Ontario results warning
Ontario vote a caution for Harper
The last time I bothered to clue in to the state of Ontario politics, which is to say sometime around the beginning of the current provincial election campaign, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was in deep doo doo. The government had broken too many of its previous promises, the pundits and the pollsters had already concluded; the Tories, under the wonderfully named John Tory, were poised to take power if only because they weren’t the Liberals. Or so they claimed.
What a difference a campaign makes.
As I write this on the morning of election day, the outcome — if you believe the polls (always a dubious proposition) and the pundits (even sketchier) — is already a foregone conclusion. You will be reading in your newspaper this morning that McGuinty and his Liberals have cruised to a convincing majority victory.
What happened? Well, everything. And nothing. The short answer is that John Tory seized on an issue almost no one in Ontario cared about — public funding for religious schools — and somehow transformed it into the issue that trumped everything else, drowning out any reasoned, or even unreasoned discussion of Dalton McGuinty’s actual record as premier or all of those issues — the province’s troubled manufacturing economy, its crumbling infrastructure and underfunded health care system — that actually matter to people.
Such are the unpredictable, illogical and ultimately unstoppable ways of electoral campaigns.
There is — or should be — a lesson in all of that for Stephen Harper. Be careful what you wish for.
Canadian voters do not appear all that dissatisfied with the current minority government situation; they certainly aren’t clamouring for a chance to give Harper the majority he craves. So merely being seen to be the political leader who triggers yet another unnecessary federal election — and Harper’s recent tough-guy, sabre-rattling, every-vote-is-a-confidence-vote posturing will be seen for exactly what it is — could backfire in ways no one, least of all Harper himself, can safely predict.
As John Tory discovered, the distance between being poised for power and looking for another line of work is short.
CBC Radio’s Information Morning has taken up the case of Dr. Michael Goodyear, the oncologist whose five-years-and-counting battle with Capital District Health Authority I wrote about in this space last week.
The Cole’s Notes version of the story: Five years ago, the CDHA suspended Goodyear’s hospital privileges, ostensibly because his continued practice endangered the safety of patients but more likely because he didn’t get along with a supervisor. The case has dragged on and on, destroying Goodyear’s career and personally bankrupting him while robbing the rest of us of his much-needed services as an oncologist.
On Tuesday, Information Morning interviewed Goodyear and Dr. John Sullivan, the president of the district’s medical staff association, which has taken up Goodyear’s case, along with that of Dr. Gabrielle Horner, a cardiac researcher who has endured a similar ordeal at the hands of Capital Health and is currently suing the CDHA over its treatment of her.
Yesterday, the program invited CDHA officials to respond specifically to the question of why it has taken so long to deal with Goodyear’s case.
The answer was pathetically inadequate.
That’s not to blame Dr. Brendan Carr, the interim vice president of medicine at the hospital, who wasn’t even in his current position when the dispute began, but who was handed the thankless task of trying to make sense of the CDHA’s sense-less arguments.
Carr, of course, couldn’t talk specifically about Dr. Goodyear’s case, only hypothetically about the process. While admitting that asking why the case has taken so long to resolve was “a very good question,” Carr insisted that “due process is in play” and that the CDHA was simply “exercising our duty to the public” in order to “maintain the public’s confidence in the health care system.”
For five years?
The “public” was not impressed. The program followed Carr’s interview with a selection of telephone calls and emails it had received in response to its interview with Goodyear. All agreed that five years was way too long for a case like this to drag on.
One caller was a former patient of Goodyear’s, who said he’d been “fortunate” to have him as his oncologist. Another came from the family member of another patient who’d died from his cancer but who described Goodyear as “professional and honest” in all his dealings with the family and added that the case against him seemed like “a waste of time, money and talent.”
Indeed.
Still another correspondent echoed my call from last week that Premier Rodney MacDonald and Health Minister Chris d’Entremont intervene to settle this mess.
Perhaps our premier might now want to take time out from pretending to know what health care workers think about his anti-strike legislation and deal with a health care issue that is not only endangering “the health and safety” of Nova Scotians but that is also clearly crying out for action from the top.
Don’t hold your breath.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
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Available May 13, 2007
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Oct 7, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
October 7, 2007
Out of gas
Despite pleas from local residents, a pitch from internationally famed photographer Sherman Hines and even a brief stay of demolition by the Queens Municipal Council, Liverpool’s architecturally rare and historically interesting Petro Canada gas station is no more.
