Going Home Again

by Dennis Bock

  I had the driver wait while I leaned on the intercom with my eyes closed, almost reduced to a state of prayer. I didn’t know if I could handle a rejection the size of the one that was shaping up before me. As the tinny buzzing of the intercom ran up through the building’s innards, the absurdity of my situation grew obvious in all its grey dimensions. I’d almost turned and started back to the cab when a familiar voice called out.

  “Daddy? That’s not really you, is it?” she said in Spanish. “Look up. Look up. At the camera!”

  The IV drip of Ava’s voice flowed into my veins.

  “You bet it is, peanut,” I said, looking up and giving her a big smile.

  “Oh my God. Are you coming up? Come, come. Pablo’s smiling at me now.”

  Of course I had no interest in meeting the man who’d whisked my estranged wife and daughter off to the City of Light. “I’m here to see you, though. I can meet him some other time, all right? Come on down. Tell your mother I’m here and that I want to take you out somewhere. I want to show you off to Paris.”

  Hands in my pockets, I smiled at the old lady sitting on the red sofa pushed up against the far wall. She held a grey cat in her lap, the snakelike tail the only moving part of this portrait. “Joyeux Noël,” I said. She shrugged her narrow shoulders and returned her attention to the cat.

  When my daughter appeared a moment later, I picked her up and turned her once in the air the way I used to when she was little, a greeting we’d perfected over the years. It was a graceful spin involving three steps, my hands gripping at her armpits.

  Isabel stood to the side with her arms folded over her chest. She was surprised, first and foremost. She was also furious that I’d discovered their Christmas hideaway in Paris. She was equally impressed, though, it seemed to me at the time, that I’d cared enough to get on a plane and fly through the night to claim some part of this day with my daughter. I was hopped up on adrenaline and caffeine and pleased with myself. The heavy sky outside the lobby window was promising at least a flurry or two, and I had, through this flying visit, trumped any gift or gesture likely to emerge from her mother’s new pairing with this celebrated Spaniard.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she said.

  I put my arm around Ava’s head in a play headlock. “I’m looking forward to it. Right now this one needs a monster plate of foie. I’m going to fatten up this goose.”

  Isabel stood at the door of the building and watched us leave. In a moment we got back in the cab and were driving through Paris. I felt like I’d just raided the enemy’s storehouse and was escaping with the crown jewels. I asked the driver to take us to Notre-Dame.

  “I bet you’d like him,” Ava said. “He can talk about lots of things.”

  “Your mom’s new boyfriend, you mean?”

  “Pablo. Yes.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. Mom deserves a nice guy.”

  “She chose you once upon a time.”

  “She did, didn’t she?”

  “He’s jealous of you, Daddy.”

  “I guess that means he and I have a little something in common,” I said.

  “You’re jealous of him?”

  “Hey, your mother’s a catch, right?” I said. “He’s a lucky guy to have her.”

  Ava turned away and watched the city go by. “I don’t think you mean that,” she said, still facing the window.

  “Why wouldn’t I mean that? Of course I do.”

  “You wouldn’t be living in Canada if you meant that.”

  “Of course I would. I’ve got that new school over there, remember? That takes a lot of my time. All my time.”

  “You think I’m stupid,” she said, turning to look at me now. “You think I’m just some stupid kid you can lie to, and I’ll just believe whatever you tell me.”

  The adrenaline high I’d ridden into town on had bottomed out in less time than she needed to finish the thought.

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  She made a cutting face, then turned back to the window and watched the beautiful city roll by as she considered the sad reality that had placed us in this cab on a lonely Christmas Day in a foreign place. It all came crashing down on me like the weight of the world because she was right, and now the incomprehensible brainteaser that was our life seemed from this new angle even cloudier than it had just a day before. I reached for my carry-on bag at my feet, zipped it open and pulled out a present.

  “I almost forgot,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Your timing’s impeccable,” she said, acidly, taking it from me and placing it in her lap without opening it.

  “It’s a promise from me to you.”

  “I’ve had a few of those before,” she said.

  “Please, open it.”

  Careful not to demonstrate any enthusiasm, she hooked a finger under the wrapper and tore. “Oh, wow. A book,” she said.

  “It’s a book of promises. Things we’ll see and do together when you come over next summer. Go on. Open it to where that bookmark is.”

  It was the coffee-table book I’d flipped through at Nate’s house the day I arrived in Canada six months earlier. She flipped ahead and found the photograph of my brother’s cottage.

  “There, see?”

  “It’s a building,” she said.

  “It’s a building, okay. But it’s the future, too. It’s what you’re going to see when you visit me next summer. That’s your uncle’s cottage. We’ll all go up there.”

  Shot at dusk from the lake, the photograph showed the log cabin, its windows blaring with golden light, framed by a stand of jack pines. In the foreground there was a small white dock with a canoe pulled up alongside.

  “Is he rich or something?”

  “He must be a little bit, anyway. And you see that tire tied to the tree on the left there?”

  “You swing on it, right? I’ve seen that in movies.”

  “That’ll be you,” I said.

