“Orion met with me and Miss Gracie last night. We talked through some of our problems. I feel very steady, very centered, Cockring. And why waste money on him when I can take this trip?”
“It just seems like he left kind of abruptly,” I say.
“Abruptly? I was with him for six fucking weeks,” Kathi says. “And, anyway, like he says, ‘Change comes from within.’ So there’s really not much else he could do. I want change. That’s a win for all of us, no? And I have you.”
“I guess.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll prove it to you,” she says, tapping my arm, adjusting her hair, turning back to her phone.
“Did you have sex with him?” I ask.
“Almost,” she says, baiting me, daring me to ask more questions.
“Good talk,” I say.
During the preflight announcements, Kathi opens her purse and pulls out little vials. One is her travel perfume. One is nail-polish remover. She pulls out cotton balls. She pulls out glitter nail polish.
“Are you seriously going to paint your nails?” I ask. “I don’t think you can do that on the plane.”
“No one cares, Cockring.” Kathi opens the vial. “Oops, wrong one,” she says, putting down the perfume and grabbing the remover. She opens it. The smell is strong and pervasive. She dabs the remover onto a cotton ball.
“That really stinks,” I say.
“Does it?”
“We’re in an enclosed space.”
“Is it?” she asks.
Flight attendants start to scramble, no doubt looking for the source of the noxious fumes.
Kathi turns and her elbow knocks over the open vial of perfume.
“Oops,” she says. “Well, that’ll take care of the nail-polish-remover smell.”
* * *
“I hope we survive Canada,” Kathi says as we land in the town of Yellowknife. In baggage claim, I haul Kathi’s luggage to a quiet corner and she and Roy watch as I plunder it, plucking out her thick winter coat, her knit cap, her wool scarf, her leather gloves.
I close her suitcases and look over at Kathi, now thick with layers, already sweating, ready for snow and ice.
“What are you wearing, Cockring?”
I look down at my outfit—sensible shoes and jeans and a peacoat from H&M. I shrug and say, “This.”
Kathi shakes her head. “Jesus Christ. You don’t have winter clothes?”
“This is winter in California,” I say, motioning to my outfit.
“This is winter,” Kathi says, pointing outside to a blizzard. “Let’s go shopping so you don’t get hypothermia. If you die, how will I ever get home?”
Instead of going to the hotel, we first stop at a mall. Kathi walks over to a computer kiosk with all the stores listed. She moves her finger up and down until something catches her eye. “Fourth floor!” she says, jetting to an escalator with me and Roy in her wake.
Kathi leads us to a furrier tucked in a dark corner, with its pretentious façade and caramel lighting and dark-wood accents.
“I’m not wearing a fur coat,” I tell her.
“Who says it’s for you?” she says, opening the door and dashing inside.
The clerk, a thin older woman with her hair in a tight bun, looks Kathi up and down like she’s a swamp creature. “Can I help youuuuuu?”
“Hiiii,” Kathi says, Roy jerking his leash to and fro as he tries to get a sniff of the pelts. “Do you have any coats in dog sizes?”
I roll my eyes. Of course she’s trying to buy a fur to keep Roy warm and cozy and chic.
The snobby woman who works there laughs. “Um. No. We don’t have ‘dog’ sizes.”
Kathi’s face shifts slightly. She smells an attitude, a fight. She smiles and says, “In that case…” And Kathi, not breaking eye contact with the clerk, reaches her hand to the right and grabs the first coat she comes into contact with. “I’ll take this one,” she says.
Kathi slaps it on the counter, a brown number with black lines—this must have once been a beautiful beast. “Cockring,” Kathi says.
I step forward and proudly hand the clerk Kathi’s credit card, and we relish the beeping and the clanking of the register as the clerk lets out a huff. As she starts to wrap Kathi’s new coat with crisp, fancy tissue paper, Kathi speaks up, “Oh. No. I don’t need it wrapped. Do you have scissors?”
And while the clerk stares in disbelief, Kathi Kannon, film icon, grabs the coat, sits on the floor, and slices up the garment, tiny bits of fur flying everywhere, until what was once a woman’s luxury coat is now, indeed, dog-sized. As Kathi stands and exits, it’s up to me to provide the look, and I fix my gaze on the clerk and raise my eyebrows to say, Don’t fuck with her.
Roy’s new fur only stays secured on his wobbly body for a few moments, but the experience warmed him, and us.
Moments later, in a proper retailer for people like middle-class me, Kathi buys me my first real winter coat, a thick scarf, and stylish black gloves. She pulls the coat’s hood over my head and tugs the drawstrings tight. “You can’t look like an amateur out there with the northern lights,” she says. “This trip could be the one that changes your life forever.”
“How? By getting frostbite and having all my toes cut off?”
“God, I hope so,” she says.
I’m thinking, I hope we survive Canada.
Kathi selected our hotel not based on our usual standards of luxury, size of bathtub, or breadth of room-service dessert menu. No, Kathi chose our hotel on this occasion based on convenience—what’s closest to the show, the new epicenter of our lives, the aurora borealis.
Our adjoining rooms are perfunctory. Bed, check. Toilet, check. TV, check. But no pay-per-view, no porn titles to peruse, only a few cable channels aptly described as basic.
“We’re fucked!” I say, flipping the channels, unable to find anything compelling at eight in the evening in Yellowknife, Canada. “Sorry there’s nothing on TV tonight.”
“TV?!” Kathi yells from her bathroom. “We need sleep, Cockring. We have a big day tomorrow before we see the lights.”
“Oh, no. What are we doing before the lights?”
Kathi emerges from her tiny bathroom and in the doorway strikes a sexy pose befitting Marilyn Monroe. “We’re going dogsledding.”
“Ohhh. Please no,” I say, fearing what could be ahead—namely, Kathi and I, one or both of us, in the hospital with broken bones, dog bites, regret, all under a cloud of what might be her fragile sobriety.
Assistant Bible Verse 143: Pack tourniquets, iodine wipes, cyanide pills.
* * *
At a crisp and bright ten in the morning, we leave Roy asleep in bed and hop in a ride sent by the hotel concierge—some guy in a Ford Explorer—and sit side by side in the back, both of us shivering, me from the cold, and Kathi from the shock of being awake, out and about, and fully lucid at this hour of the day. The driver is polite but disinterested, wearing only a cardigan and stealing glances in the rearview mirror of us wrapped up to the size of sumo wrestlers.
“Do we look like locals?” Kathi asks him.