What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

  After the last medical drama of the evening, Ellie stood, stretched her little body out and up, and said, “I think I’m done for the night. Try to remember to get those numbers from Terry, won’t you Nick?”

  We all laughed, but then I thought, she’s probably serious, so when she left the room I said to Terry, “I guess she’s right about that, Terry. I’m sorry to push the matter along, but do you think I could get that quote now?”

  He looked a bit taken aback, as though in having passed from tradesman to something more, he would never again be our tradesman. As though he wasn’t even the same person who’d arrived earlier to give us a quote on a new roof. But then he said, “I’ve just got to write it all up. Let me go to the truck and I’ll come back and run down the options with you.”

  “Fine,” I said, and he put on his boots and coat and went out into the night. I heard his truck door open and then shut. When I heard it open again five minutes later I went down to the front door to meet him.

  “Alright,” he said, “here it is.” He looked like an undergrad who’d fudged his way through a paper and was now handing it in. The sheet he gave me was stapled to a brochure for a particular brand of shingles as well as another business card. I parsed it. The number was a little higher than I’d expected, but it didn’t shock me.

  “Okay,” I said, “Let me take this in.”

  “Because I feel like we’re friends now,” Terry said, “I should say that if you wanted to pay cash, straight cash, you know, I could do it for five thousand, all in.”

  “Five thousand.”

  “Right, uh huh. Quietly, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Either way, Nick, I know it’s a lot of money. I don’t take this lightly. I know it’s hard to make these sorts of decisions,” he said, like he was reading my mind, like it wasn’t what anyone in this same situation would be feeling. It was a salesman’s trick, and I didn’t like him for pulling it out after all that had happened between us. “There’s a lot of money involved, I get that. This sort of decision can weigh on a relationship,” he said, “on a marriage. It can make you wonder, Who is this person I’m with? Can I trust her? Why does she resent me given all that I’ve done for her, all I’ve given up, okay?”

  “Right,” I said, but slowly, to show that I wasn’t really following him down this particular trail.

  “And maybe she’s out a lot, or doesn’t confide in you anymore.”

  “You’re saying I should talk about it with Ellie,” I said, trying to get things back on the rails.

  “Exactly. I mean, if this is the sort of thing you two talk about. I don’t know how this works for you, the dynamic. Like right now, for me, I’m sort of considering leaving my wife. Like, today. Or tonight, I guess, ha. So I wouldn’t necessarily consult her about it, or anything now. But, you know. For you? And Ellie? I can’t say.”

  There it is, I thought. It was like finding the pinhole in a tire that’s slowly been losing air. “Why don’t you come back in, Terry, and I’ll find us some beers,” I said. And the thought came to me, guiltily in the light of what Terry had revealed, that once this was over I was going to need another quote.

  The first time Terry mentioned it, it sounded to me like a fundamentally bad idea, like carpeting in the bathroom. We were watching a loop of sports highlights for the second or third time. Goal-goal-goal-fight-goal. I was just coming back from the kitchen with a bowl of microwave popcorn for us to share. I had put some extra margarine on it and sprinkled it with Old Bay. I had two bottles of beer, one in each hip pocket of my jeans, and I had a roll of paper towels under my arm. Terry looked at me as I came out of the kitchen and he started to say something. I assumed it would be, “Need a hand?” But it wasn’t. It was, “We should go away together.”

  “What?” I said as he cleared away our half-dozen empty bottles to make room for the new ones and the popcorn.

  “Yeah, you know, somewhere without women, just for a while. I think I see what you need, Nick, and it’s just what I need: space. Wood, water, trees!” he said, raising his arms.

  “Right,” I said. “Have another, Terry.”

  “Fish,” he said. “I know you fish, don’t you, Nick?”

  “I do.”

  “Imagine the longest fishing trip you’ve ever been on, Nick. Think of living that way.”

  “Drink up, buddy,” I told him, and I did the same.

