Toby Read online

“There’s these thoughts of my dad, in the fire. I need the full treatment.”

  Alicia wiggled out of his grasp and stepped into the shower, closed the door.

  Her father was a corporate lawyer downtown, an Old Liberal from a line of Old Liberals, and her half-Japanese mother was the only living heir of a developer with significant trust accounts and real estate holdings in the Pacific Northwest. There was never any risk that Alicia would end up in an aluminum trailer on tornado alley, picking Rottweiler hair out of overcooked macaroni and cheese. Yet she did have every opportunity to be ordinary. Alicia might have taken her master’s degree in history and accompanied her mother in the Westmount world of charity, benevolence, art patronage, event planning, and non-profit board membership. She might have followed her father into the law. Instead, at twenty-four, Alicia had joined a crew of ignorant yet attractive teenagers for a two-year diploma in broadcast journalism. Toby hadn’t known Alicia at the time, but he had seen photographs of her with her classmates—Cleopatra posing with the slaves.

  By the time she joined the most-watched English-language television station in Quebec, shortly after her twenty-seventh birthday, Alicia had already read and underlined key passages in Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and hundreds of instructive biographies of powerful men and women. She kept a black moleskin notebook of collected aphorisms and truths filtered for a career in broadcasting, and read from it in bank lineups and on other occasions when regular people turned to mobile communications devices. A few months after they’d begun dating, she had allowed Toby access to the small book. Alicia had determined the rules for advancement in the television industry by studying the men and women who had thrived in the television industries of the past, people like Galileo, the courtiers of King Louis XIV, Mata Hari, and P.T. Barnum.

  Do not outperform middle managers or make your boss look lazy or ignorant, particularly if your boss is lazy or ignorant.

  Act dumb when you must, and make deliberate errors from time to time so that your boss can correct you.

  Keep your intentions secret. If you are forced into the subject of your future plans, express prosaic hopes and a profound disinterest in quick advancement.

  Never talk for the sake of talking. Only display rhetorical superiority with a leader who can benefit financially from your skills.

  Always allow, and subtly encourage, your boss to take credit for your work.

  Never discuss your accomplishments or quote from literature.

  In her time as the most-watched English-language broadcaster in Quebec, Alicia had progressed from intern to senior reporter, to backup weathergirl to weathergirl, to morning anchor to noon anchor. Only one step remained, to six o’clock, and she was desperate to make it in Montreal, then Toronto, then New York, to establish her brand before the traditional media went Tower of Babel.

  The plan was for Toby to mirror her progress, every step. A writer at one of the alternative weeklies had written an article on them, had referred to them as a power couple. This popped into his head from time to time, in the baritone of God: POWER COUPLE.

  He pulled down the seat and sat on the toilet. “We could die, any time.”

  “What?”

  “All these dangers. Physical, mental, emotional. Something could just swoop down and take us.”

  Water slapped on the floor of the shower as she washed her hair.

  “Let’s get married.”

  Nothing.

  “Alicia. Let’s get married.”

  Again she did not respond.

  “I know you don’t want kids right away. Not right away, that’s fine, fine, but someday. We’re almost forty.”

  The cleaners had not been doing a thorough job. Where tile met wall, worms of mould.

  “I love you. You love me. If we want to move to Toronto or New York, we should go. We should just get married, have a party and do it. And be happy. I just want to be happy.”

  The shower doors were glass. Alicia was shaving now.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “I was waiting for you to break into song.”

  “Come on.”

  “Is that your proposal, sitting on the toilet?”

  Toby opened the shower door and dropped to one knee.

  “You have a ring?”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “Leave me alone for five minutes, please.” She stood under a shower head, a razor in her hand, one foot on a white plastic bench. Water cascaded off her black hair. “Please?”

  “You want me to leave?”

  She looked up into the water. “We’ll talk tonight, when your drugs wear off.”

  Toby closed the shower door and changed into his suit. He began to preen, but the look of himself, in the mirror, was unbearable.

