Broken Man on a Halifax Pier Read online

  Copyright © Lesley Choyce, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Kathryn Lane | Editor: Dominic Farrell

  Cover design and illustration: Sophie Paas-Lang

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Broken man on a Halifax pier / Lesley Choyce.

  Names: Choyce, Lesley, 1951- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190084995 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190085002 | ISBN 9781459745247 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459745254 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459745261 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8555.H668 B76 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

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  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

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  For Linda

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

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  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

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  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  If I had been able to see into the future, I may not have gone down to the harbour that morning. I may have continued with my sorry, lonely existence — a man without a job, without a purpose, without a real friend.

  If I had seen what was coming, I may have walked up to Citadel Hill instead, and sat on that stone wall built in the eighteenth century and peered down at the city, pondering the lives of those still sleeping in their houses and apartments below. Wondering how they had succeeded in being comfortable in their ordinary lives. I would have been jealous of them all. How had they figured out the formula to live, to connect, to find meaning in what they did in their everyday lives? How did they find someone to love, how did they enter into relationships, make commitments?

  If I knew the mistakes I was capable of, I could have chosen a different path and spared the world some grief, gone back to my dingy apartment, so well suited to a man whose life had gone into the gutter.

  But I knew nothing of the future, understood little of the meaning of my past life up until then, and had not a clue as to how to live gratefully in the present.

  And so there I stood at the water’s edge, not at all knowing that the story was about to begin.

  1

  She never really told me why she was there at 6 a.m. on that damp Halifax morning in April. I can’t even rightly explain what I was doing there either, standing at the end of a dilapidated pier, staring into the dark waters of the harbour, lost in thought.

  I suppose it had something to do with the fact that my life had gone to shit, that I no longer had a job, that I’d lost my life savings and was reduced to living in a “bachelor” apartment in the North End. Yeah, it might have had something to do with that. But I think that a guy like me, fifty-five years from being born, just finds himself eventually at a moment like this, staring into the water. Contemplating.

  Even now, I like to think of it as a literary moment. I was a writer, after all. Not like a real writer. Not a Hemingway or Fitzgerald, not one of the greats. Not even one of the lesser greats. A pipsqueak of a writer. After playing at reporter for a number of years, the Tribune let me write features about anything I wanted. But, alas, the Tribune was no more. How could I know when I set about embarking on my so-called career that newspapers were going to slowly begin to vanish? I was a dodo bird. A dinosaur. Pick any extinct species and I was just that.

  But if any of this is going to add up to anything, I should go back to the beginning. The whole convoluted tale will come out in due time. So let’s get back to April, the pier, the fog, the lone man standing by the edge of the water where once, long ago, the bodies from the ill-fated and legendary Titanic were landed ashore. This was a literary moment, remember. Ill-fated ship, April the cruelest month, my life a modern Shakespearean tragedy, man fallen from great heights (modest heights, really) through his own hubris (a word I had just recently added to my vocabulary). Man alone, alienated in a hostile universe. No, an uncaring universe. A universe that didn’t give a Monday-morning shit about him or most probably anything else.

  And then she walked up to me.

  I didn’t notice her at first, didn’t hear footsteps or anything. It was like she dropped out of the sleepy grey clouds hovering above. I was deep in reverie — yes, a grandiose, dark, endless, self-pitying reverie. A man feeling bad. Just plain bad. With no particular shred of hope for things to get better. Must have been painted all over my face.

  “I get it,” she said with no other words of introduction. “Broken man.”

  At first I thought it was just one of those many voices in my head. But then I looked in the direction from which the voice had come. It was a woman. A good-looking woman at that. All alone. On the pier at 6 a.m. by the misty misbegotten harbour.

  “Get what?” I asked.

  “Get you. Broken man on a Halifax pier,” she said. And her mouth went up on one corner. Not a smile exactly. An indication of a game.

  “Oh,” I said. “Stan Rogers. ‘Barrett’s Privateers.’”

  “Very good,” she said. “Can I take your picture?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But why would you want to take my picture?”

  Instead of answering, she lifted a cellphone out of her purse, walked a step closer to me and clicked.

  “Gonna post it on Facebook?” I asked. “You got your caption.”

  “No. Nothing like that.” She walked another step closer, stared down at the water and then directly at me. For a second, I thought I knew her. Or at least that I had seen her somewhere before. Something about her was familiar.


