“You’re sure you’re all right? You know Sextus is in town?”
“I heard he was going up. And did you see him, then?”
“Yes,” she said. “We all had Christmas dinner.”
“You did?” He laughed. “That’s just great.” He sounded as if he meant it. “I hear he has a new girlfriend.”
“Yes, she was here too. I was worried about giving her a drink.”
“Oh?”
“She looked like she was underage.”
“Hah,” he said.
“So what about yourself, John?”
“Ah well,” he said. “Look. I was just wondering. Are you going to be around in the new year?”
“Of course,” she said. “Are you planning a trip?”
“Ah no,” he said. “No plans. But a fella never knows. I’ve been doing some thinking.”
“It’s good to hear from you at any time,” she said.
“All right, then.”
Another long pause.
“I hope 1999 is good to you, John. You deserve it.”
“Ah well, I’m not so sure. But thanks. I hope you have a good one too.”
And he was gone, as enigmatic as ever.
She thought of calling him back, digging deeper. But it was almost midnight in Cape Breton, almost 1999, so she let the impulse fade. And she was wondering about JC. She knew he planned to visit, but he had said he’d call first. According to the Hogmanay traditions he’d learned about while based in London years before, his arrival would be shortly after midnight. He’d bring gifts. He was a dark-haired man, a harbinger of good luck in the year ahead.
She’d just been getting out of the shower when John called. After that, she had dressed in something casually flattering—slim grey sweats and a black cotton turtleneck—and settled down for what she expected would be a short wait for JC’s call or, more likely, his inebriated arrival.
It was 12:43 when the phone rang again.
“Is this Dr. Gillis?”
The caller’s formality persuaded her to answer yes. He then identified himself as Sergeant something with the Metro Toronto Police Service.
“I’m calling about James Charles Campbell,” he said, as if he was reading the name from a document.
Her mind instantly processed the unfamiliar James Charles. “JC,” she said. “Yes. What about him?”
“There’s been an accident,” said the policeman. “Mr. Campbell gave your name. Or rather, he had your business card in his wallet. Are you by chance his … doctor?”
“Not that kind of doctor. I’m a friend,” she said. “What happened?”
“We aren’t exactly sure. We’re looking into it. It seems he fell, or got knocked down. On his street. Walden Avenue.”
“Where is he?”
“Toronto General. He’s under observation.”
When she got to the hospital, she found him asleep. She sat at his bedside for an hour, watching as he slept. There was a bandage on his head. A tube running from a plastic bag hanging on a pole delivered a clear liquid to his arm. He was pale.
What a way to start the year, she thought. She struggled to suppress her fears. With him, she had what seemed to be an open-ended future. He had banished a nagging feeling of finality that had started after she’d turned fifty. Now his vulnerability had been revealed. She placed a hand on his, and the warmth was reassuring. His face, in sleep, was firm, his mouth firmly shut. His sleep was still and silent. The hospital shirt was open at the chest, and the curled hair she could see there stirred her, as did the snugness of the plastic band around his sturdy wrist.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said to her when he came in to check on JC. “By tomorrow you’ll see a big change. Give us twenty-four hours. Right now, he’s heavily sedated. We’re going to keep him that way for a while.”
So she went home.
January 2 was a Saturday. The hospital was quiet, the normal stream of visitors and staff reduced by the holidays. Perhaps it was the unnatural heat and humidity of the place that made her nervous, or the distracting sounds and smells of steamed food, biochemistry and crisis; the whispered private conversations in darkened rooms and the harsh impersonal announcements on an intercom; awkward visitors with coats on, solitary patients attached to IV poles or shapeless under sheets. By the time she reached his room, she was feeling vaguely miserable.
He was propped up slightly on the bed, eyes closed. She touched his hand.
He smiled a brief, thin greeting. “I was just thinking,” he said, “what it must be like to be stuck here with some chronic illness.”
He looked away, toward the window. “I wouldn’t have blamed you for finding an excuse to stay away. Hospitals. Christ, deliver me.”
