Late Nights on Air (6 page)

“YOU CAN TELL SO MUCH
about a person by hearing his voice,” said Dido. She was in Eleanor’s kitchen, drinking up her coffee. The radio was on in the background, an announcer introducing choral music.

“I wonder,” replied Eleanor, who’d gone to church that morning, reviving a habit she’d given up years ago. “I wonder how much you can really tell.” She remembered what her father had said about hearing Stalin on the radio in 1943: he had the warmest, sturdiest, most trustworthy voice he’d ever heard.

Dido’s hands were wrapped around her coffee mug. Her hair was loose, her reading glasses in her pocket. “Gwen sounds like she’s falling asleep on air. I can’t listen to her.”

“Give her time,” said Eleanor.

She knew more about Gwen’s past than Dido did, she knew Gwen had been having troubles with her family, she’d run away in a sense. But even if Gwen hadn’t confided in her, she would have assumed something was wrong. There was her strange pallor, which made Eleanor think of Byron’s ivory-pale skin, the result of overeating, then eating nothing, and since she’d watched Gwen starve herself at breakfast only to overindulge at dinner, she guessed the girl might be
self-denying and gluttonous, in turn. There was her consistently drab wardrobe, and not a trace of makeup or bit of jewellery.

“She seems to want to erase herself,” Eleanor said, “so it’s strange she’s on the radio. It must be hard to have everybody listening to you.”

“Or does she want to draw attention to herself?” Dido, impatient, swept her dark hair off her face. “She’s always talking to me about how bad she looks. I don’t mean to say,” altering her tone, “that she’s aware of how she talks. I don’t think she knows herself very well, actually. Anyway,” she said abruptly, “let’s get back to me.”

Their eyes met—amused—and Eleanor forgot about Gwen for the moment.

“When can I move in?” asked Dido.

“Tomorrow, if you like.”

Lucky Dido. For almost a year she’d been sharing a small bungalow with two other women who didn’t know the meaning of the words
quiet
or
clean
, and it was more like camping out than living. Tomorrow she would move her things into the small and tidy bedroom left vacant by Eleanor’s previous roommate, who’d decided suddenly she couldn’t face one more day in Yellowknife, let alone one more winter. Dido would have the run of the mobile home, the use of Eleanor’s books, the pleasure of her civilized company at a monthly rent that was lower by a third than what she’d been paying. I’ll stay here one more year, Dido thought, and then I’ll go somewhere entirely different.

One night in mid-June Dido and a former teaching colleague went to a party in Old Town that featured caribou burgers and kegs of beer. On a big deck overlooking a rocky slope with the bay in the distance, she discovered a crowd of strangers, men with huge bellies and heavy-handed hospitality and horrible opinions. She wondered if Texas was like this. She heard someone say, “If you’re a white man, vote for a white man.” She heard someone else say, “Any girl can type. We’ll just drag a squaw in off the streets.”

Dido saw the racism more clearly, seeing it with a newcomer’s eyes. These were businessmen who believed the North belonged to them. They smelled money, she thought. They couldn’t wait for the gas and oil to flow, and so they had no time for the inquiry into the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. They hated the tax dollars it was soaking up and the delays it was causing. They resented the platform it was giving to natives, environmentalists, do-gooders of every stripe. They belittled the government-appointed judge who was running it.
Berger
. She heard the name being bandied about with contempt. But the pipeline was going ahead, she also heard them say, nothing would stop it. Government was behind it, big money was behind it, real northerners like themselves, who put their shoulders to the wheel and prospered, they were behind it.

Overhead were ravens and lake gulls, all around were low hills made of the oldest rock in the world bathed by the most beautiful light on earth, and lovely miniature birches, and small flowers clinging and spreading. Dido had learned recently that this rock was the very rock she had failed to drive tent pegs into three thousand miles away in Ontario, on an ill-conceived
camping trip with her ex-husband: it was all part of the great Canadian Shield, a connection that ran deep and underfoot, though on the surface it failed to bring even two quarrelsome people together.

