“Oh,” Matthew said, pulling me close against his side, “he just meant that I didn’t go straight back to Hartford after the video was done.”
We started to walk back the short distance to my place. The night was still windy and rainy and not very warm. I wanted to get home as fast as I could, but Matthew dawdled. We decided to go to the Terminal, decided we were still hungry.
But when we got to the Terminal, it was closing. Another waitress, not Cynthia, was there and she let us know there was no use in coming in.
So we walked down the street a little to another restaurant, a glorified doughnut shop. We ordered gravy and chips—as usual. As he picked at the food on the boring, thick, cheap restaurant plate, Matthew told me again about his own china and the cabinet in which he stored it. He was worried, he said, because the style of the cabinet didn’t match the mood or the style of the dishes.
“But when you come,” he said, staring at me, “you can change whatever you want ….”
We left and on the way home, I discovered I’d lost an earring. I was content to forget about it, but Matthew insisted on helping me look for it. We retraced our steps for what seemed many long blocks. It was beginning to get quite cold and it still poured rain. We had no umbrella—and the wind would have caught it if we had.
But Matthew seemed to want to stay out as long as possible. No matter what I said, I couldn’t get him to hurry home the way I wished we would.
We gave up on the earring. “Thank God,” I thought, “Now at least we can head home.”
But Matthew was out of cigarettes, which necessitated more tramping along the rain-soaked midnight Danforth.
By the time we got home, I was frozen and drenched. But I didn’t complain. For Matthew, it had been a perfect evening. He had had the warmth, acceptance and respect that comes not only from being taken seriously—which, of course, he did not mention—but also the proud knowledge of sharing this acceptance with a woman he felt privileged to be with—which he did mention.
I thought it might be the first and last such evening that poor, lost Matthew would have in a good long time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE NEXT DAY, THOUGH Sunday, was like every other day. We loved, we had coffee, we talked, and Matthew disappeared at one in the afternoon.
He said nothing about where he was going, whether he was coming back or when.
I felt sick all day and wasn’t sorry to have the long day at home alone, but when it got to be nine-thirty and I had had no word from him at all, I called Ruth and told her I felt as though I was going out of my mind with fear, disgust, confusion, despair.
I told her I wanted to go to the police.
It was a wild, raging night. Nonetheless, my faithful, dauntless girlfriend came, and together in her car we threaded our way through the dark streets in search of the closest police station, which we eventually found.
It took the duty cop long enough to run Matthew’s name and DOB through CPIC for me to figure he had to have something on him, especially when he started writing things down, then turned to me and said, “Do you have an address for this guy?”
“Yeah, sure,” I felt like saying. “Mine!” Instead, I just shook my head.
But in the end, all the cop would say was, “I have no reason to tell you he’s dangerous. If I were you, though, and he comes by again, I would lock my door and dial 911.”
“Not much help,” Ruth commented as we left the station.
“No,” I answered, “but at least it doesn’t sound as though he’s a crazed killer or anything.” Neither of us laughed.
When we got back to my place, there was a message on my machine.
Matthew had called and said he would call back. Impatience was clear in his taped voice, displeasure at my not being there. I had left a message saying I’d be back at eleven and he said he’d call then. It was now ten-thirty.
Ruth and I wracked our brains to try to figure out what to do next, to think of a way to find out something about Matthew that we could confront him with, presumably to get him to admit to the truth about himself, whatever that was. Somehow we were convinced that if he were forced to tell the truth, he’d also be compelled to leave.
As we sat by the phone, it suddenly occurred to me that there was a possible chain of people that might lead to Dill, the singer, our only mutual acquaintance—the man we’d seen the first day we’d met. Maybe there was someone who knew someone who knew someone who had Dill’s unlisted number.
I dialed the first person in the chain.
And soon I had the other number, the one I needed.
It being very late, the recipient of my phone call was not overly happy to hear my voice. It had been a long time since I’d talked to him, and at first, he seemed reluctant to talk about Matthew, though he recognized the name immediately.
After a little prodding, he began to talk. He painted a picture of Matthew as a pathetic person who told a tall tale—even on stage—and had been considered an object of ridicule for some time. The place Dill mentioned having heard Matthew make a fool of himself often at was a coffeehouse that had had its heyday at least a decade before. Dill told me a joke people used to tell about Matthew’s claim that he had once opened for Neil Young. “Opened what?” people said, “Pop bottles?”
He said Matthew was not dangerous, just a sad fool. “And,” Dill said, “I’ve heard he likes the boys in the band, if you know what I mean ….”
He said further that he would admit that Matthew had written some good songs and that he was quite a singer, but on the whole, he was a failure and his wild stories the just object of scorn among his fellow musicians.
It sounded like all this had happened a long time ago—as though Matthew had been telling his tale for more than ten years. It also sounded as though Matthew had been very much a Toronto personality rather than someone from out of town.
The last thing our mutual friend said was that it looked like Matthew stuffed socks in his pants.
