The Continuity Girl (33 page)

The phrase
the universe reeled
flashed through her brain. Leafing through the folder—carefully at first and then faster and
more wildly as her realization grew—she came across copies of all her old school reports, excellence awards (one for perfect
attendance and another for winning a sixth-grade spelling bee she could barely remember), receipts for school fees in Osmond’s
name, plane-ticket receipts for various flights to London, as well as photographs of her that had been stuffed into envelopes
bearing her mother’s handwriting, addressed to Vogrie. One showed her at the age of three, ribby and smirking on a Mediterranean
beach. Meredith remembered the holiday, which had occurred during Irma’s brief and passing fascination with naturism. On the
back it read, in her mother’s handwriting, “
Little Mere in Mallorca, Summer 1973. Isn’t she lovely? Lots of love, Irm.
”

Meredith felt ill. She put down the file, let her hands fall to her sides and stared straight ahead, her mouth filling with
the sour taste of unwanted discovery. She remembered Holland Park—her tiny hand held in a man’s larger one. The flash of jade.

Ozzie’s
ring.

But if he was her father, why had he never told her?

For a few minutes she sat on the bed, lost in a tornado of thoughts. Her gaze became fuzzy, then somehow fixed again upon
a new object set on her bedside table. A photo in a cheap driftwood frame, the kind you might buy in a tropical-airport souvenir
shop. She reached for it. The snapshot showed three people, two men and a woman, standing by a pool clutching drinks in highball
glasses. They were hamming it up for the camera, red cheeks fortified, laughing and squinting out from a washed-out pastel
landscape of palm trees and tiki torches that Meredith recognized at once as California, the late sixties. In the background
was a swimming pool in the shape of a vital organ. The woman looked as twitchy as a greyhound in her green string bikini.
The men stood on either side, grinning for their lives. For every inch of her nakedness, they compensated with high wool vests,
thick knotted ties and pointy, gleaming dress shoes. A smoother, more sharply focused version of Ozzie stood on the far left,
slightly apart from the other two. The taller man, the one with his arm around her mother’s waist, Meredith had never seen
before. Not that it mattered.

So that explained it. Ozzie was her father. The American director was in fact a Canadian movie producer, and instead of drowning
in a swimming pool, he had hidden himself away in a Tuscan villa. She was, in fact, the progeny of a sordid Hollywood pool-house
quickie after all. But her father was not dead. Other than that, however, the story matched up. It explained everything in
fact. Meredith’s education, which her mother (it seemed so glaringly obvious now) could never have afforded on her own. The
fact that she was sent away to Canada to school. (Ozzie was originally Canadian.) The job her mother “arranged” for her in
London. Ozzie’s surprise invitation, as well as the interest he had taken in her career. And her. All of it made a sick kind
of sense.

She grabbed the photograph and slipped it inside her bag. Then she started packing.

Half an hour later she walked down the corridor to the library door. She was leaving, but first she had a question. In her
hand was the file she intended to present to Ozzie.

She opened the door a crack, but Kathleen’s voice stopped her dead.

“I’m not begging you,” said the actress in a high-pitched vibrato (the unmistakable harbinger of tears). “There are plenty
of other candidates. But I just thought you deserved, you know, what do they call it? Right of first refusal.”

Meredith could not see them from where she stood. She held still.

“As I said, I am very flattered you would ask, but at this point in my life—”

“But it wouldn’t be
yours,
” she interrupted. “I mean, of course it would be yours, but no one would have to know. And naturally
I wouldn’t ask you for—for anything. Ever. You know I could care less about that.”

“What about one of those anonymous places— Couldn’t you...?”

“Look, Ozzie, the whole point is—the reason why I came really, is that I just wanted it to be with someone I know. Not just
someone I know but someone who I’ve known for a long time and who I trust. My doctor recommended that I come to someone I
trust first before resorting to—you know...” Her voice trailed off.

“I know, I know. Poor sweet.” There was a rustling sound of upholstery as Ozzie comforted her somehow with his body. “Who
is this doctor? The American?”

