She’d considered telling JC about the latter part of Christmas night, Sextus’s clumsy effort to engage after she had left the dinner table; then the aggressive second try, three days after Christmas, when he showed up on her doorstep unannounced.
“You gave me the address last year, if you recall,” he said. “May I come in?”
There was a taxi driving off. She stepped aside.
“I know I should have called in advance,” he said. He shrugged, taking in the room. “May I look around?”
In the kitchen, he said, “This is kind of painful, thinking that I might have lived here.”
“What do you want?”
He stayed for an hour. The conversation, one-sided though it was, still might have mattered if it hadn’t been a replay of a dozen other conversations.
There was nothing between them, him and Stella. He found a dozen ways to say it. She marvelled at the creativity. She’d known forever that he was a liar, but it was the creativity that fascinated her. When she thought about it afterwards, she was impressed.
It wasn’t his visit that left her feeling stained, or anything he said, or anything that happened. It was the insanity that nibbled at the edges of her reason as he spoke. She’d poured drinks, which was probably the first mistake. At one point, he’d placed a gentle hand upon her hand, and she’d left it there. And when he touched her cheek, she failed to pull away. But it wasn’t those tiny infidelities that frightened her. It was an odd, disorienting impulse, an almost uncontrollable compulsion to first subdue and then humiliate him, to degrade him by degrading his idealism, his claim to know exactly who she was. Who she was supposed to be.
Of all the men she knew, he was the one who had known her from her days of innocence. He thought he knew her best, and thus would find his disillusionment most painful. He’s a sentimental sitting duck, she’d thought. She had simply to lay a hand on his. Allow a tear to slip. And then to take him down, down, down. She had a hundred memories to draw from to find the keys to his humiliation. But in the end she realized it would be like jumping in front of a car to harm the driver.
When he asked, “This thing with JC, when did that get serious?” she stared for a moment, then told him, “You’d better leave, right now.”
He nodded.
She watched him walking down the street, shoulders hunched, head bare, and loathed him for the pity she felt—loathed him for all the questions that perplexed her. Where had that compulsion come from? Was it perversity or was it anger? Or was it weakness, masquerading as a virtue? She loathed herself for the fear that, once again, had given her the clarity and strength to throw him out. Why couldn’t it have been pure principle, or courage?
She knew JC would understand. She knew she could even shape the narrative to make it comical. She could make him laugh about it. But she didn’t tell him, and she wouldn’t tell him now. And the reason why she wouldn’t tell him frightened and depressed her, because it was such stark evidence of weakness in her character.
She brushed her teeth and then remembered Sorley. The cat was nowhere to be found, but cats are like that. They seem to have the power to go invisible. Lucky things, she thought. She missed her daughter then, but was elated to remember that Cassie would be back in town that evening. Back from her extended holiday with the new relationship. She peered out the front window onto a street that was vague with snow.
That Sunday, after the blizzard, the city was paralyzed. There was chaos in slow motion, people wading through the drifts as though through deep water. Distressed cars with fuming exhausts and spinning wheels, barely creeping. She struggled along an uncleared sidewalk to a nearby Chinese grocery for milk. People everywhere were digging, effusive in their greetings, full of manic camaraderie.
When she was a girl, she dreaded days like this. But on a Sunday morning in the nation’s largest city with a mug of coffee in her hand, the isolation was a comfortable shelter. Later on this day she’d see her daughter, maybe meet the new man in her life. She thought briefly of what it might be like to be a grandmother. It was, she realized, a distressing notion. Then the cat was in the room, stretching and yawning and reminding her of food. Peeling plastic off the opened can, she prayed that Cassie wasn’t stranded somewhere in the wilds of Northern Ontario.
