by Todd Babiak
“What’s this?” Edward stopped a few paces away from the Chevette.
“My car.”
“No, no, no, no, that isn’t even close to your car.”
“I was fired today, Dad. I can’t afford seven-hundred-dollar lease payments anymore.”
“But all morning, all the way down here, I was figuring on the Beemer.”
Toby opened the doors, with a key. He reached in to move the seat forward so Karen might climb into the back, and he snagged the empty breast pocket of his first real suit, his third-favourite suit, an Ermenegildo Zegna, on an apparently pointless hunk of jagged metal in the doorway. The pocket flopped open, and Toby’s muscles went limp with it. He leaned into the car, resting one knee on the back seat, and closed his eyes.
Mountains and forests bordered the small northern Italian village where Toby’s first real suit had been designed and manufactured, and a fragrant wind of sophistication and virility blew through the pines. The sleek appearance of his shadow, in the Zegna, had always been a comfort to him. He wore it only on important days. When Toby had bought the suit in the late 1990s, on a one-year payment plan that amounted to $195 a month, he could not justify it. He had kept the purchase a secret from his parents. They were hosting him in their basement at the time, buying his organic food—which they could not afford—and providing an occasional allowance so he could attend all critical social functions in Montreal and carouse as necessary. It was not possible, after all, to exaggerate the importance of networking.
It had rained on the day he bought the suit. For months Toby had feared Boutique Jean-François, near Université de Montréal, assuming it would be full of business professors and lawyers already wearing Zegna and Armani, established francophones who would recognize him as the beneficiary of a weekly allowance, and as someone who could never say je vous en prie quite right. It was a Saturday. Toby had borrowed his father’s Oldsmobile. He loitered under the black awning of Boutique Jean-François and counted the soaked red cobblestones between the avenue and the store. The sidewalk, it turned out, was fifteen cobblestones wide. Clover grew between them. Chopin played on small outdoor speakers, and the composer’s sensitive genius only ripped deeper into the membrane of timidity that had grown around Toby’s heart. But once he had gathered the courage to step into the store, everything changed. The other customers in Boutique Jean-François were strivers in Polo and Club Monaco button-ups, working out the payment plans in their heads. He had discovered a secret.
“You all right?” Karen placed a hand on his back. Her voice had returned to normal.
He calculated how long he might last, given his monthly responsibilities and his cash flow. The BMW was gone, but the Visa bill remained, along with payments on his last renovation, his furnishings, his electronic needs, his last two suits. An avalanche of what the newspapers called consumer debt, which until recently had seemed normal. Then the mortgage, utilities.
Toby backed out of the car. “Just super!”
She climbed into the back seat, tended to her eyes in the rear-view mirror. “You could definitely use an air freshener in here, son.”
Toby eased Edward into the passenger seat. Even with the painkillers, the process was clearly agonizing for Edward, bending and stretching his charred skin. For a month or longer, he would have to return to the hospital twice a week for day procedures and therapies.
“So what are you going to do now?” Edward’s old tone had returned.
Both of his parents struggled with their seatbelts. He drove slowly out of the hospital parking lot, slowly west. “Look for a new job.”
“You have money saved?”
The autoroute appeared on the horizon like an advancing army.
“We can help you, son.”
“No, we goddamn well can’t, Edward.”
“We can help.”
“With what? With what, exactly, can we help him?”
How long, realistically, could he last? A month, maybe two. There were layoffs and hiring freezes across the country, in television and in newspapers. He had heard it was even worse in the U.S. Potential employers would round his age up to forty. His bald spot wasn’t getting any smaller. His salary expectations were his salary expectations. Would he hire himself?
“The boy can move back home, where he belongs.”
Toby caught his mother’s eye in the rear-view mirror. “I can’t move back home.”
“Think how much you’ll save. You can sell the place in the gay village.”
“It’s not the gay village.”
“Or rent it out. And move back in with us, where you belong. Three is the magic number, after all. Think of the Scrabble alone!”
He was thirty-seven years old.
