When the wheels are off, he holds the bike steady at the handlebars and with a quick nod signals for me to get on. It takes three tries but I am off, wobbly, riding away, down the black asphalt and onto the sidewalk.
When I turn to come back at the corner, I pretend I can’t see him watching me.
—
I’m going north tomorrow.
Or maybe east. Or west.
Or maybe I’ll wait to go with Leonard to see what’s left in Liberia.
THE DATE
I’ll know you when I see you
Doreen typed to Sean, despite the mask he wore in his profile picture.
I feel like I know you already. :)
She hit Enter.
She watched the clock in the corner of her computer screen.
8:23.
8:24.
8:25.
Saturday then? he responded.
She exhaled.
Paused.
Then typed Saturday then into the message box, appending a ! then deleting it, afraid she’d already betrayed too much giddiness with the smiley face. She didn’t want him to think her desperate and childish.
And she did, somehow, know it was him when he stepped into the restaurant and shook the rain off his yellow umbrella. The colour was like an electric middle finger to the drab greys of the November suits and overcoats that shifted and sighed on bar stools with their backs to the door. Her wineglass clicked against her teeth. She wanted to bite through and crunch the glistening shards between her molars, grind them up, taste the blood, anything to keep her looking calm and cool on the outside.
As Sean shook his umbrella dry, the yellow caught the eyes of diners who turned to see and didn’t turn away. There’s something about that guy, she could hear them thinking. A real spark. She’d known it. Known it the first time they Clinked. The restaurant’s host gave Sean a warm slap on the shoulder. He was clearly a regular, which thrilled Doreen even more as the place was new, expensive and had a signless alleyway entrance. Sean chatted with the host as he slipped his umbrella into the stand and handed over his well-tailored coat. He yanked his cap firmly down onto his forehead—he’d not be giving it up. Doreen locked her jaw to keep from eating the glass as the host led Sean to her table.
“Doreen?” His shadow hovered above her.
“Sean! I knew I’d know it was you! Remember how I said? As soon as you came in, I was like, ‘That’s him!’ So.” Her hand trembled as she took another sip.
Sean ironed his magenta tie flat as he sat down and tucked his chair close to the table. He was saying apologies and taxi and the office and King Street a mess, but she didn’t quite hear it all.
“Sure. This time of day,” she managed. She concentrated on placing her glass back down so it wouldn’t fall from her hand and smash to bits on the reclaimed barnwood floor.
Take the edge off and great cocktails here and try something new for a change, he said as he picked up the drinks list, scanning it with his small, wide-apart eyes. He held it up in the casual way a celebrity might, someone in the habit of blocking unwanted attention, but permitted Doreen an unhindered view of his features. Such as they were. Now that candlelight blotted away the shadow that had fallen from his hat, Doreen saw that Sean did not have a face.
—
“You’ve got to try Clink,” Gretchen had said three weeks earlier, when she and Faisel came home to find a sodden Doreen sitting on the floor in the dark living room, swigging whisky sours. “Remember Alma? That’s how she met Harvey. Or Marvin. Whatever his name is.” Gretchen lit a joint and opened the balcony door a crack. “Look at them now!”
Alma from the office who was pregnant with twins. Alma who had been proposed to at the company Christmas party, Harvey sweating through his suit jacket and stumbling over a taped-down power cord on his way to sing a cappella at the lectern, a crumpled speech in his hand. Everyone cried.
“Hm.” Doreen threw back the rest of her drink and pressed her eyes shut as Faisel flicked on the light. She’d finished the pinot grigio in the fridge and found only rum and whisky in the cupboard, but the former made her think of Cuba where she and Connor were supposed to go for their honeymoon, before he’d left her for his business partner.
She’s, I don’t know, happy, Connor had said when he broke it off, his face in his hands so he couldn’t see Doreen writhing on the ornamental rug. It’s like, what you see is what you get.
