by Todd Babiak
“How is she, doctor?”
“She’s gonna pull through.” Randall gestured toward the aromatic garage, where the Chevette sat among other unfortunates. “But there isn’t much life in her. That engine—”
“Don’t tell me. I can’t take it.”
They sat on hard plastic chairs with tall bottles of Maudite. It was a cozy inside joke. In high school, the first time they got drunk together it was on Maudite, a doubly rebellious act as it was not just beer, but Satan’s separatist beer.
One of Garrett’s wealthy local clients was being sued over a land dispute. The Maudite break represented his first moment away from the file, apart from a few hours’ sleep here and there, since the holidays began. He spoke slowly and precisely, and when he wasn’t speaking, his mouth remained open. Toby worried drool would sneak out.
“I put off turkey and cheap wine,” Garrett said, “but when this case pays out, in February I hope, we’re heading south.”
The men looked at each other several times, and Toby asked if anything was up. Randall shrugged. “He told me he told you.”
“About what?”
One giant index finger pointed at Garrett, the other at himself. “And we have something to tell you. We’re telling you first.”
“We’re gonna make it official,” said Garrett.
“For the kids’ sake,” said Randall. “Stability and that stuff. So they know it isn’t just sex or whatever.”
As a child, Toby had often stood in his backyard, looking up at the stars. The idea of an endless universe, endless and timeless, was impossible to comprehend. He had always assumed that when he grew to be a man, he would stop enjoying cartoons and start understanding endlessness and timelessness. But it had not worked out that way. A Charlie Brown Christmas continued to move him, and he still didn’t get the universe. It was equally difficult to fathom Randall and Garrett having sex, let alone getting married. The word, sure, even the ceremony, but the rest of it—shopping trips, dinnertime, parenthood, weekends at the family cabin, Disneyland, good-night kisses—did not scan.
“Congratulations.”
“You think it’s crazy?” said Garrett.
“It’s gorgeous.”
Randall delivered a speech he had clearly been mentally rehearsing for some time. Marriage was a flawed institution. “Me and Tracy are Exhibit A!” But if he and Garrett wanted to be a family, wanted to care for Dakota and Savannah, wanted to have a loving and caring and responsible relationship, what better way? Besides, the party would be in Puerto Vallarta.
“So who asked whom?”
Garrett pointed to Randall. “Negro got on one knee.”
“We have to wait until the divorce is all settled up.”
They hugged and clinked their Maudites and sat in contemplative silence. Toby considered the dusty racks of snacks: gum, potato chips, chocolate bars. Their chairs were arranged in a triangle, as though they were contestants in a game show.
“You all right?” said Garrett. “All packed up?”
“I can’t take much with me. Clothes. My laptop.”
“Where will you live?”
“A temporary apartment in the Upper East Side.”
“That sounds so New York!” said Randall.
“I don’t have to worry about babysitters and daycare and parks and schools anymore. So that’ll be awesome.”
Randall crossed his arms. “Bullshit.”
“What’s bullshit?”
“You’ll be miserable.”
“Are you on H?” Garrett leaned over and cuffed Randall.
Randall finished his Maudite and snarled. The last sip of a Maudite had been nasty in high school, and it was nasty today. “If you ask me, you have two options. We kidnap Hugo and smuggle his little ass down to the Lower East Side.”
“Upper.”
“Or. Or you stay here. You stay with the boy.”
“You know I can’t.”
Randall stood up and walked close. He stood before Toby, transferring his weight from one foot to the other like he had to pee. “You can’t give up the kid.”
“She’s the mom and I’m not the dad. Legally—”
“I don’t care about legally.”
“Sit down, Rand, and shut up,” said Garrett.
“You’ll regret it forever. You will.”
“It’s the job of my dreams. I’ll be—”
“Toby, I liked your show when it was on. I learned about clothes, and being good, and not spitting so much, and using a capital I in e-mails. Lots of little things. But still, it’s…Garrett, what’s that word for surfacey?”
“Superficial?”
