Terminal Grill (5 page)

I tried to find a vase for the roses but couldn't. With shaky, angry motions, I shoved half of them into the wine bottle from the night before and the other half into a tall coffee mug. I had never treated roses so cavalierly.

“Let's have some wine,” Matthew suggested, pouring us some. As we had the night before, we had to use coffee mugs for that because I'd never unpacked my wine glasses in the six months I'd lived in my place. He handed me a mug, then led me to our two hard-backed chairs where we sat facing each other kitty-corner as we had done before.

And I broke down.

I told him I was sorry to be so out of control but that knowing him had been a lovely holiday from my ordinary life. Now, I said, I realized the time had come to get back to it, and that was why I was so disappointed at the prospect of not seeing him again.

He said we could be friends, and I told him I didn't need any more friends.

He was really very nice, very kind. I knew he was trying to end things in a gentlemanly way, and I knew it was a very
good idea to do so and I wanted it, too. The beautiful unreality of our being together was already consuming a tiring amount of energy. He would soon leave town and I would soon be back to making the most of life with the stolid nobility of one who had been taught that she was responsible for her own happiness.

I was tearful. He was tender. He suggested we should lie down together, and before we did, he said, “I was wondering whether I should tell you this, but I'm beginning to fall in love with you—”

I found this comment a little strange, considering his breathed declaration of the night before. But I answered truthfully that I was falling a little in love with him, too, and that was the problem. It made perfect sense to both of us that that was an excellent reason never to see each other again.

CHAPTER SEVEN

W
E LAY BESIDE EACH
other in the light from the small lamp and he said, “You are a survivor. You don't need anybody to take care of you. A man needs a woman he can work for. He needs to know that when he's doing a job he doesn't want to do—when he's out on the road and it seems like it's never going to end—he can say to himself, ‘I have to keep doing this. I have to do this for her'. You don't need that.”

Again I began to weep. “So,” I said, “what's supposed to happen to people like me?”

“What?”

“Do I have to spend my whole life alone and without anybody to take care of me just because I seem strong?” I felt the old familiar loneliness scratch its slogan on the wall of my chest. “It's so unfair. People like me need somebody to take care of them, too ….”

Something seemed to snap in Matthew. A sudden intensity made him rigid. He compelled me to turn my eyes toward his, which were blazing with a dark light that seemed to come from the night itself. “I'll take care of you,” he swore. “I'll take care of you for the rest of your life. You'll never have to worry about anything again. I'll take you home with me to Hartford. You can live in my house.”

It was hard to look at him. I smiled. I had to smile. “You'll regret saying this,” I warned him. “In the morning you'll be very, very sorry. You'll wish you'd never—”

“No,” he swore, staring at me like a hypnotist. “I would have at nineteen, but not at thirty-five. I'll take care of you. You have touched my heart.”

In my experience, men seldom talked about their hearts unless certain barriers had been let to fall. I turned out the lamp and snuggled beside Matthew, suddenly totally exhausted. I didn't know what to think. I wished that it were true that Matthew would take care of me. I had never met anyone like him and I wondered if that meant that, unlike all the others I had met, he really could take care of me as they could not.

Out of the smooth darkness I heard Matthew's voice. “Goodnight, my love,” he said.

I had known him for fifty-six hours.

In the morning, it didn't even occur to me to wonder whether the charged conversation of the night before would alter our behaviour toward each other.

We were as happy, passionate, tender and talkative as ever. In fact, as I came out of the shower, I again heard Matthew carrying on a conversation. Quickly, I moved toward the door to see whether he was using the phone.

But I was soaking wet and it took me a moment to towel myself before I could step out of the washroom and onto the rug that led to the other room.

Matthew was sitting in a chair across the room from the phone leafing through a book of my poems.

After I dressed, we left, and for the first time, he took the subway with me, getting off before me at the Bay station,
which made sense because the studio he said he was working at was in Yorkville. On the subway, he sat very close to me, and when it was time for him to get off, he promised to call at 7:30, and he tenderly said goodbye. As the subway pulled out of the station, he turned and smiled at me and waved.

It occurred to me that I had now known Matthew for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and that he had not changed his clothes. In fact, he had borrowed a large shirt from me one day to wear under the panther sweater, carefully leaving his own shirt over a chair at my place.

He spoke so often of his preference for designer clothes that when I got home, out of curiosity, I checked the label of his shirt. It was Fruit of the Loom, and the shirt was very old.

But when Matthew called at 7:30, I was as always thrilled to hear his voice, and he seemed thrilled when I said that of course I'd be delighted to meet him at the Terminal in a little while. He said he had a bit of business to do and asked me if I wanted to come along. I said of course. Partly because I wanted to be where he was and partly because I was longing for some kind—any kind—of verification of all he'd been telling me about Neil Young and about his own marvellous and long-standing career.

He said the job was to take a signed album from Young to the manager of a pub not far from my place and to chat the manager up as a public relations job for a very prominent Toronto promoter whom Matthew had talked about over and over in our conversations. I was dying to meet someone who knew Matthew from business—someone who knew him at all.

As usual, I met him at the Terminal. By now, the waitress, Cynthia, and the owner were starting to be very friendly, were treating us not only as regulars, but as a couple.

We listened to the jukebox for a while. Matthew showed me the signed album. I couldn't read a word of the inscription. It was very scribbly. I felt a chill come over me because something told me it was not Neil Young who'd signed the album, but Matthew himself.

I had, though, no reason to think such a thing. And even as I was thinking it, Matthew handed me a gift elaborately wrapped in black paper with a silver ribbon. I told him black and silver were my favourites as I opened the package to reveal Swiss chocolates from Eaton's. I thought it was a very elegant gift.

