Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “You did. So do a lot of men. Women too, probably.”

  “There should be some kind of law,” I said.

  It got me a hint of a smile. “Like that would work.”

  “How come you didn’t just get up and leave me back there. Look at the rat’s nest I got you into.”

  “That’s a good question. In fact, after hearing what Beth Ann had to say, I almost did. I would have been gone before you got back.”

  “But?”

  “But she talked me out of it. She said she still believes you have a good heart. She forgave you a long time ago. I think it was the first real heart-to-heart conversation I’ve had with a woman in a long time.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for not ditching me and riding off into the sunset.”

  “I think Beth Ann convinced me to stick it out. There’s plenty of exits if I need them. But maybe you’ll need me around for moral support. You seem to be up to your earlobes in shit.”

  “I love the image. I believe it describes my situation perfectly. And I would appreciate the moral support, but you might get your hands dirty in the process.”

  “And I’ll have to put up with the stink.”

  “I think we should leave the metaphor there and not pursue it,” I countered. “But here I am again, totally dependent on you. No money. No place to stay now that I gave Brody my key.”

  “See. That’s why I can’t just hoist up my anchor and leave. You need an ally. But promise me you’ll find Brody tomorrow and talk to him again. Convince him to give up selling.”

  “I will,” I said, although I was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good.

  “But first we have to visit my mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have to be nice to her even if she doesn’t make sense.”

  “Hey, I was a newspaperman, remember. I interviewed dozens of politicians. Most of them didn’t make much sense, but I always gave them the time of day.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  We had dinner at the pub in Porters Lake. It was quiet. The food was okay. Our table was by the door and there was a near constant parade of smokers leaving the video gambling room, going outside for a smoke, coming back in with a desperate look on their faces as they prepared to squander whatever weekly wages had come their way. The look on Ramona’s face was what I’d call quiet resolve.

  “What’s going to become of your mom?” I asked. I was trying to prepare myself for tomorrow.

  “It’s all downhill. It’s a form of dementia and it doesn’t just go away. And it doesn’t really get cured. Hers started to come on when she was only in her fifties. Her name’s Brenda, by the way. She likes to hear the sound of her name, but sometimes she forgets it. She forgets many things and she gets mixed up easily so work with it.”

  “Well, I forget things and get confused easily so we already have a lot in common.”

  Now Ramona gave the look. The look I was getting familiar with. A pursing of the lips (those beautiful lips) that said I was an idiot, my joke was idiotic, but despite all that, she thought I was cute and funny. Yes, that was what that look meant. I was sure of it.

  Her apartment was as luxurious as I expected. Clean, neat, opulent. Movie star digs. We were both very tired. She took a bath while I thumbed through some of her books, reading passages here and there out of context.

  When she came out, she had a robe on and her hair was still wet. I couldn’t read her look this time. “Want me to sleep on the sofa?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Keep me company.”

  I showered and soon we were in bed. But it was nothing like the afternoon. We were both dead tired and drifted off to sleep quickly, more like brother and sister than lovers.

  Brenda Danforth did not look like a woman with dementia. She looked much like Queen Elizabeth, in fact, which rather startled me. She looked old, but she was elegant and well dressed, and had excellent posture for an old woman.

  “Mom, this is Charles,” Ramona said. And I almost laughed. Because of my name, that is. Because of the association I had just made with the queen of England. And because of what the queen had named her son.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Danforth.”

  “Call me Brenda,” she said, looking me directly in the eye.

  I was beginning to think Ramona had tricked me. Her mother seemed completely coherent. But then things quickly began to change.

  “I’m expecting company today,” she said. “My daughter is coming by.”

  Ramona waved at her. “That would be me.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course,” Brenda said, with a hint of doubt in her eyes.

  “Charles is a writer,” Ramona told her.

  Brenda’s eyelids lifted. “An author?”

  “More like a reporter. A journalist. Or was.”

  “But you have a love of language.”

  “Yes, I do have that.”

  “Have you read the classics?”

  “Some.”

  “The Russians? Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Gogol, Solzhenitsyn?”

  “Yes, yes, no, and yes,” I responded.

  “They’re all very dark and dreadful, are they not?”

  “Mostly,” I admitted. Most of my reading of the likes of Dostoevsky was back at Dal, when I was honing my skills at being pretentious. As I grew older, I lost my skill set in that department.

  “I listen to a lot of audiobooks now,” Brenda offered. “The words are like music to my ears.”

  I thought we were doing pretty good with the small talk, and I was keeping up my end of it nicely, but then there was another shift. She looked away out the window and then back at me. Her face lit up. “Trevor,” she said. “You finally came back to visit your old mother.”

  I looked at Ramona. I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew there had been a brother and he was dead.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m doing much better now that you’re here. Who is that with you?” she asked, nodding toward her daughter.

  “Ramona,” I said.

  “Ah, yes,” Brenda responded, but I don’t think she recognized her. “How are things in Montreal?” she asked me.

  “Good. Life is good in Montreal.”

