“How will we find them?” Ivy asks.
Newell stares ahead into the traffic, oncoming headlights gliding over and past his face. “I have Orion on my phone, that app. We can watch him finding her.”
Hm. Having Orion on his phone is not surprising, but that Finder app is more personal than a phone number, it’s a location system. Oh, she has to text Hugh.
> Orion went looking for Savaya in Toronto, very worried.
L and Jason went too. N and I are following to keep them out of trouble. Newell drives fast, this is Gerald’s good car.
I’ll keep you posted. Back as soon as I can.
A text from him, about emptying buckets. She texts back,
> of course
Waits. Nothing more comes. He must be with Mimi.
Oncoming lights flow over the car, a steady stream returning from Toronto, from Saturday night parties. Each sliding beam illuminates the planes of Newell’s cheek, the noble set of his nose. Ivy doesn’t get tired of looking at his profile, because with all its beauty it has sadness in it. Like Paul Newman or Alec Guinness; however amusing things are, awareness of pain is built into those faces. She remembers driving with Newell another time, several years ago, out to Elora Gorge for an awards dinner. She was in the back seat because Burton had the passenger seat, talking non-stop the whole time, nauseatingly witty. Newell, silent and patient, drove like a well-trained bat out of hell down that bad stretch of the 401. How can she remember that whole drive, but not a few lines of dialogue when she needs to?
She says, “You know what makes people funny? Memory. Comics remember better than we do. They remember and reincorporate things from twenty minutes or twenty years ago.”
“Thirty years ago.”
He drives. He watches the road, but he’s amused, engaged, and that’s flattering. Really, charm is just reciprocity—he finds her charming, so she loves him. “This is like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” she says. “What?”
“Oh come on.”
“I never, never, ever, watch TV. Now you know my dark secret.”
“I know, neither do I, but CCGC, as I like to call it, is on the web.”
“All right then, I will watch it.”
“But what was I saying? Oh, trouble is I can’t be funny now, because I can’t remember.”
“But you are, so obviously you still can, sometimes.”
She laughs. Part of his charm: he induces in her a running giggle.
“Are you really freaked out?”
“Livelihood, man.”
It can’t mean anything to him, that word. He must have made so much money from Blitzed Craig that he never ever has to work again, but he still does work, all the time. And now Catastrophe, another goldmine. Yet here he is, in a condo in Peterborough.
“Are you staying—do you live here, in Peterborough, really?”
“Maybe a third of the year here. When I’m not in production. You know, childhood home, people know me. And they know Ruth will get mad at them if they … oh, make a big deal, cross some kind of line. Nobody thinks I’m that big a shot here, anyway. I’m the kid from high school who talked funny, who got lucky.”
“No performing arts school in those days, I’m guessing.”
“Ha. No. We had a couple of visiting theatre workshops though. That’s why Burton came to town—he came to direct a show; talked to the university about setting up a drama department, but that went nowhere. Then he got a gig doing a workshop at the junior high.”
And that’s where we met, Newell doesn’t say. She wonders what their early relationship was. How they came to be—attached. Co-dependent. Whatever they are. Notice, no more talk about the marriage thing. Not surprising. Burton wouldn’t let Newell damage his career. One thing to be casually, unremarkably gay; another to get married, even now.
Newell says, “I did one myself, a workshop—two years ago, when I came out to finalize the condo. Terry asked me to come in and talk to the kids. I spent the day with the grade ten group.” Which would have been Orion’s class, two years ago. Changing lanes, Newell keeps his gaze on the road. “Then in the summer, after a late-night Catastrophe shoot, I’m walking along in Toronto and there’s Orion standing on the street, down behind Queen’s Park, all strung out. He said somebody had told him that was the place to go for chicken.”
It takes her a minute to process that, switching from dinner to coward to boy prostitute.
“Idiot. Whether or not he actually did anything, got paid for sex— I don’t think so. We talked, and I drove him back out here. So I’ve known him for a while,” Newell says. Gently explaining, not justifying.
Not that he has to justify anything to her. And neither does Orion.
“He was right,” Newell says, after a few miles of silence. “We should be continuing with Earnest. Getting some real work done.”
Maybe. But the cast was wrong, anyway, Ivy thinks. It ought to be Hugh as the worthy Jack and Newell his wilder, rascally younger brother; with me as Gwendoline, Newell’s theatre-cousin. And Orion as Cecily, Hugh’s country ward out in Peterborough. Ivy laughs to herself. Hugh is already a bit over-Earnest, but Newell might become Earnest for the sake of Orion. And Burton, naturally, as the impassable Bracknell bramble-barrier.
Newell says, “At least Ansel never suggested we do Tender Flowers, his play about a leper colony for nuns, and the conflicted gay priest who serves among the women.”
“When you say, his play, you mean Burton’s own?”
“Yes, the play he wrote.” Almost serious, Newell says, “It’s not as bad as you might think. Delicate, moving. He probably ought to have been a writer, with a Tennessee Williams kind of tragic life. Better than fading away as an unhireable has-been.”
Only Newell can say the thing that nobody says about Burton.
