“I did my BA in Communications in Windsor, Ontario,” I told her.
“I know that Windsor is in Ontario. I lived in your country for seven years, hmm.” She tacked on
hmm
‘s for emphasis. Everything about her had emphasis, from her eyeliner to her phrases. “There it sits, across the border from Detroit. Such an
absolutely
ruined city.”
The drinks arrived and she finished her first glass efficiently but elegantly and handed it to the server.
“Windsor,” she said, attempting to find the conversation’s thread again. “Windsor. And then you moved to Toronto and became acquainted with our Karl.”
I nodded. I drank. I reflected that I ought to put more effort into what I was saying if I intended to impress her. Which is funny. It’s funny because of how little it ultimately mattered.
I told Kovacs that I liked her book, that I admired its
writerliness
, that it was a crucial work “full of salient details,” a phrase Karl used when he was excited about something he’d read. That it was “chatoyant and layered.” I was about to
launch into how I might reference it in my own work when her look stopped me. She seemed vaguely offended. She cocked her head and her hair swished. It was so shiny, I remember. “Which one?” she said.
I immediately realized my mistake, but I plunged on.
“Make—Making of the Blonde Icon.”
“Ah, the Mayer.” And she waved a hand carelessly. “I’ve had a new one come out.”
“I see.” For the record: that information hadn’t been on the department website.
“Yes, yes, the
New York Times
reviewed it last week, somewhat favourably.” She grimaced. “You do read it, don’t you?”
I made a mental note to begin buying the paper regularly instead of scanning it irregularly online or in the library. In preparation for this meeting I’d read four hundred and fifty pages on Louis B. Mayer and 1940s Hollywood, even though my own interests were much more contemporary, and Kovacs clearly wasn’t impressed. I attempted to plunge into my thoughts on the work anyway. I told her she had “made real the generalizability of beauty.” I guess I was thinking if I could say the right thing, prove how thoroughly I’d pored over her book, she would warm to me. But she stopped me again with one look. Actually, it was a looking away. A television was mounted above the bar, its sound turned down. I stopped talking when I saw what was playing.
A jumpy handheld image filled the screen, something recorded on a phone camera. It was shot from the street through a window. It showed a woman in a salon with a purple
smock around her neck. Vaguely, we could see a table inside the room, and an elaborate hanging ornament or lighting system above it. The woman was gesturing, clearly agitated, and a man was trying to grab her arm and subdue her. She was tiny. Her hand shot up, grabbed the hi-tech lighting system, and yanked it down on his head. He slumped to the table and then the image shook as if the cameraperson had stumbled backward. I wondered why the cameraperson had begun shooting the scene anyway, but later when I watched it online there was audio and you could hear the woman in the salon shrieking. At any rate, there was a burst of pavement, as if the person recording the scene had decided to retreat, then another image sprang up, this time showing the door of the salon. It was a large overhead hairdryer, I realized, that the woman had pulled down on the man. It wasn’t an old-fashioned gun-style dryer like the kind my mom used, the kind I’d imagined from reading the clipping that morning, but something far heavier.
The footage showed several people—men and women—racing out of the salon and out of the frame. The woman followed, half her head covered in white. Bleach. Her mouth had a strange downturn, like she was in pain. She was Asian—Thai, although I didn’t know that then. The camera moved as the operator seemed to realize running might be wise. The footage cut, and a news anchor began speaking silently to us.
When I glanced back at Kovacs, she was scrutinizing me.
“You have been quite affected by the accident, haven’t you?” Kovacs reached out and patted the back of my hand. “Why don’t you tell me about it, since it’s in the forefront of
your …
hmm
?” She gestured to her temporal lobe with her pointer and her pinky finger.
“I have,” I said, echoing her syntax.
I recounted what I had seen, and when I finished, I realized my glass was empty and the waiter was replacing it with a second full one. I shouldn’t have been drinking, of course—but you’ll forgive me, won’t you? Many things have happened that weren’t meant to.
Kovacs must have been on her third glass, and in stark contrast to the rest of her, her teeth had begun to grey. “Dreadful, dreadful …” she murmured. “A dreadful thing.” But then she briskly changed gears and said, “Well, shall we?”
It took me a moment to realize she wanted to talk about my thesis. I popped open the file I had prepared the last time we’d planned to meet. It would have to do. I would have to forge on, even though I hadn’t eaten enough and the wine had numbed me. I began to read straight from the screen.
