Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Out on the balcony while the photographer flips the steaks, their fat hissing against the fake briquettes like a clique of fashionable viper-mouthed grade seven private-school girls, 1 and tells her about watching a bridge blow up outside of Sarajevo and how it was too close for comfort (emphasis his) and how a dog, a really ugly mutt, just stood on one side of this non-existent bridge whimpering and that all he wanted to do was take a picture of the dog, not the bodies, and get out of there, Didi wonders whether it was maybe unwise to have hinted so broadly last night to everyone up there on the roof that Annie Leibovitz might be at this other party tonight at the photographer’s place, which has turned out not to be a party of any kind at all.

Maybe it had been the soupy stillness of the air last night, the humidity that hung so thick the tiny pimento olive lights on the poor pissed-on palm tree glimmered as if through a fog, but she had felt as if there were a trampoline beneath her feet, felt as if anything could happen, so maybe she had convinced herself that Annie Leibovitz was going to be at the photographer’s party, when, in fact, the photographer himself had quite possibly hinted at no such thing at all.

The telephone rings and rings again, but the photographer just ignores it, poking at those alarming potatoes with a fork and talking quietly, in this flat, even tone Didi associates with people who are going off their nut but straining to appear normal, about how no one seems to really listen anymore, how everyone is too busy “communicating” (he did the quote-mark thing with his fingers) to listen, and how there was a time when he flew to the direst places on earth to find pockets of silence so that he could hear himself think, and how, believe it or not, the deepest silences come in the aftermath of an explosion, in that thin wedge of time between the explosion itself and the chaos- the sirens and keening and yelling-that follows, and that this is the same no matter what country on earth you are in. And all the while he airdrops her name every few words like it’s a relief package for starving Eritreans, Believe it or not, Deirdre , and This is the same, Deirdre , until she feels the skin tightening across her face, pulling her mouth into a grimace, although she’s not sure if she should be smiling or nodding soberly.

Then there are her hands. She has absolutely no idea what to do with her hands, which are twitching to grab those two Zeppelin-sized potatoes and hurl them into the street like grenades. But then where would that leave her?

Last night had been so full of possibilities, even after she’d been forced to give up on the butt-smacking guy when that tight-T-shirted Buddha bitch came and stuck her tits in where they didn’t belong. There’d been that Angelina Jolie-lipped VJ couple who looked like they could be brother and sister and who kept peering at her as if they were trying to convey something telepathically. Although that was before she tried to up her madcap quotient by juggling a handful of olives that went flying all over the place, causing that Eurasian tranny with the yellow hair and the five-inch cork-soled wedgies to slip on them and call her some choice names that weren’t even worth repeating, after which a very pale woman with Smartie-coloured braces (who someone said was Rufus’s new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend) raised her eyebrows at Didi in a seriously empathetic manner. Didi could practically see You go, girl! in a cartoon thought-bubble above the woman’s head. Now, out here on the photographer’s balcony, all this talk of explosions is bringing her down, bringing on the mortality thoughts, which are verboten, as her therapist has told her. Is this the old guy’s way of making a play, of impressing her with his heroic journeys? Because if that’s what he thinks, she’s just not interested.

The photographer is looking at her as if it’s her turn to say something. The barbecue tongs in his hand drip sauce out over the railing of the balcony and she wonders if somebody walking by in the morning fourteen storeys down below will think that what they see are drops of blood. And if somebody jumped off this balcony, naming no names, at this exact moment there would be a chalk outline down there tomorrow in the shape of a person as well as some real blood, which may or may not look as real to passersby as the drops of barbecue sauce. Didi considers telling the photographer this, thinks he may find it interesting, but instead she leans out over the railing and concentrates on looking as if she’s peering so hard into the distance that she can divine the future, when in fact she can’t see anything at all through the haze of barbecue smoke and the pinpricks of static dancing behind her eyes.

In the photographer’s bedroom, after inspecting the disappointingly dull contents of his bathroom medicine cabinet, Didi flings open the closet and sees an ocean of shirts, all in pale blue denim. She hugs the shirts to her and burrows her face into them as if she were his long-time lover missing him dreadfully while he was off on assignment somewhere remote and squalid, and she thinks that if he were to wander in at this exact moment to find out what was taking her so long, his heart would involuntarily contract at the sight of a young woman so capable of devotion that she’s transported from her earthly surroundings.

Didi deeply inhales a scent she finds surprisingly fresh for a man his age, a scent that scurries up her nostrils like the first sharp tang of spring, until she realizes it’s the smell of dry-cleaned clothes, and because she’s allergic to dry-cleaning chemicals she knows it’s only a matter of time before her eyelids start swelling shut and her nose begins to run and then any chance at all for salvaging the evening will be gone. Back in the bathroom she checks her face, which still seems all right, although she has to close one eye and then the other in order to focus properly. She thought she was a redhead this week, but the person staring back at Didi has this black hair and these terrible chunky bangs. When did she dye her hair black? When did she have it cut? This whole time she’s been acting like a redhead, doing red-headed things with her hands, saying red-headed things, trying to think red-headed thoughts, and her hair has been black? Was it black last night?

She’s already back in the dining room refilling her glass when she remembers she didn’t flush, unlike early this morning when, after waking up alone on the roof (even the palm tree was gone!) and somehow managing to crawl down into the apartment before being sick, Didi made sure she flushed and then flushed again. Then she’d washed her face, scraping at the flecks of roof pitch with an AirMiles card someone had left in the soap dish, before stepping into the hallway and belting out the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show . One of her hosts appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, wide-eyed, naked, just as she was pretending to toss her hat into the air Mary Richards-style, and closed the door in her face, loudly, but she caught the pretend hat anyway just to prove she didn’t need other people around to have fun.

It was only afterwards, when she was standing down on Adelaide, that she realized she didn’t have cab fare or even enough for the streetcar and had to walk all the way home while flipping the bird at ignorant would-be johns in rusting Impalas and gleaming Isuzu Rodeos with bicycle racks on the back who couldn’t differentiate if their very lives depended on it between her ironically short terry-cloth shorts (that had just been at a party with Rufus Wainwright and his new lover and the latter’s understanding and rather empathetic ex-girlfriend) and something a hooker would wear. And after all that she had so looked forward to tonight, to a fun evening in a fourteenth-floor luxury apartment belonging to a semi-famous photographer who specialized in portraits of aging women intellectuals, so excuse her!