Toby (20 page)

Edward’s fate and, now, the repudiation of what he had seen as his life’s work, his contribution, were too much to consider, let alone discuss with Randall and Garrett. So Toby entrusted Hugo to them and went outside with a glass of wine. The garden light was weak but ample for his task: lighting the barbecue.

The instructions had faded long ago, but Toby understood the principles. One turned on the propane and the burners. Then one made fire and introduced fire to the propane. It was common family knowledge that the automatic lighting mechanism on the barbecue had worked for one week; thereafter, Edward had used matches. The matchbook Toby had found in the kitchen cupboard advertised the American Hotel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. On the cover was a photograph of the hotel, which appeared historic, a couple arm in arm out front, dressed in bell-bottoms and flamboyant hats. The colours were unnatural.

Toby practised with a match. The last time he had lit one was for
Toby a Gentleman,
an episode about how to be dashing around an intended who smokes. The match did what matches are supposed to do, so he turned on the propane and opened the burners. He stepped back and dropped the matchbook into a shallow puddle of meltwater. Toby wiped the matchbook on the grass and pulled off a match. He could smell the gas now. The first match didn’t light. Neither did the second. It was decision time: make fire and light the barbecue or turn it off and regroup. Match number three lit, and Toby tossed it into the barbecue. Flames shot up with a
whoomp,
high enough to make the cable line to the house shiver. Something on Toby’s face had singed and now smelled.

It did not feel like a winter night, but cold air did rise off the new snow. Toby stood in his Paul Smith suit, the one with the hole in the knee, and stared at the flickering orange and red inside the black barbecue. Through the windows of the house, he could hear Randall and Hugo engaging in the art of medieval Japanese assassination; upon seeing them, Hugo had insisted on donning his ninja costume. Toby gulped his wine and tossed the glass against the side of the garage. It shattered with a high-pitched whisper. He looked around; there was nothing else to throw but the barbecue sauce and smoked gouda he had prepared, so he reached down and slid his finger into the knee hole and pulled up.

The young woman wanted
the handsome man to leave. Go, she said. It rained outside the stone house, in the valley. Sheep and goats wandered past olive and fruit trees, and there were bells around the goats’ hard necks. The handsome man was American, and the woman was Mediterranean, or seemed so. Slim, dark-skinned, large-eyed. There was something primitive about her; perhaps she lacked the capacity to understand political stories in the newspaper. Her fingers were long and thin. They covered her enormous brown eyes because she did not want the handsome American to see her, to witness and enjoy the pain he had caused her. The American smoked a cigarette and looked away. The valley, where he looked, was drunk with green. A gentle fog obscured the hills. Two fighter jets passed overhead. The man dropped his cigarette, stomped it out, winked at the woman, and walked out the door. She fell to her knees.

Toby watched the American reject the woman on a miniature television. It hung over his father’s hospital bed from a rotating arm attached to the brick wall. His first coherent
thought was that he longed to be in the valley with her, that he longed to be the handsome American just as all Canadian men long to be the handsome American. The smell of disinfectant and pudding faded, the tube below the bed, unhidden by covers, filled with blood and shit, blessedly faded.

Karen walked into the room, holding the ninja’s hand.

“Poney! Édouard!”

Toby touched his finger to his lips. It was a vast room in the oncology ward, a recovery area with six beds. Of the four who had been in for treatments, only Edward was awake—and barely. His eyes opened slowly.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, to no one in particular.

It had begun in his lungs and had spread up and down. In the two weeks since Edward’s diagnosis, the radiation treatments had diminished the tumours in his brain somewhat, alleviating the pressure. Already he was more like himself—himself on a fixed diet of morphine. His doctors had warned that the mood changes were unpredictable; some patients in his situation turned petulant and cruel. Others seemed to understand the fix they were in, and in the act of resignation they were more philosophical, more festive and amiable than usual.

It was dark but not late, rush hour on a cloudy day. Cars hummed and honked five storeys below. On the rolling table near the window stood a tall vase of smoked glass filled with yellow freesia. The flowers were from Steve Bancroft, a fact that Karen and Toby had agreed to keep a secret from Edward.

Toby’s BlackBerry bleeped quietly in his bag. The sound had become distressingly rare since October.

“Is that your phone?”

“It is.”

“Shouldn’t you get it?”

He wanted to devour it. “I don’t want to be a boor. I’m in my dad’s—”

“Go answer the phone.”

Toby locked himself in the first private washroom he found and listened to his voice mail. The BlackBerry had been in his satchel all day, where its regular bleeping had apparently been muffled by the four handkerchiefs he had carried since Edward’s diagnosis, just in case. There were two businesslike messages from Mr. Demsky’s assistant, the woman he had met in the townhouse. The third was more informal. “Adam—Mr. Demsky—really wants to speak to you. It affects his travel plans in the go-forward. Please call at your first opportunity.”

