Lucy’s Launderette

BETSY BURKE

was born in London, England, and grew up on the West Coast of Canada. She has a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria. Among the many jobs on her résumé, she includes opera singer, dishwasher, guitar teacher, nurse’s assistant, charwoman, mural painter, salesclerk, puppeteer, English teacher and, most recently, freelance translator. She currently lives in Italy. Her interests include art, music, books, rejection-slip origami, turning the planet into a garden rather than a toxic waste dump and trying to convince her four-year-old daughter that chocolate is not a breakfast food. She is also the author of a murder-mystery set in Florence.

Lucy’s Launderette
Betsy Burke

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Many thanks to Liz Jennings, Jean Fanelli Grundy, Salva, Sara, Mom, Kato, Yule Heibel, Margaret O’Neill Marbury and Kathryn Lye.

For David Burke

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

1

“Your prince could show up anytime, anywhere.” My mother’s words. Words not to be discounted, I’d decided. It hadn’t exactly been a bumper year in the man department. Winter had come with a vengeance and I spent a lot of time shivering under my duvet, finding true love and sensual thrills in hot paperbacks and the occasional Belgian chocolate hedgehog, emphasis on hog.

To make things worse, Anna the Viking, legs that never quit, mind that never started, had moved in the month before. Ours was one of those West End Vancouver apartments just off Davie Street, post-war Bauhaus sterile, nice hardwood floors, but with walls made of meringue. It became pretty clear after a couple of weeks that Anna was going to be the star of an ongoing Bonkfest that I would have to endure through the connecting wall of our bedrooms.

Anna was from Sweden and had men…and more men, and I don’t think conversation ever blighted her relationships. But none of them were THE ONE, because she would have stuck with him for more than a night. Let’s face it; it takes energy to find THE ONE, and I mean the kind of man who can walk, talk, dress himself and doesn’t have his finger up his nose while sitting alone in his car waiting for the light to change.

I was running on empty that winter. Too long out of university to consider myself a student, I was determined not to run with my tail between my legs to my parents’ mind-numbingly tranquil suburb of Cedar Narrows. What would I do in Cedar Narrows anyway? It had all the vestiges of a self-sufficient town: shopping malls, cinemas, brand-new homes for families of ten, churches, schools, more shopping malls; it had everything but a soul of its own. For me it had always been like one huge waiting room in a train station. The last stop before the real city.

So I’d given in to financial pressure and let Anna move in. With her ThighMaster, her mini-trampoline and her G-string. I tried turning the heat right down but she still paraded mostly naked around the living room.

For the Viking’s share of the rent, I’d packed up what had been my studio into cardboard boxes and toted it all downstairs to the storage rooms. It was like locking my children away. Okay, ugly and deformed children, but my children nonetheless. Besides, how could I call myself an artist when I wasn’t even making art?

Not only was I a non-artist, but it had been so long since I’d had a decent relationship that I was considering the possibilities of romance on distant shores. I was still worth a couple of camels, at least.

There had been Frank, the “writer,” the year before, but he didn’t qualify as a decent boyfriend. He hadn’t even been a diamond in the rough. He was a zircon, emphasis on con, and it was because of him that I was forced to rent the spare room to Anna.

Frank had all the requirements of a writer, the B.A. in English, the promising first half of a first novel rewritten a hundred times then abandoned for the first half of another promising first novel. He had the permanent three-day growth of beard, the scruffy corduroy jacket, the scotch and Gauloise halitosis, not to mention the scumbag buddies who always seemed to be flopping on my couch for the night. And could he talk! But lately, he confided in me, he was suffering from some kind of burnout or writer’s block. He just couldn’t seem to commit all those fine words to paper, just couldn’t push past it. That would have required hard work and hard work, as I found out too late, wasn’t really Frank’s line. My bank account and I were relieved to be rid of him.

My only source of income was my job at Rogues’ Gallery in Gastown. Over the four years I’d worked there, it had lost its glamorous sheen. I was still getting minimum wage and still being called the assistant manager, a term that meant glorified gopher. Being a gopher for my boss, the oh-so-miraculously thin Nadine Thorpe, meant an exaggerated number of trips to all the delicatessens and pastry shops in the neighborhood. But more about that later.

My situation was so tragic that winter that I even flirted with the idea of exploiting what little suppleness remained in my bod, a plumpish but pleasant twenty-nine-year-old bod, to find some rich old codger who would set me up as his bit of naughty. At least then I’d have a studio. But I just didn’t have it in me. My parents, in spite of all the odds against it, had brought me up with moral fiber, as well as plenty of the other kind.

And it snowed a lot that year, something that doesn’t happen often on the West Coast. The sky loomed steely gray then dumped far more than was needed to make the scene quaint. Heavy snowfalls would have been okay if it had been my dream life, the one where me and some gorgeous heterosexual man are walking through the white wonderland discussing post-post-modernism, then returning home to drink brandy in front of the fireplace that my apartment didn’t have. Instead, it went on and on. The dark days of work at Rogues’ Gallery, mounting dreary exhibits by gay friends of Nadine’s, the works all heavily concentrated on the male member, Nadine drawling at me in her phony English accent to get the phalluses erected, then ordering me out to slip and slide through the slush to the bakery to get her daily ration of a couple dozen pastries; then the dark nights of insomnia, the Viking and her conquests sloshing and moaning in the waterbed next door, and me, with the pillow over my head trying not to listen.

And then one morning, I looked out my window, and the sun was shining. Not that brittle, illusive midwinter sun, but the sun you can feel when you’ve turned the corner into spring, the warming hardworking sun. I made myself a cappuccino and sat down to enjoy it at the kitchen table, thinking, good, now the snow is melting, the ground is showing through, the winter is finally over. And then the phone rang.

“Lucy.” It was my father.

“Hi, Dad. How’re things?”

“It’s Jeremy.” Jeremy was my father’s father. My favorite grandfather.

“What about Jeremy?”

“He’s dead.” My father’s tone was odd, like Jeremy deserved what he got.

I couldn’t speak and when enough silence had gone by, my father said, “They tell me he was doing at least a hundred on his Harley. He went into a ravine up the coast. The funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

“Will you be there?” I asked.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Your prince could show up anytime, anywhere.” In which case it was going to be a beautiful day for a funeral. Going on the principle that our mothers can be right from time to time, I decided that if my prince was going to be there, I was going to make sure he didn’t miss me. I look good in black, and thanks to my old university friend, Sky Robertson, I had the clothes.

Sky manages the Retro Metro Boutique for the owner, Max Kinghorn. Max lives in Seattle and is hardly ever there, so Sky has a free hand.

She and I share the same tastes in a lot of things, especially clothing. We have other worlds in our heads. One of them is black-and-white, with sleek women in well-tailored suits or dresses cut on the bias, men in tuxedos looking as though they were born in them and not jerking and straining as if they were dressed in straitjackets. In our fantasy world, everyone gets to smoke, sip martinis and live in gleamingly smooth Art Deco high-rise apartments with views of bustling but not yet ruined cities glittering below. In our dreams.

Sky really pushes the Metro chic, the tough but sexy businesswoman. I think she pushes it too far. She doesn’t want to be like her mother. Sky’s mother went to Woodstock and spent the rest of her life paying for it. Both Sky and her name are souvenirs from those three days of music and muck.

Sky saves nice pieces that she knows will fit me, like the clothes I wore that day to the funeral. It was a little fifties number, maybe worn once by its original owner, a black wool crepe suit, jacket with three-quarter sleeves and velvet collar and cuffs, tightish skirt with a little kick pleat at the back. Jeremy would have approved of the black fishnet stockings and stiletto heels.

The day of the funeral, I got dressed, then went into the bathroom to work on my hair. Every day is a bad hair day for me because my hair is red, and curly, and if I’m not careful with it, it ends up looking like a bush. I keep it pruned to shoulder length and with enough gel and mousse and whatnot, I can make it cooperate.

Anyway, the bathroom door was open and the Viking strode in and out, amused by me, a sneering little smile creeping into one corner of her mouth. There are women who undress to make a good impression and women who cover up every inch of themselves to make a good impression. I considered myself to be in the second category, believing that if I were five foot eleven with mile-long gleaming sinewy bronze limbs I, too, would stride around the house naked, planning my next bone-crunching assault on the male population.

Anna depressed me. She reminded me of how much dieting, depilation and general suffering I had to go through to make myself desirable. I consoled myself with the fact that she still couldn’t put together a proper English sentence, although she’d been in Canada for over two years. She had something to do with sports development in the physical education department at the university, but she’d never specified which sport, or how it was being developed. I had a few ideas though.

When I was ready, I called a cab. It was an extravagance, and I knew it, but I was going to remember Jeremy in style. I was going to take a little break from my miserable, penny-pinching daily life. When I got there, I paid the cabby, stood up straight, saying to myself, I am beautiful, I am beautiful, and walked through the cemetery gates. I must have looked quite chic until I hit the patch of snowy grass and my stiletto heels sank deep into the wet earth. I had to creep on tiptoes the rest of the way. By then, Jeremy’s death had become a reality and any attempt at being beautiful and finding the prince my mother was always yattering about, was going to be marred by the mascara streaming down my face. I missed the old scoundrel and couldn’t stop blubbering like a baby when the moment of truth came.

At the graveside, there were quite a few people to see him off on his last big ride, so to speak. A number of women, all different types and ages, old girlfriends. A few older men in very natty suits standing at a distance. His real pals clustered close around the hole to watch the glittering heap of wrecked metal be lowered into the ground.

His friends had names tattooed on their fat, hairy, leather-bound arms, names like Spike, Snake, Muncher and Brewbelly. Instead of tossing flowers, they guzzled beer from tins, crushed and tossed the empties onto the corpse of the Harley, and belched with a lot of commitment and respect. A biker’s ten-gun salute.

Jeremy’s remains, on the other hand, had already been cremated. As far as I knew, there was no will, but his buddies knew how he wanted it all to be done. They were paying for the funeral.

My parents were there, too, my father being his only child, or at least the only legally recognized child. But they had no intention of coming nearer or joining the boozy group. They lurked behind some poplar trees, pretending to be part of someone else’s interment a few yards away. From time to time, they sneaked distressed peeks in the direction of our group of geriatric rabble-rousers, then looked away before anyone could catch them at it.

My father is terminally conservative. He’s the principal of Cedar Narrows Senior Secondary School, wears sock suspenders, and has spent most of his life in a state of mortification and denial over his biker dad. If he’d been born later, he would have been one of those kids that tries to get a divorce from their parents. I gather his mother, my grandmother, was a biker babe. She abandoned them, found a bigger, badder man with a bigger, badder machine and ran off, leaving Jeremy to look after a newborn baby.

Jeremy was pretty amazing. He managed to raise my father and make a life for himself. He had a little income from his Laundromat business and so could devote himself exclusively to his son, and the gang on weekends and summer holidays.

And my father actually did okay until he hit thirteen and decided he didn’t want to be who he was anymore. He started hanging out with the leaky-pen crowd at school, got religion, one of the noisier ones that involves near-drowning in a baptismal font the size of an Olympic pool, and became mortally tedious.

He met my mother at a church social. The joke was on him though. My mother, a resourceful woman at heart, was there under false pretenses, just trying things out, trolling different waters looking for a man. Over the years, she’s been able to mess my father up a bit, making him a little less respectable. But she never really took to Jeremy, who kept making passes and lewd propositions.

My parents live in the ’burbs. My mother’s idea of an orgasm is making Rice Krispie squares, vacuuming the beige wall-to-wall carpet and securing the plastic covers on the living room furniture. My father’s is finding all his pens and pencils lying exactly the way he left them. He’s a control freak. He goes to Mars if anybody moves his pens and pencils.

