Going Home Again

by Dennis Bock

  He mentioned artists and genres and styles I’d never heard of. I didn’t have any opinions regarding these things but tried to keep up and probably was pleased that he took me seriously enough to want to talk to me. Conversation eventually moved on to general matters. Back in the nineties he’d lived in San Francisco and worked in advertising. I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my life in Spain, my failed marriage, my beautiful daughter, the language academies. I handed him one of my business cards, which he examined with minimal interest.

  “Nice and clean,” he said, then gave it back to me.

  He’d been involved in some high-flying campaigns over the years. None of them rang a bell, I admitted, but that was likely due to the fact that I’d been away for so long. He’d turn sixty-one in May, he said, and had hated every minute of his sixteen years in advertising. Following a cancer scare that came and went about ten years ago now, he’d gotten up the courage to quit. His marriage fell apart not long after that.

  “We get along better now than we ever did,” he said. “That’s the secret. Get out while you can. Before the silence turns toxic.”

  Apparently he hadn’t looked back, this man. There didn’t seem to be a nostalgic bone in his body, no regrets, no living in the past. Things were good. He wouldn’t mind having the sort of money he used to make, he said, and he missed his son, who was backpacking through Thailand as we spoke, but that had nothing to do with changing jobs or leaving his marriage.

  “What about teaching?” I said. “You like it?”

  “Sure, I do. I like that I can tell people what I know and think without them getting pissed off at me. That’s essentially untrue in any other walk of life. People usually don’t want advice unless they’re paying for it.”

  “I’d say you’re right about that,” I said.

  I could only guess that teaching at a community college didn’t satisfy him aesthetically, since Vincent—based on the secrecy he shrouded his work in—considered himself an artist. But he was cheerful during class and listened intently when one of us explained to him over smudged graphite what it was we were trying to achieve. (The truth was we weren’t really trying to achieve all that much, other than clearing our heads after another uneventful Wednesday.) He seemed cheerful tonight, too, and when I reached for my wallet, he touched my hand and waved over the bartender, a heavyset redhead. “This guy thinks you’re going to take his money,” he told her.

  She said, “He don’t know our Vincent very well then, does he?”

  I could have sat there all night. She had a friendly bartender vibe about her and made it look like she enjoyed nothing more than pushing pints over that shiny mahogany bar top. A loop of eighties power pop rolled out at half volume from the speakers clamped to the brick wall behind us.

  “Well, let’s make it even then,” I said. “What do you say to two more?”

  “I wouldn’t argue,” Vincent said.

  She replaced our glasses with fresh ones.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Not a problem,” she said, then moved off to serve a bent-back old guy down at the far end of the bar. A yellow fish the size of my little finger nibbled up and down the aquarium wall and around the silhouette of a black catfish that had pasted itself to the glass.

  “No regrets, then?” I said.

  “You lost me,” he said.

  “I mean about your ex.”

  “Water under the bridge of a circular river,” he said with a grin, tracing his finger around the circumference of his pint glass.

  “You want to hear a story?” I said.

  “That’s what they invented pubs for.”

  So I told him about Christmas in Paris and that, while I’d come back feeling okay about things, I was now so full of yearning and guilt that I thought my heart was going to explode. When I’d dropped Ava off at Pablo’s that afternoon, I told Isabel about the promise I’d made to Ava about bringing her over next summer. This was bad timing, and it didn’t go over well, and now I wondered if I hadn’t blown it entirely.

  “Kidnapping, eh?”

  “That’s what it felt like. It just kind of reminded me how little say I have in all this.”

  He nodded, thinking about his own life, maybe, or that he’d opened a can of worms he’d rather close down tight again. His face was hard to read. “No two ways about it,” he said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “You need to get her over here,” he said. “You’ve got to get your daughter involved in this new life you’re setting up for yourself. It’s basic math, genius. You’re in a holding pattern. Life here is nothing but a long, sad, shitty holiday away from home until your daughter comes over and proves it isn’t.”

  “I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Her mother shut that down. When I brought it up in Paris, she looked at me like I had two heads.”

  Confusion clouded over Vincent’s face as if he suddenly were hearing a different conversation. “I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow. Because she looks at you funny you’re giving up? Did I hear that right?”

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” I said.

  “You flew over there unannounced and showed her you’ve got some balls left. Okay. So far so good. What’s your next step?”

  “I’m not sure I have one.”

  “You’ve got a lot left in your stride, trust me. Your job isn’t to accommodate this aberration, my friend. That’s done with. You’ve got to take hold of this bough and shake it until fruit starts falling from the tree. You hear me? You’ve got to put your fucking foot down.”

  “So says the expert?”

  “You better believe it,” he said.

  We ended our night together by shaking hands outside on the sidewalk. It was snowing now, and the sky was black, and dark buildings loomed overhead. Vincent pulled his wool hat down over his ears and said, “Good night, Charlie. Slippery roads. You watch yourself.”

