Toby

by Todd Babiak

  Toby locked himself in the first private washroom he found and listened to his voice mail. The BlackBerry had been in his satchel all day, where its regular bleeping had apparently been muffled by the four handkerchiefs he had carried since Edward’s diagnosis, just in case. There were two businesslike messages from Mr. Demsky’s assistant, the woman he had met in the townhouse. The third was more informal. “Adam—Mr. Demsky—really wants to speak to you. It affects his travel plans in the go-forward. Please call at your first opportunity.”

  Two voice mails followed from Mr. Demsky himself. The first was short: “Where the hell are you? Call me, Tobias, soon as you can. Business hours.” The second was more contemplative. “I don’t know how any member of your generation can be away from his phone for so long. If it weren’t so damned annoying at the moment, I’d admire you for this. But I cannot bring myself to do that, because, frankly, I want to track you down and slap you for leaving me hanging all afternoon. You try to do something generous, and this, this is how you’re rewarded. Like a stepchild he treats me.”

  “Adam,” said the assistant, in the background.

  “Like a stepchild!”

  Toby dialled Mr. Demsky’s home office number, and his assistant answered.

  “Bonjour, Madame. This is Tobias Ménard phoning. I understand Mr. Demsky has an interest in speaking to me.”

  A moment or two passed. Then: “Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell for this. This uncertainty!”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Demsky.”

  “You know what I had to do?”

  “No.”

  “I had to book meetings for you, and a flight. I had to, and I happen to be the semi-retired president and CEO of a small but profitable media company. Maybe the only profitable media company left on the continent. Do you know why I did it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “‘Sir,’ he calls me. I did it because I can’t help but give. Give and give and give.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My old friend, William Kingston, liked your reel. He wants you to adapt the gentleman business for the Americans. He’s not willing to sign on to anything, yet. He wants his staff to meet you first.”

  Toby pulled down the toilet seat and sat down. He didn’t even look to see if he was touching urine or pubic hairs. Mr. Demsky’s friend William was William Kingston, the president of ABS. He had heard William Kingston speak once, during the industry run-up to Canada’s gloomy television awards show. There was that something about him, that easy and expansive confidence, that quality a Canadian who loves his country but hates himself just a little for living in it always recognizes. No amount of money or education could allow someone like Toby to approach a man like William Kingston in style, in poise, in elegance, in authority. Kingston possessed a middle-aged assurance so natural and so healthful it defied easy comprehension. Generations of gentlemen had come before him, and he himself had absorbed all that he knew—from private schools in New England and Europe, surely, but also from his father and his grandfather and from every other man with several sets of meaningful cufflinks he would have encountered in his formative years.

  “Jesus.”

  “Jesus can’t help you.”

  “Mr. Demsky. This is the most—”

  “Clam up. Just tell me you’re free tomorrow at nine thirty. That’s when we fly out.”

  Toby had been congratulating himself for not having a job, for having this time with his father. Yet his little black book of aphorisms only had one entry so far, and it was a piece of wisdom adapted from Mr. Demsky: beast of ambition.

  “Two nights.”

  “Mr. Demsky, I—”

  “Stop.”

  Mr. Demsky insisted on picking him up in the morning, and took his parents’ address before Toby could invent an excuse to meet at the mall. The phone silent, he sat on the toilet and stared at the fading off-white of the washroom wall. The men who had built the hospital were dead by now. Its doctors and nurses, thousands of them, worked nobly to save and sustain human life, to preserve dignity in death—and all but a few of them were forgotten. Montrealers worth remembering were remembered for other acts, other trajectories and pointless sacrifices: hockey, religion, movie soundtracks, politics.

  His shoes clicked along the empty halls of the dinnertime hospital. It was quiet, as ever, in his father’s room. A young woman, hardly older than a teenager, lay in the bed across from Edward’s. She reached out to Toby. Her head was perfectly tiny and hairless. “Nurse,” she said, in a voice so meek he was surprised to have heard it.