It wasn’t that my father hated Jeremy. He just didn’t know what to do with him. I adored Jeremy because he had taught me how life could be exciting in unexpected ways. He was always ready to see the funny side of things and never too interested in control. And when I started going to university, before I had an apartment of my own, he let me hold parties in his big old house.

I had trouble with Connie, though, Jeremy’s last live-in.

Connie was at the funeral, too, standing a little apart from everyone, but still close to the grave. I just couldn’t like her. Maybe it was because she was only four years older than me. Jeremy was over seventy when he died. I thought Connie was a gold digger. A gold digger who’d made a mistake because Jeremy wasn’t rich. Her hair was big and platinum and when Jeremy wasn’t looking at her, her face became haggard and hard. Her fashion sense was Las Vegas pro. That day she was wearing a red leather pantsuit, and frankly, she shouldn’t have been because those tight pants made her look fat. She’d been with Jeremy for the last six years but she was rarely around when I got together with him. I guess he sensed my discomfort, as well as hers.

It would probably all go to Connie, whatever Jeremy had left. The big ramshackle Victorian house near Commercial Drive, his other bikes and the launderette. The building the launderette was in had five apartments. The rents from four of them would go to Connie. But there’d be no rent from the ground-floor apartment. And if Jeremy had arranged things the way he’d intended, she wouldn’t be able to sell the launderette. Not in Bob’s lifetime.

Bob was the tenant in the ground-floor apartment. He’d lost the use of his legs in a motorcycle accident and Jeremy had given him a lifelong rent-free lease. Bob managed the launderette and overhauled the washers and dryers when they needed it. I’d heard Jeremy promise Bob that the launderette would always be there for him.

When the funeral was over, the gang invited me to join them for a farewell brew to Jeremy at the Eldorado Hotel, a charming place where the cockroaches have running tabs. But I declined. I had to get back to work. Snake, the gang’s leader, gave me a bear hug that nearly crushed my ribs and said, “Luce, he wanted you to have this.” He thrust a paper bag into my hand. The thing inside was about the size and shape of a soup tin.

I thanked Snake and walked toward the cemetery gates. There were a few cabs idling nearby. I waved brightly to my parents and got into one, clutching the paper bag tightly. Once we were moving, I opened the bag. Inside, there was a small brass container with tape sealing the lid. I knew what it contained, but to be sure, I peeked, then closed the top quickly. Jeremy’s ashes. I put the urn back in the bag.

When I got to the gallery, nobody was around but there were men’s and women’s voices coming from Nadine’s office. A man was saying something and the women were laughing uproariously. I hung up my coat, took the urn out of the bag and set it on my desk, then entered Nadine’s office. I couldn’t believe it. My mother was right about princes showing up. There he was.

2

It was my idol from university days. The man who was making them all laugh. Paul Bleeker, THE Paul Bleeker, the British-born artist who worked in all sorts of different mediums. I’d read about the clamorous success of his show at New York’s Hard Edge Gallery. It was called The Breadwinners and featured figures in business suits, the bodies sculpted in shellacked loaves of bread; rye, whole-wheat, raisin, seven-grain, sourdough. In another show, he’d used the wax from votive candles stolen from churches all over North America and Europe to sculpt figures of famous martyrs, each martyr with huge chemically-treated wicks sticking out of all their orifices. On the last night of the show the wicks were lit and the sculptures went off like fireworks, eventually melting to the floor. Nothing remained but waxy puddles and the photos documenting the event. He’d also done some very interesting things with other foodstuffs: nuts, dried pasta, legumes, squashes.

A few years back, he’d come to the art department as a guest lecturer for the 400 seminar and everybody fought for his attention, and I mean everybody, including the large contingent of girls with steel-toed boots and buzz cuts. I have a particularly glowing memory of Paul Bleeker cornering me at a party and asking me all about myself in a tone that suggested delicious things for later. I started to tell him, concentrating on the exciting and rebellious moments of my life, and banishing the Cedar Narrows parts to amnesiac oblivion. But then he was whisked away by the hostess (married, but canoodling him just the same) and I was spared having to embellish any further. Since then I’ve spent years imagining the end to that evening in all its lascivious detail.

And here he was—white teeth and black leather jacket, satanic beard and tousled hair, fitted jeans displaying his endowments. And there were Nadine and her cronies. Nadine’s best friend was Felicity, a hefty blonde who filled her days getting manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, electrolysis and meeting others for lunch. I’d nicknamed her Mae West. She toted pounds of jewelry and wore suede and silk under her chinchilla coat even for minor occasions. The man who accompanied her was not her husband but an expensive ornament who looked frequently at his platinum Rolex with an air of smug boredom. Among the others in this odd social circle, there was a man I called Onassis, a short fat Greek fast-food tycoon who wore heavy gold knuckle-dusting rings and always had a wet nub of unlit cigar in his mouth. Then there was the critic for one of the local newspapers—a tall, soap-white cadaverous type always ready to pronounce a DOA verdict for any exhibition. I called him the Mortician. The other women were limp clones of Nadine and Felicity.

Usually, the gallery was deserted during the day except for a few tourists. Normal people showed up for evening openings when they could scarf free food and drink.

Here was this little crowd of society men and women with nothing better to do on a winter’s afternoon than coo and fawn over Paul Bleeker. Somebody had brought a case of champagne and they were all drinking it out of plastic cups. Nadine pretended not to notice me for a while and then, when she decided to, she sidled over and hissed, “Lucy, where the hell have you been?”

“You knew. I told you. A funeral.”

She huffed impatiently and jingled an armful of eighteen-karat gold bracelets at me. “You have to go to the deli and get something for people to nibble on. And don’t stint.” Nadine liked to nibble. Her tastes sometimes extended to the human species. By the way she was eyeballing Paul Bleeker, I figured he was going to be dinner.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked.

“Paul’s upcoming show.”

“Where?”

“Well, here of course, you little idiot.”

I didn’t let it get to me.

Nadine was another of those towering women, but then I’m only five foot two, so a lot of women tower over me. And she was disgustingly thin, with Cleopatra hair and black almond-shaped eyes. And an attitude. And that terrible accent. A recent infusion of royal blood in a Swiss clinic? As far as Nadine was concerned, there was no one smarter, more beautiful or as important as she. I was almost certain she’d shelled out a fortune for face-lifts and tummy tucks. Too bad they can’t invent the ego tuck. I did the only thing I could in that moment and whispered, “You’ve got something black stuck between your front teeth.”

As I headed out into the cold to buy lox, she was furtively trying to catch her reflection in the glass of one of the exhibits.

When I got back to the gallery, everyone was getting a little sloppy. They’d finished four bottles of champagne and were starting in on another. I set the food trays down on a table in the main part of the gallery. They moved toward the trays with all the grace of a pack of jackals. Paul Bleeker looked over at me several times between mouthfuls of cream cheese and caviar, a queasy expression on his face, as though he had an ulcer that had just started acting up. No light of recognition dawned though, and he turned back to his little claque, munching canapés and beaming hundred-watt smiles. He didn’t remember me.

I poured myself a large glass of bubbly. Nadine would never notice. She had just draped herself all over Paul, as close to being a human overcoat as anyone ever got. I watched him extract himself delicately from her grip, reach into his pocket and pull out a small square black box. He was still smoking those silly Sobranies. But I forgave him when he lit up. I wanted to be that cigarette, stroked by those eloquent fingers, moistened by those sensuous lips, thrust in and out of his mouth…and then he looked around, spied Jeremy’s urn, removed the lid and flicked his ashes into it.

I was there in a second to snatch it away. “That’s not an ashtray,” I splurted.

“Hey…it’s full of ashes.” He must have realized what it was because he banged his hand against his forehead.

“A friend of yours?”

I nodded, hugging the urn.

“Really sorry. And you are?” He squashed the R like a true North American. His accent had temporarily lost all its Britishness.

“Lucy Madison. Assistant manager here.”

“How’re ya doing. Sorry about your friend.”

“Me, too.”

And then I did the unthinkable. I gave in to grief in front of my idol. Tears rollicked down my face. Paul Bleeker took my elbow and guided me into the washrooms. He parked me near the ladies’ mirror then went into a cubicle and came back with a huge wad of toilet paper. It was cheap, scratchy toilet paper. Nadine liked to cut corners with those little things.

He handed it to me and I mopped my face. Kindness always makes it worse for me and my tears turned to those jerky hiccuppy sobs.

I felt an arm pull me into a leather-clad shoulder and a hand stroked my hair.

When I’d calmed down a little, I said, “Actually, it was my grandfather.” I stared at the urn.

Paul Bleeker just nodded as if he understood absolutely everything, everything from my feelings of loss to super-strings theory…and then a strange light came into his eyes. You have to be careful when famous artists get strange lights in their eyes and you happen to be holding a dead person’s ashes in your hands. For one thing, the famous person usually has enough money to finance his eerier inspirations.

I pulled back a little. Paul had already changed tack though. He took my chin in his hands and began turning my head from side to side. “Have you ever modeled?” he asked.

“For an artist?”

“No, for a mechanic. Well? Have you?”

“Informally.” I recalled an old boyfriend from university days who had once used me as a model. His basement suite had been glacial, its decor, early dirty gym sock, late pizza box and cigarette butt in beer bottle. He fancied himself to be the next Francis Bacon. When he finally let me glimpse his work, I looked like a fat mutant baby after a nuclear meltdown.

“Only head modeling,” I said primly. The world was not going to get the chance to laugh at any of my naked body parts even if the artist was as famous as Paul Bleeker.

“Pity,” he said. “You have a somewhat classical look.”

If he had gone on to say “Rubenesque” I would have been forced to deck him. But he said, “Give me your phone number anyway. You never know when I might need a head.” It was a ploy, of course, but I quickly rattled off my number and the gallery’s e-mail address. I could hear the natives getting restless beyond the bathrooms, and the irritated staccato of Nadine’s size ten Ferragamo heels clacking toward us. Paul Bleeker scribbled fast in his little black book and pocketed it as Nadine came through the doorway.

She just avoided snarling at me. “Lucy, you better get out there and start cleaning up. It’s a hell of a mess.” She turned to Paul and said so sweetly it made my teeth hurt, “Umberto’s all right for you?” He nodded, then shrugged at me, a poor helpless creature caught up in the tide of his adoring fans.

They were all gone by the time I came out of the bathroom. I put Billie Holiday on the CD player and cleaned up. It was nearly eleven when I trudged back out into the cold. I was freezing by the time I got on the bus. As it jostled through the slushy dark streets, I pictured the lucky group, stuffing themselves at Umberto’s Ristorante, funghi porcini, risotto di mare, tiramisù. Nadine taking second and third helpings.

Then I thought about what I would do if Paul Bleeker actually phoned me. Would I dare to tell him that I was a sometimes painter?

Would we be able to talk about…art? It’s a word I usually have to whisper because it’s all become so tricky.

When I first started making big paintings, I figured that with people hanging animal carcasses in galleries or cutting off their own body parts, bleeding to death and calling it artistic expression, I had a lot of leeway. My work is ultra-conservative in comparison to just about everybody else’s. I like decorative, and I like functional. I like something I can hang on my own wall. And for that I usually get into trouble. I was harassed at university for the “prettiness” of some of my paintings. But I couldn’t help it. I had started depicting my night dreams, in a kind of quasi-naïf, colorful, surreal way. They were so much more vivid and promising than anything that was happening in my waking life. They were full of wild things and creatures: tigers, snakes, bluebirds; orchids, roses, turquoise oceans and murky-green ponds. Sky jokingly christened my work “Frida Kahlo without the mustache.” In my night dreams, I once wore a shawl of white silk embroidered with brightly colored vines, birds and flowers, over a gorgeous tight-fitting red silk dress with matching shoes. Of course, my nighttime body is beautiful. But I think that’s good, don’t you? It means that whatever I really look like in the daytime or consciously think of myself, my deepest, barest mind thinks I’m okay.

