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journalist again, after all these years. Let me see your journalist face.”
    Cuckold. Cock.
    “I wouldn’t call that a journalist face. Say, ‘Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.’”
    He had not prepared himself. Hitting Dwayne was out of the question, and he had no basis for a legal challenge. Nothing he had read in the classics of etiquette suggested the correct course for a gentleman in this situation. Pistols at dawn. Toby was certain, now, that if he were to speak he would actually begin to cry; perspiration flashed across his lower back. They had been out together as a foursome, he and Alicia and Dwayne and Dwayne’s wife, Kathia, over twenty times. Dwayne had two sons in elementary school, private school, well-mannered boys. Toby had bought them presents for their birthdays, three years in a row. Most recently, he had bought the older one a set of harmonicas in a handsome silver case.
    Dwayne sat in his leather desk chair and put his boots up. The only black man on the island of Montreal to wear cowboy boots. “Say it.”
    “Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.”
    “I don’t believe you! Where’s the ancient spirit of blood and fire?”
    “Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.”
    “One more time, brother.”
    “Toby Ménard, Century News, Montreal.”
    “Slightly better.” Dwayne looked at his watch, a marvelof multi-functionality designed for triathletes and Green Berets. “Did you need something?”
    In the studio, as he waited for Bruce, Toby was nearly overwhelmed by an urge to break a pane of glass. In one of his Toby a Gentleman segments, he had asked a professor at the Université de Montréal for insight into why youngsters destroyed newspaper boxes and bus shelters and, in the middle of a hockey riot, storefronts.
    “Because they have failed,” the professor, a bird-like woman with enormous spectacles, had said, “and because they know, in their hearts, they will always fail.”
    Bruce chatted with his wife on the cellphone all the way to Roslyn School, in Westmount, where the Conservative candidate planned to vote for himself and speak to the media. Bruce and his wife talked about their children. One had the flu. Three times he told his wife he loved her. Toby had planned to buy a muffin at the convenience store next to the station on their way out, but he had been too focused on the possible etymology of the word “cuckold.” A Chinese girlfriend at McGill, long ago, had said that in her language and in her country a cuckolded man “wears a green hat.” She did not know why.
    The scrum was to take place on the front lawn of the school. Toby had forgotten the name of the Conservative candidate, and no other media outlets had shown up to speak to him. Bruce had finished his call, but he didn’t know the man’s name either. It was not his job to know.
    Toby practised his introductory stand-up while Bruce adjusted the camera for the harsh morning light.
    “You don’t look so good,” Bruce said.
    “I didn’t sleep last night.”
    “There might be some makeup in the bag.”
    “I am good. I am healthy. I am right. I am strong.”
    “Okey-dokey.”
    Toby said his mantra again, and again, walked in a tiny circle to banish the fire and his father, Alicia and Dwayne, to appreciate the present tense. Bruce spoke to the station through an earpiece. Their live window was only a few minutes away, so Toby had to be ready. Was he ready?
    “Ready.”
    “Did you eat anything today?”
    “Not really.”
    “I have a cookie in my bag, if it’s an emergency.”
    “Thank you, Bruce. It isn’t. We’ll be done in five minutes.”
    “It might put some colour in that bean of yours.”
    “I was wondering if I could ask you a personal question.”
    “Me?”
    “Has your wife ever, by chance, slept with another man?”
    Bruce stared at Toby for a moment, long enough to blink twice. He lifted the camera to his shoulder as a handsome black man in a suit approached, smiling artificially. He