I told Matthew I had a present for him, too—real coffee to replace the instant we'd been drinking. We both laughed, finished our beers and hopped in a cab to head for the pub where Matthew was to meet the manager.

The Highlander was not like the Terminal. It was new, trendy, built only a few years before, dark in every respect and crowded with young quasi-Yuppies. Compared to it, the noise-level at the Terminal resembled a church.

The minute we stepped in the door, we were met by a bouncer. Matthew immediately handed him the album and asked him, “Please give this to the manager.” As the man disappeared into the crowd, I noticed that Matthew was nervous again with the peculiar shakiness he'd shown the day we'd first walked out of the “wake” together.

But we found a seat at the bar and almost at once began to talk to a few others there. It was easy to see that, though the dour blonde female bartender was no Cynthia, the Highlander was as much a neighbourhood bar as the Terminal—or as any in Toronto for that matter.

After a while, the people we were talking to drifted away and Matthew started to tell me about his wonderful house and
all the things it contained: paintings, china, a pinball machine, two pianos—one a BÖsendorfer, a priceless gift from Neil Young. He painstakingly retold the details of the night—his birthday—he'd received this wonderful surprise. He told me that no one but him was ever allowed to touch this piano. Then he thought for a moment and said that now he would have to put a chair in that room so I could sit and listen to him play.

And I, perched on a stool in the dim, noisy, trendy bar in Toronto, with forty years behind me and God knew what before me, loved—as a child loves a slithery bubble that skips away from its breath—the image of myself sitting beside Matthew listening to his smoky, hurt voice singing for me alone.

He told me more about the house, the neighbours. I listened. He turned to me, and for the first time said, “I love you.” And of course I said, “I love you, too.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

H
E BOUGHT WHAT SEEMED
like a lot of drinks. Beer for me, beers for others at the bar—who reciprocated—scotch for himself, though he had told me scotch had got him in trouble before and that he made a point of staying away from it.

He handed me a thick wad of bills and told me to put it in my purse and hang on to it for him. A little later, he asked me to peel off one of the outside bills—a twenty—so he could pay for yet more drinks.

In a little while, out of the smoky, noisy, semi-darkness came the manager. He shook Matthew's hand, obviously very glad to see him, and they commenced a long conversation of which I could hear nothing except the introduction of myself. I also heard Matthew offer the manager a drink, heard the manager say he wasn't supposed to imbibe on duty, heard Matthew order a drink and a cup of coffee, saw the manager pour the drink into the coffee and take a few big gulps. Matthew looked like a man who knew exactly what to do every step of the way—smooth, friendly, in control, impressive. Professional.

And I assumed his profession was the one he said it was. The fact that the pub manager was nervous as a pup the whole time and seemed tremendously deferential to boot only made Matthew—who wasn't losing his cool for a second—all the more impressive.

But hard as I tried, I couldn't hear any of the business talk between the two men, except for one fragmented
sentence concerning the promoter. “When he called me and told me the person coming was …” the manager said, slightly mispronouncing Matthew's name, “I …”

The rest was lost as the manager turned away to say something to someone else. Matthew leaned toward me and said, “They always do that—say my name wrong.”

The comment struck me as very odd. Matthew's last name was extremely simple. Odder still was how Matthew had a preternatural ability to jump in with an explanation at the precise moment a question entered my mind. He was a skilled mind-reader and only he knew why.

The evening ended almost at closing time with a game of pinball in the basement room of the pub. Only Matthew and I and the manager were left down there.

When Matthew had told me about his own pinball machine, I'd told him how I loved the game and how I sometimes played in the street arcades.

The three-way challenge was a delicate manoeuvering of winning and losing between the men. Matthew played very well and I, of course, was not as good as the men but not bad enough to embarrass my date or his associate. In short, I was exactly right. And so was Matthew. He played a brilliant first game, then let the manager win, then won again.

When the manager again disappeared into his office, telling us not to go yet, seeming to want to draw out the evening as long as possible, Matthew bent his face toward mine and whispered, “I love you. Do you love me?”

“Yes,” I said trying not to show any hesitation.

“Are you sure?”

I couldn't answer. Without any anger or disappointment—but no snideness or sarcasm, either, he said, “I guess you're not.”

When we left the Highlander, it was raining, and Matthew became impatient with the city and the night because it took so long to get a cab. But once we finally got one, all anger fled from him. He seemed to have no energy for anger, as if he'd abandoned that emotion a long time ago—or never got it right in the first place. There was a detachment to him in moments in which anger would have been appropriate—even when it was present—that was surprising in a person who could be so passionate in his professions of love and his expressions of delight over how good and how at ease he felt when he was with me.

“Incredible!” he would say over and over again. About knowing me. About his comfort in my presence. About my body. About my mind. “Incredible!” “Incredible!”

When we got back to my place from the Highlander, I handed Matthew a large white bag the manager had given him and which he'd asked me to hold.

“No,” Matthew said, “that's yours—”

I opened the bag to find a big, soft, very expensive-looking pale yellow sweatshirt with the name of the pub and its symbol discretely embroidered in black on the front.

Delighted, I immediately put it on.

“Are you sure you don't want it yourself?”

“No. We get so many T-shirts and sweatshirts given to us you wouldn't believe it ….”

I believed it. Like all the other details Matthew had off-handedly tossed at me about his work and the lifestyle that went with it, this seemed dead on.

He rhapsodized about how wonderful I looked in the sweatshirt. In fact, we immediately fell into bed and locked in an embrace.

But in what seemed a matter of seconds, Matthew was sound asleep on top of me.

Never in all my life had I seen a person fall so quickly and so deeply into sleep. It was totally impossible to wake him. He was gone. I had no choice but to go to sleep under him. I couldn't even move to turn out the lamp.

Finally, after some time, I woke to find him rolling off me. I took off the sweatshirt, turned out the light and slept.