Lucy's Launderette (3 page)

I yawned some more and opened the envelopes addressed to the gallery. There were a lot of bills, from transporters, caterers, insurance companies and a cheque from a customer. Surprisingly, we were selling pieces that season. Nadine had taken a big risk on exhibiting all those phalluses, but she'd succeeded. The platoon of pizzles actually had buyers.

After four months, though, the subjects were getting to me. I hadn't seen a live one in ages. Another month of staring at them, and they would have started talking to me, their little singsong voices taunting me, “We're having more fun than you-oo, nah nah nah nee nah nah.”

I stifled another yawn and let my mind slide into reveries about Paul Bleeker. Then I remembered Jeremy's letter.

“Damn.” I said it loud enough that my voice ricocheted through the empty gallery. Connie. There was no avoiding her. If Jeremy said I had to go and see her, then I had to go and see her. But the thought of it was like a freezing-cold bath. It was like Sunday night when you had school the next day and hadn't done your homework. As the prospect of visiting Connie loomed over me like a big black cloud, disaster struck.

D
isaster, dressed in a Superman costume, lolloped, cape a-flutter, past the huge plate-glass window of the gallery and vanished from view. I ducked down behind my desk and peeped out from under it. The superhero stepped back into view, examined his reflection, flexed his limp biceps in a superhero-like way, and whizzed out of sight.

It was happening again. Just like a really bad déjà vu. And once more, it wasn't happening in Cedar Narrows, where the damage could be contained, but in downtown Vancouver, where the repercussions could travel a lot farther.

I immediately called my mother.

“He's here,” I wailed. “I thought you said he was in Hawaii.”

“He's…? Oh. Well, he was in Hawaii for a while. And he's there, is he? I see. Well.” My mother's voice was so calm I wanted to scream.

“Well?” I whined.

“Don't be melodramatic.”

“Numbers. I need the phone numbers, Mom. The Vancouver ones. Mine are all at home. Quickly.”

“Calm down,” said my mother.

“I am calm. Under the circumstances.”

My mother hummed under her breath as she searched. Her casualness unnerved me. “Yes, here they are. But I don't know how useful they're going to be. They're a couple of years old.”

“Just give them to me. Quickly.”

“Don't be rude, Lucille.”

“I'm sorry. I can't help it. This whole business affects me that way.”

I could hear my mother sigh just before she began to read off the numbers. I scrawled them down and hung up.

I tried the first number on the list and got an answering machine. With panic in my voice, I left a very long message and hung up to wait. I was too edgy to do anything practical, so I got out a flannel rag and began to dust. Moving nervously around the empty gallery, I buffed frames, glass cases, pieces on pedestals, in short, the entire phalanx of phalluses. As I was rubbing away at an all-too-lifelike marble sculpture of one, a voice from behind me made me leap out of my skin.

“You do that with a practiced hand.”

“Paul…”

“In the flesh,” he grinned. He was looking very sharp in black jeans, black sweater, black leather jacket.

Oh God, I thought, don't let Dirk come back this way dressed as Superman, not while he's here.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“You can come and have a drink with me sometime.”

My heart did a double-flip. I didn't want to seem too eager. “Just let me check my agenda,” I said, very smoothly.
I didn't have an agenda. I didn't need one. My life wasn't so hectic that I needed to write things down to remember them. I found an old address book in the bottom of my purse and flicked through it with an efficient air.

He said, “How about tonight? The Rain Room? Eight o'clock?”

For years I'd dreamt of someone asking me out to the Rain Room. No one ever had. Unfortunately, I had to take care of Dirk first and that could take time. “I can't tonight. How about tomorrow. We'll have to make it nine. I have another engagement tonight.”

“Fine. Tomorrow, then.” Tomorrow was Wednesday and I was free. He grinned again and was gone.

I sank into my chair. It had all happened so fast. I had a date for a drink, a real drink with the real Paul Bleeker. My next thought was, I have nothing to wear. My mental shopping spree was interrupted by the phone.

“Lucy Madison, please,” said a man's voice. It was a deep voice, frayed with exhaustion.

“Speaking.”

“Sam Trelawny here. You left a message on my answering machine?”

“Hello, Mr. Trelawny. You must be new.”

“Why do you say that?” Sam Trelawny sounded harassed.

“Because I know everybody else. Or at least I used to.”

