The Blondes (8 page)

Kovacs’s second message said she was sorry but she was leaving her office. It was nearly one in the afternoon and she’d been expecting me for an hour and a half. I quickly dialled the number she’d left.

“Doc–tor Kovacs,” she intoned. Academics who referred to themselves as “Doctor” when they weren’t in the classroom made me stutter. And this one drew out the word longer than necessary as if to emphasize her station.

I panted out apologies. “Dr. Kovacs, I’m—I’m so sorry.”

To my surprise she responded, “That’s all right, dear.” I could hear her voice softening with effort, the “dear” tacked on stiffly but not unkindly. “What’s happened?”

To my even greater surprise, I realized that my rib cage felt too tight for my lungs. Her answer had been a response to the fact that I was crying.

“Oh gosh,” I blubbered, sounding for a moment like my mother, “the subway attack yesterday, the woman and the girl—Eugenia. Have you read about it?”

“I saw it on the news,” Dr. Kovacs replied warily.

“I was there.”

“I see.”

There was another pause. I remember thinking there might be a gap in the connection. Then I realized Kovacs was adjudicating my excuse and measuring the quantity of her own
put-out-ness. I watched three Yellow Cabs whoosh through the intersection while I fought to breathe normally.

I must have passed muster and landed in the sympathy pile, because Kovacs finally said, “How awful. Did you have to give a statement?”

I turned away from the traffic, covered one ear with my hand. “Y-yes,” I stammered around the lie. “I’ve just come out of the building,” I told her. I
had
come out of
a
building—just not a police station.

“I see,” Kovacs said again.

She arranged to meet me at a café near NYU.

Political communication, international communication, communication theory, feminist studies, media and minority, the making of icons, media and activism—thinking of these topics gave me a bubble in my throat, made me choke. I could recite Dr. Wanda Kovacs’s areas of interest by heart, yet I had no idea how my thesis fit with them. She had written a much-lauded book on how the beauty ideal repressed the brunette,
Louis B. Mayer and the Making of the Blonde Icon: The Repression of Jewish Identity in Early Hollywood
. Now I had to impress her, and did I even have my notes? I had made them two days earlier,
by hand
, in preparation, but when I dug in my bag there was no spiral notebook. I had intended to type up and flesh out the notes the day before. There were reams of them on that old laptop—about fifty Word docs on different topics, all as disjointed as the individual phrases I had scrawled while flipping through magazines—but I couldn’t show Kovacs those. Of course I had an earlier draft
of something I’d prepared for one of our meetings that hadn’t happened, but the last time I’d looked at it, the thesis had seemed insipid and wandering. Now, standing in the sunlight, I said to myself,
I need a phrase, just a few phrases that will sum it up
—something, in other words, that would stun and dazzle.

I was now bringing up balls of old Kleenex from the side pocket of my laptop bag, crunching them under my glasses, against my eyes, and swiping at my nose. I’d never been so emotional. Before I knew it I’d found
Karl Mann
in my phone’s directory and dialled. I just needed to be told what to say. A line, a phrase. What was my thesis about anyway? Calling my thesis adviser at a time like that was
advisable
.

“Hello—” a high, flat female voice said, and I stopped, frozen. I’d done something I had never done before: phoned Karl’s home instead of his cell.

“Grace and Karl aren’t here right now …” the voice continued, to my massive relief.

I let out a breath, and cursed myself for having punched the number into my phone directory.

“If you have the Collingwood number, you can reach them there.”

Them? She referred to the two of them in the third person? Yes, she did. She really did. Grace freaking Pargetter. Because I hadn’t met her yet, she was a different Grace then—faraway and pristine. As soon as I heard her voice, I could see her blonde, choppy haircut and her axe-like face in my mind, even though I had spotted her only once before—way down at the
end of the hall in front of Karl’s office, leaning her weight back on one brown heel. The
wife
. I stabbed the cellphone off and experienced what was perhaps my finest New York moment. I paced to the curb, shot up my arm, and hailed a Yellow Cab, praying it would not get stuck in traffic and drain me of the meagre funds in my wallet.

