Loddy-Dah Read online

  But when Loddy looked over her shoulder one last time, The Blonde was waving back at her.

  SCENE 11:

  Eruptions

  They arrived at the intersection of University and Sherbrooke only to confront a police barricade. A gathering of a hundred or more demonstrators, brandishing placards and chanting slogans in both French and English, had congregated outside McGill’s Roddick gates. Police officers, dressed in riot gear and carrying black billy sticks, locked arms, preparing themselves for any slight provocation or misdeed. Dewey readied his camera while Loddy hung onto the tail of his t-shirt as they clawed their way into the crowd.

  “So what are we protesting?” Loddy shouted above the din. “Vietnam or Québec independence?”

  “Who knows? Everyone’s protesting something these days.”

  “Oh my God! Is that Marcel?”

  Loddy, unnerved by the sight of their former friend among the marchers, called out to him. Marcel, carrying a sign with the word “INDEPENDANCE” scrawled in black paint, followed the sound of his name and, when he linked eyes with Dewey and Loddy, vanished into the crowd.

  They were buried in the crush. A shot rang out, sending everyone scrambling blindly towards Peel Street. No one knew why they were running. Like lemmings, they just ran.

  “Hey! Hey! Wait for me!” Loddy had become separated from Dewey’s t-shirt, and she was being swept away by the mob.

  Dewey had broken away from the pandemonium and was already ahead of everyone else, unstoppable, dropping Loddy to fend for herself. Then as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Behind her, the police stood on guard, protective plastic masks concealing emotion, billy sticks and guns ready to foil a riot.

  “Ce n’était pas un coup de feu. A car backfired. Du calme!”

  Someone shouted: “Libre! Québec Libre!” A mélange of chants followed: “Québec, mon pays! Québec pour les Québecois! Peace in Vietnam. End the war!”

  Loddy, in a panic bordering on nausea, searched for Dewey among the flood of faces around her, and caught him at the top of Peel Street, photographing the rally below.

  “DEWEY.”

  The orderly protest had progressed into a riotous game between the police and the protesters, an uncontrollable provocation from both sides. Click click. “The paper’s going to like this.” Click click.

  “You left me. Like, you just ran off and left me.” Loddy slapped his chest.

  “Hey!”

  “You are such a scaredy-cat, Dewey. You really are. Like, good thing you didn’t go to Vietnam after all.”

  She regretted the words as soon as they slipped out of her mouth. Dewey’s face red, a controlled anger, he headed into the human fence of cops as they re-aligned themselves for the next eruption.

  The droplets hit her eyelids first — a splash here, a splash there — a summer breeze cutting through the muggy heat, and then an unexpected torrential downpour scattered the protesters. Loddy fled up Sherbrooke towards Stanley and took cover under the marquee of the Ritz Carleton hotel. She needed a smoke pronto! Her back to the blustery wind, she pumped the lighter until her thumb throbbed from the repetition. A brief flicker before the rain killed the flame. Cigarettes had become an incontinent desire, a replacement for food, an anesthesia to dull her appetite, her pain. Lunch was now a couple of Cameos washed down with a mug of black coffee, and she was good to go.

  She recollected Dewey’s words: “Why don’t you just put ketchup on those things and eat them like fries.” Right now, she didn’t care what Dewey said. He had aban­doned her, left her in a dangerous situation, and fled like a coward.

  “I could have been trampled. Killed. That egotistical self-centred draft dodger.” Loddy snorted like a raging bull. She didn’t know if her anger was directed towards Dewey, the storm, or her inability to light her cigarette.

  The impeccably groomed doorman in his formal black and gold-braided uniform reached over and offered her a light. Loddy cupped her hands around the quivering flame while he shielded her against the wind with a golf umbrella.

  “Thanks. You’re a life saver.” With that first anticipated puff of menthol, she sucked in the nicotine as though it was a lick of ice cream melting in her mouth, and then with a final exhalation, she regained her composure.

  A procession of taxis and limousines braked in front of the hotel, distracting the doorman, leaving Loddy in the rain.

