The Divide (3 page)

She put Roch out of her mind and thought about Benjamin instead, and that lightened her mood. She even managed a smile, standing at the check-out counter. Because Benjamin was the great discovery of her life.

A recent discovery.

He had come into the Goodtime just about six months ago, on one of those ugly spring days when the wind is raw and wet and just about anybody is liable to wander in off the street. She took him at first for one of those wanderers: a tall, benign-looking, shy man with a puppydog smile, his collar turned up and a black woolen cap plastered to his head. An oddball, but not a Type, exactly; he looked straight at her in a way Amelie appreciated. She remembered thinking the odds were mixed on somebody like that: he might tip generously or not at all… you could never tell.

But he did tip, and he came back the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon he was one of her regulars. He came in late one Wednesday and she told him, “I’m going off-shift—you’re late,” and he said, “Well, I’ll walk you home,” in that straight-ahead way, and Amelie said that would be all right—she didn’t even have to think about it—and pretty soon they were seeing each other. Pretty soon after that he moved out of his basement room on Bathurst and into the St. Jamestown apartment.

Benjamin was decent, well-meaning, kind.

Roch enjoyed crushing people like that.

Amelie’s smile faded.

And of course there was the other problem, which she tried not to think about, because, even among these other mysteries, it was
too
mysterious,
too
strange.

The thing about Benjamin was, he wasn’t always Benjamin.

The apartment was a mess, but it felt warm and cozy when Amelie let herself in. She kicked off her shoes, ran some hot water for the dishes, plugged a Doors tape into the stereo.

She was not deeply into Sixties rock, but there was something about Morrison: he just never sounded old-fashioned. The tape was
Strange Days;
the song that came up was “People Are Strange.” Loping drumbeat and Ray Manzarek moaning away on keyboard. That real sparse guitar sound. And Morrison’s voice doing his usual psycho-sexy thing.

Timeless. But she turned it down a little when she peeked into the bedroom and saw Benjamin asleep under the covers. He slept odd hours; that was one of the strange things about him. But she doubted the tape would wake him—he slept like a slab of granite.

Back to the dishes, Amelie thought.
Awright, yeah!
said Morrison.

And if Roch came by—

But maybe he wouldn’t. She consoled herself with that thought, bearing down with the scrub brush on one of the Chinese dragon bowls she’d bought in Chinatown. The basic fact about Roch was his unpredictability. He might say he was going to do something, but that didn’t mean shit. You never could tell.

She took some marginal comfort in these thoughts, losing herself in the rhythm of the music and the soapy smell of the hot water.

She was draining the sink when the last song, “The Music’s Over,” faded out. She heard the click of the tape as it switched off, the faint metallic transistor hiss from the speakers… and the knock at the door.

“You should have called.”

“I tried earlier. You weren’t home.” Roch stood blinking in the hallway. “You’re supposed to invite me in.”

Amelie stood aside as he came through the door.

“Place is a mess,” he observed.

“I just got home, all right?”

He shrugged and sat down.

It was six months since Amelie had seen her brother, but it was obvious he hadn’t let up on his gym work. He was six foot one, a head taller than Amelie, and his shoulders bulked out under his bomber jacket. AD the body work, however, had done nothing for his looks. His face was wide and pasty, his lips were broad. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and Amelie could see them moving there, knitting and unraveling, making fists, the fingernails digging into the palms. She told him to sit down.

He pushed aside a pile of newspapers and sprawled on the sofa.

Amelie made coffee and talked to him from the kitchen. There had been a letter from Montreal: Mama was adjusting to the new apartment even though it was smaller than the old one. Uncle Baptiste had been in town, looking for work when the Seaway trade picked up again. She kept her voice down, because it was possible even now that Benjamin might sleep through the whole thing… that Roch would say what he had to say and then leave. She pinned her hopes on that.

She poured a cup of coffee for him and one for herself and carried them into the living room. She sat opposite him in the easy chair, took a sip—bitter black coffee—and listened to the sudden silence of the room, the absence of her own voice.

