His slips into oddness, the flamboyance of his claims, and the darting intensity of his black eyes seemed to be warning me. But I have spent enough hours among poets, musicians and the marginally insane to believe it’s safe to give them the benefit of the doubt. To wait for riches …
He was so confident, so intelligent and so charming that I was willing to risk his being strange. He talked a great deal about his family. He told me his oldest brother had been a hockey player. As with the story of Matthew’s connection with the band he said he played with, he offered me a genealogy of hockey, eventually leading to the Hartford Whalers—of whom I knew just as much as I knew about Neil Young. He said that his brother had retired seven years before and that Matthew had bought his house in Hartford and had lived there since. He had been raised in Toronto, he said.
I noticed as he spoke that his knowledge of Toronto and his accent seemed exactly right for the facts he was relating.
He spoke of this brother, the eldest of the four sons that made up his family, as if they had been quite close. The brother now lived in L.A. with his wife, a woman of whom Matthew clearly was not enamoured. He spoke of having visited this oldest brother often, implying in a vague way that though he hadn’t seen him in a couple years, he still kept in touch with him and was closer to him than to anyone else in the family. The brother, he said, was called Daniel.
Of the next brother, Paul, he said practically nothing. Of the next, Sam, the third oldest, he said that he’d been in bad trouble with the FBI, that at one point a rich man who was his friend had bailed him out of one scrape by confronting the FBI and pretty much chasing them away from his Toronto home, where Sam was holed up. “Then,” Matthew said, “Sam met a woman—”
He leaned close to me and said, “I’ve never told this to anybody before, but I can talk to you. The fact is, I liked Sam’s wife. I liked her so much that I felt I was in love with her myself. Not that we did anything—it was just that, well, she changed Sam’s life. She changed his life completely …”
Two things struck me about this passionate revelation. The first was how desperately impressed Matthew seemed to be at the phenomenon of having one’s life “changed completely.” The other was how intensely he seemed to identify with Sam. I thought again about his referring to himself in the third person. A strange, unwelcome thought flitted in and out of my mind. The thought that maybe I should allow myself to wonder which brother my companion really was.
CHAPTER THREE
“I WAS THE YOUNGEST but there would have been another. When I was four my mother had a miscarriage in the driveway of our house. Sam and I saw it, but my father would never tell us what happened. After that my mother overdosed on pills and tried to kill herself. I’ve hated pills ever since.”
He spoke of his father’s gruff domination of the family, of his mother’s passivity, which greatly disturbed him. He mentioned his father’s business and his special love for his grandmother, who had provided for his early musical education.
He told me about his unusual hobby. He said he was an angler—a fly-fisher. He mentioned Izaak Walton and I piped up, “author of The Compleat Angler.” His face lit up and he said my knowing that “blew his socks off.”
He talked and talked and I listened, enraptured. “Do you mind if I tell you something?” he said in a suddenly personal tone, and fascinated, I leaned closer.
“Of course not. What?”
He smiled as he said softly, “I didn’t like the way your friends deserted you like that.”
There was something odd about the comment. I didn’t understand why he should think I would mind. Except that he seemed a very polite man at all times. I thought it was very nice of him to care enough to mention such a thing. I apologized for my friends and Matthew went on talking.
A couple of times he excused himself and disappeared off somewhere behind me, presumably to go to the washroom. So did I. And each time, I asked myself what I was doing with such a young, attractive, successful, exciting man. I wondered where this was going to lead. And then I wondered whether I cared.
He told me he was thirty-five but that most people took him to be younger. He started to explain something about his age that made it sound as though he thought I was younger than him. I stopped him with a laugh and told him, “I’m older than you. I’m forty, though with me, too, most people don’t realize it.”
He laughed. We joked about Dorian Gray.
For a while a blues band played and we listened. He said he recognized one of the players as a famous old-timer. I had no way of knowing anything about the man, myself, but Matthew sounded like he knew all about him.
Hours passed. Our waitress left, Matthew paying her first for my food and our beers and his cigarettes. He wouldn’t hear of my paying for anything and he seemed to have plenty of cash. Another waiter took over our table. Matthew leaned across and said to me, “You’re very nice—” and of course I said, “So are you ….”
The blues band long departed, Matthew suggested we move toward the piano in the part of the room where they’d been. He wanted to play for me, as had been his intention in bringing me to that bar. Matthew signaled the waiter and told him we were moving. I wasn’t sure why he did this, but it seemed like a nice touch. He was obviously a man of some polish.
We moved nearer to the piano and sat on high stools at a round table. Now, instead of being across from each other, we were side by side. I noticed that Matthew moved gradually closer and that once in a while, his thigh brushed mine. I didn’t pull away.
His singing voice was wonderful—surprisingly gruff and full of some elusive emotion that teetered between pain and youthful innocence. The minute he touched the piano, he seemed lost in the music, though he had a professional’s habit of looking away from the keyboard toward whatever audience might be listening. I was listening. And watching. He looked different when he played, not as handsome and somehow smaller. But he seemed more at ease with himself, too.
