The door to Queen Street opened and a little bell tinkled, as if Daughter Alice were a shop selling lace doilies or birthday cards. The girl who came in was suffering some kind of inflammation from her latest piercing; an object that looked like a cufflink made her lower lip stick out. She had a ball and chain attached to one eyebrow, which was shaved, but only her lower lip was inflamed.
“What can I do for you, dear?” Alice asked her. “I just made some tea. Would you like some?”
“Yeah, I guess,” the girl said. “I don’t usually do tea, but that’s okay.”
“Jack, fix the young lady some tea, please,” his mother said.
The girl was eighteen—maybe twenty, tops. Her dark hair was dirty; she was wearing jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. “Shit, you look kinda like Jack Burns,” she told Jack, “except you look like a normal guy.”
Alice had put some music on—Bob, of course. “Jack is my son,” Alice told the pierced girl. “This is Jack Burns!”
“Oh, wow,” the girl said. “I’ll bet you’ve been with a lot of women, eh?”
“Not too many,” he told her. “Do you take honey in your tea?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said; she kept touching her sore-looking lower lip with the tip of her tongue.
“What sort of tattoo are you interested in, dear?” Alice asked her. (There was a sign in the window of Daughter Alice: NO PIERCING. The girl had to have come for a tattoo.)
The girl unzipped her jeans and hooked her thumbs under the waistband of her panties, exposing a fringe of pubic hair, above which a honeybee hovered. The bee’s body was no bigger than the topmost joint of Jack’s little finger; its translucent wings were a blur of yellow. The little bee’s body was a darker shade of gold.
“Gold is a tricky pigment,” Alice said—perhaps admiringly. Jack couldn’t tell. “I take a bright yellow and mix it with brick red, or you can use what they call English vermilion—same as mercuric sulfide. I mix that with molasses.” Jack was pretty sure this was three quarters fabrication. Alice would never tell just anyone how she made her pigments—especially a nonprofessional.
“Molasses?” the girl said.
“I cut it with a little witch hazel,” Alice told her. “It’s tricky to get a good gold.” Jack believed that the witch-hazel part was true.
The girl was looking at her honeybee with new eyes. “I got the bee in Winnipeg,” she told them.
“At Tattoos for the Individual, I suppose,” Alice said.
“Yeah, do you know those guys?” the girl asked.
“Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg. So you want a flower for the bee?” she asked the girl.
“Yeah, but I can’t decide what kinda flower,” the girl said.
Jack was edging toward the door. He thought he’d take his chances out on Queen Street; a fan (or a lunatic) would probably recognize him, but Jack Burns didn’t need to see someone get another tattoo.
“Where are you off to, Jack?” Alice asked, not looking at him. She was laying out her flash of flower choices, to show the honeybee girl.
“You don’t hafta go,” the girl said to Jack. “You can watch—no matter where she puts it.”
“That depends,” Alice told her.
“I’ll see you back at home,” Jack said to his mom. “I’ll take you and Leslie out to dinner.”
Both Alice and the girl looked disappointed that Jack was leaving. Bob Dylan was yowling away. (“Idiot Wind.” Jack would always remember that song.) Jack wasn’t thinking about the girl; he was trying to decipher more exactly the look of disappointment on his mother’s face. What is it about me that bothers you? Jack wanted to ask her, but not with the honeybee girl there.
“Someone’s got it in for me,” Bob complained. Every time Jack came to Toronto, he felt that way. “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy,” Bob sang away. “She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.”
Jack sang the next line out loud, with Bob—never taking his eyes off his mother. “I can’t help it if I’m lucky,” he sang—because that was the principal ingredient in the look his mom was giving him. She thought he’d been lucky!
“So far, Jack—so far!” Alice called after him, as he stepped out on Queen Street and closed the door to Daughter Alice.
IV. Sleeping in the Needles
23. Billy Rainbow
Jack was on a press junket in New York. (“Following Miramax’s marching orders,” as Emma put it.) The only thing memorable about this particular interview was not the opening question itself, which he’d been asked a hundred times before, but the sheer clumsiness of how the journalist worded the question—that and the fact that Emma called in the middle of his oft-repeated answer, and it was the last time Jack would hear her voice.
His interviewer, a matronly woman with a baffling accent, was the same journalist, from the Hollywood Foreign Press, who, in a previous press junket, had asked Jack if he was modeling his appearance on that of a young Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. She was drinking a Diet Coke and smoking a mentholated cigarette, her artificially sweetened breath wafting over him like smoke from a fire in a mint factory.
“Captain Willard has short hair,” Jack had answered her that previous time.
“Cap-ee-tan who?”
“The Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now—Captain Willard,” he’d said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about his rank.”
“I didn’t mean-a hees hair,” the journalist had said.
“I’m not consciously modeling myself on a young Martin Sheen,” Jack had told her. “I’m not trying to kill Marlon Brando, either.”
“You mean-a young Marlon Brando?” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press had asked him.
“In the movie you mentioned,” he had explained to her, slowly, “the young Martin Sheen character is sent to kill Marlon Brando—remember? Not a young Marlon Brando, either.”
“Forget eet,” she’d said. “Let’s-a move on.”
This time her question was breathtaking in its awkwardness, but she had at last moved on from Martin Sheen. “Are you a person who-wa, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies weeth the opposite sex-sa? I mean-a weeth wee-men.”
“Am I a transvestite, do you mean?”
“Yes!”
“No.”
“But-a you are always dressing as a woo-man—or you seem to be theenking about eet, I mean-a dressing as a woo-man, even when-a you are dressed as a man.”
“I’m not thinking about dressing as a woman right now,” Jack told her. “It’s just something I occasionally do in a movie—you know, when I’m acting.”
“Are you writing about eet?”
“About dressing as a woman?”
“Yes!”
“No.”
His cell phone rang. Ordinarily he didn’t answer his phone in the middle of an interview, but Jack could see that the call was from Emma and she’d been depressed lately. Emma was losing the fight with her weight; every morning since he’d been away, Emma called to tell him what she weighed. It was almost lunchtime in New York, but Jack knew that Emma was just getting up in L.A.
He’d told her that he was being interviewed around the clock—Emma knew very well what press junkets were for. In mild exasperation, Jack handed his cell phone to the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press. “This woman won’t leave me alone,” he said to his interviewer. “Try telling her I’m in the middle of an interview. See how far you get.”