Late Nights on Air (24 page)

AT ELEANOR‘S KITCHEN TABLE
at the end of December, Gwen was making a circle with her fingertip, gathering up crumbs.

“She was so unhappy,” said Gwen. “I keep wondering if it was suicide. I think it was.”

Eleanor didn’t reply. She was remembering how Lorna had confronted Eddy, and wished she’d asked more questions while she had the chance. It seemed to her the frail, old woman must be dead, if the husband was to be believed, and even if he wasn’t. There was talk that she might have gone back to Boston, slipped away on a plane without anybody knowing. But how could she have gone without her purse? There was talk about the husband, too.

Gwen said, “I keep seeing all those boxes in her basement full of papers and receipts. She was so worried about money.”

“It might have been foul play,” Eleanor said.

“The husband, you mean?”

“I guess so.”

Across the table Gwen rubbed her hands free of crumbs. She sat back in her chair, then leaned forward and started again on the irresistible toast crumbs, gathering them off the table with her fingertip. “One of her neighbours thinks she
went to Edmonton, just because it’s the nearest big city. That’s what he told the police. But I don’t think so. I think she went for a walk, like her husband said, like she always did.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be hard to get lost at night if you turned the wrong way.”

“Or if you went too far. I mean, she was old. She might have fallen, I suppose. Or just become tired. It might not have been deliberate,” said Gwen, but she sounded unconvinced, especially to herself.

Then she added, “I knew something was wrong when she didn’t phone me after I played Kathleen Ferrier for her.”

On New Year’s Eve, Gwen was alone at the station doing the late shift as usual. Shortly after nine o’clock she went into the record library, and minutes later she heard voices and footsteps. A whiff of patchouli, pungent, exotic, weird; a nasty smell, she thought. She crossed the hall to the editing cubicle and saw them at two removes: Eddy and Dido in master control. The mystery couple, mysteriously together.

What she saw next reminded her of scenes from the romantic comic strip she’d loved so much as a girl. Though comic was hardly the word—a saddie rather than a funnie. They had their coats on, they looked to be quarrelling. Dido wheeled around to leave and Eddy grabbed her by the wrist, jerked her back to him with a hard twist of the arm and she retaliated by slapping his head. Gwen stood rooted to the spot. Dido’s perfume was still in her nostrils and it made her feel queasy, sickened and not herself, as she watched Eddy take
Dido’s head between his hands, and tipping her head back, kiss her mouth with such incredible tenderness that Gwen thought
nobody will ever love me like that
. She felt doubly returned to girlhood. An almost shameful sorrow for her undeveloped self.

She retreated to the record library across the hall and stayed among the records until just before the hourly station break, when she went down the hall into the announce booth and did the thirty-second
ID
and weather, and saw that master control was empty. She went out to the front, to the reception area. They weren’t there either. Poor Harry, she thought. I wonder if he knows.

There would be a light, firm tread on Harry’s front steps and a knock on the door. Dido recognized the footsteps and felt herself cave in, a landslide of feeling that left her barely able to stand. Eddy knew her hours, he knew Harry’s whereabouts, he wanted her to come away with him and she was making him wait.

In Eddy she saw a fine recklessness based on having nothing to lose. He came through the door as if she were his, and it was the nerve of it that appealed to them both. Partly the nerve, partly the secretiveness, mostly the physical pleasure. She led him, not to Harry’s bed but to the spare room, which had the advantage of anonymity spiked with risk.

Every day Harry thought of Dido lying in his bed at night -the feel of her skin, the curve of her bottom, those dark,
tanned-looking nipples erect against creamy skin—never less than incredulous at his good fortune and never unaware of her tolerance. She was sexually knowing and relaxed, she knew what pleased her, she could direct him, and she could turn away. Sometimes she turned away. He would run his hand down her back and she would move perceptibly away, as if to say
I don’t like to be touched there
.

And it was this that held him. Her little bit of physical disgust with him that made her, yes, the love of his life.

One night there were his usual jokes in bed and even though he was exhausted—amorousness; but so short-lived this time, so train through a tunnel, that Dido went still with disappointment. Harry felt her lying there, slipping out of his hands.

“Don’t leave me,” he begged, and she was touched and repelled. “What are you thinking?” he asked, and a sad half-laugh reached his ears.

She was thinking that she didn’t know what to think. Eddy was on her mind, he always was. She wondered why he was willing to share her with another man for even a minute.

“I used to know what I wanted,” she said. “I never thought I’d be like this.”

“You’re perfect.”

“I’m fucked up, Harry.” Her voice was flat and distant. He’d almost never heard her swear.

“We’re all fucked up,” he replied. He was remembering a tape he’d heard years ago, Japanese, of course, of female orgasms from around the world, and the cries of Western women seemed forced and overdone, while Asian women
were quiet and intense and finally uncontrolled. And as he lay beside her he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold on to her. Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

She said, “I don’t like myself very much at the moment, Harry.”

