Hugh Mensa circulated at the Nickelodeon wake with a glass of water laced with lemon. His bald pate with its glaze of sweat bounced just above the heads of the crowd like a helium balloon that was losing its loft. He tapped down lightly on this group, seemed to settle, then rose and drifted on. He had an idea he would see Ruby. She ought to have been there. Everyone was there. He looked forward to a confrontation in which she would call him the usual names and he would respond with his usual rapier wit.
At ten-thirty the event was well underway, the temperature in the room rising. Press had been banished, except for good friends. Mensa would have liked an opportunity to describe the scene. The fashion crowd parading by a microphone to grieve in public. Inept tribute following tearful praise. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations ransacked for references to scissors and fabric. But the larger world was not to be treated to his malice on the occasion of a death. He had some scruples.
Here was poor Sam Chow’s lover now, quoting Romeo and Juliet.
“And when [he] shall die, take [him] and cut [him] out in little stars, and [he] will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night…”
“In love with night”? Yes, perhaps. Night was the time for gaiety and costume, for pretence, indulgence; the mood was very fin de siecle. But “in love with death”? No. Unless perhaps there was a trend to be spotted here. The new despair? He liked the sound of it. He headed for the men’s room, stumbling into a couple of guys snorting coke behind the door, and made a note of it.
It was Ruby who insisted he was no critic (the title he assumed at Metropolis) but a lowly trend-spotter. He had an eye, but he also had a nose. An eye was for aesthetics, but a nose was lower down. If you had a nose you could smell out what was coming. One way he kept up was by reading the personal ads in Now. He knew, for instance, that a couple of years ago dads were in. Before that it had been slaves. Now it was transsexuals. Couture drag was in this year, which meant Ruby would be getting calls again at Hallowe’en from the drag queens who wanted to borrow her gowns.
Mensa did admire the way she’d stuck to her guns all these years. What she believed in—old-time, simple elegance and beautiful fabrics—wasn’t an easy sell here. Feminism had hit glamour hard, then the schoolboy look came in. She had sur-vived by being a good businesswoman, branching out and taking risks. And now her look was coming back in. He had a feeling she’d come back strong this year. He felt a little bad he hadn’t mentioned her in his last piece. He’d make it up to her, maybe write about romance and use her new line.
Coming out of the can he bumped into Robina. Robina looked like a drag queen but she was actually a woman. In the ’70s you’d have called her a fag-hag. In the ’80s she’d have been romanticized, a muse for the cluster of effeminate men around her. Now she was a fashion accessory. The flamboyant ones took her everywhere: she looked great, her legs went on for miles, she never said anything.
At eleven o’clock the speeches were over. In the centre of the floor, a couple of queens were doing runway, backs on a tilt, faces slack-jawed and arch. A crew of black-legged, crop-haired androgynes danced in their heavy-soled shoes. Friends stood in circles affectedly wiping their eyes and talking about how Sam’s death was, how he managed it, how he carried it off. Hugh moved from group to group like an elderly druid, his tall form curved over to hear, his ear always bending to allow the kiss. He never relaxed his removed, superior pose.
At eleven-thirty he looked at his watch. Ruby must not be coming. She had made herself scarce lately. He wondered if it was something to do with the man in the Italian suits with the deep-shadowed eyes he’d seen hanging around her place, this married man they’d all heard about. On a friendly impulse he called Ruby’s home. No answer. No machine either. Weird. But the whole team from Splash was moving off to Zydeco, and he decided to follow them. He’d have forgotten about Ruby if it hadn’t been that outside the door he saw someone standing, hunched, with his coat collar turned up. The Italian suit man. He looked so conspicuously inconspicuous that he had to be Ruby’s married man, or an undercover cop. Mensa went up to him, extending a hand.
“You need help with the bouncer?”
The man’s face was drawn down, indulged. He took the hand reluctantly, a man without trust recognizing one of his kind.
“I’m not going in. I’m waiting for someone,” he said, unwillingly. He moved off.