  “And how are things at the university?”

  “Just great. I have good grades.”

  “That’s my boy. Keep it up.” She turned toward Ramona and asked, “Could you please get me some water?”

  “Sure, Mom.” Ramona got up and walked into the small bathroom.

  Brenda leaned toward me and whispered, “Who did you say she was?”

  “Ramona,” I whispered back. “Your daughter.”

  “But I don’t have a daughter. At least I don’t think so.”

  Ramona returned with a pink plastic cup and handed her mother the water. She sipped it loudly.

  “Mom,” Ramona said, trying to re-establish contact, “I’m going to try to come visit more often. I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much as I should have.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, dear. It’s always nice to have visitors, though.”

  There was a quiet spell just then. I kind of tuned out while Ramona tried to continue to make small talk with her mother, asking about meals, health, prompting her to remember things from when Ramona had been young.

  In the midst of it, Brenda turned back to me as if just seeing me for the first time. Her facial expression suddenly changed dramatically. “Goddamn it, Stanley,” she spit out at me. “Where have you been? What have you been up to?”

  “This is not who you think it is,” Ramona insisted. Brenda remained angry.

  Ramona leaned toward me. “Stanley was my father. Things did not go well in their final years.”

  “Do you still only think about money?” Brenda asked me accusingly. An odd question to ask a man who is totally broke. I thought it best not to play along on this one. I could pretend to be a son but not a husband, one who was obviously disliked by his
own wife.

  Ramona turned toward her mother. “Stanley is not here. This is Charles.”

  That confused her. She studied my face again. “I thought it was Trevor.”

  “Charles,” I repeated gently.

  Her puzzlement gave way to a slight hint of a smile. “Of course. You always said you wanted to change your name.”

  I nodded and let go a little nervous laugh.

  Ramona drew her back into a conversation about the staff and the nursing home and her favourite TV shows. I faded into the background as best I could, and after about forty-five minutes, with Brenda getting tired, we left. We helped her lie down on the bed. A nurse showed up shortly and said, “She usually has a nap around this time of day.”

  Ramona kissed her on the cheek and asked me to do the same. I dutifully kissed Brenda lightly on her powdered cheek and we made our exit.

  We went for coffee at the Just Us! coffee shop on Spring Garden Road. It was busy in there and noisy and I liked the hustle and bustle after the oppressive quiet of the nursing home.

  “Tell me about Trevor,” I said.

  Ramona held her cup with two hands and stared into it. “Trevor was a lot like you. Maybe that’s what my mom detected in you. He loved to read and he loved words. He wrote poetry, had some published in Montreal literary magazines. He went to McGill to study literature. Wanted to be a university prof. Wanted to write books. I think he started a novel once or twice like you did. He was the sensitive type. Too sensitive. Got in with a girl from Laval. I don’t think he’d ever been in love before. But she wasn’t good for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was like us. She had a habit of just walking away.”

  “We should all have a sign stitched on our shirts. Beware of this one. Heartbreaker. Something like that.”

  “He didn’t commit suicide. It wasn’t like that.”

  “What happened?”

  “Drug overdose. Not OxyContin, not fentanyl. But it was some kind of opiate. Some kind of mix of things. I’m sure he didn’t know what he was taking. But my mother and father started to come apart after that. Maybe it had already begun. But things were never quite the same with them after that and my father started spending more time at his work and away. I wasn’t much help, off trying to chase my own celluloid dreams.”

  “So that drama back in the harbour must have brought back bad memories.”

  “It did. I tried to hold it together. When Beth Ann told me about you and about her son, I secretly hoped someone would find Brody and beat the living daylights out of him. Sorry.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to get him to stop.”

  “Promise me?”

  “Yes, I promise,” I said, although I didn’t then know what I was promising to do.

  “Thank you. And, if you don’t mind, I don’t want to speak any more about my brother.”

  “Okay. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Oh. But there is one more thing. I lied to you.”

  “About?”

  “About my father. He’s not dead. He’s very much alive, the bastard.”

  19

  The coffee shop seemed to empty just about then. The room grew quiet and I felt like I had yet again been thrown into another dimension.

  “After my brother died,” Ramona continued, “things started going badly for my parents. I went into a period of depression myself and started taking antidepressants. But they screwed up my acting. And I didn’t feel like myself. So I stopped, let the pain sweep over me, and, yes, it eventually began to fade. I got on with my life. But I was beginning to see that the whole acting thing was not the dream vocation I thought it was.

  “But my mother was trying to put Trevor’s death behind her somehow and threw herself into charity work. My father, meanwhile, had created a little real estate empire and had other investments. He started travelling a great deal as part of his work. And when they were together, they fought. Each blamed the other for something they did wrong in raising Trevor, I think.

  “And then my mother started to show symptoms of early-onset dementia. I didn’t think anything of it at first. She’d always been absent-minded, forgetful, a bit quirky with her way of doing things. By the time it was finally diagnosed, my father already had one foot out the door.”

