Going Home Again (15 page)

I felt reinvigorated after I got back to Toronto,
which is to say the guilt and uncertainty that presided over me in those days moved into the background for a time. I knew that a few grey hours in Paris couldn’t change the reality that the minutes of my daughter’s life were ticking away without me and that with each passing week some pivotal event might occur that could only be narrated to me via Skype. I’d been aware of all this, of course, at least on some level, when her mother and I began discussing the likelihood of my going back to Canada. The end of our marriage, and that stirring notion of freedom that swelled both our heads, had provided the last necessary impetus. The weightlessness that buoyed me lasted only until I realized that I was doing little more than exchanging one set of challenges for another; added to this, I was rarely if ever sure which of the two sets of challenges was more interesting. Freedom’s an empty word, I decided. It is, by my measure, the most dangerous word in the English language, at least where it concerns husbands and wives. It is a constant tug, a deceitful promise, a disease that haunts bedrooms and breakfast tables from Whitehorse to Albuquerque. When I’d made the
decision to leave, I believed—astonishingly, it seems to me now—that it was in my grasp.

When I saw Hilary a few days after getting back, she hauled out my belated Christmas present. She’d noticed the notepads I left around the house, pulled them together and wrapped them in a Christmas bow. I looked through them that afternoon, as if for the first time. Some of them weren’t bad, I thought. The character I’d been trying to get right since I was a kid was a stripped down Waldo rip-off who spent most of his time skateboarding past or into unusual situations—bank robberies, space invasions, earthquakes. As part of the package she’d included the receipt for a ten-week comics-drawing class at a downtown community college. (The amount she’d paid was blacked out, with a happy face drawn beside it.) She told me she wasn’t going to take it personally if I didn’t like the class and had to drop it. I’d seemed stressed lately, she said, and she figured something like this might help me relax.

The academy had its grand opening the second week in January. I’d flown in a handful of agents and reps and put on a small presentation and a big banquet that ended up lasting well into the night. The majority of the students who’d enrolled were from Spain and Japan, a few from Mexico and South Korea. We were at something like 28 percent capacity, but it was early days yet. That first winter term would serve as a testdrive that would ease us into the high summer season when bookings were already looking strong.

I was putting in five long days a week now working
out the kinks and training staff. I had the European schools to look after, too. Come Saturday morning I’d wake up to find Hilary sleeping beside me and feel that wonderful new body against mine and think for a minute that maybe I could do this, that perhaps there was a future for me here after all. Possibly I’d broken the back of that slump that had held me for too long, and I was just steps away from turning that fiction of a marvelous bachelorhood year into a reality.

Saturday mornings were a good time for us. There was never any place we needed to be before noon, so we lounged around half naked and drowsy, in no special hurry to wake up, and eventually prepared an indulgent breakfast, had sex in surprising corners of the house, scrubbed each other’s back in the shower and read the business sections of the papers over a third cup of coffee. Hilary led a spinning class at a gym on the lakeshore on Saturday afternoons. After she left, I’d check messages to see if anything was going on over in Spain, and if there wasn’t I’d walk down to Nate’s house to see what was up.

If Titus and Quinn had a weekend with their mother, I’d cycle over to the downtown YMCA, just a few blocks up from the academy, and pound the heavy bag on the third floor until the tingling in my jaw and the back of my head started up. I’d picked up some gloves after tearing up my knuckles a few months earlier, but I wasn’t much of a boxer. Still, dancing around that bag got my heart pumping better than anything I’d ever done. Sometimes guys who really knew what
they were doing showed up and started working out. They’d wear plastic bags over their hoodies to help them get used to the extreme temperatures they’d feel in the ring, and they’d move their hands and feet with a beauty and rhythm I could’ve watched for hours. One of them, Milton, was a small sinewy guy in his late twenties with skin as black as the man’s I’d sold that stolen picture frame to years earlier in Spain. He was leaning against the wall watching me while he taped his hands.

“How long you been doing this?” he said.

