“Do you want to go out for a drink or something?” Harriet asked.
“Can’t, I’m sorry,” Brandi said. “I’m supposed to be at a fucking death watch.”
“Well, that’s what I was inviting you to,” Harriet said.
“Another time,” Brandi said. “Hey, maybe I’ll come in on Sunday and we can look at houses together.”
“What houses?” Harriet said.
“That’s the prescribed Sunday afternoon entertainment in this burg,” Brandi said. “Garage sales on Saturday and open houses courtesy of the real estate agents on Sunday. Have you forgotten? You grew up here, didn’t you?
“Sort of,” said Harriet. “It’s been a long time, though. And I’ll probably be leaving in a day or two.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Brandi said. “You’re a fucking shoo-in for the part.”
IV
The town was familiar to her. She knew every heaving flagstone, every crack in the pavement in the grid of streets she’d walked day after day on her way to school, her perspective on it altering as she herself changed. In the beginning it was a celestial city whose core drew her downtown every Saturday afternoon. Then, after journeys to other cities, it dwindled to a rundown prairie town battered by the ordeal of its long, hard winter.
It was a schizophrenic town, leafy and full of flowers in the long summer days, ripe and mellow in the early fall when the smoky smell of distant forest fires mingled with the smell of fruit. Then, abruptly, sometimes overnight, the curtain came down on the pleasant sunny scene. When it rose again, the place was unrecognizable, transformed into a windswept settlement on the edge of Antarctica, almost uninhabitable. And there was no entr’acte. Spring was elided between the two extremes, the long, Lenten season of penitence culminating in no climactic resurrection. The drama was episodic and continual, consisting of daily ordeals of blizzard and ice.
For a long time it had existed only as the backdrop to her childhood recollections, and now she had stepped back into it. Whatever happened with the play, it was a homecoming of sorts. She hailed the surviving landmarks, finding them dearly familiar in spite of changes, like relatives rejuvenated by crude facelifts, and she mourned those obliterated to make way for new buildings.
In place of the old buildings there were skyscrapers — glass, metal, and air-conditioned — banks and sterile office buildings with institutional artworks in the foyer intended (presumably) to uplift the soul, but in fact constituting a silent rebuke. Several had cows, either depicted in paintings or sculpted life-size in bronze. There seemed to be an infestation of these domestic animals, perhaps because they too were going the way of the buffalo and were on the verge of extinction.
Among the disappeared were the fur stores, the corner groceries, and the cafés with their snakeweed plants, fly-specked oilcloth tables, and clientele of good old boys. Gone was the old Capitol Theatre, where she had lined up on Saturday afternoons, tantalized by the framed stills of movies she would never get to see and which seemed all the more alluring for that.
Yet in spite of the encroachment, and in spite of two downtown malls linked by a food court, the centre held. This was a town with a centre. There was a square park with a war memorial at the point where paths intersected, a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, a children’s playground, triangles of grass, and a few flowerbeds. Around its periphery stood the churches of various uncompromising, ununited denominations — the Anglican cathedral, the First Baptist, Knox Metropolitan. There was a library, too, a modern building with ramps for wheelchairs, and — dominating the whole — the old CPR hotel, which in spite of periodic facelifts remained its inimitable self, resistant to change or disguise. Solid, steady, and dignified with its spacious foyer and high ceilings, a living reproach to newer hotels with waterslides, chlorinated pools, and exercise rooms. It was a poor relation of similar buildings across the country — the Empress, the Banff Springs, the Chateau Laurier — but on a smaller scale as befitted its humbler setting, yet nevertheless deserving of the Homeric epithet “venerable.”
The theatre — The Globe — was housed in the former city hall, the last holdout of an earlier era, testimony to the human spirit not entirely quenched by commerce and technology, dwarfed and crowded though it was by bank buildings. On the ground floor, in defiance of the conspiracies of consumerism, a repairer of watches, the Tic Doc, had a small booth, and nearby a repairer of shoes for those who still wore out heels and soles by walking. One of the theatre’s side doors opened onto a pedestrian mall, a pleasant place with a few trees bravely planted at regular intervals in squares of unpaved earth. Vestiges of human creativity clustered about the theatre as if they had taken heart from its survival. There were two bookstores, a music store, and a hole-in-the-wall with a wide range of papers and magazines, and pornography in the back.
The rain had stopped, and Harriet walked out into the carnival atmosphere, recognizing the heady enjoyment that prevails on fine days in a cold climate. Buskers and street vendors and artists of all kinds drew the workers down from their cubicles in the high-rise buildings to linger in the open air.
She was arrested immediately by the spectacle of a mime with a white face and white gloved hands holding a pose on a small platform, arms outstretched, still as a statue. Passers-by paused more often in front of him than any of the others, a small crowd gathering to stand subdued as if his immobility were contagious. A Greek fisherman’s hat, identical to the one on his head, lay on the pavement garnering more coins than his competitors. When she stooped to put in her coins, Harriet noticed a healthy number of folded bills.
Moving along she passed a wooden cart, elegantly and skilfully painted with red Georgia O’Keefe poppies and emblazoned with the words “Carte Blanche.” From it a young woman dispensed drinks and sandwiches and carried on several bantering conversations at once. The people swarmed the cart and hung around much longer than the acquisition of food and drink warranted. For a moment, drawn by the poppies, Harriet thought of patronizing the cart but settled instead for indoor seating and quiet. The lunch crowd was thinning, the workers already drifting back to their cages, when Harriet ducked into a nearby restaurant where the tables were littered with debris and the waiters showed signs of battle fatigue. Only one table was still occupied — by four women obviously not part of the nine-to-five work force, and yet not housewives. They were talking animatedly, an empty litre carafe of white wine on the table. Naturally the waiters were not about to hurry over to a single woman, looking dazed and wanting only a cup of coffee and a place to sit.
“May I join you?”
The woman who wrote the play plumped into the chair opposite Harriet without waiting for an answer.
“I saw you come in and thought we’d better get acquainted. Hope Prince.”
She could have been Harriet’s age, perhaps younger, perhaps older; it was hard to tell. She had the air of a precocious child and spoke with an English accent.
“Do you mind the smoking section?” Harriet asked.
Hope ignored the question. Harriet would eventually get used to this, Hope’s tendency to ignore remarks that deflected the conversation from her idée fixe. She was almost ruthlessly focused.
“I saw your Sarah Bernhardt. I thought you were terrific. Saw it twice, in fact.”
“Oh.” Harriet flinched visibly.
“Don’t worry. I feel the same way when people say they’ve read something I’ve written,” said Hope, as if she read her mind. “Exposed.”
Harriet wondered if she should know what this woman had written and return the compliment.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted you so badly for Mazo.”
Fireworks went off in Harriet’s mind as words and phrases connected — I thought we’d better get acquainted; I wanted you for Mazo. Of course; she’d known all along it wasn’t an agent’s sentimental fondness that got the script