She has arrived at the pub with friends, a little disappointment. She looks womanly, now, has filled out a little since he saw her last, has cut and straightened her hair. She’s wearing a little business suit, light grey. He understands it’s not even Siobhan’s own celebration, but an outing of her cohort, her graduating class.
Siobhan and her friends are drinking Jägermeister, that beverage of choice for undergraduates even back when he was one himself. He asks the bartender what he has in the way of single malts. What’s your best one? he asks. The bartender takes just a fraction of a second too long to answer, and he is angry, pulls out his billfold and slaps a couple of fifties on the bar.
The bartender says: You want to close your tab now?
No. No he doesn’t.
There’s Glenlivet. Macallan.
No: something better. How about Bowmore 25-year-old? But they won’t have that in a place like this, not at five hundred a bottle.
From under the counter, at the back, the barkeep pulls a dusty bottle. He recognizes the name: yes. He’ll take two shots of that. One is for Siobhan: Here, he says. See if this isn’t better than the Jäg. Let your old man introduce you to the good stuff.
It’s thirty-five dollars each for two fingers in a glass.
Siobhan takes a sip, smiles politely. Gulps the rest.
Who is he showing off for? Siobhan seems older than most, but not all, of her cohort. They’re all in suits. They’ve come from some other event. They are children in adults’ clothing, he thinks.
From her safe distance, Catherine has kept in touch, updated him frequently. Siobhan had fooled around, gone wild, in her teens. She’d got mixed up with bad boys, had drunk too much, had blown off her classes, dropped out of school. Catherine didn’t know what to do with her. He had thought he could tell what she was thinking: his bad genes.
Then, at seventeen, Siobhan had hitchhiked across the country; had arrived unexpectedly, at his house, her red hair bleached copper at the ends from the sun along the Trans-Canada. Wanted him to take her to bars, though she was underage. Had shocked even him with her hooking up, as she had called it.
He’d telephoned Catherine, though Siobhan had said her mom already knew where she was, had let her come. He had felt smug, in some way. Siobhan seemed finally to have decided that there was some point to him. He was to be her ally, the parent figure who understood her, with whom she could be herself, let down her hair. It had taken a lot of moral fibre to discourage this expectation.
He had tried to show this to Catherine, without saying it outright. He had wanted her to recognize that he had done the right things. He’d bought Siobhan a plane ticket back to the coast.
Catherine had said: I’ll send you a cheque. Tell me how much.
And then at twenty, Siobhan suddenly moved back home, sobered up, started applying herself, finished her degree on the dean’s list. Like a switch being thrown, Catherine had said. He imagined it: a big, two-handed switch, like you might find on an old fashioned railway track.
So, graduating, he says. You’re what, a BBA now! Your old man never finished a degree!
He hasn’t meant to say that. Tongue like a dead mullet. But Siobhan grins back at him. I know! It’s awesome! I finally finished!
But you’ll be continuing on?
I don’t know. Mum wants me to. But I want a break from school.
You’ll get better jobs, he says.
He’s thinking he should make some kind of contribution to the group conversation. He does know something about the subject. He reads the papers. In spite of his occupation, he reads, he knows how to think.
He waits for a lull and says: So, what’s the doctrine in the business schools these days? Is Greenspan still a saint or is he the devil now?
Blank-faced silence. Then one of the boys, Indian by his look and accent, brightens up and answers him. Oh, that’s economics, sir! We don’t have to study economics. It’s an elective.
Siobhan has asked her neighbour something, he sees. He catches the reply Macro. And Siobhan’s Jägermeister snort: Slept through that.
He’ll drink too much, now; he’ll flirt too heavily. He’ll slip into someone he used to be, and is no longer. He doesn’t know why he’s here, with Siobhan and her friends.
When Siobhan had arrived at his place, runaway, he hadn’t sent her back right away. He’d been on his own, then. It was just before he met Aline. He’d showed her around, cooked elaborate meals, scrabbled through his album and CD collections for the best jazz and blues pieces to play for her. He’d pulled books from his stacks, made a carefully curated pile for her. Camus, Voltaire, Vonnegut, Nabokov. I’ll spare you the Dostoevsky for now, he’d joked.
Siobhan had said to him: I don’t want you to give me books to read. Do you understand? I’m not my mother!
Ah, well.
He’s thinking it’s time to get back to Catherine’s. He had not wanted to be there when she got back home from her thing, but he doesn’t want to disturb the household stumbling back in the early hours of the morning, either.
He finishes his drink and puts the two fifties back on the bar, looks around for a cab phone.
Then Siobhan is pulling him onto the dance floor.
He has never before danced with her. (He can’t remember if he ever danced with Catherine.)
The music in his joints and in his spine. He’ll pay for it tomorrow, but now it’s infusing him; it’s permeating his cells. His body thrusts and dips, carves out air according to some blueprint he didn’t choose. Some story is moving through him, some arc he must carry out in his shoulders, his pelvis. Siobhan twists in front of him, her face in his, aflame.