Once upon a time, winter was a prison, viewed through windows blind from furry frost, a passing car or truck a living highlight in a landscape flattened by violent winds and waves of snow. Fantasy was her religion and the prospect of escape was her salvation. Her memory was full of silences, broken only by the creak of her father’s rocking chair, the rattle of an unruly newspaper, the snap of fire in the ancient woodstove. And the wind, of course. Always the wind, blustering in the stovepipe, rattling a damper. Small sounds, but sufficient evidence of life to accentuate her solitude.
There was a radio, but her father only turned it on to hear the weather. Sometimes the news, but information always left her father agitated. Storm warnings, politics and conflict, people in distress, he’d shake his head and mutter. Click. Silence reigned again.
And suddenly she was thirteen and he was there, standing in the middle of the dingy room, reeking with the smells of town, of booze, stale smoke and cold. The radio was blaring, filling the house with the warm fluid of music on waves of air from far away. Boston. New York. West Virginia. Places, in her fantasies, full of light and life. He swore at her, turned off the radio, raised his right hand as if to strike.
But Duncan was before him. Duncan, still a boy.
“That’ll be enough.” His boy voice was husky, his boy face suddenly dark and full of danger.
It was all he said. But it was sufficient in that fleeting moment and, in her mind, it was the moment when the boy became a man and, for a long time after that, it was what a man must be. A rescue.
“What’s it doing out?” JC asked.
“Snow up the yingyang,” she said. “Hardly anything moving.”
“How did you get here?”
“Hey,” she said. “Did you really think a little snow would stop a country girl?”
“You never know,” he said.
“I spent the night at Walden,” she said. “Just me and Sorley. He says hello.”
He smiled.
“I’ll be going home to Huron from here,” she said. “I’m expecting Cassie.”
He shrugged. “Did I tell you the cop thought it was significant that they were queers?”
“Who are you talking about?” she asked, even though she knew precisely.
“Those guys, the other night. The cop says it’s a new twist on gay bashing. Now jazzed-up gays are bashing guys like us. The cop and me. I thought he was going to say ‘normal’ people. But maybe he’s right. He figures they’re just getting back for all the historical prejudice and fear and bullying. Mr. Cop thinks it’s kind of funny. The shoe on the other foot now.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Effie said, “the cop was trying to draw you into some kind of an admission.”
“Maybe.”
He looked off toward the window. “What got me was when he told me how old they were. The guy that knocked me down was born in 1980.”
“Well, that would make him—”
“I was thinking back to ’80. What I was like back then.” He laughed. “According to the cop, I tried to take them on. Can you believe it?” He shook his head.
She said nothing.
“You know, there was a time when I’d either have had more sense or I could have made mincemeat out of somebody like him. The moral of the story is, I guess those days are gone.”
“You’re overreacting,” she said. “We’re going to have to talk to someone about that concussion.”
“You get vulnerable eventually. I guess that’s the downside of getting old.”
“According to George Burns, getting old is better than the alternative.”
He didn’t laugh. “Sometimes I wonder.”
Sextus was at the nursing station as she was l
eaving. She hoped he wouldn’t notice her, but he called out. “Hey!”
“Ah,” she said, as if she hadn’t seen him there.
“How’s the invalid?”
“I wouldn’t use that particular word,” she said.
“I was thinking, Christmas Day, that JC is getting harder to figure out. Getting mystical … this Texas business. Phew.”
“What about it?”
“He’s getting too involved.”
“What do you know about it?”
“We talked. Briefly. It’s something deep,” he said. “This guy at the end of his life and knowing it, something most of us try not to think about. It’s morbid, if you ask me.” He grinned. “JC is starting to show his age.”
“Maybe some people should start to act their age,” she said and instantly regretted it.
He only laughed.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I don’t begrudge you one second of whatever happiness you have in your life. Or judge how you find it. Or where.” She waved a hand as if to leave.
“You’re as old as you feel,” he said, “and I feel twenty-five.”
“Excellent,” she said and turned.
“About the other day,” he said, placing a hand on her arm to stop her. “It was presumptuous, going to your place. But I guess that’s no surprise to you.”