Demolition crews spent the week leveling the station, which was built in the 1920s for the Fina gas company and featured pillars and stonework throughout.
The company said the station had to be demolished so it can determine the extent of oil and gas contamination in the soil under the building and clean it up, but local residents claim there were other, less destructive ways to remove any contaminated soil.
Sherman Hines initially proposed turning the building into an automobile museum and later offered to cart away its bricks and rebuild the structure somewhere else, but the company spurned both suggestions.
Municipal council did its part too, ordering a delay in the demolition to see if residents could strike a deal with the company. They couldn’t.
“It’s a loss to the town and it’s a loss to the heritage of the town and anyone who cares about vintage heritage,” Hines told the Queens County Advertiser.
With the levelling of the Liverpool station, there are just a few service stations from that era left in the province, including a still-functioning one in Bridgewater and a former station that is now a collection of retail outlets in Mahone Bay.
That got their attention
When a South Shore Regional School Board member mused recently that the only way to get the provincial government to pay attention to the “woefully inadequate facilities” at Centre Consolidated School might be for students to stage walkouts and demonstrations, the department of education very quickly got the message.
The minister and deputy minister, along with department officials responsible for capital projects, all attended a hastily convened face-to-face meeting with the school superintendent and two board members, assuring them — in the words of a report from superintendent Nancy Pynch-Worthylake — that it recognized “the need for an extensive renovation project at the school.”
The province has agreed to fork over $60,000 immediately to help deal with the most urgent issues — including constructing a barrier-free entrance and upgrading washrooms in the elementary section of the school.
The $60,000 will help, but it’s the barest of beginnings. The board’s director of operations, Paul Rand, told a recent school board meeting the school needs over $6 million worth of work.
No word on when that cash might flow. Can you say the next election?
Score one for Rodney
Rodney MacDonald’s plan to introduce legislation to take away the right to strike from the province’s health care workers has a new ally.
John Malcolm, the CEO of the Cape Breton District Health Authority who had previously opposed such legislation, says the threat of a strike in his district last year changed his mind. He’s not only changed his mind, he’s joined the Nova Scotia Association of Health Organizations $350,000 lobbying effort to convince the rest of us to support the controversial legislation
A strike, he told the Cape Breton Post’s editorial board last week, would have been “terrifying,” resulting in the closure of three emergency rooms, cancellation of elective surgeries and continued cancer treatment only for people already receiving treatment.
“It’s this and the changes I’ve felt in the system over the last five years that have brought me around to saying we’ve got to look at this differently,” Malcolm explained. “You have a disruption of services, you create a backlog. I don’t know how you ever get out of that.”
This fall’s legislature sitting — if Rodney ever calls it — will be interesting.
The burning question
If you haven’t already ordered your winter supply of firewood, forget about it, or accept the fact that you’ll probably end up with wet wood in your woodstove or fireplace.
That, at least, is what a number of suppliers told the New Glasgow News this week.
The problem, says Darcy Graham of Nodar Farms in Upper Stewiacke, is that much of the best wood is now being turned into chips and shipped to markets overseas. The problem has been getting worse over the past decade as demand for firewood goes up at the same time the supply goes down, but it’s reached a crisis point this year.
“I’m selling people wood that’s only been cut a month or two and I’m telling them that,” Graham explains. “They’re in a situation where they’ve got to buy because they can’t get wood anywhere else.”
Graham isn’t alone. David MacKay, who sells split firewood out of Truro, told the newspaper he’s down to just three or four weeks’ stock. “We won’t have enough wood to go through the winter; we usually do, but we won’t this year.”
Although both MacKay and Graham say they’re considering cutting and stockpiling more firewood in the spring, Graham points out that “it’s costly for us to hold onto it.”
The solution, they say, is to buy your wood for next winter in the spring. “I’m thinking next year my phone is going to be ringing off the hook in April or May,” Graham says, hopefully. “People are going to be getting their wood earlier next year.”
Maybe.
All’s well that ends well
The curtain is about to fall on a three-year soap opera at Parsboro’s Ship’s Company Theatre and — as happens more often on stage than in real life — the final act appears to include a surprise happy ending.
