Toby

by Todd Babiak

  There were six voice messages from Dwayne, four e-mails from Dwayne’s secretary, and a yellow sticky note affixed to his keyboard: Come see me NOW.

  He took the circuitous route to Dwayne’s office, bypassing the studio, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. On the way, he ducked into a washroom, made certain it was empty, and practised his speech in front of the mirror. He had faith in the universality of human compassion. Dwayne, for example, had always wanted to be in front of the camera. Acne scars had made a lesser man of him. It had been entirely beyond his control. Poor Dwayne. Toby meditated on this to gain an understanding of his boss: poor Dwayne, and his cowboy boots.

  There was another voice in Dwayne’s office, laughter. From time to time, when she allowed herself to relax, Alicia’s laugh degraded into a snort. He had grown to love this rare flaw in her, as it was inspired by joy. Joy. Compassion. Cowboy boots. Good-healthy-right-strong. It was marvellous that Alicia and Dwayne were in the office together—destiny.

  “Good morning to you both,” he said, at the doorway.

  Alicia was enthroned in one of the fake antique chairs that faced Dwayne’s desk, in a dark blue dress that tied around the waist and a pair of long black boots. She looked at Toby as though he had traded faces.

  “Before you say anything, allow me to—”

  “Alicia.” Dwayne stood up. The tone in his voice was entirely new. “Please excuse us.”

  “What happened yesterday?” she asked.

  Toby had not imagined Alicia would be here. He had over-rehearsed his address, and now his starting place was hidden from him. Like finding the right key, he could not choose the right tone of voice without plinking a few notes. “I…”

  “Alicia, please,” said Dwayne.

  She moved in to kiss Toby on her way out, and he backed up to block the doorway.

  “Actually, Alicia, would you mind staying?”

  “Well…” She looked at Dwayne.

  “I have a couple things I need to discuss with you, Toby.” The morning sun shone down through Dwayne’s tilted blinds and highlighted his scars.

  “Please sit, both of you,” Toby said. “Just give me a moment.”

  They sat.

  “Exceptional.” Toby rubbed his hands. He had rehearsed hand-rubbing. “Exceptional.”

  Dwayne looked at his watch. “There’s a conference call in half an hour.”

  “This won’t take long.” Toby sat in the matching chair, next to Alicia. He crossed his hands in front of his chest. “I know about your affair.”

  A glance between them. “There’s no affair,” said Dwayne.

  “Toby, that’s insane.”

  “I’m not here to condemn you or break into tears in public. What can I do? I’ve been through it in my mind, a thousand times. You obviously love one another. Why else would you forsake an epic romance, a powerful friendship?”

  Alicia stood up and sucked in her cheeks. “‘An epic romance, a powerful friendship.’ With your Lord Rector voice on. We both know where you grew up.” Then she walked out.

  “Wait. You had better…”

  She did not wait.

  “Come back here, Alicia, or it’s over between us. It’s over between us forever. You can’t…Guess what, I mean it!”

  She did not come back. Toby and Dwayne looked out the door as the sound of her heels on the thin carpet faded below the low hum of the computer. One of Dwayne’s eyes appeared swollen. His children brought legions of viruses into his house.

  Toby pulled out a sheet of paper, upon which he had made notes earlier that morning. All of his rehearsals in front of the bathroom mirror and in the car were now entirely wasted. His soundtrack had gone silent. “Well, that was unnecessarily awkward.”

  Dwayne closed his blinds.

  “I apologize for that,” Toby continued. “And for yesterday. I’m prepared to take blame where blame is due. However—”

  Dwayne turned his monitor around. There was Toby in front of Roslyn School. He had not noticed yesterday how handsome a building it was—multicoloured brick, turn-of-the-century design. His suit, a brown Canali, had been a perfect choice, given the architecture, the late-morning sunlight, the autumn leaves. The image was frozen until Dwayne sniffed, hit a key, and leaned back in his leather chair.

  Dwayne played it once, and again, and once more. Then he slid a sealed envelope over his desk. Toby opened it and skimmed the letter from the human resources director, outlining his severance package.