“Canadian actually. You’d like him. If you want, I can fly him over at a moment’s notice and we can both meet with him. He
can perform the procedure right here in Italy. I know you hate to travel. I’ve checked it all out. I’ve arranged everything,
darling. All you have to do is— God, it’s so embarrassing....”

Ozzie’s tone became more playful, one Meredith recognized all too well. “What are you saying? We can’t try the old-fashioned...”

This, followed by a round of giggling admonishments from Kathleen and more giggles and slurpy half-silence. Meredith shivered
in disgust. The urge to bolt now outweighed her need to confront.

After moving away from the door, Meredith paused. She slid the file under the door.

Her taxi was waiting outside.

The Savoy, where the wedding reception was being held, was booked solid. This was a relief to Meredith, as the cheapest room
cost roughly the same as a mortgage payment on her condo in Toronto. She ended up staying at the Hotel Excelsior, a hostel
near the central station where the room keys were attached to large wooden blocks and the windows rattled in the panes every
time a train pulled out. At least she could make a quick getaway if she needed to.

The day of the wedding Meredith had arranged to meet Elle for lunch at an outdoor café near the Duomo. The city was so crammed
with tourists she had to touch her Ativan bottle twice during the walk there. She looked around, trying to determine whether
this was the correct street in the crazy cobblestone maze of central Florence, and to her amazement spotted Elle through the
throng across the street. Her friend was doing the same wild-eyed dance—squinting down at a map and then up for a sign. Down,
up, down, up, as the crowd frothed about her.

Meredith called out and ran to her, and the two women embraced, reveling in the excitement of meeting up with a friend from
home, halfway around the world. Once they had secured a table and ordered a carafe of cheap red, everything seemed much more
hopeful. They chatted about the wedding, making fun of the overblown insanity of weddings in general without forgetting to
pore over every detail of the ritual itself. What was the bride wearing? Who was in the party? What was on the menu, et cetera?

And then Elle took off her sunglasses. She’d been living in the netherworld of sleep deprivation since having Zoe five years
ago, but this was different.

“Andrew’s moving out,” she said.

“No.”

Meredith hoped this sounded like disbelief rather than what it was: a protest.

“He’s rented an apartment near his office,” she snorted, and pushed her sunglasses back on her face. “No more sleeping on
the office couch.”

“Where is he now?”

“Took the kids to visit his parents in Florida.”

“What was the issue?”

“How can you even ask me that?”

“I just mean, was there...
something else
?”

Elle shrugged, and Meredith noticed her upper arms had grown thin. As if to emphasize this, Elle lit a cigarette.

“I guess there’s always something else going on in situations like this. The question is whether or not that something else
is the symptom of the problem or the cause.”

“But, Elle babe, listen, are you sure?”

“Sure about what?”

“That he was, you know, that there
was
someone else.” The words felt thick in Meredith’s mouth.

Elle fiddled with her sunglasses but did not take them off.

“Not him, Mere. Me.”

Meredith often ducked out of wedding receptions, and this one was no exception.

Three hours into the party she found herself leaning against a pillar in a vacant banquet hall of the hotel, watching waiters
set up folding chairs for an event the following morning. Her body throbbed pleasantly with the effects of dancing. She sipped
a soda with lime.

She had to admit it had been the very best kind of wedding. The kind where the bride and groom were young, beautiful and flushed
with good intentions. Now all they had to do was go forth and produce more people like themselves—handsome, well-loved children
of privilege, who would in turn create more immaculately happy people just like their parents and so on for generations until
the whole world was awash in thousands of clean-living, prosperous, symmetrically featured couples and their laughing blond
children throwing Frisbees in parks and shopping for old-fashioned ice-cream makers at Williams-Sonoma. Meredith, who never
wasted time fantasizing about her own wedding (after she turned thirty the thought of gauzy veils and seashell table centerpieces
embarrassed her), was suddenly overtaken by sadness that she would never be a bride like the bride she had seen tonight—twenty-eight
and beaming in the presence of her sane and married parents.

