by Todd Babiak
Garrett stopped the Cadillac on the shoulder, and they walked across the field of low grass and wet leaves. Randall lay in the glow of the headlights reflecting off the old bark. The smell of fish and mould in the air was strangely pleasant. Beyond the trees, there were metallic cusses and whoops. Twenty years after Toby’s high school graduation, the teenagers of Dollard continued to build illegal bonfires on the same beach, a wonder he had never seen, except from afar. Preppy or not, all Toby had ever wanted when he was seventeen was to roam through Dollard with the heavy metal boys and girls, smoking cigarettes and kissing in alleys, lighting fires on the beach and drinking lemon gin, and, just maybe, sliding his hand down the jeans of some troubled French girl.
He had met Randall and Garrett in grade ten, during mandatory gym class. Randall was uncoordinated, Garrett was fat, and Toby was both pimply and timid—fearful of breaking his nose or touching another boy’s moist armpit during a flag football game or wrestling match. The teacher, a cynical bodybuilder and amateur cartographer from Switzerland named Urs, was entirely cooperative. Urs allowed Randall, Garrett, Toby, and three other misfits to play table tennis in a corner of the gymnasium.
In the riverfront park, Parc des Rapides-du-Cheval-Blanc, Garrett commanded Randall to get up.
Randall stayed in the weeds. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Garrett sighed, rolled up his slacks, and crawled on his bare knees to Randall. They muttered softly and embraced, in their business suits. Randall’s silent weeping intensified, and he grabbed the back of Garrett’s collar and grimaced. They bumped heads, awkward but tender. Toby walked away. The moon and stars were obliterated by the lights of the island.
Kids laughed on the other side of the trees, and the river rushed demurely over the rocks. It had been a wilder river in 1660, when Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, the twenty-five-year-old missionary, passed on his way to meet the Iroquois—who tortured, killed, and devoured him. In the intervening centuries, the men of Quebec had not significantly improved their prospects for success.
Toby returned to darkness and silence in the house on rue Collingwood, the smell of furnace and cigar smoke, steamed vegetables. Karen was asleep in her navy blue recliner, her head drooped forward like a wet flower. She wore pyjamas and a white terry cloth robe with a heart sewn on the breast.
She mumbled that she had just been dozing, not sleeping. The news had been on. News of tremors on the West Coast. They had discussed the big one. All those people, she said, punished for living somewhere pretty. She and Ed had honeymooned there, back when they were happy. “No suicides in the hopper.” Karen’s eyes remained closed as Toby led her down the hallway. “Not back then.”
“Mom, shh.”
“Just some mountains and some water, really, quite a lot of stucco, and rain, rain.”
In the bedroom, the acrid smells of sleep and his father’s gentle snores, the puff of a humidifier. Toby said good night and Karen felt her way past familiar landmarks—a table of presents for nobody in particular, purchased at Costco just in case an occasion were to arise, drugs and photographs on the dresser, a dirty clothes hamper. He whispered good night again and closed the door.
In the bathroom of his childhood, he was forced to wash his face with a bar of white soap and water, relics of a more unfortunate dermatological era. His sulphate-and petroleum-free cleansing gel with grapefruit seed extract and pure aromatic oils drawn from birch leaf, burdock, yarrow, and wild peppermint was back at the condominium.
Toby lay awake in his old bed, the door closed. Nothing of the city here: no engines or alarms, no sirens, no howls from the sidewalk. He plotted his reconciliation with Alicia: candygrams and promises and performances, running toward each other through a field of spring flowers. Rings on their fingers. But he returned and returned to the Oldsmobile. The silence, in the end, was too much. He opened his door and his parents’ door, and fell asleep to the sound of his father breathing.
Six
Edward had always found uncommon meaning and pleasure in the Halloween season. The year after he had graduated from high school, 1966, Edward and two friends had spent the autumn and winter months backpacking through Mexico. They had spent late October and early November in Michoacán, where they had witnessed the Day of the Dead celebrations around Lake Pátzcuaro. It had been one of the defining moments of his life, a well of dinnertime stories, based around legends of the phantom-strewn lake and the sincere belief, among the people of Michoacán, that they were able to communicate heartily and happy with their lost friends and loved ones.
