Late Nights on Air (13 page)

Abe Lamont of the golden pipes and caustic opinions held forth—first about his days producing Harry’s television show, then about his return to radio announcing. His week here was a favour to Harry, he said, though he’d done training before, he wasn’t a neophyte; he’d gone into other stations and coached the staff on how to write, perform, interview, edit: radio skills, in short. Then, having established his credentials, Abe left the subject of radio altogether. He said he’d seen
Last Tango in Paris
, finally, having missed it when it first opened. A great movie. They should see it if they ever got the chance.

“Great, if you like creepiness,” challenged Dido, who hadn’t seen the movie, and who would recoil from it when she did. She turned her big watch on her big wrist, unaware that it clunked against the table. Gwen sat to her right, listening.

“I didn’t find it creepy,” Gwen said quietly.

The others looked at her in surprise, but she didn’t continue.

“Go on,” said Harry.

For a second she hesitated, gathering her thoughts. “I didn’t find it creepy,” she said again, “just interesting and very sad. You understood why she shot him in the end. He wouldn’t let go.”

She’d found the movie profoundly disturbing but enchanting. She didn’t know if she fully understood it. The movie was sad, but even sadder, she thought, would be to never experience that sort of all-engulfing love. She was almost twenty-five. She wondered if it would ever happen, if she would ever be passionately in love with someone who was passionately in love with her.

A pause, during which Harry caught Abe’s eye and saw Gwen rise in his estimation. Then Harry stood up. He reminded Gwen that her regular shift started in forty minutes and he headed off. Jim Murphy muttered something about a wife on the warpath, and he left too.

The others watched the two men thread their way past tables and Dido reached over and poked Abe Lamont’s arm with one finger. “So, how long have you known Harry?”

“We were in high school together.”

She put her elbows on the table then, and smiled. “Then you can tell us what the man is really like.”

Gwen leaned forward.

Abe Lamont’s bulk overspread his chair, his beard doubled the size of his face and gave his hand something to burrow into while he weighed how to answer this gorgeous, prickly woman who wasn’t unlike Harry’s ex-wife. Evelyn Boyd had also been dark-haired and bossy and built.

“He’s a wonderful cutter, a wonderful editor. Better at
that than being a
TV
personality. We did a history of jazz series together and I remember how elegantly he cut from ‘yes’ on page three to the top of page seven, bridging the cut by inserting ‘but.’ Of course, he operates best on three double Scotches and on three he’s cold sober, but it makes him irritable.”

“He’s not irritable with
me
,” said Dido.

“No,” giving her an appreciative look, “he wouldn’t be irritable with you.”

A pause. “I find it hard to imagine,” Dido said, “what his wives were like.”

“There was just one wife. She was nice enough.”

“Oh, Abe,” her voice low and commanding, “you can do better than that.”

Her words dislodged an uncomfortable smile—he had good teeth, she thought, for a man who couldn’t be bothered with the rest of himself. Take care of your teeth, he’d advised them all earlier in the day: false teeth will end your career on air.

He said, “You’re annoyed with me. Don’t be.”

“Am I annoyed?”

“By the end of the week you’ll see the value of what I’m doing. Trust me.”

“All I’m doing,” she said with a small hard smile, “is trying to find out about Harry.”

He took another swallow of beer, then wiped his mouth and the beard around it with the side of his hand. He was thinking she couldn’t take criticism and that was too bad.

“Harry’s a minister’s son,” he said. “A son of the manse. So he’s a complicated man with lots of hang-ups. He’s brilliant and he’s proud and he’s touchy. They said he needed a co-host on
TV
and he refused. He said co-hosts don’t work,
they talk to each other instead of to the viewer or the listener. He had a point. But they had other ideas, so they fired him.”

“He detests television,” said Dido.

“He doesn’t understand it.” Abe rocked his empty beer glass with his free hand. “He’s sneering and condescending about it, about anything he can’t stand.”

In Abe’s opinion, Harry was unreasonable about television. A smarter man—not smarter, Harry was smart—a
wiser
and less vulnerable man would have taken his
TV
failure less personally and not gone around painting all television with the same bitter brush.