At class exhibitions, my work was always put in the out-of-the-way poorly lit back rooms. It didn’t bother me. Somebody always found their way back there. And I don’t know why, but when the exhibitions were dismounted, pieces of mine always went missing. I don’t want to use the word stolen. I prefer to call it art appreciation.

If there’s one thing you have to do in your art, it’s be true to yourself. And you can take that further, into your life. It’s the same. You’re filling up your personal canvas, adding the daily strokes. You want it to be good and right, you don’t want to have to take the white and cover it all up quickly before anybody sees the amateur mess you’ve made. But messes do get made.

I stepped off the bus and gingerly walked the last frozen block. When I got home, I called out the Viking’s name. There was no answer, so I relaxed. There was a letter for me on the hall table. I realized it wasn’t a bill, and suddenly my heart was pounding. I tore it open and unfolded the one page. The signature at the bottom was such an unexpected surprise that my hands started to tremble.

The letter read:

Sorry Lucy Honey. I had to do it this way. No half measures for us, right? I won’t go into the gory details. It was one of the members of that nasty big C family and the future didn’t look too rosy. I could just about feel one good ride left in me so I took it. Must have done it if you’re reading this letter.

One last very important thing. I beg you to go and see Connie. I’m begging you on bended knee Lucy honey. When you talk to her you’ll know why. She can be a little stubborn, so if she tries to slam the door in your face or anything like that, you jam your foot in there. Don’t go away till she talks to you. Tell her I sent you.

I’m signing off now. You’re a great kid and I love ya.

Jeremy

The tears were rolling again but this time I just let them come. I went to the fridge looking for some wine to cry into, but there was none left. However, there was a half bottle of some strange Swedish liqueur that Anna called Glug. So I glugged and cried until I was too exhausted to think anymore.

The next morning I put on my power suit in an attempt to dress up for business and hide my hangover. Knee-length, gray wool, very stern. But with just a hint of lace peeping from under the jacket. Just in case Paul Bleeker happened to come in, he was going to see what a no-nonsense woman I was, and not the wet-faced ninny of the day before.

I had my own set of keys and was the first to open up the gallery each morning. This suited me fine. It meant that the dragon lady could simmer in her lair a little longer before fuming into action. She needed a lot of time to put on her makeup and, oh yes…consume a couple of breakfasts.

It was just after nine-thirty. I sat at my desk in the Rogues’ Gallery and yawned. I took small sips from my caffe latte forcing myself to make it last. I checked my e-mail. The usual load of forwarded jokes were there from Sky. When the postman came, I tried flirting with him but he didn’t even flinch. If he thought I was cute, he wasn’t letting on. I was definitely out of practice.

I yawned some more and opened the envelopes addressed to the gallery. There were a lot of bills, from transporters, caterers, insurance companies and a cheque from a customer. Surprisingly, we were selling pieces that season. Nadine had taken a big risk on exhibiting all those phalluses, but she’d succeeded. The platoon of pizzles actually had buyers.

After four months, though, the subjects were getting to me. I hadn’t seen a live one in ages. Another month of staring at them, and they would have started talking to me, their little singsong voices taunting me, “We’re having more fun than you-oo, nah nah nah nee nah nah.”

I stifled another yawn and let my mind slide into reveries about Paul Bleeker. Then I remembered Jeremy’s letter.

“Damn.” I said it loud enough that my voice ricocheted through the empty gallery. Connie. There was no avoiding her. If Jeremy said I had to go and see her, then I had to go and see her. But the thought of it was like a freezing-cold bath. It was like Sunday night when you had school the next day and hadn’t done your homework. As the prospect of visiting Connie loomed over me like a big black cloud, disaster struck.

3

Disaster, dressed in a Superman costume, lolloped, cape a-flutter, past the huge plate-glass window of the gallery and vanished from view. I ducked down behind my desk and peeped out from under it. The superhero stepped back into view, examined his reflection, flexed his limp biceps in a superhero-like way, and whizzed out of sight.

It was happening again. Just like a really bad déjà vu. And once more, it wasn’t happening in Cedar Narrows, where the damage could be contained, but in downtown Vancouver, where the repercussions could travel a lot farther.

I immediately called my mother.

“He’s here,” I wailed. “I thought you said he was in Hawaii.”

“He’s…? Oh. Well, he was in Hawaii for a while. And he’s there, is he? I see. Well.” My mother’s voice was so calm I wanted to scream.

“Well?” I whined.

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Numbers. I need the phone numbers, Mom. The Vancouver ones. Mine are all at home. Quickly.”

“Calm down,” said my mother.

“I am calm. Under the circumstances.”

My mother hummed under her breath as she searched. Her casualness unnerved me. “Yes, here they are. But I don’t know how useful they’re going to be. They’re a couple of years old.”

“Just give them to me. Quickly.”

“Don’t be rude, Lucille.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. This whole business affects me that way.”

I could hear my mother sigh just before she began to read off the numbers. I scrawled them down and hung up.

I tried the first number on the list and got an answering machine. With panic in my voice, I left a very long message and hung up to wait. I was too edgy to do anything practical, so I got out a flannel rag and began to dust. Moving nervously around the empty gallery, I buffed frames, glass cases, pieces on pedestals, in short, the entire phalanx of phalluses. As I was rubbing away at an all-too-lifelike marble sculpture of one, a voice from behind me made me leap out of my skin.

“You do that with a practiced hand.”

“Paul…”

“In the flesh,” he grinned. He was looking very sharp in black jeans, black sweater, black leather jacket.

Oh God, I thought, don’t let Dirk come back this way dressed as Superman, not while he’s here.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“You can come and have a drink with me sometime.”

My heart did a double-flip. I didn’t want to seem too eager. “Just let me check my agenda,” I said, very smoothly. I didn’t have an agenda. I didn’t need one. My life wasn’t so hectic that I needed to write things down to remember them. I found an old address book in the bottom of my purse and flicked through it with an efficient air.

He said, “How about tonight? The Rain Room? Eight o’clock?”

For years I’d dreamt of someone asking me out to the Rain Room. No one ever had. Unfortunately, I had to take care of Dirk first and that could take time. “I can’t tonight. How about tomorrow. We’ll have to make it nine. I have another engagement tonight.”

“Fine. Tomorrow, then.” Tomorrow was Wednesday and I was free. He grinned again and was gone.

I sank into my chair. It had all happened so fast. I had a date for a drink, a real drink with the real Paul Bleeker. My next thought was, I have nothing to wear. My mental shopping spree was interrupted by the phone.

“Lucy Madison, please,” said a man’s voice. It was a deep voice, frayed with exhaustion.

“Speaking.”

“Sam Trelawny here. You left a message on my answering machine?”

“Hello, Mr. Trelawny. You must be new.”

“Why do you say that?” Sam Trelawny sounded harassed.

“Because I know everybody else. Or at least I used to.”

“I was transferred from North Van into the downtown area a few months ago.”

I said, “I’ll have to fill you in, I guess.”

“I have Dirk’s file in front of me.”

“He’s been away.”

“So I gather from the paperwork,” he said.

“Yeah. He was in Hawaii for a while.”

“Uh-huh? For how long?”

“About a year.”

“How did he manage that?”

I said, “I gather a lot of people there are in the same boat. Long-term tourists without green cards.”

“I see.”

“He was in California for a while before that.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah. He was hanging around on a street corner and some Moonies picked him up. They drove him back to their plantation or their ashram or whatever they call it. I guess after one evening with him, they didn’t want him anymore. They delivered him back to the street corner as quickly as possible. He got a free meal out of it, though. I imagine that was his idea all along. He can manage on shoestrings and earwax if he’s forced to.”

I heard a guffaw at the other end of the line, then silence.

“Are you still there, Mr. Trelawny?”

“Yeah. Some papers fell on the floor. Too smart for his own good, right?”

“That’s more or less the way it is. Are you going to see him?”

“It’s unfortunate, but there’s not a lot we can do at the moment, Miss Madison. You probably know how it goes. We have to wait for something to happen.”

“Just before he went to California, he started wearing a Burmese Wot on his head, this kind of colorful knit hat with a little peak, fluorescent colors actually. He took a suite at the Hotel Vancouver and enticed a seagull into the room. He said he was teaching it to walk in a straight line. He said he was sure the seagull was capable of learning but lazy and not committed to the goal. Needless to say, Dirk left without paying his bill.”

“And this was before he went to California and then Hawaii?”

“Just before. He must have skipped town the same day. Payday. You know, the government check?”

“Do I ever. It’s always a busy week.”

“Mr. Trelawny?”

“Yes, Miss Madison…I’m assuming it’s Miss?”

“Why would you? You have a fifty percent chance of being mistaken.” I was curious.

“Your voice just sounds…I don’t know, peppy, lively…like you don’t have six kids and half an alcoholic husband dragging you down.”

“Thanks,” I laughed. “It is Miss. Mr. Trelawny?”

“Yes?”

“Something serious is going to happen very soon. Probably in the next day or so.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“He was wearing a Superman costume and moving fast. He’s on a roll.”

“Well, any signs that he might harm himself or others around him…”

“Can’t we just have him picked up?”

“Look. Take down these numbers. They’re emergency numbers. Not in the book. He makes an appearance, you keep him there, call the police, and we’ll have the assessment team arrive and do a follow-up.”

He gave me the numbers and I wrote them out carefully. Gratitude toward the faceless Mr. Trelawny oozed from my every pore.

He said, “Good luck. We’ll be in touch. I’m afraid I’ve gotta go. Got an emergency call on another line. Bye, Miss Madison.”

“Bye, Mr. Trelawny.”

My hand was shaking as I put the receiver down. On another occasion when my brother Dirk had decided his life wasn’t interesting enough, before California and Hawaii, he had boarded a downtown bus with a toy pistol. It had been snowing then as well and everyone was getting sick of the cold and slush. He had held the pistol to the driver’s head and ordered the poor man to take him to Cuba…where it was warm.

Dirk was a one-man raid on sanity. And he was six feet, four inches tall. So people usually took his threats seriously.

On the subject of Dirk, my mother took a classic position, the ostrich position, with her head well-buried in sand. Whereas my father pleaded the fifth amendment and arranged to be out or busy whenever his only male heir was around. As far as my mother was concerned, Dirk had nothing that a good meal, his family’s love and a few lithium cocktails couldn’t cure. She was always going on about how talented he was.

Dirk had trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. As far as I was concerned, he was still acting, but with a rotten script. He had once confessed to me, when we were both teenagers, that he would never work at a normal job, that he wouldn’t have to, because he was such a mind-boggling genius. I concur with the mind-boggling part.

I was on the lookout for the Superman costume all day but it never showed. Probably slowed down by a lump of kryptonite.

The next morning I took the bus down to the East End of the city and the Italian neighborhood. Jeremy and Connie had shared a big old Victorian house, a ruin with a vague whiff of damp rot about it. For years, the dilapidated four-story mansion had hosted big parties, biker friends and whoever happened to need a place to crash. And then Jeremy had taken that trip to the States six years before and come back with Connie. The doors that had always been open were suddenly closed. Jeremy took Connie very seriously. There were still parties, but never at the house.

