“There’s something I need to tell you right off,” Buddy began. “I ended up here because I’ve just left my wife.”
He let that sink in a few seconds, then added, “We have two kids. Well, grown up ‘kids’. Gloria’s twenty-six and has achieved liftoff in her career as an architect-designer; Robbie’s into his fourth year at UVic. He wants to be a teacher… Um, a writer, actually, but he’s hedging his bets.”
“You must be very proud of them.”
“Yes, I am.”
Funny, though; he hadn’t realized how proud until that moment.
He narrowed his eyes, focusing on a porcelain figurine on its shelf behind Bernice. It depicted a man wildly skirling while playing a fiddle, his cap cockeyed, leg flung into the air like a ballet dancer’s, elbows flapping like stubby wings. It seemed a contradiction to Buddy: a moment of wild freedom, frozen in baked clay, stuck on a kitchen shelf above the stove
“And your wife?”
“What we’re living doesn’t feel much like love anymore.” He studied Bernice’s face to gauge her reaction. “I suppose some might think a guy’s got to try harder, eh? That there’s this thing called responsibility comes into play.”
She let the comment pass, air through a screen door on a hot summer day. Gazed intently at him. She thinks I can do better, he thought. Can be better.
“What I’m trying to say is, I don’t know if that part of my life is over or if I’m going back, which means I might be a short-term employee.”
“Not employee, Buddy, companion. We’re looking for something more than an employee and are prepared to take a chance on, shall I say, a promising candidate.” He watched. Waited. “As long as you can stay with us will be long enough.”
She’s talking like a grief counsellor, he thought. Like she wants to reach across the table and hold hands.
“So tell me more about yourself. Where are you coming from?”
“Oh. Victoria.” He fidgetted under her gaze.
“The rest can be summed up pretty quick,” he continued. “Born in Toronto in 1959; happy suburban upbringing; graduated relatively intact from high school, then got a degree in journalism at Carlton University; started my career as a reporter in ’82, hammering out stories in takes on an Underwood typewriter; worked my way up in stages; landed at the Times Colonist in ’89; met Leanne, fell in love, and decided to stay.
“Along came Gloria, then Robbie, and I decided—again—that Victoria would be my stopping place, where our kids were born; I had a great career and a happy family life, or so I thought; the kids graduated from high school ‘relatively intact’, went on to university, moved out, and are merging onto their own career paths.
“Leanne and I were suddenly empty nesters. And we discovered the nest was really and truly empty without the kids.
“Retired last year, thinking maybe it was time to see if there was a best-seller in me; started spending more time in front of the mirror than at the keyboard, not liking who I saw; couldn’t stop asking, ‘What the hell is missing? What did we lose along the way?’
“Decided yesterday morning to find out.”
“Just like that?” Bernice snapped her fingers.
“No,” he snapped back. “Excuse my language, but it’s taken my whole fucking adult life to realize a huge part of who I might have been has gone missing in action. At the very least, I want to find the corpse and give it a decent burial.”
Bernice studied him the way an archaeologist might examine the bricks and cracks in an ancient wall, her brows knit in concentration.
“Not a great resume, I guess,” he shrugged.
“Tell me, Buddy, what made you choose journalism as a career?”
Good question! He smiled and sighed in the same instant, remembering the student counsellor sitting behind her desk in her office at Carlton. She might have been my mother, except she wasn’t, he recalled. She wore a perpetually worried, help-me-help-you look, as if her job depended on me responding successfully to whatever advice she might tender.
“After my first semester at Carlton, I was thinking of dropping out,” he began. “Can’t say which neuron had short circuited in my brain, but I’d enrolled in the sciences—biology, to be precise—thinking I wanted to become a marine biologist. Ended up bored, frustrated, and ready to quit. This counsellor, I can’t remember her name, said I should take an aptitude test. Find out which direction my intelligence and personality tended. I filled in a couple of pages of check boxes, and she told me to come back in a week or so, when the nature of my post-secondary dreams—beyond the obvious cravings for booze, dope, and sex—would be revealed.
“When I reported back, she was behaving in that flustered way of someone who’s got bad news… You know: straightening the papers on her desk, not meeting you eye-to-eye, that sort of thing. Like maybe I’d failed the aptitude test, or it revealed I wanted nothing more than a career as janitor in a shopping mall or something…”
“There’s nothing undignified about being a janitor,” Bernice objected.
“Sorry,” he bobbed. “Point taken. But I had higher aspirations, even if I didn’t know what exactly they might be. I don’t know why, but something about the situation brought out the cockiness in me. It was almost as if I was blaming her. Maybe her apparent contrition incited some kind of latent aggression in me. Let it out of the bag, so-to-speak.”
“Sexism?” Bernice raised her eyebrows.
He laughed. “If I ever was sexist, it got knocked out of me a long time ago by a legion of fierce, brow-beating Amazons.”