Two voice mails followed from Mr. Demsky himself. The first was short: “Where the hell are you? Call me, Tobias, soon as you can. Business hours.” The second was more contemplative. “I don’t know how any member of your generation can be away from his phone for so long. If it weren’t so damned annoying at the moment, I’d admire you for this. But I cannot bring myself to do that, because, frankly, I want to track you down and slap you for leaving me hanging all afternoon. You try to do something generous, and this, this is how you’re rewarded. Like a stepchild he treats me.”

“Adam,” said the assistant, in the background.

“Like a stepchild!”

Toby dialled Mr. Demsky’s home office number, and his assistant answered.

“
Bonjour, Madame.
This is Tobias Ménard phoning. I understand Mr. Demsky has an interest in speaking to me.”

A moment or two passed. Then: “Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell for this. This uncertainty!”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Demsky.”

“You know what I had to do?”

“No.”

“I had to book meetings for you, and a flight. I had to, and I happen to be the semi-retired president and CEO of a small but profitable media company. Maybe the only profitable media company left on the continent. Do you know why I did it?”

“No, sir.”

“‘Sir,’ he calls me. I did it because I can’t help but give. Give and give and give.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My old friend, William Kingston, liked your reel. He wants you to adapt the gentleman business for the Americans. He’s not willing to sign on to anything, yet. He wants his staff to meet you first.”

Toby pulled down the toilet seat and sat down. He didn’t even look to see if he was touching urine or pubic hairs. Mr. Demsky’s friend William was
William Kingston,
the president of ABS. He had heard William Kingston speak once, during the industry run-up to Canada’s gloomy television awards show. There was that something about him, that easy and expansive confidence, that quality a Canadian who loves his country but hates himself just a little for living in it always recognizes. No amount of money or education could allow someone like Toby to approach a man like William Kingston in style, in poise, in elegance, in authority. Kingston possessed a middle-aged assurance so natural and so healthful it defied easy comprehension. Generations of gentlemen had come
before him, and he himself had absorbed all that he knew—from private schools in New England and Europe, surely, but also from his father and his grandfather and from every other man with several sets of meaningful cufflinks he would have encountered in his formative years.

“Jesus.”

“Jesus can’t help you.”

“Mr. Demsky. This is the most—”

“Clam up. Just tell me you’re free tomorrow at nine thirty. That’s when we fly out.”

Toby had been congratulating himself for not having a job, for having this time with his father. Yet his little black book of aphorisms only had one entry so far, and it was a piece of wisdom adapted from Mr. Demsky: beast of ambition.

“Two nights.”

“Mr. Demsky, I—”

“Stop.”

Mr. Demsky insisted on picking him up in the morning, and took his parents’ address before Toby could invent an excuse to meet at the mall. The phone silent, he sat on the toilet and stared at the fading off-white of the washroom wall. The men who had built the hospital were dead by now. Its doctors and nurses, thousands of them, worked nobly to save and sustain human life, to preserve dignity in death—and all but a few of them were forgotten. Montrealers worth remembering were remembered for other acts, other trajectories and pointless sacrifices: hockey, religion, movie soundtracks, politics.

His shoes clicked along the empty halls of the dinnertime hospital. It was quiet, as ever, in his father’s room. A
young woman, hardly older than a teenager, lay in the bed across from Edward’s. She reached out to Toby. Her head was perfectly tiny and hairless. “Nurse,” she said, in a voice so meek he was surprised to have heard it.

“We already called for one,” said Karen, leaning on a heater. Hugo was on the floor at the foot of Edward’s bed, flipping through a book, mere feet from the tube of blood and shit.

“Is he asleep?”

“In and out. What should we do for dinner?”

“We could eat here again. Or you could take Hugo home, if you want. I could stay with Dad awhile.”

“Could,” said Karen.

Toby had planned to tell his mother now. But he could not summon the vocabulary. “You haven’t been home much. You need sleep, and a shower.”

“True.”

“I’ll stay with him for a couple of hours. But you’ll have to take the Chevette, the way the Westchester’s strapped in. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a car.”

Karen kissed her husband and whispered in his ear, took Hugo’s hand, and rounded the corner.

For the last several months, Edward had been in ferocious pain—blood in his urine, blood in his stool, headaches, abdominal cramps. In April he had seen the family doctor in Dollard, Dr. Smythe, who had arranged blood tests and diagnostic analyses. Edward had avoided the tests. For the pain, he had been doubling up on over-the-counter extra-strength ibuprofen and mixing it with alcohol. Neither Karen nor Toby could recall more than two or three instances when
Edward had actually complained since the spring, when the symptoms had become—according to Dr. Smythe, who had met them at the Montreal General in a state of defensiveness and regret—unbearable.

