The Silver Age (7 page)

He soon spotted her amid the small crowd, standing over
by the bar with an admiring cluster of junior editorial types. He approached.

“Well, hello there, madam.”

“Stephan!” she cried, all smiles. “I was hoping you’d
make it.”

He ordered a drink and they stood together near the front
of the room while he caught her up on his recent activities. It had only been a
week or so since he’d seen her, but always there was much to discuss – new
assignments, recent Sopranos episodes, the latest industry rumours.

He broke off as he caught her attention wandering.

“Hang on, Steph – here’s Jake Gilfred, the editor of
Grampus
.
We should say hello to him while he’s still relatively coherent.”

Before Stephan had time to react, she reached around him
and placed her hand on the arm of a man who was moving by. The man was a
dishevelled sixty-something with a shock of greying hair and an ill-fitting
cotton jacket. For a moment he seemed angry and confused, but then he saw who
he was dealing with and instantly brightened.

“Young Jennifer Wynne,” he murmured, smiling as he eyed
her. “How goes it, kiddo? How’s your pop?”

“Dad’s fine, Jake. I’ll be sure to give him your
regards.”

“You see our new issue yet?”

“I was just looking it over now,” she said. “You’ve done
it again, I’d venture. Another grand slam.”

“Bullshit,” Jake said, grinning and stroking his chin. “A
stand-up double at best.”

“Jake, someone here I’d like to introduce you to,” Jenny
said, pushing Stephan forward.

“Nice to meet you,” Stephan said, crisply, extending his
hand.

Jake looked him over with an expression of thinly veiled
contempt that seemed almost to border on rage. Stephan retracted his hand.

“You really need to meet this one,” Jenny persisted. “Jake
– this is Stephan Stern. Stephan’s one of the top young photographers coming up
right now. He’s a natural for one of your Camera Eye pieces.”

Jake’s face was expressionless behind its stippling of
five o’clock shadow. “So I suppose you shoot mainly digital, then, young man?”
he sniffed.

“Actually, no,” Stephan said. “I shoot film exclusively,
and black and white whenever I can, some medium format work. I don’t want to
pretend that digital doesn’t exist, but I guess you could say that my interests
lie elsewhere.”

He waited.

“Hmmm....”

“I just find that film has a, well, a texture to it that
digital will never be able to replicate.”

Jake blinked a couple of times. “Well, that was
pretentious,” he said. “But I trust Jenny’s judgement. You see that young fellow
over there, with the cardigan and the absurd spectacles? Tell him I sent you
over.”

“Isn’t he great?” Jenny said, after Jake had taken his
leave, lumbering off in the direction of the bar.

“Yeah, great.”

The art director turned out to be a tad more approachable
than Jake Gilfred had been. After Stephan had introduced himself, the man
gently, and with obvious expertise, queried him about his background and
interests. Jenny Wynne had slipped away by that point, but Stephan could catch
up with her again later. In the meantime, things were going according to plan.
Within a few minutes, he had already been introduced to several other junior
staff members – an associate art director, two photo editors and a proofreader
who helpfully explained the difference between en dashes and em dashes.

After a half-hour had passed in what felt like the span
of a few minutes, his mind returned to Jenny. He wanted to thank her for the
introduction to Jake Gilfred, but their paths didn’t seem to be recrossing. He
searched around the room in a more systematic fashion, and managed to locate
her off in a quiet corner by the side exit, chatting with a petite Asian woman
in skinny jeans and sneakers. As he approached, the woman whispered something
in Jenny’s ear, and the two of them broke up in a fit of girlish laughter.

“Jenny – how are ya?” Stephan said, nonchalant.

“Stephan!”

“Hope I’m not butting in.”

“Not at all! We were just engaging in a little childish
gossip at the expense of your new art director friend.”

“How evil of you,” he said, and was about to ask for the
details when the Asian woman spoke up.

“Hi, I’m Angela Song.”

“Oh, hi there,” he said, realizing why she was familiar –
she was a local film critic who sometimes appeared on a cable movie-review show
with a couple of other local critics. “Stephan Stern – good to meet you.”

They made small talk for a few minutes, and Angela
recommended a couple new movies she’d previewed in advance of the film festival
before excusing herself to speak to a friend she’d just spotted on the other
side of the room.