After that, I always met him at one greasy spoon or another—some place where we could get cheap bacon and eggs and talk for a while. He’d intimated that Connie reminded him of someone he’d been crazy about. But there was more to it than that. There was a sense of mission. He was like a schoolteacher guiding a favorite pupil and this had never made much sense to me.

There I was on the rickety doorstep peering through the beveled glass door into the interior. Connie was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to. I always had the feeling that she was sneering behind my back, probably thinking how tough and world-wise she was and how bourgeois and artsy-fartsy I was. It was the expression on her face whenever she saw me, a blunt skepticism, and it completely unnerved me.

But Jeremy’s wish was my command. I rang the bell and waited. A few minutes passed and no one came. I lifted my hand to ring again when I saw a dark shape at the end of the corridor. It was her. She moved slowly and when she got to the door and opened it, she didn’t look pleased to see me.

To say she looked like she’d been scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe would be putting it nicely. She had a cigarette hanging off her lower lip. Her face was puffy with a greenish tinge. Her hair was greasy and limp, and the house-coat she was wearing looked like it was hosting miniature colonies of thriving alien life.

“Hi, Connie.” The sound of my own voice made me shrink. It was too chirpy, like a cheerleader’s. Connie just nodded.

I qualified myself. “Jeremy asked me to come and see you. I have no idea why. He thought I should.”

“I guess you better come in.” The sound of her voice scared me. It was a low-pitched monotone at the best of times, which made it impossible to read her emotions, but now there was something else lurking there.

She slouched toward the living room and I followed her. The air in the house was close and fuggy and the curtains were drawn. She slumped into an armchair, narrowed her eyes at me and blew a smoke ring. “So Jeremy wanted you to see me, eh?”

“He sent me a letter. He must have sent it just before he…uh.”

“Bit the big one?”

“Yes. Did you know he was going to do what he did?”

“Not exactly. But I had a feeling it was coming. He was sick. They didn’t give him much more than a few months. He was feeling really bad.”

“Why didn’t you tell us he was sick? Why didn’t he tell us?”

“He said he didn’t want to see that look in people’s eyes. He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him.”

I wanted to be able to blame her. I wanted to hear that Connie had talked him into it, that she was somehow responsible, but I could see that it wasn’t the case. Still, I was mad, and when the “Jesus” came out of my mouth she was quick to answer.

She said, “You don’t like me, do you? None of your family does. You all think I’m trash.”

My mouth opened like a fish’s and then shut again. I didn’t know what to say.

She went on, “I didn’t choose Jeremy. He chose me. If he hadn’t, I’d have been dead in a ditch a long time ago, I can tell you.” She squinted at me again. There was a long silence and then her voice was so low, she was nearly whispering. “Jeremy got me off junk, you know. He got me off the street, got me out of the life I was leading. I don’t know why he picked me, why he thought I had anything special. But I can tell you, after a few months with him, I thought I was worth saving, too. Now I’m not so sure.” She started to look even greener than before. She muttered, “Oh, Christ,” shot up out of the chair and ran down the hall. I heard a groan and the sound of a toilet flushing. Connie came shuffling back down the hallway and just as it was dawning on me as to why she looked so chunky, she plopped herself back in the chair and said, “Damn him. He wouldn’t let me get rid of it and now it’s too late.”

I was early for my date at the Rain Room. Mostly because I wanted to see if Paul Bleeker was serious and had booked ahead. The Rain Room was the kind of place where you practically had to have reservations just to look inside. It was on the top floor of a very tall high-rise overlooking the harbor. It had a central courtyard full of trees and the walls were of molded glass. On the outside, rivulets and cascades flowed down the contours. It was like being under a waterfall or at the center of a rainstorm. At night it was lit with thousands of tiny white lights and the whole place glittered. The background music was watery, too. I recognized Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.”

Sure enough, Paul Bleeker had booked a table for two. I lingered in the doorway for a minute. I had decided to go in and sit down when I saw it. Across the Rain Room, outside in the courtyard, Dirk, still dressed as Superman, stood completely still, looking important. He then took one step forward and pressed his face against the glass. Water splashed onto his head and flowed down his body but he was oblivious to it. I bolted.

As the elevator descended with me in it, I wondered what Paul Bleeker would think of the way I’d stood him up. In that moment, I didn’t care. Until my brother had been dealt with, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I hailed a cab, got in and looked over my shoulder the whole way home. No one was following me. I paid the driver with the last of my spare change, raced through my front door and double locked it once I was inside.

I went into the bedroom and took off my all-purpose little black cocktail dress. I could hear the Viking in the other room. Without knocking, she opened my door and handed me an envelope. “This for you,” she told me.

“Who left it?” I asked. There was no stamp on it. She just shook her head in linguistic bewilderment and walked away.

I ripped it open. Scrawled on a tattered piece of paper were the words “I’M SENDING YOU TO THE PHANTOM ZONE.”

I ran to the phone and dialed the first number on my list. I was expecting another answering machine but a real voice said, “Sam Trelawny here.”

“It’s Lucy Madison. Am I glad to get you,” I said, “I think I just got a threat.” I told him about Dirk’s note.

“The guy moves fast,” he said. “Listen, just hang on. Don’t panic. I know, easy to say when you’re not there. There’ve been more reports. It seems Dirk is making his presence felt all over town. He was hanging around eating people’s leftovers at a restaurant in the West End this afternoon. We’re going to have him picked up as soon as we can locate him. You hear anything more from him, call me straightaway. Here, I’ll give you my private cell-phone number. And, Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll have him looking and behaving like Clark Kent at his desk in the Daily Planet in no time.”

I began to wonder what kind of face went with Sam Trelawny’s plummy reassuring voice.

4

The next morning, I left for work at six-thirty, hoping the semidarkness would give me cover. I snuck out of my apartment dressed like an escapee from a black-and-white British movie. One of those dowdy sixties flicks. Georgy Girl. The Carry On gang. My hair was squashed under the kind of head scarf that you tie under your chin, a silk souvenir covered with sketches of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian urchin children. I wore a huge wooly coat with sloping shoulders, a pair of black gumboots and dark glasses. I had hoped to look a little like Jackie Kennedy sneaking past the paparazzi incognito, but in fact I looked more like Jackie Kennedy’s cleaning lady. Taking these precautions was exhausting, but I counted on the fact that Dirk could sometimes be thrown by small things.

Along with the Superman disguise, Dirk had a few other personas in his manic closet. One was a tatty spy. During one endless spring, Dirk had introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond,” then waved the plastic pistol in everyone’s face and told them he was off to squash Goldfinger. For this Bond personality, Dirk had a very grotty white tuxedo, a garment he’d acquired from a bum in California, who’d claimed he’d got it from Our Man in Havana. The suit was several inches too short in the pants and jacket cuffs, covered with stains whose origins I preferred not to think about, and so creased you knew he and a dozen other people had slept in it.

He also had several sporting personas. Sometimes he pretended he was Tiger Woods, roaming around with an old golfing iron, swinging dangerously in all directions. I’d mistakenly tried to reason with Dirk, telling him that he was the wrong color to start with, would always be the wrong color, and how he lacked the discipline to be a golfing champion. This enraged him. I still hadn’t learned that you can’t reason with a man who’s down on his lithium. I always hoped that I’d get through that thick, sick hide of his, get through to that other Dirk who had to be in there somewhere.

Maybe I was overestimating him. After all, Dirk had been no great shakes as a child either. He’d terrorized me when I was small by opening up The Wizard of Oz to the Wicked Witch of the West illustration. Her green face and clawlike hands had made my whole being curdle. Dirk used to chase me from room to room holding up the scary page and forcing me to look.

He’d drawn swastikas in indelible ink on the foreheads of every one of my dolls and hung them from the curtain rod in my bedroom.

He’d tormented me from the day I made my entrance into this life.

Was it any wonder I couldn’t get through to him?

I clumped to work through the gloomy streets, dodging in doorways and scaring myself every few minutes with my own reflection. My first stop was at La Tazza, the little café next to the gallery. Lunging through the entrance, I was hit with the rich, dense aroma of ten different kinds of coffee. Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice. Behind the counter, a plump purple-hued girl moved lazily, taking glass jars down from shelves and pouring coffee beans into cellophane bags, folding the tops, and smoothing on the little gold labels as if it were a kind of meditation.

“Hi, Nelly.” She looked miffed for a second. “It’s me, Lucy.”

Behind her back, we called her Nelly the Grape. She wore only the color purple, in every variation. Today, her skirt was a deep periwinkle shade, her blouse lilac—while her hair, angelized, glinted like garnets when it caught the light. Her nails, eyelids and lips were a similar wine shade.

“I didn’t recognize you. How’s it going? I don’t know how you can sit there all day in a gallery full of penises. I’d get worked up…you know…being reminded…thinking about it.”

“I’m dead from the neck down. Numb from disillusionment.” I shrugged. “But at least this way, I don’t forget what they look like.”

“Crappy love life, eh?”

“Nonexistent. Put one of those big gooey slices in a bag for me, will you, Nelly? What are they anyway?”

“It’s a Black Forest slice, double fudge and cream, cherry filling, layers of chocolate, whipped cream and cherry along the top as well.”

“That ought to make up for two love lives.”

Nelly prepared my double latte and put the huge sweet gooey slice of empty calories in the bag. “Here you are. Enjoy.” She unconsciously ran her tongue around her lips, like a big fluffy cat enjoying the cream.

I was ready to climb into the trenches. The enemy incursion would be hard to predict. It was silly to take chances.

I unlocked the gallery door, darted inside, locked it again, and got down to the serious business awaiting me.

I had to track down Paul Bleeker’s number and let him know why I hadn’t been at the Rain Room to meet him. Let him know that I hadn’t meant to ditch him. That I was interested. That I still existed. But his number wasn’t listed. I tried calling new listings, found nothing, gave up and opened the e-mails.

I got a jolt when I double-clicked on the incoming mail and there was a message from pbleeker@coastnet.ca— “Sorry, I couldn’t make it last night, Lucy Luv”—I lingered over the “Luv” for a bit—“Something came up. Cheers. P.B.”

The reptile! He hadn’t shown up after all. Well, it was a two-way dumping ground. I typed a new message. “Sorry I didn’t show yesterday. Unavoidable business. Perhaps another evening? Lucy Madison.”

He was supposed to believe that I hadn’t seen his message, that I didn’t even know he’d sent one? All he had to do was look at the time on my message.

What I really needed to know was why? Why had he stood me up in the Rain Room? But then I’d stood him up, too, thanks to Dirk. Whatever Paul Bleeker’s excuse was, if he even bothered with one, I’m sure that Nadine was to blame. She would have to add him to her list of scalps. It was impossible for her not to try. It came to her more easily than breathing. See desired object. Take desired object. It was as simple as that. And I knew from past experience that very few men could resist her allure. Translation: resist her money.

I stifled my disappointment with some of the gooey sweet slice.

The morning crawled. No superheroes or spies materialized. The only interruption was a middle-aged Japanese couple, tourists without a word of English. They tittered and chattered over some etchings for a good half hour and then made their choice. You would have thought they were buying a Van Gogh, they were so pleased with themselves. They picked out a monster member in lurid pinks and purples, then with much bowing and smiling, they put it on their VISA and took it away. One less willy in my life.

I surfed the net for a while then e-mailed Sky, “Help, I’m a prisoner in a Gastown weenie factory.”

She e-mailed back, “Aye, there’s the rub.”

We agreed to meet for lunch at our usual place.

It was ten minutes to one when Nadine finally arrived. She wore dark glasses and when I said “Good morning” too brightly, she let out a grunt of disgust and retreated into her office. I was surprised that she didn’t send me out to get her something to eat.

“I’m going for lunch,” I yelled in the direction of the door. When there was no answer, I put on my coat and headed off to meet Sky.

