Toby Read online

  “It sounds like an adjective.”

  “A Toby, Mr. Demsky, is a coffee mug in the shape of a man’s head. With a three-cornered fisherman’s hat on it. Now, if you will excuse me.”

  “Your parents named you after a coffee mug.”

  “It was coincidental. It’s short for Tobias.”

  “So I’m on the airplane, and the two men sitting behind me start whining in these battered tones about a meeting they’d just escaped. Some brainstorming session about Internet piracy. They were involved in the music industry somehow; I guessed lawyers.” Mr. Demsky reached up and pulled out a pen that had been hidden behind his ear in his wreck of white hair. “How’d that get there? I musta slept with it!” He removed his glasses and tossed the pen at the wall. A rumble started in his chest, like the old Husqvarna chainsaw Edward had bought from a farmer to transform the fallen trees of the ice storm into firewood. It was something between a wet cough and a laugh; Mr. Demsky appeared to levitate out of his chair. The episode went on long enough for Toby to peek down at his timepiece, at his shoes—scuffed—and to think fondly of Alicia’s neck.

  “Can I fetch you a glass of water, maybe, before I accept a position at your competitor’s station? Where I’m treated with respect.”

  “The in-flight movie comes on and it’s some piece of shit about dogs. Dogs and kids in the same movie is always murder. The stewardess is embarrassed, as we should all be, as a species, so she starts handing out magazines. I take a New Yorker. Guess what the two music lawyers go for.”

  The smooth transition from chainsaw to anecdote had paralyzed Toby. The blood in his mouth was surprisingly salty.

  “I said guess.”

  “Rolling Stone.”

  “Wrong!” Mr. Demsky slid the remote controls down the desk and leaned on his forearms. “Sure, that’s the obvious response. Music people read Rolling Stone and smart people read The New Yorker. But no. No, these two choose a magazine called Gentlemen’s Quarterly. You heard of it?”

  “I have a subscription.”

  “Tobias, it’s a whole goddamn magazine about being a gentleman.”

  “I’ve learned quite a lot from it over the years.”

  “Etiquette.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And men’s clothing and perfume and spa treatments. Book clubs. How to please women orally. It’s fat with advertisements. There were a couple of recipes inside. One was for brioche! It’s a girl magazine, but for men. Men like you, Tobias.”

  “Like me.”

  “You ever been in a fist fight?”

  “No.”

  “Ever built a garage or shot a handgun?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Play any sports?”

  “I go to the gym.”

  “At first I thought the music lawyers were a couple of Kansas City faggots. But when one of them went to the can, I spotted his wedding ring.”

  “Well, it is legal now to—”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “I have a subscription, Mr. Demsky.”

  “You know what these two talked about for the rest of the flight home?”

  “No.”

  “Guess, Tobias.”

  “Rap music.”

  “They talked about the decline of good manners.” With some cussing in a language Toby took to be Yiddish, Mr. Demsky stood up out of his giant leather chair and sauntered to the window. “You been overseas?”

  “No, but—”

  “A man must go overseas, Tobias. This isn’t an actual country we’re living in; the sooner you understand that, the better. It’s a big, big suburb. It’s a place you graduate from.”

  “A suburb.”

  “If we didn’t have oil, we wouldn’t exist.”

  “What does that mean? We wouldn’t exist?”

  “Wood hewers, water carriers. That’s all we can do. And we’re impolite. Litterers. Spitters. We dress like hobos, most of us, and drink shit coffee. Toi, toi, toi. And One on One, with Toby Ménard—no offence—that’s the best you could come up with?”

  “I don’t even know what a sewer easement is, Mr. Demsky.”

  The president aimed his pipe like a rifle. “Where are we living?”

  “In a place you graduate from.”

  “Sterling!” He lowered his cigar. “Now, Tobias, can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The sort of question you can’t ask an employee anymore?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Are you a homosexual?”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m not.”

  “So I suppose you like women.”

  “Very much.”

  Mr. Demsky looked down at Toby’s grey wool pants and shiny black oxfords with that regrettable scuff. “You like suits?”

