Terminal Grill Read online

  Terminal Grill

  Terminal Grill

  Rosemary Aubert

  Copyright © Rosemary Aubert and Quattro Books Inc., 2013

  The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise stored in an electronic retrieval system without the prior consent (as applicable) of the individual author or the designer, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  The publication of Terminal Grill has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Author’s photograph: Doug Purdon

  Cover design: Sarah Beaudin

  Editor: John Calabro

  Typography: Grey Wolf Typography

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Aubert, Rosemary

  Terminal grill / Rosemary Aubert.

  Issued also in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-927443-43-9 ISBN EPUB 978-1-927443-44-6

  I. Title.

  PS8551.U24T47 2013 C813’.54 C2013-900388-6

  Published by Quattro Books Inc.

  382 College Street

  Toronto, Ontario, M5T 1S8

  www.quattrobooks.ca

  This book is dedicated to my dear friend,

  Sandra Rabinovitch.

  1987

  CHAPTER ONE

  TO MATTHEW, ALL THE days of the week are the same, and on each, no matter how busy he seems, he has only two things to do: to keep himself from thinking about what he has become and to find a place to sleep for the night.

  I met him at a wake.

  Not a real wake. A poetry reading on a warm spring Sunday in a seedy bar in what used to be the garment district. And I can’t say I really met him—only that I noticed him. For, like a lot of the other shady characters that slink into and out of the shadows and the limelight of the poetry world, he seemed familiar to me.

  The wake was for a weathered, wizened, beat-up old poet I used to see wandering the streets in summer with his typewriter tucked under his arm. The hundred or so who stuffed themselves into the dusty old bar to honour him gone were the same ones who’d drunk and argued and fought with him on a thousand afternoons like this one in a dozen other watering holes as cozy and greasy and sad.

  Every chair in the place was taken. I was sitting with friends—all men—and when one of them got up to go to the bar, this oddly-familiar stranger, who had been standing a few yards away, stepped up and asked me if he could sit down.

  We were by the front windows of the place, windows heavily curtained by dark, torn drapes. Every once in a while, someone would open one of the doors that led to the street, admitting a chiaroscuro shot of spring sun.

  I’d had only one beer, but my head was light from not eating all day and from the affectionate attention of my male poet friends who teased and flattered me. No one said anything to the stranger. He smiled pleasantly toward us all and turned his attention to the band.

  It was a pretty amateurish group and before long, they started to sound as though it were playing the same song over and over. A lot of poets had already read, but my friends were still waiting their turn and a lot more were going to read before they got it, judging from the program.

  I grew impatient. People came and went—not all of them friendly—most of them pressing up against those of us who sat at the table, getting in the way of the stranger who had to look around them to catch even a glimpse of the band.

  But though he got up to get a beer now and then, nobody asked me whether his seat was taken, and each time he returned, he sat still, not at all bothered by the comings and goings of others, and listening with what seemed some care. Once or twice, he complimented members of the band as they stepped off the stage—which in these fairly primitive surroundings really just meant stepping away from the mic. And they responded to him, which I thought interesting, since musicians tend not to take compliments seriously at all unless the compliments come from other musicians. I tried hard to remember where I might have seen him before, but I had no luck.

  Then the poets came back on stage. One after another they read their works. I started to find it hard to listen to them. Finally, though, the last of my friends got up to read, leaving me with the stranger at the table. I began to grow more conscious of his presence, as though we were suddenly together. Out of the blue, he mentioned that he was from out of town.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, “From where?”

  “Hartford, Connecticut,” he answered.

  “Insurance capital of the world,” I threw out, and he nodded. “A couple of great American artists were into insurance,” I added, “Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives. Ives wrote the best-selling textbook ever written on the insurance business …”

  His face took on a look of uncertainty, and I thought he was probably thinking, What a little know-it-all this one is! It occurred to me to wonder whether I’d mixed up New Haven and Hartford, never having been to either.

  But the man opposite me said very seriously, “I think the days of using Ives are past. The techniques are all different now.” Again he smiled, a smile that was boyish and easy. “But before—well, there’s a story I just love. It’s about a little kid whose father has died. One day the insurance man comes to the door and the little kid just happens to be the one who answers. His mom is in the kitchen and he runs to her and says, ‘Mom, we just got a letter from Daddy’. ‘A letter from Daddy?’ the mother says, upset, ‘But honey, I told you—’ But then the little boy holds up a nice fat cheque from the insurance company—”

  “Shit!” I said, and we both laughed.

  Though I had no more beer, I started to feel good. I started to feel that life was treating me just fine. Here in this room were plenty of men who obviously found me worthy of their attention—including this dark and good-looking stranger. Up on stage now was one of my friends and waiting for him to finish was another and both of them were good poets and interesting companions. I was ready to accept that all my exes and friends and might-have-beens were the only men in my life. I was okay. I was ready to call it a day, ready to take this warm glow back to my cold basement apartment. Ready to quit while I was ahead.

