Home from the Vinyl Cafe (3 page)

The bellboy wheeled the turkey into Dave’s room at a quarter to six. They had it on a dolly covered with a silver dome. Dave removed the dome and gasped.

It didn’t look like any bird he could have cooked. There were frilly paper armbands on both drumsticks, a glazed partridge made of red peppers on the breast, and a small silver gravy boat with steam wafting from it.

Dave looked at his watch and ripped the paper armbands off and scooped the red-pepper partridge into his mouth. He realized the bellboy was watching him, and then he saw the security guard standing in the corridor. The security guard was holding a carving knife. They obviously weren’t about to trust Dave with a weapon.

“Would you like us to carve it, sir?”

“Just get me a taxi,” said Dave.

“What?” said the guard.

“I … can’t eat this here,” said Dave. “I have to eat it …” Dave couldn’t imagine where he had to eat it. “Outside,” he said. “I have to eat it outside.”

He gave the bellboy another twenty-dollar bill and said, “I
am going downstairs to check out. Bring the bird and call me a taxi.” He walked by the security guard without looking at him. “Careful with that knife,” he said.

Dave got home at six. He put Butch on the table. The family was due back any minute. He poured himself a drink and sat down in the living room. The house looked beautiful—smelled beautiful—like a pine forest.

“My forest,” said Dave. Then he said, “Uh-oh,” and jumped up. He got a ladle of the turkey gravy, and he ran around the house smearing it on lightbulbs. There, he thought. He went outside and stood on the stoop and counted to twenty-five. Then he went back in and breathed deeply. The house smelled like … Christmas.

He poured himself another Scotch and looked out the window. Morley was coming up the walk … with Jim Scoffield and his mother.

“We met them outside. I invited them in for a drink.”

“Oh. Great,” said Dave. “I’ll get the drinks.”

Dave went to the kitchen, then came back to see Jim sitting on the couch under the tall swinging lamp, a drop of gravy glistening on his balding forehead. Dave watched another drop fall. Saw the puzzled look cross Jim’s face as he reached up, wiped his forehead, and brought his fingers to his nose. Morley and Jim’s mother had not noticed anything yet. Dave saw another drop about to fall. Thought, Any moment now the Humane Society is going to knock on the door. Sent by the hotel.

He took a long swig of Scotch and placed his glass by the paper napkins that Morley had painted.

“Morley, could you come here,” he said softly. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

               
W
hen you strap skis to your feet, winter skies are always blue and the temperature always crisp. When you strap a dog to your arm late on a winter night, crisp changes to cold, frosted becomes frozen, and walking up and down neighborhood streets, you can imagine yourself struggling across the Russian Steppes with a pack of wolves on your tail. There were nights in January when there wasn’t much Dave wouldn’t have done to get out of walking Arthur. Dave is not, by inclination, a winter person.

January, however, has always been Morley’s favorite month, and she has tried to teach Dave how to enjoy it. Every January they spend a weekend away together, usually in the outdoors. They have been skiing in Vermont and snowshoeing in Algonquin Park and once to an inn north of Montreal. One of the best weekends ever was the one when they went to Ottawa. They stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast in the Glebe, and they skated on the canal—up to Dow’s Lake to look at the ice sculptures and all the way back to the Château Laurier. That night they ate in a restaurant in the market and skated home.

They were planning to go back to Ottawa this year, but there was a big storm, the airport was closed, and they couldn’t drive. Even the trains weren’t running.

Morley said, “Too much ice for skating. Frozen out of the rink. Go figure.”

Dave couldn’t leave his record store the next weekend; he had been advertising a January sale for weeks. Before they knew it, the month was over, and they hadn’t gone away for the first time in ten years.

When Morley was a child, her father, Roy, used to make a skating rink in their backyard—just for her. It wasn’t always the easiest thing to do when you lived in Toronto. Some winters Roy had to take Morley’s wagon out late at night and steal snow from yards around the neighborhood in order to have enough for the base of her rink. He was happy to do it, because Morley loved to skate. She used to lie in bed at night while her father was out in the backyard—peeling his frozen hands off the hose—and she would imagine her ceiling was an ice-covered lake. She would fall asleep dreaming that she could skate on her ceiling forever.

Her all-time favorite book was
Hans Brinker
. Her all-time favorite dress was the pink chiffon costume that her mother made for her to wear in the Christmas Pageant on Ice. She was a sugarplum fairy. The pink dress had sequins. The years before, she had always had plain white dresses. She loved the pink dress because of the sequins and because the year she wore it was the only year that the Christmas pageant wasn’t a total disaster. The worst year was the yellow dress. That was when she was twelve.

For your solo number, you had to provide your own music, but those were the days before cassette tapes. So every girl would go to Mitchell’s music store and cut her own record. Each record had two sides, and because side B was a throwaway, Morley had them put “The Stripper” on side B—just for fun.

