Toby (29 page)

“I’ve been around. In this business.”

“I know.”

“What you’re saying, it’s not unprecedented.”

“It’s not.”

“You’re not one of those people.”

“One of those people.”

“It’s a painful business, as you know, and fickle and fucked. The rewards, as you also know…” He paused to burp. “The rewards can be spectacular. You could be banging serious models by this time next year, and you know it. But sure, shit, you can give it up.
People have done it,
and they’ve disappeared into their weird quiet delight, I suppose, or their
regret. That’s what I see for you, knowing you as I do: regret. I guess you’ve convinced yourself there’s something better, but I suspect you’re just raw right now, and a bit spooked.”

The cognac glass was ridiculous. Toby twirled the half-ounce in its giant roundness. The taxi home would be fifty dollars, and then he would have to come back here tomorrow for the Corolla, in the cold, his head weighing two hundred pounds and quaking.

“You only get one or two of these.” Mr. Demsky’s voice had gone down an octave. The unheeded warning in the opening minutes of a horror movie:
Get away from this place.

“These?”

“Decisions. Decisions like these, Tobias.”

“I want to stay with Hugo.”

“His name is Hugo?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Demsky took a deep breath and slowly shoved his cognac to the centre of the table. “Is he yours? Your kid?”

“Yes.”

“Why can’t you take him with you?”

“He’s mine, but he isn’t
mine.
”

Mr. Demsky placed a hand on the table, to brace himself. “We can never take them with us. I don’t even know why we try.”

A gentleman removes his glove
to shake hands. A close-up of the preparation, and the shake, had once opened a segment of
Toby a Gentleman.
As one says goodbye, he slowly removes the glove. The hand must not be bare until precisely before the shake. To pull off the glove too early and render oneself asymmetrically gloveless for the final seconds of a conversation is clumsy and inelegant. One’s companion will feel obliged to end the conversation, to shake immediately and walk away.

Mr. Demsky arrived at the Dollard location of Thé Bubble in the middle of a blizzard. It was the fifth of March. Many of the guests had already arrived. Toby was outside in his overcoat, shovelling the sidewalk so the door would continue to open and close. Nine days of blizzard. Mr. Demsky removed his glove for a shake, and Toby leaned his yellow shovel against the glass of the bubble tea shop. In his haste, he shook Mr. Demsky’s hand with his glove on.

Separated by a thin layer of calfskin.

“Well,” said Mr. Demsky.

“Let me try that again.”

“Well, well, well.”

“It’s cold. You rushed me.”

“Amateur!”

“Let’s try it again.”

“Next thing you know, you’ll be whistling at flight attendants.”

“Never.”

“Mixing up ‘seen’ and ‘saw.’”

“Oh God.”

“Wearing white after Labour Day.”

“Actually, Mr. Demsky, it’s interesting: there are circumstances—”

“You know I don’t give half a fuck.”

“It means a lot that you came.”

Mr. Demsky removed his hat, and his hair bloomed. “I can’t believe I flew back for this. You know what the temperature was in Palm Beach yesterday?”

“Thank you.”

The front windows had fogged. There were a few spots where guests had leaned against the moist glass, and the crowd was visible inside. “You’re going to work in there? All the time?”

“I’ll hover between the three locations until they’re settled.”

“Then?”

Hugo was at the door, his face pressed against the glass. Both men crouched and waved.

“This is going to make you happy, Tobias?”

“Something like happy.”

Snow was beginning to gather in Mr. Demsky’s hair. “Get me a drink.”

Inside, the guests drank spiked bubble teas—vodka, gin, tequila—and ate croque monsieurs. Some had heeded the invitation and dressed semi-formal. Most did not. Hugo wore the world’s smallest tuxedo.

“I am wearing a smoking,” he said to Mr. Demsky.

“Excellent work, Hugo,” said Toby. “
I am.
”

“No, you aren’t,” said the boy. “That’s just a suit.”

Toby picked him up and together they escorted Mr. Demsky to the counter. The croque monsieurs, in classic and modern variations—
croque Provençal, croque Auvergnat, croque tartiflette
—were cut up into squares and labelled in French and English.

Behind the counter, Steve Bancroft and Karen Mushinsky wore black Thé Bubble aprons and berets over a new brown suit and a green dress, respectively. Toby and Catherine were slated to take the next shift, in an hour. The music, French cabaret. It had taken Toby a period of research and experimentation to find the perfect volume, a matter on which many experts disagreed.

“Mr. Demsky,” Karen said, shaking his hand.

“Please call me Adam. You must be very proud of your son.”

Karen’s eyes watered up.

“I’m guessing vodka,” said Steve Bancroft.

Mr. Demsky extended his hand. “You must be the Amazing Kreskin.”

Toby left Mr. Demsky to speak with the Amazing Kreskin and Karen. Hugo asked to ride on his shoulders so he could be the tallest boy in town.

In the final stages of design and brand-creation, Steve Bancroft had hired Catherine as a consultant. There were three reasons for this. Number one: she had a legal claim on
the business plan that Toby had not been honest about, and it was a wise idea to placate her lest she sue them. Number two: she had some debts that needed clearing up. Number three: she had a damn good idea. For the Thé Bubble sensibility, they had tossed Taipei and Paris into a blender and come up with art, paint, music, food, and non-alcoholic beverages that suggested both capitals. Toby had added one element to the Dollard location: a black diorama filled with an Edward skeleton dancing to a skeleton band—“Hey, hey, hey.”

