Instead he leaned forward and gazed into the bowl of his wine goblet. “A quarter of a century ago,” he said, “when I was just out of Harvard, and the government was paying so many smart people to commit such stupid acts, I did something I should not have done.”
It was the first time she’d heard the name John Shaw.
You can see his illness, she thought now. Waves of discomfort seemed to sweep across John’s face. He clenched his teeth a moment; then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Dr. Kyriakides wants to see you,” Susan said. “The changes you’re going through aren’t necessarily irreversible.”
“He told you that?”
“He can help.”
“No,” John said.
“He told me you might react this way. But there’s no one else you can go to. And he
wants
to help.”
“I think it’s beyond that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“No offense intended. But my guess is as good as Max’s.”
“But,” Susan began, and then faltered. The pain he was suffering—if it was in fact a physical pain—overtook him again. The smile that had grown small and ironic now disappeared altogether. His knuckles whitened against the arm of the chair; his face seemed to change, as if a great variety of emotions had overtaken him, a sudden shifting… she thought of wind across a wheatfield.
She was frightened now.
She said, “What can I do? Can I help?”
He shook his head. “You can leave.”
The rejection was absolute. It hurt.
Susan said, “Well, maybe you’re right—maybe he
can’t
help.”
It was her own moment of cruelty. But it caught his attention. She persisted, “But what if you’re wrong? There’s at least a chance. Dr. Kyriakides said—”
“Fuck Dr. Kyriakides.”
Susan was quietly shocked. She stood up, blushing.
“No, wait,” John said. “Leave your number.”
“What?”
“Leave your number. Or your address, your hotel room. Write it down. There’s paper over there. I’ll call. I promise. We can talk it over. But right now—I need to be alone right now.”
She nodded, scribbled down her name and the hotel, moved to the door. She turned back with the idea of making some final entreaty, but it was pointless. He had dismissed her; she was as good as invisible. He sat with his eyes closed and his head pressed between his hands… containing himself, as if he might explode, Susan thought as she hurried down the walk into the cold October night; or shutting out the world, as if it might rush in and drown him.
Amelie Desjardins understood very quickly that she was having a bad day—and that it would only get worse.
George, the manager at the Goodtime Grill, had put her on a split shift for the week. She worked from eleven-thirty to two-thirty, took an afternoon break, then she was back from five-thirty to eight o’clock at night. Which pretty much fucks up your day, Amelie thought, since she was too tired to do much after the lunch rush except trek back to St. Jamestown for a nap—her nap having been interrupted this afternoon by the woman looking for John.
Which was mysterious in itself, and Amelie might have worried more about it… but she had other things on her mind.
First she had come in to work a little late, and George climbed down her throat about it. Then there was prep and set-up, and it seemed as if every salt shaker in the place had gone empty all at once, which was a hassle. Then Alberto, the cook, chose this terrific time to start coming on to her, and
that
was a balancing act you wouldn’t wish on a trapeze artist, because you
have
to be on good terms with the cook. A friendly cook will juggle substitutions, fill your orders fast, do you a hundred little favors that add up to tips… but when you came right down to it Amelie thought Alberto was about as oily as the deep-fat fryer, which, not coincidentally, he seldom cleaned. Alberto rolled through the steamy kitchen like a huge, sweating demiurge, when he wasn’t peeking through the door of the changing room trying to catch a waitress in her underwear. So it was “You look really good tonight, Alberto,” and winking at him, and sharing some of her tips, and then getting the hell out of his way before he could deliver one of his patented demeaning gropes. It amounted to a nasty kind of ballet, and today Amelie was just slow enough that she was forced to dislodge Alberto with her elbow—which left him in a vengeful sulk throughout the dinner rush.
Amelie was philosophical about working at the Goodtime. It was not a prestigious restaurant, but it was not a dive, either; it was a working-class wine-and-beer establishment that had been in business for thirty-five years in this location and would probably be edged out before long by the rising rents—judging by the plague of croissant houses and sushi bars that had descended on the neighborhood. At the Goodtime, there was always a fish-and-chips lunch special. Fifteen tables and a few framed photographs of the Parthenon. The walls had recently been stuccoed.
