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 [email protected]— “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.
