Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (13 page)

Come back, come back
, they whimper.
S.O.S.

The other night we watched as one of the fathers bent to tidy a life-sized crèche, scooping handfuls of wet debris and a crumpled beer can from the manger where baby Jesus should have been. We began to wonder whether it was too late to ask what God might have to do with all this, but instead willed ourselves to think about the girls' footprints in that snowy field, and we marvelled, once again, at the effort it must have taken to walk even as far as they had.

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

What is she doing here watching this older man, practically an old man, briskly rubbing garlic against the insides of a wooden bowl in preparation for a Caesar salad when she could be at a real party like the party last night where that one guy said he was so angry (angry!) at her for having such a beautiful butt he couldn't help smacking it with the flat of his hand, and then he did—so hard it stung Didi through her terry-cloth shorts, the same shorts that had everyone joking they should be using her as a hand towel, and didn't she finally let that freckle-faced little lesbian food stylist do just that to prove she had a sense of humour? The whole thing had been a riot, in fact, even though the butt-smacking guy had turned out to be an alarm salesman for a security company who lived out in Ajax and thought Rufus Wainwright (who was at the party, someone said, although she didn't see him with her own eyes) was
a famous racehorse
, so she couldn't go home with him. Could she?

It had been a rooftop party where you climbed out the kitchen window and then up the fire escape, so if you had to go to the bathroom you couldn't just bumble yourself down the hall and bang amiably on the door to dislodge some bashful substance abuser, you really had to want to go, although if you were a guy, let's say a butt-smacking alarm salesman who didn't wear a belt with his jeans (Rufus came in a
sarong
, someone said, although no one she knew actually saw him), you could piss into the base of a potted palm tree the hosts had lugged up onto the roof, with no doubt great difficulty, and strung with tiny lights resembling olives with pimento centres. And even though up until then Didi had encouraged the guy—even dribbled some of her martini down the front of his shirt, his handprint still a low-voltage buzz on her backside—after the incident with the palm tree, combined with the living-in-Ajax thing, the belt-loop thing, and the Rufus thing, she couldn't very well be seen with him and so she stayed long after he left with some overly loud girl in a Lycra T-shirt with a picture of Buddha on it and found herself waking up at about five-thirty this morning with roof pitch spotting her cheek as the sun was just starting to simmer behind the Gooderham & Worts building in the distance.

Now tonight, on a gas barbecue out on the old guy's balcony, two steaks sizzle and two enormous baked potatoes sit in their foil skins. There's not a tapenade or a small wrapped thingy in sight. Who eats food like this?

Excuse her for thinking this was going to be a
party
party or at least a dinner party with a few other people. After an hour of highballs and stilted conversation (during which Didi didn't know what else to do with her hands so she kept drinking and twisting the edge of her blouse until it looked like the snout of a small, angry, genetically altered monkey, and tried not to stare at the photographs lining the walls—all of older women, some extreme close-ups that turned their faces into what she imagines the baked surface of a Nevada desert looks like, and a few nudes in which skin falls towards earth like putty, like the women are melting, decomposing, in front of her eyes) she realizes no one else is coming, so she starts to wonder, not for the first time, what it would be like to sleep with a man this old, a man who could be fifty, maybe even fifty-five, and thinks she could stand it, that it would at least be an experience she could later use as a conversation piece,
a war story
. But he hasn't come on to her, at least not in the usual ways, although maybe older people do it differently. Why else would he have asked her here after she interviewed him last week for that mini-profile in the style section of
NOW
?

His forte, as she referred to it in her piece, was photographing aging female intellectuals, which Didi, personally, thinks is kind of perverse, although in her article she called him a feminist and praised him for loving women for their minds, because that's what the press release said—although she didn't believe it for a minute, especially when he insisted on calling her by her full name and invited her over, saying
Wear whatever you like
,
Deirdre
with feigned disinterest after she asked. She's wearing something filmy, a pastel-blue blouse that floats above her midsection (exposing the only tattoo-free stretch of twentythree-year-old backside in the civilized world—her fear-of-pain thing neutralizing the humiliation she's entitled to feel over not having a kanji symbol or Celtic knot peeking out above her thong; even her nose ring is a clip-on). And just so no one would think she takes clothing that seriously, she's wearing track pants with the blouse, a combination she had hoped would keep them guessing, keep them wondering
what that Deirdre was all about
. But there's no
them
here, only him.