  “You can gather your stuff like a grown-up and leave. Or I can have Security escort you out.”

  “You know the situation I was in yesterday. My father—”

  “I have one letter from Mr. Isidore and another from the president of the national council of the Conservative Party of Canada. I have one from the Council of Canadians of African and Caribbean Heritage, and one very long letter from the executive director of the African Canadian Heritage Association.”

  “I’m not a racist.”

  “Of course not.”

  “We’re friends, you and I.”

  “Friends.”

  “The Benjamin Disraeli Society.”

  Dwayne massaged his jacket pocket to emphasize the absence of any dress handkerchief.

  “I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t eaten. I was on a lot of NyQuil. I’d just learned that my trusted friend, my terrific pal, was sleeping with my—”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “I’ll go to Mr. Demsky.”

  “It was his decision.”

  “Liar.”

  Dwayne shrugged. Before the first segment of Toby a Gentleman launched, he had customarily worn jeans and wrinkle-free khakis with a series of checkered, unironed shirts. He had cussed and slouched. Now he had six Chester Barrie bespoke suits and flew to Jermyn Street once every two years to have new shirts custom-made with hand-sewn button holes, removable collarbones, mother-of-pearl buttons. But no handkerchief! And why he had held on to the cowboy boots was mysterious and regrettable.

  “I have a proposal for you.” Toby stood up and placed his hands on Dwayne’s desk. “I have a counter-proposal.”

  “I’m not accepting any proposals or counter-proposals. I have to prepare for a conference call, as I mentioned. All this is a real shame, damn it to hell. But you, of all people, will understand how this racist business reflects on the station.”

  “I’m not a racist.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir.”

  “You do have a choice, Dwayne. Stand with me.”

  “Just relax.”

  “I am relaxed. I’m relaxed!”

  “Just rewind a little.”

  “Yes. Let’s. Back to the good old days when I had a job.”

  “I am sorry. Sorry for everything. Really. Just calm down, be calm, and give me the knife.”

  Toby didn’t understand. He looked down. In one hand, he held a pewter letter opener designed to look like a dagger. Dwayne had received it as a Christmas gift from his wife, and occasionally swung it about during conceptualization and strategy sessions. Toby dropped it on the desk.

  Dwayne slid the dagger out of Toby’s reach and stood up, a layer of perspiration where his hairline used to be. “This is a real shame for all of us.”

  It seemed Dwayne expected Toby to leave now, to walk down the hall of anchors to the loop of middle management. There was nothing left to discuss.

  “Do your wife and children know about Alicia? Did you tell Kathia about her?”

  The station manager made a fist and chewed on his thumb knuckle for a moment, a tic. He walked around the desk and approached Toby, said gently, “Maybe you have a tape recorder in your pocket.”

  “No.”

  Dwayne reached up with one hand and pulled Toby by the tie until he fell to the ground, bouncing his forehead off the wooden arm of a chair. Simultaneously, Dwayne slammed his door closed with his other hand. Toby could smell a blur of chemical in the carpet. In school, drama class and membership in t
he debating club had formed a shield of preciousness and, in the constellation of high school brutes, pointlessness around Toby. He did not have a brother.

  With sinister tranquility in his voice, Dwayne whispered, “I don’t want to hit you.”

  “Don’t hit me.”

  “But if you ever, ever so much as hint at hurting my family, I’ll find you and I’ll fucking hit you. I’ll hit you hard.”

  “You’ve been abundantly clear, Dwayne.”

  “Hard.”

  “Clear and merciful.”

  Dwayne pulled Toby back up to his feet, again using his tie. He then loosened Toby’s tie and fixed his left lapel. Opened the door. “You know, it’s been a real treat working with you, Toby. A real treat.”

  The lights were off in Alicia’s office. She sat in a wicker chair near the window with a cup of coffee and Lawrence, her stuffed owl. All he had really wanted, down the hall, was to make her feel ashamed and to draw something—anything—for himself from her shame. Now he just wanted her.

