Ellen in Pieces Page 23

  “Oh, Ellen,” Georgia said, reaching for her friend. “You look so happy.”

  And Ellen, that much taller, wept with relief all over the top of Georgia’s curly head.

  They dried their eyes and went to the kitchen where, beaming, Ellen made coffee. Overhead an intermittent grating sounded, which Georgia would have asked about except she couldn’t get a word in.

  “Mimi and Yo?” Ellen babbled. “They’re thrilled. Thrilled to have their father back.”

  Ellen, wandering out the French doors with their coffee, pointed with a mug. The railings around the deck had been removed. “See? Next up, the hot tub. It’s never worked. Larry!”

  She set down the mugs on the patio table and, walking closer to the open edge of the deck, leaned back to see onto the roof. “He can’t hear me.”

  Georgia went and stood beside Ellen.

  Larry. She had pictured him bigger, hairier. Horned. Instead she saw a wiry man, almost a small man, with dark, attractively disarrayed hair and a Discman on his belt. He straddled the roof and, though the headphones detracted somewhat from his cowboy mien, her overwhelming impression against the towering cedars in the yard and the big sky hanging over the mountain was masculinity and sweat. He was running some kind of tool back and forth.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Demossing! The roof was practically thatched. Never mind. He’ll come down.”

  “What if he falls?” Georgia asked.

  Remembering how close she was herself to the edge of the deck, she glanced behind her. It was only about three feet down to the grass. The stairs were to the right, the safe route to the yard, which sloped downward to a rock garden. Then the unfurling view. Years later, that view would enable Ellen to follow her postponed dreams all the way to that little live-work studio in Kitsilano. An eight-hundred-thousand-dollar view with everything in it: downtown, Stanley Park, the ocean.

  They went back to the patio table. Ellen talked, but Georgia, distracted by Larry’s scraping and his unsafe position, barely listened. After a few minutes hedgehog-sized tufts of lurid green began tumbling onto the deck right beside where Ellen and Georgia were sitting.

  “Larry!”

  Ellen leapt up and marched over to the edge again, waving her arms, the old, quick-to-annoy Ellen whose brusqueness Georgia had many times had to make excuses for. That Ellen, Georgia’s dear friend, was still alive inside this gushing, maritorious wife, thank God.

  The cascade had already stopped. Ellen beckoned to Georgia, who got to her feet.

  Still riding the roof, but more uprightly, Larry was jotting something on a pad. He slipped the pencil into the coil, tucked the pad into his shirt pocket.

  “His play,” Ellen said. “That’s his process. A million little notes to himself and one day he sits down and bangs the thing out in a week. Bangs it out. And Georgia? It’s going to be brilliant.”

  “SO what’s he like?” Gary asked that night in bed.

  “Good with his hands,” Georgia said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  She giggled. Gary was, practically speaking, useless. He lumbered through the house breaking things. The knob to the back door detached regularly. Gary would leave it on the stove. Contracts he was good at. Negotiations. Making the bosses bend.

  “We have to go, you know. Ellen’s my best friend.”

  After several weeks of their own negotiations, they reached a compromise. Georgia would make blintzes and Gary would be allowed to eat as many as he wanted with no furrowed brows on her part. This would happen at Ellen’s house.

  The agreed-upon evening arrived and they trooped into the kitchen—Gary, Georgia, and Jacob, who, born three days after Yo, was practically a brother to both girls. He scampered off to find them, as though to flee the adult tension.

  While Gary bear-hugged Ellen, Georgia approached Larry with the blintzes and an open smile. On the ground he was taller, taller than Gary anyway, and about half as wide. He seemed almost shy the way his hands were shoved deep in his front pockets, his eyes downcast as he nodded hello, how, instead of accepting the platter, he stepped aside for her to set it on the counter. And in this act of stepping Larry Silver performed a perfect glissade—first position, demi-plié, glide—in his socks on the kitchen floor.

  Georgia almost cried out to Gary, “Did you see that?”

  She’d given up trying to explain a movement or a gesture, the same way she’d given up dragging Gary around to dance performances for him to fall asleep in. “But what does it mean?” he used to ask, and be baffled when she couldn’t translate, when she pounded her fist to her heart instead.

