by Todd Babiak
“I’m so nervous!”
“Don’t be.”
“I haven’t had a proper date in so long. Since Hugo! When you helped me, I thought…I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It’s my pleasure to be here.”
“Is it? Is it really?”
“Of course.” Toby wanted to touch the shirt, so he did, in a safe region of her upper arm. Her skin was warm through the thin cotton. “Of course.”
“Did you work today?” She pushed the chips and hummus toward him. “On TV?”
“I’m taking a break from TV for a while. I was out in Dollard, helping my parents.”
“Dollard is so beautiful. So green and quiet.”
Toby poured more wine for both of them. “I grew up there.”
“Wow!” Catherine pressed play on the stereo system attached to the underside of the cupboard. George Brassens sang without a prelude, the guitar tuned high. There was a pleasing gargle in his voice. “Je n’avais jamais ôté mon chapeau,” he said, somewhere between singing and chatting.
“How long have you lived—”
“Shh.”
Her fingers, resting on the white plastic counter, possessed the length and fineness of a more beautiful woman. Plain women, women like Catherine, wandered the world like phantoms. At the end of the song, she lowered her head and sighed.
“He’s my father.”
“Who’s your father?”
She pointed to the stereo, then to the postcard photo on the fridge. A number of questions, ranging from the absurd to the serious, occurred to Toby. Instead of asking any of them, he drank some more wine. It really was spectacular. Perhaps his escape route would be excessive drunkenness. A cab home, then a quiet return in the morning for the Chevette.
“He’s dead now too.”
“My sincerest condolences.”
“You know he died without heirs, my father?”
“Goodness.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
He had been thinking it must be difficult for the boy, for Hugo, to have a lunatic for a mother. “Oh?”
“But I know he’s my father. I hear it in his voice, in the words between the words he sings. My father, he knows the secrets of my heart.”
“You must be incredibly proud. He did really well for himself, Georges Brassens.”
She began washing vegetables, swaying and singing along to the music, so Toby wandered out of the kitchen and into the hall, with a view into Hugo’s bedroom. It was dark, but he could make out a live-action poster of a giraffe eating leaves from a branch. He sat on a grey chesterfield and flipped through a couple of photo albums as Catherine sang and cooked behind him. He had not seen a modern collection of printed photographs in some time, since the people of North America had gone digital. There was something here for a segment of Toby a Gentleman: What was the most intelligent and urbane way to steal a moment from the present tense without allowing it to spoil the actual experience? Catherine and a thick man of her height, with a moustache, hiking in the Laurentians. Pregnant Catherine. Catherine in the hospital with baby Hugo in her arms, the father leaning in with a fatigued smile. Shortly thereafter, the man disappeared from the album entirely. Hugo acquired more hair, grew taller, learned to walk, ran, blew birthday candles, built a tower of blocks, surrounded by other toddlers.
Candles were lit and the music of Georges Brassens was freshly chosen, turned down. The terrine was bland. The bottled vinaigrette was a travesty. Catherine opened a second bottle of wine, a cheap twist-off. She asked Toby about his upbringing, which he considered to be entirely normal—lower-middle-class suburban anglo Montreal. The Edward of his childhood was so different from the current Edward, so monumentally different, that as he described him Toby worried for the final third of his own life.
Catherine, it turned out, was adopted. She had tried unsuccessfully to locate the files related to her birth, and the provincial government had determined that the event had taken place outside an institution. The first sign of her was in windy Matane, on the Gaspé Peninsula, where she was abandoned at the Centre Hospitalier in 1972. This is where she was adopted, two years later, by a carpenter and a short-order cook with an interest in weaving by antique hand loom. She left Matane at sixteen and retained only the faintest contact with her adopted parents.
“My first memories are of my father.”
“The carpenter?”
“My true father.”
“George Brassens.”
“I see us—there we are—walking along the beach together. He tells me of the creatures of the sea.”
“What creatures?”
“He had a pipe, my father, and he wore rumpled business suits. A great artist, a hero, with business suits and a pipe and a moustache. I know where he lived, in the fifteenth arrondisement. They named a park after him. Once, I believe, it was an abattoir.”
