Late Nights on Air (18 page)

It was late. Harry lay semi-sprawled on the floor. He gave up trying to make his point, having forgotten what it was. Gwen was curled up in an armchair, reading again. Eleanor’s eyes rested on the birthday girl and a memory came back of a boy she knew growing up, Ronny Ferguson, a strange boy: other kids would be playing outside and he would be inside reading Marvel comics; even at his birthday party he kept on reading. His mother let him, that was the marvellous thing.

Gwen closed the book and asked what time it was. She asked the room at large. Everyone, except herself, was at this point sitting on the floor.

Dido, across the room with her back against the wall and Eddy beside her, waited a moment before she replied. “What time do you want it to be?”

Dido had slipped her shoes back on, low heels, black. Her bare arms were the colour of peeled almonds. Her watch was conspicuous again on her wrist.

Gwen wanted it to be very late. She wanted to go home. “I want it to be the time it is.”

“But what time do you
want
it to be?”

Gwen felt herself being toyed with, baited by Dido’s amused, provocative, subtly hostile tone, and her own voice came out hard and strained. “I. want. it. to. be. the. time. it.
is
.”

Eleanor leaned her head back against the wall. It seemed to her that something was going on here that was closer than
friendship, just as the scratchy label of a sweater is closer than the sweater.

The smile widened on Dido’s lips. She shifted and looked at her watch. Then she looked at Gwen. “Why are you sitting on a chair? All the rest of us are on the floor.”

“I’m comfortable on the chair.” But she didn’t feel comfortable. And didn’t look it either, she knew that.

“You don’t look comfortable,” said Dido with that slightly mocking smile.

“I’m as comfortable as I ever am.”

“But you’re apart from us, sitting up there. You’ve set yourself apart.”

“I know. I know I’m sitting on a chair and everyone else is on the floor.”

“Do you
feel
apart from the rest of us?”

“Maybe a little. Is that a crime?”

Dido was watching Gwen, but nobody else was. “It’s not a crime. I just wonder what’s going on. And why you’re so angry.”

Somebody had to break the silence, but nobody did.

Then Harry spoke, his voice low, conversational, a little slurred. “What’s the book, Gwen?”

She looked down at the book in her hands.

“Show me.”

She stood up then and handed him the book. And that’s how she got off the chair-island on which she’d been stranded. She knelt on the floor beside Harry. From here she could see partway down the hall and picture the rest—the underused small bedroom, the fully used big bedroom. She could
scarcely credit it. Yet it nudged her again. The eerie feeling that she knew something she could use against Dido.

Only in a snowstorm, she thought, a flurry of stuff in the air, was it possible to outwit the caribou. Outwitting people, however, that was easy. They were at the door. Eleanor embraced her and soothed her heart by saying, “Let’s have lunch tomorrow. I’ll ring your bell at noon.” But brazen Dido took her face between her hands and kissed her on the mouth. “Happy birthday, birthday girl.”

Dido’s lips felt thin and oversoft, innocent yet all wrong. Harmless, but not harmless at all.

It was I a.m., and Dido and Eleanor were listening to Billie Holiday sing good morning to her heartache as they emptied ashtrays, stacked dishes, began to wash up after the party.

Dido dried a plate. She reached for another, and as she did so, she remembered something, and the towel went still.

“I had a terrible dream last night.”

Eleanor stopped too, and turned to look at Dido, who stood transfixed. She was back in the dream.

“I was in a big city and it was very dark, pitch dark. It felt like Eastern Europe somewhere. Pitch
black
, I mean. A taxi pulled up and I got into it, and we began to drive down this old, narrow street. There were two men in the front seat in black suits. They were staring straight ahead. I couldn’t see their faces. I had no idea who they were, I didn’t know where we were going either, I didn’t know where I was.” Dido rubbed
her forehead with one hand. “There was nothing in here,” she said slowly. “I had no memory. I had no mind. I didn’t know anything. It was as black in here as it was outside.” She looked at Eleanor. “It was terrifying.”

She’s describing a hearse, thought Eleanor. She’s describing her own journey into death.

She took the tea towel out of Dido’s hand. “You’re tired, honey. It’s late.”

Dido turned to stare at the clock on the kitchen wall. “Eddy said, ‘Loon at three o’clock’ the other day. I didn’t know whether to turn my head right or left. I couldn’t remember where three was on the clock.”

Eleanor put her arm around Dido and drew her away from the clock. “I get confused by things too and I’m not trying to juggle two languages and two countries the way you are.”

Gwen had driven Harry home. On the way they didn’t talk and were comfortable not talking. They came down Franklin Avenue, named for the man who ate his boots, the explorer who managed to lose the lives of all one hundred and twenty-nine of his men in one of those foolhardy attempts to find the Northwest Passage. Proof to Harry that if your disaster was on a large enough scale, your incompetence would be forgiven.

In passing the Capitol Theatre, Gwen saw
The Godfather Part II
on the marquee, and she said, “Eddy has cruel lips.”

“Women go for that,” replied Harry with a dry laugh.

She knew he meant the movie male aggressiveness that was undeniably exciting. “Dido has cruel lips too,” she said.

Harry pretended not to hear this quiet remark. It was August 2 now, and the darkness was like a partially open drawer.

“There’s Mrs. Dargabble,” said Harry.

