Why Men Lie (21 page)

“I meant to go over,” he said. “But you have company.”

“A friend,” she said.

“It’s been a while since you’ve been.”

“Yes.”

“Will you come in?” He spread his arms, smiled shyly.

“If it’s okay. Sure. I suppose the place is all changed.”

“I suppose it is,” he said. “A bit of a mess, though.”

There was a teacup and a bowl in the kitchen sink, newspapers and unopened mail strewn on the table, a jacket hanging on a chair. The kitchen seemed larger than she remembered.

“I took out a wall,” he said, responding to her thought.

“Where did that come from?” she asked, pointing toward a massive sandstone fireplace.

“It was there all along,” he said. “That’s where the stove used to be.”

She remembered that much.

“I always suspected there was something behind that wall. I could tell from the shape of the chimney that it was probably part of a fireplace.”

“The table?”

“Found it at a yard sale.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“A bit battered.”

“Now that I remember, it’s all changed, isn’t it?”

“I suppose. Being here day in, day out, it’s hard to tell the new from the old.”

“The old table was over there.”

“I guess it was.”

Face to face, she was suddenly surprised by how little he had changed. The hair, though prematurely white, was thick; the face was lined but healthy; the eyes were clear and interested. She knew that she, too, was being carefully inspected, and it felt, somehow, reassuring.

“I could make tea,” he said.

“No, don’t bother.”

“It wouldn’t be a bother.”

“So when did you discover the fireplace?”

“Oh, Christ. It’s hard to remember. There were a few lost years there.” He laughed. “Yup. A few lost years, for sure. After you.”

“You know why I ran away, John?”

She was surprised at having said it and by his easy acknowledgement.

“I often meant to talk to you about that,” he said. “It was on my mind. But anyway, here we are.” He shrugged. They stared at each other and past each other, into time. “It’s a hard word, ‘sorry,’ sometimes.”

“Yes,” she said. “Especially when you really mean it.”

“I did. I mean it now. I don’t know what got into me, the night you ran away. I thought for a long time it was the old man coming out in me. I blamed him. But eventually I had to face the fact. Even if there’s some of him in me, I’m my own person.”

“I never blamed you,” she said. “I was way, way out of line, and we both know it.”

“Still, there’s no excuse.”

Into the silence then, she said, “You’re looking awfully well, John.”

“You’re looking pretty good yourself. You’re sure you won’t have a cup?”

“Not this time. I left the company by himself over home.”

“I see.”

“He’s from Toronto. I think his mother was from around here someplace, but he grew up in Halifax.”

“I see.”

“How about yourself? Is there anybody?”

“Well … yes and no.”

She laughed. It was, she thought, the perfect answer—the safest answer. She placed a hand on his forearm. “You should come by,” she said. “Maybe later. Meet him before he goes.”

“How long is he here for?”

“He’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

“Ah well,” he said. “Maybe the next time.”

“I hope.”

JC was in her office reading when she returned. “What’s happening in the world?”

“I dropped in on John,” she said.

“Ah. How was that?”

“It felt weird,” she said. “I see him each summer, but I haven’t been inside that house since I … left. We had a good chat.”

He was studying her face.

“I’ll tell you sometime.”

“Your call.”

She sat beside him. “How’s the book?” she asked.

“Kind of dry,” he said. “But interesting. Lots of anecdotes. You say your dad was in it?”

She walked to a bookcase, retrieved a photograph. Three men, two in army uniforms, one in work clothes, standing at the front of a truck. The civilian was holding a rifle in one hand and, with
the other, propping up the antlered head of a deer that was draped across a fender.

“Duncan gave me this before he went away. I didn’t know he had it. That’s my father there,” she said. “And that’s John’s father, Sandy. It was just before they went overseas.”

“And the guy with the rifle?”

“That’s Jack, Sextus’s dad.”

“Well, well. So this Sandy … he’s the one who was shot. In the war.”

“In Holland. Yes.”

“I think I heard something.”

“It isn’t a very pretty story.”

“They rarely are.”

“Would you care for a drink?”

“Why not.”

She was up early, to maximize the day, she told herself. His flight was in the evening. He’d have to leave by mid-afternoon. She was already resigned to the reality of his absence, resolved to keep the morning busy.

Over coffee, he told her he’d like to revisit the bookstore, see if Sylvia was there. “Would you come with me?”

“Of course.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. And curious.”

“Good,” he said.

But it was a stranger at the cash. “Sylvia’s not in today,” she explained. “She phoned in earlier. Anything I can do to help?”

“Give her this,” said JC, dropping a business card on the glass-topped counter.

The woman squinted at it. “Sure,” she said.

“Wait,” he said. Retrieved the card and scribbled quickly. “There,” he said, and slid it back across the counter. Then he turned to Effie. “I put down your number too. I hope that’s okay.”

She nodded.

“That’s the cemetery over there,” Effie said as they drove away.

“Is that where your dad is?” he asked, peering through the passing trees.

“All three,” she said. “The men in the photograph. They’re all there.”

“Can we see?” he said.

She was surprised. “I suppose, but it’s been so long I’m not sure I can find them.”

“Two Gillises over here,” he called out. “Alexander and Jack.”

“Then my father isn’t far away,” she said.

He was holding her hand. Then he put an arm around her shoulder. “You’re trembling.”

“Chilled,” she said.

She studied the simple headstone, wondering who had made the effort. Then she realized it was a basic military marker. “Cpl. Angus A. MacAskill. 2nd Batt., N.S. Highlanders.” And some dates. She hadn’t realized he’d been a corporal.