  “You have to move, lady,” he said, giving her a shove. He directed the passengers from their vehicles, instructing them to watch the puddles as they stepped onto the curb under his umbrella.

  Men and women in evening attire sashayed along the red carpet until they were safe and dry inside the lobby. Once the flurry of activity subsided, Loddy, now thoroughly drenched and chilled to the bone, eased her way back to the doorman.

  “Like, you didn’t have to push me, sir.”

  “Sorry, lady, but security is tight tonight.”

  The storm was abating, the wind falling, when a motorcade pulled up and an entourage of serious-looking men in pin-striped navy suits alighted from a Mercedes Benz. One of them pushed her back into the mash of inquisitive onlookers — fans who lined up along the sidewalk. She jumped up and down, a bouncing trampoline artist, in an attempt to catch a view of this celebrity who was causing such a commotion and, when the canopy of wet umbrellas snapped shut, she finally saw him. The newly elected leader of the Liberal party stretched out his hand and she touched it. Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

  By the time it registered, his security people had whisked him inside, and Loddy thought of Alma’s infatuation with this apple-cheeked politician who had galvanized the nation with his vision of the country. A just society, he had said. For this, he was Alma’s hero and saviour, next to Jesus Christ, of course.

  Again by the doorman’s side, she asked: “What’s happening here tonight?”

  “You a reporter?”

  “No.”

  “Fundraiser,” he said.

  Then she asked to use the phone in the lobby.

  With obvious sarcasm, the doorman asked: “Are you a guest?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s one just around the corner there” — and he directed her to a phone booth across from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

  Loddy, in no mood to argue, lit another Cameo and, with soaking canvas sneakers in hand, she hit the wet pavement, purposely skipping into the puddles like a toddler at play until she reached the phone booth. The updraft of warm air made her damp hair stick to her cheeks. She arranged the runaway strands behind her ears, and then dialled.

  “Maw! You’ll never guess! I’m at the Ritz Carleton and ...”

  “What you do there, Loddy?”

  “I just saw Trudeau!”

  “What?”

  “Yes, Maw, Pierre. Elliot. Trudeau. Shook my hand.”

  She heard a familiar long-drawn out sigh, something between a snort and a sniffle, on the other end of the line. “Why you lie, Loddy?”

  “I’m not lying, Maw.”

  Loddy had anticipated excitement from her mother, the beginning of a dialogue perhaps; share a laugh at the serendipity of the encounter. But there was neither humour nor pleasure in the conversation. There never was.

  “I’m not lying, Maw. Why don’t you ever believe me?”

  Loddy couldn’t remember a moment in her life, not a second, when Alma made her feel she had some worth, some talent, a reason for being. When she was fifteen, she had been touched by a memorial portrait of the slain American president shortly after his assassination, and had sketched him. All the newspapers of the day carried the Karsh photo of John F. Kennedy: his large head with a topping of thick Irish hair, his unassuming smile, his round arresting eyes and pudgy face. She had fashioned a good likeness, mounted the drawing on purple construction paper, and taped the sketch to her bedroom wall. When Alm
a saw it, she was taken aback by the realistic resemblance.

  “Who do that?”

  “I did.”

  “Why you lie, Loddy?”

  She never drew again.

  xxx

  Loddy held the receiver away from her ear, hung up and lit another Cameo. She continued her promenade along Sherbrooke, a street renowned for its stately, refurbished mansions, most of them now housing travel agencies, or medical offices for plastic surgeons, psychiatrists, or bariatric doctors catering to gluttonous, wealthy blue-haired ladies who wintered in Boca Raton. Expensive boutiques and art galleries surrounded the area with the Museum of Fine Arts as its centrepiece.

  She checked out the Dominion Art Gallery, sheltering her eyes against the glare of glass when a faint cushion of air caressed the back of her neck. She shook it away but still it persisted. She was ready to combat The Blonde, if that was the case, but instead, fingers tapped her shoulder and a familiar voice whispered: “Load of crap.”

  Loddy saw his reflection first, a shadow blurred in the window against a Rodin, and then recognition. She spun around.

  “FURY. Like, what the heck you doing here?”

