Ellen in Pieces (25 page)

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.

A
FTER
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.

Gary 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.”

“A
RE
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.

Georgia said, “Go ahead. I’ll be right out.”

She checked on their sleeping children. In the bathroom she stripped to her high-rise cotton panties and dingy sports bra. When she saw herself standing there like Cinderella of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, she quickly peeled them off and tucked them inside her clothes.

No towels. They must have brought them to the hot tub. Ellen kept the clean ones in the spare room closet, but that was where the kids were. Georgia didn’t want to walk in there naked in case one of them woke up.

She padded on cat’s feet to the kitchen, dimly lit by the bulb above the stove. The air stroked her. Outside, Ellen was crying out, “It’s too hot, Larry! It’s soup!” He said something Georgia couldn’t hear, something about his mother’s borscht, and Ellen laughed with snorts.

Soundlessly, Georgia stepped onto the deck, into the cooler air. Her nipples hardened and she crossed her arms. Did she want to see Larry Silver naked? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she would rather he didn’t see her, but if he looked now while she was close to the kitchen window, he would. This prompted her to take a few rushing steps into the moonless obscurity before her eyes had fully adjusted. She could just make out Ellen and Gary sitting with their backs to her. Larry was facing Ellen. He was also facing Georgia, but she couldn’t tell if he saw her, he was just a shadow.
The only visible thing was Ellen’s squashed white ass perched on the edge of the tub.

Georgia squinted and took another step, the wood of the deck rough under the soles of her feet, then not.

August 25, 1991. Georgia fell.

She landed flat on her back without making a sound, or not a loud enough sound for the others to hear over their conversation rising to a drunkenly boisterous volume. They had got onto sports cars, which Gary disdained but Larry loved. Probably Georgia had grunted when she hit the ground. Nothing hurt—the deck was only three feet up. Nevertheless, she lay there mortified and praying that none of them had noticed. They hadn’t, or they would have rushed over to see that she was all right. She was fine. She would just lie here for a minute until she thought of some way to save herself.

“Say my play’s a hit. Say I make millions and to repay you for your help, I give you a Bugatti. You wouldn’t drive it?”

“Nope.”

“Where’s Georgia?” Ellen asked.

“Modesty delays her,” Gary said. “I would sell it and give away the money.”

“My God,” Larry said.

“Modesty?” Ellen asked. “She has the body of an eighteen-year-old. Georgia!”

Georgia, lying three feet below them and eight feet to the right, heard sloshing. Larry asked, “Another one?”

“I’m okay,” Gary said.

“See what’s happened to her,” Ellen said.

“Would you sit in it?” Larry asked.

“Nope.”

She was cold. The grass prickled her back and buttocks. The smell of it and of the dirt under the deck intensified the longer she lay. She calculated her distance from the deck stairs. She could crawl over to them, drag herself up onto the deck and over to the hot tub, then pop up just beside it. They would never suspect. Or she could go in the French doors that led to the basement rec room and pretend she was only coming out now. Except that those doors were probably locked.

She heard a click, like a door unlocking.

“Really, though,” Ellen said. “She never put on a pound when she had Jacob.”

“I put on a lot of weight when she had Jacob,” Gary said.

“You were doing your part! Unlike someone else.”

Georgia sensed his approach—a very slight trembling of the earth. And then she saw him, a shadow crouching low, almost running, hurrying to her. He landed on his knees and bent over her, dripping. He found her mouth and kissed it. She didn’t resist—the opposite. She breathed in and welcomed first the pressure of his mouth and then his whole weight, so much less than what she was accustomed to. She considered the strength and mass of his shoulders and arms, felt herself pressed down into the earth as he swung his leg across her.

From that position, curled above her, he stirred. With his long, thin cock, Larry Silver stirred up her life.

I
NSENSITIVE
maybe, for Georgia to link these two events in her mind—the Bentall Centre tragedy and that night at Ellen’s. But there were tragic consequences that night too.

First, The Larry and Gary Show was cancelled. Ellen called the
next week to say that the DBP was not going so well and Larry was in a funk. “You don’t want to see him like this. I’ll let you know when he gets to the end of Act One.”

School had started by then and all of them were busy anyway.

Six months later Larry left and everything returned to the way it had been before, with Ellen calling late, slightly drunk. What she told Georgia was that Amy had originally kicked out Larry because he’d been seeing another woman; now that other woman had sounded her siren again.

“You’re sure about that?” Georgia asked.

“Yes,” Ellen said, and maybe it was true. When she cried on the phone now, her tears were for Mimi and Yo, devastated by their father’s departure.

“I could tell you didn’t trust him,” Ellen said. “I wish I’d taken the hint.”

Thump, thump, thump
went Georgia’s little fist against her chest. Also, Ellen had discovered she was pregnant, but the fetus shrivelled inside her and died. Georgia accompanied Ellen when she had her D&C.

A bloody mess.

And now this, the most tragic thing in Georgia’s opinion, the thing she thought about every time she visited, the reason she couldn’t look at Larry—that Ellen had ended up living so much of what turned out to be her too-short life without Larry Silver, who anyone could see, anyone who had eyes in his head, was the love of her life. Georgia bore some responsibility for this.

The two events had twisted tightly together. Georgia wanted to unply the strands and release herself before it was too late, but in a way it already was. Ellen was dying. Georgia should have told her years ago.

T
HE
next time Georgia visited Ellen, bearing a pot of borscht, it was standing room only even without Larry. In the kitchen, someone was using the blender. Ellen’s sister, Moira, a stouter and gruffer version of Ellen, had arrived from Calgary. Gerhard from next door stood around taking up space.

“You are enjoying this too much,” he told Ellen. “If we all went away you would get bored and go back to work. Your art is calling you. Can’t you hear it?”

Ellen laughed. She seemed ebullient, like she was holding court, alarmingly, after how subdued she’d been two days before. It reminded Georgia of the day before she’d gone into labour with each of Jacob and Maximilian, her sudden burst of energy that had sent her down to her basement studio, where she’d tried to work out a series of steps. She hoped this didn’t mean Ellen was about to die. She hoped it was the morphine.

“Georgia!” Ellen called out. “Moira! This is Georgia!”

Moira, sitting at the table with a pair of reading glasses clinging to her nose as she scrutinized the labels of Ellen’s pills, smiled a tight no-nonsense smile. A nurse, Georgia remembered.

“I was telling you about Georgia last night,” Ellen told Moira.

Georgia had some idea what Ellen had said. That Georgia choreographed dances for preschoolers; that she could, the night before a recital, single-handedly whip up enough tissue-paper flowers to decorate an entire gym; that her closet housed every possible colour of Crocs; that she had worn her hair the same way since Ellen met her despite the counsel of many, many black women who would sidle up to her with the name of the best salon for straightening; that she was “sweet,” “elfin,” a “pixie,” all things that outwardly were true but that belied the bitter seed in her centre.

Mimi was there too, back after several years in Toronto failing
to establish herself. Two years older than Jacob, but far behind him in so many ways, she’d been a troubled girl much of her life, though had now sorted herself out enough to be of help. She brought from the kitchen some kind of chlorophyll drink that Ellen tried to wave off.