Free Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre Page B

mother died when she was only three. Ray remarried, a family friend, mostly because he needed help. Then the boy came along. When his son started university, Ray and his second wife had a long chat about life in general. Talked about their time together and concluded that, with the boy gone, the marriage had lost its rationale. That was the word he used, “rationale.” They agreed to live apart and to actively consider restarting their lives, with other people—an unlikely prospect, they thought, considering their ages.
    She was remarried within a year. He lost himself in work. No regrets. Then Cassie came along. His daughter had introduced them, as a matter of fact. Cassie was writing something about Inco and had met Inco’s PR lady in a restaurant. Ray walked in. The Inco PR lady introduced her dad.
    As the narrative unfolded, Cassie watched him, smiling.
    It was all so goddamned orderly. All so rational. Effie looked toward her glass, picked it up and swirled. She could see John’s ravaged face. She felt cold again remembering his pain. Just a flash of memory, but it conjured John and Sextus and the demons. Loud voices. Flight. Guilt. Slow recovery.
    “Well,” she said at last. “I’d like to propose a toast.”
    Later, at the door, she asked, “So, Cassie, dear, when do you plan to tell your father?”
    “We’re seeing him for lunch tomorrow.”
    Once she had asked JC straight out, “Back then, how much did you and the others know about what I was putting up with?”
    “It was the seventies,” he replied. “Everyone was kind of haywire.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Sextus and the women, you mean?”
    She nodded. “You were different. I knew you weren’t like the rest of them. There was a time when I thought that you were gay.”
    “I was considered kind of slow around the girls, I guess.”
    “How bad was he?”
    “You mean Sextus?”
    “Who do you think I mean?”
    “It’s ancient history.”
    “I want to know how big a fool I was.”
    “You were never a fool. We all thought you were a saint.”
    “Great. You all pitied me.”
    “We admired you,” he said, teeth clenched slightly. “And never more than when you threw the bugger out. The only mystery for us was how you got mixed up with him in the first place.”
    She walked to work on Monday morning, feet crunching on the salted sidewalks along Bloor Street. It was cold, the sunlight sharp and brittle, the city still limping from the battering of the storm.
A wild beginning for the last year of a wretched century
, she thought.
Hard to believe it’s 1999
.
    She recalled how unsettling it once was to think ahead to 1984, the Orwellian year, and realize that the harsh dystopia imaginedby the pessimistic author was not entirely fanciful. Pessimism, she recalled, was very stylish at the time. Channelling Hobbes, not Orwell, she told someone. Benevolent dictatorship could be the answer. Clans and chiefs. People thought she was odd.
That Effie, there she goes again
. Now 1984 was fifteen years ago and the world was more or less the same. Except that people listened to her now.
    After Cassie and Ray had gone, she’d sat for a long time in semi-darkness, her mind adrift in the uncertainty their visit had created. It seemed they would be married in the spring, but there were no specifics. It was unlikely that there would be children, considering Ray’s history and his age. Cassie was, in a very real way, the end of a biological limb on a family tree about which Effie knew very little. Duncan, as far as she could tell, was celibate and seemed inclined to stay that way. Their father had no siblings, barely knew his mother, had no knowledge of his father. And Effie had no concrete memory of the mother who had died when she was three.
    Until now, the unlikelihood of grandchildren had seemed a sort of comfort. The century ahead was an uninviting place, offering a more extreme version of the century behind—unimaginable progress in technology,