Toby (18 page)

There was an unlikely harmony about the neighbourhood to the south, a jumble of nineteenth-century two-and
three-storeys arguing with the boxy high-rises built in the misapprehension of hope in 1967—Expo year, Canada’s last great year. It was now a tacky student core, full of delis and cafés and bars and restaurants, well populated with young pedestrians like himself wearing improper shoes and outerwear for the weather. It was the unselfconscious Montreal, the free market, unregulated, United Nations of Montreal, a counter-argument for the Québécois boomers, the language police, former hippies nostalgic for an uglier, meaner, rigid and unilingual time; a counter-argument for the pro-something and anti-everything else manic depressives of the English universities.

Once, in his early twenties, Toby had attended an ethnic fair in the foyer of the Hall Building at Concordia University, with a girlfriend whose name he could not recall. Members of the Jewish Students’ Association wore folk costumes and played klezmer on a small ghetto blaster, served falafels and hummus. Across the hall, members of the Arab Students’ Association wore not dissimilar folk costumes and played devotional music on a small ghetto blaster, served falafels and hummus. One of the Arab student leaders crossed the floor and accused the Jews of “colonizing” the chickpea, and it led to a fist fight.

The wind sneaked up Toby’s ripped jacket. In a busy pizzeria, he ordered two slices and a V8, as the men behind the counter hollered and gestured at one another. He sat at the only vacant table, under a yellowing poster of Beirut as it was before any of the recent troubles. No one in the little restaurant recognized him as a television star. Lebanese pop music blared from ruined speakers. Toby was old enough now that he would seem a lost and defeated divorcé, eating alone in a two-dollar pizzeria.

He finished and walked back to the Chevette. On the way, he stopped at a depanneur on de Maisonneuve to escape the cold for a moment. He bought a jumbo can of Molson Export, and the Indian clerk slipped it into a brown paper bag for him, with a wink. Toby’s pants legs were wet all the way up to his knees and he had no overcoat; for the first time in his adult life, a stranger had judged him a hobo. There were several bouquets strewn about near the produce, so Toby chose the prettiest one.

“I love freesia and gerbera daisies together,” he said.

“Yes,” said the clerk.

“They’re for my wife.”

The clerk nodded. “Yes.”

Toby finished the jumbo beer just as he reached the Chevette. He wiped the snow from the windshield with the sleeve of his jacket. His spirits renewed, he decided to take a quick tour of Westmount before returning to Dollard; in case he won the Lotto 6/49 jackpot or was asked to anchor
The National
on CBC, it only seemed responsible to be prepared with real estate ideas.

The lights were on inside the house on Strathcona Avenue, but with snow on the apple tree he could not see clearly into the salon. The clerk on de Maisonneuve had wrapped the flowers haphazardly, as he had clearly been worried that Toby, a cultivated vagrant, would steal a chocolate bar or a lighter if he were left unsupervised. Toby tried to straighten the paper and add a sense of crispness and grandeur to the package.

It was not déjà vu, exactly, for he had walked along her stone path and up the steps of her porch hundreds of times, in all four seasons. No, he felt as though he were being watched
by a version of himself, a Toby Ménard of the past or of the future, hiding under the freshly painted steps or in the peeling boughs of the apple tree. Alicia was the most beautiful woman on the island of Montreal, and easily one of the most intelligent, despite the limited demands of her profession. To ignore her, to allow her to escape him was malevolent pride. Alicia had been calling out for Toby, and he had not been listening.

He rang the bell. A deep and authoritative
clong
echoed through the cottage. The noise had always reminded him of the stroke of one in a cathedral—not that he had ever been in a cathedral at the stroke of one. The white button, with a swirl of marble about it, was the same size and shape as the button on Mr. Demsky’s townhouse.

A woman he did not recognize, with a round face and frameless glasses, opened the blue door. Foundation caked over a pimple next to her nose.

“It’s you.”

“Good evening. My name is Toby Ménard, and—”

“I know who you are. Come in.” The woman introduced herself, Carrie, as a member of the book club. Several other women sat in an oval of chairs and pillows around a coffee table full of Greene Avenue snacks—hummus, sushi, premium sliced vegetables. Yoga pants, yoga pants, yoga pants. They turned to him and waved, said hello flatly. “Hello.” “Hi.” “Wet out there?”

