Lucy's Launderette (14 page)

The vague sense of hope plummeted and turned into misery.

What was I doing, nearly thirty years old, alone, unaccompanied, solo, conspicuously single—walking along in this city that wasn't my city, and not even getting the walk
ing right, but tripping over derelict human beings in the street—on my way to an exhibit of somebody else's art—not even my own art? Why did Jeremy have to abandon me? How had I ended up in this situation?

This was not part of the master plan. Where had it all gone wrong?

When was my life going to feel like it was really mine and not a spectator sport? When was I going to look in the mirror and say, Yes, I know you. You're Lucy Madison. You're that girl who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. Welcome back. Everybody's missed you. Your chubby, wimpy shadow here has been standing in for you but doing a terrible job. Everybody's been waiting for your return.

When was it going to feel more like Christmas and less like PMS?

Or were my expectations too high?

Then I thought, Omagod. I'm just like Dirk. I'm insane and don't even realize it.

I walked a little faster.

 

Outside the gallery, a fair-sized group of people had started to gather. The windows were obscured by heavy black velvet drapes and it was impossible to see in. I tried the door but it was locked. I used my key and slipped inside.

The temperature was just above freezing. As well as being chilly, it was pitch-black in the gallery. There was a strange, sickly-sweet smell, but my nose was still a bit stuffed up and I couldn't quite place it.

I was in a maze of black drapery. Black curtains created a spiraling corridor, like a snail's shell, in which more black curtains divided areas off into cubicles. At the center of each cubicle was a tall object hidden by a silk black cover sheet. Sculptures, I suspected. There were single overhead spot-
lights for each object but they hadn't been turned on. Suspended above each object was a video screen.

I tried to find my way out of the spiral, battling with the curtains. I finally gave up, got down on my hands and knees, lifted the bottom of one of the curtains and crawled out near Nadine's office. The door was slightly ajar and I could hear voices inside. I went in without knocking.

There was a small crowd in there. Nadine, The Mortician, Mae West and Onassis all drank champagne from crystal glasses. They were dressed in either fur coats or camel hair. Why hadn't anybody told me to bring my own dead animal to wear? It was freezing in there.

I took a closer look at the four hairy men lurking in the corner and recognized Paul Bleeker's cronies. Even they had the sense to be wearing heavy sweaters.

“About time,” said Nadine when she saw me. “Go and see that there's enough loo paper, would you, Lucy? And give the toilet bowls a quick scrub while you're there. And be fast about it. The trays have arrived. They're all by the tables. You checked them on your way over, I hope, to see they didn't forget anything. The staff there has been getting sloppy lately…”

“They didn't forget anything. The order was complete.”

She noticed the way I looked at Paul's friends. They didn't recognize me.

“These are Paul's handlers,” she said. “They have years of experience with his work.”

Sure, I thought.

Years of sitting around with brains fried on who-knows-what and discussing whether toe-jam or belly-button lint was the better medium. They didn't seem too worried about Nadine's demoting them from the East Sheen Group of Artists to gallery lackeys. They looked so stoned that remembering their own names would probably have presented a problem.

“We open the doors in twenty minutes,” said Nadine, checking her watch. “As soon as we open, you're to get over by the food tables and pour champagne. They're in the circular space at the center of the spiral. When you've got the tables organized, I want you to patrol for garbage, anything that gets dropped. Oh yes, and discourage smokers.”

“It's pitch dark in there, Nadine. How am I supposed to pour in the dark?”

“There will be some indirect lighting. The sculptures will be spotlit and there should be light from the videos. In the meantime, use this.” She opened her desk drawer and handed me a tiny penlight flashlight.

“And where's Paul?”

“Paul? Ha ha ha.” She laughed as though she had him tucked away in her pocket or purse. “He'll be making an appearance soon, I shouldn't wonder. Now hurry up and do those loos. We're letting people in soon.”

I shuffled away to the storeroom to get rolls of toilet paper, rubber gloves, sponges and cleansers. Just as well I hadn't worn the red dress.