She leaned her head on JC’s shoulder. She wanted to say, “Please don’t go,” but suppressed the impulse. “He was a very bad man, in many ways,” she said, and suddenly regretted saying it.

He wrapped an arm around her and squeezed. “People aren’t bad,” he said. “They just do bad things sometimes.”

“Maybe,” she said. She could feel the ground below her feet shifting, as if she was about to slide away. She placed her arm
around his waist, held on. “I always blamed him for what happened to Sandy Gillis.”

“I heard Sandy Gillis killed himself,” JC said. “Why blame your father?”

“My father pushed him over the edge.”

“How so?”

“Sandy had no memory of the war or what happened there before he got shot. What they did—to the girl that shot him.”

“A girl?”

“Yes.”

“I heard it was a sniper.”

“It was a girl.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“My father killed her. With a knife. After she shot Sandy.”

She imagined that his arm had slackened slightly, that a tiny space had opened where their shoulders touched.

“How do you know all this?”

“Sextus. He worked it out. Years later.”

“So when was it that your father broke the news to Sandy, finally?”

“November 1963.”

“An eventful month, for sure.”

“Sandy couldn’t handle it, and he killed himself right afterwards. November twenty-second.”

He grunted. “The day Kennedy was shot.”

“Makes it even harder to forget,” she said.

There was a long silence, broken only by the whine of traffic on the nearby highway.

“Does anybody know what made your father lay that on Sandy, after all those years?”

“I do,” she said. “I know.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

She shook her head. “Yes. No,” she said.

And suddenly she was running through the gravestones, throat burning from the rising bile, stomach churning as the acid formed a vacuum in her throat. She flung herself against the cemetery fence, choking on the remnants of her breakfast.

Then he was beside her.

“I’m not crying!” she shouted. “Just leave me alone.”

He stepped back but kept one firm hand on her heaving shoulders. The sun was filtered by low-hanging cloud, but the day was warm, the air around them motionless. She thought she heard a robin in a nearby tree.

B
y early February she’d convinced herself it was because she cared so much that she’d begun to spy on him. She no longer walked to class. She would take her car so that afterwards she could drive past Walden. JC had stopped answering his telephone. She would mention Sorley whenever she left a message on the answering machine: “Hi, stranger. Hope everything is okay. I was just wondering about my cat, if he needs anything. Tell him I miss him. You too.”

Once, after dark, she parked on Broadview and walked along his street, past the little house. She walked briskly so that it seemed she had a respectable reason for being there. There was a light, but it was dim. She calculated that it was in the kitchen, the swag that hung above his table. It had a dimmer switch. Driving home, she felt a torrent of reproach.

There was something foreign in JC’s manner since he’d returned from Texas. The anger was replaced by something darker. Or maybe he had found a deeper place within himself, a place where he could go for privacy, unconscious of the distance it would open up between them. She’d abandoned any expectation that he would
show up for the party she was organizing for Valentine’s Day, even though he’d promised. There now seemed to be two JC Campbells. The one she would visit briefly or who would show up unannounced at her place, warm and interested, happily reliving happy times: the early days; their chance encounter in a subway station; his farcical attempt at reconciliation on behalf of Sextus; their summer holiday back home last year—an idyll that became more sacred as it faded. Then there was the other, the one in her imagination, the dark and silent shapeless absence, fortified inside the little house on Walden. Her only consolation was that a part of her still lived there with him.

Maybe it was the time of year. February was always bad. The weather, the irritated weariness in all the faces—friends, faculty and students equally. Or maybe it was time to just move on. Again.

And she thought,
My God, where are you now?

The book
, she thought. He’d mentioned something about writing a book. What was the subject? Impotence, he’d said. She knew exactly what he meant.

She needed him and, in particular, she needed his advice and the firm decisiveness she had started to rely on. He was direct, sometimes impulsive, but his instincts were reliable. He would know exactly what to do about the phone calls, about the stranger who had begun to insinuate familiarity.

She knew that in a moment of vulnerable carelessness she had exposed herself. But self-reproach soon turned to irritation and now approached a kind of dread each time the phone rang. And it rang a lot, day and night.

There would be pleading: “Hello. Please call. You have my number.”

Then remorse: “Hey, this is Paul. Just to say I can’t imagine what
you think … me bugging you. You won’t hear from me again. I promise. Have a nice life.”

Hours later: “Faye? I really want to talk to you. Call me when you get this.”

The last one left her shaken: “Hey, I’m not sure what kind of game you’re playing, but I’m getting really, really sick of it. Call me.”

It seemed that every time she walked through the door of her apartment, she’d see, again, that winking light. And when there was no one there, just living silence, it was always worse.

“Sorley sends his love,” JC said merrily as he kissed her cheek.

He was the last one to arrive, and now that he was here, he seemed to fill the room. Cassie almost ran to him, eyes glistening. “I’m so glad you came,” she said.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said. He hugged her and turned to Ray, pulled a bottle of Balvenie from a bag. “Something for the birthday boy,” he said. “And a bouquet of roses for my Valentine.” He handed them to Effie.

He shook hands with Duncan. “Father,” he said, nodding with mock gravity.

“It’s been a while,” said Duncan.

“Indeed it has. So, what’s on?”

Effie made brief introductions. It was a small gathering. A young woman whose name was well known from her byline in a daily newspaper; three men of diverse ages who seemed to be doctors. There was music, a nostalgia disc from the seventies; there was much light chatter. Effie noted that he had two longer conversations, one with Ray and one with Duncan, and seemed subdued in both. But over dinner he was dominant. He laughed the loudest, was first to launch the sharp responses, teasing and laconic.