  She looked at him and looked away.

  “You might have apologized, Allie.”

  “I might have.”

  “Never once did I cheat on you. Never once did I consider it. Not that I didn’t have opportunities.”

  “My sincerest congratulations.”

  Toby knew she was not in love with Dwayne. It was not in her to fall in love with a married man who occasionally contracted pink eye from his children. It did not work that way for her. “If you promise, and I mean really promise, to stay loyal to me, Alicia, I’d be willing to give you another chance.”

  She blew a burst of air out her nose.

  “There’s enough money in my severance for a trip to Paris. First-class flight, a week at the Four Seasons. We could get married at the Hôtel de Ville. If one of us has to be there for a month before they’ll do it, I’m willing to make that sacrifice. I can plot the next stage in my career.”

  “Toby.”

  He went down on one knee, again.

  “Still no ring.”

  “We can go together, right now, to the Tiffany counter. Whatever you want.”

  “Say goodbye to your parents for me. My best wishes to poor Edward.”

  “No.”

  “Toby. You don’t even have a job.”

  “I’m not leaving.” He thought he detected a smile. Something. “Tractors couldn’t drag me away now, my darling.”

  “You have nothing.”

  “I have love.”

  “Not that.”

  His right knee began to hurt, so he switched to the left. “‘Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.’”

  “You really don’t understand.”

  “I do understand. I do. I know why you were with Dwayne. But if you stick with me, I can take you ten times farther. I can—”

  “No.”

  “I’ll do anything.”

  “This is a real spectacle.”

  Toby crawled across the floor to her chair.

  Alicia produced her iPhone. “You’re humiliating yourself, and I can’t watch it. What’s the number for Security?”

  “What can I do?” Toby stood up. “What can I do?”

  “Go.”

  “I’ll show you, Alicia. You’ll see.”

  She looked at him, but also past him, as though most of Toby had already left the room. “We try to hide it, but it shows in a moment like this. Where we come from.”

  He wiped the dust from his knees and tried to formulate a response. His father with the mitts on, his mother with her chocolate milk and her cigarillos, the pile of scrap wood in the backyard. “This isn’t finished.”

  Alicia followed him to the door and pushed it closed behind him.

  Half an hour later, he was in his own office, adding four new Toby a Gentleman segments to his demo reel. He phoned Anton Beauchemin, station manager of the CTV affiliate, and said he was available.

  “What? Have they gone shithouse rat over there? You’re still on billboards.”

  “Craziness is a pretty good summation, Anton.”

  “Well, of course, we’d love to have you. Not sure what’s available at the moment. We’re officially in a hiring freeze, like everyone else. But we’re retooling the morning show. How’d you like to wake up at four every day?”

  “I would like nothing better.”

  They exchanged numbers and addresses, made plans to meet for drinks at the end of the afternoon. Toby packed a wine box full of awards and books and photographs. He printed off several copies of his C.V. and burned ten discs of his updated demo reel. The studio was half full, with a meeting of the morning show host and producers. Sandra from Poland said, flatly but not quietly, “Nazi.”

  He drove north and west toward the Montreal General. His phone vibrated. At the next red light, at Sherbrooke and de la Montagne, Toby checked and discovered an e-mail from Anton Beauchemin.

  Dear Toby, Heard about the thing. Can’t do it. No point meeting. Apologies, regrets. Anton

  For the past year, Mr. Demsky had lived and worked in a Victorian townhouse on Elm Avenue, two blocks west of the Forum, Montreal’s factory of half-remembered sepia dreams. He might have lived higher up the mountain, in the detached stone houses of multi-generational business-class travellers, but he had chosen to stay close to his audience, whom he both adored and despised. Elm Avenue was tranquil despite its proximity to a shopping mall, a synagogue, the college Toby had attended after high school, and the twenty-two-screen cinema complex that was once the Forum. It was a Wednesday, and therefore difficult to find a parking spot. Bits of dust blew up and settled on the lapels of Toby’s suit and on his violated tie, and with this wind came nostalgia for the early 1990s: kisses, European coffee, thunder, marijuana.

