Why Men Lie (25 page)

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Molly slammed her glass down on the table.

Effie said, “I’d have thought you’d be the first person he’d talk to about it.”

“So he’s agreed to watch some asshole’s execution. It’ll be the end of him. It’ll bring back every ghost of every stinking corpse he’s ever seen. And he’s seen a lot of them. You have to stop this.”

“Me?” Effie said. “I can’t even get him to discuss it. I think he wants to write a book about it.”

“Right,” Molly said. “A book. A two-minute news story is about all it’s worth. He thinks there’s a book in it? He really is cracking up.”

“He says the story is about impotence.”

Molly snorted. “Impotence, my ass. The story is about the crisis everybody has to go through at middle age.”

Effie suddenly felt overwhelmed. “Maybe it should be you.”

“No, sweetie. Not me. You’re just going to have to put your foot down. You want another drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

Parking on Walden, she felt exposed. It was awkward because Walden was one-way running east. He knew her car, so she had to park well past his house, facing east when he invariably walked west. And in any case, following on foot was tricky. He was a journalist. They were like cops, expert in following and being followed. Eventually she resorted to logic: her primary interest was Jarvis Street and learning why he sought out women who were little more than children. Prostitutes. Maybe he was working on a story. She considered asking Molly to find out, but if he wasn’t, what then?

She drove up Jarvis, turned west and circled back, then drove along Gerrard and stopped. It occurred to her that Ryerson University wasn’t far from there. They had a journalism program. Maybe it was as simple as JC going there to lecture students.
Ryerson used a lot of working journalists as part-time teachers. Maybe that was it. She sighed, remembering the scene in January, the girl named Tammy, standing, waiting, just over there. JC hurrying toward her. But maybe he didn’t even know this Tammy. Maybe he’d just walked on by. But Duncan had actually seen him talking to her once. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe it was someone else.
But why did JC seem so damned defensive when Duncan mentioned her? Why am I sitting here, getting chilled?

She turned her mind back to last August, after she’d returned to what felt like tropical Toronto, and the relative serenity that followed in the autumn. The ball games at the SkyDome. Hot dogs and beer. She’d never gone to a ball game, though she’d wanted to since the city got the franchise in ’77. Conor wouldn’t even consider it. “Fat-arsed millionaires standing around chewing gum,” he’d complained. “Makin’ up their minds whether or not to put some effort into winnin’.” Hockey he could understand, the speed, the contact. But JC loved baseball, and it turned out she did too. They’d sip their beers and chat, interrupted periodically by the crack of a ball against a bat, the relaxed excitement of the crowd’s reaction. They’d watch the play momentarily, then resume the conversation, which was usually about nothing. Until the next bat crack and crowd wow, the next fan-rouser from the PA system.

But it wasn’t all frivolity. She had resolved never to divert a happy moment by raising questions that were troubling. And she had also decided that she’d stick to fact, avoiding places in the memory that were clouded by uncertainty. So she talked about her mother, of whom she had no memory. And of Mrs. Gillis, who had tried to fill the role, and of the wounded warrior, Sandy Gillis, and of John. She was bluntly honest about John, about his goodness
and his weakness and his usefulness. She even wept for him, and JC held her close.

“Everybody came through okay in the end,” he said softly.

“Not exactly,” she replied.

“It was the war that ruined those guys,” he said. “John’s father, yours. Thousands like them. The evil infects people, and the infection migrates through the generations. Violence changes DNA. That’s the way I see it, anyway. And I think memory is the same as eye colour or pigmentation—it travels in the genes. We just don’t know how to extract the bad stuff or to change it. That’s what we’re up against. The permanence of violence.”

That made sense to her. Her father had suffered and because of that became an agent of suffering. JC enabled her to see that, had framed the subject of violence so that there could be no moral judgment of the victims of it and therefore no betrayal of the man who, after all, had given her the life she now enjoyed, had given her experience that shaped her and made her strong.
We’re all the victims of past violence
, she realized.
We all have that in common
.

“You never thought of moving out?”

“Of course. I did, eventually,” she said.

“It started when you were what? Twelve or thirteen?”

“That was when I noticed.”

“The knife should have been enough—you were in danger.”

“It was never like he was going to do anything with it. It was just there. I was terrified of the knife, but not of him. Of course, it was later that I understood. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about that girl, in Holland. The one he killed. He had to kill her, you know. Or she’d have killed him.”

“Why do you think she tried to kill them in the first place?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about that. You said yourself, about war.”

“Yes.”

“The poor girl. I often think of her.”

And then she realized the girl was standing there, a hundred feet away. Just standing on the corner, smoking. Effie couldn’t see her face but knew it was Tammy. In the glow of the street light, she could see the flimsy jacket made of imitation leather, the knee-high boots.

A car approached, slowed, then stopped. The girl spoke briefly to someone in the car. The car drove off.

Then Effie saw JC.

“Just keep walking,” she pleaded. “Just walk on by. Don’t even notice her.”

And it seemed as if he would. He didn’t appear to be aware of where he was, seemed lost in some distant memory, maybe mentally preparing for a class at Ryerson.

“Keep on going,” she whispered. “Please.”

