A Killing Spring (16 page)

As I went to answer it, Taylor called out, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell any more about the party till you’re back.”

When I heard Rapti Lustig’s voice, my first thought was that somehow I was back on the political panel. Rapti was an assistant producer on Jill’s show, and usually she was unflappable, the calm at the eye of the storm, but that morning she sounded harried.

“Jo, I’m glad I got you. Listen, this is Tina in makeup’s last show before the wedding, and we’ve just decided to have a little party for her after we wrap tonight. I know it’s short notice, but we’d really like you to come.” Then she added wheedlingly, “Please. For old time’s sake.”

“Rapti, it’s only been a week.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but a lot of us here are already nostalgic for the good old days. Jill’s new man is a royal pain. Anyway, say you’ll come. Tina likes you so much, and we’re ordering from Alfredo’s. I’ll get a double order of eggplant parmesan. I remember you like it.”

I thought about Alex and about the empty evening ahead. I hated showers, but I did like Tina. “I’ll be there,” I said.

“Great,” she said. “Now, people are bringing gifts, but don’t get anything cutesy. One of the techs had a kind of
neat idea. He suggested a tool box and tools. Tina and Bernie are buying that old wreck on Retallack Street. They’re going to be fixing it up themselves. What do you think of the idea?”

“I think it’s inspired,” I said. “No bride can have too many hammers.”

“We’ll see you at six then.”

“But the show starts at six.”

“That’s why it’s our best time to get everything ready so we can surprise Tina. Makeup’s through by six, so Bernie’s going to take Tina out for a drink and bring her back as soon as the show’s over. If you come early, you can help me decorate the green room and stick the food around.”

It seemed my penance was taking shape already.

Rapti was buoyant. “We’ll have fun,” she said. “We can get started on the wine. I have a feeling we’re going to have to be totally blitzed to endure Tom’s
TV
debut.”

“You don’t think he’s going to be good?”

Rapti chortled. “I have a premonition that Jill’s boyfriend is going to be a twenty-two-karat, gold-plated, unmitigated disaster.”

I was smiling when I turned back to Taylor and her narrative. “Okay,” I said. “Did Samantha back down, or did her mother have to shoot the cake?”

Our day filled itself, as Saturdays always did, with the inevitable round of lessons and practices and errands. Twice during the day I told myself I should try Kellee’s number again; both times, I drew back before I even picked up the receiver. I felt fragile, like someone whose energy has been sapped by a long illness, and I was grateful for the Saturday routine that carried me along in spite of myself. Whenever I thought of Alex and what he must be feeling, I wanted to be
with him, but the best I could do was hope that his Saturday had its own pattern of mindless, sanity-saving errands.

In the afternoon, Taylor came with me when I went to Mullin’s Hardware in search of something glamorous in a tool box. Then we came home and I made chili while T sat at the kitchen table and worked on her sketches of Nanabush and the Close-Your-Eyes Dance.

After she’d been drawing for about thirty minutes, she called me over. “It’s not working,” she said. “I’m trying to make it seem real but not real, like the story. But I don’t know how to do it.” I sat down and looked at her sketch. To my eye, it was amazing. The section Taylor was working on was the one in which the hungry Nanabush tries to convince a flock of plump ducks that if they join him in a Close-Your-Eyes Dance, they’ll have the time of their lives.

“See, it’s all too real,” Taylor said. “Alex’s story wasn’t like that.”

When I looked again, I saw what she meant. “I have something that I think can help,” I said. I went into the living room and came back with a book on Marc Chagall that Taylor’s mother had given me years ago. I flipped through till I came to an illustration of the painting “Flying Over Town”; in it, a man and a woman, young and obviously in love, float above a village. The village is very real, and so, despite their ability to defy gravity, are the young couple. But the world they inhabit is not a real world; it is a world in which love and joy can carry you, weightless, above the earth. In “Flying Over Town,” Chagall had created a fantastic world that transcended physical facts; it was the same world that came to life when Alex told Nanabush stories.

Taylor leaned so close to the book that her nose was almost on the page. Finally, she said, “Nanabush and the birds don’t have to be on the ground.” Then, without missing
a beat, she ripped up the sketches she’d been working on for days, and started again.

