I had expected him to say that he’d be late at the party. I had even half-hoped he might have invited me along. Instead, he said he’d meet me at the Terminal in an hour and a half.
When he arrived, he was extremely agitated and said he was very drunk—though he seemed the same as always to me. He sat opposite me in the booth. He seemed to vibrate with nervousness. He ordered drinks and he began to talk. He said I acted as though I wouldn’t be coming home with him. He said in the morning he’d listened to me as I talked to people on the phone and it sounded as though I planned to spend my future alone.
I had no answer to this, except to shake my head, to reach across the table and take his hands between mine. I could feel him begin to calm down.
After a while, be became quite relaxed. He drank. He smiled and said, “You never asked me why I wear the same clothes all the time …”
No. I never did. Did I?
I kept silent, and he went on. “It’s because of continuity,” he said, assuming I knew the technical term, which I did. “Now that the video is over, I can wear anything I want.”
We discussed this for a while, kicking around the fact that Matthew had not really worn the same clothes each day because he’d borrowed shirts from me and one day hadn’t even worn the panther sweater at all. We both knew there had to be a lie in this somewhere, but neither could face it. I believed with half my heart that he was lying and with the other half that he was not.
I had gotten to the Terminal a little early and was reading Cosmopolitan before he arrived. Matthew knew more about fashion and designers and fine china and international cuisine than anyone I had ever met. He also had exquisite manners at all times. This made discussing things with him a sophisticated and cultured pleasure. We began to discuss the woman on the cover of the magazine, and as he so often was, Matthew was brilliant.
He pointed out that a cover photograph is but a frozen instant—a carefully orchestrated moment. He said that offstage from such a shot was a whole brigade of people ready to rush in and correct the slightest imperfection.
In contrast, he said, beauty in real life was unfrozen. It had staying power. It was real. He said he had dated many very beautiful women in his time and told the story of one woman he had slept with who had been on the cover of Vogue. He said she had made him promise that he wouldn’t look at her without her makeup, which she took off and put on out of sight of Matthew—insisting on staying in the pitch dark at all other times.
The upshot of all this was that I was a true beauty, much more desirable than the frozen beauty in the picture.
We finished our drinks and went home and spent our hours together in bed. Matthew asked me to promise yet again that I would never leave him, and I promised. I went to sleep smiling and I woke up smiling, too.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THAT MORNING, WE SAT in bed and calmly discussed the plans for our future. Matthew would keep trying to sign a deal for the next three weeks. I would finish writing my book, and then, together, we would go home to his house. We would marry. I would establish myself as his wife and wait for him while he travelled until he decided that it was time to stop. I would be faithful—unlike, he implied, his first wife.
He would call the two gay artists who regularly house-sat for him and tell them he was coming home—but not alone this time.
He would provide for me. I would not have to work—and therefore would not have to worry about immigration. He himself, he said, had—of course—a green card, since he had never relinquished his Canadian citizenship.
We spoke of these things very calmly, very reasonably. After, we had a coffee and talked some more.
Then Matthew asked me for three hundred and fifty dollars.
I was stunned. My heart dropped. The night before, he had repaid me the twenty he’d borrowed, and as he’d handed me the money, I had thought, “This is a set-up. This is to make me think that he can borrow more and more, and I’ll believe he’ll repay me.”
And now, it seemed, my instinct had been right.
But how could I refuse to give him the money? He knew I had money because he’d seen me cash cheques. We had just discussed our marriage. How could I say no? Especially when he swore it was just a loan for a few days and that he’d transfer funds from the States right away to provide for the fact that he was staying three weeks longer than he’d expected.
With forced cheerfulness, I told him I’d give him a cheque. “No—” he said, “it would be too hard to cash.”
“Of course,” I said, offering to take him to my bank and cash it for him.
As we left the house to go to the bank, I tried to remind myself that what Matthew said about transferring funds made sense.
On the way to the bank, Matthew was shaking. He spoke wildly about flying down to Florida for a single day for me to meet his parents.
When we got to the bank—a different one from the other I’d been to—he refused to come into the building. Instead, he offered to go across the street to wait for me at McDonald’s—where I had told him I was planning to have a coffee. He said he’d never been in McDonald’s before.
I cashed two cheques and got a thick wad of cash—like the ones he’d been flashing the previous week—and crossed the street and found him smiling at me near the counter of McDonald’s. He’d got me food and found us a table. I handed him the wad. He was still dreadfully nervous. And so was I.
But he kept talking about our wedding—which country would I prefer to hold it in? Who would stand up for us? He made it sound like the most logical choice for him would be to have Neil Young be his best man, but he said he didn’t want that sort of publicity.
I listened to him in fearful silence.
He talked about introducing me properly to his community, about putting a notice in the Hartford paper. He smiled across at me and said, “Why, you’ve never seen me in my good suits, have you?”
I felt as I listened to this that I was slipping farther and farther away from all that was familiar—from reality as I had always known it—into some new kind of reality that left me without footing and without breath, like a stranger in a new country with slippery soil and a vastly different altitude from her own.
