Would I Lie to You

by Mary Lou Dickinson

  “Tell me what’s going on,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “David,” he blurted out. “Who is David?”

  He ought to have known. He, a psychic, should already have figured it out. But he knew that psychics were poor readers of their own lives, and, as usual, the traumas in his unfolded just as trauma unfolded for anyone. Unexpectedly. Like his sister’s death. Anna. He had loved Anna more than any of his brothers; she, the one he had turned to all his life to help him out of scrapes with his parents, with teachers, with anyone. She had had cancer in her pancreas and died quickly. Not even sixty yet. He wished he could talk to her now.

  “Have you been reading my mail?” Heather asked. “What right have you to read my mail?”

  “Well, if you don’t want me to know you’re carrying on an affair under my nose, don’t leave your damn letters scattered out where I can’t help but see them.”

  She kicked her boots across the room and stomped into the kitchen. He heard the bags thump onto the floor. Following her, he stood watching as she shoved vegetables into a plastic bin in the refrigerator.

  “Leave me alone,” she said.

  “I have a right to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Who is David?”

  “You’re waiting for me to say he’s my lover, aren’t you? Well, you’re mistaken.”

  He felt the vein in his forehead throbbing, even worried he might hit her. He picked up a plate, but quickly turned in the opposite direction and threw it against that wall. As it smashed into shards, he shuddered.

  “Such melodrama,” she said. “I told you he wasn’t my lover.”

  “So I smashed a plate,” he said. “Big deal. What about my feelings? I’m supposed to like it that I might be getting diddled? Fuck it all, I love you,” he said as if at this moment it surprised him. How could he still love her? The thought of this David infuriated him.

  “I’m sorry, Hans,” she said. “But he understands some things you don’t and so we talked a lot when I was there.”

  “Well, did you even try to talk with me about it?”

  “I just know you wouldn’t understand,” she said. “But I do love you.”

  “This is crazy,” he said. “Whatever it is sounds as if we need to talk about it.”

  She reached toward him, almost touching his cheek. “Right now wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “So what are you going to do about David?” he asked more gently.

  “I don’t know.” She pulled away. “Probably nothing.”

  He wondered if he would break something else or if he would run outside and start screaming. But he waited.

  “There isn’t anything to do,” she said. She picked up a tin from the counter and put it in a cupboard.

  “So, are you having an affair with him?”

  “Of course not. I told you I wasn’t. You’re just so willing to believe the worst. Dad asked me if I could come to England to help him deal with Mum. You know all that.”

  Hans did not know what to believe. He hated how he looked in the bathroom mirror of late, lines creeping in around his eyes. And his belly was getting larger. It was easy to believe that Heather might find someone else more attractive.

  “So why didn’t you just tell me that? And how he happens to be helping your family?”

  “I haven’t had time.”

  “There’s been plenty of time. You’ve been back long enough to make phone calls, to get this letter.”

  Her eyes blazed. “I think I’d rather talk later,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Just a little later. I need to get some air.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if you just told me something to set my mind at rest?”

  She reached for the wall and propped herself against it. “I’m not trying to keep anything from you. I don’t know where to start. Dad was upset.”

  “You said something about your mother’s prescriptions before you went.”

  “That, too.” She sat down against the soft cushions of a chair in the nook beside the kitchen where one of them often sat reading the newspaper. “We got them straightened out, as I already told you. I went to the doctor with Mum.”

  Hans watched the lines between her eyes recede. She looked younger. She was younger, but perhaps age had nothing to do with any of it. He did not know. Just that he was increasingly conscious of it and how could she not be?

  “I’m glad you were able to go and help,” Hans said. “You know that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  But there was still something that niggled at him and he willed her to erase his suspicion. It bothered him because they had always trusted each other. He looked toward the window. Snow fell beyond it on the rolling hills of the farm, onto the leafless maples beside the house. A horse neighed in the barn, the sound echoing in the distance.

  “David is a neighbour who found Mum wandering outside and brought her home. That turned out to be because of the medication. I didn’t meet him when I went to visit before because he lives in London. His parents live next door. He’s coming to Canada to do some research. I said we could help him out with contacts.”

  “All my love, David?”

  “He’s a kid, Hans. All of twenty-three. And expressive and affectionate. That’s all.”

  So for her, was that all? He was not sure. The phone calls. The way she often turned away from him when he pressed against her. Something he had to admit now had begun long before her trip.

  Hans went out into the snow, large flakes dropping onto his cheeks and melting. He kicked at some chunks of ice that went skidding down the driveway. Maybe she was telling the truth, but there was something more to it. He picked up a shovel and began to lift the snow that lay along the path to the barn. He threw it into mounds beside the fence. In the summer, the two goats would be peering at him, but all the animals were inside their sheds or the barn today.

  An hour later, he went back into the house. Heather handed him a mug of hot chocolate.

