Why Men Lie

by Linden MacIntyre

  Also by Linden MacIntyre

  THE LONG STRETCH

  WHO KILLED TY CONN (with Theresa Burke)

  CAUSEWAY: A PASSAGE FROM INNOCENCE

  THE BISHOP’S MAN

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2012 Linden MacIntyre

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to Faber and Faber Ltd. for permission to reproduce from “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacIntyre, Linden

  Why men lie / Linden MacIntyre.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36088-5

  I. Title.

  PS8575.1655W59 2012 C813.’54 C2011-904098-0

  Cover design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: Andreas Schlegel/fStop/Getty Images

  v3.1

  For my daughters

  ELLEN, MAGGIE, CIORSTI

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Three Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Four Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  one

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  T.S. ELIOT, “BURNT NORTON,”

  FOUR QUARTETS

  1

  For a person who was rather private, it was startling to hear her name in such a public place.

  “Effie Gillis?”

  The tone was tentative, bordering on disbelief. She could have ignored it, but she turned, out of curiosity or anxiety. She was in the St. George subway station, heading home, Christmas shopping finished. It was December 19, 1997, another detail she’d remember.

  She knew him right away though she hadn’t set eyes on him for decades. Campbell, JC Campbell. He was standing near the end of the east-west platform, a newspaper in his hand, smiling. She noted the glint of silver in the hair around his temples.

  “My God,” she said.

  They shook hands.

  “It’s been, how long …”

  “Twenty years, at least,” he said.

  They fell silent briefly. She remembered that he’d taken a job with a television network in the United States. Something about his passport, she recalled; American employers loved the Canadian passport. It travelled better than their own because it was less likely to provoke an inconvenient attitude at certain border crossings. She recalled a drunken farewell party at her house. It was in the Beaches, so yes, it would have been 1977. Twenty years ago, 1977, the year of raised voices, slamming doors, her child cowering underneath the kitchen table. The farewell celebration was a kind of respite.

  She remembered him as being tall, but he was maybe five eleven, only slightly taller than she was. Still slim. She remembered black-framed glasses, longer hair, a mullet, maybe. Hockey player hair, they used to call it. Now the glasses were gone, presumably replaced by contact lenses. The hair was cropped short. He had the same emphatic hairline, with a hint of widow’s peak. He had the look, she thought, of a sober single man.

  He smiled, narrowed his eyes. “And yourself, you and Sextus …”

  She felt the blush but didn’t mind, knowing that it made her seem younger.

  “Yes and no,” she said. “One of those things. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since … when was it? Seventy-seven, I believe.”

  “Seventy-seven it was when I went off.”

  “We split up after that,” she said. “But, miracle of miracles …” She laughed.

  “I was glad to hear that you were back together,” he said. The statement seemed cautious, speculative. “Sextus and I have stayed in touch, sporadically. I felt bad when he told me you two split, back then. But he’s still—Sextus—living in Cape Breton?”

  “For now. We’re trying to come up with a plan.”

  “Your brother, Duncan. Still in the priesthood, I imagine?”

  “Yes and no again,” she said. “He’s here in Toronto now. But still a priest. A rarity.”

  “I haven’t seen Duncan since university,” he said. “And yourself, still in academe, I gather? I think Sextus told me that you got a doctorate. Tenure and the whole nine yards. Would be kind of hard to give that up.”

  “And do what?” She laughed.

  “Just look at you,” he said, arms held wide. “You look fantastic.”

  Now he blushed. Her eyes drifted to his left hand. He was wearing gloves.

  “So you’re back here now, are you? The last I heard, I think you were overseas or in the States, working in the news.”

  “Still in the news, but back home,” he said. “Speaking of home, I’m just heading there. I bought a little place in lower Riverdale.”

  She could have told him that she lived just three blocks away from the St. George station. It would have been appropriate, reciprocal disclosure, but something stopped her. She felt a certain freedom here and she wanted to enjoy it for a moment.

  She was living in a duplex she’d rented, the ground level and second floor of an old Victorian mansion close to everything. She’d sold the big house on the Kingsway, and the transaction left her relatively wealthy. She’d been able to complete the renovation of her old home in Cape Breton, and even after that she had a nest egg that would supplement the inevitable academic pension. Or buy another house. But she didn’t want to go into that with him, how she lived or where or why. She felt oddly stimulated, talking to a stranger who was still familiar. The gloves, the haircut, the cashmere overcoat marked him as a man of style. He could have been from anywhere, the attractive man before her. She felt a mild excitement trying to recall their common past.