  “We already called for one,” said Karen, leaning on a heater. Hugo was on the floor at the foot of Edward’s bed, flipping through a book, mere feet from the tube of blood and shit.

  “Is he asleep?”

  “In and out. What should we do for dinner?”

  “We could eat here again. Or you could take Hugo home, if you want. I could stay with Dad awhile.”

  “Could,” said Karen.

  Toby had planned to tell his mother now. But he could not summon the vocabulary. “You haven’t been home much. You need sleep, and a shower.”

  “True.”

  “I’ll stay with him for a couple of hours. But you’ll have to take the Chevette, the way the Westchester’s strapped in. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a car.”

  Karen kissed her husband and whispered in his ear, took Hugo’s hand, and rounded the corner.

  For the last several months, Edward had been in ferocious pain—blood in his urine, blood in his stool, headaches, abdominal cramps. In April he had seen the family doctor in Dollard, Dr. Smythe, who had arranged blood tests and diagnostic analyses. Edward had avoided the tests. For the pain, he had been doubling up on over-the-counter extra-strength ibuprofen and mixing it with alcohol. Neither Karen nor Toby could recall more than two or three instances when Edward had actually complained since the spring, when the symptoms had become—according to Dr. Smythe, who had met them at the Montreal General in a state of defensiveness and regret—unbearable.

  Up in Edward’s airless room, Toby waited until eight o’clock for his father to wake up. A home decorating program was on, and its level of audience participation gave Toby an idea or two for New York. This show was boring, though, and the host was too loud and too gay.

  “You’re going home?” Edward’s eyes opened slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. For being here.”

  “I’m so sorry I—”

  “Think good thoughts.”

  Toby was stricken with good thoughts, and he wanted to express them somehow, but there were five other patients in the room. The young girl with the tiny head had visitors: her parents and what appeared to be a teenage brother, who guffawed nervously every few minutes.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Come back.”

  “Done.”

  “And remember what I told you.”

  Toby mimed taking notes.

  His father sneaked a hand out from the covers, and Toby took it: a dark hand, big fingers, wedding ring, cuticles always immaculately cared for, burn streaks.

  He had never liked beets, Edward Mushinsky, despite his connections with Eastern Europe and, more recently, his fractional Jewishness. Borscht, never. He could not smell a pickled beet, lest he retch, but he could eat the mould off a muffin, a piece of bread, a brick of cheddar cheese. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, after he and Karen had been to a party together, or out for a rare meal at a restaurant, Edward would drink a large glass of beer and tomato juice to splash his hangover away. When membership in the Royal Canadian Legion was diminishing, they opened it up to relatives of veterans. Edward joined, and on Saturday afternoons they would go to the hall in Lachine for the meat draw. On summer weekends, he liked to wear shorts. But at the Legion there was a dress code. To conform, just barely, Edward would wear blue short shorts, navy knee-high socks, and a pair of leatherette slip-on dress shoes. At weddin
gs he would dance so vigorously that sweat stains would appear under his arms and in a winged pattern on his back, soaking the poly-cotton blend of his faded shirts. “Hey, hey, hey,” he would say, stomping one foot and clapping his hands. Midway through Toby’s one disastrous year in organized hockey, in grade six, the team had travelled to Hull for a weekend tournament. Edward and the father of another inferior player, Georges Tremblay, drank a bottle and a half of Bailey’s Irish Cream over the course of Saturday, and screamed and danced in the stands. They were quietly escorted out of the evening banquet for spooking some of the children. Christmas was his mother’s time. She bought the presents, wrapped them, and decorated the tree. But every year, his father would buy one thing for each of them and present it on Christmas Eve. These unwrapped gifts included flashlights that were also bookmarks, mobile battery packs, laser pointers for corporate presentations, flashlights that twisted like snakes, scissors that were designed to open hard plastic packaging, compact stepladders, sweatshirts that commemorated the Canadian team’s participation in the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, heated seat covers for the car, cordless drills, and flashlights that one attached to one’s forehead. Never once had Toby used one of these gifts, but he had kept them, like talismans. When Toby was small and could not sleep, his father would come in and rub his back and sing “You Are My Sunshine” in a soft voice, and he would stay until Toby could not remember him leaving.

