Don't I Know You? (11 page)

I took the bottle of wine home for another silent knife-clicking dinner with Roberto.

“Any luck today?” I asked. He had pitched a photo essay to the
Whig
about the women in solitary confinement at the infamous Kingston Prison for Women.

“No,” he said, and did not elaborate.

The next morning the phone rang.

“It's Bill. Want to catch a ball game tomorrow night?”

Bluff called. I dithered and said I had to work. I also explained that I was currently, technically, involved with someone.

“Fine. No problem. So just meet us for drinks,” said Bill Murray.

Well, why not, I thought. I'm an individual. People meet other people for drinks all the time.

“Tell me when you get off work and we'll pick you up outside the restaurant,” Bill Murray said.

The next day I told Roberto that I'd be working late, and put some eyeliner in my purse.

That summer I commuted everywhere by bicycle, including the twenty-kilometer ride from the farm to the town and back. I had long blond hair, wore Gloria Steinem aviator glasses, and had just come back from a five-month cycling expedition in South America with Roberto, so I was thinner than usual and in good shape. But South America had done us in—it was just too hard, too isolating, a ridiculous undertaking. We had made it up and down the Andes in Ecuador, but we couldn't make it through dinner in a restaurant. The only problem with breaking up was that the trip, both the hardship and the beautiful strangeness of it, had fused us. Five months in a tent is a micromarriage.

Roberto was a decent, kind man—a keeper, really. Although I had run away from him at first, now I was utterly confounded by our falling apart. I had decided that it showed a deficiency in me, an inability to love someone who really cared for me, and was deserving of my love.

So I was waiting for something to happen when Bill Murray turned up, live from New York.

The next day, after my shift, I stood with my bike at the corner of Princess and George feeling silly and mildly felonious. A vintage roadster pulled up beside me. It was an eye-catching cream-colored convertible, some rare model I couldn't identify. Aykroyd was at the wheel with his TV pal beside him.

“Hop in,” said Bill Murray. He had a faint constellation of acne pits on his cheeks and lots of wayward brown hair.

“I thought we were going for drinks,” I said.

“We are,” he said. “Hop in.”

“What about my bike?”

“Not a problem,” said Aykroyd, who was quite tall, with a sturdy farm-boy build. He stepped out and slung the bike into the back of the car. I got in beside it and they began to drive out of town.

“I thought we were going for a drink,” I said again after a while.

“We are,” Bill said. “A country drink.” We were now moving through the outskirts of Kingston, where all the boarding kennels, storage places, and car dealerships were.

“I can't be too long,” I said nervously.

“Don't worry, it's not far.”

We drove north into stony, rolling farmland. Late-afternoon light slanting over cornfields. Perhaps I'm being kidnapped, I thought placidly. It seemed uncool to ask. It was also, I noticed, a fine day in late August, with goldenrod nodding in the ditches. It felt good to be out of the kitchen and the omelet-y smell of the restaurant. This is an adventure, I told myself, just go with it. Lighten up and live a little. (Years later, this sentiment would be recognized by others who have been similarly hijacked as the Bill Murray Effect.)

A half an hour later we turned onto a gravel road that took us to a cottage—a white frame house with a sun porch, and a separate smaller bunkhouse. Nothing fancy, just a typical Ontario family cottage on a lawn that slanted down to a broad, shallow-looking lake. Close to shore, reeds poked through the surface of the water like a five o'clock shadow.

“I'll start dinner,” said Aykroyd, heading over to a charcoal barbecue. “Make yourself at home.”

“But I'm expected home for dinner,” I said.

“We'll get you back, no problem,” said Aykroyd, scraping black gunk off the grill. “Why don't you guys go for a dip while I put the chicken on.”

Bill Murray changed into swimming trunks—roomy ones, probably borrowed. I didn't have my bathing suit with me, but I was wearing a Danskin body stocking, dark-green, under my summer dress, and I figured I could swim in that. I also had on a pair of candy-cane-striped red-and-white platform sandals; it was the first generation of platform sandals (unless you count ancient geisha-girl, bound-feet versions). I wouldn't normally wear heels with a bathing suit, but in this case I had no choice.

