by Liam Durcan
They rolled the ball back and forth until Paul grabbed it and tomahawked it off the sand and down the tarmac flats of Scheveningen beach. Nina got up to chase after the ball and threw it back. The recent sweep of paternal plumage aside, Patrick was never one for children. The sole benefit of being so much younger than his sisters was being almost the same age as his nieces and nephews and therefore spared the indignities of uncledom. No sitcom attempts at babysitting, no inevitable uncle categorization as creepy rogue or charmless loser. It occurred to him that as an adult, outside the setting of a mandatory medical-school rotation in Pediatrics, he’d never actually seen a child this close up. They were fascinating. A frontal lobe still in the process of developing, not yet capable of reining in behaviour. A little Gage who would outgrow his tantrums.
Suddenly Patrick felt drained, and he sat down. It took seconds for him to remember that sitting was simply not a natural posture at the beach and he stretched out on the edge of the blanket. The sand was neither cool nor warm in the late morning sunshine. But the sun was warm on his face, and soon random, unclaimed images carouselled by him as he began to doze. A flash of Birgita’s face. His old office at the university. His mother sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword. The antidepressant he had been taking was lighter fluid to the dreams, breathing a vivid heat into them. A park in the middle of summer, municipal park green, serotonin intense. Next, the face of Hernan, draining of colour, looking at him with all the hopeless expectation of a teacher who has placed too much importance on a certain lesson being learned. Hernan was in the tribunal’s booth, but Patrick was much closer than his usual seat in the gallery, next to him really, sensing something wrong. The tube of a stethoscope connected them. From that to a tunnel he remembered from Schiphol Airport, a moving sidewalk and fluorescent lights so dim it seemed the overcast sky had moved indoors to provide a more uniform distribution of weather woe. Through it all he felt the warmth, the animal comfort of warmth like a blanket pulled up over his shoulders. He shuddered awake to the sound of Nina talking. A hand to her head, cradling a phone. It used to be so comforting to listen to people talking to themselves, you knew they were crazy. Nina said goodbye in a singsong to someone half a world away. A different voice entirely. No produce being rerouted. Celia and Paul had disappeared from the blanket and were halfway to the water’s edge, the child plough-horse-pulling her there.
“You clear things up with your sister?”
“Yeah, we’re fine.”
“So,” Patrick said sitting up and trying not to make old man grunting noises, “you’re running the store. I’m impressed.”
“If I can turn it around, it’ll be a miracle.”
“I went in a while back, when I was in town. I liked the expansion.”
“That was Roberto’s decision, not mine. It put us in a difficult position; too big to be the friendly corner dep, still too small to have a hope of competing with the chains.”
“It looked prosperous enough.”
Nina smiled. “It’s getting there. There was a drop in business after all this with my dad came out in the news. But the neighbourhood is doing well, that’s been the most important factor.” She flipped open her phone again, checked a text message, grinned, and thumbed in a response. She closed the little clamshell and put it in her pocket.
“Celia told me that you still think Hernan is innocent,” Patrick announced.
“She’s projecting.” Projecting. The last time he’d spoken to Nina alone she wore a retainer and had posters of non-threatening boy bands on her bedroom wall.
“You think?”
“You saw how she reacted just now,” Nina said. “She gives this impression of being so together, but at the core, she has so much invested in him, in getting him out.” Patrick squinted at her through his better eye. She was a shadow with the late morning sun behind her, haloing her. He caught a glimpse of the sun and turned away, looking into the blue sky over the pier, and the sun persisted in flashbulb footsteps across the horizon. “As for me, guilty or not, you fight. That’s what upsets me most, the silence stuff. We all come over here to support him, to fight for him, and he won’t even speak to us.”
“I asked di Costini what he thought–”
“Don’t mention that loser to me. Sometimes I think he’s happy Dad’s not speaking.”
“He’s trying his best.”
Nina let out a sarcastic snort.