I quickly scoured the bathrooms, inspected myself in the mirror, then went to look for the tables. It was strange, like being in a stage production, groping around in the dark to take my place before the curtain went up. I turned on the flashlight, squinted and stumbled around until I found the tables.

They were there at the center of the spiral, in a big circular space. There were several large tubs containing crushed ice and bottles of champagne. On one of the tables were rows of glass champagne flutes as opposed to the plastic cups we usually brought out for openings. There were also china plates and linen napkins. I rearranged the trays, then grabbed a couple of artichoke hors d'oeuvres and stuffed them in my
mouth. I had to keep rubbing my hands together and hugging myself to stay warm. My teeth began to chatter. My leotard wasn't nearly heavy enough.

I uncorked a bottle of Brut, poured myself two glasses, and clinked them together, toasting in silence to my faltering sanity and a better future. Then I downed them both.

The lights came on. I could hear the woosh of the cover sheets being pulled off the sculptures. I was miffed. It was the first time I had ever been excluded from an exhibit's preparations. The videos started automatically, creating flashes that gave a strobe-light effect. Through all that fabric, I could hear the muffled sounds of Nadine opening the front door and letting in the public. Little by little, wooly voices seeped through the curtains. Snatches of conversation reached me then drifted away.

I continued to pour champagne until most of the glasses were filled. Over the next half hour, there were sounds of awe and appreciation, and then a few people trickled into the center and began to drink champagne. Through the drapes I could hear The Mortician commenting, “Interesting choice of medium. Witty. Very definitely enhanced by the projections. Good Lord. Is that who I think it is? Do I recognize…?” And then his voice wafted away and disappeared.

Another slightly familiar woman's voice came into earshot but I couldn't place it. I strained to hear more.

“…at a party…quite interesting…the forefront of the modern art scene in Britain…very sweet really…a little party up in West Vancouver…”

I knew that voice. It was Francesca de la Hoity Toity, Sam's colleague from the Forensic.

And then I heard the other voice.

“They're funny…not bad…but perishable…has he thought about longevity? I mean, hell, Leonardo's stuff didn't
last and now we're all sorry. I'd worry about mice. Or people with a bad case of the munchies.”

Sam's voice.

He was here.

Here with Francesca St. Claire de la Roche.

I had to see what he looked like.

I fought my way through the people who were now crowding and blocking the corridor. It was frustrating. I could make out Sam's voice somewhere in the maze, but not the words, and whenever I tried to get closer to where I thought he was, the voice disappeared. There was too much confusion.

Then it occurred to me. I was rushing past all Paul's work without taking anything in. I hadn't seen myself immortalized. I hadn't looked at the show.

I peered into one of the cubicles. At the center was a life-sized white sculpture of a nude woman. It was stylized, angular and definitely not me. Square shoulders, impossibly long legs. Above the sculpture, a TV screen projected a naked woman, moving, posing, moving again, all slightly out of focus.

The video disturbed me. It was done so that if you really wanted to, you could recognize the model.

I moved on to the next sculpture. It was dark brown, a tall woman, but this time with spidery limbs. The video above it seemed to be another out-of-focus woman posing, moving, posing. She was so thin her ribs stuck out.

The next sculpture was light brown, a tall, slender, flat-chested woman. The video above, again blurred images, corresponded.

And that sweet smell. I moved closer to the sculpture. It was…what was it anyway? I touched it. It was smooth. I held my finger against it. The surface beneath melted slightly and left a small dent.

I licked my finger.

Chocolate.

His sculptures were made of chocolate. Some portrayed female nudes in a prone position, stretched out on their backs, others resting on their sides. Some looked as though they were about to fly, others just languishing. Some of the sculptures were white chocolate with a slight tint. One was deep brownish purple. And above each was an image of a blurry naked woman moving on a screen.

My impatience was growing. And then, about three quarters of the way through the spiral, I stumbled onto myself.

