The Video Watcher (3 page)

“Fine,” I said. “Good. Is Sadie in?”

I stepped inside and leaned down to undo my laces.

“Sadie,” she shouted, then turned back to me.

“Are you finished school?”

“Two weeks ago,” I said.

“Sadie—she told me she finished the week before.”

“Everyone has different exam schedules.” I followed the mother into the front hall.

“I don't know. Sadie never tell us anything—Sadie!”

At the foot of the stairs I fiddled with my car keys. Dinner plates were still on the table in the kitchen and her father was watching a hockey game. The smell of Maggi sauce was in the air.

The woman started to call “Sadie” again, but Sadie was at the top of the stairs.

“What?” she shouted, then noticed me. “Trace. Did you tell me you were coming?”

“No. I was at the hospital.”

She pouted—“Look at me.”

I was—she was wearing a pink terry-towel tracksuit, her hair in curlers—actually, I preferred the look of her when she wasn't dressed up.

“You're fine,” I said.

“Come up. I'm just getting ready.”

In her room, I lay on the pink canopy bed while she sat at the matching bureau and finished her hair. The radio was on, playing “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys.

Taped to the nightstand was a prayer written in Slovakian. Sadie'd told me her mother used to make her pray every night. Each time I was in the room, I'd try to figure out the pronunciation of the words.

Sadie, her back to me, hummed along with the song as she took curlers out of her hair. She had her hands raised over her head.
“There's this girl there, she's so fucking hot. She's kind of short? Blonde hair? Yeah—that's her!”
It was strange to think of the things guys said about her at UBC; now she was just a girl.

A few minutes passed without either of us speaking. I picked a
People
magazine off the floor and flipped past the glossy photos of Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias to the pages showing women.

“So, what were you doing at the hospital?” Sadie asked.

“A friend of mine, he—”

“Don't you think she's hot?” She pointed to the picture of Jennifer Lopez I'd turned to. “I mean, I'm not a lesbian. But she even turns me on.” After that comment I didn't bother talking about Damien. I asked instead what she was doing tonight. She said not much, that she and some friends were getting together at the Avalon, that if I wanted to come, I could come, that there would probably be people from UBC there.

She took a black crushed-velvet top out of her closet. As I waited for her to return from the washroom, I paced the room and debated about whether I should go to Avalon. It would probably just make me feel lonely, but I wanted to go.

A beige bra hung off the back of the chair, and I bent down and examined it. I imagined her nipples pressed against the inside of the cups, and flipped the tag and read the measurements on the strap. 32 B. I repeated the number a couple of time trying to remember it.

It was strange—I could never really imagine Sadie having sex. I knew she had sex with guys, she was beautiful, and I was always seeing her in partial stages of undress, but when it came to the actual visuals, there was a blind spot.

Black and white model photos were wedged in the right side of the mirror frame, and I leaned forward to study them. They'd been taken when Sadie was fifteen, before she'd stopped growing and was told she was too short to model. When she told me, I'd remembered a quote by Hitler from the History 12 textbook: “the Czechoslovakians are a vile race of dwarfs.” She looked happy in the photos.

Ten minutes later Sadie came back in the room. Before going to the washroom her face had been pale and featureless, like a young girl's. Now, with lip gloss, rouge and eyeliner, it looked like the faces in the magazine.

 

On the drive down to the club, I asked Sadie if she was going out with anyone and she said no. She had broken up with Steve just before the exams, and she wasn't going to date anyone for a while. She wanted to leave her summer open, she said. The drunken chant of Offspring's “Self Esteem” came on. She asked if she could change the station, and flipped to one playing Ace of Base's “All That She Wants.”

At the Avalon there was quite a group of people—some I knew; some I didn't—and they'd pushed the tables together to form one long table. I sat down in what looked like an unoccupied chair, and Sadie sat next to me. As she'd predicted, people from UBC were there, and I waved at Hugh and Anna at the other end.

I was about to ask Sadie if she wanted anything to drink when I felt a hard tap on my right shoulder.

“That's
my
place.” The guy was large, and bulky, and he wore a backwards Raiders hat and a down vest.

I tried to think of something to say.

“Leave—or I'll make you.”

I went to the other end of the table to join Hugh and Anna and Paula. Hugh, whose real name was Hugo, and was either French and spoke Spanish or Spanish and spoke French—I couldn't remember—was dressed (as he always dressed) in light blue jeans (holes in the knees) a tweed jacket and a scarf; and he was talking to Anna, a Polish girl, who apparently modeled and who, when I met her the previous fall, had been going out with a guy called Bruce whom she'd said she loved and would marry and whom two weeks later she had to break up with—because she was in love with Hugh. As I sat down next to them I held out my hand for Hugh to shake. I guess he didn't see it. I turned to Anna and asked how her summer was going. “Great!” she shouted in a tone that suggested she hadn't heard what I'd said. She kept smiling and I couldn't think of another thing to say, so I said “Lemon,” a word I once used to describe an English professor we both had and both disliked and which always made Anna laugh.

