Joshua Then and Now Read online

  Walking was Joshua’s only exercise. Even on the coldest nights, the streets abandoned but the lights glowing everywhere, it used to please him to stroll downtown, past the Forum, as far as the International News Store, to fetch a batch of magazines for him and Pauline to read in bed. But with Pauline in the hospital, things were no longer the same. The children were understandably upset, and when he returned from his walk it was to confront homework problems that confounded him, or to settle squabbles, something he lacked the patience for.

  One afternoon he returned from The King’s Arms to find a tearful, pale Susy adrift on the study carpet in a confusion of encyclopedias and other reference books, her own essay pages blank.

  “What’s your problem?” Joshua asked.

  “It’s my project. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “I’ll help,” he said, aware of Alex watching.

  “Tell him what you’re into,” Alex said.

  “High school education in modern China.”

  “How could they ask you to write about that?”

  “It was high school education anywhere. I picked China.”

  Joshua moaned.

  “You told us we should show more interest in other societies,” she reminded him.

  “When does it have to be in?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Should I make you a Scotch?”

  “No. Yes. I’ll give you a note,” he said, avoiding Alex’s eyes.

  The pizza Joshua had ordered arrived and they sat down to dinner. Tears rolled down Teddy’s cheeks. “What’s wrong?” Joshua asked.

  “She’s looking at me.”

  “He says you’re looking at him.”

  “Because he shouldn’t eat with his elbows on the table.”

  “Why not? I do.”

  Teddy glowed.

  “You always take his side,” Susy said, fleeing the kitchen.

  Joshua turned on Teddy and asked him to stop grinning like a smart-ass.

  “I hate her,” he said, running off.

  “Well,” Joshua said, smiling at Alex, “haven’t you got anything to say?”

  “Sure. But you’d only say no.”

  “Try me.”

  “Can I register for driving lessons?”

  Joshua reached for his Scotch.

  “I’d be able to help with the shopping. I could take Teddy to his swimming lessons.”

  “O.K. Why not?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, really?”

  “Yeah. Really. I mean, what’s a red-blooded kid your age without wheels?”

  “But you didn’t have a car until you were thirty, and at my age you’d read all of Dostoevsky.”

  “Yes, but such immortal works as Fear of Flying had yet to be written.”

  “I didn’t buy the book. Carol lent it to me.”

  “Is she that touchingly sensitive gamin with the chewed-out fingernails who’s getting her shit together, as they say?”

  “That’s Penny.”

  “Then Carol must be the long smelly one with the frizzy hair and the green nail polish.”

  Alex laughed, appreciative, and Joshua grinned back, wondering what would happen if he got up to hug him. “Once,” he said, “when I was eleven, my father tried to kiss me and I flinched from him. If he had stayed behind to talk to me for only another five minutes, the cops would have had him.”

  Alex waited, hoping for more. But all Joshua said was, “Run upstairs and see what you can do with them, O.K.?”

  “Sure,” he said, touching Joshua on the shoulder in passing, “and you know …”

  “What?” Joshua asked hungrily.

  “I miss Grandpaw. I really do. When’s he coming back from Florida?”

  After everyone had gone to bed, Joshua poured himself another Scotch and flicked on the TV, catching the last period of the hockey game.

  He was half asleep on the sofa when the phone rang, jolting him. Not the hospital, he thought. Please, no.

  “Do you know where I’m calling from?”

  “No,” he replied, sinking.

  “The King’s Arms,” Jane Trimble said thickly. “Why aren’t you here?”

  “Because it’s one a.m. and I intend to be up at seven to see that my loved ones get a proper breakfast.”

  “I only came here hoping to run into you. Now I’ve been picked up by a young man in computers. He reeks of Old Spice. I’ll bet he wears Jockey briefs,” she giggled. “Multicolored. He put my hand on his thing and asked me if I had ever felt such a big one.”

  “Little did he know whom he was dealing with.”

