Late Nights on Air (12 page)

“People are getting stupider with each passing day,” he said. “It used to be that every little town had its repairman who made a nice living mending anything that broke; now something breaks: pitch it.” Waving his hand at the dump, “I wouldn’t mind if every corporate executive was put in jail.”

“You want to be different,” said Gwen.

“I
am
different. You want my view of the future? I see a handful of people. A few survivors. The Dene will be okay. Indigenous cultures. They’ve still got the basic skills. But the rest of society? Down the toilet.”

The ravens croaked and Gwen smiled. “Have I finally found somebody cheaper than my mother?”

She saw his face stiffen. He didn’t like the word
cheap
. Neither did her mother.

Gwen took the tape back to the station and put together a short radio piece that began with the hoarse and garrulous ravens, proceeded to steely Eddy, and ended with her own impression of what the dump looked like: a shipwreck on dry land. The station had become her workshop, reminding her not just of the backroom in the family jewellery store, but of camping, since everything she needed here was also close at hand. On air, in the dusky light of the booth, she was walking through homes with her voice, along leaf-covered trails,
under a canopy of trees, and nobody minded. Listeners in pyjamas took themselves down the path past the outdoor pump to the screened-in toilets, where long-legged insects spent the night on walls and ceiling, around the light fixture, batting at the screen door.

Everyone noticed the change in Gwen. The girl had laced up the soft shoe of her voice. Now she spoke rather more confidently and not so close to the microphone. Her voice didn’t make the same sad dive at the end of every sentence.

One night, towards the end of July, Harry appeared in the doorway of the announce booth. “I’ve been listening to you. You’re getting better.”

She fastened him with skeptical eyes.

“There’s a new warmth to your voice, Gwen.”

“I’ve always preferred the coolth. But thank you, Harry.”

Seeing him like this, suddenly, made her ache a little, the way her teeth ached after she flossed them.

He’d come to tell her that an old radio hand from Toronto would be arriving the following week to give a six-day training workshop. A good friend of his and a veteran announcer. Abe Lamont. Harry had leaned on him to give up a week’s holiday for the good of northern broadcasting. It would mean long hours, he said, doing her regular shift at night and the workshops during the day. But it was a great chance. She was doing fine, but it could only help.

“Harry?”

He was watching the way she sat sideways at the control board, shoulders hunched up around her ears like a kid in school just before an exam. He hadn’t thought about school for a long time and now it flooded back, all his early doubts and vulnerabilities that seemed of a piece with his feelings for Dido. “What?”

“You said to be good you have to be afraid. But I’m better because I’m
less
afraid.” She sat a little straighter and her shoulders dropped an inch.

He took the empty chair. She was monitoring the network, doing the hourly station breaks, there was plenty of time to talk. “You make me want to go back and start all over again,” he said heavily.

And to her surprise the skin around his eyes went a subtle pink, as it does when you speak well of someone dead. At her mother’s funeral she’d noticed this—that deep feeling comes in reds and blues, and in movement across the face. The tone of Harry’s skin changed, the area around his eyes reddened, the rest of his face went pale, bluer. His eyes were suddenly too gleaming.

“Did I tell you this is where I started out?” He looked around the booth. “The clock is different. Everything else is pretty much the same.”

Then his eyes settled on her again. The suggestion of tears had subsided, and the colour.

“Harry,” and her voice was earnest, curious, “have you ever thought about going back to Toronto and doing radio there?”

“They don’t want me,” he said.

“That can’t be true.”

“They don’t want anything to do with me, Gwen. Believe me.”

That night she played a heartbreaker by Emmy Lou Harris. It ended, and she said, “That was so beautiful, let’s hear it again.”

And Judge Berger called out of the blue to thank her.

He agreed to go on the air for a moment, and Gwen introduced him as The Great Listener. She asked him what he did with his free time, and he confessed he’d gone to see
Shampoo
at the Capitol Theatre, Warren Beatty exposing all the pitfalls of being a certain kind of male. “Really it was a very good movie,” he said with a wonderfully amused laugh.

There were times that summer when she found herself talking to Berger on air. That is, she imagined him listening as sympathetically to her as he listened to the witnesses in small settlements who were speaking for the first time into a microphone.

THE TRAINING SESSIONS HARRY ARRANGED
led to a sea change at the station, opening wounds, fanning grievances, inspiring ambitions, and creating the alliances that would pave the way for his eventual downfall. His old friend, bearded, big-bellied Abe Lamont, set himself up in the studio at the baize-covered table, and that first day Abe saw every member of staff who worked on air, one at a time, for half an hour. It was easier if you had no illusions and little experience. Jim Murphy, a broadcaster for fifteen years, emerged from his initial meeting looking sour and asking Dido what “fatuous” meant. Dido went in eagerly, but also came out chastened and annoyed. Abe had told her that her delivery was almost too perfect, he’d warned her against sounding antiseptic.
Antiseptic?
She drew herself up and his eyes glinted in response. Dido joined Jim in the office where the announcers had their desks, and he told her not to pay any mind, Abe Lamont was as over the hill as Harry. Where they got these people was a mystery.

The station had to keep running, of course, so everyone fit their sessions with Abe around their regular shifts. Gwen came in at noon. She read the script he provided, and when he played her voice back, her body contorted in embarrassment.
Abe would have none of that. It’s a discipline, he told her, holding her gaze with bloodshot eyes, working his hand through his beard. No horror allowed. No self-revulsion. It has nothing to do with
you
per se, and everything to do with what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re going to be a professional, he told her, then you have to listen to yourself in a detached way and work to correct what’s wrong. He asked her to read the page again with as much energy and passion as she could muster. “You’ll never overdo it,” he said. “It’s not in your nature.”

