Snapped (16 page)

“What happened?” I ask, picking up the next notebook in line. I’m anxious to move ahead, to know it all. The photographs are black-and-white, taken in the fifties and yellowed around the edges. Many of the square black corners pasted into the books to keep the pictures in place have dried up and fall into my hands every time I hold one of the notebooks upright, so I stop and splay out on the floor and open the pages carefully and one by one.

Esther reaches over me and grabs the third book, the one with the
Portrait of a Lady Undone
and the photo booth pictures and the casserole recipe. “She fell in love with another man—Stephen.” I remember the letters he wrote her, the way he always called her
darling
. “Luc found out and it was quite a scandal. He tried to reason with her, but Lila would have none of it and she left him. They were divorced—nobody got divorced back then—and she moved in with Stephen. I met her around that time, when I was working at the English library in Westmount. She’d come in to read the magazines she couldn’t afford to buy, although she always scraped together enough to pick up
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Vogue
. Stephen was a writer and didn’t make much money. He wrote
paperbacks that you could only order from the ads in men’s magazines while he worked on his novel.”

“He wrote porn?”

Esther laughs. “I’m sure it would be considered very tame today, but back then the books were mailed in plain paper wrappers. Once I got to know Lila she’d bring copies to me at the library and I’d read them under the checkout counter. Some racy stuff. There was even one about bondage. I still have them in a box in my closet if you want to take a look. Lila would have killed me if she’d known I’d kept them.”

“Why?”

Esther closes the notebook, sets it down and sighs. “Stephen didn’t turn out to be the man she thought he was. They had so many plans—to travel, to start a magazine together. Lila wanted to design dresses, Stephen was going to finish his ‘real’ novel. Lila wanted to host fabulous parties and do all the things they talked about, but a few months after Lila moved in Stephen started to talk about getting married, having kids and all the things Lila could have had with Luc but didn’t want. Stephen started to complain about their cramped apartment. He started writing for an advertising agency and gave up the paperbacks. He started wearing a suit and talking about moving to Pointe-Claire. Lila was horrified. She felt he’d conned her by pretending to be someone he wasn’t, so she left.”

“What was the final straw?”

“He told her to grow up.”

My laugh comes out like more of a snort. “I’ve heard that one.”

“Lila didn’t have many friends and when she left Stephen I don’t think she really had anywhere to go. She started
spending every day at the library and I noticed that she’d wear the same dress sometimes two or three days in a row. She was always clean and beautifully turned out, but it was odd. I have no idea where she was staying—she never told me. But one day I invited her over for a drink after the library closed and we ended up blind-drunk and she stayed, well, until we bought this place in nineteen sixty-five.” Esther smiles at something only she can see in her head. “I’ll never forget that day I went with her to Stephen’s to collect her things. She was so matter-of-fact about it, efficient. Stephen was crying, begging her to change her mind and she told him to
fuck off.
I’d never heard a woman talk like that before.”

“What happened to Stephen?”

“He got married and moved to Pointe-Claire—right down the street from Luc and his second wife as it would turn out. Had two kids, stayed in advertising as far as I know.”

“And Lila was okay with this?”

“She was and she wasn’t. She’d always say that she was, you’d never hear her say otherwise. But the truth is often in what people don’t say. She designed her dresses and she’d put together fashion photo shoots for the newspaper. Men were constantly ringing her up for dates but after Stephen she wasn’t interested in seeing anyone seriously. She believed all men were looking for was a wife for them and a mother for their kids and she didn’t want that, but I think she resented the way married people with kids were always accepted and invited to everything. Lila’s choices scared people, so she kept to herself most of the time. She lived by a strict personal code—she had very strong opinions about what was appropriate and what was not, whether it be about clothes or food or socializing.”

“I’ve read some of her rules. They’re pretty smart. And the how-to-walk-in-heels instructions are genius. She
should
have had a magazine.”

“She got close, once, to securing the financing, but the deal fell through when she wouldn’t sleep with the financier.”

I roll my eyes. “That’s such a cliché.”

“She wasn’t the same after that. She went on designing her dresses, and there was a point in the late sixties that one of her pieces was featured in
Chatelaine
and a movie star, some American girl, I can’t remember her name—was photographed wearing another one of Lila’s dresses. That was all very exciting and she had lots of orders and had some meetings in New York, but nothing ever came of that and I think she lost her spirit. Once she knew that she wouldn’t have a magazine or be a famous designer—the things she dreamed about for so long—she changed. I don’t think she regretted not having a family, but she was lonely.”

