Idea in Stone (10 page)

“At least a couple of months.” She cocked her head. “You’re making that face again, Stefan. This is the process. It takes that long. We need this time. We have a lot of work to do.”

~

Stefan wondered why he shouldn’t just buy a ticket and leave. Money was coming in, and his debts were shrinking quickly. With a set purpose before him, he found it easy to avoid spending and to accumulate money quickly. This play, though, it would take everything he had and then some, and from what Helen told him, he knew he shouldn’t expect to make a cent from the production.

He walked along Yonge Street, past discount stores, sex boutiques, and electronics shops, all lit with flashing neon words and flickering bulbs. Every window offered objects he could have, but he was pleased to find he didn’t want. People bustled in and out of the shops and squeezed past him on the sidewalk. Pixelboards overhead flashed down with giant news-anchor heads, shiny cars, and television celebrities.

The next shop he passed was a travel bureau. Inside the window was a white plastic board listing destinations, with prices magic-markered in next to them. Edinburgh wasn’t listed. Glasgow was the closest destination mentioned. He could get there just by putting the ticket on his credit card.

Stefan took out his wallet and opened it. His father’s face looked from his driver’s licence at him with one eyebrow raised. Stefan slammed the wallet shut.

Right,
he thought,
I should stick with the plan.

~

Stefan watched as the bodies flapped together like pink sea creatures thrown from a net. He turned his head, studying them, listening closely, trying to filter out their voices from that extra voice he always heard. He really wanted to listen to the other voice, but that was not what he was here to do.

“What are they saying to each other?” Stefan asked. “Do you have a transcript, something translated that I can work from?”

“Look,” said the man who’d been assigned to this task, who Stefan suspected was not a real recording engineer, “it’s an adult movie. What sounds do you make when you bang a girl?”

“Oh, I uh, I don’t—” stammered Stefan, then finally concluded with a shrug.

“Right, okay, I’ve dealt with your kind before, those ‘What’s my motivation?’ types. You know what your motivation is? Getting paid. You want to know the dialogue?” he asked, scribbling on a piece of paper. “Here. Here you go. Now we’re going to take this in one.” He returned to his controls. “Go!”

Stefan followed the movements of the man onscreen as best he could, moaning. When the man started speaking, Stefan read from the paper with all the conviction he could muster. “Yeah. You like that, don’t you bitch?”

Ah feel like a fish supper
, said the extra voice he heard underneath the recorded sounds, uncharacteristically clear. Stefan bit his hand to keep from laughing, moaning instead. The voice and he were in on a joke, and something about that felt sexy. Stefan found himself forgetting the sound man and getting wrapped up in the work.

~

Helen crossed out a line of the script and Stefan winced. She picked up her cup of tea and sat back on the low couch in her living room. The space was filled with carvings and paintings of dramatic aboriginal Canadian design. They were surrounded by vivid spirits with exaggerated expressions and grand stories behind them. Stefan looked at one of the sculptures, marvelling that this whole section of the Canadian world that had only existed for him before in a shadow way had now come alive for him. The culture’s back had been broken long ago, and some people like his grandfather insisted that assumptions of a spirituality were antiquated and condescending, but Stefan felt there was something to it. Just the idea, the romance of it, made it real. Still, though, it was too thin in his blood for him to claim it as his own. He knew it wasn’t. His spirit was elsewhere, and he’d had that feeling long before his father came back into his life to tell him.

“Stefan?” said Helen. “Focus.”

“Right, where were we?”

“This line. It doesn’t work. What do you feel your father was trying to say?”

“Well, here she’s talking about her father’s company.”

“Oh,” said Helen, “oh, I hadn’t seen that. Good. So how should we put that?”

Stefan picked up a pencil and leaned in next to Helen, scribbling words beside her notation on the photocopied script. He wondered about being so close to her, but knew she would make no mistake about him; surely Delonia found some opportunity during their work together to divulge her son’s exotic sexual otherness (though the revelation got much more of a reaction when he was in grade school; in recent years the effect had diminished greatly).

