The Motion of Puppets (3 page)

“I can't imagine being apart like that just when we are finally together.”

“Be practical. I was only trying to save a little money.”

Frantic at the thought of separation, he had juggled his schedule at the college in New York and used the advance from his publisher to find this place on Dalhousie, where he could work while she was off performing. The whole episode left him questioning how she prioritized their marriage and her career.

Shortly after noon, with still no word from Kay, he thought to call the stage manager at the warehouse rehearsal hall to see if they had any information on her whereabouts. The number, fortunately, was posted on a sticky note next to the fridge, but unfortunately no one answered his call. Too early for the performers or crew to arrive and prepare for that evening's show. They would all be sleeping now, the upside-down world of theater people. He decided to go out and look for her, and, taking a page from his notebook, he scribbled a note saying to please call if she came home before he returned.

Bright June sunshine fell across his face as he stood outside their apartment considering the possibilities. She could be anywhere or nowhere at all. Injured and lying in a gutter or whisked off to a hospital. Or worse. He quickened his pace, following the familiar path between the apartment building and the warehouse, turning down rue Saint-Paul, past the cafés and antique shops, hurrying along the street till he reached the quayside farmers' market where they often went to shop in her free hours. Old Town stretched out over his left shoulder, the hotel Frontenac loomed like a castle on a mountain. He had to cross several busy streets before coming at last to the warehouse where the company had kept the enormous sets and contraptions that went into making their outdoor show a few blocks away. Now, it was largely empty, save for the few giant props that had not made it into the final version of the show. The large sliding doors at the front of the building were chained shut, so he went around to the side entrance, only to find that door locked as well. He banged his fist against the metal door, the echo empty and melancholic.

From deep inside the bowels, a shout worked its way forward, alternating in French and English, urging patience,
s'il vous plaît.
A deadbolt snapped, tumblers turned in a lock, and the door slowly swung open to reveal a rather sleepy-looking dwarf, who scowled in the sudden brightness. They considered each other for a moment in mutual suspicion. The little man rubbed the stubble on his chin.

“Go away,” he said. “
Nous sommes fermés
. Come back at four.” He began to close the door.

“Wait.” Theo raised his voice. “I'm looking for my wife. She's with the show.”

“No one is here. Cast and crew arrive at four o'clock. Tickets at five. Come back when the box office is open.”

“I didn't mean to disturb you—”

“Well, you have a funny way. I was fast asleep.”

“It's just that she didn't come home last night after the performance.” He held up his phone. “And she's not answering my texts. I even tried to call, but no luck.”

The doorman gave him a jagged grin. “Well, she wasn't with me, whoever she is.”

“Pardon?” Theo looked over the little man's head into the cavernous room.

“I meant nothing by it. Just a bit of a fat morning, and you've caught me out of sorts.”

“An acrobat with the show,” he said. “Kay. Kay Harper. I'm her husband, Theo. I thought she might have spent the night here, with the other performers.”

“Egon Picard,” the little man said. “Assistant to the stage manager, and major domo of this empty building. Look, bub, if you want to come in and wait?” Egon widened the entryway, and then without a backward glance, he turned and led Theo through the dark passageway to a ramshackle office tucked into a far corner. A rumpled blanket covered the bottom of a small cot, and the room also held a tiny sink and a counter with a hot plate and an electric kettle. He produced a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet beneath the sink and two highball glasses, indicating with a gesture his offer of a drink. Theo nodded and inspected the room with a casual air.

Taped to the walls was a gallery of sepia pictures, nineteenth-century postcards of women in various stages of undress. In the one above the pillow, a fully clad gentleman reached beneath the skirts of a maid seeming to enjoy the experience. Another showed a woman with a riding crop resting against her bare bottom. Swinging on a trapeze, a third woman leaned back in all her glory above a trio of circus clowns just out of reach.

“That's quite a collection,” Theo said. Ambling around the room, he paused to inspect the more provocative poses.

Handing one glass to Theo, Egon downed his own drink in a single swig. “My
spécialité,
” he said. “I won my first beauty playing poker with a man from Fargo, North Dakota. Full house. Knaves over deuces to his hearts flush. And he had no money, so. Out of such chance comes obsession. Do they offend you, Mr. Harper? Do they scandalize you?” The little man was goading him, waggling his hairy eyebrows and leering.