But not before Mensa caught a glimpse of a visage he recognized. A reflex expression of respect came over Mensa’s face, a reflex that only occurred when he was in the presence of Someone Who Could Do Something for Him. But he said nothing, lit a cigarette and went off after the others.
At ten-thirty-five Thursday morning, Audrey looked up from her desk to see Ruby’s ten-thirty appointment standing in front of her, a Mr. Walter from Harridge’s. She replaced the large, encrusted clump of plaster that was her left earring, removed by necessity for answering the phone.
“Whoops!” she said. “I know she’s expecting you!” She whirled on her chair and headed behind the screens to Ruby’s office, which was, she knew, in a state of total chaos from some sort of tantrum she’d had the night before. She picked up Ruby’s desk phone. Ruby wasn’t at home.
“I can’t believe it, she’s slipped out! Maybe she had an earlier appointment,” said Audrey, showing her large teeth in what was meant for a smile as she came back to face the buyer. “She must be delayed getting back. Can I get you a coffee?”
As the man sat stiffly in the Victorian wicker chair, sipping out of his turquoise Fiesta cup, she made conversation.
“Used to be you could get around town pretty quickly before noon. Now the rush hour starts at ten!”
By eleven o’clock, Audrey had tired of putting on this show. She went back into Ruby’s office to phone again. Still no answer. Wondering what she was going to tell Mr. Walter, she called Blair.
“Do you happen to know what Ruby’s up to?”
Blair said she had no idea. Maybe Audrey should call Marvin. You can’t call Marvin, said Audrey. His instructions. Nobody ever calls him, not even Ruby.
Blair said maybe if she was sick she’d gone over to her brother and sister’s. Audrey had that number. The first small wave of alarm overtook her. Just as she put the phone down it rang again: Mensa. She blurted out to him that she had some guy waiting and Ruby hadn’t shown up and she couldn’t find her anywhere.
To be told things was part of Mensa’s talent, a singular talent and not necessarily a pleasant one. Mensa knew that people confide spontaneously and without consideration in loitering individuals with known malicious tendencies, perhaps for the simple fact that they seemed so ready to receive disturbing information. He had also perfected a means of seeming to confide, himself, while revealing nothing, and in fact pumping the other party for information.
Ruby hadn’t shown up at Sam Chow’s memorial either last night, which was peculiar, as she had once been his lover, had she not? he said. Audrey, without realizing that he was fishing, confided that Ruby claimed she couldn’t remember. But then Hugh said he’d phoned her place last night and got no answer, which meant she hadn’t been seen or heard from since yesterday afternoon. Hadn’t Audrey better get on the phone to that married man they’d all heard about?
By the time Audrey got off the phone she had decided this was a crisis. Just naming it firmed her up. She pulled out Ruby’s drawer mirror and applied fresh lipstick. Straightening her skirt, she went out to tell Mr. Walter that she had just received word Ruby had been in a car accident. She was not seriously hurt, but had gone to hospital to be looked at. Mr. Walter, who had several other appointments in the neighbourhood, left. Audrey sat down feeling much better. The phone rang. She took off her earring, lifted the receiver and repeated the story.
Mr. Walter went on to his next appointment at Ports International, where he mentioned, in passing, Ruby’s car accident. By late afternoon, one hundred people had been told that Ruby Mason was in a car crash. Her injuries had gone from minor to major. Amnesia was a definite possibility.
Blair forgot about Audrey’s call. Perhaps she was angry at Ruby, always making people worry. She went in to work as usual at three and did not give Ruby another thought.
Mary Mason, Ruby’s sister-in-law, got the phone call from Audrey at eleven-thirty in the morning. Mary was small, round and maternal; having no children, she was Ruby’s champion in the family, defending her from Arthur’s wrath and her mother-in-law’s fervour. She fretted at home until Arthur came in from his shift at four. Then, Mary bubbling with terror, they drove the short distance over to Ruby’s house. Letting themselves in with the key she had given them, they found the place as always—perfect, dustless, styled like a shop window. Only the small puddle of clothes in front of the closet was evidence of anything strange.