He laughs.
“What?”
“Just thinking about it. Tender Flowers.” Newell smiles as he drives, a slight and perfect Buddha-statue smile.
All down the DVP Savaya’s blue dot roves the backstreets around Queen’s Park. L watches the phone screen. “Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, the Hepburn Block—what’s in there?” When Orion can look she shows him. “Now up to Wellesley Street, she’s walking up and down in front of St. Joseph’s school.”
Get out of there, you dope. The blue slides along St. Joseph Street as Orion turns, cutting over on College Street. “She’s up to the yellow street,” L says. “Oh, it’s the road around Queen’s Park, and … across, and into the park.”
He can’t just leave Newell’s car on the street, like he would if it was his own. He turns right, right, right again, and finds a lot between the Toronto School of Theology, the Jesuits of Upper Canada, and the Marshall McLuhan building. Theme: Canada’s conflicted soul.
From the back seat Jason hands forward a sheet of paper with ON DELIVERY in very professional black capitals. He holds up L’s eyeliner and says sorry. Orion shoves it in the windshield, not asking what anybody might be delivering in a Saab 9-3.
“Right,” he says. Organizing the troops. Then doesn’t know what to say, how much to tell these guys. “Right, so, I think you’d better—I think—let me—”
L nods. “You talk to her, we’ll just wander around till you need us.”
She takes Jason’s hand. They cross the lawn, then pause for the traffic before loping across the big road, into the darkness of the park. They’re good.
Right.
Orion checks his phone.
Into the woods. The horrible pain of Burton kicking him out comes flooding back for a moment. Rising up like a freak tide from his ankles whooshing up to his hair. It’s not just rage, it’s raging embarrassment; and the realization that he is stupidly arrogant, Burton’s right; then lashing pride and determination to be more arrogant; annoying pity for an old man who’s past it, thrown on the junkyard of theatre history; and misery, and powerlessness.
Flat out running, now, power of the legs at least, following the blue dot on the screen he checks every few seconds. Almost through the park, and she’s still not visible. There’s the other leg of the divided road—where the fuck is she?
Through the midnight grove he passes shadows, strange lumps and humps of bodies, singly and in clusters. A clutch of workmen bending together in the grass. He’s close, warmer, closer. He stops, swirls, emo batshit—checks the phone again: blue dot, stopped. Like a stupid movie.
There’s her red-cased phone, lying on the ground.
“Savaya!” he shouts, not even meaning to.
The darkness under the trees is quiet, nothing echoes, no one answers. Even the traffic has quieted. It only—the dot was moving, a minute ago.
He sits on the steps of the monument to WWI or something, South Africa—his own phone buzzes.
The voice says, “We’re getting there.” Velvet, loving. “Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“Right,” Orion says. He puts his phone away, and stands. He’ll go round the park again, L and Jason are down there at the south end somewhere, maybe they’ll—
Savaya slides around the big stone block of monument, above him.
“I don’t even know how,” she says, skinny arms blue-white in the night air. “Check my privilege, I can’t even work out what to say to somebody. Or a car—how do you get a car to even stop? How do they tell you’re up for it?”
“Good thing you can’t figure it out.” Orion’s heart only starts pounding now, with the effort and the relief. “I’m sure if you were like, starving, you’d do it. But not—it isn’t a thing to, to be prying into when you don’t need to for survival. Maybe for a part, for research,” he adds, to be fair. “Otherwise it’s dilettante-ism.”
“If that even is a word.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Fuck-liar.” She climbs down the stone shelves to his level.
“Fuck-wipe.”
That makes her laugh, and then crumples her face. “Only not, as it turns out.”
He’s angry with her now that the relief has eased, but he’s not going to let that out. She’s shivering and hiccuping and there’s a lot wrong; it’s no time to be scolding someone for drunkenness. She’s more slurry than ever, her orthodontically altered bite making her speech sweetly stupid, when she is so smart. “I’m such a fucking mess.” She wipes her nose with the inside hem of her short, stupid, frilly dress, and sees her phone on the ground.
“Hey,” she says, “I dropped my phone.” She bends to pick it up, like a kid, like Ophelia bending for flowers in the stream. Maybe she’ll go and kill herself too now.
“So what’s this about Terry?” Orion pulls her down and sits beside her on the cold stone. “And BT-dubs, Terry-He or Terry-She?”
Savaya hiccups again and says, “I was fooling all you guys with Pink. I did a good job, huh? Terry and I, and me, are going to get married. Once they get divorced … I totally think we are. But I am not too sure, because they are getting back together.”
She is so drunk, so totally plastered, and on top of weed, smells like.
“Have you talked to him about that? Or to her?”
“Yeah, I talked to Nevaeh, that was my first mistake.”
“Nevaeh’s spinning too fast to listen. She just can’t because her family—”
“She hates me so much now.” Savaya starts to cry again, fumbling with her phone, looking for some heartbreaking text or other. “It was hard enough before.”
Orion takes the phone and puts his arms around her, wanting with all his heart to make her feel all right. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Any of it. Terry, Nevaeh, anything. You can just stop for a while, wait for a while, till you can handle it better.”