“I’m lonely.” My voice is barely a whisper.

“Me, too.” Esther nods. “I think that’s the hardest thing to say.”

By 6:00 a.m. the sun is up and Lila is no longer a mystery. She’s a woman who almost did so many things. I jot down a few points in my notebook that I want to be sure to bring up when I talk to Ellen’s agent. I don’t need to sleep, I don’t think I can. I start to write, make an outline. Esther went to bed around four. She was so stiff from sitting on the floor in Lila’s bedroom she could hardly stand. I helped her up and walked her to her bed, guiding her through the living room and down the hall, keeping my eyes ahead and away from the liver spots on her hands.

I don’t need a pill; I don’t want a drink. I’ll write this book, this book about Lila, and people will get to know her and it will be about the way it is if you’re a woman and you don’t want a husband and kids, but it won’t be a downer, some story that the daytime talk shows pick up that prompts more single self-loathing and unnecessary hysteria. No, it will be a celebration about choices, but not in a two-bit schlocky way, and I won’t gloss over the hard parts. It’ll be Lila’s story, but bigger, contemporary, a reasonable alternative to lobotomizing oneself with a stiletto heel after too many reruns of
Sex and the City
and books with pink covers illustrated with retro-style drawings of girls flagging taxis and drinking colorful cocktails. It has to be real, raw, funny, smart. There will be sidebars with Lila’s advice on manners and makeup and of course walking in heels. There will be casserole at the launch party. Lila’s story is my book and I won’t sell the movie rights, not unless it’s just right and I’m writing the screenplay and somewhere in the contract it says that no matter what, the Lila character can’t get married and have kids and live happily ever after. This is no romantic comedy.

I have a coffee and smoke three cigarettes in a row while I wait for the clock to turn nine. I snap a quick shot of my face with the Polaroid—a portrait of the author before. I wait four more minutes and then I call. Ellen’s agent’s name is Teresa and she talks very fast, though with the coffee and nicotine kicking in, I’m matching her speed with my pitch that I get right into after we’ve said our good-mornings and how-are-yous like we are the best of old friends.

Teresa says
uh-huh
a lot as I race through Lila’s story and I’m not sure when or where to stop because I haven’t figured that part out so I get into the stuff about the sidebars and
having some reproductions of her sketches and wouldn’t it be cool to include a paper pattern—a sewing pattern—so readers could make the Lila dress with the jagged neckline, and that photograph, her
Portrait of a Lady Undone,
would make the best cover, and it’s a good title, too.

I come up for air and Teresa finally speaks. “She sounds fascinating—great story. Really unique.” I’m going to be a writer, a biographer. I will not smile in my author photograph. “Maybe
too
unique.”

I fumble for my lighter and a cigarette. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if it’s
relatable
enough, I’m not sure if Lila’s story is
universal
in the way publishers are looking for.”

“But the
Ordinary Lives
series…”

“I don’t think her life was ordinary enough—she had her issues, her struggles, but not the ones everyone can understand. Most readers are looking to connect with the subjects of these books and Lila’s life was so different, her choices were unusual—I’m afraid she’d come off cold.”

“She wasn’t cold, she was lonely, and it doesn’t get more universal than that.” I’m defensive now. Teresa is not getting it.

“Lonely is fine, but she chose that life and I don’t see readers relating to that. There has to be a connection or the desire for connection and she made a conscious decision to remain disconnected. Do you see where I’m coming from, Sara?”

“You mean she didn’t have a family.”

“It’s not a personal judgment, it’s simply that most people do and it’s those kinds of connections and similarities that make a story like this work—or not.”

“I could send you some copies of pages from her notebooks—they’re remarkable. It might make it easier….”

“Look, Sara. I’m going to be straight with you. The appeal
of the Lila book is too narrow. Now, if we were to talk about something more salable like maybe a collection of your DOs and DON’Ts photographs or maybe a street fashion guide or a dishy trend-spotting how-to, tricks of the trade, that sort of thing, I’d love to represent you. Ellen mentioned that you’ve left
Snap
so it wouldn’t have to be a branded book
per se
, but we can still play on your position as cofounder. Think about it?”

“Yeah, sure,” I lie.

“Just out of curiosity—how’d she die?”

“What?”

“Lila. How did she die?”

I don’t know. I never asked. Esther didn’t say. I didn’t care. Didn’t I care? I am humbled and ashamed and I lie again.

“Heart attack,” I say.

