Were you supposed to sleep on the hard wood slabs of the cell’s floor? He no longer had his sweater to use as a cushion, they’d taken it from him fearing he’d hang himself with it. There was a woman calling out helplessly every few minutes from somewhere down the line. “Hello? Hello? Hello?” A man’s voice seemed to be calling him from a cell or two over but he was in no mood for a jailhouse confab. And what was he doing here? And why had no one asked him what the hell had happened? Why was he guilty without being allowed to say a word, make a statement? His right was to make a phone call or have them make a phone call for him, if he happened to know the number. But it was five to five and Christmas had just passed and New Years was coming fast and who the hell would be in the office this late? And trying to find his lawyer’s home number, well that wasn’t possible. You might have a right to a phone call, but not to a phone book. They had taken his possessions, his rights, his freedom, his sanity. He lay his head against the wall and told himself to stay calm. Just breathe. This would pass. How long could they hold him? The bigger question was: “By what right were they holding him?”

The legacy of an alcoholic is a long one. At least a generation. And if odds hold up, the adult child of an alcoholic will become an alcoholic, too, and it goes on and on. And, of course, he read, they had problems with intimate relationships. No kidding.

Annie never spoke of the others. There had been hundreds or so it seemed, but they were never mentioned … her sexual past cloaked in vague references.

“What was the longest, Annie? Who did you spend the most time with?”

“I told you. Kevin. Seven years.”

“You were 21, opened a restaurant with him.”

Annie said nothing. She was looking at Evan, but he couldn’t interpret the look. Was it fear? Embarrassment? Feeling cornered?

“Annie, he was the guy you opened a restaurant with?” “A café. A shit hole. I knew it wouldn’t work but he insisted and I did all the work, waited tables, cooked in back …”

“But you can’t cook.”

“I can cook some stuff. I mean we weren’t three stars in the Michelin Guide.”

“What happened with Kevin? How’d it end?”

“I went shopping for canned tomatoes for the sauce I made, put it just about on every damn thing. He left a note. ‘See you on the other side.’ He was gone.”

“Just gone.”

“Never saw him again, never found out where he went.”

“And later, older …?”

“I was busy,” she said, and started arranging things on the table. “François, I went out with him for three years. He got a job in New York and left and we decided long distance wouldn’t work. My life was here.”

“Stay in touch?”

“I ran into him at the Café Cherrier about two months later. The job didn’t work out, he said. He was working in Montreal, had a place. Was with a woman. I told him to call me but he never did. I found out he never went to New York. He had met another woman and had been living with her, even when he told me he was moving to New York he had already moved in with her. Some suburban ticky tacky rat hole, I heard. She was a nurse or something like that, cleaning bedpans.”

“Two guys, you’re 50 and you’ve gone out with two guys?”

“No, I dated lots of guys …”

“I don’t mean getting laid on a Saturday night.”

“There’s nothing wrong with getting laid on a Saturday night.”

“I mean guys you spent some real time with.”

“Sure, there was André … We went out for about I don’t know, two years, maybe a year and a half actually. He just ended it. Said we weren’t going anywhere. I said where the fuck you want to go, tell me? Africa, England, the North Pole? He was an asshole, always bragging about the books he was writing or the talk shows he was on. He couldn’t stand the fact I had a show and was writing, too. A woman doing better than him, pissed him off, hard on his ego. Guys … They want a woman to say ‘Aren’t you the best, baby? A champ in and out of bed, you’re never wrong, darling. Let me make you a nice drink and get on my knees and blow you.’”

“I’d like a scotch with three ice cubes and… And the guy you said left you for a woman ‘cause he needed a mother.”

“That was André, died of cancer … I helped nurse him through it with her, the woman he dumped me for, Joanne. They lived up north in Saint Sauveur.”

“Joanne in Saint Sauveur? I know a Joanne in Saint Sauveur.”

“There might be more than one.”

“She’s English. Jewish?”

“Yeah, so?”

“She’s a friend of Peter’s … You know Peter in Saint Sauveur, makes boots.”

“Everybody knows Peter in Sauveur,” Annie said, starting to rearrange things on the table, wiping it with her bare hand, moving glasses an inch here and an inch there.