“I was transferred from North Van into the downtown area a few months ago.”

I said, “I'll have to fill you in, I guess.”

“I have Dirk's file in front of me.”

“He's been away.”

“So I gather from the paperwork,” he said.

“Yeah. He was in Hawaii for a while.”

“Uh-huh? For how long?”

“About a year.”

“How did he manage that?”

I said, “I gather a lot of people there are in the same boat. Long-term tourists without green cards.”

“I see.”

“He was in California for a while before that.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah. He was hanging around on a street corner and some Moonies picked him up. They drove him back to their plantation or their ashram or whatever they call it. I guess after one evening with him, they didn't want him anymore. They delivered him back to the street corner as quickly as possible. He got a free meal out of it, though. I imagine that was his idea all along. He can manage on shoestrings and earwax if he's forced to.”

I heard a guffaw at the other end of the line, then silence.

“Are you still there, Mr. Trelawny?”

“Yeah. Some papers fell on the floor. Too smart for his own good, right?”

“That's more or less the way it is. Are you going to see him?”

“It's unfortunate, but there's not a lot we can do at the moment, Miss Madison. You probably know how it goes. We have to wait for something to happen.”

“Just before he went to California, he started wearing a Burmese Wot on his head, this kind of colorful knit hat with a little peak, fluorescent colors actually. He took a suite at the Hotel Vancouver and enticed a seagull into the room. He said he was teaching it to walk in a straight line. He said he was sure the seagull was capable of learning but lazy and not committed to the goal. Needless to say, Dirk left without paying his bill.”

“And this was before he went to California and then Hawaii?”

“Just before. He must have skipped town the same day. Payday. You know, the government check?”

“Do I ever. It's always a busy week.”

“Mr. Trelawny?”

“Yes, Miss Madison…I'm assuming it's Miss?”

“Why would you? You have a fifty percent chance of being mistaken.” I was curious.

“Your voice just sounds…I don't know, peppy, lively…like you don't have six kids and half an alcoholic husband dragging you down.”

“Thanks,” I laughed. “It is Miss. Mr. Trelawny?”

“Yes?”

“Something serious is going to happen very soon. Probably in the next day or so.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“He was wearing a Superman costume and moving fast. He's on a roll.”

“Well, any signs that he might harm himself or others around him…”

“Can't we just have him picked up?”

“Look. Take down these numbers. They're emergency numbers. Not in the book. He makes an appearance, you keep him there, call the police, and we'll have the assessment team arrive and do a follow-up.”

He gave me the numbers and I wrote them out carefully. Gratitude toward the faceless Mr. Trelawny oozed from my every pore.

He said, “Good luck. We'll be in touch. I'm afraid I've gotta go. Got an emergency call on another line. Bye, Miss Madison.”

“Bye, Mr. Trelawny.”

My hand was shaking as I put the receiver down. On another occasion when my brother Dirk had decided his life
wasn't interesting enough, before California and Hawaii, he had boarded a downtown bus with a toy pistol. It had been snowing then as well and everyone was getting sick of the cold and slush. He had held the pistol to the driver's head and ordered the poor man to take him to Cuba…where it was
warm.

Dirk was a one-man raid on sanity. And he was six feet, four inches tall. So people usually took his threats seriously.

On the subject of Dirk, my mother took a classic position, the ostrich position, with her head well-buried in sand. Whereas my father pleaded the fifth amendment and arranged to be out or busy whenever his only male heir was around. As far as my mother was concerned, Dirk had nothing that a good meal, his family's love and a few lithium cocktails couldn't cure. She was always going on about how talented he was.

Dirk had trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. As far as I was concerned, he was still acting, but with a rotten script. He had once confessed to me, when we were both teenagers, that he would never work at a normal job, that he wouldn't have to, because he was such a mind-boggling genius. I concur with the mind-boggling part.

I was on the lookout for the Superman costume all day but it never showed. Probably slowed down by a lump of kryptonite.

 

The next morning I took the bus down to the East End of the city and the Italian neighborhood. Jeremy and Connie had shared a big old Victorian house, a ruin with a vague whiff of damp rot about it. For years, the dilapidated four-story mansion had hosted big parties, biker friends and whoever happened to need a place to crash. And then Jeremy had taken that trip to the States six years before and come back
with Connie. The doors that had always been open were suddenly closed. Jeremy took Connie very seriously. There were still parties, but never at the house.

