The Blondes (19 page)

I pulled out the phone, but there were no messages.

“How dreadful,” Kovacs said. “How dreadful.”

She squatted and put her hands around her face, peering in the window, the slim curve of her buttocks hovering above her square-heeled shoes. Then she stood again, and turned to me. She asked if I thought it had happened the day before. The hardness had fallen from her and she looked genuinely lost. Clearly, this was the closest she’d been to an attack.

A woman came out of an office a few doors down and headed in the opposite direction. I called to her and asked if she knew anything.

Reluctantly, the woman came back toward us. I noticed she still kept her distance, as if she thought we might be infected. She was wearing scrubs. The door she’d come out of was a dentist’s office, I think.

“Police, ambulance, it happened around five last night. Just thankful it wasn’t us. But you know, women’s health care—there’s bound to be more risk.”

“Perhaps you should try somewhere else, dear,” Kovacs said to me, and she seemed more like herself again. “Just to be safe.” She patted my elbow with something between friendliness and formality.

“Good luck,” the dental lady said, and moved off down the hall.

“But Tuesday,” I said. A door opened and closed in the distance. “Tuesday or Wednesday?”

The question hovered between us.

Kovacs peered down at me. She said that she simply couldn’t do it, that she was leaving the continent—and none too soon, it seemed. “This outbreak. I’ve made plans to fly to Mumbai from LaGuardia. I told you this on the phone. Research.” She made finger quotes around the word
research
as if she didn’t care that I knew she had other reasons for going. It wasn’t until the following week, but she was going to be packing and frantically making arrangements.

Yes, her decision was cold. I thought it then, and now … well, I assume she’s safe, after all. So how can I blame her?

We waited for the elevator, staring at the illuminated red Down arrow. I felt sick to my stomach. I put my palm against the wall to steady myself. I remember Kovacs tossed her coffee cup into the trash can, and ran her hands up and down her knit scarf, held on to its ends like she was weighing something.

“I am very sorry, but you are on your own.”

We boarded the elevator, and as it took us down, I felt like its bottom was dropping out.

We exited into the lobby, then out to the street, and we both
turned toward the American Apparel store before pausing, realizing we should be sure to walk in separate directions. We stood in front of the twin images of the spandex-clad girls with their arms up.

Kovacs put her hand on my arm again. “Phone Karl,” she said from beneath her shiny synthetic bangs. “He has the money. He can fly in for this appointment if you make him.”

“Do you think he’d leave Grace?”

“Grow up, Hazel,” Kovacs said, her voice rising over the din of rush hour. She squinted into traffic. It had become too hot for her scarf, and she unwound it and shoved it into her bulky black purse, her fingers scrabbling. “He has been with that
bitch
ten years.” The word
bitch
emerged from her lips as if she relished putting her mouth around the shape of it. She leaned in and embraced me stiffly, which took me aback. She smelled of talc and bitter coffee. She kissed my right cheek and then my left, and before I could thank her or kiss back, she turned and stalked off, past the clothing store and the mannequins without hips or breasts or heads.

I haven’t seen her since.

AFTER GRACE AND I LOST THE TV SIGNAL HERE
, she went on a jag. She said a red wine hangover was a bitch, but what else was there to do? She drank and talked about the outbreak, pontificating like someone who worked in television—which she does, or at least did—parroting things she’d read or seen as if they were her own opinions.

Meanwhile, I read books of Karl’s that he left here on who knows which getaway. Or maybe he brought them here in boxloads—things Grace didn’t want around their condo. Occasionally I got up and did the yoga position the Child for a minute or two. Grace called it a “supine” pose. I couldn’t tell if that was a nice way of saying “doesn’t require a lot of effort,” but then I decided that Grace isn’t nice enough to cast about for the gentle word for things. Sometimes I do the Cat and the
Cow too, because those only involve getting down on hands and knees and flexing my back.

One of the books of Karl’s that I was reading last week was
Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich and Mass Culture
. I came to this passage: “Once the source of endless pleasure, the female voice has stripped Rath of masculine authority, effected its crisis and uprooted him from his class. Unshaven, unkempt, and dressed in tattered clothes, misplaced and displaced in the cabaret milieu, he is the tragic shadow of his former self.”

It gave me an odd sense of déjà vu. I put the book down for a second, then picked it up again. I’d heard Karl say these words. I closed my eyes and tried to remember where. I had watched the film with Karl here in this cabin, but—looking around—I knew it wasn’t here he’d said them. I was supposed to watch
The Blue Angel
for that first symposium I took with him, but somehow I had missed doing so. Karl said he couldn’t believe he’d let me pass the course—and he made me watch it with him.

Then the memory came to me, like a perfect snapshot: the long table that ran down the middle of the symposium room. It was my first class and everyone else’s third. Dr. Mann. I remember I sat there looking at him while he spoke. I had believed the words he was saying were his own. This was a couple of months before anything occurred between us. He was standing, and everyone else was seated around the table. I remember thinking,
Yeah
, when he said “stripped of masculine authority”—yeah, maybe I could take this course. Maybe Dr. Mann would make a good adviser.