“Name one reason why not.”
Toby could name thirty-seven reasons. His mother reached up and poked him in the ribs as Edward broke into “Deep River” again. They were on the autoroute named after a folk singer now, rumbling west into the archipelago of parking lots. She cleared her throat as Edward sang, and again Toby met her eye in the rear-view mirror. The sarcasm had passed away. All that remained was fear.
“Please,” she mouthed. “Will you please?”
Warehouses. Unkempt yards. Big-box retailers. Minivans. Identical houses. Fewer and fewer pedestrians until, as they neared his hometown, the pays natal, there were none. To his knowledge, he had never before suffered a real anxiety attack, with all the trimmings. He opened the window for some air. Dollard-des-Ormeaux stretched out before him.
PART TWO
Five
There was a fire department SUV parked in the steep driveway of the house on rue Collingwood, behind the carcass of the Oldsmobile. One side of the house, the white door of the garage, and a swath of lawn had been scorched black. Toby could not look for long at the remains of his father’s fire in the afternoon light. It exposed Edward more fully, more intimately, than the flourescent bulb in the hospital bathroom.
Toby guided his parents out of the car, and Karen ran interference between Edward and the Oldsmobile. Two men in jeans and matching red bomber jackets sneaked about the car, performing a silent ritual. “What are they doing here?” said his father.
“Investigating.”
“Investigating what? Hey! Fellas! This is private property.”
Toby asked Karen to lead Edward into the house and make him a tuna sandwich.
“Don’t you refer to me in the third person. Two will be the magic number pretty damn soon.”
Once his parents were in the house, Toby introduced himself in French. Both investigators, who wore polyurethane gloves, waved like drowsy men swatting at flies. One bent under the melted abstract sculpture that had once been a hood. The other was on his knees in front of the driver’s-side door.
“Have you determined the cause?”
The one addressing himself to the engine scratched his orange beard, looked at the other and sighed.
“We’re not supposed to say anything,” said the younger man at the door.
“Do you always investigate so thoroughly?”
Orange Beard said to his partner, “You deal with it. I want to be home for dinner. We’re having ribs, and I like them hot.”
The younger fireman removed his right glove and shook Toby’s hand. His name was Gregoire. It struck Toby that he had never met a Gregoire or Gregory who referred to himself as anything but Greg.
“There are irregularities.”
“Like what?”
Gregoire looked up at the house. Toby followed his gaze. Edward was looking out the picture window, his cheek pressed to the glass. “There was accelerant on your father’s pants.”
“Accelerant?”
“Gasoline.”
“Perhaps he had been mowing the lawn.”
“In October?”
Toby beheld the Oldsmobile with Gregoire. It was set to rain.
“And if you discover he’s done something preposterous here, what then?”
“We info
rm certain agencies. The police, the insurance company.”
“So you’re working for insurance companies?”
Orange Beard cleared his throat. “Back to work.”
“We won’t be much longer,” said Gregoire.
The house smelled faintly of rum-and-wine-dipped tobacco, as it always had. Officially, Karen only smoked outside, on the back patio, but unofficially she indulged in the living room whenever it was cold, whenever she felt lazy or drowsy, and whenever smoking guests visited. Her collection of ashtrays was formidable and, along with the standard black glass pieces, included representational pottery stamped with images and logos from Hawaii, Paris, San Francisco, Puerto Vallarta, and Buckingham Palace. Edward and Karen had not visited these places; their friends, knowing Karen’s penchant for collecting, had found ashtrays a simple and rewarding Christmas gift.
His parents were at the kitchen table. The chairs, covered in peeling vinyl, had not been updated since the late seventies. But for the two navy recliners, the furniture in the living room was only a few years younger; furniture had never been a priority. The lampshades had gone faintly yellow from a combination of nicotine and sun bleaching. Toby had been in elementary school the last time the walls had been painted. Yet when he had neared graduation, and had veered toward the prep-school aesthetic, Edward and Karen had found room in the budget to keep him in the West Island uniform of Polo and Lacoste shirts, Sperry Top-Siders, white pants by Yves Saint Laurent, pastel Givenchy shaker knit sweaters, and Ray-Ban sunglasses.
