Why Men Lie (11 page)

The ring, she remembered, was hidden in a drawer. Why hidden?

He stood, so she did too. The song on the radio was “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and they danced as the music filled the sudden silence of the kitchen.

“What does JC stand for?”

He stopped. “I think I hear something,” he said.

“The baby,” she whispered, stepping back. “I must …”

“Yes,” he said.

And now, as she drove to her office in a city she had mastered in the last trimester of a life that finally seemed to have a shape and content of her own designing, it seemed so odd that she’d forgotten such a moment, and so many moments like it.

In her effort to impose coherence on the subsequent events, she would recall a Friday evening sometime in mid-January. They’d eaten in a little Chinese place not far from Walden and were returning home. The meal had been subdued, as Friday evenings sometimes were. She’d had a busy week. JC seemed bored.

She recognized the set and sway of the young man’s shoulders as he hobbled toward them along Broadview, baggy pants slung
low. The fear she’d felt on Christmas Eve was instantaneous. She didn’t hear what JC said to him, but she heard the response.

“Go fuck yourself,” the young man snarled.

They stopped. JC and the young man eyed each other for a moment.

“Fuck myself?” JC said softly, as if confiding. “When there’s a cunt like you?”

The young man stiffened, hesitated, then turned and walked away. JC followed him for two paces, then stopped and watched him go. Effie felt weak. It wasn’t just the shocking word. It was the tone, the sudden menace she saw in him.

Sandy Gillis stood back, breathing heavily, though she could remember only an instant of his fury. Everything before the fury was fading quickly, a settling darkness filling in a hole where she knew there had been a paralyzing terror. Now she saw the menace prostrate on the barn floor. She wanted to go to her father, to comfort him, to reassure herself, but she knew that Sandy Gillis wouldn’t let her
.

“You’re a sick fuckin’ man,” Sandy was saying, breathing in short gasps
.

Her father’s choking turned into sobs
.

And then Sandy turned to Effie. “You go in the house … I’ll get someone to come over. Go now.”

“Don’t hurt Daddy,” she was saying
.

“You just go.”

And as she left, he said, “You don’t mention this to anybody. Remember. Not a word.”

Much later on that Friday evening, after the second nightcap and just before he returned to his sullen silence, he advised her, coldly, as she would remember it, “Just so you know, they’re like animals—they can smell fear. So, like, from now on …”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I could feel your tension, and he could too. I saw the way you looked at him.”

“You’re saying that I caused—”

“Maybe it’s time you thought about doing something to get rid of some of the baggage you’re carrying around. You’ve got more hang-ups than a cloakroom.”

He was so far over the foul line that she knew he had to be aware of his absurdity. And she knew how dangerous that made him.

“If you wanted a fight tonight, you should have had it on the street. Don’t pick on me.”

“Bullshit.”

She stood and put her glass down. “I’ll call you in the morning,” she said.

He looked away.

She didn’t call him in the morning or on the Sunday morning either. And then it was Monday again. There was more snow in the forecast. Another major blizzard moving in from somewhere, deepening the endless winter. The numbness she felt wasn’t even close to the misery she had known from past misunderstandings. She could reflect objectively on other winters in a life that was defined by isolation. A word she feared.

She wrote it down, drew a box around it. “Isolation.” Under it she wrote: “The difference between solitude and isolation is …”

She remembered from her childhood the constant wondering
about her father. When will he leave? When will he return? Two simple questions, always burdened with unbearable anxiety. That was isolation. And it was isolation when she lived with John, imprisoned in his yearning and her own. And, in a way, Toronto had been her greatest isolation, because it was impossible to understand. How could she have been so isolated while living with a million people, the whole world passing through, surrounded by her friends, her life enriched by a baby who was of her substance, dependent on her, and a man who loved and needed her? And yet she was, in those early days, more isolated than she’d ever been at home.

It came to her as she sat there in her office, in the largest city in the country, the head of a department in the country’s largest university. The difference between solitude and isolation is autonomy. And she wrote that word down and drew two boxes around it so she’d be able to remember its uncompromising challenge.

She was sitting at her kitchen table with a book. It was a school book, and it was called
Beckoning Trails.
It had a blue cover, and on it there was a man skiing. She stared through the kitchen window, imagining that the road outside was beckoning
.

Mrs. Gillis was suddenly across from her, in her father’s place. She had her coat on. She placed a hand on Effie’s hand. Effie stared at it, surprised by its warmth and softness
.

“Where do you keep the tea, dear?” Mrs. Gillis asked
.

Effie pointed to a cupboard
.

Mrs. Gillis poked inside the wood stove, moved the kettle to the front. The kettle rumbled
.

“Please stand up. I want to check your clothes,” she said
.

Effie stood
.

Mrs. Gillis knelt before her, passed a hand over the front of Effie’s skirt, lifted the skirt quickly, looked under and let it fall
.

“Okay,” she said. “You can sit now.”

“Where’s Daddy?” Effie asked
.

“They went to town.” Then, when the teacups were filled, Mrs. Gillis said, “Will you read something for me?”

Effie stared at the page, but the words were gone, replaced by ugly scratches that were meaningless. ‘ “The day is done …” ’ she managed. But she could read no more
.

Mrs. Gillis took the book. Read slowly. ‘ “The day is done, and the darkness / Falls from the wings of Night, / As a feather is wafted downward / From an eagle in his flight.’ ”

“That’s nice,” she said. “John loves that one.”

“Where’s John?”

“He isn’t home yet.”

