Terminal Grill

by Rosemary Aubert

  We left for the bus terminal. I had called in sick at work again and therefore wasn’t in a hurry to get to the office. But though the bus didn’t leave until one, it was barely eleven. Far too early—but I wanted to make very sure that we weren’t too late for Matthew to get on that bus.

  All the way downtown, he sat very close to me, our thighs touching, just as we had every other day.

  By the time we got to the terminal, we still had an hour to wait for the bus. Matthew was terribly nervous. I was scared, tired and confused. It was a warm, beautiful sunny day—as if once more the season had changed. Despite our mutual state, we noticed, even enjoyed this strange, sudden, untimely summer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AT THE BUS TERMINAL, I kept waiting for Matthew to disappear. I just expected to turn around and find him gone. At one point, I did turn around and did find him missing—but only because he had moved closer to me.

  It took only moments to buy the ticket, since it was midday Tuesday and the terminal was nearly empty. We decided to go for a beer, and Matthew chose a place across the street from the terminal. He seemed to know every bar in town. We sat facing a window that looked out on Bay Street. We discussed the old, questionable-looking hotel across the street. I asked—half-joking—whether Matthew had ever been in there. I was now so terrified about what he had told me the night before about roaming and sleeping in the gay baths—which he said he’d done in Paris, Montréal, and New York as well as Toronto, supplying details of how the men cruised at night and how each city had its own code by which straight men who slept in the baths let it be known they weren’t available.

  Of course, he had told me that he’d never been available in that way, but I now considered him capable of anything I was capable of imagining.

  A tall man walked by us—inside the bar—and it seemed to me that Matthew glanced at him with a hint of desire. Once again I asked him whether he had ever slept with a man. He shook his head seriously and said, “Never in my life.”

  Then he smiled and added, “But I’ve thought about it …”

  He went on. “When I was reading about ancient Greece,” he said, “I read that there a man could do whatever he felt like doing sexually until he was thirty. Then, he had to choose whether he would be gay or straight for the rest of his life. That is so much more civilized than us. I wish we were as civilized as that.”

  It struck me that the word “civilized” had been one of Matthew’s favourites during our brief time together. It also struck me that I was becoming more terrified by the moment at Matthew’s apparent sexual ambiguity.

  “Oh, Matthew,” I sighed, “I really hope you haven’t lied to me about everything—about being sterile …”

  Again he smiled, completely without rancour and said, “Well, in a month you’ll know about that, won’t you?”

  He sipped his beer and glanced out the window. He was not sad, but he was very pale and shaky. He looked small and distant and clean again and handsome. I knew I had less than an hour left to be with him. I wanted the hour to go. I wanted him to go.

  He ordered two more beers at once and drank them fast. I ordered one and drank it quickly, too. Outside, an old man passed by, a Chinese man walking with one arm behind his back. Matthew commented on how civilized the old man looked. Again that word. He seemed to be going away. Seemed to have left me already.

  We went outside and walked in the sun. As on the very first afternoon, Matthew looked over at my hair and laughed sweetly.

  “What is it?” I was laughing, too. Despite the terrible weirdness of what was going on, we kept slipping back into the laughing warmth we’d shared for so many happy hours. He said, as he had said the first time I’d walked with him, “The colour of your hair looks neat in the sun.”

  I thought about circles—how we walk in them all the days of our lives, how we turn back upon ourselves, how we spin and spin.

  We went back to the bus terminal to check the time but it was still too early. The racing minutes dragged their feet. We walked back out into the sun again and headed to yet another bar across the street.

  I had a Perrier and Matthew downed another two beers and he talked about our relationship, saying he had enjoyed our time out of bed as much as our time in bed—saying again, too, that he wished he’d met me before things had gone bad with him.

  But there was a flatness to everything he said, and I was unable to know whether it was because he was really thinking he would kill himself soon and was upset, or whether the strangeness of what was happening was affecting him. Nor could I be sure my own ears were capable of hearing clearly, so strong was the fear and the sorrow, the longing and regret. I wanted him to stay forever and to get away as soon as possible.

  He told me again that he had once given a solo concert to which his parents had come. He told me that it was true he once had had a very fine career. The bar we sat in now was quite elegant. A lunchtime crowd calmly ate their meal, totally unaware of the couple at the chrome and glass bar. Us. Almost done. Done for.

  I kept looking at my watch. Finally I told Matthew we had to go and he tossed down the rest of his fourth beer. We headed for the terminal. As we crossed the street, he said, “On my way to the oblivion express …” But a laugh was bubbling up through the hysteria in both of us.

  When we got to the terminal, he asked me if I would buy him some cigarettes and I was happy to do him this one last favour. I asked him what I should ask for and he told me and I got him a couple of packs.

  Out on the platform, he asked me if I would give him some money for “one last blow-out in Killaloe,” and I told him no. He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the contents—a few tattered business cards, including my own, and a five-dollar bill. I didn’t give him anything more to add to this ragged beggar collection.

  It seemed to take forever for the bus to load, but at long last, the line began to move. Matthew turned to me, grabbed hold of me, held me to him and said, “I really do love you.”