Stephan was glad to have Jenny to himself again. “She
seems nice,” he offered. “Not as pretty as on TV, though.” He paused. “Sorry,
that was a moronic comment.”

“How did things go with Jake’s art director?”

“Not too badly, I guess – he didn’t seem to want to beat
me up, at least. Actually, he said that he might have an assignment for me. Of
course, you never know if these things will pan out, but still, thanks. I owe
you one.” 

“Think of it as a tiny gift from a friend.”

Mid-way through the event, Stephan found himself chatting
with Nathan MacGregor, his old acquaintance from
This City
, who it
turned out also wrote for
Grampus
from time to time.

“So what do you think of this place?” Nathan asked him.
“Is it going to be the new ‘it’ spot?”

“Sure, maybe?” Stephan said with a shrug. He wasn’t
exactly an expert on such matters. “As long as they keep hosting events
featuring free drink tickets, they should pack people in.”

“Yes, the free drink tickets are rather a draw, aren’t
they? I’m something of a shark when it comes to free drink tickets, I’m
afraid.”

“I’m more of a remora of free drink tickets myself,”
Stephan admitted.

Speaking of free drink tickets, by that point Stephan had
long-since used up his supply, and was not coincidentally feeling well
lubricated.

He made a pit stop in the men’s bathroom, upstairs, which
hadn’t yet been renovated by the new owners, except for new sinks and an
automatic hand dryer, one of the newer ones with a built-in motion sensor. The
walls were a vomity yellow-green, at least where they weren’t covered in
graffiti, and there were ancient soccer stories from British tabloids pinned
above the urinals. The story above Stephan’s urinal was an account of a
Manchester United victory, but he was more taken with the sidebar obituary of a
deranged Baronet known for his love of fox hunting and sadomasochistic orgies.
He’d died of an overdose of opium... a predictable downfall.

He washed his hands at one of the incongruously clean new
sinks and mussed up his hair.

“You look fabulous, dude,” said the guy at the next sink.

“So they tell me,” Stephan said as he dried his hands
under a sharp blast of warm air from the gleaming dryer.

Back downstairs, he found that the magazine launch was
starting to break up. A bunch of people wandered off to check out the karaoke
session that was starting up in the main bar, while outsiders began to come
into the café to take advantage of the free tables. Stephan mingled with the
stragglers from the launch, keeping an eye out for Jenny, but she had wandered
off again; Angela Song, too, seemed to have moved on. He had a quick look
through the main bar, but there was no sign of them there either. Maybe they
had gone out to get some air, or ducked into one of the events currently
unfolding in the secondary rooms upstairs – no doubt Jenny knew people at some
of these gatherings. Perhaps she was saying a quick hello.

Then he spotted her. She was standing in the doorway to
the main bar, watching a pair of bad karaoke singers’ enthusiastic rendition of
a Fleetwood Mac number from the dim years of his early childhood. He hurried
over and placed a friendly hand on her shoulder, but knew immediately that it
wasn’t her. Same height, same hair colour, same swatch of a dress. But when she
turned to face him her eyes were grey, not blue, and her nose was too long.

“Sorry!” he roared, pulling away his hand as if he’d just
placed it on a hot grill. “I thought you were someone else.”

The woman regarded him with a bored, blank expression.
Then she shrugged and turned back to the singers as they launched into another
off-key chorus.

He searched through the entire hotel, from top to bottom,
which took some time. The place was huge, much bigger than he’d realized. In
addition to the café where the magazine event had been held, and the main bar
across the hall, there were several galleries, micro-lounges and lesser event
spaces, many still in the midst of renovation. He had several more sightings,
but each time when he got close enough he saw that he’d been mistaken, that it
was not the real Jenny but some look-alike. Finally, back in the main bar, he
came upon Nathan again, watching the karaoke, a fresh gin and tonic in hand and
a glazed expression on his face.

“Bravo! Bravo!” Nathan hollered as Stephan approached.

“I was just wondering if you’d seen Jenny Wynne by any
chance,” Stephan asked, willing himself to remain calm.

Nathan pondered. “She was here not even two minutes ago,”
he said after a long pause. “The two of them did a smashing duet of ‘Love to
Love You Baby.’”

