Authors: Anthony Bidulka
We entered the hospital room, and for a moment I was transfixed by Ethan’s face; eyes closed, innocent, peaceful, beautiful like a sleeping giant in repose. Everything about him was strong and big and husky, yet achingly helpless here in a hospital room with tubes sticking out of his thick arms. Drawn to the chair next to his bed, like the prince drawn to Sleeping Beauty, I lowered myself into it. I reached out for Ethan’s hand, which sat motionless at his side, and covered it with my own. I felt comforted by the fact that it was warm and soft and pulsing with life. I watched in hope as his eyelids fluttered then slowly opened. Despite the drabness of the surroundings and paleness of his face, his dark eyes seemed to shimmer like melting chocolate. In slow motion, the corners of his mouth turned up and he opened his lips and whispered my name: “Russell.”
For some reason unknown to me I was struck dumb.
“How are you today, Ethan?” Anthony asked, leaning over my left shoulder where he’d placed a hand.
Ethan’s eyes moved to Anthony. “I’m good. Ready to go home,” he said in a weak voice that trembled with the truth. He wasn’t well yet.
“The doctor says maybe early next week. It seems the swelling in your old noggin has finally come down,” Anthony said gently. “About time.”
“Frank says everything in the house is going fine. So fine in fact, they may ask you to move out when you get back.”
Ethan’s face broke into a wide smile that sprouted dimples in his cheeks and turned his eyes into horizontal half moons.
“Gentlemen,” a voice behind us said. “It’s time to go. The patient needs his rest.”
“Do you need anything?” Anthony asked. “I’m going to bring by some magazines-
Vanity Fair, The
Advocate
okay?-and a sweater to cover this god awful sackcloth they dress you sick people in. Tomorrow maybe? Or are you busy?”
That was good for another good-humoured smirk. Ethan’s eyes fell back onto mine and he thanked me for visiting him. I squeezed his hand and left without saying one word the entire time we were in the room.
“What are you doing here?”
He recognized me. How sweet. Allan Dartmouth lived in Stonebridge, in a house so new the stucco was still wet. As he stood there at his door, which was painted a brazen shade of orange, I could see his eyes worrying as they surveyed me and the street behind me. In his right hand he held a delicate pair of reading glasses that had probably set him back a couple of hundred bucks, even though they didn’t look much different from the $34.95 version at Shoppers Drug Mart.
“I was wondering if you own a current year Lincoln Navigator, black, licence plate number 131 KGS?”
He frowned, not quite sure what I was getting at. “What are you talking about? Why do you want to 148 of 170
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know about my Navigator?”
It was cold standing out there on his fine, new stoop, but I wasn’t holding my breath until I got an invitation inside. “I was just wondering if I could get a ride from you? No? Maybe if I put on a balaclava, spoke like Sylvester Stallone, threatened a local private investigator?”
It was fascinating to watch his face. Irritation turned to confusion then to curiosity which slowly, inexorably, dissolved into fear. He knew I had him. The successful, upstanding, respected massage therapist had been caught hiring a thug to scare me off. The question was why. I think I knew the answer.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had to try. He really did. It just wasn’t a very convincing try, especially with the fine sheen of sweat now covering his expansive forehead.
“I have to tell you, Allan, you surprised me,” I said (and actually meant it). “I didn’t expect a mild-mannered masseur would be so ballsy as to hire a no-neck to try and scare me off from finding Matthew Ridge. But I suppose,” I hesitated here for drama. “Once a bully, always a bully.”
He checked over his sweatered shoulder, probably for a wife or kid, then looked back at me with hate in his eyes. But I guess a cat had his tongue because he didn’t say much.
“I had to wonder why,” I continued on. “Why would this guy go to such extreme lengths to convince me not to dig up the past? Had to be because he didn’t want something from the past to mess up his future. That about right?”
He shook his head as if not quite believing what was happening to him on the expensive doorstep his future was meant to pay for.
“That something is named Robin Haywood, isn’t it?”
