Toby (6 page)

“I have a proposal for you.” Toby stood up and placed his hands on Dwayne’s desk. “I have a counter-proposal.”

“I’m not accepting any proposals or counter-proposals. I have to prepare for a conference call, as I mentioned. All this is a real shame, damn it to hell. But you, of all people, will understand how this racist business reflects on the station.”

“I’m not a racist.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

“You do have a choice, Dwayne. Stand with me.”

“Just relax.”

“I am relaxed. I’m relaxed!”

“Just rewind a little.”

“Yes. Let’s. Back to the good old days when I had a job.”

“I am sorry. Sorry for everything. Really. Just calm down, be calm, and give me the knife.”

Toby didn’t understand. He looked down. In one hand, he held a pewter letter opener designed to look like a dagger. Dwayne had received it as a Christmas gift from his wife, and occasionally swung it about during conceptualization and strategy sessions. Toby dropped it on the desk.

Dwayne slid the dagger out of Toby’s reach and stood up, a layer of perspiration where his hairline used to be. “This is a real shame for all of us.”

It seemed Dwayne expected Toby to leave now, to walk down the hall of anchors to the loop of middle management. There was nothing left to discuss.

“Do your wife and children know about Alicia? Did you tell Kathia about her?”

The station manager made a fist and chewed on his thumb knuckle for a moment, a tic. He walked around the desk and approached Toby, said gently, “Maybe you have a tape recorder in your pocket.”

“No.”

Dwayne reached up with one hand and pulled Toby by the tie until he fell to the ground, bouncing his forehead off the wooden arm of a chair. Simultaneously, Dwayne slammed his door closed with his other hand. Toby could smell a blur of chemical in the carpet. In school, drama class and membership in the debating club had formed a shield of preciousness
and, in the constellation of high school brutes, pointlessness around Toby. He did not have a brother.

With sinister tranquility in his voice, Dwayne whispered, “I don’t want to hit you.”

“Don’t hit me.”

“But if you ever,
ever
so much as hint at hurting my family, I’ll find you and I’ll fucking hit you. I’ll hit you hard.”

“You’ve been abundantly clear, Dwayne.”

“Hard.”

“Clear and merciful.”

Dwayne pulled Toby back up to his feet, again using his tie. He then loosened Toby’s tie and fixed his left lapel. Opened the door. “You know, it’s been a real treat working with you, Toby. A real treat.”

The lights were off in Alicia’s office. She sat in a wicker chair near the window with a cup of coffee and Lawrence, her stuffed owl. All he had really wanted, down the hall, was to make her feel ashamed and to draw something—anything—for himself from her shame. Now he just wanted her.

She looked at him and looked away.

“You might have apologized, Allie.”

“I might have.”

“Never once did I cheat on you. Never once did I consider it. Not that I didn’t have opportunities.”

“My sincerest congratulations.”

Toby knew she was not in love with Dwayne. It was not in her to fall in love with a married man who occasionally contracted pink eye from his children. It did not work that way for her. “If you promise, and I mean really promise, to stay loyal to me, Alicia, I’d be willing to give you another chance.”

She blew a burst of air out her nose.

“There’s enough money in my severance for a trip to Paris. First-class flight, a week at the Four Seasons. We could get married at the Hôtel de Ville. If one of us has to be there for a month before they’ll do it, I’m willing to make that sacrifice. I can plot the next stage in my career.”

“Toby.”

He went down on one knee, again.

“Still no ring.”

“We can go together, right now, to the Tiffany counter. Whatever you want.”

“Say goodbye to your parents for me. My best wishes to poor Edward.”

“No.”

“Toby. You don’t even have a job.”

“I’m not leaving.” He thought he detected a smile. Something. “Tractors couldn’t drag me away now, my darling.”

“You have nothing.”

“I have love.”

“Not that.”

His right knee began to hurt, so he switched to the left. “‘Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.’”

“You really don’t understand.”

“I do understand. I do. I know why you were with Dwayne. But if you stick with me, I can take you ten times farther. I can—”

“No.”

“I’ll do anything.”

“This is a real spectacle.”

Toby crawled across the floor to her chair.

Alicia produced her iPhone. “You’re humiliating yourself, and I can’t watch it. What’s the number for Security?”

“What can I do?” Toby stood up. “What can I do?”