Happy? Happy!? What does that even mean? Happy. No one is ‘happy’ all the time.
That’s not true. She meditates.
“Everyone meets online now, Dor,” Gretchen said, blowing a spectre of blue smoke out the balcony door. “It’s not like it was. That’s how we hooked up.” She nodded over at Faisel, who’d been texting since they came in. He worked in film or television, his thumbs dancing ceaselessly on his iPhone.
“It’s true,” he said without looking up. “I’ve heard good things about Clink.”
Doreen knew he’d say anything to get her out of Gretchen’s condo, where she’d been staying since her breakup.
“Seriously. A guy I work with is on it,” he went on. “He’s a good guy, like, not at all trash. Just divorced is all.” He went over to Gretchen to take a pull off her joint, then continued, holding in the smoke. “Or maybe his wife died. Cancer or something. Anyway, good guy.” His phone chirped. He smiled at whatever was on his screen and exhaled into the living room.
—
Sean tapped his menu and said to the waiter, “Steak frites. Don’t even know why I bother looking. Creature of habit.”
Clink cost five hundred dollars to join, so Doreen had figured the people on it were serious. Or rich. She saw a preview of some of the men and they were nice-looking. They had white smiles. They had jobs in offices and weren’t drunk or overly tanned or in Cancún in their profile pictures. It had taken her almost two hours to fill out the questionnaire, and at the end of it, after a brief processing pause, the algorithm spat out the first of her six matches.
Sean.
He was holding a carved wooden mask over his face, backdropped by lush green foliage.
“And for you?” the waiter asked.
It was a hobby, Sean had told her the first time they talked on the phone. Seeking out isolated populations around the world. It started when he was young, when his family skipped from continent to continent with his father, a mining engineer. Sounds like an expensive hobby, she’d said. He’d laughed, thoughtfully. Almost apologetically. More like a labour of love, I guess.
“Miss?”
Where Sean’s nose and cheeks should have been his skin was stretched taut, his mouth a lipless slit, his eyes two watery black beads. He held a neatly folded napkin to his chin as he sipped his ice water, careful to catch what dribbled from the corners of his mouth. He looked out the window at the lashing rain. His profile a plane of skin.
“Perhaps you’d be interested in our catch tonight,” the waiter was saying. “Mahi-mahi, flown in from Hawaii this morning. The chef has prepared it with a coulis of—”
“Sure,” Doreen said, shoving her menu at him. “Could you tell me where the washroom is?”
She was trying not to gag. She wanted to bolt. She wanted her money back. She wanted to pound Gretchen and Faisel into the ground with her fists.
A bottle of champagne arrived before she could get up.
“This is from Jasmine,” the host said as he placed two flutes on the table. “The owner,” he explained hastily to Doreen. “For our esteemed guest this evening.” He smiled at Sean as he untwisted the muselet and draped a white napkin over the cork to catch it as it popped. He poured their two glasses and left the bottle in a silver bucket in a stand beside them, nodding deferentially at Sean as he departed.
“Cheers,” said Sean, tilting his flute toward Doreen. “It’s great to finally meet you in person.” He waited a few beats to see if she would lift her glass, then tapped it with his anyway. “Well. Salut.”
He dabbed his chi
n with his napkin. “Okay. Well, I’ve managed to compress this to a few sentences.”
She stared at the tiny rising bubbles in her glass, her mouth hanging open a crack.
“I was fourteen,” he said. “Living in Zambia. I’d been in an argument with my stepmother—she’d ‘accidentally’ let my pet monkey escape that morning. I took off on my bike and pedalled for miles to the site where my dad was working. I was going to tell him I was moving back to Canada to live with my mother. I’d heard she was in Calgary somewhere. I sped along the dirt roads, weaving around the potholes, thinking of what I would pack—my camera, baseball cards, the few things that came with me everywhere. I rode right past the security gates and spotted my father’s blue hard hat on the other side of a big pit. And that’s the last thing I saw.” He paused, turning the stem of his glass. “They said later they’d let me through the gates because of who my father was. Chief engineer of explosives. They didn’t want to lose their jobs.” He lifted his flute. “Anyway, twenty years and twenty-four surgeries later, here we are,” he said, clinking their glasses again. He didn’t wait for her this time and took a swig, napkin at his chin. He nodded when Doreen excused herself to go to the washroom.
