The Silver Age (3 page)

Stephan watched her as she mingled. She wasn’t
monopolizing her conversations or fighting for attention, but the eyes of those
in her vicinity did revolve inexorably towards her, insignificant moons locked
in orbit around some gas-giant of a planet. She wore a silvery nothing of a
dress. It shimmered in the mood-lit room, picking up and refracting the colours
of everything around it – faces, oriental carpets, tables heaped with rich
food. The teen-like skinniness and self-conscious glances that had marked her
as a newcomer at Helmut’s back in the day were now long gone.

She was irritatingly beautiful. There was something about
the colours of her skin, subtle hues of white and pink and gold, that looked as
if they belonged in a photograph. There was a crackle of warm energy in those
colours, which fluctuated beneath a translucent surface, so pale and subtle
that they seemed on the cusp of fading to black and white. The smirk of her
mouth, somehow both arch and unaffected, added to the sense of liveliness and
energy she projected.

The others in Stephan’s circle had been watching her too.

“She certainly is attractive,” Amanda was saying.

“Attractive, maybe, but evil all the same,” replied Joan.
“She didn’t even care that she ruined Sandra’s dress.”

“Didn’t care? Surely you’re not suggesting that was an
accident?”

“Oh, come on now – you and your conspiracy theories.”

“But Sandra published that nasty gossip piece in Tattle
Tales last month, about that latte incident at Starbucks with B-Licious, the
hip-hop artist. Think about it.”

“Hmmm.”

“Anyway, Jenny Wynne is a horrendous prose stylist.”

“Absolutely. Her stuff is so unstructured.”

“She has such amazing hair,” sighed Amanda.

“And pretty good aim with a champagne flute,” added
Nathan, raising his own glass as if in salutation to her skills before downing
it in a quick gulp.

The evening hurried onward. Soon after the incident with
Ms. Blankton, the sit-down dinner portion of the event was announced, and
everyone dutifully filed into the main ballroom. It was quite the production, a
slick simulacrum of a Hollywood awards show. There were video vignettes
announcing each award category, and a deejay who pumped out snippets of ambient
techno music to herald each presenter and usher out thank-you speeches that
went over the thirty-second limit. Local pseudo-celebrities appeared on stage
to present some of the higher profile awards. Jenny Wynne – fleetingly – was
one of them. Mumbling into the microphone, her jokes falling flat, she was
suddenly the uncertain little girl once again. And then she was off the stage,
vanished into the darkness on the far side of the theatre.

It seemed odd to Stephan that so much effort was being
directed inwards – towards writers, editors, photographers and designers –
rather than being put into the publications meant for actual readers. If the
creators could only convince themselves that what they were doing was worthy of
sequined gowns and chocolate fountains, then whatever the outside world
thought, or didn’t think, about them wasn’t so important. Most titles aimed to
be the Canadian answer to some internationally renowned American or British
magazine. The Canadian version of
Vogue
, the Canadian answer to
Harper’s
.
And every story had to have a Canadian angle – the Canadian contribution to the
Space Shuttle program, say, or the Canadian answer to American Idol.

As per the unwritten rules of all awards shows, the event
was not only extravagant but also drawn out. After a couple of hours, Nathan –
who had continued to imbibe throughout dinner – had his head down on the table,
and could be heard faintly snoring. But if Stephan’s own mood was any
indication, the awards-show format did encourage attentiveness in many of the
guests, no matter how uninterested everyone pretended to be in it all. He found
himself waiting for the announcement of his own award category with carefully
disguised anticipation. He feigned interest in the architecture details of the
space, and spent several minutes adjusting his shirt cuffs and neck tie.

His attention was warranted, because when his category
finally came up it was revealed that he had won a silver medal. He felt a warm
rush of pleasure as the crowd applauded his name and his table-mates grudgingly
offered their congratulations, although he kept up the pretence throughout that
it was all an embarrassment. He wasn’t invited up on stage to give a thank-you
speech as the gold medalist, the real winner, was a few moments later, but
several of his shots were briefly flashed on the room’s giant video screen. And
when he excused himself to visit the restroom as the next category was
announced, he found that he was smiling broadly at his reflection in the mirror
as he soaped his hands.