Roch said, “I lost my job.”

She put her cup down. “Oh, shit.”

He waved his hand. “It was a stupid job.”

Roch had been working as a parcel clerk at the BPX depot, the last Amelie had heard. This was, frankly, not a great surprise; Roch had never been good at keeping jobs. But it was not good news, either.

She said, “You found anything else?”

“I have some leads.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged.

“You have any money?”

He said, “Is that an offer?”

“I don’t have a hell of a lot to spare.”

Roch was silent for a while. His expression was reptilian, Amelie thought, the combination of his pout and the slow, periodic blinking of his eyes. She was tempted to stare. Instead, she looked at her coffee cup.

Roch said, “You could earn some.”

“What—George is gonna raise my salary because I have an unemployed brother?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her brother paused in his blinking.
“Calyx!
Amelie, do you think I’m stupid?”

When Roch got angry he slipped into his father’s vernacular: it was
calyx
this and
tabernacle
that,
maudit ciboire de Christ
and so on. Venerable backcountry curses. She shrank down in her chair. “That’s not what I meant.”

Roch smiled. The steady semaphoring of his eyelids began again. “Waitressing is not the only way to make money.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have a problem here. I have to pay rent, you know.”

“Look, what do you want? Some cash? A loan?” She reached for her purse. “I can give you twenty.”

“Fuck that,” Roch said. “Twenty dollars? Christ!”

She waited.

He said, “Remember when we came to this city?”

Now Amelie was silent for a beat.

“Yes,” she said.

“You remember what we did then?”

Deep breath.

“Yes.”

“Maybe the time has come again.”

“No,” Amelie said.

“What?”

“I said
no!
All right? Is that clear? I won’t do it.”

“I don’t like the tone of your voice.”

“I don’t care.” She couldn’t look at him.

He said, “You don’t care that I’m broke—that I’ll be out on the street?”

“No. I meant—”

“Hey, I’m your little brother! You look after me!”

“So you want to
pimp
for me? Is that your idea of a good career move?”
Christ de calyx!
As her father might have said.

But Roch only smiled. “You can keep your day job.”

“Well,
fuck you
!”

Her reaction was involuntary. She hated him for bringing up the subject. Sure, she had done some things in the past. She was barely seventeen when they left home; Roch was younger. They slept on warehouse roofs some nights, and other nights they rented rooms in the wino hotels on Queen Street. You can’t survive on the street without doing something you don’t like. And so maybe she had done that—what he talked about—when they needed the money, and maybe once or twice just because they
wanted
the money… but that was the old days. He was crazy, coming here with a proposition like that.

So she stood up and said
fuck you
and it was a mistake, because Roch did not take well to that kind of abuse—as he had told her many times—and now
he
was standing up, inches away from her, so close she could smell the hot-metal reek of his breath. He did not blink at all. He took her wrist in a fierce grip. All that weight-lifting had made him strong.

He said, “You do it if I tell you to do it.” Then he slapped her.

The slap was painful and Amelie stumbled away from him. She caught her foot against the table supporting the stereo; she fell down hard on the floor and the tape player came tumbling down after her.
Strange Days
popped out of the cassette compartment with a streamer of tape reeling after it. Amelie closed her eyes.

Opened them, and saw Benjamin come out of the bedroom.

She looked up from the floor, blinking.

Benjamin stood in the doorway with his Levis half unbuttoned and his belt undone. He was naked from the waist up. His hair was tousled. He gave Amelie a long look and then stared at Roch. He said, “Who the hell are you?”

“Never mind,” Amelie said, “it’s nothing.” But the damage was already done.

Roch broke out into a big anticipatory grin.

“I’m her brother,” Roch said. “Who the fuck are
you?”

Benjamin stepped forward. He was as tall as Roch but less bulky —he looked emaciated by comparison. And fragile, his hairless chest exposed. He said, “I guess you were leaving.”