  Sometime past midnight I noticed that Terry had left me drinking alone. He’d gotten a stein from the kitchen and kept filling it with water from the filter jug in the fridge. Then he found the cookie dough ice cream and he had two or three bowls of that. All this time he kept peppering me with more and more enticing details of this scheme of his.

  “That truck out there would last us years,” he said. “It’d be ours.”

  “I’ve always wanted a truck,” I said.

  “I kind of figured.”

  And by that time of night when you stop looking at the clock because there’s nothing on TV anyway, it had become our scheme, a thing we both shaped, brought more fully into being, a thing we both believed. We were watching one of those half-hour commercials for a “companionship phone line” when out of nowhere I blurted, “There’s something about the company of men, isn’t there?”

  “Men get it,” Terry said.

  “I think priorities come into play,” I said.

  “There’s a difference in expectations, Nick. A big difference.”

  “If men lived with men, they’d take turns taking out the garbage, for instance.”

  “You bet they would, Nick.”

  I chewed on that for a moment. I knew I was a bit drunk, but I thought Terry was alright. I felt as though I was thinking straight, anyway. I felt like I was capable of weighing fairly one thing against another.

  “You own a gun, Terry?” I asked.

  “My dad’s. Beautiful gun. He taught me to shoot with it.”

  “Ever take down a moose?”

  “Naw, you?”

  “Not yet I haven’t.”

  “Imagine it, though.”

  “I have,” I said, “a thousand times.”

  “That’s the kind of thing men do.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “Get your boots on.” I stood up, aimed the remote at the TV and shut it off.

  “Really, Nick? I mean, you’re for real here?”

  “Yes, goddamn it,” I said. “Get your boots on, Terry. Now.” I put on my warmest coat and the boots I’d had for thirteen years. I was consciously not taking stock of everything else I was leaving behind. I was not hastily packing a bag. I had everything I needed, I thought, in the form of my wits, the clothes on my back, and the Swiss Army knife in my hip pocket.

  “Won’t she notice you’re gone?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, then, “Yes. Shh. Just go, let’s go.”

  And once we were out the front door, I had a feeling in my chest like the sound of a chainsaw starting up. There were magnesium flares going off in my blood. My pulse hammered in my throat and everything looked new. We ran down the driveway and jumped into the truck. I didn’t look back at the house. I didn’t look to see the soft glow of Jordan’s night light in his window. I didn’t look back to see if there was a face peeking through the curtains.

  We were driving nowhere in particular, some dreamscape forest of the mind that we didn’t bother to fix in real space. Anyway, there was a sense that a destination wouldn’t really matter until dawn, until the morning light brought the world into sharper focus. I wasn’t anxious for that time to come. Until then we’d just put some miles between us and whatever had come before. The next day was Saturday, and back at the house that meant a farm breakfast: bacon, pancakes, sausages, eggs, some sliced apples, juice, coffee. Ellie grew up on a farm in eastern Quebec and that had been their tradition, one she brought to the marriage. It was always a great pleasure to me, and I was sorry I wouldn’t know it anymore. But maybe there’ll be a diner somewhere ahead, I thou
ght. It wouldn’t be the same, but that was the point, wasn’t it?

  Terry’s face was dimly lit by the dashboard glow, and he looked ten years younger than when I’d met him just the previous afternoon. He looked bright, fresh, hopeful, re-inflated. I wondered how I looked to him. Did I look like his brother? A friend? Did I look like a lover?

  As we drove on that night, into the wide, inviting Canadian nowhere, toward whatever we were to become, the darkness behind us was the world dropping away from my feet, a great gulf opening there. It was unknown and frightening and I wished not to go back to it. I wanted only to be in the truck, with Terry. But I began to think of what I would say to Ellie if I ever spoke to her again. And I decided that what I would tell her was that sometimes the really big decisions, the ones we can’t explain, are the best ones we ever make.

  “Goddamn,” I said to Terry. “Goddamn!”