Lorna Dargabble was on the other side of the street, out for a walk at one in the morning, hands in her pockets, oversized
chapeau
on her head. A lonely figure, slow, heavy, troubled. The last time Gwen had knocked on her door, no one had answered, but she’d heard a radio, faintly; Lorna always had the radio on—it was her lifeline, she said. In the hallway Gwen had called out her name, and up came Lorna from the basement, full of apologies for not having her teeth in and dressed in much the same style as the half-renovated kitchen: she wore the most elegant shoes, green suede with straps at the back, a long green velvet skirt, and a lumber jacket. The kitchen had insulation but no drywall, a new stove not yet installed, and a true boarding house smell of none-too-clean.

“I don’t see her at the station any more,” said Harry.

“Oh, she still comes in. She’s been talking about moving back to Boston. She says Yellowknife is no place for an old woman.”

Harry nodded. Or an old man, for that matter.

When Gwen pulled into Harry’s driveway, she turned off the motor and sat back, unwilling to end a night she’d held steadfastly at bay. There was something she wanted to ask.

“Harry?” She ran her necklace of blue beads back and forth across her lower lip.

The gesture reminded Harry of his ex-wife, who used to draw forward a strand of her long hair and curl it around and around her finger.

What she wanted to ask was why Dido had kissed her on the mouth like that. What was she trying to prove? And why were her personal things in Eleanor’s bedroom when she was obviously sleeping with Eddy? She wanted to say, What’s going on with Dido, this woman you’re so in love with?

But an easier statement slipped out. “I’d like to live down here,” she said.

Then she said something else. “I don’t really like living alone. I liked it better when I lived with Eleanor. I mean, lived with her, sort of.”

“Too bad she doesn’t have more room.”

She looked at him. “There’s enough room. Dido’s bedroom doesn’t seem to get much use, even when she’s there.”

For a second his eyes drilled her. Then he looked ahead with a bleak little smile.

It had slipped out innocently enough, cloaked in honesty, even delicacy. She had observed something. How could she not take credit?

Iago. Iago had bobbed up inside her.

“It’s late, Gwen.” He reached for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”

But she was Iago and Othello in one: insinuating and sorry. “I’m sorry. Forget what I just said. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She was looking over at him. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean to be nasty.”

Harry remained silent.

“Or maybe I do,” she said.

Harry heard the misery in her voice. Now she was staring at her hands in her lap. It was cool enough that he was surprised she wasn’t shivering in her light jacket.

Later, he would ponder on what she’d implied.
Dido’s bedroom doesn’t seem to get much use
. A shock—if it was true. But his world wasn’t destroyed by the thought of Dido in Eleanor’s bed. It’s not the thought of a woman with another woman that makes a man unhappy, it’s the thought of a woman with another man. Anyway, he didn’t buy it—although he’d give anything to see Eddy’s face if it were true. No, the remark said more about Gwen than it did about anyone else. She’d leapt to a conclusion for reasons of her own, and then she’d had the decency to regret it.

GWEN FOUND HERSELF THINKING
about the vulnerable rivers and birds and plants and animals and old ways of life—all of it unprotected, much of it wary. At the Berger Inquiry she’d heard that snow geese in late August gathered in the thousands on the arctic coast, feeding for several weeks on berries and sedges before flying eight hundred miles non-stop to northern Alberta, then on to the wheat fields farther south. On these August staging grounds, said the biologists, the birds were easily frightened by planes overhead and activity on the ground—the noise of a compressor station at a distance of a mile and a half, or a small aircraft at the same distance, was enough to flush them into the air. Similarly, the white whales of the Beaufort Sea were wary of man, yet increasingly exposed. To give birth they came into the warmer, shallow waters of Mackenzie Bay, now the site, and increasingly so, of offshore drilling for oil and gas.

Then there were the caribou. In March they left their winter range among the trees and slowly travelled north across the tundra, arriving at their calving grounds near the arctic coast in late May. In early June, after the calves were born, the cows joined together in small, timid clusters, then larger bands, then greater herds that culminated in the post-calving
aggregation, the gathering en masse in July that forms the sight over which everyone marvels, a spectacle equal to the long lost flights of passenger pigeons, or the once glorious massing of buffalo. But disturb them while calving, fly a helicopter low in the fog, and you cause the females to be separated from their young, with drastic results. At the same time these creatures were enormously resilient, able to withstand extreme cold and hunger, epic distances and plagues of maddening flies.

She learned the word
albedo
. An oil spill, in turning the ice black, ruins its albedo or reflective capacity, causing it to absorb light rather than reflect it, and to melt, thereby changing the environment in unforeseeable ways. Albedo like albino, went her connecting mind, like bezel—a ruby-eyed albino. Jewellery terms came back to her, and her father’s slender explanations, his reticence. He would sit at his jeweller’s bench, using a brush to sweep up piles of silver dust, or lemel, which he kept and melted up for reuse. He had little boxes of gold dust too. Every so often the big jewellery makers would take everything up, he told her once, all the floorboards, all the shelves, and burn them for the gold. He would bring his magnifying loupe to his eye, then raise the jewel to the loupe, checking for imperfections. It’s all illusion, he’d murmured once as he fine-sandpapered a brooch: you make something smooth with a series of scratches. Cabochon was another old word used in the trade; it referred to any stone that was flat on one side and round on the other. In little drawers her father had cabochons of amber and turquoise, in other little drawers loose pearls, garnets, amethysts. Anneal. She loved to watch the process happen, the metal relax and
change colour, soften and become supple under the steady heat of the gas flame. Her father would have said that Dido had a jeweller’s hands and wrists and shoulders, square and strong and capable. It wasn’t hard to imagine Dido doing what she herself had never managed to do, polish silver and gold on the rouge wheel without ever blackening her long, competent fingers.