Amelie had never heard him talk like that before.

Roch said, “Guess again.”

Benjamin didn’t flinch. He was looking at Roch with an expression Amelie had never seen on him before, a kind of automatic and terrible contempt… which unnerved Roch, who balled his fist.

“Get out of my face,” Roch said.

“Get out of my home,” Benjamin said.

Roch drew back his fist…

But Benjamin hit him in the face.

Roch just stood there, blinking, as if he was working it out in his head:
what
happened?—
what?
—then raised his hand to his nose. It was bleeding; Roch examined the blood for a long moment. Then he drew back his fist and threw it at Benjamin in a terrible, pistoning boxer’s punch… but Benjamin moved out of the way somehow; and then Roch—who was a member of a Cabbagetown boxing club, a heavyweight—threw a couple of very serious street punches. But Benjamin just leaned around them somehow and threw a few punches of his own, little nettling jabs that infuriated the bigger man. It was crazy, Amelie thought, it was not even a fight, there was nothing fair about it; it was a humiliation. Roch was turning a bright brick red. He screamed, “Stand still, you fucking faggot!”

And Benjamin stood still, but Roch didn’t respond—couldn’t, maybe.

The expression on Benjamin’s face was terrifying. It was a cold, radiant confidence in his own supremacy, an unblinking ferocity. He moved closer to Roch now, stood so that he was separated from him by a few inches of air. Amelie imagined the space between them as white-hot, flashing with some kind of invisible lightning. She could not see all of Benjamin’s face now but she could see Roch’s, and she was stunned by the fear he began suddenly to radiate. Staring into Benjamin’s eyes and seeing… what?

Something awful.

Benjamin said one word, very low; Amelie thought it was, “Leave.”

Roch turned away like a whipped child and lurched to the door.

Before he left he turned and pointed a trembling finger down at Amelie. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

“You,” he said. “You …
cunt
…”

And then fled.

And Amelie turned to look at Benjamin, and understood all at once what had happened:

He
wasn’t
Benjamin right now.

He was John.

He looked down at her in that way she hated, a mixture of pity and condescension at the back of his eyes. He started to say something—it might have been “I’m sorry.”

“Get out,” Amelie said. She was embarrassed, hurt, humiliated —she couldn’t stand him looking at her. “Just leave.”

His eyes lingered a moment longer. Then he nodded.

He went back to the bedroom for a shirt and a jacket, and then he left… but he stopped on the way out and picked up something that had slipped off the lampstand during his fight with Roch. It looked like a scrap of paper, Amelie thought… with maybe a phone number written on it.

It was near midnight when John called.

Susan had eaten dinner at the hotel coffee shop and had come back to her room to read, hiding from this strange city in the pages of a book. She had a Joyce Carol Oates novel and a Travis McGee mystery, both from the paperback rack in the lobby. She loved to read, and after her father’s death she had thought about giving up the sciences and starting over as an English major. She decided against it for a couple of reasons. Her taste in reading was way too catholic—she read Faulkner and Stephen King with approximately equal relish. And she was afraid of destroying the pleasure she took in these books. Susan was not analytical about fiction; she had been twelve years old before she understood that books had
writers,
that they had to be manufactured, somehow, like shoes. Better not to inquire too closely into cherished illusions.… They were fragile.

Tonight the Joyce Carol Oates seemed a little too architectural; she slipped into the welcoming embrace of Travis McGee. Old Travis had mellowed a lot in his later books. He had more second thoughts these days. She liked that.

With the drapes open she curled up in bed, propped up with pillows behind her and a view of the city lights running north to the horizon. She was three chapters into the book and inclining toward sleep when the phone rang.

She picked it up expecting Dr. Kyriakides, but it was late for him to be calling; she couldn’t place the voice at first.

“John Shaw,” he said.

Well—obviously. But he sounded younger on the phone. You couldn’t see his eyes; his eyes were ancient.

Susan struggled to assemble her thoughts. “I’m glad you called—”