Her eyes widened and brow furrowed before she laughed—the genuine, deep laughter of someone who appreciates a quirky taunt and doesn’t make an issue of it. “Okay! Okay! Get on with your story, and I’ll shut up.”
“No Bernice! I’m glad you called me on it,” he said. “There’s an overlap between sex and aggression that’s hard to identify, like the exact boundary between red and pink. Sometimes even the most liberated amongst us get confused by it and need reminding. Do you want me to be frank on that one?”
“Please do.”
“The biggest thrill I get out of sex has always been my partner’s sigh, the shudder of ecstasy incited by the genuine touch of love. Anything less is a form of bestiality at best, rape at worst… Not that there’s anything wrong with bestiality; so long as both parties are panting to the same beat. It’s just not my style.”
“Thank you, Dr. Frankfurter,” Bernice demurred. “But perhaps we should get back to talking about this counsellor of yours. I used to be a high school counsellor myself, so I have a sort of professional interest in your encounter.”
“What I was doing was transferring my frustrations onto her for something that hadn’t happened yet, but we both knew was coming: bad news. I was inflating my ego to tough-guy proportions, saying, not in so many words, ‘Give it to me straight.’
Bernice smiled knowingly.
“Once I’d taken my seat, the counsellor did look me in the eye, and she said, ‘This is a bit awkward, Buddy, but in your case, the aptitude test is inconclusive. It hasn’t yielded a result we can say with confidence points in a direction you might want to go.’
“For some reason, I wasn’t surprised, but I pretended to be so as not to disappoint her. I did want to know what an ‘inconclusive result’ really meant, though.”
It was like we were bad actors caught up in a pat script, Buddy remembered, each trying to live up to a clichéd role.
“She ‘supposed’ we’d have to find some other way forward, said inconclusive results happened from time-to-time.
“The ‘I suppose’ part said it all. There was really nothing left to say that couldn’t have been summed up in a quick ‘goodbye, good luck, and what the…’
“You get my drift.”
“Quite!” Bernice feigned indignation.
“I thought that was it. No visible wreckage, no smoke, no flames, but my future had just fallen out of the sky like a lead airplane. There was no point looking back or trying to figure out how to put the pieces together again. I was done. That’s the state of mind I was in, heading out of her office. But just as I was about to step over the threshold and close the door behind me, she said in an almost desperate voice, ‘Have you ever considered journalism as an option?’
“I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. ‘Why should I do that?’ I asked, sort of edgy at her attempt to mitigate my victimhood. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘reporters don’t have to be anyone; their job is to be invisible and get at the facts and circumstances of other people’s lives straight. Maybe journalism’s a good fit for you. Maybe there’s meaning to your inconclusive test…’ She reminded me that I’d expressed an interest in writing during our previous conversation.
“I said ‘thanks’ and left.
“I’ve come to regret my surly tone though. I wish I could go back in time and show her how that snippet of advice took hold, how she’d injected me with a passion that still defines who I am…”
“Injected?”
“Oh yeah! Once journalism’s in your blood, you’ll never be the same. You crave news, dig for it, demand people give it to you so you can write about it, then get on to the next story or dig some more for a deeper version of the one you just wrote. It’s an addiction, journalism. An exhilarating, exhausting, frustrating addiction.
“I took a couple of years off before succumbing to her advice, though. Drove out here and discovered the West Coast—a place where I can see the curve of the horizon, looking out to sea; its jagged edge, looking toward the mountains. I knew I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, even before I’d been anywhere else.
“But after a couple of years kicking around Vancouver, I decided, ‘enough with the factory jobs and sales rep shticks; time to get a real career.’ That counsellor’s advice had germinated by then and taken root in both sides of my brain. So I drove back to Ottawa, got accepted into the journalism program at Carlton, graduated, and then got my first job as a reporter on a Vancouver biweekly—not the rung I’d hoped for, but a start.
“And there you have it, my life and career in a nutshell.”
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” Bernice hesitated, “but why on earth would a man like you respond to my help-wanted ad in the Chemainus Valley Courier, Mr. Buddy?”
He shrugged. “Some things we can’t explain. We just do them and see what happens next. I’ve never lived that way. I’ve always picked out the stones I’m gonna land on before I set out crossing a creek. But, at this point in my life, I guess I need to take some leaps of faith.
“I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I stood a snowball’s chance of being where we are right now—in your kitchen, seriously considering my suitability for a handyman-companion gig. To be even more honest, the room and board part of the offer is what really appealed to me; after a night huddled and shivering in my car, a camper parked in somebody’s driveway sounded pretty grand.”
“I do appreciate your honesty, Mr. Buddy. And now it’s time to ask if you have any questions for me?”
“Naw,” he smiled. “You’ve answered any questions I could have thought up already.”
Bernice smiled back.
It felt good to have made her happy. Really good!
Next: Grumpus Maximus