Terminal Grill (8 page)

Matthew said it had been a wonderful idea to go out for coffee, that it had relaxed us both. I smiled and we walked on together, very close.

We got into the subway, still chatting. I began to tell him about my love for Beethoven. When we got to Yonge and Bloor, he said, “I'd love to hear this—you are so animated. But the journey is far too short.” With that he kissed me and stood to get off the train. We made plans to meet on campus after my class that night. I suggested an easy-to-reach street corner, but he said no. “I don't like standing around on corners.”

Finally, we settled on a building at the university and a flexible range of times in case neither of us could get there exactly when planned. He smiled and waved and got off.

I couldn't suppress the worry that he got off at Yonge and Bloor every day not to walk to the studio but to switch to the southbound train, maybe to wander aimlessly around the Eaton Centre or some other mall.

I went to work. I went to school. I finished class. I waited. For an hour and fifteen minutes—with no sign of Matthew.
The rainy night turned cold and wild with ripping winds that battered the still-bare trees.

I waited so long that the building I was waiting in closed, though the kindly caretaker took pity on me and let me stand inside after he'd locked up.

Finally, I gave up. I walked out of the building and toward the street, balancing on the curb and leaning into the traffic looking for a cab. The wind blew so hard that my clothes stung my body as they flapped around me, and the rain was a frigid, continuous slap in the face.

I had not stood on the curb for more than a minute when I looked up to see a dark figure materialize out of the distance, running toward me, soaking wet, rain dripping from his coat, his eyes and hair blacker and more wild than the savage night.

I opened my arms instinctively and he ran into them as if that was where he'd been headed forever. “You've got to take care of me,” he gasped. “I'm all drugged out ….”

I clutched him, trying to pull him out of the driving rain and in under the flimsy shelter of my small umbrella. “Come on,” I said, “I'll get us a cab.”

“No,” he insisted, “No. I want to get inside now. One of the buildings … one of the residences.”

He seemed quite coherent, but he looked stranger than ever, so pale, so handsome, the black curls a tight wet tumble about his drawn face. He was helpless and childlike—lost, but also controlling, the way a skillful little boy is when he teeters on the verge of tantrum.

I was freezing, but not scared. I felt my only concern was to get him out of the rain. He, however, turned out to be very
choosy about which building he wanted to be in. As we passed one after another, huddled tight together, he explained that it being the second to the last day of the video taping, the drug and sex dealers had arrived at the studio. He seemed to imply that he had no trouble passing up the “eighteen-year-olds,” but that he had succumbed to peer pressure and bought and consumed a huge quantity of drugs. He said he was very stoned, though he wasn't acting what I considered out of control of himself.

At long last—both of us wet and freezing—we arrived at the building he'd been seeking.

It had an archway between two sections and set in the arch were the doors to each part. Matthew immediately went to the north door—the archway was brightly lit—and began yanking on it with a sort of almost-lazy anger. When the door refused to open, he began to pound on it. He seemed panicky, but, as always, there was a wall of some kind between him and his emotion, as if he didn't have the strength, the interest to be fully angry.

No one came to the door. Exasperated, he pulled me away from the door and leaned against the wall inside the front of the arch. From his pocket he pulled a handful of strange-looking things. He told me what they were, proudly, as if it were quite a coup for him to be in possession. But knowing nothing about drugs, I didn't know what he was talking about.

My pity for him was rapidly turning to disgust—and there was no wall between
me
and
my
negative emotions!

He said, “Go get me some papers and I'll smoke a joint to come down.”

This really angered me. I was supposed to go out in the raging night to get him papers? I told him I didn't even know where one purchased such things.

He wrinkled his face in mild disdain at my ignorance. “Just go to a drugstore.”

Sure. I wasn't just angry. I was also confused about a person being so stoned that they had to smoke to come down. I felt like saying, “Pardon my ignorance, Matthew, but I was under the impression people smoked to get high …”

He was, of course, not very angry at my refusal to do as he bid. He looked away from me toward the door, and he saw what I saw—a man with a pizza ringing the doorbell. The door opened. The pizza man slipped in. And so did Matthew and I.

The building was one of the lovely neo-Gothic student residences that dot the campus of the University of Toronto. “This is where I went to school for a year …” Matthew said. He had referred to the university a number of times, but I got the feeling his familiarity with the place was far more recent than the distant days of his education.

We moved confidently down a long, high-ceilinged corridor interrupted by heavy, dark wooden doors. Knowing exactly which door to open, Matthew led us into one of the lovely, stately, Victorian common rooms.

As soon as we entered, I saw why Matthew wanted us to be in this room. By the tall door stood a baby grand piano. The room was furnished like a sturdy sort of drawing room with a long couch before a fireplace in which a few logs glowed. Though a young man was fast asleep on this couch, Matthew proceeded at once to set the stage for a private concert.

Near the piano was a high-backed wing chair facing the fireplace. He struggled to turn the heavy thing around so that it faced the piano, and he gestured for me to sit down. Reluctantly, I did. From time to time, a person would open the door and look in on us, but, though I was afraid someone
might throw us out, no one questioned us, or even seemed much interested at all.

When I was seated to his satisfaction, Matthew began to play. I was so stunned at this strange course of events, so angry—more with myself than with him—so disappointed, that I rested my head against the upholstery of the chair and simply stared at his back bent slightly over the keys. I was so wrapped up in my own fury and sorrow that I didn't even hear what he was playing.