“There’s no tuna, it turns out,” said Karen.
Edward’s forearms were on the table. He stared down at them.
Toby hunted in the fridge and cupboards and found little but pasta, canned beans, condiments, and discount beer. “Is everything all right? Financially, I mean?”
Karen looked in the pantry, where they traditionally kept large and bulk items purchased at the discount megastores. “Well,” said Karen.
“The Chien Chaud?”
“I don’t know.”
“Answer him, Karen.”
“He just walked in the door. He lost his job.”
Toby regretted the initial question and nearly suggested a game of Boggle, to divert the energy in the room. “You don’t have to talk about it, Mom.”
“It’s never been good, as you know, in the ‘making money and getting ahead in life’ sense of good. We’ve been beavering away, good little entrepreneurs, sure it would turn around, a time would come when we wouldn’t have to work so pissing hard, when we could take vacations, when some half-assed reward would come. Then it never did. And now it won’t.”
Shortly after moving out of the city, his parents had quit their government jobs and opened a hot dog shop called Le Chien Chaud. It did well enough in Dollard to support two more shops on the West Island. Toby had worked at the Chien Chaud until he moved into an apartment in the McGill ghetto when he was nineteen, where the contents of his refrigerator were eerily similar to his parents’ fridge today—five years from their planned retirement.
“But they’re making money?”
“Well,” said Karen.
“No.” Edward had not yet looked up from his hairless forearms, glistening even in the flat light of early dusk. “Not even close.”
“Couldn’t we have waited till he sits down?”
“It’s getting late.” Toby had intended to stay in Dollard for the night, for a week, to help with his father’s recuperation and to stew noiselessly in his shame. But now that he was here, really here, it appeared quite impossible. “I think I’ll head back to the condo.”
Karen shoved a kitchen chair into the table, pulled it out, and shoved it in again. “You get yourself fired, you do hell knows what with Alicia to push her away, and now you can’t even talk to your parents for five minutes?”
Out of habit, Toby looked down at Edward. It was father-son eyebrow-raising time, a well-honoured tradition in the Mushinsky household. He might have reminded Karen that, less than thirty seconds ago, she had not wanted to talk about the Chien Chaud. But that would have inspired a dangerous escalation. A slammed door, at least. This time Edward did not look up for the eyebrow raise.
“Poetry,” Edward said. “I think Toby might feel a heck of a lot better if he had a hobby like poetry.”
“Let’s stop talking about me.”
Karen said, “Ha! You see. Here’s the heart of it.”
With a series of surprising grunts, Edward pushed himself up from the kitchen table, a solid maple gift from Toby’s paternal grandparents—both dead now, drowned. He stood before Toby and said, “Son. Listen to me. I know your pain.”
Toby turned to his mother. “Aren’t we here, together, for his pain?”
“We all have our pain,” she said.
“Life as I know it has been destroyed, in two days.” As his parents watched, Toby slowly drew and drank two glasses of water, to prevent himself from making an untoward emotional display. He wanted desperately to shout at his parents, to splash their faces with cold water and rush out of the house, back to the city and his condominium, his computer and his ironing board. But etiquette was about using beauty and grace to restrain one’s passions. Outer dignity reflected inner peace. “‘Pain’ isn’t the right word. My state of mind is completely under my control, as yours should be.”
Now Edward and Karen stood together, against the stove. “Toby, we saw what happened. On TV. We’re worried about you,” said Karen. “Really quite worried.”
“About me?” There were so many things Toby could say about their house, the contents of their refrigerator, the burned-up car in the driveway, the whole idea of a business, in the twenty-first century, devoted to poor-quality beef slipped into a flour-sprinkled white bun. Karen’s cigarillos. Edward’s impromptu performances of Negro spirituals. The family portraits from the late eighties, in which they represented the Platonic form of Unhappy. He corrected his posture and said none of this. He said, “I’m going to buy you two some groceries.”