“If it weren’t for Caesar Oliveira, my father would be convicted already.”
“You’re not worried about Oliveira?”
“Why should I be worried?”
“Roberto thinks that–”
“A person could get rich betting against my brother.”
“I don’t know this Oliveira, but I look at the Democratic Voice, I look at what they do, and it worries me.”
Nina listened but made no effort to conceal her displeasure at what he was saying. He tried to remember what he’d read about the group, the names of former congressmen who worked for it, but the details were escaping him. “They supported using Guantanamo for interrogations, and I read they were behind those protests in Venezuela.”
“I didn’t know you were political, Mopito,” she said, laughing, and it was because he never considered himself political, always thought of himself as somehow above politics, that the words felt like an insult.
“Your mother wouldn’t have wanted them involved.”
“Well, my mother is dead. And you know what?” Nina continued, as though she didn’t want to give him the time to apologize. “I’d be worried about their motives if we had our choice of supporters, but we don’t. They’re it. The Canadian government washed its hands of us and you can imagine the Honduran community. The Democratic Voice found those witnesses, not di Costini. The Democratic Voice saved our store from bankruptcy and paid our way here and they’re the only ones who are trying to figure out where Dad will be able to go once this is over.”
“Do you mean if he’s acquitted?”
“Well, that too, but also if he’s convicted. They’ll have to find a country that’ll accept him. If not, he stays in Holland. That’s what Oliveira said.”
“Did you meet with him too, yesterday?”
Nina paused. She was no stranger to making blunt appraisals of value, and Patrick felt her weighing the question.
“No.”
Fifty yards away, Celia and Paul had become indistinct in the glare off the sand.
“For a long time I felt guilty about not calling.”
“What?”
“I didn’t call when he was accused of all this. I wrote him a letter after Marta died, but I didn’t, you know, give him my support. I feel like I betrayed him.”
“There wasn’t much you could have said.”
“How did he deal with it?”
“Dad? He dealt with it pretty much as you’d expect. He got a lawyer. I was the only one living at home with them and nobody ever said much about it. Isn’t that weird? I mean, how sick is that? Everyone is so up in arms about him not talking, but he never talked, never explained himself to any of us. But Mum waited for his explanation. She pleaded with him for months. But he still didn’t say anything. And after that, things got worse, Mum got depressed and I was freaking out, but when Celia came back from Toronto it was better, it was almost normal, and it was like we all concentrated on Mum getting better. She just wanted to stay in her room, she wanted nothing except her books. For a while it was like we could avoid even thinking about it. We just kept going. Then, one day, after another article in the newspaper, he sat Celia and me down and told us that the situation in Honduras was complicated but that the story would eventually come out. He asked us to be patient, he told us that we’d all get through this. I remember that word. Patient. Even back then I thought, oh boy, this isn’t going to turn out well. That was a month before Mum died.”
“And Celia stayed.”
Nina nodded. “I’m probably to blame for that. My father wasn’t
saying much, as usual, and Roberto was angry after Mum died and they started fighting. I needed Celia. It was either I go to Toronto or she stay in Montreal. And if I went, the store would close.”
“Is Celia happy?”
Nina looked off in the direction of her sister, shoes off and toeing the liquid edge of the North Sea.
“Dad’s in jail. We’re in Holland. It’s November. Not the recipe for happiness.”
“But before all this. Has she been with Paul’s father for a long time?”
“She told me not to talk about that with you.”
He was pleasantly appalled that Celia had even thought about it.
“Get out.”
“No, really. She called you insidious.”
“Tell me about Paul’s father,” Patrick urged, but Nina was a sphinx. “What’s everyone so paranoid about? I see you people every ten years. I live in another country. It’s natural to want to know what you people are up to.”
Nina looked at him. “You didn’t ask who I was seeing. Or Roberto.”
“I need to take a bath after what you told me about Roberto. And I saw you sending text-messages. But I was being discreet, you know, you’re still in your formative years,” he teased.