  The streets of Paris were all but empty this morning. Wreaths were strung from lampposts. A scooter chugged by carrying the driver and his passenger off to some seasonal rendezvous.

  “You can swim and read all day there. They have a Jet Ski, too, and a motorboat. But maybe you’re more of the canoe type. Let me look at you. Oh, yeah. You’re definitely a canoe girl. You won’t believe this, but all that water you see in the picture—it was frozen solid when I was there last week.”

  “You were there last week?”

  “It was all white. Snow up to your knees.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “This is Canada we’re talking about.”

  “Did you see any polar bears?”

  “No bears. But we could order some.”

  “Was the ice thick?” she said, smiling now.

  “Thick? We skated on it!”

  For a kid raised in Madrid I knew this would sound as fantastic as camels in the desert might have seemed to me at that age.

  “I guess that’s pretty cool,” she said.

  “You’ll love it. That’s another promise.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mom would never let me go. I’m just twelve. And she’s never going to want to go over there.”

  “No, probably not. But you’re thirteen next summer, and that’s official teenager status. That’s when you start telling us what to do.”

  “As if,” she said.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Anyway, in case you’ve forgotten, my birthday’s at the end of the summer.”

  We got out at the next intersection and walked up into Saint-Germain a few blocks, my carry-on slung over my shoulder. As we waited for a traffic light, Ava slipped her arm in mine, and I pulled her in close to me and kissed the top of her head.

  After we got a pastry and some hot chocolate at a little café, we leaned against the balustrade of the Pont Notre-Dame and watched the sightseeing boats passing beneath u
s.

  “You’re going to meet someone over there and marry her and have a new family,” she said. “And then you’re going to just forget about us.”

  “Is that what you really think?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It happens all the time.”

  “Not with me it doesn’t. Not in a million years. That boat coming now?” I said, nodding.

  “What about it?”

  “I’m like that boat,” I said.

  “Leave it to you to compare yourself to a boat.”

  “Why would you want to sail anywhere else in the world once you’ve sailed through the heart of Paris? That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Eight

  I felt reinvigorated after I got back to Toronto, which is to say the guilt and uncertainty that presided over me in those days moved into the background for a time. I knew that a few grey hours in Paris couldn’t change the reality that the minutes of my daughter’s life were ticking away without me and that with each passing week some pivotal event might occur that could only be narrated to me via Skype. I’d been aware of all this, of course, at least on some level, when her mother and I began discussing the likelihood of my going back to Canada. The end of our marriage, and that stirring notion of freedom that swelled both our heads, had provided the last necessary impetus. The weightlessness that buoyed me lasted only until I realized that I was doing little more than exchanging one set of challenges for another; added to this, I was rarely if ever sure which of the two sets of challenges was more interesting. Freedom’s an empty word, I decided. It is, by my measure, the most dangerous word in the English language, at least where it concerns husbands and wives. It is a constant tug, a deceitful promise, a disease that haunts bedrooms and breakfast tables from Whitehorse to Albuquerque. When I’d made the decision to leave, I believed—astonishingly, it seems to me now—that it was in my grasp.

  When I saw Hilary a few days after getting back, she hauled out my belated Christmas present. She’d noticed the notepads I left around the house, pulled them together and wrapped them in a Christmas bow. I looked through them that afternoon, as if for the first time. Some of them weren’t bad, I thought. The character I’d been trying to get right since I was a kid was a stripped down Waldo rip-off who spent most of his time skateboarding past or into unusual situations—bank robberies, space invasions, earthquakes. As part of the package she’d included the receipt for a ten-week comics-drawing class at a downtown community college. (The amount she’d paid was blacked out, with a happy face drawn beside it.) She told me she wasn’t going to take it personally if I didn’t like the class and had to drop it. I’d seemed stressed lately, she said, and she figured something like this might help me relax.

  The academy had its grand opening the second week in January. I’d flown in a handful of agents and reps and put on a small presentation and a big banquet that ended up lasting well into the night. The majority of the students who’d enrolled were from Spain and Japan, a few from Mexico and South Korea. We were at something like 28 percent capacity, but it was early days yet. That first winter term would serve as a testdrive that would ease us into the high summer season when bookings were already looking strong.

  I was putting in five long days a week now working out the kinks and training staff. I had the European schools to look after, too. Come Saturday morning I’d wake up to find Hilary sleeping beside me and feel that wonderful new body against mine and think for a minute that maybe I could do this, that perhaps there was a future for me here after all. Possibly I’d broken the back of that slump that had held me for too long, and I was just steps away from turning that fiction of a marvelous bachelorhood year into a reality.

  Saturday mornings were a good time for us. There was never any place we needed to be before noon, so we lounged around half naked and drowsy, in no special hurry to wake up, and eventually prepared an indulgent breakfast, had sex in surprising corners of the house, scrubbed each other’s back in the shower and read the business sections of the papers over a third cup of coffee. Hilary led a spinning class at a gym on the lakeshore on Saturday afternoons. After she left, I’d check messages to see if anything was going on over in Spain, and if there wasn’t I’d walk down to Nate’s house to see what was up.