This real-life play began three years ago when the theatre company moved into a new facility and applied to Parsboro for tax exempt status as a cultural institution.
The town said no, designated 22 per cent of the building as commercial and dinged the theatre company for that share of its property taxes.
The Ship’s Company countered that it couldn’t survive the extra costs and, besides, other municipalities with theatre companies exempted them from property taxes.
Relations between town and theatre got so bad, reports the Amherst Citizen, that they were “barely [on] speaking terms” at the beginning of the summer.
But now, thanks to last minute negotiations, the town has agreed to tax the theatre on only 12 per cent of its property instead of the original 22.
“I’m thrilled, and you can put that in bold, capital letters,” Ship’s Company general manager Chuck Homewood told the Citizen. “This is a wonderful step in the right direction.”
The denouement should occur later this month when council holds second and final reading on the revised tax exemption bylaw.
No curtain calls, please.
Whose obstacle course
Former-gym-teacher-turned-premier Rodney MacDonald says he wants to remove the “obstacles” that prevent community groups from using local school facilities after hours. But critics say his own government’s failure to foot the bill for the required extra insurance is the biggest obstacle those community groups face.
The long simmering rural issue bubbled back to the surface during a recent meeting of a committee of the Tri-County Regional School Board in Yarmouth. The commitee was discussing the board’s community use policy. Board members said they too wanted to open up their school rooms and gymnasiums — often the only large public gathering spots in rural communities — but their school insurance policies won’t cover such “non-school” activities. That means the groups often have to ante up hundreds of dollars to buy additional insurance just to hold one meeting or event. And, worse from the school board’s point of view, they end up blaming the board for forcing them to purchase the insurance.
Responding to those concerns, the premier told the Yarmouth Vanguard he’s instructed his ministers of education and health promotion and protection to figure out ways to make the province's schools more accessible.
If he’s really serious, says school board vice-chair Ron Hines, the solution is simple. ”If the province is so determined to provide these facilities to the community they should have liability insurance that would cover the whole thing across the province.”
Back to you, Rodney.
Come in, the water’s warm
No one around Isle Madame had seen such a creature before. It was a six-foot-long, 60-pound fish with “large silver scales and a large, round mouth” that recently washed up on shore in an estuary of a brook in nearby Port Royal.
So they called the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO sent out an officer to examine the sea creature. He confirmed the fish was, in fact, a tarpon.
A tarpon? Sometimes called the “silver king” and prized by sports fishermen because they put up such a good fight, tarpon are usually only found in the tropical and sub-tropical waters around the Gulf of Mexico, Florida and the West Indies.
How did it end up in Isle Madame? Good question? Can you say global warming?
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES:
Amherst Citizen, Cape Breton Post, New Glasgow News, Queens County Advertiser, Port Hawkesbury Reporter, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Michael Goodyear’s ordeal continues (Oct 4, 2007)
Five years of ‘stress, isolation and poverty’
Dr. Michael Goodyear marked an anniversary this week. He didn’t celebrate.
Five years ago on Tuesday — Oct. 2, 2002 — Goodyear, a respected medical oncologist and ethics researcher, received a letter from his bosses at the Capital District Health Authority.
As the result of ongoing personality clashes with his division head over Goodyear’s “communication… availability and judgment,” the chief of medicine, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Cowden, informed the doctor she was varying his hospital privileges.
The problem is that you can’t simply vary a doctor’s hospital privileges — which are critical to his ability to do his job — because he doesn’t get along with his boss. You have to prove he poses a real threat to his patients’ safety.
The CDHA hasn’t — and it’s had five years to make its case.
The District Medical Advisory Committee spent three months investigating the allegations against Goodyear, and found no substance to them. A complaint was also lodged with the doctors’ governing body, the Nova Scotia College of Physicians and Surgeons. It too was unable to substantiate the allegations, and eventually withdrew its complaint.
Despite that, the Capital District Health Authority — which, by its own rules, should have dealt with Goodyear’s case within a month after the initial emergency variance — has dragged its feet, all the while refusing to restore his privileges.
