Late Nights on Air (40 page)

They’d met, she said, when she enrolled in social work and he taught her several courses. She hadn’t finished the degree,
though. She’d stayed home for a year after their son was born, then she’d volunteered at a hospice and found her calling. It was listening to people with real problems tell her their troubles. “It never tires me,” she said. Now she was training to be a family counsellor who would work in palliative care, but she was doing it part-time, since David was only four. So there it is, she said. That brings you up to date.

They stopped at a corner and waited for the light to turn. “Your hair is different than I remembered. Shorter.” He pushed it gently off the side of her face and touched the rim of her ear. It looked delicately chewed, as if by mice, he told her. “My good ear’s the same,” he said, the result of frostbite as a kid, those hours and hours of playing outside and walking to and from school. He told her he’d heard of Prairie kids who delivered newspapers and froze their fingers so badly that although otherwise their hands grew to normal size their fingers stayed stubby, the growth plates destroyed. “If you ever see someone with fingers like that,” he told her, “you’ll know the reason.”

She fixed him with those eyes of hers. “I almost wore your fur coat today. I would have if it had been any colder.”

“Then it hasn’t fallen apart.” He felt caught, but not displeased. “So Eleanor couldn’t resist.”

Gwen smiled. “The coat’s still perfect,” she said.

“Well, good. I just took pity on a poor girl who needed a warm coat.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Harry Boyd.”

He leaned forward with something in his manner that Gwen hadn’t seen before, an almost beseeching gallantry, and planted a kiss on her ear.

They crossed the street and what came next might have seemed like a non sequitur, but it was far from that for them. “Last summer,” she said, “my son stepped on a wasps’ nest and got stung seven times.”

Harry seemed to be wrapped up in looking at her.

“And I got stung twice when he ran into my arms.”

“Last summer I was in New York,” he said slowly. “I was walking in Central Park, when a woman touched my arm. She said, ‘You don’t recognize me.’“

From the change in his face, the way it widened in mystified sadness, Gwen guessed who it was. “It was Dido,” she said, and her voice was flat.

He nodded.

Gwen turned her head and glanced at the traffic going by. “And what’s she doing with herself now?”

“I’m not entirely sure. She has problems with her health. If I’d never seen her before,” he said thoughtfully, “I might have mistaken her for a nun.”

Gwen stopped and stared at him. In her mind she saw Dido in her pretty shoes. In a cashmere sweater and leather skirt. Slender, elegant, fresh from her time in L.A. “You could say many things about Dido, but comparing her to a nun isn’t anything that ever would have occurred to me.”

He smiled. “I don’t mean she was wearing a habit. She looked very different, that’s all. Thin. Not very happy. Eddy looked much the same as ever.”

“So they’re still together.”

“He’s got more work than he knows what to do with, he told me.”

Gwen reflected. “I wonder if they have children.”

“They didn’t say so. I don’t think they’re even married.”

Gwen was silent. Then she said, “Marriage is hard.” She’d been about to tell Harry something more, about her own marriage, but the moment had passed.

Harry had been walking in Central Park when he saw Dido after all those years. It was a late summer afternoon and the wide green spaces were full of light and movement. Runners, cyclists, the leaves stirring a little in the trees. To Harry, the park’s gentle contours seemed incredibly inviting, and he stopped walking to take it all in, then felt a hand on his arm.

“You don’t recognize me,” she said. She’d leaned forward from her bench to get his attention. She had a book open in her lap.

The sight of her did something to his heart. He felt its exact location and entire size inside his chest.

She’d lost weight. She was wearing grey. A loose linen dress with long sleeves. He saw streaks of silver in her dark hair; a filigree of silver, he thought. No wedding band.

“The last time I saw you,” he said, “you were wearing a yellow sweater.”

She smiled. “We can’t be feeling sorry for ourselves, Harry.”

He sat beside her on the bench. “Why not?” he asked.

“How many years ago was that? Don’t tell me.” Her dark-light, buoyant-sad voice. “You were good to me. I haven’t forgotten.”

And what was he to make of that, he wondered. She hadn’t forgotten, but she couldn’t be bothered to explain.

“You disappeared without a word,” he said. “I waited for you to come home. I almost called the police. Then I ransacked the house and realized you’d gone. Why the hell didn’t you say anything?”

“Kill it before it dies,” she said, and sighed. “I’m not saying I couldn’t have done better by you. But at least you knew where you stood.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t know a thing. You didn’t
tell
me anything.”

“You weren’t listening. You’re still not listening.”

He shook his head at her, confounded.

“I’m not such a prize, Harry.”

“That’s not how I see it.”

A boy on a skateboard zoomed by so close Harry drew in his feet, looked up, and a girl in jeans and a tank top glanced at them as she strode by. Then he saw himself, a middle-aged man with a hangdog look, sitting on a park bench with the woman who’d broken his heart. Snap out of it, he knew Dido was saying in her own way. Snap out of it, Harry.

She was rubbing the side of her face with her hand and
she doesn’t look well
, he thought, pulled back into his concern for her. “Has life been good?” he asked.

“I’ve had better days,” she said.

He pressed her with more questions and learned that she hadn’t been able to work since June, a combination of exhaustion and depression; the doctors had suggested an extended leave might help, and NBC was being decent about it. Eddy
worked for both of them anyway, she said. He worked all the time.

