Terminal Grill

by Rosemary Aubert

  He was really very nice, very kind. I knew he was trying to end things in a gentlemanly way, and I knew it was a very good idea to do so and I wanted it, too. The beautiful unreality of our being together was already consuming a tiring amount of energy. He would soon leave town and I would soon be back to making the most of life with the stolid nobility of one who had been taught that she was responsible for her own happiness.

  I was tearful. He was tender. He suggested we should lie down together, and before we did, he said, “I was wondering whether I should tell you this, but I’m beginning to fall in love with you—”

  I found this comment a little strange, considering his breathed declaration of the night before. But I answered truthfully that I was falling a little in love with him, too, and that was the problem. It made perfect sense to both of us that that was an excellent reason never to see each other again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WE LAY BESIDE EACH other in the light from the small lamp and he said, “You are a survivor. You don’t need anybody to take care of you. A man needs a woman he can work for. He needs to know that when he’s doing a job he doesn’t want to do—when he’s out on the road and it seems like it’s never going to end—he can say to himself, ‘I have to keep doing this. I have to do this for her’. You don’t need that.”

  Again I began to weep. “So,” I said, “what’s supposed to happen to people like me?”

  “What?”

  “Do I have to spend my whole life alone and without anybody to take care of me just because I seem strong?” I felt the old familiar loneliness scratch its slogan on the wall of my chest. “It’s so unfair. People like me need somebody to take care of them, too ….”

  Something seemed to snap in Matthew. A sudden intensity made him rigid. He compelled me to turn my eyes toward his, which were blazing with a dark light that seemed to come from the night itself. “I’ll take care of you,” he swore. “I’ll take care of you for the rest of your life. You’ll never have to worry about anything again. I’ll take you home with me to Hartford. You can live in my house.”

  It was hard to look at him. I smiled. I had to smile. “You’ll regret saying this,” I warned him. “In the morning you’ll be very, very sorry. You’ll wish you’d never—”

  “No,” he swore, staring at me like a hypnotist. “I would have at nineteen, but not at thirty-five. I’ll take care of you. You have touched my heart.”

  In my experience, men seldom talked about their hearts unless certain barriers had been let to fall. I turned out the lamp and snuggled beside Matthew, suddenly totally exhausted. I didn’t know what to think. I wished that it were true that Matthew would take care of me. I had never met anyone like him and I wondered if that meant that, unlike all the others I had met, he really could take care of me as they could not.

  Out of the smooth darkness I heard Matthew’s voice. “Goodnight, my love,” he said.

  I had known him for fifty-six hours.

  In the morning, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder whether the charged conversation of the night before would alter our behaviour toward each other.

  We were as happy, passionate, tender and talkative as ever. In fact, as I came out of the shower, I again heard Matthew carrying on a conversation. Quickly, I moved toward the door to see whether he was using the phone.

  But I was soaking wet and it took me a moment to towel myself before I could step out of the washroom and onto the rug that led to the other room.

  Matthew was sitting in a chair across the room from the phone leafing through a book of my poems.

  After I dressed, we left, and for the first time, he took the subway with me, getting off before me at the Bay station, which made sense because the studio he said he was working at was in Yorkville. On the subway, he sat very close to me, and when it was time for him to get off, he promised to call at 7:30, and he tenderly said goodbye. As the subway pulled out of the station, he turned and smiled at me and waved.

  It occurred to me that I had now known Matthew for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and that he had not changed his clothes. In fact, he had borrowed a large shirt from me one day to wear under the panther sweater, carefully leaving his own shirt over a chair at my place.

  He spoke so often of his preference for designer clothes that when I got home, out of curiosity, I checked the label of his shirt. It was Fruit of the Loom, and the shirt was very old.

  But when Matthew called at 7:30, I was as always thrilled to hear his voice, and he seemed thrilled when I said that of course I’d be delighted to meet him at the Terminal in a little while. He said he had a bit of business to do and asked me if I wanted to come along. I said of course. Partly because I wanted to be where he was and partly because I was longing for some kind—any kind—of verification of all he’d been telling me about Neil Young and about his own marvellous and long-standing career.

  He said the job was to take a signed album from Young to the manager of a pub not far from my place and to chat the manager up as a public relations job for a very prominent Toronto promoter whom Matthew had talked about over and over in our conversations. I was dying to meet someone who knew Matthew from business—someone who knew him at all.

  As usual, I met him at the Terminal. By now, the waitress, Cynthia, and the owner were starting to be very friendly, were treating us not only as regulars, but as a couple.

  We listened to the jukebox for a while. Matthew showed me the signed album. I couldn’t read a word of the inscription. It was very scribbly. I felt a chill come over me because something told me it was not Neil Young who’d signed the album, but Matthew himself.

  I had, though, no reason to think such a thing. And even as I was thinking it, Matthew handed me a gift elaborately wrapped in black paper with a silver ribbon. I told him black and silver were my favourites as I opened the package to reveal Swiss chocolates from Eaton’s. I thought it was a very elegant gift.