Worse, it appears — on the face of it — to have done its best to consign him to languish in a kind of extended exile. According to a complaint Goodyear lodged this summer with the province’s human rights commission, the CDHA has restricted him from “clinical practice, research, teaching, administrative duties and publication and presentation of my work.” It stripped him of his position as the authority’s research ethics chair — despite the objections of other members of the committee and several former chairs — and locked him out of his office. He was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.
“Five years (and still counting) is a significant time taken out of one's life at a time when one is supposed to be at one's most productive and thinking about planning for retirement,” Goodyear mused in an email this week. “Five years,” he added, “is a long time to spend under continuous stress, professional and social isolation and poverty.
The only recent development in his case is that the CDHA’s board has finally agreed to assume jurisdiction of the case from the hospital’s privileges review committee, which hadn’t managed to come to a conclusion in five years of sort-of trying.
While that should be good news, Goodyear notes, “the two bodies are now, as expected, arguing about the terms of such a transfer [of jurisdiction], and this is continuing to occupy the now even larger list of law firms engaged in the process.”
Ah, yes, the lawyers — the only ones who actually benefit from this protracted affair.
And not just this one.
We know through freedom of information requests that the CDHA has already spent more than a million dollars on outside lawyers to fight a similar — and similarly ongoing, not to mention similarly frivolous — case involving pioneering heart researcher Dr. Gabrielle Horne.
The Horne case started at almost exactly the same time and involved the same non-issue of personality differences with her bosses. Last September, the authority’s board finally ruled that it had had no authority to vary Horne’s privileges but it did so in such a reluctant, roundabout way that Horne is now suing the health authority.
Which means the case will cost taxpayers — and Nova Scotia’s underfinanced health system — even more than it already has.
We can only guess that the CDHA has spent at least as much on outside lawyers in Goodyear’s case — and will continue to run the clock until it runs out of legal options.
Or until the premier and his minister of health insist the authority stop wasting our money on lawyers to cover its collective ass and spend it on providing health care instead.
Are you listening, Rodney? Chris?
***
In last week’s column, I quoted Jayati Vora, a former student in Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs who’d written an article for The Nation about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at the university. I described Vora as a he. Well, “he” is, in fact, a she. My apologies.Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
More text goes here.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
A Short Story
As if it mattered
By Stephen Kimber
From Mixed Messages, "an anthology of literature to benefit hospice and cancer causes," published by English Garden Publishers and featuring such writers as Jane Urquhart, Paul Quarrington, Joseph Boyden, Wayson Choy, Katherine Govier, Will Ferguson, Andrew Pyper, Stuart McLean and Erika Ritter. Edited by Paul Knowles.
The 1-0-4? You. Quizzical. Professorially skeptical. You mean the 4-0-1. As if you were lecturing a particularly dense student. Or you wife. As if this kind-eyed cop standing in your front porch telling you your wife has just been killed in a car accident must have gotten her highway route numbers mixed up.
As if the numbers mattered.
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1. I heard you say it. In my head. In that strapped, trapped-in-place, tumbling, twisting, turmoiled, ice-skidding, gravel-spitting, chassis-flipping, coffees-flying, metal-crunching, airbags-exploding, windshield-shattering, roof-meets-mind, final, strangely never-ending ever second between what had been and nothingness… I heard you say it.
Even though you hadn’t.
Not yet.
But you would.
You did, didn’t you?
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.
I loved you for it. Perhaps that is why I fell in love with you. For your uncanny ability to fixate on such an insignificant detail and miss what really matters — to be, so often, so beside the point. I used to think of it — my gender forgive me — as an expression of your endearingly ditzy, feminine side. Or, to give you your male professional due, as a manifestation of your absent-minded professor self.
As you will now have to discover for yourself, I twisted whatever you prefer to call that guileless obtuseness of yours to my own advantage. Not that I intended to.
How could you not have known? You must at least have suspected? How did we end up with our roles so scrambled? I should have been the one listening to the kind-eyed cop. And you should have… Instead of…
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.
Of course, I hated you for it too, for your annoying need to be correct. About everything. And anything. Do you remember that time you decided I should take Quinpool Road to get to my office?
“It would be faster,” you said.
“No, it wouldn’t,” I answered. “There’s less traffic and fewer lights on Chebucto.”
