by Michael Helm
On the way home from the library Harold had mumbled at the traffic and dozed, but upon arrival he’d sprung from the car and made it up and into his bed without weaving, and Kim had wondered if he wasn’t more sober than he pretended. But she found two empty bottles of wine and a near-empty glass on the floor next to the loveseat. Assuming he hadn’t had a drink in at least three hours, it would be that long again before he was lucid – what on earth had the counsellor been expecting from their session? – so she set about putting the kitchen in order and then stood at the window, looking down at the city and at the building that had quite suddenly, it seemed, lifted from the ground at the attack scene.
When he’d visited her in the hospital he had spoken of moving from here, and yet he’d stayed, each day with this prospect of the incident being entombed. Would he allow himself to acknowledge that it could have been much worse? Maybe he had. Maybe he was getting past it, and the drinking had other sources. What did she know of him, other than that he had never learned to properly iron his clothes and had no colour sense?
She knew that he often seemed on the verge of a surrender that had never come. That he possessed a capacity for love that he didn’t know how to express. That he was at times a liar. Not so long ago, he’d been good at his work. His conversational ploys were transparent. He was guilty, pretended to be guileless. He lived at the limits of his strong intelligence in a state of higher bafflement.
And looking into the long sweep of him, imagining backwards from the man he was to the man he must have been, in stories, in photos, a narrowing. When he was her age, younger, his entirely intellectual interest in history had begun to reward him, and his outward character, a persona he himself was aware of, must have emerged in the trade. He would have left something of himself behind with each success. The post-doctoral fellowship, the first book, the first tenure-track job. There was a sadness inside sure ascendance.
She left him a note and drove to Little Italy for panini, and as she brought them back and parked the car, still thinking about Harold, the way she’d let her attention to him waver so easily over the years, an uneasiness came over her.
When she came through the door he was already up, standing in the kitchen in his underwear drinking coffee. He hadn’t seen the note. When he was dressed they took their sandwiches to the dining-room table. The sleep had partially restored him.
“Don’t expect me to explain myself. Not even when I’m sober.”
“You knew the counsellor. She’s had to see you before?”
“I send students to her.”
“Hannah suggested that you’ve seen her too.”
He was holding his sandwich before him with two hands, staring into it.
“It’s none of your business, or Hannah’s, but yes, a few times after what happened to you.”
“Why does Hannah know about it?”
“Because I missed some classes.”
“So she knows what happened.”
“I said it was a family matter. She let it go at that. And you can too.”
“And that’s what this was about today, then? Me?”
“I know it looks bad, Kim, but don’t worry too much. The drinking was just a sort of recreational accident. We’re different people to ourselves on the other side of a drunk.”
He wouldn’t recognize himself passing by.
“Mom says you showed up drunk at the house.”
“Well. I happened to be drunkenly in the neighbourhood.”
“And my detective says you called her when you’d been drinking. Where’s this coming from?”
“Burgundy, mostly.”
He had no idea what he was doing to her.
“She also said, Cosintino, that you’d heard rumours and had theories and seemed to be investigating things on your own.”
“I sound like a real wreck. I just asked her a few questions.”
He was a fleer of rooms. As she had been, as a girl.
She asked about the torn page. For a moment he seemed to consider pretending not to know what she was referring to.
“I think I wanted it for a gift.”
“A gift for who?”
“I’ve met an Anglican woman. She’s solid and strong and certainly deluded.”
“You’re seeing this woman?”
“She’d rather not have anything to do with me.”
“Hmm …”
“Then she isn’t so deluded, I know.”
They’d reached the end of what he’d tell her. It was a cold place. They each retreated into their thoughts. Yesterday she’d looked up from her life and found herself on a subway car, rolling into St. George Station. Faces shot past, she caught a few and watched them fly, and then the train stopped and she was out and climbing to ground level and entering the street in the smell of hot dogs and there was the vendor. She began the walk home, along the route she used to take as a student. Street by street, she was reclaiming each old path by walking it.
She wanted to tell him that it was working, this reclaiming, but it might seem she was asking for something he couldn’t give her, the sum of his absences.
He stood and took the remains of their lunch to the sink, then began hunting through his bottles of vitamins on the counter.
“What happened to me isn’t your fault. Is that what you’ve been thinking?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. We all stand accused of our lives.”
“Maybe you should stop showing up drunk for it.”
For a second there was no indication that he’d heard her.
“As bad coping goes, it is kind of a cliché,” he said finally.
“And we have sworn off clichés.”
He opened a bottle and shook out a pill.
“B complex. A good complex for drunks and nervous wrecks. Have one?”
“I’m getting past what happened but you work pretty hard lately at staying wrecked. Why is that?”
“It’s just entertainment, pointless sport. But the real always has its revenge, always has the last word. It’s the same in every language.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning we all end up in the same place. And it’s not heaven, and it lacks the colour of hell.” He smiled for her. “You sure you don’t want some vitamins?”
