Terminal Grill (2 page)

But I'd have to have been really stupid not to have known that Neil Young was famous and that anybody who travelled with him, as this man was claiming he did, had to be pretty near famous himself.

“Neil lives in L.A. now,” he offered.

“So that's why you live in the States?” I asked, a little nervous now, but not wanting to end our conversation.

“Yes. So I'm just up here for a little while longer.”

Part of me was thinking how lucky it was to have met somebody as charming and handsome and important as this.

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE BEAUTIFUL, LIKE THE
rich, are different.

I couldn't help noticing as we spoke just how beautiful Matthew was—a white lion with a black mane. Pale, slight, but with a high-cheekboned face that seemed sometimes boyish, sometimes harshly masculine. His eyes had a startling, dark intensity that set off the wild long tumble of his black curls. He wore an impressive sweater on the front of which was embroidered a panther in dozens of subtle shades of thread, including a shot of shining gold.

When it became evident that my friends were not going to return, Matthew sort of offered in a hinting way to help me find them and I sort of hinted that I'd rather go somewhere with him. It worked. He told me he knew a little place not far away and was more or less headed that way now and that I would be welcome to come along. Again, I felt flattered. He seemed very much younger than me and very suave and very good-looking and very well-dressed in the navy raincoat he donned as we left the bar.

Out in the afternoon sun, still brilliant now at half-past six, I saw, to my surprise, that he was quite nervous. He looked at me with a sort of sidelong glance and laughed and said he liked the way the colour of my hair looked in the sun. I asked him if we should take the bus, assuming that we would, but he said he would rather take a cab and that he always took cabs when he'd been drinking a few. I thought this an odd comment from a man from out of town and wondered whether he was implying that he had a car.

We walked up Spadina just a few metres and saw an empty cab parked in front of Mr. Submarine. Matthew said that obviously the driver had gone in for a coffee and that he'd be out any minute. There was such authority in his voice that even so simple a comment seemed an impressive display.

But we waited for a bit, and the driver didn't come out, so Matthew hailed another cab. We got in, and as we sped up Spadina I felt young and free and a little wild to have gone off with a man as young and handsome and—maybe—as important as this. By the time we got to Bloor and Madison, a few minutes' drive away, I was already willing to ignore the fact that I was almost sure that Matthew had inadvertently referred to himself in the third person, as if he were not Matthew at all, or as if he had momentarily forgotten that Matthew was who he was supposed to be.

The bar he'd chosen was a very nice one I'd seen from the outside many times and had often wanted to go into, though not alone. So I'd never been. It was new, but decorated in a fairly traditional English-pub style. It was close enough to the University of Toronto to be a student/graduate bar, and it was crowded. Nonetheless, Matthew strode in with confidence and immediately found us an acceptable table. I found it reassuring that the waiters and some others in the bar seemed to nod to Matthew as if they knew him. I did not ask myself why I needed to be reassured.

We sat in the bar and talked for a very long time. I asked Matthew a few questions about his career, and again he said he was part of a back-up band that travelled everywhere with Neil Young and that they'd been in town for a total of three weeks minus the eight days they had left and that they were working on a video. He mentioned the studio—the address sounded vaguely familiar. He mentioned that a well-known children's show was finishing up taping when they had arrived to begin their shoot. I asked him if they were striking the set when his people had arrived. When I used the word “striking”—not
one the uninitiated might be expected to use—Matthew registered pleased surprise.

In the cab we had talked about the only mutual acquaintances we shared in Toronto. One was the musician who had failed to say hello to us at the wake, whose name was Dill. The other was a woman named Barbara who'd once been that musician's lover. Barbara was an eccentric and outspoken woman, a poet herself. The only other person both Matthew and I had known was the dead poet. Now as we talked, I asked him where he was staying, expecting him to name a hotel.

