Authors: Todd Babiak
Toby shrugged his shoulders. “In some ways, it’s a good deal. I could only buy a suit and a half for two thousand dollars. Hugo now has an entire closetful. And I was somewhat concerned about the clothes he came with. All those giant logos. You don’t want him to be a walking advertisement for a chain store. We don’t yet understand what that does to a person, psychologically.”
“He’s two.”
“I get that.”
“We can’t pay our mortgage this month. Do you get that?”
“I’ll write you a cheque for the clothes.”
“You can’t afford it either. I can say this with confidence, as your employer.”
Toby stopped concentrating on his mother’s worries and wishes, which transformed into a lecture on saving and spending, the nature of debt. She had failed as a mother, as a wife, as an entrepreneur. She broke down, and he hugged her, more satsuma than Old Port tonight. The loose flesh on her back. The rattle in her lungs he could not hear but, only now, feel.
“I stopped at the fire station on the way home.”
“Why? Why would you do something like that?” She broke away from him, her eyes red and small. “Why in hell?”
“I wanted to know.”
“Wanted to know what? There’s nothing to
know.
We’re just trying to get through an evening here.”
“We can help him.”
“How, precisely?”
“By getting him on the right drugs. The chief was saying—”
The boy returned, this time in the navy blue suit with a red tie, an obvious combination that reminded Toby of a bureaucrat dressing up for a meeting with the Minister of Public Works. He could practically see the identification badge around Hugo’s neck, the burgeoning pot belly, the fart jokes and fast-food lunches, the minivan.
“You need a different tie with this.”
“You do,” said Hugo, grimacing and pulling at the tie.
Toby helped him take it off and led him by the hand into the living room.
“We’ll be homeless soon,” said Karen, behind them. “Real, actual homeless people. This is how it happens.”
Toby sat in one of the navy blue recliners his parents had purchased with their modest income tax refunds in 1996 and watched Hugo try on what Edward kept calling “the new threads.” Much of it was slightly too large, but Hugo carried it well. The recliner was, traditionally, his father’s. It smelled faintly of smoke, but also of Skin Bracer aftershave and microwave popcorn. Before moving in, the last time Toby had spent an entire evening in the house was last Christmas, the night Edward learned that microwave popcorn was killing thousands of Americans. Instead of singing carols around the piano or drinking hot chocolate about the hearth, the Mushinskys drank sparkling wine in highball glasses—they had neither a piano nor a hearth, and only one champagne flute—and watched a repeat broadcast of a current affairs television show,
20/20
: “Killer Fat in Microwave Popcorn.” The program had confused Edward, and he had expressed this confusion in a dialogue with himself during a commercial break. Why would the executives of a food company endanger their customers, upon whom they relied for financial success? Yet why wouldn’t they, if they also owned pharmaceutical conglomerates and funeral homes? This dialogue had ended neutrally, in the middle of a holiday-themed advertisement for Swiffer cleaning products—“Farewell, feather duster”—and Edward vowed to continue taking microwave popcorn with his prime-time television consumption.
Toward the end of the modelling session, Hugo became increasingly uncooperative. Edward pulled clothes on and off the boy with great care, but Hugo had started to whine. It occurred to Toby that the boy had not eaten, and that a blood sugar-related episode was imminent. So he rushed into the
kitchen to heat up a few cans of tomato soup and throw a frozen pizza in the oven.
Karen watched him, leaning on the doorless jamb that separated the kitchen from the living room.
“They’re good together, Edward and Hugo.”
Toby grated extra cheese for the pizza. The large white frozen chunks that came with the product carried a distinct sadness. He wanted Karen to forget about the money, even if only for half an hour. There was a bottle of red wine on the counter, with a twist cap. He poured her a glass and handed it over.
“Your dad was good with you, too.”
“I bet he was.”
“No one loved being a dad more. Not that I ever seriously considered leaving or anything, but I remember thinking,
You can’t leave this. You just can’t.
”
Karen closed her eyes and kept them closed for some time, as she drank and Toby stirred the soup.
“Other people we knew at the time—I mean when you were little—the man was never around. He’d work all day, long hours, overtime, and then go out in the evenings, doing whatever. Seeing his friends. Volunteering. Whatever, like I say. Not Ed.”
“What was Steve Bancroft like?”
Karen flinched and sagged, a punctured tire.
“Dad talks about him.”