  “How old was she at the time?”

  “Only fifty-four. I didn’t know such a thing could happen. And my father refused to accept that it was a medical condition. Besides, he was already at work on firming up the classic male cliché. He had found another woman. A younger one, of course. Someone who liked him for his cash.”

  “Did they divorce?” I asked, hoping to sound sympathetic.

  “No, they didn’t. My father was just away more and more. My mother claimed she didn’t care. She was happier when he was gone. I eventually moved back to Halifax. My father moved to Toronto to be closer to the big money. The other woman was soon replaced by a second and a third. There was a trust fund to take care of Mom and me. There was never a divorce. Mom got worse. I did a bit of modelling again since it wasn’t as stressful as acting. But I grew to hate it. Standing around in those lights. Posing. Pouting. Pretending.”

  “But you don’t talk to your father.”

  “No. I tried for a couple of years. But I hated him. He’d walked away when she needed him most.”

  “I guess some men can be pretty callous.”

  “Actually, the way he treated us really coloured my feelings toward men in general. I found myself being attracted to women again. But I soon came to the conclusion that men and women are pretty much the same when it comes to faithfulness and loyalty.”

  “Is that what you want? Faithfulness. Loyalty? Did you ever think of getting a dog?”

  “Idiot.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, it is.” And then she paused. “Well, now you know more of the story. What do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “About me. About my situation.”

  “Well, I think you have wounds that haven’t fully healed, but then you seem to have gotten on with your life.”

  “No. That’s just it. I didn’t get on with my life. I stalled somewhere along the way.”

  “You had all that guilt money to live on, so why worry about a career or anything else?”

  “Because it always felt like something was missing. And then you came along.”

  That last line threw me. “I didn’t exactly come along. I was just standing there minding my own business.”

  “But you were there at the moment I was about to break out of my shell.”

  “Two lost souls on a Halifax pier.”

  “Something like that. I was drawn to you. I don’t know why.”

  “Right time, right place. Right stranger staring into the fog.”

  “Yes, I thought you looked lost. I wanted to help.”

  “I think I read it somewhere on the internet. If you want women to like you, see if you can arouse their pity.”

  “Maybe there’s something to that. You did look lost. You looked like you needed a friend. And I needed something too. I needed to walk out of my comfortable dead-end life.”

  “But then you stumbled into my suddenly complicated coastal world of fish, drugs, and fucked-up folks.”

  “Yes. And that was not what I expected.”

  “But now that we’re rooting around in each other’s sordid past, what next?”

  “The past always, always catches up with us. I don’t think my father has figured that out, even now. He never comes back to visit. I’ve cut off communication with him.”

  “But the money is still there.”

  “Yes. The bloody trust fund. A well-invested trust fund that seems to keep growing, even though Mom’s nursing care is paid for and I can dip into it whenever I want.”

  “Poor little rich girl.”

  “That’s exactly what I say every morning when I look in the mirror.”

 
The coffee shop was completely empty now except for Ramona and me. And it was like a scene from some movie. What was it? Not a romantic comedy. Not a tragedy. Not an action thriller, that’s for sure. Something independent. A tad melodramatic. But not exactly predictable.

  The silence was suddenly deafening. “Do you think there’s any chance we could make this last?” she asked. “I don’t want to use the word love so soon, but —”

  I held up my hand to stop her right there. There was something in her eyes I didn’t understand, but I didn’t really care what it was. “Yes, Ramona. Whatever you need. Whatever you want. I think I already do … love you, I mean.” And as soon as the words were out, I knew this was not acting. This was what my heart forced my mouth to say.

  It wasn’t the classic Do you love me? But it was one hell of a line. There was a director somewhere — the barista maybe — looking my way, waiting for me to deliver the line of the big scene in the movie.

  Maybe I was expecting some great romantic moment to follow, some clever, sexy comeback line, the next invitation to hop into her posh Halifax sack and make love. But it didn’t play out that way.

  “Then you need to do something for me,” she said.

  It was some kind of test. Bring it on. “Okay. What?”

  “You need to make sure Brody never sells another pill, another bag of coke, any other drug ever again. You need to do this for my mom, do this for Trevor, and do this for me.”

  20

  After we went back to Ramona’s apartment, she told me she had a couple more appointments in the afternoon. She gave me a key to the place and said I would be on my own for the afternoon. After lunch she took a shower and then was gone, leaving me with a kiss on my cheek and a squeeze of my hand. Then she put her car keys in my hand again. “I can walk to where I need to be. Take the car for a spin. Go down to Point Pleasant Park or something.”

  I had this feeling that something wasn’t quite right between us. I’d met her mother, she’d filled in some gaps in her life, admitted to lying to me, taken me many miles deeper into her tangled life, and then delivered a kind of ultimatum. And it was just that. It was an ultimatum, not a request. It seemed strange for her to leave me like that. I didn’t like the feel of it. Had I been coyly manipulated yet again by an attractive woman? Or had she stated something so obvious that it had to be done?