  “Suits are my favourite.”

  “And unless I’m mistaken,” he leaned over Toby, sniffed, “you’re wearing perfume.”

  “Cologne.”

  Mr. Demsky returned to his chair, sat back, snorted. “Ever go to a dinner party and think, sweet Christ, should I bring wine or champagne?”

  “Red wine or flowers, depending.”

  “Wish you had your own herb garden at all?”

  “I have one.”

  “How about vacuuming? You like to vacuum?”

  “There are some delightful vacuums on the market.”

  “Decoupage?”

  “If only.”

  “You ever been afraid?” Mr. Demsky bit down. The joy had departed. “I don’t mean movie afraid. Afraid, afraid, for your life or the lives of the people you love?”

  “Well…”

  “A generation of pussies. Shoppers, who haven’t even been overseas.”

  “I intend to go very soon.”

  “How would you like to develop and host a series of segments on how to be a gentleman? Manners, etiquette. But with shared concerns among the ladies and the poofs? We’ll produce them here and broadcast them on all the stations. What do you say?”

  “I would adore that, sir.”

  “One more ‘sir’ and you’re cleaning my shitter. Write up a proposal and slip it under my door.”

  “When would you like it?”

  Mr. Demsky examined his cigar. “I’m due for a Vietnamese massage in an hour and a half.”

  “I really didn’t mean what I said about you failing and dying painfully, Mr. Demsky. My father gave me bad advice. I have only the fondest thoughts.”

  “Mention, as a postscript, some businesses where Kansas City faggots like yourself shop for clothes and perfume and flowers and, you know, ceramic pots and garden tools and scarves and serviettes with roosters on them. I’ll meet with the advertising knobs on Monday.”

  That night at Toqué!, Alicia wore a white top that wrapped around her like silk bandages on a mummy. Between the wrap and the skirt, an inch of her stomach was visible. Her dark hair was tied up in the back with an intricate arrangement of clips, and it shone in the candlelight.

  Toby was making $38,000 at the station before he became an etiquette commentator, a personality, a person. He could not afford a $298 dinner. Yet Alicia stared over the candles as though he were the most significant man on the island, and feigned fascination as he told her about his family, his meeting with Mr. Demsky that afternoon, and the proposal he titled Toby a Gentleman. “You think it’s gauche, to make my name the title?”

  “How else are you going to be famous?”

  The plat principal was canard aux framboises, and Alicia claimed she had never eaten duck, a claim Toby would realize, some months later, was grossly false. She thanked him more than twenty times: for asking her out on this special day, for ordering food and wine so commandingly—in French!—for being adventurous and knowledgeable about duck.

  Toby wanted to ask if he could move into her house. He wanted Alicia to be his before she realized she could be a movie star, a pop icon, a network anchor. The desire to lock her in a
kitchen for forty or fifty years of olde-tyme afternoon-sex-on-the-table marital solitude nearly burst out of his chest and onto the expertly unpolished table before them.

  He had framed the bill from that night at Toqué!, still the most magical night of his life. It hung on the wall in his kitchen, where he made an Americano and watched the morning summaries of the federal election. The Conservatives had prevailed, with a minority, but Westmount-Ville-Marie had gone to the Liberals. He wrote a note of condolence and fond wishes to Stéphane Isidore. His neck was stiff from sleeping in a hospital chair for six hours, but with medication, yogurt and granola, and a redemptive session at the ironing board, he was ready to return to work. His phone had been flooded with data, but he could not sufficiently steel himself to hear or see any of it. Instead, he simply dialled his father’s cellphone number. To his delight, no one answered, so he left a rather long and inspiring message. A poem, really. “We’ll all soon see, Mom and Dad, that this accident was really the catalyst for so much positive change in your lives.”