Anna laughed.

Hugh turned back to her and stroked her cheek and said something in… French? Spanish? English? Polish? At the other end of the table Sadie was on the lap of the guy who had told me to move. He massaged her thigh while flirting with the brunette across from him. Someone tapped my shoulder. It was Hugh. He shouted something, and after shouting it two more times, Anna told me that Hugh was wondering if I could get them two margaritas. As she said this, she patted my arm and smiled. At the bar, there was a crowd. It took me twenty minutes to get the drinks. Hugh and Anna had gone when I got back. When I found them, they were in the corner. I approached, I stopped.

Hugh's tweed coat was over Anna's lap, his hand was working under it. Anna's face had an earnest expression, her eyes half-glazed, her mouth half-open.

Back at the table, I drank the margaritas.

“Having fun?”

Paula was Chilean, and once told me that if she didn't shower everyday she got B.O.

“Uh—”

“I'll talk to you in a second,” she shouted, getting up. “—gotta go pee.”

 

The moment I got out to the parking lot, my mind cleared. The margaritas had done their job. The cold spring air felt good.

The club's sound system still thumping in my head, I drove up Keith Road, past the Catholic school I went to in junior high. A house beyond it had my aunt's real estate sign on its lawn.

On Lonsdale, I turned left. The highway led West, to Horseshoe Bay. I stamped the accelerator, lowered the front and back windows. All the stations that night were playing the Pet Shop Boys' “Go West”—I finally turned the radio off and put on Led Zeppelin's “Dazed and Confused….”

I pressed repeat.

 

The last week in May, I didn't do much. Each day I slept later and later, the thick blanket in the window stopping the sun from waking me. At first this had bothered me, my seeming purposelessness, but slowly I grew used to the rhythm of the days and the routine of killing time.

After the night at the Avalon I hadn't expected to hear from Sadie again—actually I didn't want to hear from her again. But she called the night before I was to pick Cam up from the airport. I was sitting on the sofa watching
Maniac
when the phone rang, and without pausing the movie, I grabbed the portable. “Patterson Realty,” I said.

Her voice, after a pause, said, “I'm sorry. I think I have the wrong number.”

“Sadie?”

“Trace? Why'd you say Patterson's Realty?”

I explained that it was my aunt's line and that was how she wanted me to answer it.

We asked each other about our breaks; and after a long story by Sadie about how she had quit Earl's and now worked at the Cactus Club and how her new manager was better than her old manager and how the new manager took her out for drinks, I asked, “So? Are you and—Brad—dating?”

“You mean Chad?”

“I guess. The guy at the Avalon.”

“No—well, yeah. Yeah kinda.”

“Really?” I said.

The movie was coming to my favourite scene. I held the phone away and covered the mouthpiece.

“Well, we're just seeing right now. I don't want to rush anything. I think that was the problem with Steve.”

“Sure,” I said.

On screen, Frank Zito (the maniac) leaped onto the hood of the parked car in which a couple had been frolicking. He held a hunting rifle and, crouching, taking careful aim, squeezed the trigger. The head of the driver exploded in slow motion, flinging brain and blood all over the woman's face.

“What's happening?” Sadie asked, sounding alarmed.

“What?”

“The screaming? Is someone hurt?”

“Oh, no,” I said, imagining that the man in the car was Chad. I reached for the remote. “It's just some late night movie.”

 

 

 

 

 

2

 

 

C
am's flight was late.
To kill time I wandered the airport, went to the kiosks and through the souvenir stores, and got the impression of the city that a tourist might get—maple syrup, smoked salmon, totem poles, stuffed toy killer whales.

The girl I'd noticed earlier was still at the flight status screens when I returned, and I went up beside her. She was about my age—maybe nineteen or twenty—she had an olive complexion, and hair that was thick and wavy and black. She stood patiently, holding her black leather handbag at waist level with both hands, a purple cardigan draped over her right arm. The dress she wore was white with black orchid prints, and there were copper medallions on her brown leather sandals.

As I stood beside her, I took furtive glances while pretending to study the computer terminals. Her demeanour and clothing suggested that she wasn't from here, and that fact, for some reason, made it easier for me to speak to her.

“Are you waiting for someone from Mexico?” I said finally.