  The front door was unlatched, though Toby was certain he had locked it. The morning was sunny and warm, typically windy. Two blond girls in uniforms passed with their father, who wore a camel-hair overcoat. He had time, the father. He had been born into timelessness. His children were lovely and his shoes were well polished. Toby greeted them as they passed, and stood next to his black car, recalling the white Lexus SUV that had been parked in front of him a few hours before. A miniature tornado blew a mass of leaves and a potato chip bag down Strathcona Avenue; it stopped and settled before him, as though ashamed.

  Two

  To distract himself, Toby opened the passenger window a crack and turned up the music, a satellite channel specializing in edgy but not too edgy pop. This was what every smart commodity, cultural or otherwise, strove to be in the ascendance of his generation: edgy but not too edgy. Revolution light. It was the sound of The Man smashing himself with a hollow plastic mallet.

  The city and its fading graffiti of despair, all that he had seen before and dismissed, clawed at him. Dirty white steeples peeked up from the crusted neighbourhoods south of downtown, vainly now in the continent’s most statistically godless major city. Warehouses and factories of an economy that had gone trite, home to pigeons and the schizophrenic.

  He had come to believe that the white Lexus SUV parked in front of him on Strathcona Avenue at five thirty in the morning had been Dwayne’s. In the underground parking lot, south of René Lévesque, Toby inspected the vehicle to be sure. He was tempted to ascribe his suspicions to a cocktail of shock and guilt and NyQuil and sleeplessness, to a manufactured paranoia that would seem ridiculous in the arc lamp of sobriety. But the scenario fit, from Dwayne’s line of questioning in the bistro to the state of Alicia’s bedclothes. He sat on the rear bumper of the station manager’s Lexus until the garage door opened. A Honda Civic passed, a production assistant waved. She opened her window. “Big day!” she said. “Hey?”

  Toby drew upon all his strength and managed a thumbs-up.

  He had twenty minutes before he was set to leave, with Bruce the cameraman, to interview the Conservative candidate in the riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie. Instead of researching the hopeless candidate and his curriculum vitae, Toby hunted for Dwayne in the offices and corridors of the station, which occupied three floors of a brutalist structure in the southeast corner of downtown. Every fluorescent light had been removed from the hall of anchors. The pimple-, scar-, and wrinkle-revealing tendencies of the cheap tubes made them a grave danger to newsreaders, who share one essential and essentially dangerous trait: equal parts self-love and self-disgust. The walls were decorated with inspirational poems—If I have faltered more or less / In my great task of happiness—and faded colour photographs of sunsets, sporting victories, lone wolves, and tall poppies. Dwayne’s corner office, at the end of the hall of anchors, was empty. It was inhabited by his collection of African art and a fresh dose of his musky cologne. From his small stereo system, Marvin Gaye. The blinds were pulled down and the room was lit, tastefully, with a couple of antique lamps. Nausea swept through Toby. He had to eat.

  “Mushinsky.”

  Toby turned slowly. His hands quivered and he was certain that if he spoke his voice would be wors
e. His lips were electric.

  “You ready?” Dwayne carried a muffin and a giant coffee. “A real journalist again, after all these years. Let me see your journalist face.”

  Cuckold. Cock.

  “I wouldn’t call that a journalist face. Say, ‘Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.’”

  He had not prepared himself. Hitting Dwayne was out of the question, and he had no basis for a legal challenge. Nothing he had read in the classics of etiquette suggested the correct course for a gentleman in this situation. Pistols at dawn. Toby was certain, now, that if he were to speak he would actually begin to cry; perspiration flashed across his lower back. They had been out together as a foursome, he and Alicia and Dwayne and Dwayne’s wife, Kathia, over twenty times. Dwayne had two sons in elementary school, private school, well-mannered boys. Toby had bought them presents for their birthdays, three years in a row. Most recently, he had bought the older one a set of harmonicas in a handsome silver case.

