Terminal Grill (4 page)

Between work and getting on the subway for school, I had only a five-minute break. I ran to the nearest phone away from the office, which was in a commuter bus terminal in the basement of the neighbouring plaza. I could hardly hear myself, let alone Ruth as I tried to tell her about Matthew, the sounds of bus after bus being announced blaring across the echoing expanse of the terminal.

I told her as fast as I could where I'd met Matthew and what he'd told me about himself. She listened patiently to my breathy, shouted story, then promised to see if she could find out anything about him from a friend of hers who'd spent some time in the rock music business several years before.

When I told her my doubts, she said there might be plenty of explanations for the fact that Matthew's name wasn't on the albums. She said he sounded like an interesting guy. She told me to keep calm, to have a good time, and to use safes.

So on the way to school, at the expense of possibly being late, I stopped at a drugstore and bought some.

It was nearly impossible to pay attention to the lecturer at class, even though the teacher was a noted guest from the States. No matter what he said, all I could think of was how much longer it would be until I would see Matthew again.

Finally, I snuck out the back door, ran to the subway station, hopped on the train and tore across town toward the Terminal Grill.

The Terminal Grill was a perfect neighbourhood bar five minutes from my house. It was probably built between the
wars and had never been renovated. I'd heard an old customer swear that there used to be a huge ceiling fan, but the waitress argued so strongly that nothing has ever been changed at the Terminal, that the old customer backed down, saying, “I could have sworn, but I guess I must be wrong.”

It looked like a diner, only longer and wider with lots of windows, a bar with stools, and booths with green marble tables and patched red banquette seats. The menus were covered with padded dark red plastic that in the old days used to be called leatherette, and the faded scraps of gold that clung to some of them must once have been the emblazoned name of the place.

There was a jukebox at every table. Once a year or so, a man came and changed the songs.

It was adjacent to a subway station and across the street from one of the TTC barns. During all the hours that it was open—probably from seven a.m. to midnight, the shift of the owner and the waitress and the cook—uniformed TTC drivers came in and out for take-out or to sit for a meal. Alone, they always seemed to be reading. But together they were a boisterous lot.

The other habitués were an assortment of neighbourhood drunks who shouted insults to each other across the aisle between the booths and the bar or the double row of six booths in the back. Or who discussed politics so energetically that it made a person feel good to live in a democracy, just so everybody had a right to his say.

On Friday nights, there were also the genteel poor—old couples come for a night out, a feast of five-dollar pork chops complete with soup, crackers, roll, and rice pudding. Occasionally in the afternoon, young Italo-Canadian girls from the neighbourhood dropped in for coffee after shopping at Maxie's Discount Drugs.

Behind the bar, beneath the TV that, like God, looked down on all, eyes always open, stood Pete, the owner, a man of sixty with a sad, wise face. A gentle, tough man. I once saw him wrestle an unruly customer down to the banquette and pin him there until the guy calmed down and took back the threats he'd leveled at another customer.

The waitress was Cynthia—maybe thirty and looking like she'd seen a thing or two in her time—also sad and wise and gentle and tough. Slender as a cigarette, maybe because of them, with huge, pale eyes reflecting almost all the light that entered them, a quick, warm smile and a lot of curls. Beautiful as an angel to anyone willing to stop a moment and gaze upon the wiry beauty of bargirls.

The Terminal was well-lit, always bright, almost cheerful. You had to look around for the darkness, but it was there.

I was too early. It was only 8:15. So after glancing in the window, I walked from the Terminal along the busy Danforth, past the parking lot and into Maxie's, where I took another look at sex aids and decided on a tube of greaseless jelly.

Back at the Terminal, shaky with nerves and all of a sudden sure that I'd never see Matthew again, I sat in a back booth, asked Cynthia for a Carlsberg, took out my criminology textbook and tried to read it. I had to force myself not to look up at the slightest movement of everyone in the bar.