“Go.”

“I’ll show you, Alicia. You’ll see.”

She looked at him, but also past him, as though most of Toby had already left the room. “We try to hide it, but it shows in a moment like this. Where we come from.”

He wiped the dust from his knees and tried to formulate a response. His father with the mitts on, his mother with her chocolate milk and her cigarillos, the pile of scrap wood in the backyard. “This isn’t finished.”

Alicia followed him to the door and pushed it closed behind him.

Half an hour later, he was in his own office, adding four new
Toby a Gentleman
segments to his demo reel. He phoned Anton Beauchemin, station manager of the CTV affiliate, and said he was available.

“What? Have they gone shithouse rat over there? You’re still on billboards.”

“Craziness is a pretty good summation, Anton.”

“Well, of course, we’d love to have you. Not sure what’s available at the moment. We’re officially in a hiring freeze, like everyone else. But we’re retooling the morning show. How’d you like to wake up at four every day?”

“I would like nothing better.”

They exchanged numbers and addresses, made plans to meet for drinks at the end of the afternoon. Toby packed
a wine box full of awards and books and photographs. He printed off several copies of his C.V. and burned ten discs of his updated demo reel. The studio was half full, with a meeting of the morning show host and producers. Sandra from Poland said, flatly but not quietly, “Nazi.”

He drove north and west toward the Montreal General. His phone vibrated. At the next red light, at Sherbrooke and de la Montagne, Toby checked and discovered an e-mail from Anton Beauchemin.

Dear Toby, Heard about the thing. Can’t do it. No point meeting. Apologies, regrets. Anton

For the past year, Mr. Demsky had lived and worked in a Victorian townhouse on Elm Avenue, two blocks west of the Forum, Montreal’s factory of half-remembered sepia dreams. He might have lived higher up the mountain, in the detached stone houses of multi-generational business-class travellers, but he had chosen to stay close to his audience, whom he both adored and despised. Elm Avenue was tranquil despite its proximity to a shopping mall, a synagogue, the college Toby had attended after high school, and the twenty-two-screen cinema complex that was once the Forum. It was a Wednesday, and therefore difficult to find a parking spot. Bits of dust blew up and settled on the lapels of Toby’s suit and on his violated tie, and with this wind came nostalgia for the early 1990s: kisses, European coffee, thunder, marijuana.

Personal assistants never lasted long with Mr. Demsky, and when he hired someone new he would seek an untried nationality: Chinese, Ukrainian, Thai, Caribbean, Pakistani. Toby couldn’t pick out this latest woman’s accent, at least not on the intercom system. There was a breathlessness about her. “The door is open,” she said. “Just enter.”

Mr. Demsky kept several residences in North America, France, and Israel, and in the midst of his semi-retirement he moved from house to house to avoid extreme cold, extreme heat, and boredom. According to the October chill Toby felt as he entered the townhouse on Elm Avenue, Mr. Demsky’s time in Montreal would soon come to an end for another year.

There was a dark wooden arch in the foyer and complex geometric shapes on the tile floor. Over the neoclassical violin music that issued from tiny speakers bracketed to the ceiling, Toby could hear Mr. Demsky and his assistant arguing bitterly. On his way up the stairs, Toby stomped his feet so they might hear him and quiet down. Of course, they knew their visitor was not a former prime minister; Mr. Demsky worked before a bank of LCD screens that displayed shots of the perimeter of his townhouse. The giant master bedroom, transformed into an office, had a bay window overlooking Elm Avenue. There was nothing on the white walls but a single art deco cowboy poster advertising canned tomatoes. Toby knocked on the door jamb; again, they ignored him.

The woman was stout and wore a dress and stockings inspired by a Bavarian beerhouse. Her hair was red and tightly curled, flecked with grey.

“I don’t want bulgur wheat salad.”

“Vegetables, Adam, vegetables.”

Mr. Demsky shook Toby’s hand, though he hadn’t yet made eye contact. “Go cook me a steak.”

“You had red meat yesterday.”

“And while you’re at it, open a bottle of Chablis and order us up some hookers.”

“You would not know what to do with a hooker.”

Mr. Demsky looked down and shook his head. “And now you emasculate me in front of my protegé.”