“Listen, Hayes,” Kovacs interrupted almost immediately, “if your thesis exists only on computer, it doesn’t exist. You must know which issues are your focus. Forget the file. Tell me.” Her long fingers punctuated the air, waved away my words.
“Okay. It’s called
Through a Screen Darkly: Vamps, Tramps, and False Consciousness in Female-Marketed Culture
.”
“Is that really what you want to write about?” Kovacs boomed. The café had begun to get busy with after-work traffic and we had to speak up now over the clatter of plates and the whir of the espresso machine. “I lived through the ’70s. You didn’t. Don’t you think falseness
can
be powerful?”
Aesthetics isn’t simple politics, Kovacs said, and she tapped her glass with one fingernail. Why, she asked, did I think she continued to maintain her blondeness at her age? It brought a person things: flattery (she tapped the glass), attention (tap), sexual attention (tap, tap), power (tap), and with power, money (tap). If you come from very little, why give up any privilege? she asked, reclining against the deep red cushions of the dark wood booth.
I had the distinct feeling we were done talking about me and my thesis. Kovacs looked fatigued, and quite a bit older than she had when I’d walked in. I decided that she must be older than Karl by a few years, that he must have been in first year when she was in third or fourth. But just as that occurred to me, a sly smile appeared on her lips.
“Tell me,” she murmured, reclining into the cushions, “does Karl’s cock still kink to the right?”
“Excu—excuse me?” I stuttered. I felt hives climb my neck. I could tell I was as bright as a tomato.
“Come now,” Kovacs said, sipping her wine. “It’s an honest question. I thought it, and I asked it. It is what I was honestly wondering …” She smiled, tilting the rim of the glass so the last of the liquid swirled lazily around the bottom.
There was a terrible pause, and then without even knowing what I was going to say, I opened my mouth. “Beautiful women,” I said, “are full of anger over their privilege. They use deceit as a kind of trade. They receive more attention than other women, and want to be the centre of attention at all times. It’s an addiction. And like all addicts, they’re controlling and abusive, full of insecurity and rage.”
“Oh my,” Kovacs said. I think she bit her glass a little. “Is that really what you think? That—
therapy speak
?” Then she waved a finger at me, and peered at me with her dark eyes slit. “Now I see you, Hazel Hayes. Now I see you, Hayes. I see you in there. You were hiding.” She set the glass down and we both looked at it rather than at each other. She slid it this way and that on the table like a cat with a mouse. “This is personal for you.”
She brought her hand up to her temple and held it there, covering one eye. “This headache, it’s the wine. Forgive me …”
I raised my arm and signalled the waiter. Paying the bill was the least I could do, given what I’d said. But Wanda Kovacs wouldn’t hear of it. Her credit card was on the table before the bill had arrived. The server took it, and as we waited for his return, I shut down my laptop and managed to stammer a weird roundabout apology.
“Please,” Kovacs said. “It’s been … fun.” That’s the word she used.
Fun
. “You’re not at all what I was expecting. You are not like the girls Karl usually sends me.”
It was as if she had spit in my face or called me “full-figured.” I looked away; I didn’t want her to know how she had affected me.
I stared toward the bar. A young woman in a halter dress and heels was arguing with our waiter. She gestured, posture loose, waving an arm at the vodka selection behind him. Bottles of Absolut Citron, Absolut Pears, Absolut Kurant glowed on a sturdy wood bookcase, lit from below—bottles and cocktail glasses round and clear as snow globes. The
waiter ignored her. He ran our bill and brought it over. The woman rapped her knuckles on the counter and leaned so far back on one heel I thought it would break. The receipt slid onto the surface between Kovacs and me, and the server dodged away to another table. Kovacs signed it with a flourish and collected her purse.
“This headache,” she said again, circling two fingertips against her temple. “I should know better than to start a long weekend this way.” I was reminded that we were beginning the Labour Day break—it was almost six months ago now. “Hayes … Hazel—” She found her feet, towering to her true height, and extended her hand to me. I took it briefly and briskly. “Nice to meet you. Really.” She seemed to mean it.
Kovacs teetered out onto the street and I let her go, watched her fumble for a pair of sunglasses, fit them on her face, veer to the left. I slowly gathered my things and then cloistered myself in the bathroom, where I ran the taps, splashing water on my hot face.