  If there were only some way to express all this without saying it aloud.

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow.”

  “I am so proud.”

  Toby was prepared to outline the ways and means in which he had wronged his father, from elementary school all the way up to the previous week. “I’m regretful, Dad.”

  “Shh.”

  “When I saw you in the car, burning up, I wanted to pull you out.”

  “You did. You did pull me out. You pulled me out.”

  “I was a coward. I am a coward.”

  “Good thoughts.”

  Toby kissed his hand.

  “You better go.”

  “I’ll stay awhile longer.”

  “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  As he walked, Toby stared down at the fifty-year-old tiles on the floor, decorated with squiggles—the fucking squiggle-maker had probably lived to be 104—until he found the washroom. He splashed water on his face and stared at himself in the mirror. There was a rogue grey hair on his left eyebrow, long and kinked. He pulled it out. The counter was riddled with drops and pools of water. Empty soap dispenser. Dirty mirror. An ungrammatical sign urging everyone to wash their hands, singular subject and plural pronoun, to avoid gender-specific language. The secret damage of this.

  It was eight fifteen, so he drove first to Boutique Jean-François. He bought three new shirts and a pair of meaningful cufflinks, black and silver. The shop smelled of new fabric unleashed, quality cologne, the latest in cleansers.

  When Toby arrived at home, it was forty minutes past Hugo’s bedtime. The boy was still awake, sitting up in his pyjamas and babbling. Toby hugged him and kissed him and implored him to sleep, rubbed his back and attempted to sing “You Are My Sunshine.” He didn’t remember anything after “Please don’t take my sunshine away,” so he started over and repeated himself until Hugo was asleep.

  Karen sat in the living room, a bottle of Alsatian white wine on the coffee table, the glass a small fishbowl in her hand. “Want a drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Your dad and I were saving it for a special occasion.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You went shopping.” She nodded at his Boutique Jean-François bag. “How festive.”

  She was in her white satin pyjamas with a character from the Japanese alphabet on the breast pocket. On the table, next to the bottle of wine, lay a book called Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul.

  “Be careful with that stuff, Mom.”

  “The book?”

  “The book too.”

  She looked down at the glass, swished the wine around, smelled it. Her eyes were gluey.

  “I have to go to New York tomorrow morning.”

  Karen slowly leaned back in her chair.

  “Someone wants to interview me.”

  The room was lit by one faint lamp, loaded with an energy-saving fluorescent bulb that gave the room a pale yellow tint. She stared at Toby for a long time, as though she struggled to recognize him. The old grandfather clock struck six. It was 9:52. She finished her glass of wine quickly, picked up the bottle, and walked out. The sound of the refrigerator door opening and closing. Blowing her nose. Running water to take her sleeping pill. Her feet swooshing across the shag.

  Downstairs, Toby washed and ironed his three new shirts and prepared himself for the interviews. He put extra-strength whitening strips on his teeth, clipped imperfections out of his hair, and researched William Kingston on the Internet; the man enjoyed sailing, Tintin books, small Greek islands, and Nina Simone’s covers of the hit songs of the 1960s.

  Toby practised spontaneity. Pompousness had to be scraped out of his ideas and philosophies, so he repeated them aloud in front of a decorative mirror. Teenagers today are expected to cuss on public transit, Mr. Kingston, to spit on sidewalks, to litter, to modify their mufflers, to wear clothes that reveal the colour and style of their underpants. Even the smart ones. Their role models are celebrities who did not finish high school, who speak in artificial British accents, drink and drive, and upload videotapes of themselves performing doggie-style. Books have become irrelevant, and not just for teenagers. Their parents have abandoned newspapers, suits and dresses, symphonies, pleases and thank yous, the library and the voting booth, in favour of Pilates and poker and plasma screens. Media companies are the most cynical of all, and television the most potent force for the erosion of order, but all that can change.

