Going Home Again (13 page)

On a windy October afternoon in 2005
I asked Hilary if she’d like a tour of the new academy. Hilary was the woman I’d interrupted at the coffee shop after speaking with the Sikh business owner earlier that fall. She was sitting under the Picasso print in the Starbucks on Yonge Street, sipping a latte. “You’ve been listening to that racket for weeks,” I said. “What do you say?” The hammering and banging had been going on a lot longer than that, in fact, and things had warmed up between us considerably since our first meeting.

“It sounds like a war zone up there,” she said, drawing a strand of hair behind her ear.

I walked her through the maze of sawhorses and vats of plaster and extension cords. The classrooms were framed in at that point, and the drywall was going up. You now could get a good sense of what the whole place would look like in a few weeks.

“It’s a helluva project,” she said.

I showed her my office and the view looking down over College Street.

“Boss gets the best sight lines, I see,” she said.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I toured her through the rest of the place, then
locked up, and we strolled down to the Elephant & Castle for a drink and a basket of nachos. She was a Guinness drinker, she said—had been ever since a trip to Dublin a few years back.

“Fabulous place. I’m there twice a year, for a while now.”

“I suppose you have an academy there, too?”

I tilted my head and shrugged.

“Well, well. Mr. Big Shot,” she said. “What other plans for conquering the world should I know about?”

We ended up going home together that night, and soon after that we fell into a comfortable routine. I got the impression that she was as lonely as I was. She camouflaged this fact with a number of pressing needs: to get her book of essays ready for publication and to bail out of the continuing-studies program where she’d been teaching for too long—contract work, a “ghetto” as far as she was concerned—and find a full-time faculty job at a university. I learned over the weeks that followed about the boy named Hans she’d fallen in love with in high school. He became a police officer after they married and got to telling her stories about injecting urine into oranges as a practical joke around the station house, as if she’d see the humor in that. It was scary they let a guy like him carry a gun, she said. She’d married him at the age of eighteen, three months after graduating, then walked out on him the day she turned twenty-three. She’d never make a mistake like that again, she told me.

“Marrying a cop, you mean?” I asked.

“Marrying, period,” she said.

After she ditched Hans, she went to India on one of those soul-searching missions we all hear about. The difference is, this trip amounted to something. She joined up with an NGO in Delhi, where she stayed for three years. She’d never seen anything like it, she said.

“The slums?” I said.

“The slums were horrible, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the competition between the NGOs there. Before long it was obvious we were stabbing one another in the back trying to get the same job done, always fighting for funding and turf. I thought that’s just how India was. After that I came back here and got my undergraduate degree, then my master’s. But I was still thinking about it six years later, so off I went again. This time to the Philippines. I loved it, though it was the same thing there, fighting over every dollar and patch of ground just like in India. The survival instincts of most of those NGOs are the same. The ones I know, anyway. They almost forget what they’re doing it for. It’s like an end in itself, keeping the machine alive.”

I admired her determination and the idealism she kept imperfectly hidden beneath her hardened sense of life’s depressing fiascoes. She had a desk at a ten-member writing co-op on Ossington. She cycled out there most days when she wasn’t teaching and pored through her research and inched her essays toward completion. I read one of them, and it was incredibly complicated, full of charts and graphs meant to elucidate theses that remained intangible to me. I had
a strong head for business but didn’t understand much at all about this. I was sure she’d end up at Princeton.

That fall and winter she spent most Friday nights at my place. We’d meet at the coffee shop after work and cycle east into Little Chinatown, pick up some seafood and end up rolling around on my living room couch, then put supper together as she explained the big economic ideas she’d been hacking away at that day. I’d try to make a connection with something I’d learned in putting my language schools together, and she’d listen politely and maybe nod and say, “Yeah, that’s right, something along those lines,” but I always felt she thought the actual giving and taking of money somehow sullied the purity of the models she was interested in.