I knew we were definitely talking about the same man.
I thanked Dill for his help and hung up.
All during our conversation, there had been a strange clicking sound. Both of us had noticed it and had tried to decide whose phone was doing it. “My phone never does that,” Dill asserted. “Neither,” I swore, “does mine.”
When I turned to Ruth and briefly relayed what I’d been told, my only feeling was pity for Matthew. Dill’s narrative had been bitter and dismissive, and maybe he spoke out of some negative emotion of his own, resentment or even envy, but what he had said could not be ignored.
I knew I had to confront Matthew with this information, but I was no longer frightened at the prospect. No crazed killer. And no star, either. He was nothing more than the most pathetic of losers—and I had dealt with pathetic losers before.
Ruth offered to stay and help me out. But I told her I would have to handle things myself.
The phone rang. It was Matthew. He asked me whether I was okay. I said yes, wondering why he should be worried.
He answered that he’d tried to get me and that when he heard the busy signal, he’d made an operator cut in on the line to make sure I was okay.
This astounded me. I had never heard of an operator agreeing to cut in on a conversation. My understanding was that you’d have had to convince an operator that it was a matter of life and death before they’d do such a thing.
Nonetheless, I said nothing to Matthew. He seemed nervous and said he was starving and asked me if he should pick up some sandwiches and bring them over.
I found this extremely strange and asked him whether he’d eaten dinner. Of course, he said no. So I said, “Okay, bring food if you’d like.” Then we hung up. Matthew’s voice had a quality to it that was so similar to the quality it had had the night he’d met Ruth, that I had the uncanny feeling that he knew exactly what she and I had done this night.
Ruth was reluctant to leave, but I felt sure I could handle him. My only concern was th
at she would run into him on her way out, since he claimed to be calling from the very next street.
When an hour and a half had passed with no sign of him, I gave up and went to bed—not pulling it out, but leaving the futon folded as I did when I slept alone.
As soon as I closed my eyes in the totally dark room, I heard a soft knock on my door.
I went and opened it.
In burst Matthew all full of happy energy and carrying a large bag from a pizza place. He’d had to go from place to place in a cab before finding something open, then finally he did find something open and here he was and he was starving and I must be starving, too, and God he loved me!
I found this whole routine confusing in the extreme, but he wasn’t fooling me right now. Though I had no idea what he was and had been up to, I now, at least, knew he was always up to something.
He looked at the bed and smiled and commented, “Oh, you went to bed—and you’re sleeping single again,” just as if that was nothing to him.
He was so full of energy and so cheery and so hungry—bustling about, searching for forks to eat the pizza pockets he’d bought and talking about how in love with me he was.
He was making me sick. I told him I’d called Dill and told him Dill had told me that the story about Neil Young was nothing but a joke.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HE GOT THE ANGRIEST I’d ever seen him.
He swore he’d told me before—which he pretty much had—that Dill was his enemy. He said Dill was a nobody. Over and over he said, “You shouldn’t have done this, you never should have done this. Now you’re going to lose me.”
I wasn’t falling for it. “Matthew,” I said calmly, “I can’t lose you. I’ve never had you. This is all a story, a fantasy.”
He had no answer to that. He said I should have called all the people he’d told me about—and he rattled off a long list of impressive names, names he’d been dropping all along.
Remarkably enough, in the middle of all this, we calmed down and we ate. Matthew was not kidding about being very hungry.
When we finished the food, we resumed our discussion. It should have been angry, but there was only the usual fake kind of anger in Matthew, only a stance, a gesture, the saving of face.
I pointed out to him yet again all the odd unexplainable things about him and about our time together. He offered the same lame excuses, some of which made no sense at all. He insisted, for instance, that he had run out of money because his credit card had run out, and how that meant he’d authorized payment, then torn the card in four and thrown it into four separate trash cans—as he had when his other cards had run out.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but it crossed my mind that perhaps he stole credit cards and somehow used them for cash advances, then destroyed them. I thought of the night I’d left him alone in the back of the cab with my purse. I thought of how he’d stared at that purse the day I’d bought my ticket to Utica. I thought of how he’d been perfectly willing to enter one of my banks but that wild horses couldn’t draw him into the other. And I thought of how many times I’d lain beside him in the dark of night, drifting off into sleep, convinced he was sleeping, too, when he might have been faking, might have been waiting for me to sleep so that he could get up …
I thought of how he’d had the keys to my place for a whole weekend. Long enough to have had them copied many times over.
I told him that both Ruth and I had called Hartford and found neither him nor his brother listed. At this information, he rattled off a phone number—with the right area code for Connecticut—and told me to call it.
There was no way I could write it down and I didn’t ask him to say it again.
When I pressed him about the friends he’d supposedly been staying with, he again gave me the supposed location—in a neighbourhood that I now knew was largely gay. I had looked up the name he’d given me for those friends and there was no listing in the Toronto phone book.