  FLORIDIANS

  It’s a common thing, I guess, to step off an airplane here and into a perfect, salty evening—the cries of seabirds, the sound of traffic humming by on the highway, the gentle rustling of the palms—and to wonder why a person would ever leave this place. To make a mental note to go back home and work for another thirty years, and then sell everything except a set of Callaways and a pair of deck shoes, and to move permanently down to Florida to wait out the end.

  A common thing, maybe. But then a good many common things always eluded me.

  The gleaming white taxicab tore along the four-lane, across the bay, then onto the causeway over to the Keys. The seat covers had lascivious-looking flamingos on them. The cars shone on the palm-lined causeway, and the Gulf wind kicked through the open window. Outside, I saw houses built close to the earth. An open-air laundromat and an adult video warehouse in a strip mall next to a giant home improvement store. A massive dog track, big as a football stadium. There was something chiming and bright on the radio, ours or someone else’s.

  I had arrived at this place looking for something. What I sought was grace, only I didn’t know it then. Instead, I said “fun,” I said “relaxation.” Anyone else might’ve just gone on a bender, but I didn’t have the friends for that. I needed something to suggest that I had worth, whatever form that took, or if I had none, to learn how I might acquire it.

  I’d always been wary of the whole state of Florida, thinking it little more than a big strip mall surrounded by water and sinking into swamp, full of bluehairs and the laughably conservative. But I’d wound up with a bit of time to kill, and I wanted to feel the sun’s fullness in the dead of winter, so I let the wind and cheap airfare carry me south. I found a room at a place called The Sands at Indian Beach, and booked it for two months.

  “No problem,” said Mr. Beverley, the owner, who I’d reached by phone. “Just had new countertops installed.”

  And before I knew it, I was walking the beaches and dipping my ghostly white toes in the Gulf of Mexico, feeling a suspicion of easy leisure lift off my shoulders and disappear, replaced by a kind of goofy and easy hands-in-pockets gait, a loose and happy feeling of the sun on my face and arms.

  I sought the banyan, the date palm, the sycamore, palmetto, mangrove. The roseate spoonbill, the pelican, the heron, ibis, egret, cormorant. Never the grotesque neon and cheap plastic, not the talcum and death smell of old people, not waiting in line while a woman insists on paying for her groceries with a personal cheque, not the traffic-choked roads. The birds and the trees: these are the things I wished to keep.

  I took a cab to the state botanical gardens. I walked through them with my hands in my pockets and the dumbest smile on my face, smelling the floral notes so deep and rich they were almost vulgar. A couple stood by the tall grass and took pictures of an alligator with their zoom lens, debating whether or not the animal was real, lying there perfectly still fifty yards away. When it shook its tail and slid like oil into the water beneath the reeds the woman gave a small shriek.

  That night I got ripping drunk in a place with fishing nets strung across the panelled ceiling and plastic fish hung in random constellations, because that’s what you do in a strange town, isn’t it? You find a bar and you sit among the blue-veined men who are talking college football and the governor’s record on crime, and you drink a local beer in order to forge some connection to the place, drawing Xs and Os in the dewy runoff of your umpteenth bottle.

  I made my wobbly way back to The Sands, to my room decorated with fish and sailboats and all manner of aquatically themed plastic things, and I watched a Law & Order rerun, then part of a dog show. A German wirehaired pointer with large, watery eyes stood like a painting at its handler’s feet, perhaps seeking its own version of grace, but I fell asleep before they handed out the trophies.

  At The Sands there’s a long central corridor that runs through the building where you can gaze along the pink stucco walls and see the ocean, and in the evenings the sun would set right there. Sometimes I’d sit in a plastic kitchen chair outside my door at the end nearest the street and wait for the immodest pink and orange flare of sunset to appear there, framed by the stucco walls.

  It was out of that corridor that I watched her walk one afternoon. She came from the direction of the ocean. I was reading by the pool, which was always empty. She took a lounge chair on the far side. It wasn’t all that hot a day, a bit cloudy, but she wore small cut-offs and a bikini top. She looked at me over her magazine. It was a bored look, or maybe, if I were to summon some optimism, a look that said, You’re the first not-boring thing to land here in a while.