  “So you were Christmas shopping, I imagine,” he said. The easy smile was yet another feature that was unfamiliar.

  “Just on my way home,” she said. “I live nearby. So you’ve got all the shopping done already?”

  “Well,” he said, “my shopping is pretty limited.”

  “Yes. You reach a certain age.”

  They fell silent. He was nodding, thoughtfully it seemed. And it might have ended there, but he suddenly suggested going for a drink around the corner on Prince Arthur, and she couldn’t think of a single reason to resist.

&nb
sp; At the pub there was a Christmas party in full swing, old-timers getting plastered. He seemed to know most of them. Reporters, he confided. She had a glass of wine. He had a Guinness.

  “So the man himself,” he said. “I imagine he’ll be coming up for Christmas. Or will you go down?”

  “You mean Sextus?”

  “Yes. Wasn’t there talk of himself moving back to the city?” His brow was furrowed, eyes innocent.

  “Neither of us likes to travel much this time of year,” she said, not really answering what he was asking. “I think way too much is made of Christmas anyway. You know, it’s a manufactured feast at best … to seduce the pagans from their superstitious rituals.”

  “New Year’s was the time,” he said. “Oidhche Chaluinn.”

  “Ah. You know about it.”

  “Well, of course.”

  And when the waitress offered them a menu, he didn’t answer, just stared at her, waiting.

  “We might as well,” she said.

  JC Campbell was part of the clique from home when she and Sextus Gillis first came to Toronto, back in the early seventies. She was a fugitive. That was how she saw herself. She needed the distractions of the unfamiliar city and would have been much happier if she’d been able to blend into an entirely new society of total strangers. But Sextus was part of an odd assortment of construction workers, miners and newspaper reporters with nothing much in common except Cape Breton and what seemed to be a mutual belief that life would always be more or less the way it was just then, a serial ceilidh with brief interruptions for recovery and as much employment as was needed to sustain it. They all seemed to be in their mid- to late twenties, all prosperous enough to have sufficient money for the basic necessities and enough left over to nearly satisfy voracious appetites for fun. Some were single, all were childless, though she was pregnant at the time.

  Maybe she’d begun to notice JC Campbell in those frantic early days because he, like her, seemed to be on the periphery of everything. He seemed to be just a little bit more serious about work, a little less inclined to be unconscious at the end of every social function. He often helped her with the cleanup after the other men had stumbled home or off to temporary sleeping arrangements. Back then she thought he was from Halifax. She’d suspected, for a while, that he was homosexual, that his remoteness came from a feeling of exclusion. But Sextus told her that he probably held himself a little apart because of fallout from an incident when he was still a student. JC had secrets, but he definitely wasn’t gay.

  That evening, December 19, 1997, they parted after dinner with a hug. It was almost fraternal, but it left a lingering sensation oddly similar to reassurance, and it stayed with her, as did certain moments in their conversation.

  The next time she saw him he was on television. There was sunshine. He was talking to a camera. He had told her that he preferred to be the guy behind the scenes, the producer or the writer. But there he was, speaking to the world. She found herself staring without hearing what he had to say.

  Effie Gillis had by then achieved just about as much as she aspired to in terms of her career and her life. She was into healthy middle age, she was a department head at a major university. She was published and looked forward to perhaps a peaceful decade contemplating parts of history she deemed to be important, conveying insight with poise and credibility to her students and her peers. She and Sextus were rebuilding a relationship that she’d convinced herself might now provide stability even if it fell short of the intimacy she still craved. It was easy in such circumstances to forget the fragility of expectations. The reminder, when it came, was brutal.

  After the initial shock wore off, she would be able to recall with some amusement that it came on a Palm Sunday, a week before the end of Lent, when warm spring days and all the old familiar stories of redemption lift the spirits. Her brief encounter in the subway station months before had all but faded from her mind. Then her brother called. His words were blunt, especially from a priest: “The miserable quiff is having an affair with Stella Fortune.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “You know who I’m talking about. That sleazebag Sextus.”

  In the background she could hear dishes rattling, human babble, raucous laughter.

  “Are you there?” Duncan asked.

  “Yes, I’m here,” she said.

  “Well, say something.”

  “What do you expect me to say? That I’m shocked? That after all the years I’ve known him, anything he could do would come as a surprise, especially involving women? Wake up, Duncan.”