Evvie’s Midnight Diner was one of those Naugahydebooth, dusty plastic aspidistra, twirly-stool-at-the-long-steel-counter kind of places near East Hastings. A hungry part of town. Evvie was actually a huge ugly-beautiful Lebanese man. His name was unpronounceable so everyone just called him Evvie. He had bought the place from the real Evvie back in Jeremy’s day, sold it in the eighties, gone home to Lebanon, seen what a Swiss cheese had been made of his home country, hightailed it back to Canada, bought his old diner back, and restored it to exactly what it had been in the seventies, right down to the liverish color of the booths.

Evvie’s Midnight Diner had been a well-kept secret for decades, a haunt for vanilla drunks, Korea crazies, fresh air inspectors and actors waiting up to read their reviews in the morning papers. Now it was becoming fashionable again simply because it was so unfashionable. The real thing. Sky and I had given up being virtuous and eating at those health food places with the nut rissole burgers and grass cutting teas. Evvie’s served cheap old-fashioned unhealthy food and piles of it.

Sure, there were salads on the menu at Evvie’s, too, but it would have been frivolous for a person in my financial position to bypass the mountainous, double-cheese, bacon and mushroom burgers with the side of fries for a sagging lettuce leaf and an anemic tomato slice. Or the platter of battered and deep-fried halibut and prawn with loads of tartar sauce. It was good dollar value.

Let’s be frank here. Only the rich can afford to starve.

And there was another problem. The food I left in the fridge at home disappeared mysteriously before I could get to it. I thought I was being clever, eating out, keeping my food out of the Viking’s mouth. She’d denied touching any of it, just as I’d denied touching her Glug. I asked her if maybe her conquests didn’t get hungry and thirsty in the night, and perhaps didn’t make a raid on the provisions, but her eyes and mouth narrowed into a sneering expression and she said, “You jealous.”

Sky was sitting in our booth at the end of the diner. She was not alone. With her, was a man whose hair was just a little too blond. His trimmed mustache lurked on his upper lip like a small yellow rodent. His face was buffed to an unnatural shine. He wore a lavender-colored Lacoste T-shirt, a preppy gray knit sweater knotted around his shoulders, and a pair of jeans that were so tight I wouldn’t have been surprised if he squeaked when he talked. He was fit though, and very neat. Nice and tidy right down to his fingernails. He must have been edging on forty—perhaps he was older—but he gave the impression of eternal forced youth.

He was running his hand up and down Sky’s arm and if he kept at it much longer, he was going to leave her with no skin. There was no doubt about it. He had taken possession of her. And Sky seemed pretty happy to be possessed. She had a slightly goofy expression on her face and a bruised, trampled look about her. When I sat down at the table, she held out her hand, palm up, in a Ta-da gesture and said, “Lucy Madison, Max Kinghorn.”

So this was the guy who had hired Sky to manage the store, the famous boss from Seattle. I peered rudely.

Max didn’t bother to stand up on my arrival as I might have expected from such a tidy polite-looking person. He must have sensed my hostility. He laughed a nervous, whiny, slightly nasal laugh and went back to the arm stroking as if his life depended on it.

I stretched out my hand to shake his, and to stop him from doing all that damned stroking.

“Sky’s told me all about you,” I said, forcing myself to smile.

He whinnied again.

She had told me all about him. She’d gone into quite a lot of gory detail.

Max Kinghorn was the owner of the Retro Metro Boutique, but he lived in Seattle where he had other vintage boutiques. He was a strange bird. A vulture, to be precise. He stocked his stores by reading obituaries published up and down the West Coast, from California to B.C. He was always ready to swoop down on the defunct’s family and offer to take the horrid burden of dusty antiquated clothing, furniture and knickknacks off their hands. As vintage vultures go, I gathered he was the best in his trade. But Sky, I wanted to scream, Oh Sky, what about that little thing you told me about Max, that one, really important detail?

Max shifted, gave a few last frenzied strokes, then pecked Sky demurely on the cheek. “Well, I’m sure you ladies have a lot to talk about. I’ll get going. I have business in Port Townsend.” Then he whispered to Sky, “Ciao, liebchen, I’ll call you.”

I could picture it already, Max hovering and slavering as he waited to pick over the corpse down in Port Townsend, offering condolences to the bereaved family along with his certified cheque.

I watched him leave then glared at Sky across the table. “That’s Max, Sky? The infamous Max?”

She glared back at me. “Don’t get worked up about it. I told you I thought he was interesting.”

“I didn’t realize you thought he was that interesting.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”

Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.

“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”

Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.

“He’s so…so…”

“Gay?”

“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”

“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.

Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”

“I think I need to start worrying about you.”

“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.

“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s time you started listening to your mother, Sky. All those talks of hers about self-esteem and so on.”

“You’re not listening to me, Luce. Shut up for a minute. What I mean is, I’m something new for him. I’m exotic. By comparison, I mean. You know, by comparison to being with men.”

“Sure you are, dear,” I said in the voice my mother used on me when I was eight.

“And Christ, Lucy, you should see the way he looks in a suit.”

I wanted to see the way he looked in a suit. A suit of armor. Dropped into the ocean, with him in it.

Sky always had been a sucker for a nice garment. Her degree is in theatrical costume design. We met when the university theater department roped me into doing a little set painting for a production of Peer Gynt. During that particular show, she was fighting with the director, who’d slept with her then refused to acknowledge her. She took revenge by using weak seams in strategic places. A few belly dancers accidentally bared their nipples during the dance sequence and some trolls had codpiece problems while trogging around in the Hall of the Mountain King. We giggled like idiots from backstage. Apart from that, it was an uneventful production.

Sky had had a lot of boyfriends back in the university days, but none of them had left her with the day-after evidence that Max had.

“I can’t resist him.” She shook her head, then grimaced and stuck out her tongue at me.

“When are you seeing him again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course I don’t know. Why would I know? He’s a busy man. So stop asking me trick questions.”

I didn’t remind Sky of that drunken evening just after I’d gotten rid of Frank. The one where Sky and I started out delicately sipping white wine and ended up falling headfirst into gallons of tequila sunrise, sloppily guzzling and making a lot of drunken Never Again promises. Never Again would we go out with men who were lechers, men who were leeches, men who were misogynists, men who were polygamists—our list was quite long and we pretty much eliminated half the human race.

After all the Never Agains, and since Mr. Perfect still hadn’t shown up, it was just a question of choosing one of the guys off the Never Again list.

I said, “Let’s forget about him for a minute. Let’s not let men ruin our lunch.”

“Good thinking.” Sky suddenly looked like her old self again.

I launched into all my news. Jeremy’s funeral, Paul Bleeker’s big show and small advances, Connie. When she heard the Connie part, Sky said, “I think you need to talk to Reebee on this one. You might need a shot of voodoo.”

Reebee Robertson is Sky’s mother and my creativity expert. In her forty-seven years of life, Reebee has been Rolfed, Reike-ed, Shiatsu-ed, acupunctured, transactionally analyzed, regressionally analyzed, re-birthed, de-birthed, Jung-ed, Freuded, Adlered, Kleined and Winnicotted. These days she offered up her own kind of psychological hodgepodge. Her techniques may not have been highly regarded by the head-shrinking intelligentsia but they worked for me.

For a small painting, she would leave me thinking how wonderful I was and get me unstuck when I was blocked and unable to paint. Of course, I had to put up with Sky snickering on the sidelines at what she called all that New Age drivel.

Reebee had turned a life’s worth of experiments and hapless wandering into a psychology degree. Then she had added a whole lot of other elements—myth and superstition—to her treatment. In her New Age way, she had renovated and furnished her Kitsilano house with favors.

She traded her way through life, something that Sky couldn’t tolerate. “Give me the delicious feel of cool hard cash any day,” Sky was prone to saying, punctuated with, “I’m a material girl.” Sky lusted after clean sheets and her own pristine space. It was hard to blame her really. Reebee had dragged the protesting toddler from a Salt Spring Island commune to Victoria group house to a California Hari Krishna plantation to a hammock on a Maui beach, before finally dumping her with the grandparents back in Vancouver when she decided to go back to university.

The waitress brought our orders and just before Sky threw herself on the club sandwich, she said, “Really terrible about Jeremy. Easter’s going to be awful without him, isn’t it? God, I can still remember that year when we all went out to Cedar Narrows for the big meal. I nearly peed myself laughing, Jeremy making all those Jesus jokes, and your dad turning scarlet with rage.”

“That was Jeremy all over. A terrible tease.”

“Where are you spending it this year?”

“Don’t know. My parents’ place in Cedar Narrows as usual, I guess.”

“You could spend it with us. Reebee will probably be doing something obscene with tofu but there’ll be lots of good wine.” Sky became emphatic. “She really wants to see you. I’ve been keeping her up-to-date, but she wants to see you in person.”

“I don’t know about Easter.”

“Call her.”

“I will.”

“Promise you’ll call her today, when you get back to work.”

“I promise. But I’ve got to do something about the Dirk situation. I’ve got to see my parents and get this thing sorted out. He might show up. I should go out to Cedar Narrows and act as a decoy. Big holidays always bring out the worst in him. If only he’d just come out and behave badly and we could have him arrested. And there’s one other thing about going to Cedar Narrows for Easter.”

“What’s that?”

“Having to show up alone and unmarried when that walking hormone of my cousin and her perfect husband will be there. You know Cherry. She’ll be front and center with Michael and her entire demon spawn and probably pregnant with triplets if I know her.”

Sky nodded and then a wicked smile crept across her face. “You could ask Paul Bleeker to Easter at your parents’. I’m sure he’d appreciate your mother’s collection. All that marvelous sculpture.”

I swatted her with the menu.

I took my time getting back to the gallery that afternoon. Max was far from perfect but at least Sky had someone to stroke all the skin off her arm. All I had was a vague possibility that Paul Bleeker might, if he happened to remember, ask me out again. And even at that, there was no guarantee that he’d show up.

When I got back to the gallery, Nadine’s office door was open and she was moaning into the phone. “So did I, darling, so did I…so are you, darling, so are you…it was, darling, it really was…it was so…what, Night Porter?…no, I rather think Last Tango in Paris.”

I confess I haven’t seen these movies but the word-of-mouth rehashes of the important bits have a wide circulation.

Nadine stuck her head out of the office, glared at me, and continued talking. “Do let’s do it again. I’ll supply the champers and the toys. You supply the…yes, that. Yes, of course I will.”

I don’t know about you, but when I really want a man, I choose to ignore his past, even if it’s a very recent past, like a just-a-minute-ago-on-the-other-end-of-a-telephone past, just as long as it really is past and doesn’t creep into the present or the future. I couldn’t be sure who was on the other end of the line, but I wanted to be prepared for any eventuality. I mean, a man that came with no past, what kind of a man could he be? On the other hand, a man that sleeps with Nadine Thorpe? Nadine Thorpe was one big walking appetite. And Nadine looked flattened and mussed-up today. She had definitely had sex last night. Everybody—Nadine, Sky, Max, that middle-aged Japanese couple, possibly even my parents (repellent thought)—was having sex but me. It was time to take action. It was time to get therapy. I phoned Reebee and got myself invited for dinner that Friday night.

5

It took some courage. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. After the Frank episode, I was afraid to see her, afraid of what she’d tell me because I’d avoided her the whole time I’d been involved with him. I was like a Catholic who hadn’t been to confession in a really long time, and all my sins had piled up so that I was going to Hell for certain and no priest could save me.