Carrie felt obliged to stand next to him, as his guide into the house, but she did not make eye contact.

“Did someone tell Allie he’s here?”

One of the women popped up and slid over the wood floor in her socks.

“What book are you doing? Reading, I mean, in your club.”

Three of them answered at once, so Toby did not catch the title. It sounded like every other recent novel. Two nouns, mixed up for pretty effect:
The Something of Something.

“Brilliant choice.”

“Oh, you’ve read it?”

“Yes, yes. Harrowing.”

Carrie rubbed her hands together. “You must join us. It would be useful to have a male perspective.”

The women stopped chewing and looked at each other. Alicia entered through the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the salon. She strode in a queenly fashion, in a tan dress he did not recognize and black high-heeled sandals, carrying a bottle of wine and a bowl of artisan potato chips.

“He read the book,” said Carrie. “We thought he could join us.”

“Nonsense,” said Alicia. “He doesn’t read books.”

“Yes, I do.”

She placed the wine and chips on the table and lifted a copy of the paperback. It was thick, with a bee on the cover. “What’s it about?”

Toby looked at Carrie and the others, shrugged. “Making conversation, you see. But I do read books. I read them all the time.” Something about Carrie’s expression inspired him to continue. “I was just thinking about a book earlier this evening, in my car. A book that had been very important to me, in recent years.”

“Very impressive.” Alicia reached back for an artisan potato chip. “Did you come by for any non-literary reasons?”

“I was hoping we could speak in private.”

Alicia placed a hand on the mantel. “Where are you living? I saw the condominium in the
Gazette.
”

“Dollard.”

“With your parents.”

“Yes.”

Alicia turned to the fellow members of her book club. They looked down at their books, their small plates filled with snacks, their glasses of wine. One actually snickered.

“What could we possibly discuss, Toby?”

“I thought alone, we could…”

“We could what?”

There were several Alicias. None of them was capable of appearing emotionally dependent on the affections of a man. In all their years together, she had never once consented to hold his hand in public. But she encouraged and inspired him, and really never seemed to mind, excessively, that he was from the West Island. Hosting-a-book-club-meeting-Alicia crossed her arms and tilted her head just slightly, like a nightclub bouncer, and didn’t open her eyes all the way.

“We left things oddly, I thought, back at the station,” he said.

“Define ‘oddly,’ in this context.”

“We had three goldfish together. To this day, and I’m sure it’s the same with you, I’m not sure we actually broke up.”

She turned again to her utterly rapt book club, then back to him. “We actually, definitely, assuredly broke up.”

“I was wondering if that might be negotiable.”

“It was non-negotiable. It remains non-negotiable.”

“Of course. I just wanted to be certain.” Toby pulled the bouquet off the narrow table in the foyer. “These are for you. Just some flowers.”

“I see that.” Alicia did not step forward to take them.

“Excellent. All right.” He put his free hand in his pocket. “I suppose I should say, Alicia, that I wish you the best, all the very best, in your career and in every other facet of your life.”

“This is what you came to say?”

“No.” He placed the bouquet on the wooden floor. “There’s this website. If you upload a digital photograph of yourself and one of your partner, they mash it up and for five dollars make a prediction about what your child will look like. They make a boy and a girl. I chose age three. It’s a cute age, I think, and you do have a fairly solid idea of what a person will look like as an adult by age three. The clothes weren’t right. I can just imagine, Alicia, how you’d dress up a little girl. Dresses, long coats, boots. Straight out of the forties. I would sometimes browse, you know, real estate websites in Europe. One day, when the kids were old enough to appreciate it, and to learn from the experience, I thought we could get an apartment in Barcelona. Remember, when we were there, how I would go downstairs and bring up breakfast and coffee, and we’d lie there with the shutters open? The sirens of those police cars. That sound still excites me when I hear it. In movies, or on television, what have you.”