“Does he?” Karen looked away, watched the proceedings in the other room. Hugo was making demands. He was shouting at Edward, in English, about doing something “all by yourself.”
“Oh.” Karen pulled a square of paper from the front pocket of her jeans. “I forgot to tell you. Adam Demsky called.”
Toby abandoned the tomato soup, swiped the paper from his mother. “What did he say?”
“Nothing, really. To call him.”
“Jesus, Mom.” Toby dialled and stirred the soup. There was no answer, and Mr. Demsky had never burdened himself with a voice-mail service. The unreasonably smooth and coherent tomato soup, staple of any recession, bubbled once. Toby turned it down to simmer and, when the timer on the oven dinged, removed and sliced the pizza. He changed into a fresh shirt and one of his tier-one ties, and kissed Hugo.
Both Edward and Karen objected. “You have to eat something first.”
“No time.”
“Poney, you want to go.”
“No, Hugo, sorry. But I’ll be home soon. I’m just running a couple of errands.”
“You want to go!”
“
I
want to go.” Toby closed the insulated front door and, through it, heard Hugo break into a shriek and then a tantrum. He was tempted to stay and hold the boy, murmur sweetly and rock him back into food-related sanity. Of course, it said in one of the parenting books that one should never give in to this temptation, lest the child learn that throwing a fit is productive. Toby listened for two or three minutes, until the house on rue Collingwood was quiet again, then jogged to the Chevette. He enjoyed jogging in a suit whenever an opportunity presented itself: FBI agent.
It was just cold enough for the light rain that fell on the autoroute to transform, by the time he reached Montreal, into wet snow flurries. He parked on Elm, fixed his tie, examined his teeth, said a brief mantra three times—“Success is
mine, for I deserve it”—and crossed the deserted avenue to Mr. Demsky’s townhouse. The carvings and moulds in the stone were lit strategically with soft orange spotlights, the tiny shadows of snowflakes darting across them like aphids. Toby removed his glove and touched the doorbell button, noted its smoothness. Somewhere on the continent, a factory in what was once the outskirts of a city, now a realm of suburban development, produced doorbell buttons. Its owner was wealthy and happy, retired in Palm Beach, though the doorbell magnate feared, as he eased into sleep at night, that the industry was changing too quickly, that his children would fail. Toby pressed the beautiful button and a bell echoed within. He didn’t smile, exactly. In between smiling and not smiling, shoulders back, casual but alert.
Nothing.
Toby retreated to the Chevette and watched the late-November snow swarm the street lights of Elm Avenue for fifteen minutes. During the desperate cold snaps, Toby often found himself resenting both his ancestors and the fathers of this halting nation, who settled on Montreal as the capital of Canadian commerce and culture instead of, say, the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. But he was not a winter-hater. It was a far more fashionable season than summer, demanding two layers of elegance and creativity instead of one. Scarves alone justified living in a four-season climate. After twenty minutes, hungry and frustrated, he decided to depart. He made the same decision at about forty-five minutes, and at an hour, and at an hour and a half. Then, having invested that much time waiting to speak to Mr. Demsky in person, Toby vowed to stay all night if necessary. He had always kept a book in the BMW, a facsimile of the 1922 first edition of
Etiquette,
by
Emily Post, his progenitor and hero.
Etiquette
was the holy book of his trade, its wisdom and its truths so full and articulated with such authority that it steeled him against all critics and challengers. In his haste and his shame, he had forgotten his copy of
Etiquette
in the BMW when he returned it to the dealership, tucked in a pocket behind the passenger seat. Now, even in the absence of critics, challengers, or an audience of any sort, for two hours and seventeen minutes he longed for its return. He read sections of the Chevette’s owner’s manual, which he found in the glove box, and thought of Alicia on the day of their someday wedding in St. George’s Church on rue Stanley. He had begun to abuse himself, through his slacks, when a black Infiniti M45 with tinted windows pulled up to the townhouse and remained idling until Mr. Demsky opened the door, mid-chuckle, waved, and exited.
Toby knew better than to open his own door immediately, but he was sore from sitting and half mad from thinking. The Infiniti accelerated silently to the end of the block and turned left, into more elevated realms of Westmount. Toby opened his door and called out to Mr. Demsky, who stood directly below the street light. He blocked it with one hand.
“Yes?”
“It’s me, Tobias.” He walked across the street and noted that Mr. Demsky was looking at the Chevette. Toby walked between his former boss and his current car, to keep them separate. “Terrific evening.”