  His grin, a dimpled revelation of white teeth and earthy eyes, caught her by surprise.

  “Just finished a kids’ art class at the Museum.”

  “You teach kids?”

  “Well, being an artist doesn’t exactly pay the bills unless I get a commission to do something huge, like a mural for a Metro station, and that’s a long shot for sure. Gaboriau has that one covered, so I get teaching gigs wherever I can.”

  Both fell short of words. Loddy studied her feet, wiggled her toes as though she had just come to the realization she was without shoes. “Guess I better, like, get these sneakers back on. It stopped raining.”

  An awkward moment, the type portrayed in romantic movies, a love scene before the big kiss. Instead, he stooped on one knee and tied her shoelaces. Some indefinable force compelled her to touch his head, ruffle his hair, but just as she stuck out her fingers, he stood up with the abruptness of a tornado, knocking his head against the palm of her hand.

  “You ... you ... had some paper in your hair ...”

  “Ah, the kids. They get right into cutting up newsprint and throwing it around.” He shook his hair as though it were full of confetti.

  “So,” he said, “if you’re not doing anything, why don’t you join me for a coffee?”

  “Can’t. I promised Rita I’d help at The Garage. They’ve rented out the space for the next three days, and I’m supposed to help out, like, wherever. I think I’m already late.”

  Another one of those awkward movie screen moments: Bergman and Bogart. Casablanca. ‘We’ll always have Paris.’

  She slipped a Cameo from its package. “Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  He slanted his face towards her, and she placed the cigarette in his mouth, fingers inadvertently touching his lips. He steadied her hand against the summer breeze, and as she lit it, he lingered there, a place of pleasure, caressing the inside of her wrist with his thumb. Her hand snapped back as though she had just touched a hot curling iron by mistake. He inhaled the smoke then sputtered: “What the hell kind of cigarettes do you smoke?”

  “Oh. Cameo. I guess it’s an acquired taste.”

  He laughed, head back, and popped the cigarette back into her mouth.

  “When are you going to model for me again, love?”

  “I ... I don’t know. I better go,” she said, starting to walk away. “Rita’s going to be really pissed off.”

  “Hey, Rubens’ model,” he called out. She whipped around and, in deliberate steps, walked backwards, away from him. “You promised. My students thought you were the best model they ever worked with.”

  “Really?” So she was good at something. Loddy left him, forlorn on the wet pavement, as she spun like a prima ballerina, leaping over the puddles this time, the sneakers with their tightly knotted shoelaces supporting her.

  xxx

  A barrage of voices singing Oklahoma exploded like a fire-bomb as she swung open the door to The Garage Theatre. Rita was nowhere in sight so she tiptoed to the mezzanine, and took a gander at the audience below through the railing. The house, especially the front end, seemed jam-packed. Loddy surmised the seats were occupied by the congregation of St. Anthony’s Drama Group. In the front row, as was her habit, sat Erica in her familiar button earrings and turban with matching colour-faded dress, a sleeveless red tent-style this time, giving her the appearance of a frumpy, unadorned gift bag. The Garage Theatre hadn’t experienced such a full house since the closing night party for The Resurrection of Robbie Rabbit. With the commencement of the 1968 season, Samuel took a passive, lethargic approach to his duties as Artistic Director. Once again he continued to rent out the theatre at various times to drama and church groups, and minor dance companies for rehearsal space, or to wedding parties looking for their moment on stage under the black light—a reception and entertainment package thrown in as part of the deal. Any means to keep the theatre afloat. Samuel was becoming less of a tangible entity as Marvel gained control of the reins, under Rita’s protests, and held everything together like Velcro. She’d pop a Valium now and again as though they were breath mints and, if anyone noticed, she’d qualify the pills as medication for her migraines. Everyone suspected Samuel would be a complicated partner to live with, so sympathies were always with Marvel. Percy called their relationship The Theatre of the Absurd.

  “He’s an alcoholic,” Ulu had said. “He’s been drinking for years and now he’s drinking away whatever money the theatre makes.”