The man who was playing the records that year was the father of one of the other competitors. When it was Morley’s turn, he put on the wrong side of her record—“The Stripper” instead of Doris Day singing “Que Sera Sera.” Morley began her program as if nothing were wrong. But then everyone started clapping along to “The Stripper.” When somebody yelled, “
Take it off,
” she started to cry, and then she fell and didn’t get up. She lay along the blue line until her father came and picked her up and helped her off. He said it wasn’t her fault, but it didn’t make her feel any better. She never skated in the pageant again. And she never again owned a yellow dress.

In fact, she didn’t even put on a pair of skates for ten years, not once during her adolescence, not once. Not until the summer she left home.

She had a job working in summer stock, in a theater in Providence, Rhode Island—eight plays, two months. She was a seamstress.

There was a three-thousand-seat arena not far from the theater. It offered a free skate from eight to ten every Monday night. That was the only night the theater was dark. Morley kept meaning to go skating. She finally did—at the end of August. It was the night she met Dave.

Dave was in town with a Dick Clark
Caravan of Stars
production—eight acts in two hours, including ? and the Mysterians, the Archies, and Bobby Goldsboro. It was a hateful tour. The musicians hated the music they were playing, and they loathed the venues they were playing in. A sourness descended on the whole enterprise before the end of the first week. Dave, who began the tour as the technical director, soon realized he was presiding over the rock-and-roll equivalent of a Ford Pinto. He could count on something going wrong every day. He kept waiting for the explosion. The only
salvation was the most hated moment of all—the last number of every show—when Bobby Goldsboro sang “Honey.”

About two weeks into the tour, one of the Mysterians bought a battery-operated megaphone, and every night a group of musicians would huddle offstage, trying to distract Bobby Goldsboro by singing alternate lyrics during his song. They would sing just loud enough so he could hear them and the audience couldn’t. In Saratoga Springs they rigged up a microphone behind the stage. The plan was to feed their version of “Honey” through Goldsboro’s monitor. Somehow the feed got rerouted—it was never clear how—and their lyrics, which involved Honey doing unspeakable things with a shaved, greased goat, got routed through the arena PA.

To the audience, this unbelievable rewrite appeared to be coming out of Goldsboro’s mouth. Goldsboro, who was dimly aware that something was horribly wrong, gamely finished the song while the crowd watched in disbelief. When the tune came to an end, there was a moment of pure silence. Then Goldsboro looked around in confusion as the audience rose as one and gave him the only standing ovation he got on the tour. After the show, he kicked up such a fuss that the Mysterians had to stop their evening antics. Instead, every night when it was time for “Honey,” they would slip into the audience, where Goldsboro could see them, and put on oversize construction ear protectors, waving, smiling, and making rude gestures at him while he sang.

Things got so bad that Dave left the tour and began to advance the show. This meant arriving in each town a few days ahead of everyone to prepare the arena and then, thankfully, leaving before anyone else got there. He spent the entire summer arguing with arena managers about concession rights and electrical boards. And that was how he came to meet Morley in those last days of summer.

When he first saw her, Dave was leaning on the arena boards, waiting for the free skate to end so his crew could start laying a temporary floor over the ice. The lights were dim, and there were waltzes playing over the arena PA. Everyone was paired up, holding hands as they skated around and around. Dave suddenly felt alone. He bought a coffee in a cardboard cup and watched the skaters, and as he watched, he was transported back to the arena in his hometown of Cape Breton—to the annual Valentine Weekend Ice Waltz. They used to put lights in the arena ceiling. The lights would twinkle like stars. There was the big face of a moon, which would wink its eye every so often, and a live orchestra suspended on a plywood platform over center ice. At the beginning of the night, the musicians would have to climb up a ladder with their instruments. Dave’s mother made him promise he wouldn’t skate under the platform during the polkas, because when the orchestra played polkas, the platform swung back and forth. Whenever that happened, Margaret would stand by the boards, light a Sweet Caporal, and say she didn’t mind if the cigarettes got her, but she was damned if she was going to become an item on the TV news because she was the only woman in the history of Cape Breton to be squashed to death by a polka band.

That was what Dave was thinking about when Morley skated into his life. She had long chestnut hair with bangs that were at least an inch below her eyebrows. She was wearing a hand-woven poncho over a blue army-surplus turtleneck sweater, and bell-bottom jeans with embroidered cuffs. And granny glasses. Dave was bewitched.

She was the only person on the ice who could really skate—around and around all by herself—one leg crossing
over the other in the corners. Every so often she would glide to center ice and do a spin. Dave thought, She must be Canadian. He had to meet her.

He rented a pair of skates. But when he got onto the ice, he couldn’t catch up to her. So he slowed down to see if she would catch up to him. She did. But she just kept going.

Dave was getting frantic as he watched the clock at the far end of the arena. Then she was standing right in front of him at the blue line. But Dave was going so fast that he was going to shoot right by her. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed her. She screamed, and then they were suspended in midair, clutching at each other and, for a horrible frozen moment, face-to-face. In that moment of eternity, as they hovered horizontally over the ice, Dave said, “Hi.”