My voice was weak and I started to repeat the question.

But a smile was already there. “Yes, yes,
Me he co
.”

The smile remained and I felt encouraged to say more. I forced a grin. “My friend. He's coming from Mexico.”

“Yes? He from
Me he co
?” she said. She had obviously misunderstood and thought Cam was
from
Mexico.

The strap of the blue bra was visible beneath the white dress strap. I looked back at her face. “Are you staying in Vancouver?” I asked.

“Yes, studying English.”

“You like it?”

“Yes. It very nice.”

“I'm Trace,” I said. I held out my hand, and she shook it, her hand soft and cool. “My name Maria,” she said.

We said one or two more things.

Then, afraid of freaking her out by asking for her number, I offered mine.

She seemed enthusiastic. She took an agenda from her handbag. As I waited for her to open it and get a pen, I tried to guess the size of her breasts under the dress's material.

“O. Kay,” she said carefully.

I gave her my number. She wrote it on one of the pages, and I noticed her chipped nail polish. She looked up at me. Her eyes were very dark brown.

“I. Will. Call.” she said, concentrating hard on the pronunciation of each word.

She waved to someone coming through the door, then turned to me and said—this time a bit faster, “I. Will. Call.”

 

Cam came through the doors, wearing a sombrero, and so tanned he looked black. As always, he had the hulking posture and the intense glare that had frightened people in high school.

I had to shout twice before he saw me. When he did, his expression softened.

“Hola,” I said.

“Mr. Patterson, Mr. Patterson,” he said, shaking his head with a sort of sad/happy disbelief. “Long time no see.” He held out his hand and I put mine in it, and he squeezed hard.

We didn't say anything else till we reached the end of the railing that separated us.

“Can you watch this?” He handed me his grey duffle bag. “I got to use the washroom. Those fuckers in customs wouldn't let me go.”

The duffle bag was the one he'd taken to outdoor school in Grade 11. I had a clear memory of that period, but at the same time, the memory seemed distant.

When Cam returned, I pointed at the bag and asked him if he remembered outdoor school.

“Oh. Yeah,” he said, obviously thinking of something else.

“Trouble with customs?”

“Fuck! I was
this
close,” Cam said, indicating a few millimetres with his thumb and index finger, “to punching the bitch in the head.”

He picked up the duffle bag. I started toward the parking lot and he followed. “Is there a number you can call to complain about those people?”

“I guess.”

“They took away my tequila.”

“All of it?”

“Except one bottle.”

“Isn't that all you're allowed?”

“I really wanted to punch that bitch in the mouth.”

When we stepped through the doors, the early June heat wave hit us like a wall. We crossed the road and went through the parkade and out again into the hot bright sunlight. A plane roared by overhead.

By the time we reached the BMW we were sweating.

“Nice car.”

“It's my aunt's.” The leather seat was burning and I slid forward and tried to keep my bare thighs off the seat.

“Crank the air conditioner.”

“I did,” I said, and shifted into reverse.

A mile from the airport Cam's mood improved. Air-drumming along with the Chili Peppers on the stereo, he said for the sixth time that he couldn't believe he was back.

“So, tell me a story, Mr. Patterson. What's been happening?”

“Not much. Just going to some parties,” I said. “By the way, I saw Damien.”

“Damien!” Cam slapped the top of the door and glared at me. “Fuck! Don't tell me you still hang around with
that
loser.”

“Shouldn't I?” I said, pretending not to know what was coming next.

“The loser fucking totalled my car.”

Cam, for some reason, always blamed Damien for the accident we were involved in.

I didn't say anything more, and we were downtown before he asked, “So tell me, has he put his life back together again?”

“He had to spend some time in A2 again. Some problem with his meds.”

“I bet you liked that.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

But Cam only laughed and said, “Don't worry. Forget it.”

 

Cam's parents had sold their house in North Van when he was in Mexico and now lived in the Properties. As I started the maze of roads up the mountain, the city falling away behind us, I asked, “So why'd they move?”

“I don't know,” Cam said staring out the window. “My father made a bunch of money on some land deal or something.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I guess not.”

We didn't speak again until we arrived at the house. The houses across the road were down the hill and over their roofs I could see Vancouver from the tip of the UBC endowment lands in the west to Burnaby Mountain in the east. But Cam's parents' house, like a lot of houses in that area, had a shabbiness to it, and if I had my back to the view and ignored the Mercedes and Range Rovers in the neighbours' driveways, I'd assume it was worth a tenth of its value.

“Well, I guess that's it,” Cam said. “I'd invite you in, but…”

“Sure.”