  Larry Silver’s glissade was a handful of ice crystals dropped down her back. She set the platter on the counter, leaning into it until the feeling passed.

  By then Ellen had introduced the two men. They’d shaken hands, Gary frigidly, though Larry probably couldn’t tell. Gary’s reluctance to meet Larry wasn’t only out of loyalty to Ellen; he didn’t approve of Larry’s line of work. But with his round, bearded cheeks, wire-framed glasses, and moist rosebud mouth, Gary looked disarmingly like a youthful Santa, which was part of his success as a negotiator. He seemed to twinkle at you even when he loathed you. The only indication of his true feelings came when Larry and Gary unclasped hands; Gary wiped his on his pants.

  “Beer,” Ellen commanded, and Larry grabbed two bottles from the fridge.

  “Give him a glass,” Ellen said.

  “He doesn’t want one,” Larry said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Ellen, Ellen,” Gary said, patting her shoulder.

  “So you work for a union?” Larry said.

  “Proudly.”

  “Know anything about the Winnipeg General Strike?”

  Twinkle, twinkle went Gary. “A thing or two.”

  “I’m writing a play about it. I’ve never tried anything historical before. Maybe I can pick your brain.”

  “You should put on the steaks,” Ellen said. “The kids are starving.”

  Larry opened the fridge again and tucked his beer under one arm so he could carry the two plates of meat. Gary relieved him of the bottle, leading the way to the barbecue. Georgia could have pointed that out, too, that the way Gary pulled on the neck of the bottle, so gently, communicated something. Already, he was softening his stance.

  “You didn’t introduce me,” she told Ellen after the men left.

  “You met. A few weeks ago, remember?” Ellen said.

  “We didn’t,” Georgia said. “He was on the roof.”

  After helping Ellen with the salad, Georgia went downstairs to the rec room to check on the kids, who were heaped like kittens in front of the TV. Georgia and Gary didn’t own a television, which made it especially hypnotic for Jacob. So deep was his trance he didn’t notice Georgia’s foot on his bum, jostling him.

  Back upstairs, Ellen poured Georgia’s wine. They moved to the deck, where Larry and Gary hovered by the barbecue several feet away, their backs to the women. Far beyond and below them, the summer city glinted. The islands organized themselves in gradations of grey and green.

  “How’s it going?” Georgia whispered with a glance at Larry.

  Ellen smiled hugely.

  “Everything fixed up?”

  “Us, or the house?”

  “Both,” Georgia said.

  “We are. He’s lost some steam on the house.”

  They could talk like this, Larry within earshot, because his conversation with Gary had already reached that oxygen-sucking stage other men quickly get to when they talk about hockey, each voluble point adamantly agreed upon so that if you didn’t understand the language you’d think they were arguing. The way some of Gary’s older relatives slipped into Russian and their venomous exchanges prompted Georgia to ask Gary, “What are they talking about?” Hitler, usually, or digestive troubles.

  It turned out that Larry Silver knew quite a lot about the Winnipeg General Strike. He mentioned something called “the Fowler Am
endment” and Gary roared out, “The Fowler Amendment!” Larry went back inside, passing Ellen and Georgia at the patio table. He smiled at Ellen but ignored Georgia. He had yet to make eye contact with her. During the brief time he was in the house, the two men continued yelling to each other.

  “The Fowler Amendment was why my great-uncle left the Winnipeg Free Press!” Larry stepped onto the deck with two more beers. His eyes glided unseeingly over Georgia.

  Not shy. Rude!

  Georgia turned to Ellen for some explanation, but Ellen hadn’t noticed. She sipped her wine and gazed at Larry with an expression not unlike Jacob’s. Jacob couldn’t believe he was actually watching Rugrats. Ellen couldn’t believe Larry was back.

  By then the vegetables were grilled. Larry started on the steaks, lifting the first one, stabbing it with the two-tined barbecue fork, dropping it hissingly on the grill. He gave Ellen the five-minute warning. She snapped to, rose, called the kids.