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. He says older women turn him on. I’m only forty-two, Joshua,” and then she began to cry.

  “Go home to bed, Jane.”

  “He frightens me. If I go, he’ll follow.”

  “Call Jack, then.”

  “Oh, sure, call Jack. He frightens me even more. Come and get me.”

  “I’m not even dressed.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “No.”

  “I want to see Pauline.”

  “You so much as go near the hospital and I’ll break your arm. And that goes for Jack too.”

  “Please come and get me out of this. Please, Joshua. I have to hang up now. He’s coming.”

  Joshua phoned the bar immediately and spoke to George the bartender. “I think you’ve got a lady there.”

  “Yeah, she’s been asking for you.”

  “Is she in trouble?”

  “Well, she’s been necking with this yo-yo, but really leading him on, and now she’s crying and he’s calling her a cock-teaser.”

  “Do you think you could get him out of there and send her home in a taxi?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Settled, Joshua thought. But he should have known better. A half-hour later the front doorbell rang. “Well,” she said, “Sir Galahad at home.” Sweeping past him into the study, relieving him of his Scotch in passing, she added, “I thought you’d be undressed. How disappointing!”

  Skipping from here to there, circling warily, knives certainly drawn, they went into everything. The night of the astonishing dinner party on the lake. Her version of the events that had preceded it. Kevin. Jack. Pauline. The unfortunate timing of his trip to Spain. His fool’s errand. An hour later, inevitably, it ended badly.

  With the back of his hand, he was driven to cuff her hard against the cheek, bouncing her off the open front door, sending her sprawling.

  Jane sat down in the snow, blood leaking from her nose.

  “I’ll get you a towel,” he said wearily.

  “Oh no you won’t,” she said, stumbling upright, losing a shoe, as she ran for her approaching taxi.

  A week later he learned that she hadn’t gone home, but had continued on to Dickie and Wendy Abbott’s house, drinking out the remainder of the night with them. One shoe missing. Lying with her head back to stanch her bleeding nose.

  Where were you?

  Joshua’s.

  Yossel Kugelman, sole begetter of Your Kind, My Kind, Mankind, was no longer on the case. But the new doctor, a cheerful young man Joshua suspected of being an oaf, wasn’t making any progress either.

  Pauline, Pauline.

  Why hadn’t he caught the signals early? Appreciated that Kevin’s return had tipped the balance. Her delicate balance. So that, suddenly, there she was again, tidying everywhere, cleaning out crammed cupboards, dusting books, and compulsively making lists of chores to be done. Lists and lists of lists. Instead of recognizing the demon and helping her to expel it, he had yielded to exasperation, shuffling out of his study at five, written out, discovering her surly, and charging, “You’re in a bad mood.”

  “Am I?”

  “How come we don’t have drinks together before dinner any more?”

  “Do you want to hear about my day?”

  “Sure,” he said warily.

  “I spent an hour on the phone with Eaton’s, trying to get them to correct an error in
last month’s statement. I was switched from department to department to department and each time I had to repeat the story from the beginning and they’ve still got it wrong. Then I went to buy Teddy new skates. I had to double-park outside Mr. Tony’s and when I came out I had a ticket. Then I drove all the way out to Ville St. Laurent to get a new blade for the Garburator, but they don’t make that model any more. They wanted to sell me a new one. So I drove back to the Swiss Repair Shop and talked them into soldering and sharpening the old blade. I went to pick up your shirts at Troy and stepped into the street just in time to have a passing car shoot slush and blue salt all over my suede coat which will now have to be cleaned. That, and the parking ticket, will take care of most of the money I saved on the garburator blade. I stopped at Miss Westmount for a coffee. Why not, I deserve it, I thought. A fat greasy man sat down next to me at the counter and told me I had terrific tits. I went to Steinberg’s for the food order and that took another hour. Then I remembered the toaster in the back of the car and I went back to the Swiss Repair Shop and stood in line again and left it to be fixed. I registered Teddy for the spring swimming class at the ‘Y.’ I bought Alex the new Frank Zappa record he asked me to look out for. I went to Howarth’s to buy Susy three pair of school panties. The panties are not the right shade. Alex already has the Zappa record. Teddy doesn’t like the skates, they’re not what the other boys at school are wearing now. Then the order came from Steinberg’s and some ass had put the yogurt in upside down, and it was all over everything, and I have just finished washing all the cans before putting them away. Now it’s five o’clock and you expect me to be sweet and sexy and then you will want your dinner. Well, I haven’t done a thing about it yet.”