  Dwayne sat in his leather desk chair and put his boots up. The only black man on the island of Montreal to wear cowboy boots. “Say it.”

  “Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.”

  “I don’t believe you! Where’s the ancient spirit of blood and fire?”

  “Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.”

  “One more time, brother.”

  “Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.”

  “Slightly better.” Dwayne looked at his watch, a marvel of multi-functionality designed for triathletes and Green Berets. “Did you need something?”

  In the studio, as he waited for Bruce, Toby was nearly overwhelmed by an urge to break a pane of glass. In one of his Toby a Gentleman segments, he had asked a professor at the Université de Montréal for insight into why youngsters destroyed newspaper boxes and bus shelters and, in the middle of a hockey riot, storefronts.

  “Because they have failed,” the professor, a bird-like woman with enormous spectacles, had said, “and because they know, in their hearts, they will always fail.”

  Bruce chatted with his wife on the cellphone all the way to Roslyn School, in Westmount, where the Conservative candidate planned to vote for himself and speak to the media. Bruce and his wife talked about their children. One had the flu. Three times he told his wife he loved her. Toby had planned to buy a muffin at the convenience store next to the station on their way out, but he had been too focused on the possible etymology of the word “cuckold.” A Chinese girlfriend at McGill, long ago, had said that in her language and in her country a cuckolded man “wears a green hat.” She did not know why.

  The scrum was to take place on the front lawn of the school. Toby had forgotten the name of the Conservative candidate, and no other media outlets had shown up to speak to him. Bruce had finished his call, but he didn’t know the man’s name either. It was not his job to know.

  Toby practised his introductory stand-up while Bruce adjusted the camera for the harsh morning light.

  “You don’t look so good,” Bruce said.

  “I didn’t sleep last night.”

  “There might be some makeup in the bag.”

  “I am good. I am healthy. I am right. I am strong.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  Toby said his mantra again, and again, walked in a tiny circle to banish the fire and his father, Alicia and Dwayne, to appreciate the present tense. Bruce spoke to the station through an earpiece. Their live window was only a few minutes away, so Toby had to be ready. Was he ready?

  “Ready.”

  “Did you eat anything today?”

  “Not really.”

  “I have a cookie in my bag, if it’s an emergency.”

  “Thank you, Bruce. It isn’t. We’ll be done in five minutes.”

  “It might put some colour in that bean of yours.”

  “I was wondering if I could ask you a personal question.”

  “Me?”

  “Has your wife ever, by chance, slept with another man?”

  Bruce stared at Toby for a moment, long enough to blink twice. He lifted the camera to his shoulder as a handsome black man in a suit approached, smiling artificially. He was the same height as Dwayne. A young red-haired woman hustled beside him.

  “No one else showed up?” The candidate’s teeth had been bleached for the campaign.

  His handler adjusted the Conservative Party button on his lapel. “What he means to say is thank you so much for coming.” The woman caressed her leather portfolio as though it held her up, and shook her head with affectionate exasperation.

  Bruce mumbled into the small microphone on the collar of his Century News leather jacket. He kept one eye on Toby, and it was squinting.

  “I’m fine, Bruce.” The old trees in the schoolyard, with their naked branches, beckoned. To climb the closest one, to be caressed by its fat limbs and there to sleep. He introduced himself to the candidate, a Conservative running in a safe Liberal riding. A sacrifice of some sort, to demonstrate loyalty and sincerity. It was a non-story, filler. Not long now.

  “Thirty seconds,” said Bruce.

  Isidore. The man’s name was Isidore. Toby meditated on it, so he would not forget in the middle of the interview. Dwayne and Alicia, images of them entwined in her bed, in the Jacuzzi—wet!—in his office, on his desk, that striking skin contrast, poked through his fatigue. Good, healthy, right, strong. Isidore, Isidore.

  An elderly couple, the last of the true democrats, clutched each other for support as they took tiny steps toward the school. “Are you well, Mrs. Twiss?” said the gentleman. He wore a thick, bread-coloured three-piece suit for the occasion. It had surely fit him, once.

