Wheat Kings and Pretty Things Read online

  Paul couldn’t remember her reply, but evidently she’d agreed. On the way back to the classroom, Dylan said, “If you’re ever afraid again, just imagine you’re a superhero. Batman wouldn’t be afraid to pee, right?”

  “I wasn’t afraid,” Paul lied, but secretly he bore that in mind for the rest of the year. And for the remainder of his time at the school. Weeks before graduation, even after the incident with the Burberry cape, he was still thinking idly, Batman wouldn’t be afraid to pee as he stood at the urinal, where “Paul Thompson sucks cock” was written in permanent marker on the tile. Wishful thinking, at the time.

  Dylan looked up from his menu. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” Paul said. He couldn’t tell Dylan about that memory. He would sound completely unhinged, or strangely perverted. “I just never thought I’d see sushi in Regina.”

  “Tell me about it.” Dylan smiled. “But the dragon rolls are really good.”

  They were. The salmon wasn’t quite as melt-in-your-mouth fresh, and the seaweed on the temaki wasn’t as crisp as it would be in the best places in Toronto, but given that only a few days earlier Paul would have automatically associated “Saskatchewan sushi” with “severe illness and risk of death,” he was pleasantly surprised.

  He was equally surprised to learn that Dylan was a high school teacher there in Regina. “Can you believe it?” Dylan said gleefully. Paul took that as a cue he didn’t have to hide his shock.

  “I never would have imagined it.” He still couldn’t quite picture Dylan in front of a classroom, molding impressionable young minds.

  “Me neither, to be honest. It’s too bad most of our teachers have already kicked off. I would have loved to rub it in their faces.”

  Paul could see how that would have been enjoyable. Dylan, as far as he could remember, hadn’t been a star student. Or even a mediocre one. He’d always been the kid who handed in his homework three days late covered in mysterious stains and/or footprints. Toward the end, Paul didn’t think he’d handed it in at all.

  “I teach phys ed, mostly, but I do a couple of health classes too. It’s amazing. I love it,” Dylan said.

  “I’m happy for you.” Paul meant it.

  “You like your job?” Dylan sounded genuinely concerned, like it was important to him.

  “It’s great,” Paul replied automatically. Then, feeling a bit disingenuous, he added, “We’re going through a bit of a rough patch right now.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It’s just temporary. It’s a very competitive industry.” And Cleo had been right. If they didn’t have another success soon, they were going to be considered a lot less competitive, possibly permanently.

  Dylan deftly picked up a squid nigiri with his chopsticks. “I can’t even imagine. I was in Toronto once. Years ago. I would have looked you up, but I didn’t even know where to start.”

  “It’s a big city.” Of all the banal things Paul could have said, that one was probably the worst. He cringed into his sake, letting it burn its way down his throat.

  “But you must love it there.”

  It wasn’t something Paul had ever really thought about. His French wasn’t good enough to move to Montreal, Vancouver was far away, and unless he wanted to apply to leave the country and go somewhere like New York or London, there was really nowhere else he could do his job.

  “There’s a lot of stuff to do,” Paul replied, although now that he said it, he realized he didn’t really do all that much. He had never been into clubbing, even when he was young. While he went to the movies and the theater and the opera and the ballet with Cleo and the various short-term boyfriends who came in and out of his life, Paul couldn’t say he had a real abiding passion for any of it. “I have an apartment downtown. I can look out of my window at any time of the day and see people moving around. It never stops.” That was comforting, in a way. It was childish, maybe, but it was nice to know that when Paul couldn’t sleep, which was more often than he’d like, there were other people out there awake too. And it was so different from where Paul grew up, where they rolled up the streets at six o’clock every night, at the latest, and not a soul stirred after that.

  “Are you married?” Dylan asked. He wiped his mouth on a napkin, leaving a trail of soy sauce behind, and pushed his empty plate to one side. The waitress, pretty and impossibly young, glided by smoothly and picked it up.

  “I’m gay,” Paul said. It was a declaration he hadn’t made overtly in more than a decade. He hadn’t had to.

