see it. You may have the chance to find out about it as you get to know him. If you decided you want to get to know him. But I think the person to give you all this information is your father himself. You need to hear the story from the horse’s mouth, as it were.”
I shook my head.
What was he talking about? I was as unenlightened as ever with all his beating around the bush. “Okay. So. Now. What’s his name and where do I find him?”
“You can find…just a second, Dinah.”
The man with the collapsed face from the front desk was standing in the doorway signaling to Rupert.
Rupert held up an authoritative palm to him. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.” He turned back to me. “Listen, Dinah. Let’s do it this way, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. And then we can catch up. I’d really like to catch up on your mother, too.”
My face must have twisted a little. My expression made him add quickly, “And you, of course. Hell, I remember you when you were just a little—”
The front desk man pointed his thumb toward the street, and said loudly, “Cab’s here.”
Rupert said, “Look, we can…hell, I gotta go…got a production meeting at…” He looked at his watch and grimaced. “Christ. It started five minutes ago.” He slapped some money on the counter and started toward the door. I hurried along after him. His last words before he was out the door were, “You meet me here at seven Friday night and I’ll take you there myself. You have a car?”
I nodded.
“Great. Wouldn’t mind seeing the old picaro again myself.”
I idly sharpened pencils. Ian Trutch was locked up with Ash. There were fleeting glimpses of him and whiffs of his aftershave hanging on the air, but that was all. Ash was looking delirious behind her thick lenses. She’d taken the clips out of her hair and let it down.
Penelope was declaring all-out war on me. It’s amazing what a total lack of carnal knowledge, of real sex, can do to a person. I mean, at least if the rest of us weren’t actually having sex, we still had our experiences and memories to fall back on, but Penelope… Penelope was beginning to show the mental strain that comes with ITD—Incoming Testosterone Deficit.
She had the war drums going strong when we got on to the topic of funds for AIDS awareness and sex education. She had a litany of sexual terrorism tales, nasty little stories on hand to make her case for chastity. Poor Lisa, who was genetically predisposed to being nice to everyone, to her own detriment, got stuck in the middle.
Penelope smoothed down her calf-length black skirt and said, “Did you know, Lisa, that the introduction of sex education at too early an age has been known to cause trauma in adolescents? It’s been documented.”
I smoothed my red leather skirt and said, “Did you know, Lisa, that too much pregnancy at an early age has been known to cause trauma in adolescents?”
“Ah, jeez…ah, c’mon, you two. Cut this out.” Lisa, on the edge of despair, looked back and forth between the two of us, imploring.
Penelope continued to inform Lisa. “Some schools have grade-schoolers practice putting condoms on the fingers of their classmates. What a disgusting thing to do to children. Now, in my opinion, that is exactly like telling a nine-year-old to go out and have sex.”
I looked Penelope straight in the eye, “Yes, but the message here is safe sex, Penelope, safe sex.”
“Well, I’m sure you’d know all about it, Dinah, given your long and varied experience in the field,” said Penelope.
Cleo arrived just before I was about to grab Penelope by the hair and knock some sense into her. Cleo pulled me by the arm toward my office, calling out to the others, “We’re going for lunch.” And then she whispered to me, “I heard all that. It would be so much easier if we were at high school and Penelope had just called you a slut outright. You know? Then you could just corner her in the girls’ bathroom, hold her head down in the toilet bowl and flush.”
“And flush. And flush,” I agreed.
Whenever Cleo dragged me to lunch like that, it meant two things.
Hunger.
And she was seeing somebody new.
When she wanted to talk about her private life she refused to go to a restaurant because she was afraid somebody would overhear. And for good reason. Cleo waded indiscriminately through the tides of men who washed up on her shores. Married, committed, or fit to be legally committed, the men that Cleo chose were safely designed for dumping when she grew tired of them, poor guys. But she had a special fondness for the high-profile married type, and she was right to be cautious. The thing about dating high-profile married men is that you never know when a low-profile wife in the know could pop out of the bushes or the woodwork, ready to reduce you to a pulp.
But this day was a little different.
Cleo gave me just enough time to grab a cup of dishwater in a paper cup and a cardboard-and-pink-mush sandwich, and then drove us both up to Queen Elizabeth Park. We sat down on a bench and admired the autumn colors of the maples and alders for a second or two, then I said, “Okay. Tell me all about him. What’s he like?”
“You know all about him,” said Cleo.
“Somebody I know? Who?”
“Can’t you guess?”
I didn’t have to think very far back. I could feel a heaviness in my stomach and it wasn’t just the bad sandwich. I shook my head. “Simon. It’s Simon. Of course it’s Simon. Oh, Cleo, you don’t know what you’re in for.”
But she didn’t give me a chance to go on. She told me how warm he was and how beautiful, and that she couldn’t get enough of him, that she loved younger men and that she hadn’t slept because he’d kept her up all that night. I should have ruined her fun, right then and there, but I just kept my mouth shut because…well…I did more talking about living than actually doing the living itself, and I admired Cleo for being a doer.
When we got back from our so-called lunch, Lisa said, “Hey you guys. You know there’s been another cougar sighting?”
Cleo raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, this time in the Spanish Banks area. Don’t know how the poor kitty got from Burnaby to Spanish Banks but they haven’t caught him yet. Careful when you’re out jogging, Dinah. He’s on your side of town now and those big cats move fast, especially when they’re feeling hungry and tetchy.”
The Tsadziki Pervert came on hot and heavy that week, too. I’d lost the whistle I was going to tie onto the phone. It had probably skidded under the furniture and I didn’t feel like heaving around all those heavy Deco bureaus I’d inherited from my great-grandparents. Or facing all the other junk I’d find under there. Joey was always teasing me, saying, “Just because your furniture dates back to the nineteen-twenties doesn’t mean the junk you find under it should date back to the twenties as well.” The day I moved the furniture was going to be a revelation.
The Telephone Pervert Voice was now a regular feature of my evenings. “I want to come over,” it hissed, “and cover your thighs in taramasalata