After a while, she gravitated towards a less crowded corner of the deck and saw Eddy leaning on the railing, his loose hips, long legs. He was staring off into the distance. She glanced his way several times, but not once did he acknowledge her. She went to stand next to him. She rested her arms on the railing beside his, and he said to her, “These people are despicable.”

“Then we agree about something.”

He looked her in the face, his eyes full of anger. “Racists run the show up here,” he said.

“I know.”

His harshness appealed to her and surprised her. She began to ask him about himself, and he responded and not with small talk.

He’d grown up in California, the son of a house builder who died at the age of thirty-eight, leaving his mom with three kids and no money. Now his troubled boyhood had been stirred up again by the sudden death of his sister-in-law, who’d left behind a little girl, only five years old. He’d been five, too, when his father died.

“How did he die, your father?”

“He was up on a roof and they say he lost his balance.”

His voice was quiet and clean, she thought, unlike Harry’s fleshy growl. Eddy was leaning back now, against the railing, his fingers pushed into the front pockets of his jeans.

“Tracey asked me how you spell disappointment,” he said.

His niece, she thought. “Disappointment,” she repeated softly.

“I helped her sound it out and she got it all except for the second
p.”

Dido made her excuses to her friend, and she and Eddy left the party together. It was midnight. A car went by, having no need of headlights despite the hour. They walked south on Franklin Avenue, uphill, for they both lived in the new part of town. A drunk in a white shirt came weaving down the hill towards them. On his way by he reached out and grabbed Dido’s arm and brought his dazed, liquored-up face to within a few inches of hers. Eddy stepped neatly between them and the man reeled off. “Incredible,” muttered Eddy, “that he’d do that when I’m right here.”

They walked on.

Dido was touched by his account of his niece. She could picture him sitting on the floor beside the little girl, helping her spell out her state of mind, and the girl would feel protected, cherished.

They reached the Yellowknife Inn and Dido said she would take a taxi the rest of the way home. Eddy offered to drive her. He had a truck, his place was just a couple of blocks away—he hadn’t driven to the party, he’d ended up there, he didn’t bother to explain how. No, she smiled, this was fine. He opened the taxi door for her, and once she was safely inside he asked her where she lived, then told the driver where to go, and in the back seat Dido felt a little amused but not displeased. Eddy was looking out for her.

The next morning she was in the bank. Another perfect summer’s day, and she was congratulating herself on having come to a part of the world that was dry and light and spacious. I understand infinity now, she was saying to her father in her head. From my base point I’ve come a huge distance to a place consisting, in itself, of infinite distance.

She was at the side counter, signing a money order for her mother in Nijmegen, when a single red rose was set down beside her right hand. She stared at it, then turned, and there he was. Unsmiling, aggressively gallant, intent on being understood. Eddy touched his hand to his heart and held her gaze. And then he turned and walked out of the bank.

Dido followed him with her eyes, then looked down at the long-stemmed rose. And again, from nothing, or almost nothing, her attraction grew.

That night she lay beside Eleanor on Eleanor’s double bed, listening to music on the radio, turning the big watch on her wrist and thinking aloud “about a day on the beach when I was as close to my father-in-law as I am to you, watching all these little birds race along the water’s edge.” They’d found a sheltered place in between the sand dunes, she said, and her father-in-law had told her about the first time he made something with his hands and discovered he was good at it, and it surprised him, not that he was good, but that anyone could be who was interested enough in what he was doing. “‘Find something you’re really interested in and everything else falls into place.’ I was lying on my side, watching the light on his face, and I said, ‘Okay, what about somebody. If you find somebody
you’re really interested in, does everything fall into place?’” Her voice dropped a little, moved into another register. “I remember the hour exactly, because he spotted this watch in the sand and picked it up and slipped it on my wrist. Half past four and he said, ‘This is what I think about at night, if you ever wondered,’ and he bent down and began to kiss me through my blouse, everywhere, not just my breasts, everywhere.