I told him.

“Okay, man. Watch this.”

So I stepped aside, and he showed me, point by point, what I was doing wrong.

“Okay. Look, when you do this … no, no, not like that, man. Why aren’t you listening? Come on, brother. Do it again.”

Between rounds on the heavy bag I’d lean on the railing overlooking the basketball courts in the gym on the first floor. There were always kids down there shooting hoops or doing Tae Kwon Do. Sweating and breathing like I’d just come off a 10K run, I’d watch what was happening for a minute or two, then start up again for as long as I could stand it. I’d pound away for ten or fifteen minutes until my lungs started burning and I felt that electricity coursing through my body—a strange, prickling sensation that was entirely new to me—until I had to crouch against the wall gulping for air and consciously tell myself that this wasn’t the day
I was going to fall over and die in front of a bunch of strangers. When I finally got my heart rate back down to normal, I’d change for the pool and swim until I barely had the strength to haul myself up out of the water.

My first drawing class fell on a Wednesday evening near the end of January, not long after the academy’s official opening. I stayed at work late that day, hiked up my collar and walked the ten blocks through a heavy snowfall over to the School of Design on Adelaide Street. I was tired, an unremarkable state for me at that point, and casting around in my memory for happy thoughts about my daughter. I think I’d just put my Japanese contact back on a plane after a night on the town. I was feeling drained and woozy, and all I wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. I’d give it try, though, just to say I’d given it a fair shake; then I’d drop the class and buy Hilary a couple dozen roses and take her out for dinner to let her know the gesture had been appreciated.

I entered through the student gallery and found studio 2. There were seven of us in the class, the most talented a tall, slim Croatian named Suada whom I pegged to be in her midthirties. She wore all black and composed incredible panels that showed snipers hiding in church towers or hotel rooms as little kids and mothers picked through the streets for firewood. As far as I could tell no one else had nearly as much to say about the world as she did. I don’t think I heard her
speak two words the whole ten weeks. I noticed her that first day looking at the art taped to the exposed brick studio wall before the instructor walked in and started assigning easels.

At first I thought Vincent was another student. He was a pointy-bearded man with slender fingers, somewhere in his late fifties, I guessed, and introduced himself that evening with a round of handshakes and said he was looking forward to working with us. By the end of that first class I decided to stick with it.

He liked to start by bringing out a series of favorite frames or comic strips and explaining what made them special. He said there was a perfect work of art inside all of us but that only someone gifted and disciplined was able to bring it out into the light of day. After one of these introductions we’d settle in and work on some drawing exercises while he walked around the studio and asked, leaning over a shoulder, exactly what you were trying to get at. Most of us knew enough about drawing to realize that only the Croatian really had anything to offer. Once he used Suada’s work as an example of a great use of perspective; she had a frame of a sniper’s bullet spinning toward the viewer that I just couldn’t take my eyes off. He never talked about story arcs or blocking figures. That was comic-book territory, “and way beyond most of you,” but he liked to ask questions like “What’s this guy supposed to be doing?” or “Is there a reason this head’s so small?” I imagined he was one of those community-college teachers who’d been saved from economic ruin by a steady job and was toiling late into the night in
a brightly lit basement studio on some epic comics masterpiece. But he never brought in his own work, not being the sort, he told us, to talk about a work in progress.

Four or five weeks in, sometime in early March, I saw him coming up from the lockers, his red scarf already wrapped around his neck, a black wool cap set on his head, ears uncovered. He had a backpack in his right hand.

“That was a good class,” I said as we walked down a colorless hallway.

“Some talented artists in the group.”

“But no Stan Lees, I guess,” I said, putting my bike helmet on and fastening the snap under my chin. I’d bought it after seeing a courier get doored a few weeks earlier. The guy at the bike shop told me cyclists in the city were dropping like flies, getting their heads squashed, femurs crushed, arms busted.

“Cold night to ride,” Vincent said.

“I’m not that far, anyway.”

