Terminal Grill (10 page)

As we left—Matthew paying as always—he turned to me, stopping me in my tracks. “I was so lonely before I met you,” he said, “now, to be without you would …”

The pause was too pregnant, too slick. It sickened me a little. I asked him why he would worry about being without me after the elaborate plans we'd discussed for staying together for as long as possible. But he didn't answer. He just turned away and we resumed our walk.

All the snow was gone now and it had begun to rain. Side by side, very close, we walked back to my place, talked, went to bed. Everything was dreamlike and wonderful.

In the morning, Friday, a few minutes before we left, when I was once again unprepared, hurried and too stunned to refuse, Matthew asked me for another three hundred dollars.

Now, I was terrified. I could only agree. Just before asking, he had called the airport and asked the price of a ticket to Boston on the pretense of wanting to know because of our plans to fly there in three weeks.

I was so confused, so disappointed, so scared I could not speak to him as we rushed to the bank, hurrying so I wouldn't be late for work. Again, he refused to come anywhere near the building, but loitered on an opposite corner, then slunk
across the street when I came out with the cash clutched in my trembling hand as if I'd robbed instead of being robbed.

I handed him the wad. I felt a total fool, but I knew I dared not risk refusing him now for fear of what strange or ugly thing might happen if I did.

He tried to make conversation, but I just couldn't talk. A thousand thoughts spiralled in my brain while he babbled on about some man he'd met who did aerial photography. He said maybe the man would take us up in his plane. He reached into the pocket of his raincoat, which I now noticed was spotted in front, and pulled out a worn business card that had printed on it the name of some private flying outfit.

This attempt to capture my attention was totally pathetic. It was the tactic of a vagrant, of a desperate street person. I'd seen it before. Some sorry individual pulls out a letter or a photograph, grappling, by means of a grubby piece of paper, for some lost respectability, some connection with the person from whom he is begging. I could not respond at all. Even pity failed me.

We got on the subway, and, as always, Matthew sat close to me. We did not speak during the whole trip. No discussion of videos or Beethoven or sports cars or art.

When he got off at Yonge and Bloor, I got off with him. This, of course, was not our usual way, but I pretended I was upset over the prospect of quitting my job, which we had discussed and which I'd said I would do that day in order to have more time to get ready for our plans.

In fact, I got off because I wanted to kiss Matthew goodbye, to hold him one more time. I was one hundred per cent certain that I would never see him again. He had almost seven hundred dollars of my money—enough to get to Boston
and from there to Hartford with no trouble. He didn't need me for anything more.

And when we parted and he failed to say—for the only time—“I'll call you,” I was sure it was over.

I got on the train. As it pulled away, Matthew waved at me. “Goodbye forever,” I thought. “Goodbye.”

I was so certain he was gone for good.

Yet one infinitesimal part of me whispered in a voice I could not hear, only feel the vibration of deep inside. “It's not going to be as easy as that …”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

W
HEN
I
GOT TO
work I tried frantically to get a free minute to phone Ruth, and after an hour or two, I finally managed it.

When I told her about the money, she said I was hopeless and that she was ready to give up on me. Despite my distress at what she said, I didn't blame her. I felt the same way. She told me to calm down, and that after work she'd do what she could to help me out.

Somehow I got through the afternoon.

I got home and waited, sure Matthew would not call. Ruth, however, did call, and she said I should wait only a little longer, then should go out with her. She was quite certain Matthew must have left town.

I asked her to call information in Hartford to ask if there was a number listed for Matthew, figuring that even if it was unlisted, they'd tell us whether his name was in the directory.

I waited some more.

In a little while, the phone rang. It was Ruth. There was no one by Matthew's name listed in Hartford—or anywhere in the surrounding areas, either.

I decided to call the manager of the Highlander—the one who'd been so excited about Matthew—to ask him what he
knew. But he was off that night. All I could do was leave a number for him to get back to me.

Then I decided to call the police. They listened patiently to my story and told me I could have an officer come to the house and report a “suspicious person.” I just wasn't ready to do that to Matthew, whoever or whatever he was.

It got to be 8:30. Everything led to the inescapable conclusion that Matthew was gone: the money, the call to the airline he'd made that morning, the fact that he—for the only time—hadn't said he'd phone when he'd left me at the subway, the fact that indeed he hadn't called.

I changed my clothes and went out with Ruth.

We had dinner, and during it I felt calm, relieved somehow. Ruth kept saying I was taking “it” well. It seemed to me I wasn't taking “it” at all.

After dinner, we visited friends of Ruth's—lively, interesting people I'd been with and enjoyed several times before. I enjoyed them now, but I began to feel extremely tired. I also began to feel the presence of Matthew lurking somewhere, lying in wait.

Among my friend's friends, I got such an overwhelming feeling of the joys of normalcy that all I had experienced with Matthew seemed appalling and repellent in comparison. As I sat among these pleasant, ordinary people, laughing and talking, I felt a sense of longing—profound longing for the life I, too, had had less than two weeks before. I felt I had lost my life. I wanted it back.

But then I thought of the strange promises of my demon lover, thought of him beneath me in the black night swearing that we were one. I felt lost, adrift between two worlds.

When I got home, he was waiting for me, crouched in the rain, peering into my window like a mad man, swearing he could see me sleeping down in the apartment, even though I was standing beside him. He was delirious—drunk, stoned, crazy, or all three. Absurdly, he clutched in his hand a bright, crisp, new Blue Jays baseball cap.

I had a hard time convincing him that I was beside him and that there was no one beyond the window into which he kept looking. “But the light's on down there,” he kept saying. “The light's on … And the bed's all messed up. Somebody's there. Somebody's in that bed …”

I tried to soothe him, to draw him away from the window, to coax him in out of the rain. “I left the light on, myself,” I told him, “because I didn't want to come home to a dark place. And I'm the one who messed up the bed. I was taking a nap.”