“The Joanne I know owns an Italian restaurant.”

“Yeah, that’s her. Evan, promise me you’ll never let me go … Promise me.”

He stared at her moving tableware for no purpose, remembering that Joanne was not a mothering type at all. She was a hard-working business woman, had a successful, white tablecloth restaurant and a staff of about 30. André left Annie for her but not because Joanne was a mother figure. Evan knew her and she wasn’t his idea of anyone’s mother. She was sexy and charming and Evan felt a chill. If he had the choice, he would do the same thing. He wondered what Joanne was up to these days.

“I promise, Annie. I promise.”

A box of her new book arrived at the door UPS. She tore it open and took a couple out and handed him one. The cover was glossy and smelled of fresh ink.

“We got to celebrate,” Evan said. “Congratulations.” He tried to kiss her but she turned away.

“I told them I didn’t want this shade of blue. I wanted it darker.” She was angry. “It looks like hell.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Evan said. “It looks great. Let’s open a bottle of bubbly.”

“No one’s going to even see it in this colour,” she said. throwing the book back in the box. “It’s horrible. It’ll never sell.”

“Knock it off, Annie, it’s your new book. Let’s go have a drink and a toast.”

“I can’t go have a drink,” she said. “You know how much I have in my bank account? Beside if I have a drink on an empty stomach, it’ll go right to my head and if I eat anything it’ll ruin my dinner and … I got a lot of work to do.” Having a drink, despite her life-long experience doing it, involved a certain alignment of the stars, her appetite, her mood, bank balance and elements he could only guess at. When others were involved, the façade of free and easy conviviality was hoisted and she reverted to her “normal public” self. Having a 5 à 7 at one of the dozen terrasses on the boulevard was a perfectly civilized cap to the day. In their private couple, it took planning on the scale of the invasion of Normandy.

She was a born critic and her own worst critic. For every TV show, film, play, director, actor, script, lighting guy, bottle of wine, plate of food, article, travel book, art director, costume designer, print job, she had an instant opinion. There were so many incompetent people out there. If only they did it like she would do it. Except when she did do it, she was miserable with the result. Evan was exhausted. Part of his life was enduring her criticism of him, part was trying to salve her criticism of herself. Another part was devoted to ignoring her critiques of others.

Soon, whatever he was enjoying, person, play or film, he would wait for her critique to kill his pleasure and the cortisol to drip drip drip into his bloodstream.

She had tried therapy. And gave up. He wanted to love her. He did love her. So he stayed in therapy, on the sofa, next to the plants, listening to tough love, hearing that Annie was highly neurotic, her actions sometimes incomprehensible, but usually manifestations of her need to dominate.

“She’ll never be well,” the therapist told him. “But she could learn to modify some of her behaviours.”

So he would mount a rescue effort. He’d be the model partner. He’d understand, he’d accommodate, bend, take a few shots for the team — them. He would put himself, his needs, second. In the name of love.

One day as they walked down Mont Royal, Evan again had to work to avoid stepping on the back of her feet. It was a challenge for her to walk beside him. She had a tendency to cross over and walk in front of him. “Why should women always follow?” she would say.

Once she was again beside him, her hand in his, he said: “I’m sacrificing myself for you. I seem to be sublimating my needs for yours.”

“I know,” she said. And they left it at that. It was not raised again.

“Evan,” the therapist said. “No amount of abuse is acceptable. Allowing yourself to be abused, physically and verbally, will hurt you much more than the physical and emotional pain of the punches or the words. You have to understand that. You have to stop accommodating.”

He had his own hell growing up and had needs, too. His mother had been the poster girl for Valium. Prone to temper tantrums and anxiety attacks, his memories of her were of ranting and raving and locking herself in her bedroom. She slapped, she threw things, she insulted. The past seemed not too different than the present.

Valium calmed her. The hysteria declined but it not only led to life-long lethargy and depression and a cupboard full of early generation anti-depressants. It killed her. The pills mixed with booze delivered by he knew not whom, had her near comatose every night. Her other vice was cigarettes, torched with a big Zippo.

