by Dennis Bock
So I was surprised, maybe even a little suspicious, I’ll admit now, when he offered to pick me up at the airport. What might have changed, I wondered. A few hours into my flight I became convinced it had to be a misunderstanding and doubted he’d show. At baggage collection I watched an empty baby bassinet make three solitary revolutions and weighed my immediate prospects. I had a pocketful of euro coins that weren’t going to do me a lick of good here, a cell phone with thirty-seven Madrid numbers on speed dial and one single solitary local address written out on an old Post-it in my wallet. For an uncomfortable moment I felt something like a college student on the first leg of the big trip, tired, woefully underprepared and full of conflicting emotion. I saw my brother for an instant then—he was standing in the concourse—when the automatic doors that separated us opened. I almost didn’t recognize him, not because he’d changed—he hadn’t—but for the simple shock of seeing him there.
He was holding a newspaper in his right hand and wearing jeans and a green golf shirt. I might have smiled when I saw him—surprised he’d actually come to meet me—and then I wondered if he somehow knew I was limping home at the end of my marriage. Would he remind me, after thirteen years apart, that he’d always come out on top in the competition that seemed to rule us? Steeling myself, I collected my luggage and continued to the doors. He saw me and waved, and when we embraced, I recognized the cologne that our father had worn when we were boys. I didn’t know what it was called, but its scent opened my eyes like an old family photograph.
“My big little brother,” he said. “Welcome home.”
“It’s good to see you, Nate,” I said.
I’m taller than my brother by two fingers, have been since I caught up and passed him at the age of fourteen, and when we stood back from our embrace, he put his hand on my shoulder—the railing still separated us at hip level—and nodded and smiled as if some pleasant observation was registering in his mind. His hair was thick and dark, gelled or greased and cut short in a way that made him look younger than his years. He looked more or less as I remembered him. He was a fit and handsome man, like our father, with strong shoulders and a natural athletic grace that had favored him throughout and beyond his high school years. I couldn’t begin to imagine how much my appearance had changed since then. I had expected a similar aging in my brother, of course, the beginnings of a paunch or the thinning of hair that followed on our father’s side. But there was no hint of that. The years seemed to have passed him by. His face was still unlined and youthful-looking, his dark hair was thick as ever, and he wore the same conspiratorial and dazzling smile he’d used to his advantage when we were kids.
There were no awkward silences between us that day. As he drove me into the city—we were riding in air-conditioned comfort in a big white Escalade that afforded us a bird’s-eye view of the laps of the drivers in the next lane—he mentioned his kids three or four times, how great they were, what they did for fun, how he liked nothing more than hanging out in the backyard and grilling hot dogs and burgers for them. Sticking to the upside of my life, I told him that Ava was an athletic and popular kid, almost twelve years old at that point, a kid who loved to read, did great in school and had a knack for languages. “Can you believe it? Us as dads,” he said. “The mind boggles.”
A few minutes later he pointed out an office tower in the distance, tall and glassy and shimmering in the afternoon sunshine, sixty stories of gold-tinted windows. He was a partner with one of the big law firms in that building, specializing in sports and entertainment. His client list had a number of golf and baseball and hockey players on it. The only name that stood out for me was a young female tennis player’s, likely because I’d always kept an eye on that game for its connection to memories of summer evenings spent rallying tennis balls against the south wall of my high school. Cycling, tennis and swimming had been my areas of concentration, solitary sports whose lack of bullish camaraderie seemed to make him suspicious at the time.
“Sounds like you enjoy what you do,” I said. “There aren’t a lot of guys around these days who can make that claim.”
“I’m not saying life’s perfect where I’m sitting. I’ve got a bit of a domestic situation going on.”
“Oh?”
He told me that Monica—his sons’ mother—had moved out in April, three days after tossing her wedding band into the Toronto harbor at the end of a night on the town with three girlfriends. Now she was living with an older Swedish man who owned what he described as a multidimensional sports-and-entertainment complex for the modern adventure-seeking kid, a high-end, one-stop birthday emporium called Wonderworld. The man in question had come over from Scandinavia in the early nineties and doggedly built a chain of these franchises across the country.
“That’s where she met the guy. At our kid’s tenth birthday party. Nice, eh?”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.
Since then Nate and Monica had hashed out an agreement where the kids were concerned. Everything else was still up in the air. Technically he took his sons every other week, but now he was traveling so much and so often that he was barely able to keep up his end of the deal. His tone when he told me this wasn’t whiny or bitter, not on that first afternoon, anyway. If anything he seemed contemplative—a word I never expected to use to describe my brother. But that’s how he came off that day as he drove me into the city. It seemed he’d been humbled. It stood to reason. You can’t go through something like that and not be.
I listened to the rest of his story, then told him something of my own great humbling. The two stories were dishearteningly similar.
He nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds just about right. Bang, bang, bang. Half the marriages on our street have gone bust. It’s a freaking epidemic here. Maybe it’s different in those Catholic countries. But here …” He shook his head again, then smiled.