“She could have been missing for weeks, we’d never know the difference,” grumbled Arthur. “It always looks like nobody lives here.” He was tall with a long, axe-handle head. He had never liked Medicine Hat; he’d been a loner. He joined the Mounties in Alberta; happily, they moved him here. He sat on the living-room couch thinking evil thoughts about Marvin, who he was certain was a bad influence and was married, anyway. But Mary went straight to the bedroom, opened the cupboards and drawers and tried to figure out what, if anything, Ruby had taken. The dazzle-painted duffle bag she carried on short trips was there, as well as her big nylon garment-bag. As for clothing, Ruby had so much of it Mary couldn’t begin to figure out what was missing.
Marvin arrived in his office Thursday around noon, with his hair still wet from the shower and his ears burning from a fight he’d had with his wife. He’d taken a chance last night, telling her he was staying at work. Of course she’d phoned again. Result: full-scale battle. And all to stand outside Nickelodeon for an hour waiting for Ruby. The only good part was that, as she hadn’t shown up, he was genuinely guiltless.
“A woman from deBoltz Designs has been trying to reach you,” said his trusty assistant, whose antennae were excellent. Marvin believed, erroneously, that she was in the dark about his relations with Ruby. “She’s calling back after noon.”
He composed an enervated face. “I suppose they want to talk about coverage for the Fashion Festival,” he said, “or maybe a little feature spot for their line.” When you control an outlet like “City Time,” everybody wants something. It was one of his cynical pleasures, to figure out what people wanted in advance and to decide, in most cases, that they weren’t going to get it. He grinned amiably at his assistant, but when she turned away he scowled. He’d told Ruby never ever to call him here. Whatever stopped her from turning up last night, she was only going to make it worse. That woman has become a millstone around my neck, he said to himself. Or whatever the expression is.
No sooner did he get back to his desk than the call came. But it wasn’t Ruby; it was Audrey.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea where Ruby is,” she began argumentatively.
“What’s the matter, she gone off?”
“We can’t find her.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they found her in the bathtub with her wrists slashed,” he said.
Audrey was so upset she said goodbye and hung up.
Marvin sat at his desk staring at the phone. He’d just said a very foolish thing. He couldn’t imagine why. Ruby had been making trouble lately, but suicide had never entered his head. Of course he didn’t want Ruby to be hurt. If something happened to her and people started looking for her, it would all become public. His wife, who already knew what he was up to, would know with whom, and where and when. Furthermore, he, Marvin, would be exposed to public ridicule.
Marvin sat at his desk and he fretted. He went out for a walk. He closed his eyes and saw Ruby. He opened them and she went away. It was a relief. The woman wanted too much. He missed her when she wasn’t there but, compared to dealing with her demands, this was easy. Having made his decision, he rushed over to her house in a lather of premature mourning, opening the door with his key.
There, in the small satin-and-plush living room, leaning forward with his elbow resting on the glass coffee table, sat Arthur. Marvin didn’t like Arthur, because Arthur was a cop. Mary, who was right behind him, he didn’t like either, because Mary was smart and gave him the impression she saw through him. They both returned the feeling, had done since they’d met him, a year ago. They all stopped short and glared at each other.
“You have a key?” said Mary.
Marvin was dishevelled in a way that suggested he thought dishevelled was the right look for the occasion. His tie was pulled half loose and hanging to one side of his chartreuse silk shirt; his jacket was flying sideways, his hair likewise, its gel having gone sticky in the humidity.
“Before you say anything, it’s all my fault,” he sobbed. “It’s all my fault, I know it is.”
“Marvin, you are mistaken,” said Arthur in his low, slow voice. “This has got nothing to do with you. Wherever Ruby’s gone, whatever happened, it’s not for you to put yourself in the middle here. We are the family.”
He stood directly in front of Marvin, legs apart. Marvin took this gesture as an invitation to cast himself sideways on the sofa, where he began to sob. “I knew it, I knew it,” he said. “I was so bad for her.”
