Somehow I got through the afternoon.
I got home and waited, sure Matthew would not call. Ruth, however, did call, and she said I should wait only a little longer, then should go out with her. She was quite certain Matthew must have left town.
I asked her to call information in Hartford to ask if there was a number listed for Matthew, figuring that even if it was unlisted, they’d tell us whether his name was in the directory.
I waited some more.
In a little while, the phone rang. It was Ruth. There was no one by Matthew’s name listed in Hartford—or anywhere in the surrounding areas, either.
I decided to call the manager of the Highlander—the one who’d been so excited about Matthew—to ask him what he knew. But he was off that night. All I could do was leave a number for him to get back to me.
Then I decided to call the police. They listened patiently to my story and told me I could have an officer come to the house and report a “suspicious person.” I just wasn’t ready to do that to Matthew, whoever or whatever he was.
It got to be 8:30. Everything led to the inescapable conclusion that Matthew was gone: the money, the call to the airline he’d made that morning, the fact that he—for the only time—hadn’t said he’d phone when he’d left me at the subway, the fact that indeed he hadn’t called.
I changed my clothes and went out with Ruth.
We had dinner, and during it I felt calm, relieved somehow. Ruth kept saying I was taking “it” well. It seemed to me I wasn’t taking “it” at all.
After dinner, we visited friends of Ruth’s—lively, interesting people I’d been with and enjoyed several times before. I enjoyed them now, but I began to feel extremely tired. I also began to feel the presence of Matthew lurking somewhere, lying in wait.
Among my friend’s friends, I got such an overwhelming feeling of the joys of normalcy that all I had experienced with Matthew seemed appalling and repellent in comparison. As I sat among these pleasant, ordinary people, laughing and talking, I felt a sense of longing—profound longing for the life I, too, had had less than two weeks before. I felt I had lost my life. I wanted it back.
But then I thought of the strange promises of my demon lover, thought of him beneath me in the black night swearing that we were one. I felt lost, adrift between two worlds.
When I got home, he was waiting for me, crouched in the rain, peering into my window like a mad man, swearing he could see me sleeping down in the apartment, even though I was standing beside him. He was delirious—drunk, stoned, crazy, or all three. Absurdly, he clutched in his hand a bright, crisp, new Blue Jays baseball cap.
I had a hard time convincing him that I was beside him and that there was no one beyond the window into which he kept looking. “But the light’s on down there,” he kept saying. “The light’s on … And the bed’s all messed up. Somebody’s there. Somebody’s in that bed …”
I tried to soothe him, to draw him away from the window, to coax him in out of the rain. “I left the light on, myself,” I told him, “because I didn’t want to come home to a dark place. And I’m the one who messed up the bed. I was taking a nap.”
He was utterly terrified, crying and shaking and insisting he had to know who it was who was down there.
“Nobody, Matthew, nobody is down there. I’m up here …”
He started to ask me where I’d been, as if it were inconceivable that I hadn’t waited for him to call whenever he’d been ready to call.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s get out of the rain. Let’s get inside.”
“I feel so bad,” he cried, “so bad. And Monday I have to start that work. I should go home. I should just go home.”
His reference to the jingles he’d said he’d contracted to write struck me. It struck me as sounding oddly true, as if he had in fact somehow gotten that work and was now, though fairly incoherent, remembering that he’d set himself up for a major obligation. Scared as I was myself, it struck me that if he’d made that up, if he were pretending, his mention of this now made him the most acute, sensitive, clever actor I’d ever known. Either some of the things he said were for real or else he was so consummate a performer, so keen an observer of life, that his act commanded a respect that his life never could.
I managed to calm him down only a very little, but it was enough to get him inside out of the wind and the rain.
He kept asking me where I’d been, and I kept telling him. He was shaking, but he soon took off his clothes. He would not let me touch him and kept making a strange motion with his hands and wrists, fending me off not by striking out at me but by bending his hands inward toward his chest.
He said he was terrified of me—that he didn’t know who or what I was …
I pulled out the bed, helped him out of his wet clothes, and we sat side by side on the edge of the mattress. He became calmer. He’d been waiting for me, he said, for three hours at the Terminal.
I didn’t even try to explain that I’d had no way of knowing he’d be there, though I did tell him I thought he was about to disappear when he’d left me at the subway that day.
“But I didn’t disappear,” he said. “I’m here …”
We lay down and he became calmer still. He no longer seemed drunk or stoned. He did not smell of alcohol. In fact, he never did smell of alcohol—ever.
I told him I’d phoned Hartford and that there was nobody living there or near there who had his name.
“That’s easy,” he said, “the phone is listed under my brother’s name.”
I persisted. “How did you give that guy a cheque for Africa? You don’t have a chequebook.”
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I have a chequebook.”
“But you don’t have any ID. How can you travel from here to Hartford and back with no ID? I cross the border myself all the time. You have to have ID.”
“No,” Matthew said cryptically, “it can be done without.”