As always, we took the subway and Matthew got off at Yonge and Bloor and I went to work. And if I wondered why he was taking the same route as before, when the video was now finished, I didn’t make myself answer. Somehow I already knew for sure that when I saw him again, he would not be wearing one of his good suits.
That night he called me at 6:30 because we had agreed that—for the first time—we were to eat supper at my place. He would have come at once, he said, but I told him my landlady was down in my apartment doing her laundry and Matthew thought it better to stay away for an hour or so. I made a large salad and heated some soup and put out cheese and croissants and wine, and everything was ready when he arrived.
As happened now every night, he was extremely nervous when he showed up. He said he’d just come from meeting with the African he’d mentioned in our very first conversation, the man to whom he had promised that he would go to Africa. Now, he said, he’d just told the man that he’d fallen in love and decided he couldn’t go to Africa after all. Matthew said he was feeling terribly upset about this. With burning intensity, his black eyes searched my face. “Will you think less of me for not going?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I answered—since I’d thought the whole thing foolish from the start, anyway.
Matthew smiled, breathed out a sigh of relief. “That’s what I was worried about most,” he said as he took off his coat and we sat down to supper after turning off most of the lights, since Matthew said he had “a thing about light.”
“I gave that African a thousand dollars,” Matthew said.
The first thing that popped into my mind was to question Matthew as to how he could possibly have accomplished this. I had never seen him with a chequebook and his “funds” were not supposed to arrive for another five da
ys.
The second thing that popped into my mind was to question whether Matthew had paid the man in American or Canadian funds. If his story about living in the States was true, surely this would have come up.
We began to eat, Matthew, as always, taking almost nothing. The only thing he seemed to like was the pure olive oil I’d bought for the salad. “That is a very fine oil,” he said a couple of times.
He spoke some more of his decision not to go to Africa. In the middle of this discussion, he stopped, looked across the darkened table at me, and laughing said, “I felt like such a fool when he took the cheque and said to me, ‘Is this American or Canadian money?’”
I was beginning to be so confused, I no longer knew what to think. Many of the things I’d worried about before, Matthew had excuses for and had offered them before I’d even mentioned what I was thinking about.
He said, for instance, that he’d ordered a pizza and had had to find my address. That explained the left-out tax form.
Also, one day, I took a drink from the mug I’d found with the lipstick mark and discovered I’d just made an identical mark. Clearly, the first mark had been mine, too.
And he had long since given me back the keys to my place.
As we ate, Matthew said it looked very good for the jingles he was trying to get that three-week commission to write. He’d met with a Mr. Santo, he said, a man who was quite impressed with Matthew. It seemed as though the extra work would soon be a sure thing.
Thus far, Matthew had still never changed his clothes, never showed any ID or keys, never had any possessions on him, never mentioned friends and always dropped names as though he were a spring cloud dropping rain.
After eating supper—which was only, for him, a bit of salad and a taste of soup—he wanted to go to bed, though it was barely eight p.m. Though I would have preferred to actually do something with him, something other than just being together, I acquiesced to his insistence.
Our warmth and closeness, our passion, our laughter and our discussions continued unabated—intensified in every way, in fact. We—or mostly Matthew—talked about our future, our house. He said over and over that he wished he were capable of having children—he seemed obsessed by this theme.
He asked me to promise yet again that I wouldn’t leave him. He told me about his ex-wife—the only woman he talked about seriously. He said she was a university professor, specializing in quantum physics, from a wealthy Canadian family and that they had been divorced ten years before.
He said again how surprised he was to be so very in love—that he couldn’t believe how in love he was. He begged me to hold him in my arms, to hug him as hard as I could. When I did, he asked me to hug even harder than that.
In the middle of the night, either before we slept, or after awaking out of sleep and loving, I lay atop him, his slender body nearly completely covered by mine. In the depth of the night, I felt the strange power of our union. “Matthew,” I whispered into the total blackness of the room, “I don’t know whether our plans will work out, but whatever happens, I think we are already bound together now.”
“I know.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MORE AND MORE MATTHEW began to lose his air of confidence and strength. He began to say to me, “I am very fragile.” I was puzzled by this, though I knew it was true. I’d not yet realized, though, what it might mean.
Somehow, after our little supper, we managed to spend fourteen hours in bed. It occurred to me that Matthew and I had actually done almost nothing together except sit at the Terminal and lie in bed, but that thought was pushed to the back of my mind along with certain others.
Like the fact that he never seemed to read anything—no books, no newspapers, no magazines, no menus. Though he occasionally talked about movies, he didn’t seem to know a thing about recent ones, as though he hadn’t seen one in years.
That morning, we got up, had coffee, talked—our usual routine. We took the subway together. He said he’d call me later, and he did.
I was waiting for him rather late that night at the Terminal. He arrived and Cynthia set down his brand of beer without his asking. He smiled. He seemed, more than ever before, perfectly calm. He was obviously, though, very happy about something. He seemed different and it took me a minute to realize what the difference was. It was that he seemed normal.