I have reached a new level of asshole. I am a dirtbag bigger than every dirtbag guy I ever dated in my twenties and there were plenty of them. I don’t know how Lila died. I know nothing—nothing really—about Esther. She was a librarian at the Westmount library, she never married, she didn’t have children, she’s seventy-five and is kind and has liver spots. She likes me but she shouldn’t. I’m an asshole, I’m a nightmare. I take another Polaroid. Tears blink from my eyes. A portrait of the author after realizing she’s not an author at all but an asshole who doesn’t know anything.

I don’t want to wake Esther so I pick her spare set of keys out of the bowl by the doorway and quietly let myself out. I push and twist the childproof cap on the blue plastic vial as I walk. I swallow two Ativan. I have to pick up my dry cleaning.

The tranquilizers numb me enough to be able to sip a coffee and scan the shelves at Connections bookstore-café without crying before I walk up the block to the dry cleaner. I’m looking for a book about why I’m such an asshole and how to fix it and another one that will tell me what I’m supposed to do now. I collect books about depression, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and think I might have all three and be a sociopath. The books advertise help and comfort—I can start living a balanced life today!—but the words strike me as hollow. Even a healing stone seems more promising. That I count seven other people perusing the same section this early on a Tuesday morning makes me depressed—if I wasn’t before—and I dump the pile of books on a display table and the counter girl I’ve seen before shoots me the dirtiest look. My cell phone rings and the counter girl points to a sign: a circle with a picture of a cell phone with a red slash through it. I swear the man in the green sweater thumbing through a book on bipolar disorder actually growls at me. I can’t find my
fucking phone, there’s so much shit in my purse, so I take my coffee and flee to the safety of the sidewalk.

It’s Susan the lawyer and she says she has good news. She’s talked to Ted’s lawyer and the
Snap
lawyer and nobody is acting like a prick—she doesn’t use the word
prick,
but I like to think she wants to. The deal is in motion, Ted will buy me out, there will be papers to sign and would I prefer a bank transfer or a cashier’s check. Susan recommends the bank transfer. “That’s a lot of money to be walking around with on a piece of paper,” she warns.

It is a lot of money, more money than I’d thought, not that this is money I’d often think about since I figured Ted and I would keep going and going, making fun of outfits and leading Trend Mecca Bootcamp weekends. Nothing would change, we’d never get old or have babies or move to the suburbs. Gen wouldn’t have huge fake breasts and stop talking to me because of Ted wetting his mushroom dick inside that cunt Eva. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. And I was never supposed to get bored with that life and be standing outside some self-help bookstore wondering where I’m supposed to be.

I don’t want to go home or go back to Esther’s. I can’t sit at Connections with the counter girl glaring at me and the green-sweater guy growling. It’s too early for a drink, not that I want one—my blackout night with Ellen was enough, at least for this week, though a glass of wine with dinner or a pint of beer at happy hour doesn’t really count.

“Excuse me.” A short, round woman with red cheeks tries to edge past me. She looks grumpy. I realize I’m blocking the entrance to Connections and step aside.

I walk to the corner and cross the street. The dry cleaner is another block up but if I pick up my cleaning I’ll just have
to lug it back to Esther’s or to my apartment and I don’t want to do either and I wish I had thought of this earlier so I could have made alternate plans. I could have gone to the art museum or had a pedicure. I still could, I suppose, do those things or something else entirely. I slump up against the
Satin Rules
building and watch the people at the intersection. Everyone has somewhere to go, a place to be. I have nowhere to go, no place to be. I have a pending bank transfer and dry cleaning to pick up. I need somewhere to go, I need a place.

“Waiting for someone?” It’s George Jr.

“Huh? Hey. No.”

“So you just like hanging out in front of empty buildings?”

“Something like that. I like the graffiti.”

“Ah, yes.
Satin Rules.”

“It truly does.” I have no idea what I’m saying. Am I flirting? Am I retarded?

“I would have thought satin might go against all your rules,” George says. I think he’s flirting with me. Maybe he’s retarded.

“I have no more rules.” Who is writing what’s coming out of my mouth? I’m not drunk; I blame it on the Ativan.

“What about your DOs and DON’Ts?”

I shake my head. “Done.”

“Really?” He looks genuinely surprised.

“I am officially retired. Well, officially as soon as I sign the papers and sell my half of the company to my partner—ex-partner?—Ted.”

“Business partner or partner-partner?”

It takes a second for me to get what George is saying. “Oh, God, no! Business partner, definitely.
Artner.”
I laugh as I say this.