  During her bitter years, Ellen had failed to mention certain things about Larry, like how funny he was, how charming. Except to Georgia. Mimi and Yo burst upstairs and ran to him, shrieking, “Daddy sandwich!” themselves the two pieces of bread hugging the meat that was Larry. They all took their chairs, Georgia directly across from Larry, Gary at the far end of the table.

  Larry asked Gary if he’d go to a play called The Fowler Amendment.

  “You bet I would,” said Gary, who hadn’t been to the theatre in at least a decade.”

  What’s that?” Mimi asked.

  “Something bad,” Gary explained. “It took away the workers’ right to strike.”

  “It’s maybe the title of the play Daddy’s writing now,” Ellen said.

  Yolanda asked, “The DBP?”

  “That’s how we refer to it,” Ellen told Georgia. “Daddy’s Brilliant Play.”

  Georgia was actually angry now that she was sitting across from Larry, angry and quite miserable. She bowed her curls over her plate and poked her food, but no one noticed; she wasn’t a big eater anyway. Before dessert, she excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she peed in wrathful bursts. As she washed her hands, she studied her furiously furrowed brow in the mirror. Only her head floated there, seeming buoyed up by her hair. Was that what made her so ignorable? Her size?

  Then, as she reached for the towel, as her own insignificant profile flashed in her peripheral vision, she remembered something. The first time she saw Peggy Baker on stage she, Georgia, had to watch from the corner of her eye, otherwise she would be overcome. The way Peggy Baker moved, even how her hands fluttered, was too beautiful for a direct regard.

  Georgia returned to the table, where Ellen was passing around the blintzes, Larry asking as he filled his plate, “What’s the worst thing you’d do for a blintz?” The kids were shouting out their answers. Jacob would eat a worm. Mimi would dye her hair green.

  “You’d dye your hair green anyway,” Ellen told her.

  Georgia stared at Larry.

  Larry said to Gary, “I believe the Fowler Amendment also took away the right to eat blintzes,” and Gary threw back his head and laughed, showing the blintzes and strawberries chewed to a uniform pink.

  The way Larry kept turning his head to talk to Gary presented Georgia in a side-view.

  “THIS was so great. This was so fun,” Ellen told them at the door as they were leaving, the wine making her effuse. “This was The Larry and Gary Show!”

  She hugged them all, Georgia, Gary, and Jacob, and then Larry did. Just before Larry took Georgia in his arms, he looked. It was like two tines penetrating her.

  NOWADAYS they had TV. Gary had relinquished that principle long ago. (In fact, they possessed most every digital gadget available, all of which Maximilian, seven now, had taught them to use.) And not just any TV: a fifty-inch HD flat-screen mounted on the wall where previously there had been a framed movie poster for The Red Menace, a gift to Gary from Larry Silver before he absconded the second time.

  The Bentall Centre Memorial made the news that night. Gary called to Georgia, who was loading the dishwasher after dinner, “Honey, it’s on next! Come see!”

  She did, hovering in the doorway, watching the actors in the muted commercials stretch their faces and mouth their lines. Maximilian texted Jacob in Montreal. Gary worked the remote, turning on the sound as soon as he saw the grainy footage.

  “Twenty-nine years ago. January 7, 1981,” the announcer said.

  Tower Four, its last few floors not yet dressed in glass, appeared leached and dreamy, like in an old Polaroid. The camera travelled down to the site below, to the jumble of fencing and containers, the crew milling in shock. Hats hard, shirts plaid, faces blank.

  Then a closeup of a boot jutting from a sheet. The camera panned out, revealing the whole draped body before retracing the plunge, reversing it, travelling up, up thirty-six floors to the top of the building again and pausing there for a pregnant second.

  “Georgia!” Gary called. He turned and, seeing her in the doorway, patted the place between him and Maximilian.

  Georgia shook her ringlets.

  No blood on the ground, or did they just not show it? She’d imagined a bloody mess.

  Maximilian shouted out, “There you are, Daddy!”

  Georgia, who was pressing her forehead against the door frame, looked up just as Gary flashed by. TV, she remembered, adds ten pounds.

  The footage from today was crisp and bright, the way more recent memories are clearer. Four symbolic coffins painted black, each bearing a white rose and a white hard hat printed with a name. Donald. Gunther. Yrjo. Brian.

