Confidence Read online

  “You know Constantina.”

  “Indeed, we met many years ago, you were only small.”

  The daughter smiled. “My mom talks about you all the time.” Her hand was hot.

  “You really had me fooled about the rave,” said Concetta.

  “Concetta, there aren’t really raves any more. Are there, Constantina?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I just study all the time.”

  “Constantina’s at Brown,” said Concetta.

  “Brown, wow. Brown. The birthplace of the rave, no?”

  “Is it?” said the girl.

  “No.”

  “Go,” said Concetta, “you’re keeping your wife.” Concetta waved and smiled towards the door. “Tell her she’s beautiful.”

  “I will.”

  “She really is.”

  “I know that. Nice to see you again,” he said to Constantina. “We’re off, well, I’m off, with some friends, to a place called Petunia. It’s a new place and apparently it has some whatever. Some style. You’re both more than welcome to come.”

  “Oh, I’m far too old for that,” said Concetta. She extended her hand as if to look at her rings and bracelets. “This one might want to go.”

  “Is there music?” said Constantina.

  “Oh I’m sure there is music. It’s all music.” Dominic glanced towards the door, at Christine waiting with her coat on. She was texting.

  “I haven’t been dancing for like ever.”

  “You should go. You’ve been cooped up with your boring old parents for days. Dominic will take care of you.”

  Dominic looked at Christine, who looked up from her phone. She raised her eyebrows.

  Dominic was conscious of being watched as he took out his own phone and entered the number that Constantina dictated to him. Then he shook hands with the girl and kissed Concetta on her perceptibly powdered cheek and came back to his wife. She took his arm and helped him down the two steps to the freezing street.

  The concrete was white from the light of Djibouti Cafe and Restaurant (Business Club). There were still guys in there, on display, smoking their hookahs, looking disapprovingly out at all the people who cared about getting into Petunia.

  “Look at the Pharisees,” said Dominic, “watching in judgement. Hey, did you see that look the elf gave me? It was pure hatred, like a challenge, it was what guys do when they want to fight you. It was like, you looking at me? Let’s fucking do this. He is so fantastically in character all the time.”

  “I’m going to walk,” said Christine. “You get this cab.”

  “Now that is crazy, really crazy. I’m coming home with you. Then I’ll get a cab.”

  “You’re not going to walk all the way home though. It’ll kill you.”

  “It’s exactly what I need,” said Dominic. He put as much weight as he could on the cane and tried to stand tall. “Or we could get a taxi together, home, and then I’ll go.”

  “Why?”

  Dominic looked at his wife. She was tall on her heels, her head up, looking down the street for a taxi. Passing students looked down furtively at her calves in their shiny leggings. She looked like a photo shoot. People watching would have been jealous that he was taking her home. Except he wasn’t. “I find this weird,” he said.

  “What? You want me to be all hysterical that you’re going to a club with Cenerentola?”

  He snorted. “That’s good, Cenerentola, that’s funny.” Then, quickly, “It’s not really a club. It’s more kind of loungey from what I understand. But yes, I guess, yeah. I think this whole thing, this whole new idea.” He had to stop talking because a car stereo was too loud. Wind sliced into his coat. He struggled to button it with one hand on the cane. “I have to admit, although I think it’s not a bad idea, I have to admit it hurts my feelings.” He was almost shouting this. “It hurts my feelings that you don’t want to come home with me.”

  “Of course I do, sweetie.” She stepped back from the curb. A cab swerved almost onto them both and stopped with a jerk. She opened the door. “But I know you don’t. Go out, have fun, tell me all about it. We’ll talk about the other thing later.”

  “Listen,” he said. He was holding the cab door open. “It’s not going to be forever, this leg thing, whatever it is. If it was life-threatening they would be more panicked about it. It’s most likely something that will go away on its own and I’ll be better, some time. I’m going to get better.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And then I will be more myself and I hope things will get back to normal, in every way, don’t you?”

  “Of course. Give me a kiss.”

  She slammed the door, and the cab sped away.

  Dominic stood there for a moment to check his phone—there was indeed a text from Frederick, an address—and then stuck up his hand. Two taxis squealed to a stop and some honking followed.

  He gave the driver the address. He listened to the Koran being recited. This had become a comforting sound. He watched the bright facades slicing by and the girls slipping on ice in their heels.

  The car got stuck in traffic beside a dark park where there was nothing to look at and the arabic chant grew irritating. Cenerentola was so good. Not everyone would get it, which was one of the attractive things about Christine.

  When they reached the next light, Dominic leaned forward and told the driver they were going somewhere else. He gave his home address.

  Dominic and Christine lived down a lane between two houses. It was known as a coach house although it had actually once been a garage. He got out of the cab on the street and walked down the lane. He walked past the front door of frosted glass. The motion-sensitive light went on. He walked around the side of the box, where there was a sliding glass door. Through this door, if the curtains were not drawn, one would be able to see into the entire main room, where both the kitchen and the television were. One would be able to see if anyone was home.

  He stopped carefully just before the door. There was light coming out. He stepped back, just beyond the reach of the light, and peered in.

  Christine was sitting on the sofa, in front of the TV. She was wearing her terry-cloth bathrobe, and black socks, and her reading glasses. She had a litre bottle of Coca-Cola on the side table, which was something she would not drink in front of him. She was knitting. The thing she was knitting was only small still, a woolly square, with two stubby extensions. Perhaps these were sleeves. She kept stopping and leaning forward, poring over some kind of instruction sheet laid out on the coffee table.

  On the tv were the expressive and overly blonde women of the kind of reality TV show that Dominic could be withering about if he caught her watching it. One of them was trying on a wedding dress. The other women were reacting with a pantomime of hysteria. All of this was silent.

  He watched her knitting. She was not very good at knitting—she had tried it in front of him, a few times before, after her friends had had babies—and scorned it just as he had. He watched her unravel several rows and screw her eyes up at the magazine and start again. She was being very patient with the knitting.

  It was, as she turned the thing over in her hands, starting to look like a tube or sleeve, although a very tiny one. Of course it was a baby sweater, for the new one, Frieda’s new baby, her second. It was a crazy thing for someone like Frieda, almost forty and single, to do, to have a second one; she had already been poor and exhausted enough by the first one. Dominic had commented on this until Christine had told him to stop.

  Dominic did not know for how long Christine had been knitting this thing. At the pace she was going, it must have been for a while.

  Dominic watched her a while, knowing then that he had to go back to the bars, that he could not interrupt her in this secrecy, could not admit to having seen it, everything that Christine was doing and wearing and hiding from him, and he felt a terrible longing to protect her, a tenderness, as if she were his small and only child.

  THANKS

  Jowita Bydlowska


  Martha Magor Webb

  Dan Wells

  John Metcalf

  Emily Donaldson

  The Ontario Arts Council

  Pepper’s Café

  The line about poets and croquet players in the

  story “Confidence” is from Christian Bök.

  “Research” was first published in The Queen Street Quarterly, “Fun Girls” in Toro, “TXTS” in Lostmag, “Confidence,” “Gentrification” and Crazy” in The New Quarterly, “Sleeping With An Elf” in the Humber Literary Review.

  Russell Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Halifax, Canada, His previous novels include Muriella Pent and Girl Crazy. He writes a weekly column on the arts for the Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Crazy

  Research

  Fun Girls

  Gentrification

  TXTS

  Confidence

  Raccoons

  Sleeping with an Elf

  Acknowledgements

  Author