In the garage there were three grass-fronted black boxes, altars of Michoacán, handcrafted by Edward in 1983. The first and most elaborate represented Toby’s paternal grandparents, whom he had never met. Both had drowned in a boating accident on Lake Memphrémagog when Edward was in his early twenties. Toby’s grandfather, in the diorama, was depicted as a violin-playing skeleton; his grandmother, a dancer, lifting her skirt. Their black box was decorated with tiny items they appreciated: vodka and border collies, pot roasts and fishing poles. Edward had honoured Karen’s parents in the second diorama: a pharmacist skeleton and a housewife skeleton in a long dress and apron. First her mother and then her father had passed away in a seniors’ home on the south shore, after an occasionally fraught relationship with their son-in-law. Hence the blandness of their diorama. The third box was empty but for an Edward skeleton and a Karen skeleton standing over a cradle with a baby skeleton inside; this was Toby’s younger brother, Ryan, who had succumbed to crib death three weeks after he was born.
Something about that backpacking trip in 1966 had convinced Edward that the personal mastery of death required an openness of spirit. Before he found Judaism, whenever Edward had wanted to feel close to God he spent time among his hand-carved wooden skeletons.
It was late in the afternoon. Toby’s network of acquaintances and colleagues at the station and at other stations, even off the island, had been largely silent. They were polite when they answered their phones, and willing to listen as he outlined what he saw as injustices, but no one had called back—not socially and not professionally. Toby had already updated his C.V. and had phoned the television outlets in every major market in Canada. Not one of the station managers or human relations directors had expressed much hope, given the economy and the “failure of the business model.”
Karen and Edward had taken the other family car, the Corolla, to bring soda cups to the Chien Chaud. Toby worked with what he considered to be an unfair hangover, placing the Halloween boxes in their traditional positions on the front lawn, setting up the spotlights and sugar skulls. Edward had built square vases into the tops of the boxes for dried marigolds.
To admire the finished product, Toby poured himself a glass of wine, the only reliable cure for a headache he knew. His BlackBerry and the bottle sat beside him on the front porch. Twenty-five kilometres away, in the southeast quadrant of downtown Montreal, someone was doing the five-o’clock weather update on the sidewalk.
The Corolla pulled up as Toby poured his second glass of wine. He took a proud sip. His father walked stiffly up the lawn, his eyes darker and larger than usual, his face thinner. He stood before the dioramas, in a pair of Bermuda shorts and a loose-fitting sweatshirt that said Gap on it.
Karen came up behind him in her faded yellow Chien Chaud apron. The hot dog mascot they had dreamed up together, Rover, waved and said, in a bubble, allez, viens!
“Oh look, Ed,” Karen said, in the voice of an elementary-school teacher, “Toby put up your Halloween display.”
The BlackBerry hummed and twirled on the concrete platform. Toby was frantic to pick it up, or at least look at the caller identification, but Edward was a lit match on the brown lawn. “The kids in the neighbourhood, Dad. They’d miss the skeletons so much. I just figured…”
Edward looked down at the third box, the baby Ryan box. All the nothingness in the baby Ryan box. He closed his eyes and tilted his head skyward. “Blessed are
you, Lord, our God, king of the universe, who bestows good things on the unworthy, and has bestowed on me every goodness.”
“Superb.” Karen climbed the porch steps and sat next to Toby, drank from his glass of wine. The BlackBerry buzzed and then settled, miserably, next to her thigh.
“Blessed are you,” Edward said. “Blessed, blessed.” Like a vintage movie monster, he whipped the marigolds to the lawn. He knocked the candy skull away.