After only a little while, I heard someone say, “Hi-hi.” Absurdly, I thought, “Wow, but that guy's voice sounds a lot like Matthew's…”

I allowed myself to look up from my book, and there he was: lively and handsome and obviously thrilled that I was there. Through my mind jumped the thought that maybe he had thought he might never see me again.

The deal had been that we'd meet between 8:30 and 9:30. I looked at my watch. It was 8:35.

In his hand he held a wrapped bottle of wine, but he sat down and ordered a beer. Then we decided we'd better move across the aisle over to a no-smoking booth.

He looked around the place and had a good laugh. Not what he was used to, that seemed clear. Both of us dug in our pockets for quarters for the box and spent a bit of warm-up time flipping through the not-so-hot selections. I was nervous and talked too much, too stiffly. He didn't seem to notice, and before long, the problem was gone.

“Did you eat?” he asked. I'd been so nervous, excited, I'd had nothing all day but one bagel. He scolded me and told me I'd better order, and when I told him all I felt like eating was French fries, he scolded me again.

I told him the teacher had given me back my essay. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I forgot to ask.” He took the essay from me and carefully studied the teacher's comments. I thought his own comments smart and sweet.

I asked him how his day had gone, and he told me a bit about the video they were working on, saying that the men at the studio were amazed to see him there at eight a.m. but that it was okay after all.

We talked and drank beer and ate French fries and laughed and were both very happy that each other had turned up at the Terminal.

After a while, I led him back to my place.

But first, he paid the bill.

CHAPTER SIX

H
E
'
D BEEN TO
L
OVECRAFT
and delighted in telling me about all the things he'd seen there. There wasn't the least hint of vulgarity in his descriptions and, as usual, no profanity in his speech. He showed me what he'd bought for our impending night: lambskin. And I showed him what I'd bought.

He uncorked the excellent wine he'd brought, and we took it to bed with us.

There followed what may have been hours of tender and passionate lovemaking—joyous lovemaking and professions of deep mutual admiration and laughing and touching and wine-drinking and cigarettes—for Matthew was extremely addicted to nicotine.

But despite the satisfying sensuality of our prolonged encounter with its numerous ecstatic climaxes, there was no intercourse, for Matthew was just too big.

At the end, he looked at the opened packages and the unrolled but unused safes and he laughed and said, “This is quite a spread we've got here—”

We both giggled, but he went on, “All our precautions have come to nothing …”

My heart fell a little, because I knew he had to be dissatisfied. “Yes,” I answered.

“Well,” he replied, “we certainly make a pair of interesting lovers.”

Really, we did, but I hesitated before asking, “What do we do about that?” knowing it was silly to expect an answer. Even had our sex burned through the basement floor to Toronto bedrock, he'd be gone in a couple of days and I'd be back to being forty and brave in my cheerfulness.

“Nothing,” he answered. But there was a sweetness in his voice, a surprising reassurance, and I knew that it meant he was not dissatisfied, that he'd enjoyed the things we'd done. I smiled from the inside out, and leaned across his reclining body to turn out the lamp.

As we lay in the gentle darkness, touching all along our sides, he sighed, “I'm falling in love ….”

But I didn't allow myself to respond to this in any way, not even by the slightest movement of my body because I know that men sometimes say such things in the passionate night, then wake to regret that they've been rash.

In the morning, we laughingly, lovingly, had our “interesting” sex again. And again. Each time, Matthew's largesse seemed less of a problem. Until it wasn't a problem at all.

He talked and talked that morning and I listened and learned the connection between the words rapt and rapture, for I could have looked at his handsome face and listened to his words forever. He told me about music and musicians, about the music business and about his family.

But on this morning, he suddenly grew extremely quiet, and lay very still as I sat beside him on the stretched-out futon. “I'm having an anxiety attack,” he said softly, and he seemed
to draw into himself, struggling with something that left him with a tense immobility different from sleep.