Something in her tone suggested he was not to ask about the carpenter and the short-order cook, who, in Toby’s imagination, were desperately clad people of the nineteenth century. She spoke instead, with astonishing detail, of Georges Brassens.
He was born in Sète, on the Mediterranean coast, in 1921. So when Catherine was conceived, he was fifty. According to her research, he had arrived in Montreal in 1971 for a series of concerts. Catherine deduced that his romance with her startlingly beautiful but troubled mother had begun in Quebec City in the autumn, for she was born the following summer. Georges Brassens was back in Paris by Christmas for a famous concert at the Cabaret Bobino. There was no official record of his return visits to North America, but Catherine had her memories.
Memories and ambitions. On top of her bookshelf there were several small manuscripts, bound in transparent plastic. For eighteen months she had saved, sacrificing pleasures that were her due and living in this dump, for a commissioned business plan. A consultant with an office on the thirty-fifth floor of a tower on University Street had written and researched it for her. All she needed to proceed was a partner.
“I know, I know. You’re thinking, She is not Chinese! But that does not matter anymore, not in this country. The first time I tried it, the black tapioca through the wide, wide straw, I felt it deep inside me.”
The title of the business plan was “Bullé Pour Moi: A New Model for Bubble Tea.” Toby congratulated Catherine on her cleverness and flipped through the document. The effects of the red wine and the contours of her breasts, through the thin red T-shirt, distracted him. He could only pretend to read it. “Your own shop.”
“A nationwide chain.”
“You’re a mogul.”
She shrugged.
“How much do you need, to get started?”
“Half a million at least.”
“You’re almost there?”
“I have nine thousand. No collateral. And a student loan from my anthropology degree. I make eleven dollars an hour, at a bubble tea shop in the McGill ghetto.”
She insisted that Toby take one of the plans, as the consultant had given her seven copies. Midway through “La complainte des filles de joie,” he learned that his instincts about Catherine had been wrong. She was a natural beauty of the highest order. Now that she was talking about bubble tea instead of Georges Brassens, she approached normal. The rule about single mothers was clear: Do not hurt them. But he recognized when someone had feelings for him. Catherine did not have feelings for him. She had a scheme.
Her scheme was his scheme: a one-night stand. His first ever. She had not been with a man since the birth of her son. He wore the green hat. The second bottle of wine was nearly finished, and Toby could not imagine learning anything else about Georges Brassens or bubble tea that was remotely illuminating, so he slid his chair around the table and kissed Catherine. It took some adjustments. They apologized to each other for uncomfortable positions, and Toby burned his forearm, mildly, on one of the candles. Catherine had fuller lips than Alicia, and she was hostile with her tongue. By the end of the album, they wer
e in Catherine’s bedroom.
Toby knew the right clothes to wear on every occasion, the correct gifts to give, the proper tone of a congratulatory note, the ideal physical and emotional architecture of a dinner party, a wedding, a funeral. The bedroom, however, he had always considered the only room in life beyond manners and etiquette—intellectually, at least. Though he had never built a segment of Toby a Gentleman around it, he considered sex the one activity during which selfish impulses, bad language, social experimentation, and carelessness about bodily fluids made life more and not less enchanting.
Sex with Alicia had been a visual feast, and she had learned to heighten and enhance Toby’s experience by ensuring that the lights—preferably a lamp—were always on and by writhing about like a trapped mermaid. Her preferred mode of foreplay was the erotic massage, not because it felt good but because her skin glistened. It was never an ecstatic experience, however, as Alicia valued control far more than anything else in her life; the spirit of surrender was something she could only manufacture. Despite her naughty talk, Alicia was, at heart, a conservative. And so was he.
Catherine cried out in apparent agony and in the next moment announced that she had never known pleasure so acute and explosive. She licked him, head-butted him, commanded him to take her like a Viking, asked if she could be upside down, so the blood would rush to her brain during orgasm; she growled and roared and slapped him on the face, twice. She pulled him into the shower so they could do it with the water running. When Toby begged for sleep, she shouted insults at his penis.