  “Mommy’s crying,” Maximilian told Gary.

  “It makes her very sad the way those men died,” Gary told him. “Do you remember what they’re called?”

  “The Bentall Four.”

  “Good. And why did they die?”

  “Because of unsafe work conditions.”

  “Good boy.”

  They had agreed not to tell him anything about Auntie Ellen until they had to.

  AFTER that first dinner, Gary admitted that Larry seemed okay. Later, when The Larry and Gary Show had been happening regularly and Georgia had fallen for Larry, he said, “Anyway, we don’t really know what went on between them. Ellen can’t be the easiest person in the world to live with. She’s not like you.”

  “Don’t say mean things about Ellen,” Georgia told him.

  Every Saturday the two families got together, always at Ellen and Larry’s. Georgia brought along Jacob’s toothbrush and pyjamas in case the evening stretched into night, which it usually did. They would carry their sleeping boy out to the car, limp from the rigours of playing with two girls, sated with TV, and lay him on the back seat with the lap belt secured around him. Usually Georgia drove because she drank less. Not that Gary would be drunk. Ellen might be, but not Gary or Georgia, who never forgot that the night would end with a drive home on a mountain highway.

  Georgia chauffeured her significant others, the two people she loved most. But did she still love Gary? She glanced in the rear-view mirror, saw him in the strobe of the passing highway lights, watching over Jacob, whose head lay across his thigh. Yes, she did. Of course she did.

  But she also loved Larry Silver. She loved how he would play with the silverware as he talked, or nab Mimi running past and very tenderly pick a leaf out of her hair. With Georgia, Larry barely interacted and his every non-look, everything he didn’t say, thrilled her. By their second or third get-together she began to experience their avoidance as a sort of reverse pas de deux that the others, Gary, Ellen, and the children, were completely blind to. Georgia sat down, Larry stood up. Georgia came into a room, Larry immediately left. And as they passed each other sparks flared in Georgia’s peripheral vision. Larry’s too, she could tell. If they happened to accidently touch feet under the table, or hands when a glass of wine was offered, they both leapt back. Two nice Bordeaux glasses had been shattered this way on two different occasions.

  G
ary noticed. He said, “You look beautiful, honey.” Of course, that intensified her guilt on two counts, Gary and Ellen. Not that she intended to act on her feelings. She never would. But she loved toeing that line, reaching with one pointed foot toward it and applying the slightest pressure.

  “You’ve never said anything about Larry,” Ellen mentioned one night.

  How wonderful to be able to speak out loud about him, how terrible that it should be to Ellen. “Gary likes him.”

  “I didn’t ask what Gary thinks.”

  “He’s funny. He’s wonderful with the girls. Also, a man who’s handy? That’s pretty sexy.”

  “Oh, he’s sexy all right. But he leaves everything half finished. I finally had to call someone about the hot tub. Just in case you think he fixed it. And I paid.”

  “ARE you coming?” Larry asked.

  This was after dinner, after the men had cleaned up and were sauntering through the dining room with towels around their necks.

  “Sure,” Ellen said.

  “This baby has a whole new motor,” Larry told Gary. “They put in the Bugatti of hot tub motors.”

  Gary hadn’t brought a bathing suit, but that didn’t faze him. He marched out and dropped his clothes on the deck. So did Larry, either to keep Gary company or because he always went in nude.

  Ellen said to Georgia, “Come on. It’s dark.” She said, “If anyone should be shy, it’s me,” and grabbed a handful of flesh that happened to be hanging around her middle. “If it’s Larry you’re worried about, don’t be. He doesn’t care. Or we can go in in our underwear if you want.”

  Ellen left, then returned in bra and panties, pinning up her auburn hair. Despite their years of mutual confiding, there were things Georgia didn’t know about Ellen. She didn’t know about her underwear, for example, which seemed of such tissuey construction that it might have been stitched by elves. Georgia normally felt sorry for full-figured women and the double burden they were cursed to carry, but Ellen’s breasts, supported by this fairy-tale garment, could cast spells. Even her pearlike bottom-half barely dressed in ivory lace could. As Gary liked to say: hubba-hubba.