Terminal Grill

by Rosemary Aubert

  When I told him that Matthew seemed to disappear every day between one and nine p.m., he said that, on the one hand, if the man were a musician, those were not odd hours to be working—the cocktail hours. But on the other hand, the early afternoon was when the drug trade traditionally got under way each day.

  I told him about the cop the night before, about his running Matthew through CPIC and how long it had seemed to take and how the cop had copied something down and asked if I had an address.

  He said it was possible that the computer had listed prior arrests and charges on Matthew for drug offenses.

  Then my friend turned to me and said, “Look, if I was a con, I’d know how to work you the minute I laid eyes on you. You’re a nice lady—a very nice lady. All I’d have to do would be to make you feel sorry for me and I’d have it made. I’m sure the guy valued everything he got from you. Obviously there was an emotional thing going on—plus he got a bed and an address.

  “But,” he went on, “this sounds like a guy who might be on his way down. He’s done without you for thirty-five years. He can do without you now. When a person tries to lift somebody like that up, at first it’s great and both people are lifted. But pretty soon, he’s back down and he’s dragging you down, too. And then he starts resenting you—because you’re successful and he’s not.

  “There was a case a while back where a young man took up with an elderly woman. He ended up raping her, beating her, and taking just about all she had. And she didn’t even want to press charges ….

  “Look,” he said, “I can tell how drawn you are to the guy, and I can understand it. I’ve been drawn to losers myself—and got burned, too. But let me tell you a story. I loved somebody once, a wonderful woman, but a woman not my wife. I’m a cop, it’s true,” he laughed, “but to me, once I’m married, I’m married for life. No matter how tempted I was, I knew what I had to do. I said to this woman, ‘I wish I could have it both ways’, and she said, ‘you can’, but I said, ‘No. I love you, but you’re never going to see me again.’”

  It took me a minute, but I got the point.

  “But I’ll tell you one thing,” he continued. “As a cop, I’ve always trusted my instincts. I can’t tell you more than that …”

  It was pouring rain still. If Matthew did come back, the likelihood of my giving him a place to stay for the night was about a hundred per cent.

  But then there would be tomorrow night and the next night and the night after that ….

  I thanked my friend. I got out of his car. I dashed through the rain to my door.

  As soon as I got inside and took off my coat, the phone rang.

  Matthew begged me to give him a bed for just one more night. “I have nowhere to go,” he cried, not trying to hide the fact that he was now blatantly pleading with no pretense at all.

  “Please,” he said. “I’ve decided the best thing for me to do is to go up north and try to get my life back together. Just let me stay the night. Tomorrow I’ll be gone. It makes perfect sense for me to spend just one more night with you.”

  “No. I’ll meet you downtown and talk to you, but I will not let you come here,” I swore. “I’ve been thinking about this all day and I …”

  “I bet you have. I just bet you’ve been thinking about this,” he said with genuine nastiness. “Well, thanks, thanks a lot.” He hung up.

  I didn’t feel sad or even relieved. I just felt empty. I felt that single, tiny conversation had proven beyond doubt that Matthew had cared nothing for me, had cared only about where he was going to lay his head each night, a head he kept clouded enough by drugs or alcohol or sex or madness to provide the dreams he surrendered to without resistance in the all-encompassing darkness of his sleep.

  I went to sleep myself, not even very sad to be alone.

  But I was awakened by the phone.

  “Okay,” he said, “just come downtown—wherever you like. Or we could meet at the Terminal …”

  “No. Not in this neighbourhood.”

  “Okay. Just come downtown.”

  He needed enough money to spend the night in the baths, he said, and I promised to bring it to him.

  His manner changed entirely. Gone was the nastiness. Now he was all sweetness again, swearing he loved me.

  “Oh, Matthew, please,” I said, sick of his nonsense. “You don’t love me. You just need me …”

  “No,” he swore, “no. No. I …”

  I interrupted any further protestations of devotion. “We can talk about that when I get there,” I said with exasperation.

  We met at the subway. I came up from the platform, and I saw him leaning against the tile wall of the Bloor Street station. He looked hateful—smirking and dirty and ugly. He looked like the stereotypical con artist: greasy, sneaky, bad.

  I walked up to him, repelled, but full of a sense of power and adventure. In my purse was the difference between this man’s sleeping in a doorway or a bed. In this desperate character off the filthy streets was a man more dangerous than any I’d known before, simply because he might be anyone: madman, conniver, thief, angel, devil, genius, singer, lover of women or men or both.

  I should have been weeping and I would be soon, but now a wild laugh was chafing my lungs. I felt total contempt for Matthew and I felt strong.

  “Where do you want to go to talk?” I asked, “Inside the subway or out?”

  He smirked at me. “I know a place,” he said, and he turned back toward the steps that led to the platform. We moved along it toward the concourse underneath Bloor and Yonge.

