The Blondes (7 page)

Moira said she’d just wanted to check how I was doing.

“I think I’m in shock,” I told her.

She nodded and said that was natural. Then she asked if I had called “him” yet, and I realized she meant Karl. We were talking about two entirely different things. I reached over and flicked the laptop shut. I didn’t want her to see it. I had unburdened myself to her enough already.

“What’s that?” I pointed to her case.

“Glockenspiel.”

“Will you show me?”

Moira held the case out and pulled at the edges, producing fold-up legs. She opened the case, and it was now a stand. Two sets of slim metal bars gleamed inside. I wasn’t sure about the difference between a xylophone and a glockenspiel, and I admitted as much to Moira. I told her I’d thought that the glockenspiel had tubes hanging from it. Although I supposed it was wrong to engage in small talk after everything that had happened that day, I found myself doing it without guilt.

“Now you’re thinking of a marimba,” Moira said. “Xylophones are wooden. Glockenspiels have metal bars. Marimbas
have the resonating tubes. They’re more for orchestral performances.” She told me she had one at home, but not a good one, since a good one cost as much as a piano.

I asked Moira where she was from.

Buffalo and Richmond, she told me. Her parents had split and she lived with her “mum”—which is how she said it, with a soft
u
—but sometimes spent summers with her father in Virginia. Moira did a lot of travelling. Drifting, she called it. I remember that I felt a flicker of excitement—now I had met someone while travelling, and that meant I was a real traveller too. Moira had studied music in school, and she performed with various art groups and experimental ensembles, mostly in galleries. I could hardly believe she roamed across the country by herself. When she was in Buffalo she tended bar because it was flexible and she could easily get away for days at a time. She’d had just the one performance in New York, so far—“And it paid,” she said. I remember her raising her expressive caterpillar eyebrows in amazement at this. She said she would be back to play again in the city in a couple of weeks.

I told her I wished I could’ve seen the performance and asked if she would play something for me.

“The glockenspiel makes a pretty penetrating sound,” she said, and made a worried shape with her mouth. It was after one in the morning on a Thursday. But she’d been standing behind the instrument, as if about to play, since I had first asked her about it. “I’m sure there are other guests here, aren’t there?” she added, uncertainly.

I didn’t say anything as Moira turned and closed the door
to my room. She picked up the mallets. Her face took on a look of concentration.

When she struck the first bar, it was as if a bell had been shaken in the small room. The song progressed, flute-like and tinkling, almost a lullaby. She used hard, quick-moving mallets, and eased from the vibrating bars a timbre that reminded me of running water. Blue-green was the only way to describe the sound, and reclining on the bed, I closed my eyes. A few moments later, the song became more percussive. The floor shook with thumps from an irate neighbour. The instrument hiccupped a couple of final notes, as if Moira wanted to fit them in, then stopped suddenly.

I opened my eyes.

“
Glockenspiel
literally means ‘hitting of one body against another.’ Well, actually that’s not true,” Moira amended. Her voice was softer than before, perhaps from concentrating on the music. “It means ‘playing of bells,’ but the hitting definition is in there somewhere too. Germans!” Her eyes were downcast, fixed on the gleaming instrument.

“That was … breathtaking.”

The corners of Moira’s mouth curled into a wry, half-hearted smile. “That song’s called ‘Plastic.’ Usually the glockenspiel is amplified and I use a delay pedal.”

It took me a second to realize that she was apologizing—that she felt the song hadn’t sounded quite the way it was supposed to, that I’d somehow been cheated.

I laughed, the sound startling me. “Call it whatever you want,” I told her. “It was great.”

Sometimes, Moira told me, she played with art-school bands. She listed a flurry of names—none of them recognizable to me. As she tucked the mallets away, a gold cord caught my eye. Attached to one end of it was a shape the size of a dollar coin, slightly thicker, flat and shiny. The apparatus lay in a crevice of the case. It reminded me of Eugenia’s earbud.

“I’ve been thinking of aborting,” I told Moira from the bed, where I was still sitting akimbo. “What’s that?” I gestured to the cord.

“This?” She held it up, the gold circle dangling. She didn’t seem fazed by anything, and I decided I really admired that about her. “It’s a contact microphone. It catches the sound directly from the instrument’s body.” Moira efficiently inserted the contact mic back in its place. “I have a friend in Brooklyn. She might be able to help you find a clinic. She’s been here a while. In Williamsburg. I don’t know if she knows these things or not, but she might.” She closed the case. “What’s your last name? So she can get in touch with you?”