“Yeah, same to you,” she says. Bleary, sodden voice. “You don’t know my life.”
“I was just bullshitting, when I told you about going to the chicken walk. I never did anything. I shouldn’t have told you. I was just fucked up, being stupid.” She’s not listening. “Did you come in your parents’ van?”
She shakes her head. “It’s so strange. I have slept with some majorly revolting people, you’d think I could easily— I mean, this one guy yelled something out the window at me and I was telling him to fuck off before I even thought.”
“How did you get in to the city?”
“Hitched.”
“Right, but hitching is as dangerous as hooking, you know that, right?” It sweeps over him that she’s a baby, such a gigantic, mewling baby, and what does that make him? Exactly the same. He cringes inside, his stomach squeezing to think of Newell finding him that night, walking the streets and trying so hard to be so fucking hard. A baby, as bad as Savaya. Newell must have laughed.
“At least I know how to hitch,” she says. “I got a ride right away, in a Jaguar.”
“You’re so stupid.”
He takes off his jacket and puts it over her shoulders because she’s actually shaking now.
“Get up, walk,” he says. “You can walk it off and we’ll get some coffee or something. Plus, L and Jason are here looking for you too.”
Savaya gets up, and they go into the park, toward the centre where it looks safer. She doesn’t speak, she just lets her mouth open a little and keeps on crying. Damp soaking rain coming straight out of her eyes. Who knew there was that much water in a person.
“I heard Newell talking about me tonight,” he says, offering other misery to distract her. “At Hugh’s. I left when Burton got there, but then I went back and climbed the tree by Hugh’s roof deck and listened. Newell said, he said he likes me.”
Savaya squeezes his arm, says, “That’s good though.” The distraction is working, she’s stopped shaking.
But it means he has to think about it. “Like is for Facebook. He said I fed his ego.”
“Who was he talking to? Maybe he couldn’t talk honestly with them.”
“Hugh. Who else is he going to talk to? He told Hugh he thought he might be of some help to me.” Now I can’t even talk to him, Orion thinks blankly, bleakly. Or be in the same room with him, ever again.
“It’s the same with me,” Savaya says, and the fountain of tears starts again.
It’s nothing like the same, he doesn’t say.
She blubbers through the tears, “Terry said that, be of help. Like, with what—auditioning for National Theatre School or some fucking thing? It’s nothing, it was just something to say. Like I’m such a puppy, all I need is help and not, like, an actual human relationship.”
She shudders all over, like she’s going to throw up—then she tears off his jacket as if it’s choking her and runs like a mad thing, racing to get somewhere private before— Whoop, there she goes. Puking and puking, poor kid. Coming up too late, he tries to hold her hair out of the spray. Fuck, that’s a lot of intake volume. Where’d she get all that?
Savaya staggers away from the mess and tries to run again but she can’t. He takes her arm to help her. She lies down—they’ve strayed off the path into dark grass, away from other people, all the crouching shapes in the darkness. She sinks, and slumps over, and lies on the dry old grass, burying her face. He stands over her like some Greek hero over a sleeping maiden. Like fucking Perseus and what’s her name with the dragon. They need fucking Medea to make it go to sleep. There’s a play he’ll never read now. And now here come L and Jason, traipsing along holding hands, all Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Behind them, who?—Ivy. So is Newell here too? Orion’s stomach grips again.
But no, it’s just Ivy. He holds out a hand so they don’t come too close and freak Savaya out. “Hi, guys,” he says. “She’s taking a rest. She might have had a few pops or something.” Not being sure how cool Ivy is with weed.
“What’s going on?” L takes a step but stops, she stays outside the dragon’s reach. “Is she hurt?”
“She’s okay. Just fucked up and also drunk.”
L stares at him. “Did her parents find out about Nevaeh?”
“Terry. Not Pink,” Orion says, trying to convey the news without giving it to Ivy.
“Holy,” Jason says.
As if it’s any of her business, L cries, “Shit, another one?”
“Another what?”
L doesn’t speak.
“Another?” Orion asks her. “Another stupid kid with a crush on a teacher?” Lightning is racing up and down through his body. He could leap and fly with rage. How could they—even Jason, standing there doughfaced. Don’t speak to them, don’t justify—but it comes anyway, bursting, electric, unpleasant, unstoppable: “Nobody seems to realize, I love him. This isn’t a PR plan or some star-fucking thing. I know him, and I—”
They’re all staring at him, in the fitful tree-blown lamplight, moonlight.
Fine, stare! “If I was a girl, nobody would have the slightest problem with this—you’d all be saying oh about time Newell left that old hag he’s been saddled with for so long, and how much more suitable a match this is, a young woman who loves him—if it was Savaya, you’d all be going oh quite understandable, that rogue Newell, heh heh, but of course, that’s the way it should be. Like you were with her and Pink, you can’t deny it.”
They’re all staring at him, like he’s doing them some fucking injustice.
Then out of nowhere comes water, a violent, drenching spray hurtling from everywhere at once, a raging dragon of cold rain.
Orion hauls Savaya up, and they run.