  “Let’s go out for dinner. The kids can eat pizza.”

  “The kids eat enough junk food without my ordering pizza. Susy needs help with her history tonight and Alex is going out with that awful Sally again and he’s bound to come home upset and want to talk to me in the kitchen. I haven’t been able to read a book in more than a month. I feel stupid. My hair’s greasy. You have that pained look which means ‘There she goes again.’ I’m a drudge. Well, you’ve all made me into a drudge. I’m sorry I had the children, really I am. I wish I were a cashier or a call girl with regular hours and men who brought me roses rather than split trousers to sew or skates to exchange. I don’t want to go out.”

  “All right then, I’m going out,” he said.

  The Flopper, his eyes adrift, was ensconced at the bar of The King’s Arms.

  “Joshua, there are three things that worry me in this world. Terrorism. All those nutty Ay-rabs hijacking planes left and right. And inflation. You know what they are asking for tomatoes today?”

  “You said three things.”

  “Right. Yeah. And Effie.”

  Effie was his wife.

  “What’s wrong with Effie?”

  “I promised her I’d be home at two o’clock this afternoon. What time is it now?”

  “Seven-twenty.”

  “Shit. I figured. Buy me a drink.”

  Pauline was waiting up for him in bed, reading the morning newspaper at last.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean a word of it.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I didn’t tell you everything.”

  He waited.

  “I ran into Jane on Greene Avenue and we had a drink together in the Jockey Club. She’s going back to work,” Pauline said, biting back tears.

  “Doing what? Poisoning wells? Snipping the balls off passing men and beading them into a necklace? Tell me. I’m fascinated.”

  “Crombie and McTeer. The copywriting department. She used to work there and now they’re taking her back.”

  “Why should that upset you?”

  “You should have seen her. She had just had her hair done. She was wearing a new outfit. She told me she was going back to work because her children were growing up and soon wouldn’t need her any more and she wasn’t going to become a household drudge. She said we were crazy, demented, allowing our husbands to turn us into a combination of mothers, maids, and cooks, draining the life out of us, and then they would look at us one morning and tell us that we had become boring, and that they found other women more exciting. She said she certainly wasn’t going to let that happen to her.”

  “God damn it. Son of a bitch. Jane never had time for her children or her husband or cooked a proper meal in her life. I would not find you more interesting if you had some dreary job in an ad agency or did social work. The children need you here. I need you here. I could rent an office somewhere. I work at home because I enjoy being with you.”

  “Jane is more interesting than I am. She has more spirit.”

  Joshua sat down on the bed and stroked her hair. “You and I come from very different Montreals, so I imagine the name ‘Tony Vitto’ means nothing to you.”

  “No.”

  “Tony was shot dead in a restaurant in Brooklyn a while back, following the killing of Crazy Joe Gallo. I met him when he was still a young hood and I asked my father, ‘What does he do?’ ‘Well,’ my father said, ‘Colucci, you know, has his problems. Yeah, with his shoes.’ ‘His shoes?’ ‘Yeah, he gets stones in his shoes, see, and Tony gets them out for him. He has a problem downtown, say, and he shouts at Tony, “Livarsi na patra di la scarpa! – Take this stone out of my shoe!” And that’s what he does.’ Well, Jane is the stone in your shoe and I wish I could get her out. Stop seeing her.”

  “But we’ve known each other since we were Susy’s age. We have fun when we’re together.”