Arthur stood with his hands in his pockets looking down in disgust and forming the word “worm” with his lips. Arthur was a kind person with an eye for the criminal type, both major and minor. He had spotted Marvin at the outset, suspicious because Ruby told him that one week after they met they’d gone to a beach in Jamaica, where they fell passionately in love.
“Everyone looks better on a beach,” he said to his sister then.
“Not everyone,” she answered. “Beautiful people do. He’s not beautiful people. I met him at a reception held by the Mayor! He’s a very important person in the media.”
“I’m not happy about the kind of people you hang around with,” he said to her. “You never could see beyond the bedposts.”
His suspicions were confirmed when he saw the lapsed licence plates on Marvin’s car. “Why would a television big shot have lapsed plates?” he said to Mary. Something was wrong. Probably he was a fraud with no job at all. It wouldn’t be the first time Ruby was taken in.
Mary said nothing. She did not want to contradict her husband, but she was certain that if Ruby was missing, Marvin did have something to do with it. She thought Marvin was trouble. She didn’t know why Ruby hung on. “It’s just a lark, you know, I’d die if he ever left his wife, I wouldn’t know how to get away fast enough,” she had said. But why, but why, but why? Mary said. “He loves me, he needs me, and besides, it’s hard to find men nowadays,” Ruby answered.
It might be hard to find men, but it couldn’t be that hard, thought Mary. “You think he needs you, to hell. He just needs a meal ticket,” Mary said to Ruby. She and Arthur’s mother, Martha, had often talked about it, how this guy came along and he wouldn’t go away. He was a fake, with no job.
“He’s got a good job, don’t be ridiculous,” said Ruby. That was the trouble with the family success story. They all thought Ruby was rich because her picture was in Toronto Life fashion magazine. They thought all men were after her money, while the truth was, if five Toronto ladies didn’t decide to tie the knot this year, her business would go under.
Now Mary examined Marvin minutely, looking for the key to his hidden, villainous identity. He was, she had to admit, attractive in a sepulchral fashion. His lips were sensuous, he appeared explosively passionate, unlike Arthur. He looked like he had a lot of nervous energy, didn’t fall asleep on the couch like Arthur, either. She was curious, she had to admit. Ruby’s lived, she thought.
Without warning, the door opened again to a tall, thin, bald man with red hair over his ears, introducing himself as Hugh Mensa, the fashion critic. Hugh wrung their hands.
“We don’t need the press here, thank you,” began Arthur, standing up to block his further penetration of the room.
“I’m not here as press. I’m a friend. I heard from Audrey …looked for her last night…” he said. “I didn’t get your name.” He extended his hand to Marvin, and this time recognized him: Marvin Arbat, producer of “City Time” on City-TV. Indeed, a man who could Do Something for You (if only in a small way), but most often didn’t.
Marvin took the hand and mumbled something, not his name.
Mensa offered to go back into Ruby’s bedroom with Mary because he knew Ruby’s wardrobe well, and perhaps he could tell if she’d taken things to go on a trip. In the bedroom, he put his head close to Mary’s.
“How do you feel about this man Marvin?” he said to Mary. “I sensed Ruby was unhappy…”
In the living room, Arthur and Marvin inspected each other in aggravated silence.
“Did you and Ruby have a quarrel, Marvin?” said Arthur. He said “quarrel” oh so carefully; it was a euphemism. What Arthur really implied was, Did you beat her up and throw her body under a bridge?
Marvin said Ruby worked too hard and she had a lot of stress.
“She’s always happy, that girl,” said Arthur indignantly. “And when she had stress, she talked to her family. She’d have no such problems if she listened to me.”
Marvin nodded carefully. He’d already made that blooper about slitting her wrists. “I think maybe she was having trouble with her backers.” It was a sore point; Ruby consistently refused to tell him who they were.
“Backers? What backers?” said Arthur. He rearranged his legs on the impossible chair. “We can argue all day but we aren’t getting any smarter in the question of her whereabouts. We don’t even know when she was last seen. She might just be gone to a spa.” He said “spa” as if to spit on one.
