Why Men Lie

F
or a person who was rather private, it was startling to hear her name in such a public place.

“Effie Gillis?”

The tone was tentative, bordering on disbelief. She could have ignored it, but she turned, out of curiosity or anxiety. She was in the St. George subway station, heading home, Christmas shopping finished. It was December 19, 1997, another detail she’d remember.

She knew him right away though she hadn’t set eyes on him for decades. Campbell, JC Campbell. He was standing near the end of the east-west platform, a newspaper in his hand, smiling. She noted the glint of silver in the hair around his temples.

“My God,” she said.

They shook hands.

“It’s been, how long …”

“Twenty years, at least,” he said.

They fell silent briefly. She remembered that he’d taken a job with a television network in the United States. Something about his passport, she recalled; American employers loved the Canadian passport. It travelled better than their own because it was less
likely to provoke an inconvenient attitude at certain border crossings. She recalled a drunken farewell party at her house. It was in the Beaches, so yes, it would have been 1977. Twenty years ago, 1977, the year of raised voices, slamming doors, her child cowering underneath the kitchen table. The farewell celebration was a kind of respite.

She remembered him as being tall, but he was maybe five eleven, only slightly taller than she was. Still slim. She remembered black-framed glasses, longer hair, a mullet, maybe. Hockey player hair, they used to call it. Now the glasses were gone, presumably replaced by contact lenses. The hair was cropped short. He had the same emphatic hairline, with a hint of widow’s peak. He had the look, she thought, of a sober single man.

He smiled, narrowed his eyes. “And yourself, you and Sextus …”

She felt the blush but didn’t mind, knowing that it made her seem younger.

“Yes and no,” she said. “One of those things. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since … when was it? Seventy-seven, I believe.”

“Seventy-seven it was when I went off.”

“We split up after that,” she said. “But, miracle of miracles …” She laughed.

“I was glad to hear that you were back together,” he said. The statement seemed cautious, speculative. “Sextus and I have stayed in touch, sporadically. I felt bad when he told me you two split, back then. But he’s still—Sextus—living in Cape Breton?”

“For now. We’re trying to come up with a plan.”

“Your brother, Duncan. Still in the priesthood, I imagine?”

“Yes and no again,” she said. “He’s here in Toronto now. But still a priest. A rarity.”

“I haven’t seen Duncan since university,” he said. “And yourself, still in academe, I gather? I think Sextus told me that you got a doctorate. Tenure and the whole nine yards. Would be kind of hard to give that up.”

“And do what?” She laughed.

“Just look at you,” he said, arms held wide. “You look fantastic.”

Now he blushed. Her eyes drifted to his left hand. He was wearing gloves.

“So you’re back here now, are you? The last I heard, I think you were overseas or in the States, working in the news.”

“Still in the news, but back home,” he said. “Speaking of home, I’m just heading there. I bought a little place in lower Riverdale.”

She could have told him that she lived just three blocks away from the St. George station. It would have been appropriate, reciprocal disclosure, but something stopped her. She felt a certain freedom here and she wanted to enjoy it for a moment.

She was living in a duplex she’d rented, the ground level and second floor of an old Victorian mansion close to everything. She’d sold the big house on the Kingsway, and the transaction left her relatively wealthy. She’d been able to complete the renovation of her old home in Cape Breton, and even after that she had a nest egg that would supplement the inevitable academic pension. Or buy another house. But she didn’t want to go into that with him, how she lived or where or why. She felt oddly stimulated, talking to a stranger who was still familiar. The gloves, the haircut, the cashmere overcoat marked him as a man of style. He could have been from anywhere, the attractive man before her. She felt a mild excitement trying to recall their common past.

“So you were Christmas shopping, I imagine,” he said. The easy smile was yet another feature that was unfamiliar.

“Just on my way home,” she said. “I live nearby. So you’ve got all the shopping done already?”

“Well,” he said, “my shopping is pretty limited.”

“Yes. You reach a certain age.”

They fell silent. He was nodding, thoughtfully it seemed. And it might have ended there, but he suddenly suggested going for a drink around the corner on Prince Arthur, and she couldn’t think of a single reason to resist.

At the pub there was a Christmas party in full swing, old-timers getting plastered. He seemed to know most of them. Reporters, he confided. She had a glass of wine. He had a Guinness.

“So the man himself,” he said. “I imagine he’ll be coming up for Christmas. Or will you go down?”

“You mean Sextus?”

“Yes. Wasn’t there talk of himself moving back to the city?” His brow was furrowed, eyes innocent.

“Neither of us likes to travel much this time of year,” she said, not really answering what he was asking. “I think way too much is made of Christmas anyway. You know, it’s a manufactured feast at best … to seduce the pagans from their superstitious rituals.”

“New Year’s was the time,” he said. “
Oidhche Chaluinn
.”

“Ah. You know about it.”

“Well, of course.”

And when the waitress offered them a menu, he didn’t answer, just stared at her, waiting.

“We might as well,” she said.

JC Campbell was part of the clique from home when she and Sextus Gillis first came to Toronto, back in the early seventies. She
was a fugitive. That was how she saw herself. She needed the distractions of the unfamiliar city and would have been much happier if she’d been able to blend into an entirely new society of total strangers. But Sextus was part of an odd assortment of construction workers, miners and newspaper reporters with nothing much in common except Cape Breton and what seemed to be a mutual belief that life would always be more or less the way it was just then, a serial ceilidh with brief interruptions for recovery and as much employment as was needed to sustain it. They all seemed to be in their mid- to late twenties, all prosperous enough to have sufficient money for the basic necessities and enough left over to nearly satisfy voracious appetites for fun. Some were single, all were childless, though she was pregnant at the time.