“I just wanted to have a quick word with her.”

“Oh, well, you may be out of luck. She and her girlfriend
were just leaving for some after hours club.”

“Sorry?”

Nathan looked him over unsteadily. “Oh, I thought...
never mind. If you hurry you might still be able to catch them.”

He burst through the hotel’s front doors and down the
short flight of stairs. On the sidewalk all around him, people stood in quiet
circles smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices. Checking each group of
people in turn – he must have looked like a lunatic – he failed once again to
find her. Defeated, he was just about to go back inside when, up the street, a
taxi made a looping u-turn in his direction and then accelerated past him.

There she was, illuminated suddenly in a pool of light
from a streetlamp, locked in a deep kiss with Angela Song as they sped off into
the night.

Chapter 6

Streetside, the
Telegraph
newspaper box regarded
him with an obscene leer.

“So our star lifestyle columnist left you in the lurch,
now, did she?” it burbled, with a nod and a wink to drive home the burn. For
some reason the newspaper box spoke with a poncy upper-class British accent.
“Rotten luck there, old fellow.”

Stephan landed a vicious karate kick to its simpering
face, as up the block a couple out walking their Bichon Frise crossed over to
the other side of the street. The box tottered, then fell backwards, lolling
against the chain that secured it to an adjacent signpost.

It was late now, bizarrely late for dog walking, come to
think of it, although he wasn’t sure of the exact time because he had managed
to misplace his cell phone. He had stayed on at the Balfour after Jenny Wynne’s
departure, eventually tagging along with Nathan and a couple of others to a
dive bar up the street for a last drink at the end of the night. And when his
companions of the evening had eventually dispersed, he sat alone at the bar,
bitter and sullen, downing rye and cokes. The place was one of her occasional
hangouts, and he found himself hoping, pathetically, that she might appear. But
of course last call came and went without any sign of her.

He walked the twelve blocks home despite the fact that he
was more than a little unsteady on his feet by that point. Half way through a
shortcut down some nameless laneway off Spadina, he collapsed in a heap on a
discarded packing crate for a time out. As he forced himself back to his feet a
minute later, dazed and confused, a stubble-faced ruffian, beer gut lolling,
limped out of a dark-side alley to confront him.

“Hey there, chief, got a smoke?” he called.

“No I don’t, and I’m not your chief either,” Stephan
yelled, suddenly in a frenzy. “Or your buddy, or your bro, you stupid ugly
bastard.”

“Whatdyousay?” said the man, looking around wildly, as if
he expected Stephan’s posse to leap out of the bushes.

“I said smoking causes cancer, in case you hadn’t heard,
you crazy dumbass.”

He was sprinting down another laneway, fighting off
nausea, his muscles burning, even as he found that for some reason he was
cackling maniacally. He seemed to have eluded his pursuer, finally, not that
the guy had put more than a token effort into the chase. Thank God for smoker’s
lung, Stephan said to himself as he slowed to a walk, although he probably had
deserved the beating the man had offered him.

The chase had taken its toll on him too, he suddenly
realized. He leaned against a lamp post and vomited once, twice, a third time,
spattering his shoes and pant legs. Noticing another
Telegraph
newspaper
box across the street, he pictured it reporting his humiliation back to its
injured colleague. The two of them would then share a laugh at his expense, the
bastards.

The next day he woke late to the strains of Gamblor’s
plaintive mewing, which seemed to rise and fall in unison with the pounding in
his skull. Opening his eyes, he found the cat sitting on the bed a foot away
from his face. Were her meows expressions of concern for his well-being or
signals of a more basic desire for a snack? He wanted to believe the former but
suspected the latter.

For several minutes there was a void in the place in his
brain where last night’s events should have been filed, though already he
understood that things had not gone well. Soon, however, the memories began to
come back to him, at first as disjointed fragments, most of them unfortunate.
Gradually they resolved themselves into a story of sorts. A highly regrettable
story.

A light on his phone was beaming forth a distant beacon
from the outside world. The call and ensuing message must have come in while he
was sleeping. His first thought was that maybe it was her, calling to offer
some apology or explanation for her behaviour. But when he checked his
voicemail the only message waiting for him was from Pete, who’d called to tell
him that his and Sally’s offer on the house had been accepted. They’d be
closing in a few weeks and, oh yes, would Stephan be able to pitch in on moving
day?