  The black sapphire metallic 335i sedan was his superhero phone booth, spotless and dark, filled with the scent of triumph and, this morning, baroque chamber music. He pulled over at the congested corner of Roy and Drolet to mail his letter to the Conservative Association of Westmount-Ville-Marie. The morning wind was warm and cool at the same time, and smelled of bakery. His decision to forget the fire, Alicia, the on-air gaffe, his naked father, had cleansed him of anxiety. Montreal opened to him, as it always did. He said, “Bonjour, Monsieur” and “Bonjour, Madame” to the francophone media workers who passed, in black boots or shoes, on their way from renovated houses on the Plateau to the game show studios on Saint-Laurent. He complimented a retired gentleman in mustard slacks on the splendour of his poodle.

  A woman on an old bicycle, with one speed and a basket, waited to cross Drolet. She ventured too far into the street and tried to steer back onto the sidewalk, but she caught her skirt in the gears. The bicycle wouldn’t move. Gingerly, she tried to tug the fabric out. He shouted for the woman to get off her bicycle and carry it to the sidewalk, to safety, and she turned to him. “Quoi?” she said.

  “Allez à la…” Toby was too far away from her, in the wind, to be heard.

  A taxi with its light off sped southward on Drolet. The woman looked at Toby instead of the traffic and did not see it. “Quoi?” she said again.

  Toby gestured madly toward the bank of cars, led by the green taxi. As the woman shifted her attention back to the traffic, her heavy bicycle rolled forward slightly and the taxi clipped the front wheel. She cried out and at once flew sideways off the bicycle and into the pile of dust and decomposed leaves that had gathered at the mouth of the storm drain. The contents of the basket, her handbag and its secrets, lay strewn about. Cars behind the taxi had stopped, though it had continued along. Toby ran to the woman and helped her up onto the sidewalk. Then he pulled her bicycle to safety and gathered up pens, tissues, an address book, a tiny photo album, three blank postcards, her bulky wallet, one condom, and a set of keys.

  Back on the sidewalk, he asked the woman, in French, if she was injured. She listened, with large green eyes and thick lips slathered with gloss, but did not respond. Toby wiped the dust from her arms and shoulders. She was pale and thin and agitated, the uncharismatic daughter of Mick Jagger and Carly Simon. On her feet, she turned around as if before a mirror and felt her body quadrant by quadrant until she reached her right leg. She lifted her torn red skirt to reveal a pair of black nylons. They had ripped in three vertical strips above the knee, and tiny bits of gravel and sand were embedded in the wound. She wept briefly, with one hiccupping sob.

  A gentleman is obliged to carry a dress handkerchief, along with a square of white linen, for emergencies. Brooks Brothers manufactured lovely linens for this purpose, with just-detectable fleur-de-lis embroidery. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, then stuffed his linen into her bag without taking even a moment to consider its astonishing beauty. From time to time, in moments of crisis, moments like these, Toby questioned the rewards of his behaviour. He understood why so many of his peers cussed in public, why they spent more time in restaurants and cafés looking at their iPhones than into their lovers’ eyes.

  The woman removed her helmet. “He was a murderer.”

  “No, Madame.” The taxi had long gone. “He was just an idiot.”

  She rubbed her shoulder. The sturdy bicycle had survived the impact, but the chain had fallen off. Toby took her bag and walked her bicycle one block east to the gas station on Saint-Denis.

  “It’s another awful day. Another ridiculous, monstrous day.” She sobbed again. Toby pulled the linen out of her bag and gave it to her demonstrably, so she might notice the fleurs-de-lis. Traffic was light suddenly. The sun was warm on his face and the wind had calmed. No one was honking.

  “The day will surely improve for you, Madame. I have a feeling.”

  She pointed to her ripped nylons. “I’m already late.”

  “You were hit by a car.”

  “There is a recession, you know.”

  “My name is Toby Ménard. I’m enchanted to meet you.”

  “Catherine Brassens. I’ve seen you on television.” She attempted a phrase in English: “I practise sometime to hear correct.”

  “Parfait.”

  “It’s normal, I suppose, that you’d stop for a woman in distress.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  In English again, she ventured, “A gentle man.”

  “A gentleman and a gentlewoman.”

  Catherine went into the washroom, and Toby waited for one of the gas station attendants to make eye contact with him so he might ask for some assistance. Eventually, he gave up and replaced the chain himself. Now there was grease on his hands, plenty of it. He hopped on the bicycle and pedalled in a small circle in the gas station parking lot.