She stood, her back to him, words rushing but unsaid.
“I was supposed to go home tonight,” he said. “But I’m staying on a few more days. I want to meet Cassie’s new boyfriend.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll be interested in hearing what you think.”
“She sounds pretty serious about this Ray.”
“We’ll see. ‘Serious’ is relative.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
She didn’t have to turn to know that he was smiling again. She could always hear the smile.
Cassie’s voice was merry when she called. They’d try to be there by seven, and they were starved. The drive down from Sudbury had been hellish, but Ray couldn’t wait to meet her.
“You never told me what Ray does for a living,” Effie said.
“He’s a doctor.”
“A doctor!”
“Didn’t I tell you? Oh well, a small detail. We’ll be there by seven thirty at the latest. You can do your own assessment.”
She tidied, but it would be more accurate to say she just shifted things around. She repositioned books that might shape subtle insights about character or serve as conversational connections. She left a volume of modern Gaelic poetry open on a coffee table. It was mostly love poetry, but only she would know that. He might ask about it, and his reaction to her explanation would tell her something about him. It was a poet after whom she’d named a cat, she’d tell him, a possible diversion into other, lighter, places. She set out her own academic tome, always guaranteed to stir at least a superficial interest. Penannular circles. Destiny.
She had planned to order pizza. Young people are always happy to be stuffed with pizza. She had beer and wine. But because they were “starved,” she worried that pizza wouldn’t be enough. Ray the doctor was probably health-conscious, watching the sodium and fat. Pasta, she decided, checking her diminished cupboards to reassure herself that she had all the ingredients she needed. There was still time to acquire some salad fixings from the small twenty-four-hour grocery on Bloor.
Ray wouldn’t be the first of Cassie’s men she’d met. But there was an amusing tension in her daughter whenever she mentioned him. Cassie, after all, was twenty-eight, established in her career. She felt a vague maternal pride—her daughter married to a doctor—but quickly felt ashamed at such pedestrian ambition. If Ray was right for Cassie, it wouldn’t matter if he was a miner or a taxi driver. The only thing that mattered in the long run was Cassie’s happiness. And she was, again, embarrassed by the superficiality.
Piss off, she told herself. Chances are you’ll meet the bugger once or twice before he vanishes like all the others into the legions of the Unremembered and the Never-more-referred-to.
She was tempted to pour a drink, thought better of it. Poured one anyway. Sat for a moment, legs crossed, studying her bobbing foot. Then stood, drink untouched, to fill a pot with water. She remembered the mess in the spare room, where she’d left the litter from her Christmas wrapping. The bed was covered in festive paper, twine, tape and scissors. Maybe they planned to stay.
Cassie’s gift was on the bed too. Effie had splurged on a Vuitton overnight bag. As a business writer, Cassie travelled frequently, mostly short trips to Ottawa, New York, Washington. Effie had also wrapped a modest gift for Ray. A book. A le Carré novel that she liked a lot. A Perfect Spy. But now she was having second thoughts.
Ray, the doctor, might have already read it. Or might find it trite. She rebuked herself again. What am I thinking? He’s no more literary than I am. Less so, depending on how you look at it. But still, she changed her mind about the book. She picked it up and carried it to her bedroom, found herself downstairs again, distracted.
If they stayed, she thought, it would surely be a sign of something substantial. Possibly commitment. If he was a doctor, he must be in his thirties, depending on what kind of doctor. Even a GP would be nearly thirty, a perfect time to settle down.
She had a new CD, a gift from JC, Celtic music played in the Baroque style that originally inspired it. Cape Breton music, local, insular and, until just a few years earlier, considered primitive. Just like the language of the old people. Passé. But now in fashion, studied for its classical connections, its origins in ancient cultures. It made her smile. Where was all the scholarship when it might have nourished and perhaps restored a dying world to relevance?