“How sad for you, my friend,” Stephan said, out loud, as
if Pete were actually there on the line. “Throwing your youth away to settle
down with a kind, mature woman who loves and supports you? Truly unfortunate.”

He hung up the phone and flopped back down on the bed,
where he lay for a long time, miserable and inert. There really was no way to
put a positive spin on what had taken place the night before. Jenny Wynne had
tossed him aside, and done so in the most cruel and careless way imaginable. It
was a worst-case scenario. After he’d laid there for a good half-hour,
paralysed with angst, Gamblor came over to check for vital signs. She sat
herself down in front of him and mewed questioningly a couple of times. When he
made no response, she gave him a whack with her paw, as if testing his
reflexes.

“Don’t worry, old friend,” he croaked. “Still alive.”

She meowed again, in an especially mournful tone this
time. He reached out to pet her, to offer what reassurance he could in his
current state, but at the last moment she slipped through his fingers, then
sauntered off towards the kitchen, not even bothering to grace him with a
backward glance.

*  *  *  *  *

He tried to convince himself that he didn’t care, that
he’d known all along it was just a fling, but this pretence was too obviously
false to sustain. On the second morning after the debacle, his phone had rung,
and he’d snatched it up in a single fluid motion, as if he were swatting a
mosquito as it landed on his neck. He thought he heard somebody let out a
regretful sigh on the other end of the connection, but it must have been his
imagination, because after a couple of seconds an automated recording kicked
in.

“Hallo, this is Janos speaking,” said a cartoonish male voice,
in a bad parody (he assumed) of a thick Eastern European accent. “Are you in
needing of movers service? We is cheap and hardworker fellows of strong
muscle...”

He hung up, uncertain if it was a legitimate sales pitch
or someone’s bizarre idea of a joke.

Several times he picked up the phone, cradling it in his
hand as if about to make a call. But there wasn’t anyone he needed to speak to
just now, and so each time, after a moment of confusion, he put it back down
and wandered off to do something else. Meanwhile, the phone just sat there,
inert. Even Janos had given up on him.

On the fourth morning, he braved the sweltering
mid-summer head and rode his bike down to the lab. The streets he took on the
way were mostly abandoned, people out of town for their summer vacations or
sequestered in air-conditioned rooms, praying for rain.

He didn’t have much developing work to do that day.
Business had been flat in recent weeks, and the handful of things he did have
on his plate weren’t enough to keep him busy. But he figured a little time in
the darkroom might replenish his mojo. The darkroom had always been a safe
harbour, a place where the petty annoyances of life melted away. It had also
occurred to him that Bill might be around. Bill wasn’t someone Stephan would
want to actually burden with his problems, but the man’s calm and groundedness
had an infectious quality to it. Even a brief chat about the hot weather might
prove therapeutic, Stephan figured.

But alas Bill was not to be found at the lab that day, and
so Stephan wearily retired to darkroom three for a stab at productivity. It did
not go well. Within fifteen minutes of his arrival he had already ruined an
entire roll of negatives, after failing to watch the clock and taking them out
of the developer tub way too early. Then he somehow got his stop bath mixed up
with his fixer, which led to several botched prints. Giving up in frustration,
he tossed everything he’d been working on into the trash, then dragged himself
back home. Along the way, for good measure, he nearly got himself run over by a
street-sweeper as he dodged his bike out around a parked car on Ossington
Street, but the driver swerved at the last moment and failed to put him out of
his misery.

She called him up a week after the painful evening at the
Balfour. He hadn’t been expecting the call, then or ever. Nevertheless, he had
spent several days by that point thinking through exactly what he wanted to
say, going so far as to write down a number of key phrases and important ideas
he wanted to be sure to get across to her.

Despite this extensive preparation, his mind went blank
as soon as he heard her voice.

“Stephan Stern, how’s it going?” she was saying, all
blasé and cheerful as if nothing at all had changed.

“Jenny? I... well, I guess you could say I’ve been
better.” Already the conversation was a flopping salmon about to slip through
his fingers. “We need to talk,” he said, wincing at the cliché even as he
uttered it, but managing to keep his voice firm.