Helen was so comfortable to be around. When they were out in public together, he saw how people reacted to her, just as he had when he first saw her, and felt lucky to be past the bubble of her strangeness, in close to the centre of who she really was. But being with her—her endless challenges to any half-reasoned, sloppy arguments from him and her complete commitment to the things she stood for—honed his thinking to a point where he could see through even this new-found comfort to a sort of smugness, a self-righteous pride in their friendship: at its core was still her difference; he felt special for getting beyond it, for being the chosen company of such an oddity.
Question everything
, she told him. He wondered if her circumstances made her this clever, or if she would have been like this anyway. Maybe she and her circumstances were indistinguishable. It occurred to Stefan that her condition wasn’t something put upon her, something that should be fixed. It was as quintessentially her as the laugh—like an emptying balloon—that he loved to coax from her.

“What about this line?” Helen asked him. “This section is all a bit foggy. What does it mean?”

“I have no idea,” answered Stefan.

“Good,” said Helen. “It’s good to say that. Let me know if you get any indication.” Helen often made oblique references to his recent experiences of his father, speaking of them in a matter-of-fact way that made him feel better. “We’ll skip it for now and come back to it.”

Stefan nodded. Then looked at the marked-up script: the ‘finished’ pile consisted of a few sheets of paper. The ‘yet-to-do’ pile was very big.

~

“These gloves kinda smell,” said Stefan, putting the bulbous fingers near his nose.

“Yeah, Theo was a bit superstitious about them,” said the floor manager.

“Washing them was bad luck?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well,” said Stefan, “you can tell Wardrobe that I’m not superstitious.” He walked behind the black velvet drape and pushed the oversized hands through openings on either side. “Hey, cool,” said Stefan, leaning his face into the back of the mirror, “I can see through this. I never knew the guy could see through it.”

“Yeah, it’s a sheet of Mylar. We spray it down so it doesn’t reflect the cameras.”

“Hey there, kids,” said Stefan, waving his hands around the thick gold mirror frame, which matched the look of the green-screen window on the opposite side of the puffy couch. He pressed his nose to the ‘glass’ and called to the floor manager. “Hey, Roger, I can see what you’re doing over there with the wardrobe lady.” He made lewd gestures with the oversized hands.

“Har har,” called Roger over his shoulder. He could see the long shape of Stefan’s nose against the mirror. “Just be careful there,” he said, turning back to the costume mistress. He heard a sound and turned back to Stefan.

Stefan’s head hung through the torn sheet of plastic. His eyebrows were making for his hairline. “Um,” he said, “sorry?”
 

~

Stefan stood outside the travel bureau, smiling. He held a ticket in his gloved hand. He opened the long cardboard envelope and looked at the sheets with their red carbon backing.
August third.
He stuffed the ticket into his jacket’s inside pocket, then took out his wallet. His narrow face smiled awkwardly from his driver’s licence, the long dimples on either side of his smile and his big open eyes making him look a bit simple. He didn’t like the picture, but it was the one he was accustomed to, the one that was supposed to be there.

Well Dad,
he thought,
I’ll take this as a good sign.

This was his secret Christmas present to himself. He’d yet to tell anyone other than Helen that he was leaving. He felt guilty about all the people he’d be leaving behind, so he kept quiet. He supposed his friends would understand—they’d all talked about leaving sometime or another, and were hardly going to stay there for each other. His mother would take it personally.
And why shouldn’t she?
he thought. It seemed cruel, put like that.

He turned and walked down the blinking canyon of Yonge Street toward the mall, on a mission.

~

Xmas was always a big affair in Delonia’s house. She made a point of calling it “Xmas” whenever she mentioned it, and only the uninitiated would refer to the occasion by its religious name. Things were cooking in the oven, on the stove, in the toaster oven, and thawing on counters. Decorations hung everywhere, and lights trailed around ceilings, up the stairs, and around every window. People would soon arrive for a party lasting well into the next day. But it was still early. Delonia wafted about in her dressing-robe, a giant wrapped in a drape. Cerise plodded heavily downstairs holding her head, not yet Delonia’s equal when it came to holiday excess. Stefan joined them in the living room—where Delonia said they must meet at this time—holding a large gift-wrapped bundle.