Theo took a sip of his whiskey, the liquid burning pleasantly in the back of his throat. “Heavens, no. I just was admiring your eclectic tastes.”

“Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that these women are all gone now, yet they live on in these pictures, captured in the flower of their youth and beauty?”

“The power and art of the photograph,” Theo said. “To stop time. Do you know the work of Eadweard Muybridge? Stop-motion? He often used nudes to study the mechanics of how the body moves.”

Egon poured another two fingers of Bushmills in his glass. “I don't know any Muybridge. I know nothing about art. I speak of beauty, man. Youth and how it fades, even though a picture lasts forever.”

The notion hung in the air between them, coaxing both to silent contemplation. Egon tilted back another dram of liquor, and Theo took the phone from his pocket to check for a missing message. He swiped and thumbed in his password, and his wife's image filled his screen. Dressed in a costume and wearing a wig from a now-forgotten show, Kay looked over her shoulder at him, caught in a moment between surprise and happiness. He showed the photograph to Egon. “Are you sure you don't remember her? She's in the balancing act with the contortionist, one of the flower girls. And she's in the tableaux, the tumbling finale.” He thrust the phone closer.

Egon leaned in to take a good look. “Kay, Kay, Kay, Kay? Yes, I know that girl. Seems to me, yes, now that you showed me her picture, of course, I know her. Supporting cast. A voice in the chorus.” With a wave, he dismissed the phone.

“So do you have any idea where she might be? Friends in the show? She texted me last night that some of the cast were going out after the performance. Not to wait up. But she never came home.”

Wiping his eyes with the heels of his palms, Egon bore down on his clouded memories. “They all run together, these nights, but thinking it over, she may have been with a bunch of the actors. Sarant and some of the others, now I recall. She may be the girl arm in arm with Reance. You know him, the master of ceremonies? Old fart in a pair of goggles?” He caught the expression on Theo's face. “You mustn't be alarmed. There were a bunch of them going out together. Actors, you know.
Toujours gai, toujours jolie.
So he makes a play for each of them in time, but often as not,
pfft,
nothing comes of it.”

“Where can I find this Reance?”

“Patience,
monsieur,
they have a call for tonight's performance at four o'clock. He'll show up.”

*   *   *

She should have never gone. At first, it was flattering to have been noticed and asked to join the party, and on the way over to the bar, they had been a jolly crew, Sarant and Reance, four others from the show. But Kay had too much to drink and that man had been pawing her at the table. Hand on her thigh to punctuate a joke. Brushing against her to reach another bottle of wine. Arm around the back of her chair and then leaning against her to tell a story. Whenever she dared to speak, Kay could feel his eyes upon her, rapt, attentive, darting with an unspoken question. She tried to shrug him off, change the subject, let someone else take the spotlight, but he persisted in flirting with her without saying a word. The empty glasses seemed to breed more glasses, and the bottles crowded the tabletop. All around them, couples finished their nightcaps, parties broke up and departed, leaving the place to the actors. At two, a weary waitress forced a check upon them, and they counted out the strange Canadian dollar coins to split the bill. The tipsy revelers staggered out and congregated on the sidewalk, caught between the desire to carry on with their fun and the flagging energy of a long night. Sarant and two of the other women called a taxi. The men wavered and waited under a crescent moon, Reance lurking at her side like a jackal.

“I think I'll walk,” Kay said. “It isn't far. Clear my head.”

“Let me escort you,” Reance said. “So that you're safe.”

“Not necessary,” she answered quickly. “Besides, I go the other way. Our flat is in the Basse-Ville. There's nobody about, and I walk home alone nearly every night after the show.”

“It's so late. I insist. I wouldn't feel right.” He was playing the gallant, but just below the skin was a rogue.

“No, I insist. It was fun though. Thank you for asking me to join the party, but I will be perfectly fine.” With a wave, she said her good-byes.