This is personal for you
.
There was a sudden thumping from inside one of the two stalls. The pink door vibrated—a tinny quaking, as if someone had punched it from the inside. A woman’s voice cursed repeatedly. I remember thinking how strange it was, how she must have known I was there because I had been running the faucet. Slow and wine-sodden, I stared at the door in the mirror. The paper towel tore off loudly as I wiped my hands quickly and prepared to leave. The door to the stall flew open and the woman, who was about my age, wobbled out on peek-toe heels. She had an anchor tattooed on her ankle and bright
red lipstick, and she looked drunk. She was the one who had been standing at the bar earlier, when Kovacs and I were talking.
When she saw me, she froze as if she’d been caught at something. She was tall and pink-skinned with a short tufted hairstyle the colour of vanilla ice cream—one of those girls who’d gone all the way with the retro fifties look. I remember having a fleeting thought that she was in the wrong bar for it—I would have expected to run into her someplace where pictures of Elvis hung on the walls.
My mother would have approved of her style choices—I remember thinking that too. My mom always said that if a girl was going to wear her hair short, she had to wear more makeup to show she was still all girl. Liza Minnelli, Anne Murray, Mary Lou Retton, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tyne Daly from
Cagney & Lacey
, Demi Moore when she cut her hair—these were the short-haired women my mother admired. According to her, even Annie Lennox, although mannish, had the good sense to put on some blusher. My mother gave some of her clients a short haircut where she used a curling brush and blow-dried the hair straight up from the brow. “Go big or go home, that’s my motto,” she would say.
I was standing there when the girl suddenly reached out and punched the lid of the garbage can. It swung on its hinge, screeching. I backed away, grabbing for the door handle, but the girl pushed past me, mad-eyed. I fell and my tailbone hit the tiles hard and I yelped. The door clunked me in the temple as the girl clawed it open and tore out of the tiny room.
I sat there crying. I didn’t even try to get up. A few minutes
passed, and then the waiter tentatively knocked on the door and stuck his head in.
“I’m all right,” I choked, and brushed myself off.
He offered me his hand anyway and helped me to my feet, saying that the establishment had removed the strange girl—as if he cared more that I might press charges than whether I was hurt.
I’ve been sitting in Karl’s cabin, looking out this window, thinking about the affair that led to the creation of you. There’s nothing outside but snow and trees, and little bushes that might look like animals if you let yourself think so. But the thing that I’m thinking about my affair with Karl—or about any affair, I guess—is that the relationship is based on absolute disconnection.
You know there are things you can never say to the other person in an email because someone else may find it. You know you can talk on the phone, but only during certain hours of certain days. And even then, your number is there, multiple times, in the phone’s memory if anyone were to check. The more you and the other person communicate, the more likely you are to be caught. You have memorized the schedule of a person you don’t even know (your lover’s partner) and certainly don’t like. Every time you touch the person you’re involved with, you wonder if it will be the last time. There’s a finality to everything you do together. Everything is a first and a potential last. You may do it again, but the kernel of doubt means you’ve
already been jettisoned, become disconnected. I knew this the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sure, let’s count the hand job in his car and say sixth time with Karl.
But knowing it also excited me.
If I hadn’t actually met women hurt by dangerous relationships with men, I at least had a plethora of examples from television shows, films, and novels to draw on—everyone from Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter to Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. Was there ever a female adulterer, or “other woman,” who met a desirable fate? Nina Simone sang about the loneliness of the other woman and how she cries herself to sleep. Tess in
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
is cast aside not for her dalliances but for admitting to having been
raped
before ever meeting her husband;
The Great Gatsby
’s Daisy Buchanan ends up stranded in her rich but empty life after her lover, Jay Gatsby, has been murdered for her crimes; Janey Carver in
The Ice Storm
loses her son while she lies fetal after the shameful canoodling of a key party. The film of
Doctor Zhivago
features Julie Christie as Lara, attracted to and repulsed by the same man, eventually attempting to shoot him. In Catherine Breillat’s
Une vieille maitresse
, Asia Argento plays the used and abused Vellini, ruined by her love, good for nothing but sex with one man. Literally, all she can do is screw him; there’s nothing else in her life. Then there’s Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s
Belle de Jour
, a prostitute by day but frigid housewife by night. Her husband is shot when her rough-trade lover tracks her home, and she winds up caring for an invalid the rest of her days.