“You’re smart. You’re handsome. You’re talented. If all the people like you in the world didn’t do fashion and celebrity shows and reality TV, imagine. Just imagine the shit we could do. There’d be solar panels everywhere. No poverty. What about the fucking Gaza Strip?”
“Don’t listen to him.” Garrett stood up and guided Randall into his chair. “You can’t stay. That would be your great regret, not the boy. You’re not a hot dog guy, or a bubble tea guy. You’re not a Dollard guy. Every second you stay is another insult to God.”
“Yeah,” said Randall. “God has a plan. He’s been waiting for us to get married since junior high. If you want to be like that about it, we should leave too. This really ain’t the place for a gay tow truck driver and his gay lawyer fiancé, not by a long shot. But Dakota and Savannah are here. I’d eat shit, actually eat actual shit, if it meant being close to them. Fashion doesn’t matter. Etiquette doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. If it did, you wouldn’t have to make a show about it. You know what matters?”
Toby turned away.
“Great. Now you made him cry.” Garrett cuffed Randall again, apologized on his fiancé’s behalf, and declared him drunk and mentally unstable.
Only Randall chose to have a second Maudite, and in the ensuing twenty minutes Toby felt as though he had already left his friends and this place, this particular oil-smelling spot in the constellation of snack racks.
The next morning, one week before his departure, Toby packed two suitcases and three large cardboard boxes to be picked up and shipped by UPS. He sent flowers of congratulations to Randall and Garrett. He had been calling Catherine, and finally she phoned back.
“Have you considered it?”
“You stole my idea.”
“How’s Hugo?”
Catherine breathed through her nose. “He talks about you. He says English words I don’t know.”
“I’ll visit a lot.”
“He’ll get over it.”
The lukewarm coffee Toby had just finished turned to acid. “In time, yes. He’ll forget all about me.”
“As for your proposition. Your mother and that man…”
“Steve Bancroft.”
“I wrote down that you said $45,000.”
“To start as manager. And you live rent-free.”
“This is charity.”
“We don’t know the bubble tea business like you do. It’s only fair. And Hugo…there are big parks here, lots of room for him. Not so much traffic.”
“It sounds like I would owe you something.”
“You do. But that’s not what this is about.”
Karen sat on the chesterfield and listened as Toby spoke to Catherine and paced the short length the phone cord would allow. Her hands were clasped. Karen’s French was imperfect, but she understood most of what Toby was saying. Her eyes brightened as the conversation progressed. Toby tried not to look directly at his mother; news that she was moving hastily o’er into the bed of King Claudius did not settle well with him. Especially since he was the one who had pushed the sacrificial lovers into the same room again—Abie’s Smoked Meat.
“Toby, can I speak to your mother?”
“I suppose. But slowly.”
Toby handed the phone to Karen, who said, “Bonjour, Madame,” and nodded as she listened. “Oui,” she said, a number
of times, and “Non” once or twice. “Je voudrais très heureux d’avoir toi ici.” Then she laughed, as Catherine would be laughing.
The Chevette may have been fixed, but Toby did not trust it. He borrowed his mother’s Corolla one final time, because he did not want to be late. By the time he arrived at the bright restaurant on the Plateau, designed to look like a pub in Trois-Rivières, five minutes late for their reservation, Mr. Demsky—always a gentleman—was already drinking a gin and tonic and tucking into cromesquis de foie gras.
“I thought you’d be late,” he said. “Actually, no, I didn’t. I was just hungry.”
Mr. Demsky had chosen the restaurant because it was the height of Pepsi-tude, an homage to meat and fat unlike anything Toby would find in New York.
Toby sat and Mr. Demsky pulled out a present for him.
“Come on.” Toby shook the wrapped tube. “Like you haven’t given me enough already.”
“Open it!”
Six sesame bagels from Fairmont, in a Scotch container. “Thanks.”
“I don’t know if you realize this, but the bagels in New York are shit.”
“Really?”
“It’s difficult to imagine, I know, because you’re Canadian, but there are a few things we do better: wood-hewing, water-drawing, and, it turns out, bagel-making. Here, have one of these dumplings.”