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” I whispered, thinking this anxiety might have something to do with his statement of the night before about falling in love. But he said no. He may even have asked me to hold him, for as our days together progressed, he often sought the false security of my helpless embrace.

I felt enormously sorry for him and wished there was something I could do to help him. I wasn't at all surprised that he should be this frightened, but I didn't ask myself why I wasn't surprised.

After a while, it passed and he said he was all right. It was time for me to go to work, and he said he'd come with me to the subway. He said he needed to walk.

I was early and asked him whether it was all right if I walked with him for a while, almost expecting him to say that he preferred to walk alone. But he didn't say that. He said, “Oh, yes ….”

Though it was only March, the weather was warm and sunny, a caressing spring morning. He mentioned how lucky we were with respect to the weather. He said his time in Toronto had been so nice that he was loath to leave.

He said, too, that, once before, when he'd been visiting a musician in Montana with the band, he'd had an anxiety attack because it was such a wonderful visit that he couldn't stand the thought of leaving the good times and the warmth behind. We talked about a traveler leaving the road, and he spoke like a man who'd been on the road a long time and was tired of it, but not tired enough to leave.

We got to the subway, and he kissed me—not as passionately as I had hoped—and presumably continued his walk in my neighbourhood as I went off to work. We'd agreed that he would phone me later.

Before we'd left that morning, two things had happened that involved the telephone. One was that my girlfriend had called to say she'd asked her friend about Matthew and had gotten no result. Her friend just had never heard of him. But he did say that nothing Matthew said sounded impossible—or even far-fetched.

The other thing was that when I was coming out of the shower, I heard Matthew talking. I assumed he was calling someone about the video and I was a tiny bit offended because he hadn't asked to use the phone. It only occurred to me to be offended because he had been so excruciatingly polite about everything else that this seemed a breach in otherwise impeccable manners.

But when I stepped into the room where he was, Matthew was nowhere near the phone.

That evening he called to say he'd be tied up with the video crew until late, but he wanted to know if I'd meet him at the Terminal at 10 p.m. He asked me to buy some wine and promised to reimburse me for it.

At ten I was waiting. I looked up to see Matthew coming toward me with a wide smile on his face and a dozen long-stemmed red roses in his hand.

I smiled widely myself.

But almost immediately he began a conversation that sounded very much like goodbye.

I could deal with that. Though disappointed, I said, “When you go I'll miss you.”

He smiled, shrugged, looked down at the green marble slab between us and generally acted like a man who didn't want any trouble. A nice man, who, nevertheless, didn't want to take anything from a woman he was about to ditch.

I was so surprised and hurt that I couldn't hide it. Though we both made a valiant attempt at small talk, our conversation was stupidly awkward and I had to try hard to keep from crying because I was so insulted and humiliated. Matthew was getting angry. It was the first time I'd seen him exhibit any negative emotion at all, and, like everything else about him, even his anger seemed gentle, restrained, almost at times, an effort.

“Is this going to be a downer?” he asked in irritation, and I shook my head, unable to answer.

“Maybe I should just go?”

It was a good idea, actually, but not one I was going to jump to agree to. I just wasn't as strong as that, much as everything in me said it was the best thing that could happen. I didn't say anything.

“Look,” Matthew said, conciliatory, “let's just spend one more night together.”

The song “One More Night” started ringing through my head. I guess I agreed; I guess I said okay when he suggested we go back to my place, when he asked me yet again if he could be my guest.

We left the Terminal. I was so upset I kept dropping things—first the paper from the roses, which Matthew
gracefully stooped to sweep up off the floor before heading for the cash and paying our bill.

Then I kept dropping roses. I just couldn't seem to keep a grip on them. Matthew was getting more and more angry, and when we reached my place, he snapped at me about some small thing I said.

Rather than being hurt, I felt relieved. As if the tremendous strain we'd been under—the strain of Matthew's gentle niceness—was finally being broken.