After that, I always met him at one greasy spoon or another—some place where we could get cheap bacon and eggs and talk for a while. He'd intimated that Connie reminded him of someone he'd been crazy about. But there was more to it than that. There was a sense of mission. He was like a schoolteacher guiding a favorite pupil and this had never made much sense to me.

There I was on the rickety doorstep peering through the beveled glass door into the interior. Connie was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to. I always had the feeling that she was sneering behind my back, probably thinking how tough and world-wise she was and how bourgeois and artsy-fartsy I was. It was the expression on her face whenever she saw me, a blunt skepticism, and it completely unnerved me.

But Jeremy's wish was my command. I rang the bell and waited. A few minutes passed and no one came. I lifted my hand to ring again when I saw a dark shape at the end of the corridor. It was her. She moved slowly and when she got to the door and opened it, she didn't look pleased to see me.

To say she looked like she'd been scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe would be putting it nicely. She had a cigarette hanging off her lower lip. Her face was puffy with a greenish tinge. Her hair was greasy and limp, and the house-coat she was wearing looked like it was hosting miniature colonies of thriving alien life.

“Hi, Connie.” The sound of my own voice made me shrink. It was too chirpy, like a cheerleader's. Connie just nodded.

I qualified myself. “Jeremy asked me to come and see you. I have no idea why. He thought I should.”

“I guess you better come in.” The sound of her voice scared me. It was a low-pitched monotone at the best of times, which made it impossible to read her emotions, but now there was something else lurking there.

She slouched toward the living room and I followed her. The air in the house was close and fuggy and the curtains were drawn. She slumped into an armchair, narrowed her eyes at me and blew a smoke ring. “So Jeremy wanted you to see me, eh?”

“He sent me a letter. He must have sent it just before he…uh.”

“Bit the big one?”

“Yes. Did you know he was going to do what he did?”

“Not exactly. But I had a feeling it was coming. He was sick. They didn't give him much more than a few months. He was feeling really bad.”

“Why didn't you tell us he was sick? Why didn't
he
tell us?”

“He said he didn't want to see that look in people's eyes. He didn't want anybody feeling sorry for him.”

I wanted to be able to blame her. I wanted to hear that Connie had talked him into it, that she was somehow responsible, but I could see that it wasn't the case. Still, I was mad, and when the “Jesus” came out of my mouth she was quick to answer.

She said, “You don't like me, do you? None of your family does. You all think I'm trash.”

My mouth opened like a fish's and then shut again. I didn't know what to say.

She went on, “I didn't choose Jeremy. He chose me. If he hadn't, I'd have been dead in a ditch a long time ago, I can tell you.” She squinted at me again. There was a long silence
and then her voice was so low, she was nearly whispering. “Jeremy got me off junk, you know. He got me off the street, got me out of the life I was leading. I don't know why he picked me, why he thought I had anything special. But I can tell you, after a few months with him, I thought I was worth saving, too. Now I'm not so sure.” She started to look even greener than before. She muttered, “Oh, Christ,” shot up out of the chair and ran down the hall. I heard a groan and the sound of a toilet flushing. Connie came shuffling back down the hallway and just as it was dawning on me as to why she looked so chunky, she plopped herself back in the chair and said, “Damn him. He wouldn't let me get rid of it and now it's too late.”

 

I was early for my date at the Rain Room. Mostly because I wanted to see if Paul Bleeker was serious and had booked ahead. The Rain Room was the kind of place where you practically had to have reservations just to look inside. It was on the top floor of a very tall high-rise overlooking the harbor. It had a central courtyard full of trees and the walls were of molded glass. On the outside, rivulets and cascades flowed down the contours. It was like being under a waterfall or at the center of a rainstorm. At night it was lit with thousands of tiny white lights and the whole place glittered. The background music was watery, too. I recognized Saint-Saens's “Aquarium.”

Sure enough, Paul Bleeker had booked a table for two. I lingered in the doorway for a minute. I had decided to go in and sit down when I saw it. Across the Rain Room, outside in the courtyard, Dirk, still dressed as Superman, stood completely still, looking important. He then took one step forward and pressed his face against the glass. Water splashed
onto his head and flowed down his body but he was oblivious to it. I bolted.