  But it seemed wrong to leave in the middle of a poetry set. Then it seemed wrong to walk out on the band. So the afternoon wore on. My friends came back to the table. Someone came over and invited them to join “everyone” for Chinese food across the street as soon as the wake was over. She nodded toward me, too.

  But all I wanted was to get something to eat fast and to go home by myself, satisfied with the afternoon and determined to spend the evening studying for an exam in my night-school criminology course.

  Every time somebody cracked the darkness with a splice of sun from the door, I edged closer to standing up and getting out.

  Only, I couldn’t get out without crawling over the good-looking stranger, plus a couple of my friends, all of whom were now on the same side of the table between me and the path to the door.

  At long last, the afternoon’s program ended with a tape—a long, gravelly posthumous speech from the day’s dead poet. It was a voice from the grave. From the streets. From drunk alleys and garbage can meals and filthy doorways and fleabag rooms. A voice so familiar to everybody in the room—everybody who’d been yelled at, cajoled, convinced, stunned by the old guy—that all of a sudden the wake was for real.

  The roomful of poets emptied fast, but with an impressive lot of silence.

  Into the spaces left slipped the usual habitués of the place. I sensed my friends talking to each other, but I wasn’t paying close attention, because the stranger had asked me whether I was a poet—a question it took me a minute to think about. They got up and start
ed to walk away. One of them turned back and said, “We’ll be back to get you to go over for supper.”

  There was now only me and the stranger in that whole section of the pub. “Is that your man?” he asked me.

  And knowing full well exactly how it would sound, nevertheless I said, “I have no man.”

  At first I thought my friend had meant it when he said they were coming back. But more and more poets left, more and more neighbourhood types—seasoned drinkers in green workpants and checkered shirts—filled spaces at the rickety tables, though no one came into the corner where we sat.

  A waitress came and cleared our table of all but the two beers that sat in front of my new friend. He helped her, gathering glasses and bottles and empty packages from cigarettes. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

  “So,” he said, in a voice I now noticed was smooth and very deep and slightly accented with the unmistakable tones of New England, “are you a poet?”

  I looked down, the question always embarrassing me. “Yeah,” I said, “but I didn’t read today.”

  “I didn’t think you were a poet,” he said. “They all seemed so anxious to get up there and stay there as long as they could—hogging the spotlight. You don’t seem like that.”

  I, of course, could say nothing to that.

  “Anyway,” he went on. “I’m glad I didn’t miss you. I got here late. I heard about the wake, and I knew I better come.”

  He spoke about it as if it were as much a wake as one held in a funeral home. The poet in question had been buried a few months now, so …

  “You knew him, then?” I asked.

  “Knew him? Oh yes, yes, sure.”

  Across the room, a well-built, slender man with wild blond hair dyed lighter in front stood up and got ready to leave the pub. “Know him, too,” the stranger said.

  “I do, too,” I smiled. The man was a poet and rock singer whom I’d known when the wild hair had been curls and the hard rock songs had been lonely folk ballads. He was on his way to fame now.

  “Bet he doesn’t talk to us,” my companion said, and I noticed bitterness in his voice. It was a little surprising because he seemed such an even-tempered, almost gentle man, as far as one could tell from a couple of hours’ nearly silent acquaintance.

  “I don’t think he can see us here in the corner,” I commented as both of us watched the man leave without so much as a glance our way.

  “Are you a musician yourself?” I asked, curiosity finally getting the best of me.

  The man turned and looked me full in the face. He had a strange expression, one compounded of shyness and something else. “Yes,” he said, “as a matter of fact I’m a pianist with Neil Young.”

  I looked away from him. I was ignorant of any specific knowledge of that kind of music, but something struck me funny about a famous musician having a pianist. “Yes,” the man said, “that’s why I’m here. Neil’s doing a video. We’ve been at it almost two weeks and now we’ve got eight days left.”

  “I guess you’ve been with him a while?” I asked, not really knowing what to say.

  “Seven years,” he said. And he launched into a long, complicated genealogy of bands the way a historian will sometimes launch into an explanation of the bloodline of foreign kings. I recognized some of the names, and the way he talked was the way I remembered people talking about bands when I did know about such things, but for the most part, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  But I’d have to have been really stupid not to have known that Neil Young was famous and that anybody who travelled with him, as this man was claiming he did, had to be pretty near famous himself.

  “Neil lives in L.A. now,” he offered.

  “So that’s why you live in the States?” I asked, a little nervous now, but not wanting to end our conversation.

  “Yes. So I’m just up here for a little while longer.”

  Part of me was thinking how lucky it was to have met somebody as charming and handsome and important as this.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BEAUTIFUL, LIKE THE rich, are different.

  I couldn’t help noticing as we spoke just how beautiful Matthew was—a white lion with a black mane. Pale, slight, but with a high-cheekboned face that seemed sometimes boyish, sometimes harshly masculine. His eyes had a startling, dark intensity that set off the wild long tumble of his black curls. He wore an impressive sweater on the front of which was embroidered a panther in dozens of subtle shades of thread, including a shot of shining gold.

