by Dennis Bock
We finished the leftover spaghetti and tried to keep the fun going when we got home; but we couldn’t drink anything more, and five minutes later I was passed out on the pullout couch. I don’t know if I’d been asleep a few minutes or a few hours, but I woke up when I heard footsteps cross the apartment floor. I was disoriented. My head was pounding, and my ears were ringing after a night of loud bars and music. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, and then when everything came clear again—that I was lying on Miles’s couch in Montreal—I felt that something was going to happen. What I was hoping for surprised me. I hoped it was Holly standing there on the other side of that flimsy bamboo curtain and that she wouldn’t go back into the bedroom she shared with my best friend. I wanted her to silently slip in beside me on the couch. I imagined her warm legs against mine and the taste of her lips and the feel of her hand reaching for my cock. I held my eyes closed and wished with all my heart that it was her and that she knew something about me before I knew it myself.
“You asleep?” Miles said.
“Yes.”
He sat down on the floor, his back up against the pullout. “Come on. Wake up.”
I ignored him.
“I’m too wired to sleep. My head’s on fire.…”
After he didn’t say anything for a few minutes, I began to think he’d fallen asleep propped up right there against the couch. I saw a faint light shining in the window when I opened my eyes.
He turned and looked at me over his shoulder. “You were walking with a cute girl last week. I talked to Anne a few days ago. She told me she saw you.”
I used to call on Miles every morning on my way to school before he went off to Montreal. His mother—whom he sometimes called by her first name, Anne—usually answered the door holding a blue coffee mug and a cigarette. She was a secretary at some sort of electrical parts manufacturer. Miles didn’t remember much about his father, only that he’d taken off when he was a baby. On Sunday mornings I used to see a different car in their driveway, and sometimes a man—rarely the same man twice—hovering about, watching the street from the front window as if he were expecting someone to drive into his life and complicate matters.
“A cute girl?” I said.
“That’s right. Cute.”
“That would have been Sandra.”
“Vizinczey? The volleyball player?”
“Yeah,” I said, still half asleep.
“That girl has some serious legs.”
We spoke about Sandra for a little while longer, about her beautiful legs, and about some other people at school, girls and boys, and after Miles finally staggered back off to bed—I don’t know how much later—I did my best to think about Sandra’s legs. But all I could think about was Holly sleeping beside my best friend in the next room and what it must feel like to wake up beside a woman as perfect as she’d seemed to me that first day.
In the morning I found the note Miles had left on the kitchen table telling us when and where to meet him later that afternoon. There was a group project he was working on with some people from his biology class. He’d mentioned it the night before, but I’d forgotten this till now.
Holly and I went to their favorite diner for breakfast. We sat in a green booth at the back beside an old-time jukebox that no one put money in anymore. There were two ceiling fans that remained lifeless while we were there and a long desolate countertop where three old men sat and slowly turned their heads as the waitress came and went.
“It’s our place,” Holly said, opening the menu. “Greasy eggs galore.” She was wearing a red bracelet on her left wrist and big blue earrings. Her eyes were shining and bright. She looked incredibly fresh and happy. “Best hangover eggs in town,” she said.
“I’ll be trying those, then. I guess you know all the best places in Montreal by now.”
“I like it better than where I grew up, anyway,” she said. I asked her where that was. It was a town back in Ontario I’d never heard of.
“I guess Montreal’s better than most places you can come from,” I said.
The waitress appeared again, this time with coffee, and asked if we were ready to order. Once she left, Holly said, “You know what? Your French isn’t all that bad. Better than mine when I got here. Anyway, I’m not staying in Montreal forever.” She put a teaspoon of sugar in her coffee and stirred it, then looked out the window for a few seconds before turning back to me. “There’s too much to see everywhere else in the world,” she said. “I really believe that. People like to stay where they are. That’s what I don’t get. All those people out there …” She paused again and watched the crowd passing by on the sidewalk. “They wake up in their beds and convince themselves that wherever they are is the only place in the world. I don’t get that.”
“That’s just natural, right?” I said. “Wanting to be comfortable?”
