Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (19 page)

If he had had to rely on locating that squalor inside himself, Tony would have come up empty-handed. His life had always been a neat and tidy affair. Sometimes he would recall, with a twinge, overhearing two young actors talking about him. One of them had said, “The only part Japp ever got exactly right is the one in his hair.” At the time he had been able to dismiss that remark as simple envy. Because with the right costume, he had always been right for
any
role. Tony Japp had never suffered from typecasting, had never lacked for work.

Yet when the odd spell of unemployment came, Betty had complained he was impossible to live with, a moody pain in the ass. Now Tony asked himself if those infrequent stretches of joblessness hadn’t provided him with a troubling glimpse of what he faced now each and every morning in Chernobyl: his profound, essential emptiness.

His therapist had encouraged him to express his anger over the loss of his wife, which she assured him was a normal response. But Tony wasn’t sure he felt angry. He could
simulate
anger for the counsellor, which he did convincingly on any number of occasions. But the line between what he felt and what was just acting was never clear. He
did
feel a terrible grief over his wife’s death, of that he had no doubt, but he couldn’t be sure that the tears he shed in the therapist’s office weren’t simply squeezed out of him to fulfill her expectations
of how he ought to be behaving. It was easy enough to do. For years he had wept on cue for cameras and audiences.

Spring came in torturous increments. On the lake the ice began to rot, forming tiny puddles that glinted maniacally in the strengthening sun. Japp’s eaves gargled meltwater and the sand on the beach shyly crept out from beneath the snow. The worst winter in a decade was ending. Then one morning as Tony stood on his front steps drinking his morning coffee in a weak shimmer of sunshine, a whitetail doe staggered on to his lot and crumpled to the ground, lay there panting, stark ribs heaving under its mangy hide. Tony ransacked his fridge for anything a deer might eat, but the doe was too weak to take a carrot or even a leaf of lettuce from his hand.

In a panic, he called the cell of the local handyman, a fellow he had often seen riding around in a half-ton with a 30.30 in a gun rack in his back window, and implored him to come put the animal out of its misery. But Bits Bodnarski didn’t view this as an emergency; besides, he was busy pumping out a septic tank and estimated he couldn’t make it to Tony’s place in less than four or five hours. Given Tony’s description of the deer’s condition, Bits thought the doe would be long gone before he got there but if Tony wanted him to haul the body to the dump he was willing to do that.

A city boy and a newcomer to the area, Tony had no idea who else to turn to, what else to do in the unnerving situation he found himself in. The thought of watching the deer slowly expire before his very eyes threw him into a panic.
Suddenly, he became determined to put distance between himself and the deer, between himself and Chernobyl. He booked a room in The Bessborough in Saskatoon, jumped into his car, and beat it, leaving Bodnarski to deal with the mess.

Next morning Tony decided to go for a walk in downtown Saskatoon, hoping a little air might dispel the previous night’s morbid dream about the doe. A nightmare garishly embroidered with vivid, gruesome details that he couldn’t remember actually having witnessed while kneeling beside the dying animal: a swollen tongue lolling in a blue-grey mouth, an eye scummed with a thick, yellowish mucus; a pungent, scorched-coffee-bean stench rising from the hide.

On his stroll, Tony stumbled on a vintage menswear store that piqued his interest. Thirty minutes later he left the shop with a leather hat box under his arm. According to the owner, the woman who had left the hat with him on consignment had told him it had never been worn. Her grandfather had ordered the hat, a homburg, from Europe in 1950, but before it arrived the old man had died from a massive coronary. For sixty years the homburg had been shuttling from one of his descendants to another until it had finally passed to her. But as she had said, “What use is a stupid-looking hat to me?”

Tony had fallen in love with the hat at first sight.

Back at the hotel, he unsnapped the brass clasps of the hat box and reverently laid the hat, a dove-grey felt with Prussian blue velvet band, on his bed. The leather sweatband was in immaculate condition, not the slightest discolouration. As the woman had claimed, the homburg had clearly never touched anyone’s head. It was virgin.

The hat was merely a taste, an
amuse-bouche
, just enough to make Tony aware how ravenous he was, how starved he was for the full-meal-costume deal. The
Yellow Pages
yielded only one tailor who offered custom-made suits. Within the hour, he found himself in a seedy section of town in a small shop run by an Iranian immigrant. When Tony showed the man a picture of the 1930s-era suit he had located on a website and had printed off in the hotel’s business centre, the tailor assured him he could have it ready for him in forty-eight hours, no problem, “Same as Hong Kong. Better than Hong Kong.” Tony selected a charcoal wool pinstripe and patiently submitted to having his measurements meticulously taken.

By the end of the day he had visited several other men’s clothing stores and completed his costume: a trench coat with a leather collar, a couple of dress shirts with French cuffs, a pair of distinctly foreign-looking Italian shoes, a set of abalone cufflinks. He was excited, just as he used to be when a role started to come together, when he sensed himself getting a handle on a part. Best of all, he felt himself filling up, not feeling quite so hollow anymore.