  When it became evident that my friends were not going to return, Matthew sort of offered in a hinting way to help me find them and I sort of hinted that I’d rather go somewhere with him. It worked. He told me he knew a little place not far away and was more or less headed that way now and that I would be welcome to come along. Again, I felt flattered. He seemed very much younger than me and very suave and very good-looking and very well-dressed in the navy raincoat he donned as we left the bar.

  Out in the afternoon sun, still brilliant now at half-past six, I saw, to my surprise, that he was quite nervous. He looked at me with a sort of sidelong glance and laughed and said he liked the way the colour of my hair looked in the sun. I asked him if we should take the bus, assuming that we would, but he said he would rather take a cab and that he always took cabs when he’d been drinking a few. I thought this an odd comment from a man from out of town and wondered whether he was implying that he had a car.

  We walked up Spadina just a few metres and saw an empty cab parked in front of Mr. Submarine. Matthew said that obviously the driver had gone in for a coffee and that he’d be out any minute. There was such authority in his voice that even so simple a comment seemed an impressive display.

  But we waited for a bit, and the driver didn’t come out, so Matthew hailed another cab. We got in, and as we sped up Spadina I felt young and free and a little wild to have gone off with a man as young and handsome and—maybe—as important as this. By the time we got to Bloor and Madison, a few minutes’ drive away, I was already willing to ignore the fact that I was almost sure that Matthew had inadvertently referred to himself in the third person, as if he were not Matthew at all, or as if he had momentarily forgotten that Matthew was who he was supposed to be.

  The bar he’d chosen was a very nice one I’d seen from the outside many times and had often wanted to go into, though not alone. So I’d never been. It was new, but decorated in a fairly traditional English-pub style. It was close enough to the University of Toronto to be a student/graduate bar, and it was crowded. Nonetheless, Matthew strode in with confidence and immediately found us an acceptable table. I found it reassuring that the waiters and some others in the bar seemed to nod to Matthew as if they knew him. I did not ask myself why I needed to be reassured.

  We sat in the bar and talked for a very long time. I asked Matthew a few questions about his career, and again he said he was part of a back-up band that travelled everywhere with Neil Young and that they’d been in town for a total of three weeks minus the eight days they had left and that they were working on a video. He mentioned the studio—the address sounded vaguely familiar. He mentioned that a well-known children’s show was finishing up taping when they had arrived to begin their shoot. I asked him if they were striking the set when his people had arrived. When I used the word “striking”—not one the uninitiated might be expected to use—Matthew registered pleased surprise.

  In the cab we had talked about the only mutual acquaintances we shared in Toronto. One was the musician who had failed to say hello to us at the wake, whose name was Dill. The other was a woman named Barbara who’d once been that musician’s lover. Barbara was an eccentric and outspoken woman, a poet herself. The only other person both Matthew and I had known was the dead poet. Now as we talked, I asked him where he was staying, expecting him to name a hotel.

  Instead, he spun a long tale about a magazine writer, whose name was, again, vaguely familiar, saying that the writer had as
ked his advice when writing a review about the work of Dill and Barbara, a review that Matthew implied was very critical of Dill, since Matthew didn’t like Dill’s work. He said that the writer, who, according to him, worked for a well-known Toronto magazine, was out of town and that he was staying at the home of her and her husband because it was nicer than staying at a hotel. He then smiled and added a touching little detail: he said they had a bird that he was looking after for them, a cockatiel. I didn’t ask him where this apartment was, but he volunteered the information that it was near Maple Leaf Gardens.

  As we spoke, Matthew kept saying he preferred not to talk about his career or his music. But he did talk a lot about many things. I was very hungry and ordered a sandwich, which I ate, and a basket of French fries, which I was too excited to eat, even though I still felt starved. Matthew ordered nothing but beer and wouldn’t touch the food I’d ordered and offered to him.

  On and on we talked. Mostly, I listened. When I mentioned my interest in criminology, he told me that he used to do benefit concerts in prisons. He said that one time, the band got the time of a concert wrong and ended up at a prison one hour late only to discover that the warden had made the men put up chairs for the concert, sit in them for nearly an hour, then take them all down again—then refused under any circumstances to let the concert go on when the band arrived. He said the band was so furious about this that they tore up the town.

  I was tremendously impressed not only with this story, but with the apparent sensitivity of the teller.

  He told me that he no longer did benefit concerts, though, he said, he’d done Farm Aid. He said that now—and this was a recurring theme throughout our days—he was planning to go to South Africa “to educate.” He mentioned a prominent Canadian journalist and said the man had promised to keep an eye on him and to write about him if he should be killed.

  I knew so little about the kind of music he claimed to be working on that to question him would have been rude. So I kept my peace, except to say I felt there were causes closer to home he could take up instead. He said nothing to that. But he did quite clearly say about going to Africa, “Matthew says it’s dangerous.”