Three weeks later, when I’d forgotten all about the conversation, you brought it up again. “I was right,” you said. (You were always right, of course, or perhaps you just never mentioned it again when you were wrong.) As an experiment, you told me, you’d driven each route for a full week during both morning and evening rush hours, then averaged out the times. Taking the Quinpool Road route saved, on average, forty eight seconds’ driving time in the mornings, thirty six in the evenings. You. Triumphant.
Did I ever tell you how much I disliked that about you?
Not that that explains anything. I mean this didn’t happen because I hated you for your need to always be right. I did it because… well, that’s the question, isn’t it?
You mean the 4-0-1.
You were wrong this time. Not that that’s your fault. And not that it explains anything either.
I didn’t take the flight to Toronto. Another damn sales meeting, I’d told you. Carolyn’s panicking about the fall numbers already. So she’s called a special meeting. You know how much I hate those meetings. But what can I do? It’s just one night. Me. Resigned.
There was no meeting. No Toronto. And so, no 4-0-1.
I did go to the airport, but only to pick up Hubert. You remember Hubert Durand? The French author? The one whose universities’ tour I organized last spring? You don’t, do you? Like I said, you always missed what matters. Anyway, let me tell you some other things you don’t know that now don’t matter anymore either.
Hubert, a professor of literature at some university in Paris, wrote a novel, a truly trashy erotic romance, the translation of which somehow ended up in a discard bin at the New York Review of Books. Some reviewer picked it out of the pile, read it, loved it and wrote a review that tarted up Hubert’s simple lust story with multiple metaphysical meanings he had never intended nor — believe me when I say this — understood.
His freshly re-interpreted book — repackaged with a gauzy, sepia cover photo that featured mysteriously entwined naked limbs — their naughty bits decorously obscured by breathless blurb copy from the now-infamous review —became a cult phenomenon on North American university campuses (where smut is always welcome, especially when served with a dollop of sanctifying meaning). The publisher, understanding how quickly today’s cult success can become tomorrow’s pulped returns, immediately decided to cash in with a lecture tour to celebrate the novel’s miraculous resurrection from the remainder bin.
Which, of course, is where I came in. You must remember this part. After I’d organized Hubert’s east coast stops, the publisher asked if I would accompany him. They were worried his English might not be adequate, that he’d get lost, or disappear, or something. I didn’t want to do it. I was trying to nail down the local details of the next Atwood book flog, but the publicity people were insistent. I told you all this at the time; I know I did. Am I telling you again now to try and explain why what happened happened? I didn’t want to go. I didn’t intend…
It’s not quite true. While it is fair to say I didn’t intend for precisely what happened to happen, I didn’t not intend it either — if that make any sense. The only part I really didn’t intend was how it has now all ended. I definitely didn’t intend that.
At any rate, Hubert’s English was fine. Better than fine, actually. I met his plane at the airport. By the time we’d rescued his luggage from the carousel, he’d already propositioned me. I won’t flatter myself; he was practising his new role as middle-aged campus literary Lothario. He was good at it. And good looking too, in a rumpled, stubbled, smoky, boozy, weathered, French author sort of way that usually doesn’t appeal to me.
So why did I say yes? I didn’t. In fact, that first time, I laughed at him. Out loud. Perhaps that was because it had been so long since anyone had come on to me like that. You certainly never did. That first night at the bar, I was the one who picked you up. Remember? Five years ago, when my biological clock was still a ticking time bomb. You fit within what I thought at the time were all the requisite father-of my-child parameters: you were male, heterosexual and had a pulse. Better, you were gainfully employed, a tenured professor even, smarter than me, probably kinder. What can I say? I was thirty five; I wasn’t thinking straight. Otherwise, I might have asked for a fertility test, or at least a sperm count.
Was that the issue? Too few of your little guys swimming victory laps around my crown jewels? Does that explain everything? Anything? I doubt it. The truth — I never told you this, perhaps because I didn’t want to acknowledge it myself — was that your diagnosis was also this condemned woman’s minute-before-midnight governor’s stay of execution. I was not ready, not fit to be a mother.