At last, clearly able to tell no more lies—at least for that night—he lay on his stomach and said, “At least let me stay for one more night.”
And of course, it being one in the morning and raining unrelentingly, I was not likely to do otherwise. I still pitied him. I lay on top of him, as full of terror and I was of pity, and began to comfort him. And one thing led to another and soon it was I who was lying underneath and he was telling me how tragic it was that he couldn’t have children because he knew that in me he’d found the one woman kind enough to be the mother of his daughters and sons.
And I kept saying, “Matthew, this is a dream and you are a dreamer and nothing about this is real. It has to come to an end.”
But what he was saying as he bent over me in the soft light, his lean body pale, his dark curls shining, was beautiful. He was describing, as I’d never heard a man describe before, his dreams of fathering—what he imagined it would feel like to know that he had made me pregnant, that we were one in the child I’d carry in my body.
His words, his kisses, his gentle touches were so tempting, so impossible to resist, that for the first time, I understood why nature had connected sex and parenthood.
My whole body was reaching for him, even though I refused to answer his passionate musings. He sighed my name and swore I was capable of driving a man crazy. Then, he stretched out beside me and fell into the death-like stillness he called sleep, and so did I.
In the morning when I awoke and looked at him he was utterly beautiful—the perfect body, the insouciant curls, the mauve perfection of his largesse. For the only time in my life, I knew what it was to desire a body regardless of the soul that inhabited it—or my own soul. But I knew that sooner or later I’d be called upon to pay dearly for these strange pleasures to which I had given myself totally.
When we rose to dress, I knew our time was done. Matthew, looking more boyish and fragile than ever, was nearly dressed—all in his own clothes this time, the same clothes, of course, as those he’d been wearing the first day. He was sitting on a chair, and I went over to him and stood before him.
“Matthew,” I said, “this thing between us has been great, but I have to get back to my ordinary life.”
He looked stricken, but not surprised. In fact, the change in his expression was imperceptible. It was just that suddenly he looked very weak, very vulnerable, very in need of help.
“If I had the wherewithal,” I said, “I would keep you with me for the rest of my life, but I can’t. It’s hard enough taking care of one person …”
As I spoke, I stroked his black curls. He sat perfectly immobile and silent beneath my touch. I sat opposite him and watched the boyish tragic beauty in the planes of his face. I couldn’t help thinking that he looked like the kind of man another man would love to love. We said nothing. After a while, he got up and went to the washroom. He was a long, long time in there, and I began to be afraid.
So I got up and went to the door and knocked on it, fearful of what I’d hear.
But he came out. Without speaking, he put on his panther sweater and went over to the dresser where he’d put the ashtray after smoking his very last cigarette. “I’m sorry to have to do this,” he said with a little laugh, “but …”
He began to dig through the ashes looking for a butt long enough to light. He didn’t find one.
I went over to him and looked up at him, and much as I still feared and pitied him—for he seemed truly and irredeemably desperate now—I respected him, too, because he still carried himself with unmistakable dignity.
“Matthew,” I said, staring into his handsome face, “tell me what you were doing the day I met you—before you came to that wake …”
With downcast eyes and in a voice so low it was almost impossible to hear, he said, “I was wandering …”
“And where did you sleep the night before you slept with me the first time?”
He nearly whispered the words.
“The baths …”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
/> “THEN YOU GO WITH men sometimes?” I asked, sure he must.
“No.”
He raised his eyes. His voice seemed choked with tears and his face was stolid, pale, beautiful and very sad. He looked down at me and he said, “I just wish I’d met you when I was better …”
My heart felt as though it had started to bleed.
“Oh Matthew,” I said, throwing my arms around his neck, “What are we going to do?”
I must have known quite well even then that we were going to do nothing.
After only a few moments, he stepped out of my embrace and headed for the door. “Can I call you later,” he asked, “to find out how you are?”
It seemed a strange question, but I couldn’t stop myself from nodding yes.
It was early afternoon. Somehow I passed the hours until it was time for me to go to school. I felt so sad I could hardly lift my eyes. It seemed to me I suddenly understood the grief of widows.
But I sat through the whole class. By luck, the man who sat next to me was one of the police officers in the course and a person who I knew lived not far from me. I decided that, after class, I would ask him for a ride home, and that on the way I would tell him my sad, weird tale.
He listened patiently, despite my many protestations of shame and self-disgust over what I was rapidly coming to feel was an appallingly stupid situation to have got myself into.
But he assured me that many people had had such experiences, that some liars were very skillful and that there was nothing to be ashamed of. On the other hand, he said, some truth-tellers had very strange stories indeed.
When I told him I had asked where Matthew lived and had been told “the baths,” he said that meant the Roman Baths in the heart of the gay prostitution district at Wellesley and Bay. The cop said that not everyone who frequented the baths was gay. He said they served as a central storehouse for the downtown drug trade and that there was constant traffic between the baths and the St. Charles gay bar on Yonge Street. He said he knew what he was talking about because he’d busted both places.
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