Allan Darmouth had lied to me. He indeed had spent time with his buddy Matthew Ridge the summer before Matthew was sent away; specifically one horrible, alcohol-and-drug fueled night, in a neighbourhood park where Robin Haywood had the great misfortune of being at the same time as Matthew and his gang. Allan Dartmouth had been one of the posse that had beaten up the defenceless boy.
It was an event so horrific and reviled-and therefore of great interest to a public insatiably curious about such things-that it spent many months on the front pages of Saskatchewan newspapers. Allan Dartmouth had done everything he could in the intervening years to distance himself from the infamous story and his involvement in it. After all, who wanted to have the same hands that once bashed the body of a teenage boy caressing your back and shoulders?
I couldn’t blame him for hoping he’d never have to face judgment from his clients-his wife? his kids?-over what happened that night. For all I knew (and hoped) he’d paid for it in other ways over the years. It was obvious to me that my stirring things up would not be a popular turn of events in Dartmouth’s lily-white, new life. What wasn’t obvious, however, was how far he’d go to bury the truth.
One of the things I’ve learned in my career, first as a policeman and then as a private detective, is never to judge a book by its cover. By all appearances, Allan Dartmouth was a nebbishy, WASPy, white-collar, clean fingernails kind of guy, who probably coached his son’s hockey team and chaired a host of charity boards and committees. But there was a rigid rod of cold steel running down his spine, and at that moment, he showed me a glint of that metal through slitted eyes as he murmured, with teeth clenched tight, the well-known phrase, “Fuck you.”
And then he slammed that bright orange door in my face.
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“I know Jared asked you to help him convince me to end our relationship.”
We were at a private table in a dark corner of a popular downtown restaurant, 2nd Avenue Grill, renowned for its martini menu, and boy did we need some of those. I was having an old favourite, a Red Apple martini, while Anthony was sticking with the classic: straight-up Bombay, sniff of vermouth, and some olives.
“He told you?” I said. “Or did Barbra and Brutus spill the beans? Damn dogs, they’ll say anything for a couple of Snausages,” I added with a levity that wasn’t called for.
“I can’t believe you spoke of this in front of the children,” Anthony shot back gamely.
“I’m sorry, Anthony.”
“For what?”
“This is serious. I’m sorry about what you and Jared are going through. And I’m sorry I left things with Jared the way I did. He must be pretty angry with me.”
“Of course he isn’t. Jared doesn’t get angry. Or if he does, it lasts about as long as cheap lipstick.”
Anthony was right. Jared Lowe has a sweet disposition. “I suppose none of us can know what it feels like to go through what he’s had to go through since…since he had his face taken away.” I swallowed a mouthful of Red Apple. “God, it makes me so sad, and mad, to think about it. What must he be feeling?
And you, Anthony, this isn’t easy on you either. As much as I hate it, and I know it’s wrong, I can understand, a little, why Jared would think it would be best to end your relationship.”
“Can you? Can you really?”
I heard something new in Anthony’s voice, something I’d never heard from him before in the many years I’d known him: a mocking, acerbic lilt, as if challenging me to take him on in a verbal battle he knew he’d never allow me to win.
“I don’t mean it that way, Anthony,” I quickly added, flinching at the tight look on his face. “I don’t know what the two of you have gone through but…”
“This is all so ridiculous, absolutely ludicrous, I can hardly believe it’s happening,” he shot back. As he loosened control over his usually impeccable diction, his English accent grew thicker. “I am fifty-six years old, Russell. Fifty-six!”
“Oh, but look at you, you look fant…”
“Shut up, puppy.”
I was ever so glad he added the “puppy”.
“Save me the platitudes. I’m fifty-six years old. Jared is thirty-two. We’ve been together eight years.
And for eight years I have wondered almost every day when he would leave me because of the way I looked, because I’d grown too old, because the wrinkles around my eyes and on my forehead were too deep, my chest dropped too low, my belly wasn’t tight enough, my ass too droopy, my hair grown too thin, my mind too slow, my joints too sore. And you know, Russell, I was ready for that. I’ve been preparing for it. I could understand it, accept it; it just makes sense.” He sipped his drink with the finesse of a well-rehearsed martini drinker. “When he’s my age now, I’ll be eighty years old, for goodness sake. Yet now…now…can you believe it?...he wants to end the relationship because of how
he
looks! How dare he, the little shit!”