  But before we even reached the steps—a distance of twenty or thirty feet, Matthew stopped. He seemed to suddenly change personality completely. As if something had come over him. Or as if something that had come over him before had suddenly been lifted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HE VEERED TOWARD THE yellow tile wall and threw his shoulder against it, pulling me toward him. His voice was broken and he began to tremble as his incoherent words forced themselves from his lips.

  “Please,” he cried, “please. If you have any shred of respect for me at all, you’ve got to believe that I really love you …”

  As he spoke, his hands gyrated in the weird gestures he’d used the night he’d been delirious outside my window, having the effect of fending me off. “Please,” he went on, “promise me you won’t forget me—say you won’t forget me.”

  I’d as likely forget myself, but I reassured him. He kept waving his hands in strange motions in front of his chest, and I finally told him to let me touch him. That stopped the frenetic movement. I tapped him lightly on the chest, not at all sure what my own gesture was meant to convey, though it must have intended some sort of comfort.

  He calmed down a little. “I haven’t got much time left,” he said, “pretty soon I’m going to be dead.”

  All I could think of was what the cop had said about Matthew being a guy on the way down. “Yes,” I answered, “I know.”

  “So you’ve got to believe I love you. Because I’m going to die.”

  I tried to calm him. But he switched out of this personality into a sort of neutral one, leading us down through the subway concourse toward a dark, dingy bar at the farthest extremity of the underground plaza.

  Of course, as he had no money, he asked if I would buy beer and cigarettes, which I did.

  We sat on tall stools at the end of the bar. By now it was midnight, and there were only a few people in the bar. Everyone could hear the wild talk that issued from Matthew and the wild tears and protestations that issued from me.

  He said he was going up north to wander into the wild to kill himself. He said that meeting me and loving me was a cruel irony because he hadn’t loved anyone for two years. At that time, he said, he had had a wonderful career, but—realizing he could never have children—he had finally become totally unable to continue because it just wasn’t worth it to him. He said he had simply walked out on his life.

  He claimed to have had ple
nty of money and said he had simply taken to roaming—that he had been to Europe. He mentioned Budapest, which I had told him I particularly loved. He said, “I have been to Buda and I have been to Pest,” which he pronounced “Pesht.” Most people have no idea that Budapest is really these two cities and that the name of the second is pronounced as though it contained an h. How did he know these things? How did he know that I knew them and that I would be impressed? I never spoke of the separate cities or used the proper pronunciation myself.

  He told me that he had once been a much better man than he was now. He said that once he’d been cultured and respectable.

  It was certainly true that he looked shabby now. His wonderful hair, though still clean, had somehow become too long and had lost its style. His coat was minus its belt, so it hung on his slender frame like something that has escaped the wind and swings on a twig. His shoes were ruined by so very many days and nights of rain. His complexion seemed blotchy. He even needed to blow his nose.

  But his conversation, though desperate and strange, was as compelling as ever. He said, “Sometimes fantasy and reality are confused in my head.” He swore over and over that he was a broken man, that once he had been something, that now he was nothing, that without the ability to have children, his life was worthless.

  “But you could adopt …” I protested.

  “How could I adopt a child?” he asked. He said his father had told him that by walking away from his career in bitterness over his inability to have children, he was ruining his opportunity to adopt. He laughed at the irony of that.

  Over and over he repeated there was nothing for him to do but to go up north and kill himself.

  Desperately, I tried to convince him that he was wrong. That he was a wonderful person, that he had every chance in the world to go on with life, to improve.

  But he said he couldn’t. He said, “There was no morality to things before; now there is …”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. What he meant by morality. What he meant by “now.”

  He kept on and on and soon I was throwing my arms around his neck and begging him not to kill himself.

  It made a delicious spectacle for the bartender and the other customers—all of whom were watching with rapt interest.

  “You don’t know what shameless really means,” he said “You don’t know what I have done in the last two years …”

  “Lying?” I said, “stealing?”

  “Well,” he answered softly, “lying and—no—well, yes—stealing.”

  He looked into my eyes. “There’s one thing, though,” he said, “one thing you’ve got to believe. I’ve been with countless women in my time, and you are truly beautiful. You have to believe that you are a truly beautiful woman.”

  Despite the tears, I smiled. He was not going to make me believe that. All the other men who’d sworn I was truly beautiful had not made me believe it either.

  We must have talked for forty minutes or so. Matthew tried hard to convince me that he must die, that there was no way he could change or improve his life. Once, he said, he’d worked for an Italian couple as a dishwasher but he’d eventually had to walk away from that, too. He was finished. There was nothing more to be done but to die.

  Wearily, I agreed. Death did seem the only solution. For the first time in my life, the suicide of someone seemed to make perfect sense.

  I came to this conclusion at about the same time as the bartender came over to tell us he was closing up. As he took away our glasses and ashtray and wiped the bar, he smirked at Matthew and laughed merrily and said, “Goodbye then—until next time.”

  Matthew told me that this was a place where he drank when he was “in Toronto.” I suddenly understood it was also a place where he must say goodbye to girlfriends who’d outlived their usefulness.