“We'll do something this weekend.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Thanks for picking me up at the airport.”

“No problem.”

 

“What was he even doing there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know—where he was?”

“Mexico?”

“Mmm,” Damien said, gulping the end of his beer. It was Friday night and he and I were sitting in The Bourbon, a bar in Gastown where college students went to slum. We were supposedly there “to celebrate” his release from the psych ward.

“I mean, what was he doing in fuckin' Mexico?”

“I think he expected to meet some women,” I said, gazing at the circling bodies. The counter we sat at ran along the long edge of the dance floor.

“What?”

“He
Expected.
To.
Meet. Latin. Women
.”

Damien sneered. He took a drink and said, “Why'd he go there? There's enough here.”

He gestured with his head to the dance floor. I didn't know what he was talking about, then saw an East Indian girl in a purple tube top and realized that that was his idea of a Latin woman.

Damien shouted something.

“Say that again.”

“—hope he gets bit by a fucking scorpion.”

“Why?” I asked, laughing. “Do you hate him?”

Damien didn't answer. He downed the remaining beer and told me to guard his stuff while he used the washroom.

I sipped my drink and watched the dance floor. It was crowded with dancers, but all of them danced in loose groups or alone—none of them danced in pairs. I thought about why I had mentioned Cam's arrival and realized that I guess I had hoped they would repair their friendship now that they were out of high school. Why this was important to me, I didn't know.

Two middle-aged women circled toward the counter. They'd beckoned me and Damien to join them earlier, and I waited to see if they would repeat the invitation. The one with the rhinestone top was staring in my direction, but she didn't seem to see me.

A few feet from her, there was another person I'd noticed before. He was about my age, but he had this immense afro that made him look like someone from the '70s. All night he'd been attempting to dance with someone. He would keep going up, and keep trying to join the circles of dancers. But each time the circle closed without him.

He had now moved close to a woman in a white halter top and the woman, without losing sync with the beat, turned her shoulder to him, then her back.

“What I Like About You,” was just fading out when Damien returned. He was carrying a pitcher of beer. He started to pour some into my glass.

“I can't. I got to drive.”

Damien shrugged, and filled his own glass. He pulled out the bar stool and sat on it.

“So why do you hate Cam?” I shouted.

The guy with the afro was directly in front of us. He tried casually to attach himself to another circle of women as the circle closed without him.

“What?” Damien yelled, craning his head toward me.

But I didn't get a chance to repeat the question. The afro kid had his hands on the brass rail in front of us, then his foot.

“Hey!
Hey
!
” Damien yelled, holding his hands out to stop the guy. But the guy catapulted himself over the counter, catching the pitcher with his knee.

Beer was everywhere.

I had pushed back in time to avoid it running on my legs, but Damien's jacket was soaked. “Fuck,” I thought I heard Damien say as he stood up. He was facing the afro boy, his back to me. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but the afro kid looked down, his arms hanging loose at his sides.

A group of four men stood behind the afro kid, watching. Though the music was too loud to hear anything, I was certain that someone was chanting, “Fight, fight, fight.”

Damien held his jacket up, shaking it. He pointed at it and the kid said something, nodding.

After what seemed like a long time, Damien turned to me. “Let's fucking go.”

 

The cold night air was a relief. A line up of people stood waiting to enter. The doorman, glancing at us as we came out the door, I guess noticed the expression on Damien's face. “Is everything alright, gentlemen?”

Damien stopped. “Look what this fuckin' asshole did to my jacket.”

The man leaned closer, and the specks of dandruff became visible on his black dress shirt.

As Damien started to explain, the people in the line-up watched. The dirty blond with the red poodle skirt had bare legs that ended in Dorothy-from-
The-Wizard-of-Oz
ankle socks and I was staring at those legs when Damien said, “And he threatened me with a fuckin' knife?”

The doorman's eyes looked like they were going to fall out. “A knife?” he asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, a knife,” Damien said, his tone so earnest that even I believed him.

“Where? What does he look like?”

The description Damien gave, fortunately, wasn't too accurate; he described the guy as having dreadlocks. He gestured with his head to where we'd been sitting, and the man, leaning forward and pointing, said, “There?”

Damien nodded.

“Okay, thanks.” He patted Damien on the shoulder. “Can I get you another drink?”

“We're fine,” I said.

“You sure?'

I assured him we were.

“I'm really sorry this happened. Come again, guys. Next time I'll make sure you get free drinks.”

We thanked him and left.

I'd parked the car on Robson. As we started back, Damien and I were silent. The streets looked how they always looked after you left a club, cold and deserted. It must have rained when we were in the bar because everything had a fresh shine to it.