Thankfully, it did not. Rush hour would have been another story, but even so, taxis cost less in the Big Apple than they do in Toronto. That’s right, you’re kicking. You know that this is something you might need to know one day. If we ever go back to civilization. If we survive.

I know. I promised you I wouldn’t do this again, but here I am, outside in the cold. If I can just get the satellite dish to turn, I feel like the signal will come back on. It’s worth trying. Steady, and … Shit, it’s cold. If I can use my glove to—What’s that sound?

The mail truck.
Oh
. Why is she swerving like that, like she’s drunk, like—It’s that same delivery woman. Damn, I can’t believe it. Grace was right. Yeah, yeah, baby, I know. I’m going. I’m climbing down. Slowly, carefully. We’re going to run back inside. Look at her go. Holy frig! It’s like she isn’t even seeing what’s in front of her. She just took out the neighbour’s mailbox as if she were driving over a soda can. That must be what I heard before. I’m surprised she hasn’t wound up in the ditch. Don’t wind up in the ditch, please don’t wind up in the ditch—I don’t want to have to make a
decision about whether or not to help. Good, just go. Go. Wow.

We can’t get a signal out of the satellite, but if
that
isn’t another kind of signal, I don’t know what is. And don’t worry, baby, I’m not going back outside again—not today, anyway.

HERE’S WHAT I SHOULD TELL YOU
about Dr. Kovacs before I get to the story of our meeting: the thing about Kovacs is that she did try to help me. But here’s the other thing: if I hadn’t met her that day, I wouldn’t have been so angry with Karl. And if I hadn’t been so angry, our lives, mine and yours, might have taken a different path. That said, it’s easy to look at the what-ifs or trace an alternative route after the fact, isn’t it, my little hatchling?

Kovacs, sitting in the booth of the restaurant that day, had the bearing of someone who had been waiting half the afternoon and had reached her last shred of patience. I remember how her mouth turned downward in a slightly constipated way. Here was this tall woman, chiselled chin emerging from a sleek white-blonde bob, white eye shadow
and black mascara highlighting dark eyes. Dramatic, my mom would have said. Kovacs’s long manicured nails were wrapped around a half-empty glass of red wine. I stopped partway to the booth. She hadn’t spotted me yet. In the black-and-white photo on her department webpage, she’d looked silver-haired. I hadn’t anticipated that she would be blonde. Although her head had clearly been assisted to such levels of luminosity, there was no doubt that she was naturally blonde. This is what gave me pause: I wasn’t sure what a blonde would make of my thesis. Would she find that it perpetuated stereotypes, even though I was attempting to dismantle them? (Most models in advertisements are blonde—or they were back then.)

I also had a hard time marrying this woman in front of me to her work. Kovacs’s thesis focused on the early men of Hollywood, how they—insecure about their Jewish culture, concerned about class, and about appearing aristocratic—turned away from the thick-tressed, dark-haired beauties of the silent film era to the blonde starlets, who would pervade pop culture ever after. They selected small-nosed, pale-skinned lovelies as a standard for the silver screen, and any mark of originality was cut away, surgically removed or dieted off with the help of doctors on the studios’ lots.

One of the men she wrote about was Louis B. Mayer, who grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. By the age of seven he was a full-time scrap collector, supporting his family by salvaging and selling odd pieces of metal. Kovacs’s description had made quite an impression on me; I imagined a small frame tottering through
cobblestone streets and dirt lanes, forty pounds of odds and ends hanging on the child’s back. Mayer was a constant truant from school, lugging sharp, unwieldy objects in a red metal wagon. In my mind, he took on the shape and grubbiness of an eighteenth-century London, England, bone-collector or rag-picker. In spite of his dedication to his work, he was mocked by his teachers and beaten by his father for being overly ambitious. Silent films arrived in Saint John in 1897, and Mayer, age twelve, was enthralled by them. Scrap sales would give him the means to sign the cheque on his first theatre, then a chain of small theatres in the American Northeast. In—let’s see, was it 1918?—1918, only twenty-one years after viewing his first silent film, he would open his first production, starring Hedda Hopper and Anita Stewart, having realized that making films to put in one’s own theatre would yield a higher profit than simply securing a film from a distributor to show. That same year he moved to Los Angeles, and soon the studio MGM was born, and with it, the star system.