Toby did not know whether to stop his father. A woman pushed her baby carriage past the house. Karen lifted her wine in greeting, then leaned back against the front door. His initial attack at an end, Edward stood before the diorama and breathed. Then he pressed his weight on the box and, with his stiff legs, broke the thin window in the front. He kicked the cradle over. Karen stood up and walked into the house with the wineglass and bottle.
One of the dioramas was now destroyed. Edward turned to the next one, said, “Blessed are you.” The woman jogged her carriage away. Toby hopped up and wrapped his arms around his father’s torso, where the fire had not touched him, and held him away. Edward reached back and elbowed Toby in the forehead. Toby released Edward and fell onto the cold grass, allowed his father to rip the flowers and skulls away, to break the thin window, to smash the skeletons.
Edward lumbered into the garage and returned with a mallet. When he was finished, the boxes were a black pile of scrap before the innocent hostas. Edward wiped the dust from his clothes and leaned heavily on the mallet, panting like a marathon runner. He looked across the street, over the roofs. Somewhere, a woodpecker went at a hollow tree. Edward walked up the steps, each a trial of unbendable limbs, and into the house.
There was a box of professional-quality garbage bags in the garage. Toby filled five of them with the detritus of the dioramas and left them near the cans at the sidewalk. He swept up the sawdust and glass as best he could and stood on the driveway with a broom in his hand. A flock of geese flew overhead, south to hope.
His missed phone call was from a woman with an unfamiliar, halting French voice. “Good day, Toby, it’s Catherine. I’m calling to confirm our dinner at six thirty tonight. I hope it’s all right that I can’t leave a message in English.”
On the second listen, he remembered: the woman whose heavy bicycle had been hit by the taxi. A skeleton from another life. He did not remember agreeing to a night or a time, and had assumed he would not see her again. Any number of people had his business card, had expressed an interest in coffee, or a drink, or dinner. It was five thirty, and this stranger expected him in an hour. He had planned to make the fish and risotto for his parents, but going out for dinner with anyone else, anywhere, was more attractive than spending one more minute on rue Collingwood. His car keys were in his pocket; without a word to his parents, he dashed to the Chevette.
After two nights in Dollard, he luxuriated in the candy warehouse, a physical extension of his personality. Toby had been delaying the call to his real estate agent, hoping a mad mogul of francophone media would save him from the numbers in his bank account. He now knew nothing would save him. Had anyone ever been saved? He showered and shaved, pulled his finest bottle of wine from the electric cave Alicia’s parents had given him as a housewarming present, and set off to have dinner with a strange woman.
The route to Catherine’s apartment took him past the Olympic Stadium, a grand void, a public error so profound and embarrassing that Edward and Karen Mushinsky had almost moved to Ontario after the 1976 Summer Games. Toby loved the Stade Olympique, as it represented all that was valiant and all that was tragic in his hometown. The stadium had been commissioned and designed with ambition, boldness, and that open-hearted search for particularity that had always made Montreal the only real city in Canada; yet it also represented the naïveté, the political corruption, and the spirit of ruin that hovered over the island.
Plans for Catherine’s apartment building in Pie-IX had been inspired by the suburbs of Vladivostok. There was a nearby Dixie Lee, and the combination of wind currents and rotten luck filled the neighbourhood with the smell of fried chicken.
Traffic had been lighter than Toby had anticipated, and his stop at the florist had been uncommonly quick, so he sat in the Chevette and played with the AM radio receiver. A cassette tape was stuck in the deck. He pulled it out with two pens: Love Gun by KISS.
In the shower, to batter away at thoughts of his bank account, Toby had decided he would show Alicia. He had received many offers from women over the years—it came with the job—but he had always said no as nobly as he could manage. A gentleman may quietly have a mistress, to protect himself from the spiritual effects of a loveless marriage, but he does not philander.
He was startled by a knock on the passenger-side window. Catherine was there, in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He reached over and rolled down the window.
“Que fais-tu?”
“I was five minutes early.”