“Artner?”

“Never mind. It’s a joke.”

“I like jokes.”

“Maybe another time.”

“Because you’ve got someplace you have to be, right?”

He’s sarcastic and his words puncture my spirit. “Nope. No place to be.”

“I’m just about to open up. I could make you a coffee?” His voice is warm, the sarcasm gone. He wounded me and I know he knows this and I hate that so I say no thanks and he tells me he’ll see me around.

I watch George make his way across the street and past Connections to the bar. I sit on the pavement and root through my purse, not looking for anything in particular, but wanting it to look like I’m doing
something.
I check my home messages from my cell and wish I hadn’t—there’s only one call and it’s from Eva, wondering if she can use me as a reference. “I
was
a good assistant, Sara,” she says and it’s true, she was, except for the part where she screwed my married partner in my home and fucked up my relationship with my best friend. I don’t want to think about this.

I sit on the pavement for I don’t know how long, but for a couple of hours at least because the quiet streets abruptly fill with people and I know it must be noon. I stand and brush myself off. I’m stiff and the Ativan has worn off, I’m no longer numb to the traffic and chatter and sun. I lean beside the
Satin Rules
graffiti and light a cigarette but quickly stub it out. There are too many people on the street and there’s nowhere safe to blow the smoke. The
Satin Rules
graffiti is sprayed on a plywood board that is nailed over a window. A corner of the board has been hacked away and I bend over and peek through. I can’t see much, but the sun catches the building at just the right angle and I can make out a curved
counter, a staircase and a second floor overlooking the first. I lean against the building again, covering part of the
Satin Rules
graffiti with my back. I look at the For Sale sign. I have nowhere to go and I don’t want to move so I pick up my cell phone and dial.

“People do this every day, Sara.” Esther lifts a pile of Lila’s magazines and places them carefully in a box. “They buy things, they sell things.”

“I know, I know. But I didn’t think it would be so easy,” I say, sealing a bankers box with packing tape and labeling it
Harper’s Bazaar, 1955–1957.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“Of course, my dear. I think it’s wonderful. Lila would be so pleased. I know you’ll take excellent care of her things.”

Esther has given me everything—all the magazines, the notebooks, Lila’s clothes, the patterns for the clothes, a dressmaker’s dummy. She even dug out her box of Stephen’s paperback porn for me. I turned down her offer of the furniture, though. There’s only so many dead woman’s things I can live with.

“So are you planning to get a new roommate?” I ask.

“Oh, heavens, no,” Esther replies.

Every day I make a point of asking Esther at least three things about herself. I keep a tally in my notebook just to be sure. Yesterday I asked her only two questions for her but have forgiven myself since there was so much going on with Ted’s bank transfer to me and my bank transfer to a man called Mervyn who owned the
Satin Rules
building. Now I own the
Satin Rules
building and I have somewhere to go.

The movers take Lila’s things away and drive them the two blocks to their new home. The boxes from
Snap
were deliv
ered to the office of Susan the lawyer this morning and according to Susan,
they’ve taken over her office
. I told her I’d arrange to have them picked up and delivered to
Satin Rules
this afternoon. My books, my cameras, my clothes, my computer and my music are all I brought from my apartment. I didn’t go back there. I hired someone to clean up my mess and pack my things and get rid of everything I didn’t want, which was practically everything. I gave my notice to my landlord via voice mail. Still, I couldn’t help but cringe when I thought about the movers and the mess in the living room, the bloody condoms in the trash and the red stains on the rug. “No one will care, dear,” Esther said. “They do this all the time—it’s their job—they’re not going to see anything that they haven’t seen before.” I told her I’d spilled wine on the rug and that my place was a disaster. The truth about the paperboy and bloody condoms is not something Esther needs to know.

“So what are your plans for your first night?” Esther asks as we pull up in front of the building. There are workers prying the boards off the windows and blasting the grime from the exterior with pressure hoses. There is a cleaning crew inside, as well. The phone and Internet guys are scheduled to arrive at two. You can hire people to do anything and this discovery tickles me with infinite satisfaction.

“I have that interview with Ellen at seven for her book, but other than that, I don’t know. Read magazines?”

Esther laughs. “You have plenty of those. I’m so happy that we’ll be neighbors, Sara. You’ll have to come by for dinner at least once a week.”

“At least,” I agree, getting out of the car. As I step onto the sidewalk I see a burly man readying himself to rip off the plywood with the
Satin Rules
graffiti. I run to him. “No!
Wait!” The man stops and looks at me quizzically. “Hi, there. I’m Sara—the new owner.”