The room was as full as it could be without contravening fire regulations. Randall and Garrett sat at a corner table, surrounded by potential members of the Benjamin Disraeli Society. The topic: back pills. Randall explained that they had rented several Frank Capra films one Sunday in February and had enjoyed “a Percocet Valentine’s Day.”

Catherine stood in the middle of the room, in a red dress, speaking to no one.

“I want to get down now.”

Toby carefully lowered Hugo, and he adjusted his suit.

“How is my tie, Poney?”

“Perfect.”

“I like perfect.” He wiggled away, toward the counter and another croque monsieur.

Catherine walked over and stood next to Toby. Their arms touched. It was rare to be this close to her, even though they had lived in the same house for two months and had prepared the grand opening together. A woman from the swimming pool, who had a girl Hugo’s age, approached them and began talking about her daughter—who kept choking on the tapioca balls. Toby had been watching the door for special
guests. Two people were now outside the shop, tiny people. Toby excused himself.

The Brassens, Denis and Josée, shuffled on the sidewalk in bulky snowmobile jackets. Denis carried a small gift bag.

“
Vous êtes Monsieur Mushinsky?
” said Denis. His head and hands were enormous, not unlike a Taiwanese puppet’s, and the skin on his face seemed collapsible. His eyes were small and green, and gave the impression that he was about to explode into laughter. Toby had expected a large man with an unfortunate stoop.

“It’s an honour to meet you. And the beautiful Josée.”

Josée handed the small bag to Toby. “This is for Catherine.”

“Oh, you should give it to her.”

The Brassens looked at each other.

“Come in, please.”

“We do not know,” said Denis. “Now that we are here, we do not know.”

They had not been difficult to find, as there were only two Brassens in the phone book for Matane, a town on the northern coast of the Gaspé Peninsula. Denis worked in a shrimp plant of some sort, and appeared every year in the Festival de la Crevette in a shrimp costume. Josée was a short-order cook in a hotel restaurant specializing in seafood. In a twenty-minute phone call, with both of them on the line, Toby learned all this and plenty more. They lived in an attached townhouse on the hill that led down to the
grand fleuve.
This is where Catherine had grown up, from whence she had fled at seventeen. As a child, she had liked to swim, to sing in the choir, and to camp in the Chic-Choc Mountains. Both Denis and Josée had cried on the telephone when they learned they were grandparents.

“Does she know we are here?” said Denis, in a powerful accent Toby associated with taxi drivers.

“It’s a surprise.”

“She may not like this surprise,” said Josée. “I do not think she will.”

Toby escorted the Brassens inside and took their jackets. Their glasses fogged. Hugo sat on the counter, surrounded by Catherine and Mr. Demsky on one side, Karen and Steve Bancroft on the other. Toby picked him up and asked Catherine to come along. She spotted her parents and stopped, dished a colourful stew of church-related curse words. Hugo placed his hands over his ears, much too late.

“What are they doing here?”

“I put them in that Hilton by the airport.”

“Why? Why did you do this?”

“Poney,” said Hugo, “why?”

Toby handed the boy to his mother. He expected another curse word or two, or at least a frustrated sigh. Instead, Catherine looked up at Toby for a moment. She wore eyeliner and lip gloss. The dress was crooked on her shoulders, from carrying the boy, so Toby adjusted it for her. She walked across the floor of the bubble teashop.

The first couple had departed and a small crowd was eagerly gathering at the mess of long winter parkas. His father’s friends and the friends of Steve Bancroft, Karen’s friends, many of them astounded into silence by the new couple’s coming-out party. Women Catherine had already met at the library and at moms-and-tots swimming lessons, who talked about nothing but children. How they ate, slept, played, prayed, talked, battled colds. Most of them wore clothes no one in the city would dare put on outside a private residence.
Toby had convinced himself that he would wake up one morning, in this new century, and stop noticing.

Mr. Demsky held a giant cup of bubble tea before him like a bowl of spoiled milk. “You gave up network television for
this?
”

Toby did not respond.

“These people are your friends?”

“I lost my friends when I became a racist.”

“Of course.”

Together they looked out on the polyester suits, khaki pants and no-iron blue shirts, the croque monsieur grease, the photos of French bicycles and Asian bicycles, tiny white skeletons in a black box, the blizzard out the window.

“I think I’ll be going, Tobias.”

“My friend.”

“Congratulations.”

They shook, gloveless this time. “And congratulations to you, Mr. Demsky.”

Over the speakers, “
La Mer
” was just reaching the end point, where Charles Trénet calls out resolutely, “La vie-uh.”

Hugo took Toby’s hand and pulled him through the crowd toward the corner, where Catherine stood weeping with her miniature parents. A gentleman carried two handkerchiefs, one as a pocket square and the other for practical concerns—tears and other emergencies of the heart. This afternoon, in his haste, Toby had forgotten to sneak a square of white linen into the inside pocket of his jacket. So he pulled out his yellow Hermès, the most perfect thing he owned, and presented it to the mother of his son.

Toby: A Man

Copyright © 2010 by Todd Babiak.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Babiak, Todd, 1972-

Toby : a man / Todd Babiak.

I. Title.

PS8553.A2435T63 2009 C813’.6 C2009-905711-5