Meredith watched the opera singer who’d performed two arias earlier in the evening folding up her music stand. A fastidious--looking
switch of a woman, she wore her hair coiled on top of her head with ribbons like a demigoddess. Just before she left the room
she gave Meredith a nod good night. Something about the exchange reminded Meredith of that fundamental rule of humanity: that
no matter how impenetrable and well-appointed people might seem on the surface, beneath the waxed brows and bleached teeth
they were just like you. A total mess.

“A perfect wedding,” said a man’s voice.

She turned to see him—Dr. Joe, standing with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his trousers, smiling as if it were
the most normal thing in the world for her to keep bumping into her gynecologist in different countries. For some inexplicable
reason, she was not surprised.

“You know it’s rude to read people’s minds.”

“Really?” he said.

“Yes. It’s like any other superpower. There are rules. Manners.” She looked at his cuff links. They were silver. A very silvery
silver.

“Like what?”

“Like...for example, Superman. He had X-ray vision but he never would have let Lois know that he knew, you know, what she
looked like...underneath...” Oh God, what was she trying to say? This was ridiculous. What was he doing here anyway?

Joe stepped forward and slipped his hand under her elbow. “Why are you avoiding me?” he said.

“Avoiding you? Last time I checked it was a good idea for single girls to stay away from married men.”

“My wife died over two years ago.”

Meredith was momentarily abashed. “What’s with the ring, then?”

Joe looked at his hand as if he had just noticed the narrow white-gold band he wore on his third finger. “She died of cancer
two and a half years ago, and my daughter gets upset if I take it off. She wears her mother’s engagement ring. It’s sort of
symbolic, I guess. Half the time I just forget it’s there.”

Meredith paused, coughed, examined the rounded toes of her sensible black pumps. “Your daughter. How old is she?”

“Livvy is eighteen. She goes to university in the fall.”

He reached into his breast pocket, pulled a photo from his wallet and handed it to Meredith. It was a school portrait of a
dark-haired girl with a secret smile. Her hair was brushed forward in front of her shoulders, like a curtain. The girl from
the drugstore.

“We adopted her when she was six months old,” Joe explained. “She’s not smiling there because she still had her braces on.
They make them in rainbow colours now. It’s supposed to be fun, but it just makes kids even more self-conscious. I keep meaning
to get a more recent photo.”

His face relaxed into a smile. He bent down and removed a piece of confetti from her forehead. He smelled deliciously clean,
like cotton bedsheets and lemon balm.

“Don’t you want to know how I found you here?” he said.

Her face turned hot and prickly.
Found?
Did he really say
found
?
Found
implied he had
looked
, which implied that he liked
her. Not just liked her but
like
-liked her.

“How?”

“I had to fly here to treat a patient. A mutual acquaintance,” he said with the look of someone trying to say something without
actually saying it. “And when your mother told me you were going to be in Florence at a wedding at the Savoy, I decided to
drop by.”

“You talked to my mother?”

“I thought that’s where you were living. I got her number through the production office on the film set.”

“They just gave it out to you?”

“Not exactly. I had to pretend to be your brother.”

“Oh. Weird.”

“Sorry. It just seemed at the time to be the least, uh, lascivious-sounding of all the possible excuses I could give. And
I was getting a bit worried after you didn’t return any of my messages.”

“You left me messages? When?”

“Dozens!” He coughed. “Well, several anyway. Certainly a few. A few sounds better, doesn’t it? Let’s say I left you a few
messages. After that...altercation on the movie set, and you losing your job...” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Meredith,
I felt terrible. I really did.”

“So did I.”

“I bet you did.”

“Uh-huh. So bad I didn’t leave the flat or check my messages for more than a week.”

“That explains it. I’m so sorry.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you apologize a lot for a man?”

He laughed. “Really, Meredith, I just can’t stand the thought of making you suffer.”

“I wasn’t suffering too badly. I just needed to be alone. Sometimes I just sort of need to be on my own. It’s an only-child
thing.”