As a teenager I remember talking my way out of babysitting jobs — Test tomorrow… Have to study… So sorry… Why don’t you ask my little sister? — because just the thought of taking care of some crying, clinging, wriggling, shitting, puking helpless little thing scared the hell out of me. In my late twenties, when all my friends suddenly seemed to transform themselves into baby-making factories, I had to force myself to coo and cuddle, and pronounce every Winston-Churchill or rhesus-monkey-looking one of them the most adorable baby I’d ever seen. And, worse, to put up with their mother monsters, my former friends who’d joined the coven, swallowed the Kool-Aid and now professed that having your nipples nibbled raw by an insatiable teething beast was fulfilling, that sleeplessness was its own reward… and, oh, Chloe, why don’t you join us?
At the time, I thought I must just be jealous. I realize now I was not.
The more we tried — and failed — to conceive, the more I worried we might actually succeed. I can’t tell you how relieved I was the day that officious young resident at the clinic finally delivered his male-factor-infertility-for-dummies lecture, complete with personally tailored, colour-coded PowerPoint charts that might have been funny if he — and you — weren’t so serious.
See this blue line here, Mrs. Lydon, he explained, a long, elegant finger tracing its trajectory across the computer screen. This line represents what medical science considers a normal sperm count — twenty million or more sperm per milliliter of semen. He clicked the mouse and a second, much shorter yellow line magically drew itself beneath the first. This line shows your count from last week’s fertility test, Mr. Lydon. As you can see, it’s only eleven million per millilter, or just over half of the normal level. We call this condition oligospermia, or, in layman’s language, low sperm count. He paused, turned and smiled at both of us. The good news is that modern artificial reproductive technologies now offer the opportunity for us to assist Mother Nature…
That was his good news, not mine. When I recoiled, the doctors, who quickly became puppy-eager to offer up their cocktails of anti-depressants to deal with my “problem,” and assumed my increasingly shrill refusal to consider artificial insemination (“too clinical”), sperm donation (“some pimply-faced guy in a backward baseball cap jerking off into a bottle is not going to be the father my child!”), male fertility drugs, (“what if we ended up with some hideous mutant?”), or adoption (“I don’t want someone else’s damaged goods”) was just my understandable, if crazed hormonal response to the news you were not the man you were supposed to be, but that I would get over it, come around, be realistic, adapt.
I didn’t. And, when I think about it, you didn’t try too hard to change my mind. I wonder now if that was because you were as frightened about having a child as I was. It’s too bad we didn’t talk more. Perhaps if we had, this would all be easier.
What else can I tell you that will help you make sense of it all now?
The first time? St. John’s. Last stop on the tour. After the post-lecture reception at the university. We’d taken a cab back to the hotel.
“A night cap?” he said. “To celebrate such a wonderful evening.”
“I should call my husband,” I said. And meant it. I was feeling randy from the two glasses of wine and the exhausted exhilaration of having done what I knew was a good job, but all I wanted was to curl up in bed and listen the sound of your voice over the phone.
“Just one?”
“Well… OK… but just one....”
I knew where it was heading, long before the first glass of wine became the second Scotch-on-the-rocks and the third Scotch turned into a coquettish, I-really-shouldn’t, sweet-dreams, bottoms-up Bailey’s; certainly well before Hubert got off the elevator at my floor instead of continuing on to his own because “a gentleman always sees a lady to her room;” and way before a simple thanks-for-all-your-good-work, goodnight peck on the cheek turned into a gasping, groping dry hump against my hotel room door while Hubert took the plastic room card-lock key from my outstretched hand and slid it into the slot in the door and we tumbled backwards through the opened door onto the carpeted floor, at first giggling and then urgent, rolling, pulling, shrugging, unbuttoning, unzipping…
I’d known where it was heading, and I didn’t do anything to stop it. After, I asked myself, What was I thinking?, tried to summon up some shame, or, at least, the least regret. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about how good it all felt. Not the sex. The sex itself, as always, was a letdown (if that makes you feel any better). It was the letting go, the giving up, the absolute and total abandonment of all my usual, careful, consider-the-consequences calibrating, measuring, weighing, balancing. The pleasure, the release was in just experiencing the moment. The sex was better than I said (why should I lie now?), but the power of the orgasm had less to do with what was happening between my legs and much more with the absence of what usually happens inside my head.
Even the next morning, I felt remarkably free of guilt, or even angst. Perhaps because I knew the tour was over and I would never have to see Hubert again. Perhaps because I knew you would never find out.
What did I know?