Up in Edward’s airless room, Toby waited until eight o’clock for his father to wake up. A home decorating program was on, and its level of audience participation gave Toby an idea or two for New York. This show was boring, though, and the host was too loud and too gay.

“You’re going home?” Edward’s eyes opened slowly.

“Yes.”

“Thank you. For being here.”

“I’m so sorry I—”

“Think good thoughts.”

Toby was stricken with good thoughts, and he wanted to express them somehow, but there were five other patients in the room. The young girl with the tiny head had visitors: her parents and what appeared to be a teenage brother, who guffawed nervously every few minutes.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Come back.”

“Done.”

“And remember what I told you.”

Toby mimed taking notes.

His father sneaked a hand out from the covers, and Toby took it: a dark hand, big fingers, wedding ring, cuticles always immaculately cared for, burn streaks.

He had never liked beets, Edward Mushinsky, despite his connections with Eastern Europe and, more recently, his fractional Jewishness. Borscht, never. He could not smell a pickled beet, lest he retch, but he could eat the mould off a
muffin, a piece of bread, a brick of cheddar cheese. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, after he and Karen had been to a party together, or out for a rare meal at a restaurant, Edward would drink a large glass of beer and tomato juice to splash his hangover away. When membership in the Royal Canadian Legion was diminishing, they opened it up to relatives of veterans. Edward joined, and on Saturday afternoons they would go to the hall in Lachine for the meat draw. On summer weekends, he liked to wear shorts. But at the Legion there was a dress code. To conform, just barely, Edward would wear blue short shorts, navy knee-high socks, and a pair of leatherette slip-on dress shoes. At weddings he would dance so vigorously that sweat stains would appear under his arms and in a winged pattern on his back, soaking the poly-cotton blend of his faded shirts. “Hey, hey, hey,” he would say, stomping one foot and clapping his hands. Midway through Toby’s one disastrous year in organized hockey, in grade six, the team had travelled to Hull for a weekend tournament. Edward and the father of another inferior player, Georges Tremblay, drank a bottle and a half of Bailey’s Irish Cream over the course of Saturday, and screamed and danced in the stands. They were quietly escorted out of the evening banquet for spooking some of the children. Christmas was his mother’s time. She bought the presents, wrapped them, and decorated the tree. But every year, his father would buy one thing for each of them and present it on Christmas Eve. These unwrapped gifts included flashlights that were also bookmarks, mobile battery packs, laser pointers for corporate presentations, flashlights that twisted like snakes, scissors that were designed to open hard plastic packaging, compact stepladders, sweatshirts that commemorated the Canadian
team’s participation in the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, heated seat covers for the car, cordless drills, and flashlights that one attached to one’s forehead. Never once had Toby used one of these gifts, but he had kept them, like talismans. When Toby was small and could not sleep, his father would come in and rub his back and sing “You Are My Sunshine” in a soft voice, and he would stay until Toby could not remember him leaving.

If there were only some way to express all this without saying it aloud.

“I’ll come back.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

“I am so proud.”

Toby was prepared to outline the ways and means in which he had wronged his father, from elementary school all the way up to the previous week. “I’m regretful, Dad.”

“Shh.”

“When I saw you in the car, burning up, I wanted to pull you out.”

“You did. You did pull me out. You pulled me out.”

“I was a coward. I am a coward.”

“Good thoughts.”

Toby kissed his hand.

“You better go.”

“I’ll stay awhile longer.”

“We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

As he walked, Toby stared down at the fifty-year-old tiles on the floor, decorated with squiggles—the fucking squiggle-maker had probably lived to be 104—until he found
the washroom. He splashed water on his face and stared at himself in the mirror. There was a rogue grey hair on his left eyebrow, long and kinked. He pulled it out. The counter was riddled with drops and pools of water. Empty soap dispenser. Dirty mirror. An ungrammatical sign urging everyone to wash their hands, singular subject and plural pronoun, to avoid gender-specific language. The secret damage of this.

It was eight fifteen, so he drove first to Boutique Jean-François. He bought three new shirts and a pair of meaningful cufflinks, black and silver. The shop smelled of new fabric unleashed, quality cologne, the latest in cleansers.

When Toby arrived at home, it was forty minutes past Hugo’s bedtime. The boy was still awake, sitting up in his pyjamas and babbling. Toby hugged him and kissed him and implored him to sleep, rubbed his back and attempted to sing “You Are My Sunshine.” He didn’t remember anything after “
Please don’t take my sunshine away,
” so he started over and repeated himself until Hugo was asleep.

Karen sat in the living room, a bottle of Alsatian white wine on the coffee table, the glass a small fishbowl in her hand. “Want a drink?”