Catherine stepped back from the door of the Chevette and bowed and waved her arm in a gesture of welcome. The small patch of grass in front of her building was decorated with four non-traditional jack-o’-lanterns. They slumped like toothless grandfathers at the end of Christmas dinner. He handed her the bottle of wine and a bouquet of gerbera daisies.
“They’re from Fleuriste Marie Vermette.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know of it?”
“I don’t really buy flowers.”
“And I’ve been saving the wine. Châteauneuf-du-Pape, 2002.”
She considered the bottle, without really reading the label, then his suit. Toby had worn his grey Prada, his slimmest and most daring suit, definitely not appropriate for a corporate event.
There was graffiti on the concrete stairwell leading up to her suite; the front door of the building had not locked. “You look beautiful, Catherine.”
“Hey, you’re lucky. I showered today.” She opened the door into a five-and-a-half with cracked parquet floors and faux-wood walls decorated with concert posters for Georges Brassens. The avocado appliances in the open kitchen were older than Toby and Catherine. Toys and books were stacked neatly yet randomly. There were abstract crayon drawings tacked on lower quadrants of the walls and off-white cupboards, and the humming and clicking refrigerator was a tumult of baby and infant photographs. If there was a modern design element in the space, anything that declared “independent, thinking, desiring adult of the twenty-first century,” Toby had not yet discovered it.
He developed a short list of illnesses he could immediately fake. “You’re a mom.”
“I am.”
The pictures were of a boy with blond hair and softened versions of her features, a big mouth and big eyes. He had a solemn air. Among all the photos, Toby could not discover one in which the boy was smiling. “What’s his name?”
“Hugo.”
“Like the novelist.”
“No.”
“The designer?”
“No, no.”
“The president of Venezuela?”
“It was his father’s idea, to name him after the world’s strongest man, Hugo Girard. He’s almost three, Hugo.” Catherine opened the wine.
“I’ve never heard of Hugo Girard.”
“You’re not Québécois.”
Whenever Toby heard a proclamation like this, he was tempted to pull out his birth certificate. “Does your husband live here too?”
Catherine laughed. “He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And he was never my husband.” Catherine bent down and peeked into the oven. There was a green salad on the counter, a plastic bottle of Italian dressing, and a wooden bowl of tortilla chips. A store-bought mini-tub of hummus.
Nausea was best, for a quick escape. People understood immediately if you complained of nausea.
“They said, first, it was some sort of Taliban attack. It was on the news and everything. Then one of the other men came home and told me he shot himself.”
�
�That’s terrible, Catherine.”
“We didn’t really like each other. He was an accident, Hugo. I thought one thing was happening, during sex, and I guess Hugo’s dad thought another thing was happening. You know how that is?”
The only other person on the fridge, aside from Hugo and Catherine, was Georges Brassens. A large, full moustache on him, dark brown with flecks of grey. One of his eyebrows was higher than the other, expressing humour, perhaps, or impatience. A publicity photo. His brown eyes were serious, his ears massive. There was a Mediterranean tint to his skin.
Catherine poured the wine into one Burgundy glass and one sherry copita. She kept the copita for herself and they clinked. The station had paid for him to take a ten-week sommelier course some years ago, for Toby a Gentleman. If a camera had been on him now, he would have said that the wine was smoky, with hints of chocolate and eucalyptus.
“Is he here?”
“Who?”
“Hugo.”
“He’s staying at my neighbour’s, one floor up. She’s dropping him off early in the morning, though. She works at Subway, and they have to start baking the bread.”
General stomach ailments worked almost as well: a bad cramp, with a hint that it could be appendicitis. The wine was open, though, and it was only getting better with each sip.
“It smells wonderful.”
“Chicken terrine.”
Catherine’s red T-shirt was thin. The colour had begun to fade from years of machine washing and drying, and her nipples were visible. Toby had never allowed himself to hold on to a shirt for so long. He would have packaged it up for the diabetes society before it ever reached this state, but there was something admirable about it, poignant. He told Catherine so, and she stared as though his French had suddenly become incomprehensible. He finished his thought and she finished her glass in one gulp, apologized.