In the mornings now he came upstairs after Rosemary had left for the day and made a small breakfast of bread and cheese and poured a coffee and went out and sat on the front steps. Often he saw faces he recognized from the neighbourhood. One of them was an old woman who spoke no better English than he did. She would pass by and look at him and he would nod. She never spoke or smiled or acknowledged him at all beyond the look and she’d continue to a house two doors away where she’d stop on the sidewalk and talk to someone unseen, a woman in a window behind a curtain. The same exchange each day, about the weather, the garden, someone named David. One morning, finally, he heard the woman say, “He there, same again,” and then later, “He sit in front.” Thereafter he took his coffee inside.
The early afternoons were spent up on St. Clair Avenue in a little Latin bar that was mostly empty until the evening and would then run all night so loud sometimes that the police would come, which is why Rodrigo never went at night. He went in the day because Teresa worked there. They would sit together and she’d talk about news from home – he never had any, he had stopped sending and checking for emails –s and rumours about people she knew here, affairs, business successes, a young girl from the spring who would come in with a man she called her “baby father” and they’d dance all night and then the man had left her and she had ended up in jail and her child taken by the authorities. They spoke not at all about Luis. Teresa told the stories without delight or reproof as if she just wanted them added to the pictures of this place and the place they came from. She always moved them in their talks towards whole things. It was a joke between them that she would say his full name and he would say hers. Teresa Viviana Gallego. It put more truth between them but a secret t
oo because the others still called her Maria. It wasn’t clear to Rodrigo if they thought that she was her sister or were simply agreeing to maintain the untruth.
One night as the streetlights came up, he emerged from the subway directly into a police scene and saw a woman officer pulling a line of tape off the pavement next to the chalk figure of a small human body. People stood staring at the marked-off space. There seemed no actual witnesses. The policewoman’s partner was sitting alone in the cruiser. The passing cars slowed and drifted on. Someone said “a cyclist, not a kid on a bike,” and Rodrigo knew the victim was a woman.
Owing to the accident, the walk south and then west along the café strip was not itself, despite the smell of coffee in the air, young men with instrument cases dressed raggedly, women on patios laughing or bending close, in summer dresses. His love for this street had been failing recently because he knew now he would not be admitted into the possibilities it held. The knowledge had the odd effect of settling his attentions – he saw people as they were, happy, unseeing, hungry for the summer nights while they lasted. They moved differently depending on their decade of life. Some of the older ones, in their forties or fifties, they didn’t even look up from their books when the sexy young people walked by.
He sat at a bench on a corner with a view of cafés and card shops, a small movie theatre, a butcher’s with sausages the size of his leg hung in the window. When he’d first come to the city he would walk himself lost into parts he didn’t know, a new subway stop, choosing a bus at random, getting off, turning corners. He came to know the place by its smells and shapes, its local shops and corner stores and intersections where the sky was crossed with transit lines, where the window signs changed from an alphabet he knew to one of broken characters. In this neighbourhood he’d seen his first winter thunderstorm, near midnight and the grey overcast lit up like a gun muzzle in the rain.
He was falling in love with Teresa and it was too bad for them. Of course they would fall in love. No one else would have them, they weren’t people to build a future upon. He wondered if she knew what was happening to them and would she let it happen. She had come here to marry a Canadian and enjoy a Canadian life. She would want children, born here, with at least one parent who could not be sent away.
A block to the south was the church where the Italians ended their Easter procession. He’d seen the Christ in torn robes, a foil crown of thorns, and running shoes, and the Romans in plastic breastplates pretending to whip him. An old woman in black had wailed in the streets at the illusion. He had wondered at her sorrow. Only months ago. Now he thought back, and pictured himself watching them, and wondered at himself, unable as always to make sense of what he saw. When he was a boy his mother often told the story of Jesus at the empty tomb appearing to Mary Magdalene as a gardener. She said the story proved Jesus loved working people above all others. But Rodrigo now thought the story proved something else. Mary did not recognize him as a plain man. If a plain man is unthought of, unseen for what he is, even when he’s a prophet or the son of god, then what hope does a simple man have to be marked as good, as a worthy citizen or husband? His watching the procession, the slow, unreal cruelty, meant nothing in his favour because he’d been ruined by what he’d seen elsewhere, and in this new place, judged a killer.
His poor mother, her husband and one son dead, the other gone forever. She went to church twice daily, the new one without priests, full of singing, and believed that God spoke through her in a language no one understood.
He hated the course of his self-sorry thoughts. It was hot and he thought of Teresa, and then he put her out of his mind and thought of other women. He still fell in a boy’s kind of love twenty times a day. Men were made more simply than women, with their secret desires. Tonight he would go by the Latin dance club and sit on the patio, watching the women moving inside. If he was lucky, two in a group of three would be claimed by other men, and the third, left alone, might allow him to come by her table. Maybe tonight he would finally lie about himself – it was what some of them wanted – and she would take him home. If he could be foolish enough to live inside his hours and not look ahead, he could have a fool’s happiness until sleep, and sleep a fool’s sleep until morning.