  Personal assistants never lasted long with Mr. Demsky, and when he hired someone new he would seek an untried nationality: Chinese, Ukrainian, Thai, Caribbean, Pakistani. Toby couldn’t pick out this latest woman’s accent, at least not on the intercom system. There was a breathlessness about her. “The door is open,” she said. “Just enter.”

  Mr. Demsky kept several residences in North America, France, and Israel, and in the midst of his semi-retirement he moved from house to house to avoid extreme cold, extreme heat, and boredom. According to the October chill Toby felt as he entered the townhouse on Elm Avenue, Mr. Demsky’s time in Montreal would soon come to an end for another year.

  There was a dark wooden arch in the foyer and complex geometric shapes on the tile floor. Over the neoclassical violin music that issued from tiny speakers bracketed to the ceiling, Toby could hear Mr. Demsky and his assistant arguing bitterly. On his way up the stairs, Toby stomped his feet so they might hear him and quiet down. Of course, they knew their visitor was not a former prime minister; Mr. Demsky worked before a bank of LCD screens that displayed shots of the perimeter of his townhouse. The giant master bedroom, transformed into an office, had a bay window overlooking Elm Avenue. There was nothing on the white walls but a single art deco cowboy poster advertising canned tomatoes. Toby knocked on the door jamb; again, they ignored him.

  The woman was stout and wore a dress and stockings inspired by a Bavarian beerhouse. Her hair was red and tightly curled, flecked with grey.

  “I don’t want bulgur wheat salad.”

  “Vegetables, Adam, vegetables.”

  Mr. Demsky shook Toby’s hand, though he hadn’t yet made eye contact. “Go cook me a steak.”

  “You had red meat yesterday.”

  “And while you’re at it, open a bottle of Chablis and order us up some hookers.”

  “You would not know what to do with a hooker.”

  Mr. Demsky looked down and shook his head. “And now you emasculate me in front of my protegé.”

  Protegé. Hearing this word, Toby knew that Dwayne had gone too far. He would be back on the air before the end of the week. Until now, he had been an external presence in the room. With “protegé,” a word of infinite
hope, he settled into the triangle. The violin music, Mr. Demsky—his hero, really—the ornate features of the townhouse.

  “I quite enjoy a bulgur wheat salad, with lots of parsley,” Toby said. “It’s cleansing.”

  “You see?” said the Bavarian.

  “Oh, betrayal.” Mr. Demsky squinted at her. “Tobias, wait downstairs for twenty minutes. I’m about to strip this woman to her underclothes and teach her a lesson.”

  “You are too old.”

  “I have drugs.”

  A stalemate ensued, until the assistant walked out. Toby watched her go.

  “She humours me.” Mr. Demsky sat in his leather chair and wheeled back behind his desk.

  “Mr. Demsky, I’m here because—”

  “When my wife died, Tobias, I was miserable. Couldn’t see a way out of it. I gave myself two years, tops. It’s been eleven.” Mr. Demsky pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from underneath a hollow Bible, selected one, and lit it with a match. “She throws a fit when she catches me smoking.”

  “Of course.”

  “In the midst of my misery, eleven years ago, I sat down and made a list of my final goals. How old was I? Not so old. All I really wanted, at that time, to cap off my life, was to fuck a robot. I still do, but technological innovation has been moving slower than I anticipated.” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew it straight up with his eyes closed. “But I refocused. I refocused. I took my hit, and I refocused.”

  “This morning, Dwayne fired me.”

  “He called for permission.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve been working for the past two hours with a couple of my lawyers, threatening to sue anyone who distributes the video. It’s been halted on the sharing sites, but it did spread quickly. The damage has been done. I can’t afford to piss off the Conservatives right now.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Nothing, Tobias. What you are in that video is the one thing we cannot be. The station is dead to you, like my wife and my robot.”

  “He’s sleeping with Alicia. He wants to destroy me.”