I asked him question after question, and though some of his replies were very odd and made nearly no sense, he valiantly strove to come up with an excuse for every single accusation.
By now I was well aware how pathetic he was. I had long feared he was dangerous. Yet in his presence, I felt far more pity for him than fear.
He knew I had to know almost certainly that he was lying, but he knew, too, that his lies still had power over me.
I told him I couldn’t stand it anymore, that unless I met the people he was supposedly staying with—though, of course, he’d still not got different clothes—unless I was actually introduced to someone who knew him, I had to assume that what he had been telling me about himself was untrue.
His immediate answer was that he didn’t like the apartment where he was supposed to be staying because the neighbourhood was too full of gay men!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT OCCURRED TO ME, as it had before, though without my making much of it, that Matthew talked about gay men an awful lot for a man who was straight himself. There were the gay artists who were supposedly in “his” house. There were the gays in the neighbourhood of his “friends.” There was his strange comment the first night we met, a comment that came back to me later. He’d said he often spent time among handsome men.
What could all this mean?
Yet, as always seemed to happen, something distracted me from questioning him. What distracted me now was that he rolled over on his stomach as if weeping into the pillow and cried, “I should just leave. I should just go home.”
“Where, Matthew?” I asked him. “Where would you go?”
“Hartford,” was all he said.
And of course, he did not go home, he did not leave. He seemed to be crying. I lay on top of him, full of sorrow for him, knowing full well that most certainly I would soon be full of sorrow for myself.
He mumbled that he had made up his mind that he must go to Africa after all. He was sorry, he said, but that was the only answer. As he fell into the death-like stupor that, for him
, passed as sleep, he quite clearly said, “Don’t worry, I’ve spoken to my lawyer. You’re taken care of. Everything I have is in your name.”
I fell in a deep sleep at once, and we didn’t wake until late the next day, even though our sleep was interrupted by a knock on the door by the landlady, who needed to come down for something to do with the furnace. I told her I wasn’t up yet, and we slept for hours more.
At noon, it was obvious that she wouldn’t be put off, so we got up and Matthew insisted on hiding in the washroom when the landlady’s boyfriend came down to check out some fuses.
A little while later, Matthew dressed and prepared to leave. I asked him what he would do that day, a little surprised that we’d not be doing something together, which seemed the natural thing for two people who’d sworn they couldn’t bear to be apart until their “marriage.”
He said he was going to do some errands, then arrange for me to meet the friends I’d insisted on meeting. There had been no mention recently of the fact that Matthew, nearly two weeks after I’d met him, had never changed his clothes except to borrow my shirts and socks, though a day or two before, he’d said that he didn’t want to go to his friends’ place “just to change.”
As he prepared to go, there was still the tiniest shred of belief in me, but mostly I was biding my time, trying to think of a way to force him to tell me the truth about himself. Somehow I thought the truth would bring about the result I now saw as absolutely necessary: to get him away from me, away from my place, out of my life.
He promised to call at 3:30 p.m. It was now 1:30, his usual time for leaving me. Off he went.
Despite all that was going on, I calmly sat down and wrote the last chapter of my novel.
But 3:30 came and went and there was no word from Matthew.
I did, however, talk to the manager of the Highlander. I noticed, as before, what an exceptionally jumpy man he was. He was quite friendly, but I was no longer sure I should mention Matthew—and I didn’t, asking him a few questions about one of the topics we’d discussed the night we’d met. He seemed quite satisfied with that.
I also erased the tape on my answering machine from the night before. That morning, before Matthew had left, I had played it back. It was full of frantic, desperate calls from Matthew, his voice panic-stricken, swearing I was there but not picking up the phone, begging to know where I was and why I wasn’t answering. “Where are you?” he begged to know over and over again. “I can’t believe you’re not there. I can’t. I can’t …”
Anyone, it seemed to me, anyone with the least shred of dignity would have cringed with embarrassment at hearing such a display played back. The desperation was so blatant, so passionate as to be almost subhuman. Matthew listened to that tape and laughed.
Another thing I did in his absence that Saturday was to examine a small vial of pills he’d brought home the night before. He said he’d been to an herbalist and told the man about his long and fruitless battle to regain his fertility. The herbalist, he’d said, had told him that if he took these pills, he’d be fertile within the year.
I could tell nothing by examining the pills themselves, the little bottle they came in, nor the round dot of a label on the top with numbers and letters written in pencil.
But I recalled that, before he’d left that Saturday morning, Matthew had told me he now felt foolish that he had believed what the herbalist had said.
It got to be five o’clock and—fearing another panic attack—I erased the usual message on my answering machine and constructed and recorded one that would reassure Matthew if he called and found me gone. I had to grocery shop, and soon the stores would be closed.
I went first to the bank where just the day before, I’d withdrawn the second lot of money for him. I felt almost ashamed to go in, as if they would wonder what sort of a fool I was to come into the bank so often.
Weatherwise, it was a horrid evening—full yet again of wild rain and unrelenting wind. I went to a neighbourhood grocer and bought far more food than I needed for myself, though I don’t know who I thought would eat it.