“Come on,” she said. “A hospital is a hopeful place. I was here yesterday, but you were sleeping.”
“They told me. Maybe I’m just antsy because I see a lot of hospital in the future.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she said, forcing a laugh.
“Look at me, flat on my back. And because of some teenage punk …”
“Please,” she said. “There was an accident. You got conked on the head.”
“I don’t know,” he said, examining his hands. “I don’t know—there was a day.”
“What happened?” she asked.
He grimaced. “Actually, it was the cat’s fault.”
“The cat?”
The story came out in fragments. The cat had bolted just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. JC was placing an empty wine bottle in his recycling box on the back deck before setting out for her place. The cat slipped between his legs and vanished up a fence and a tree and onto the roof. JC followed, up the fence, from the top of which, by stretching, he could reach a fire escape.
The cat, being long-haired and snow white, shouldn’t have been all that hard to find in the darkness. Effie had named him Sorley, after a white-haired Scottish poet whose work she taught to undergraduates. She could easily imagine it: JC up on the roof, prowling, swearing quietly, angry mostly at himself for the momentary carelessness that enabled the cat to dash for the deck while the patio door was open.
JC’s roof was part of a continuum of rooftops on Walden, which though called an avenue was more like a narrow one-way lane between two rows of old, mostly semi-detached houses in what had once been a factory area but was now a second Chinatown. JC lived in number 14.
He stood on the roof for a long time, watching for movement. On an earlier visit to the rooftops he’d learned to avoid skylights, of which there were four, having once inadvertently peered down and caught sight of two naked men struggling in what seemed to be an act of intimacy.
He finally spotted the cat about four units along, on the roof of number 20, he estimated. Being an indoor cat, Sorley had the kind of confidence that apparently diminished as the surroundings lost familiarity. To proceed farther, he’d have to leap a gap between number 20 and 22, so he’d settled down to await the inevitable recapture, eyes serenely shut, his thick tail tucked tidily along a silky flank. JC gathered him up without a word and was about to make his way back in the direction of his own place when he heard a shout from the street below.
“Hey, asshole! Get fucking down here, right now.”
He’d found the hostile tone to be perfectly understandable in the circumstances and had no intention other than to oblige. He would have reacted the same way had he seen a stealthy figure on the rooftops any night, let alone the eve of the brand-new first day of the last year in a millennium.
It might have turned out differently if he’d gone straight to the street, carrying the cat in the crook of his arm to confirm what any normal person would have probably considered an unlikely explanation. But after descending from the roof, he tossed the cat through the sliding patio door through which he’d fled originally, and quickly closed it.
There were three men waiting in the street, and they had obviously been celebrating. They were young and full
of righteous certainty, and they had no interest in listening to his explanation.
To be precise is difficult. There was, on JC’s part, some genuine confusion about whether he had insulted one of the aggressors with a crude homophobic slur. That was what the young men told the police afterwards. He clearly recalled being shoved from behind, but nothing after that. The fact that all three claimed to have a clear recollection of the epithet left him at a disadvantage. Charges were unlikely. And in any case, while the young men told their version of events, JC was on his way to the hospital, unconscious in an ambulance.
When he heard what he’d been accused of, he vehemently denied their story. “It’s a word I never used in my life,” he told the investigating officer. “I’m not saying they made it up. But I know I’d never have said something like that. It isn’t in me.”
“They’re also saying you’re a pervert,” the policeman said. “Up on the roof, looking down the skylights.”
“That’s pure bullshit too.”
He was watching Effie closely for her reaction. “Pathetic, eh?” he said.
“It was a misunderstanding,” she said.
“Yup,” he said. “Life’s just full of misunderstandings.”
There were a hundred things she could have said to comfort him. But she realized that he wasn’t in the mood for comforting.
Then Sextus spoke. “Well, look at this,” he said. “The mighty oak has fallen.”
