He said this with kindness, and Wayne had a sense of the world being a place where everyone had the sorrows he had, whereas, before sitting here with Robin Williams, the world had been a place where most people coped much better than Wayne did. Wayne pictured everyone in the rain with their sorrows, which were quiet, personal sorrows of every kind, and Robin Williams had studied them all. Did every woman feel this way once she had accepted the offer of a makeup consultation, or was this artist unique? Wayne had no idea. He thought of the name Robin, how blue the egg of a robin was in spring and how a robin meant certain hope.
The artist told Wayne that you wear colours on your face that are the opposite of the colours in your eyes. He showed him how to create a lifetime supply of lipstick by using a pot of face powder for pigment and mixing it with any clear lip gloss.
“If you take this face powder meant for women with dark skin, you can push it into your lash line with a brush and one pot will last you for years.”
“Thank you,” Wayne said when Robin Williams showed him his new face in the mirror. He wondered if the colour around his eyes made him look harrowed. He was not sure. He decided to have faith for now, and bought the pots. He did not feel that Robin Williams was unscrupulous, or that he was there purely to sell.
“I applied these with a Lancôme brush, but you can use any brush. You do not have to buy Lancôme brushes, which are twenty-four dollars.”
The makeup artist was there to sell pots of makeup, to be sure, but Wayne felt he cared about what he did. Robin Williams felt that life was something in which maybe you would cry, and he gave every woman dignity by tracing her mouth, her eyes, her skin, with kind hands.
When he went back out into the mall, Wayne was glad there were crowds. He thought he might like to come back here in future and just walk or sit in the food court and know no one was interested in him. There was no Frank King, and no Derek Warford. He did not like the mall or find anything in it beautiful. It was ugly, really, as featureless and anonymous as any mall in North America, but this gave him a feeling that he was hiding, just for a while, from daylight and from scrutiny. St. John’s had a hard daylight sharpened by the shale of Signal Hill and the Southside hills. There was no retreating from it downtown or in the Battery. But here in the mall you were anonymous, and you could rest.
But he was sitting in the food court with a hot chocolate in a paper cup, thinking about whether to get noodles from China Hut or some teriyaki chicken from Koya Japan, when he saw someone he knew. At first he hoped it was not the person he thought it was. He did not want that person to see him in the clothes he had bought from Fairweather. Several times now he had thought he saw people he knew from Labrador. It was a thing that happened when you went to a new place. People from your old home seemed to appear, but it was an illusion of place, and when you got close to them, you realized they were not that person at all. This had happened to Wayne a few times. Once he even thought he saw his father, but of course he had not. But this woman looked more and more, the closer she got to Wayne, like his old school principal, Victoria Huskins, the woman who had berated a child in kindergarten for having an accident in the school washroom. The woman responsible for suspending Thomasina Baikie the time she took Wayne to the hospital when he was in grade seven. She had come out of the drugstore where he had just had his face made up by Robin Williams, and she had entered the food court and was now looking around at the different stalls as he had done, trying to decide what she was going to eat, and he was still waiting for the moment when he could tell himself it was certainly not Victoria Huskins, but a stranger, when she recognized him.
31
My Dear Companion
WHAT HAPPENED, WAYNE WONDERED, to make a person like Victoria Huskins appear younger after her retirement? Without saying anything about his appearance, she greeted him with what felt like genuine warmth, asked if he was free to chat with her while she had her lunch, and left her bags at his table while she went to get herself a Dairy Queen cheeseburger and a caramel sundae. When she came back to the table, she did not unwrap the burger but began eating the sundae.
“I’m having dessert first.” Her hair was straight instead of being held in a controlled helmet style as it had been when she was his principal, and she had grown it so that it framed her face in a way that was pretty. “How are you, Wayne?”
He felt exposed and had to tell himself it was not like it had been when she was his principal. He had left grade seven long ago. She had faded out of his life, and in senior high there was a new principal. But he felt now that if he did not control his feelings, he would turn into thirteen-year-old Wayne Blake here in front of her, and she would have a principal’s authority over him.
He told himself silently that he had grown up and had left school, had in fact left Croydon Harbour behind, and did not need to feel ashamed that he now sat before Victoria Huskins looking like a young woman instead of a young man. Did he even look feminine? The lights in the food court were not bright. And even if they were, did he look like Annabel or did he look like Wayne? The only people who had given him any idea had been the man he saw earlier in the washroom, who had looked at him strangely, but had Wayne imagined that look? That man, and the makeup artist who looked like Robin Williams, and he had been so kind, so non-judgemental that Wayne still did not know how he appeared, at this moment, to someone like Victoria Huskins. And even if he did look more like Annabel than like Wayne, why should he feel ashamed in front of Victoria Huskins? He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so. Now he looked at Victoria Huskins as she collected the last of her caramel sauce on the end of a plastic spoon, and he knew she was not what he had thought. There was nothing in her face that matched the idea he had of her when he was younger. She appeared to him to be much more human.
“I’m all right,” Wayne said. “How about you?”
“Retirement is wonderful. I spent most of June in the vegetable garden, and I come down here to see my sisters and my old friends from university and we cackle a lot and talk about living wills and planning for when we get old and feeble, and between that and some painting I’ve always wanted to do, there’s hardly any time left for belly dancing or getting on my stationary bike. In fact I think I might have to sell the bike and just concentrate on the dancing.”
Wayne remembered that Joanne, the waitress in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, had told him that women all over the world danced. They danced by themselves, in ways no one knew about. He wanted to ask Victoria Huskins now, Where was the belly dancing when you were the principal of grades kindergarten through seven in Croydon Harbour? But he did not. He could see in her face that she had found a freedom he did not have. Somehow this inflexible woman had become flexible, and she was beautiful in a way that he could not attain, though she was old. He wondered if he was imagining her new flexibility. He wondered if she was the same hard person she had appeared to be in his childhood, and if he was the one who had frozen or petrified, so that even Victoria Huskins was now softer and more human than he was. He did not know who he had become, and now here was Victoria Huskins asking him to tell her what he was doing in St. John’s.