The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  “You think you can find one little silver cup in this dark village?” Diana slaps Tony lightly on both cheeks and brushes her lips against his. “You must begin to think about this more clearly.”

  Diana curls herself closer into Tony, pulling his arm over her shoulder and taking his hand in hers.

  “Now, of course, I will be kissing you again. If you win back your cup. And only if you win back your cup.”

  “Where is the Cup?”

  “More clearly, Tony. Are you a champion?”

  “But you know what I have to do to get it back? Is it dancing?”

  “Dancing is for grooms. Are you a groom?”

  “No.”

  “Then something else.”

  When they re-enter the reception hall, there is no more music. The bride, Irina, has been returned to the celebration and she attends to an exhausted Dragos Petrescu, who is collapsed against the stage steps, his shirt open. He takes small sips from a cup of water in his new wife’s hand. Tables and chairs have been moved, and the small backgammon table now sits in the centre of what had been the dance floor. Petrescu’s new grandfather, Andrei, sits at the board across from an empty chair. As usual, everyone in the room is smiling at Tony. They cheer when they see Diana wrapped around him. Tony decides he hates the smiling, and the cheering even more.

  “Ah,” yells the exhausted bridegroom, “I recognize the look in his eye. I have seen this look in the locker room. This is the look of a man who will not leave here without the Cup. If he has to kill us all, he will take that cup, and whatever else he wants, back with him to Canada.”

  When Tony is seated at the game board, Diana leans in to Tony’s ear.

  “Remember, he is not an old man. He is your opponent—your enemy.”

  Seventeen

  Autumn is just days away. Tony stands beside his car and counts trees in the chill evening air. Skate-high on the sixth trunk from the road he finds the nail and the cottage key dangling from it. He straightens up and pictures Stan doing the same, always alone, an old man walking the gravel path from his car to his lakeside cabin, tired after some long flight from Europe, glad to finally be home.

  “Thanks, Stan,” he says to the cedars. “You really should have had a family, old man, someone with your blood to leave this to. But better me then some other asshole, am I right? I guess I deserve it.”

  He skirts the sagging building and walks first to the shore. The sun is well past the western trees and he is facing east. Lake Simcoe stretches out calm into purple blackness, spotted here and there with lights from the far shore. The lighthouse on Big Bay Point glows out suddenly and then fades, glows and fades. Tony stands in the darkness, counting the rhythm of the slowly turning light. A triple-decked paddlewheel chugs by far out on the lake. Tony hears the sounds of soft jazz bouncing in off the water, a saxophone and stand-up bass, laughter and shuffling feet.

  The sign by the road had said Coop, the final e and r of Stan’s last name lost to weather, or maybe never painted there in the first place. The sign above the threshold reads Reward. The door catches a bit on buckled floorboards. With its opening it releases the moist scent of a building rotting slowly into the muddy lakeside.

  Tony palms the wall for the light switch, feels a moth brush his face in anticipation of the flare. The cabin walls are lined with shelves. Light bounces back at Tony from every angle. On the shelves sit hundreds of shot glasses, souvenirs of every hockey-playing country in the world, of every hockey team in every year since 1952. The dust on them is thin, barely there, but Tony picks up the cloth Stan has left folded over his chair and begins to wipe glasses, looking at their logos.

  “This is as far as I go, Stan,” he says. “I like it just fine, but it doesn’t do for me what it did for you. I think instead I’ll fill this house with some voices.”

  He scans the room with his eyes, looking for anything that doesn’t reflect back to him the image of himself in an armlock with someone else’s triumph.

  “Diana will be landing in about two weeks, Stan. And she will kick my ass if she sees this place looking like this. Until then, maybe I’ll start by getting a radio in here.”

  He nudges at the arm of Stan’s one comfortable chair with his shoe.

  “And maybe I’ll do something to get that smell out of here.”

  On the lake, a lone powerboat slices past, its engine a dull hiss like the slow deflation of an air mattress.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Miki, Andrei, Gino, Vasile, Peggy, Julius and Valentin for wonderful drunken stories. Thanks to Georgiana for reading first and getting all the accents right. Thanks to Chris Chambers and Tim Elliott for hockey. Thanks to Julia for long discussion over martinis.

  I want to especially thank the people at Toronto’s Gibraltar Point artists retreat centre (Susan, Claudia, Robert, everyone) for October 2001, a terrible, turbulent month during which the first draft of this novel was completed. More whiskey, please.

  Thanks to Eva Blank for a fine first edit; to Silas White for wanting it and making it better; and to all at Nightwood Editions.

  Finally, thanks to Jonathan Bennett. A good friend, though distant. Look Jonathan, it’s a book.