“I think we should all go away and wait till tomorrow,” said Marvin. “She’ll turn up.” He was twitching in his seat; he wanted to get out of there.
“Not even call the police?”
“What are the cops gonna do? She’s nobody’s little kid. She’s not a wife or a mother. I suppose if she wants to go off truant for a while then it’s her own business.”
Marvin paced around the room for another minute. Then he said he had a meeting, and he went to the door and blew out, even more desperate-looking than when he came.
Mensa advised Arthur and Mary to report it to the police. “Likely it’s nothing, but in case there was some foul play, every hour would count. Marvin doesn’t want it, but Marvin may not be thinking only of Ruby,” he said, with a smile on his transparent, freckled face. “Do you see what I mean?”
Friday morning Arthur talked it over with his buddies at work: should he call the city cops? The Mounties didn’t like to give work away, not unless they had to. But so far it wasn’t a case. He ended up dropping down and reporting her miss-Mg. He found himself talking to a regular beat cop. It was eerie. The guy said just what Marvin had predicted. Since Ruby was a grown-up woman and had no close family, she was perfectly free to take a powder for a few days or a week. When Arthur said she’d been expected at work, he acted like unreliability was part of her profession.
“You don’t understand Ruby,” Arthur said, a phrase he was going to repeat many times over. “She loved that business. She built it up. She wouldn’t just not show up for work one day.”
“We’ll put a Missing Persons on the wire, but that’s about it unless there’s foul play suspected.”
“But what about this Marvin Arbat? He told Audrey that he expected to find her in the bathtub with her wrists slashed.”
“From City-TV? Oh yes. Mr. Arbat was the first to let us know. He thought you’d be filing a report. He did mention that remark,” said the cop, rolling a finger over the pencil on his desk, up and down the blotter.
“What’d he say?” Arthur’s suspicions rose even higher: a guilty man’s move if there ever was one. Worse, Marvin had stolen a march on him.
“He allowed as how it was a pretty dumb thing to say. He explained to us that he was sick of having the screws put to him, first by his wife, then by Ruby.” The cop grinned sympathetically.
Smeared by Ruby’s conduct once more, Arthur got mad. He went home to Mary. Mary was on a crying jag, making no sense at all. He shouted at her a bit, told her to hold on to her hat, it was still only a day and a half. But Mary carried on until Arthur was forced to call his mother in Medicine Hat. She was bad, and then Mary got on the line, half weeping, and said that people were talking about suicide. Martha Mason began to hoot like a train whistle.
“No Mason would commit suicide. Ruby knew, when you have problems you take them to God! You hear me? Maybe things were not going well the last few weeks, but she was at peace with herself and with God…”
Arthur held the phone away from his ear until Martha stopped. “When did she go?”
“Wednesday night’s the last anyone saw her.”
“But I talked to her on the phone Wednesday night!” Martha howled. “She called me, she was fine! What are you talking about, she’s gone and disappeared? Arthur Mason, she’s there somewhere, you find her.”
“It’s a big city,” said Mary, on the extension phone. “We don’t even know where to start. And the police say they’re just putting it on some kind of wire—”
“I’m getting on an airplane,” said Martha Mason. “I’ll phone right now and get myself a ticket, get that shiftless neighbour of mine to drive me in. You haven’t seen nothin’ until I get there. We’re gonna find that girl if it’s the last thing we do.”
Mensa searched the files until he found a photograph of Ruby. It was a black-and-white shot taken as part of a portrait series on “Women on the Move.” It was backlit, and her head was inclined slightly as if tuned to—yes, another world. She looked younger, more glamorous, and somehow dated, which she would hate. But it had the look, the right look for the occasion.
He’d done a little snooping, a bit of police-type work. Some people, like Mary Mason, hadn’t known he was going to quote her, but that was a quibble. It turned out to be a long article, but he got it past the editor ’cause it was news. He was rather proud of his piece; once it was printed he collected a dozen copies of the paper to save. This was his story, he wasn’t going to let it go. His eyes and his nose and all his reporter’s instincts told him this was a big one.