I rang the doorbell and waited. Reebee opened up and stood there nodding and smiling smugly. She was tiny, even smaller than Sky. Her long silvery-dark hair was pulled into a braid, and she wore an antique Chinese silk dress that hung to her feet. Her earrings were coin yen with ivory gambling sticks dangling from them. Although it was March, and still cold, she wore thongs on her feet. There was a strange musty odor to her, like closed rooms and incense.

Her first words to me were, “Your aura, Lucy. It’s very strange. Come inside and we’ll fix it.”

“Sure,” I said, “get out your aura repair kit. Why, what’s wrong with it?”

“It’s full of anger and jealousy, with a little sadness thrown in.” She put an arm across my shoulders and said, “I’m sorry about Jeremy. But then it’s clear to see that it was his time. He had to move on. But I wouldn’t worry. His karma was good. He’ll be moving onto a higher plane. Do you want some tea before we start?” she asked.

“Uh…dunno,” I muttered. Reebee called it tea but the stuff she served was mulch in my opinion. “You wouldn’t have any real tea, would you, something with a punch to it like Twinings English Breakfast or Lapsang souchong?”

“Ah, Lapsang souchong. What memories. A remnant of another life.”

Reebee and her lives.

“Yes?”

“It seems I was a Chinese courtesan as well.” She said this proudly. It explained her new get-up.

“No kidding. When did you discover this?”

“Last week. I was having a session and this came up.”

“Go on.”

“It’s not too clear. I just have the end, which is usually the way it goes with these sessions. The death scene. I think I must have been a wealthy man’s concubine, because my clothes were gorgeous. And I had these tiny feet. I was trying to get away, to run, but I could barely walk with these terrible feet the size of children’s fists. I’m sure it was the other wives and concubines who murdered me because the last image I have is of lying on the ground and looking up and there are all these other women standing over me with knives. I was pregnant, too.”

“Oh my God, Reebee, that’s awful.”

“It’s passed. I’ve moved on.”

“Yeah, I guess you have.”

And that was how it went with her. She was always discovering new past lives, and for a while she’d drift around in the costume of the person she’d been until the next life or this life took her over. She’d been a friend of Archimedes, helping him on the construction of the great lighthouse at Alexandria. She’d been a general of Genghis Khan’s, in the end slicing off heads all along the Khan’s funeral route until her own head was sliced off. She’d been at the courts of Catherine the Great and Elizabeth the First. I envied her. She really got around.

Reebee said again, “So how about this tea?”

“Lapsang souchong?”

She shook her head as if I were a lost cause and sighed heavily, “Hibiscus tea. That’s what I’m going to give you. Your aura is demanding it.”

She disappeared into the kitchen and I sat down on her couch. Reebee’s house had a view of the ocean from its glassed-in sunporch. I could see freighter lights glittering in the dark distant bay. The whole house shivered and shimmered with bells and wind chimes, Ojibwa dream catchers, wall hangings, mobiles. It was full of color and clutter in contrast to Sky’s high-rise apartment with its clean sparse lines and neutral colors.

Reebee’s house always made me feel as if there were great and infinite possibilities, that my life could work out the way I wanted if I just applied myself somehow.

She came back a few minutes later and set a tray with two mugs down on the coffee table. Without a word she grabbed both of my hands, scrutinized them, then frowned. “You haven’t been painting.”

I told her about the Viking invasion.

“So the Swedish woman is supposed to help balance the budget.”

I nodded.

“And all this deficit is because of Frank the Writer?” asked Reebee.

I nodded again. “The so-called writer. You’re welcome to say I told you so.”

“I would never say I told you so. Tell me how it ended.”

The ending. It was funny because I had been thinking about the end of Frank just before Jeremy died. A few months back, Sky and I had had the bright idea of going for a drink at the Sylvia Hotel. Of course, I should have realized what a stupid choice the Sylvia was. As soon as I was through the door, I saw Frank. And god, it was like being in a time warp. He gave the impression of having been born in that spot, of never having moved, of having stagnated in that corner forever. The girl sitting across from him even looked a little like me. I felt sorry for her and hoped she didn’t have a lot of money in her bank account.

I knew exactly what he was talking about, because his voice rose above the others, but also because I had endured his rant a million times. It was his party piece, his hobbyhorse. If only I’d known back then what it would all amount to. Back then, I’d thought he was very clever and intellectual.

Frank was going on and on about the play Waiting for Godot.

He’d dragged me to see it shortly after we first met. I’d been up for the whole of the previous night helping to mount an exhibit and was tired when I got to the theater.

The play is about these two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, or Didi and Gogo, who are waiting for this guy Godot. I kept nodding off and waking up and whispering to Frank, “Has he arrived yet? Wake me when Godot arrives.” And Frank just looked at me with an expression that said, “What a pathetic ignoramus!” How was I to know Godot never shows up? The second time Frank dragged me to a different production of it, I found the play sort of funny in places and I actually stayed awake.

As for the third and fourth productions, well, I’d rather not talk about it. Let’s just say I probably won’t sit through two showings when they make the movie.

Afterward, the first time, we went for a drink at the Sylvia Hotel and Frank sat in his spot and lectured. Are Vladimir and Estragon—Didi and Gogo—a sort of everyman, a representation of all mankind? I argued (he didn’t expect it) that it was a thin representation of mankind, and extinct by now, because there weren’t any women on that stage unless it was a futuristic play about cloning, then it was okay. Frank launched in… You’ve missed it entirely, Lucy, the biblical allusions, God in the word Godot, the prayerlike elation in the hope that Godot will come and the certainty that he will not, blah, blah, blah.

Standing in the doorway to the Sylvia’s lounge with Sky, I knew exactly what Frank was saying to that plumpish girl with the red hair, the girl sitting exactly where I used to sit. Frank was even wearing the same old rancid corduroy jacket he’d always worn, the same expression of superiority animating his face. The only difference was that his hair was shorter. Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? After what I did to it.

I turned around and dragged Sky away with me to some more respectable drinking establishment. I hate flogging dead horses.

The day I put an end to me and Frank, the day I discovered the overdraft at my bank and the fact that he’d forged my signature on a cheque, I’d planned on a lot of revenge, mostly cliché scenarios. I seethed and plotted all the way home. I thought of the woman who had cut off one sleeve of each of her husband’s suits and shirts, but that only works if the man has a vast, expensive wardrobe. I thought of feeding Frank one meal so full of chili pepper that it would put him in hospital.

When I got home, Frank wasn’t there.

His daily routine consisted of getting up after I’d left for work, then spending the day “writing his novel,” which was a project that required intense study of nearly all the shows on daytime television, and involved a lot of overflowing ashtrays and scrunched-up cheeseball bags. After that, he was off to the Sylvia Hotel for a few beers in his usual corner before I got home, giving me plenty of time to clean up his mess and prepare dinner. Then he’d saunter in around seven, full of the local lager and himself, ready for his meal.

The night of the forged cheque, I didn’t prepare anything. Food was the furthest thing from my mind. When I saw that he hadn’t come home yet, I went out again and sat in the cinema at the end of the street. It was running a Fellini festival, so for a while I slouched in the seat and watched large lazy women and small horny men cavort relentlessly. I decided to go home when the subtitles started to blur before my eyes.

I approached my building by the back way. The two homeless men who often slept in the Dumpster—I’d privately nicknamed them Didi and Gogo—were there with their shopping carts and plastic bags full of junk, or rather, their worldly goods. They were ready to settle in for the night. It was September and just starting to get chilly.

I waved. They waved back.

Inside, I found Frank sprawled out on the double bed, facedown and snoring. He was wearing nothing but his dingy boxer shorts. The sight of him made me furious. Tears began streaming down my face, which rage had turned the color of a ripe tomato. I went into the living room and screamed into the sofa cushions. If I had been a Fellini character, I might have had the nerve to wake him up and smack him around directly. But I was just Lucy, about to be Frankless, and that meant some act of quiet treachery.

I was careful not to make any noise, which wasn’t easy because I was sobbing and hiccupping. I went around the apartment and gathered up all of Frank’s stuff, his clothes and books and general rubbish, and heaped them into a pile by the bedroom window. The window faced the back with the Dumpster and Didi and Gogo. As I was building the pile, Frank snorted and gnashed his teeth a couple of times in his sleep but didn’t wake up.

I left the mound by the window and went to get the scissors from my sewing box. While Frank slept, I sheared a chunk of hair out of the middle of the back of his head, as short as I could get it without rousing him. His hair was shoulder-length at the time and he was quite vain about it. I opened the bedroom window and let the lock of hair waft down to the street below. Didi and Gogo saw me. I waved to them, still silently blubbering, and began to drop Frank’s things out the bedroom window. They hurried over and gathered up as much of his stuff as they could carry or cram into their shopping carts. When I’d finished, I yelled so that the whole neighborhood could hear, “Godot has arrived.”

Frank woke up with a start and said, “Wuzza?”

I threatened him with my aerosol-pump can of pepper spray, told him to put on his disgusting corduroy jacket and leave. He staggered out of the apartment in a stupor, wearing nothing but that jacket and his boxer shorts, and the last I saw of him, he was playing tug-of-war for his possessions with Didi and Gogo at the back of the building.

“That was a bit naughty of you,” said Reebee. “You realize you had to go through it. Being with Frank had its purpose although it’s usually a while before we know what that purpose is. Did you press charges?”

“No. I was too embarrassed. I didn’t want anybody to know how stupid I’d been by putting up with such a lout. I thought I was supporting the next Michael Ondaatje.”

Reebee smiled. “I grew up in the sixties and seventies, Lucy sweetheart. You and Sky, you girls, your generation is miles ahead of mine. I fell for men just because they had nice threads and longer, nicer hair than mine. Now tell me about your dreams.”

Reebee always asked about my dreams. When I first started taking my problems to her, I was always asking whether or not I was going crazy. It was my private terror, that the genetic pool would try to drown me, that I’d become like Dirk, put on a Supergirl costume and start wandering around town harassing people, and not even realize I was doing it. According to Reebee, my dreams could gauge my mental state. In fact, it was Reebee who first encouraged me to start painting them all those years ago.

So I told her about the one I’d had the night before.

Mother was having a big house party. My father was nowhere around, in fact I didn’t even know he existed. It was sort of like our house in Cedar Narrows but it was better. There were more rooms and conservatories and rolling lawns. Drunken guests were sprawling everywhere and having a good time and I was aware that they’d been there all night, that it was light out and morning was coming. I went into the dining room and there was my mother and her new husband sitting at a very elegant table, just the two of them, about to have breakfast, like the king and queen of some land where people did nothing but party. The table was set with white linen and silverware, croissants and orange juice and caffe latte.

My mother’s new husband was Ugo Tognazzi, the actor who was in La Cage aux Folles, the macho one living with the transvestite performer.

In the dream, I was quite pleased with my mother’s choice of husband. When I came up to the table, UgoTognazzi told me that he had decided to give me a present for my high school graduation. He was holding a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and pointing at pictures of fancy black lace underwear. I told him that I’d graduated from high school years ago. So then he said, “University graduation then, you did graduate from university, didn’t you?” And in the dream I honestly couldn’t remember if I had or not. I had the sensation that there was a lot of unfinished business left over from university days.

Ugo Tognazzi said, “Look, this is what I’m going to give you.” It was the same shawl that keeps showing up in my other dreams: the white silk and lace one embroidered with flowers and vines and birds. I was touched by his gesture because it was beautiful. The perfect gift.

Reebee was nodding and smiling.

“What do you think it means?” I asked her.

“Hell if I know,” she said. “You’re the one who’s got to figure it out. But there is one interesting point in there.”

“What’s that?”

“Ugo Tognazzi. You like your mother’s choice of husband, a gay man in the movie, but in actual fact, straight in real life. The actor I mean.”