Dido chose her words carefully. “Harry is what I would call an anachronism, actually.”

“Anachronism?”

“You like big words.” In no hurry to forgive him for
antiseptic
, to say nothing of
fatuous
. “You know what anachronism means, I’m sure.”

They were at a standoff—until Gwen interceded, her voice oddly emotional.
“I
think Harry’s
shy.”

Abe nodded and looked pleased. “You’re right. I was shy too.”

The word ignited a connection between them, an identification, a deep interest. Shy. For Gwen it was a tiny, precise, potent word like air, like loam, rock, sand, clay, marl, silt, mud, one of the basic building blocks of the world she lived in. An old word, wonderfully adapted to what it described. Being shy. Which meant shying away from oneself and from others, from life itself.

Abe claimed that his shyness arrived when he was seventeen and he remembered the exact moment. He was standing
beside an orange car parked in the street, looking back at his house, when he felt a wave of shyness followed by a wave of depression. What flooded through him was exactly the opposite of whatever it was—the ecstatic joy—that swept through gloomy Proust when he tasted his madeleine biscuit and recaptured his past.

Gwen’s eyes didn’t leave his face. She wanted to know what kind of shyness he meant. Did he feel that everybody was looking at him?

“No. I was alone in the street. Just suddenly I felt mediocre and worthless.” His rich radio voice made his words sound even more singular. “A guy without a future.”

Gwen was trying to put her finger on the same shift in herself. In her case, shyness arrived at puberty and shut down her carefree childhood. After that, everything was hard: talking, being with people, being in the world. “According to my mother, I was loud and boisterous when I was little. I know it’s hard to believe.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Dido.

“I do,” Abe said. “I was like that. Gregarious and reasonably confident. But then everything changed. For one thing, I avoided people and they took it the wrong way.”

“There’s a
right
way?” The word
shy
rankled with Dido too. What did it really mean? Everybody was shy from time to time. But the two of them—Gwen and big, boozy Abe Lamont—seemed to be of one cozy mind on the subject.

“Except for Harry,” he said, ignoring the sarcasm. “We fell into walking to school together. He didn’t talk and I didn’t talk.”

“And you both ended up in radio,” Gwen said.

“Harry has a great face for radio,” cracked Abe.

It was a good line. Gwen would use it from now on.
I have a great face for radio
.

“You get to be invisible,” Abe went on. “You control the interview, you ask the questions, you say when it’s over. The theatre world is packed with the same kind of people. Extroverted introverts.”

Dido was biting her thumbnail. “That’s different. On stage you lose yourself in a part, in radio you have to be yourself.”

Abe leaned back. “It’s still a performance, Dido. You can’t just be yourself on the radio.”

“I thought that’s what everybody was trying for.”

“No. You’re trying to be
almost
yourself. You see the difference? You’re giving a performance as your natural self.”

“It’s not you,” said Gwen, thinking aloud, mulling it over.

“It’s almost you,” Abe said.

That night Gwen was speaking on the phone to the weather office at the airport, gathering weather stats, when Eddy stuck his head into the booth. His chiselled face and mouth looked extra-hard somehow. He wanted to know if she’d seen Dido.

“She was in the Gold Range when I left.”

Without saying a word, he turned on his heel, and she assumed he’d left for the night.

Later on, Harry appeared. He pretended to barricade the door of the announce booth with a chair, as if seeking refuge from all the nutcases hounding him, and Gwen felt agreeably
flattered. She said, “Abe told me he used to be shy, and so were you.”

“That can’t surprise
you.”

This sounded like a compliment. She too sought out corners, or spots behind doors, much as Harry had done just now.

“At bottom we’re afraid of people, you and I,” he said, collapsing into the only other chair. “Or maybe intimidated’s a better word.”

Not
a compliment, then.

At that moment Eddy reappeared—he walked into master control, not having left the station, after all. Through the glass window they saw him take off his black leather jacket and drape it over the back of a chair.

“Eddy’s the sort who could intimidate me,” Harry said.