“Pfft. Like you care,” she said and smiled. “She was with Steven for three years.”
Any pleasure he felt with the past tense soured with mention of the name. Steven. An open audition for the part of Steven was called in Patrick’s mind. The truth was he had ego enough to allow only permutations of himself, allowing for minor improvements in looks or disposition. Steven, the sensitive boy, pallid and occasionally morose, less a personality than a series of affectations. Well, maybe that was too close. Stevo, then, the polar opposite: purveyor of good moods and possessor of a physique straight from the rugby scrum. Untroubled by doubts or deep thought and no match for her. Then came the brooding visionary Stefan, disdainful of any art form less painful than German expressionist cinema, lowering himself to associate with a commercial artist. Patrick hated them all.
“I’m going for a walk,” Patrick said, and Nina just nodded, sunflowering to catch the warmth.
He tried to get up from his seated position in one motion but felt dizzy and so he opted for the staged ascent, leaning to one side and using an arm as a support to get him to a steadier tripod stance and then to his feet. He brushed the sand off and looked around. Behind them, a grand, old-fashioned hotel with a complicated-looking red-tile roof occupied most of the prime real estate on the other side of the Strandweg.
It wasn’t far to Der Pier. A small staircase climb from the Strandweg. From the top, it was easier to appreciate the height of the bluffs that backed the beach and the vast expanse of sand to the west. Behind him, he found the hotel he’d seen in the guidebook, the Kurhaus. In the November sunshine it looked like an abandoned temple, an Angkor Wat of beach life. He continued walking on the pier, the North Sea visible below, from this angle a grey slate floor, freshly washed and scattering sudsy foam.
He was surprised by how painful it still was to think about Celia with someone else. He knew this was all nothing more than the conceit of the former boyfriend, that it was only a short dip in emotional maturity to the degenerative sphere of plaintively themed tattoos or drunken, wordless telephone calls in the middle of the night. And while he never expected Celia to resign herself to spinsterhood or wander through the rest of her life mumbling like a shattered Ophelia, the thought of her getting over him, being happy with someone else, seemed to be the most complete form of vengeance. He had no right. She’d say that to him if they were alone. He’d given up any right to even think about her in that way ten years ago.
It would have been easier on him if his relationship with Celia had ended differently. He would have preferred a seismic argument or a parting that followed on the heels of a long-simmering philosophical disagreement. That way, he could have kept believing they were incompatible and the end was coming sooner or later. But they never fought. They were content. Celia spoke in vague terms about going to New York, just as he did about applying for a residency in Boston, and it all seemed so adult, so sophisticated.
Patrick reasoned that for Celia, living in a house with all those voices–Nina now eleven, Roberto still taking pleasure in baiting her–his apartment, with its silence and further freedom not to have to say anything, was a relief. Silence meant no argument, no dissenting voice. No ultimatum. He grew used to Celia being in the apartment, more conscious of her absences, something that he hated about himself, something he promised wouldn’t happen. She would stay with him for days and then go back to Harvard Street for a week, without explanation, then he would come home to find her painting in the back room again. He’d asked her to move in permanently, she was already there incrementally, her paints were there, he said. But she said no.
She painted and he studied and there was silence (a García silence, he later told himself, although he was responsible for it too). As the time approached for him to make plans about Boston, first the tentative steps of applications and interviews, followed by the irrevocable decisions about visa applications and deposits on new apartments, he grew frustrated with Celia for the silences, for neither of them having any intervening words. And while he could have said something, simply sat down with her and demanded they clarify how they felt and how they were going to negotiate the next five years in their lives, that would have meant him declaring his need for her. It would have meant risking Celia telling him that nothing had really changed since that first day in Le Dépanneur Mondial, that the need wasn’t mutual.