She turned and he was in the doorway. “I could come back,” he said, then walked in and threw his overcoat on the foot of the hospital bed.
JC moved stiffly to raise himself. “Christ, they’ll let anybody in.” Sextus leaned to clasp his hand.
“If you don’t mind,” Effie said, “I’m going to Walden now to check on the cat.”
JC waved. She knew that Sextus was waiting for a greeting from her, some signal, but she ignored him.
“You’ll have to forgive the mess,” JC warned her.
She nodded, blew a kiss and left.
Effie was almost at Yonge Street when she heard the clank of the streetcar lumbering behind her. She had to run to catch it at the stop and cursed the dirty wetness now inside the low-cut boots she’d carelessly selected for the visit to the hospital. Once settled, she watched the city turn seedy as the tram proceeded eastward. It was snowing, and the swirling flakes were gathering velocity.
Sorley, a blue point Himalayan with eyes like icebergs, was really hers, a birthday gift from JC. But the long hair seemed to activate some dormant allergies, so she’d had to give him back. During Christmas dinner, Sextus had noted with his customary sensitivity that in all likelihood her problem wasn’t really about cat hair, but about tomcats in general. Nobody laughed, least of all JC, who later made the sympathetic observation that if Sextus wasn’t such an asshole, she’d still be with him.
The cat stood just inside the door, bushy tail straight out behind him, and yowled accusingly. But by the time she was removing her second boot, he was making friendly rumbling sounds and tight figure eights around her ankles. She could feel the pungency of the litter box in her eyes but went straight to the sink and filled the cat’s metal drinking bowl with water. She found the cans of cat food neatly stacked in the usual cupboard. Sorley was on the counter in a bound and eating even as she spooned the food into his dish, so she left him there and turned her attention to the soggy litter box. When that was done, she poured a Scotch and sat.
JC’s place was a reno from the late seventies, gutted out, dry-walled and painted white. It was sparse but comfortable. His only alteration had been to replace the industrial carpeting, which had been fashionable during the eighties, with hardwood flooring. On the walls were three large, well-executed photographs from home. Mabou Harbour, thick with lobster boats. Port Hood Island, backlit by a sunset that was almost equatorial. An old black-and-white of the Canso Causeway, presumably a day or so before they finished it; foaming water surged through a narrow gap as four men crouched to jump the distance and be first across. Propped here and there on tables and the TV set were smaller photos from the places he had been for work, ruined buildings, hostile-looking brown men with machine guns, important people he’d known. There was one of him and Arafat. Another with Pierre Trudeau and Castro. Gorbachev and a smiling bearded man with a television camera on his shoulder. On his dresser in the bedroom, there was a photograph of her, though she was not particularly fond of it. Her hair was too unkempt, she had protested, her face too slack, her eyes half-open, making her look weary. JC insisted the net effect was one of wantonness and that was why he claimed it and kept it by his bed.
The cat, his immediate needs accommodated, had vanished. She tried to sink into the silence of the little house but was unable to ignore the rising shrieks of wind outside. She stood, went to the front window and peered out. The snow now streaked horizontally down Walden, the parked cars already turning into shapeless hummocks. She remembered the open cat food tin on the kitchen counter and went back to cover it with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge, which she noted badly needed cleaning. JC’s mail was scattered on the kitchen table, and she couldn’t resist quickly flipping through it. Among the cards was the envelope from Texas. She saw, in the upper left-hand corner, a return address. Ellis I, E13—1—14, Huntsville, TX 77343. She recognized the careful printing and she sighed.
Eventually, she switched on the radio. JC had the tuner set on an AM all-news station, and they were telling people to stay off the streets. A good idea, she concluded after one more look outside. She decided she would stay there for the night.
She dozed awhile on the couch and when she checked his kitchen clock she was surprised that it was nine. She turned on the television and there was a movie halfway finished. She flicked it off, wandered into the kitchen and decided to tidy the table, where, buried under newspapers, she found his laptop. On top of the closed lid he’d left a small square disk. His carelessness surprised her. How easily the disk might have been swept up with the newspapers, tossed and lost, and with it whatever information he’d stored on it.
