Riviera Blues. Jack Batten

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 returned my call.

      And now, ten years later, I said I’d have tea at her house. Was I nuts? Possibly. Curious? Slightly. Apprehensive? Definitely.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Pamela lived on Ardwold Gate. I drove over in my white Volks Beetle convertible with the dent in the passenger side. Ardwold Gate is a cul-de-sac that curls behind Casa Loma at the top of the steep hill on Spadina Road. The houses on the street are a jumble of architectural styles, most of them ersatz. Georgian. Spanish. Edwardian. They have nothing in common except price, a couple of million per house. It takes big money to get ersatz just right.

      The Cartwright place was built of heavy grey stone and filled a double lot. I gave the polished brass knocker on the front door a solid thump. A hefty woman in her fifties opened the door almost immediately. She had on a severe black dress and spoke with a Hungarian accent. She verified that I was Mr. Crang and ushered me into the living room.

      It was a room that had chic stamped all over it. Walls painted terra cotta. Furniture covered in pale grey fabric. Oils and watercolours by Canadians who worked in contemporary realism. I looked out through the French doors. There was a tennis court at the back. It had a red clay surface. Not many of them left in the city.

      “How have you been?”

      Pamela spoke from the living-room entrance behind me.

      I turned around. “Since when?” I asked. “The whole last ten years?”

      “You’re looking well.”

      “That makes two of us.”

      Pamela had blond hair cut short and flipped to the right. She had eyes that looked out through a brown mist, a slightly stuck-out upper lip, and a figure that was slender all the way down. She was wearing a white silk blouse and cream-coloured trousers with many pleats in front. There were three or four thin gold bracelets on her left wrist and a thick gold wedding band on the appropriate finger. I would wager the blond hair still didn’t need much help from a bottle.

      “Please have a seat.” A small wave of Pamela’s hand told me I was to sit in one of the wing chairs. She sat on a sofa opposite me. In between us, there was a marble-topped coffee table with a bowl coloured a deep inky blue on it.

      “Thank you for coming,” Pamela said.

      “Glad to oblige.”

      “I hope it didn’t interfere with your work schedule.” Pamela was perched on the edge of the sofa, her legs crossed at the ankles. “I know how important your practice is to you.”

      “You going to keep on like we’re diplomats exchanging bows or are you going to get down to why I’ve been summoned?”

      “Shut up, Crang,” Pamela said. “This isn’t particularly easy, and I want to get through it my own way.”

      There was a cigarette box on the coffee table near the inky-blue bowl. Pamela reached over and lifted off the top. The box was light green. It looked like wood to me, studded with pieces of white glass. Pamela put the lid on the table. It made a sharp clink against the marble. The box wasn’t wood. It was some kind of metal, and I was probably wrong about the white pieces too. They were probably antique ivory.

      “Do you mind?” Pamela asked. She was lighting her cigarette from a lighter that matched the box.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