“What’s this?” asked Delonia.

“It’s for you, Mom,” said Stefan, smiling, “and for you, Other Mom.” Cerise was surprised, her open mouth turned up in a smile.

“Go on,” said Stefan. The two women tore the paper from the gift, exposing a very large and very thick duvet. He saw his mother’s eyes reflexively flash to the label, worried.

“Yes, it’s made with real feathers,” said Stefan, “but they were taken from the hatchery of a wildlife reserve. Nobody died.”

Delonia smiled at his knowledge of her, and held her arms open. Stefan reached across to hug her. “Merry Xmas,” he said. She replied in kind. Then he turned to Cerise and gave her a warm, if careful, hug. “Merry Xmas,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. She smelled of cigarette smoke. He wondered how Delonia handled that.

~

Stefan had seen Rick’s pictures already, the ones his girlfriend sent from Malaysia, but Rick was happy and drunk, so Stefan feigned ignorance and let Rick talk him through them again. Jennifer was pretty, and she looked very happy there, sun-browned and set against a paradise backdrop. She’d sent Rick pictures. Despite all their worries to the contrary, this meant he was still in, that he wasn’t deluding himself about their still being an item. Something about him was more relaxed, too. Stefan never considered that Rick had doubts, too. But tonight everything was fine.

Rick straightened the pictures and slid them carefully back into the envelope they’d arrived in, with his name printed on it in Jennifer’s handwriting. It was time for him to go back up for the next set on the makeshift stage at Allen’s house. Few of the friends Allen had invited over for New Year’s seemed to be enjoying Rick’s band—it was a bit heavy for them—but there was a lighter tone than usual in Rick’s delivery.

Allen’s partner had family (or friends, or business, or something) in New York, and couldn’t be at the party. No one was surprised, since he didn’t like any of Allen’s friends and made no effort to hide it. Allen had just secured a large deal at work, and threw even more money into this year’s party than usual, and was having a fine time playing host on his own.

Paulo plopped himself down on the couch next to Stefan, grinning, handing Stefan a second cup of the strongly-spiked punch. Paulo clearly couldn’t wait for midnight, because this year he had someone. His Adam was across the room, talking to some other journalist person, both of them excavating the quarry of spinach-dip rye bread wheels.

Stefan wondered what chemistry was at work in his friends’ relationships. He didn’t feel jealous for a change, but happy for them, curious, watching and wondering who these exchanges would turn them into. And he had something this New Year’s, too: a secret. He sipped his punch, smiling at Paulo, though his throat tightened at the thought that this was his last New Year’s with these friends.

Someone started the countdown to midnight, and everyone joined in. Stefan wondered how long it would take to count to August.

Six

Something to Show

The subway car moved through the dark guts of the city, a length of stainless steel cud delivering human nutrients to its vitals—the businesses and shops. The lights flickered and the car shuddered to a halt. The passengers groaned. The momentary complaint unified the riders, then they returned to ignoring each other. Their eyes drifted to the advertisements above the facing passengers, to their shoes, to their books, newspapers, and magazines. The light was dim here in the tunnel, so any kind of sight-related activity was a pretence, but the passengers shared a tacit agreement to leave each other alone in their bubbles of privacy. That imaginary solitude was the only concession available to those who had to get to work this way.

Stefan looked at his hands, examined his fingernails, coughed, then looked up at an ad for basketball shoes. Annoyed at the commercial invasion of his thoughts, he studied the subway car’s door, self-consciously adopting an expression that said,
I’m just looking to see what’s happening
. He checked his watch with the same forced deliberation. A voice came over the loudspeaker, but he had no idea what it said. This was not because of the second voice he always heard, but the quality of the sound: none of the other riders had any idea what the mumbled yet blaring announcement said, either.
God love the Toronto Transit Commission
, thought Stefan. For some reason, every transit worker he encountered seemed angry about something. He wondered what that was.