Instead, he spun a long tale about a magazine writer, whose name was, again, vaguely familiar, saying that the writer had asked his advice when writing a review about the work of Dill and Barbara, a review that Matthew implied was very critical of Dill, since Matthew didn't like Dill's work. He said that the writer, who, according to him, worked for a well-known Toronto magazine, was out of town and that he was staying at the home of her and her husband because it was nicer than staying at a hotel. He then smiled and added a touching little detail: he said they had a bird that he was looking after for them, a cockatiel. I didn't ask him where this apartment was, but he volunteered the information that it was near Maple Leaf Gardens.

As we spoke, Matthew kept saying he preferred not to talk about his career or his music. But he did talk a lot about many things. I was very hungry and ordered a sandwich, which I ate, and a basket of French fries, which I was too excited to eat, even though I still felt starved. Matthew ordered nothing but beer and wouldn't touch the food I'd ordered and offered to him.

On and on we talked. Mostly, I listened. When I mentioned my interest in criminology, he told me that he used to do benefit concerts in prisons. He said that one time, the band
got the time of a concert wrong and ended up at a prison one hour late only to discover that the warden had made the men put up chairs for the concert, sit in them for nearly an hour, then take them all down again—then refused under any circumstances to let the concert go on when the band arrived. He said the band was so furious about this that they tore up the town.

I was tremendously impressed not only with this story, but with the apparent sensitivity of the teller.

He told me that he no longer did benefit concerts, though, he said, he'd done Farm Aid. He said that now—and this was a recurring theme throughout our days—he was planning to go to South Africa “to educate.” He mentioned a prominent Canadian journalist and said the man had promised to keep an eye on him and to write about him if he should be killed.

I knew so little about the kind of music he claimed to be working on that to question him would have been rude. So I kept my peace, except to say I felt there were causes closer to home he could take up instead. He said nothing to that. But he did quite clearly say about going to Africa, “Matthew says it's dangerous.”

His slips into oddness, the flamboyance of his claims, and the darting intensity of his black eyes seemed to be warning me. But I have spent enough hours among poets, musicians and the marginally insane to believe it's safe to give them the benefit of the doubt. To wait for riches …

He was so confident, so intelligent and so charming that I was willing to risk his being strange. He talked a great deal about his family. He told me his oldest brother had been a hockey player. As with the story of Matthew's connection with the band he said he played with, he offered me a genealogy of hockey, eventually leading to the Hartford Whalers—of
whom I knew just as much as I knew about Neil Young. He said that his brother had retired seven years before and that Matthew had bought his house in Hartford and had lived there since. He had been raised in Toronto, he said.

I noticed as he spoke that his knowledge of Toronto and his accent seemed exactly right for the facts he was relating.

He spoke of this brother, the eldest of the four sons that made up his family, as if they had been quite close. The brother now lived in L.A. with his wife, a woman of whom Matthew clearly was not enamoured. He spoke of having visited this oldest brother often, implying in a vague way that though he hadn't seen him in a couple years, he still kept in touch with him and was closer to him than to anyone else in the family. The brother, he said, was called Daniel.

Of the next brother, Paul, he said practically nothing. Of the next, Sam, the third oldest, he said that he'd been in bad trouble with the FBI, that at one point a rich man who was his friend had bailed him out of one scrape by confronting the FBI and pretty much chasing them away from his Toronto home, where Sam was holed up. “Then,” Matthew said, “Sam met a woman—”

He leaned close to me and said, “I've never told this to anybody before, but I can talk to you. The fact is, I liked Sam's wife. I liked her so much that I felt I was in love with her myself. Not that we did anything—it was just that, well, she changed Sam's life. She changed his life completely …”

Two things struck me about this passionate revelation. The first was how desperately impressed Matthew seemed to be at the phenomenon of having one's life “changed completely.” The other was how intensely he seemed to identify with Sam. I thought again about his referring to himself in the third person. A strange, unwelcome thought flitted in and out of
my mind. The thought that maybe I should allow myself to wonder which brother my companion really was.

