Throughout my teenage years, I’d been driven by two overlapping goals: to win the heart of a seemingly unwinnable girl, and to live a life of fame and fortune as a singer-songwriter. These two goals fed off each other, creating a positive cycle: my obsession to get the girl sparked my songwriting, which played into my career, which then made me more desirable in the eyes of that unwinnable girl. Incredibly, these once-impossible, overlapping dreams of mine, hatched at roughly the same age, were now being realized at the same time.
My constant radio airplay, reinforced by coast-to-coast touring and continuing media coverage, catapulted my first album, titled Dan Hill, into the position of hottest-selling record on GRT’s roster. And Cynthia had moved from St. John’s to Toronto, transferring to York University, where she’d received a partial athletic scholarship. Gone forever were the days of me sharing a house with six other guys. Now Cynthia and I were living together.
Aside from the seventy-two hours I’d spent lost in a sexual frenzy with Helena, I didn’t have a clue how to go about living and sharing my life with a serious girlfriend. Furthermore, anything I’d learned about women through my past relationships could most certainly not be applied to Cynthia.
My earlier girlfriends had treated sex as a statement, rather than the beginnings of a deepening emotional bond. (“Whom I choose to share my body with is no one’s business other than mine,” Helena would say, in the midst of clunking me over the head with every unsavoury detail of her last encounter.)
But Cynthia embraced our new intimacy with the same commitment she brought to everything else in her life. Sex meant a permanent monogamous relationship: approaching it any other way was disrespectful to the act itself and cheapened both participants. Cynthia didn’t expect other people to share her beliefs, and she was the first to poke fun at her old-fashioned standards. But of course, I wasn’t “other people”; I’d officially become her life partner.
According to Cynthia, our new status as lovers, when factored in with all those years growing up apart yet together, was now incontrovertible evidence that we were and would always be the perfect pair. So then, what was the problem? This was what I’d always wanted. Why was I complicating things?
Did I love Cynthia? Absolutely. Could I imagine any woman other than Cynthia in my life, for the rest of my life? Not a chance. Did that mean I could remain faithful? Well, I was working on that one. However, as a work in progress, it was proving to be a challenge.
“Where are you? Don’t fade away on me,” Cynthia would implore whenever she caught me drifting, lost in an unfinished song or second-guessing something imprudent I might have said in a recent interview. Her wake-up call, reinforced by a playful nudge of her chin against my shoulder, always brought me back. In that way that befitted the narcissist I was becoming (nothing like a quick shot of fame to make the self-involved that much more so), I loved how absolutely Cynthia seemed to know and understand me. At least the part of me I was willing to open up to her. She never failed to find the right words to put me back together following a crisis. And the music business was essentially a series of crises: you solve one only to confront the next one that’s popped up in its place. Upon my cry-babying over a particularly vicious review, she’d giggle, mimic my stricken expression and say, “Danny, can’t you see, that critic really likes you, he’s just afraid to admit it. Look how he accuses you of writing the kinds of songs only fourteen-year-old girls can relate to. That’s a compliment. Do you know how hard it is to get the attention of a fourteen-year-old girl?”
Did the critic really like me? Doubtful. Did Cynthia really believe what she was telling me? Doubtful. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I believed her.
In turn, I did the same for her: calming her down when she’d stress over her ever-tight hamstrings, convincing her to ease off on her training so her body could recover. Ice, heat, massage, ice, heat, massage: one or two nights a week were spent with me trying to coax some life back into her beaten-down legs as she lay moaning in pain on her stomach, reading for some psychology course. To the outside world, we must have come across as an insufferable advertisement for perfect love. Indeed, more than a few people found it nauseating to be around us. But we may well have been so demonstrative on the outside, smooching and stroking, giggling and caressing, to compensate for serious problems on the inside. Because beneath our shared glow, our permanent smiles, the inside jokes, the knowing back-and-forth looks, the cutesy glances and exchanges that tended to make everyone else feel excluded, we were the furthest thing from the perfect couple.
Cynthia, while becoming close with my mother, had a more difficult time with Dad, not knowing what to make of his teasing manner or his homey, off-colour humour.
“What were you two up to last night?” Dad asked, the morning after Cynthia and I had slept over in the basement bedroom.
“I’m sorry, did we have the TV on too loud?” Cynthia responded.
I stared into my cereal bowl, knowing what was coming.
“What I was hearing didn’t sound like the TV,” Dad said.
“I don’t understand,” Cynthia maintained.
“Ignore him, Cynthia. Dad’s being—”
“Son, haven’t you told Cynthia about the air vents in that basement bedroom?”
“Dad, enough already.”
“Dan,” Mom echoed.
Knowing that once Dad got started any discouraging words from Mom or me would only egg him on, I grabbed hold of Cynthia’s hand under the table. Then I braced myself.
“The thing about those old air vents of ours,” Dad explained, “is that they carry every single basement moan to every room in the house.”
“Why would your father deliberately embarrass me like that?” Cynthia asked, once we’d made a hasty exit.
“Relax, we didn’t even fool around last night. Once Dad realizes he can’t get your goat he’ll stop teasing you.”
“That’s what hurts. That your father wants to get my goat in the first place. Why? Is it about my family being religious? I know he thinks that means we’re all narrow-minded. And he’s always commenting on how rich my family is.”
It was hard to say what was worse, Cynthia crying or Cynthia losing her temper. Neither had happened all that often until she’d moved to Toronto. But now, as I unrolled the car window so that her raised voice had a place to go, I spoke without thinking.