  Tiredly, not knowing whether I meant it or not, I answered, “I love you, too.”

  Finally, it came to be his turn to board. He turned and said goodbye and disappeared into the blackness of the bus.

  I was so afraid he would hop back off if I left the platform that I was determined to stay until the bus pulled out.

  It seemed to be hours. I waited and waited, standing there in the deserted bay with only Matthew’s bus yet to leave and only me seeing it off. The driver fussed with luggage, chatted with other drivers, came, went, came back, got on, got off—

  And all the time, I waited for Matthew to roll out of my life. I could see nothing, because the windows of the bus were so darkly tinted. I thought he might be sitting on the other side of the bus, so I walked around it once, but felt silly and started to laugh.

  Then I worried that he might have fled the bus while I was on the side away from the door—even though the door had only been out of my sight for moments.

  Then, it was time. The bus driver was ready, and he began to pull out. As he did so, I saw a figure on the bus rise and become visible standing in the aisle. The figure waved and I saw by the motion of its hand and by its posture that it was Matthew waving goodbye.

  I waved, too, and watched as the bus drew away from the terminal bay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  AND ONLY WHEN I could see the bus no longer did I turn and walk off the platform, back through the waiting room, out onto the sidewalk, across the street, past the bar we’d just been in, down the sidewalk we’d just walked, toward the subway we’d just ridden, and all the way back to the basement room we’d shared for the past seventeen days.

  I had come all the way back in a trance, and the moment I entered, Matthew’s permanent absence hit me like a fist in the chest. I drew in a stunned breath. Whatever had happened in this room was over forever and would never happen again.

  Still in a trance, but one now more comprised of sorrow than relief, I saw the panther s
weater draped carefully over the chair where Matthew had sat so many times, where I’d taken his dark curls between my confident hands.

  I took the sweater straight to the sink and began to wash it. I’d not noticed that it was a little threadbare. I washed it and washed it as Lady Macbeth had washed her bloody key. But I wasn’t washing Matthew out of it. I was washing away anything that might in any way damage or diminish it because I had decided to keep it forever.

  Carefully, I laid it out to dry.

  And then I lay down myself.

  And over me began to wash wave after wave of revulsion. I thought of all of Matthew’s lies. I thought of the drugs, the fevered sex, the talk about gay men, the baths, the streets, the craziness that poured out of him when he was begging me to hold him, never to leave him. I thought of his terrifying fragility, of his complete poverty, of his wasted talent and his conniving life.

  And I thought how he had tricked and duped and fooled me. How he had told me I was beautiful. How he had sworn over and over that he loved me, then taken a whole month’s salary away from me. I thought of the way he smelled the night he’d met me at midnight at the bus terminal that terrible Sunday. I thought of him digging in the ashtray for a butt, the way any bum would. I thought of his waking in the middle of the night to smoke a cigarette, then collapsing into a stupor again.

  I thought of him as a weak, cheating, crazy, ugly vagrant living off the desperation of decent women past their prime.

  I thought of ways he might even now be trying to rob me. Credit cards. Bank cards. Cheques. Long distance calls.

  I thought of disease. Of many of them. Of the worst.

  I lay for hours as the soft sun through my basement windows gave into darkness. I thought I had been so stupid as to not merit the pity of decent people and so soiled as to never expect to be granted social intercourse—let alone any other kind—ever again.

  For days, all I could think of was how horrible everything about Matthew had been. In the middle of the first night he was gone, I heard the phone ring. I awoke and lay stock-still, hearing his voice on the machine saying he would call me back.

  The next morning, he did call, and I answered. He said he was at the Toronto bus terminal. It was nine a.m. The once-a-day bus from Killaloe wouldn’t arrive until 3 p.m. Clearly, he had not gone there.

  He said he’d decided that knowing me had given him the strength not to want to commit suicide after all.

  I said nothing. I was not moved. I was afraid this call meant he would come back to my place. I was scared.

  He asked me whether he had hurt me and I said, “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  Angrily he replied, “Yes, I do.”

  I said to him, “You know we can never see each other again.”

  He said, “Yes.”

  I asked him never to come to my place again, and—a little insulted—he said, “Of course not.”

  He said that all he wanted to do now was to pick up the pieces of his life.

  I simply said, “Matthew, I wish you all the luck in the world.” And then I hung up and I went to work.

  As the days went by, I grew more and more frantically afraid that Matthew had tried to rob me somehow. I began frenetic calls to my credit card company, to my bank, to the phone company to check these things out.

  And I also began to check every day to see whether the panther sweater, which I had hung on the door of my washroom, had somehow disappeared of its own accord.

  I felt dirty and wanton and foolish and old.

  But something besides this horrible self-loathing began to happen. I began to miss Matthew. I began to miss him as passionately as I had once missed him—in the days in which I could count the hours until I would be seeing him again. I could count the hours now, too. They numbered all the hours of my life, for much as I feared he would return, much as I shook with fear at the thought of some night coming home and finding him crouched at my window, I knew he would never come back to me.

