Going Home Again

by Dennis Bock

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Bock

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Simultaneously published in Canada by HarperCollins Canada.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bock, Dennis, [date]

  Going home again / by Dennis Bock. — First edition

  pages cm

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-34969-7

  1. Divorced men—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction.

  3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.B559G65 2013

  813’.54—dc23 2012050903

  Jacket image © Imagestopshop/Alamy

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  first loves

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Move on, move on, as we are directed to do at the scene of an accident, or a crime.

  —John Banville

  Prologue

  On the Friday evening before Kaj Adolfsson was killed, I was actually feeling pretty good about things. I had just landed in Madrid, which was home, and a big round sun the color of orange sherbet was three-quarters gone in a fine late-summer sky. I was coming off a strange year, a bit battered and bruised, but my circumstances were looking up. The language business was going well, my love life had crawled back up out of a deep dark hole, and the day after tomorrow I was hosting my daughter’s thirteenth birthday. My problems seemed at that moment destined to disappear like that setting sun. And then, as I watched the city come into view from the backseat of my taxi, my brother’s wife called with the news that set everything moving off in the wrong direction.

  “And you haven’t heard from him since?” I said, leaning forward and pointing to the dashboard radio. When the cabdriver reached for the dial to turn down the volume, I saw the little stub on his right hand where his index finger used to be.

  “That’s why I’m calling,” Monica said. “I thought maybe he’d called you.”

  “No. Nothing. I just got in. There were no messages.”

  My brother and Monica were in the middle of a divorce full to overflowing with discord and grievance. Over the past year they’d told me in so many words that they each wished the other had never been born. Now she was on the phone telling me Nate’s sailboat had been found crewless and adrift thirty miles south of Naples, Florida.

  “The Coast Guard contacted me three hours ago. I don’t know what to think. That stupid boat was his baby.”

  “Is his baby,” I said, maybe a little too forcefully.

  “He’s two days overdue, Charlie. He was supposed to pick up the kids yesterday. Of course he doesn’t show up. Now they call telling me his sailboat’s under tow and do I know the whereabouts of my husband? The partners at his office haven’t heard from him, either. No one knows a thing. You can imagine what this is doing to my head right now.”

  I did what I could to convince Monica that Nate was probably fine and all we could do was sit tight, he’d call soon enough. I’d be back in three days, on Monday, in any case. But after slipping the phone back into my pocket, I wondered if he wasn’t already somewhere over the Atlantic en route to finishing up the business we’d left hanging between us. He was capable of much more than I could ever understand, that much I knew by then, and this sort of grand gesture—popping up in Madrid on the weekend of my daughter’s thirteenth birthday—provided the retributive drama favored by a man on the verge of losing his family. I ran through as many likely explanations as occurred to me in the time it took to get into the city. But half an hour later, when the cabbie dropped me at the door of the Mesón Txistu, that feeling of unease still hung over me.

  Men and women were sitting and standing in small groups taking aperitifs at the front bar when I walked in. I nodded to the bartender and continued up the stairs into the back room and found Isabel and Ava, our daughter, sitting at the table beneath the bull’s head on the south wall, a pitcher of ice water between them. Ava’s hair was shoulder length and chestnut brown, like her mother’s, and she looked, despite my northern complexion, every bit the Spaniard. When she turned and saw me at the far end of the room, she got up and met me between tables, throwing herself into my arms. I gave her a spin and a hug.

  “How was your flight, Daddy? How was Ireland?”

  “It was good,” I said, slipping out from under a shoulder strap. I handed her the lighter of two carry-on bags, the one loaded with presents. “You’re looking great. How’s Mom? She okay?”

  “She’s fine,” she said, then led me by the hand to where Isabel sat, wearing a smile I wasn’t quite able to pin down.

  “Good to see you,” I said, stooping to kiss both cheeks.

  I didn’t recognize the dress she was wearing that night. It was a green-and-white summery number that showed those great arms of hers, shaped and tanned at the tail end of an active and outdoorsy season. We’d been separated for more than a year now, and the fact that she had a man in her life was old news. Through a family friend named José, whom I’d known since my earliest days in Madrid, I’d heard more about him than I needed to know—for instance, that he was a constitutional lawyer in the Spanish Supreme Court and, at forty-two, the youngest justice in the history of the institution. He owned a house in Ibiza, as well as the flat in Paris I’d visited the previous Christmas. As far as I knew, he had no kids and lived the kind of life that stressed-out parents like to dream about.

  The waiter appeared, helped me with my seat and left us with three leather-bound menus. Isabel was sitting directly across from me, Ava to my right.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Isabel said. “You look worried.”

  “Just glad to be back,” I told her. “No problem.”

  We usually spoke Spanish when the three of us were together. But for some reason we spoke English that night.

  “You know Dad always looks tired, anyway,” Ava said, opening her menu. “It’s all that thinking he does. Right, Dad?”