Muddled by the wine, Kay set off in the wrong direction and had gone down an unfamiliar side street before realizing her mistake. Rather than backtrack and risk bumping into her friends again, she circled around the block, past the empty businesses, the small hotels, and town houses drowsing with sleepers, feeling hopelessly lost in the tangle of alleyways. She thought of phoning Theo to come rescue her but did not want to wake him at such a late hour. She considered trying to hail a cab, but the few in town were almost always to be found on a main thoroughfare and rarely at this hour, so she walked on, the sound of her own footfall echoing against the stone houses. With each step, she invented someone following her, a madman, a killer, so she would stop and listen and laugh at her own foolish imagination.

For their honeymoon, Kay and Theo had rented a cabin near a lake in the Maine woods, and she had gone out in the middle of the night by herself to see the stars from the deck. The constellations were clear and crisp, but the pine trees had obscured Cassiopeia, so she walked along the driveway trying to find a better vantage spot. From the birches came a shudder, steps amid the falling leaves, and the shadow of a moose scared the wits out of her. She ran back inside as quickly as she could and stood on the other side of the closed door, panting and laughing at herself. When Theo heard her story, he had chided her for going out alone, and she seethed for half an hour about how overbearing he could be sometimes. But lovable, too, to be so concerned.

Without quite knowing how, she stumbled onto rue Saint-Paul near the Marché du Vieux-Port, a landmark for her journey home. The familiar sight allayed her fears. Under the streetlights, the low-slung farmers' market appeared like a set of models from a miniature railroad, down to the smallest detail—the sign over the entrance, the empty pushcarts, and the covered stalls. If she drew closer, she felt they would be revealed as fakes, and so unsettled, she rushed past, averting her eyes, heading down Saint-Paul with grim determination. Kay was certain now that she was being followed, her pursuer matching her movements in perfect synchronicity. When she stopped, he stopped. Pick up the pace, slow, dawdle, speed up again. He was clever, for each time she turned around to confront him, she could find no one. In a curious way, she hoped it was Reance and not some random thug come to take her money, her life. Earlier when they were leaving the bar, Reance had pressed his hand against the small of her back at a precise juncture that signaled his desire. His hand felt hot and clammy through her thin dress. He had been flirting with her all night and now he was following her, she was sure. She jogged a few paces, past a tiny parking lot, the street narrowing.

Behind her, a hiss startled her, a cat chasing a rat, a snake in the cracks of the sidewalk, breath of air escaping from an anxious man. A single light snapped on and pooled on the sidewalk, a bright oasis in a desert of darkness. The two moments, the hiss and the light, followed as though one had caused the other, like the scrape of a match simultaneously producing the flame. Her heel caught in a crack in the pavement and snapped in two.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, surprised at how loud her voice sounded. After trying to reattach the stem of her heel, she flung the broken piece in the gutter and carried both shoes, limping barefoot, realizing that the light was coming from inside the Quatre Mains. She flew to the storefront, escaping her assailer, and tried the knob to the perpetually locked door, a flutter in her heart as it turned.

Bells along the lintel rang cheerfully when she crossed the threshold, and even at the late hour, she expected to be welcomed to the shop by its proprietor, a kindly old soul:
May I help you?
But no one answered her hellos. The shop was crammed with toys, and all that had been hidden before was now revealed. She and Theo had never seen what lived in the shadows. Dead center was a puppet theater, a sylvan scene decorating the proscenium, just the right size for a young child, and hiding behind the scenery were a handful of finger puppets—a porcupine, a moose, a beaver, a loon, a Mountie, and a damsel in distress. Along the wall next to the door was a long wooden counter with an antique cash register. She laid her bag and broken shoes atop a display case filled with tray after tray of parts for dolls, not just their costumes and accessories but glass eyes, arms, shoes, mittens, hair of every color from fiery red to coal black. A half-dozen marionettes hung on long ropes from the ceiling, twirling ever so slightly as she passed, Hansel and Gretel off to meet the witch, Alice and the Queen of Hearts. Along the other wall were rows of Pinocchios, Muppets on a hat rack, Indonesian shadow puppets, glove puppets, sock monkeys, and papier-mâché lions and tigers and bears. There were windups and cast-iron banks of old-time baseball players pitching and catching. A felted red rooster in a yellow beret. A flywheel monkey dressed in a green bellboy's cap and jacket. Clowns whose arms and legs jumped when you pulled a string. The creatures all seemed to be watching her as she roamed about the shop. In the peculiar quiet, she wondered where the owners were.