Late Nights on Air (4 page)

She went for a walk down to Old Town and without her being aware of it the interviewing voice started up inside her head, asking, “As a child, did you realize how famous you were going to be?” And in a modest voice she answered, “Not
as a child. Not then. Believe me, I’ve combed through my childhood looking for signs and there weren’t any.” An answer so honest and self-deprecating and gently humorous it provoked even more admiration from her imagined interviewer and she became aware that it was happening again, her mental tape recorder was on. She was being questioned about her long and famous life and she was talking easily, confidently, amusingly, without a trace of self-consciousness.

Gwen took over reading the news from the smooth-voiced favourite of the two newsmen, Roland Clark, who would be leaving in a week for Vancouver. Dido was given Radio Noon. The night shift would fall to a casual who regularly filled in on holidays, at least for now. Harry wanted to keep his options open until he saw how the women worked out.

Shake it up, he thought, when he leaned into the newsroom to announce the change, making his fresh start on Gwen’s shoulders. How could she know that she’d hitched her wagon to a murky star, to a man who’d been written off by the real powers in the station as one more example of head office’s ineptitude? But she discovered soon enough. The enmity of newsmen is no small thing.

IT WOULD BE ONE OF THOSE RARE
summers when the light is crystalline, the sky deep blue, the air continuously warm. Yellowknife was like a summer residence, a northern resort. It was Summer itself. Children were in the playgrounds all night long.

Harry’s little white house on Latham Island overlooked Back Bay, an extension of Yellowknife Bay, itself an arm of Great Slave Lake. One evening he enticed Dido to spend time with him by offering to take her sailing on the bay. Later the same week they went out in his canoe, paddling across Back Bay to the tiny abandoned cemetery on the opposite shore. Dido asked to get out and wander about, and it was there, in that spot, that she first smelled invisible apples.

“‘Transparent fruit,’” nodded Eleanor a few days later when Dido thought it wise to bring her along as a chaperone. The pleasant odour, pervasive but without a source, made Eleanor think of other phrases that captured the North as it lit up the human imagination. “Garden of Desire.” “Country of the Mind.” She was sitting in the middle of the canoe as if she were a factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company. “My father would have loved this,” she murmured as they paddled her around, a woman who seemed older than she was, closer to
fifty than forty, but she’d always seemed older than she was, always an Eleanor, never an Ellie.

That evening Dido stayed alone in the cemetery, while Harry and Eleanor explored the shore. She was kneeling in the long grass, trying to make out the name on a weathered wooden cross and thinking of her father in his tweed cap and trench coat, an anglophile until the last. She’d learned about his sudden death three weeks after it happened, in a letter from her mother, an act of casualness that still dumbfounds her. Now, in the sloping, overgrown shadiness of a faraway cemetery, something extraordinary happens. She hears him call her name.
Dido
. And she looks around, exactly as she did when she first caught the sweet smell of apples in the air.
Dido
.

Her heart opens wide and she trembles. The voice is real. Not old or quavery, but clear, unmistakable, as confident in her as ever. A steady, loving voice. Not wanting to break the spell, she stays kneeling for several minutes and says nothing to the others.

That night she sleeps a long, deep, uninterrupted sleep, and in the morning she dresses for work knowing she’s equal to whatever lies ahead. At 5:30 p.m., when she reads the news, her accent is gone and each word seems to pronounce itself.

It was like putting my foot on firm ground, she marvelled a few days later when she confessed what had happened.

Gwen gave her a look of honest envy, keen and wistful. She had always wanted the same kind of miraculous release. To be caught up in something so remarkable that she was taken completely out of herself.

Slender-hipped Dido. Who didn’t fall in love with her that summer? Who didn’t notice her habit of holding her mug backwards, embracing it with both hands and lacing her fingers through the handle? Or recall that she drank her coffee black? Or remember her boast that she had a Thermos of coffee at her bedside in order to indulge herself first thing in the morning before getting up?