  I leaned back and looked up into the sky, watched an airliner slice into a cloudbank.

  How strange to find yourself in a new place. How suddenly freeing to discover that things about you are different. To approach her instead of sitting on your hands. To make remarks funnier than you’d have thought you could muster. To manage small talk, even charmingly. To agree to her invitation to go to a blues club, even though you hate the blues. To do so not because of her enthusiasm, or her beauty, or not only her beauty, but also because you reason that what you hate is the blues clubs back home, or maybe that the person who hates blues clubs is the home-based you, a former being, a dead acquaintance.

  Once there, your excitement is genuine. Your stomping foot, your hand on her knee under the table. The ease with which you address the waitress, the colourful drinks you order. What, you wonder, makes you the person you are? It’s a feeling like falling, the pleasantness of shifting boundaries, of a night floating by without a moment of doubt or an instance of regret, dawn arriving to find you still awake, looking down at her hair on the pillow in the soft, soundless glow of sunrise. To be in this new place, and to make yourself anew away from those things people know and hold you to, all those personal contracts left far behind.

  The next night we watched the sun go down from a place called Pier 60, up the key a ways. There were vendors selling cheap things, and a canteen counter with funnel cakes and soft drinks. An entertainer with a headset microphone walked among the crowd, juggling fire, telling jokes, and then pretended to steal my wallet. After, we walked out onto the pier as the darkness grew and the wind kicked up, listened to the surf hammer against the massive pilings buried deep in the Gulf sand.

  I reserved a table for two at a nice seafood restaurant. I gave them the name Ted Cruikshank, which was the one I’d given her on a whim when we met by the pool. An alias felt, in that moment, like a potentially useful deception. The reasons were elusive even to me—I had no wife, no creditors, I wasn’t hurting anyone. I just had the gut feeling that while living and moving about on this humid spit of land between sea and swamp I might engage in certain untidy acts with someone I might never intend to see again.

  Did she ever see my credit cards? My driver’s licence? I don’t know. She never said anything. It’s possible she did see them, but before speaking was reminded in some way of the matter of her age, a subject that, if I’m honest, we were both careful to avoid. I had my lie, and she had hers. The shared knowledge o
f both of these deceptions might have been all we ever really had in common.

  It was all very good that night, everything in trim working order, propelled along by an unusually easy feeling. The lobster, the wine, the dim light, her laughter.

  She asked, of course: What was I doing in Florida?

  “Visiting,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “You, as it turns out.” At this she blushed.

  “Well, how long are you staying?”

  I took a sip of wine. “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of months.”

  And how exactly, she asked, did a person my age find himself with all this time and money, seemingly, to burn? On this count I gave her the truth, more or less: the IT company where I’d been a programmer had been swallowed by a big American competitor, and I and most of my fellow programmers had been deemed extraneous. As I had developed a key piece of the software which had made the little fish so attractive to the big fish, and the former owner being understandably grateful, I was handed a compensatory cheque for a sum falling somewhere beyond generous but perhaps just short of princely. I was wished good luck, and sent away.

  “Look,” I said to her, “I’m under thirty, no kids, single. I was standing on a street corner in Toronto in the middle of February, which—I don’t know if you’ve ever been anywhere like that, but—the blowing snow, the wind was howling. So I said, ‘Screw this,’ went home, fired up my laptop, bought a one-way ticket, and here I am.”

  She smiled, ran her birdlike fingers through her sandy-blonde hair. “Wow, you’re a lucky guy.”

  “I can’t deny that,” I said, and I could feel us sliding toward something irretrievable.

  Deep in the night, as we slept in my room, there was a flash, a shower of sparks outside the condo’s window, and by the time we were conscious there was a ruckus out there. Three fire trucks arrived as we crept in the dark and opened the blinds, straining our necks for a better view. Finally I went outside in my bare feet while Stephanie stood in the doorway of my room. She folded her shapely arms and hunched her small shoulders against the chill.