CHAPTER THREE

“I
WAS THE YOUNGEST
but there would have been another. When I was four my mother had a miscarriage in the driveway of our house. Sam and I saw it, but my father would never tell us what happened. After that my mother overdosed on pills and tried to kill herself. I've hated pills ever since.”

He spoke of his father's gruff domination of the family, of his mother's passivity, which greatly disturbed him. He mentioned his father's business and his special love for his grandmother, who had provided for his early musical education.

He told me about his unusual hobby. He said he was an angler—a fly-fisher. He mentioned Izaak Walton and I piped up, “author of
The Compleat Angler
.” His face lit up and he said my knowing that “blew his socks off.”

He talked and talked and I listened, enraptured. “Do you mind if I tell you something?” he said in a suddenly personal tone, and fascinated, I leaned closer.

“Of course not. What?”

He smiled as he said softly, “I didn't like the way your friends deserted you like that.”

There was something odd about the comment. I didn't understand why he should think I would mind. Except that he seemed a very polite man at all times. I thought it was
very nice of him to care enough to mention such a thing. I apologized for my friends and Matthew went on talking.

A couple of times he excused himself and disappeared off somewhere behind me, presumably to go to the washroom. So did I. And each time, I asked myself what I was doing with such a young, attractive, successful, exciting man. I wondered where this was going to lead. And then I wondered whether I cared.

He told me he was thirty-five but that most people took him to be younger. He started to explain something about his age that made it sound as though he thought I was younger than him. I stopped him with a laugh and told him, “I'm older than you. I'm forty, though with me, too, most people don't realize it.”

He laughed. We joked about Dorian Gray.

For a while a blues band played and we listened. He said he recognized one of the players as a famous old-timer. I had no way of knowing anything about the man, myself, but Matthew sounded like he knew all about him.

Hours passed. Our waitress left, Matthew paying her first for my food and our beers and his cigarettes. He wouldn't hear of my paying for anything and he seemed to have plenty of cash. Another waiter took over our table. Matthew leaned across and said to me, “You're very nice—” and of course I said, “So are you ….”

The blues band long departed, Matthew suggested we move toward the piano in the part of the room where they'd been. He wanted to play for me, as had been his intention in bringing me to that bar. Matthew signaled the waiter and told him we were moving. I wasn't sure why he did this, but it seemed like a nice touch. He was obviously a man of some polish.

We moved nearer to the piano and sat on high stools at a round table. Now, instead of being across from each other, we were side by side. I noticed that Matthew moved gradually closer and that once in a while, his thigh brushed mine. I didn't pull away.

His singing voice was wonderful—surprisingly gruff and full of some elusive emotion that teetered between pain and youthful innocence. The minute he touched the piano, he seemed lost in the music, though he had a professional's habit of looking away from the keyboard toward whatever audience might be listening. I was listening. And watching. He looked different when he played, not as handsome and somehow smaller. But he seemed more at ease with himself, too.

He sang three old traditional blues numbers, a couple of which were familiar to me. One had a line that went, “Throw your big leg over me, mama—don't know when I'm gonna feel this good again.”

I loved the sound of him. But he was rusty. Not at all like a man who'd spent the past two weeks playing in a video every day.

The people in the bar didn't seem to mind, though. They clapped and shouted out for him to play more, and when he sat down beside me again, a couple of people stopped by to tell him how much they'd enjoyed what he'd done.

He ordered more beers for us and we talked on. He told me his parents hadn't responded to him as a child and he told me, too, how he'd once taken a helicopter trip over the Grand Canyon and been so bowled over by what he saw that he'd asked his girlfriend of the time to go with him and do it again, but that she wasn't very impressed. He said that if he could have had children, he would always have been careful to respond to every single thing they showed him with enthusiasm so
that their excitement about life would never be dampened. When he spoke about children, his whole body seemed to come alive and his voice was full of feeling.