by Dennis Bock
“You’re saying nice things,” she said.
“I guess I am. But it’s true.”
“I don’t really—” She stopped herself.
“I think I know what you’re going to say.”
She shook her head and motioned with her hand that I should give her a minute.
“Okay,” I said.
And so I sat there waiting quietly for her to tell me that her marriage was over and that she’d been thinking about us and that maybe, once she got back on her feet again, maybe we could start slow, little by little, and see where we were. That’s why she’d come. I saw the confusion of a failed marriage in her face and felt sorry and pained that I couldn’t help her heal her broken heart any faster than the slow, agonizing time it would take.
“Miles jumped,” she said.
For a moment I was taken aback, the pivot was so jarring. “We don’t know that. No one can ever know that.”
“I do,” she said.
“You know he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t that sort of person. He was full of life. He wanted more than anything to—”
“I know he did.”
“You can’t say that,” I said. “And you shouldn’t say that.”
“I told him I wanted to be with you.” Her eyes began to tear up.
“I don’t understand.”
“I was a coward, Charlie. I was in love with you. And I didn’t know how else to tell him. It just happened.”
“You’re telling me something I can’t understand,” I said. “This is too much.”
“I told him after you fell asleep. We were lying in bed, and I said this horrible thing to him and just kept going and going and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say a word. I thought he didn’t care anymore. So I just kept going, taking him apart like that. And when I woke up he was gone.”
I remember not knowing what to feel or say that afternoon, and in some ways I still don’t. In less than a minute the last twenty years had been entirely recast, and the first love of my life was now grounded in the bedrock of a suicide. It was sadness I felt more than anything that day—I can say that now—but I felt angry, too. She’d wear that guilt forever, it would never go away, and there was nothing I could do or say about it to help her. Miles had died thinking the two people he loved most in his life had been laughing at him behind his back, and I couldn’t change that, either. That world of our youth, so long a source of strength for me, was gone.
I’d sat there stunned, my head abuzz, trying to process everything she’d told me, and checked the urge to rebuke her, to tell her she’d killed one of the most beautiful human beings either of us would ever know. Eventually she rose, wiped the tears from her eyes and silently left me to the privacy of my own thoughts.
I went for a hard ride along the river that afternoon, needing desperately to move. To do something. People in the office were looking at me with worried expressions, so I dipped down into the valley and rode for as long as I could, hoping this would clear my head, and when I got back to the house I showered and changed and tried to eat something. My friend had died all over again. That’s what I kept thinking. Suicide was an ending that never stopped. It went in circles, and the arc of its spirals grew wider as time passed, and you thought about it so much you had no idea anymore if you hadn’t actually been there, hadn’t in some way contributed to it or not done enough to keep it from happening. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I imagined what his last thoughts must have been—that the two people he’d loved most in his life had betrayed him. That was the last thing he knew, and it always would be.
That evening I walked over to Nate’s house, as I often did when he was away, to see if the cats needed any food or water. Their bowls were full—it seemed they hadn’t touched a thing. The older one, Mouse, appeared at the top of the landing. I climbed the stairs and picked her up and turned and saw Riley standing in the bathroom doorway in my brother’s robe. It was hanging open. She pulled the folds together quickly, but not fast enough. It was obvious what was going on, even before Nate called out to her from his bedroom.
“How about that towel, angel?” he said.
Her face turned red, then she slipped back into the bathroom and closed the door.
The next morning I stood on his doorstep, sweating, my heart pounding madly in my chest. The image of Riley in my brother’s bathrobe had stayed with me the whole night. I’d tossed and turned and remembered Nate draping his arm around Isabel’s shoulders years ago in Madrid and taking a wild swing at me in the street in front of that bar. But things were worse now than I ever could have imagined. I didn’t know what to think anymore. The door opened then. He was smiling.
“The return of the better brother,” he said.
“Is Riley still here?”
He was wearing sweatpants and a blue short-sleeve shirt and holding an unopened bottle—my present from the duty free, I was sure—in his right hand. A golf club was leaning against the sofa, and a coffee mug that he’d been putting into was turned over on the floor. Music was playing in the background.
“You expect me to kiss and tell? Here, go on, take it,” he said, offering me the bottle. It was a Courvoisier Vieille Réserve. I didn’t take it.
“Your kids are staying with their mother full-time now,” I said. “They don’t want anything to do with you anymore. You’re a selfish prick. They finally see that.”
He looked over my shoulder into the bright morning, then turned his eyes back to me. “You’ve gone over to the enemy, I see. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“You’ve only got yourself to blame, Nate.”
“Just wait till your turn comes, brother. That’s all I can say. When someone tells you Ava’s through with you? Is that when the wounded little brother comes crawling back for help?”
“I’m not here to talk about my daughter,” I said.
“Fair enough, then. Come on, for services rendered,” he said, offering me the bottle again. “Think of it as a fee. You earned it. I wouldn’t have had a chance with that sweet little piece of ass without your help.”
I took it by the neck and looked at it, and when he smiled and turned around, I stepped over the threshold after him and raised the bottle in the air and brought it down on his head as hard as I could.
