Confidence Read online

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “By two wives.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. I find that extraordinary.”

  “That I know that?”

  “No, no. Having twenty children. One thinks of composers as intellectuals, and one hardly expects . . .” He sighed. It was not important to finish that, although it was interesting. He felt the calm washing his veins. And yet the lines were so sharp.

  After a time he said, “This is the most extraordinary feeling.”

  “Yup.”

  Then they were still again for some minutes. He felt as if he had never heard this music before, never known anything beautiful. He didn’t feel sleepy, he didn’t feel edgy. He was listening to the music and wide awake. “Three of his sons became composers,” he said quietly, “and well-known. It is extraordinary. Out of sixty Bachs

  we know by name, something like fifty-three were musicians.”

  She sighed. He sipped his vodka, which tasted like cold water.

  He picked up the book again and said, “Let me find this one piece of dialogue.”

  She put one hand, flat, over the page. “I don’t like being read to. I want to read it myself.”

  “But you’ll like it. I’m good at it. I do the voices and everything.” He didn’t know why he wanted to do this so much.

  She sat up. “All right, Lionel, why don’t you read it to me, why don’t you read everything to me. Show me, Lionel, I don’t know anything, explain the world to me. Isn’t that what you got to do with Trixie or Misty or whatever her name is?”

  He put the book down and stood up. He walked quickly to the washroom.

  When he came out, she said, “I was just joking, you know.”

  “I’d better go.”

  “Are you crying?”

  He went to the closet near the door and looked for his coat. She followed him, slipping in her stockings.

  “You are. You are crying.”

  “Treena,” he said. “Her name is Treena.”

  “I knew you were. Sit down for one second.”

  She took him by the hand and led him back to the sofa, where he sat dumbly, with his coat on.

  “It was just a joke,” she said.

  “You know what?” he said quickly. “You know what’s really a joke is that you’re right. You’re absolutely right, that is exactly what I want, to know everything and explain everything, and for you to listen, and that’s exactly what I had with Treena, and she did listen and she wanted to hear everything I had to say, and you can laugh, but it was really wonderful.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s bad.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s lovely.”

  “Okay. Whatever. I guess I understand that.”

  He shrugged. It was hot in his coat but he couldn’t stand. Nor could he take his coat off. The music was weeping, it was devastating.

  She said, “It’s a little bit sick, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you just get a pet?”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Take your coat off.”

  “I have to go.” He stood up. “I guess I do have this thing about being either a teacher or a student. I always have to be one or the other. I’ve talked to my shrink about this. I—my dad was a teacher. So I want to be one all the time. I find it kind of romantic, I guess.”

  She said very gently, “Right. But you forget that I am a teacher. And you can never explain the world to me. And I don’t want to be your teacher or your student.”

  “Yeah.” He stood up. “Thanks for the blow. And stuff.”

  He walked to King Street for a cab. The temperature had dropped; he had to button his coat. His cellphone rang. A hoarse voice said, “Katrina.”

  “Oh. No. Sorry, she’s gone.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Lionel. It’s my phone.”

  “Katrina wanted me,” said the guy.

  “Yes. She called you from my phone. But she went home. Who is this?”

  The line was dead.

  There were no cabs on this deserted end of King where the condos began. Lionel began to walk east, back towards Bathurst. He wondered what he would do when he got to his dark apartment, as he probably couldn’t sleep. Now would be a good time, actually, to have a dog, a dog that would be happy to see him, movement in the apartment, and he would have to take him out for a walk in the cold.

  It wasn’t really the absence of Treena that was bothering him, or the vanishing of Treena, the fear over what had happened to Treena that had been cutting him for the past four months; that had faded, really, over the last few weeks. He was okay with that now, not reeling with panic every time he saw a pornographic magazine on a corner-store shelf, not calling the last number he had for her every week. He was not writing letters to her on his computer any more.

  He knew what it was that was bothering him, and it was something that he did not want to think about or even admit, because it had not bothered him for some five years, and should no longer bother him.

  A cab almost killed him when he raised his hand at it near Bathurst. Once he was inside it and racing again through danger, again miraculously avoiding death as if suspended in a protective bubble, his phone rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Well now,” said Lionel, listless, “you called me, so why don’t you tell me who you are?”

  “It’s Timmy, bud. Where’s Leona?” There was a loud noise behind Timmy’s voice, shouting, and a beat.

  “Ah. Timmy, Leona went home. This is Lionel.”

  “Lionel? You a friend of Leona?”

  “Yes. She used—”

  “So where is she?”

  “Timmy, sir, she went home.”

  “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time, all right? I’m on Yonge Street. Where are you?”

  “Timmy,” said Lionel, “Timmy, honestly, Leona’s not here.”

  “Don’t jerk me around here, all right? Where is she?”