“Stick with it,” he said. “Exercise is a good habit. Artists rarely have those.” He opened the glass door that looked out onto Adelaide Street. “Can you ride with a beer or two in you?”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. Hilary was staying over that night, but she had an early morning appointment. I called her to say I was grabbing a beer with my instructor, and ten minutes later I was sitting at the bar facing an aquarium full of marvelously colored tropical fish and listening to Vincent talk.

He mentioned artists and genres and styles I’d
never heard of. I didn’t have any opinions regarding these things but tried to keep up and probably was pleased that he took me seriously enough to want to talk to me. Conversation eventually moved on to general matters. Back in the nineties he’d lived in San Francisco and worked in advertising. I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my life in Spain, my failed marriage, my beautiful daughter, the language academies. I handed him one of my business cards, which he examined with minimal interest.

“Nice and clean,” he said, then gave it back to me.

He’d been involved in some high-flying campaigns over the years. None of them rang a bell, I admitted, but that was likely due to the fact that I’d been away for so long. He’d turn sixty-one in May, he said, and had hated every minute of his sixteen years in advertising. Following a cancer scare that came and went about ten years ago now, he’d gotten up the courage to quit. His marriage fell apart not long after that.

“We get along better now than we ever did,” he said. “That’s the secret. Get out while you can. Before the silence turns toxic.”

Apparently he hadn’t looked back, this man. There didn’t seem to be a nostalgic bone in his body, no regrets, no living in the past. Things were good. He wouldn’t mind having the sort of money he used to make, he said, and he missed his son, who was backpacking through Thailand as we spoke, but that had nothing to do with changing jobs or leaving his marriage.

“What about teaching?” I said. “You like it?”

“Sure, I do. I like that I can tell people what I know and think without them getting pissed off at me. That’s essentially untrue in any other walk of life. People usually don’t want advice unless they’re paying for it.”

“I’d say you’re right about that,” I said.

I could only guess that teaching at a community college didn’t satisfy him aesthetically, since Vincent—based on the secrecy he shrouded his work in—considered himself an artist. But he was cheerful during class and listened intently when one of us explained to him over smudged graphite what it was we were trying to achieve. (The truth was we weren’t really trying to achieve all that much, other than clearing our heads after another uneventful Wednesday.) He seemed cheerful tonight, too, and when I reached for my wallet, he touched my hand and waved over the bartender, a heavyset redhead. “This guy thinks you’re going to take his money,” he told her.

She said, “He don’t know our Vincent very well then, does he?”

I could have sat there all night. She had a friendly bartender vibe about her and made it look like she enjoyed nothing more than pushing pints over that shiny mahogany bar top. A loop of eighties power pop rolled out at half volume from the speakers clamped to the brick wall behind us.

“Well, let’s make it even then,” I said. “What do you say to two more?”

“I wouldn’t argue,” Vincent said.

She replaced our glasses with fresh ones.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Not a problem,” she said, then moved off to serve a bent-back old guy down at the far end of the bar. A yellow fish the size of my little finger nibbled up and down the aquarium wall and around the silhouette of a black catfish that had pasted itself to the glass.

“No regrets, then?” I said.

“You lost me,” he said.

“I mean about your ex.”

“Water under the bridge of a circular river,” he said with a grin, tracing his finger around the circumference of his pint glass.

“You want to hear a story?” I said.

“That’s what they invented pubs for.”

So I told him about Christmas in Paris and that, while I’d come back feeling okay about things, I was now so full of yearning and guilt that I thought my heart was going to explode. When I’d dropped Ava off at Pablo’s that afternoon, I told Isabel about the promise I’d made to Ava about bringing her over next summer. This was bad timing, and it didn’t go over well, and now I wondered if I hadn’t blown it entirely.

“Kidnapping, eh?”

“That’s what it felt like. It just kind of reminded me how little say I have in all this.”

He nodded, thinking about his own life, maybe, or that he’d opened a can of worms he’d rather close down tight again. His face was hard to read. “No two ways about it,” he said.