  I told Matthew I had a present for him, too—real coffee to replace the instant we’d been drinking. We both laughed, finished our beers and hopped in a cab to head for the pub where Matthew was to meet the manager.

  The Highlander was not like the Terminal. It was new, trendy, built only a few years before, dark in every respect and crowded with young quasi-Yuppies. Compared to it, the noise-level at the Terminal resembled a church.

  The minute we stepped in the door, we were met by a bouncer. Matthew immediately handed him the album and asked him, “Please give this to the manager.” As the man disappeared into the crowd, I noticed that Matthew was nervous again with the peculiar shakiness he’d shown the day we’d first walked out of the “wake” together.

  But we found a seat at the bar and almost at once began to talk to a few others there. It was easy to see that, though the dour blonde female bartender was no Cynthia, the Highlander was as much a neighbourhood bar as the Terminal—or as any in Toronto for that matter.

  After a while, the people we were talking to drifted away and Matthew started to tell me about his wonderful house and all the things it contained: paintings, china, a pinball machine, two pianos—one a BÖsendorfer, a priceless gift from Neil Young. He painstakingly retold the details of the night—his birthday—he’d received this wonderful surprise. He told me that no one but him was ever allowed to touch this piano. Then he thought for a moment and said that now he would have to put a chair in that room so I could sit and listen to him play.

  And I, perched on a stool in the dim, noisy, trendy bar in Toronto, with forty years behind me and God knew what before me, loved—as a child loves a slithery bubble that skips away from its breath—the image of myself sitting beside Matthew listening to his smoky, hurt voice singing for me alone.

  He told me more about the house, the neighbours. I listened. He turned to me, and for the first time said, “I love you.” And of course I said, “I love you, too.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HE BOUGHT WHAT SEEMED like a lot of drinks. Beer for me, beers for others at
the bar—who reciprocated—scotch for himself, though he had told me scotch had got him in trouble before and that he made a point of staying away from it.

  He handed me a thick wad of bills and told me to put it in my purse and hang on to it for him. A little later, he asked me to peel off one of the outside bills—a twenty—so he could pay for yet more drinks.

  In a little while, out of the smoky, noisy, semi-darkness came the manager. He shook Matthew’s hand, obviously very glad to see him, and they commenced a long conversation of which I could hear nothing except the introduction of myself. I also heard Matthew offer the manager a drink, heard the manager say he wasn’t supposed to imbibe on duty, heard Matthew order a drink and a cup of coffee, saw the manager pour the drink into the coffee and take a few big gulps. Matthew looked like a man who knew exactly what to do every step of the way—smooth, friendly, in control, impressive. Professional.

  And I assumed his profession was the one he said it was. The fact that the pub manager was nervous as a pup the whole time and seemed tremendously deferential to boot only made Matthew—who wasn’t losing his cool for a second—all the more impressive.

  But hard as I tried, I couldn’t hear any of the business talk between the two men, except for one fragmented sentence concerning the promoter. “When he called me and told me the person coming was …” the manager said, slightly mispronouncing Matthew’s name, “I …”

  The rest was lost as the manager turned away to say something to someone else. Matthew leaned toward me and said, “They always do that—say my name wrong.”

  The comment struck me as very odd. Matthew’s last name was extremely simple. Odder still was how Matthew had a preternatural ability to jump in with an explanation at the precise moment a question entered my mind. He was a skilled mind-reader and only he knew why.

  The evening ended almost at closing time with a game of pinball in the basement room of the pub. Only Matthew and I and the manager were left down there.

  When Matthew had told me about his own pinball machine, I’d told him how I loved the game and how I sometimes played in the street arcades.

  The three-way challenge was a delicate manoeuvering of winning and losing between the men. Matthew played very well and I, of course, was not as good as the men but not bad enough to embarrass my date or his associate. In short, I was exactly right. And so was Matthew. He played a brilliant first game, then let the manager win, then won again.

  When the manager again disappeared into his office, telling us not to go yet, seeming to want to draw out the evening as long as possible, Matthew bent his face toward mine and whispered, “I love you. Do you love me?”

  “Yes,” I said trying not to show any hesitation.

  “Are you sure?”

  I couldn’t answer. Without any anger or disappointment—but no snideness or sarcasm, either, he said, “I guess you’re not.”

  When we left the Highlander, it was raining, and Matthew became impatient with the city and the night because it took so long to get a cab. But once we finally got one, all anger fled from him. He seemed to have no energy for anger, as if he’d abandoned that emotion a long time ago—or never got it right in the first place. There was a detachment to him in moments in which anger would have been appropriate—even when it was present—that was surprising in a person who could be so passionate in his professions of love and his expressions of delight over how good and how at ease he felt when he was with me.

  “Incredible!” he would say over and over again. About knowing me. About his comfort in my presence. About my body. About my mind. “Incredible!” “Incredible!”

  When we got back to my place from the Highlander, I handed Matthew a large white bag the manager had given him and which he’d asked me to hold.

  “No,” Matthew said, “that’s yours—”

  I opened the bag to find a big, soft, very expensive-looking pale yellow sweatshirt with the name of the pub and its symbol discretely embroidered in black on the front.

