed out the cow-gates. How far they’d come: from that to this. How urban and sophisticated they were. Growing up, Blair had seen cow-gates all the time, and they didn’t prove anything. She didn’t see Ruby again. The glass walls bounced the sun back down and made the people swim together. She wished she had her sunglasses. Max Ostriker. What would she say to him? He had been Ruby’s friend, not hers, ever since that night in Banff.
She caught a small movement at foot level. She rubbed her eye. The speck moved again. She bent down. In a square of concrete bounded by a wrought-iron fence post and the red metal foot of a mailbox was a small, brown bird. The bird was tipped over on its side, struggling to get up on its feet.
People began to bump her from behind. “Watch out, will you?” said one. She looked back at the man and then down at the bird, which showed signs of tiring in its struggle. Its wings moved less quickly than before.
“I think it’s dying,” she said. The pedestrian moved on, saying nothing.
The bird was unspectacular, dun-coloured, a sparrow, probably. It continued to jerk desperately upwards without managing to get on its feet. It might have a wounded wing. It might just be disoriented down there with all the stone and concrete. Probably sound waves bouncing off all these glass walls multiplied into a roar. To the bird, this place must be like a war zone.
She wanted to pick it up. All the admonishing voices of childhood rose up in her head: Don’t touch! It’s dirty! It might be diseased! You might squeeze it where it’s broken, and that would be the end!
She cupped her hands around it. The bird was so light, it felt hollow, but it was warm in her two hands. It fluttered twice and then lay still. She brought her hands up near to her face and opened them. The bird’s small jet eye was shiny. It blinked. Blair rejoined the press on the sidewalk, moving quickly now, toward Max’s office tower.
Coming out of the elevator on the twenty-ninth floor to face two oak doors, Blair willed some fast-moving lawyer to wheel through and open them. At exactly the right moment, one did come out, on exactly the angle Blair expected him to: feet to the side, head and torso leaning back, as if pushed by the sheer momentum of work behind him. He arrested himself for an extra second with an arm stretched, as Blair slipped under and in the doors.
“Thank you.”
His staring eyes took in her walking shoes, her wind-blown hair, her dampish face.
“Beautiful day to be outside!” he said, down his nose, and went on.
That bad, was it? Opening her crumpled linen blazer, Blair cupped both her hands against her ribs on the left side and approached the receptionist’s desk.
“To see?” said the woman, in Oxford–East Indian elegance.
“To see…Mr. Ostriker.”
“He is expecting you, Miss…?”
“Bowker.”
The corridor was wide as a prairie street and empty, paved with beige broadloom. The paintings were ten feet across. They were mostly of steam-rollered and smashed-up objects, tables, flowers, women in gowns. The hall went on for ages before she arrived at more desks, a humming computer and a telephone, which jingled unattended, like some autonomous musical instrument.
No secretary presided. The place had been abandoned. A surprise fire drill? Everyone out for a conference in the Ladies? All those office doors and nothing so vulgar as a sign. How was she to know where Max was? The sparrow twitched at her rib. An office door was ajar. She walked quietly up and looked inside.
The rug was thick and he did not hear her. The man behind the desk spoke on the telephone, head down, doodling on his blotter. His teeth were bared in a smile or an attempt to dislodge something caught in a tooth. At once the conviction of his setting hit her: Max was a Bay Street lawyer. This was the fabled quantity. She’d never met one. Said to be greedy, unprincipled and exploitative. Ruby had all kinds of friends. “People you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, the detective said.” But Max wasn’t what they meant.
Seeing him, it all came back from that one long day twenty years ago. His bonhomie, his bigness. His black, curly hair looked firm to the hairline and vibrant, full of energy, the face kindly and long-jawed (sheepishness outgrown). Different was his tie (now loosened) and his confidence. He looked comfortable within the enclosure of that desk, easy in his rumpled shirt, his jacket cast on the other chair in the corner. She looked for the traditional photograph of wife and children. There was none. Only a large eight-by-ten glossy of a rocky shore and a boat tied up to a dock.
She was nearly in front of his desk. He still hadn’t heard her. Maybe he thought she was his secretary and was trying to indicate that he didn’t want to be bothered. She reached out her hands and put the bird, struggling, warm, in the middle of his blotter.