Then she left the room and came back with a large pad and oil pastels. “Draw the shawl,” she said. “Show me what it looks like.” I hesitated. It was like a smack in the face. It should have been so simple to just pick up the pastel and draw, but I realized that with all that had been going on in my life, it had been at least six months since I’d actually drawn a single line. Reebee looked at me knowingly and nodded as if to say, go on, you can do it.

“While you’re sketching, tell me about Jeremy’s girlfriend. Sky mentioned that there was some problem but I want to hear it from you.”

“Connie.”

I couldn’t say her name without feeling a twinge in the pit of my stomach.

“Jeremy wanted me to keep an eye out for Connie. A request from Jeremy was something you didn’t ignore when he was alive. And I know if I ignore this one now that he’s dead, he’ll come back to haunt me in my dreams. Connie’s pregnant. The thing is, she told me she used to use heroin. Jeremy met her in Las Vegas but I don’t know where she’s from before that. She looks like an old showgirl. One that never quite made it. Not sunny enough, if you know what I mean.”

Reebee’s expression was deadpan.

“Reebee, I can’t explain it. When I’m around Connie I feel like I’m going to be sucked into a black hole. She’s one of the scariest people I’ve ever met and I can’t even say why. But it’s Jeremy’s baby she’s having. That’s if everything goes okay. She was smoking her head off last time I saw her and who knows what else she might be doing while we’re not watching. She looked terrible when I saw her.”

“Go and see her again, Lucy. It was what Jeremy wanted. He wanted someone to watch out for her and the someone he chose is you. That’s a responsibility.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Well, you could ignore your responsibility and just not bother, but can you imagine how you’d feel?”

I nodded.

“Watch out for her. You have to do it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I left Reebee’s after eleven. We’d had one of her meatless dinners of pumpkin soup, blue corn bread and a green salad, and I was starving again. I got off the bus and hurried through the windy streets toward my own refrigerator hoping the Viking might have left me a few measly scraps of something Swedish—some rye crispbread, some pickled herring.

As I turned up my street, I could hear footsteps behind me. I walked a little faster. The footsteps were coming closer. I crossed over to the other side and heard the footsteps cross over with me. I shoved my hand into my bag and groped my little spray-pump bottle full of lemon juice and chili pepper. The footsteps were right behind me. I reeled around to face my attacker, but he had grabbed the bottle before I could squeeze.

6

“Lucy!”

I screamed, “What are you trying to do scaring me to death like that?”

Paul Bleeker said, “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d call on you.”

“It’s nearly midnight.”

“I was passing through the area and thought I’d look you up. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about you. I was asking myself tonight, ‘Where is that sumptuous redhead when I need her? I’ll go and find her.’”

“At eleven-fifty at night?”

“My best ideas come at night.”

We were nearly at my building. He stopped, grabbed me by both shoulders, moved me over to a cement wall, grinned and leaned in to kiss me, pressing me up against the Virginia creeper. I was too surprised to say anything.

“You live here,” he reminded me, taking me by the hand and leading me up the steps. I fumbled the keys out of my purse and unlocked the main door. His breath was hot on my neck.

Because I was well brought up, I said, “Would you like to come in? I don’t know what I can offer you. I’m afraid I don’t have anything. A glass of water?”

“Get what you need. I want you to come out with me.”

“You want me to? …Uh…sure.”

“I want to drop in on some friends first. That all right with you?”

I nodded.

“They’re artists. Very interesting people.” He gave me an intense look, and added, “Will you model for me? The show only needs a couple more pieces. You would round the whole thing out very nicely.”

Little did I know at the time how literal his words would be.

“And I work very quickly once I have my concept,” he said. “Would you do it for me?”

“What? When? Tonight?” I had planned to go on a diet first. I had planned to lose about a thousand pounds before taking my clothes off in front of him. There was the question of that little roll of midriff lard.

“That all right with you, Lucy?”

In my head, I’d played my encounter with him over and over, the clothes, the moves, the snappy retorts. All I could do now was mumble, “Okay.”

As I unlocked the door to my apartment, his hand slithered around my waist. We moved, crablike, into the hallway. Anna was in the front room doing yoga. Her chest was on the floor and her legs arched backward over her head so that the tips of her toes nearly touched her nose. She straightened out, rolled over, put her feet over her head and her perfect buns in the air.

“My roommate Anna,” I said.

Paul said, “Hallo.”

“Hallo,” came a voice from somewhere under her butt.

He whispered in my ear, “Get your stuff. I’ll wait here.”

I dashed like a fast-forward video clip, collecting things from the bathroom and bedroom and shoving them into a large purse. Everything that deodorizes went into that bag, as well as some new peach lace underwear I’d been saving for a special occasion.

Paul hustled me out of the building and down to where his black Ford van was parked at the end of the street. I thought it was gallant of him to open the door on the passenger side. I climbed in. The van smelled vaguely of gerbil’s cage, and the back was full of black garbage bags. Art supplies, I imagined.

“You know, Lucy,” he said. “I’ve met you before, but I just can’t remember where.”

The light was dawning. I wasn’t such a zilch after all. “Art 400 seminar. About seven years ago. University.”

“Was it there?” He looked worried.

I had the opening. I should have said, “I’m an artist, too,” but it just wouldn’t come out. It seemed like a ridiculous thing to say to Paul Bleeker, one-time Bad Boy of British Underground Art and now Star of the International Art Scene. He was too famous. I’d never sold a single painting. People had stolen my paintings, or traded something for them, but never actually paid real money.

“I got my degree in Fine Arts,” I said to my feet.

He shook his head and sort of half laughed, half snorted. “One of the Ivory Tower lot, are you, duckie? Thought you would be safe in the cocoon of academia? No one’s safe.” His British accent was back. He laughed again. This time, it was a weird, quiet snicker-snacking sound.

There’d been a lot written about Paul. About how he’d run away from home at the age of thirteen because his father had wanted him to go into the corner-store grocery business with him. How his mother had died when he was ten. How he’d lived hand-to-mouth with a group of derelict artists that eventually became known as the East Sheen Group. And then how the East Sheen Group picked over refuse heaps looking for usable materials for their works.

I’d read all about Paul Bleeker’s breaking out of the Group with a one-man show of his own, all crafted in found bits of rusting metal. He had been involved in big conceptual projects, too, like the one that got him three days of jail—the giant game of Cat’s Cradle over Stonehenge, using bungee cords and professional rock climbers.

As for his personal life, he had stated in the interviews, “I like women if that’s what you nosy lot want to know.” There was a lot of speculation about who his women were in those days, but nothing concrete was reported.

I remembered this and sighed to myself. He was gorgeous. He reminded me of the singer from Wet, Wet, Wet.

Okay. Yes, I confess, I’ve always been a bit of a Wettie. Paul Bleeker’s resemblance to Marti Pellow was strong enough in certain moments that I half expected him to croon all those lyrics about wanting to get close to me, right into my ear in the same languid sexy tones. If he could sing like that, I would willingly be his slave.

I snuck glances at Paul as he drove. He certainly had a profile like Marti Pellow’s. He had those same dark, sexy looks. But I could see there wasn’t going to be any serenade. Paul was a busy man, a true artist with true art to make. What I hadn’t realized before was that a working artist had to make sacrifices. He had no time to be crooning or sitting around in places like the Rain Room drinking big sloppy drinks with little umbrellas in them.

We drove in the direction of the university. I was encouraged. It was an area of big comfortable wooden houses with large yards and beautiful gardens. I could picture us already, standing around in a plush living room with a bunch of savvy people discussing art with a capital A and drinking a decent chilled Italian white wine, while we waited to help ourselves to the buffet, which the considerate hosts had prepared. I was starving.

Paul stopped the van in front of a brown house with peeling paint and a garden that featured, above all, waist-high thistles, dandelions and morning glory. Paul reached across the gear shift and touched my cheek. “You’re an artist. You’ll like these guys, luv. Old-fashioned Bohemians.”

An artist! A famous artist had just called me an artist. How did he know? He hadn’t even seen my work. Maybe someone had told him about it. Nadine perhaps. It didn’t matter. I climbed out of the van and followed him into the darkness. He was pushing his way through the overgrowth that blocked the path leading around the side of the house to the back. I stayed close, getting whipped in the face by the branches as they left his hand and snapped backward.

A dim bulb lit the stairs leading up to the back door and revealed a yard full of junk. Most of it was rusting scrap metal. There was even part of a smashed-up Cadillac, its massive snout crinkled up long ago in some nightmarish impact.

I followed Paul closely. The steps weren’t safe. There were more rotten boards in the staircase than good ones. Paul seemed to know his way because he bounded fearlessly up all the right ones while I picked my way as if through a field of land mines trying to ignore the dangerous splintering noises under my feet. Paul didn’t bother knocking. He just walked right in.

The kitchen was in darkness but I could make out the sink full of unwashed dishes, the take-out Chinese food and frozen TV dinner boxes piled on the kitchen table and counters. And I couldn’t help but notice the paraphernalia. Paul caught me staring and said, “The lads like to do a little spliffing-up from time to time.” There was a contraption in the corner that was straight out of Alice in Wonderland. All it needed was a caterpillar.

“Spliffing-up? That hookah’s bigger than me,” I said too loudly.

He smiled. “C’mon,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me toward the living room.

His four friends, “the real Bohemians,” were slouched around the dimly lit space and seemed intent on creating a thicker, smokier fug in the room. They all rolled their own from pouches of Drum tobacco. Two of them were seated on the floor, another on a sofa whose stuffing was popping out in several places, and the fourth was stretched full-length in the middle of the floor staring at the ceiling, fascinated. I heard the one on the sofa say to no one in particular, “Yeah, oi fink it’s super ven, really, fabulous, absolutely staggering, yeah, amazing ven, innit?”

One of the floor sitters, a guy with black hair growing on every available part of his face, noticed Paul and leapt to his feet. “Corrr, Bleeker you ol’ git, where’ya been?” His beady black eyes did a quick tour of my body. “Corrr, ooo’s the bi’a crumpet?”

I tried not to let it get to me. Nobody was calling me anything edible these days so I tried to take crumpet as a compliment.

“Bloody good crack, it is, seein’ you, you ol’ wanka,” said the man on the sofa. He was a superannuated hippy, fiftyish, thin droopy features and long reddish-gray hair, much like an Irish setter’s. He got up, came over and gave Paul one of those self-conscious cool-guy hugs.

At that point, the others all followed suit, including the prone ceiling-gazer. I had to listen to a lot of corr and blimey and fooching roights and poxy thises and thats before I realized that these guys were part of Paul’s old East Sheen group. It accounted for the garbage dump out the back. Since I had so much trouble following their accents—one was from Liverpool, another from Edinburgh, and the remaining two from “Souf’ London”—I sat back and pretended to drink from the bottle of Guinness that was offered to me.

I think the conversation turned to art, but I can’t be sure. There was a long argument that seemed to be about belly-button lint as a medium, and then the topic turned to jelly. Jellied everything. As an art form. Using enormous life-size moulds. Beef broth jellied into the shape of a cow, for example.

At the jelly part, I was finally able to cut through the accents and follow the drift. I saw my chance and leapt in with “aspic?” Unfortunately, it was misinterpreted, and there were a lot of lewd comments and guffaws, so I shrank back into my corner of the floor and kept my mouth shut for the rest of the evening. Who would have thought that suffering for one’s art could take such an unusual direction?

It was Paul’s success that rescued us. As I’ve mentioned, he was a very busy man. He suddenly looked at his watch, said quick goodbyes all round and hustled me out of the house, this time through the front door.

When we were in his van, he said, “Amazing blokes, eh, luv?”

