Going Home Again (8 page)

At night I lay awake wondering if Holly wasn’t waiting for a sign from me. That meeting seemed too perfect and meaningful to be anything less than predestined. I was reaching, obviously. I appreciate that now. But here I was, newly single and casting about in the city of my youth, and out from the past steps my first love. On one level I knew how unrealistic it all was; yet the fantasy of stepping back in time with her played on in my head. I found myself thinking about this at all hours of the day and night. Hovering over my keyboard after a long day, I learned the name and location of the office building where she worked and the long list of books she’d published in her career. There were photographs of Holly smiling for the camera at glitzy parties, galas and prize-giving ceremonies. One afternoon I caught myself picking up the phone about to call her office before I stopped myself. So instead of stepping back into the safety of the past, I stepped out onto the streets and began to call in on half a dozen shops or restaurants every day to present my business card and talk about how I’d be bringing some new foot traffic into the neighborhood—the sort of commonsense
meet-and-greet, low-intensity PR campaign I’d used for each of my previous start-ups.

One windy afternoon a heavyset Sikh sporting a magnificent grey beard examined my card with unusual interest after we shook hands. His name was Paul, and he owned and operated the electronics shop two blocks north of me, presiding over a thousand square feet of oversize flat screens that played endless loops of high-definition golf greens, hang-gliding adventures and the dancing turbulence of the Great Barrier Reef. “Oh, you are most welcome to the neighborhood, sir,” he said with a smile, slipping the card into his breast pocket. “My brother is also involved in the language business. He is a translator in New Delhi. The greatest of cities. He is accredited in nine languages. Perhaps you will be interested in joining the Downtown Business Council?”

After Paul loaded me up with the relevant documents, I dipped into the Starbucks three floors below the academy and saw the woman who at this time of day often sat reading at the table beneath the big Picasso print on the exposed brick of the west wall. She was an attractive thirty-something, I guessed, and sometimes she looked up from her book and smiled when she saw me. I thought maybe she’d help push the thoughts of Holly out of my head. She was there almost every afternoon, sitting alone, a silver bracelet flashing against her tan skin as she sipped her chai latte. I was feeling connected, possibly even gregarious, my new association with Paul at the electronics shop having buoyed me with a high sense of community spirit.

“Nice little niche you’ve found yourself,” I said.

She lifted her eyes to mine. They were quite beautiful, I thought, and showed surprise, then impatience and last, a small measure of sympathy.

“Sorry. I’ve got to do this,” she said, indicating the paperwork spread out before her.

“You bet,” I said. “I know the feeling.”

I joined the queue, chastened, and even before my coffee was served, she collected her things and walked out the door.

 Four

Nate came to Montreal
for a lacrosse tournament in the fall of my second year at McGill. At the time I was living with three engineering students in an old house on Rue Jeanne-Mance, a place that reeked of moldy insulation and damp plaster once the furnace was turned on in the fall, and somehow that smell lingered on through the winter until spring came and the windows were opened to let in the freshness of a new season. The dining room table, a slab of unfinished particle board, sagged perceptibly, like the belly of a fat old fish. My roommates, all of whom were two years ahead of me, had known one another since their first weeks at McGill. They spent their days at lectures and studying at the library. As a result I hardly saw them, and they paid very little attention to me when I did. On occasion Stevens, who lifted weights in his bedroom, which was right beside mine, leaned a sweaty shoulder against my door frame and told me that I was welcome to tag along to one of their engineering parties. “Looks like you could use a piece of tail, Bellerose,” he’d say, and I’d tell him thanks, but I was all right for now. On Saturday mornings they played ball hockey in the house league and afterward went off drinking for the rest of the day. I
cleared out on the weekends they brought the team back to the house. I’d go to the pool on campus or find a carrel at the library and read all day. There was always a stack of novels I had to get through. During the week they studied incessantly and rarely got home before midnight. I admired how they could turn that switch on and off in their heads.

It was a Thursday night when my brother called. I was home alone—doing what, I can’t remember—but I know I was alone. I’d just broken it off with Sandra, the volleyball player. We had decided to go to the same university after a couple of good months together in high school, and things hadn’t worked out as well as we’d hoped. When I answered the phone, I heard my brother’s voice. Two years had passed since we’d last seen each other. “Uncle Hugh gave me your number. He figured I should give you a call. So I’m calling.”