“Look,” she whispered.
Max saw the bird. His head jerked back. He saw Blair, her wind-blown hair, her flushed face. Then he looked down to the bird again.
“Jesus Christ,” he yelped, and put the telephone down. “What the fuck is this?” He pushed back his swivel chair abruptly and stumbled to his feet, tucking his shirt back into the waist of his pants with a fast, automatic hand.
“A bird,” she said. “I think it’s still alive, I found it on the street. It must have flown into the glass walls.”
Max was looking at the telephone. “Did I say goodbye?” he said. “Did I just hang up?”
“You hung up.”
The bird, which was lying on its side, brought its wings out and flapped once more, valiantly. It almost regained its feet.
“Jesus Christ,” said Max again.
“I’m Blair Bowker.”
“You want me to do something about this bird? Well let’s get it out of here. Get my secretary, get somebody,” said Max. He had his hands over his head, he was ducking. “Jeez, what if it starts to fly around in here?”
“It’s a sparrow. Not a bat. It won’t hurt—”
He looked back at the telephone. “I can’t believe I hung up the telephone. That was Mr. McNaughton. A very major client. Major.”
Blair noted that he hadn’t said hello. Still, she was mainly interested in the bird. “I guess we could call the Humane Society.”
He pulled the telephone book from under his desk. “I hate birds in houses. They fly into the windows. He’ll just end up dead, if he isn’t already.”
“I couldn’t just walk by and leave him.”
Max found the number. He got on the telephone. As he pressed the numbers he looked into her face.
“Of course you’re Blair,” he said. “I remember you. You couldn’t leave it there? One hundred and ten thousand other people could, but not you.” He shook his head and turned his mouth to the receiver.
“Hello, I’m calling from Ostriker, Mugwell,” he said, “up on the twenty-ninth floor of Canada Place? We’ve got an injured little bird here. What would you like us to do with it?”
The voice on the other end of the line began to purr soothingly; Max listened a little, and concurred, and listened some more, and demurred. “Someone picked it up down on the street,” he said. And then waited and said, “You don’t say. I’d never have thought. Thousands, eh?”
“What’s she telling you?” said Blair. She picked up the bird and held it against her heart. The bird’s heart was beating hard; her own, too. She wondered whether it saw her hands and Max’s as death, and was only waiting to be crushed. Whether it felt hope, or anything near hope. Imagined itself restored to the air currents that swooped and coiled between the towers, to its life on the wing? Or feared forever now a collision into the cold, ice-blue, mirrored walls.
Max put down the phone.
“I said we’d courier it over,” he said. He buzzed. The secretary came to the door. When she saw Blair, her mouth screwed itself downward. “Oh!” she said, clearly annoyed. “I had no idea anyone had got in here.”
“Maureen, can you rig up some kind of packing for this? And then Expedite it to the Humane Society?” He gestured to Blair’s bird.
“Oh my,” said Maureen, shifting her feet. Her face puckered here and there, rhythmically, in distress.
“I’ll pack him. I prefer to,” said Blair.
They made a cage out of a box that had held computer ribbons, softened the interior with the clear plastic wrapping paper that is full of air bubbles and settled the bird inside. When Blair was taping up the sides of the box Maureen came closer and whispered.
“I gather you’re a friend,” she said. “Mr. Ostriker has been a little nervous”—she gulped—“since he saw that womanum”—she searched for a delicate word—“take her life in the subway.”
“Oh,” said Blair.
“He’s not normally…so aggressive. I expect you surprised him.”
“Perhaps,” said Blair.
Blair saw the box into the messenger’s hands. She told him to handle it gently and to get it immediately to the Humane Society, before any other deliveries.
“Apparently thousands of them fly into the glass every night. And they die on the street unnoticed. Either that or they lie there stunned for a while, and then eventually they hop up and get away,” said Max, watching, his hands in his pockets.
“Amazing,” said the messenger. It was not clear whether he meant about the toll on birds or about the assignment. “I’ll rush it then,” he said.
Max sighed loudly and turned to go back into his office. “Maureen, will you get me Mr. McNaughton on the phone please? I’ve got to apologize for hanging up on him. Geez, he’s gonna think I’m a maniac.”