Later that night, he tagged along to an after-party at
the Stem with Amanda, Carol and, surprisingly, Nathan – the latter having
miraculously rallied. They took a cab across town via Richmond, through the
Entertainment District, where the sidewalk writhed with 20-year-olds on their
way to and from the dance clubs that lined the strip. Meanwhile, Carol regaled
them with a rambling story that climaxed with her puking in her high-heeled
boot at a previous edition of the magazine awards back in the day. (The point
of the story seemed to be that Carol knew how to party. A subtext was that the
event, and perhaps Carol herself, had seen better days.)

“Why so quiet, mister silver medalist?” asked Amanda,
nudging him, as they neared their destination.

“Just taking it all in, I guess.”

The entrance to the Stem was via an unmarked grey steel
door set into a brick wall at the end of a nondescript alleyway. Nathan, who
was of course a member, brandished a grey plastic key fob and the door clicked
open to reveal a bleak stairwell and cramped elevator, like something out of a
Coen Brothers movie. The elevator carried them (barely) to the top of the
building, its creaking door opening directly onto the club’s sleek, modernist
interior.

Magazine people seemed to have taken over the entire
establishment – it was a repeat of the awards themselves, minus the more mature
and less socially aggressive guests. Competing cliques stood in discrete
groups, their eyes rolling enviously towards each other. If one of the members
of
Urbanista
had defied the tribal codes and chatted up a staffer from
This
City,
a massacre might have ensued. Until such a provocation occurred, the
only thing to do was to find out which group could consume more martinis and/or
exchange wittier banter.

After an hour or so in dutiful conversation with his
clan-mates, Stephan slipped on his suit jacket, which he’d been holding tucked
under an arm, and stepped out onto the Stem’s half-dark rooftop patio to get
some air. It was cool outside, and quieter now, the ranks of party-goers
thinned by slow attrition. Here and there small groups of stalwarts clustered
in talk, forming dark islands of activity demarcated by cigarette-ember
lighthouse beacons.

He went to the edge of the balcony and stood gazing out
over the city. The sky above had turned a sickly grey, and the handful of stars
able to compete with the city lights were fading fast. Down below, the clustered
office towers of the financial district were lit up like Christmas, even though
they would be abandoned now by all but a few cleaners, security guards, and
perhaps the occasional insomniac MBA gearing up for a big PowerPoint
extravaganza the next day.

From an invisible condo in a tower across the road there
came the sound of a stereo playing an old Smiths album from the late 1980s. A
faint breeze wafted in off the lake, tousled his hair. The night air was
somehow almost fresh, at least by smog-ridden downtown standards. The song the
stereo was playing at that moment had been a favourite of Stephan’s when he was
in high school. He’d owned the vinyl record, and later the cassette tape. His
friends had made fun of him for liking such an obviously prissy Brit band, had
serenaded him in imitation of Morrissey’s moany falsetto. But he hadn’t cared –
in fact, he’d been secretly gratified by their mockery. The sound of Johnny
Marr’s layered guitars, jangling mournfully in a minor key, put him in a
wistful mood. It seemed as if something had just clicked into place, and for
once the life he was living was identical to the one he daydreamed for himself.

A ghostly figure broke away from a group that had been
standing in the shadows on the far side of the patio and made its way over to
the railing near him, where it lit a cigarette. How strange, he would think,
years later, whenever he looked back on the scene, that people still smoked in
those days. A few years later, and the story might never have unfolded.

It was her.

The flare of pale yellow flame from her lighter
illuminated her features for a second or two before fading. Then her face was
dark again and she was blowing smoke rings out over the railing. He watched as
each ring stood perfect and solid for a few seconds before evaporating into
nothingness, swallowed up by the hot night.