I remember it was a cramped, narrow room, and yet Dr. Mann seemed so apart from the rest of us. He closed his eyes when he spoke, like he knew what he wanted to say, like he was listening to a piece of music only he could hear and was trying to identify it. I envied that separation, that ability to be so caught up in an idea. His face was made of lines. I could draw it for you. There was a set of brackets around his eyes, and another around his mouth. There was a double T-shape across his high forehead. Short, thick brown eyebrows sat above his square metal glasses. Vertical lines of tendon ran down his neck. Later he sat at the long table with us, and under the table, his feet bounced up on tiptoe, his dress shoelaces dangling, even as his voice went calmly on. He seemed like two different people, one below the table’s surface and one above.

“The CIA is behind this,” Grace interrupted my reverie, and I lowered the book, unsure what she was talking about.

I was beginning to worry that if I went into labour with you, I wouldn’t be able to drive myself, and Grace wouldn’t be sober. I worried that even if she were sober, she might go into some kind of spontaneous vengeful state and just let me bleed out, or she might panic about the disease and I would be left bleeding even if she
didn’t
intend it. I mean, we humoured each other, and there were occasionally acts of kindness, but she was erratic, that’s for sure. That’s one thing you can count on in an alcoholic.

I told myself not to dwell on it—but here we are, my little cub. It’s morning, day four on our own now, and I’m here with Larissa’s dead vehicle, and Grace Pargetter is not.

After the missed appointment at the clinic with Kovacs, I lay in bed and tried not to think about the money sitting in my bank account. The thing about the first months of pregnancy is that they’re almost incapacitating. You incapacitated me—like a vampire. I’m not exaggerating. I felt as limp as if I’d lost blood. Even the smallest errands exhausted me. I feel no animosity toward you now, my little parasite, but really, truly, it was as if you planned it, this tactic.

I remember one night I dreamed you were scratching me, clawing your way out through my abdomen, and eating my innards on your way. I turned over onto my stomach and went back to sleep. Yes, I dreamt that. I’m not going to lie to you. People pretend otherwise, but motherhood is scary shit, girl.

When my computer was ready for pickup, I used some of the money from Mom and Richard to pay for it. As I walked to a nearby café where I could sit and get wireless, I passed a small assembly of people. They were positioned at the edge of the sidewalk, where normally one might find vendors of sunglasses and scarves. Across from the small crowd was a sign that said W
ORSHIP
B
EGINS AT
T
HREE
. It stood beside an open doorway. I peered in at stairs that must have led to a walk-up second-floor church squeezed above the storefronts. I stepped over a long orange extension cord that snaked between the sneakers of the onlookers and connected to a pair of buzzing clippers. The man wielding them had a hard, pocked face, cruel as the moon’s surface. In the thick sunshine of midday, he was
wearing a black suit. He held the clippers above the head of a girl covered in a smock. I wondered why she wasn’t in school. She looked no more than fourteen.

“This hair-borne illness,” the man shouted, and without meaning to, I stopped to watch. “This hair-borne illness”—he grabbed a hank of her seed-brown hair—“has been sent from God. That’s right, sent from God as a punishment for vanity. A punishment for promiscuity! A punishment for those who worship false deities! A punishment for pride!” He kept going, coming up with new reasons for the punishment.

An assistant in a teal dress held up a handful of the hair, then cut into it with a pair of scissors. The girl in the smock watched it fall. For a moment, she looked like she might cry. Then you could see her face rearrange and compose itself. Some people hooted and clapped.

Someone else muttered obscenities and dodged around the group. Deking between people, he expertly cut a trail for me.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable with religion—with the exception of Catholicism, which is so creepy it’s almost admirable. Besides, Catholicism is a requisite for horror movies. When I was growing up, five out of ten of my classmates were Catholic, but when I asked Mom about our religion, she just said, cigarette hanging from her lip, fingers flying over her friend Ruth’s hair as she snipped, “One rule, Hazel: do unto others. That’s all you need—one golden rule.” So I always visualized religion as an object: a ring, a coin, or even a gold filling, something with weight and value that you could use if you really got
down on your luck, but that, at the same time, was fairly useless.

This little assemblage was surreal. I don’t know what denomination these people were, if any. As I walked on, I heard more clapping and the rattle and buzz of the clippers. When I looked back, the hard-faced man was taking a strip off the side of the unhappy girl’s head. Locks littered the sidewalk and bristles appeared at her scalp. Like brown leaves, the clippings rolled away in the breeze, out into the street. Car tires rolled over them. As the two figures moved around her, continuing to snip and clip, coils rained down on the girl’s shoulders and smaller wisps floated on the air. The man commanded her to smile, his voice thundering. “You have said, ‘No to vanity!’ ‘No to promiscuity!’ and ‘Take that, pride!’ ”

At the wireless café, I found an email from Moira’s friend waiting for me. I had emailed her before turning to Kovacs for help. She apologized for the delay, saying she’d had a scare when she thought her mother had contracted the virus. Thankfully it had turned out to be food poisoning. She’d been with her mother in the hospital for two days, and hoped I’d managed all right with my appointment. She asked me if I’d heard from Moira, said she had seen on Moira’s website that she was supposed to be back in the city for another show. Like the woman in the dental scrubs at the medical centre, she closed by wishing me luck, as if things like life and death were decided by the stars.

There was an email from a women’s organization whose newsletter I had signed up for late one night in a bout of lonely, political earnestness.
Blame the disease, not the women!
their headline proclaimed. Their newsletter attacked the language
being employed by the media and prophesied the impact of the disease on women’s services as well as pink-collar workers.