Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

A year after they separated, Patty came to Frank’s house in Montreal. She stood on his doorstep, weeping.

“Take it easy,” Frank said in his doorframe.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She walked past him and lay on the couch they shared as man and wife. She was wearing a wind-breaker, a nightgown and sneakers. She'd lost weight since she moved out. He had wanted to see her, but not like this. He thought of what his father always said, "Y'know, son, one doesn't like to be deceived, but one likes less to be undeceived."

“Are you drunk?” Frank asked.

“Well, you’d know wouldn’t you?”

He had been five years sober earlier that week.

She stumbled and then pushed her head against the leather cushions and lay like a child on her stomach. “I did love you, you know.”

He sat in the space next to her and put his hand on her back.

“I feel sorry for you,” he told her, moving his palm down her spine.

She smelt like liquor. When had she started drinking liquor?

“Don’t be hateful. Please. This is hard enough.”

He moved closer to her again, pushing them against the leather arm of the couch. He felt his sturdy weight against her and wondered if he could crush her into dust.

“I’m being truthful. I feel sorry for you.”


“Why? I left you.”

“It’s not an easy life.”

She cried louder, moving her body against his. He held her like a baby.

“You know, Una blames me for making you a dyke,” he said.
 He hoped she'd appreciate that. She always liked brutality more than honesty.

“Frank, it’s not your fault. You were a good husband.”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t say anything. He was going to say that deceiving others was what the world called romance, but he'd used that on her before. She knew it was Oscar Wilde's, not his, and footnotes were for fags. He searched the room for Sean. He felt his dead friend but he could not see him, and in this moment all he wanted was to see his face, to know he wasn’t alone, but he only captured the feeling in his chest.

"I wasn't a good husband. I fooled around."

As time passed, he couldn’t understand why a year after the fact, he had wanted so desperately to clear his guilty conscience.

“I didn’t like myself while I was doing it.”

“I don’t like myself either,” she told him.

But then, Frank had always believed his life was a miracle of bad luck.

"I guess we both had secrets," she said as she was leaving into the kind night.

The next time he saw her was her funeral.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

The truth is, my father’s life was a deeply touching failure.

Despite being declared the greatest journalist of his generation time and time again, he could never keep a job. He holds the simultaneous Canadian record for numbers of newspapers worked at, number of newspapers fired from. At first impression he made a lasting impression. He wrote two best selling novels on baseball players. Almost every reviewer said he chose the wrong protagonist.

He should have lived on those pages.

My father was a star. He was a liar and a cheat. Tell me, how could a four year old be dancing on the ceiling while you’re still eating your potatoes?

Like most sad people, he remembered his childhood best. He idolized his dead family, his brick house at 742 Woodbine Avenue, the 1950‘s. The present was always completely fabricated. I grew up being told to believe everything he said was a lie.

But now, years double back and skip forward.

Snippets of My Day

I sit at my computer, which rests on a collapsing table. We used it for dinner when I was a child. It was folded up and pushed against a wall as we grew older, as my mom worked more and didn't need the money from renting out the downstairs, where the bigger, better dining table lived.

We use it since my parents separated, now that we live upstairs again.

The table is my father's family heirloom. I remember when he refinished it one summer, how he sweat under the sun, the stains on his peach t-shirt.

I stare at my reflection in the mirror across from the table and I decide what's wrong with my face. Mirror-gazing is my favourite pass time because time does not weigh upon me. I remember when my hair was longer, how I was prettier then, softer, younger.

Why do women always change their hair when things go to shit?

I decide I should shower before speaking to my editor. A piece of stray hair falls past my face, and I watch it from the corner of my eye, sure it's a bat.

The cyclical nature of life seems unfair.


...

I call a divorce lawyer with my mother's last name who has an office in the Scarborough Town Center. My father used her to divorce his third wife after my brother was born. They had been separated for ten years, but seeing my mother's last name on the lawyer's store front, he took it as a sign to severe ties.

This was, to him, a romantic gesture.

"Can I come in tomorrow?"

"10:30?" said the woman on the phone.

"Any later?"

I hang up and I have a craving to call my father, but I promised myself I wouldn't until all was said and done.

...

I am sitting in a park with two new friends. They are bohemian and beautiful and I feel strangely at ease in their company. They suggest we do a play reading and I oblige when normally, I hate doing things in front of people.

There is one speech that my friend reads about a exposing herself to a man she loves and I think about it all afternoon.

She talks about the philosophy that only we are real, that everything else is a dream. That the man she loved was a dream. That she made him up. That she fell in love with the wall. That he was the one person she exposed everything to. She trusted him with her deepest, darkest secrets, but that she could only do that because he wasn't really there. That she chose him for that reason. That she fell in love with him because he was fake.

But don't we all fall in love with dreams?

...

At a diner with my brother, I turn to him while eating poached eggs. "I'm just disappointed that he wasn't who I thought he was."

He drinks his coffee, thoughtfully. It's 4 pm and he's just woken up. He takes the DROPOUT cap that he had made off his head. My brother stands on shaky, hopeful ground so it's fitting that he would take what he hates most about himself and stitch it across his forehead.

His curls are so matted. How did they get so matted?

"The thing is, he was. Everyone always is who you thought they were while also being who they became to you. They're both. He is, and was, sometimes, who you thought he was."

"That's deep, Mike," I say.

He shrugs. "Yeah, I'm in an everything is true phase."

"Be careful."

"Why?"

"It's really confusing."

"No."

"Trust me. You're new to it."

If everything is true, who do you blame?
...

I do a photo shoot for my friend. She was my book buddy in grade one and it took me awhile to realize I knew her when we met again. She recently travelled the world and as I an putting on a ball gown, she tells me about Cambodia. She has heart problems and ever since her diagnosis, it is like seven hearts beat in her and she can't live enough.

"There was this little girl, she couldn't have been more than fourteen. She would follow you through the streets and could beg in every language. Fluently. She must have spoken eight different languages."

"No."

"Yes. English. Spanish. German. You name it, she spoke it. My friend from Ireland went to Cambodia shortly after me and I told him, 'Be careful, just speak to them in Gaelic and they'll leave you alone.' I swear to you, it was the same girl that he met. He started speaking to her in Gaelic and they had a full conversation."

"In Gaelic?"

"Yes."

"No one speaks Gaelic."

"I couldn't believe it. How did she learn those things?"

"It's so sad."

"I know. The resiliency of the human spirit is unbelievable."

Looking at her, feeling her seven heartbeats, I agree. I think of how smart that little girl must be, how I could never learn French even when I tried.

Maybe I just didn't have to. Maybe we can always do what we have to.

...

I lie with him in his bed. He just bought us new sheets from the dollar store. On my skin, they feel like silk.

He holds me from behind and with his arm near my breast, I have never felt more committed.