So last night there she was having such a great time, what with the terry-cloth-shorts thing and the butt-smacking thing and Rufus W. in his sarong there with his new boyfriend (who she thinks she did catch a glimpse of from the back after someone pointed him out), and now here she is watching a guy in brown plastic sandals, with his seriously yellowed toenails poking out for all the world to see, tossing a salad and telling her about the time he was sent to photograph the Berlin Wall coming down and how he was shocked at feeling a little sadness and nostalgia for Checkpoint Charlie and the
damn wall itself
(emphasis his) and how these feelings were so disturbing amidst the general euphoria that he just stood there as if paralyzed for a minute or two while champagne rained down on his head as if he were being baptized even though he didn't deserve it. And because there's nothing remotely flirtatious about this story and because she doesn't understand why he's telling her all this, Didi wants to ask, “What are we doing here?” It's the not knowing that's killing her. If nothing is going to happen, she's going to walk out right now, because what's the point of eating all these carbs and then just going home to watch some
Rhoda
reruns on WTN? That's what she'll be forced to do, as she can't very well go catch up with everyone—
the gang
—later and admit that the party she went to at the semi-famous photographer's place was a bust.

The interview last week had been fun. The photographer had brought his favourite camera down to the gallery, a Mamiya, he told her, a real man's camera because you needed man-sized hands to work it, although Annie Leibovitz used the same camera, he told her, as she had these man-sized hands. It was gratifying how everyone at the party last night was impressed by how Didi effortlessly worked her insider knowledge of Annie Leibovitz and this other sort-of-famous photographer and their Mamiyas into the conversation as she gamely offered her shorts as a hand towel, although the information was wasted on the butt-smacking guy from Ajax who thought Annie Leibovitz was
a stand-up comedian
and had never heard of the sort-offamous photographer who took pictures of aging lady intellectuals and in fact had made a joke about lady intellectuals which she had thought was funny at the time, although she'd stopped laughing abruptly when she realized no one else found it funny and pretended that she was really just choking because her drink had gone down the wrong way. (No one thought to thump her on the back and later, much later, she couldn't help wondering what would've happened if she really had been choking.) After that came the incident with the palm tree and that Buddha-shirt girl, and waking up alone on the roof early this morning and climbing down into the apartment and peeking in on her hosts sleeping so peacefully in their bedroom, wrapped around each other, surrounded by old family photos in really nice-quality frames, and then letting herself out, but not before making a fair degree of noise in the bathroom hoping they'd wake up so she could wave goodbye and hear them tell her she'd been the life of the party.

Out on the balcony while the photographer flips the steaks, their fat hissing against the fake briquettes like a clique of fashionable viper-mouthed grade seven private-school girls,
¹
and tells her about watching a bridge blow up outside of Sarajevo and how it was
too close for comfort
(emphasis his) and how a dog, a really ugly mutt, just stood on one side of this non-existent bridge whimpering and that all he wanted to do was take a picture of the dog, not the bodies, and get out of there, Didi wonders whether it was maybe unwise to have hinted so broadly last night to everyone up there on the roof that Annie Leibovitz might be at this other party tonight at the photographer's place, which has turned out not to be a party of any kind at all.

Maybe it had been the soupy stillness of the air last night, the humidity that hung so thick the tiny pimento olive lights on the poor pissed-on palm tree glimmered as if through a fog, but she had felt as if there were a trampoline beneath her feet, felt as if anything could happen, so maybe she had convinced herself that Annie Leibovitz was going to be at the photographer's party, when, in fact, the photographer himself had quite possibly hinted at no such thing at all.