Listening to her talk, Harry wondered if Daniel Moir had ever contacted her. He wanted to ask, but it was really none of his business. If Moir had gone all the way to Yellowknife but no farther, it wouldn’t do Dido any good to know about it. And if they had been in touch, it hadn’t amounted to anything, obviously. Why meddle, he said to himself. Why open old wounds.

She and Eddy had been in New York for two years, she was telling him. Eddy was directing a television series now, a police show that was very popular. “But
you
wouldn’t know that,” she said in a tone that had in it something of her old manner, flirtatious, cutting. “Not being one for television.”

“That doesn’t sound like Eddy,” he said, “a police series.”

Dido shrugged as if she had no opinion on the matter, or as if Harry’s opinion was of no interest. She said Eddy had other things on the go too. His photography for one.

“So.” Harry lifted the cover of her book. “What are you reading?”

“You won’t know it,” she said again, and she told him it was an old volume by A.E. Coppard, one of the English books her father had struggled with. He’d kept them in a row on a shelf beside his bed, and she’d brought some of them back with her after a recent visit to her mother. She’d been perusing them to see what it was that had occupied her father for so many hours. “This one’s very old style. Not easy either. I wonder how much my father understood. Shall I tell you what it’s about?”

There was something a little mocking in her voice, challenging, aggressive. “Sure,” he said.

Well, she went on, it was about two women who go into the woods to gather dead branches for firewood, and while they work they reminisce about the same man. “The same long-lost man,” she smiled. “Then the wind rises in the forest and they listen to it.”

When she had come to that passage, a certain phrase had made her pause and read it a second time: the description of the wind in the treetops “as of some lost wave seeking a forgotten shore,” and she’d become aware of the breeze in the trees around her and raised her eyes and there was Harry Boyd, large as life.

She raised her shoulders and let them drop. “Life is a bit of a joke,” she said.

As if, thought Harry, he needed any more reminding that he didn’t cut it as a long-lost man.

Then she sat forward, pushed up her sleeve to check the watch that fit her wrist exactly. “I have to meet Eddy in ten minutes.” She stood up. “Why don’t you come and say hello to him.”

“Eddy doesn’t want to say hello to
me.”

“You mean
you
don’t. Come on, Harry. Keep me company.”

The breezes had stopped and the air was heavy. Beads of sweat had gathered on his neck. They walked quickly through the park, Dido saying it wasn’t far. A friend of theirs was having a show in a gallery and they’d been invited to the opening. Beside him, despite the heat, Dido looked cool, and quite at home in the city. They came to the address on West 57th and went up a flight of stairs and through a glass door into a sizable gallery. He saw Eddy at the back, talking to a younger man with a brush cut. Dido went to them and Harry
followed in her wake. Eddy had a long, deep scratch on the top of his nose, red and recent.

Dido said, “Look who I found wandering around Central Park.”

Eddy stared at him without a glimmer of recognition, it seemed to Harry.

Dido kissed the young artist on both cheeks. “You’re a genius,” she said. And introducing him to Harry, “He’s going to be very famous one day.”

Then she said, “Look at Eddy. The cat swiped him. Well, he deserved it.”

“It’s been a long time,” Eddy said, shaking Harry’s hand. “I can’t remember half the things I’ve done since I left Yellowknife.”

So he
does
know who I am, thought Harry. Eddy’s eyes still looked absolutely neutral. It gave Harry the weirdest feeling.

“But I’ve always got more on the go than I can handle,” Eddy said.

He wore black jeans and a black T-shirt, and he looked more substantial, Harry thought, more muscled. He’d been working out. His face had the old chiselled confidence. His haircut must have set him back a few bucks. “Dido tells me you’re still taking pictures.”

“Yeah. I might have a show here,” he said, glancing around him. “It’s not really my kind of space, though.”

The gallery was filling up. Another admirer collared the artist and pulled him away, and for a moment, Harry and Dido and Eddy were their own little unit. Harry ventured to say he’d left Yellowknife not long after they had, but an older woman,
wearing half her weight in gold jewellery, had approached Dido and begun to bend her ear, and Eddy excused himself and started to work the room. So Harry made his way around the gallery as best he could. It was hard to see the paintings for the people. The canvases were big, bold, abstract. He rather liked them. Once, in the early sixties, he’d flown into Resolute Bay in the Far North after a fresh snowfall, and the buildings around the airstrip were like these pure bands of orange and yellow. The people, however, were not his type at all. In some cases their clothes were so elegant and well-fitted he was tempted to say, “Who’s your tailor?” He looked around for Dido, but the room was too crowded, he couldn’t see her. And so he left, taking the stairs down to the street and stepping outside into the warm evening air. He turned east and walked for quite a while before it occurred to him that he was going the wrong way. He stood for a moment on a corner, trying to orient himself. Then he turned south and walked to the bar in his hotel.

Harry and Gwen located their restaurant near the market and took a table by the window. After they ordered glasses of wine, Gwen drew a snapshot out of her purse and showed him her son.

Harry studied the picture. “He’s lucky,” he said.

She laughed. “Because he doesn’t look a bit like me.”

He handed the picture back to her. “I was thinking of his father. He’s a lucky man to have the two of you. Maybe he doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

Gwen’s face was suddenly warm.