  Lionel shut off his phone. They were approaching his corner. He had to get off at an alleyway because he could only get into his apartment by a rear fire escape. Once he was up the fire escape and had wrestled with the lock that stuck, his phone rang again. The green screen said Private Number. He switched off its power. He took off his coat and turned on as many lights as he could and turned the heat up and put music on the laptop, queued three full-length concerts that would last him all night, and turned it up loud (the first was Schumann piano, mad and jangling, which his father had loved), and poured some Scotch and paced, wondering why he was thinking of his father now, his father whom he so wanted to be like, and whom he couldn’t call now, much as he wanted to, because he was dead.

  GENTRIFICATION

  It was, if anything, getting worse, the intersection. There was a new girl staggering around in broken heels and a miniskirt. She came rushing and tripping out of the doughnut shop into the cluster of guys in black hoods on the sidewalk, shoved her way through them and started yelling at someone farther off, walking fast in that jerky and deliberate way Tracy had come to recognize. She came right towards him, glancing at him quickly, in a mesh shirt over a black bra, and the black bra was loose and had slipped down below her nipples, which were thrust through the mesh. And her skinny legs were bruised and scabbed. There was no way to tell, with these women, how old they were: from far they looked like teenagers because they were so thin, but up close they could have been between twenty-five and fifty. They were sometimes missing teeth.

  Tracy walked on, the pink nipples in the fall air flashing on his retinas like the imprint of a bright light.

  There was no denying it: it was getting worse. Yesterday he had seen a black SUV cut off another black SUV right in the middle of the main street, and two white guys in black jackets had got out and flashed badges and pulled out the two guys in the other car, and those two guys looked exactly the same as the first two, except they weren’t cops. And
they were spreadeagled and searched against the car hood, just like on TV. Nobody passing had stopped to look. Everyone just kept their heads down.

  He had seen that same girl the week before riding a child’s tiny bicycle. In her heels. As if there was somewhere she really had to go. And Morgan had had her bicycle stolen from the back garden just the week before. They were, he and Morgan, both looking at every rack of bicycles they passed now, in case hers showed up. They knew it couldn’t have been taken far.

  But it was still only the big intersection that was bad, really: their little street was quiet, during the day at least, and their little house right down at the end, at least two hundred yards from the main street, and you didn’t have to walk far along that bad street before you could get on a streetcar. It was only Morgan who had to do that anyway; Tracy himself walked in the other direction to get to his train, down through the old factories to the commuter line, and that area was almost totally transformed, all animation studios and loft sales offices. That would no doubt come, soon enough, to them, just a few blocks over. He was still sure they had made the right decision.

  But there right in front of him was a group of people of all ages, walking towards him, and he knew right away what they were: there were the three bald young guys in track suits, and the grandmother pushing the baby carriage, and two other kids dancing around, and the vast shopping bags from the dollar store, and the language you couldn’t identify—at first he had thought Slavic, then Arabic, and it was none of these. They passed him noisily; they hadn’t been aggressive to him yet, even when the bald guys were in their packs without the women. They seemed happy to be there so far. They had all come before they changed the refugee status thing coming from the Czech Republic. There would probably be no more coming. Already they had their community organization and were taping up posters in their fantastic language, with lots of k’s and i’s, a language for warfare, and all the posters had the word ROMA at the bottom, sometimes with an exclamation mark, like a soccer chant.

  He rounded the corner, and heard yelling, the same old guy, Leslie, if that was his name, it was something androgynous, like Tracy’s own name, so it was something he was sensitive to, although god knows why he could never remember if this old guy was Leslie or Francis, it was something like that, god knows he had heard it five times on the day they’d moved in, and there he was, Leslie it was, on the square of concrete between the chain-link fence and the steps to the rooming-house, with his broom, sweeping up the broken glass that was always for some reason there, shouting happily to himself. “You tell me,” he said very loudly and clearly, his head down, “you tell me if that’s worth five grand. You tell me these fuckers aren’t trying to rip the goddam shit out of you for five grand. My opinion, you want my opinion.”

  He always seemed absorbed in his monologue and yet he never failed to notice Tracy trying to slip by with his head down. “Good morning,” bellowed Leslie or Francis, and Tracy called back heartily without stopping, almost at his own front door.

  “Hope you got some sleep last night,” shouted the old man, “you want to file a complaint I’m with you, you go right ahead, you got my support.”

  Tracy stopped, his hand already on the key in his pocket. “Something happen last night?”

  The guy dropped his mouth open like a guy expressing shock in a cartoon. “Don’t tell me you weren’t up all night like everyone else with all that ruckus. Firetrucks here and the whole mess.”

  “Yeah,” said Tracy. “Heard some yelling.” He did want to know if the old guy knew who it was who had been fighting but then he didn’t want the stories that would follow, so he just shook his head. “Just the usual, eh?”

  “It’s getting worse, you ask me,” said Leslie, smacking glass into the concrete gutter around the house. “My opinion, you want my opinion, this whole thing’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”

  Tracy shook his head, smiling, and shook out his key with a jingle.

  “That’s just one man’s opinion.”

  “Got to rush,” said Tracy.