  “Effie, I thought Stella had more sense than that. Sextus Gillis. Of all the goddamned people she could have—”

  “You thought Stella had more sense than your sister,” she said tightly, anger rising.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “No?”

  “I feel like an idiot,” he said. “I told her things …”

  “Presuming you were dealing with some higher sensibility.”

  “I’m sorry I called,” he said. “I should have left you in the bloody dark.”

  He hung up, and afterwards she felt sorry for the selfishness of her reaction. She could picture her brother standing there alone, slouched against the wall beside the pay phones, misery personified.

  Duncan had moved to Toronto in the fall of 1997. He told her only that he’d been granted a sabbatical to work the streets in what he called a rescue mission. Saving lost street people while rescuing his ministry, he said. Trying to redefine his priesthood, to give it relevance, or, maybe, in the end, to give it up entirely. Effie hadn’t been aware that Stella Fortune was a factor, though she’d known that they were friends when he was pastor in her parish in Cape Breton.

  Duncan called later to apologize. “You’re the one who should be pissed,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t deserve me lashing out.”

  “I feel it’s my fault,” Duncan said. “If I’d been paying more attention … But I thought she had more … character.”

  “We don’t know the whole story,” Effie said. “One thing Stella has is character. But character sometimes gets trumped by needs.”

  “I don’t think I want to know the whole story,” he said, and laughed briefly. “You didn’t have a clue?”

  “I didn’t. How did you find out?”

  “Stella phoned. Apparently he just started dropping in on her. Then he made it clear to her that he wanted a more intimate relationship.”

  “So she came to you?”

  “She wanted my advice.”

  “My God, Duncan,” Effie said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t believe how thick you are. Do you really think it was advice she wanted?”

  She told herself she was too old for heartache, but not for embarrassment. Privately she knew it was her smugness she regretted most; it bothered her that she had let her guard down, as if past mistakes could ever immunize a fool from future foolishness. All the years she’d known Sextus, all the old betrayals, now weighed heavily upon her. She realized she didn’t really mind the now inevitable solitude. She’d learned to think of it as independence. What bothered her was this reminder that there was, never far beneath the surface of her poise, a yearning (dare she call it loneliness).

  It took about three days for the embarrassment to ripen into an unspeakable anger.

  On day four, which was Holy Thursday, Sextus called her.

  She hung up.

  He phoned again that same day and left a message: they needed to talk; he’d made a huge mistake; he wanted to explain; he knew she’d understand if only he could have a moment. Nobody understood him better than Effie did.

  She erased it.

  Her smugness, she now realized, had come from the certainty that male behaviour could never catch her by surprise again. It was a small reward for all the years she’d spent coping with the turmoil men cause. Father. Brother. Husbands. Live-in partners. Even her neurotic m
ale colleagues at the university. There was no excuse this time. It was entirely her own fault. She could and should have seen it coming. Her brother had disapproved of her renewed relationship with Sextus from the outset, but she really didn’t need a warning. Sextus Gillis had been dazzling and disappointing her since childhood. She dumped a husband for him, eloped and married him, tried to raise a child with him, tried to rise above his infidelities—and eventually threw him out and got over him successfully.

  She should have had the sense, based on past experience, to avoid another entanglement from which there could be no constructive disengagement. But she was home when they started up again, back in Cape Breton where, she concluded afterwards, most of her worst life lapses had occurred.

  She was vulnerable (God, how she hated to admit that), but, it seemed, he was too. And it shouldn’t have been totally far-fetched to think he’d changed a little at middle age, grown perhaps. Except it was too much to hope for and certainly too much to ask for. And here she was, messed up again.

  Then it was day five, Good Friday, and JC Campbell was on her doorstep.

  “Well, well, well,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again.”

  “I’m a reporter,” he said. “I have ways of tracking people down. May I come in?”

  She stepped back to let him in, then closed the door behind him. Stood there, mind blank.

  “What a great spot,” he said, hands on hips, taking in the room. He walked over to a bookcase and studied a shelf of Gaelic volumes, murmuring more compliments. She was at a loss. To ask abruptly what he wanted would sound unfriendly. He was an old friend of sorts, but then again he was a stranger and, more to the point, one of Sextus’s friends. She felt vaguely threatened.

  “I was going to pour a drink,” she said.

  “So, what are you having?”

  “A Scotch,” she said.

  “Single malt or blend?”

  “Single,” she replied.

  “No ice in mine, then.” He was smiling.

  He still had his coat on, sitting at the corner of her kitchen table, sipping his drink. “You probably don’t realize that I am on a mission.”