The telephone rings and rings again, but the photographer just ignores it, poking at those alarming potatoes with a fork and talking quietly, in this flat, even tone Didi associates with people who are going off their nut but straining to appear normal, about how no one seems to really listen anymore, how everyone is too busy “communicating” (he did the quote-mark thing with his fingers) to listen, and how there was a time when he flew to the direst places on earth to find pockets of silence so that he could hear himself think, and how, believe it or not, the deepest silences come in the aftermath of an explosion, in that thin wedge of time between the explosion itself and the chaos— the sirens and keening and yelling—that follows, and that this is the same no matter what country on earth you are in. And all the while he airdrops her name every few words like it's a relief package for starving Eritreans,
Believe it or not, Deirdre
, and
This is the same, Deirdre
, until she feels the skin tightening across her face, pulling her mouth into a grimace, although she's not sure if she should be smiling or nodding soberly.

Then there are her hands. She has absolutely no idea what to do with her hands, which are twitching to grab those two Zeppelin-sized potatoes and hurl them into the street like grenades. But then where would that leave her?

Last night had been so full of possibilities, even after she'd been forced to give up on the butt-smacking guy when that tight-T-shirted Buddha bitch came and stuck her tits in where they didn't belong. There'd been that Angelina Jolie–lipped VJ couple who looked like they could be brother and sister and who kept peering at her as if they were trying to convey something telepathically. Although that was before she tried to up her madcap quotient by juggling a handful of olives that went flying all over the place, causing that Eurasian tranny with the yellow hair and the five-inch cork-soled wedgies to slip on them and call her some choice names that weren't even worth repeating, after which a very pale woman with Smartie-coloured braces (who someone said was Rufus's new boyfriend's ex-girlfriend) raised her eyebrows at Didi in a seriously empathetic manner. Didi could practically see
You go, girl!
in a cartoon thought-bubble above the woman's head. Now, out here on the photographer's balcony, all this talk of explosions is bringing her down, bringing on the mortality thoughts, which are verboten, as her therapist has told her. Is this the old guy's way of making a play, of impressing her with his heroic journeys? Because if that's what he thinks, she's just not interested.

The photographer is looking at her as if it's her turn to say something. The barbecue tongs in his hand drip sauce out over the railing of the balcony and she wonders if somebody walking by in the morning fourteen storeys down below will think that what they see are drops of blood. And if somebody jumped off this balcony, naming no names, at this exact moment there would be a chalk outline down there tomorrow in the shape of a person as well as some real blood, which may or may not look as real to passersby as the drops of barbecue sauce. Didi considers telling the photographer this, thinks he may find it interesting, but instead she leans out over the railing and concentrates on looking as if she's peering so hard into the distance that she can divine the future, when in fact she can't see anything at all through the haze of barbecue smoke and the pinpricks of static dancing behind her eyes.

In the photographer's bedroom, after inspecting the disappointingly dull contents of his bathroom medicine cabinet, Didi flings open the closet and sees an ocean of shirts, all in pale blue denim. She hugs the shirts to her and burrows her face into them as if she were his long-time lover missing him dreadfully while he was off on assignment somewhere remote and squalid, and she thinks that if he were to wander in at this exact moment to find out what was taking her so long, his heart would involuntarily contract at the sight of a young woman so capable of devotion that she's transported from her earthly surroundings.

Didi deeply inhales a scent she finds surprisingly fresh for a man his age, a scent that scurries up her nostrils like the first sharp tang of spring, until she realizes it's the smell of dry-cleaned clothes, and because she's allergic to dry-cleaning chemicals she knows it's only a matter of time before her eyelids start swelling shut and her nose begins to run and then any chance at all for salvaging the evening will be gone. Back in the bathroom she checks her face, which still seems all right, although she has to close one eye and then the other in order to focus properly. She thought she was a redhead this week, but the person staring back at Didi has this black hair and these terrible chunky bangs. When did she dye her hair black? When did she have it cut? This whole time she's been acting like a redhead, doing red-headed things with her hands, saying red-headed things, trying to think red-headed thoughts, and her hair has been black? Was it black last night?