“Hayes.”

Moira repeated it. “Hayes. Hazel Hayes.
H-A-Y-E-S
?”

I nodded.

I had noticed she did that: repeated things, or sometimes said them out of sequence, like that morning when she’d told me “Here” before she brought me the toilet paper to wipe my nose. I wondered if it was a musician thing, something to do with timing and thought processes. Or maybe she was just a little drunk and tired.

I thought about the fact that Moira hadn’t told me not to abort. She hadn’t offered advice either way.

“Have—?” I began. “Have you ever—?” I let the words hang.

Even if I’d had the words right then, whoops and hollers interrupted me from the window. It was noise carrying from the gay bar on the street out front. A man with a shrill voice screamed, mock-seriously, “Come on, bitch. I dare you, I dare you!” It was that time in the morning when people had drunk or inhaled too much and were being pulled home by their friends.

Moira gathered her hair between her hands and pushed it back behind her neck. She peered at me. “Wait …” She gestured vaguely, one hand extended, moving in circles. “Something’s different. Glasses—no, you did have those this morning.” I could see her squinting, cataloguing me.

“My hair.”

“How was it before?”

“Brown.”

“Brown, brown. And now you’re red. Here—” She came around to the front of the glockenspiel and reached toward me. She plucked a lock of hair between her fingers. “It’s coarse, but not as coarse as mine.” She let the section fall.

I told her I had used lye once to tame it. The first time it straightened my hair and gave me slick baby-doll locks. The second time it gave my hair a plastic texture every time it got wet, and strands broke off when I tried to run a comb through them. My mother had cried to see me. Eventually I had shaved all my hair off in one go.

“Wash it as infrequently as possible, or use conditioner instead of shampoo,” Moira said, nodding.

I didn’t tell her my mom cut hair for a living. I didn’t tell her about the eggy fumes of perm solutions that were the smell of my childhood, or that I had heard every piece of hair advice there was as if it were gospel.

“The other thing you can do is gather it in a ponytail and just wash the outside strands,” she continued.

Then, as if the alcohol had caught up with her, Moira swayed and moved away. She retreated from the bed and closed up the glockenspiel for the night, as if putting a bird to sleep by covering its cage. “I’m sad to say I leave early tomorrow morning.” She folded up the legs of the makeshift pedestal and snapped them into place so that the whole contraption was just a briefcase again. She held out her hand to me, and we shook. She had calluses on her fingers.

I suppose if Moira hadn’t stopped by my room that night I might have phoned someone, crying, to talk about the pregnancy, the girl I’d seen killed. I might have had less pride. But Moira calmed me. When I look back it’s easy to hypothesize about the course my life might have taken. I might have made it back here sooner, and Karl and I might even have worked things out, one way or another, together. But who knows? Maybe if I’d left the city sooner, I’d have wound up somewhere else, the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe I would have contracted the virus myself. Maybe I’d have
landed in one of those wards Moira later told me about …

Because, as it turned out, the second attack had already occurred.

I woke the next morning to find a business card lying on the grey carpet, just inside the door. It had been slipped under.
Moira Clemmons
, it said. There was a website address and a woodcut image of a glockenspiel in green ink. On the flipside she had written in ballpoint pen,
My friend in Brooklyn
, and an email address. She had big, neat bubble penmanship, the kind that popular girls have in tenth grade. I ran my thumb along the edge of the paper stock, then tucked the card into my wallet.

I was at the New York Public Library when I found out about the second blonde incident. I couldn’t concentrate on my thesis, though I’d gone there with that intent. The entire time I’d been in Manhattan I’d been flipping through magazines, stopping at spreads by Gucci or Bulgari, and writing down random phrases such as
The machine of gender, Beauty as its own language, The wealth of youth, The “wet look” of women in fragrance, Nautical-scarved superwomen
, and
Androgyny in advertising in the age of HIV
. I had three dozen scraps of paper with these nonsensical snippets on them. The thesis was a year in progress and I still hadn’t written anything beyond scraps. Let me tell you, what I’d write now would be much more cohesive. Women and vanity? Ways of looking at women? After these past seven months every human left on Earth has become a women’s studies major. We women matter. We are the discourse on a twenty-four-hour news cycle because we are dangerous.