  “There you go,” I said. “Nail on the head.”

  “I hope no one drops dead at my party,” Ava said. “The heat’s killed forty-one people in France this summer. Can you believe that?”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “Mostly old people, I know. They were talking about it on the news this morning.”

  “At least it’s cooler up there in the mountains,” I said.

  We’d celebrated Ava’s birthday at a friend’s house in the Madrid sierra, thirty-five minutes north of the city, for the past ten years. I’d flown into Dublin from Toronto that morning and spent the day putting out fires at the Bellerose Academy—one of the language schools I owned and operated—before hopping a shuttle over to Madrid for the occasion. Since splitting up t
he previous summer, her mother and I had managed to keep the lawyering to a minimum. Now, whenever we found ourselves in the same room together (which wasn’t very often), we did our best to keep the edge out of our voices. In calmer moments we’d agreed that the success we’d have in raising our daughter would rise or fall in direct relation to the number of conflicting issues we chose to leave by the wayside. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. Choose your battles. Wasn’t that the best advice you could ever give or receive? By then it wasn’t a question of solving anything or determining who was in the wrong, as too often someone was, but managing to move forward with our dignity intact.

  “Grandpa’s going to talk your ear off about his gardening. He’s on this new thing. He’s ordering papaya seeds from Brazil or something.”

  “And you?” I said, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. “What’s up with you? I’m sure you’ve got a doozy waiting for me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, her big brown eyes glowing.

  Ava liked to trot out riddles and tongue twisters and brainteasers as often as she could. I’d decided it was her way of focusing the mind on the solvable mysteries in life rather than dwelling on the incomprehensibles, like the annoying head-scratcher that her parents’ marriage presented.

  “This one will take you at least the weekend to figure out.”

  “Hold tight,” I said, grabbing two corners of the table for emphasis.

  “Okay, here goes,” she said, looking at her mother, then me. “What’s the difference between a cat and a comma?”

  Isabel and I traded glances. We both put on an expression that showed our daughter we were really thinking.

  “No idea,” Isabel said.

  “I can see a lot of ways they’re different,” I said, “but none of them is very clever.”

  “Wait. A cat and a coma?” Isabel said.

  Ava swiped the air with an imaginary pencil. “Comma! Comma!”

  “This one’s a killer,” I said.

  “Just how I like them,” she said.

  “Good thing we have the whole weekend to stew over it.”

  A troubled look swallowed Ava’s pretty smile when I said that. She began working her lips over the braces on her teeth. They still bothered her, I could see, though she wasn’t much of a complainer about things like this.

  “But we might not last through the whole weekend,” she said. “What about that? People are dying all over Europe. Fifty people in France alone!”

  “You just said it was forty-one,” I told her.

  “That was yesterday. By now it’s fifty.”

  “What a tragedy,” her mother said.

  “You better not be giving up,” Ava said. “Mom always says you give up too fast. In everything.”

  Isabel’s cheeks filled with color.

  It was a characterization our daughter had heard often enough, I was sure. But I didn’t bite. The waiter, now attending a table near ours, appraised us over half-moon glasses. Ava took a packet of sugar from a small cut-glass bowl in the centre of the table, ripped it open, poured it into her glass and began mixing it with a spoon. She sucked her lips over her braces again and then very sternly said, “A cat has its claws at the end of its paws.…” She put down the spoon, her face breaking into a smile. “And a comma is a pause at the end of a clause!” The air around her glowed.

  “Very nice,” I said. “The crown is yours.”

  She was the queen of riddles in the family and very smart indeed—in Spanish, English and French—even if she had hauled that brainteaser off some website. One day she was going to be a writer, she said, the next Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf all wrapped up into one. Apparently (according to her mother) she was already talking about universities where she was interested in studying. For reasons unknown to me, there was one in Buenos Aires that figured at the top of her list. I had no idea what any of this was based on, though it heartened me to know that our daughter’s possibilities were all the brighter for the fact that she was fluent in three languages.

  Her Spanish mother spoke English well enough—quite well, in fact—but you needed a native speaker’s proficiency to grasp a linguistic parallelogram as lovely as that. I asked Ava if she was going to translate for her mom.

  “I would, but I’m sure you two have lots to talk about,” she said. It was—and she knew it—the understatement of the year. She dipped a hand into the purse hanging on the back of her chair and produced one of those gargantuan novels she carried with her everywhere, opened it to where a green ribbon marked her place roughly halfway through, leaned forward and started reading.

  Ava was our little scholar in the making. I’d always known she was a brilliant kid. But I was fully aware that a novel like that, in a situation like ours, was as much a shield against stupid adult high jinks and petty bickering as it was a rollicking good read. She was into something called dark fantasy at the time, which, if I understood correctly, usually included some sort of urban werewolf, a compulsive but sympathetic murderer or a vampire challenged by the crushing human need to be loved. I was sure that over the past year, since I’d left Madrid, she’d cast her mother and me in roles every bit as compromising and bloody as those she chose to read about. I’d never asked her how those novels typically ended, whether in bloodbath or in reconciliation, or which of the two endings, the gory or the romantic, she preferred; but I knew—and not without the guilt that still kept me awake at night—she hadn’t given up on us yet.