  The roads, slippery as they might have been, were pretty much mine that night after I cleared the downtown core. I burned a few red lights and hopped a few curbs along Gerrard and was coming up to Parliament at a good clip when my front tire caught in a streetcar track and I went headfirst over the handlebars. I must’ve blacked out for a second. When I came to, I was flat on my back and watching the snow fall through the cone of yellow light from the streetlamp on the corner. Just inches from my head, my front tire spun resolutely; I thought I’d broken my right shoulder. Every time I tried to budge, a razor of pain shot through it. I pulled myself off the road and over to the curb. It took a few attempts to sit up, but I finally managed to, and that’s when my shoulder popped back into its socket.

  Hilary was out cold when I arrived home. I got undressed and checked for bruises, then swallowed three or four Tylenols and crawled into bed. With two pints and those pills in me, I thought I had a good chance of getting a half-decent sleep. What I hadn’t figured on was anyone calling me in the middle of the night.

  It was around two o’clock when the phone rang. Nate sometimes liked to call from the road, not to check in—his boys were with their mother that night—but to let me know how much fun he was having or, conversely, to bitch and moan about some new “cuntism” Monica had just pulled. I was used to listening patiently while he got whatever he needed to get off his chest—mostly something about that Swedish boyfriend of Monica’s, whom he suspected was moving in on fatherly duties with the boys. He had no evidence of this, of course, at least to my knowledge. They’d never even met, I knew, but he had theories and opinions that I supposed were based on little more than what his sons let slip and his own sense of the ever-increasing injustice.

  More and more often now he talked about how unfair everything was for a father these days—the courts, custody, all that. He often had been drinking, certainly enough to drop his tendency to come off as flashy and polished and likable. But after blowing off some steam, his mood might lift, and we’d end
on a positive note, some story about racking up an exorbitant bar tab with clients and now kicking back at the marina with his feet up, basking in the moonlight over the Gulf—and wasn’t life grand for those savvy enough to figure it out? He was usually half in the bag, but I’d steer him in a direction that I hoped might bring him back into the steadiness you need when you’re alone on the road, and then we’d finally sign off. Usually, when he called in the next day or two, he’d have no recollection of the earlier conversation, and it was as if I’d dreamed it all up.

  And then in my mind’s eye I imagined Ava sitting at the breakfast table back home in Madrid, crying and in desperate need to talk to me. That was another possibility. Or was it Isabel calling to say that our daughter was hurt? All this flashed through my mind between rings, and now, forgetting about my shoulder, I rolled over and felt that same agonizing pop all over again.

  “Who was that?” Nate said, when I took the phone from Hilary. She’d answered it while I was putting my shoulder back in place.

  “Who else could it be?” I said. “It’s Hilary. You know what time it is?”

  In the silence on the other end of the line I could hear him thinking, maybe looking out over a seascape bathed in warm moonlight and smoking one of those great cigars.

  “What’s up?” I said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I go back to sleep?”

  “That’s Hilary with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounded like Monica, you know, when she answered. I know my wife’s voice.”

  “And I know what you sound like when you’re drunk.”

  “You’re fucking my wife, aren’t you?”

  “I’m hanging up now,” I said.

  In the cold light of morning I wondered if he’d remember the phone call. I didn’t believe he actually meant what he’d said. He knew Hilary was staying at my place two or three nights a week in those days and that any woman answering my phone in the middle of the night would have to be her. I decided he’d been either drunk or determined to put me on my back foot, though I had no idea why he’d want to do that. That was the sort of game he’d played when he stayed with us in Madrid all those years ago, a strange and pointless badgering that seemed an end in itself as far as I could tell.

  He usually seemed fine when he got home after a trip. He’d step out from the airport limo hale and smiling, the picture of his old sporting self, and as if to prove something to me, or to himself, he’d convene a game of catch or touch football or soccer, followed by a couple beers on the back deck, at which point he’d tell me how much fun he was having as a bachelor, how this should have happened years ago.

  I decided that what he craved was his youth. He wanted sunshine and blue water and the thrill of sport to return him to the quickened spirits he’d had before getting married. He didn’t speak about the old days very much, but his hobbies and recreations were those of a man who would never be dislodged from better days long gone.

  He often brought a gift for the boys and a bottle of wine or cognac for me. In exchange Quinn would give him a heavy high five or fist bump, then run off with his new autographed football or baseball glove to add to his collection. But Titus, who over a weekend with me and his brother might have shown indications that he wasn’t as pissed off at his mom and dad as I knew he was, and who lately had smiled through the Mel Brooks films we watched and actually said something positive from time to time, would roll his shoulders and sneer and offer some sarcastic comment that Nate couldn’t just ignore. “That’s a nice way to greet your old man,” he might say, masking his anger or disappointment with locker-room irony. “See how this peckerhead talks to his dad?”

  He didn’t look or act any different when he came by the house later that day after he got back from Florida. He seemed in high spirits and was full of stories about his fresh triumphs. My shoulder still wasn’t feeling very good, and when we shook hands I must’ve flinched. “Something wrong there, champ?” he said. I almost expected him to refer to the phone call then, maybe to laugh it off and tell me I was a serious dick who couldn’t take a joke. But he didn’t. Instead he asked if I wanted to take a spin up to “the Swede’s” house. That’s how he always referred to Monica’s boyfriend. I supposed denying the man a real name made it all just a bit easier for Nate. But he needed to pick up his kids in a few minutes, so did I want to tag along?

