Late Nights on Air Read Online Free PDF Page B

horizon. She
was
the horizon to those listening.
    One day Dido came upon her standing stock still in the record library, moaning to herself. “Don’t think you’re the only one,” Dido assured her. “I cringe when I hear myself too.”
    But Gwen didn’t believe her. Dido lived outside embarrassment—in the free and easy woods of herself.
    Dido was never slapdash, never in a hurry. She brought to every task the same care that Gwen’s father brought to the repair of a wristwatch or necklace or alarm clock. After eating a sandwich at her desk, Dido would brush her teeth in the washroom in the basement, taking twice as long as Gwen would have taken had she bothered, plying her toothbrush like an artisan working with ivory.
    “You’re so good on air, Dido.” Gwen was standing with her arms wrapped around herself. “You make it sound simple.”
    Dido smiled. It
was
simple. What could she say? It came naturally. “It’s a piece of cake for me. Do I say it correctly?”
    “You say everything correctly.”
    Dido smiled again. She liked Gwen—the way her face lit up and she stopped whatever she was doing to talk for a while, to ask her opinion, to listen.
    “Try to slow down,” Dido advised her. “You go too fast. But you sound better than you think you do.” She pushed Gwen’s hair off her troubled forehead. “You don’t believe me. But I always say what I think.”
    Dido’s unconventional beauty went hand in hand with the light. Officially, the June sun set close to midnight and rose three hours later, but it never got dark. Dusk, yes. Between sunset and sunrise there was a soft sort of dusk and the street lights came on, but nobody needed them or noticed them. The constant light was like endless caffeine.
    One afternoon, as Dido stood talking to Eleanor, Mrs. Dargabble came through the door, wearing a white-and-black scarf on her head. A wrap of sorts half fell off her shoulders and her red lipstick was in motion too, travelling like water through sand into the fine wrinkles above her lips and the deep fissures below. Mrs. Dargabble exclaimed to Eleanor, “I had to see Dido here in Yellowknife!” Then she greeted the woman in question by quoting Shakespeare, “‘In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand.’“
    From her receptionist’s desk, Eleanor watched Dido deal with one admirer after another. It was like being close to a beehive, the steady hum of light and attraction, and the mysteryat the core. People were drawn to the North and in the North they were drawn to Dido, so it seemed, and Dido managed herself very well. It was an art, appearing interested while saving the main part of yourself for something better.
    Mrs. Dargabble was telling Dido that once upon a time she had been a hard-working seamstress with a lucrative business designing clothes. But then she met her husband - her first husband—a lovely man, from Boston like herself, who begged her to “jump.” He urged her to be colourful and rambunctious and carefree, to shed her responsibilities and marry him instead. We came north together, she was saying, we set up a business raising dogs until—may he rest—he drowned ten years ago.
    Gwen came out of the newsroom, and the old woman caught her hand as she walked by. “You’re so soft,” Mrs. Dargabble said to Gwen with traces, still, of her Boston accent: yo-ah for you’re. “So soft. My husband told me to jump. You must
jump.”
    “Jump?”
    “You must
jump.”
    Gwen made an agonized face and continued on into the studio.
    Mrs. Dargabble had taken the chair that Eleanor always offered. It was on the side of her desk near the window and next to a small table of plants, avocadoes and oranges in pots, started by her from seed, and a handsome jade plant of uncertain age that Ralph Cody had given her after he saw her reading Ezra Pound’s
Cathay
. She’d heard his voice once, the poet who slowly went mad on the air. A short clip of one of his fascist broadcasts for Radio