She also liked to talk about her friends, especially the three who’d been there for her at the end of her relationship with Hans. She was exceptionally devoted to these women, two of whom I met later that fall at a salsa club on College Street. I hadn’t been thrilled about the prospect of going to a club but felt, ridiculously I see now, that it might be something a man in my position—that is, one who was sleeping with a younger woman—was supposed to do. It wasn’t all that bad, though I’m sure I made a spectacle of myself. Paula and Danielle spent the night walking me through the dance steps they’d spin off and demonstrate, coming in and out like a yo-yo on a string, putting their lovely sweaty arms around me. “You lived in Madrid for how long?” Danielle said, shouting above the music. I tried
to convince them that Madrid had nothing to do with salsa, but they didn’t believe me.

A few hours later that night, Hilary sat half dressed and staring out my bedroom window over the neighborhood. A light rain had started to fall. “You know something funny?” she said.

“Tell me.”

“We never fought, Hans and I. I don’t think we argued once. I just started to see that he wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t my life. Can you believe that?”

“Sure I can.”

“I used to feel this incredible admiration. I was so in love I could taste it. I would have eaten glass for that man. And then I just didn’t care anymore.” She paused, staring out the dark window. “He didn’t change one bit. He didn’t do anything different. It was me.”

“First love,” I said.

“Maybe that’s our only true love. I don’t know, but I sometimes think so. Maybe everything after that’s just us trying to find what we’ve lost.” She looked at me with a sad half smile. “Maybe that’s too depressing to admit. I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”

I knew what she was getting at. She was talking about that hope you feel before the first heartbreak or betrayal or the first signs of your own limitations come into view. When your heart knows only the perfect impulse to share everything with someone without shame or resignation or restraint. She was talking about the difference between who we used to be and who we were now and how the space that remains when love
ends becomes an empty grey thing you never thought you’d become.

My spirits began to rise as the holiday season approached. I was due to go home for Christmas. I hadn’t seen Ava since coming back to Toronto, though we usually spoke once or twice a week. One snowy evening I inked nine green stars in the corresponding squares of the calendar hanging on my kitchen wall. Each symbolized a full day I’d spend with my daughter in Madrid.

The week before my departure Nate and I took the boys up to the cottage pictured in the handsome coffee-table book he’d pulled out for me my first day here. Though it was smaller in real life, it was all rustic charm and exposed rafters and bunk beds, everything you’d hope for in a place on a lake. There was a big stone fireplace, which we stoked up as soon as we pulled in, and from the windows you could see the lake and the evergreens on the far shore. In the afternoon we shoveled a square in the snow on the lake and skated until dark. I had no idea where Nate’s self-esteem was that winter, but I admired him for the confidence that remained and his ability to push his problems aside and keep on. I thought he might be an example to look to in my own circumstances. He truly enjoyed himself up there with his kids, chasing them around the rink, tossing them into soft piles of snow. This was the sort of roughhousing our father had done
with us and seemed, at those moments, to mean more than anything you could ever say. I was happy to see it and to remember our father like that, fully alive and deeply connected to the people who loved him.

I thought Nate would be fine in the long run—that his competitive nature would win the day if for no better reason than a bloody-minded determination to rub Monica’s nose in his happiness. Whatever was happening between Nate and his older son would settle. That’s what I decided that first evening up north. He’d fallen out with Titus for a time, but nothing had happened between them that couldn’t be corrected, and as the sun slipped behind the trees, I knew things were on the mend now, that at least here my family was coming together and that I was privileged to be part of it.

The afternoon we got back from the cottage, an e-mail from Isabel informed me that she was taking Ava to Paris for Christmas with Pablo, her boyfriend. I stared at the screen and read the message a second time, then stood up and threw the first thing I could find—a coffee mug—against the wall, and it exploded against the Christmas calendar.

“Like
fuck
you are,” I said, reaching for the phone.