I
stared for a long time. At first, it was in disbelief and then with the thudding heaviness of certainty. There was no mistake. It was like one of those dreams where you're in front of the class at school, or on a stage with millions of people in the audience, or walking down a crowded street. You look down and realize you're naked and weigh three million tons.

Not that I think being naked is a bad thing. On the contrary, naked is wonderful. But it's best when you know it's happening or you planned it to happen and you know what its consequences are going to be.

Paul Bleeker had taken all my most noticeable problem zones and exaggerated them wildly. The blobby sculpted Lucy Madison was reclining on her side, enormous thighs tapering down to dainty little feet. Huge globes for breasts with a pink tinge at the nipple. Pink tinged the knees, elbows,
and cheeks. I looked like a cross between the Easter Bunny and Elmer Fudd.

As for the video, although he'd kept the images out of focus, there was no doubt it was me. I was just a little fuzzy at the edges. Like the ace pornographer he was turning out to be, he must have had the camera very cunningly hidden.

My eyes were blurry with tears as I hurried back to the champagne. Quite a large group had gathered. They ate and drank and warbled praise for the show. I watched the people milling and chattering. Then I saw the sheaf of white-blond hair gleaming above the other heads. It was Anna, my roommate. Of all people. I hadn't mentioned the show to her. I didn't think she was interested in art. I felt an affinity to her just then. I needed to see a friendly face and roommates can be good in those bad moments. I mean, we'd shared so many things, things you could almost call intimate, like boxes of Tampax, dish soap, Glug and bathtub rings. I would like to have talked to her in that moment, but she turned away before I could catch her eye.

Francesca was there, too, standing alone, off to one side, tasting the caviar. No prospective Sam-types stood nearby, though.

It was another surprise to see Nelly the Grape, the girl from La Tazza, sipping champagne and schmoozing. She was even more purple than usual.

I'd had enough. I grabbed a full bottle and headed for the bathrooms. There was only one remedy. I locked myself into a cubicle and began to drown my sorrows in a whole delicious bottle of Brut. I was down to the bottom part of the label and on the verge of hiccups when I heard voices approach, the door open, and two sets of footsteps stop in front of my cubicle. I yanked my feet up onto the toilet seat.

A voice whispered, “Oh, Sam, you should. I could make
us dinner, then we could take a swim in the pool. There's a Jacuzzi, too. You need to relax. I know you've been under a lot of pressure lately with the Jennifer business.”

Sam!

And who the Bojangles was Jennifer?

I was dying to peek through the crack and see what Sam looked like but couldn't risk discovery. I held my breath and squeezed back the hiccups.

There was the flick of a lighter and a blue curl of smoke rose into the air.

“Francesca. You think you should? I don't know that they'd appreciate you smoking,” said Sam.

“That's why we're in here. It's just like school, isn't it?” She laughed her fluttery laugh. I could picture Francesca as a girl, at some elite private school, taking bites out of each and every forbidden fruit.

“Francesca. What are you doing?” Sam's voice was soft and teasing.

There was more fluttery laughter, then the dry shoosh of hands on fabric and the wet slurpy sound of lips on lips.

“How was that?” asked Francesca.

“Um, you've caught me…the champagne must have…uh…I mean, I'm a little surprised…um…uh…what about Gordon?”

“Gordon and I have an understanding.”

“Look. Let's get out of this place. I'm freezing and I need to get some air.”

“Whatever you say.”

They were gone, and with them my stupid slim hope that Sam might be available. I could be fairly sure that he wasn't a hunchback with bad acne scars and two long hairs vainly covering some bald spot. He was kissable in Francesca's books, and women like Francesca could have anyone they
wanted. I didn't know who Gordon was but it sounded as though she wasn't letting monogamy get in her way. I couldn't compete with her. I chug-a-lugged the rest of the champagne and sat there in a maudlin haze, wishing Jeremy were alive, wishing for a Sam…I mean…a man…of my own.

 

I staggered out of the bathroom and back to the tables. Paul had arrived. His voice filtered through the curtains. He was holding court. All the disciples and adoring fans surrounding him had stopped chattering.