Harry thought her voice sounded like a tarnished silver spoon. He listened for it coming down the hall, catching her unusual scent first. Patchouli, she told him. A heavy, dark-brown fragrance from the other side of the world.

Dido was slender despite having wide shoulders and thick wrists and big hands. Reliably kind despite being reliably hurtful. A long, pleasant evening might be the prelude to a single, crushing remark: “Harry, you grunt like an old man when you lift that canoe.” Yet she was zealous in her compliments and capable of the most reckless intimacy.

That she would marry a man younger than herself, for instance, yet be more intrigued by his father even before she met him, her sense of attraction building from the son’s initial description and abetted by his answers to her many questions, until she had a clear picture of the driven, moody, hugely successful businessman so good with his hands he’d built his own forty-foot sailboat and named it
Nansen
.

Then she did meet him and he was brown as a nut from sailing — in a black polo shirt, white cotton pants, bare feet. Immensely good-looking in his deep tan. Holding by the hand a diapered, towheaded grandson. Standing in the driveway as she drove up for the first time.

They walked to the beach together, they swam. He carried a bathing cap of sea water to wash off her sandy feet, put sun-warmed stones into her cold hands, took her sailing. Married, he was, to a woman who was afraid of water, whereas she of the soft, unshaven legs loved the sea.

In her father-in-law’s home there were no rooms where they could hide, an open-concept, gravity-defying house on the side of a hill. A mistake, he said to her. If you don’t have a door to close, you don’t have a door to open.

Then move, she said.

You make it sound simple.

You’re not
old
, she said.

She was twenty-seven, he was fifty-eight.

It was she who moved, leaving his son one day and coming north. If her father-in-law loved her enough, he would find her. But a year had gone by.

Whenever Dido entered or left a room, eyes followed her. “You watch her just like a man,” Eddy the tech said to Gwen one day. Red hair, small eyes, tall, lean, older, in a town where “older” meant thirty-two, Eddy was an unsettling presence. He looked right through Gwen as she flushed, the innocent up and down of her scrutiny under scrutiny. “Your eyes were on her body,” he said, “just like a man’s.”

Uncomfortable, uncomfortable. And just a taste of what was to come.

A station break. All she had to do was sit at the control board in the announce booth, lower the round dial—it was called a pot—that controlled the feed from the network, flip
the switch, and open her mike by turning another pot, then give the local and regional weather.

Harry was with her. “Watch the clock,” he told her. “At twenty-nine seconds, get the network back up.”

At thirty-one seconds, Harry reached over her shoulder with experienced hands and lowered one pot (her mike) and raised the other (the network). Toronto came back in mid-word, and Gwen was giving the final temperatures to a dead microphone.

She turned around and located his face.

“The first time is the worst,” he said. “I’ve known announcers who opened their mouths and nothing came out.”

She clenched her hands. Cold, clammy.

Harry said firmly, “You’ve got to keep one eye on the clock as you read.”

Then he took her hands, his own being warm, and held them for a moment. At his comforting touch, life came into her again and she said, “That was awful!”

She’d been dropped in front of a microphone, like a child dropped out of a sack: no mother, no father, all alone on the highway of sound.

“‘Thro’ the jaws of Death,’” quoted Harry, “‘Back from the mouth of Hell.’“

“The Bible?”

“‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’“

“Kipling,” she said.

“Tennyson.”

And she buried her ignorant head in her hands.

After two weeks in Yellowknife, Gwen managed to find a furnished basement apartment on an unpaved side street that ran off Franklin Avenue. She was told she was lucky. In general, decent housing was hard to find and rents were atrocious. In her small, anonymous living room, however, she missed the domestic companionship of Eleanor and her roommate. We shared suppers and breakfasts and the stories of our lives, she thought.