Amelie had been working at the Goodtime for almost a year now and she had a kind of seniority, for what it was worth—the newer girls would come to her with questions. But seniority counted for shit. Seniority did not prevent the occurrence of truly rotten days.
Like today, when the new girl Tracy innocently grabbed off a couple of her regulars and seated them in her own section. Like today, when she was stiffed for a tip on a big meal. Like today, when some low-life picked a busy moment to walk out on his check—which George would sometimes forgive, but, of course, not
today;
today he docked her for the bill.
It was maybe not the
worst
day Amelie had ever experienced. That honor was held by the memorable occasion on which a female customer had come in during the afternoon, ordered the Soup of the Day, meticulously garnished the soup with crushed soda crackers, then retired to the Ladies and opened her wrists. Both wrists, thoroughly and fatally. Amelie had found her there.
George told her later that this had happened four times during the history of the Goodtime and that restaurant toilets were a popular place for suicides—strange as that seemed. Well, Amelie thought, maybe a suicide doesn’t
want
a cheerful place to die. Still, she could not imagine taking her final breath in one of those grim salmon-colored stalls.
So this was a bad day, but not the
worst
day—she was consoling herself with that thought—when Tracy tapped her shoulder and said there was a call for her on the pay phone.
Bad news in itself. No one was supposed to take calls on the pay phone. She could think of only one person who would call her here.
“Thanks,” she said, and delivered an order to Alberto, then checked to see if George was hanging around before she picked up the receiver.
It was Roch.
Her intuition had been correct:
A
very
bad day.
He said, “You’re still working at that pit?”
“Listen,” Amelie said, “this is not a good time for me.”
“I haven’t called you for months.”
“You shouldn’t call me at work.”
“Then come by my place—when you get off tonight.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
Amelie realized that her hand was cramping around the receiver, that both hands were sweaty, that her voice sounded high and throttled in her own ears.
Roch said, “Don’t be so shitty to your brother,” and she recognized the tone of offhanded belligerence that was always a kind of warning signal, a red flag. She heard herself become placating:
“It’s just—it’s like I said—a bad time. I can’t talk now. Call me at home, Roch, okay?”
“You’ll be home tonight?”
“Well—” She didn’t like the way he pounced on that. “I’m not sure—”
“What, you have plans?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m living with someone.”
“What? You’re doing
what?”
The outrage and the hurt in his voice made her feel a hot rush of guilt. Crazy, of course. Why should she consult
him?
But she hadn’t. And he was family.
But she could never have told him about Benjamin. She had been hoping—in a wistful, unconscious way—that the two of them would never have to meet.
The party at Table Four was signaling for her. This was, Amelie recognized, a truly shitty day.
She forced herself to say that she was living with a guy and that it might not be all right for Roch to come over, she just couldn’t say, maybe he ought to phone up first. There was a very long silence and then Roch’s voice became very sweet, very ingratiating: “All right, look—I just want you to be happy, okay?”
“I’m serious,” Amelie insisted.
“So am I. I’d like to meet this guy.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Hey! I’ll be nice. What is it, you don’t trust me?”
“I just—well,
call
me, all right? Call me before you do anything.”
“Whatever you want.”
She waited until the line went dead, then stood with her forehead pressed against the cool glass of the enclosure. Took a breath, smoothed a wrinkle out of her uniform, forced herself to turn back toward the tables.
George was standing there—hands on his hips, a monumental frown. “You know you’re not supposed to use this phone.”
She managed, “I’m sorry.”
“By the way, the corner table? The party that was waiting for the bill? They had to leave.” Now George smiled. “Tracy took your tip.”
She was out of the place by nine.
Nine o’clock on a Friday in October and Yonge Street was crowded with the usual… well, Amelie thought of them as
types.
