“You caught me.”
He looked ready to apologize again, so I cut him off. “You know I’m teasing, right? I had a great time. I saw puffins and whales. I’m just a little disappointed that neither one was eating pizza.”
“I guess it may not be the right time to ask if you want lunch.”
“I will want lunch, sometime in the future. I can conceive of wanting lunch at some point before I die.”
I boughtPaul a thank you lunch at a little local seafood restaurant. Over lunch, he told me about his love for school teaching, which he’d been doing for four years, and how he originally studied acting in college and had tried his hand as an actor for a few years in Toronto before returning to Newfoundland to help care for his father, who was dying of cancer. Since then, he’d been helping his mother to navigate life on her own.
“It seemed like the right thing to do, but I also started building a life here. Trish was…my ex… I felt bad, because I was half the reason she came to St. John’s in the first place. It’s not glamorous, compared to some other places.”
“I know people who lead glamorous lives,” I said. “They spend half their mornings with their head in a toilet and theother half asking their therapists whether anyonereallylikes them or just their Bombardier jet.”
Paul shrugged. “Anyway. My wife found it boring.”
“Or she found herself boring,” I said, “and went off looking to escape herself.”
Something flickered in Paul’s eyes, but I couldn’t read it. The same look. “So tell me about your work,” he said after a moment.
“Speaking of boring,” I said. And I told him about my financial writing job, and about my previous job as a journalist working for a fancy magazine.
“For a while, I specialized in interviewing very wealthy people about how they were getting their kids into college, or how they paid their nannies under the table. Illicit stuff, the rule-bending that goes into fancy people getting their way. It was morally abhorrent but really fun to read about. And for some reason I could get people to confess to all sorts of things, off the record. They liked talking to me. But then my love life went downhill, and I stopped being able to get people to share with me. I guess I sounded too cynical on the phone, which was a vicious cycle, because the closer I came to being fired, the more grumpy I got, and the fewer people I could convince to share their dirty secrets.”
Paul smiled. “I bet you were a formidable interviewer.”
“Want me to grill you about your darkest secrets and you can find out?”
“I’m an open book.”
“Not with that many dirty jokes floating around your brain.” I smiled at him, and he looked out the window again, holding something back. “What was the dirty joke you were going to say on the boat?”
He flushed a little, embarrassed. “I was just going to say I was sure you gave excellent head.”
“There,” I said. “Was that so hard?”
He laughed. “Technically, being hard would be the point, there.”
Neither of us looked at each other for the next minute or two, but I was flushed and grinning and I had a feeling he was, too.
Paul droveus slightly too fast up the coast on the way back north. I had heard once that people’s real personality came out when they were driving, and Paul seemed more assertive, more confident behind the wheel of a car than he was the rest of the time. He told me we were going to make one more stop at Cape Spear National Lighthouse, the easternmost point in North America.
“If that’s okay,” he added.
“Of course. As long as this is another noble sacrifice.”
“Always. I’m having a terrible time.” He gave me a warm look and then glanced back at the road.
We found a place in the small parking lot, which was mostly empty. At the end of a grassy bluff was a beautiful white lighthouse, set high up on cliffs. We had to shout at each other as we walked toward it, buffeted by the wind.
“Please don’t fall off!” Paul cried. “Lots of paperwork I’d have to fill out.”
“No promises. I sometimes get sudden whims to run off cliffs. Did I forget to tell you that?”
“It slipped your mind.”
“Well, you’ll just have to hope for the best! Oh wait…the impulse is coming upon me…”
“Right now?”
