What is she doing here watching this older man, practically an old man, briskly rubbing garlic against the insides of a wooden bowl in preparation for a Caesar salad when she could be at a real party like the party last night where that one guy said he was so angry (angry!) at her for having such a beautiful butt he couldn’t help smacking it with the flat of his hand, and then he did-so hard it stung Didi through her terry-cloth shorts, the same shorts that had everyone joking they should be using her as a hand towel, and didn’t she finally let that freckle- faced little lesbian food stylist do just that to prove she had a sense of humour? The whole thing had been a riot, in fact, even though the butt-smacking guy had turned out to be an alarm salesman for a security company who lived out in Ajax and thought Rufus Wainwright (who was at the party, someone said, although she didn’t see him with her own eyes) was a famous racehorse, so she couldn’t go home with him. Could she?
It had been a rooftop party where you climbed out the kitchen window and then up the fire escape, so if you had to go to the bathroom you couldn’t just bumble yourself down the hall and bang amiably on the door to dislodge some bashful substance abuser, you really had to want to go, although if you were a guy, let’s say a butt-smacking alarm salesman who didn’t wear a belt with his jeans (Rufus came in a sarong, someone said, although no one she knew actually saw him), you could piss into the base of a potted palm tree the hosts had lugged up onto the roof, with no doubt great difficulty, and strung with tiny lights resembling olives with pimento centres. And even though up until then Didi had encouraged the guy-even dribbled some of her martini down the front of his shirt, his handprint still a low-voltage buzz on her backside-after the incident with the palm tree, combined with the living-in-Ajax thing, the belt-loop thing, and the Rufus thing, she couldn’t very well be seen with him and so she stayed long after he left with some overly loud girl in a Lycra T-shirt with a picture of Buddha on it and found herself waking up at about five-thirty this morning with roof pitch spotting her cheek as the sun was just starting to simmer behind the Gooderham & Worts building in the distance.
Now tonight, on a gas barbecue out on the old guy’s balcony, two steaks sizzle and two enormous baked potatoes sit in their foil skins. There’s not a tapenade or a small wrapped thingy in sight. Who eats food like this?
Excuse her for thinking this was going to be a party party or at least a dinner party with a few other people. After an hour of highballs and stilted conversation (during which Didi didn’t know what else to do with her hands so she kept drinking and twisting the edge of her blouse until it looked like the snout of a small, angry, genetically altered monkey, and tried not to stare at the photographs lining the walls-all of older women, some extreme close-ups that turned their faces into what she imagines the baked surface of a Nevada desert looks like, and a few nudes in which skin falls towards earth like putty, like the women are melting, decomposing, in front of her eyes) she realizes no one else is coming, so she starts to wonder, not for the first time, what it would be like to sleep with a man this old, a man who could be fifty, maybe even fifty-five, and thinks she could stand it, that it would at least be an experience she could later use as a conversation piece, a war story. But he hasn’t come on to her, at least not in the usual ways, although maybe older people do it differently. Why else would he have asked her here after she interviewed him last week for that mini-profile in the style section of NOW?
His forte, as she referred to it in her piece, was photographing aging female intellectuals, which Didi, personally, thinks is kind of perverse, although in her article she called him a feminist and praised him for loving women for their minds, because that’s what the press release said-although she didn’t believe it for a minute, especially when he insisted on calling her by her full name and invited her over, saying Wear whatever you like, Deirdre with feigned disinterest after she asked. She’s wearing something filmy, a pastel-blue blouse that floats above her midsection (exposing the only tattoo-free stretch of twentythree-year-old backside in the civilized world-her fear-of-pain thing neutralizing the humiliation she’s entitled to feel over not having a kanji symbol or Celtic knot peeking out above her thong; even her nose ring is a clip-on). And just so no one would think she takes clothing that seriously, she’s wearing track pants with the blouse, a combination she had hoped would keep them guessing, keep them wondering what that Deirdre was all about. But there’s no them here, only him.
So last night there she was having such a great time, what with the terry-cloth-shorts thing and the butt- smacking thing and Rufus W. in his sarong there with his new boyfriend (who she thinks she did catch a glimpse of from the back after someone pointed him out), and now here she is watching a guy in brown plastic sandals, with his seriously yellowed toenails poking out for all the world to see, tossing a salad and telling her about the time he was sent to photograph the Berlin Wall coming down and how he was shocked at feeling a little sadness and nostalgia for Checkpoint Charlie and the damn wall itself (emphasis his) and how these feelings were so disturbing amidst the general euphoria that he just stood there as if paralyzed for a minute or two while champagne rained down on his head as if he were being baptized even though he didn’t deserve it. And because there’s nothing remotely flirtatious about this story and because she doesn’t understand why he’s telling her all this, Didi wants to ask, “What are we doing here?” It’s the not knowing that’s killing her. If nothing is going to happen, she’s going to walk out right now, because what’s the point of eating all these carbs and then just going home to watch some Rhoda reruns on WTN? That’s what she’ll be forced to do, as she can’t very well go catch up with everyone-the gang-later and admit that the party she went to at the semi-famous photographer’s place was a bust.
The interview last week had been fun. The photographer had brought his favourite camera down to the gallery, a Mamiya, he told her, a real man’s camera because you needed man-sized hands to work it, although Annie Leibovitz used the same camera, he told her, as she had these man-sized hands. It was gratifying how everyone at the party last night was impressed by how Didi effortlessly worked her insider knowledge of Annie Leibovitz and this other sort-of-famous photographer and their Mamiyas into the conversation as she gamely offered her shorts as a hand towel, although the information was wasted on the butt-smacking guy from Ajax who thought Annie Leibovitz was a stand-up comedian and had never heard of the sort-offamous photographer who took pictures of aging lady intellectuals and in fact had made a joke about lady intellectuals which she had thought was funny at the time, although she’d stopped laughing abruptly when she realized no one else found it funny and pretended that she was really just choking because her drink had gone down the wrong way. (No one thought to thump her on the back and later, much later, she couldn’t help wondering what would’ve happened if she really had been choking.) After that came the incident with the palm tree and that Buddha-shirt girl, and waking up alone on the roof early this morning and climbing down into the apartment and peeking in on her hosts sleeping so peacefully in their bedroom, wrapped around each other, surrounded by old family photos in really nice-quality frames, and then letting herself out, but not before making a fair degree of noise in the bathroom hoping they’d wake up so she could wave goodbye and hear them tell her she’d been the life of the party.
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