Blair stood in the hallway.
“I guess I’ll be going then,” she said.
Max turned on his heel.
“Oh sorry, sorry,” he said. “No, don’t go. We haven’t talked. You just got me rattled. I’ve got to finish this call first. We’ll have coffee.”
Blair inclined her head. “I’ll wait here,” she said. She refused Maureen’s offer of coffee, and stood, rather than sat. Maureen bristled over her desk until Max came out.
Riding down in the elevator, he hummed and stared at the numbers above the door. They slid down like butter, without weight. In these elevators you could begin to believe you were an angel.
“Didn’t want to say anything in there,” he mumbled, when they stepped into the lobby. “You never know who’s going to get in.”
“Oh,” said Blair. “Intrigue.”
“Not necessarily.” He laughed. The laugh came from a long time ago, unaffected. He was careful of the way he used his size, apologetic almost. His arm went out along the wide metal bar on the door, and the door flew open before Blair as if it were weightless.
They sat on the rim of a stone wall by a fountain in the midst of towers. Someone had placed life-size cow sculptures there. They looked stupidly around at their pasture of pavement, their high-walled enclosure.
“It was about Ruby, you know,” he said. “I don’t want to make a lot of this, but she called me that night. The night they’re saying she was last seen. When she was meant to be at that memorial? She called me at the office about ten o’clock. And she gave me your phone number.” Now that Max saw Blair’s eyes, the translucent skin of her cheeks, he was hit by memory. How he first saw her, walking into the dark on the mountain meadow, her long hair like a stream of water down her back. He recalled exactly the thump in his belly when they came face to face as she fled from the dormitory. I recognize you, he knew then, you come from my future. How had he forgotten? Here it was the future, and here she was.
“What did she call you for?”
“I dunno what for. I’d cancelled our lunch. She more or less admitted she was having some sort of business problem she couldn’t get out of. Did you know?”
“No,” said Blair.
“She mentioned you,” said Max, again.
“What for?”
Now Max looked at her carefully. She hadn’t changed; she still looked innocent. She wore no make-up. She was flushed, as if she had just run a mile. Her hair, which had once been long and white, was now light brown, chin-length; it was pulled back and tucked behind her ears. “Why would she mention me?”
Max did not have an answer to that. After a minute, Blair stood up. “Nervous,” she said. “Can’t sit.”
“Let me tell you my worst fear…” He told her Ruby wanted to know all about the woman he’d seen jump in front of the train.
“If she’d done that, they’d know,” said Blair. “People don’t jump in front of trains and nobody notices. Anyway, she didn’t do anything like that. She wouldn’t.”
“I guess,” said Max. “But where—”
“But probably you should tell the cops,” said Blair.
Max thought for a moment. He didn’t tell her he’d already spoken with them. For some reason, he wanted Blair to see him as independent of that search. “I don’t really think this is a case for the cops,” he said finally. “Come and get a yoghurt cone.”
They walked together to the underground concourse. The lights were too bright, and the signs were all orange-and black. In the lunch crowd, Blair moved closer to Max; otherwise they might lose each other. He felt like safety. Someone who knew her so long ago, but didn’t know her—and who she didn’t know—at all.
“I guess nobody’s gone back to work yet,” he said. “Shop, shop, shop. I eat at my desk most of the time.”
“I don’t have a desk,” said Blair. “I start work at three. All morning I walked. I keep thinking I’ll see her.”
Max handed her a strawberry cone. They worked their way back up the stairs. “I don’t really know why I called you,” he said. “Except Ruby told me to.”
“Oh.”
“I’m glad, though,” he said.
“Oh.”
There was a pause.
“Well, I’m glad too.”
“Good.”
“What I think it was,” said Max finally, as if he were answering a question asked an hour ago, “I think it was like she knew, but she didn’t know, that she was going away. And she wanted me to kind of, befriend you or something. Which is fine with me. Look,” he said, “my partner Andy’s having a dinner party. Will you come with me?”
Blair smiled. She was thinking about the bird. If it ended up in the incinerator. She’d bet it lived.
When she came into the house from work it was dark, as always. She turned on the light and saw the letter on the radiator. She recognized his handwriting. ‘Though she hadn’t seen it for six months. Her secret lover. He was, after all this time, still loyal.