We walked down to the lake, waded in, and paddled around, orbiting each other and talking. The lake was a little weedy but the water felt cool and welcome after the drive. I like being in the water and I'm a good swimmer; I did a dolphin dive to impress Bill Murray. There's a kind of amusing shark-fin thing I can do with my elbow too. Being in a lake felt less datelike, and safe. I told him about a synchronized-swim group I was part of at summer camp, where we performed to a loud, scratchy recording of the thunderous piano theme to
Exodus
:
Duh DUH … duh DUH, duh DUH duh duh … duh-duh.
Very dramatic. So the two of us lay on our backs in the water, and sculled our toes together as we sang the theme to
Exodus
. Then we paddled back to the shore and sat in the early evening sun, drying out.

I told him that I wasn't really a salad girl in a restaurant. I was “sort of a writer.” Which was true—especially the “sort of” part. I wrote weekly book reviews for the
Toronto Star
, and was working on an article about our South American adventure. I'd published a couple things in
Rolling Stone
too, but that little window had come and gone. Not too many women wrote for them.

Bill Murray talked about his first year on
Saturday Night Live
, and living in New York City. “There's a certain amount of pressure involved,” he said mildly, like someone who had very little prior experience with pressure. Also, this was 1975, when the streets of New York were more dangerous, and the subways were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch: hellish, hot, and noisy.

“It's a lot to take on in one year.”

I found it easy to talk to this not-quite-handsome stranger with the round nose and the slightly pitted skin. He didn't make jokes, at all; he was sincere and straightforward. He could have been the secretly sharp guy who pumps gas at the local summer marina. He didn't go on about himself or the show—he was more curious about what I was up to. He had the knack of tuning in to other people quickly, getting past the small talk to go deeper, but in a lighthearted way. There was a zone of intimacy he was skilled at creating without making you nervous.

Meanwhile, I could smell the chicken on the barbecue. Aykroyd was playing some R&B on a boom box.

I had the impression that I wasn't the first roadhouse girl that these boys had scooped up, but I didn't care. Nobody was putting the moves on me, and I was surprised by how genuine Bill Murray was. There was a formal kindness about him. Plus, I had only seen him on TV a few times, not enough to be star-struck or tongue-tied. He was no star, yet. Just as I was no writer. We were still in the lobby of our lives.

Pretty soon I found myself talking more seriously, about books, writing, and what I really wanted to do. His listening silence and his questions were encouraging.

But then, as usual, I got nervous—nervous about what would come next, nervous about how good it felt to be talking like this, nervous about lying to my blameless boyfriend. I talked to him about Roberto.

“So give the guy a call,” Bill Murray said, “tell him the truth. Tell him you got kidnapped but you're okay, and you'll be home soon.”

We had moved to the kitchen of the bunkhouse now, ready to eat dinner (three oversized chicken drumsticks coated in blistered red BBQ sauce). Aykroyd pushed the big black rotary phone over to me.

“I'll turn down the music,” he said.

“Hi,” I said when Roberto finally answered, frosty-voiced. “Sorry to be late. I'm just having drinks with Dan Aykroyd, you know, the guy on
Saturday Night Live
, and his friend. They came into the restaurant the other day, remember I told you?”

There. The damage was done. “I've already eaten,” Roberto said, then he paused, and hung up.

Aykroyd served potato salad out of a cardboard container, and the three of us ate inside because the mosquitos were starting. John Lee Hooker played on the boom box. They were easy, taciturn buddies, a couple of guys who could be out there rocking on the porch, enjoying twilight.

“This is all delicious, thank you,” I said primly as I picked at the deli salad. Roberto's cold, angry voice had stayed with me, and I couldn't eat much. Aykroyd poured a couple shots of tequila. I passed one to Bill Murray, and drank another glass of wine instead. Maybe tonight is the night Roberto and I will finally break up, I thought. Maybe I can fly to New York with my new friends and become a highly paid television writer. Stranger things have happened.

They didn't complain about skipping dessert when I said I had to get back home. “My life is complicated right now,” I said as they cleaned up and put my bike back into the roadster for the drive to the farm. Clearly they had hoped for a longer, more interesting evening. But this was how the dice had rolled, and that was okay with them too. It was the zen thing; the only possible, sustainable response to fame.

