The drunk looked Stan up and down and laughed a loud drunken laugh.
“Did you have a little fight with the beach then?” he said.
Stan saw for the first time the effect of his half-sleep on the beach. The lower half of his black coat was soaking wet and covered in grey sand and pebbles. He wasn’t a bum, but he sure looked like one.
“I fell asleep,” Stan said, flicking tentatively at his coat with his fingers.
“Lucky you,” the man said. “Got a cigarette?”
The two men stood at the corner of Queen and Woodbine, smoking. Stan kept his eyes on his companion, not relishing another dance with him, and wondered what would happen next.
“My wife is rich,” the man said, adding smoke to his spit-filled conversation. “She’s one of the richest women in the city. We live in a fucking mansion up there on the hill. Where the fuck am I?” He looked around to get his bearings. “Up that way.”
“Sounds nice,” Stan said.
“Sounds nice? Yes, it is nice. Nothing like being fucking rich, let me tell you. I did okay myself once. Boxing. I was a boxer—hard to tell, I know, what with my beautiful face and all, but I broke heads up and down the Great Lakes for ten years, and when I stopped boxing, I managed younger boxers. I made a fucking fortune.”
“Sounds like you have it all figured out.” Stan was enjoying his cigarette, enjoying the approach of morning, but getting more and more anxious for bed. He could feel exhaustion creeping up his legs from the cold sidewalk.
“That’s when I met her, my wife. She came to the fights one night on the arm of some other rich stiff, some art-loving prick who thought he knew something about everything. I saw them in the crowd and just hated the guy right away. I said to myself, I’m going to save that girl from herself. So, I went and took her way. We were married six weeks later.”
“You’re a man who knows what he wants,” Stan said.
“She didn’t need me or my money. Her father made millions in steel out of Hamilton. She didn’t need anything I had to offer, but she wanted me, so we got married. Then those pricks fixed one of my boys and that was that. One prick little fighter takes one prick little fucking bribe and suddenly I’m giving all my money to lawyers.”
“Mob?”
Stan had heard all the stories. The mob had even taken a run at hockey. The word was it didn’t pan out for them, but who knew.
“Mob is right. Everyone was mob. The commission was mob, the prick fighter was mob, the fucking press was mob as far as I know. All I know is they emptied me. And she said she didn’t care, she said that’s not why she married me anyway. Now, every night she gives me a handful of cash and sends me out of the house so I won’t get pissed up there and start breaking things. Now, I’m like a big dog she can’t handle any more. I still get the good food, but I’m in the kennel sure as fucking anything.”
“There are worse things,” Stan says.
“What the fuck do you know about it?” The man tried to raise his voice to a shout but lost heart halfway.
“I know about it,” Stan said. “There are worse things than being pitied.”
“Yeah, maybe, but not for me.” The man rubbed his forehead under his hat, his huge right hand still wrapped around a folded brick of cash. “Look, are you going to take this or not? I don’t have all night.”
“Why would I take it?” Stan said.
“It’s up to you,” the man sniffed at him. “Either you take it, or the lake takes it. I know one thing, I’m not going to take it any more.” The ex-boxer clamped his left hand on Stan’s shoulder and, squinting, guided his right hand to Stan’s coat pocket. The money slipped in like a smooth rock. He felt the weight of it immediately.
“Buy yourself something nice,” the man said, tripping backwards a little as he released Stan.
“And if anyone asks you, you never saw me tonight. I don’t want them dragging me out of the lake for her to look at. Just let me go. Maybe I’ll wash up in New York somewhere. Maybe I’ll go over the Falls.”
“The Falls go the other way,” Stan said.
The man stopped walking backwards and looked Stan in the face. He started laughing. They both started laughing.
She typed the note. Stan knew this was her way of being polite, so he didn’t have to look at her handwriting and become morbid about it. In books he’d read, the note had been the only thing left to remind the man of the woman, but this was not true for Stan. She’d left all her gardening utensils, including her prized stainless steel hand spade and the little mat she used to rest her knees on while weeding. Many of her books remained, the ones, he guessed, she never intended to read again. She had taken only one of her houseplants, the African violet. He’d suspected for years she had a special relationship with this plant and now he knew he’d been right. The ficus and the rubber tree stood where they’d always stood, though it looked like she’d dusted their leaves sometime in the last few days.
Otherwise, it had been a hasty leaving, he could tell, and with good reason. Recognizing what had happened, seeing that Stan had seen their hands laid casually one on the other, watching his face as he was dragged away from his timekeeper’s booth into a mob of suits and reporters, Louise knew the time she’d been anticipating had arrived. She had Jim accompany her in a taxi to the house on Saulter Street; they’d thrown her essentials into a couple of suitcases, grabbed the African violet and left. The note told Stan that she’d taken the car—they’d taken the car—but he knew without having to be told. They wouldn’t stay in the city. They would get away, far away, and for that they’d need a car.
Stan sat at the kitchen table. In front of him was his wife’s typewritten, unsigned goodbye, and beside it on the tabletop, a neatly stacked pile of twenty-dollar bills. He’d counted them three times, to be sure of things. There was nineteen hundred dollars in the stack. What man needs almost two thousand dollars to have a good time for one evening? What kind of life must that be? Stan didn’t worry that the drunk had jumped into the lake. He’d known drunks in his time. He’d listened to the remorse an evening full of whiskey can bring, and he knew it rarely prompted any serious action other than the kind of impulsive behaviour one generally lives to regret, like picking up a girl at the end of the night, finding yourself in an alleyway brawl, or giving away a pocketful of money because you feel sorry for how life’s treated you. He felt sure the man was right now sleeping himself into a hangover on a chesterfield in his wife’s luxurious mansion overlooking the lake. If he even noticed his missing allowance the next morning, he’d chalk it up to more bad luck and add it to his list of grievances against himself. Stan felt too sorry for himself to feel sorry for some poor drunk rich guy.
For the first time in years, Stan listened to a hockey game on the radio, at the local tavern up on Queen Street. He listened all the remaining games there, heard Toronto win the championship. When the final whistle blew, he pulled a small fistful of money from his jacket pocket and bought a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. He was grateful to the crowd in the bar. Stan’s picture had been in the paper for a week following the game that had lost him a job and a wife, but if anyone did recognize him, they said nothing about his two-second mistake. They let him drink and enjoy their enjoyment of the games. For hours after the final game, Stan walked through the crowds on the street, watched them bang their pots and blow their horns.
In the early summer, Stan received a letter with a Winnipeg postmark. This note was handwritten (she’d left her typewriter behind). She apologized for the abruptness of her departure and for the way in which Stan had to discover her relationship with Jim. She was sorry he had lost his job and she hoped he’d be all right. She did not explain how it had all happened, the affair, the destruction of their marriage.