He dropped to his knees and made a strange gurgling sound and slowly raised his hand and touched his head. He gazed up at me with a look of confusion, like he didn’t know who I was or what had just happened. Streaks of blood lined his face. He tried once to push himself up into a standing position but slumped forward and caught himself with his left hand against the sofa.
“Stay down,” I said.
I helped him into a sitting position on the couch and held a cushion against his head.
“Just stay there,” I said. “I’ll make this simple for you. If you so much as see her again, a single phone call, a text message, anything, your kids will be visiting you in prison. I promise you that.” Then I turned and walked back out into the sunshine.
Twelve
Three days later I flew into Madrid via Dublin for Ava’s thirteenth birthday. It was Saturday morning now, that cat-and-the-comma riddle was still fresh in my head, and there was still no news about my brother. Walking to work, I peered into the café across the street from the academy. Along with a few other restaurants and bars, the Café Comercial was one of our landmarks, a place where Isabel and I used to meet once or twice a week to sip coffee and chase down each other’s thoughts in a new language. Whenever I saw it now, I remembered us as we’d been long ago in a far less complicated time. I’d often stop and have a look inside and think about things, the past or maybe what lay ahead, and end up coming away with little sense that I was any wiser or better off than I’d been fifteen or twenty years earlier. And I’d peel myself from that window wondering if other people had those thoughts—that too many of life’s lessons were hidden away somewhere in the past like a forgotten stash of unopened Christmas presents moldering awa
y in a dark closet, no good to anyone.
Two young people were studying away at the table closest to the window. I could have laid my hand on their heads but for the streaked pane of glass between us. I recognized one, the girl, as a student at the academy. She’d been with us for years. There was a regular little home office spread out on the marble tabletop between them: a notebook and dictionary, two pens, coffee cups, a small yellow square of Post-its, saucers and spoons, empty sugar packets. After mistaking a stranger in the café for my brother, I started across the street to the Ocaso Seguros building, the most elegant in the neighborhood and home to my first academy, and pushed through the heavy door and stepped into the lobby. It was cool as a mountain stream in there, all marble and high ceilings. The old man at the desk nodded good morning. I rode the elevator to the fourth floor, waiting for the familiar ding of the bell, then stepped off the lift and padded down the long corridor to suite 4000.
Our receptionist came out from behind her desk and welcomed me back with a peck on each cheek. She was a young pretty woman named Rosa. That morning she smelled of nail polish and citrus and fanned herself lazily with a yellow notepad she’d scribbled all over in blue ink. Riding low in the heavy leather chairs we’d brought in last summer to give the lobby a warm, loungy feel were two sleepy-looking teenagers, buds plugged into their ears. “I see you’re holding down the fort,” I said.
She ripped the top leaf from the pad and handed it to me. “Siempre trabajando,” she said, and made some good-natured quip about being chained to her desk all day. I glanced at the note. My first meeting was running twenty minutes late. I slipped the paper into my pocket.
Half the city cleared out to make for the sierra or one of the coasts in August. Five of the ten classrooms were empty now, their chalkboards wiped as clean as the day they were installed. But the fall term started in October, just over four weeks away, and the lead-up to autumn kept the back office busy. I had appointments stacked throughout the day, starting with my Housing and Home Stay coordinator, who’d e-mailed earlier that morning with news that we were fourteen beds short for the Japanese contingent set to arrive at the end of September. After that I was meeting with reps and owners from the feeder schools in Milan, Edinburgh and Tokyo.
“You’ll know where to find me,” I said.
I walked down the corridor to my office and turned on the two fans facing my desk. I angled each in the direction of my empty chair, pushed the thought of my brother out of my head and got down to work.
Isabel called while I was in the middle of a meeting with the owner of the King’s Crown School of Languages, operating out of Tokyo and Osaka. A tall, slim man, and vaguely Western looking, Kichirou Gifu jetted between European capitals at least once a year, drumming up business, tweaking and renewing contracts and generally putting a face on his brand. He’d come over to Toronto for the opening last January. The contracts between our schools had represented 16 percent of my revenue over the past four years. For someone in his early fifties he seemed to have more energy than a man half his age. Tomorrow, more or less around the time Ava would be blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, he’d be in Rome to do there what he was doing here. Today he was wearing a light blue dress shirt, khakis, a red necktie and black loafers.
“Please, please,” he said, bowing his head and gesturing to the ringing phone on my desk.
I’d been expecting one of those two-minute postgame conversations that sometimes followed our family get-togethers. How did Ava seem to you? Was she taking this okay? Did you notice anything unusual?
“So what did you think?” Isabel said.
“Just that she takes great pleasure in stumping her parents with those brainteasers. Once we got that novel out of her hands—she seemed great.”
A few hours later, late that afternoon, I took Kichirou out for a drink. We’d found those fourteen additional beds we needed for the group coming in from Tokyo, and now we sat at a shaded table on the terrace of the Pizzeria Maravillas, in a plaza near the apartment Isabel and I had shared back when we first moved in together and where, in fact, Ava was conceived. Kichirou pushed a pack of Marlboros across the table and adjusted his sunglasses. I helped myself but didn’t light up until the waiter brought me a beer and a rum and Coke for Kichirou. The glasses were ice cold and sweating. We smoked and people-watched and tried not to talk about work.
