Late Nights on Air Read Online Free PDF

had a clear picture of the driven, moody, hugely successful businessman so good with his hands he’d built his own forty-foot sailboat and named it
Nansen
.
    Then she did meet him and he was brown as a nut from sailing — in a black polo shirt, white cotton pants, bare feet. Immensely good-looking in his deep tan. Holding by the hand a diapered, towheaded grandson. Standing in the driveway as she drove up for the first time.
    They walked to the beach together, they swam. He carried a bathing cap of sea water to wash off her sandy feet, put sun-warmed stones into her cold hands, took her sailing. Married, he was, to a woman who was afraid of water, whereas she of the soft, unshaven legs loved the sea.
    In her father-in-law’s home there were no rooms where they could hide, an open-concept, gravity-defying house on the side of a hill. A mistake, he said to her. If you don’t have a door to close, you don’t have a door to open.
    Then move, she said.
    You make it sound simple.
    You’re not
old
, she said.
    She was twenty-seven, he was fifty-eight.
    It was she who moved, leaving his son one day and coming north. If her father-in-law loved her enough, he would find her. But a year had gone by.
    Whenever Dido entered or left a room, eyes followed her. “You watch her just like a man,” Eddy the tech said to Gwen one day. Red hair, small eyes, tall, lean, older, in a town where “older” meant thirty-two, Eddy was an unsettling presence. He looked right through Gwen as she flushed, the innocent up and down of her scrutiny under scrutiny. “Your eyes were on her body,” he said, “just like a man’s.”
    Uncomfortable, uncomfortable. And just a taste of what was to come.
    A station break. All she had to do was sit at the control board in the announce booth, lower the round dial—it was called a pot—that controlled the feed from the network, flipthe switch, and open her mike by turning another pot, then give the local and regional weather.
    Harry was with her. “Watch the clock,” he told her. “At twenty-nine seconds, get the network back up.”
    At thirty-one seconds, Harry reached over her shoulder with experienced hands and lowered one pot (her mike) and raised the other (the network). Toronto came back in mid-word, and Gwen was giving the final temperatures to a dead microphone.
    She turned around and located his face.
    “The first time is the worst,” he said. “I’ve known announcers who opened their mouths and nothing came out.”
    She clenched her hands. Cold, clammy.
    Harry said firmly, “You’ve got to keep one eye on the clock as you read.”
    Then he took her hands, his own being warm, and held them for a moment. At his comforting touch, life came into her again and she said, “That was awful!”
    She’d been dropped in front of a microphone, like a child dropped out of a sack: no mother, no father, all alone on the highway of sound.
    “‘Thro’ the jaws of Death,’” quoted Harry, “‘Back from the mouth of Hell.’“
    “The Bible?”
    “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’“
    “Kipling,” she said.
    “Tennyson.”
    And she buried her ignorant head in her hands.

    After two weeks in Yellowknife, Gwen managed to find a furnished basement apartment on an unpaved side street that ran off Franklin Avenue. She was told she was lucky. In general, decent housing was hard to find and rents were atrocious. In her small, anonymous living room, however, she missed the domestic companionship of Eleanor and her roommate. We shared suppers and breakfasts and the stories of our lives, she thought.
    Dust drifted in through her open window and gathered on the books piled on the floor beside her bed. She wrote her name on the mirror. A block away was the public library, where she’d gone to hear a visiting poet read. To the southeast, a five-minute walk away, was the radio station, where she wasn’t doing very well at all. A place utterly contained, enclosed, yet voices carried beyond the