“Maybe when you’re old, sure. I get that. When you’re old you want to stop and think about all the things you’ve done in your life. That’s fine. But when you’re young? Do you want to hear what my worst fear in life is?”
“Shoot.”
“Getting old and being full of regret. Hating myself for not taking chances. I want to be able to look back on my life and not wish things had been different. You only go around once, right?”
The waitress loaded the table between us with plates and glasses of orange juice and refilled our mugs with coffee. By now it was probably noon, and I was starving and still slightly hungover, though not so badly that I wasn’t able to appreciate the comments Holly had made. She went on to explain that she thought people ended up living cruel or unsatisfying lives because they confined themselves to the present. It was a question of taking a longer view and regarding your world through the prism of your older self.
“Do you think you could actually do that?” I said. “It takes a lot of concentration to walk around all day wondering about consequences and what you’re going to be thinking forty years from now. It might take all the fun out of things, too.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy. I guess that’s the point, right? I’d call that an essential moral dictate. You’ve got to figure out how to live a good life.”
“Okay, whatever that means.” I had never heard anyone talk about essential moral dictates before.
“I’m reading a lot of Kant these days,” she said. “It’s sort of like his categorical imperative. Which hinges on the belief that the idea is inside all of us. You’ve got to recognize it and bring it to the surface and actually do something about it.”
She went on to tell me about her German classes. She’d just finished reading The Threepenny Opera and All Quiet on the Western Front for a course called Twentieth-Century German Literature. The only German novel I’d ever read in my life was by some stroke of good fortune the Remarque novel. We talked about it a little, but mostly I listened. Her confidence and intelligence about books were something I’d never witnessed before. Excited and smart, she picked apart that Remarque novel in a way that made me want to read it all over again. When she mentioned Bertolt Brecht, I told her the only play I really knew anything about was The Pajama Game.
She made a funny face. “Why’s that?” she said, picking up a piece of buttered toast.
“There was a girl I liked. She was an actress and she had a part in it.”
“Miles never told me you were an actor. But I can see that. You have expressive eyes.”
“I’ve never acted in anything myself. The idea of standing in front of a whole bunch of people like that terrifies me. That’s absolutely the worst thing I can imagine. I have nightmares about being up in front of people and forgetting my lines. I don’t know how they do that. Actors, I mean.”
“You never know until you try.”
“Maybe. But I used to watch all these rehearsals she was involved in. Every day after school I’d find some excuse to hang around the auditorium, where they were rehearsing. It was just a typical school play, and probably horrible. But I thoug
ht she was amazing. I have no idea where she is now. She went off to some performing arts school last year.”
“You’re a romantic, I think,” she said. “I like that.” She was mopping up the egg yolk on her plate with the last of her toast.
“Maybe I am. It’s hard to say. But I could never talk to her. She had guys falling all over her all the time. I’m not so great with girls.”
She popped the toast into her mouth, chewed and swallowed, then sipped her coffee. I’d never seen a girl eat so much.
“That’s not so strange,” she said. “You build someone up so much and end up being tongue-tied the whole time. I know what that’s like.”
She was too beautiful and confident to ever be tongue-tied in front of anyone, I thought as she dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a serviette. So smart and at ease with herself, she wasn’t nearly self-conscious enough to worry about what people thought of her.
“And then they become unapproachable, right?” I said. “For me, anyway. I think I was probably in love with the idea of her more than the actual person. She was hot, though.”
Holly smiled and slipped the serviette under her right thigh and reached two fingers into her shirt pocket.
“Looks like you were hungry,” I said.
“I’m definitely a breakfast person.”
She took a stick of lip balm out of her pocket and applied it, then slipped it back into her pocket.
I looked at my watch. It was almost one o’clock. “I think I could get used to university life.”
“We have a bit of time to have some fun,” she said. “It’s not all categorical imperatives.”
“It better not be,” I said.
We paid the waitress and walked over to the campus to meet Miles. He was standing in front of the Social Sciences Building with a squash racquet sticking out of his backpack. She kissed his face, and then he shook my hand.
“Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life,” he said.
Three
The renovations at the academy were going full-bore by the time Holly stepped back into my life. I was already in over my head, but for a few days after that chance encounter I couldn’t get my mind back into the here and now. Everywhere I went, and at all hours, I felt her presence as strongly as if she’d left the room only a moment before. My carpenters hammered and banged away as I tried to drag myself back into my work. I ground through bank statements and city red tape, conferenced with the other academies and started firming up contracts for the winter term. At lunch break I joined the carpenters, submarine sandwich in hand, and talked about La Liga and David Beckham’s declining fortunes at Real Madrid. But I couldn’t keep my mind on soccer. I was thinking about Holly Grey.
After locking up for the day, I’d head for home, a fifteen-minute bike ride, and I always half expected to see her—at every street corner, behind the windshield of each passing car. I kept my eyes peeled like a man waiting for a secret message to be delivered. I rode along Gerrard and through Cabbagetown watching for her. I barreled down the grassy hill by the Riverdale petting farm into the Don Valley, where urban legend had it that deer were still spotted occasionally and forty years ago the roar of the lion housed at the now-closed zoo had echoed through the shallow depths. I looked for her there among picnicking couples and solitary women walking dogs or jogging along pathways. Back up on the other side I’d stop in Little Chinatown to buy some meat or fish and vegetables, looking for her there, too, when picking through a bin of oranges or standing by a lobster tank. And finally I’d cycle the last stretch home through the park where the boys and Nate and I sometimes played soccer and tossed the Frisbee, and never once did I see her. But I knew I would. It was only a matter of time.
Everywhere around me marriages were shattering like old china dolls, and still the world rolled merrily along. What did it matter? Back in Madrid, well-meaning friends had assured me that my daughter would be fine in the end. Kids were more resilient than we thought. With a few adjustments it could be a good year, they said, maybe even a beautiful year. That’s what I’d tried to convince myself of before coming over. I saw myself flying back into Madrid every month or so to book a suite at the Reina Victoria. I’d always be Ava’s father, nothing would change that, and she was old enough to figure out the truth of the situation, which was that her parents could love her separately as much as they did together, maybe even more so.
On paper it all looked eminently doable. What I had to do was stick to the plan. It was a wonderfully real and achievable prospect and no less a desire than it was my right. I’d imagined myself straddling two worlds—a controlled and confident tightrope walker crossing back and forth over the Atlantic bearing presents and renewed energy, the transformation from hungry bachelor to family man completed seamlessly somewhere between takeoff and landing. It was as good as a done deal. A new life beckoned me. It would be like falling into the arms of a beautiful woman.
I was determined to keep up my guard, stay healthy and focus on the job that had brought me here. I’d get that fifth academy up and running, and in the meantime I’d hit the gym four days out of seven, cook myself sensible meals and limit myself to a reasonable amount of alcohol at night. I reminded myself constantly that I’d return to Madrid in a year’s time, not a day longer. It was a question of getting through it, focusing the mind and knowing this was not the end of anything. I even started reading novels again, after not reading for a decade. This was all part of the routine I needed to keep myself going, ten pages a night whether I liked it or not. I bought myself a mountain bike, took out a membership at the downtown YMCA and picked up a big fat recipe book especially tailored to the health-conscious professional. By half past five every morning I was out the door and heading to the Don Valley for an hour-long trail ride. Into the fall season the valley trails were busy with joggers and fellow cyclists who emerged like phantoms from banks of fog on those early mornings, and I’d often find a tired pod of salmon pooling below an obstacle in the river, rallying their forces before forging on. I would stop and observe this marvelous scene. And if one did jump and made it instead of being pushed back to try again later, I considered myself and the day privileged, as if I’d just caught a falling star. Its dorsal fin would disappear into the water with exhausted triumph on the other side of those rocks, and I’d watch and wait for the next one and cast around in my mind for some image or memory of Ava that would carry me through to the end of my day. What didn’t go unnoticed was the instructive symbolism of the spectacle before me, those desperate twisting efforts to get home.