“What?”
“You know those little fridge magnets? The ones with writing on them? Some little bead of wisdom or saying or whatever to warm your day.”
“Sure. I think so.”
“We had one on our fridge forever. I didn’t think much about it. I thought it was just a joke. It used to give me a laugh.”
“What did it say?”
“ ‘Men are like floors. If you lay them right the first time, you can walk all over them for years.’ ” He smiled a big genuine smile.
“Who’s going to argue with that, right?” I said.
“But that was her basic philosophy. Typical passive-aggressive bullshit that women get away with all the time now. Maybe it’s different over in Spain, who knows? But a guy puts some sexist joke about women on his fridge here, he’s automatically a misogynist and creepy asshole. Stay long enough, you’ll see for yourself.”
Nate lived in the city’s east end, two blocks north of the old Don Jail, in a nice-looking neighborhood set at the edge of a deep, wide valley. When he led me through his house that afternoon he told me it had been featured in House & Home and Architectural Digest; he managed to impart this information without seeming to brag, though of course that’s exactly what he was doing. He directed my attention to an oversize book on the coffee table called Rustic Cottage Ontario, and when he flipped it open to a photograph showing the vacation property he’d recently bought two hours north of the city, I told him it looked like things were going well for him.
And it was true. The walls in the room he’d led me into were hung with colorful paintings, and the hardwood floors were covered in fine rugs. The overall feel of the place was original, homey and expensive. It seemed he’d made himself into a success. But I hadn’t intended the comment to be understood this way, if in fact it had been. I’d meant to say that he’d taken his life in a positive direction, or so it appeared, given what the details seemed to suggest. Despite the domestic situation he’d referred to, my brother had ended up a family man, or at least some version of one. I saw the traces everywhere: a golf putter, a baseball glove, a
heavily thumbed copy of the latest Harry Potter; playing cards were scattered over the dining room table; a Monopoly set was open midgame on the coffee table beside the cottage book. Someone had left a skateboard in the middle of the living room floor, and rather than cursing and stepping over it as we moved into the kitchen he lowered his foot decisively against its stern, and the board obediently popped up into his hand, and he tucked it under his arm with a smile. It was a trick he might have performed in the family driveway thirty-five years before. And that’s when I wondered for the first time if my brother had truly changed. Had I judged him too harshly? Had I even remembered him correctly after all those years?
Two cats appeared from behind a couch, one black, one white, and disappeared up the carpeted stairs. He leaned the skateboard against the wall, its wheels still spinning noiselessly, and grabbed two bottles of Heineken from the fridge. We stepped out into the backyard. Overhead was the sort of sky that seems to go on forever. There was nothing but blue up there and a single widening and blurred contrail that cleaved the heavens in perfect halves. “To the end of long journeys,” he said, raising his bottle. The small tree fort that sat in the crotch of an old maple at the far end of the garden was awash in afternoon sunlight. The fort was painted a cheerful Mediterranean blue that held the light with a sharp warm glow, and the driftwood and cedar trees that bordered the property seemed to lean inward, as if they were expectant of some rivalry that might now make itself known and listening intently.
“This is your place now. For as long as you want. Seriously. We set up a room upstairs.”
I told him I appreciated the offer, that it meant a lot to me, but I’d booked a room in a hotel downtown.
He insisted, shaking his head. “That’s not how it works here,” he said. “You’re our guest. Absolutely not. No way. You’re not leaving. The boys have been looking forward to this. They’ve heard all about Uncle Charlie now. You can’t just suddenly disappear. They’ve been talking nonstop about—” And with this he smiled and gestured over my shoulder. I turned and there were his sons, Titus and Quinn, big grins eating up their faces. They were both wearing baseball caps and long, brightly colored shorts. “Thing One and Thing Two,” he said.
Titus was ten that summer, two years younger than Ava, but he was already as tall. His head came up to my chin. I shook hands with both boys. They were perfect little gentlemen that afternoon.
“Welcome to Canada,” Titus said. “It’s very nice to meet you.” With his thick curly brown hair, he looked much like I did at that age. He was gangly and awkward, at the point in a boy’s life where muscle and coordination seem to disappear under the blitzkrieg of skeletal growth. Quinn, two years younger, was blond and cheerful as a brand-new sports shirt.
Both boys’ eyes were brown, like their dad’s, Ava’s, and our father’s. Well tanned and radiantly healthy, they’d just finished two weeks of canoe day camp on the Toronto Islands. They told me what sports and hobbies they’d done there, and I pulled out some pictures of their cousin and told them that she loved swimming and playing soccer, too, and that with any luck one day they’d meet.
“But why does she live over there?” Quinn said.
“That’s where she’s from, you idiot,” Titus said. “She’s Spanish!”
“But Uncle Charlie’s not Spanish, are you?” Quinn said.
“I’m from here. Just like your dad. I went away for a long time. And now, poof, I’m back.”