I wait until nine o’clock. Only then do I feel that you are free, to be on the same wavelength as me. You are alone, your child has gone to bed…
He knew about her job. He knew about Sissy. And he knew about much more.
…this is to say nothing, of course, of dreams. Where we are in the altogether and frolic in a season of gold. I must see you, must know what I feel I know already…
I am bothered by you, in short. And must obey—your voice is wonderful. Sometime I’ll hear you speaking from an inch away through your hair and think God is smiling on us. But down the road is sterility and death. And on the way is a straitjacket. You can’t make this omelette without breaking all the eggs.
He was mad. There seemed no other explanation. He had come out of nowhere to say all this, as if he were a figment of her imagination. But the letter was real. She turned it over in her hand. She was disturbed by it. This time she would keep it in a drawer; she wouldn’t even play at secrecy with this man.
Blair lay awake at three o’clock in the morning.
A dream about Ruby woke her up. In the dream Ruby looked well; it was early morning, and they were talking. Ruby’s face had a renewed look; her skin was radiant and clean, and that made Blair feel elated. But someone was com-ing to the door. Ruby asked for money. Blair knew it must be for drink, or drugs, and that she could not stop her buying it. Don’t, she said, handing over the money. But when she woke up she felt glad. Ruby was alive.
Now she couldn’t get back to sleep. It happened to her every night. Sometimes she would be awake for several hours. Her body lay exhausted but her mind walked over Toronto, turned corners, investigated avenues.
Wild stories had begun to circulate. Ruby had been murdered by the drug-dealing friends of Marvin. Suicided because she had AIDS. Gone berserk because of quack “psychic advisers.” In the stories, Ruby was always the victim. That could not be right, Blair thought. If there was a victim, there must be a villain. Marvin’s face—long-nosed, vain, unnaturally white-skinned—began to flower exotically as sleep leant over her. Then the image burst, warping at the sides, like a photograph with a rock thrown through it, curling around the wound. There was something missing, some factor no one had accounted for yet. Ruby’s will. What Ruby wanted. Maybe she wanted to disappear.
Maybe she wanted to escape the weight of life. No ordinary burial hers, in a black suit with her make-up on, filed in a careful box in rows with other careful boxes. Or burnt, turned to ash so as to conserve space in crowded Mount Pleasant Cemetery. No, she would go in some natural catastrophe, like the one that overtook the Burgess Shale, where thousands of animals were stopped in their tracks, squashed and impressed with mud, preserved, for ages.
Not here and now, like Blair would be, caught between the third floor and the first floor of her house. The mudslide would come down and compress it all to one inch thick, and within that graphic sheet would be all Blair’s things, along with her skeleton. She would be buried and identified by things in the Egyptian way, with a catalogue of things, things above her and directly beneath her that would all fold together, all be reduced to one dimension in this event.
Skis, below, and poles and boots, in the basement furnace room, as well as the Christmas-tree stand and the strings of lights. Then, on the main floor, the CD player and the stack of discs, a brass parrot from Mexico and an Irving Penn photograph of (how fitting) a woman lying in bed draped in white sheets. The photograph was flat already. Probably all that would remain would be the frame, but that, too, would provide interest. On this floor, her things. Her earrings and hairpins, her closet full of shoes and dresses, the creams and ointments in the bathroom cupboard. And up above: on the third floor, Bernie’s beauty aids and momentos of home. All of these things would be buried with her, naming her, identifying her for all time. In fact, Blair’s things were more durable than she was. She would biodegrade, and they wouldn’t.
This was not for Ruby. Perhaps her friend had a warning, advance notice of this disaster coming. And she had chosen to get away from all this stuff, this material claptrap, these goods, by which she lived but by which she did not wish to die. She had chosen to get away and to find an empty space in which to impress herself upon time. She would prefer, since she had to become a fossil, to be pure form. A simple, clear-cut shape, a skeleton—woman, end twentieth century—and nothing else.
Eventually, imagining that Ruby had walked out of the house and had found, miraculously, in the street, a stretch of pampas grass that was very soft, and clean, and cool, like sweet-smelling sheets, Blair’s heart slowed and her breathing lengthened out and she went to sleep, dreaming of a singular and intact fossil.