Another song and they keep dancing. There’s something alive between them, visible to others; he can feel the gazes of the bartender, of Siobhan’s friends, astonished, admiring. He can feel the music in her cells as if they were his own. He can feel the music push through her body to speak. They move perfectly together, each balanced and charged, by the other. So that Siobhan’s gestures, her responses, are an improvisation on his, and his on hers, and both are illuminated by something new, something sparked out of the music or their affinity. So that they are completely connected, attuned, as if threaded through by a spirit signal. So that they are finally reunited, halves of a whole.
IN THE MORNING his hosts are gone before he wakes up. Catherine has told him they will be off early on Saturday morning, some official capacity to do with commencement. Andrew, Catherine’s husband, is some senior administrator at the university, some bigwig: that’s why they have this house to live in. Kevin himself needs to go to the market for ingredients for the celebration dinner tonight, which he has promised to cook after the ceremony.
The house is quiet, but with a church-like silence. As if waiting for its purpose. He puts on a bathrobe and finds his way to the kitchen to look for coffee, finds it occupied by Catherine’s younger daughter, Anna, with her breakfast and a thick novel. She says, I’ll make you coffee. What kind? And almost stumbles, climbing down from the stool. At sixteen, she hasn’t grown into her body yet, he thinks. She’s taller than Catherine, but has the thin, edgy quality that Catherine had: a sort of nervous flickering.
She puts the new pod in the coffee machine, leaves the used on the counter. He’s not a big fan of these automatic expresso machines, but has the same model at home, in his kitchen. Aline had bought it for him, for Christmas.
The girl busies herself with the coffee maker in the way of shy women, as a means of filling up a silence. He reminds himself to be careful with what he says: He likely knows more about Catherine’s younger daughter than he ought. What grade is she in now? he asks, though he knows the answer. Where is she thinking about going to university? What bands does she like?
He thinks he’s carrying more than his share of the conversation load, but when she gives him the plate of whole wheat toast she’s made for him, she looks at him directly under her straight, thick eyebrows (Catherine’s eyebrows) and says, stern
ly: It’s nice to take the coffee and the newspaper out to the terrace. And so he is dismissed.
WHEN HE’D HEARD FROM CATHERINE, after all those years, Catherine wouldn’t send Siobhan by herself for a visit, and he couldn’t afford back then to fly out to the West Coast. But Catherine and he had started to talk: by phone, by email, clandestinely, in part. With pure intentions, and then not. What they’d had before was still there, they agreed, only with the depth and perspective, the grace, of maturity. They made each other happy. They completed each other. They fit together in a way that neither of them did with anyone else.
Then Catherine had flown out with Siobhan and got a hotel room in Thunder Bay, where he was living, and enrolled Siobhan in a riding camp, to give her something to do during the day, while he, Kevin, was supposedly at work. They had had a week of it, of rediscovering each other. They could get back together now, they had said. They had lost all of those years, but things would only be better for it. They were more fully themselves: They would appreciate each other, what they had together, so much more. They had parted like this: They would get back together.
Catherine’s two younger children were two and five years old, at that time. She was close to getting tenure. She had not left Andrew, after all.
Still, he waited for her, more or less. For quite some time.
THE COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY is surprisingly religious in aspect. He thinks of church, priests. Medieval-looking robes: the plain black of the graduands, the ornate purple and red and cobalt of the faculty, and their elaborate hats. The program lists a number of ceremonial processes: items carried in and presented formally, doffing and dubbing. An invocation by a First Nations Elder, oddly Christian-sounding.
Earlier, dressed in his suit and waiting for the rest of the family to get ready, he had heard Andrew say to Catherine, rather querulously: I say, aren’t you robing, Cathy? And Catherine’s reply: Not today, dear.
He’s sitting between Catherine and her younger daughter, who says: Is it strange to be in the audience, Mummy? Catherine says, reprovingly: I don’t sit on the stage every year. I don’t even attend, every year. He understands this is for his benefit.
Catherine says: It’s a lot of hokum, of course. Ritual. I don’t know why we keep it up.
But he is moved. Once things get going, he feels it: the weight of tradition, the slowing down of the event with ritual, to make it more important. He respects it.
Siobhan will be the first person in his family to get a university degree.
KEVIN HAS BROUGHT HIS CAMERA, as promised, and, after the ceremony shoots a capacious storage card of images – of his daughter alone, with her friends, various permutations of her family – in the university gardens, among the rhododendrons.
Catherine says: I should take some of you and Siobhan. Just point and shoot?
No. It is not just point and shoot.
He reaches around her to show her how to work the camera. Her nearness. His breath stopping in his ribcage.
Then Andrew, still in his heavy, decorated robes, says: What about the three of you? in a gesture that’s either foolish or chivalrous, and so he and Catherine stand in front of some florid bushes with Siobhan between them, both with their arms around Siobhan, as if they had somehow turned back the clock and travelled down a different road.
Catherine has so often over the past years said to him: Andrew is oblivious.
HE’S STANDING NOW IN CATHERINE’S KITCHEN, smiling, listening to the rise and fall of the conversation of Catherine and Andrew, the girls, Siobhan’s friends, in the living room, which is two rooms away, through arched doorways. Siobhan has put on one of the compilation CDs he’d made for her when she had last visited: Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Nina Simone. Gateway musicians, he had joked: an introduction to the good stuff. The music floats through the archways, sounding very much like music from a decade before.