Dust drifted in through her open window and gathered on the books piled on the floor beside her bed. She wrote her name on the mirror. A block away was the public library, where she’d gone to hear a visiting poet read. To the southeast, a five-minute walk away, was the radio station, where she wasn’t doing very well at all. A place utterly contained, enclosed, yet voices carried beyond the horizon. She
was
the horizon to those listening.

One day Dido came upon her standing stock still in the record library, moaning to herself. “Don’t think you’re the only one,” Dido assured her. “I cringe when I hear myself too.”

But Gwen didn’t believe her. Dido lived outside embarrassment—in the free and easy woods of herself.

Dido was never slapdash, never in a hurry. She brought to every task the same care that Gwen’s father brought to the repair of a wristwatch or necklace or alarm clock. After eating a sandwich at her desk, Dido would brush her teeth in the washroom in the basement, taking twice as long as Gwen would have taken had she bothered, plying her toothbrush like an artisan working with ivory.

“You’re so good on air, Dido.” Gwen was standing with her arms wrapped around herself. “You make it sound simple.”

Dido smiled. It
was
simple. What could she say? It came naturally. “It’s a piece of cake for me. Do I say it correctly?”

“You say everything correctly.”

Dido smiled again. She liked Gwen—the way her face lit up and she stopped whatever she was doing to talk for a while, to ask her opinion, to listen.

“Try to slow down,” Dido advised her. “You go too fast. But you sound better than you think you do.” She pushed Gwen’s hair off her troubled forehead. “You don’t believe me. But I always say what I think.”

Dido’s unconventional beauty went hand in hand with the light. Officially, the June sun set close to midnight and rose three hours later, but it never got dark. Dusk, yes. Between sunset and sunrise there was a soft sort of dusk and the street lights came on, but nobody needed them or noticed them. The constant light was like endless caffeine.

One afternoon, as Dido stood talking to Eleanor, Mrs. Dargabble came through the door, wearing a white-and-black scarf on her head. A wrap of sorts half fell off her shoulders and her red lipstick was in motion too, travelling like water through sand into the fine wrinkles above her lips and the deep fissures below. Mrs. Dargabble exclaimed to Eleanor, “I had to see Dido here in Yellowknife!” Then she greeted the woman in question by quoting Shakespeare, “‘In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand.’“

From her receptionist’s desk, Eleanor watched Dido deal with one admirer after another. It was like being close to a beehive, the steady hum of light and attraction, and the mystery
at the core. People were drawn to the North and in the North they were drawn to Dido, so it seemed, and Dido managed herself very well. It was an art, appearing interested while saving the main part of yourself for something better.

Mrs. Dargabble was telling Dido that once upon a time she had been a hard-working seamstress with a lucrative business designing clothes. But then she met her husband - her first husband—a lovely man, from Boston like herself, who begged her to “jump.” He urged her to be colourful and rambunctious and carefree, to shed her responsibilities and marry him instead. We came north together, she was saying, we set up a business raising dogs until—may he rest—he drowned ten years ago.

Gwen came out of the newsroom, and the old woman caught her hand as she walked by. “You’re so soft,” Mrs. Dargabble said to Gwen with traces, still, of her Boston accent: yo-ah for you’re. “So soft. My husband told me to jump. You must
jump.”

“Jump?”

“You must
jump.”

Gwen made an agonized face and continued on into the studio.

Mrs. Dargabble had taken the chair that Eleanor always offered. It was on the side of her desk near the window and next to a small table of plants, avocadoes and oranges in pots, started by her from seed, and a handsome jade plant of uncertain age that Ralph Cody had given her after he saw her reading Ezra Pound’s
Cathay
. She’d heard his voice once, the poet who slowly went mad on the air. A short clip of one of his fascist broadcasts for Radio Rome. Young Gwen couldn’t have
sounded more different. She was reading the news now, coming over the speakers in the hallway. Her voice irritating, whispery. Like someone standing behind you and playing with your hair.