  “I know,” Dylan replied easily. “And I still feel bad about being such a dick about it back in high school. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be married.”

  He was right, Paul supposed. “I’m not.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not at the moment.” Which meant “not for the past two and a half years.” Paul shifted on the banquette seat, then frowned at himself for letting a simple question make him feel physically uncomfortable. These were all things he would have to talk about at Nana’s party, over and over again and with people less well-meaning than Dylan seemed to be. He might as well get used to it.

  “I’m single too,” Dylan announced. His gaze came up to meet Paul’s. “And gay.”

  For a long, painful moment, Paul didn’t have the faintest clue how to react. Is this how people felt when I told them? His own coming out, when his parents visited Toronto during his final year of university, had been a nonevent. “We knew when you ordered the Burberry cape,” his father said. “Actually,” his mother countered, “I knew when you told me you wanted to marry the Hardy Boys.”

  Paul hadn’t known about Dylan, not in the slightest. That kiss the night of their graduation party might have been a clue, but when Paul, his head buzzing with shock and confusion, had followed Dylan into the shack, he’d found him cuddled up on the threadbare couch with Daisy McLaughlin on his lap. He and Paul hadn’t even spoken to each other the rest of the night. The next morning, Paul had left Saskatchewan for good.

  “What about Emma?” Paul finally blurted. He was flailing, and it was the nearest lifeline he could grab. “I thought you said she was getting her hair cut….”

  Dylan laughed so loudly that the couple at the next table turned to look. Paul could feel his cheeks grow hot, first with embarrassment and then with anger at himself for being embarrassed. “Emma’s my dog,” Dylan said finally. “Do you want another round of sake?”

  Paul nodded. He felt like he was going to need it.

  Emma turned out to be a brown and white spaniel with long, floppy ears. “Your sister has Springer spaniels, doesn’t she?” Dylan asked, as he helped the dog bound into the back seat of the car. Paul was in the front. He’d been unsure whether he should get out to greet the dog when Dylan brought her out of the groomer’s, but in the end he stayed where he was.

  “I don’t know,” Paul admitted. “I haven’t seen her for a long time.” It didn’t worry him, normally, but now he suddenly felt a pang of guilt. He and Kim had been close at one time, but that time was long gone.

  The dog leaped from one side of the car to the other, sniffed at the back of Paul’s head, turned in a circle, and finally lay down on a blanket. Dylan came back around and started the car. “How are you planning on going out to Liddon for the party?”

  “I was going to rent a car.” There was no other way of getting there.

  “Save your money. We can drive in together.” He glanced over. “If you want.”

  “Okay,” Paul replied. Saving money was saving money, after all, and it wasn’t like he had an exorbitant excess of it to throw around.

  Dylan dropped Paul off at his hotel. It was an unremarkable place, a midlevel chain of the sort that had an identical branch in every city in North America. For a brief, awkward moment, Paul wondered if he should ask Dylan in for a drink at the no-doubt eminently predictable hotel bar. Emma woofed, and Paul decided against it.

  At Dylan’s request, Paul handed over his phone,
and Dylan typed in his number. “I’ll swing by and get you in the morning,” Dylan promised. “Give me a call if you need anything else. Or text.”

  Paul nodded, although he had no idea what that would possibly be. Out of courtesy, he waited under the hotel awning, his bag over his shoulder, until Dylan drove away, then went to check in.

  The room was as plain as the rest of the hotel. Paul let himself in with his key card and tossed his bag onto the chair, then pulled out his phone again. Arrived OK, he texted Cleo. Met an old friend from school. He hesitated, but he and Cleo didn’t keep things from one another. He’s gay now. Paul sent it, then immediately clarified: I mean, I guess he was gay then too. But he’s out now. And it was still a strange thought to process. Until he moved to Toronto, he’d been the only gay person he knew, or so he believed. What would have happened if he’d known about Dylan back then? Had Dylan even known about Dylan back then?