As soon as she slid the lock into the stall door, she texted Gretchen.
Today 7:38pm
Help! He’s a freak! He doesn’t
have a face!!!
Today 7:40pm
WHAT!??
Today 7:40pm
NO. FACE. Some kind of explosion.
Hence mask in picture.
Today 7:41pm
Your lying!!!
Today 7:41pm
No!!! Need to get out of here.
In bathroom but no escape window
Today 7:42pm
Hello???
Today 7:44pm
HELLO???!! This is YOUR FAULT
Today 7:46pm
Sorry!! Faisel called…
don’t leave! Think of the story
you can tell after!! Its just dinner.
You dont have to fuck him.
Today 7:47pm
;P
Today 7:47pm
Ahhhhh! Going to puke!
Today 7:48pm
Seriously!!! HELP ME.
Today 7:50pm
Faisel agrees. Don’t go.
Today 7:50pm
ALSO—I know your not a mean
person!! Cant judge a book by
its cover etc.
Today 7:51pm
Fuck. FUCK!! Okay. Just dinner.
But that’s it. and I want my
money back!!!
Doreen washed her hands and went back into the restaurant, pausing at the bathroom door. Sean was looking out at the rain with his hands folded, barely moving, the two glasses of champagne on the table in front of him. His singular loneliness was unfathomable to her. She inhaled and went back to her chair.
“Sorry, I…” She realized she hadn’t come up with an excuse for why she’d been gone so long. “A friend called. She needed my help.”
He pressed his mouth slits together. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She smoothed her napkin over her lap. “Wasn’t an emergency or anything.” She winced and took a sip of champagne.
“I’m just glad you decided to come back,” he said as a waiter set their plates in front of them. “That doesn’t always happen.”
The host brought over a bottle of red wine and turned the label toward Sean. “Our sommelier says this is exquisite with the steak, Mr. Roche. It’s a ’93 first-growth Bordeaux. New to our cellar.” He poured a small amount in a glass to taste. “He’s available if you have any questions.”
Sean swished it around his mouth and nodded his approval. The host filled their glasses and backed gallantly away.
“So what’s the deal?” Doreen asked. “You some kind of movie star or something?”
Sean took a small bite of steak and had a sip of wine, patting his mouth with his napkin as he swallowed. “My business had its IPO this week. It went better than expected.”
“Oh?” She looked from her plate to the rain outside. If she squinted to make things blurry and concentrated on seeing him with only her peripheral vision, he could look almost normal.
“Just an Internet thing. Behind-the-scenes programming. I won’t bore you with the nerdy details.” He said he wanted to talk about her instead, the places she’d travelled. “Weren’t you recently in Greece?”
She’d put it in her Clink profile (List any recent travel destinations_____) but not that she’d gone the night Connor had ended it with her. Not how she’d grabbed her purse, her passport, and left their home in a cyclone of tears and smashed wineglasses and a desperation to scratch off her own skin. She’d hailed a taxi on the street, violent winds chucking her hair all over, and shook the whole way to the airport. There was a seat open on a flight to Athens. She’d charged it to Connor’s Visa. No, no bags to check. The woman at the desk looked at her suspiciously but handed over her boarding pass anyway. She would buy all that she needed when she arrived. A bathing suit. Underwear. Strappy sandals and a loose flowing dress and big sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Once she was in the air, drinking her second mini chardonnay, she was soothed by thoughts of stark white buildings against a blue sky and sea. This postcard vista, all she knew of Greece, was so clear and cool and uncluttered. She was convinced it would calm the simmering fury and mend the pulpy remains of her heart as she sat on a balcony with wine and cheese and olives. Salt air flowing in and out of her lungs. She’d smiled as she pictured it. She would be cleansed. Purified. Renewed. Healed.
