by Dennis Bock
“I’d pay to see that.” I laid out five dollars on the kitchen island.
He raised the glass to his nose and drew a small quantity of milk up into his sinuses, lowered the glass and plugged his nose with his fingers, then leaned forward as he bore down, and magically a white bead grew in the corner of his left eye and rolled down his cheek. He burst out laughing and pocketed the money. I was astonished, at once grossed out and impressed. With a talent like that, I told him, the world was at his feet. “This could get on TV,” I said.
Well before seeing him shake hands with Kaj Adolfsson, I’d noticed that Titus was a lot happier when his old man wasn’t around. I wanted to chalk it up to some evolutionary struggle between a father and his firstborn son but frankly didn’t know what was going on between them. I always dropped indirect praise in his father’s direction when Nate was away and pointed out that the reason he worked so hard was because of them; he was concerned for their future, worried about them all the time and couldn’t wait to get home to be with them. In effect, everything I was hoping someone was telling Ava about my absence from her life. Sometimes I even believed what I was saying. Titus would just keep doing whatever he was up to when I said these things, staring at the TV or looking down at the food on his plate, and he never challenged my assertions. Sometimes he’d shrug, but generally he let what I said slip away, whether unnoticed or internally mocked, I couldn’t be sure. Quinn didn’t seem to need my help. I knew he looked up to his father. My brother wasn’t around all that much, but when he was they played street hockey or basketball out front, and that seemed to be all this boy needed. It was a physical, easy sort of engagement that Nate was good at. Quinn occasionally wondered out loud why his mom and dad couldn’t live together anymore or why they didn’t just buy a bigger house so their bedrooms would be farther apart. At which Titus would say there wasn’t a house big enough for that anywhere. Quinn never really talked about his mother’s boyfriend other than to say that he liked going to Wonderworld. But the moment Titus made milk stream from his eye, it was clear to me that something in him remained essentially pure and innocent, and if he hated his dad, at least that hatred hadn’t spiraled out of control into the wider world. He wasn’t so far cowed by his father’s indifference that he couldn’t have fun and enjoy stupid little moments like this. What I needed from him, and what he anted up that evening, was an essential statement of his boyhood. He was still a kid.
Titus showed me the secret when I told him this was a trick I couldn’t live without. His brother and I listened to his instructions, and then we both tried it. I couldn’t stand the feeling of milk crawling up my nose like a cold finger. The moment I felt it approaching the spot behind my eyeball, I blew a heavy stream from my nose over the table, and they both burst out laughing and laughed until they practically rolled off their seats.
What was certain was that fifteen years from now they’d spill their guts to a wife or girlfriend or therapist about how disastrously their parents had destroyed each other’s prospects of happiness, as well as the push and pull of hating and loving them and wishing them dead or remarried or in love all over again in the same lightning, contradictory thought.
I knew that Quinn and Titus needed to be with their mother. Their dad was a distant second best, and I began to suspect that what he was going through was bigger than the end of a marriage, though I really had no idea. I wondered if he was hiding a bankruptcy or some crushing lawsuit. And I was prepared to listen if he wanted to start talking. But I knew Monica’s new boyfriend was like a pitchfork in his guts, as Pablo was in mine. His only solution to this was to despise her and start sleeping with every woman in sight, which is what I thought he was doing on all those trips of his. Maybe in the short run he needed to bury himself in some temporary fantasy. Eventually the vitriol against Monica would fade, and he’d settle into a quietly resentful and outwardly smooth bachelorhood.
He didn’t come home that night. I hoped that my heartsick and chronically selfish brother, despite the odds and all the patterns he’d traced through his life, had met a nice girl. I don’t tend toward fairy tales but was almost optimistic that night after I got his kids to bed. I thought maybe he’d found a woman who might teach him, by her own steady measure of strength and generosity, that there was power and comfort in beneficence and that he still had something positive to give.
Then, just before two o’clock, a knock on his front door woke me up. Thinking Nate had locked himself out, I wrapped myself in his housecoat, went downstairs and opened the door. It wasn’t Nate.