  “It looks cold and uninviting,” she said, nodding at the swirling foam in the harbour water below.

  “I wasn’t going for a swim if that is what you were thinking.”

  “No stones in your pockets? Did you forget them?”

  “I’m not good at planning ahead,” I said. “Besides, I’m more of a bridge man. A leaper, if it ever comes to that. Unfortunately, they have the bridge walkways all caged in now. Always someone trying to take the fun out of everything. The bastards.”

  Now she just stood there, not talking. Then she lifted her phone and took another photo. Closer up. Mug shot.

  “You want me to take my clothes off?” I asked.

  “It’s too cold. All I’d get is a picture of goosebumps.”

  “True,” I said. I suddenly realized I was in the middle of a conversation with a rather attractive and mysterious woman. “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “You’ve seen me. At least I’m guessing you have. If you haven’t, I’ll be pissed.”

  I looked her over again. Inspecting. She noticed, did a little slow twirl. Front and back. I didn’t have a clue who she was.

  “Give up?”

  I nodded.

  She looked a little miffed. I figured I should say something. “Well, you’re not the queen of England, I know that. Too young, too beautiful.” I was trying to pull it out of the trash can. She wasn’t young — forty something, fifty maybe — and not exactly classically beautiful, but she was truly pretty and absolutely most interesting. And I much preferred looking at her to staring down at the water.

  She snapped another photo of me. I think I had a funny look on my face — man just thrown a lifeline, man shifting back from the brink from some abyss, man wandering alone in a wet world just given a blanket over his shoulders.

  “What do you call that look? The one you just gave me.”

  “I call it my happy look,” I said.

  “You call that happy?”

  “Relatively speaking. Happiness is relative, right?”

  “Philosophy major?”

  “English.”

  “Ah. April is the cruelest month, right?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking when you came along with Stan Rogers.”

  “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now.”

  “Sherbrooke. Nova Scotia or Quebec? I could never quite figure it out.”

  I wondered if we’d stand there and trade Stan Rogers lyrics for the rest of the morning. It would have been fine by me. I had nothing better to do. Take her through the Northwest Passage, tracing one warm line, through a land so wild and savage.

  “What comes next?” she asked.

  “In ‘Barrett’s Privateers’?”

  “Idiot. No. Right now.”

  It had been a while since anyone had flirted with me. I was way out of practice.

  “Um,” I must have said.

  “Um. That’s all you got?” she asked with a sharp edge in her voice. “You, an English major. Can’t come up with a line from James fucking Joyce or John fucking Milton?”

  For a split second I thought she was actually angry with me. I didn’t know then that she was an actor, that she’d been in movies. I was beginning to think she was deranged. I was curious to see if there were weapons involved.

  The weapon was the phone — lifted, pointed, snapped. “That’s a real crowd-pleaser. ‘Man Befuddled by Woman’ reads the headline.”

  “Headline, why headline?” I was wondering if she knew who I was.

  “Just a phrase. Why does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t,” I said. And I tried smiling. It had been a while. It hurt. I guess it showed.

  “Ouch,” she said. “That looked painful.”

  I wanted to explain my lack of happy moments in my recent tenure on the planet but clammed up, shrugged instead.

  She must have liked the shrug. “Buy me breakfast?” she asked.

  “I’m broke,” I said. Paused. “Well, I think I have five bucks and a couple of quarters. But I’m waiting for the banks to open.”

  “Never heard of ATMs?”

  “They don’t like me. I don’t know what it is. They just don’t seem to want to deal with a guy like me.”

  “A guy like you?”

  “Down on his luck.”

  “Okay, you want to play that card? I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  “Now you’re talking,” I said.

  And so began a new chapter in my life. If I can stretch out the cinematic moment, I would say the sun came out, or it began to pour rain, or there were birds and flowers, quotes from Shakespeare or unison singing of “Fogarty’s Cove.” But there was none of that.

  She touched my arm once. And we walked in silence to the Bluenose Restaurant on Hollis Street. She ordered poached eggs and toast. I ordered scrambled eggs and bacon. And then all the waiters and waitresses and morning-weary breakfast patrons broke into song.

  2

  I was only joking about the singing. Actually, I played with my toast and she sipped black coffee. It was awkward. Awkward, as in seventh-grade awkward, when you like the girl and the girl likes you, but you just can’t get over your shyness and have a simple conversation.