  “You do?” he asked, surprised.

  “When you aren’t there, or other men, she’s different. Honestly, she can be wickedly amusing. She makes me laugh.”

  “I don’t understand women and their relationships, I really don’t. But I don’t want her interfering in our lives.”

  After Detective Sergeant Stuart Donald McMaster had got his day off to a far-from-rousing start, and he had bent his work rules, going out for a walk at 10:30 a.m., he had intended to stop at the Royal Vic to look in on Pauline, but as he got closer to the hospital he found himself making clever little detours, anything to delay the inevitable. Pauline was not only abysmally depressed, she was also depressing, and these daily visits to her room were beginning to get at him.

  Professing great and enduring love, Joshua was astonished at the resentments he had been able to nourish over eighteen years of happy marriage, a stock of pettiness he was able to feed on during her hour of need. Pauline had made no effort to be civil to Seymour’s wife, which was hurtful to an old friend. She hadn’t worn the dress he had bought her for her last birthday more than once. “It won’t do. My waist is going. Or haven’t you noticed?” They never went on a trip, she protested, unless he needed a break. Her needs never entered into it. Furthermore, in social matters large and small, it was his taste that always prevailed. So, no matter how much wheedling he had to do on the phone, he never failed to surface with tickets for at least one game of the Stanley Cup Finals, but he had never once taken her to Stratford.

  True, true.

  Pauline, the senator’s daughter, had been raised on the arts, while he had been brought up on the rough justice of Mr. Nat Fleischer’s Ring ratings. Look at it this way: While she was learning how to curtsy in the presence of the Governor-General, his father was teaching him how to jab, keeping his chin tucked in at the same time.

  But that’s all beside the point now, isn’t it, Joshua? If not for your unnecessary return to Spain – that stupid, self-indulgent trip that was to settle nothing, absolutely nothing – she wouldn’t be lying in the hospital now and he, come to think of it, might still be alive. You should have stayed home during her hour of need. Instead, you took off for bloody Ibiza, proving yourself an idiot twice.

  A fool’s errand, she had called it, and she had been right.

  When he finally arrived at the Royal Vic, late in the afternoon, he di
scovered Pauline asleep. In repose, her face without strain or reproach, she looked fine, just fine, and he was sorely tempted to undress and curl into bed against her. Instead, he sat in the chair by the window for better than an hour, Pauline breathing deeply, evenly, until, in a sudden panic, he rushed out into the hall to confront her nurse. “You promised me you wouldn’t let her stockpile any of those bloody pills.”

  “But I haven’t, Mr. Shapiro.”

  “I told you you were to wait by her bedside and make absolutely sure she swallowed them each time.”

  “We’re not fools here.”

  “Then why is she in such a deep sleep now?”

  “Because she had a very restless night. She hardly slept at all. And Miss Hodges gave her something to help her rest about an hour ago.”

  “Well,” he said, retreating, “all I ask is that you be careful.”

  “We are careful with all our patients, Mr. Shapiro, even those who can’t afford private rooms.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “You are being exceedingly rude.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joshua said, fleeing down the hall.

  But he certainly wasn’t going to leave the hospital until she wakened. He phoned Susy to say he would be home late.

  “Where are you, Daddy?”

  “At the hospital. Is Teddy there?”

  “He’s feeding his fish.”

  “Alex?” he asked.

  “He’s not home yet. A policeman phoned three times.”

  Alex picked up with a nickel bag, “What did he want?”

  “He wouldn’t say. But he left his name. McMaster.”

  “Did he leave a number?”

  She gave it to him.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  “No. Nothing, Susy. But I’d better call him right away.”

  Joshua called the station and got McMaster on the phone. “Why,” he demanded, “did you call my house three times?”

  “You sound irritated, Mr. Shapiro.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “We could have towed your car away.”

  “I owe you.”

  “I was wondering if you’d had a chance to take even a little peekie at my manuscript yet?”

  Joshua began to laugh.

  “Did I make a funny?”