He insisted on sitting beside me in the booth rather than opposite, and he revealed that he’d been totally successful in his dealings with reference to the jingles. He said he’d closed a deal: one sixty-second spot and two thirty-second spots. He was going to get a one-time payment of eighteen thousand dollars for this work.
He said he was thrilled to have accomplished this, and that the biggest thrill was to be able to share his good fortune with me. Not only was he happy, he was hungry.
He ordered, and ate, a large plate of French fries. And then he ordered another.
It was the happiest time we’d had yet—which was saying something. He told me he wanted to buy me something—not too extravagant. He always maintained that he hated extravagance, that it was inelegant. So he wanted to spend, he said, only about four thousand dollars.
He told me he’d take me to New York to buy a dress and he spoke of several designers, some of whose names I recognized and some not.
I said maybe jewellery would be nice. He didn’t like this idea because he thought four thousand was too small a sum to spend for a good piece of jewellery, but he said he knew a goldsmith, so …
Then I thought of something I’d wanted all my life. I asked him if his house was big enough for a grandfather clock.
“Our house,” he corrected. “And yes. Yes, of course it is. If that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll buy you. When we get home I’ll buy you a grandfather clock.”
We were both in a wonderful mood that night. How we joked and laughed and touched! How he drew for me a verbal picture of his friends, the two gay painters who were house-sitting for him—and of another of his friends, a sports car dealer. “You’ll meet them,” he said with evident joy, “you’ll meet them all.”
On and on we went, so joyous in our pretense, so together, so happy, and so beautiful that the shabby bar seemed to glow with radiance, and even the half-gone old drunks sat up straighter against the patched red vinyl of the booths and grinned more widely in their reeling, toothless way.
As we left—Matthew paying as always—he turned to me, stopping me in my tracks. “I was so lonely before I met you,” he said, “now, to be without you would …”
The pause was too pregnant, too slick. It sickened me a little. I asked him why he would worry about being without me after the elaborate plans we’d discussed for staying together for as long as possible. But he didn’t answer. He just turned away and we resumed our walk.
All the snow was gone now and it had begun to rain. Side by side, very close, we walked back to my place, talked, went to bed. Everything was dreamlike and wonderful.
In the morning, Friday, a few minutes before we left, when I was once again unprepared, hurried and too stunned to refuse, Matthew asked me for another three hundred dollars.
Now, I was terrified. I could only agree. Just before asking, he had called the airport and asked the price of a ticket to Boston on the pretense of wanting to know because of our plans to fly there in three weeks.
I was so confused, so disappointed, so scared I could not speak to him as we rushed to the bank, hurrying so I wouldn’t be late for work. Again, he refused to come anywhere near the building, but loitered on an opposite corner, then slunk across the street when I came out with the cash clutched in my trembling hand as if I’d robbed instead of being robbed.
I handed him the wad. I felt a total fool, but I knew I dared not risk refusing him now for fear of what strange or ugly thing might happen if I did.
He tried to make conversation, but I just couldn’t talk. A thousand thoughts spiralled in my brain while he babbled on about some man he’d met who did a
erial photography. He said maybe the man would take us up in his plane. He reached into the pocket of his raincoat, which I now noticed was spotted in front, and pulled out a worn business card that had printed on it the name of some private flying outfit.
This attempt to capture my attention was totally pathetic. It was the tactic of a vagrant, of a desperate street person. I’d seen it before. Some sorry individual pulls out a letter or a photograph, grappling, by means of a grubby piece of paper, for some lost respectability, some connection with the person from whom he is begging. I could not respond at all. Even pity failed me.
We got on the subway, and, as always, Matthew sat close to me. We did not speak during the whole trip. No discussion of videos or Beethoven or sports cars or art.
When he got off at Yonge and Bloor, I got off with him. This, of course, was not our usual way, but I pretended I was upset over the prospect of quitting my job, which we had discussed and which I’d said I would do that day in order to have more time to get ready for our plans.
In fact, I got off because I wanted to kiss Matthew goodbye, to hold him one more time. I was one hundred per cent certain that I would never see him again. He had almost seven hundred dollars of my money—enough to get to Boston and from there to Hartford with no trouble. He didn’t need me for anything more.
And when we parted and he failed to say—for the only time—“I’ll call you,” I was sure it was over.
I got on the train. As it pulled away, Matthew waved at me. “Goodbye forever,” I thought. “Goodbye.”
I was so certain he was gone for good.
Yet one infinitesimal part of me whispered in a voice I could not hear, only feel the vibration of deep inside. “It’s not going to be as easy as that …”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHEN I GOT TO work I tried frantically to get a free minute to phone Ruth, and after an hour or two, I finally managed it.
When I told her about the money, she said I was hopeless and that she was ready to give up on me. Despite my distress at what she said, I didn’t blame her. I felt the same way. She told me to calm down, and that after work she’d do what she could to help me out.
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