“When I was a teenager, she would pop her quotient of sleeping pills late at night, mixed with whatever else she was consuming, wait for them to work and then try and make it to the bedroom,” he told Annie one night in bed. “When her timing was off, she fell, the dog barked, and I picked her off the floor and dragged her to bed. My father heard nothing. He was deaf. After I left, I often visited and would find her face bruised and cut, her arms a rainbow of purple and yellow and black. Funny thing, wasn’t till I was in therapy that I discovered my childhood really sucked.”

Years later, mired in pills and alcohol, Evan’s mother dropped her Zippo on the cheap synthetic dressing gown she lived in and went up in flames like a protesting Buddhist. She lived six weeks in the burn unit at the Hotel Dieu one block from Evan’s house. His father had retreated into the TV. Evan finally realized he had been an orphan with parents.

Annie pushed her head into his neck, and wound her little arm around him. She wanted comfort from his pain that she was sharing. He squeezed her.

Annie loved to hear his pain, his fears, his losses. She liked the bass notes. You wanted to share tragedy and confusion, self-doubt and failure, she was there for you.

“We’ll heal each other,” she said.

“We’re the only family we have,” he’d say. “My brother’s not there, your sister and brother are nuts. All we really have is each other. We have friends but you and I are family.”

Her eyes would shine when he said that. She wanted to believe that she would not grow old alone, that there would be someone to hold her when she died.

“If something happened to you, I wouldn’t want to live,” she said. They held onto each other. Cars rumbling down Papineau St., maybe a voice or two coming from the alley, they were locked together under the glow of the small reading lamp they shared, in the big, sprawling, indifferent city. They had each other. In these moments he believed that’s what was life was about, a couple united against all the shit the world had thrown at them and would continue dumping on them. Was that not true love?

He had rarely been happier, his loneliness for a few hundred sacred seconds, dissolved. Yes, there was chaos and condemnation and abuse and control but this love in the middle of the city that he increasingly had little patience for, somehow made it all worthwhile. Other than the music and the theatre, what else did he have?

Annie’s father drank himself to death at 50, but she soldiered on with a backpack of personality disorders and an inability to just sit for a minute. He couldn’t remember seeing her without reading a screen or a paper or a magazine. She rarely left the house without a folded paper in her purse lest she be alone with thoughts for a minute.

Her manic energy did provide a laugh now and then, albeit sodden ones. Running out of things to do at the lake at a friend’s house they rented for a song, she dragged herself away from the computer now anchored to the kitchen table and decided they should canoe to the grocery store rather than walk the half a kilometre or take the car. The sky was dark and threatening.

“It’s going to pour,” he said.

“No, it won’t. It’ll be fun.”

“The sky’s black. It’s going to rain cats and alligators.”

“No, it won’t,” she said, and they headed out, her untying the canoe, her will a force of nature unto itself, able to control the elements. Not to go along would mean continual badgering escalating into a high-volume tantrum. Non-acquiescence was rarely a choice.

“See, it’s cool, right?” she said as they paddled toward town, the wind coming up.

“Really cool,” he said. In fact, he didn’t mind the adventure. This was preferable to walking around the house, avoiding landmines or hearing the blathering radio.

The rain hit as they came out of the grocery store and it started to teem as they climbed into the rocking canoe. In seconds they were sodden. He had to laugh. The lake was small and they were in no danger as they paddled as hard as they could. It was a memory.

The next day she needed to run. The morning swim around the lake, the six or so hours glued to the tube, had not burned off sufficient mania and she was going to run up the road.

“It’s going to pour again, Annie, look at the sky.”

“No, it won’t,” she said as she laced up her grey, beaten runners. Off she went.

Fifteen minutes later he was in the car, windshield wipers on high, driving down the highway, trying to find her through the deluge. She was running toward him, her hair plastered to her head, her shirt stuck to her skin, waving at him. She climbed in and thanked him, wiping the water from her eyes with her damp shirt.

He smiled. Wasn’t it typical? he thought. Annie thinking she could control everything, he coming to rescue her or clean up the mess.