Besides, Ruby was his friend. He remembered, doing all this thinking about her, how much he liked her.
The fashion world is rife with rumour and innuendo since the disappearance Wednesday night, September 6, of fashion mogul (and favourite role model for upcoming female designers) Ruby Mason. More than twenty-four hours after she was last seen by a neighbour getting into a cab in front of her house, no clues have been found. Foul play has not been ruled out.
Miss Mason was expected that evening at a wake for her former close associate, Sam Chow, who died at Casey House. When Ruby did not arrive, at least one friend became worried and called her home, to find no answer. Thursday morning she did not appear for work. Audrey Tippet, who manages the Mason design studio, deBoltz Designs, told a caller Mason had been in a car accident.
“Look, I just made up the story about the car accident to get this man off my case,” said Tippet. “I can’t believe how people talk. I got like a hundred phone calls this afternoon. Everybody wants to know. What happened, where is she? Is it amnesia? They don’t want to be the last to hear.”
Ruby’s closest relatives in the city, her brother Arthur Mason and his wife Mary, were at her home later Thursday. In the absence of any explanation of her whereabouts, they were questioning their sister’s life. The high-level success story did not come without troubles. The former singer with the folk band Hearts of Flame had many friends, but few intimates. Recently she had been seeing a man.
“He wasn’t Ruby’s type. You see, he latched on. He stuck, and told Ruby he needed her. I told Ruby he was bad news. Arthur said a while ago something serious is going to happen to Ruby,” says sister-in-law Mary Mason.
Other questions involve the state of her business, and whether she could expect to enjoy the continued support of her backers.
In some quarters, speculations that Miss Mason had committed suicide were high. At least one person was quoted as saying he expected to find her in the bathtub with her wrists slit. Other friends point to Mason’s longterm involvement with Oswald Yakibuchi, the former pollster who bills himself as “Consultant to the Stars.” Yakibuchi also sang with Hearts of Flame. Friends say that hypnotism and other unorthodox practices drew Ruby to him in times of trouble.
“Oswald knew her in a previous life, you know. They were King and Queen of Egypt or something,” said Ramone, the house model at deBoltz Designs. “She listened to him more than anyone.”
Mr. Yakibuchi could not be reached for comment.
Suicide seems unlikely to Mason’s close associates. “If she did it, she’d do it properly, you know? If she was going to kill herself she’d have done it with drugs, like Marilyn Monroe, and she’d have dressed up for the occasion. She always wanted to look her best.”
Ramone was one of many who heard the story that Mason had been in a car accident. To her mind that is still a likely explanation.
“You know she was in one before, and she walked away. How can you explain that? Except by saying that she’s not from this world? Maybe she’s gone on to another world again. You can’t rule it out.”
Police are not treating the case as a homicide.
In advance of any police investigation, Metropolis inquired of Ruby’s next-door neighbour, Mr. O. Pike. Mr. Pike said she went in and out again Monday night around ten o’clock, looking “possessed by demons—in a tearing hurry and with her eyes smeared with black.” She kept a cab waiting. He said Ruby always had a smile and a few words for him, but that night she did not look his way.
A memo left on Ruby’s desk, and overlooked by Tippet, implied Ruby might be intending to do something serious. The memo read: “Sorry to do this to you. Ramone needs more zip for green velvet, can’t get it done before, trust you with it—R.”
But does an apology a suicide note make? Certainly Ruby’s glamorous life, when examined closely, looked ripe for tragedy. But perhaps, in the aftermath of a disappearance, all our lives do.
Audrey Tippet, carrying on business at deBoltz Designs while waiting for a sign or a word from her employer, hopes Ruby has not met with violence. If she did, it would be an irony. She was ready for a change.
“She missed the simple things. She told me someday soon she was going to give this all up, have time for long walks and seeing friends.
“But it’s only been one day. She could walk in here tomorrow. It could be a stunt. It could be a career move.”