The Continuity Girl (36 page)

“At the beginning.”

Florence came back to Meredith in flashes. Not recollections so much as relived moments—complete with smells, sounds and the
aching texture of immediate physical experience. There was the smell of his breath and the taste of his mouth—savory as gin-soaked
olives. His second toe, a hammertoe, half-broken and doubled over on itself. She’d lain end to end with him and taken that
toe in her hand and tried to smooth it out with her fingers but it wouldn’t stay flat. No matter how she rubbed it, the toe
snapped back to its crooked self. He said it was good luck—the toe. She couldn’t believe it. Her luck, that is.

For three days Meredith and Joe stayed in his suite at the Savoy. Outside, the city felt as if it were baking in a brick oven.
Inside, their room was cool and clean. Every few hours they sent down for room service, ordering anything on the menu, no
matter how ridiculous or oddly matched—cherry cheesecake with the Japanese businessman’s breakfast, pink champagne and lasagna,
oysters with mint sauce and apple cider, Tuscan bread soup followed by a whole lobster, cracked and dressed. Nothing seemed
too silly or decadent. What they didn’t eat they left on trays in the hall. What they didn’t drink they spilled on each other.

At one point he leapt up on the bed, kneeled over her and began filming with the Super 8 camera he’d brought along to record
the wedding. At first Meredith covered her face with a pillow, but after some gentle coaxing she found herself vamping for
the lens like the star of a French blue movie. She pouted her lips and lifted her bum in the air, waggling a pair of lacy
knickers.
What had gotten into her?

On the bedside table was a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s stripped from the now nearly empty minibar the night before. She
picked it up and began running its hard cold surface over her abdomen, encouraging every mammalian hair on her body to rise.
Joe began crawling toward her, across the bed. She took a slug of whisky and passed the bottle back to him, but he waved it
away, encouraging her to keep playing. She felt a little silly, but aroused all the same, so she began to experiment: taking
the neck of the bottle in her mouth and moving her lips over it suggestively, taking a too-large swig and letting it run out
the side of her mouth, dipping her fingers in and rubbing the bourbon on her nipples—the astringent liquid buzzing on her
flesh. Feeling sly and sexy, Meredith inclined the bottle between her legs. She slipped a finger into her panties. (Yes,
panties,
that was the word for them. She was now a woman who could say the word
panties
without cracking up.) She teased and taunted,
fingering the lace and sliding the neck of the bottle nearer to the spot. Joe lowered his head slightly and opened his mouth,
but before he could say a word, she raised her eyebrows and—
uh-oh
—poured whisky between her legs.

The pain!
Before she knew it she was up and running around the room, clutching her crotch and howling like a woman on fire
(which, in a sense, she was). Joe flew into action, and before she knew it he was on top of her again, pinning her to the
bed like a wriggling insect specimen and pressing a cold, wet facecloth to her crotch.

“You okay?”

He said this very seriously. So seriously she wanted to cry, before she noticed her cheeks were already streaked with salt.

“Mmm.” She nodded, trying to imitate his seriousness in the hope of drawing out the moment of rescue. It was so nice to be
taken care of. She pressed her face into the crook of his shoulder and started to laugh—a slow, rocking laugh so much like
a sob that he comforted her for a moment by stroking the hair at the nape of her neck before he realized his mistake.

He could be a bit serious—it was his one flaw. She loved him for it.

The day of the wrap party Meredith booked a ticket back to Toronto. She didn’t fly for a week, which gave her plenty of time
to tie up loose ends in London, mainly in the form of actually getting to know her mother for the first time. Their relationship,
which had never been particularly comfortable, now appeared to be on the verge of reaching an uneasy truce. At moments, they
seemed almost related.

They went to the movies and saw a play—a bad translation of an even worse French farce—and Meredith cooked a proper dinner
of roast lamb and potatoes.

She was feeling unusually flush (Ozzie had sent her a big fat check for her work on
Avalon
—enough to tide her over for the
next few months at least), so she took her mother out for lunch.

They never mentioned the story Irma had told Meredith the afternoon she came home from Florence, but it sat between them like
an armrest—providing a comfortable distance as well as a point of contact. For the first time, their shared history became
their emotional buffer.