  Cleo didn’t immediately reply, which irked Paul to an extent even he knew was unreasonable. Karsten was in Germany, but that didn’t mean she was sitting at home waiting to hear from Paul. She could be at the gym, she could be grocery shopping, she could be anywhere. Paul placed the phone on the bedside table and went into the bathroom. Instead of complimentary toiletries, there was a minuscule bar of soap in a paper wrapper and a note to “please contact the front desk if you require additional supplies.”

  As he emerged, he heard his phone ding once, then again, and then a third time. He picked it up and read, Is he cute? Are you smitten? Are you abandoning me to raise wheat and children in darkest Saskatchewan?

  He’s a gym teacher, not a farmer, Paul replied, although Dylan wasn’t far removed from it. For generations, his family had farmed a place just outside of Liddon. Idly, Paul wondered if they were still there.

  A gym teacher!!! Paul could hear Cleo’s hoot all the way from Toronto. That’s too sexy. Has he got you all excited about putting on little shorts and whipping balls around?

  Paul rolled his eyes. Get a grip, Cleo.

  I’m sure you’ll be saying that to him soon enough.

  It’s not like that. We weren’t even friends, really, we just went to school together. That wouldn’t mean the same thing to Cleo as it did to him. She was raised in the heart of Toronto. There were over three thousand students at her high school, she’d once told Paul. She hadn’t even recognized more than two-thirds of the people on stage with her at her graduation ceremony.

  Things can change in twenty years, Cleo replied.

  Thanks for that dramatic insight, Paul shot back. As he looked at his phone, he caught a glimpse in the corner of the last picture he’d taken, of the astonishing Aboriginal art he’d seen in the window of the gallery near the legislative buildings. He sent it to Cleo, and they talked for a while about the possibility of looking into similar artists for their gallery. After she signed off, saying, It’s late here, and I don’t want to keep you from dreams of your gym teacher, Paul took a shower. This time when he came out, after drying his hair on a towel with the texture of sandpaper and the absorbency of single-ply toilet paper, he picked up the phone to see a text from Kim.

  Do you mind picking up the balloon arch? She hadn’t waited for a reply. The address of what had to be a balloon shop with the twee name of Up Up and Away followed, along with a smiling emoji. Thanks. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

  Paul didn’t bother replying. Instead, he unzipped his bag and realized he’d forgotten to pack any pajamas.

  PAUL KNEW he would be the only one at the party wearing a suit, but that didn’t matter. He’d never been afraid of being different from the people around him; it was resembling them too much that had always worried him.

  Dylan arrived right on time. Paul’s phone buzzed while he was finishing his “continental breakfast”—a bagel, some listless reconstituted scrambled eggs, and a cup of passable coffee—and Paul went out to meet him.

  Instead of the Kia, Dylan was sitting behind the wheel of a very large and very old windowless van. Rust rimmed the wheel wells, and it was painted the sort of light beige color that stopped being fashionable for cars, or anything, about thirty-five years previously.

  “You didn’t mention you had a sideline as a neighborhood pervert,” Paul said, as he climbed into the passenger’s side.

  Dylan pushed his sunglasses up onto his head. “We’re picking up a balloon arch, right?”

  Paul nodded. He’d remembered to text Dylan about it just before he went to bed, in his underwear. Dylan had replied almost immediately: No worries. Obviously, he had really meant it.

  “So I borrowed it from my neighbor.”

  “What was wrong with the car?”

  Dylan looked at him. “Have you ever seen a balloon arch?”

  “Not since our high school graduation.” Once he said it, Paul realized that wasn’t quite true. The one time Cleo had convinced him to go to a Pride event, he’d ended up beneath a rainbow balloon arch with a man in suspenders and short shorts who seemed to think the balloons functioned as some sort of mistletoe. Paul would have complained, but he ended up dating the man for six months before it became clear he was, in fact, a complete lunatic. In hindsight, Paul should have known that from the start.

  “You’re going to thank me for the van,” Dylan said, as they pulled away.