Something about her posture made him think that she
hadn’t seen him. He wondered if he should make some sound to let her know,
without startling her, that she wasn’t alone. He might have slipped away
unseen, but her position along the railing blocked him into a dead-end corner
of the balcony, so that he couldn’t leave without passing directly behind her.
But before he could make any sign she turned to him, unalarmed, her face in darkness
but a halo of golden light on her hair.

“Who’s that over by the potted plant?” she called.
“Raymond? Is that you?”

He emerged, feeling somehow like a voyeur caught in the
act.

“Sorry... I...” He stepped forward into the light, and
she looked him up and down.

“You’re not Raymond,” she said, sounding miffed, as if he
were somehow to blame for the fact that he wasn’t Raymond. “Aren’t you one of
those people from
This City
I ran into earlier?”

“Well, it wasn’t me that you actually ran into. That was
someone else.”

It was an aggressive, as opposed to genuinely witty,
thing to say. Most likely it was the alcohol talking, and he half-expected,
even wanted, her to take it the wrong way, lash back at him. But she only
smiled.

“No, of course I know that,” she said. “But you may have
been splashed.”

“Only a little. And anyway it gave me a chance to
actually use my pocket square, which was kind of novel.”

Her smile morphed into her trademark smirk.

“I’m Jenny Wynne,” she said, confident and
matter-of-fact, extending her hand for a formal little shake. “I don’t believe
we’ve been introduced.”

As he took her hand in his he resisted the temptation to
tell her they’d met before in less sympathetic circumstances.

“Between the two of us, I’m out here because I’m in
hiding,” she said, in a conspiratorial tone.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope Sandra Blankton hasn’t
returned to take her blood-, or at least champagne-, soaked revenge.”

“Not yet, thank god,” she said, happily. “But just now a
man I was with at the bar told me that I had the most beautiful nose he’s ever
seen. He said he wanted to eat it.”

“That’s a little... I was going to say on the nose.”

She giggled. “It is, isn’t it? I’m glad I’m not alone in
feeling that. So if you don’t mind I think I’ll wait over here in the shadows
with you for a few minutes.”

“Be my guest.”

They wound up chatting together with surprising ease,
almost as if they were old friends reunited after a long and tiresome interval.
They talked about the journalism business, the eejits and douches who peopled
it, about books and articles and movies they liked. In future years when
looking back on the conversation, he would have trouble recalling any
specifics, but be certain nonetheless that their words had been sophisticated
and insightful, profound even. She was a skilled talker, without question, her
sentences curving sinuously, intricate and bright in the air between them. And
although he usually preferred to express himself with images rather than with
words, that night he was in excellent verbal form, spinning out his own
thoughts and ideas with confidence and clarity.

She lit another cigarette, in the same moment drawing
back her hair and blowing a stream of white smoke through puckered lips. Her
arms were lithe and graceful, her skin creamy and taut. Beneath the fabric of
her silver dress, her hip bones protruded on either side of her waist, looking
sharp, almost weapon-like, as if they could slice flesh. At least they could
bruise, as Sandra Blankton had probably discovered earlier in the evening.

After a time she paused in mid-sentence and shivered.
“It’s getting cold out here,” she said.

“Do you think he’s gone by now?” Stephan asked, hoping
that this would turn out not to be the case.

“We’d better make sure before I go back in there.”

They went to a yellow window and peered through. Inside,
the crowd had thinned further. Most of those who remained were seated at
tables, talking calmly, candlelight flickering over their faces. The coast
appeared to be clear.

“Thank you so much, Stephan,” Jenny said. “You’ve been a
gentleman. I enjoyed our chat.”

“I’m glad.”

Something about her company made him feel sure of
himself, affirmed his belief that he belonged among the clever and articulate.

She started to go, then paused and turned back to him.
“Seriously,” she said, looking into his eyes. “I felt like I was hanging out
with an old friend.”

Or an old nemesis.

“I had fun too,” he said. “Maybe we should...”

“Keep in touch? I was just thinking the same thing.”