“It’s weird,” I said.
“What’s weird?”
“My mind’s been playing tricks on me all day.”
“Tricks?” he said, retrieving a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing the beads of sweat from the bridge of his nose. He readjusted his shades, then returned the hankie to his pocket.
“I’m seeing my brother everywhere.”
He was silent for a moment. “I’ve had that. Last year in Stockholm I had jet lag so bad I thought every woman I saw was Claudia Schiffer.”
“That’s my kind of jet lag,” I said.
“It was hard getting back on the plane, that’s for sure,” he said.
Kichirou and I went out on the town whenever we visited the other’s territory. Midnight in Tokyo or Madrid with your brain and body still hardwired into a time zone on the other side of the planet can be a soul-crushing ordeal, we’d both agreed. So the host usually compensated by taking his guest out and staying up late into the wee hours. I was prepared to do the same tonight if he asked me to, but an old friend of his was driving up from Seville to see him, and I was off the hook. It wasn’t seven yet. I was looking forward to a sound sleep in my air-conditioned room at the Reina Victoria. First, I’d grab a swim in the hotel pool, then drink something cold up at the rooftop bar, and maybe flip through a magazine or newspaper. There was a nice view of the city from up there. After a civilized martini or two I would hit my pillow like a ton of bricks.
We shook hands on the sidewalk, and I hailed him a cab, tapped the roof twice, then started down the shady side of the street toward my hotel. At the Gran Via I saw the giant digital display next to the McDonald’s, the screen as big as a house and measuring the temperature in glowing red numbers—each the size of a grown man. Forty-four degrees, it said. Shielding my face from the sun with my briefcase, I waited for the lights at the zebra crossing, then continued back into the shade and down Montera Street to the Puerta del Sol, the heart of the city, where I turned left on San Jerónimo and weaved through the narrow streets to the Santa Ana Plaza.
Café tables were set up in the middle of the square, orange umbrellas angled against the evening sun. Sparrows were flying overhead in circles, and waiters were carrying drink trays and plates of food to the busy tables. The air smelled of olive oil and black tobacco—after all these years one of the most stirringly romantic aromas I know. Sitting alone at a table was an attractive woman wearing a red dress and leafing through a glossy magazine, her right leg crossed suggestively over her left. The elegant sandals she wore were the sort that laced partway up the ankle and shin. I walked over and cleared my throat. “Surprise, surprise,” I said.
“Que tal, guapo?” Isabel said, lifting herself from her seat to kiss my cheek.
I pulled up a chair and flagged a waiter.
The dress was something I’d bought for her a few years earlier, an ultrafeminine one of a kind that showed some leg, cherry red with a frill just above the knees. She’d put some effort into tonight, that was pretty obvious straight off. We hadn’t been out on the town alone together in years, and as we sat here now I wondered why she’d taken the trouble of doing herself up so beautifully and staking out this table in front of my hotel. I’d heard nothing that suggested things had gone sour with the constitutional lawyer.
“And Ava? Where’s the little genius this evening?”
She, I was informed, was catching a movie just down the street at the Cine Ideal with a friend and the girl’s mother, who’d make sure Ava got home safe and sound.
The waiter came with a couple of gin and tonics, and the sky turned from blue to apr
icot, then purple to black, and the modernized streetlamps that were meant to look like something out of the 1800s came on, and the square was bathed in a warm glow. To my surprise, we talked about my life as a single man. She’d never shown any interest in what was going on over in Toronto, apart from updates on how the business was faring.
“It’s chugging along,” I said. “Some ups and downs. I guess it’s something I’m getting used to.”
“And the girlfriend situation?” she said. “Are you happy?”
“I see you’ve got your spies on me,” I said.
“Of course,” she said, smiling.
“And what are you hearing?”
“You mean apart from the fact that she’s a good swimmer?”
“She is that,” I said.
Sticking mostly to the ups, I told Isabel about my life over there in distant Canada, a little bit about Hilary, and also Ava’s cousins and the good people working for me now.
“I’m glad you’re happy,” she said.
“Things work out in the end.”
I didn’t mention the phone call from Monica or what my brother had done. I was looking forward to the party and didn’t feel like spoiling the mood by dredging up what he’d just put me through. The air was finally starting to lose that sharp daytime heat, and we were having drinks in one of my favorite squares in the city, and the edge in Isabel’s voice that I’d come to expect was softer and more welcoming now than it had been in years. I wondered if we’d come to the point where we could actually talk like normal people instead of getting all twisted up and angry over the smallest detail or confusion. We stayed there drinking and talking pleasantly until just after midnight. And when it was time to walk her over to Atocha Street, where cabs were always circulating, she linked her arm through mine and then, without my expecting it, she kissed my face, not in parting but for no reason I could imagine.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“For a nice night,” she said. “For two nice nights.”