“Cynthia, you have to admit your dad’s one of the richest guys on the east coast. And you could hardly accuse him of being a liberal thinker.”
“You and your dad. You’re snobs. You’re always making digs about my dad being Mr. Straight, after he’s been so generous to you. But you’re no different than he is.”
“Okay, so first you accuse me of being a snob like my dad, and now you’re telling me I’m a dead ringer for your father?”
“You’re both businessmen who never went to university. You both have a product that you’re obsessed with selling around the world.”
“So what are you telling me, that you’ve fallen in love with your father?”
“You know what? You can let me out at the next stop sign.”
Cynthia had disconcertingly efficient ways of putting an end to unpleasant conversations. The abrupt hang-up. The storming out of restaurants. The sudden, silent exit from a movie theatre. Now Cynthia scrambled out of the car before it had come to a complete stop. Her final words as she slammed the door were “I want out, now!” leaving me to think she meant out of Toronto. Out of her life with me.
Cynthia returned several hours later, apologizing for overreacting. I matched her apology for apology, pretending not to see the truth. That we were turning into the last thing we’d imagined: a cliché. What could be more predictable than a couple getting into a fight over the in-laws?
As teenagers, our quick long-distance visits had granted us a shared escape from our immediate worlds; we were each other’s vacation from life as we knew it. Now we were confronted with the overwhelming permanence of being a couple. No longer were we escaping reality; we were reality.
The things that had fuelled our friendship and correspondence through our teenage years were starting to trip us up as a couple. It had been easy for me to defer to Cynthia in St. John’s and for Cynthia to do the same with me when visiting Toronto, but now that we were living together neither of us felt comfortable being in the other’s shadow.
Even the thing that had once been such a source of connection for us—my music—was now threatening to divide us. My songs no longer served as our personal immutable bond; they’d blossomed, or rather, bastardized, into something hugely public, taking on a life of their own. And the greatest insult was that, for the first time, people were only interested in Cynthia because of her relationship to me. She’d uprooted her life and moved halfway across Canada for this? To become the girlfriend of the star? Although Cynthia got along well with my Toronto friends, I was on the road a lot, leaving her lonely and homesick in this sprawling, impersonal new city.
More and more Cynthia began to blow up at me over minor incidents rather than the real, overarching problem. My absent-minded eccentricities—such as confusing a pot of tea for maple syrup in the much too early morning and pouring it on my pancakes, causing the plate to overflow and drench the floor—started to grate on her nerves. I was always talking too loud, usually about something risqué, in an intimate restaurant; or getting lost while driving her to a track meet, which made her late, which cut into her warm-up time, which resulted in another round of strained hamstrings. It seemed I could do nothing properly. Had I told my parents the story about one of Cynthia’s girlfriends trying, unsuccessfully, to seduce one of my musician friends (the more Dad roared with laughter, the angrier Cynthia became) because I was insensitive? Or worse than that, was I a chip off the old block, going out of my way to upset her for my own warped amusement?
Most of the time Cynthia wouldn’t reveal why she was angry, and would deny being angry at all, leaving me scrambling to apologize while feeling clueless about what, exactly, I’d done wrong. But how could Cynthia articulate the source of her anger when she didn’t really understand it? I understood it: more and more, I was being seduced by my own stardom.
I blamed it on the power of radio. On writing those cursed romantic songs, delivered in that raspy, too-Black-for-folk, too-white-for-R&B voice. On being a solo singer, my guitar as my backing band, which made me appear vulnerable and approachable to audiences weaned on rock ‘n’ roll bands big enough to form an army. Given a chance, I could come up with a million reasons why it wasn’t my fault. Only it was my fault.
I was becoming secretly addicted to sex on the road. Even though I managed to limit my one-night stands to while I was touring, Cynthia, on some visceral level, must have sensed what was going on.
I found myself straddling two worlds—acting the swashbuckling pop star on the road while setting up a quiet domestic life with Cynthia at home. What was astounding was just how well, superficially speaking, I managed this double life, tucking it discreetly out of view: from Cynthia, from my family (whom Cynthia and I, despite Dad’s incorrigible antics, spent most of our free time with) and even from my closest friends. All those years of pulling the wool over my father’s eyes had left me adept at covering my tracks.
In my determination to savour the best of both worlds, I found little enjoyment in either. At home, I’d alternate between feeling guilty over my road sex and longing for the next adventure. On the road, I’d swear that each new woman would be the last, and, as morning greeted my escape from a college dorm or some coffeehouse dressing room, or as I exited some cramped bathroom encounter during a red-eye flight, I hungered for home, convincing myself that I was finally cured, that I could start fresh with Cynthia.
Somehow, through all of this, the positive cycle that had resulted in everything magically falling into place for me at twenty-one was beginning to reverse itself. I was in the process of gradually and methodically destroying all that I’d managed to achieve. (Even though my career kept gathering momentum, my rate of songwriting was slowing down, which was certain to erode the consistency of my future albums.) If I didn’t know when, exactly, things in my life would start coming apart, I did know how: sooner or later my watertight compartments would give way to the rising pressure and flood into one another, all the separate parts finally whooshing together and washing the life, or lives, I was expertly juggling down the drain.
When the truth finally tumbled out, what would happen to Cynthia and me? I felt a constant gnawing pressure squeezing at my insides the way it used to when I was a boy and Dad trapped me upside down in one of his wrestling lock-ups. Only now it was me, no one else, who was tying the deepest, darkest part of me up in knots.