In the late afternoon I’d hover over my Skype page waiting for signs of my daughter. I sent barrages of e-mails with attached photos of past family vacations, birthday parties and hiking trips, moments whose significance grew for me with each passing week. I found myself looking at these obsessively. If it wasn’t later than five o’clock, her image would materialize before me like some electronic angel, imperfectly grainy and smiling and full of infinite mercy. “There you are!” I’d say, and when I detected no note of melancholy or despair or resentment in her voice or eyes I was able to forget for a few moments that we were separated by a black and churning ocean as fathomless as the decision I’d made to leave her behind.
One afternoon I told her some stupid lie about everything being the same as it had always been. “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” she said. “I guess that’s why I’m talking into a computer right now.” And then she slammed the connection shut in my face. When I tried to raise her again, she didn’t answer. She didn’t answer her cell phone, either. I put my head in my hands and waited. After half an hour I went out to the living room and poured myself a drink. It was three days before she answered another Skype request.
It didn’t take long for the reality of single life to set in. Time away from Ava felt like a cruel and selfish retreat from the one pure thing in my life. I could only fool myself for so long. I needed to get back, but I didn’t know how. The fantasies that had sustain
ed me guttered. I confided this to my brother, who actually listened without expressing the need to start cursing his own circumstances. He asked if I thought things would be any better if I hadn’t left. What’s different? he said.
I didn’t tell Nate about my growing obsession with Holly or the past we shared. Instead we sat up talking about the plans I’d devised to break into the city’s competitive language market. He had a good business head on his shoulders and gave me his take on things. There were three schools within a ten-minute walk of the new academy. Two of them were not-for-profit organizations, catering to a completely different clientele and mortally dependent on the caprices of provincial and federal funding. The third had a heavy emphasis on Latin America. I’d visited each one, shaken hands with the directors, had a look around. The main competition as far as I was concerned was a fourth school up on Bloor Street, beyond my blast radius. They had their hooks into all the same markets we did, and some we didn’t—principally, a newly implemented ten-year bursary cash cow out of Riyadh that had just started sending Saudi kids to Toronto by the planeload.
“Sounds like that’s some low-hanging fruit,” Nate said.
He was right, but pursuing a contract as rich as that was also the sort of commitment that demanded more time and focus than I had on hand. In a year or two that’s exactly the kind of expansion I was aiming for. But right now I was overloaded. Apart from managing the renovations, I’d started assembling the team for the new academy—sales and marketing managers, accounts administrators, accommodation and social activities organizers, program director—looking exclusively for people from within the industry who knew the business and could run a department with limited or no oversight the minute they walked through the front door.
After that week I stayed with Nate, we didn’t talk so much about the past. It was always there between us, of course. But it would serve neither of us to go too deeply into it or to dwell on it. As I said, we’d been taken in by an uncle after our parents died. Hugo was a quiet man, a city engineer and our father’s only brother. I recall few details from this time. It might simply be characterized as a lost year in my life. I was going into ninth grade when this happened, and I can only imagine myself as I might have appeared then, a new kid in a new school, standing forlornly in the throng of boys and girls rife and dripping with the high spirits of youth. If nothing had made sense to me when I still had parents to turn to (and likely nothing did) neither had the world asked anything of me yet. After they died its demands were ceaseless and unendurable. Nothing made any sense to me at all. Our uncle was a kind man but unequipped for the challenge. Who might have been suitably equipped, I have no idea. But I was a special case, it seemed. Nate handled the situation with an astonishing calm. He made friends within weeks after we were transferred into our new school district. I couldn’t understand this. I do remember some specifics—his smile, for example, as he leaned against his locker door between classes. It looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. I’d stare at him until he noticed me, then he’d give me a smile so fraudulent that I almost thought he was a complete stranger. We shared a bedroom on the third floor of my uncle’s house, a tall narrow semi on a quiet avenue just north of Bloor Street. Every night for months I tried to talk about our parents. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone, to hear that my brother and I shared something no one else could understand. But the deeper I tried to drill down, the more he told me that this was our life now and talking about them all night wasn’t going to bring them back.