  “Like it never happened,” he said, when Catherine returned.

  She had three wet paper towels. “The mirror in the washroom’s too small and too high. Will you?”

  Toby crouched and inspected the wound on her upper thigh. She had done a thorough job, but islands of dirt and debris had been hidden by her nylons. “May I?”

  “Of course.” Catherine lifted her skirt a few inches higher.

  He pulled the fabric away from her skin and reached in through a hole, gently dabbing the dirt and bits of gravel away. The skin of her leg was not as pale as her face and neck, and she was muscular: the advantage of bicycle commuting. He looked up, for an instant, when he was finished. She watched him. The colour had returned to her cheeks. Neither of them spoke until a dump truck passed, rattling him to his feet.

  “You’re going to be all right, Madame Brassens.”

  “Thanks again, Doctor Toby.”

  “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

  “The murderer shouldn’t have hit me with his taxi.”

  They shook hands. His grease transferred to her, and he apologized. She pulled a small package of damp wipes from her pocket and offered one to Toby. Together, they wiped the grease from her hands, and Toby wondered about the damp wipes: Who carries such things?

  “Can I do something for you in return?” Already she referred to him as toi.

  “Madame Brassens, it was my pleasure to help.”

  “I’ll make you dinner.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “What’s necessary? I just want to make you dinner.” A strong gust came up Saint-Denis, without any bakery in it. She shifted the bangs of her blond hair from her eyes. “You’re a gentleman. You can’t refuse. I have you.”

  Toby pulled a calling card from his stainless steel Frank Lloyd Wright holder, a gift from Alicia. “My number is here, and my e-mail.”

  “Friday night. Six thirty.”

  Catherine wrote her address on the back of a crumpled receipt. He watched her go, on her ugly bicycle. The receipt was for a thirty-six pack of Huggies.

  Now, on t
op of everything else, he was late. The phone buzzed in his satchel, his parents, no doubt. First he would deal with Dwayne, then he would call his parents with more late-night infomercial philosophy. We are indeed the architects of our own lives.

  There was enough traffic on René Lévesque to allow him to work his strategy into a baroque chamber composition, with dramatic pauses and hand gestures. He rehearsed, imagining his meeting in the office of the station manager, his friend, the president of his society. Humility, first, and an acknowledgment of one’s failings. Then a stunning declaration of grievances, leading to eloquence and great wit, historical allusions, mastery of the room. All of it set to the fifth Brandenburg. Toby was not the first man in history to be cuckolded by a member of a visual minority, and father-burnings must be quite common, statistically. If anyone had actually heard the interview, other than his father and Bruce, he had a footnoted speech prepared about the public’s short attention span.

  He used his electronic card to enter the parking garage, and remembered to be comforted and delighted by the sound of the driver’s-side window snapping shut. In challenging times, times like these, it was essential to return to a place of sumptuousness and strength, a small victory, rather than succumb to self-doubt.

  In the elevator, Toby pulled his shoulders back and raised his chest; he thought of Jacques Chirac’s moving retirement speech in front of le drapeau tricolor: “Mes chers compatriotes de métropole, d’outre-mer, de l’étranger…”

  The elevator opened onto the dark studio, and Toby stepped out as though passing through saloon doors. The writers, producers, on-air talent, and interns stopped speaking for a moment, in what Toby first took to be stunned reverie. Most of them had been to his parties at the converted candy warehouse. He had taken baguette lunches with them on the port, as the long-legged rollerbladers zoomed past. He had briefly dated one of them, before Alicia, but she had smoked the same brand of cigarillo as Karen—they were surely the only two women on the island with a cigarillo addiction—and the sex had made him thoughtful. Toby greeted those with whom he shared friendly relations, with whom he had made sarcastic remarks about Ed Hardy T-shirts. “What’s up?” His friends and acquaintances and Sandra from Poland, the former girlfriend, responded with barely perceptible nods. In his office, he dropped his satchel. The orange light on his telephone flashed.