“Sounds serious.”

His shoulders sagged. “Now you’re making fun of me,” he
said.

“Oh wow, I’m sorry, Steph.” Her voice finally modulated,
taking on a just a hint of concern, as if she were finally cluing in to the
fact that he wasn’t interested in engaging with her in witty banter just now.
“I was just trying to be friendly, honestly.”

He wanted to confront her, to bring things into the open
and figure out what was really going on – passive aggression, insanity, mere
cruel indifference? All of the above?

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“In person.”

“Hey, that’s perfect. I was just calling to see if you
wanted to get together for lunch tomorrow.”

“Huh.”

After hanging up the phone, he stayed seated on his
couch, lost in thought. He was still angry, both with her, and, much more, with
himself. But even as the wave of disgust washed over him, it was met by a
countervailing wave of excitement, anticipation. He would be seeing her
tomorrow. He rose from the couch and set about gathering up the dirty laundry
that lay scattered around the room. He needed to get down to the laundromat –
he was out of clean underwear.

The next day, wearing freshly washed clothes for the
first time since the Balfour, he took the Bloor subway west to High Park for
their meet-up. It was a clear, temperate day. A strong wind had blown up on the
previous evening, dispersing the yellowy smog that had hung over the city in
recent weeks, and the air was fresh for a change. If summer had a summer, this
was it. Even so, there was already an inkling of fall in the air, although
September was still weeks away.

She was already at the café when he arrived, which, given
her customary tardiness, was notable. He was a few minutes late himself, as it
happened, but only because he’d learned over the course of many meetings to set
his watch on Jenny time. The patio was nearly full, even though it was the
middle of the afternoon, half-way between the lunch and dinner hours. But
despite the crowds, she’d managed to secure a central table with a sweeping
view of the patio and street. The table was neatly canopied by the branches of
a tree with small exotic leaves, gold-hued. Glancing up at it, he felt a
fleeting desire to know what kind of tree it was, even as he sensed he never
would. Why would he ever have the occasion to learn such a thing?

There was a Mac laptop open in front of her, one of the
new generation of svelte, purse-sized ones that were trendy at the time. He
stood on the sidewalk unseen, watching as she tapped away at the keys, a faint
smirk playing about her mouth (no doubt she had just come up with some
sparkling bon mot for her next column). Pausing, she took a sip from a mug – of
cappuccino, frappuccino, café au lait, fair-trade whathaveyou. As she drank,
her eyes peeked out above the white porcelain, scanning the faces around her.
She saw him and lifted a hand in greeting.

“Stephan! Hi!” Her voice was bright and bell-like in the
clear air.

“Hi,” he said in a curt tone, as she caught him up in a
brief, tight hug. He felt the graze of her fingernails on his back through the
fabric of his shirt.

“You’re looking so well!” As she said this, she gazed up
into his eyes as if she were in love with him, and had been all along. “And you
smell amazing. What kind of soap is that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Ivory, I guess.”

“Ivory? How deliciously spartan. I love it.”

 “Uh... thanks.”

She was more beautiful than ever that day. The cotton
summer dress she’d worn was brown and informal, the fabric stippled with tiny
blue and yellow flowers. Earthy, vaguely hippieish, it wasn’t in keeping with
her usual look, but it worked. It also matched her skin, which had taken on a
honey-brown tone, and her hair, which was now sun-streaked with bright yellow
highlights. The hours she’d been logging on patios like this one had achieved
the precise effect that many women spent hundreds of dollars in salons trying
to replicate. Her eyes were the same cool blue they always were.

“So, you wanted to talk,” she said, after he’d settled in
and ordered a drink.

He took a sip of his sparkling water – not a particularly
commanding choice of beverage, it occurred to him, too late. Placing his glass
down on its paper coaster, he carefully centred the base on the dark circle of
condensation that had already formed there.

“Yes,” he said.

“How intriguing. Are you planning some sort of swindle?”

“Ha ha. Not at the moment – sorry.”

“I’ve always thought that would be a cool thing to do if
the journalism gig were to fall through – pulling off some audacious heist, I
mean. Of course, whatever we stole, it would have to be something really
worthwhile, like a rare painting, or a famous sapphire.”