Different instructions for the men. I’m going to take an octave off your voice, he told them. Put your head between your knees. Open your mouth. Are you drooling yet? When you’re drooling, come back up, and you’ll sound like you’ve got a third ball. Now let’s record the last syllable of time, he would tell them. Let’s have a little sound and fury.

But the same basic assignment for everyone. Go out into the field, as he called the world, gather tape, edit it, write an introduction, present it to me. Nothing longer than ten minutes.

Gwen headed to the post office, intending to ask people what letters they were dreading to get, but on the way she saw Lorna Dargabble seated on the steps of her house, her shoulders shaking with laughter. Gwen went up the walk, tape recorder running, but the laughter turned out to be heartbroken sobbing, and she stopped her machine. Then she sat down beside the sorrowful woman, who took her hand and fingered and kneaded it as she might a seam—as she did a seam, the frayed state of her sofa being all too apparent when Gwen
passed through the living room on her way to a cup of coffee.

“You know, my dear,” declared Lorna sadly, “you’d be beautiful if you made a little effort. Come downstairs and I’ll cut your hair.”

It turned out that Mrs. Dargabble had a hair-styling shop in one half of her basement and no, she didn’t mind if Gwen taped the snipping and the running commentary: “Dear girl, all your clothes are brown. What are you afraid of? With skin like yours you need blues, lavender, off-white. Show some spirit.”

“You mean jump?” smiled Gwen, remembering the elderly woman’s advice.

“I mean
leap
. And you can start by calling me Lorna.”

Next to the space occupied by chair, sink, mirror, and shelves was a standing cabinet like the one Gwen grew up with. Inside it, a radio with its large golden speaker and a record player with a deep shelf for records. Lorna confessed that she came down here to listen to music and to be alone. “But you’d better turn that thing off,” she said, and once again Gwen pressed pause. Then Lorna confided that she’d had dozens of records until he broke them in a drunken fury. Her husband. For a moment, she looked around herself in despair. Also in the basement were boxes upon boxes of financial records—a painstaking paper trail of every one of her expenses, she said, and every bit of the income she’d earned in this second marriage that was destroying her. She said, “He’ll take everything he can.”

“I’m thinking,” Gwen said gently, meaningfully, “that perhaps you jumped into the wrong marriage.” She was sitting on a padded stool in front of a mirror with a hair-dressing cape over her shoulders.

Lorna took up her long scissors. “
Touché
, my dear. Just remember there are worse things than loneliness and you won’t make my mistake. But winter here does terrible things to people. You’ll find out.” The old woman’s Boston accent came out in her vowels. “Winter leaves a lasting mark, my dear,” and it sounded like lasting mack. “You discover you’re not so strong, after all.”

“I’m looking forward to winter.”

“Not so strong and that’s a fact.”

Lorna’s breathing was heavy and she stopped in mid-snip to say there was something else she’d learned, something worse—“But let’s have some music.” She went to put on one of her few surviving records, then returned to her thought. “It’s a terrible thing. But even the nicest people get corrupted by the company they keep.”

Gwen guessed that Lorna was talking about marriage in general and her husband in particular.

“I mean to say,” she continued, “you put an onion next to butter and you get butter that tastes like onion.”

“You’re talking about your onion-husband,” said Gwen.

“Yes.” Laughing. “My onion-husband.”

But now it was Brahms who made her cry.

Gwen listened too, less moved by the music than fascinated by its effect on her friend. In the mirror Lorna’s old chin began to wobble and work like a little machine of emotion, quite independently and alarmingly, all its pistons firing. And then the tears flowed down her cheeks. She stopped to mop her eyes with a towel and to blow her nose. The sad heaviness of her face reminded Gwen of thick frosting badly applied and shored up with stiff scrapings from the bowl. She stood up
and put her arms around her. Lorna hugged her back, and then recommenced cutting.

Half an hour later, Gwen looked at herself in the mirror and thought,
Is that really me?
Lorna had shaped her hair and lifted it somehow so that her small face looked wider, prettier.

Opening a closet, Lorna began to pull out clothes. “I used to be as skinny as you are. Try these on. I told you I used to make clothes.”

To Gwen’s surprise they were simple tailored garments of cotton and linen in white and cream and blue and chocolate brown. A shift, a few pairs of pants, tunics with pockets. She gazed into the mirror again—new clothes, new colours, new haircut—and couldn’t take her eyes away.

An hour later, Gwen approached the doorway of the announcers’ office, then hung back for a moment, suddenly self-conscious. She could see that Dido was absorbed in conversation with Harry and Jim, but Dido looked up and let out a whistle. The other two turned around, and Harry said, “Oh no!”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Dido.

“What have you done?” Harry raised his hands to his ears to indicate her hair, but he was play-acting, exaggerating.

Dido examined Gwen from the back as well as the front. “It’s a vast improvement,” she said with finality.

And it was. But something about Gwen would get on her nerves in the coming days. Dido had seen similar types in the classroom when she was substitute teaching, fresh-faced girls trying too hard to succeed, feigning surprise at their good marks, being disingenuous. Girls who were more ambitious than they ever let on or perhaps ever realized.

Gwen would feel Dido’s coolness and be puzzled, not sure what she’d done wrong. Perhaps she’d just been herself. Anyone might tire of that, she thought. It would take time before she realized that she and Dido were locked in one of those personal misunderstandings that has no clear entrance and no exit either.

Later that same afternoon, their first day of training at an end, they all went to the Strange Range and occupied a table in the corner. Harry told Gwen that he’d known her hairdresser when she was still Lorna Palliser. “Doug Palliser used to volunteer at the station. A wonderful guy. He was running a rapids on the Back River when his canoe flipped over and he drowned. Lorna’s been a lost soul ever since.”