  Loddy had dropped by Ulu’s place for coffee and conversation one afternoon when the topic shifted towards Samuel and Marvel.

  “Saw them both at Atwater Market one Saturday morning. She was walking ahead of him, like Queen Elizabeth to his Prince Philip. They stopped at the meat counter, and he pulled over to the side, next to the pork chops, and took a swig from a flask.”

  “Maybe it was a soda and he just, like, had a thirst and couldn’t wait.”

  Ulu shook her head and said: “You’re nice, Loddy, but so naïve. That’s why we all love you.”

  She didn’t want to be nice and naïve. She wanted sophistication, worldliness and even infamy, to be anyone but herself.

  xxx

  “Where have you been?” Rita screeched between her teeth, a bad impersonation of a ventriloquist. “They’re going into the finale and everyone will be up here wanting something to drink any minute!”

  “Like, I’m here Rita. It’s not a big deal.” Loddy could serve coffee blindfolded, walking a trapeze. For Rita, everything was a big deal; after all, she financed the theatre and, in return, Samuel provided her roles beyond her capacity. The Garage Theatre was her one expensive hobby. The solo shows were always hers.

  Marvel was already behind the bar, impatient with the waiting. “About time, Loddy.”

  “It’s been a day, Marvel. Anyway, like, I have to leave early tonight.”

  “You just got here and you’re telling me you’re leaving early? I was counting on you. Don’t let me down.”

  Loddy wanted to tell her off, but swallowed the thought. Her foot in cement kept the guilt anchored, forbidding her to toss the words that so freely spilled out of her mouth earlier on Stanley Street. Be nice. She was hungry now, but instead lit a cigarette. Yeah, she thought, I’m too damn nice.

  SCENE 12:

  Cocoon

  Midnight. Like everyone else, Loddy queued up outside the Limelite-A-Go-Go, trying to manoeuvre her way in.

  “I know Ulu and she’s expecting me,” she said. But the doorman ignored her and selected only the fashionable girls in their Mary Quant mini-dresses and Sassoon haircuts as worthy to grace the club’s dance floor.

  “You, you, and you.” He pointed to the chosen
ones — a chorus of groans from the rejects. Nevertheless, some persisted and endured an ever-increasing line-up to this popular night spot while others just came to terms with their failures as fashion mavens, and either checked out The Cheetah on the ground level, or left. Loddy had come directly from the theatre still dressed in her red and black outfit, oozing with the odours of caffeine, tobacco and dry perspiration, her hair a matt of dampness, not exactly conducive to the Mod look.

  She lit a cigarette and blew the gauzy smoke towards the starless sky. A muggy summer night, the downtown core pulsated with the rhythm of a city stirring from a wet spring of capricious thundershowers. Drunks urinated in alleys behind restaurants oblivious to the rats that skittered over their shoes. Couples locked arms, interrupting bilingual conversations to smother one another in French kisses or English hugs. Blinking neon lights, the sudden draft of music blasting from nearby clubs and bars created a night life that was uniquely Montreal’s.

  Every time someone emerged from The Limelite-A-Go-Go, several determined girls swarmed the doorman.

  “Let me in. I’ll make it worth your while. Laissez-moi entrer. Take me. ME ME.”

  Loddy sighed with boredom and hunger. Her feet hurt, but she had promised she’d walk Ulu home and she always kept her promises.

  A skirmish in the front of the line created an undulating domino effect, crushing people, forcing Loddy to lose her footing and topple over the guy behind her.

  “Hey! Ouch! You stepped on my foot, fatso!” She hadn’t heard that word since the Verdun bus ride. Even though she had lost quite a bit of weight, measured against the women in Vogue and Glamour, she was still a double plus size. Fine that Marvel’s classes had given her a new sense of self-confidence and self-esteem, a comfort in her own body. After all, she was also Rubens’ Model. But just this one remark and she regressed to the Loddy of old.

  “Who am I kidding?” she thought as she located the Cherry Blossom stashed in her pocket in case of an emergency. She unwrapped the succulent chocolate bar and was about to pop the entire thing in her mouth when she heard pandemonium outside the club.