She put the CD on, and the music warmed the room. She wondered who Ray was, really. What did he look like? Did he have siblings? Would she get to know his parents? She hadn’t heard a surname yet. Maybe he had connections with home. Sudbury, she knew, was a vast and rowdy diaspora of people from her part of the east coast. Or maybe he was a foreigner. A Pakistani. She chuckled, imagining the look on Sextus’s face when he found out. “A Paki? Jesus Christ!” She could actually hear him, the irrational distress. Then again, who knows? He might surprise her. He often did.
She had retrieved her drink and was sipping it when the doorbell rang. Then she heard the key, and the door opened. Cassie stood there, kicking snow from her boots. Effie rose quickly and rushed toward her, and they embraced.
“Ray is getting something from the car,” Cassie said.
“You found a place to park.”
“Half a block away.”
“You’re lucky,” Effie said. “The snow.”
Cassie stared at her. “You call this snow? Mother, we just came from Sudbury.”
She saw a man moving quickly up the walkway, carrying a shopping bag. He was bulky in a zipped-up leather jacket, collar up, and a baseball cap pulled down. He was of average height, built athletically.
Cassie, whose back was to the street, was whispering, “Mom, Ray isn’t what—”
“Well, you must be Ray,” said Effie.
She saw a broad smile. He put the bag down. “Dr. Gillis,” he said.
There was something seasoned in the voice that caught her by surprise. Maturity, she thought. Then he removed the ball cap. His close-cropped hair was grey. And, as he moved toward her and into the light, extending a cold, firm hand for her to shake, she saw the deep lines in his face. For a moment, she thought, They’ve brought Ray’s dad along!
But she knew that this was Ray. Prematurely aged by the pressures of his work? Or just plain old.
“Let me introduce you properly,” said Cassie, gamely. “This is Mom—call her Effie. No more Dr. or Mrs. Gillis. And this is Ray. Ray Cameron.”
“Cameron,” said Effie. “There’s a familiar name.”
“I’m not sure where it’s from,” Ray said. “Dad was born in the north of England. I was born in Quebec, the Abitibi. Dad fol
lowed the mining. We ended up in Sudbury. More than that, I haven’t got a clue.”
“Your dad is …?”
“Going on ninety-four,” he said. “Mom is just a year younger. I’ve got the genes, if nothing else.”
The obvious question was, of course, suppressed.
“Well, come in and close the door, and make yourself at home. I was just going to whip up something simple. Cassie, get yourself and Ray something to drink.”
Cassie was already at the hutch that served as Effie’s bar, examining the labels. Effie realized her hand was shaking. A chill, she told herself, from standing at the door.
“Ray,” Cassie said. “What about you?”
“I’ll just have a ginger ale or juice. Whatever’s there.”
My God, thought Effie. Along with everything else, a non-drinker.
Ray was now sitting. He’d picked up the book of poetry from the coffee table. “This is …”
“Gaelic,” she said. “The language of your ancestors.”
He laughed and put it down.
Cassie was perched on the arm of his chair, a languid arm across his shoulder, left hand glinting.
“I see you’ve acquired some new bling,” Effie said.
“Nothing fancy,” Cassie said, raising the hand.
“Nothing fancy?” said Ray, in mock surprise.
“So when should we expect …”
“We aren’t in a rush,” said Cassie. “But probably at Easter,” said Ray.
“By the way,” said Cassie. “Where’s the lovely Mr. Campbell? I half-expected he’d be here.”
“Not to alarm you, but JC’s in the hospital. He had a fall on the street, hit his head. They’ve kept him in for a few days. Observation, mostly.”
Ray looked concerned. “Which hospital?”
“The General, but look, it’s really nothing.”
Ray and Cassie suddenly seemed grave.
“Come on,” said Effie. “JC would be appalled if he could see your faces. Ray, surely to God you’ll join us in a real drink.”
Why Men Lie Page 6