Taylor was still at the table when I left for Nationtv at 5:15. I kissed the top of her head. “Chili’s on the stove,” I said. “Angus promises to dish it up as soon as his movie’s over, and I’ll be home in time to tuck you in.”

For the first time in months, Taylor didn’t even turn a hair when I announced I was going out for the evening. “Good,” she said absently, and she went back to her drawing. Finally, it seemed I had done something right.

It was strange to walk across the park towards Nationtv on a Saturday evening without feeling a knot of apprehension about the show, but I was grateful that there was no hurdle I had to leap that night. I’d had enough. All I wanted to do was take deep breaths and look around me. In the park, the signs of an early spring were everywhere: the breeze was gentle; the trees were already fat with buds; the air smelled of moisture and warming earth. As I walked, my mind drifted. Once I had heard a poet describe the eyes of Hawaiian men as “earth dark,” and I had thought of Alex’s eyes. When I told him, he had laughed and said I was a hopeless romantic. Maybe so, but I had still been right about his eyes.

The first person I ran into when I walked into Nationtv was Tom Kelsoe. He was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. Very hip. My first impulse was to pretend I hadn’t seen him, but if I ever wanted to reconcile with Jill, I was going to have to bite the bullet.

I smiled at him. “Break a leg,” I said.

Tom Kelsoe looked confused. “What?”

“Good luck with the show,” I explained.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. For once, his tone
wasn’t rude. He seemed genuinely perplexed; somehow my presence had knocked him off balance.

“It’s personal, not professional,” I said. “There’s a party for the woman who does makeup for the show. She’s getting married.”

“I guess Jill mentioned it,” he said warily.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m glad I ran into you. I didn’t get a chance to talk to you and Jill at the service for Reed yesterday.”

I could see the pulse in his temple beating. “Who put that display by the door together?” he asked.

“I did,” I said. “What did you think of it?”

He flinched. “It was fine.” He checked his watch. “I’d better get down to the studio.”

“Have you got another minute?” I said. “I need to ask you about Kellee Savage.”

“What about her?”

“Apparently, Reed Gallagher had a very high opinion of her work. I wondered if you shared it.”

Tom looked at me coldly. “She’s a troublemaker,” he said; then, without a syllable of elaboration, he headed for the elevators. Apparently I wasn’t the only faculty member Kellee had gone to with her charges against Val Massey.

I was the first person at the party. The green room was empty, but somebody had brought in a clear plastic sack of balloons and made an effort to arrange the furniture in a party mode. Two tables had been pulled together to hold the food and drink, and the chairs had been rearranged into conversational groupings. The effect was bizarre rather than festive. All the furniture in the green room had been cadged from defunct television shows, so there was a mix of styles that went well beyond eclectic. I was trying to take it all in when Rapti Lustig came through the door.

Rapti was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman: whip-thin, with a sweep of ebony hair, huge lustrous eyes, and a dazzling smile. But as she looked around the room, she wasn’t smiling.

“What do you think?” she said.

“I think it looks like the window of a second-hand furniture store,” I said.

Rapti made a face. “A cheesy second-hand furniture store.” She pulled a roll of tape out of her pocket and handed me a balloon. “Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

It didn’t take us long to get the balloons up, cover the tables with paper cloths, and set out the paper plates and glasses. Rapti had bought everything in primary colours and, despite its entrenched charmlessness, the room was soon as cheerful as a box of new crayons. At 6:00, Rapti gave the room a critical once-over, pronounced it not half bad, walked to the television set in the corner and turned on our show. When the theme music came up, and I heard the announcer’s familiar introduction, I was grateful that I was sitting in the green room with Rapti. In less than a week, I had lost my job and my man. If I’d been sitting home alone, it would have been hard not to feel my life had become a country-and-western song.

Rapti handed me a glass of wine. “To good women and good men. May they find one another.”

I pulled a chair closer to the television. “I’ll drink to that,” I said.