He slowed. The girl on the corner noticed him. She turned away. For a moment Effie thought she was about to flee, but she turned back to face him. Then they were speaking, separated by a space of about ten feet. Even from where she sat, huddled in the darkness of the car, Effie couldn’t miss the familiarity in how they stood, how they gestured as they spoke.

And then he came closer to her, hands shoved into his jacket pockets. She produced another cigarette. He lit it for her. Then he reached into his jeans and extracted something, handed it to her. She accepted it and shoved it in a pocket. Then she turned. JC looked around. For a moment Effie was certain he’d seen her
car, seen her sitting there behind the steering wheel. But then he walked over to the girl and grasped her by the elbow; she yanked her arm away from him. Effie could see that clearly. Then they walked together down Gerrard Street. Effie watched them go until they disappeared into the darkness of the winter night.

I
t surprised her when she realized that what she felt was pity. A younger woman might have felt insulted, even frightened to discover such darkness in one she believed to be the mirror image of herself. But Effie had learned that one must never assume that she knows anybody. The human personality is like a wardrobe, with varied ensembles of expression to produce reactions in another, or a slew of others. Love me, need me, fear me, laugh or cry with me, obey me. We rarely see another human in his moral nakedness. But that, she realized, was what had been revealed on Jarvis Street. She’d seen JC Campbell stripped of all his qualities, and the effect was not what she expected. Not that pity was less distressing than anger would have been, or jealousy. She understood that pity causes distance and distance is the cause of loneliness. She’d already known enough of loneliness.

Only one of the three strangers in her living room stood when Conor introduced her. Faye Ferguson, he called her, which was strange. The “Faye,” she thought, was private. The man who stood was slim, of medium
height, with thinning hair. His smile was warm, his accent the same as Conor’s. Mr. Harrison, Conor called him. He was wearing a sports coat. The other two were burly, wearing bulky leather jackets. “And this is Mr. Megahey, and Mr. Cahill.” They nodded but remained seated, their expressions frozen in whatever moment she had interrupted. Old friends from home, Conor explained
.

“Conor says you’re becomin’ an expert in Celtic history,” said Harrison, whose interest seemed to be authentic, except that he pronounced the “Celtic” with an s. Seltic history. “And you’re a Canadian, born and raised.”

She nodded
.

“You’re a lucky woman,” he said. “Canada is a grand country.”

“Yes,” she said. Then added, “But I’ve never considered nationality to be much of an asset.”

Cahill smiled thinly. “Maybe that’s because your nationality has never been a liability.”

“The boys won’t be stayin’ for dinner,” Conor interrupted. “The four of us are goin’ for a pint, and we’ll probably grab a bite to eat. You’re all right, then?”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do.”

They all stood. Harrison shook her hand and nodded. “It was a pleasure, Faye.”

When they were gone, she wondered where and why she’d felt such loneliness before
.

Cassie’s marriage was a wonderful distraction—a local anesthetic was how Effie thought of it—and she embraced the project as if it were her own. She’d become extremely fond of Ray. She saw him as a rare example of stable adulthood in a time defined by error and despair.

Screw it, she would say in her mind. Screw it, screw it, in a kind of sing-song mantra. She forced herself to laugh at all her new ironic insights, which were not, upon reflection, really new at all, being as they were about the darkness of male sexuality. Which made them seem that much more laughable.

The phone rang and she picked up, knowing it was probably a mistake. She said nothing, just waited.

“Faye?”

Silence.

“I saw you on the street today, on St. George. I had a class there. You were at the light, waiting. You seemed down. I almost crossed over to talk to you, but I kept my promise. You looked like you could use a friend. I can’t stop thinking about you …”

She gently pressed the hang-up button, realizing that it was sadness she felt.

JC called and left a message, wondering if there was anything wrong. She almost called him back: “Anything wrong? What fucking planet are you living on, you idiot?” It was almost funny enough to have authorized a reengagement. But no. There were worse conditions than isolation. Loneliness doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

On April seventh there was an urgent message from Molly Blue. Effie returned the call immediately.

“You know about Texas?” Molly said.

“What about it?”

“That character has lost what seems to be his last appeal. It’ll be on the news tonight. A circuit court in New Orleans has turned him down. And our hero is packing his bag.”

Effie sighed.

“You heard what I said?”

“Yes. I heard.”

“I know you two are kind of estranged …”

“He told you that?”

“Not in so many words. But he asked me to look after the frigging cat for a few days. Effie, you have to intervene. This is serious. This could be the end of him.”

“What makes you think I can influence him?”

“You’re the only one who can.”

“I’m busy with my daughter’s wedding. I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the energy for a lost cause.”

“A wedding …”

“Look,” said Effie. “He isn’t the only one who’s had miserable experiences.”

Molly’s voice was shaky. “Forget yourself for a moment. Think of him as sick. He’s sick. I don’t know if it’s from the knock on the head or from a whole life of hard knocks. But he’s not normal. I know the man better than you do. Trust me. This is not JC. This is a composite of the wickedness he’s witnessed. And now he seems to think that he can make sense of it all by watching one specific wicked moment up close, actually knowing the victim for once, really understanding the nature of what he’s witnessing by allowing himself to be a part of it.”