Mr. Demsky insisted on ordering. First, the appetizers: onion soup, bison tartare, poutine au foie gras, and, of course, roast piglet. For his main course, Toby would enjoy the most exotically Canadian dish on the menu, the plogue à Champlain, a monstrous helping of pancakes and bacon with both maple syrup and foie gras on top. Mr. Demsky went for duck in a can.
“Isn’t that maybe too much food?”
“Eat your cromesquis.”
Mr. Demsky apologized for being incommunicado since the funeral. It had hurt, the way Toby had kept things from him. A debriefing had long been in order. “I’m selling.”
“Selling what?”
“Oh, everything.”
Toby assumed at first it was a set-up for a joke, but there was no slyness in the president’s eyes. The wine arrived and the server opened it. Mr. Demsky smelled the cork, smelled the wine, tasted it, and sent it back. “You must have had the bottle sitting in front of the heater. Bring us something serious, câlice. You think we’re a couple of homos from Toronto over here?”
Diners at several nearby tables looked over, and Toby’s core body temperature rose by approximately nine degrees.
“That was your real present,” Mr. Demsky whispered, over the table.
It was difficult to imagine Mr. Demsky without his stations. In books and articles about Canadian media barons, Mr. Demsky always merited a chapter or a paragraph. He had grown up poor and had become wealthy and powerful in his late forties. Mr. Demsky had not overreached in recent years like most of his contemporaries; Century Media remained private and carried no debt. When Catherine had arrived to steal Hugo away from him, this had been Toby’s consolation: he could become Mr. Demsky. That is, work on-camera until his receding hairline became uncomfortable, then move into management, executive management, and ownership.
“This is supposed to be a terrible time to sell anything.”
“It’s not going to get any better. Not in my lifetime.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I’m wretched. I’ve been wretched for years. I’m tired. I have no heirs. The only person in the company I actually liked…I had to fire his ass. Turns out he was a racist.”
“Sorry.”
“Planning a careful succession, with Dwayne or someone else, the idea makes me want to hide in a closet, naked, with a small tub of magic mushrooms.”
“You’ll retire.”
“I’m a baby boomer, Tobias. This was never supposed to happen. I can’t believe I got old. I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
A new bottle of wine and the appetizers arrived, and it was already too much food for a couple of small men.
“There must be a place in the world for a gentleman of my humours and appetites to, whatever, live out my days in peace and comfort. My needs are modest. What do I want? Warm weather, good food and wine, access to legal and illegal drugs, and beautiful whores who speak foreign languages. I don’t even care which languages.”
The onion soup was rich and cheesy. Toby supplemented it with bites of foie gras poutine and roasted piglet, Mr. Demsky bogarting the bison tartare as he outlined the pros and cons of each possible retirement hot spot: Saint-Tropez, Haifa, Buenos Aires, Sydney. The wine, a Saint-Émilion, was worth more than the Chevette. It was one of those nights when the wine tasted better and better with each sip, and provided a clearer and clearer view of the truth. The bottle was finished before they had made it halfway through their appetizer bacchanal, so Mr. Demsky ordered another.
Toby had not thought to bring a notepad, but:
“Forget, first of all, that there ever was a country three hundred miles north of New York City. You were Canadian, but that’s over now. When you say us and we, they have to know you mean it. No one cares where you came from. You might win a literary award in Toronto for mooning over your origins, but you won’t get laid and you won’t get paid. Not in a real country. Now. These people want to be entertained. What’s your name gonna be?”
“Toby Marshall.”
“Good. And what about that boy?”
“Finished.”
“And don’t fuck around with marriage.”
Toby had made a number of profound errors in the past month, but advice from this man had led him to leave Edward for a trip to New York City. If he had been honest with Mr. Demsky, the interviews with ABS could have waited a few days, a week, but he had not been honest. “You loved your wife, Mr. Demsky.”
“I did.”
“Then how can you say that?”