He was utterly terrified, crying and shaking and insisting he had to know who it was who was down there.

“Nobody, Matthew, nobody is down there. I'm up here …”

He started to ask me where I'd been, as if it were inconceivable that I hadn't waited for him to call whenever he'd been ready to call.

“Come on,” I said, “let's get out of the rain. Let's get inside.”

“I feel so bad,” he cried, “so bad. And Monday I have to start that work. I should go home. I should just go home.”

His reference to the jingles he'd said he'd contracted to write struck me. It struck me as sounding oddly true, as if he had in fact somehow gotten that work and was now, though fairly incoherent, remembering that he'd set himself up for a
major obligation. Scared as I was myself, it struck me that if he'd made that up, if he were pretending, his mention of this now made him the most acute, sensitive, clever actor I'd ever known. Either some of the things he said were for real or else he was so consummate a performer, so keen an observer of life, that his act commanded a respect that his life never could.

I managed to calm him down only a very little, but it was enough to get him inside out of the wind and the rain.

He kept asking me where I'd been, and I kept telling him. He was shaking, but he soon took off his clothes. He would not let me touch him and kept making a strange motion with his hands and wrists, fending me off not by striking out at me but by bending his hands inward toward his chest.

He said he was terrified of me—that he didn't know who or what I was …

I pulled out the bed, helped him out of his wet clothes, and we sat side by side on the edge of the mattress. He became calmer. He'd been waiting for me, he said, for three hours at the Terminal.

I didn't even try to explain that I'd had no way of knowing he'd be there, though I did tell him I thought he was about to disappear when he'd left me at the subway that day.

“But I didn't disappear,” he said. “I'm here …”

We lay down and he became calmer still. He no longer seemed drunk or stoned. He did not smell of alcohol. In fact, he never did smell of alcohol—ever.

I told him I'd phoned Hartford and that there was nobody living there or near there who had his name.

“That's easy,” he said, “the phone is listed under my brother's name.”

I persisted. “How did you give that guy a cheque for Africa? You don't have a chequebook.”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I have a chequebook.”

“But you don't have any ID. How can you travel from here to Hartford and back with no ID? I cross the border myself all the time. You have to have ID.”

“No,” Matthew said cryptically, “it can be done without.”

I asked him question after question, and though some of his replies were very odd and made nearly no sense, he valiantly strove to come up with an excuse for every single accusation.

By now I was well aware how pathetic he was. I had long feared he was dangerous. Yet in his presence, I felt far more pity for him than fear.

He knew I had to know almost certainly that he was lying, but he knew, too, that his lies still had power over me.

I told him I couldn't stand it anymore, that unless I met the people he was supposedly staying with—though, of course, he'd still not got different clothes—unless I was actually introduced to someone who knew him, I had to assume that what he had been telling me about himself was untrue.

His immediate answer was that he didn't like the apartment where he was supposed to be staying because the neighbourhood was too full of gay men!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
T OCCURRED TO ME
, as it had before, though without my making much of it, that Matthew talked about gay men an awful lot for a man who was straight himself. There were the gay artists who were supposedly in “his” house. There were the gays in the neighbourhood of his “friends.” There was his strange comment the first night we met, a comment that came back to me later. He'd said he often spent time among handsome men.

What could all this mean?

Yet, as always seemed to happen, something distracted me from questioning him. What distracted me now was that he rolled over on his stomach as if weeping into the pillow and cried, “I should just leave. I should just go home.”

“Where, Matthew?” I asked him. “Where would you go?”

“Hartford,” was all he said.

And of course, he did not go home, he did not leave. He seemed to be crying. I lay on top of him, full of sorrow for him, knowing full well that most certainly I would soon be full of sorrow for myself.

He mumbled that he had made up his mind that he must go to Africa after all. He was sorry, he said, but that was the only answer. As he fell into the death-like stupor that, for him, passed as sleep, he quite clearly said, “Don't worry, I've spoken to my lawyer. You're taken care of. Everything I have is in your name.”

I fell in a deep sleep at once, and we didn't wake until late the next day, even though our sleep was interrupted by a knock on the door by the landlady, who needed to come down for something to do with the furnace. I told her I wasn't up yet, and we slept for hours more.

At noon, it was obvious that she wouldn't be put off, so we got up and Matthew insisted on hiding in the washroom when the landlady's boyfriend came down to check out some fuses.

A little while later, Matthew dressed and prepared to leave. I asked him what he would do that day, a little surprised that we'd not be doing something together, which seemed the natural thing for two people who'd sworn they couldn't bear to be apart until their “marriage.”

He said he was going to do some errands, then arrange for me to meet the friends I'd insisted on meeting. There had been no mention recently of the fact that Matthew, nearly two weeks after I'd met him, had never changed his clothes except to borrow my shirts and socks, though a day or two before, he'd said that he didn't want to go to his friends' place “just to change.”

As he prepared to go, there was still the tiniest shred of belief in me, but mostly I was biding my time, trying to think of a way to force him to tell me the truth about himself. Somehow I thought the truth would bring about the result I now saw as absolutely necessary: to get him away from me, away from my place, out of my life.

He promised to call at 3:30 p.m. It was now 1:30, his usual time for leaving me. Off he went.

Despite all that was going on, I calmly sat down and wrote the last chapter of my novel.

But 3:30 came and went and there was no word from Matthew.

I did, however, talk to the manager of the Highlander. I noticed, as before, what an exceptionally jumpy man he was. He was quite friendly, but I was no longer sure I should mention Matthew—and I didn't, asking him a few questions about one of the topics we'd discussed the night we'd met. He seemed quite satisfied with that.