  We left the bar and walked out into the concourse, now nearly deserted in the slimy subterranean downtown wee hours. We found a pay phone nearby and called information and got the number of the friend he said he was going to up north in Killaloe.

  I offered to stay downtown with him—in a hotel. I wanted to spend as much of his remaining time together as we could. I really believed his story about walking away from a brilliant career. I really thought he’d reached the end of his rope. I really believed he was going to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FINALLY, IDIOTICALLY, I BEGAN to insist that he come back home with me. Once more, I threw my arms around his neck and wept. He embraced me, holding me to him and making no attempt to push me away despite my clinging to him. A group of men—possibly from the bar—walked by and sarcastically called out, “Cute couple!”

  But I didn’t care. All I cared about now was my few remaining hours with Matthew.

  All he cared about, after smiling and protesting weakly, “Against my better judgment,” was the fact that I was paying for a cab—the subway now closed—and taking him home for one more night.

  The minute we got inside the cab, all talk of love and death ceased. Matthew got home, got undressed and fell asleep nearly at once, but not before telling me one more time that he had really got the work writing the jingles.

  Suddenly I became convinced that the whole weird speech about his having walked away from a brilliant career was yet another lie. That his remorse over his wasted life was a lie. I began to get all screwed up. Was he lying when he said he was a terrible asshole? Yes? But then he wasn’t an asshole? But he was a liar?

  I lay awake all night trying to figure out unfigurable conundrums and trying to decide whether I should fear for my life. Not because Matthew was dangerously insane but because I was dangerously stupid.

  In the morning I told him how terrified I’d been the whole time I’d been with him. He listened and he apologized. I told him I’d gone to the police. I told him about my conversation with the cop the night before and what that cop had told me about people ripping people off, and people on the way down and loving and walking away. Matthew’s answer to this was, “It sounds like you’ve got a good friend in that guy …”

  I told him the police had told me—which was true—that he was way off in his estimates of how long funds took to get from the States to Toronto. I smiled and warned him to be more careful the next time he used that technique to get money from a woman. He seemed to be holding his breath, to be listening very hard to what I was saying.

  I mentioned a few other things about his technique as a shyster and I said, “You’d make a far better one—a perfect one—Matthew, if you could just get over being so very nervous right before you ask for the money.” He said nothing.

  I knew, too, that there was but a single bus to Killaloe each day, and that I was determined that Matthew should be on it. We continued to talk as though he were about to commit suicide, and I, who, in the emotional turmoil of the evening before had considered alerting someone to stop him—even, perhaps, trying to locate his parents—was now feeling that if that was what he’d decided to do, then that was what he should do.

  Half of me believed he really wanted to die. The other half just wanted him out of my life. He might be tired of being a gigolo, a shyster, a liar. I was tired of being afraid.

  I convinced him that time was running out, that he should phone his friends in Killaloe to make sure they still lived there. I wanted to make sure he really had someone to go to.

  He rose and dialed the number. As always, his voice on the phone was deep, confident, commanding—the voice of a successful, self-assured man.

  He spoke for only a few moments, telling his friends he’d be coming their way and was planning on dropping by. I signaled for him to give me the phone, which he did without resistance.

  When I took the receiver, I spoke to the man by the last name Matthew had told me was the man’s to make sure that that was indeed the person Matthew had called. I no longer trusted him at all. I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if the voice on the other end had belonged to a recording, or if, in fact, ther
e might be no voice at all.

  But the man answered to the name. And since I had watched every digit Matthew had dialed, I knew the man had to actually be up north.

  I wanted to warn him that Matthew was suicidal, but, since Matthew was sitting beside me, this was difficult. I settled for a cryptic sentence to the effect that the man should keep an eye on Matthew if he should wander into the woods. I said something about spring fever.

  I don’t know why, but I was surprised that the man sounded at least a little annoyed at the prospect of Matthew’s planning on visiting him. He said whatever Matthew did was his own business as he, himself, was far too busy with work on his own place to bother about Matthew.

  I hung up a little confused, but relieved that at least Matthew was headed for someone who really existed.

  It seemed a foregone conclusion that it was I who would be buying the ticket.

  When Matthew got ready to go, I asked him if he would take something of mine with him, and he said that he hoped I would let him take an unusual and very beautiful sweatshirt that my brother had given me in Utica and which I’d let Matthew wear a couple of times. It was black with a striking design on the front in white, against which was silhouetted the black head of a loon with a red eye. Beneath were the words, “Loon Magic.” I knew there were very few such sweatshirts in existence, since they were available only from a very small and obscure printer in New York State. I knew this might be the only one in all of Canada.

  Matthew looked magnificent in this exotic piece of clothing, which complemented perfectly the dark, long, clean curls, the pale fine-boned lines of his face. I was happy to let him have it, even though I’d never had a chance to wear it myself except to try it on.

  In return, he left the panther sweater—which he swore he had bought in New York City for six hundred and fifty dollars.

  Just before we left, he began the little whining sound I recognized as the voice of a begger. “No, Matthew,” I had to tell him, “I can’t give you any more money.”