Eventually, she grew tired. Toby lay in one of the wet spots, not only exhausted but regretful that he had gone thirty-seven years without a night like this. Of all the women on the island of Montreal, he had chosen perfectly for his first and last one-night stand. The idea struck him with such force that he said it aloud before really thinking about it. Luckily, Catherine was asleep.
He awoke in the dim light of an overcast morning to the muffled sounds of francophone rock from a neighbouring suite. The Québécois were a sophisticated and avant-garde people, brilliant with circuses and abstract theatre, but utterly hopeless with a guitar. He was alone in the bed, which smelled of the previous evening’s activities and also, faintly, of Dixie Lee fried chicken. There were dead bugs in the orange base of the light fixture above, cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling.
In the bathroom, plump with the humidity of a recent shower, Toby discovered and swallowed some Aspirin. He wrapped a towel around himself and walked out into the kitchen. No sign of Catherine.
The only cereal in the cupboard was Raisin Bran. Toby splashed milk on it and, as Catherine didn’t seem to subscribe to a newspaper, read the back of the box in both of Canada’s official languages. The table was still covered in the aromatic remains of their dinner, so he sat on the couch with his bowl. He was in the midst of considering the nine essential nutrients—why exactly nine?—when he heard a coo from the hall. The Aspirin had not yet completed its work, and his entire body thumped. Hugo’s bedroom door was open; it had not occurred to Toby that Catherine had sneaked into bed with her son, who would have been delivered by the upstairs neighbour some hours ago.
Another coo, a whine from the direction of the child’s room.
Toby squeezed the cereal box.
“Maman?”
He stood up and crept around the corner, peeked into Hugo’s bedroom like a sniper. It would not do to have the boy see him. There was a layer of aluminum foil over the window, so it remained dark. Cracks in the foil provided just enough light for him to see that Catherine was not in bed with her son. She was not on the floor or in the rocking chair. Toby had been bracing himself on a white IKEA bookshelf, and as it shifted to the right so did he.
“Ma.” The boy spotted Toby and sat up on his bed. “Ma!”
“Bonjour.”
Hugo backed into the corner where bed met wall and began to scream. Toby sprinted into Catherine’s bedroom and wrestled into his suit. He opened the window wide enough to crawl out and hop to the fire escape. He folded his tie into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled the chair over. The trick was to slither out the window without ripping his second suit in a week. Hugo continued to cry. Toby had no idea what to do with a crying child, and Catherine had not left instructions.
“Don’t worry, Hugo,” Toby called out, in French. “Maman will be back in a minute.” He stood on the chair, looked out at the gunmetal morning. A raccoon was at the bottom of the fire escape, plucking at an open pizza box. Was it possible that, in a half-conscious state of grace, Toby had agreed to babysit the boy for an hour?
He crept back into the hall and peeked inside the room again. Hugo fell back into a defensive position, arms and legs in the air, and said, “Non, non, non.”
Touching the boy at this point would have been illegal. Toby crawled into the bedroom, turned on the lamp, and sat on the floor. Hugo shrieked and covered his eyes. In nature documentaries, animals tend to approach one another with their necks and bellies exposed to display a lack of aggressive intent. So Toby sat with his arms behind him and said, every few minutes, “Shh,” in the softest voice he could muster. He hummed the only French children’s song he knew, “Frère Jacques.” On the fifth go-round, it occurred to him that it might actually be about death.
Eventually, Hugo stopped crying. He sat up on his bed and stared at Toby in an expressionless manner. “Maman,” he had said, but that didn’t mean he could talk. Could almost-three-year-olds talk?
“My name is Toby.” Speaking simple French to a child, he was reminded of the cassette tapes his teachers played to the class in elementary school. “I am your mom’s friend.”
Hugo wailed again, just once, and lifted a book as a shield. Le chat chapeauté, a translation of The Cat in the Hat.
“Would you like me to read that to you? I would enjoy it immensely.”