Patrick hadn’t slept the night before it ended with Celia. It hadn’t been some long dark night of the soul; instead, like any fourth-year student going through a surgery rotation, he’d been up all night as a third assistant in the OR, getting a good view of the surgical resident’s shoulder, and in the morning he’d telephoned Celia to see if she wanted to go for breakfast before he went to sleep. After calling the Garcías’, he called home, thinking she’d be there. He listened to his own voice on the machine and then hung up.
He tried to round up a few friends to go for breakfast, but everyone had plans, so he headed out by himself, ending up at a small bacon and eggs place on Park Avenue. It was a busy little restaurant, close enough to the ghetto to be frequented by students and with prices so famously low that it was widely rumoured to be a front used by the mob for laundering money. Or so the story went, but the eggs were good. He was exhausted, yes, he remembered exhaustion being an integral part of the story. He ate alone and watched people. He was seated among clusters of friends and couples, and, as much as he tried, he could not block out the sounds of their conversation and laughter. He would have given anything to have a real grievance with Celia, any hint of betrayal would have been eagerly accepted, but all he had was this, having to eat alone and hear people enjoy themselves. Even his loneliness felt paltry and childish.
He didn’t go home. He went back to the hospital and drank coffee in the cafeteria for an hour or two. He phoned the apartment a couple of times, not able to wait until the third ring before hanging up and then spent the rest of the afternoon at a movie, stumbling into small potholes of sleep before being shaken awake by the huge planetary faces on the screen.
It was early evening when Patrick got home. When he tried opening the door, it thudded against its chain. A second later, Jane, one of Celia’s friends who was storing some canvases in their spare room, appeared in the gap, looking stark-eyed and frightened. She closed the door to unbolt the chain and then reopened it. Hadn’t Celia told him she was going to the de Kooning show in Toronto? He shook his head, he’d been working too much to talk to her about anything.
“Celia said I could do some work here, I hope you don’t mind.”
He shook his head again.
“I’ll be out of your hair by tomorrow, tops.”
“Sure. Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you okay?” Jane asked.
“Yeah. When is she coming back?”
“Tomorrow night, I think.”
“Uh-huh.”
He made some dinner and ate wordlessly, Jane joining him, talking and talking. And even though her mood seemed strange, it appealed to him: Jane was energized with the hum and hiss of a person operating on an unnatural level of alertness. It was unnerving at first, and he tried to dispel the suspicion that maybe she was taking something or wasn’t well, but he got past that and decided that he liked her fervour, that there was something distinctly attractive about it. She was speaking quickly and effusively about her work, how she had described her work to so and so over the phone and he said he could tell that it had promise, real promise, but that didn’t matter because she was developing her own aesthetic sense now and the dealers could go fuck themselves because she’d found what she was looking for, it was inside her, inside her all the time, she said.
Then she brushed the red hair away from where it had fallen over her face and smiled and said, “Do you want to see it?”
He said, “Sure,” and he listened to the word as he said it, the comfort of it, how it annihilated silence and erased doubt and made any act that followed seem necessary.
Three days later–a full two days after Celia should have returned but still hadn’t, the deep space of that extra forty-eight hours confirming that Jane had admitted what had happened between them to a friend and the news had been duly reported to Celia–Patrick was awakened by full-bodied hammering on the door of the apartment. He opened it to find Roberto standing there and he was transported to Le Dépanneur Mondial back in 1986; Roberto staring him down, jaw muscles contracting and relaxing as if he were gilled as well as angry. A shove to his chest followed, not really that much force, but enough at that time of the night to drive Patrick backwards into the hallway and flat on the floor. Then Roberto stood over him, asking where her paintings were. Patrick remembered being impressed at Roberto’s restraint, suspecting even then that he’d eventually pay more completely. Ah yes, in that light the punch on the Churchillplein made perfect sense. Sweeter for the wait, for the self-control shown that night in the apartment. Travelling halfway around the world and across a Den Haag plaza was a detail, just the coordinates of a job to be finished.