“Amazing,” I said flatly. My backside was numb from sitting on the cold floorboards, my stomach churning from the smoke and the sickly taste of the beer.

“Listen, Lucy luv, just a word. These chaps are not exactly living here legally so it might be best not to mention your meeting them.”

“Oh, okay. I see. I’m curious though. How do they keep body and soul together?”

As if I didn’t know.

“Oh, they do a little of this, a little of that.” He stared straight ahead and drove faster.

Paul’s loft was in Gastown not far from Rogues’ Gallery, in a huge, old brick building. He all but pushed me up the four flights of stairs. As we climbed, he said, “This building was once a brothel.” He opened the door and flicked on a light.

“Interesting,” I mumbled. There was nothing brothel-like about it now, and it was too bad, because the place could have used a little frou-frou. His warehouse space was done in black: shiny black floor, brick walls painted over with dull black, black leather sofa and armchairs in one corner, black glass coffee table and big black bed (!!!) in another corner. The only relief was the computer, and the studio area comprising a curving white ultra-modern psychiatrist’s couch and a white sheet draped on the wall behind it. Along another wall was a row of huge stainless steel walk-in refrigerators, which kept his art supplies, I imagined.

“It’s very…er…black,” I said.

“Absence of light. I need it for my work. The influence of color can be a dangerous thing for an artist.”

“I see.” But I didn’t see at all.

He threw a big switch and the corner with the white sheet became a glare of spotlights. He pointed to the wall near the white zone.

“Over here,” he said. “You can hang your clothes on that hook.”

Just like that. No preliminaries. No coyly helping me ease my way out of my clothes. No stroking all the skin off my arm or other parts of my body. Just straight to the total nudity. He rummaged around and began to prepare his drawing materials. I stood frozen to the spot.

“Well, hurry up.”

I didn’t move.

He laughed that snicker-snack laugh again then came over and put his arms around me. “What a sod I am, asking you to strip just like that. A drink?” He was already headed toward the refrigerators. He opened and closed one of them so quickly I couldn’t see inside, then he came over with a bottle of vodka and two chilled glasses. He poured two huge slugs and handed one to me. “Nasdrovya. You have to knock it back fast.” He finished his in a gulp.

I sipped politely.

“You do want to be my inspiration, don’t you, Lucy luv? My muse?”

I shrugged.

“Well, do you?”

“Errr…”

“Drink up then. It’ll help you relax.”

I downed it. I told myself, what the hell, Paul Bleeker the famous artist wants you to model for him and you stand there like a moron.

He held up both hands. “Okay, okay, just a minute.” He disappeared through a door in the bed area and came back with a black bathrobe. “You can put this on until you’re warmed up. Another drink?”

“Yesh, pleashe.”

I was warming up nicely. After a few more minutes, my clothes seemed to have taken themselves off and I lounged on the shrink’s couch wondering what all the fuss had been about. With the vodka firing through my veins, it became clear that I was born to pose nude, a natural artist’s model, my creamy-skinned gorgeous body poised for immortality…

“Bloody hell, your knees and elbows are blushing. Too sloppy, that pose. Straighten up. Tits front, girl. Arse we’ll do later.”

It was a very long night. Paul Bleeker sketched for hours. He went through reams of paper. I held walking, running and dancing poses. I sat. I stood tall. I bent to the left, willowed to the right. Crouched. Sprawled. Rolled myself into a ball. Stretched out like a corpse. It was exhausting.

Sometime around daybreak, Paul put down his stub of charcoal and came over to me. I was kneeling on the floor. It wasn’t by chance that I was on my knees. I was praying the modelling part of the session would be over soon.

He took me by the elbows and pulled me to my feet, then started kissing me. It was hungry-aggressive kissing. One of his hands gripped me around the waist while he unbuckled and unzipped himself with the other. We stagger-hobbled in the direction of the bed and somewhere just short of it, he pulled me down to the floor. There were a few books lying around and one of the thicker tomes got me in the center of my back. My head was to one side and I could see dust-balls the size of tumbleweeds scudding around underneath the bed. Paul had the condom on in three of the deftest seconds I’ve ever witnessed, and within another twenty seconds, it was all over and he was flopped to one side puffing on a Sobranie and flicking ash onto the floor. I extracted a complete anthology of Henry Miller from between my shoulder blades.

Let’s face it. First times never live up to their promise. It would improve. It would have to. We just needed time to get used to each other.

He fell asleep like that, with the burning cigarette dangling between his fingers. I removed it and stubbed it out. Paul was comatose. I could barely see his breathing.

I grabbed the black robe, pulled it tight around me and stretched out on his bed. I sank into sleep and dreamt I was in a field of wildflowers: poppies, daisies, dandelions, blue cornflowers, borage and lavender, dog roses, nasturtium and burning bush, crocuses, tansy, marigolds. Every season of flower had been rolled into one and dazzled my eyes with their brilliance.

I was aware that there were women standing in the field, each one with a different petal’s color and fragility. A bird like a crow or raven flew overhead, blocking the sun, and in its wake a huge black cloud stopped over the field. It began to rain soot. The petal women melted into the mucky dark ground. I started to run, trying to escape the black rain, but it was like moving in molasses. The rain was coming harder and faster and now there was such loud thunder that I started awake and wondered where the storm was.

It was my stomach rumbling.

Paul was still asleep on the floor and I was famished. I got up, dressed myself and went over to his fridges. There were five of them, and somewhere inside one of them, there had to be a tiny little snack. I grabbed the handle and was about to open the door when a voice barked, “Get away from there.” Paul was sitting up and looking mean.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you kept your victims’ bodies in the fridge.”

He didn’t look amused. “You are never, ever to open any of those. Do you understand?”

“I didn’t realize…”

“Do? You? Understand?” he enunciated, as if I were a child.

“I said I was sorry.”

“Just as long as you understand.”

My lower lip trembled and my eyes began to water.

I know they say crying is healthy, cathartic, that it’s a bad idea to bottle it all up. But tell that to someone like me, a natural crier, whose tear ducts open up and produce whitewater rapids over the slightest provocation. Just once in my life, I longed to be less transparent.

His evil expression softened. He came over and gave me a hug. “Lucy, Christ, I’m a wretched sod. No tears now. It’s where I keep the tools of my trade. Top secret. If you knew what was in there, you’d be susceptible. Some clever bugger of a journalist would find out you’ve been up here and make you spill the surprise. Surprise is a lot in my kind of art. So the less you know the better.”

This was different from the other artists I’d known. The others were usually clubbing journalists over the head with their work, rough or finished.

He coughed and looked at his watch. “You better hurry or you’ll be late for work.” As he hustled me out the door all I could think was, What, no breakfast? No white linen tablecloth? No croissants? No caffe latte?

Chivalry was dead and buried.

Before I started down the stairs, he pulled me back and gave me a proper kiss. “I’m only four blocks away from Rogues’ Gallery. Keep that in mind for your lunch break, won’t you? I’m usually here at that hour. Run along now.” He grinned and shut the door.

I hurried down the street. It was a rotten windy day, candy wrappers, scrap paper and leaves gusting around me. I stopped at La Tazza and had Nelly the Grape make me my usual double caffe latte. I bought a huge fattening pastry as well. I deserved two pastries but I held back, thinking of all the nakedness that might still take place.

The door to the gallery was unlocked which meant that Nadine was already there. Her office door was closed and I could hear her voice but not make out the words. I took off my coat, put my bag on my desk and sat down. The little brass urn full of Jeremy’s ashes was still sitting on my desk. It was comforting to have it there in front of me during my long boring gallery days.

“Hi, Jeremy,” I said to it. “I had quite a night. I’ll tell you about it sometime when I figure it all out. I hope you’re okay, wherever you are. I hope you’re watching. I hope you’re going to find a way to help me from the other world, you know, look after me a little, put in a good word with the powers that be. I wish you would. I don’t need to tell you how much I miss you. I went to see Connie. I just don’t get you, Jeremy. I’m sorry but I just can’t see what you saw in her. She looks like a real mess. And I just don’t know how much help I can be in all of this…”

A loud “Heh-hem” interrupted my murmuring. Nadine was standing in her office doorway looking superior. “If you’re finished communing with the dead, Lucy.”

“Isn’t it in my contract that you have to respect my religious beliefs?”

Nadine shook her head. “It’s in your contract that if you screw up, you’re out the door. In fine-print legalese.” She peered at me more closely. “Whatever have you been doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your face is all smutty. Go and look at yourself.”

I went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. I looked like a chimney sweep. Paul Bleeker’s charcoaly fingerprints were on my face. I probably had smudges all over the rest of my body as well. I scrubbed myself with wet paper towels, brushed my hair and put on a little lipstick. A nice dark shade.

When I’d finished cleaning up and was back at my desk, Nadine said, “I’ve got an IT expert here. Jacques needs to examine your computer. He’s going to be putting in some new software.”

“Jacques? Jacques who?” My heart skipped a beat. A computer whizz would be able to see where I’d been on the Net, see all the hours I’d frittered away checking out eBay, Big Brother sites and Lonely Hearts Web pages.

“I’m upgrading,” said Nadine. “Jacques, this is my assistant, Lucy Madison.”

Jacques came into view and I laughed.

“Hey, Luce, how’re ya doing?”

“Jacques. What are you doing here?”

Jacques came over, picked me up and whirled me around. I only came up to his chest. Next to him I was a sylph.

He put me down and glanced over at Nadine’s raised eyebrows. He said, “Miss Thorpe wants to buy the farm, add a few more gigabytes. And some fancy stuff for showing off artists’ work to full advantage. That right, Miss Thorpe?” I could tell by the way Nadine was looking at him that she wanted a few of Jacques’s private bits and bytes as well. It was understandable. Jacques was six feet four inches of broad-shouldered barrel-chested male sweetness. Because he didn’t have to impress anyone, he always wore the same uniform: jeans, lumberjack shirts and long straight black hair that went past his shoulders. He had a hint of local native blood and an easy smiling expression. Like Geronimo on tranquilizers.

He was a computer genius. He’d been finishing his studies when I first met him. In university days, he’d been lost in love with Madeline from the art department. Madeline was his only defect. He would come looking for her, his dark eyes puppy-dogging along all the routes Madeline might have taken, checking out all the places where Madeline might be. We made friends during his long waits for her. What Jacques didn’t know back then was that Madeline was a very busy girl, very popular, with a lot of extra-curricular men, and she loved having Jacques as a personal six-foot-four doormat.

“So what are you doing these days, Jacques?” I asked.

“Working at the university, rescuing departmental techno-dummies all over the campus whenever they melt down. Hey, you still painting, Luce?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” It was neither a yes nor a no. I hate lying to friends. “How’s Madeline? She still making…”

“Heart art. Yeah. She’s doing some really great stuff.” He sounded slightly panicky, the way the less-loved partner in a relationship sounds when they are afraid of losing the other. “She’s selling quite well in New York.” He sighed. “She’s there right now. Gonna be there for a couple more weeks.” He sighed again.

These words crushed me like a ten-ton block. Back then, Madeline had been into this mock-sixties pop art stuff using a lot of pink and hearts and doe-eyed Twiggy-like female figures. The worst part was that there were professors who thought she was the great promise of the art department.

Hearts.

She still had Jacques’s heart after all these years, and it looked like she was still reducing it to pulp.

I reached for my caffe latte and knocked my bag off the desk. Its contents, including my virgin peach lace underwear, spilled all over the floor.

Jacques smiled and raised his eyebrows quizzically. Nadine looked peeved. I would like to have told them that it had been a great night, a masterpiece of lovemaking, but the fact was, the Maestro had barely dipped his brush.

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