This time — the second time, the time that never actually happened — it was different. Hubert emailed me last week. He’d been invited to speak at some literary conference in Boston and had a few free days afterward. He wrote that he was thinking of flying to Nova Scotia, and wondered if I might be free to show him around and “perhaps renew acquaintances.” I wrote back to say — equally blandly — that it was a very busy time for me but that, if he came, “perhaps we could have lunch.”
If you’re curious, you’ll find this exchange of unrevealing correspondence on my computer in a sub-folder of the “Freelance” folder of my email program entitled, “Other…”, along with three previous messages from Hubert, including a “Thanks for everything!” message containing a smiley-face emoticon, which he wrote just after he arrived back in Paris the first time, and two even more impersonal messages, including the text of a news story — in French — from a Paris newspaper about his North American tour and a much-forwarded email containing a link to a joke about George Bush eating French fries that I didn’t get. Or perhaps wasn’t funny. You won’t find any other replies from me. There weren’t any.
You’ll be curious, of course. You’ll check my cell phone records — why is it that modern technology makes everything so easy to know and so difficult to understand? — and discover a series of calls to and from Hubert’s hotel room in the Boston Marriott, only one of which lasted longer than two minutes. That call, made on a Sunday afternoon three days before he flew to Halifax, was from me to him, went on for twelve minutes and thirty four seconds, and was followed, less than half an hour later, by a one-minute-and twelve-second call from his room to me. And then, three minutes after that, the records will show I placed a call to a number in Sackville, New Brunswick. If you check, you’ll find the number is for the Marshlands Inn. You remember that lovely old inn where we stayed on our honeymoon? I’m not very imaginative. If you call, you’ll discover I made a reservation for the same room in which we stayed, the one with the sleigh bed and cast iron clawfoot tub. I’m not very inventive either. The reservation is for Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Lydon.
There will be more hints and allegations you’ll discover as you go. When the Visa bill comes, for example, you’ll notice a purchase from Leeza’s Lingerie dated the day after that exchange of phone calls. You’ll find the purchase itself — a too lacey, too revealing, much-too-girlish-for-me pink peignoir set — in my suitcase with the price tag still on. You won’t know this — except that I’m telling you — but I left the tag attached in case I chickened out and decided to return it instead. (Leeza’s has a strict thirty-day returns policy, so you shouldn’t wait too long—… My God, such strange advice I’m offering you! Think of it as the practical side of my personality, showing itself even in death. I mean, there’s no point for you to keep it… unless… do you have secrets too?
How little we really know about anyone.
And even what we think we know… do we really know it at all?
I would like to tell you I planned to call it off — whatever this “it” really was. I did. In fact, in the days of doubt between that flurry of Sunday phone calls and the arrival of Flight AC8894 at 10:38 on Wednesday morning, I considered calling Hubert to cancel many times. The cell phone logs don’t count calls considered but not made.
I would like to tell you I was hesitant because I loved you. But then I would have to tell you that I went ahead anyway because I didn’t love you. And neither is quite true.
If you must know, you had very little to do with either decision. Neither did Hubert. It was, as so many things are, mostly just about me. About the positive job evaluation I got. And the raise I didn’t. About the fact I actually cared about either. About the jeans that no longer fit the way I’d imagined they once did. About my father’s cancer. And my mother’s loneliness. About the new computer program I can’t seem to make do what the ads claimed it would. About the hot flashes that began before I was ready for them. About all the people I never became. And the one I did. About me.
It was as twisted and as uncomplicated as that. Escape from reality. Pretend for a day and a night. And then back to my life, my job, my husband.
No one would ever know.
So much for that.
It was different than the first time. We — I — couldn’t pretend I didn’t know the road we were traveling down. Literally. Figuratively. We stopped for coffee in Truro. Hubert had acquired a taste for Tims double-doubles during his last visit. We talked about the success of his book and his inability to write the next one, the conference in Boston and the pretentiousness of academics, the war in Iraq, the first signs of spring in Boston and the far-from-last vestiges of winter in Nova Scotia, the unlikely prospect that a Nova Scotia vintner could ever produce a wine Hubert would consider acceptable … everything, that is, except the fact this was all a huge mistake, and that it shouldn’t have happened the first time, and that it couldn’t happen again.