Street kids with leather jackets and weird haircuts. Blue-haired old ladies in miniskirts. Lots of the kind of lonely people you see scurrying past on nights like this, with no discernible destination but in a wild hurry to get there: heads down, shoulders up, mean and shy at the same time. It made her glad to have a home to head for, even if it was only a shitty apartment in St. Jamestown. Shitty but not, of course, cheap—nothing in this town was cheap.
She peered into the shop windows, trying to distract herself, but it was a chilly night and she felt intimidated by the warm glow of interiors and the orange light spilling out of bus windows as she trudged past the transit station. Nights like this had always seemed comfortless to her. You could smell winter gathering like an army just over the horizon. Nights like this, her thoughts ran in odd directions.
She thought about Roch, although she didn’t want to.
She thought about Benjamin.
Impossible to imagine the two of them together. They were so different… although (and here was the only similarity) each of them seemed to Amelie endlessly mysterious.
Roch should not have been a mystery. Roch, after all, was her brother. They shared family… if you could call it family, an absentee father and a mother who was arrested for shoplifting with such startling regularity that she had been banned from Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and Ogilvy’s. Sometimes Amelie felt as if she had been raised by a Social Welfare caseworker. She’d been fostered out twice. But the thing was, you learned to adapt.
Roch, her little brother, never did. They grew up in a rough part of Montreal and went to the kind of Catholic school where the nuns carried wooden rulers with metal edges embedded in them—in certain hands, a deadly weapon. The nuns were big on geometry and devotions. Amelie, however, had had her own agenda. In an era when the Parti Québecois was dismantling English from the official culture, Amelie had resolved to teach herself the language. Not just the debased English everybody knew; not just the English you needed to follow a few American TV shows.
Real
English. She had conceived of a destiny outside Montreal. She saw herself living in English Canada, maybe eventually the States. Doing something glamorous—she wasn’t sure what. Maybe it would involve show business. Maybe she would manage a famous rock band.
Maybe she would wait tables.
Roch was different. He never had any ambitions that Amelie could figure out. When he was real little he would follow her around as singlemindedly as a duckling; she would tow him down St. Catherine’s Street on sunny summer days, buy Cokes and hot dogs and spend the afternoon watching the Types from the steps of Christ Church Cathedral.
Roch had needed the company. He never had friends. He took a long time learning to talk and he wasn’t reading with any facility until he was in fifth grade. Roch, it turned out, was slow. Not stupid—Amelie made this important distinction—just slow. When Roch learned something, he hung on to it fiercely. But he took his time. And in that school, in that place, taking your time was a bad thing. It made you
look
stupid. Not clever-stupid or sullen-stupid or anything dignified; it made you look dog-dumb, especially if you were also small and ugly and fat. Amelie had been bruised a few times defending Roch in the schoolyard. And that was when she bothered to stand up for him. A thirteen-year-old girl sometimes doesn’t want to know when her idiot brother is catching flack. She thought of him that way, too—her idiot brother—at least sometimes.
But Roch
wasn’t
stupid, Amelie knew, and he learned a lot.
He learned not to trust anybody. He learned that you could do what you wanted, if you were big enough and strong enough.
And he learned to get mad. He had a real talent for getting mad. Pointlessly, agonizingly mad; skin-tearing mad; going home and vomiting mad.
And then, eventually, he learned something else: he learned that if you grow up a little bit, and put on some muscle, then you can inspire fear in
other people
—and oh, what an intoxicating discovery that must have been.
Amelie trudged along Wellesley into St. Jamestown, past the hookers on the comer of Parliament, thinking October-night thoughts. She stopped at a convenience store to pick up a couple of TV dinners, the three-hundred-calorie kind. She was skinny— she knew it, in an offhand way—but her reflection in the shop windows always looked fat. Mama had been fat, with a kind of listless alcoholic fatness Amelie dreaded. Amelie was young and skinny and she meant to stay that way.