  Whatever spell had come over us on the pier had been broken by the intrusive ordinariness of sitting in the Bluenose Restaurant having breakfast.

  “Fuck,” I said out loud. Accidentally.

  She looked up at me. “That’s kind of rude.”

  “No. I didn’t mean it like that. It was my inner voice expressing my frustration at not being able to say something nice, something intelligent to you. Something like a protagonist in a really good novel would say to a woman who has just come into his life.”

  “Is that what I did? Come into your life?”

  “Yes. And I want to thank you for that.”

  “You’re thanking me?”

  “Hell, yes. See I’m not all that rude. What were you doing on the pier anyway? Why were you there?”

  “You’d like some intriguing, complex answer, but now I have to disappoint you. I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.”

  “You live nearby?”

  “Oh, now you want to get personal. Are you asking me where I live?”

  “Should I not do that?”

  “Who am I to tell you what you should do or shouldn’t do?” I could see she had a thing for the verbal dance. We might go on like this for a long time. Me saying, her throwing it back to me. Hell, what else better did I have to do?

  “So?”

  “So I live in the Towers.”

  “Richmond Towers? On the water.”

  “Thirteenth floor to be exact.”

  “I thought only rich people lived in the Towers.”

  She did a little thing with her eyelashes.

  “Oh, and you were asking me to buy you breakfast?”

  “I thought men were supposed to buy.”

  “That was last century. Not no more.”

  “Not no more? English major?”

  “I lied. I studied English at Dal but graduated with a Psych degree — Abnormal Psych was my thing. Then I went into journalism so I could write about people, using my Coles Notes knowledge of what makes us all tick.”

  “Ah, journalist. Who do you write for?”

  “No one, now. I was with the Tribune for twenty years. Then one day, they packed it up and left town. Just like that.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t often read newspapers or maybe I would have read some of your articles.”

  “That’s okay. You obviously were not alone. Folks stopped reading papers, so one day I was out of a job. And just for the record, I rather liked that previous century I was talking about. The one that is not no more. The one where men bought pretty women breakfast and then the two of them probably sat cozylike in the sunshine and read the morning paper.”

  “Not no more,” she echoed. “So what would the name be on — what was it called? — the byline on your articles?”

  “Cha
rles. Charles Howard.”

  “Your friends call you Chuck?”

  “What friends? And no, only my brother was allowed to call me Chuck and that was back when we were twelve. So now you know my name. I’m presuming you have one too.”

  “A reasonable presumption.”

  “Well, Miss Thirteenth Floor Richmond Towers, give.”

  “Ramona,” she said.

  “Ramona? Really. No one names their daughter Ramona.”

  “My mother did. It was her grandmother’s name.”

  “Well, hell yes. I can see someone’s grandmother named Ramona but not …” I trailed off. Another blunder. Silly dumb Chuck. Chuck the Fuck.

  “Not someone living in Richmond Towers?”

  “Stupid me. Sorry.”

  “No worries. I even have a last name.”

  “I promise to keep my opinions to myself. Please?”

  “Danforth. Like the street in Toronto.”

  “Ramona Danforth. Now that does sound like someone living the high life in a rich-ass apartment.” I scratched my jaw just then like something Humphrey Bogart would have done in one of his film noir movies. “Ramona Danforth. That rings a bell.”

  “I was hoping it might. I have this delusion that people actually still remember who I am.”

  “Oh, yeah. You did TV for a while and a couple of movies. Sorry, I don’t watch much TV or go to the movies much.”

  “You are part of a fairly large group of the population. Which is why TV and movies have gone down the tubes — Canadian TV and movies anyway. Guess we’re both fully paid up members of the last of a couple of dying breeds.”

  She let me study her then. I did remember this Ramona woman. A couple of fairly decent TV dramas produced by the CBC in Halifax, then a couple of films shot in Toronto that made the rounds of film festivals. Then a short stint in Hollywood, like every Canadian actor, trying to land a big role. And then what? I didn’t know.

  “Then you did all right for yourself,” was all I could seem to say.

  “I had a good run at it, saved my earnings, got some guilt money from a family trust, invested all of it wisely before my so-called career went down the drain.”

  “Somehow I get the feeling that the plumbing was kinder to you than me.”

  “Are you really broke, or is that just a line you use to pick up women?”