Before the wrap party, Irma’s date arrived for a drink. He was an old man, the sort you’d call a “chap.” He turned up on the
front stoop wearing a corduroy day suit with a bright yellow ascot. Meredith stuck out her hand, which he took and kissed
in a dry, unprovocative way. He introduced himself as Jeffrey. There was something familiar about his face.

“Irma has told me ever so much about you,” he said.

Meredith gave a skeptical smile. “Oh, sure.”

“No, really, I tell you, she has. Quiz me.”

“Pardon me?” Meredith was removing his jacket at this point and taking the champagne from him. Her mother had yet to appear.

“Really, do ask me. Anything you like. I know almost everything about you. When Irma told me she had a daughter, I made her
tell me everything so I could get to know you in a sense before I met you. So now, you see, I feel like I already do.”

Meredith laughed. “Okay, then, what’s my shoe size?”

“Seven and a half. Narrow.”

“Okay, you win. Can I get you something to drink? Unless she’s converted you to the vile yellow stuff as well.”

“No, no. Not yet. Scotch on the rocks for me, please.”

He settled into the squashiest chair in the room and crossed his legs at the knee. Meredith saw he was wearing yellow socks
to match his neckerchief.

The apartment had been scrubbed, purged and generally made over. Boxes of old junk disposed of and eons of grime and dust
wiped off walls and shaken from the curtains and upholstery. Instead of looking like an overused landfill, the small flat
now had a shabby coziness about it. Underneath all the detritus Meredith had been pleased to find her mother had quite a few
“nice pieces,” as Irma called them. One was the inlaid mother-of-pearl coffee table on which she placed Jeffrey’s Scotch.
Jeffrey had picked up an ancient copy of the
Canadian Literary Review,
which contained a rave review of one of Irma’s books
of poems from the late sixties. (Meredith was planning to take it back to Toronto and have it framed and sent to her mother
at Christmas.)

Irma appeared, swathed in brown velvet, at the top of the stairs.

“Darling!” Jeffrey leapt to his feet and ran over to her on his tiptoes like a ballerina dashing across the stage.

Meredith half-expected him to pick up her mother and twirl her around, but instead he placed a gentle kiss on each of her
rouge-smeared cheeks. They murmured stuff to each other for a while and Meredith tried not to watch or listen. She’d never
seen her mother in such a state.

“I see you’ve reacquainted yourself with my daughter.” Irma turned and smiled. “Meredith, you remember Jeffrey.” She completed
this sentence with one of her unsubtle wide-eyed looks that said, And even if you don’t, you’d better pretend you do.

“Sorry,” said Meredith. “Mother tells me you were involved with the movie.”

“Ah, yes.” Jeffrey coughed. More of a pause than a cough. “My house, more than I was.”

“Oh my God, of course. You’re the Earl of Dorgi!” Meredith clapped her hands in recognition.

“
Meredith,
” Irma warned.

“No, no, that’s quite all right, Irma, really. Is that what they called me on set, then? I think it’s a rather becoming name.
I’m not actually an earl, you know. Not that it matters where pet names are concerned.”

Irma took a sip of her Limoncello, which had magically appeared in her hand (she was rarely without it), and placed a hand
on Jeffrey’s knee. “And how are the dear dorgis, then, darling?”

“Much better now that they have their house back. Now, my duck, we’d better hurry if we’re to make our dinner reservation.
Meredith, I do hope you’ll come with, and then on to the party afterwards?”

“I wasn’t invited,” Meredith said.

“Nonsense, darling.” Irma jumped up and began running around the room opening drawers. “Now where did I put that damn thing
anyway?” She pulled open the refrigerator, flipped open the butter tray and took out an envelope. “Ah, yes, here it is. Now,
look, you’re most certainly invited. Sorry I hadn’t made it clear earlier.”

She handed the invitation to Meredith, who scanned down past the “You and a guest are cordially invited” part to an ink scrawl
at the bottom. Ozzie’s handwriting. “
Dearest Irm,
” it read.
“Do come. And bring Mere as well.”

She looked up. “Ozzie’s coming?”

“One of his rare public appearances,” said her mother.

“Who is this mysterious Osmond Crouch anyway? I’ve been hearing about him for years and look forward to finally meeting him,”
Jeffrey said, draining his Scotch. “Are we off then?”

Meredith shrugged. She hadn’t planned on it, but then, what
had
she planned on lately?