  Delighted, I immediately put it on.

  “Are you sure you don’t want it yourself?”

  “No. We get so many T-shirts and sweatshirts given to us you wouldn’t believe it ….”

  I believed it. Like all the other details Matthew had off-handedly tossed at me about his work and the lifestyle that went with it, this seemed dead on.

  He rhapsodized about how wonderful I looked in the sweatshirt. In fact, we immediately fell into bed and locked in an embrace.

  But in what seemed a matter of seconds, Matthew was sound asleep on top of me.

  Never in all my life had I seen a person fall so quickly and so deeply into sleep. It was totally impossible to wake him. He was gone. I had no choice but to go to sleep under him. I couldn’t even move to turn out the lamp.

  Finally, after some time, I woke to find him rolling off me. I took off the sweatshirt, turned out the light and slept.

  In the morning I awoke to thoughts of how I might begin to dismantle my life in order to move to Hartford.

  It was Thursday, and before work, Matthew walked me a long few blocks to my bank. I had told him that the next day I was leaving to visit my brother in Utica, New York. Something about this seemed to bother him, and not sure what, I thought maybe he’d miss me, so I told him he was welcome to come with me if he liked.

  I told him I’d arranged to take the next day off work to be with him as long as possible before my bus left at two in the afternoon, and I told him, too, I’d take the latest bus possible because, according to what he’d originally told me, the Sunday I got back was supposed to be Matthew’s last day in town.

  He said he’d think about going with me, but he seemed remarkably nonchalant for a man who’d declared his love and might have only a few hours left with his beloved.

  Come to think of it, I was pretty nonchalant myself.

  As we walked to the bank, Matthew talked again about his brothers, especially the one who was now successful in some aspect of the arts—exactly what his brother did was unclear to me. Matthew mentioned, as he had before, that when he was twenty-one, he’d been hit by a car in Yorkville, an accident that resulted in a semicircular scar between his right eyebrow and his nose, another scar under his jaw and scars on his body he said he had, but which I never saw. He said, too, that this accident had resulted in his inability to have children and that in compensation for that, there’d been a very large settlement.

  He said he wanted to use the money to get state-of-the-art equipment for his musical career, but that his brother had wanted to borrow it for something else. They’d quarreled and never really mended the breach.

  When we got to the bank, Matthew came inside and took a chair while I did my business. I knew the manager and had a friendly chat with him, which Matthew commented on pleasantly later.

  We left the bank, and, having a few minutes before it was time for me to get on the subway, went across the street to a tarted-up greasy spoon with flocked wallpaper for a coffee.

  Matthew told me I’d been wonderful at the Highlander the night before. He said my behaviour had been perfect for his business purposes. He said he was proud of me.

  I told him I thought he’d been pretty impressive himself. He had, I said, the perfect combination of arrogance and humility. We both laughed. Then he told me a story of an evening he’d spent with a famous musician who’d taken a crowd of people to a restaurant and after dinner ordered a whole bottle of cognac for each guest. Matthew had been appalled and disgusted. He very often mentioned his distaste for excess of any kind, and he seemed to have found this incident really disturbing.

  What I found really disturbing was the way he suddenly seemed to lose interest in the conversation, seemed to be studying something—or someone—over my shoulder and reacting nervously to it, or him or her ….

  Suddenly he seemed in a hurry and anxious to leave the restaurant. Though he said nothing, I quickly finished my coffee. I offered to pay the small bill, but he refused and paid
the bill himself.

  We got on the subway, but instead of getting off at Bay, near the studio, Matthew got off one stop before. I thought this a little strange, but thought that perhaps he was headed south to finally go to the apartment he was supposed to be minding to change his clothes. Only his underwear had been changed since I’d met him. I was now lending him my shirt and washing his.

  As usual, he told me he’d call me later. As usual, he turned and smiled and waved as the train pulled out of the station with me on it on my way to work.

  It was growing very difficult for me to concentrate on my job. Only one woman there was in any way a friend, and after work that day, I had a coffee with her and told her all about Matthew—not only the good things, but also the gnawing doubts about all the music business names he was always dropping, about his descriptions of his work and his career, about the fact I couldn’t find his name on any record anywhere nor locate anybody who’d ever heard of him.

  As it happened, this woman had had experience in the music business herself, and she said that, while some of what Matthew said seemed a little odd, all of it was certainly possible.

  Once more I was left with the feeling that to question Matthew might be to insult him in a way he did not deserve.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE EMOTIONAL PACE OF the days was exhausting.

  I got home and soon after Matthew called to say he’d be tied up for a while with the guys working on the video but that I should meet him at the Terminal at ten.

  It never bothered me that he always wanted to meet me so late. I needed time to myself, since when I was with him, the being with demanded all my time and energy. Plus I figured that, in his profession, ten p.m. was early. It amazed me that he could get away so early every night and that he preferred to spend the time with me rather than drinking and taking drugs with his buddies, which was what I assumed recording artists preferred to do.

  But he told me that some musicians had nothing to do with drugs and that he was one of them. Though, he said, he sometimes thought he was still too much into alcohol.