  “Thanks,” he said, although he wished she would also hand him his pipe that she had been asked to hide while he stopped smoking.

  “I’m going out to see the horses,” she said. “They missed me when I was away.” She had her boots on already. The door closed behind her.

  Hans sat at his desk, sorting through papers he needed to take into the office. Among them he saw Sue’s number. He picked up the phone and dialled it. A recording came on. Please leave a message. Veuillez laissez un message, s’il vous plait.

  “I haven’t forgotten you,” he said. “This is Hans. So when are we going to have lunch again?”

  He left a number for her to call, a private number.

  *

  Sue listened to Hans’s message. She could hear his playful good nature and something ingenuous about him. Of course, the quintessential question, too. How did he know the future? He had told her that people went to see psychics because they were unhappy or curious. Sometimes both. She had asked him if he had thought her unhappy.

  “Not an unhappy person,” he had said. “But how could you have been happy when your husband was dying?

  Now, she questioned whether to return his call. People came to him for something to hope for, he had told her. That was what she needed, something to hope for. Likely, she would call and after doing so set out, feeling almost light-hearted, to meet him at a coffee shop not far from his office. And although he was full of the unexpected, when she did reach him the next day that was exactly what he suggested.

  “You know that little coffee shop not far from the corner, near my office?”

  Well, yes she did.

  “In half an hour?” he asked.

  When she arrived, Hans rose with a grin that stretched across his face.

  �
�I brought some photographs,” she said. These were shots taken in various locations around the city. Horses sculpted out of black iron on a green bridge over Yonge Street just north of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Later, the horses would disappear, but she would know they had been there.

  “They’re very good,” he said, looking at the images.

  “Most of the shots are experiments. I take them when something suddenly appears that demands to be painted. I love horses.”

  “We keep horses,” Hans said.

  “Do you ride?” She was aware of the “we” that stood suddenly between them. He might not have noticed saying it, or he might have done so intentionally.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I feed them in the early morning and then again in the late evening. When I go into the barn, they shuffle around, swish their tails, and peer over the edges of their stalls, waiting for food. I clean up after them, too. I don’t mind.” Shovelling the shit was good for him, he said. It made him feel strong. “They belong to my wife though. She’s the one who rides most often. I like cows. We don’t have many. That’s what we had on the farm where I grew up.”

  She showed him the rest of the photographs. One was of a streetcar near St. James Cathedral, another of the boardwalk on the island.

  “I like the curve of that walk,” she said. “I’ve often tried to paint it.”

  “I spent months working as a gardener in my first years in Toronto, digging up those flower plots on Centre Island with the breeze blowing in from Lake Ontario,” Hans said. “Sometimes it was so cold, my whiskers were full of ice. I worked in Edwards Gardens, too.”

  She could visualize the manicured, carefully laid out flowers where many wedding photographs were taken.

  “I like working with plants as much as with people. In those first years, I missed the animals on the farm.”

  “I thought you worked as a translator.”

  “I did,” he said. “But there wasn’t enough money in that. When I started to look for something else, I looked for work outdoors that would give me a break in the winter so I could start to do readings.”

  “Where did you do readings?” she asked.

  “At first in a shop down on a side street off Bloor. People heard about me through friends who came to see me. I never had signs out on the sidewalk or in windows,” he said, tossing his head. “I made appointments over the telephone.”

  Sue could tell that he was proud of this and considered himself in a different league than those who advertised that way.

  “How did your wife feel about it?” she asked.

  “She wasn’t too keen,” he said. “She didn’t really believe I could make a living that would support a family of five. We had three children. And she was tired of working as a cook for women who saw her only as a servant. I didn’t notice what was happening to Maxine and our marriage didn’t last. Not surprising. I’d be more forgiving if she hadn’t started to call the readings the devil’s work. And worse than that, turned the children against me. I’m relieved that as they’ve grown up, all of my children have come looking for me. ‘We need a father,’ they said. ‘We need a grandfather for our children.’”

  Not having known anyone like him before, Sue was intrigued not only by the scenarios he drew, but also by how demonstrative he could be.

  Thank you, thank you, and thank you, an expression that had surprised her the first time he used these words in multiples, although it had also made her smile. He’d said it after they had laughed and talked together, he seemingly grateful for their good humour.

  “The ring,” she said, looking at the wide gold band on his finger.

  “I married again.” He did not seem about to go into it.

  “What’s her name?” Sue asked tentatively.

  “Heather.”