Ozzie stepped into the booth, pulled the curtain shut and sighed as he contemplated the still life laid out before him. On
the small Formica counter sat a stack of plastic specimen bottles, a bottle of generic-brand water-based lubricant, a box
of Kleenex and a pile of dog-eared smut mags—Brit porn, he noted sourly. The sort of publications that featured naughty schoolboy
cartoons involving bishops and pictures of girls with thin lips in cheap lingerie. Figured that after a lifetime of mild disdain
for the English, he would end up conceiving his only child in a London fertility clinic after an imaginary encounter with
a fake-titted page-three poppet named Shirlee. But if he was going to do it, he might as well do it right. The Canadian fertility
doctor Kathleen had in for a consultation at Vogrie said the procedure would benefit enormously if the specialists in London
had a “full range of specimen” to work with, so here he was: offering up whatever he could.

He took his bifocals out of his jacket pocket and peered at the title topping the pile.
Tits ’n Bits.
He shook his head. Too
depressing for words.

The truth was, he couldn’t believe he was even here. After all those years of evading the bonds of fatherhood—all the girlfriends
he had escorted to abortion clinics (including Kathleen), the countless tearful breakups, the condoms, the last-second withdrawals,
the paranoid nightstand searches for evidence of birth control pills, the secret stockpiles of morning-after antidotes—after
all that, here he was, jerking off into a cup.

He chose a magazine from the middle of the pile and opened it to a random page. There was a photograph of a topless redhead
in a suede miniskirt and cowboy boots. She sat on some sort of countertop, cupping her breasts and looking down in surprise
as if she had only just discovered them for the first time. Like most former pornographers, Ozzie was fairly inured to the
sight of naked women, but something about this girl moved him.

It was the skirt. Kathleen had worn one exactly like it the night he first saw her. He remembered it like it was five minutes
ago. Him sitting at his regular bar stool scarfing free salted nuts. Her leaning over the bar in a low-cut chiffon blouse,
reaching for a glass, which she (thinking no one was watching) spit into and polished with a white cloth napkin. God, she’d
been gorgeous. Still was. As fierce and exciting a creature as he’d ever known (and he’d known many). And while his feeling
toward her was not exactly love, it was something far more certain: a belief that no matter what happened, their fates were
linked. He owed her this baby, but that was not the only reason he was here in this phoneless phone booth, cock in hand, pumping
away (well, okay, more squeezing and pulling, at this point), trying to draft a few million able-bodied DNA servicemen. No,
the truth was, he wanted a child as much as she did, but for entirely different reasons. Not for the cutesy clothes and pureed
carrot stuff, which was as frightening as it was a turnoff, but for the continuation of the larger narrative.

Seeing Meredith again had convinced him of the importance of leaving a legacy. Frank may have died the night of her conception,
but a part of him lived on through the daughter he never even knew existed. Now that
Avalon
was finally finished Ozzie felt
emptied out, his imagination overfished. He was overcome with the need for someone else to take over the story. Perhaps it
was vain and sentimental, but he wanted a child with the hooded Cruchinsky eyes, whom he could set on his knee and to whom
he could tell the story of his own tormented boyhood, of his mother’s ceaseless toil in the sweatshops, of his father’s flight
from the pogroms of Europe and know that this small someone was a living, breathing continuation of...oh Christ. Fucking hell.
This was not the right mental track at all.

Ozzie squeezed another daub of lube into his right palm and began again. He closed his eyes and ran through a series of mental
photographs from his past. Two Kenyan airline stewardesses rolling around in a four-poster hotel bed...nothing. Okay,
next.
A grubby young hitchhiker whose name and age he forgot to ask. Nah. Too dirty. He began to flip through the mental picture
book faster and faster, searching for something on which his brain could alight and find purchase. Kathleen—yes, it was appropriate
he thought about Kathleen.

In his mind’s eye he opened the photo album with her name written across the cover in girlish gold cursive. Kathleen in a
hot tub, drunk, squeezing together her breasts and smiling up at him. Kathleen prancing down a runway in a transparent teddy
and high-heeled slippers. Kathleen getting mock-fucked from behind on set by a large black man. Were these the right thoughts
for a conception? He thought of that crazy night more than thirty-five years ago. The night Meredith had been conceived. The
night Frank died. The same night Ozzie got the script that made his career. The script he didn’t write but took the credit
for anyway. Frank’s legacy and Ozzie’s darkest secret.