Betsy Burke - Lucy's Launderette

Sure enough, Paul Bleeker had booked a table for two. I lingered in the doorway for a minute. I had decided to go in and sit down when I saw it. Across the Rain Room, outside in the courtyard, Dirk, still dressed as Superman, stood completely still, looking important. He then took one step forward and pressed his face against the glass. Water splashed onto his head and flowed down his body but he was oblivious to it. I bolted.

As the elevator descended with me in it, I wondered what Paul Bleeker would think of the way I’d stood him up. In that moment, I didn’t care. Until my brother had been dealt with, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I hailed a cab, got in and looked over my shoulder the whole way home. No one was following me. I paid the driver with the last of my spare change, raced through my front door and double locked it once I was inside.

I went into the bedroom and took off my all-purpose little black cocktail dress. I could hear the Viking in the other room. Without knocking, she opened my door and handed me an envelope. “This for you,” she told me.

“Who left it?” I asked. There was no stamp on it. She just shook her head in linguistic bewilderment and walked away.

I ripped it open. Scrawled on a tattered piece of paper were the words “I’M SENDING YOU TO THE PHANTOM ZONE.”

I ran to the phone and dialed the first number on my list. I was expecting another answering machine but a real voice said, “Sam Trelawny here.”

“It’s Lucy Madison. Am I glad to get you,” I said, “I think I just got a threat.” I told him about Dirk’s note.

“The guy moves fast,” he said. “Listen, just hang on. Don’t panic. I know, easy to say when you’re not there. There’ve been more reports. It seems Dirk is making his presence felt all over town. He was hanging around eating people’s leftovers at a restaurant in the West End this afternoon. We’re going to have him picked up as soon as we can locate him. You hear anything more from him, call me straightaway. Here, I’ll give you my private cell-phone number. And, Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll have him looking and behaving like Clark Kent at his desk in the Daily Planet in no time.”

I began to wonder what kind of face went with Sam Trelawny’s plummy reassuring voice.

The next morning, I left for work at six-thirty, hoping the semidarkness would give me cover. I snuck out of my apartment dressed like an escapee from a black-and-white British movie. One of those dowdy sixties flicks. Georgy Girl. The Carry On gang. My hair was squashed under the kind of head scarf that you tie under your chin, a silk souvenir covered with sketches of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian urchin children. I wore a huge wooly coat with sloping shoulders, a pair of black gumboots and dark glasses. I had hoped to look a little like Jackie Kennedy sneaking past the paparazzi incognito, but in fact I looked more like Jackie Kennedy’s cleaning lady. Taking these precautions was exhausting, but I counted on the fact that Dirk could sometimes be thrown by small things.

Along with the Superman disguise, Dirk had a few other personas in his manic closet. One was a tatty spy. During one endless spring, Dirk had introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond,” then waved the plastic pistol in everyone’s face and told them he was off to squash Goldfinger. For this Bond personality, Dirk had a very grotty white tuxedo, a garment he’d acquired from a bum in California, who’d claimed he’d got it from Our Man in Havana. The suit was several inches too short in the pants and jacket cuffs, covered with stains whose origins I preferred not to think about, and so creased you knew he and a dozen other people had slept in it.

He also had several sporting personas. Sometimes he pretended he was Tiger Woods, roaming around with an old golfing iron, swinging dangerously in all directions. I’d mistakenly tried to reason with Dirk, telling him that he was the wrong color to start with, would always be the wrong color, and how he lacked the discipline to be a golfing champion. This enraged him. I still hadn’t learned that you can’t reason with a man who’s down on his lithium. I always hoped that I’d get through that thick, sick hide of his, get through to that other Dirk who had to be in there somewhere.

Maybe I was overestimating him. After all, Dirk had been no great shakes as a child either. He’d terrorized me when I was small by opening up The Wizard of Oz to the Wicked Witch of the West illustration. Her green face and clawlike hands had made my whole being curdle. Dirk used to chase me from room to room holding up the scary page and forcing me to look.

He’d drawn swastikas in indelible ink on the foreheads of every one of my dolls and hung them from the curtain rod in my bedroom.

He’d tormented me from the day I made my entrance into this life.

Was it any wonder I couldn’t get through to him?

I clumped to work through the gloomy streets, dodging in doorways and scaring myself every few minutes with my own reflection. My first stop was at La Tazza, the little café next to the gallery. Lunging through the entrance, I was hit with the rich, dense aroma of ten different kinds of coffee. Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice. Behind the counter, a plump purple-hued girl moved lazily, taking glass jars down from shelves and pouring coffee beans into cellophane bags, folding the tops, and smoothing on the little gold labels as if it were a kind of meditation.

“Hi, Nelly.” She looked miffed for a second. “It’s me, Lucy.”

Behind her back, we called her Nelly the Grape. She wore only the color purple, in every variation. Today, her skirt was a deep periwinkle shade, her blouse lilac—while her hair, angelized, glinted like garnets when it caught the light. Her nails, eyelids and lips were a similar wine shade.

“I didn’t recognize you. How’s it going? I don’t know how you can sit there all day in a gallery full of penises. I’d get worked up…you know…being reminded…thinking about it.”

“I’m dead from the neck down. Numb from disillusionment.” I shrugged. “But at least this way, I don’t forget what they look like.”

“Crappy love life, eh?”

“Nonexistent. Put one of those big gooey slices in a bag for me, will you, Nelly? What are they anyway?”

“It’s a Black Forest slice, double fudge and cream, cherry filling, layers of chocolate, whipped cream and cherry along the top as well.”

“That ought to make up for two love lives.”

Nelly prepared my double latte and put the huge sweet gooey slice of empty calories in the bag. “Here you are. Enjoy.” She unconsciously ran her tongue around her lips, like a big fluffy cat enjoying the cream.

I was ready to climb into the trenches. The enemy incursion would be hard to predict. It was silly to take chances.

I unlocked the gallery door, darted inside, locked it again, and got down to the serious business awaiting me.

I had to track down Paul Bleeker’s number and let him know why I hadn’t been at the Rain Room to meet him. Let him know that I hadn’t meant to ditch him. That I was interested. That I still existed. But his number wasn’t listed. I tried calling new listings, found nothing, gave up and opened the e-mails.

I got a jolt when I double-clicked on the incoming mail and there was a message from pbleeker@coastnet.ca— “Sorry, I couldn’t make it last night, Lucy Luv”—I lingered over the “Luv” for a bit—“Something came up. Cheers. P.B.”

The reptile! He hadn’t shown up after all. Well, it was a two-way dumping ground. I typed a new message. “Sorry I didn’t show yesterday. Unavoidable business. Perhaps another evening? Lucy Madison.”

He was supposed to believe that I hadn’t seen his message, that I didn’t even know he’d sent one? All he had to do was look at the time on my message.