off the set and turned out the lights. Across the street, three gentlemen who looked in need of fresh barbering were sitting at one of the tables under a light in the park passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. Maybe they weren’t winos. Maybe they were free and questing spirits come to commune with the shade of Goldwin Smith. I went to the bedroom at the back of the apartment and slept straight through for eight hours.
4
I WAS DRINKING my second cup of coffee, and when it got to be eight-twenty, I turned on the radio in the kitchen. The radio was set at the CBC station. The morning show was in its third hour and time had come for Annie B. Cooke to do her movie reviews. I never miss Annie B. Cooke.
The show’s host introduced her, and after he and she had engaged in fifteen seconds of what passed for witty badinage at eight-twenty in the morning, Annie B. Cooke waded into a movie about Tarzan. I gathered it was a movie that its makers intended to be taken seriously. Ms. Cooke wasn’t having any of that.
“The movie reveals how Tarzan was raised in semi-dark Africa by a bunch of guys dressed in costumes left over from Planet of the Apes,” she said in a voice that was a match for Debra Winger’s, “how Tarzan grew up and shopped at a jungle emporium for a loincloth by Giorgio Armani, and how he was taken to London, where he freaked out when he discovered his former jungle colleagues locked in cages at the zoo. The movie is pompous and makes you yearn for the good old days of Johnny Weissmuller.”
The host chuckled, and Annie B. Cooke praised a French movie with Lino Ventura, trashed a directing job by Paul Mazursky, and recommended a comedy that Carl Reiner had written the script for. The host thanked her and it was over to the weatherman to size up the prospects for more July heat wave.
I turned down the radio and poured a third coffee. When five minutes had gone by on the clock on the stove, I picked up the phone and dialled a number I knew by heart.
“You have a nimble way with a phrase,” I said when Annie answered at the other end.
“Aren’t you the loyal listener,” she said. She sounded out of breath. It takes her five minutes to walk rapidly out of the CBC Cabbagetown studio where the morning show comes from, half a block north and two blocks east to her flat on the third floor of a renovated house. Renovated is the only way houses come in Cabbagetown these days. Annie always walks rapidly after her morning reviews, something about the adrenalin pump of working live radio.
“Listening to you,” I said, “it beats going to the dud movies.”
“Hang in there, Crang,” Annie said. “Next month, the Roxy’s running an Anita Ekberg retrospective.”
“Just my speed.”
“We’ll go to the seven-o’clock screenings. My treat.”
“Does this mean we’re steadies?”
“Pinned. It’s a progression: dating, pinned, steady, engaged, married, cheating, an entry on the court calendar.”
“Let’s plan on vamping somewhere between pinned and steady for a decade or two.”
“You’re not otherwise entangled tonight, is that the reason for this early-morning chat? You’re not labouring on behalf of people who probably should stay in jail anyway?”
“It’s Thursday,” I said, “date night all over the world.”
“Seems to me you once described Saturday as date night all over the world.”
“Next I may say Friday,” I said. “It’s a shifting kaleidoscope out there.”
“Okay, I’ve got a screening of the new Richard Gere at four,” Annie said. She spoke in her down-to-brass-tacks tone. “You can come by at seven. This is for dinner, I take it. I wonder how many times Gere’s going to drop his pants in this one. Seven o’clock and I’ll brace you with one of those vodka martinis before we go out. Or whatever it is you do with one of those vodka martinis.”
“Drink it.”
I went into the bathroom for a shave and a shower. My bathroom is decorated with a framed poster Annie gave me for my last birthday. It’s from a 1940s movie called The Mask of Dimitrios. It shows Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Zachary Scott trying for a snarl in their expressions. My kind of guys.
I fell for Annie B. Cooke’s voice before I met the rest of her. It kept turning up on the radio in the morning. One day the program Annie does the movie reviews for had me on in a four-minute guest spot. I was in the news with a weird defence I’d worked out for a teenage hooker who’d retained me. The defence got her off. Other criminal lawyers picked up on it and the CBC morning show wanted me to explain the defence on the air. I agreed. The program’s host was hyped-up and energetic and got in more jokes than I did until the four minutes were over and someone was tapping me on the shoulder. It was Annie. She was next up on the show and wanted the microphone I was sitting in front of. I hung around and asked Annie out to dinner. She accepted. That was a year and a half ago.
We get along pretty well together. Annie isn’t keen on my clients, but that isn’t a problem. More a point of vigorous debate. Everything else is jake. I like her line of patter, she likes mine. We’re attracted to one another in the physical department. We may even be in love. But we aren’t saying. We don’t discuss marriage or moving in together. Gun-shy. Or maybe that’s partner-shy. I’ve had a marriage that didn’t pan out. She had a live-in guy for a couple of years and I gather it ended messily. For Annie and me, it’s comfortable the way it is, keeping our own places, stepping out on plenty of dates, maintaining mutual faithfulness. We’re still getting to know one another. I trust it’ll be a lengthy process.
5
IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A CAR that anyone who has a regular job would drive. It’d make a grand third car in a rich stockbroker’s family, something for the kids to wheel over to the country club. It’s a Volkswagen convertible, small, white, and sporty.
I drove it out from behind the house. I went over to Spadina and headed south. I wanted to get out to the west suburbs and I had a choice, Lakeshore Road or the Gardiner Expressway. No sense putting the Volks up against the speed merchants on the Gardiner. I turned off Spadina on to the Lakeshore.
I’d always wanted a convertible. Indeed, lusted for one. The Volks wasn’t what I’d had in mind but it came as a gift. I was defending a client who’d served time for robbing banks. He was on trial for another holdup. My client was black. At the preliminary hearing, the bank teller who’d emptied his till when someone pointed a gun at him described the robber as a look-alike for Sammy Davis Jr. My guy was tall and light-skinned. He looked more like Lena Horne than Sammy Davis Jr.
At the trial, I read the teller’s testimony to the jury. I showed them a dozen photographs of Sammy Davis, including the one of old Sam embracing Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. I asked the jury if that man resembled my client. They took fifteen minutes to acquit.
My guy paid his fee. He said he was so grateful he had a present for me. A convertible. I was thinking something flashy and American. My guy was thinking miniature and German.
The traffic was light on the Lakeshore and I dawdled along. On my left, the sun glinted off the water. Lake Ontario was almost motionless in the still of the morning. I passed the Argonaut Rowing Club. Three strapping lads in blue singlets and shorts were easing their shells into
