The Deep End

‘What do you want to know about?’

‘Who were you when you were growing up?’

It seemed like a poignant question, given the origins of the man who posed it. If she were to pose the same question to him and if he were to be honest with her, the picture he would paint would no doubt be filled with shadows.

She tucked herself deeper into the coat. ‘Nothing exciting has ever happened to me. I grew up with just me and my mom, mostly. When I was really small we lived with my grandmother. It was her house. She smoked like a chimney, as they say, and after she died my mom tried to scrub the nicotine off the walls. Have you ever tried to get rid of fifty years of smoking from a wall? Eventually she gave up and just painted the house a combination of yellows, browns and oranges.’

She laughed, rocking on her feet, as the scene before her eyes transformed into the tiny ginger room she’d grown up in. ‘God, do I ever hate the colour orange. I won’t wear it. I won’t even wear pantyhose that are too close to orange.’

‘I prefer the nude stockings with the black garters.’ He spoke so low the traffic drowned him out, but his voice was a frequency embedded in her brain. Even if he had whispered and she hadn’t caught a word, she’d still feel his sentiment in her blood.

‘I wasn’t dirt poor or anything,’ she went on, ‘Though we probably would have been homeless if my grandmother hadn’t left us the house. My mom – man, could she burn through a line of credit. There were always bill collectors on the phone. She only got out of debt when I moved out and she sold the house. She married an American about ten years ago and they live in Florida.’

‘No siblings?’

‘Not growing up. Tony, my stepfather, has a son and a daughter.’

‘Then you’re all alone in the world.’

So many people had said the same thing to Grace, and their condescending tone was always like sandpaper on her nerves. Like their first meeting in the boardroom, there was none of that in Taureau’s observation. No, there was kinship to be found in there.

‘I can tell you’re uncomfortable,’ he said. ‘I’d bet money you’re even twitchy.’

‘I’m not,’ she lied. It wasn’t that his asking about her past made her ‘twitchy’, but answering made her uncomfortable. She’d had a good upbringing. Taureau’s eventual spiral into drug use suggested to her that he hadn’t.

Her life hadn’t been charmed, but it was warm, and she thought that perhaps her warmth was what he was looking for.

The car arrived before she could say any more, and, once she was nestled into the cushy backseat, Taureau spoke again.

‘Tell me about something else,’ he said. ‘Tell me about why you started taking your lovers at the office.’

‘Oh, that’s an easy one, but I don’t think now’s the time.’

‘Are you actually shy about talking sex in front of a stranger?’

‘Actually, yes, but I’ll give you the short answer: convenience. I can work and have my fun without giving up either of them. I have little time to myself outside work, and when I do I have all of those mundane little things that everyone needs to do. If I want sex, I don’t want to have to get to know someone first, and hooking up with people I meet in bars or online isn’t my thing. At the office, I at least have a sense of the calibre of man I’m screwing and there’s an understanding. So, for me, sex and work are a perfect combination.’

‘Efficient.’

She laughed and combed through her hair with her fingers. ‘Your turn. Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘You could write a book,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Really, you could write a book.’

‘And many have,’ she pointed out, ‘but you know that I’m not interested in tabloid sludge. I want to know about you. Tell me something. In fact, tell me something that you haven’t told anyone before.’

He paused, and Grace didn’t mistake his silence for a disconnection this time. After at least a minute, she murmured, ‘Not so easy, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t,’ he said, sounding irritated. ‘I’m thinking.’

‘Don’t make something up, either.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. All right, Miss Neely, you want something no one else knows about me? I’ll tell you, but brace yourself; it’s a shocker.’

She couldn’t tell if he was joking, and wondered if she would have been able to read him even if they were face to face, so she did what he said and braced herself.

‘When I was nine years old, a kid at school was giving me a hard time. I wasn’t small, but I was smaller than he was, so he started roughing me up where he could. One day he told me that he would kick my ass after Art class, and so I told him that my family hadn’t gotten its fortune from buses and airplanes. I told him that we were actually a mafia family, and if he laid another finger on me I’d have one of our hit men take him out.’

There was a shake to his voice, not quite a laugh but getting there.

Grace sat for a moment, hands folded over her knees as she stared out the window. She hadn’t been expecting an admission like this. She had steeled herself for something sordid and shocking, but this confession was just so … human.

A coughing laugh burst from the back of her throat, and then she smiled. ‘Did it work?’

‘Of course it did. I even named the hit man. Red “The Butcher” Belliveau. Red was actually a gardener, and we did call him “The Butcher” in my family because of the way he seemed to relish hacking the brush along the fence around the house. I told the kid this, too. I told him it was a front. I told him that Red’s speciality was castration by pruning shears.’

Grace laughed. ‘That is just evil. You were an evil child.’

‘I’ve always had a solid sense of preservation.’

‘And this is something no one else knows – aside from the kid who thought his dick was going to be snipped off.’

‘Not a soul,’ he said, and she heard the creak of him sitting back in his chair. ‘Are you close?’

Grace asked the driver, and reported to Taureau that they were just a few traffic lights from their destination.

‘I’m going to disconnect now,’ he told her. ‘Tell the driver to wait for you. Once you get there, identify yourself to the concierge and he’ll give you the key and tell you where to go. Put the phone in the dock to keep it charged.’

‘Am I going to be there all night?’

‘You can stay if you want, but I’m only interested in keeping you until just after dark. Keep the headset in. I’ll call you back in about fifteen minutes.’

After the click in her ear, Grace once more wondered about his surroundings. It almost seemed absurd to think that he was something more than a disembodied voice occasionally joined by a partial portrait on a screen. The idea of him doing things that normal people did, like running errands or answering the door to a pizza delivery, was laughable to her.

As the car passed through the gate of a park-like condominium community, Grace had to admit to herself that the initial lure of Jacques Taureau had been his mystery. The idea of some faceless man directing her from the shadows would have made her laugh a month ago, but once it became her reality she had been intoxicated by the mystery.

Now, things were changing. He was giving her little facets of himself that didn’t fit the image of the ubiquitous stranger. In her mind, Taureau was like the mummy from the horror movies who, piece by piece, went from dust and bone to flesh and blood.

The driver told her to have the concierge notify him when she was ready, and she watched him leave to no doubt while away the evening at one of the nearby eateries. The concierge greeted her with a practised smile and promptly produced a key to an apartment on the third floor.

She took the elevator up, and as she slid the key into the lock a sudden dread of the unknown came over her. No boundaries had been set with Taureau. None had been needed, what with the digital nature of their relationship, and she worried now that she was about to walk into something abhorrent.

As much as she enjoyed sexual experimentation, there were things that had never appealed to her. Group sex, for example. The occasional threesome was one thing, but a handful of times in her adult life she’d politely declined an invitation to take part in an orgy. The same went for sex with other women. She’d never had a lesbian experience, not because of any particular aversion to it – enough of her fantasies included women – but because she’d never met a woman she was so attracted to she could feel it in her bones.

Those were the soft scenarios of what might be behind the door. She refused to entertain the more chilling ones. Sucking in a deep breath, she turned the key and pushed the door open, and was relieved to discover an empty apartment.

Well, almost relieved. Part of her had still held out hope that she’d open the door and find herself face to face with Taureau, even though deep down she knew she had a better chance, that night, of being struck by lightning.

The apartment was what one would expect of an executive condo. The space was tastefully furnished and decorated in neutral colours and had the unlived-in smell of air freshener hanging in every room. Grace doubted that the chef’s kitchen had ever been used to its full potential. The bedrooms, perhaps, though when she peeked in both the master and the spare she saw nothing short of showroom perfection.