Hardly Working. Betsy Burke

long and varied experience in the field,” said Penelope.

      Cleo arrived just before I was about to grab Penelope by the hair and knock some sense into her. Cleo pulled me by the arm toward my office, calling out to the others, “We’re going for lunch.” And then she whispered to me, “I heard all that. It would be so much easier if we were at high school and Penelope had just called you a slut outright. You know? Then you could just corner her in the girls’ bathroom, hold her head down in the toilet bowl and flush.”

      “And flush. And flush,” I agreed.

      Whenever Cleo dragged me to lunch like that, it meant two things.

      Hunger.

      And she was seeing somebody new.

      When she wanted to talk about her private life she refused to go to a restaurant because she was afraid somebody would overhear. And for good reason. Cleo waded indiscriminately through the tides of men who washed up on her shores. Married, committed, or fit to be legally committed, the men that Cleo chose were safely designed for dumping when she grew tired of them, poor guys. But she had a special fondness for the high-profile married type, and she was right to be cautious. The thing about dating high-profile married men is that you never know when a low-profile wife in the know could pop out of the bushes or the woodwork, ready to reduce you to a pulp.

      But this day was a little different.

      Cleo gave me just enough time to grab a cup of dishwater in a paper cup and a cardboard-and-pink-mush sandwich, and then drove us both up to Queen Elizabeth Park. We sat down on a bench and admired the autumn colors of the maples and alders for a second or two, then I said, “Okay. Tell me all about him. What’s he like?”

      “You know all about him,” said Cleo.

      “Somebody I know? Who?”

      “Can’t you guess?”

      I didn’t have to think very far back. I could feel a heaviness in my stomach and it wasn’t just the bad sandwich. I shook my head. “Simon. It’s Simon. Of course it’s Simon. Oh, Cleo, you don’t know what you’re in for.”

      But she didn’t give me a chance to go on. She told me how warm he was and how beautiful, and that she couldn’t get enough of him, that she loved younger men and that she hadn’t slept because he’d kept her up all that night. I should have ruined her fun, right then and there, but I just kept my mouth shut because…well…I did more talking about living than actually doing the living itself, and I admired Cleo for being a doer.

      When we got back from our so-called lunch, Lisa said, “Hey you guys. You know there’s been another cougar sighting?”

      Cleo raised her eyebrows.

      “Yeah, this time in the Spanish Banks area. Don’t know how the poor kitty got from Burnaby to Spanish Banks but they haven’t caught him yet. Careful when you’re out jogging, Dinah. He’s on your side of town now and those big cats move fast, especially when they’re feeling hungry and tetchy.”

      The Tsadziki Pervert came on hot and heavy that week, too. I’d lost the whistle I was going to tie onto the phone. It had probably skidded under the furniture and I didn’t feel like heaving around all those heavy Deco bureaus I’d inherited from my great-grandparents. Or facing all the other junk I’d find under there. Joey was always teasing me, saying, “Just because your furniture dates back to the nineteen-twenties doesn’t mean the junk you find under it should date back to the twenties as well.” The day I moved the furniture was going to be a revelation.

      The Telephone Pervert Voice was now a regular feature of my evenings. “I want to come over,” it hissed, “and cover your thighs in taramasalata (Tuesday), hummus (Wednesday), tsadziki (Thursday), then lick it all off.” I mean, the guy was really hooked on Greek. And my social life was so not-happening that his propositions were almost tempting.

      Almost.

      I had better distractions though, more solid ones. My gay neighbor, for example, was performing a very fine sideshow in his fishbowl of a living room. Tuesday night he decided to go through his usual body-building routine. Whatever it was that weighed on his mind, it had him worked into such a state that I wanted to run over there and say, “C’mon now. Out with it. Stop bottling it all up. Let me give you the number of my therapist.” Because he really seemed troubled and I guess the workout was a good way of keeping his mind off the problem. At times his expression seemed almost tortured it was so serious. While he hefted and pulled and pushed and sweated, I watched and tried to ignore the little thrum of longing in my solar plexus.

      The next night, Wednesday, his partner was there for dinner. My neighbor had placed fat white candles around the room, and after dinner he and his friend took their drinks over to the brown leather couch, where they began to have an intense conversation.

      I wondered if lip-reading courses were given anywhere in town.

      And then the guest stopped talking and my neighbor grabbed the other man and gave him a long tight hug. He had such a tender expression on his face that watching them brought tears to my eyes.

      The next night, strange things were going on. My neighbor had guests but they weren’t human. I counted five black cats in his living room, skittering around, climbing up the curtains, scratching the furniture. My neighbor didn’t seem too concerned about the damage. He picked each cat up in turn, stroked gently, rubbed their ears until they were calm, rolled them onto their backs and stroked their bellies, then held their paws and played with them. In that moment, I wanted to be a black cat, too.

      Friday

      At ten-thirty, Lisa, Cleo and I knocked on Jake’s office door.

      “Come in.”

      We all entered, our faces plastered with the most businesslike expressions we could muster. Ian Trutch was lounging in Jake’s extra chair. He raised his hand. “Hello ladies.”

      We gave a chorus of hellos.

      “I was just telling Jake that I was going to have to corner Dinah to go over the figures.” Ian’s smile made it clear that he wasn’t just talking about numbers. Cleo nudged me hard and Lisa giggled.

      I let out a long breath and said, “We just wanted to let you know that we’re on our way out for the afternoon. Have a few office errands to run.”

      Lisa and Cleo piped up a little too quickly, “Field work.”

      “And I have to see Halliwell, the printer,” I said.

      Jake wasn’t used to us justifying our actions. “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

      Our eyes were fixed on Ian. He looked at Jake as if to say, “Do they normally do this?”

      We all nodded a little nervously then hurried out of the building.

      “I think he bought it,” whispered Cleo.

      I said, “Well if he didn’t, I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it.”

      “And what’s more, Dinah, he likes you. Milk it for all it’s worth.”

      I laughed. “You mean I might still have a job while the rest of you are standing in the bread line if I let the CEO crunch my numbers?”

      “Something like that.”

      We rushed out to Lisa’s battered old rust-and-rhubarb colored VW van. She drove fast to my place. We tumbled out and raced up the stairs.

      In my bedroom, Cleo said, “I hope I’m dressed okay. What does one wear to a tree-hugging anyway?” It didn’t matter what she wore. A burlap sack would look good on her.

      “Cleoooo,” sang Lisa, “we do not call it a tree-hugging. And it’s not a fashion event either. McClean and Snow Incorporated are about to knock down a stand of boreal forest that is millennia old, destroying the habitat of numerous species of wildlife with the runoff polluting I don’t know how many streams and fixing it so the salmon won’t be returning…”