Eddy was intent on the equipment, taping something off the network. They had a view of his lean, muscled back. He was a man in control, running things, daring you to contradict him, quiet in a way that made you feel anything you said would sound foolish. Once, late at night, Gwen had witnessed him in master control take his wheeled chair and slam it into the wall—the impact more than the sound made her look up. Something had infuriated him. But when she asked him later what it was, he shrugged it off, said he’d just wanted to give her another sound effect—if you ever want the slam of a steel door, that’s how to get it.

“The alpha male,” said Harry. “What does he do here at this hour?”

“He’s often here. I don’t think he sleeps.”

Eddy caught sight of them, and stared for a moment without any expression, then went back to what he was doing.

“Stoned,” murmured Harry.

“I thought he’d gone. He was looking for Dido a while ago.”

“The mystery couple,” said Harry, and his voice was so low-spirited, so defeated that Gwen didn’t know how to respond.

Then Harry shook himself and brightened a little. He told her he’d got authorization to hire a woman to present the news in Dogrib. Teresa Lafferty would replace silver-haired Sam, who’d joined the special team of reporters covering the pipeline inquiry full-time. Teresa had grown up in Fort Rae, he told Gwen, and gone south years ago, but she’d come back for her mother’s funeral, then decided to stay on. An older woman, Harry said, but a real live wire. It was Sam who’d suggested her name, he’d known her family for years, and described her as smart, fluent in both languages, conscientious. “She starts tomorrow,” Harry said, “so she’ll get the benefit of Abe’s training too.”

Her full name was Teresa Dolorosa Lafferty, the Dolorosa for Mary’s seven sorrows. But Teresa wasn’t sorrowful. She had a sweet brown face with eyes almost hidden by laughter-induced wrinkles and sun-darkened pouches of skin. Teresa was fifty-three, and she would turn out to be a completely natural broadcaster, moving back and forth between English and Dogrib, and speaking softly and persuasively in a slightly nasal, low-pitched voice. She would start out by translating
the news into Dogrib and reading it twice a day, but within weeks she was doing two hours of talk and music on Saturday afternoons, ad libbing without effort as she cued up records, and sounding irreverent, down to earth, completely human.

Gwen learned all about Teresa’s past when Abe Lamont had several of them sit around the table in the studio and interview each other. Think about the best first question, he told them. Ask something that will make listeners
wait
to hear the answer.

Gwen looked at this vibrant, independent woman, and asked what she’d been like at twenty-one, and instantly Teresa was full of mirth. She’d spent her twenty-first birthday in a nunnery, she said, shaking her head, laughing. Inspired by the local priest, she and her older sister Audrey entered together, though her sister lasted longer. “As children we would say fifty rosaries each. Audrey insisted we hold our arms out like Jesus on the cross, and alternate. So we’d stand, arms outstretched, for as long as it took to say one hundred rosaries. First our hands would go numb, then our arms, then our shoulders. I had to throw myself into a state of holy detachment,” she laughed, taking undivided pleasure in the telling.

Teresa rolled her smokes from Player’s tobacco and smoked while she talked, the paper clinging to her lips like skin you’re trying to pull off. Short dark hair without a trace of grey, light blue jeans, pressed white shirt. Gwen admired her astonishing levity, her ability to lift up into a seventh heaven of teasing and being teased, a woman who had a way of defanging anyone else’s intemperate remarks. Teresa didn’t take offence when Abe told her that her reading skills were questionable. “Questionable,” she chortled. It wasn’t a matter
of thick skin, but of this lightness, thought Gwen. A balloon, genial and serene, floating in the air, and not pulled down by the small, nervous people around her.

Under Abe’s eye, Gwen practised her interviewing skills, and got an outpouring of stories—about Teresa’s days teaching in Old Crow in the Yukon, teaching on a native reserve in Saskatchewan, running a roadside restaurant, getting busted for trafficking marijuana, spending three months in jail. First, in a holding cell in Regina—a bunk with a filthy mattress and one thin blanket that she arranged so her face wouldn’t touch the mattress, her body shaking with the cold and with shock. “Michelle, just a kid,” she said, “came in at midnight for murder.” By then, in order to escape the insults of the police, the humiliation, she had “retreated to the moon,” practising a version of the same holy detachment that brought her through the marathons of hundreds of rosaries.