“You Nathaniel?” the man said. He was overweight, about fifty and wore a nice suit with a red carnation in his lapel. It looked like he was coming from a fancy event.
I told him it was a bit late to be knocking on the doors of people you didn’t even know to look at.
He muttered a quick apology, then turned and walked to the big white SUV idling on the curb, climbed in and pulled away. After watching the tail-lights disappear, I went upstairs and started snooping through Nate’s desk, dresser drawers and bedroom closets. I had no idea what I was looking for. The two possibilities that had crossed my mind were equally troubling. First, that this guy was the boyfriend or husband of the woman Nate had taken out that night. Or that I was looking for pills or a Baggie that might have been intended for this late-night visitor.
“Someone driving a white SUV Benz came by last night,” I said the next morning. Nate was texting at the kitchen island, a mug of coffee steaming beside him. “Any idea what he was looking for? He thought I was you.”
“Tall thin guy?”
“On the fat side actually.”
He shrugged. “No clue.”
I walked home with Miles’s copy of Rubber Soul tucked under my arm. I left it on the kitchen counter while I made some business calls and tried to organize the day in my head. But my thoughts kept turning to Holly. The obsession I’d felt after seeing her for the first time in years had softened by then. But it was still there, buried like a seed, and that old Beatles record, like a spot of sunshine, brought it curling back up to the surface.
Nine
In the early spring we learned that Titus was playing hooky. He’d been doing this for close to two weeks when Monica called me at work to say that the police had picked him up on Yonge Street, just a few blocks south of the academy. She wanted me to come over and try to talk some sense into him. Nate was traveling—“not that he’d have any idea how to talk to his son”—and wouldn’t be home until the weekend. So I drove over and knocked on their door.
Kaj Adolfsson opened it with a smile on his face. “Come on in,” he said. When I stepped forward, he shut the door behind me and offered to take my coat.
“I won’t be staying long,” I said.
“Okay, you’ll be wanting to speak with Monica?” he said in that strange singsong accent of his.
He was a handsome man with sharp blue eyes, a few inches shorter than me, and balding. He wore a greying blond Frank Zappa–style mustache and goatee that drew your attention away from that shiny pate of his.
I’d been feeling like a traitor since the minute I agreed to do Monica this favor, and now it only got worse. Stepping through that threshold had compromised whatever loyalty my brother might have reasonably expected of me. Here was a summit in progress, agreed to by me and held in enemy territory. Only a few hours earlier I’d spoken with Nate as he’d passed through some airport in the Midwest, caught between planes. Of course I’d failed to mention my plans for the evening, that I’d be standing in the Swede’s living room making nice. I wondered now if this had been a strategic misstep. My brother would hear about it, surely, and the fact that I’d set foot in the house of the man who had stolen his wife would erase any purchase I’d gained with him since coming back. He’d see it as nothing but the betrayal I myself might have felt if he’d agreed to a secret meeting with Pablo on the far side of the Atlantic.
The foyer, whose centrepiece was a spiral staircase lea
ding to the second floor, was the size of an average living room. I stood silently, waiting, as he went to the stairs and called up.
“Nathaniel’s brother is here.”
I felt something turn inside me that I can only describe as nostalgia and regret when I heard Monica’s response echo around up there. What I heard was the voice of a woman who already seemed at home in her new life. It wasn’t the nature of Monica’s sudden shift that astounded me—that she could end up so quickly in another man’s bed—but the envy that weighed on my heart. Here stood the victor, the balding Frank Zappa look-alike, the Swedish version of my constitutional court lawyer, the man whose heart and entrails my brother ate every night in his dreams.
