Riviera Blues. Jack Batten
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from around Annie’s shoulder. The hand had gone to sleep. I stood up and shook it.
“You think the sun’s over the yardarm?” I asked her.
“Probably over Hawaii by now.”
Outside the window, the street lights had come on. I looked at my watch. Not quite seven. For late April, it had been a murky day and close to the freezing mark.
“White wine, please,” Annie said. She had Premiere open again. “It says here Marcello Mastroianni’s in a film that’s set for competition at Cannes. Lucky you, your very favourite actor.”
I went into the kitchen. I poured Annie a glass from an open bottle of Orvieto. The Wyborowa was in the freezer. I put three ice cubes in a glass that I’d got for buying two tanks of gas at a Texaco station. I filled the rest of it with vodka. The glass was imitation crystal and spectacularly ugly. I bet a Pole wouldn’t sully his Wyborowa with ice cubes. Probably wouldn’t drink it out of a Texaco glass either. There was a tin of unsalted nuts on the counter. I managed to open the tin without cutting myself and dumped the nuts into a cereal bowl. I got the wine, the vodka, and the nuts in delicate balance in two hands. The telephone rang.
“You mind getting that?” I called to Annie.
I have two phones, one in the kitchen, the other in the bedroom. Annie came into the kitchen. I passed her at the door and put down the glasses and the bowl on the pine table behind the sofa. I could hear Annie talking on the phone, not words, just tones. She wasn’t long.
“Is old what’s-her-name’s mother still living?” Annie asked me.
“Pamela’s?” I said. “As far as I know.”
“In that case, she’ll probably be the next member of the family wanting to bend your ear.”
“Pamela’s on the phone? Right now?”
Annie pointed a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen phone. “It’s a woman, and she wants to speak to you, and when I asked ‘Who may I say is calling?’, she said ‘old what’s-her-name’.”
“She did not.”
“You’re right,” Annie said. “She said ‘Pamela Cartwright’.” I lifted my glass from the table, and swallowed an inch of vodka.
“Well, now,” I said. “I wonder what she wants.”
CHAPTER THREE
Pamela wanted me to come to tea at four o’clock the next afternoon, Thursday.
“Well, sure, that’d be just fine, you bet,” I said on the phone. I sounded like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
“Until tomorrow then,” Pamela said, crisp and categorical.
“I clocked that at a forty-second call,” Annie said in the living room. “You and Pamela aren’t much for trips down memory lane.”
I swallowed another inch of vodka. My hand shook slightly.
“She invited me to tea tomorrow.”
“That’s wild.”
“The tea?”
“No, that’s quaint,” Annie said. “Her asking to see you, that’s wild.”
“Tea might be a euphemism for scotch whisky.”
“What’s she after, any hints?” Annie was sitting up on her knees on the sofa. “More about this Haddon bounder? Or deeper matters? I put my money on deeper.”
“The only reason Pamela would call me is if she wants something very special,” I said. “Special to her.”
“Not your body, I trust.”
“The implication when we got divorced was she’d had her fill of it.”
I made myself another vodka on the rocks. I finished it while Annie drank half her wine. Annie was an absent-minded drinker. Then we walked down to Queen Street and ate chicken and shrimp at the Rivoli while Annie pumped me about Pamela.
I told her that, in a marriage that had lasted five years and change, Pamela had been bright, sexy, caustic, profane when angry, and no more self-absorbed than any other young woman who’d inherited several millions of dollars from her grandfather. Marrying middle-class me represented Pamela’s one departure from the normal course of moneyed life. I was never sure whether it was true love or an act of rebellion.
This was territory Annie and I had covered a dozen times before. Annie brought it up every few months, like a kid asking for a favourite bedtime story. Never got bored with it, even if she kept up the running joke of calling Pamela old what’s-her-name. And now that Annie had spoken to the woman herself, her fascination had increased.
“She’s got one of those great throaty voices,” Annie said. “Or was that just the phone?”
I said it wasn’t the phone.
We had two espressos each and went back to my place. I played Billie Holiday again. Annie and I sat on the sofa and listened. The lights were out. Lady Day sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” I held Annie in my arms. We didn’t talk.
In the morning, after Annie had left the apartment on movie duties, I got busy on the passport drill. Went downtown and had photos taken. Buttonholed a lawyer I’d known for more than two years to sign in the spaces where a doctor or lawyer or minister guarantees I am who I say I am. Crang. Criminal lawyer. Green eyes and all. And took everything to the passport office in the government building near the corner of Dundas and Yonge.
The lineup lasted an hour. I read a copy of the Sun somebody had left behind. It had a fat sports section. Too bad Annie’s specialty wasn’t baseball. Or violent homicides that involved motorcycle gangs or distraught spouses.
When I got my turn at the front of the line, a sunny East Asian woman said I could pick up my passport in four days, any time after nine a.m. Monday. A near thing, I told her. Annie and I were to leave on an Air Canada flight Monday night.
At home, I made a meatloaf sandwich. The meatloaf was from Ian downstairs. He’s a wizard cook, and offloads on me whatever he and Alex and their dog don’t consume. The dog’s name is Genet.
I considered a visit to my office. And rejected it. I run a one-man practice out of a second-floor space on the north side of Queen near Spadina. I’ve been a tenant there for twenty years. In recent weeks, I had let things wind down in anticipation of my sojourn in France.
Two o’clock. Two more hours until tea with Pamela. I puttered. Smoothed out the duvet and patted the pillows on the bed. Took out the clothes I would pack for the trip. Tied up all the magazines that were a month old in a bundle for the recycle pickup. The New Yorker. Downbeat. Saturday Night.
“Damn,” I said.
The puttering wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do: take my mind off the Pamela appointment. I felt apprehensive. I felt damp in the armpits. I went into the bathroom and stood under the shower for five minutes. That took care of the armpits. The apprehension remained intact.
Pamela had occupied a significant chunk of my life; she was a woman I’d fallen in love with, a woman who had ditched me. And the ditching, in my opinion, was for a lousy reason. Because I wouldn’t go out and play. When Pamela flew to Gstaad for the skiing, Manhattan for the shows, Lyford Cay for the sun, I stayed home. I had clients and trials. Pamela decided the arrangement wasn’t working and asked for a divorce. Not so much asked as ordered one up, the same way she used to have catered lunches for eight whipped over from Paul’s Fine Foods in the Village. She sent down to the Supreme Court of Ontario for one divorce, and had it delivered for a Friday before she jetted to London for the shopping. I felt bitter for a couple of months. I phoned Pamela’s new condo in Granite Place and told her that skiing, shows, and the sun were no substitute for me. More accurately, I told it to her answering service. Pamela wasn’t home. She never