Mr. Demsky did not answer for some time. He tucked into the bison tartare and took a last spoonful of soup. “She died and left me alone, didn’t she? Now I have no one, and I’m too old to make any new friends, let alone find a new wife, like some of my contemporaries. Men in their seventies with thirty-year-old brides. Losers! Clowns! I knew, when she got sick, that I’d never have anyone else. Anyone who’d know my heart, who’d know me without my having to explain everything. That simple thing she did. She was…she knew when I was shit, when I was frightened and angry and hiding it, when I wanted to get the hell out of here. I’m not an easy person to live with, hour by hour, Tobias—you can probably sense it—but she rose above all that and saw me, the real me, better than I did. She started loving me—why, goddamn it?—before I had a penny. And she never stopped.”
“You don’t regret any of it.”
“It’s not so simple, Tobias. Regret and not regret. Each minute I’ve had away from her eats up days, weeks, months, years of our life together. And I’m a fuck-up. Do I sit around remembering the good times? No, I obsess over all the time I didn’t spend with her, when I was travelling for no good reason or working late in that ugly box on René Lévesque. I cheated on her for a few years, after I started to make a name for myself. Mr. Big Shit. And who cares, right? A little ass on the side? If she knew, she never said a thing. An angel. And I was weak and stupid and selfish and scared of getting old and ugly. I was supposed to die first. I mean, look at me. I’m a drunk. What do I eat? Fat! Salt! Do I exercise? Fuck no. Her getting sick—if I believed in God, I’d see he was a genius. He crafted the ultimate punishment for my many sins: eleven years without her.”
“Why didn’t you have kids?”
Mr. Demsky dropped his spoon in the soup, cold now and forlorn. “That isn’t up for discussion.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize! That’s another thing. When you get down there, enough with the sorry, sorry, sorry. You might as well wear a badge: I’m a Canadian dope from the outer suburbs of Dopetown.”
The restaurant was bright and boisterous. The serve
rs took the plates away and the main courses arrived. Mr. Demsky did not say merci or even thank you. When the server asked if everything was going well, Toby answered that everything was magnificent, and the server paused for a moment, looked down at Mr. Demsky. A slight finger wave, signalling, Fine, go away. When they were alone again, he winked at Toby. “That just tears you up inside, doesn’t it?”
Pancakes for dinner. When Toby was growing up, on the few occasions when Karen did not make it home by six o’clock, Edward tended to make breakfast for dinner: cereal, fried eggs, fried egg sandwiches, scrambled eggs, or pancakes. They never had maple syrup, even though they might have tapped a tree down the street. All they kept in the house, all they could afford, was sugar water—a generic version of Aunt Jemima’s, butter flavour, which made butter unnecessary.
Foie gras and maple syrup initiated a salt, sugar, and fat battle so intense that Toby had trouble concentrating halfway through the second bottle of wine. Mr. Demsky was talking again, about the medical advantages and disadvantages of his various retirement options. A glow around that white nest of hair, quivering just slightly, Toby’s nervous system beginning to fail. Too much fat. The music was so loud, suddenly, along with the crashes and clanks of the cooks and servers. It occurred to Toby, as he pretended to listen, that he was sweating. He dabbed at his forehead and continued eating, eating, drinking, drinking, half listening, willing it all away. In the morning he would be gone from this place, all this fat. The fat had occupied him. His liver was under siege, desperate to detoxify even as he shovelled in more fat, more sugar, more salt, more sulphites.
Cognac.
A man of his time. No, the man of his time. His specialness, that locomotive of instinct and certainty, even during the darkest and quietest nights on rue Collingwood as he prepared to see himself as merely regular. His destiny: to talk on television about cutaway collars, the correct thing to say in a receiving line, money talk, sex talk, religion talk, getting old talk, talk talk. Mitigating anxiety and discomfort. Meaning-lessness and mattering. To matter.
Toby had never been able to see himself in Edward Mushinsky. But his future was clear in Mr. Demsky: that life of happy unhappiness, of travel and legal troubles, of only the best sulphites. Being slightly—please, finally—more. Being written up in a real gossip column. Some time later, looking back on his night at Au Pied de Cochon, his final night in Montreal, he would recognize it for what it was: a spiritual night. A night with God the Imbecile. Toby had only one life, and it was already more than half finished. There was no room for error.