“Read more.”

“ ‘I see the lights of the village / Gleam through the rain and the mist, / And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me / That my soul cannot resist: / A feeling of sadness and longing, / That is not akin to pain, / And resembles sorrow only / As the mist resembles the rain.’ ”

The wetness on Effie’s cheeks caught her by surprise
.

“That’s enough reading,” Mrs. Gillis said. “You come with me now. I have the supper on.”

“I have to wait for Duncan.”

“We’ll leave a note for Duncan.”

The second major snowstorm of 1999 moved in on Wednesday night. By noon on Thursday, media reports of chaos in the streets
had generated hysteria at city hall. The mayor of Toronto asked the federal government for help. The federal government, with tongue in cheek, Effie was convinced, sent in the army: four hundred soldiers armed with brooms and shovels, backed up by a mechanized brigade of snowploughs. Effie found it all hysterically funny, but she was also grateful that she was able to stay home, marking exams, while the less fortunate were forced to flounder to their dreary offices.

JC called her on the Friday night. His voice was subdued. He wasn’t feeling well, he said. A bit of flu. He was lying low, but he wanted her to know that he planned to go away on Monday for a while. Heading south.

It was a great idea, she thought, and she told him so. Cuba or Barbados would be lovely. Even just the Keys. She envied him. He corrected her: he didn’t plan to go quite that far south. He’d asked the office for a leave of absence, and they’d consented to four months. He was going to go to Texas for a week. Hang out in Huntsville, spend some time with Sam. He was going to try to get his head around what was really happening there.

“At the very least, it might be healthy to get a little perspective, spend some time with someone worse off than I am.”

She choked off the logical response: “How can you compare your life with his?” Once upon a time she would have said it, spontaneously. But she also knew that she would quickly have regretted saying it, and that the injury inflicted by her words would far exceed the insult that she felt.

She asked if he’d be coming by before he left. He didn’t think it would be wise, he said, to risk passing on whatever bug he had.

“I was out of line the other night,” he mumbled.

“I understand,” she said.

“Sometimes I’m a bit—I don’t know.”

“It’ll be okay.”

Saturday night she attended the symphony. She wasn’t particularly fond of classical music but found a deep resonance in the musical themes and rhythms of certain serious performers and composers. The program on Saturday featured violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi, and he was one of those composers who, at times, evoked a rare serenity and memories of her father seemingly transported to a place of harmony as he listened to the local fiddle players.

The invitation had come from a history professor whose husband was down with the flu and who didn’t want to waste expensive tickets. After the performance, they had a quiet drink on King Street, not far from the concert hall, then she dropped her colleague at her condo near St. Lawrence Market.

Driving up Jarvis on her way home, Effie noticed a man standing at the corner of Carlton, waiting for the light to change. Even before his face confirmed it, she knew it was JC. He’d said he was preparing to leave town, to go to Texas. He wasn’t well. Why was he there on a seedy part of Jarvis? He was a long walk from where he lived, but maybe not for a man who was working through the challenge of a mid-life crisis. She decided not to think about it any further.

But at home she felt restless. The post-concert glass of wine sat like a sour scum upon her tongue. She plugged in the kettle to boil water for a cup of tea, resolving to cut back on the alcohol intake, at least until Easter.

Suddenly she ached for Easter and the springtime. As she waited for the kettle, her gaze shifted to a calendar on the kitchen wall. December.
Long gone
, she thought. She removed the page and
stared at January 1999, trying to remember why there was a circle drawn in ink around the sixth, a Wednesday. What about the sixth? Then it came to her. Duncan had made that mark in May. The Epiphany, he said, a benchmark of some kind, a reference to her and JC Campbell.

They had made it through the summer, the ecstasy of summer, and through the blissful fall all the way to the Epiphany and then beyond. There were challenges, of course, but the basics were intact. She found great comfort in the small gestures, his sorrowful apologies, all the signals that he needed her.

She felt reassured, but she couldn’t shake a feeling that was close to dread, and she remembered Duncan’s words when he briefly visited in September—epiphany or catharsis, and that sometimes it’s easy to confuse them. The kettle squealed.

The mug was hot, the fragrance of the tea refreshing, but she couldn’t get the sight of JC Campbell off her mind. It was how forlorn he seemed. She was well aware of how defeat reshapes a man, restructures neck and shoulders, tips the face. And she saw it in the lonely-looking man on Jarvis Street, only slightly less pathetic than the spectacle she’d seen just south of there, moments earlier: a woman, or maybe just a girl, huddled in a cheap imitation leather jacket, thighs and knees pressed together below a foolishly short skirt, a hungry face lit briefly by the futile ember of a cigarette.

She listened to the silence of her home. She told herself again that there was comfort in the silence. The nurturing silence of a hard-won solitude. Autonomy. She raised the slowly cooling mug.

M
onday morning she was up with the dawn, quickly lost in essays, once again lamenting how the carelessness of language can devalue creative insights and original ideas. She found the sloppy spelling, the lazy syntax, to be deeply irritating. But it was, she acknowledged, an improvement over when she also had to deal with almost indecipherable handwriting.

She stared out a window, momentarily transported back to a shabby little schoolhouse, felt the ache of isolation, the craving for escape, and reminded herself:
This is it, this is the escape
.

“
Huh???
” she underlined with three firm strokes of the red pen. She scratched another cryptic marginal comment and then reviewed it guiltily, wondering how much of her criticism was a projection of a mood that had nothing to do with students, scholarship or literacy.