After a couple of tunes, he got up from the piano and stood before me. He seemed to have lost his confident manner altogether. Like a small boy begging, he stood facing my chair—too far away for me to touch him—and begged, “Will you take care of me? Will you take me home?”

I studied him. He looked young, fragile and wasted. Lost—not dislocation but perdition.

My heart felt as though it were on hold. I could end this by a single gesture of head or hand. I, myself, could disappear into the black, cold wildness of the night and leave this pathetic creature to a fate he perhaps deserved, though I hadn't allowed myself to picture what that fate must inevitably be.

“No, Matthew,” I said, “I will not take you home if you have drugs. I'll get thrown out.”

“Okay,” he said, “okay …” with the eagerness to please of a puppy, “I'll flush the drugs …”

He disappeared through a second door at the side of the room. Again it occurred to me that I might rise and walk out and leave him here. Again I did not. He came back shortly and grinned and said, “There, they're gone.”

I had no idea what he'd really done with the drugs. I sat immobile in the chair watching him jitter his need for my acceptance in nervous little dancing gestures, waiting for me to say, “There's a good boy.” The sight of him should have repelled me totally.

“I'll play more for you,” he said, moving toward the piano. “Come and sit beside me.”

I did. He began to play and sing, his voice gruff and pained, and, despite its rustiness, clearly professional.

I listened and as I listened, something in me started to break. I couldn't stand it anymore. I looked sideways at him, maybe I put my hand on his to make him stop the music. “Matthew,” I said, “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

He stared at me. Fear danced in the deep eyes, a small white figure gyrating in the distant blackness. “I am who I said I was and I am from where I said I was from.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
KEPT MY EYES
on him.

“I don't care about your wonderful house or your marvellous career or your important contacts,” I told him. “All I care about is the wonderful person I've seen inside you. If you have some terrible problem, it's all right. I'll care about you anyway.”

He smiled. “That's very sweet,” he said, “but …”

And then I told him about the song. About the fact that it was credited to someone else. He jumped to his own defence immediately. He said he'd allowed the other person to take credit because he'd been so young himself at the time. He said—just as my brother had said—that the songbooks were often wrong. And then he began to play several famous songs that had been recorded by well-known singers but written by lesser-known composers—to prove that such mistakes were often made.

Then he sang me two songs I'd never heard—lovely songs that he said were also his. He told me that if I wanted a list of people to call about him, he'd be happy to supply names and numbers—but then the mystery would be gone. “You, too,” he said to me, “are full of mystery.” He played a little longer, then told me more about his wonderful house—“our” house. He tried to teach me to sing one of the pretty songs he'd written. Then he asked me once again to take him home.

Back out in the night, the weather was wilder than ever, but a frenetic joy seemed to have overtaken Matthew as we hailed a cab. Despite the now bitter cold, he wrapped me in his coat—leaving him in only the panther sweater. He kept saying, “I'll get sick and you'll have to take care of me ….”

In the cab, he couldn't seem to stop kissing me nor to restrain himself from declaring, “You are the love of my life.”

We decided we were starved and we headed for the Terminal, but first I had a package I had to drop off at the place where I did volunteer work. It was, by now, 11 p.m., and I felt reckless and young and important. It was the first time in my life I'd ever taken a taxi to one place and asked it to wait while I completed an errand before going on to another place. I left my purse in the back seat of the cab as I ran to the door, through freezing rain, to deliver my parcel. I heard Matthew give instructions to the cab driver as though he often took cabs from one place to several others. He said he'd wait for me in the back.

When we got to the Terminal, he told me he'd spent all his money on the drugs, so I paid for the cab.

The streets were slick with frozen rain. Holding onto each other for dear life, we slid our way from the cab to the door of the Terminal, and giggling, burst in out of the hostile night. Matthew threw off his coat and insisted that he had to sit in the booth on the same side of the table as me, so that we touched all along one side as I ate.

He seemed enormously happy and was full of talk about our future. He loved to talk about how he would go out on the road and I would be waiting for him in our house. He expressed fear that I might be lonely there. I asked him whether any of the band members' women travelled with them. Matthew froze for an instant, then turned to me and said, “I don't think you would want that. I don't think you would want to see how all those eighteen-year-olds are always throwing themselves at me.”

I bought this. I bought everything he said all evening. I also bought the fries, the hamburger, all the beers, and a cab to take us back to my place through the glaring, frozen streets.

The next morning, the whole world was covered with a thick blanket of soft white snow. And Matthew had begun to ask me to promise him that I would never leave him. “Promise me. Promise.”

And I did.

Without his asking, I gave him twenty dollars, because I knew he had no cash. He said “dollars” the way only a person from Boston could pronounce that word. I paid attention. I was soon to hear him mention dollars again.

Together we walked through the drifted snow to get to the subway. It was ruining Matthew's expensive leather shoes, but he seemed not to care at all. I found this odd in so fastidious a man.

As had become our routine, he got off at Yonge and Bloor and I went to work, already looking forward to his calling me at 7:30 as he had promised. All afternoon, I could smell him on me. It made me half afraid and half proud. I cancelled a course I was supposed to teach and a public appearance I was supposed to make. I decided when and how I would quit my job. I didn't think about the fact that I had known Matthew for fewer than nine days.

At 7:30 on the dot, he called. There was a lot of noise in the background. It was, he said, a party because it was the last day of the video. He was excited, too, because he was working on a deal to get himself three weeks' worth of additional work in town so that he could stay with me until I could finish the
book I was working on—which was nearly done—and make arrangements to go back with him. So we would never have to be apart again before we were married.

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.