Protegé.
Hearing this word, Toby knew that Dwayne had gone too far. He would be back on the air before the end of the week. Until now, he had been an external presence in the room. With “protegé,” a word of infinite hope, he settled into the triangle. The violin music, Mr. Demsky—his hero, really—the ornate features of the townhouse.

“I quite enjoy a bulgur wheat salad, with lots of parsley,” Toby said. “It’s cleansing.”

“You see?” said the Bavarian.

“Oh, betrayal.” Mr. Demsky squinted at her. “Tobias, wait downstairs for twenty minutes. I’m about to strip this woman to her underclothes and teach her a lesson.”

“You are too old.”

“I have drugs.”

A stalemate ensued, until the assistant walked out. Toby watched her go.

“She humours me.” Mr. Demsky sat in his leather chair and wheeled back behind his desk.

“Mr. Demsky, I’m here because—”

“When my wife died, Tobias, I was miserable. Couldn’t see a way out of it. I gave myself two years, tops. It’s been eleven.” Mr. Demsky pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from
underneath a hollow Bible, selected one, and lit it with a match. “She throws a fit when she catches me smoking.”

“Of course.”

“In the midst of my misery, eleven years ago, I sat down and made a list of my final goals. How old was I? Not so old. All I
really
wanted, at that time, to cap off my life, was to fuck a robot. I still do, but technological innovation has been moving slower than I anticipated.” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew it straight up with his eyes closed. “But I refocused. I refocused. I took my hit, and I refocused.”

“This morning, Dwayne fired me.”

“He called for permission.”

“But—”

“I’ve been working for the past two hours with a couple of my lawyers, threatening to sue anyone who distributes the video. It’s been halted on the sharing sites, but it did spread quickly. The damage has been done. I can’t afford to piss off the Conservatives right now.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Nothing, Tobias. What you are in that video is the one thing we cannot be. The station is dead to you, like my wife and my robot.”

“He’s sleeping with Alicia. He wants to destroy me.”

“Sentimentality.”

“I’d been up all night, with my dad. He was burned in a fire, and I was on a lot of NyQuil.”

Mr. Demsky walked to a tall wooden bookshelf stained a deep burgundy. He pulled down a leather-bound volume with gold-embossed pages and placed it open in Toby’s hands. It was a long poem, in English on the left side and Latin on the right, “On the Nature of Things,” by Lucretius. Toby read the first few lines in English without really concentrating.

“Wow. That’s really pretty.”

“Out loud, for Christ’s sake.”

Toby put on his broadcaster voice and read slowly. “‘Therefore death to us / Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least, / Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.’”

“Lucretius was a brilliant old atheist. Whenever I’m tempted into sentimentality, I like to read him. You can borrow that if you like.”

“Mr. Demsky, I’m—”

“You’re serious about this business.”

“I am.”

“You made a mistake and you want to make it go away.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you can’t. But starting right now, you have to see the lesson in this. It’s time to grow up, yes? To forget about your mother and father, your friends, your girlfriend, your wife, strangers who can do shit for you. If it isn’t sleep they’re taking, it’s your centre of gravity. Your calm. Your gift, Tobias. Everything you’ve earned. You don’t have to be an asshole, but you do have to be discerning with your time and energy. Ruthless. Dwayne succeeds, you see, because he genuinely does not care about displeasing his wife and breaking his children’s tiny little hearts. He never cultivates friends who cannot help him. It all comes naturally to Dwayne, as it comes naturally to me.”

“That goes against pretty much everything I’ve ever taught my viewers, Mr. Demsky. What about the breakdown of morality? The spiritual crisis in America? What is etiquette, if it isn’t—”

“It’s irrelevant. It’s an effect, and men like us, we have to be in the business of causes. There is success, Tobias, and there is nothing else. It’s very, very simple. You and I can
share a bottle of wine and talk about making every man on the East Coast a gentleman, but there is only one reason, one, to do it. To create wealth for ourselves, and honour.”

Mr. Demsky sat down across from him again. They remained silent as Toby went through a mental roll call of great men and women.

“This is why we are here, why the universe was created for us.” Mr. Demsky butted out his cigarette. “At first it’s difficult, but slowly, as with everything else, you develop your muscles. It becomes routine, and you begin to notice the people around you responding submissively. Because they sense a beast is among them, a beast of ambition.”