But back on that day I was browsing the newspapers instead of writing my thesis. I quickly found a more comprehensive article about the subway attack. Coworkers and associates had identified the blonde business-woman. Her name was Alexis Hoff. She was forty-eight, an advertising executive. Her assistant reported that she had torn a whiteboard off its stand and thrown it at a trash can before storming out around two-thirty that afternoon. Her face had turned haggard and her eyes bloodshot. Nothing had prompted the outburst, and those who witnessed it had assumed she was having a personal problem. Her assistant said that Ms. Hoff had breezed in “acting like her usual self” that morning, but by noon had asked for Tylenol for headaches and had begun mumbling nonsensically. She had passed on lunch, saying she had no appetite, and had “seemed a little edgy or paranoid,” but the assistant had not thought it his business to ask if anything was wrong. A fellow ad exec had expressed his grief at the—and I quote—“bizarre incident that resulted in the loss of one of our finest.” The company’s official statement was that although Ms. Hoff certainly could have a powerful presence, the company had never seen her act violently—that the acts she had been accused of, if indeed true, were highly out of character. They could only assume she had been delirious and in need of medical attention.

Ms. Hoff was a Harvard graduate, and spent her free time with her two Weimaraners, who were her pride and joy. She was close with her parents, who declined to comment. Her sister said, “We’re grieving. You need to know Alex was a good
woman.” I remember that quote was highlighted in a big call-out font:
She was a good woman
. “She wouldn’t harm anyone,” the sister continued. “This is not her fault.”

It made me feel cheap: reading about the previous day’s incident, like a tourist of tragedy. Beneath the table I pushed my hand along my belly to quell my nausea.

News of the second attack was buried, and it was a while before I discovered it. Titled “Blonde Fury,” it was not much more than a bit wedged between local shootings, arrests, train and automobile accidents, and ads for the New York Diamond Exchange. That catchphrase,
blonde fury
, wasn’t widely used yet—or not that I knew. This was the first time I saw it.

The previous evening, at six o’clock, in an upscale Midtown hair salon called Humble & Tumble, a client had brutally attacked her stylist. Halfway through a bleaching session, the stylist had been blinded with his own chemical potion. Three other hairdressers rushed to subdue the client, who grabbed a hot flatiron, yanked it from the wall, and began beating them with it. One stylist was rendered unconscious by a forceful blow with a hairdryer. Police arrived after the stylists and their other clients had hastily left the premises. The attacker was easy to identify by her erratic behaviour and the purple vinyl smock still fastened around her neck. In apprehending her, one of the officers sustained minor cuts and lacerations. Two stylists were treated for minor burns and released, but the main victim was still in critical condition with chemical burns to his face and eyes.

So now it was blondes, plural.

My eyes raced to the top of the page, where the day’s date was printed. I walked out of the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, down the hallway, and outside as fast as I could without making Security nervous. On the steps, under the disapproving gaze of a stone lion, I fished my cellphone out of my bag. I had already missed two calls from an unknown number.

The first message was from Dr. Wanda Kovacs. We had arranged to meet several times already, but she always cancelled at the last minute via email—something that needled me. She was a busy woman, and one of the few contacts Karl had given me when I told him my plan to apply for funding to go to New York. All he had said about her was “An amazing woman.” The rest I’d had to research on my own.

Kovacs possessed a BA in Cultural Studies from Trent University, an MA in Psychology from Cornell, a PhD in Semiotics from Brown, and apparently a soft spot for Karl and for Canadians. Although I was frustrated with the number of times she’d managed to cancel or delay our meetings since my arrival, I’d had no recourse but to persevere. Her tone in emails was always tepid. She was doing me a favour and I was highly aware of it. And now, in an unforgivable fog, I had been the one to miss our appointment entirely. I had believed it was the following day. I’d lost a day, I guess, when I found out about you. Or lost it somewhere between the discovery of you and the subway accident. Or maybe it was a psychological block on my part. I mean, looking back I have to ask myself: How had I gone to the library to work on my thesis on the
exact day I was supposed to meet the one contact I had in the city
for
my thesis? There’s a name for this kind of slip. I’m sure of it. Freud coined it.
Parapraxis
, that’s it. The rest of us call it a major fuck-up.