“Like this,” and Dido demonstrated on Eleanor’s sleeve. Eleanor giggled.

He’d drawn her blouse into his mouth, sucking it up with light puffs of air, a sort of reverse kiss, warm, amazing, the most arousing thing she’d ever felt.

To Eleanor the demonstration felt like being vacuumed by a little vacuum cleaner. “And then?”

“Then he stopped himself. ‘I can’t do this to my son.’“

The rose was in her room down the hall. Being given a rose shouldn’t make such a difference, and yet it did. “Father and son,” said Dido. “That’s what mattered.” She was remembering how every Friday her father had brought fresh flowers home from the market to her delighted mother, whatever was in season, gladiolas, dahlias, margaritas, lilies, tulips.

“You mattered,” said Eleanor. She was trying to read the changing expression on Dido’s face.

“Not enough.”

Their heads were inches apart. For another moment Eleanor studied the faraway look on the face beside her. Then she turned on her back and stared up at the ceiling. Dido’s words—candid, confiding, self-absorbed—had come so easily that they infected Eleanor with the same ability to touch upon things normally never spoken about. And so on this June night
filled with light, when so little sleep was required or attainable, she divulged the secret of her own failed marriage.

She was teaching English in those days and she’d fallen in love with a colleague, a married man whose wife was mentally ill. He was very good to his wife, very kind, but always sad. “He talked to me about her all the time, and now and again I went to visit them. He always called her sweetheart. Sweetheart, here’s Eleanor. This went on for years, but then she got worse. Well, she became violent. She tore up his clothes, one day she threatened to kill him. In the end she was institutionalized and a year later he got a divorce. I thought he was right—not everybody did—but he had a life to live and so did I. After the divorce I persuaded him to marry me. On our wedding night we lay on the bed—like this—side by side, and he let me touch him but he didn’t touch me back. On our honeymoon he removed his wedding ring. When we got home he wouldn’t tell anyone we were married. And then he began crying, he couldn’t stop crying.”

“Are you saying you never made love?”

“We never did.”

“How long were you together?”

“About six months in 1970.”

“That’s the year I came to Canada. I arrived in August and in October there was the War Measures Act. I couldn’t believe it. I thought Canada stood for peace, and suddenly, tanks in the streets.”

“It was a bad year,” said Eleanor.

Dido raised herself on one elbow and looked down at her. She smoothed the long wisps of blond hair off Eleanor’s forehead, then bent down and kissed her briefly on the mouth, an
act of affectionate sympathy that moved Eleanor and took her aback. Then Dido said, “We both came north to escape love affairs. At least you left him.”

“No. He left me. I would have stayed.”

Dido flashed her a look of disbelief, and Eleanor said, “Sex isn’t the most important thing to me.”

Dido responded by once again turning the watch on her wrist. She seemed to Eleanor miles away. In another world.

“Tell me,” Eleanor asked quietly, “where was your husband while you were on the beach with his father?”

Dido looked directly into her face. “Danny adored his mother. He pretty much forgot about me when he was with her.”

Eleanor didn’t think that could have been possible. But she said, “My husband doted on his mother too. What’s his name? Your father-in-law.”

“Daniel Moir.”

“And you’re still thinking he’ll come to find you one day?”

“I don’t know any more.”

“But he knows you’re here.”

“He knows.”

Eleanor woke up the next morning and discovered she wasn’t alone. In the night Dido had slipped in beside her; she was curled up on her side, sound asleep. Eleanor lay still for a moment. Then she got out of bed and made coffee. From the kitchen she heard Dido stretch and yawn. She filled another mug and took the two mugs down the hall, aware of the sound of her feet on the carpet. Dido plumped up her pillows
gratefully. Eleanor sat at the foot of the bed and watched her friend take her first sip.