The Delphi Room (11 page)

So sorry you saw the scene in Davie’s bathroom. What else can I offer you, but an existential shrug of the shoulders and a rueful smile? It was an accident, sort of. I didn’t want to . . . There was (is) a man that stalked me. I call him the Shadowman. My torturer. He was out to get me. He didn’t seem to bother other people. Sometimes he would tell me to do things, and I would end up in the hospital. The doctors gave me meds and sometimes he would stay away for a while. But the meds made me feel sick and tired, and the Shadowman always came back. I hope you don’t see any more of that kind of thing. No life is PG-13.

Anyway, Davie asked me to be his costume designer. A few months before I killed myself, we staged a production at Havana on Commercial Drive, which is a restaurant-cum-theatre space with a gritty, textured kind of charm. In fact, it’s a happy place, a little haven, and I knew it belonged to me the day Davie took me there for lunch to discuss costumes. In the middle of the conversation, I glanced up from my spinach and artichoke salad and over to the wall, and plain to see, like a sign from the seat of the cosmos, were the words “Retro Velvet.” My name was on the wall! In the midst of swirls of graffiti, proclamations of love, etc, there I was! Retro Velvet!

I had to dress all eight people in the cast on no budget, which I must say was a pleasing challenge. But Value Village came through for me in spectacular form and everyone looked fabulous. One of my greatest finds was a white satin Jean Harlow-style gown that was worn by the villainess. (The play was a detective story set in the 1920s.) Actually, come to think of it, the dress looked a lot like the one your mother was wearing. Davie played the hero’s sidekick. He’s such a good actor, and his impressions are legendary. You should see his Groucho Marx.

There was something so beautiful about sitting in the back of the theatre and watching lives—outfitted by me—being lived on a grand scale. I like feeling myself breathe in the dark, feeling the hush in the theatre like a blanket and seeing dust motes stream in the spotlights while people glitter. There’s not enough glittering in the world at all. All we want is magic, right?

I believe now that play prolonged my life. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing I suppose could be the subject of endless debate. The inevitable happened—does it matter if it came earlier or later? But I’ll say that there was something about doing it, about existing in that rarified bubble, that temporarily gave me peace. (The Shadowman loved the play, and he gave me lots of great costume ideas. He actually complimented some of my work—his good mood was so refreshing.) Like when we watch movies, and for the time that it plays the lives onscreen supersede our own. This was like that only more so, because I helped make it—I was inside the world. Art grants temporary amnesia. I sat at the back of the theatre and saw only other people’s tears and tantrums, joys and heartbreaks, faces and costumes. Did you ever feel as though you were outside of yourself, watching? I felt like that always, except for those nights in the last row. Even when the Shadowman came to visit, a part of me was standing back, watching it happen. But in the back row of the theatre I wasn’t watching myself, I was only conscious of this other world before me.

Except for that time, I’ve never been able to shake the sensation of floating, as though I’ve come untethered and I’m drifting somewhere up above my head, always looking down, scrutinizing, watching my every move. Were there ever moments, looking at yourself in the mirror (I know you don’t like mirrors, but I also know there were times you looked) when you didn’t recognize what you saw? I sometimes stood in front of a mirror for hours, searching for something—I’m not sure what. Pulling on my hair to watch my face change, testing to see if I was real. Touching my fingers to the glass and expecting them to pass right through, as if into water, because everything seemed like an illusion. The woman in the mirror was always a stranger. I have been accused of being vain (by Davie and my mother), a person who catches glimpses of herself in store windows, hand to her hair, pursing her lips, but I was only testing to see where the edges of me were, where I began and ended, whether or not my ball-and-chain body was still around.

