Free Terminal Grill by Rosemary Aubert Page A

disgust—and there was no wall between me and my negative emotions!
    He said, “Go get me some papers and I’ll smoke a joint to come down.”
    This really angered me. I was supposed to go out in the raging night to get him papers? I told him I didn’t even know where one purchased such things.
    He wrinkled his face in mild disdain at my ignorance. “Just go to a drugstore.”
    Sure. I wasn’t just angry. I was also confused about a person being so stoned that they had to smoke to come down. I felt like saying, “Pardon my ignorance, Matthew, but I was under the impression people smoked to get high …”
    He was, of course, not very angry at my refusal to do as he bid. He looked away from me toward the door, and he saw what I saw—a man with a pizza ringing the doorbell. The door opened. The pizza man slipped in. And so did Matthew and I.
    The building was one of the lovely neo-Gothic student residences that dot the campus of the University of Toronto. “This is where I went to school for a year …” Matthew said. He had referred to the university a number of times, but I got the feeling his familiarity with the place was far more recent than the distant days of his education.
    We moved confidently down a long, high-ceilinged corridor interrupted by heavy, dark wooden doors. Knowing exactly which door to open, Matthew led us into one of the lovely, stately, Victorian common rooms.
    As soon as we entered, I saw why Matthew wanted us to be in this room. By the tall door stood a baby grand piano. The room was furnished like a sturdy sort of drawing room with a long couch before a fireplace in which a few logs glowed. Though a young man was fast asleep on this couch, Matthew proceeded at once to set the stage for a private concert.
    Near the piano was a high-backed wing chair facing the fireplace. He struggled to turn the heavy thing around so that it faced the piano, and he gestured for me to sit down. Reluctantly, I did. From time to time, a person would open the door and look in on us, but, though I was afraid someonemight throw us out, no one questioned us, or even seemed much interested at all.
    When I was seated to his satisfaction, Matthew began to play. I was so stunned at this strange course of events, so angry—more with myself than with him—so disappointed, that I rested my head against the upholstery of the chair and simply stared at his back bent slightly over the keys. I was so wrapped up in my own fury and sorrow that I didn’t even hear what he was playing.
    After a couple of tunes, he got up from the piano and stood before me. He seemed to have lost his confident manner altogether. Like a small boy begging, he stood facing my chair—too far away for me to touch him—and begged, “Will you take care of me? Will you take me home?”
    I studied him. He looked young, fragile and wasted. Lost—not dislocation but perdition.
    My heart felt as though it were on hold. I could end this by a single gesture of head or hand. I, myself, could disappear into the black, cold wildness of the night and leave this pathetic creature to a fate he perhaps deserved, though I hadn’t allowed myself to picture what that fate must inevitably be.
    â€œNo, Matthew,” I said, “I will not take you home if you have drugs. I’ll get thrown out.”
    â€œOkay,” he said, “okay …” with the eagerness to please of a puppy, “I’ll flush the drugs …”
    He disappeared through a second door at the side of the room. Again it occurred to me that I might rise and walk out and leave him here. Again I did not. He came back shortly and grinned and said, “There, they’re gone.”
    I had no idea what he’d really done with the drugs. I sat immobile in the chair watching him jitter his need for my acceptance in nervous little dancing gestures, waiting for me to say, “There’s a