The long shadows were still golden. The air had just an edge of coolness, an edge of autumn. Riding in the car with these two undemanding swains, my hair whipping around in the breeze and one wheel of my horizontal bike slowly spinning in the air, I realized that it had been too long since I'd felt this way. Hopeful.

They dropped me off on Abbey Dawn Road at the top of the long gravel driveway into the farm. Bill Murray helped me hoist my bike out of the car, and we said goodbye. He crooked his finger under my chin, tilting it up in an ironic movie moment. “You're one hell of a woman,” he said in a John Wayne voice.

Really? For a second I believed him. I hope I blushed. Then I got on my bike and headed down the road toward the lights of the farm and my last night with Roberto.

Just beyond the little bridge over the creek, I passed the horse meadow, where I could see an orange dome tent pitched in the far corner. Our South America tent. Lantern light glowed through the nylon walls. I cycled past slowly, surreptitiously, hoping he couldn't hear the gravel under my wheels. It was obvious that Roberto had decided to skip the fight we were about to have and make the first move.

Good, I thought, good for him.

 

Bob Dylan Goes Tubing

One morning Eric and I came back from town to find a strange car parked under the white pines beside our cottage. An old Citroën, the kind where the chassis goes up and down hydraulically. Yellow. Nobody we knew drove a Citroën.

Eric's son, Ryan, ran down the long switchback of wooden steps that led to the water. “There's somebody out on the lake,” he called up, “on the air mattress.”

We shaded our eyes. A pale, small, but visibly adult figure was lying on the mattress, slowly paddling with his hands toward the diving raft.

“I need the binocs,” Eric said, and went in to get them. Standing on the deck he studied the figure.

“This is really weird, but whoever that is looks exactly like Bob Dylan.” He passed the binoculars to me. He was right. A pale little guy with a pencil mustache, in a Tilley hat, was on our air mattress.

“See? Dylan, only older.”

“Well, he is older.”

The figure paddled closer. Eric waved and called out. “Hi there! We're back.”

I waved too. It could, remotely, be some friend of a friend, dropping by on his way up to another cottage. Our place, a rental, had no landline. So sometimes people just turned up.

“Yeah, I'm back too,” the Dylan person called. Then he started singing in a slightly hokey
Nashville Skyline
voice, “Back here on Kashagawigamog.”

That was in fact the name of a northern Ontario lake, but not ours. Ours was Sturgeon.

“What do we do now?” Eric said.

“Invite him up, I guess. Offer him a drink. Although, it's early.”

Eric cupped his hands. “Come on up and join us if you're heading in.”

“Sure thing,” the floater said, having reached the raft. I got a towel from the pump shed and took it down to the dock. Bob Dylan—no question, it was him—slung the mattress up on the raft and did a credible breaststroke over to our dock, keeping the brim of his hat dry. He held on to the edge with thin white fingers.

“No ladder?” The nails on the baby finger of each hand were extra long, and filed square.

“Let me give you a hand.”

I leaned over, careful to keep my scoop-neck shirt from gaping, and Dylan grabbed hold of me like a big ropy eight-year-old. He was pale as a grub with a dot of chin hair and a riverboat-gambler mustache. But his blue eyes were still strong and clear. They met mine, took me in. He whisked the water off his arms with his hands as he stood up.

“Water's real nice, once you get in.”

Dylan was wearing a pair of old-fashioned wool swimming trunks with a narrow white belt. Wet, the suit revealed a springy crescent of cock underneath. His skin was so white it looked translucent, but he had biceps—from playing guitar, probably. His forearms had energy too, and drew your eye.

He wrapped himself in my blue towel.

“Want to see the boathouse?” said Ryan, who had run back down the stairs again. He showed Dylan Eric's old green Chestnut canoe hanging from the rafters, and the aluminum boat we use for fishing. Ryan was nine and didn't know or care who this skinny stranger was. Our seven-year-old daughter, Ceri, was staying with her grandparents in Quebec and he was getting bored on his own.