  “Hey now,” said the old man, “let me ask you one question.”

  “Yup,” said Tracy, on his own front step. Morgan wouldn’t be home yet; he’d get an hour on the computer, maybe only forty-five.

  “Answer me this: if a deaf kid signs swear words, does his mother wash his hands with soap?”

  “Ha,” said Tracy, “that’s a good one.” He failed to add, Leslie. He still wasn’t convinced.

  “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things. Have a good one.”

  And there was the girl from underneath them, their tenant, shuffling up the basement stairs in her baseball hat and her dreadlocks, lighting a cigarette right under his nose.

  “Hey Deiondre,” he said, smiling determinedly.

  “Hey,” she said quietly. She did not smile. She was frowning. She loped off down the street, swinging her shoulders like an inmate in the exercise yard. She pulled her hood up over her hat. There was no way you wouldn’t think she was a boy if you passed her.

  At least it had not been her and Teelah fighting last night. And there had been no sound of the baby. There had only been a baby one night. It was quite possible it didn’t belong to either of them.

  The house was cold, which was good, actually, reassuring, it meant Morgan was finally listening to him about the absurd cost of heat in these old places, and also just the silly excess of it. He turned it up a bit, though.

  From the bedroom window the street looked quite unthreatening again, if a little sad: the ranks of recycling bins in front of the apartment blocks had at least replaced the hillocks of green garbage bags and white grocery bags, and there were no new dumpings of furniture. Most of the tenants in the blocks were families; they didn’t make trouble; and yet still every week there was a bed frame and a fractured dresser and a rug out there. Then they disappeared again; it wasn’t clear if they were disposed of or picked over by others who had had their beds and dressers dropped into the street.

  He had that knowledge again, rising in him like nausea: it was getting worse. He had been denying it to Morgan. But you had to face up to it. The Roma thing was good, really, he was happy for them, they probably really had been persecuted somewhere. They probably just wanted better dining room furniture. But two weeks before there had been a fight right on the main street, right in the middle of the intersection, not gypsies, two middle-aged white guys with shaved heads and stained coats grabbing, swinging away at each other, and then one head down on the asphalt and the other pounding. Cars had to stop in both directions. They were honking but nobody got out. The crowd outside the doughnut shop was watching and laughing.

  And at night the girls came out with their bruised bare legs and their cigarettes. They always looked away when he passed them.

  The computer was in what he was calling his little study, although officially they shared it, on the understanding that it would become a nursery. But he spent most of the time in there, on the computer; Morgan was starting to prefer the TV, in the evenings.

  He did not check his own email; he had been doing that all day, at work. He went straight to AmateurEx where they had posted the photos of Morgan. The response at first had startled them both: three thousand views of one photo in the first twelve hours, three hundred thousand within a week. They had both thought, immediately, of money: if you could have a buck, or even a quarter, for each one of those views. If you had a gallery of a dozen photos, with a million views of each at a quarter a piece. It would take a couple of days of shooting, up in the upstairs bathroom with the skylight. The variety would just come from the different pairs of panties. He would enjoy buying them. But of course now she wasn’t interested any more.

  There she was, still up, Samantha X—they had been joking, at the time, about the cheeziest name they could invent, but now he was a little proud of it—in the red panties and the white, one up against a wall and the other on a white sheet, as
s in the air, and the full nude with a trimmed little thicket just artfully in shadow. Her face was out of all of them, even her hair. The background was carefully neutral, the one large mole on her thigh shopped out. She had no tattoos anyway. Not even someone who had been in their bathroom would recognize the beige tiles. They were just beige tiles.

  Eight new friend requests, just the usual pictures of cocks, and the illiterate compliments. They were always half aggressive. And one more couple, or at least someone posing as a couple, with a picture of a naked pudgy lady in a kitchen in Belgium. She claimed to be bisexual and find Samantha extremely beautiful and just her sort. She was not unsexy, really, this pudgy lady in Belgium. Tracy was already hard from this exchange.

  He accepted all the new friends. The photo views were tailing off; only three hundred more in the past week. They would have to post more or they would fade into the archives; fans wanted new poses. It was sad that they were going to lose this, but Morgan wasn’t going to pose for any more. She had been flattered at first by the attention but not aroused, as he had been, and now she thought it was silly. And she didn’t think there was any point as she was not able to go to the gym nearly as often as before since her courses, so she looked, so she said, completely different anyway. There was no convincing her of the nonsense of this.

  It was interesting that the most views were still going to the white panty shot, not the full nude. Perhaps because there was the slightest hint of a shadow at the crotch, the area that was intriguingly called the gusset, a smudge that could possibly have been a stain of moisture. And perhaps the bathroom tile background suggested wetness or even some kind of unsanitary play. It was the least explicit shot but also possibly, in imagination, the dirtiest.

  He had explained this to Morgan and she had wrinkled up her face and said “My God men are weird.” It was after this that she had lost interest in the site, and in any new photos.