Nate, who at that very moment might have been standing at some airport hotel window staring soulfully over a bleak America, was defeated. Whom did he have left but me, his only brother and last ally? By his reckoning his wife had begun cheating on him sometime shortly after Titus’s tenth birthday. He should’ve known what was happening, he said, but hadn’t picked up on the signs. Suddenly, out of the blue, his terminally grumpy wife was all smiles, which was, to a slightly lesser degree, what had happened in my own case. Isabel, busier than ever and dutifully occupied with committees and meetings and late dinners with friends I barely knew and associates I’d never heard of, seemed to breeze in and out of our home like a harried movie star dropping in for a quick wardrobe change. She played the role well enough for Ava to believe that her mother was entering into a demanding and exciting new phase in her life. My brother had no idea what Monica was up to until the day he got home after a trip and saw that half her closets had been cleared out. He said he sat down on the edge of their bed and cried, though I have a hard time believing this. In my own story Isabel had inched her wedding band off her finger and slid it quietly across the breakfast table and said she had something to tell me.
I found Titus and his mother sitting at a computer in his bedroom on the second floor watching YouTube videos of Japanese kids on skateboards smacking themselves against sidewalks and lampposts. They waved me in, and I watched a couple of spectacular wipeouts with them, and then Monica, who was dressed in jeans and a light blue sweatshirt, led me out of the room and downstairs.
“Titus doesn’t want to go back to his father’s house,” she said. “He hates it there.” There was a serving window between the kitchen and the living room, where Monica and I sat facing each other. Hearing the fridge door open and plates clattering, I knew Kaj was hovering back there somewhere.
“I was hoping you’d help prepare Nate for this,” she said.
“You want me to tell him? I don’t think that’s my place.”
“Just start easing him into the thought. I don’t know. He can’t even look at me anymore without calling me some name.”
She seemed nervous, almost afraid. I guessed it wasn’t an easy thing for her to ask me.
“I’m thinking of the boys,” she said. “It’s mostly you who takes care of them, anyway. I know that.”
“Maybe Titus just needs time. It’s still pretty fresh, right?”
“You know what your brother’s like. He’s not changing.”
Kaj entered the living room now and handed me a glass of beer. His uncomfortable expression—he was trying to smile—told me he knew exactly why I’d been called here.
“My brother may have trouble showing it,” I said, “but he loves those kids. He’s just—”
“Loving your kids doesn’t make you a good father,” she said.
This was true. You could love your child up and down with every last fiber in your heart and soul and still be a shitty parent. You can fuck them up every which way and have no idea that you’re doing it. I wondered how much of that statement had been directed at me. She knew the basics of my story, of course, but beyond that she’d have her own theories and speculations. Did she think I was as cold and irresponsible as my brother was? I didn’t think so. I reasoned that she might not appreciate that I’d gradually been taking over his fatherly duties. Did she believe Isabel had asked me to clear out of my daughter’s life, like she wanted Nate out of their sons’? It was an uncomfortable parallel that hadn’t occurred to me before now. Maybe she thought I knew something about dilemmas like the one we were facing now. Did she think I’d been on the receiving end of such a conversation and now might apply some much-needed experience to my brother’s case?
“Does Quinn feel the same?” I said.
“No.”
I took a sip of beer and leaned back in my seat and thought things through. “Let me talk to him,” I said.
“Good.”
“I mean Titus.”
Upstairs I found him reading on his back on the floor in his bedroom, the book positioned in his two hands like a small shield between his face and the ceiling light. He seemed relaxed and gripped by what he was reading, the most recent novel by Holly’s author, the young man we’d seen at the fair in September.
“Hola,” Titus said.
“There’s hope for you yet.”
“Yo quiero Taco Bell.”
“I’m impressed,” I said.
“Isn’t it awesome?” He grimaced, let out a loud fart, then went back to his reading. I waited for him to stop giggling.
“Listen, Titus,” I said. “Your mom says you’d rather stay here. I get that.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You’re not getting along with your dad.”
He shrugged.
“I guess he’s not in town much these days,” I said.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“I like it here,” he said, shrugging again. He turned the book over on his chest. “It’s awesome. This place is a mansion. There’s practically a TV in every room.”
“I wonder if you should think a bit more about this before we talk to your dad. Can you do that?”
“Are you two really related?” he said.