Whenever I picked up a pen, the girl that was floating up above my head would suddenly anchor. Well no, that’s not true. For the most part, that last statement would fall into Life’s Column of Bullshit Wishful Thinking. But in the best moments, she would anchor and be still, and in that stillness the mast of a story would unfurl, no illusions, no folding mirrors, no pain. Sometimes—no Shadowman. Or even better, he would stand there—in a good mood—and throw out the most fabulous ideas. I was writing a novella about a company of interstellar circus performers—always been a deep admirer of people who can juggle flaming torches. I wanted the Shadowman to be a character in the book, but he wouldn’t let me, of course. He accused me of trying to use him for publicity. I wasn’t just a waitress in a Thai café, or a onetime costume designer for a shoestring theatre troupe! I started writing stories when I was six—my smash debut was entitled “Mr. Aardvark Ties His Shoes.” I hope I’m accurate when I say I’ve progressed since then. I actually had a couple of stories published in high school, in small fringe journals that pay you with a copy of the magazine. I did a lot of writing at school in the bathroom stall farthest from the door, under a pebbled glass window, at lunchtime. There’s something deliciously subversive about doing creative work that no one knows about in a place where you would never be suspected. Also, there’s no revenge like painting a cruel picture of someone you hate with words.

I’ve since had quite a few stories published in lit journals, mostly tiny publications run out of a garret, so to speak. I considered those small victories to be target practice. Wrote poems too, but I never showed them to anyone. Sometimes the Shadowman would dictate his poetic inspirations to me and I would be forced to write his verses for him. I hated doing that. He has a fondness for violent imagery. (Maybe you think I’m crazy because I see things that other people don’t see. But Davie always said it made me interesting. And lonely.) I’d been working on my novella for about a year, but it was a nerve-destroying, hair-pulling process. Many nights I spent studying my red walls, tapping at them with my index finger as though I expected a “Mouth of Truth,” just like the one in
Roman Holiday
, to appear and spew forth the key to genius, or lying on the couch counting the bumps on the ceiling, as if some final number might be the mathematical proof I needed to solve the question of why it was so hard to create. I guess part of why it was so hard was the Shadowman. He’d come up with great ideas, but sometimes he’d suddenly insist I cross out what I’d written. I always felt as though I was writing (and living) against a tide, and in the last months, that tide was washing out my will.

Maybe I should’ve written a script instead—a movie for Davie to star in. Not that he deserved it. But what people get and what they deserve seem to be random factors in life. Are we meat puppets playing out a script? The whim of a sadistic playwright’s hand?

I had a father, but he died in an accident before I was born. Actually, he was run over by a car, same as you. So I spent much of my life missing him even though I’d never met him, wondering where he was and what he was doing, until I trained myself not to think about it. Now I’m wondering about him again. I suppose I half expected him to knock on the door, say “Hi Velvet, nice to meet you” and provide some further instructions. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I guess he went to Heaven.

I’ll shut up now.

Sincerely, Velvet

I
lay on my back doing Pilates exercises because I have always found if you do something physical you don’t have to think as much, not because I cared about having tight abs in Hell. I kept my eyes on the frozen 8:57 clock.

When my stomach hurt as much as I could stand, I collapsed flat out, closing my eyes so I wouldn’t be tempted to count the bumps on the ceiling. How long had I been in here? No wrinkles yet—in fact, I seemed to look younger. Having spun off the treadmill of tick tock, I couldn’t even take a guess. Back on planet Earth, time seemed an incontestable reality: measured, estimated, swallowed up, drawn out. But in the pink room with the broken clock and the window that looked out on a meta-landscape of white, time was a flimsy nothing. From the moment the heavy door shut behind me, or no, wait, from the moment I went whizzing down the slide in the dark, the ticker-tape continuum bent, and life in a bedroom bubble began.

And it was a good thing I didn’t feel hungry, since room service had not appeared at the door. Nor did I have to pee, a fact I also counted as a major blessing. When I thought about food, the coconut curries I ate every workday, or the three bars of bittersweet chocolate I went through once a month, it was with a sensation of fond nostalgia and sharp sadness, but it did not evoke any physical longing in me.

It was people I longed for.