Anthony once again artfully raised his martini glass so that it sat just above nose level, hesitating before 150 of 170
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taking a drink, his eyes swimming across the shimmering expanse to meet mine. I knew enough not to say anything.
A dark-eyed server approached our table and asked if we needed refills. He seemed particularly taken-as many people, men and women both, are-with Anthony’s screen idol good looks. Anthony did this nod thing that I guess is the international signal for “God, yes, keep them coming” and the young man strode away to fill our order.
Placing a hand over mine, a magnificent amethyst ring sparkling from his third finger, Anthony said in a voice that was half-whisper, half-throttled cry, “You’re going to think this despi-cable-and it is despicable, hideous really-but, God forgive me, Russell, I almost prefer it.”
My brow lowered as I tried to comprehend what my friend was saying. “You prefer…what?”
“The way he looks now.”
I recoiled at the notion. “Anthony…” And that was all I could think of to say.
“Ghastly, I know,” he said. “Didn’t I warn you? But it’s not as it sounds, really it isn’t. I would never have wished this on Jared; I would give anything, my life, I would give my life, truly, if it meant that this hadn’t had to happen to him. Not only the horror and pain of the actual act-and believe me, I have spent many hours torturing myself, thinking about what he must have gone through in those moments after that…that creature threw acid in his beautiful face…God, Russell, I can sometimes hardly bear the thought of my sweet, sweet Jared in such agony-and then there’s all the pain he’s had to go through since, learning how to live with his deformity, learning how to live with people’s reaction when they see his scarred face. It’s so torturously difficult for him. So no, I’m never glad for that.
“But, but, oh how do I say this? And I‘d only say it to you…” And here he stopped and regarded me with the intensity of a million pairs of eyes.
I nodded my assurance that this conversation would remain between only us, just as so many before it had.
“If it
had
to happen-regardless of anything I might do or wish or think-I…I prefer this new Jared to his former magnificence.”
For a full moment there was silence between us. I looked at him. He looked at me.
“It’s selfish, I know,” he uttered, “but you see, it is so much easier for me.”
“Easier?” I could only manage a whisper. “How can this possibly be easier, Anthony?”
“Jared and I were first attracted to one another because of how we looked. It’s the truth. There’s no denying that. But when you are in love with a beautiful man, although everyone around you continues to see that same intensity of beauty every time they see him, you begin to see only what is inside. The shell, that lovely wrapping paper, becomes less and less important until finally, you no longer notice it. You see, Russell, I don’t need Jared’s lion-cat eyes, his perfect olive skin, his golden locks, his impeccably designed body, in order to love him, not anymore. I know it must sound inexcusably corny,” he said with a hard smile, “and I can’t believe it is coming from these lips, but all I need is what is inside.
“Over these past months, as we’ve been dealing with all of this, the physical and mental repercussions of the attack, the doctors, even though there has been much distress and anger and sadness, I’ve been having this…this feeling, a sensation I could not for the life of me identify. Until recently. Do you know what it is, Russell?”
I shook my head.
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“Relief, Russell, blessed relief. Like that of a one-thousand-pound weight being lifted from my back. I feel at ease with myself and my age and what my body is becoming. I have stopped wondering about when Jared might leave me because of how I look. And by learning this about myself, about how little exterior appearances really matter to me now, including my own, I see it in him too. The state of his current exterior means nothing to me. Does any of this make sense?”
“Anthony, can I ask you a question?”
“What is it?”
“Did you ever-knowing Jared as well as you do, loving each other as you have-
really
expect that he would wake up one day, take one look at you, and say, I’m sorry but it’s over now?”
He held my gaze for nearly thirty seconds-a long time if you count it out-before finally speaking. “No.
To be truthful, I always believed we’d find a way to work it out. That we’d realize what everyone the world over hopes is true, but never knows for sure until something happens to test it, that we’d find out that indeed- oh gracious, save me, Russell, but I’m about to spout even more cliché-we’d find out that love truly does conquer all.”