“Watch out!”
The Chevette was rolling slowly backward, down the gentle slope of Elm Avenue. Toby sprinted toward it and opened the passenger door just as the car began to pick up speed. He dove in and his jacket ripped under his right
armpit, his third ruined suit in a season. To stave off boredom, he had kept the car in place with the foot brake. Now he pulled up the emergency brake. The gear shift dug into his neck, and the driver’s seat, which contained twenty years’ worth of ass, was a cushion for his nose. At that moment, if a small animal had been in the vicinity, regardless of its cuteness, Toby would have picked it up and thrown it. He twisted so the gear shift dug deeper into his neck.
“You all right?”
Toby closed his eyes, wiped the moisture away, and waited a moment to speak.
“That was like a movie, Tobias. A really pathetic movie. One of those low-budget jobs from the Midwest.”
“Sorry.” Toby slid out of the Chevette. “I’ve surely ruined your reputation with the neighbours.”
Mr. Demsky looked around. “No one saw but me, Tobias.”
“They might have seen.”
“Fuck ‘em. How long were you waiting?”
“I don’t know. Ten minutes. I was running some errands in the neighbourhood, and since I missed your call…”
“Your reel, I packed it up and sent it to a friend in the States. There’s no guarantee. All I can really ensure is that he looks at it. But if he calls…”
Toby extended his hand for a shake. “Thank you so much, Mr. Demsky. I don’t deserve your support.”
“Shut up with that shit. It doesn’t suit either of us.”
Toby wanted to kiss Mr. Demsky, or just make a declaration.
“I’d invite you in, but I’m beat.”
“Me too. I was just about to leave.”
Mr. Demsky glanced at the Chevette again. “Everything’s okay, otherwise?”
“I’ve had some financial setbacks.”
“Right.”
“But other than that, Mr. Demsky, everything…no, everything’s really quite terrible.”
“Everything?”
He decided not to tell Mr. Demsky about Hugo.
“Good. Honestly, good, Tobias. You need to touch the bottom of the shitter for full renewal. It’s the way I felt after my wife died, like I couldn’t get any lower. I did, of course, get lower, on account of a cocaine binge I could have done without and a trip to a singles resort in Aruba for unattached Jewish baby boomers.”
Toby leaned against the Chevette, crookedly parked, and wet dust transferred to his forearm. He glanced about quickly, looking for a small dog or perhaps a bunny.
“Your advantage, today, is you have nothing holding you back. No wife, no kids, no job—sorry—in Montreal. The economy and our industry are global now. One of my colleagues in Toronto, for Christ’s sake, his son works for Al Jazeera in Qatar. Doha, Qatar, Tobias, and he’s not even hardly half an Arab. I’d give anything to trade places with you right now. Even the car, fuck it.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Demsky.”
“Just look over the hill and you’ll see a new valley.”
“All I see is a hot dog shop.”
Mr. Demsky crossed the street again, wiping the snow from his hair and from the shoulders of his black overcoat. “If I hear anything from William, I’ll let you know right away.”
“William?”
“My friend in New York.”
“Thanks again, Mr. Demsky. I can’t tell you how—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Toby waved until the door was shut, then inspected the new tear in his suit. The emergency brake debacle and his mini breakdown in the Chevette had been related to his own crisis of low blood sugar, he determined. So he parked a block away and walked east in the slush along Sherbrooke until he reached the Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition of Cuban work was either opening or closing. Men and women in suits and cocktail dresses stood in the foyer with tiny white plates and wineglasses, canapés and South African merlot, Quebec Inc. living the life he had lived up until a few weeks before. Toby walked around the corner, to the side of the building, and looked in. A man with a beard, certainly francophone, leaned in and whispered something to his companion, a tall woman with red hair tied back. In their late forties or early fifties, naturally attractive. Confident. Both of them with wedding rings. The intimacy they shared, close to the window, did not suggest the ease of marriage. Mystery juiced their lips, jumped in the black wool, shone their shoes, seduced them from their well-designed kitchens this cold night. Toby recognized several people in the room, the French culturati, and it occurred to him that Mr. Demsky, as usual, had been perfectly and brilliantly correct. There was nothing for him here anymore. He should have realized long ago that his fake name was not sufficient. These people would never accept him as one of their own. Post-disaster, none of them had sent a note or a card inquiring about his well-being.