“Could you tell who he was with? Bertolucci?” the kid asked. He had fuzz on his upper lip and scarlet acne streaked across his forehead.
“Press I suppose,” the girl answered. “Somebody boring like that.”
I squeezed the lime into my drink and prepared to sip. If the vodka gave me nausea, I might have to throw a tantrum.
“We still haven’t decided about Sunday morning,” the girl at the next table said. She had skin without flaw. Life was unfair.
“Why do they make such dumb schedules?” the boy said. “The David Lynch on practically the same time as one of the Truffauts, that’s maximum dumb.”
“Not as if the tickets are exactly cheap or anything,” the girl said.
“Your father paid for yours,” the boy said with the disdain only an adolescent can summon.
“It’s still money, Don.”
I was a quarter of the way into the vodka and soda. Not a hint of upset tummy. All seemed copacetic with my gastric world. Annie was still writing in her notebook and still oblivious of my manly presence in the restaurant. Would she have sensed the aura of Dennis Quaid?
“We’ve already seen Stolen Kisses on TV about three times, Karen,” Don said to the girl with the perfect complexion. She had blonde hair and a little bow mouth to go with the skin.
“Plus it’s on VCR,” Karen said.
“The only thing—”
Karen talked over Don. She said, her turn for disdain, “I know what you’re going to say, Don. It’s not the same on small screen.”
“The values, Karen,” Don said. “You have to admit.”
“I still think it’s ridiculous to miss a new David Lynch,” Karen said. “There’s probably going to be a hundred more Truffaut retrospectives besides this one. He is dead after all.”
Don and Karen were scrutinizing their Festival of Festivals schedule. The schedule folded accordion-style. Open, it covered most of Don and Karen’s table. The Festival ran eleven days and screened maybe two hundred movies. Don and Karen may have been going for the all-time, all-world attendance record. On their schedule, there were tick marks beside four or five movies on each day. The theatres the Festival used were in midtown, an easy hike from the Belair, and Helga Stephenson’s offices were around the corner on Yorkville Avenue. Proximity qualified the Belair as the Festival’s unofficial watering hole. It was done in peach and grey and ficus plants and had a pianist in the bar who didn’t gag at playing “Feelings” half a dozen times an evening. Bernardo Bertolucci once took Perrier at the Belair. I had Karen’s word for it.
Across the room, Helga Stephenson talked, Annie wrote, and fatso jiggled. Don and Karen stewed over the Sunday-morning blank space. I willed them to take the old François Truffaut instead of the new Dave Lynch. When I saw Blue Velvet, I came down with a severe case of the heebie-jeebies. To celebrate my recovery from the Wyborowa trauma of the night before, I asked the waiter for another vodka and soda.
Don cranked his head around the room and turned back to Karen in high excitement.
“Roger Ebert,” he said. His voice cracked.
“Oh wild,” Karen said. Her voice didn’t crack. “With those two women in the corner.”
Don and Karen had it right. Roger Ebert was the jiggler with Annie and Helga Stephenson. Could Gene Siskel be far behind?
Annie folded her notebook, stood up, and smiled at Helga and Roger. Annie had a sneaky smile. She turned it on, and you felt select. She turned it off, and you noticed an ache in your heart that didn’t use to be there. Annie was petite, as they would say in Vogue. No bigger than a minute, as my old mother would have said. Her hair was black like midnight is black, and she wore it cut in a tight cap around her head. She had on a pale-blue denim dress that buttoned down the front and stopped within hailing distance of her knees. Her leather shoes, flats, were the same pale-blue, and the only jewellery that adorned her person was a small gold pocket watch on a gold chain around her neck. Annie saw me, and I got the smile. I knew all about the ache in the heart. So far, two years of Annie and me, the ache hadn’t come close to permanent.
“Aren’t you just full of surprises,” Annie said. She leaned over my table and kissed me lightly on the lips.“You’re supposed to be in court. Your Arizona man.”
“The judge gave us a holiday,” I said. “You were in swift company over there.”
“Roger? He and Gene Siskel come up for the Chicago papers every year.”
Silence emanated from the next table. Don was tilting in Annie’s direction. Karen, more subtle in the arts of eavesdropping, sat upright and stared straight ahead.
I said to Annie, “It’s Oklahoma, by the way, the scheme my guy’s charged with.”
“Sweetie pie, is the state relevant?”
“It could be Delaware, in your view, and my guy’d still be guilty?”
“I couldn’t have phrased it more cogently.”
Annie didn’t disapprove of all my clients. Ninety-nine per cent of them.
“Your pal Roger seemed antsy,” I said. Don and Karen would be grateful for the change in topic back to movie personnel.
“He thought he’d scare me off with his big rep,” Annie said. “It was my appointment with Helga, and dammit, I needed every second.”
“Fill your notebook?”
“Crang, this year, seriously, it’s freelance heaven.” Annie’s deepbrown eyes shone. “I’ve got Metro Morning same as usual, but it’s stepped up to five minutes every single day of the Festival. Television, The Journal’s having me on for a wrap-up panel a week from Friday. And last night I get a call from San Francisco, the Chronicle. Their regular guy’s all of a sudden sick, and would I file two big pieces? You impressed?”
“Pauline Kael, step aside.”
Annie reviewed movies. She had one steady gig. It was radio, twice-a-week commentaries on the local CBC wake-up program. For the rest, she scrambled. Articles in Premiere Magazine, sometimes a radio documentary, guest spots on TV. It made for a precarious career.
“Helga’s setting me up for the major leagues,” Annie said. “Get this, a half-hour interview Tuesday night with Daniel Day-Lewis.”
Don made motions like he might fall out of his chair.
I said, “The English guy, that Daniel Day-Lewis? Handsome, young, talented, probably articulate?”
“The material I can get,” Annie said, “all the radio producers, newspaper editors, they’ll be kissing me on both cheeks.”
“Daniel Day-Lewis, the guy the two women in the movie you took me to year before last went crazy over?”
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
“The same reaction to Daniel Day-Lewis among women, I imagine, applies off the screen.”
Karen’s head made a nod that I assumed to be of enthusiastic affirmation.
Annie said, “If this is jealousy, Crang, put a sock in it. I need you for something else.”
“My charm?”
“Later,” Annie said. “Right now, it’s information.”
“Charm comes free. Information, I turn the meter on.”
“Suppose I ask my questions, and you answer charmingly.”
“You