Hugo sneaked under the covers and kicked, aimlessly, until he knocked a glass of water off his bedside table and directly onto Toby’s exposed neck and belly. Much of the water soaked into his crotch. It was just after eight in the morning. Toby saw a day of this stretching before him, stuck in a rabbit warren, smelling of sex and chicken, with a violently disturbed two-year-old. While he had peers with children, he had always been the adult they avoided. The stubborn ones, who saw a challenge in him, would torment Toby until he performed a lacklustre horsey ride or perhaps an impromptu puppet show, but everyone—including the child—tended to see this as a stunt.
A stalemate was reached. Hugo remained under the covers, peeking out from time to time to make sure Toby had not advanced on him. At first, when he saw the boy’s eyes, Toby would wave or nod his head or say something innocuous like “Salut,” but this only served to inflame Hugo.
Half an hour passed in silence, though it felt like a full morning of peeking and looking away and smelling stale urine. When the front door of the apartment suddenly opened, they raced to the bedroom door. Toby just about knocked the boy to the parquet floor as they rounded the corner. They rushed into what served as the salon, and Hugo broke into tears again and jumped into his mother’s arms.
“You’re awake, my darling, awake.”
Toby was entirely dressed but for his shoes, so he put them on as mother and son became reacquainted. The boy clung to her like a gibbon.
“Where’re you going?”
“Home. Then to Dollard. Then I don’t know. Saskatchewan.”
“I went out shopping for breakfast. I got bacon.”
“Thank you again, Catherine, for a bewitching evening. But I really must go.”
She did not seem fazed by this. “Are you and Toby friends now?” Her voice raised an octave when she spoke to her son. “Good buddies?”
“Hugo was terrified, which seems natural. He was left alone with a stranger.”
“It was just a few minutes.”
“Again, thank you for last night. It was extraordinary.” Toby saluted on his way out the door. “And Hugo,
good luck to you, my handsome young friend.”
Seven
Toby spent three hours scrubbing and cleaning the condominium for a parade of men and women whose most pressing problem, for the moment, was deciding how exactly to spend $450,000. He phoned his real estate agent, a dangerously thin woman he had interviewed for a recent segment of Toby a Gentleman on how to remain poised in the midst of financial calamity.
“You’re trading up?” she said.
“I can answer that in a variety of ways.”
“This is a terrific time to buy, Toby.”
“Not to sell?”
“As long as you stay in the market. You’re staying in the market. Good lord, tell me you’re not fleeing the market.”
“I’m not fleeing the market.”
“Never flee a down market.”
A night of drinking red wine and the stress of babysitting conspired with the cleaning supplies to give him an eye-twisting headache shortly after noon. He boiled a pot of chamomile tea, tried to drink a mug of it, and lay on the chesterfield. Thirty-seven was so close to forty, and forty was practically fifty, if you lay on the couch with chamomile tea and a hangover and really thought about it. He had grey and thinning hair. The skin on his neck was softening. The stock market crash had not affected him because he owned no stock. To be unemployed and unemployable at this age was his most potent nightmare—but it no longer fit the precise definition of a nightmare because he was actually living it. He lay on the chesterfield and came up with a new most-potent nightmare: to be unemployed and unemployable at practically fifty with a palsy that comes out of nowhere and makes one side of your face sag.
Edward had taken the train into Montreal to have dead skin scraped and sluiced from his burns, and had been calling to ask Toby to meet him for a late lunch. To avoid thinking about himself any longer—the possibility that a man without a career was not a man at all—Toby phoned Edward back and arranged to meet him a few blocks south of the hospital.
The bistro was an imperfect choice. Toby had remembered it from his student days as relaxed and affordable, with thrift-store art on the walls and far too much smoke in the air. But the boom-economy sandwich years had inspired an unearned air of formality and tradition in the small room, and several more tables had been squeezed in. The server wore a black polyester suit and tie. A small towel with a Kilkenny ale logo was draped over his arm to complete the picture of near sophistication. It was enough to intimidate Edward, who had worn sweatpants and a black Jazz Fest 1997 T-shirt.