  Up Up and Away was open when they arrived. At least, the door was unlocked, and bells jangled as they stepped in, but the room was dim and Paul couldn’t see anyone. While Dylan examined the wall full of Mylar balloons as if he was truly interested in two dozen variations on “Happy Birthday” and “Congratulations,” Paul went up to the deserted cash desk and cleared his throat. When that didn’t work, he coughed. He was about to resort to yelling, “Hello?” when a door marked Employees Only opened and a middle-aged woman with glasses emerged.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She smiled pleasantly but vaguely, as if she wasn’t quite sure what anyone might be doing there.

  “I’m here to pick up an order for Kim Boyko.”

  “Yes, of course.” The woman nodded, still looking unsure. “One moment.” She disappeared again.

  A moment stretched into two, and then three. Dylan, having evidently seen all the balloons he cared to, came to stand beside Paul. At last, the door swung open again, and an arch made of blue and white balloons, with a bottle-shaped Mylar “It’s a Boy!” as its lodestone, lumbered through.

  Paul gritted his teeth. “That’s not it.”

  The woman’s head popped out from behind the balloons. “I’m quite certain that’s what I have for Kim Boyko.”

  Annoyance began to creep up in Paul. “Really? Because I’m quite certain it’s not. Unless there’s something about this—” He gestured to the arch. “—that says ‘Happy 100th Birthday’ to you, because I have to say, it’s escaping me.” There was a snort beside him. Paul didn’t look at Dylan.

  “Let me see.” Pushing past the arch, the woman tapped at a mouse attached to a computer that had to date, in Paul’s admittedly inexpert estimation, at least from prehistoric times. “Oh. Oh, I see. I’m sorry. There seems to have been some confusion.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I’m going to have to fix it.”

  Paul didn’t want to ask. He had to. “And how long is that going to take?”

  “Only about an hour.”

  “An hour?”

  “What time’s the party?” Dylan broke in.

  “One o’clock.” Any later, apparently, and it began to cut into the naptimes of his grandmother’s friends.

  “So we have time.” Dylan looked at the woman’s name tag. “That’ll be fine, Lorna. We can wait an hour. But,” he went on, “could you manage a bit of a discount? For the trouble, I mean. Say, 50 percent?”

  Lorna pursed her lips. “I can do twenty.”

  “Thirty, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  “All right,” Lorna conceded.

  “Great. We’ll see you then.” Dylan placed his hand on
Paul’s shoulder only briefly before moving away again.

  “I didn’t need your help,” Paul said once they were outside the shop. It sounded petulant, even childish, but he needed to say it. “That’s my job.”

  “What? Negotiating stupid stuff?”

  “Part of it.” More or less. Although he was usually the “good cop” when it came to making deals for the gallery, in contrast to Cleo’s tough-as-nails “bad cop.”

  “Well, it gave me a chance to experience something new, then.” He pulled down his sunglasses. “Feel like a walk?”

  It was a warm morning, for September in Saskatchewan. The leaves hadn’t started to turn, but they would soon, and there was always the possibility of a little snow before the month was out. As they walked down the street, they passed two police officers on bicycles coming the opposite way.

  “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” Dylan said. Paul nodded, acknowledging the sympathy. The cancer had spread so quickly, Paul hadn’t had a chance to come for a last goodbye. If he was honest with himself, he likely wouldn’t have done it anyway. “He was great. He did a lot for the town.”

  Although he was an out-of-towner, from the far-off wilds of Nova Scotia, Paul’s father had been the town Mountie in Liddon for close to thirty years. He gave up a lot of chances to move and even shots at promotion, Paul later found out, in favor of staying where they were. He couldn’t begin to understand why.

  “He did a lot for me too,” Dylan replied. “Did he ever tell you he arrested me once?”

  “No.” His father didn’t talk about work much, but he didn’t have to. In Liddon, everyone knew everything anyway.

  “It was after you’d left for university. I was going nowhere, working on my folks’ farm but hating that. I got drunk one night and tried to set fire to the grain elevator. It was empty.” That made a difference. Full, and Dylan could have jeopardized the crops of half the farms in the area. “Your dad threw me in the cell for the night. When he came to get me in the morning, he said, ‘You have two paths in front of you. Either you find something meaningful to do with your life, or the two of us are going to be spending a lot of time together. And I’m warning you now, I’m a fucking bastard.’”