He sang three old traditional blues numbers, a couple of which were familiar to me. One had a line that went, “Throw your big leg over me, mama—don’t know when I’m gonna feel this good again.”
I loved the sound of him. But he was rusty. Not at all like a man who’d spent the past two weeks playing in a video every day.
The people in the bar didn’t seem to mind, though. They clapped and shouted out for him to play more, and when he sat down beside me again, a couple of people stopped by to tell him how much they’d enjoyed what he’d done.
He ordered more beers for us and we talked on. He told me his parents hadn’t responded to him as a child and he told me, too, how he’d once taken a helicopter trip over the Grand Canyon and been so bowled over by what he saw that he’d asked his girlfriend of the time to go with him and do it again, but that she wasn’t very impressed. He said that if he could have had children, he would always have been careful to respond to every single thing they showed him with enthusiasm so that their excitement about life would never be dampened. When he spoke about children, his whole body seemed to come alive and his voice was full of feeling.
I couldn’t help but be enormously touched by this. It brought out the maternal instinct in me—toward him. I asked him why he spoke of having children as something beyond him, seeing as he was still so young.
“I can’t have children for various reasons,” he said with a slightly evasive smile, and I feared I’d been impolite, though he showed no irritation at my question at all.
We’d been together since four and it was nearly eleven. Matthew insisted I have another beer, though it seemed to me I’d been drinking for a very long time, not that I felt drunk in the least. But noticing the time, I realized I should take out my contact lenses before they became permanently melded to my eyeballs. I made a joke about it and excused myself to go to the washroom yet again. Matthew said of course, but that before I went, he wanted a favour.
“What?” I asked, more touched than nervous.
“I
want you to kiss me,” he said. “Would you do that?”
The request seemed touching and charming and inviting. It also seemed slick. But I let his lips briefly touch mine.
When I returned I told him I couldn’t see very much but that vanity prevented my putting my glasses on. He told me to put them on by all means, and that he would like me with them on just as much as he liked me without them. He asked for another kiss and got it.
Then he started a new conversation. He said he couldn’t understand how a nice man like him and a nice woman like me could be alone the way we were. He said he couldn’t believe I didn’t have a husband. There was about these comments the same slickness as there’d been with the first kiss. I could have told him lots of reasons why people like us could be alone, allowing our thighs to press against the thighs of strangers. We could be crazy. We could be sick. We could be liars. I could easily have had a husband and he could easily have had a wife. Maybe more than one. Or each of us could also have had someone at home with a body more or less exactly like our own.
But I said nothing. And when he said, “After three weeks all my faults become obvious …,” as if that explained why he was alone, I thought to myself, “After three weeks you’ll be in Hartford or Africa and I’ll have forgotten this conversation.”
He wanted to talk about the happiness of simple people—married people. He told me about the couples he sometimes saw in the lounges he played in. It sounded as though he’d toured the whole country playing in piano bars. He told me how happy and satisfied with each other some of the middle-aged and older couples were, how the women in small towns would dress up just to go out with their husbands to some local place. He told me that everywhere he went, he liked to go down into the audience during his breaks and sit with some older couple and chat with them.
He told me how one charming old couple had chided him about how thin he was. He said they left and he went on to play his last set, but that during the set, the old man had come back and put a bag on the stage, then disappeared. When the set was over and Matthew opened the bag, he discovered two fat cheeseburgers.
He talked like a man who’d played five thousand one-night stands in five thousand one-horse towns.
We talked and drank some more. “I’ve only written one hit song in my life,” he said. He got up and went back to the piano and did a few bars of vocal and instrumental introduction that I’d never heard before, then segued into the main body of a song that I recognized as one of my very favourites, a song my brother had played for me countless times. I was dumbfounded.
That Matthew should have written this song among all the possible songs in the world seemed the most wonderful stroke of fate. The old familiar words that had rung in my ears in my brother’s soft sweet voice now tumbled there in the rough voice of the stranger, and I was spellbound, wishing the moment could go on forever.
But he finished and moved back to the table. Up till then, I had only touched him accidentally. Now I reached out and caressed his arm and told him that the song had been special to me for a very long time.
He was very pleased with my reaction and we talked about the history of the song, how he had felt, when, at the age of nineteen, he’d had it recorded by a major folk singer of the sixties.
In the middle of this conversation, he left once again, and when he was gone, I thought about things a bit. When he came back, I told him a story. It had to do with a friend of mine, a woman who’d been a folksinger in the sixties, too. It had to do with a ring she had at the centre of which was a magnificent pearl of great size. The pearl was beautiful beyond description, but my friend always claimed to hate that ring—because nobody would believe the pearl was real.
Matthew smiled at me and said, “That’s a very nice story.”
Somehow he worked the conversation about to the subject of coffee, and he wondered whether we could go somewhere and make some. I thought he was inviting me to go back with him, and a thousand nos and yeses battled in my head.