  It was a ten-minute drive from door to door, barely long enough for two songs to come and go on the car stereo but more than enough time for my brother’s mood to visibly shift into a silent, gnawing anxiety.

  There was nothing in my brother’s rival’s Rosedale neighborhood for less than two million dollars. It was clear that Kaj Adolfsson was a bigger success than he could ever be. In business and in love he’d beaten him hands down, no contest, and as Nate pulled the Escalade up to the curb, and I asked him if he was okay, he looked at me, winked and said, “Peachy, couldn’t be fucking better,” then leaned on the horn.

  I should have seen that coming. He wasn’t about to knock. Instead, he got out of the car, crossed his arms over his chest and watched the palatial house with a sneering eye. It was a big grey monster and artfully landscaped, with a low fieldstone wall rising up from the lawn and running parallel to the sidewalk.

  I got out, too, and stood beside my brother in the cold. There was snow on the ground, and the sky was brooding with heavy blue clouds. It was midafternoon. Nate reached into the car and honked again, and finally the front door opened and Quinn appeared and waved, went quickly back inside and emerged a moment later carrying a backpack and wearing a wool hat and a blue ski jacket. Nate scooped up a snowball and threw it, and Quinn lunged and caught it and tossed it back at us. He was in the car and thumbing away at his GameBoy before Titus appeared a minute later. Waiting there on the other side of the stone wall, I saw the hesitation and regret in his face when he turned to his mother, as if reiterating the case he’d been making all week, or all month, that he didn’t want to leave. She was standing in the doorway with him, and I knew Nate saw it, too, and I felt more for him at that moment than I ever had in my life. He knew the battle was lost. The boy couldn’t have put a finer point on it, and when he kissed his mom and then shook hands with the man who suddenly appeared beside them, I swear I almost heard my brother’s heart die.

  For that trip Nate gave me a fifteen-year-old single malt. Quinn got Call of Duty 3. And for Titus, a baseball bat autographed by some renowned slugger. He brought out these presents after we got back to their place. Titus tapped the bat against the kitchen tile, rolled his eyes, then said in a weirdly squeaky Sponge-Bob voice, “Good for bashing heads.”

  Nate called Monica a few hours later, when the kids were upstairs watching TV. I could feel my own heart pounding with anxiety as they spoke.

  “You think so?” he said. “You think it’s fucking normal that a kid should say something about bashing heads? No. Not even remotely possible. And then I hear this—”

  After abruptly hanging up he swore and started pacing the room.

  “It’ll pass,” I said. “I know it’s tough.”

  “Yeah. Maybe when those kids grow up and realize what a bitch their mother was. But I’ve got to live with this. I’ll have to put up with this for the next twenty years.”

  He was rattled, as I would’ve been, but I thought he’d try to turn the point to his advantage, refer to it as justification for the comment he’d made about her sleeping with me—that it was making him crazy. He didn’t, though. He just kept steaming away, lost in the outrage of seeing his son shake hands with the devil.

  A week later I went by to see how they were holding up. Nate was in the basement, packing a cardboard box to overflowing with items and keepsakes from when we were kids.

  “Artifacts from the twilight zone,” he said. “Maybe you want some of this stuff. It’s been down here for years.”

  I was surprised our uncle had
n’t thrown everything out when he sold the house and moved away and that he’d had the foresight to pass it along to Nate. I went through the box, my amazement and wonder growing with each new discovery. An old sketchbook of mine fattened with drawings. A stringless yo-yo, a glass jar of beach stones and seashells, a scented green rabbit’s foot, a compass, a Staedtler Mars geometry set, a broken whistle and a cracked magnifying glass. All this was like a great puzzle I was hardly able to make heads or tails of. There was a leather pouch filled with Greek coins, a Signet edition of Hamlet, a baseball cap fitted for a ten-year-old head and a glass paperweight with a red-and-green angler’s fly in its centre. On the bottom of the box was a copy of Rubber Soul, with familiar initials inscribed on the back. I hadn’t seen it in years. Miles had lent me this record before he left for Montreal that first time, when I was still in high school and dreaming about following him off to university on the greatest adventure of our lives.

  Nate asked if I wouldn’t mind looking after the kids that night—he had a hot date—and I said I’d be happy to. After he left we got a couple movies and a pizza and had a boys’ night.

  I was glad to hear about the possibility of a new woman in my brother’s life. I knew what seeing Hilary had done for me; if not a cure for a broken heart, it was at least a fine distraction while you tended to the tough stuff in your life. Isabel and I weren’t at each other’s throats like Nate and Monica were, far from it, but I understood that the situation between us might shift and darken, that in the life of a troubled family there was always room for tragedy.

  After the first movie we raided the fridge and made baloney-and-mustard sandwiches. While we were eating, Titus asked if I wanted to see him cry milk. Taken by complete surprise, I asked him what that meant.

  “Cry milk,” he said. “Seriously. It’s exactly what it sounds like.”