She wakes and goes straight to her desk, carrying the dream with her in fragments. A street at night lined with maples on fire. A dog or cat burned up in a yard. Some certainty up ahead of her that she tries to follow. She stops on a sidewalk mid-block and sees a mark drawn in chalk on a tree lit up by the blazes.
The mark won’t come back to her. She’s seen it before on the periphery of her attention, like something glimpsed in passing. Only now does she realize it had been R in the dream, the certainty up ahead had been R, he’d led her to the mark on the tree. And sitting here, she thinks it’s very close now, this convergence of their lives, this impossible intersection. It’s all she can do not to run through the house to the front window and look for him.
And then as she imagines doing so, and begins to write of herself here in the room, getting up from her desk and heading for the window, she realizes the street she dreamt was her street, and she knows somehow where he was going.
She opened the garage. The heat trapped there moved against her and out the door. She stepped inside, let her eyes adjust. She took off her cotton sweater and hung it from the seat of her bike, then walked along the aisle formed by the stacks of Harold’s boxes, and already her back was itching from the dust drifting into her T-shirt.
Upon seeing it again, she remembered the pictograph she’d seen in the dream. It was markered on the side of one of Harold’s boxes. A cross inside a circle. She’d seen this box before, when she and Donald had carried in her few pieces of furniture, and every time she came in to get her bike or put it back. She must have registered the symbol without realizing it, and it had floated into her dream. A cross inside a circle, or a circled X. A kiss and a hug. Not, she decided, crosshairs in a gunsight.
As she lifted the box to the floor, exposing another behind, she saw the mark again. When she untucked the flaps, she found written in full on top of each box one of his old addresses, for a house in the city’s Riverdale neighbourhood. He’d been on sabbatical that year, living in Mexico City, and must have shipped them back home. The symbol was simply a circled letter T, meaning Toronto.
She had learned in the hardest of ways to trust her intuition.
The boxes’ contents had been shuffled over the years – the descriptive notations scribbled on the file folders no longer meant anything. She found old typewritten lectures on agrarian reform mixed with letters to Harold from his aunt inside an envelope marked “Grade Sheets, Term Assigns 82-86.” Course syllabi, exam papers, flight documents, illegible handwritten notes, phone numbers without names, bus transfers, a ruined pair of black leather shoes. In a folder with pay stubs from the years after he was gone for good, a picture of an unsmiling, dark young woman in shorts and a halter top, standing on an empty beach somewhere, with nothing written on the back.
When she came to it, about ten minutes later, she knew it at once. The script was typewritten, copied in blue, on mildewed pages cranked out with chemicals through some old deadly process. The file they were in was marked “Unreturned Work.” The folder’s name was “Job Ads.” There were three copies of his CV. She would have passed them by but for the thought that he was more or less her current age when he composed them. Years of achievement reduced to tight script. And she would have missed the discrepancies but for the way one line hung out to the edge of the unjustified right margin. The line had been removed for the subsequent CVs. It was under the subheading Scholarships and Awards. “Hannity Travel Scholarship. Santiago, Chile. June-September, 1973.” The other line missing from the later versions was under the subheading Languages. He’d studied Spanish at a school down there.
Why had he never mentioned he was in Chile during the dark days of the coup?
He’d saved the CV, like most of the junk, by chance, and
wouldn’t even know it was here. But she’d found a line to lead her, evidence to follow. Her training, intuition, even common sense told her so. Here was a detail within the larger mystery of his deep past. He liked to tell stories from his life, often of his travels, and often self-ridiculing, but always from the Montreal and Toronto years – at the cottage last winter he’d remembered a day trip he’d made with a boatload of historians up the Demerara into the Amazon, and when the motor died, their combined education left them unable to make fire and so they sat around in the dark all night imagining snakes in the trees. He never told stories from the time before he met Marian in ’74. Only from Marian had she learned that Harold’s mother had died when he was two, and his father had been itinerant, an alcoholic war veteran, quite likely a petty criminal. When she was old enough to be curious about his youth, and had asked him about it, he’d waved his hand and said, “I don’t live there. I never really did,” and that was understood to be the end of it.
It wasn’t just that he’d remade himself, or repudiated his origins. She’d always had the sense that part of his remaking involved forgetting his past. Now she had evidence that he’d actually erased a part of it, and a part that must have been at the very least vividly interesting to a budding historian of Latin America, and likely fraught with experience.
His life had two stories. Had she found the time and place where the first one ended?
She repacked and restacked the two boxes, took the CV, went into the house quietly through the back and found Marian still asleep, as she’d left her on last inspection. She sat at the kitchen table. It occurred to her to wonder whether she should bring Marian into the question of Harold’s time in Chile. Had she known? And if not, was there any point in altering her mother’s sense of the past, the early days with him, with the news that he’d been withholding something even then? Or maybe the missing line was, in fact, explicable, insignificant.