“We’re not that different.” I’d meant to suggest that my brother had some reserve of good sense that would surprise his son one day, though when I said these words it sounded more like a nod toward some waiting calamity, that both my brother and I were turned in the wrong direction. “Your dad’s busy. I think that’s all it is.” The lie almost caught in my throat.
“You actually give a shit about other people, not just yourself,” he said. “Or is that a big lie, too?”
“It’s just easier for an uncle. And I’m not such a great dad, either. Look at me. I’m over here, and my daughter’s back in Spain.” I reached down and lifted the book off his chest and read the first line on the open page.
“It’s nowhere near as good as his last one,” he said, taking it back.
“Your dad’s a complicated guy. Maybe that runs in the family. But he loves you guys.”
“You’re divorced, too, right?”
“Soon to be.”
“Are you sad about that?”
“Yes.”
“And what about your daughter? Is she sad about it?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you and her mom just make up?” he said.
It was a question I couldn’t answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “People change. Time changes people.” It was one of those stupid adult evasions he’d heard a hundred times in his life, I was sure. I regretted pulling him out of the forgetfulness of his book.
“Okay. Tell me this: if getting a divorce is so great,” he said, “then why’s everybody still so miserable? Why are you miserable? Why’s my mom always so sad?”
“Everything always works out in the end. You’ll see.”
“Mr. Everything’s Fine.”
“Just think about it a bit more, okay? Your dad’s back in a few days. We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, stop ditching school.”
The look on his face told me he wasn’t convinced. The screen saver on the laptop we’d been watching skateboarding videos on showed a number of sharks sw
imming back and forth in front of a sunken pirate ship. He was watching the screen now, maybe lost in thought. I touched the top of his head. “Let me know how you like that book, okay?”
I found my host standing beside the coffee table downstairs holding a weird-looking rifle and vest. “You okay?” he said.
“I’m good.”
“You’ve got to give this a try.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll love it,” he said. “It’s the latest model in the laser-tag market. Just got it in up at the place. The kids are eating it up.”
I’d heard all about Wonderworld by then. They had Whirlyball, paintball, sports courts and indoor minigolf, arcade and redemption games, simulators and batting cages. Their laser-tag facilities were the jewel in the crown. Kids from all around donned futuristic vests and goggles and set out in pursuit of one another in one of four different landscapes—jungle, war zone, planet ZOINKS and the Old West.
“Hand that vest over,” I said.
I slipped it on and held my hands up in the air.
He shot me three times at point-blank range. “How do you like that?” he said. “Zing, zing, zing.”
It felt like a finger jabbing my heart.
I took Titus and Quinn to a movie later that week. Their dad was out of town again, Cincinnati, then Dunedin, then Naples. I’d said nothing to him about my conversation with Monica, though I’d left the question open in my own mind. Like I said, it wasn’t my place, and I was also afraid that sharing this with him might set him off on some path I wasn’t prepared to follow. I imagined again the sense of betrayal he’d feel. It would be a final crushing of the spirit. I then wondered if my leaving Madrid had something to do with avoiding putting Ava in the position where she’d have to choose between me and her mother, knowing that I’d barely have a fighting chance if it actually came down to that. I worried, too, how news of Titus’s dissatisfaction would make their relationship even more adversarial than it already was.
At the movie I sat in the aisle seat next to Quinn. Up on the screen a man’s brains exploded from his head, and the villain holding the weapon grimaced and wiped the blood from his cheek. Halfway through the film, Quinn whispered that he had to use the washroom. I stood waiting outside the men’s room and watched the teenagers we’d bought our popcorn and Cokes from at the concession stand. With buds plugged into their ears, their heads bobbing in unison, they were having a great time. The girl wore a railroad track of braces in her mouth. She smiled, much like Ava did, first broadly and unconsciously, then quickly drew her upper lip down over the teeth. The sound of machine guns crackled up from the theatre. What bank robbery was I missing, I wondered. What soppy kiss, when the silence returned, had I been spared?