When I got home at six, he’d still not called. Finally, though, at six-thirty, he did.
He said he was at a friend’s house and that the friend had invited us to dinner, that the friend just happened to live right in my neighbourhood and that he and the friend would come over to pick me up within the half hour.
Though in my heart I knew that this, too, was a ruse, as always, I was happy to have finally heard from Matthew and happy at the prospect of soon being with him again. I had got to the point where I was almost praying that I’d never see him again, and yet, my first thought on seeing him was, “Thank God, you’re back.”
He arrived very soon after the phone call, and he had the look on his face that by now I realized meant he was up to something. He was nervous, too, but it was an excited kind of nervousness—that of a kid who has lucked out and is sure he’s going to get away with something just because he was fortuitously snatched from the jaws of doom by the fate that is kind to the bad.
He asked me if I would bring along a copy of one of my books to autograph for the wife of his friend. I was happy to lend him this credibility, even though I knew the evening he was now offering as his own credibility was as suspect as everything else about him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MY SUSPICIONS WERE CONFIRMED before we even got to our host’s home.
I walked out to the curb in front of my place and there I saw a brand new van. So far so good. Inside the van was a man I trusted the moment I set eyes on him. He was warm, obviously intelligent, very kind-looking. He even turned out to be an exceptionally careful driver.
With Matthew—smirking—sitting on a milk crate between the driver’s and passenger’s seat, where I sat, we took off for the friend’s—Bob’s—nearby home.
But first, Matthew insisted, we had to stop off at the neighbourhood beer store for a 12-pack—which he also insisted on paying for. He got out of the van and headed into the store.
Which left Bob and me alone. I turned to him and said, “And how long have you known Matthew?”
“Well,” the kindly Bob answered in his sweet voice, “that’s a funny thing. I met Matthew playing in a small club downtown about three years ago. I hadn’t seen him since, but this afternoon I was in a bar near here and I saw him and I said to myself—hey, I know him! So I went up and struck up a conversation. He remembered me and was really happy to see me. Some coincidence, eh?”
Yeah. Some coincidence.
But there was no way I was going to blow Matthew’s evening, because Bob and his wife Sue were absolutely lovely people. They welcomed me into their home. For a good long time, Bob entertained us by playing his guitar and singing. One of his own songs was so wonderful that Matthew and I both insisted on hearing it again. Matthew sang a bit, too. How I loved to hear him—even when I knew his wrecked, pained, painful voice was the voice of deceit and despair no matter what he’d made Bob and Sue believe about himself. How some things will scream the truth when everything else about a person is a lie.
I could tell by the unmistakable deference with which Bob treated Matthew—and by a few of Bob’s comments—that Matthew had told him the same story about Neil Young as he’d told me and that Bob had bought it totally, too. I found this sad and confusing, but I forced myself not to weaken. I knew Matthew was a liar. I just wanted to give him a few more happy hours.
And he was happy that night. Our conversation ranged over all sorts of topics. Bob and Sue were very au courant, very intelligent, very individual and very sensitive. So were Matthew and I. Never had I so enjoyed an evening of two-couple conversation.
After a little while, Sue asked us if we were hungry. Matthew, who had, of course, never eaten a meal in my presence, said yes.
Sue, as it turned out, had been simmering a pot of quite wonderful shrimp soup, which she now served us with fresh bread and cheddar cheese. As she set the table, I saw Matthew looking at he
r china. It was truly elegant—simply a white embossed design of a single swirl forming the edge of the plate, then moving inward to change from structure to ornament in a sweep.
Matthew seemed to observe it with resigned longing. He complimented them on their taste in having chosen it. I could tell he was genuinely moved by some emotion that was strong but strongly hidden. I couldn’t tell whether it was regret for something he had lost or sorrow over the unattainability of something he would never have. Or both.
Matthew slowly, almost painfully, it seemed to me, ate two whole bowls of soup. He seemed to have to force it down, though he complimented Sue on how exquisite it was.
After the meal, Bob made espresso, and when he took out the machine for it, Matthew leaned toward me and whispered, “We have one of those …”
“No,” I wanted to say. “No, my poor confused love, we do not.”
Instead, I merely nodded.
We talked more. Bob mentioned in passing that Matthew was supposed to have given him his address in Hartford, but had forgotten.
“Oh, yes,” Matthew said, “I meant to do that. I’ll have to write it down.”
Fat chance.
At another point in the conversation, I mentioned that I had called the manager of the Highlander. Matthew—who had told me he’d played there the Saturday night I’d been in Utica—reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card from the manager. On the back was written, “Thanks for all the fun.” It looked to me very like the same scrawly handwriting on the “autographed” Neil Young record.
When it got to be eleven, we left. The last thing Bob said to Matthew was, “It was fun seeing you again. It’s lucky that you missed your plane …”
“Missed your plane?” I asked as we walked into the rainy night. “What does that mean?”
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