So last night there she was having such a great time, what with the terry-cloth-shorts thing and the butt-smacking thing and Rufus W. in his sarong there with his new boyfriend (who she thinks she did catch a glimpse of from the back after someone pointed him out), and now here she is watching a guy in brown plastic sandals, with his seriously yellowed toenails poking out for all the world to see, tossing a salad and telling her about the time he was sent to photograph the Berlin Wall coming down and how he was shocked at feeling a little sadness and nostalgia for Checkpoint Charlie and the damn wall itself (emphasis his) and how these feelings were so disturbing amidst the general euphoria that he just stood there as if paralyzed for a minute or two while champagne rained down on his head as if he were being baptized even though he didn’t deserve it. And because there’s nothing remotely flirtatious about this story and because she doesn’t understand why he’s telling her all this, Didi wants to ask, “What are we doing here?” It’s the not knowing that’s killing her. If nothing is going to happen, she’s going to walk out right now, because what’s the point of eating all these carbs and then just going home to watch some Rhoda reruns on WTN? That’s what she’ll be forced to do, as she can’t very well go catch up with everyone-the gang-later and admit that the party she went to at the semi-famous photographer’s place was a bust.
The interview last week had been fun. The photographer had brought his favourite camera down to the gallery, a Mamiya, he told her, a real man’s camera because you needed man-sized hands to work it, although Annie Leibovitz used the same camera, he told her, as she had these man-sized hands. It was gratifying how everyone at the party last night was impressed by how Didi effortlessly worked her insider knowledge of Annie Leibovitz and this other sort-of-famous photographer and their Mamiyas into the conversation as she gamely offered her shorts as a hand towel, although the information was wasted on the butt-smacking guy from Ajax who thought Annie Leibovitz was a stand-up comedian and had never heard of the sort-offamous photographer who took pictures of aging lady intellectuals and in fact had made a joke about lady intellectuals which she had thought was funny at the time, although she’d stopped laughing abruptly when she realized no one else found it funny and pretended that she was really just choking because her drink had gone down the wrong way. (No one thought to thump her on the back and later, much later, she couldn’t help wondering what would’ve happened if she really had been choking.) After that came the incident with the palm tree and that Buddha-shirt girl, and waking up alone on the roof early this morning and climbing down into the apartment and peeking in on her hosts sleeping so peacefully in their bedroom, wrapped around each other, surrounded by old family photos in really nice-quality frames, and then letting herself out, but not before making a fair degree of noise in the bathroom hoping they’d wake up so she could wave goodbye and hear them tell her she’d been the life of the party.
Out on the balcony while the photographer flips the steaks, their fat hissing against the fake briquettes like a clique of fashionable viper-mouthed grade seven private-school girls, 1 and tells her about watching a bridge blow up outside of Sarajevo and how it was too close for comfort (emphasis his) and how a dog, a really ugly mutt, just stood on one side of this non-existent bridge whimpering and that all he wanted to do was take a picture of the dog, not the bodies, and get out of there, Didi wonders whether it was maybe unwise to have hinted so broadly last night to everyone up there on the roof that Annie Leibovitz might be at this other party tonight at the photographer’s place, which has turned out not to be a party of any kind at all.
Maybe it had been the soupy stillness of the air last night, the humidity that hung so thick the tiny pimento olive lights on the poor pissed-on palm tree glimmered as if through a fog, but she had felt as if there were a trampoline beneath her feet, felt as if anything could happen, so maybe she had convinced herself that Annie Leibovitz was going to be at the photographer’s party, when, in fact, the photographer himself had quite possibly hinted at no such thing at all.
The telephone rings and rings again, but the photographer just ignores it, poking at those alarming potatoes with a fork and talking quietly, in this flat, even tone Didi associates with people who are going off their nut but straining to appear normal, about how no one seems to really listen anymore, how everyone is too busy “communicating” (he did the quote-mark thing with his fingers) to listen, and how there was a time when he flew to the direst places on earth to find pockets of silence so that he could hear himself think, and how, believe it or not, the deepest silences come in the aftermath of an explosion, in that thin wedge of time between the explosion itself and the chaos- the sirens and keening and yelling-that follows, and that this is the same no matter what country on earth you are in. And all the while he airdrops her name every few words like it’s a relief package for starving Eritreans, Believe it or not, Deirdre, and This is the same, Deirdre, until she feels the skin tightening across her face, pulling her mouth into a grimace, although she’s not sure if she should be smiling or nodding soberly.
Then there are her hands. She has absolutely no idea what to do with her hands, which are twitching to grab those two Zeppelin-sized potatoes and hurl them into the street like grenades. But then where would that leave her?
Last night had been so full of possibilities, even after she’d been forced to give up on the butt-smacking guy when that tight-T-shirted Buddha bitch came and stuck her tits in where they didn’t belong. There’d been that Angelina Jolie-lipped VJ couple who looked like they could be brother and sister and who kept peering at her as if they were trying to convey something telepathically. Although that was before she tried to up her madcap quotient by juggling a handful of olives that went flying all over the place, causing that Eurasian tranny with the yellow hair and the five-inch cork-soled wedgies to slip on them and call her some choice names that weren’t even worth repeating, after which a very pale woman with Smartie-coloured braces (who someone said was Rufus’s new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend) raised her eyebrows at Didi in a seriously empathetic manner. Didi could practically see You go, girl! in a cartoon thought-bubble above the woman’s head. Now, out here on the photographer’s balcony, all this talk of explosions is bringing her down, bringing on the mortality thoughts, which are verboten, as her therapist has told her. Is this the old guy’s way of making a play, of impressing her with his heroic journeys? Because if that’s what he thinks, she’s just not interested.
The photographer is looking at her as if it’s her turn to say something. The barbecue tongs in his hand drip sauce out over the railing of the balcony and she wonders if somebody walking by in the morning fourteen storeys down below will think that what they see are drops of blood. And if somebody jumped off this balcony, naming no names, at this exact moment there would be a chalk outline down there tomorrow in the shape of a person as well as some real blood, which may or may not look as real to passersby as the drops of barbecue sauce. Didi considers telling the photographer this, thinks he may find it interesting, but instead she leans out over the railing and concentrates on looking as if she’s peering so hard into the distance that she can divine the future, when in fact she can’t see anything at all through the haze of barbecue smoke and the pinpricks of static dancing behind her eyes.