He spoke. “The corridor represents the female void, the darkness is the sense of terror and emptiness on entering it, or penetrating it, as it were. The video images are intended as brief moments of light, that which tempts us in flesh and the female form. Females as constellations, beautiful and alluring at a distance, but close up, one discovers that this is no star but a planet, surrounded by noxious unbreathable gasses and temperatures unfit for human habitation. The female is portrayed here as a paradox, nature's lure, a biological trick designed to have us believe that she is an entity of light, when really she is a creature of a darkness so total that you should fear for your life. All a trap to ensure the race's procreation.”

“What about the chocolate?” asked a voice.

“Heh heh heh,” snicker-snacked Paul. “It seemed the perfect medium. Women and chocolate. They're inseparable.”

On that point, there was no faulting him. Following the other line of reasoning, all that babble about light and dark, Paul, the misogynist creep was the occupant of a warehouse that he'd taken all sorts of pains to paint black, and so by his own definition, had built himself a made-to-measure female void. That was my interpretation anyway. Paul Bleeker had created a monumental womb for himself and crawled inside it.

Why hadn't I seen right away that he was a first-class weirdo?

I knew his mother's death must have affected him, perhaps even traumatized him a little, but I had no idea that he was thinking such dark thoughts about women all that time that he was pretending to be so charming and understanding. No wonder sex with him always happened like an air raid.

On automatic pilot, I wandered through the area, pouring champagne and picking up whatever was dropped. Humiliation buzzed through me, making me blind and deaf to everything and everyone.

When the crowd had finally left, Nadine gave me her mile-long list of closing-up instructions. Then she left, arm in arm with Paul, who blatantly ignored me.

I stumbled out of the spiral and into the dark storeroom. It was warm compared to the rest of the gallery. I plopped myself down onto the pile of old coverings, pulled a couple of sheets over myself and sank into a drunken sleep.

 

I dreamed the chocolate women. There was a battalion of them, and in the way that dreams try to tell you things you've overlooked in your waking life, I knew those women were familiar.

They were also gothic, horrifying. Rags and bits of gauzy bandage hung and fluttered from their torsos and limbs as they moved toward me like zombies, like the living dead, their sickly-sweet aroma filling me with nausea.

I could see myself at the back of the group, moving with them, as big as a circus Fat Woman, lumbering along and falling behind as usual. The only difference was that I was fresh and undamaged in my fat way, no bandages hung off my body. I had to take this as a good omen, that I was at least alive.

Paul appeared out of nowhere. At first his eyes seemed normal, black and flashing, but then his pupils began to glow bloodred. He was touching the chocolate women, unbandaging them, licking them all over, chewing bits of face and limb.

I understood in a flash. It was a question of eat or be eaten.

 

I sat bolt upright. It was impossible to tell what time it was. I staggered to my feet and back out into the freezing gallery. I stumbled from one cubicle to another, scrutinizing the sculptures. How had I missed it? As well as I knew artists and what it meant to be their “model,” I had chosen not to see the obvious.

The Other Women.

Recognizing Nadine wasn't hard. She was the spidery one, all elbows and ribs. Naturally, I'd expected her to be one of Paul's models. She had more than one tick. She had a megalomaniacal habit of forcing artists to involve her in their work whenever they were going to have a show in her gallery. But it still made me furious.

I broke the big toe off the chocolate Nadine's foot. It was a full two inches of dark chocolate that in real life had seen more Ferragamo shoe leather than was decent.

And Anna the Viking. He must have been sloshing and pillaging with her behind my back since the day he met her—that evening when she had been doing yoga in the front room, her buns in the air, and I had been running around collecting my things. I took both of her white chocolate index fingers.

Francesca St. Claire de la Roche was the one that stuck in my craw the most. Because she was beautiful and could have whoever she wanted. She was the biggest surprise. How had she infiltrated my social circle so quickly? All that pale
milk chocolate, I took her thumbs, her ring finger and both big toes.