I was saving that conversation for after dinner. No, later. For after sex. Or, perhaps, later still, for those few minutes tomorrow in the airport lounge after he’d checked in for his flight back to Boston and before he proceeded through Security. It’s been fun, Hubert, I was going to tell him, and good for me in a strange kind of way — it’s important to be honest — but it can’t go on. I have a husband. And a job. And a life. Goodbye…
Do you believe that? Do I believe that?
Not that it matters now, of course. We never made it to the inn, let alone to dinner, sex, breakfast, back to the airport. We never had the conversation.
It was early afternoon. Around two, I’m guessing. The sky — grey, gloomy, heavy with menace and malice — pressed down hard against the frozen landscape while wind-whipped snow squalls chased each other angrily across the road in the beams of the car’s headlights. We were driving along the 1-0-4 somewhere between Wentworth and Oxford. I used to know all the landmarks but, ever since they replaced the old, winding, “too dangerous” road with a new toll highway a few years ago, it all looks the same to me.
I needed a cigarette. I know, I know. I don’t smoke, and haven’t since long before I met you. But I had one that first night in St. John’s. After. Hubert was still on his back, waiting for his breathing to slow down. I was tucked into the crook of his arm, feeling the room spin. He reached over to his sports jacket and pulled a pack of Gitanes from its inside pocket, lit one, and held it out to me. I arched my neck up toward his proffered hand, took a long, slow drag and remembered how much I used to like the sensation of smoking. Do you remember me joking that if the doctor ever told me I had a terminal illness, the first thing I’d do was go out and buy a package of cigarettes — or was that from before I met you? Not that it matters. Smoking kills. Trust me on that.
Hubert had left his package of cigarettes in the well between the car’s front seats, along with my sunglasses and cellphone, and his new iPod. You would have been proud of me. I know how much you hate when I get distracted putting on my makeup while driving. I didn’t look down, just kept my eyes fixed on the snowy nothingness in front of me and felt around with my right hand like a blind man until I felt the familiar shape of the cardboard packaging.
“Want one?” I asked Hubert.
“Sure,” he said. “But, please, let me…”
“No, no, that’s OK. I can do it.” I had a sudden image — black and white, from a fifties’ movie, a romantic comedy, perhaps? — of me with two unlit cigarettes dangling from my mouth, lighting one, passing it across to Hubert and then lighting my own.
Smooth.
Not so much in real life.
I did manage to get both cigarettes out of the package, insert them, filters facing correctly, into my mouth and, then, more awkwardly than in the picture in my mind’s eye, lit each of them with the car’s lighter. But, as I reached back up to take the first from my mouth and hand it to Hubert, I somehow knocked the second from between my lips. It fell into my lap. Instinctively, I looked down and frantically began to use my right hand to brush it off my slacks. Wrong hand. Now, one burning cigarette had fallen onto the seat between my legs, the other had become — thanks to me — a shower of sparks burning pinkprick holes in my slacks. Had I packed another pair? I—
“Merde! Non—“
I looked up, saw the red tail lights of a monster eighteen-wheeler looming up out of the snow swirls dead ahead of us. We were going too fast; it wasn’t going fast enough. We were about to rear-end a transport truck!
“No! Fuck—“
I slammed on the brakes and, at the same time, twisted the steering wheel to my left, thinking, ‘If I can just get past him, everything will be OK.’ But then it wasn’t. An air horn blast just above and behind me! Oh, no. There was a second truck. In the outside lane. Trying to pass me and the first truck. Sandwich time. I dragged the steering wheel back to my right, felt the hurricane whoosh of the second truck as it barreled past to my left. Breathed again. Braking had put some distance between me and the truck in front. It was going to be OK. I almost had time to feel the pain from the cigarette still burning between my legs. Almost. The car’s rear end fishtailed as it hit a patch of black ice. Was this a metaphor for my life? Just when you think… Brake? Don’t brake? Brake. Jolt. Gravel. Pavement. Ice. Gravel again. Then flying. And then silence.
And then everything happened at once, and didn’t happen at all.
Which was when I heard you say it.
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.
I wanted to explain, make you understand that this wasn’t about Hubert, or you, or us; that it was about me; that none of the explanations explained anything because there was no explaining anything; that I was sorry for what you could never know; that I’d loved you in my way, been true to you in my fashion.
As if any of it mattered.
But I couldn’t.
I’m dead.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.