On bad weeks, when she was locked in a cycle of anxiety, panic, abuse, Evan would sleep in the spare room or spend more time downstairs, in his office or the living room, on the sofa she resented, maybe sipping scotch, working or reading the news on the computer, or just staring at the ceiling, the cat on his belly, purring. And writing songs. Annie was a fount of misery that easily translated into lines or verses and choruses. The songs just kept coming. He didn’t know what to do with them but he kept writing them, often when she was listening to the babble of cable TV. In the songs was escape. He stopped going to motel rooms. He went into his office and closed the door and picked up the guitar and transported himself. The music not only shut her out, it killed his own misery. It was as addictive as any drug but there was no come down, no dealer, and it wasn’t cut with anything. The quality was never what he wanted but it didn’t seem to matter. It was its own kind of high. He would start out depressed as hell and after a tune or two, he was, well, singing. It was his own private pleasure and his way to turn hell into a wisp of heaven.

“If I ever get a little crazy,” she told him one afternoon in their first year together, “you just have to put your arms around me and hold me. I’ll be fine.”

Seemed like a plan. She got a little crazy. What was she ranting about? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, did it? Evan smiled. It didn’t really matter what it was. He put his arms around her. “It’s okay, calm down,” he told her, trying to fold her up against his chest.

“Don’t touch me,” she screamed. “Don’t touch me!” Then she started punching him, her little bird-sized fists slamming against his chest.

“Hey, hey, stop it, Annie. Stop it! Get a grip.” He grabbed her fists, one in each hand. She started kicking him. He let go of her and turned away. She had lost it completely. She was screaming and lashing at him. He backed up.

Annie had left the tiny ravaged body that was chasing him, all bone and fury. She was gone. The furious creature in front of him was he knew not who. He did what was to become SOP. He grabbed his car keys.

“Go, go, get out!”

“You need a psychiatrist,” he said and opened the door.

“Where you going?” she asked, a new panic in her eyes.

“I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

“Don’t go,” she said, the demonic terror replaced by fear and pleading. “Please don’t go.”

“Go see a shrink,” Evan said and slammed the door behind him.

He drove and drove, across the Jacques Cartier and back again. He was nuts for staying. He knew why there had been no men in her life. They had run. The control. The constant judgement. The demand that you justify yourself. Verbal abuse. Perfunctory sex. Temper tantrums. The need to find fault. Hysterics. Threats. Punching. Kicking. And now lies had begun to emerge. The house was bought by an inheritance, not by her hard work, not a symbol of feminist accomplishment at all, just a sip of the silver spoon. The languages came not through world travel but via a nanny, another sip of the spoon. André, the boyfriend she nursed through cancer, well, it turned out she had spent an hour reading to him. In one of countless escapes to the mountains, he met Joanne in Saint Sauveur and had lunch. He asked about André, told her that Annie had said she had nursed him as he was dying. She looked at him as if he had spoke Urdu.

“She had told him he could stay at her house when he had chemo, ‘cause she lived just a few blocks from the hospital,” she said, speaking through pursed lips. “The day he was supposed to go to her place, the day before his first treatment, she called him to tell him she had her book club meeting that day and she didn’t think it would work, him staying, anyway. He was heartbroken. And of course, he had to drive home after chemo rather than stay at her house. It was hell. She came up once to read to him, just before he died. And to forgive him for dumping her.”

What other lies did he not know about?

All of the above or just a few had kept the men at bay or maybe for some lucky guys, just one was enough to beat a hasty retreat.

Or maybe he was being hasty, overly judgemental. No, he wasn’t. His life was seriously fucked. She was seriously fucked up. What was he going to do? He was stuck on Papineau.

He turned left and headed for the cocaine store. Did a few lines in the can and headed for his flea bag sanctuary. He felt better in the car, better still once he locked the door behind him. His phone buzzed. It was Annie. He turned it off. He didn’t get to sleep until five. He had spent the evening and early morning basically numb, staring at the ceiling, listening to a woman and a couple of guys amuse each other.

He stumbled out into the parking lot at 10 a.m.