  “I am well, Mr. Twiss. This breeze is something.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  Toby watched the Twisses all the way to the door, as Bruce counted down. He turned back to the candidate, who suffered from razor burn in the same manner as Dwayne. Dee-wayne, a hillbilly name. Under what circumstances had his parents found it appropriate?

  “Five.” Bruce counted down silently to one with his fingers.

  Toby introduced himself to the camera and briefly described his location. “I am here with Stéphane Isidore, the black candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada in Westmount-Ville-Marie.” Toby put on his smile. “Monsieur Isidore, whom did you vote for this morning?”

  “Uh, can we start over?”

  “Actually, we can’t. We’re already in the living rooms of Montreal.”

  “Well, then. I voted for myself, of course. A Conservative candidate who happens to be black. What you said—”

  “It’s interesting you bring that up, Monsieur Isidore. This is a great time, I would think, to be black and in politics. Or African-American. African-Canadian. Do we say African-Canadian?” The words arrived before Toby had a chance to filter them through the tiny engine of blandness, of artificial enthusiasm, that a television reporter cultivates. That engine, and the tone it created, was the source of his only relevant talent. And it seemed to have shut down, along with his short-term memory. Who was this man again, and why were they here? Toby was, briefly, freezing cold. Then hot. He struggled to remain standing. A squirrel flitted about on a nearby maple. To be a squirrel, just now. Looking for a nut. Dwayne and Alicia. The first time Toby and Alicia had made love, in the master bedroom of her handsome brick house in Westmount, he was shocked to hear her speak. He was not naturally inspired to speak during sexual intercourse, and up until that point he had seemed to attract only the quiet, smouldering ones. But he did not want Alicia to feel he was ignoring or abandoning her. On that first afternoon, skylight sun lent an auspicious golden tone to her skin. Toby’s skin against her skin. An unidentifiable streak of bodily fluid shone on her stomach.

  “Give it to me hard,” she said, at approximately the midpoint of their activity.

  The polished bed frame was clearly an antique, and it groaned beneath them. Toby wanted to match Alicia’s vigour, to engage her in a spirit of competition and fellow feeli
ng, yet he struggled to find the words and the intonation. It had to be more than appropriate. This was their first time, and all they said and did would resonate with them later that day, in the ensuing weeks, for the rest of their lives. Toby worried that he would seem arid or Belle Époque if he remained silent. He continued along for some time, and his mute lovemaking acquired a colour and a density. Then, just when he thought it would never arrive, the perfect phrase came to him. He summoned all his actorly vim, and manufactured a sneer that he hoped would render him both serious and surprising. He said, “Oh fuck, yeah, baby, you want me to fuck you hard?”

  Either Alicia didn’t hear it, caught up in her own reveries, or she was too embarrassed for them both to respond. To his relief, she soon began speaking again, making demands and stating conclusions, but it was thereafter clear to Toby that Alicia was not trying to make conversation. She was a sexual monologist.

  What did she say to Dwayne?

  Candidate Isidore looked at him with both confusion and mild rancour. “What are you talking about?”

  “Being black, and in politics.” Toby had to keep talking. Somehow, the tiny engine of blandness would mulch through all of this misunderstanding. “What’s it like? I mean, historically speaking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…” To lie down now, to lie in a bed of soft, red, dead leaves. The hibernating squirrel. “Look at you. You’re a handsome gentleman. The world is yours. Yours to seize.”

  “Mine?”

  “You people. All of you.”

  Candidate Isidore looked away from Toby, straight at Bruce and the camera.

  “Barack Obama, right? Rejoice. In the context of.”

  The candidate shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I don’t get this.” He looked about the schoolyard, dished a smile that was not a smile. “Can someone help me here?”

  “Election day!” Saying the words with authority summoned Toby’s engine back to life, if only on auxiliary power. His voice returned. “It’s election day here in the federal riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie. Conservative candidate Stephen—”