Milt brightened. “That’s it!” He turned his pencil and began furiously erasing. “Ha!”
They went down a hallway and she unlocked a door which sent pigeons clattering from the windowsill on the far side of the room. “Not much of a view,” she said of the brick wall opposite. She shrugged off her jacket. There was a metal-framed bed, a sink, as well as a chair and table that didn’t match. Snoring came from the next room; on the other side someone swearing drunkenly.
“Nice.”
“I think the word is character.”
“Where’s the rest of the cast?”
“Motel 6. Budget’s lean. The tour’s a risk. Chair or bed?”
He sat on the ladder-back chair and she lay on the bed and propped her head on her fist. He noted the pleasing swell of her hip. Little Connie Chow had most definitely filled out. She jutted her chin and said he looked sturdier than she remembered.
“And you look… impressive.”
“Impressive?” She mulled that.
“Hollywood,” he said.
“Please.”
“You should be proud.”
“You think so?”
He shrugged, suddenly feeling naive, and told her how in carpentry a nail with its head sticking up above the wood was said to be proud.
“All the better to get whacked down,” she said darkly, prying off her Daytons which bumped like bricks to the floor.
Cyril looked around the room noting the wainscotting, the lumpy lath-and-plaster, the exposed pipes, the lino that curled against the walls. “This place looks like the real thing.”
“1890. Ghosts coming out of the walls and everything. One looks like my granny.”
Cyril had envied Connie having a grandmother who was so eccentric, although also wondered if the old woman was so fundamentally different from his own mother’s grimly whimsical obsession with funerals and icons. “How is she?”
“The ghost?”
“Your grandmother.”
“Met a man in the Lonely Hearts and moved to Montreal. I’ll be seeing her in a couple of weeks.”
He imagined Connie and her grandmother in some French café. He knew nothing of his own grandparents.
Lying back, Connie put her hands behind her head and yawned. “I am so thrashed.”
Cyril looked at his watch. 1:35 AM. He stood.
“Sorry, I’m not very entertaining.” She followed him into the hallway. “Good seeing you, man.”
“You too.”
They hugged. She was shorter without her boots and felt smaller without her leather, more the way he remembered her. He was about to suggest getting together tomorrow but she had her hand on the door ready to shut it. “Okay, see you.”
As he passed the office Milt shouted, “Aunt!”
He was still living in the top floor suite of the house with the downtown view. When he got home he stared out the window at the city and thought over the evening. She’d seemed genuinely pleased to see him, but he was here and she was there, and in another day she’d be gone, and what had he expected anyway? Nothing. Everything.
He stared at his latest drawings: boxes. He was drawing boxes. Not just any boxes: corrugated cardboard boxes. He thought of Connie looking at them and trying not to laugh. What the fuck was he doing drawing corrugated cardboard boxes? Rarely have corrugated cardboard boxes been rendered with such loving attention to detail, with such passion. This reviewer will never look at corrugated cardboard boxes the same way again… Still, they were good boxes, the folds so well rendered they invited you to run your finger along their edges. And the boxes had something else: the question of what was in them, what they contained, or perhaps more significantly what they hid. He thought of Gilbert’s grandmother’s wooden box with the pistol in it. Surely a box with a pistol in it looked different than a box containing a rose, or a box that was empty. Cyril sat down and worked on the latest box until the sun was rising and when Connie called at eleven he was in a dead sleep.
“You sleeping?”
“No. Well… sort of.”
“What, you went out on the town after dumping me off?”
“I did some drawing.”
“Of what?”
He looked at one of the boxes. Lies fast-forwarded through his mind. “Boxes.”
“Boxes? Boxes of what?”
“Well, that’s the thing, I’m figuring out what’s in each one as I draw it.”
There was a silence as she thought about this. “Cool.”
“It might be empty,” said Cyril, incapable of not undermining himself.
“Or there’s a puppet inside,” said Connie, jumping on the idea. “Or a clown. Clowns’re so creepy.”
“Or a sword jutting out from the inside,” said Cyril, remembering her collection of swords.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Or fire,” he said. “The box contains fire.”
“Or a head. I’m thinking there’s a head in it.”
“Whose head?”
“Well, that’s the whole mystery,” she said, as though that was obvious.
They met outside her hotel where she was studying the newspaper. “No review.” She pitched the paper into a bin and shook her head.
Cyril assured her she’d been wonderful and she said be specific and he said her accent and she shrugged as if that was no great accomplishment, so he said she’d been compelling, and she said tell me more, and he said she was passionate and wholly convincing, and she said: “More.” And he said she was heartbreaking, at which she smiled and said: “Please sir, more.” And he said, “You sure did good rememberizing all them there lines, ma’am.” And she said, “Thank you, I feel better.”
They walked from Chinatown to the West End, then into Stanley Park and along the seawall. Dense white clouds tumbled across a hard blue sky while the low tide beach seethed with barnacles. A black lab bounded about the sand scattering gulls that fled screeling into the air while the owner shouted haplessly.
“So,” Connie enquired with mock formality, “how’s the family?”
He mentioned that Paul and Della now had twin sons, Chuckie and Steve, a pair of evil six-year-olds bent on household and eventually world domination, and that his mother was devoted to them. He did not mention how maddening it was seeing both his mother and Paul make a point of speaking Ukrainian to the twins, though there was some small grim satisfaction in the boys’ refusal to learn.
“Is Paul still a runt?”
“A prosperous runt.”
“Are the kids runts?”
Chuckie and Steve were big, thick-necked, round-shouldered thugs, Steve so light-fingered his pockets had to be checked every time he left a playmate’s house; Chuckie, a bed-wetter, though each terrifyingly bright in a warped fashion, each habitual contrarians constantly fighting with each other and obsessed with winning arguments and delighting in proving Uncle Cyril wrong. He saw them at Sunday dinner each week where they regarded him with sneering scepticism. “They’re galoots.”
“Galoots,” said Connie, enjoying the word. “That is some seriously fat pile of sulphur over there,” she said of a massive pyramid of yellow on the North Shore. “I don’t remember that.”
“What’s your first memory?”
“The sound of the Empress of India’s horn as we were crossing the ocean. Yours?”
“The way the sheets in my bed had wrinkles and folds that cast shadows, and I could change them by tugging the sheet. It was like drawing, or sculpting.”
She was looking at him wonderingly. “Huh. Actually, mine was puking up Cream of Wheat.”
Cyril confessed that his was getting conked on the head by the ironing board that folded up into a closet on the wall.