Then I realized he sounded as though he were inviting himself back to my place, though I couldn’t be exactly sure.
He stood and helped me with my coat, then put his stylish raincoat on over the panther sweater.
Beside the golden eyes of the cat was a string of what looked like Chinese letters painstakingly embroidered in red. He saw me looking at the sweater and said, “This sweater was made especially for me by the Japanese designer Yashimoto. There’s only one like it in the whole world ….”
I felt my eyes widen, but I said nothing. Matthew gestured toward the line of red letters. His eyes were deep and soft in the dim light of the bar. “The letters are a sort of poem,” he said.
“What does the poem say?” I asked.
Matthew smiled. “It says, ‘The night is a panther …’”
CHAPTER FOUR
OUT IN THE STREET I asked him if he was in fact inviting himself back to my place. He hedged a bit but didn’t deny it. I said it would be okay but that I lived in a basement apartment and that other people lived in the house and would be there, too. That was all right with him.
We walked the short distance to Bloor, hailed a cab going in the wrong direction, got inside and made ourselves comfortable as the driver pulled a good Uie in the middle of the street that was still busy at eleven p.m.
The cab, like no other I’d seen in Toronto, but like those I’d seen in Detroit, had a bullet-proof shield completely separating the driver from his passengers. Matthew was appalled at this and said the very sight of the thing inspired an ugly paranoia. We talked about that shield most of the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to get to my place. When we did get to my house, Matthew wondered how he was supposed to pay. He didn’t wonder long. A little door, like a chute, popped open at a level with our eyes and Matthew slid through a twenty. He seemed to have no end of twenties, though he was careful to tell the driver that it was a large bill and he also refused, on principle because of the shield, to leave a tip.
I led him down the side of my house past the basement windows toward the back door. The house was completely dark, but I wasn’t nervous. As I let him in, I warned him to watch his head, as the headroom of the door was too low for all those over five-foot-five.
He came in and immediately hung up his coat. I have never known a man more careful with his clothes—as if he were conscious at all times that any mistreatment—the slightest wrinkle, the smallest tear, the tiniest spot—could have major consequences.
He turned away from the coat rack at the bottom of the stairs and at once his eye fell on an eight-by-ten baby portrait of me. “Who’s that baby?” he wanted to know, and I sensed strong emotion behind his question, perhaps a note of fear, as if he thought this baby might be mine and that there might be a husband lurking somewhere despite my previous protestations to the contrary.
“It’s me,” I said with a little laugh, moving closer to him.
And suddenly, I was in his arms, the whole length of me drawn close up against him, either by my will or his or both. His body fit perfectly against mine, and it felt totally natural to hold him, to feel the slender yet substantial muscles of his shoulders in the clasp of my arms.
But I pulled away and went to make the coffee. It was going to be instant, which was all I had. But he said that was okay. It was a remarkable thing about Matthew that, much as he spoke in the most intimate detail of the finer things in life, he was always gracious in accepting anything one offered him—except food.
I had told him that, as well as taking night courses and working part-time, I was an author, and I led him to a portion of the basement between the large furnished room and kitchenette that formed most of it and the washroom. In this unfinished in-between space were some shelves and a workbench on which I kept a row of copies of my books. He stood beside me and listened with the politeness of an obedient child as I showed him the various editions. He didn’t seem genuinely interested, but he showed no impatience. Since we’d met at a poetry event, I reached
up and took down for him a copy of my poetry collection.
This little space was lit by a single, bare, overhead bulb, and by its light, Matthew was suddenly studying my face. “I didn’t notice you have such beautiful eyes,” he said, his own eyes blazing.
There was such intensity in his expression that it struck me uncomfortably as the expression of a good actor who could be just a smidgen better. It occurred to me to wonder how this man could have been talking to me for the past five hours and not notice my eyes. Other men had noticed them in a lot shorter time than that. I grinned a little condescendingly.
Matthew reached out and touched me, his hands at my waist, then sliding up beneath my sweater.
I was tempted to let him remove it, which was what he quite clearly had in mind. Instead, I pulled away and told him I’d better check the coffee.
I poured it for us. I had no milk. He said that was just fine. We sat on my futon, which I kept folded like a couch, and I told him I had a problem—which was that I considered it against my principles to have sex with someone I’d just met. There was no question of presumption in my comment. The appropriateness of it was perfectly obvious to us both.
Matthew’s expression was soft, handsome, boyish and—it seemed to me—a trifle desperate. “Let me spend the night here and just be with you,” he said with a sidelong glance. “I can do that, you know—”
There was no way I was going to say no. It seemed to me a long time since I had had the warmth of a man beside me in bed.
Within minutes we were undressed and the futon was pulled out double-size and we were sitting beneath the covers talking.
When we talked, his striking intelligence was obvious. When we touched, he was so tender, so accommodating. Nothing seemed to annoy him, insult him, anger him. He asked me nothing about myself, and, since I wanted to talk about my life as little as possible, not wanting to mar the day and the night with reality, I offered nothing.
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