Tell me, how do I remember all these facts when I forget the names of actors I once liked? That’s the life of a Cultural and Communication Studies major, my little grub. Pure facts and chance of memory. Some of us are better at it than others. Or maybe it just goes to show you how diligently I studied Kovacs’s work. She had a fascinating way of telling the stories of the silent film stars who moved into talkies—the dark-haired leading ladies such as Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Hedy Lamarr. But in the ’30s and ’40s the movie business turned away from anything “ethnic.” Now
came the blondes: Anita Page, Jean Harlow, June Allyson, Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh. Even indisputably striking women like Ava Gardner were under threat: MGM attempted to manipulate her into erasing her chin dimple to render her into a more generic, from-the-mould beauty. She refused.

No wonder I was shocked to discover the author of this essential tome was of that very class of beauty she seemed to disdain. Or maybe I was simply afraid of beautiful people. Maybe that’s what my thesis was really about, and why I hadn’t been able to put my thoughts down in words.

Kovacs looked up and saw me hovering a distance from the booth. She rose as I approached, and put her hand out to shake. My grip was sweaty and soft. I fumbled with my bag and sat down.

“Well, what has Dr. Diclicker sent me?” she said, bemused.

“Ex—excuse me?”

“Sorry. Dr. Mann.” Kovacs waved a hand. “Diclicker. Diclicker
was
his name, such a long time ago. He changed it, you know, during his master’s. After Mann, the German novelist—”

“Thomas Mann?”

“No. Heinrich. Wrote a novel called
Professor Unrat
, which was adapted into Germany’s first sound film in 1930,
The Blue Angel
. It was Marlene Dietrich’s first major role. Karl wrote his master’s about it, before moving on to that … Howdy Doody shoot-’em-up stuff for his doctorate.”

Karl’s thesis was
Self-Aware Masculinity in the Late American Western
.

“But Dietrich was always
my
territory, hmm.” She paused. “I wonder. Do you think our Karl was competing with me or trying to impress me? I guess he just didn’t want to be Dr. Dick-lick-er.” She stressed each syllable. “I cannot fault him.”

I
had
known Karl changed his surname. But he’d never told me what it was originally. He’d said, “At a certain point in your life, you have to make a break with the past to become your own person.” I tried out his name in my mind as if trying to fit a square peg in a round hole:
Karl Diclicker, Karl Diclicker, Karl Mann
.

I opened my laptop bag and set up the computer on the table between me and Kovacs. I remember she whisked her wineglass far to one side, as if concerned I would accidentally topple it.

A waiter came and I asked for a menu.

Kovacs told me to have a drink with her. “It will settle you,” she said, and the matter was decided. She ordered another glass of red for herself, though she hadn’t finished the first.

“I’m really not sure I should drink,” I protested, but the server had already turned away.

“It sounds like you’ve been through a lot, dear,” Kovacs said, but the “dear” again struck my ear as glacial.

I told myself this was the way accomplished women her age spoke, with distance and sheen. She had a slight accent, and I suddenly recalled Karl saying that she was Polish, that she had come to Canada at sixteen. Now the fact that Kovacs was blonde made sense.

“Let’s not start with that.” Kovacs indicated the computer with a wave of her hand as if it were a distasteful thing.

I nodded for the second or third time.

She squinted at me and asked me how old I was. “Twenty-five?” she guessed. She didn’t wait for me to nod or correct her, and I wasn’t about to. She asked me where I’d studied. No, wait—I remember she made an assumption, asking if I’d studied entirely in Toronto. She said the word
Toronto
with some disdain, as if even the name of the city was off-putting.