  If Titus and Quinn had a weekend with their mother, I’d cycle over to the downtown YMCA, just a few blocks up from the academy, and pound the heavy bag on the third floor until the tingling in my jaw and the back of my head started up. I’d picked up some gloves after tearing up my knuckles a few months earlier, but I wasn’t much of a boxer. Still, dancing around that bag got my heart pumping better than anything I’d ever done. Sometimes guys who really knew what they were doing showed up and started working out. They’d wear plastic bags over their hoodies to help them get used to the extreme temperatures they’d feel in the ring, and they’d move their hands and feet with a beauty and rhythm I could’ve watched for hours. One of them, Milton, was a small sinewy guy in his late twenties with skin as black as the man’s I’d sold that stolen picture frame to years earlier in Spain. He was leaning against the wall watching me while he taped his hands.

  “How long you been doing this?” he said.

  I told him.

  “Okay, man. Watch this.”

  So I stepped aside, and he showed me, point by point, what I was doing wrong.

  “Okay. Look, when you do this … no, no, not like that, man. Why aren’t you listening? Come on, brother. Do it again.”

  Between rounds on the heavy bag I’d lean on the railing overlooking the basketball courts in the gym on the first floor. There were always kids down there shooting hoops or doing Tae Kwon Do. Sweating and breathing like I’d just come off a 10K run, I’d watch what was happening for a minute or two, then start up again for as long as I could stand it. I’d pound away for ten or fifteen minutes until my lungs started burning and I felt that electricity coursing through my body—a strange, prickling sensation that was entirely new to me—until I had to crouch against the wall gulping for air and consciously tell myself that this wasn’t the day I was going to fall over and die in front of a bunch of strangers. When I finally got my heart rate back down to normal, I’d change for the pool and swim until I barely had the strength to haul myself up out of the water.

  My first drawing class fell on a Wednesday evening near the end of January, not long after the academy’s official opening. I stayed at work late that day, hiked up my collar and walked the ten blocks through a heavy snowfall over to the School of Design on Adelaide Street. I was tired, an unremarkable state for me at that point, and casting around in my memory for happy thoughts about my daughter. I think I’d just put my Japanese contact back on a plane after a night on the town. I was feeling drained and woozy, and all I wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. I’d give it try, though, just to say I’d given it a fair shake; then I’d drop the class and buy Hilary a couple dozen roses and take her out for dinner to let her know the gesture had been appreciated.

  I entered through the student gallery and found studio 2. There were seven of us in the class, the most talented a tall, slim Croatian named Suada whom I pegged to be in her midthirties. She wore all black and composed incredible panels that showed snipers hiding in church towers or hotel rooms as little kids and mothers picked through the streets for firewood. As far as I could tell no one else had nearly as much to say about the world as she did. I don’t think I heard her speak two words the whole ten weeks. I noticed her that first day looking at the art taped to the exposed brick studio wall before the instructor walked in and started assigning easels.

  At first I thought Vincent was another student. He was a pointy-bearded man with slender fingers, somewhere in his late fifties, I guessed, and introduced himself that evening with a round of handshakes and said he was looking forward to working with us. By the end of that first class I decided to stick with it.

  He liked to start by bringing out a series of favorite frames or comic strips and e
xplaining what made them special. He said there was a perfect work of art inside all of us but that only someone gifted and disciplined was able to bring it out into the light of day. After one of these introductions we’d settle in and work on some drawing exercises while he walked around the studio and asked, leaning over a shoulder, exactly what you were trying to get at. Most of us knew enough about drawing to realize that only the Croatian really had anything to offer. Once he used Suada’s work as an example of a great use of perspective; she had a frame of a sniper’s bullet spinning toward the viewer that I just couldn’t take my eyes off. He never talked about story arcs or blocking figures. That was comic-book territory, “and way beyond most of you,” but he liked to ask questions like “What’s this guy supposed to be doing?” or “Is there a reason this head’s so small?” I imagined he was one of those community-college teachers who’d been saved from economic ruin by a steady job and was toiling late into the night in a brightly lit basement studio on some epic comics masterpiece. But he never brought in his own work, not being the sort, he told us, to talk about a work in progress.

  Four or five weeks in, sometime in early March, I saw him coming up from the lockers, his red scarf already wrapped around his neck, a black wool cap set on his head, ears uncovered. He had a backpack in his right hand.

  “That was a good class,” I said as we walked down a colorless hallway.

  “Some talented artists in the group.”

  “But no Stan Lees, I guess,” I said, putting my bike helmet on and fastening the snap under my chin. I’d bought it after seeing a courier get doored a few weeks earlier. The guy at the bike shop told me cyclists in the city were dropping like flies, getting their heads squashed, femurs crushed, arms busted.

  “Cold night to ride,” Vincent said.

  “I’m not that far, anyway.”

  “Stick with it,” he said. “Exercise is a good habit. Artists rarely have those.” He opened the glass door that looked out onto Adelaide Street. “Can you ride with a beer or two in you?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. Hilary was staying over that night, but she had an early morning appointment. I called her to say I was grabbing a beer with my instructor, and ten minutes later I was sitting at the bar facing an aquarium full of marvelously colored tropical fish and listening to Vincent talk.