Briefly she examined it. On the label he had written “Huntsville, TX, ’98.” Curiosity aroused, she again picked up the envelope from Texas, opened it and examined the Christmas card. It was a traditional religious greeting card: the manger scene, the swaddled baby in the straw. Inside, in careful handwriting, this message: “Hope you enjoy a peaceful holiday. Thanks for the poems. I’m looking forward to 1999. I expect good things. God bless, Sam.”
Poems? What poems? She’d already warned JC about getting close to Sam. Now it seemed she had sound reasons for concern. Her hand was trembling. And suddenly she wanted to be in his bed, even if alone.
The cat was on the bed, a splash of sprawled purity against the navy blue duvet. Effie shooed him from the room and closed the door behind him. Then she picked up the bedside photo of herself, searching once again for what made it special to JC. It had been taken about five years earlier, during a time of emotional drift when even the university had become a source of insecurity and disappointment, mostly because of the mental collapse of the man who headed her department. But Effie, at the time, was also being noticed for her study of Celtic antiquity interpreted through art forms, The Penannular Circle and the Celtic Ethos of Uncertainty. Her work had been well received, not just by the Celtic crowd, but by Sociology as well. And when the head of her department died, she got his job. She had the doctorate in history, but it helped that she was female, an attractive redhead who could have stepped straight out of a Georgian lithograph, a fluent native speaker of the Gaelic language and Canadian to boot.
There was a chill in the bedroom. She found a pair of JC’s sweatpants in a bottom drawer. Then a T-shirt. Before undressing, she leaned close to the full-length mirror on the closet door and, again, studied her face for signs of the deterioration that she dreaded now that she’d begun the headlong sprint toward sixty.
The thin, soft skin below her eyes was only mildly crinkled.
Her neck was smooth, with only the slightest sagging between her chin and throat. She stripped quickly, then clambered into the sweatpants and noted with some satisfaction that her legs were just as long as his; there was noticeable thickening at waist and hips, but her thighs were still compact from her energetic daily walks to class. Sliding the T-shirt over her head, she paused for just a moment to observe that, with upraised arms, her breasts were those of someone half her age, well formed and still relatively firm. Many years before, when she had made a self-deprecating comment to Sextus about their size, he’d laughed and reassured her that one day she’d be grateful. “They’re long-term assets,” he had told her. “They’ll be outstanding over the long haul, not sitting on your lap like sleepy puppies when you’re old and fat.”
Crude, she now thought, though she still smiled at the memory.
And then she was in JC’s bed, but it was terrible Sextus on her mind as she drifted off to sleep.
They stopped somewhere in Quebec because Sextus said he was hungry. He needed a sit-down meal. They’d been living on soda pop and chips and chocolate bars all day and were a little edgy. They were in Rivière-du-Loup. The waitress couldn’t speak English, and Sextus struggled unimpressively in French. “You must be Lou,” he joked. The waitress was confused. “Lou from River du Lou.” She didn’t get it, so he ordered. “Deux Cinquante,” he said, holding up two fingers. “Et deux poulet chaud.” Effie wasn’t sure what he’d asked for, but they got hot chicken sandwiches and beer.
Looking out the window, he said, “I don’t think I could handle it if I thought that you were feeling guilty about anything.”
“What’s wrong with guilt?” she asked.
“Guilt is poison,” he said.
“Guilt is normal,” she replied. “Bitterness is poison.”
He dredged a french fry through congealing gravy. “I wonder what your father thinks,” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She woke up vaguely angry, a half-remembered dream producing acid in her gut like the half-absorbed heavy nightcap she now frequently consumed, against her better judgment, to help her sleep. Sleep had become an issue. Also dreams that left her troubled. Lying there in JC’s bed, she said aloud, “Come on. Don’t kid yourself.”
Why Men Lie Page 5