  Sue sipped her coffee, not at all happy about something so stark as a name that was now known by her. Consequently, she knew this woman existed. But what right did she have to feel jealous? This was not something she had experienced with Jerry, except possibly momentarily when he had joined the meditation group and spent time with Jane. Otherwise, he could be involved with his work or listening quietly to music or out with friends or on a political rampage over some injustice, but she had not really ever felt her place in his affections seriously threatened. That she should now be jealous of the unknown wife of a man who was almost a stranger was ludicrous. She, a woman who would never knowingly become involved with a married man, or so she had always believed. But her marriage had been a dance full of secrets and deceit. Now, it seemed she might not be who she had always thought she was either. An honest woman. A woman not easily fooled. One who would not deceive her husband. It seemed she had been wrong about everything, and possibly, most of all, about herself.

  “Is her last name Jonker?” she asked, not sure why it mattered.

  “No.”

  “What is it?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you that. That’s her business.”

  Sue felt he could sense her jealousy. “Is it all right to ask if you met her in Canada?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Hans said. “She comes from England and has an accent that immediately places her. Although when I first learned English, it was such a confusing language I thought all the different accents were part of it.”

  “Does she have children, too?” Though aware that she could stop at any moment, she kept right on probing.

  “One daughter.” He eyed her quizzically, then continued as if her curiosity were not unusual, as if he might even want to tell her. “Heather and I raised Vivian together. A young teenager when we met, she spent every second weekend with her father. I love children, but neither of us wanted any more.” He said they had been able to follow their dream to own land in the country. Rolling hills where the wind from the lake came rushing through and you could feel the weather changing and when a storm was coming. And they had fields of oats for their horses and for the ones they boarded. They had a pond where he fished and swam, where Heather’s daughter still swam when she came to visit.

  “Chickens. Roosters. Pigs. And my dogs, of course.”

  He described it as an oasis from his work in the city. She could almost visualize it and it intrigued her almost as much as he did.

  “I don’t think about psychic premonitions there,” he continued. “I spend my time planting and weeding or mowing hay. We grow fresh vegetables and freeze them for the winter. And catch fish. Sometimes we have a big fish fry with the neighbours.”

  “Does Heather do the farm work, too?”

  “Not much. A little. She works hard in the city. Often, I scarcely see her.”

  He did not say it as if this bothered him though Sue imagined it did.

  “Tell me more about your work,” she said. Would he be here with her if there were no cracks in his marriage? She did not think there had been any women in Jerry’s life she did not know about, but now she could doubt even that if she let herself. No, she must not do that. Nothing that she knew or had discovered suggested he had been unfaithful.

  Hans paused and seemed to ponder what he would say. “Usually, unless I know through the media or they’ve left that information, I don’t know a last name,” he said. “Yet I know a lot more about people in the first moment than they could possibly imagine. I get a sense right away, as with you when I saw you in the waiting room. A son, but not one you knew about. I’m never good about time frames. Usually, I just know something is going to happen. I want it recorded because often it helps a person later. If they’re unsure, they can check. They can also see I didn’t make idle predictions.” So, he had known that first time that she already knew her husband was going to die.

  “It’s draining to take in so much of another’s pain,” he said.

  “Soon there’ll be a memorial for my husband,” she said. “On the island.”

  “Yes.”


  “You know,” she mused, “One day I will probably be a grandmother without ever having had children.”

  “If I’d told you that when I first read for you, you wouldn’t have believed that either.”

  But Hans did not seem to know about anyone except Thomas. She wondered if she ought to feel reassured about that, proof that he was ordinary, that his knowledge about Thomas had been a lucky guess after all.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to think about it,” she said. “So it’s just as well you didn’t. Did you know then?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  An answer she was glad to hear.

  When they left the coffee shop, Sue walked with Hans along Bloor Street toward his office. They dodged a fast moving group of children and stepped around a man leaning on a bicycle. He invited her upstairs for a moment, indicating a chair she now recognized that let them sit across from each other. In the waiting room outside Hans’s office that was used by everyone on the floor, the radio played Mozart and the soft music drowned out the voices for anyone who might arrive for an appointment. The kettle there was also boiling, likely plugged in by someone down the hall who was making tea. Sue watched him start to fiddle with the papers on his desk and thought whatever else he was or was not, his face and physique appealed to her. Her type, although he was quite different from Jerry.

  “I need to clear my head,” Hans said. “I have a string of appointments, then a long drive back to the country.”

  “I’ll get going.” She stood to leave and he came across the room to put his arms around her in a friendly hug. Her body stiffened momentarily and then she leaned briefly against him.

  “See you,” he said.

  *

  Sue walked through the house to the sliding doors that led into the dining room. The morning newspaper was strewn across the long wooden table where so often friends had gathered, she sitting at one end and Jerry at the other. Off the dining room was a bright pantry with a skylight her husband had installed. It sprinkled light into one end of the living room and onto a huge abstract painting with red shades predominating, as well as onto the old piano Jerry had often played to relax. He had often sat there, picking out chords before launching into ragtime or jazz. Sue searched the empty spaces as if he would be there, imagining him turning to smile at her. Light flashing across his face from above, crinkles where the laugh lines were.