Towards the middle of January, Harry and Dido were in the penthouse of the only high-rise in town. It looked like a waiting room for Air France, dark leather chairs, a kind of airless faux luxury. From some of the windows you could see Con Mine’s property, a desolate wasteland of rocks and stumpy trees that extended a long, snowy distance to the shoreline of Yellowknife Bay. Harry, looking out the window, remembered years ago having a picnic with an old sweetheart on a bit of a cliff right along the water’s edge. He told Dido that he would take her there in the summer, and she smiled. “I’d like that,” she said.

The occasion was a territorial government reception, and Dido had come hoping to meet Tom Berger, but he wasn’t there. Laid out were wine, cheese, arctic char. Harry was speaking to the vice-commissioner when Dido came up to him and said she had to leave.

He accompanied her to the elevator. She was wearing a yellow sweater draped over her shoulders; her parka was over her arm. She got into the elevator and took his breath away by saying very quietly, before the doors closed,
I love you
. The
doors began to close and she mouthed the words a second time.
I love you
.

Harry stood there, watching Dido say she loved him, and then down she went—into the underworld, he thought later, since when he got home, she was gone, she and Eddy too, as he found out later.

HARRY WAS ALONE NOW
in his little house. The inside surface of the front door and the doorknob itself were feathered with frost. The windows had a thick buildup of ice on the inside. He was drinking and in his muddled mind it occurred to him that he should have given Dido flowers. But a woman friend once confided that the worse things got, the more European her husband’s gestures became. Dozens of roses, she said, rolling her eyes.

He had given her a gold watch instead, which he’d found in her bedside table along with a key chain and a letter. The letter was addressed to Dido at Box 853, Yellowknife. It had a Halifax return address with the last name Moir and a December postmark. Harry held it, suddenly aware of what he’d picked up. The slim envelope came alive in his hand. He hesitated, then drew from it the single page of notepaper. His eyes flicked from salutation to signature, from
Dear Dido
to
Daniel
. Then he read the letter itself—a bold, tidy script saying that his new wooden skiff had lovely lines, that his grandson was turning into a sailor in his own right, that apart from these two pleasures he found things as they were intolerable, but he saw no way forward at the moment. He thought of her constantly and loved her.

Harry could see that Dido’s father-in-law wasn’t about to “walk through that door” any time soon, but he still wondered why she’d left the letter behind.

On a Sunday in late January, two weeks after Dido had left him, the police came to his house not once but twice.

Around noon, there was such insistent knocking on his front door that his heart leapt. But it was a Dene fellow wavering on his doorstep. He’d been shot in the foot by somebody who was in the house across the road, and another guy had been clubbed on the head with a rifle butt, and would Harry help him out and call the police?

Harry brought the man into his kitchen. His name was Arthur, he said. And that’s when Harry recognized him. He was the one who’d complained at the inquiry about getting a parking ticket on Dene land. Harry drew out a chair for him, then went to the phone, and in the time it took him to make the call, a pool of blood had formed around one of Arthur’s leather boots.

Harry poured a glass of orange juice for him and gave him an ashtray. Then he hushed Ella, who was growling, sent her off into the living room and told her to stay, and saw out the window the other man stumbling past Louise’s shack next door, holding his head in his hands as he lurched forward through the snow.

He put on the kettle for coffee and the police arrived before it boiled. They showed up in three cruisers with bullhorns and rifles. They made a show of loading their rifles, but it wasn’t necessary. Four men and two women trooped
out of the house in question and stood passively at the side of the road, no longer arguing or drinking. Harry went out to help. The man with the wounded head was now in the back seat of one of the cruisers, and when the ambulance arrived Harry helped him onto a stretcher, helped lift the stretcher into the ambulance. There was a lot of blood, and the poor guy was crying.

After that Harry led the police into his kitchen. The kettle was boiling away, the juice in Arthur’s glass was gone. Two policemen lifted Arthur off the chair and half-carried him outside, a third took the cigarette from between his fingers and dropped it in the sink on his way by. Harry would find it there, soggy, later when he went to do the dishes. After the police were gone, he cleaned up the glutinous puddle on the floor and discovered what congealing powers blood has. Only then did he feel sick, quite sick and shaken. They’ll have to cut Arthur’s boot off his foot, he thought, his brand new leather boot with the high heel.

Later that day, the police were at his door again. Not about Arthur, it turned out. About Eddy. They were following up a complaint and they wanted to talk to Harry as Eddy’s employer.

Harry listened to what they had to say.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

After they left, he sat still for a while. The police were investigating something sordid. Men giving Indian girls booze for sex in a motel on the road to the airport. One of the girls had wandered outside and nearly frozen to death.

He’d told them they were barking up the wrong tree. Eddy didn’t drink, for one thing. For another, he wasn’t that kind of guy. For a third, he’d left town before the incident occurred. Harry wanted to know who’d fingered Eddy, but the police wouldn’t say.

He stood and went over to the window. Outside, it was thirty-one below. The willows between his house and the bay were full of ptarmigan, feathery plops of white balanced on slender branches. He remembered Eddy saying we’re too soft; fucking Eddy running his hands through his wiry red hair and boasting that he slept with a window open all winter. So where did fucking Eddy do all his fucking?

On the lake the ice was green, the snow lavender. On the far shore the gold mine nestled into the bay. Smoke flapped out of chimneys.