At that moment, as I heard the call ring through, I hoped Pablo might pick up so I could tell him what a chump asshole he was and how his situation might look rosy right now but just you wait, my friend, your time will come. Sooner or later you’ll get a taste of what this backstabbing conniving bitch has in store
for you. Oh yes sir, just you wait. And then he’d pass the phone to Isabel, who’d freely admit I’d been right all along and was absolutely in the clear, that the list of mistakes and injustices she’d made in the lead up to this pathetic family drama was as long as her arm and that, yes, Christmas in Paris was the worst idea she’d ever had.

But then she answered the phone.

“You have no right. You hear me?” I said. “No right whatever. Don’t think for a second I’m going to let you do this. You know what this is called? This is called child abduction. Kidnapping! She’s my daughter, too. We talked about this.”

“It’s four days. And stop shouting, or I’ll hang up.”

If I had a second mug to throw, I would’ve thrown it then. “Four days? You think that’s nothing after I haven’t seen my daughter in five months? We’ll both lose if you want to play that game.”

There was a pause. I looked at the Christmas calendar. It was dripping with coffee. The mug was all over the kitchen floor.

“You’re forgetting one thing,” said the queen of calm, with nothing but killer instinct. “I’m raising our daughter, not you. You left, not me.”

She knew the oceans of guilt I was swimming in and was more than willing to hold my head under long enough to remind me that
I’d
gotten on that plane and disappeared, not her.

“You’re unbelievable,” I said.

“Pablo was never the issue. You know that.”

“Put her on the phone,” I said.

Half a minute later, when my daughter’s voice flooded my heart, I felt the urge to rip open my chest and cry like an eight-year-old girl.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, possibly the two sweetest words in the English language. “Have you heard?”

“You’re going to
Paris
.”

The futility of my situation had never felt as real to me as it did at that moment. Blindfolded and outnumbered, I was fighting a battle with both hands tied behind my back.

“The Champs-Élysées, the Eiffel Tower, all that stuff you see in pictures! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“It sure is. You’re a lucky girl. That’s a hell of a city.”

“And you don’t mind, right?”

“Christmas in Paris—who says no to that? Are you kidding?”

“You’re not mad at Mom, right?” she said.

“Me? Of course not,” I said, switching to Spanish and leaning my forehead against the kitchen cupboard. It had always been a language in which I found it easier to bury my lies.

“Mom’s telling me to get off the phone now,” she said. “Okay?”

“Okay, sweetheart.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

She spoke French to me two days later when she called from Pablo’s apartment on Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris. It was as if some brilliant little tour guide was
hanging on the other end of the line extolling the virtues of some new, previously undiscovered kingdom. I played along, muddling through in my passable French, prompting her with questions.

“Yes, mademoiselle, and do you like the little monkeys in the streets dancing to the accordion music?”

“Oh, yes. And their little hats.”

“And the bells they clap together?”

“Those are miniature tambourines, monsieur,” she said.

Her French was beautifully accented, and when she spoke of Pablo’s building, kindly providing the address, she made it sound like a castle, grand and elegant and five times bigger than the apartment she lived in back in Madrid. She said she could actually see the Eiffel Tower from her bedroom window. She’d been to the Louvre that day and toured through the catacombs beneath the city. The kicker was the no-holds-barred shopping spree Pablo had treated them to this morning. I clenched my teeth and told her it sounded like Christmas in Paris was a dream come true.

After drinking three small whiskeys and a watching a movie I couldn’t concentrate on, I Googled a street view of Pablo’s place on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Among the sidewalk crowd was a teenage girl riding a blue bicycle, and for an instant, I thought it was Ava. According to the date stamp on the images I trolled through, it was spring, two seasons removed from the depths of the winter I found myself trapped in. But when I saw the girl—her lovely cheek and the small point of an ear under her long, dark hair—my
heart jumped, a powerful surge of hope from points unknown flowed into me, and I stared at who was not but could’ve been my daughter, lost in thought and willing it to be her as if pondering a marvelous ghost facsimile of my own soul.