“Most of my serious mirror time was devoted to trying to look like Sandra Dee.”
Ariel looked baffled.
“Sandra Dee was the Cameron Diaz of the fifties,” I said.
Ariel grinned. “Gotcha! Anyway, I think I was trying to be hip and ironic when I dredged up poor old Hippocrates today, but Fraser listened very seriously, and suddenly I was very serious, too. Then the strangest thing happened. When I got to the line ‘I will preserve the purity of my life and my art,’ I couldn’t speak. Fraser reached out and took my hand, and I finished. Then he asked me what I thought had happened. I was so embarrassed I told him the truth…”
“Which was?”
Ariel gave the perfect leaf a final twirl and handed it to me with an enigmatic smile. “That I need to find out what happened to that girl in the mirror who believed in the purity of life and art.”
She never spoke to me about Fraser Jackson again. I had never seen them together on campus. I hadn’t even associated them in my mind till I’d spoken to Mieka. Yet I was certain that he was the man to whom Ariel had turned when she sought a father for her child.
As I walked back from Political Science 101 class on Wednesday morning, I was wholly absorbed with the problem of how to get Fraser Jackson to open up to me. My arms were full of essays, and when I reached to open the door to the main office, they shifted, and the copy of Political Perspectives that had appeared so fortuitously minutes before my first meeting with Ariel’s class, slid to the floor. I bent to pick it up and knew I had my opening.
Rosalie was at her computer. She was wearing a sweater set the colour of violets, and she was beaming. “Guess what?” she said. “I cooked an entire meal for Robert, and he loved it.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “What did you make?”
“All his favourites.” As she recited the menu, she ticked the items off on her blunt-edged fingers: “Roast beef with suet pudding, fried potatoes, onion rings, broccoli in cheese sauce, rolls and butter, and gravy, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “And for dessert?”
“Chocolate eclairs,” she said. “But I cheated. I bought them frozen at Safeway.” A tiny frown crimped her forehead. “Am I wrong, or are you looking a little disapproving?”
“Not disapproving,” I said. “It’s just… Rosalie, how old is Robert?”
“Sixty-one,” she said.
“If you want him to see sixty-two, you might want to cut back a little on the cholesterol.”
She took my meaning. “A new cookbook?”
“Maybe just a more judicious selection from the old one.”
Rosalie whipped out the Rombauers from under her desk. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.
“Before you do, I have a question. Yesterday, when Ariel’s book turned up on our doorstep, you said there was no note.”
“That’s because there wasn’t one.”
“I know, but I forgot to ask you if the book was in any kind of wrapping.”
“It wasn’t wrapped up,” she said. “Just stuck in an inter-office envelope. But your name wasn’t on it, and there was no sender’s name. I checked.”
“Is the envelope still around?”
“I haven’t sent anything out.” She walked over to the shelf under our mailboxes and removed a stack of large brown envelopes. “I’ll go through these if you’ll tell me what to look for.”
I glanced at the envelope on top. “No need,” I said. “We hit the jackpot, first time out.” I pointed to the last address.
“The Theatre department,” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“I think we’ve found our secret Santa,” I said.
I dropped off my books, and headed off in search of Fraser Jackson. His office was in our campus’s shiniest new bauble, the University Centre, a building with a soaring glass entrance, floor tiles arranged to represent an abstracted aerial view of our province’s southern landscape, a painting of a huge woman, defiantly and confidently naked, an upscale food court, two theatres, a clutch of offices that tended to student affairs, and the departments of Music and Theatre.
When I stopped in front of Fraser Jackson’s door, a student passing by told me that Professor Jackson was in the Shu-Box, the nickname that had inevitably attached itself to the theatre donated by philanthropists Morris and Jacqui Schumiatcher.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the theatre, but I felt my way to a chair at the back, settled in, and watched as a student massacred one of the loveliest passages in The Tempest. Jeff Neeley, the young man onstage, was the quarterback of our football team, and he recited Caliban’s speech at breakneck speed, as if he had to unload the words before he was sacked.
When Jeff finished, Fraser rose from his seat in the front row and walked over to him. Jeff’s body tightened, but Fraser’s voice was disarmingly soft.
“You’re finding it hard to connect to this.” It was a statement of fact, not a question. “You know that moment that comes when you first wake up and what you’re waking up to is a hundred times worse than what you’re leaving behind?”
Jeff knitted his brow, then the light bulb went on. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when I wake up the morning after we’ve lost a game. The worst was last year against the Huskies. All I could throw were interceptions. Then in the final play I got clocked and fractured my femur. They shot me full of Demerol. I was dreaming that I’d run into the end zone for a touchdown and we’d won; then I woke up.” He shook his head in wonder at a world that had such moments in it. “I would have given my left nut to have drifted off again.”
Fraser’s nod was empathetic. He was wearing Nikes, jogging shorts, and a sweatshirt. His body was hard- muscled and athletic; it was easy to believe he understood the power of Jeff’s dream. When he put his hand on Jeff’s shoulder and locked eyes with him, the fact that he’d made a connection was apparent. “I knew you had an instinct for what this scene’s about,” Fraser said. “Now use what you just told me, and let’s hear it again – from the top.”
Jeff squared his shoulders and began: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises…” By the time he got to “The clouds methought would open, and show riches/Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked/I cried to dream again,” he had me. He wasn’t Kenneth Branaugh, but he wasn’t bad.
Jeff glanced towards Fraser expectantly.
“Not there yet,” Fraser said. “But definitely within field-goal range. Keep working on it.”
As Jeff sprinted past me towards the doors that would release him into the world of sunlight and scrimmages, his relief was palpable, but I knew my ordeal was just beginning.
Fraser Jackson was slumped in a seat in the front row with a script, but as soon as he spotted me, he smiled and stood up. “Did you catch the performance?”
“I did.”
“There’s still a perception among the jocks that Theatre is an easy credit. I’m doing my best to get the word out that it’s not.”
“If the entire Rams team transfers into Poli Sci, I’ll know who to thank,” I said.
His laughter was deep and reassuringly warm. “What can I do for you, Joanne?”
“You’ve already done it,” I said. “I came to thank you for sending me Ariel’s copy of Political Perspectives.”
He exhaled heavily. “How did you know it came from me?”
“You used an inter-office envelope. Your department was the last addressee, and I knew you and Ariel were close.”
His eyes were wary. “I wouldn’t have made much of a spy,” he said finally.
It was now or never. “Maybe not,” I said, “but Ariel believed you’d be a good father.”
Pain knifed his face, but he was an actor who had learned strategies for containing emotion. He shifted his gaze from me to the empty pool of light on the darkened stage. “She told you?”
“It must have been a terrible loss for you,” I said.
“It was,” he said huskily. “It’s been hard not being able to talk about it.”