There was a hint of sympathy in her eyes, and she listened without fidgeting or looking away. It was quiet in the big old house on Strathcona Avenue. Alicia stood and soaked it up, his discomfort and now his humiliation, as though it were a rare replenishing cream. Just when it seemed she would be led into pity, she sighed and gently slid the flowers across the floor to him.

One of the other women, a running partner of Alicia’s, a neighbour of a certain age, said, “Can we open the goddamn wine?”

Traffic was light on the autoroute. The radio in the Chevette cut in, and Toby turned up a scratchy version of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. It was, he deemed, the most beautiful piece of music ever written. With whom in his new constellation, he wondered, might he share this opinion? Neither Randall and Garrett nor his parents would understand. He would have to play it for them and explain, which would only strain his knowledge of baroque violin, history, the philosophy of music, and the human heart. He would have to make things up. More importantly, it would bore the hell out of them. Twice he nearly drove off the autoroute into the shadows of some snowy nowhere.

From the front yard, he heard Hugo crying in his bedroom. The door was not locked, so he threw it open and ran down the hall before he had a chance to answer his parents’ greetings.

Hugo spotted him in the faint hallway light and said, “Poney, Poney, you need water, Poney, you
need
some.”

There was a small glass of water on the bookshelf. Hugo took a short sip and lay back down, smiling. “I’m home, Poney.”

“I
am
home.”

For the next long while, he explained to the boy about Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. “If there is a God, this is where He resides. Do you understand?” The boy fell asleep holding Toby’s hand. The smallness and smoothness
and newness and guilelessness of Hugo’s hand. It took Toby several minutes to extricate his fingers gently enough so that he would not startle the boy awake.

Karen sat in her blue recliner, watching
Law & Order.
It was an early episode—the young people in a nightclub scene pulled their jeans up too high and tucked their shirts in, beltlessly.

Edward was in his own recliner, staring up at the ceiling. “Where were you just now?”

“I met Mr. Demsky to talk about my career.”

“Come to any conclusions?” Edward continued to look at the ceiling.

“I suppose not, no.”

“It’s ten thirty.”

Toby had carried the flowers and a vase into the living room to properly arrange the bouquet. In the car, he had briefly considered presenting the depanneur flowers to Karen, but he did not know when his father had last bought any for her.

“You should be here, with your son, at ten thirty.”

Your son.
Toby needed to sit. He looked around for the footstool, but it had been flipped over and its underside filled with wooden spoons and three plush chicks.
With your son.
Toby looked to his mother, and she closed her eyes, shook her head. He learned, from this gesture, that Edward had been in a state for some time. “You’re right, Dad. I’m very sorry.”

Something about
Law & Order
had always comforted Karen Mushinsky; she turned to it for wisdom and consolation the way earlier generations had turned to Wordsworth.

“A crisis is coming. You do know that,” said Edward.

“I do?”

“It’s upon us. I can feel it.”

“What sort of crisis?”

Karen cleared her throat to warn Toby away from this line of questioning.

“The grandest and darkest crisis of our time. Food and fuel are running out. The economic system? A sham. We’re in for drought and then for war. The drought war. The crazy Jew-haters are going to bomb New York City, you just watch. It’s a six-hour drive. You think the nuclear winter won’t float up here, on a nor’easter?”

“I don’t know how nor’easters work.”

“When I close my eyes, Toby, I see them coming.”

“Who?”

“They’re so close I can smell them. They’re going to sweep through our little house and rip us to pieces, you see? Destroy our human dignity. That’s why I want you close, our family close. In case it comes. So we can be together in that final moment. Huddled. Huddled.”

Edward’s eyes had expanded their dominion over his face. Karen’s hands were at her mouth in a gesture of prayer. She was about to cry.

“This is why you cannot, cannot stay out until ten thirty at night. What if it happened while you were away? What if I missed it, missed a chance to say goodbye?”

“Dad…”

“Having Hugo here just brings it all back. Our little family, what, thirty-five years ago. You and me and your mom. Three.” Edward cleared his throat and sang, his voice weak and wavering. “
Three is a magic number. Yes it is, it’s a magic number.
” He stopped singing and turned to Karen. “You remember, my sweet?”