Titus seemed to take this as a satisfactory explanation and then, apropos of nothing I was aware of, showed me what he’d learned in karate class earlier that week. He waved his little arms in the air and did a few turns and kicks, ending with a horizontal chop.
Quinn looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Okay, ninja boy,” he said.
Nate slipped inside and returned with another round for us and a bag of Oreos for his kids. “If this isn’t a special occasion,” he said, tossing the bag to Titus, “I don’t know what is.”
I canceled my room at the Marriott and stayed with Nate and his sons for a week until my rental was available. Things went fine those first few days.
We played sports and toured around the neighborhood during the day, and when Nate got home just after seven, he joined us in the backyard, two bottles of Heineken in hand, and threw some steaks or burgers on the barbecue and put together a salad.
We’d end up spending most of the night out there, talking and drinking and reminiscing, the boys listening to our stories. As the evening light softened and slipped away altogether, the sound of music and voices in one or another of the adjoining properties rose up through the trees and played on as a colorful backdrop to our memories. Titus and Quinn would get bored around then and drift up to the family room to turn on the TV. But we stayed out there long into the night catching up, talking about our lives and relationships and how much our kids meant to us, and I felt for the first time in years that my brother and I were able to talk about things that were important to us without getting tangled up in the weeds.
That I began to like my brother again couldn’t have surprised me more. He’d turned into a pleasant man. The last sorry image I had of him—stumbling over that wild punch on the sidewalk outside a Madrid bar—began to fade. If the shadows were just right, I could see our father’s face in the silhouette against the porch light above the sliding back door. I wondered if I’d been misjudging him all along. We talked about his first love, sailing, and his sons’ soccer and hockey skills, how he and I needed to keep our kids insulated from the troubles that plagued divorcing parents. One night I showed him all the pictures I had of Ava. Smiling and nodding, he seemed to give each one a good measure of his attention. “She’s going to break hearts one day,” he said.
“Mine, at least. That’s for sure.”
On the third or fourth day the boys took me to a public pool just a few minutes from their house. The day was already hotter than it needed to be, and I was feeling up for a bit of exercise and sunshine. After Nate left—he was driving down to Detroit that morning—we got into our bathing suits and walked over. The teenager at the front desk of the grey cinder-block building you needed to pass through to get to the pool checked us in and handed over the color-coded wristbands everyone under the age of twelve had to wear. We walked through the men’s changing room and down a slippery tiled corridor that led us through the building to the fenced-in pool on the other side. The water and decks were crowded with pink and red and black bodies splashing around or lying out in the sun. We found an empty patch of cement, dropped our towels and got in the pool.
After a few minutes I pulled up to the edge and watched the city of glass towers on the far side of the valley come to its full morning expression of shimmering light. In my years away I’d sometimes glimpsed the city on a TV screen or in a magazine article. Once, I saw it on the cover of a brochure at a travel agency in Madrid while shopping for plane tickets to Prague. It stood for the place I had yearned to run away from, the place I’d lost, and it had the charming and minor-key bravado of a city that still seemed too much in search of itself and at the same time too inclined to declare itself as one to be reckoned with. For me, it was a hometown by default and cruel luck, since Nate and I came here to live with our uncle after our parents were killed in a car crash. I’d attended high school and bided my time until I was old enough to jump ship. I appreciate now how little I thought about Toronto all the years I lived in Madrid. But on those rare occasions when I was reminded of it, when a memory or emotion surfaced, it stayed with me for an hour or a day until my regular life took over again.
It was close to noon when a man dressed in the staff uniform approached the side of the pool and pointed into the crowd of swimmers. He was roughly my age, maybe a few years older. In his right hand a bullhorn was lowered at his side. A silver whistle and a bunch of keys on a string hung from his neck. Beside him stood a woman holding the hand of a girl who looked to be nine or ten years old. The woman, about forty, wore dark bug-eyed
sunglasses and was dressed in an orange one-piece. She pointed to the middle of the shallow end. The movement and splashing in this area stopped and slowly the swimmers parted around Titus. He raised himself to a standing position and walked toward the man, who was beckoning him to come over. I lowered myself into the water and crossed to the opposite side.
“What’s going on here?” I said.
Titus shrugged, hands pressed flat against the concrete deck. “No idea,” he said.
“Are you this boy’s father?” the man said.
I identified myself as his uncle and asked again what was going on.
“Both of you please remove yourselves from the pool and come with me,” he said.
As if to protect her daughter, the woman placed her hand over the girl’s shoulder when I lifted myself out of the pool, and they marched off alongside the man, Titus, Quinn and I following behind, my arm around Titus’s shoulder, to a glass-walled office that gave onto the pool.
“You’re sure this is the boy?” the man asked the woman as he positioned himself on the opposite side of a large desk, and she nodded. When I saw Quinn standing out on the deck, staring in at us from the other side of the glass door, I gave him a wink, and he smiled and rolled his shoulders with a questioning shrug. In the pool behind him the circle that had widened around his brother filled again with swimmers.