  The long, long days went on. It seemed that many had passed before he called me again, but actually, it was in the middle of the night between the first Friday and the first Saturday that he was gone—only a few days after he left—that the machine intercepted a call from him again. He said, “Hello, Marie, I just wanted to say hello.”

  My heart sang at the sound of his voice. I was still terrified, but I longed for him so, that I played the tape over and over again, just to hear those eight words.

  The next day was a rainy, dismal Sunday. I folded the panther sweater—which had not disappeared—and put it away. I spent the long day alone, as I had spent so many Sundays before he came.

  At six—the hour at which he’d so often called me before—the phone rang.

  “Hello,” he said, “this is Matthew.”

  “I know.”

  His voice was very broken and really sounded as though he were in tears. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “that I am extremely sorry for what happened. Somewhere along the line, I got off the track …”

  There was a long silence. My heart closed, as though this were not happening at all, as though I had no feeling left in me. Finally, though, I forced myself to say, “Well, thank you for telling me that; I really appreciate it.”

  There was another pause. “I just wanted to say goodbye,” he said, his voice still sounding as though he spoke with great difficulty.

  Somehow, I could not keep a smile out of my own voice. It was a smile of relief that he was gone. It was a smile of gratitude that he had been noble enough to call. It was a smile of well-wishing. It was a smile of a kind of love. “Goodbye, Matthew,” I said, too blithely, too easily. And I hung up the phone. I felt almost nothing, except that I thought it was very nice of him to have called.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE FIRST THING I learned was that I was not pregnant.

  Then I learned that Matthew had not tried to rob, pilfer, or cheat me out of anything except the money he had asked for and had been freely given.

  Each time that I checked and found that Matthew had not hurt me in some way I had suspected, my hurt over the loss of him became more acute.

  There remained only to find out whether he had in some way infected me.

  When the day came, I found myself sitting in the blood testing laboratory when an old female patient walked in and sat in a neighbouring chair, all cheerful and friendly and nice. I almost expected her to ask me—in a small-talk sort of way—what I was being tested for and I was almost prepared to say, “Oh, well, I fell in love with this vagrant who is possibly bi-sexual so I thought it made good sense to be tested for AIDS ….”

  She never asked.

  So I just sat there and watched as the virginal technician approached me and punched a hole in my arm and waited for five glass vials to fill quickly with my blood. And as I watched those fat glass tubes turn red, I thought what a tough old muscle is my good heart.

  Several weeks later, the doctor phoned to say that all the tests were negative.

  I wept. Matthew now seemed officially—well and truly—gone from my life. And all the harm he had done, as far as anyone could tell, was to let me love him, then to go when I sent him away. I longed for him as never before. Though I knew that what I longed for would never be mine—or anyone’s—because Matthew was a myth.

  There had been times when I had feared that I would find him again someday. Sleeping on a subway grate. Hunched in a doorway. Wandering some ward I was doing volunteer work in or dragged into some courtroom where I was observing a trial.

  But as I realized for one last time that he had not robbed, raped, defiled, seduced, impregnated or infected me, I felt the certain knowledge that I would never see Matthew again. I wondered what it would be like to love like a widow.

  It was now the latter part of June, again a Sunday, and the bright spring warmth of March had given way to the heat of summer.

  I was down at the harbour, sitting on a bench, idly watching the yac
hts and smaller craft negotiating the turns necessary to get out onto the wide free waters of the lake. There were people walking on the path behind me. I could hear their conversations, the idle chatter of families and friends enjoying the leisure of a day off.

  I was happy for them, happy for them all. As for myself, I was content to watch the boats and to read my book and to enjoy my own leisure.

  I don’t know how long I had sat there when I heard it. At first I thought it must be my imagination. Behind me came the voices of a couple. She sounded sophisticated, an educated woman, but friendly, too. She spoke of her love of the lake and how much she enjoyed sharing time beside it with a new friend.

  The man said, “Well, as I’ll only be in town for a couple of weeks working in the studio, I appreciate any time I can spend relaxing. “And,” he added, “finding a woman like you to spend it with, that makes it really special.”

  Whatever the woman said in reply, I couldn’t hear. But I heard him again, and this time I knew who it was who spoke.

  “It’s nearly one now,” he said, “and I really should be getting back. But I’ll be done at about eight-thirty.”

  “Oh,” the woman replied, hesitantly, hopefully, I thought.

  “So maybe we can meet. Have a little supper …”

  “I guess that would be okay. Yes. That would be fine.”

  There was a silence as if she were wondering exactly what or where he had in mind.

  “Listen,” he finally said. “I know a cute little place in the west end. I’d like to meet you there, treat you to a beer or two …”

  The woman laughed. “I’m not really a beer drinker, but …”

  “You’ll love the place. It’s called The Lakeview Restaurant. You can wait for me …”

  “I don’t usually sit alone in a bar,” the woman answered. “I find that sort of scary.”

  “No,” I heard the man reply in his soft, persuasive voice. “Not scary at all. A beautiful woman like you has no need to be afraid. Someone will always look after you.”