The suit was ready on time, just as promised. And Tony had been able to extend his reservation at the hotel. Location was every bit as important to him as the costume. The Bessborough, built in 1928, had a marble-floored lobby, crystal chandeliers, and well-worn Bergère chairs in the hallways, the proper stage setting for the man he was envisioning. Maybe not quite
Grand Hotel
, but then he wasn’t John Barrymore’s Baron Felix von Geigern, except for the Homburg. Even more important than the physical setting The Bessborough provided was the hotel’s reputation for sheltering ghosts.

Tony had learned that from the teenaged bellhop who had shown him up to his room when he had checked in. The kid was obsessed with “the Bez’s ghosts.” The soul of the suicide who had thrown himself over an upper-floor railing and cracked the marble floor of the lobby when he landed there. The man in a grey suit and fedora who wandered the hallways late at night, but, hey, nothing to worry about from him, he always gave everyone a nice smile, that was it.

When Tony had spotted the hat he had immediately thought,
What better way to banish the ghost he had become than to
play
a ghost
.

Tony came down from his room a little before six and seated himself in one of the Bergère chairs near the entrance to the restaurant. In his hand he held his final prop, a copy of Georges Bernanos’s
Sous le soleil de Satan
, a book he had picked up that afternoon in a second-hand bookstore. Tony
had thought that the reference to Satan on the cover had a nice atmospherish touch to it and that a French novel wasn’t really at odds with his conception of the character he was playing: a pre–World War II gentleman of Mitteleuropa, cosmopolitan, slightly jaded, and frayed by history, a man who by now would have been in his grave for nearly fifty years. But that was the point, wasn’t it? A ghost was supposed to be dead.

He sat there for an hour without anybody giving him a second glance. Not the harried-looking business travellers who bustled by him into the restaurant, nor the families from rural Saskatchewan visiting the city on shopping safaris. Tony felt underappreciated, a little like he had when Probert hadn’t more forcefully protested his decision to quit acting. Which led him to hunt up excuses for why he wasn’t attracting more attention. First of all, it wasn’t exactly the hour people expected to encounter spectres. Second, matinees were always a tougher sell, audiences less responsive and appreciative.

Tony decided to fuck it, find some place outside the hotel to eat.

His mood lightened a little as he walked over the Broadway bridge. Spring was becoming a reality. The air was milder, softer; sunshine flashed on the scales of the river and the trees bore pale green parasols of budding leaves. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine yourself in Budapest, sauntering over the Danube.

And, even more encouraging, he was drawing looks from
those he met on the bridge, most of them hipper young people than the sort you ran into at The Bessborough. One young Johnny Depp wannabe in a trilby even gave him a grin and a thumbs-up, one wearer of hats saluting another. Tony asked himself when was the last time he’d seen an actor in a homburg? Al Pacino in
The Godfather II
? David Suchet in
Agatha Christie’s Poirot
? At any rate, it put him in distinguished company.

He chose to take a light supper in a French-style bistro. Gratifyingly, one or two heads turned when he made his aloof and self-possessed entrance and was seated at a table beside a window where he could watch people strolling about, enjoying one of the first truly warm evenings. Placing his homburg and
Sous le soleil de Satan
conspicuously on the table, he asked for a glass of red wine and a plate of charcuterie in the faintly Germanic-sounding accent he had been working on all afternoon, nothing Colonel Klinkish, just the slightest shading of pronunciation and intonation. When the food and wine arrived, Tony shot his French cuffs and tucked in with more appetite than he’d had in ages. He even indulged in dessert: a vínarterta, a double espresso, and an Armagnac.

Tony could feel himself growing more confident, owning the part, so much so that he opened the Bernanos, propped it against the vase on his table, and began to pretend to read. His French was almost non-existent, but he felt it was a crime not to take advantage of a prop.

Someone was talking to him. Tony looked up in surprise and discovered a very attractive woman standing by his table, smiling down at him. He couldn’t catch a word of what she was saying and then he realized that that was because she was speaking French. For an instant, his mind blanked, but then he recovered, answering her in his faintly German-inflected English. A pro carried on when things took an unexpected turn, as they often did in the theatre.

“I am sorry to say, madam, that a conversation in French is beyond me,” Tony said with a formal, apologetic tilt of the head. “What you see is a man attempting to recover a little of the French he had long ago – when he was a schoolboy. And failing miserably.”

“If it’s a recovery operation,” the woman said, “I wouldn’t start with Bernanos.”

“No, a little modesty about one’s abilities would be more correct.”

The woman laughed, a bark of unrestrained pleasure, of spontaneous applause. She was fiftyish, tall and handsome, rather dark, flamboyant, and Gypsyish-looking with her large gold bangle earrings and blue silk scarf tied around her head, knotted at one temple, its ends dangling down over her left breast.