Free The Blondes by Emily Schultz Page B

suddenly recalled Karl saying that she was Polish, that she had come to Canada at sixteen. Now the fact that Kovacs was blonde made sense.
    “Let’s not start with that.” Kovacs indicated the computer with a wave of her hand as if it were a distasteful thing.
    I nodded for the second or third time.
    She squinted at me and asked me how old I was. “Twenty-five?” she guessed. She didn’t wait for me to nod or correct her, and I wasn’t about to. She asked me where I’d studied. No, wait—I remember she made an assumption, asking if I’d studied entirely in Toronto. She said the word
Toronto
with some disdain, as if even the name of the city was off-putting.
    “I did my BA in Communications in Windsor, Ontario,” I told her.
    “I know that Windsor is in Ontario. I lived in your country for seven years, hmm.” She tacked on
hmm
‘s for emphasis. Everything about her had emphasis, from her eyeliner to her phrases. “There it sits, across the border from Detroit. Such an
absolutely
ruined city.”
    The drinks arrived and she finished her first glass efficiently but elegantly and handed it to the server.
    “Windsor,” she said, attempting to find the conversation’s thread again. “Windsor. And then you moved to Toronto and became acquainted with our Karl.”
    I nodded. I drank. I reflected that I ought to put more effort into what I was saying if I intended to impress her. Which is funny. It’s funny because of how little it ultimately mattered.
    I told Kovacs that I liked her book, that I admired its
writerliness
, that it was a crucial work “full of salient details,” a phrase Karl used when he was excited about something he’d read. That it was “chatoyant and layered.” I was about tolaunch into how I might reference it in my own work when her look stopped me. She seemed vaguely offended. She cocked her head and her hair swished. It was so shiny, I remember. “Which one?” she said.
    I immediately realized my mistake, but I plunged on.
“Make—Making of the Blonde Icon.”
    “Ah, the Mayer.” And she waved a hand carelessly. “I’ve had a new one come out.”
    “I see.” For the record: that information hadn’t been on the department website.
    “Yes, yes, the
New York Times
reviewed it last week, somewhat favourably.” She grimaced. “You do read it, don’t you?”
    I made a mental note to begin buying the paper regularly instead of scanning it irregularly online or in the library. In preparation for this meeting I’d read four hundred and fifty pages on Louis B. Mayer and 1940s Hollywood, even though my own interests were much more contemporary, and Kovacs clearly wasn’t impressed. I attempted to plunge into my thoughts on the work anyway. I told her she had “made real the generalizability of beauty.” I guess I was thinking if I could say the right thing, prove how thoroughly I’d pored over her book, she would warm to me. But she stopped me again with one look. Actually, it was a looking away. A television was mounted above the bar, its sound turned down. I stopped talking when I saw what was playing.
    A jumpy handheld image filled the screen, something recorded on a phone camera. It was shot from the street through a window. It showed a woman in a salon with a purplesmock around her neck. Vaguely, we could see a table inside the room, and an elaborate hanging ornament or lighting system above it. The woman was gesturing, clearly agitated, and a man was trying to grab her arm and subdue her. She was tiny. Her hand shot up, grabbed the hi-tech lighting system, and yanked it down on his head. He slumped to the table and then the image shook as if the cameraperson had stumbled backward. I wondered why the cameraperson had begun shooting the scene anyway, but later when I watched it online there was audio and you could hear the woman in the salon shrieking. At any rate, there was a burst of pavement, as if the person recording the scene had decided to retreat, then another image