In the IGA, after-work singles picked through last year’s Halloween leftovers, many of them speaking cheerlessly into cellphones. None of the brand-name chocolate bars and chips were out yet. Crates of molasses candies, Rockets, lollipops, jujubes, and marshmallow treats were priced to sell, and the young citizens of Dollard went through them like runt hyenas looking for a slice of organ.
“Marshmallows. Do they take us for morons?” A slightly taller man in khakis and a nylon jacket with a Tommy Hilfiger logo on the breast stood next to Toby. He was familiar in a misty way, like a backbench politician or the general manager of a lesser sports team. His watch was of the G.I. Joe variety; Toby wondered if, after damning the Halloween candies, the gentleman was planning to dive to the bottom of the St. Lawrence and save a damsel. He did not know whether to reinforce the man’s efforts at geniality with his own remark about the marshmallows. They had not yet made eye contact. The man inhaled and spoke again, his words married to a sigh. “How is your dad?”
Steve Bancroft: former neighbour, industrialist, villain. “He’s home already.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Just an accident.” Toby poked through the Rockets as he debated whether to ask what Steve Bancroft had heard on the street. “He’s absolutely fine. They’re both terrific.”
“Well, isn’t that terrific.”
Brown loafers with tassels. Steve Bancroft was a wealthy man: Why would he choose to diminish his humanity with tassels?
“So, Karen. Karen’s holding up, with the shock?”
“She really couldn’t be better. Thriving, Mr. Bancroft.”
“Tell her I said hello, will you? I’ve been thinking about those hot dog joints of hers.”
“Theirs.”
“Theirs.” He pulled a card out of his pocket. “Pass this on, will you?”
Toby pocketed the card and walked away, toward the cut-flowers section. He had already picked up the fruits and vegetables, but he could not have
stood next to Steve Bancroft any longer. A real man, his father’s son, would have at least made a sideways comment about those loafers.
To avoid returning immediately to rue Collingwood, Toby wandered the aisles and played the game he played in bank lineups, in the waiting room at the dentist, and on park benches as the camera operator set up the shot: he appraised the sandals worn with socks, fleece mountain jackets, jeans that did not fit, flip-flops, and sweatpants of his peers. His parents’ generation had done this to America with their pretend revolution and the ensuing after-school specials and desperate self-help philosophies. The inner world was the realm of truth.
The goal of Toby a Gentleman had been to prove the baby boomers wrong, to demonstrate the enduring links between traditional manners and success, between clothes and the soul. Did a man not feel more serious and thoughtful, more worthy of respect and social acknowledgment, when he wore a well-fitted suit? When he spoke in full sentences, instead of belches and grunts? When he said please and thank you, vous and not tu, Monsieur and Madame? When he allowed a woman to pass through a door before him? How did it feel, truly feel, to wear bicycle shorts, a fanny pack, and a gigantic T-shirt advertising a sports conglomerate? In the early days of the show, Toby had flattered himself with fantasies in which the male populations of Quebec, Southern Ontario, and northern New England were transformed.
Contrary to his critics’ suppositions, Toby had not set out to reinforce class differences. His broad social goals were to encourage men of all salaries and births and tastes to see that dressing like a superhero, a hiker, a homeless person, or a sideshow performer were acts of cruelty—to oneself and to others. It was not a frivolous notion. Every day, a man ought to wake up and consider his behaviour and his wardrobe gifts to the community and to the world. Now, what sort of offering is a snort at the checkout while on a cellphone? Camouflage short pants and a Yankees jersey? Why did the man of today spend two hundred dollars a month on satellite television and high-speed Internet access, yet only thirty dollars on clothes from a big-box discount retailer headquartered in Arkansas? Did the man of today not see that he was doomed by this behaviour, that the outer life, contrary to what he might learn in a romantic comedy, had a direct and enduring effect on the inner life? And vice versa? An effect so powerful that a Harley-Davidson shirt might actually erode some of the brain’s higher functions?