The Trickster. Muriel Gray
to Vancouver, she said. She was going back to tell her boyfriend that it was over and then she would come straight back to Silver and be with him.
Katie braced herself for Sam to be sceptical, to dismiss her as a middle-class girl who’d used him for some rough-stuff vacation fun, and to be angry and hurt. But Sam looked straight back into her eyes, and said, ‘I know you will.’
They did what their bodies told them they had to do about four or five times, and then, exhausted, crawled back down the trail to town. Sam said goodbye at the end of her street, and walked away as if there was absolutely no doubt they would see each other again. Katie knew that was the truth.
She thought about Tom on the car journey all the way back to Vancouver, about how she could tell him without hurting him.
She loved him still, in a nostalgic kind of way. She’d been his girl almost half her adult life. A life together was taken for granted. But now the thought of him even kissing her made her wriggle with discomfort. She would tell him the moment they got back.
He called twenty minutes after they returned and said he’d made a dinner reservation in Denton’s. Where better to tell him, she thought, than in the best restaurant in town? Her parents seemed excited, asking her ridiculous questions, like, what time Tom was picking her up and what was she going to wear? Perhaps if Katie’s mind hadn’t been on Sam Hunt’s brown body and warm lips, she might have detected something was up in the Crosby household, but she slung on her green dress and grabbed a jacket when the door chimes announced Tom was there.
Tom held her and kissed her on the lips the moment she answered the door, as her eyes screwed in a grimace that he couldn’t see.
‘God, I missed you, you hick.’
She gave him a weak smile.
‘Let’s eat.’
He was looking unusually smart. He wore a grey Italian suit and a silk tie that she hadn’t seen before, and as he opened the passenger door of his Volvo for Katie she saw him raise his head and wink up at her father waving from the bedroom window.
They went to a wine bar first and Katie let him talk for three-quarters of an hour. He talked about the ball and how everyone had missed her. He told her about the trouble he’d had with his new PA and how James had a new car. He told her that she should enrol in this new health club on the coast that everyone was joining. It would do her good. Get her in shape. She watched his mouth move but struggled to concentrate on what the words meant. Katie was back in Silver, smelling the pines, hearing the woodpeckers knocking out a rhythm in the distance, feeling the rough dry earth beneath her back and buttocks as Sam blocked out the sun above her with his body. But here she was. Sitting in a bar full of vacant young men in crumpled designer suits and women pretending to be young and cool until they could revert to their true suburban colours the moment they hit thirty.
As she gathered the courage to say what she had to say, he motioned to the barman for the check and told her it was time to go. It could wait, she thought. She would tell him at dinner. Give him time to take it in.
They drove to the restaurant in near-silence, Katie staring ahead, Tom smiling and humming. She’d been to Denton’s only once but the head waiter greeted them as if they were long-lost friends. Tom took Katie’s arm and halted her in the marble-floored, plant-filled lobby.
‘You go in, darling. I’ll be there in a minute. I love you.’
He held her face and kissed her deeply. She was stunned. Weird behaviour, but the head waiter was already guiding her through the lobby into the restaurant before she had time to ask Tom what the hell he was playing at. Big shock. Her parents and Tom’s widowed mother were sitting at a big round table for six. They stood up and greeted her. Katie was completely and utterly lost. The restaurant was full, faces looking at her as she sat down heavily on the blue velvet seat pushed into the back of her knees by the waiter.
She looked open-mouthed and helpless at her mother for an explanation, but Mrs Crosby put a finger to her lips and smiled at something behind Katie’s shoulder.
The lights in the restaurant were dimmed, and behind her she heard Tom’s voice. My God, he was talking to the whole restaurant. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone very special here tonight.’
She was going mad. What was happening? Her mind tossed in a frenzy to make sense of it. Had Tom somehow read her thoughts? Was this mockery of her first meeting with Sam to punish her, to make her pay for her betrayal? How did he know? How could anyone know her secret?
She spun round. He was standing with a guitar in his hand, his best friend James at Tom’s side holding a lit candelabra.
Tom continued while Katie looked on with the expression of a witness at a road accident.
‘I’m sure you’ll forgive me for interrupting your meals, but I’m hoping that this special person here, Miss Katie Crosby, is going to say yes to what I’m going to ask her in a moment.’
There were noises of people going aw, and ah, and before Katie could move or shout no, her horror was completed as Tom started to play the guitar. It was a clumsy attempt at Harry Nilsson’s ‘Can’t Live if Living is Without You’. She only barely recognized it. Katie’s easy-listening habit stretched way back and Tom naturally scorned her for it, but occasionally relented and bought her albums she liked, always among albums he thought she should listen to. She didn’t, however, like Nilsson. If Tom was being generous, he was misdirecting his energy. He started to sing, becoming embarrassingly and comically way off his limited vocal range when he came to the chorus.
Katie had descended into Hell. The nightmare of a song went on for about ten years, and then it stopped. There was a burst of applause from the diners, and Tom dropped onto one knee while James grabbed the guitar. He took Katie’s limp hand in his and said it.
‘Katie. Will you marry me?’
There was a cheer from some of the more inebriated diners who were clearly enjoying this spectacle.
Katie’s parents beamed and Tom’s mother dabbed at an eye with her napkin.
She thought then that she would like to die. Time stood still for Katie Crosby at that moment. It seemed that all the faces staring at her had frozen in the middle of some action, like an edition of the Twilight Zone. Surely Rod Serling would walk in any moment with a cigarette, and introduce the first story?
She saw through the dimmed light a fat man in the corner with a fork raised half-way to his mouth. There was a woman leaning her head on an elegant hand by the window, grinning with the slit of a red-painted mouth. A couple who were holding hands at the next table smiled at her as though she were their daughter graduating from high school. But she could hear nothing except the beating of her heart and the buzzing of her own blood in her ears, and there was Tom’s face, still gazing up at hers in theatrical expectation.
Katie stood up. Her mother made a happy O shape with her mouth over at Tom’s mother.
She spoke quietly, but nobody in the restaurant missed a word. ‘No. I won’t marry you, Tom. I love someone else and I’m going back to Silver tomorrow to ask him to marry me.’
There was a tiny scuffling noise from the table, but mostly silence.
‘I’m sorry. I really am.’
She pushed back the chair and walked calmly from the room. She walked more quickly through the lobby and by the time she got to the street she was running as hard as she could in her high green silk shoes. She ran gasping down the sidewalk, tears of humiliation and horror streaming down her face and she didn’t stop until she got the ocean in sight.
She cried like a child for at least five hours, walking the streets until she could have dropped, before she dared hail a cab and go home. By the time she crawled out of the cab and stumbled up the front porch steps she looked like a hooker on a busy night: her jacket mangled and creased from being clutched to her chest and her face streaked with make-up that had dissolved hours ago in salty tears.
There