He was going to be the exception. Their love was too great, too unique, too end-of-the-line to let it go over a few personality disorders. He was special. Annie had told him that a dozen times. He would find a way. He would sit her down and have a heart-to-heart talk, make her see that she was killing them. She was smart. She would see it, she would try and change. He started the car, headed toward home, bleary-eyed, and, he realized, he was still a bit under the influence. Why else could he possibly think she would listen to him. He laughed, shaking his head. The cop idling next to him at the light looked over but Evan kept laughing.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” he told her. He stomped upstairs and pulled a bag out of the closet and started throwing stuff into it. He was in a barely controlled rage. Six pairs of socks, no eight. Underwear.

“What are you doing?” Annie was in the doorway, watching him.

“I’m packing,” he said, holding up a handful of boxers. “You won’t have to complain about my fucking underwear anymore.”

She had been in a full “you don’t know anything,” “you don’t know what you’re talking about” tirade, as a way to end discussion of cover art for the next book. He had no taste, knew nothing about publishing, writing or editing and she had segued to his using cocaine about three weeks ago as she sat tethered to her wine glass. The tirade was a familiar epilogue to any disagreement.

“Where you going?”

“Away from you,” he said, digging around for a pair of running shoes. “I can’t stand listening to you, I can’t stand working with you, I can’t stand living with you. I’m done.”

“Don’t go,” she said. “Please. Don’t. I’m sorry.”

She stood in the doorway. To get out of the room he’d have to move her. He would’ve gladly picked her up and thrown her out the window.

“Get out of the way,” Evan said, looking down at her, his duffel in hand. “Get out of the way.”

“Please, I won’t … I’m sorry. I won’t … You’re too sensitive. I didn’t mean anything.”

She looked at him with those big dewy eyes, floating in alcohol. She was drunk. She took his hands in hers, pressed them to her breast.

“I don’t want to live without you,” she said.

“You need help,” he said. His rage was softening. Was it love or was it the sight of this tiny, sagging woman with tears in her eyes? Sympathy. Jesus, she was a mess. The ardent feminist control freak had vaporized.

“Why don’t we go for an ice cream? You like that. I’ll buy. We’ll go to that place you really like. Ripples.”

“Annie, you need to see a therapist.”

“I will. I will. We’ll go together. I just need to finish this book.”

She took the bag out of his hand and placed it in the closet, sliding the door closed, putting it all away, the abuse, the insults, leaky vessel, now forgotten behind the closet door. It never happened.

He knew tomorrow he’d find a love letter in his inbox. She wanted it to work so badly. It kept them together. She didn’t want to fail. Again he caved. It would take a few days, maybe a week, but he’d turn the page. He’d turn it with burnt fingers, but he’d turn the page.

She was special. They were special. He needed to believe that, he thought, eating his moka almond fudge like a good boy. She wouldn’t eat an entire ice cream cone, would ask for licks of his. She did the same at breakfast and at lunch and often at dinner. Pleasure had to be rationed. She started talking about who was running in the federal by-election next week. And what the Tories were trying to do by fielding a candidate known to be tolerant of working people, if not sympathetic. A guy in a suit that looked like a car salesman that wasn’t an advocate of union busting, not entirely, anyway.

Evan listened, but only with half an ear. This was Annie’s SOP after one of her abusive rages. Everything was fine. Her hand was on his thigh and weren’t they the perfect media couple, dissecting the Tories on a summer evening? Not really. He watched the people go by but saw her peeking at her watch. It was already near 9 p.m. and he knew she was calculating how long it would take to get home, get to sleep and how many hours of sleep she would have before she hit the pavement for her run. Evan smiled to himself. He knew her mind was making calculations, computing when would she risk saying it was time to go home without putting a pin in the balloon of the pacification process she had initiated.

He saw that her face was falling, the muscles losing their grip as they did at this hour every night as age and fatigue won out. She had the same fragile hold on her smile as she had on her rationale. It was only a matter of time before they slipped away.

Evan decided to save her the trouble. She had problems just being, he knew that, and he decided to save her the internal struggle she was waging.

“Why don’t we go home?” he said. “I want to go to the gym tomorrow and I have a lot of work to do.”

She popped up. She was relieved. A frivolous excursion like ice cream on a summer night, people watching on St. Laurent, stressed her. Evan thought as they walked to the car, if he could bend and not break, it would work. He just needed to learn to understand and accept. No sweat.