Siobhan appears in the kitchen doorway. Recognize this?
He appreciates the gesture, smiles at her. May sun slants through the west-facing window, gilding the wood floor, picking up the copper in Siobhan’s hair. She’s got on a dress that flatters her, bronze silk with a little white collar. In it she looks more demure than the night before, her breasts and hips less flagrant.
That’s a pretty dress, he says.
Mummy picked it out for me. She looks uncertain, then, for an instant.
It’s very becoming, he says.
I’m not sure it’s me, she says. But she smiles back at him, and then wraps her arms around him, briefly, kisses his cheek.
He takes the bunch of asparagus out of the shopping bags of food he has brought and removes the band around it. The asparagus spears spray in a fan shape across the cutting board; he gathers them in one sweep of his hand, rinses them and shakes them dry, cuts the ends of the stalks off. The saucepan of water is at a boil; in the asparagus go, for a quick blanching. Twice baptized, they will now be anointed. A splash of truffle oil in the skillet. He shuffles the pan, watching for the slightly translucent shimmer. Then deglazes with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar (oak-coloured, and forty years old). With tongs he lifts the asparagus, still slightly crisp, from its aromatic bed, and wraps it in transparent strips of prosciutto. He arranges the fragrant bundles on a deep-yellow platter he finds in Catherine’s cupboard and brings it into the room where the others are gathered. (He likes this platter.) He pours the prosecco. Everyone bites into the hors d’oeuvre with little cries of pleasure. He takes a bundle of asparagus himself. Yes, he thinks. The flavours distinct, playing off of each other with just the right amount of harmony and antiphony.
He has, for a good reason, no memory of meeting Catherine, and only a couple from their four years of dating and living together. One is of visiting Catherine at her parents’ house: She says it must have been the first summer after they met at university, when she went back after term ended. Her parents were away: He and Catherine were alone in the house. He has a strong sensory memory of that house; he can remember the layout of rooms, the colour of the wall-to-wall carpeting, the immense cedars that leaned over the house and kept it in shadow. He and Catherine had made out and then had sex: her first time, not his, but he remembers the shape of her body, her texture and smells and taste, distinctly. The underwater light created by the looming cedars, and the blue-green undertones of Catherine’s skin.
The other memory is of a time later, standing in the corridor of their apartment building – Catherine had taken his key, wouldn’t let him in their suite – pleading with her to take him back, to give him another chance. The feeling that something inside him was breaking. Catherine nearly softening, but then the apartment door opening, a woman he didn’t know asking Catherine: Is everything alright? and looking at him with shocking animosity.
He’d deserved it, no doubt about it. At twenty-three he’d been a total fuckup, staying out constantly, coming back to the apartment plastered. Or not coming back, screwing around, not bothering very much at all even to hide it from Catherine.
Now, back in the kitchen, he prepares the soup course: pear-and-leek, which is surprising, seductive, and relatively easy. He puts a pot of stock, made this morning, on to simmer, and chops and cleans the leeks. The leeks go into a little light oil to sauté, and he peels the pears. Then both into the pot of stock for twenty minutes.
He begins to cut up the spaghetti squash and the wild mushrooms. Catherine comes into the kitchen and offers to help, but he sends her out: She will be a distraction.
He’d had a motorcycle accident, in his mid thirties, lost everything. Had to learn to walk and talk again. Lost most of his memories of Catherine, though some had come back, when she’d reminded him of them.
This was the strange part, though. When he’d regained consciousness, after the accident, his first thought had been of Catherine, though he hadn’t seen her or heard from her, at that point, for over a decade. He couldn’t recall events; it was more that he had a sense that she should be there. He had a sense of her absence.
Catherine, and not any of the many other women he’d been with since her, or of the woman he’d been living with just before the accident.
There’d been another accident victim he’d got to know when he’d started his physiotherapy. The guy had lost a leg, just below one knee. He felt the missing leg all the time, he had told Kevin. Phantom limb.
Then Catherine had contacted him. Though she turned out to be married. And to have had his child, and never told him.
He seasons the fish – Chilean sea bass – with fleur de mer and a grinding of green and pink, black and white peppercorns. The fish goes onto thin sheets of softened rice wrapper; he lifts deftly the cubes of fish onto the perfectly square sheets. On each square of fish, he positions a round of mousse that he made earlier that morning with truffles and foie gras; it’s a strange pinky-black, but smells like paradise. He folds the wrappers precisely – like origami. He lifts the rice wrapper packages one by one into the sauté pan to lightly crisp on each side. His movements are precise and economical.
Not that he could blame her. The time when he was in hospital, when his memory started to come back – that’s what he had remembered, his drinking and screwing around. Not in clear detail, but in a sort of montage. It had been a kind of torture, remembering. He could not blame Catherine for ditching him when she found out she was pregnant. No.
He has been faithful to Aline. He feels that for the first time, with Aline, he is doing something honourable. He feels, in this and in other acts, that he may redeem himself.
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