  Thirteen years on and I could still remember clearly the weeks leading up to the day Ava was born: the rolling waves of anxiety and excitement; how Isabel walked around with her right hand pasted to the side of her amazingly huge stomach; the endless baths she ran, blue candles placed around the edge of the tub. And at night how the mysterious being inside her pressed itself against my waiting hand, like she was already fully conscious in there and just counting down the days. And when I finally held our daughter in my arms for the first time, I felt that she’d been part of me my whole life. The feeling was so powerful I found myself moved to tears.

  The fact that Ava was turning thirteen probably made a bigger impression on me than it made on her. It almost felt that night as if I were stepping into a finished painting, and all I had to do to figure out what that painting meant was get to the other side of this weekend. Ava was excited, of course—she was the one getting the presents and blowing out the candles. But my first year as a bachelor in two decades was just coming to a close, and now like magic, as if time had snapped its fingers, it came to me that I was in the middle of a life I hadn’t really paid much attention to. My old self was buried in the irretrievable past, the world had continued, and suddenly my baby daughter was a teenager.

  “And your brother?” Isabel said.

  I glanced at Ava to make sure she was deep into her book. “Difficult, as usual,” I said. “Bit of a prick, actually.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s the same,” she said.

  “Worse.”

  And like a spy in one of those old movies, Ava lowered her book conspicuously, stared at us for a moment, then slipped back into her story.

  One

  There was no reason to think anything would be different between me and my brother the previous summer, in 2005, when I called ahead to tell him I was coming back to Toronto to try out my new life as a single man. I’d been studying the possibility of taking the business across the Atlantic for years, but for too many reasons to count, I’d never managed to pull it off. After finding out about the Supreme Court justice named Pablo, though, and having by then bunkered down at the Reina Victoria Hotel for two months, I was feeling sufficiently unsettled to actually do it. I needed some changes in my life. New schedule, new people, new rhythms. I was hoping for something else but wasn’t at all sure what it might be. The challenge of setting up my fifth language academy was a project that would focus my energies in the meantime and perhaps turn off the panicked voice in my head that kept telling me thi
ngs I didn’t want to hear.

  I wondered if some overlooked germ of hope had lain dormant in my heart over the years since I’d last seen my brother. But it wasn’t an easy telephone call to make at the time. There had always been some fundamental confusion between us, a wall, in effect an unending failure to imagine how the other saw and thought about the world that too often made things go sideways between us. That’s what had happened in Madrid the last time I’d seen him. We’d spoken by phone half a dozen times since then—on a birthday, his or mine, or the shared anniversary of our parents’ deaths—and I’d always come away glad to know he was well but also relieved that our lives were separate and distinct and that the problems between us might remain buried to the end of our days.

  They had met only once, Isabel and Nate, when he came through Madrid back in 1992, the summer of the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville World’s Fair, after dumping the girl he was traveling with in France. He turned up at our door one night and told us he was heading down to check out the señoritas in Seville, then going back north to try to score some tickets for the sailing competitions in Catalonia. We put him up on the couch for a week. Showing him around my adopted hometown, I took him to the oldest restaurant in the world and spent a wad of money I didn’t really have. We wandered through neighborhoods packed with bars and clubs. Nothing seemed to impress him. In fact he found it all just a little bit irritating. The city was too hot and dirty and loud; he bitched and moaned about train schedules and shitty restaurants and the near-complete absence of spoken English in the streets and hotels. I got the impression that everything he saw in Spain made him feel superior, though of course he didn’t say as much. His last night with us he got stupidly drunk and said he wanted to go find some prostitutes. At first it was a joke I could almost brush aside. But he kept insisting. Then he draped his arm around Isabel’s neck and asked if out of the goodness of her heart she could possibly loosen that grip she’d fastened around my balls, the boys just wanted to go out and have some fun for a change. That’s when I took him out for a drink he didn’t need and told him he could find some other couch to sleep on. I knew he had some experience with prostitutes. I didn’t care so much about that, since we both did. What I couldn’t stand was him treating Isabel as if she were some sort of obstacle in my life. The whole week had been building up to that moment. He’d been throwing out little put-downs and challenges, testing to see how far he could push me. When I told him what a selfish prick I thought he was, he took a swing at me right there in front of the bar. Not nearly as drunk as he was, I just stepped aside, went back to the apartment and took Isabel out to dinner. His backpack was gone when we got home a few hours later. The taps in the kitchen and bathroom were open full blast and a jug of water had been emptied into our bed. It was probably three or four years before I talked to him again.