Nelly the Grape from La Tazza was among them, too, dark chocolate with a purplish tinge. I took both of her middle fingers.

Of the rest of them, those of Paul's chocolate lovers that I'd never met, I took one digit each. I found some clean tissue paper in the storage room, wrapped all the appendages neatly and stuffed them into my purse.

Then I went on a final random binge, breaking off little bits here and there and popping them into my mouth. My face shivered with too much sweetness.

When I'd had enough, I emptied the contents of my desk into a plastic bag, grabbed Jeremy's ashes and left the gallery, oblivious to where I was going.

 

I stood in front of the launderette. I'd walked for most of the night and ended up in Jeremy's neighborhood. Unable to face Anna back at my apartment, I'd wandered, still blurry from all the champagne but buzzing with chocolate-powered energy. I blended in with the bag ladies and threadbare night people. I should have been terrified but I wasn't. I was too angry, striding in a fury past the central knot of cement and glass high-rises, toward East Hastings and Chinatown. I'd clutched my bags in one hand and my little brass urn with Jeremy's ashes in the other, holding it out in front of me as if it were a talisman for warding off evil spirits.

I felt seasick with Jeremy gone, his life, my safe island, had vanished, the magic had fallen into the sea like Atlantis, and left me to swim or drown.

It was seven in the morning. The venetian blinds had been lowered on the inside. The launderette seemed as dead as its owner. There was a card on the front door that announced
in large sloppy handwritten letters: Closed Until Further Notice.

I still had the emergency set of launderette keys that Jeremy had given me years back. I unlocked the door and went inside. At the far end was a little utility room with a two-way mirror and a big lost-and-found box. I unlocked the door, went inside the little room, turned on the light and locked myself in. I pulled a few towels and some sweatshirts out of the lost-and-found, improvised a bed and lay down. The smell was delicious. Laundry soap, Borax, bleach and fabric softener.

 

I dreamt I was walking with Jeremy. The landscape shifted constantly. We were visiting places where we'd spent parts of my childhood. We walked through a forest. The trees, huge Douglas firs, were bending toward us, eavesdropping and sighing. He said, “It's okay, Lucy, honey, it's okay to look at these places again with me. It's okay to think you're always gonna come back to them. But if you do things right, it doesn't matter if you do come back to them or not.”

“How can you say that?” I screamed the words and hit his chest with my fists. He just looked at me, softly, unresisting. We had come to the ocean, a sparkling cove. There was a little dock, and the slurp slurp of dinghies rocking against it. The water was a rich sapphire blue, ruffled by wind.

Jeremy said, “The way that water looks out there on the ocean, that was our time when you were a kid jumping out of boats, swimming all summer. It belongs to that time. You won't remember it any better than that.”

“I will. I will,” I protested.

“Don't get attached to it. Let it go.”

“What are you telling me?”

We had moved on and were standing in a vast sunlit field.
It smelled of damp hay and late summer sun. His hair was whiter and longer than I had ever seen it. His feet were not quite touching the ground. “My house, all the stuff in it. Don't get worked up over it. Try to forget it.”

“You don't know what you're saying,” I sobbed. “You're crazy. You've completely lost your mind.”

“You see, you've gotta let me go because my leaving is your permission to fly. Lucy, the past is weighing you down.”

“Crazy, crazy, you're crazy.”

“Your memories of me will be a drag unless you know how to use them. And the way to use them is to let them go. I'll be part of you, count on that.”

“You can't fool me. I know this is a dream and that your voice is really my voice. I've been through a little therapy, too, you know.”

“Therapy shmerapy,” he said.

“I'm not afraid.”

“It's only natural to be afraid. You're supposed to be afraid. It's part of the game. Hold my hand.” I took his hand. We began to lift off the ground and glide over the field. I could hear the ocean roaring in the distance. The sun was shining but the moon and stars were glimmering in a darker sky as well. We glided toward that part of the sky.

Jeremy's hair was growing longer and gleaming silver. We glided higher and I could feel the terror of falling growing in me.