But then she arrived and the streets were in chaos. She watched a man set himself on fire in the middle of a public square.
“I went to see the Acropolis,” she said. “The history there, and all.”
“Sure,” he said, nodding. “I get that.”
“What about you? You never said where you were in that picture. The one in your profile.”
“Madagascar,” he said. He told her about a tribe there, where, years ago, babies began to die. “The people thought they’d done something to offend the spirits,” he said. “One mother lost three in a row and when her fourth was born, she cut marks into his face to make him ugly, so the spirits wouldn’t take him away.”
“Jesus. It didn’t work, did it?”
“Well, he didn’t die, if that’s what you mean.” He speared three frites with his fork and dipped the ends in aioli. “All the mothers started to do it, so the elders made it a ceremony. They would carve a mask out of bark before each baby was born and the mother would take it and cut the same design into her newborn’s face. Each mask a different pattern. Kind of like a snowflake. They made one for me.”
Doreen shook her head. “It’s barbaric.”
“Maybe,” Sean said, pouring more wine for them both. “But when I got there, there were all these beautiful teenagers walking around with faded markings on their faces. Like the most magnificent tattoos. It would have taken your breath away.”
She liked how he’d included her in that, how she could have been there too. They sat quietly for a moment, sipping their wine and looking out the window. A woman ran past in high-heeled boots, head down as though that would keep her dry, her hair already a slick river down her slender back. Sean watched until she dipped into her car and drove away.
Anyone would look beautiful running in the rain, Doreen wanted to say. She wanted to go outside, jog back and forth in front of the window to demonstrate.
“So they all lived, then?” she asked.
“Hm?”
“You said there were all these people with scarred faces. It must have worked, then.”
He swirled his wine. “No. Lots of babies died. So, no, I guess it didn’t.”
—
“Oh my God! Doreen!” Gretchen pounced on her when she was barely through the door. “That was fucking amazing. I’m just like, wow. Wow.”
Doreen leaned Sean�
�s dripping yellow umbrella against the wall. He’d given it to her at the end of the night when they realized someone had taken hers. Easy to mistake, black like the rest. She was tingly from the champagne and wine, the cognac that had come with dessert.
“Gretch. I’m exhausted,” she said, taking off her shoes. “I promise I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
“You should see the comments!” Gretchen grabbed her hand and pulled her to the coffee table where a laptop was flipped open, the only source of light in the room. “You felt something, didn’t you? Don’t lie! Don’t lie to me. This is fucking amazing. I’m almost, like, I can’t believe you’re standing right here!”
On the screen, a man was being interviewed by a sprightly young woman with a swoosh of white-blond hair. She was leaning over the arm of her chair as if she couldn’t get close enough to him.
“So he gave her the umbrella,” the woman said. “That was just so sweet!”
“Yeah. It was a very authentic gesture. I mean, we’re thrilled.”
“I’ll say! Did you honestly think this could happen?”
He smiled, shaking his head. “This went way beyond. Way beyond our expectations.”
Tweets scrolled along the screen below them.
@stacey325: SEAN has the #humantouch! Mind blown!!
@starlightbrite: Professor! YOU ARE A GOD! #humantouch
@zach_bibleraiders: Doreen gives us all hope!! #humantouch
“Professor McGivney, let’s go back to the part just before dessert when SEAN talked about the children he’d seen in that ‘tribe’—priceless, by the way. It was like that all really happened. And the whole bit about the Internet IPO? I mean, come on. Those details! You’re really amazing!”
He waved away her praise. “Can’t take credit. SEAN’s conversation program was developed by Abe Matumbe, a postgrad in my lab. He’s a genius with nuance.”
The Dead Husband Project Page 16