  Men have reacted to the challenge of gender equality by elevating their lizard brains—dressing like cartoon characters, carrying handguns. The popularity of no-rules cage-match fist fighting, a weekly festival of televised vulgarity, is the visual culture equivalent of tearing off one’s clothes and running into the bush, eating raw meat, and howling at the moon. It is a sign of desperation, the far end of the social pendulum. We have gone as far as we can go. Soon, very soon, gentlemen will be back. And they will want to know whether or not they should remove their suit jackets during dinner.

  Never.

  Toby would accomplish for his generation what Emily Post had for hers. She had written Etiquette for women like herself, well born and wealthy members of Best Society who had a genuine need for guidance about the treatment of household servants. The majority of her readers, though, were regular people, the newly literate yet poor citizens of the twentieth century, desperate for a dream that would lead them from the horrors of the war through technological, social, and cultural transformation, the hopelessness of the Depression. A book that would teach them the rules of the ruling class, that would give them permission to pretend. Etiquette was the book most requested by American soldiers fighting in World War Two; Toby a Gentleman could be the most-watched video segment on YouTube.

  He recited all of this aloud, several times, sitting and standing. For the first time in ten years, it took some effort to back it up with feeling. This, he determined, was not so much a crisis of faith as the comforts and consolations of suburban mediocrity seeping into him. He crept up into Hugo’s room and gave him a kiss on the forehead. “Tomorrow,” he whispered.

  The sun came up. Toby paced with his shoes on. He wanted to say goodbye to Hugo before Mr. Demsky arrived, so he faked some coughs and stomped outside the bedroom door. The boy was still sleeping when a silver Town Car parked in front of the house at exactly 7:45. Karen did not speak; she did not even nod when Toby asked her to say goodbye for him and to kiss the boy and to make sure he sat on the potty at least once
each day.

  The tinted rear window rolled down, and Mr. Demsky’s mad scientist hair was revealed. “Hurry your ass!”

  Karen stood at the door as Toby hurried down the front stairs with his folding garment bag and small suitcase.

  “Good morning, Madame Ménard,” said Mr. Demsky.

  “Mushinsky,” she said.

  The driver, a tall man in a black suit and a Siberian fur hat, stood at attention before the open trunk. Toby did not know whether to put his own things inside or to hand them over. So he asked.

  “Is your choice, sir. But I take.”

  Another potential segment. It was endless. He told Mr. Demsky as much, as the driver navigated his way out of the mysteries of Dollard.

  Mr. Demsky shifted on the black leather, his own suit at least twenty years old and tailored for a larger man. “What was up with your mom?”

  “It’s early.”

  “Here I am, going out of my way to help her son move out of the house, and what do I get? Mushinsky?”

  “It was a controversial moment in our little house when I became a Ménard.”

  “Still.”

  It was the last thing Toby wanted to talk about. “She didn’t want me to go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just…family stuff.”

  “Everything’s okay?”

  “Beast of ambition.”

  “And one day, beast, you can have all this.” Mr. Demsky gestured at the back seat of the Town Car, at his suit, and began to laugh. A three-minute coughing fit ensued, and Mr. Demsky spat into his handkerchief several times. It occurred to Toby that he had not eaten breakfast. An empty stomach always made him prone to nausea. He retched as daintily as he could manage at the sight and sound of Mr. Demsky’s spitting, and opened the window for a blast of exhaust and river.

  “How did you hatch from that little house?”

  Inside the airport, Mr. Demsky initiated Toby into the wonders of the Maple Leaf Lounge. An emergency phone call from the national sales director freed Toby to read the New York press and take a complimentary breakfast of yogurt, fruit, and granola. For the first time, Toby knew the pleasure of boarding the airplane early, sitting in business class, and making eye contact with the unfortunate as they filed into economy. He suppressed an urge, as the airplane taxied away from the gate, to kiss Mr. Demsky.