“I’m Jean-Pierre.”

“Look, Jean-Pierre. This is going to sound really weird, I know, but I was wondering if you could be extra careful pulling that board off.”

“I will not break the window,” he says, his English heavily accented. I think I’ve insulted him.

“No, no. I know you won’t. It’s just—It’s just that I’d like to keep that board. I want it all in one piece.”

Jean-Pierre looks at it. “
Satin Rules,
eh? Okay. It’s to you.” He shakes his head and shrugs.

I sit on the floor in the corner of the second-story loft, smoking and talking to Ellen. I can see the
Satin Rules
board downstairs, by the door. I’m using a half-empty plastic water bottle as an ashtray. It’s disgusting and it smells.

“Sorry things didn’t work out with the Lila book,” Ellen says. “I really thought Teresa would bite.”

I don’t want to talk about Teresa or the Lila book. “It’s no big deal.”

“Very exciting about the new building, though. I can’t wait to see it. What do you think you’re going to do with it?”

“I don’t know. Read magazines?”

Ellen laughs and I decide that’s what I’m going to tell people I do if they ask. People are insatiable in their need to know
what do you do? What do you do?
Like the answer holds the secret key to who you are.

“Okay, so I want you to take me back to the beginning, not just the beginning of
Snap
, but when you first developed
an interest in trends and realized that you had a talent for knowing what the next big thing would be.” Ellen is all business now.

I liked fashion, I liked music. I’ve read American
Vogue
since I was ten and kept every issue. I spent my allowance and whatever money I managed to earn babysitting, even though I didn’t much like babies, on imported records, limited-edition twelve-inch singles. I made my own clothes and shopped at thrift stores, which perplexed and annoyed my mother, who thought I should dress like a lady. This was ironic because she was anything but—single mom, too many boyfriends including, when I was seventeen, one of mine.

“Oh my God, you’re kidding!” Ellen says when I tell her this.

“I wish I was. Don’t put that in, okay?”

“Don’t worry about it. But—off the record—what did you do?”

“I moved out. She moved to Victoria with some old rich guy.”

“Do you talk?”

“No. But I send her a birthday card every year to remind her that she’s old. She hates getting old. I think it was easier for her when I left. I was a constant reminder that she was aging.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

“We got back together. Not for long, just until he went off to university in the States.”

“You didn’t go to university, right?”

“Nope. Ted did.”

I worked as a fashion stylist and photographer for crappy little magazines for six years, but on my own time I’d take pictures of people everywhere—on the street, in clubs. Then Ted started writing articles for crappy little magazines after he
graduated. And one night he came over and got drunk and we thought it would be funny to divide my pictures into DOs and DON’Ts like in
Glamour
magazine, but without the black bars over the eyes of the DON’Ts. Then we made this little ’zine and left it in all the cafés and bars we went to and pretty soon people were talking about it and wanting to be in it so Ted asked his dad if he’d loan us some money, which he did because I think he was embarrassed that Ted’s degree was in English literature and wanted to be able to say he was a
publisher
instead.

“You see, it was all a fluke,” I say.

“More like you were in the right place at the right time with the right idea—like all successful entrepreneurs. It must have been very satisfying to watch the business grow and see people respond to your ideas.”

“It was—for a long time.”

“And now?”

“Off the record?”

“Off the record.”

“Now I don’t care. I’m tired and I’m guilty.”

“Never feel guilty for your success,” Ellen says.

“But what if your success was based on judging and making fun of people?”

Ellen doesn’t have a snappy,
Infinite Woman
—power answer for this and neither do I.

I have a place but I don’t have anywhere to sleep and I take this as proof of my long-suspected retardation. I left my furniture behind, refused Lila’s and now it’s eleven o’clock and I have no bed. I have no cigarettes, either, having smoked an entire pack during my conversation with Ellen. I need to get
on the patch or something—but tomorrow. Right now I need cigarettes and a bed. I could stay in a hotel. I have plenty of money. I could take a suite at the Ritz and order truffles and call all my friends to tell them I’ve taken a suite at the Ritz, but I don’t have any friends except maybe Esther and Ellen, but she doesn’t count because she’s in Toronto, so I’d have to hang out at the Ritz bar and make new friends. I could stay for days—a week—and shop for beds all day. The staff won’t know what to make of me. I’ll buy a turtle and a puppy and I won’t comb my hair. I’ll play Eloise and crash a wedding in the ballroom.