As I looked at the screen, the first thing I noticed was that Tom was still wearing his jacket. Black leather was perfect for Tom’s “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” image, but before the show was five minutes old, it was apparent that Tom had given more thought to his outfit than to his homework. He made a lulu of a factual error about the powers possessed by the Senate, but when Sam Spiegel, who was a senator himself, nudged him gently towards the right
answer, Tom was adamant. Glayne Axtell wasn’t gentle. When Tom misrepresented what the leader of her party had said, Glayne said crisply, “It would help your case if you got at least one of your facts straight.”

When the phone-in segment started, Tom’s performance went from bad to worse. The callers, sniffing incompetence, made straight for Tom’s jugular. As the show ended, and the screen went into its farewell configuration with the host in the centre and the panel members in their respective corners, Sam Spiegel interrupted the host’s wrap-up to announce that he wanted to say goodbye to two colleagues who had been on the panel with him from the beginning, and whom he was certain the audience would miss as much as he did. When Sam was through, Glayne Axtell sent what certainly appeared to be genuine good wishes for the future to both Keith and me. Tom Kelsoe, isolated in his box on the lower left of the screen, gave an odd little salute to the camera but remained silent. By the time the credits finally rolled, I almost felt sorry for him.

Rapti jumped up and turned off the set. “That,” she said, “was the worst hour of television since ‘The Mod Squad’ got cancelled. Jill’s going to be livid.” She shuddered theatrically, “This is going to be one tense little party.”

It turned out Rapti was wrong, at least about the party. It was a very merry prenuptial event. No one made a hat with ribbons for Tina, and no one decided to break the ice with games. The wine was plentiful and the take-out from Alfredo’s was sensational. The only person happier than Tina was Rapti. As she pushed in the red wheelbarrow that was her gift, Rapti glowed with the effects of good Beaujolais and triumph.

Even I had fun. My improved spirits were, I had to admit, due in no small degree to Tom Kelsoe’s pitiful debut. My pleasure might have been mean-spirited, but I was revelling
in it until, almost an hour after the party had begun, Jill Osiowy walked in the door. She was pale and tense, and as she picked up a bottle of wine from the refreshments table and poured herself a glass, I saw that her hands were trembling. She drained her glass, refilled it, and walked over to join the group who had clustered around Tina.

I had known Jill for over twenty years, and as I watched her trying to blend in with that carefree crowd, my heart ached for her. I was familiar enough with the structure of Nationtv to know that Jill had spent at least part of the past hour on the telephone being castigated by someone who didn’t have half her talent but who picked up a paycheque twice as hefty as hers. I also knew that the most punishing criticism Jill would be subjected to that night would come from herself. She was in a miserable spot. She was passionate about two things: her work and Tom Kelsoe. Tonight the show that she had created, lobbied for, and nursed along had sustained a heavy blow because she had been foolish enough to offer it up to the man she loved.

I had long since stopped trying to fathom the choices other people made in their relationships. Perhaps, as an old friend of Ian’s once told me, it was all a matter of luck; if you were born under a benevolent star, your loins would twitch for the right one. In my opinion, Jill’s star had led her astray. If that was the case, maybe the time had come for me to stop sulking and let her know she was still very dear to me.

I walked over and put my arm around her shoulder. “How would you like to curl up with a large tumbler of single-malt Scotch?”

She smiled weakly. “That beats my last offer. The vice-president of News and Current Affairs suggested hemlock.” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. In the years I’d known her, I’d seen Jill deal with deaths, betrayals, and disappointments, but until that moment, I’d never seen her cry. “Can
I take a rain check?” she asked. “I think I just want to go home and go to bed.”

“Of course,” I said. “Any time.”

Her voice was low. “Jo, I’ve missed you.”

“Me too,” I said.

The clock was striking nine when I walked in the front door. The kids were down in the family room. Taylor and Benny were curled up on the rug listening to the soundtrack from
The Lion King
, and Leah and Angus were huddled together on the couch, doing homework, or so Angus said.

“Fun’s over, T,” I said. “I’m back.”

She rolled over and grinned.

“How’s Nanabush?” I said.

“Better,” she said, “but I don’t want anybody to see it now until it’s done.”

“How was your party?” Angus asked.