His team, the Syracuse Orange, had been eliminated in the second round of the conference finals, and now he was sitting in a dumpy hotel room somewhere downtown with a couple of his teammates watching TV and drinking Courvoisier. I heard noises in the background, loud talking and laughing, and a girl’s voice. Nate had captained the lacrosse team in high school and won most of the medals and ribbons that counted, and now he was trying to do the same in university. I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t surrounded by girls. He knew how to talk to them, and what to say, and after some exchange in the school hallway—chuckling to himself as he sauntered past my locker, where I stood helpless, two years his junior and
in awe—he would turn to the girl I was trying to talk to, or to the girl two lockers down who smiled at me from time to time, and whom I dreamed of at night, and he’d talk to her effortlessly or make a wisecrack at my expense that made her laugh and look at her feet and forget all about me once he walked off down the hall. It was like a game to him. When he ended up winning a lacrosse scholarship to Syracuse University, I was relieved to see him go.

Nate’s hotel was in a part of the city I wasn’t familiar with. It was a cold night, and the taxi’s headlights caught the colors of the leaves drifting over the street, and when the driver finally found the address Nate had provided, I saw the billboard he’d told me to look for. Situated over an abandoned parking lot and fastened to the side of the hotel, it showed a pretty model’s face, an advertisement for an optometrist, I think.

I wished I was at home reading or at Miles and Holly’s apartment. I was over there once or twice a week in those days. But I felt I should make the effort to see my brother. In fact, I almost tricked myself into believing that he’d come all the way from Syracuse to visit me, though obviously it was a lacrosse tournament that had brought him here.

When I got to his room on the fifth floor, he introduced me to the girl whose voice I’d heard over the phone. Her back up against the headboard, she was sitting on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles. She had a very attractive face. “My name’s Bunny,” she told me.

Nate beamed ecstatically. “Bunny! Can you believe that? We have Bunny here with us this evening.”

She worked at the strip club where they’d spent the afternoon. Her hair touched the tops of her shoulders, and her bangs were cut high and straight across her forehead. Her fingernails were painted in an alternating black-and-white pattern, almost akin to a piano keyboard, and when Nate introduced me she smiled and said, “Hello, little brother.”

The other two people in the room that night were, like him, forwards—attackmen, in lacrosse parlance—and they all played together on the same line. One of them explained how they roamed around the opponent’s half of the field waiting to pounce, always pressing. They were predators, he said. It was instinct, nothing thought out, nothing verbal. You exploited the moment. At any instant each knew where the other two were on the field. That night it looked like they had that same nonverbal communication going on. The hotel room was like a playing field, and Bunny was the object of their attack. Without needing to speak or make eye contact, they chucked beers to one another and traded high fives, and when Pete—the dark-haired one who’d explained the magic of the game—took Bunny into the washroom and locked the door, my brother smiled and slid down against the headboard and folded his hands over his chest with a look of great satisfaction on his face, like he himself had just scored the winning goal.

She went around to each of us that night, and when it was my turn, Bunny grabbed her small leather purse and led me into the bathroom and closed the door behind us. I got out my money and gave it to her. She
counted it and put it in her purse, then sat on the edge of the tub and opened my fly. I watched the top of her head for as long as I could, then closed my eyes. She didn’t want to embarrass me. Everything happened very fast. When she was through, she slipped the red purse off her shoulder again and took out a paperback copy of
L’Étranger
and started reading. I did myself back up and leaned against the tiled wall and watched her. She might have been waiting for a bus or for a waiter to bring her a burger and plate of fries. I hadn’t needed as much time as my brother or his friends had, though we waited like that for as long as the others had taken. Her checkered black-and-white fingernails looked beautiful and modern against the dull, scuffed cover of her book. She mouthed the words as they came to her and rolled each page softly between her fingertips before turning it.

Later that night I lay in bed and thought about doing all the things I hadn’t done with Bunny and wanted to do now. I’d wanted to hold my eyes open and look into her eyes when I came, to strip off her clothes and explore her body. But none of that had happened. My mind raced that night. We’d finally gone back out into the main room after enough time had passed, and soon after that I took a cab home.

My brother had smiled, slapped me on the back and said, “Okay, stud. Go home and get some beauty rest.”

I told Miles I was thinking about dropping out and going traveling. This was a few weeks after Nate’s visit.

“Why would you do that?” he said.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just bored.”

We were sitting at one of those old beer halls with great big round tables that seat twenty or twenty-five people. It was loud, everyone talking and laughing. I think midterms might have been winding down just then. Students were out celebrating, getting drunk and looking for sex. MTV videos were blaring on a big screen at one end of the room, and we were forced to raise our voices to hear each other.

“Okay,” he said. “So what’s stopping you?”

“That’s the weird part. I can’t think of anything.”

“What’s even weirder is if you stuck it out here just to get some stupid piece of paper with your name on it.”

He was right.

I went to the Office of the Registrar after a few days of debating this and gave notice that I was dropping my courses. When they told me I’d be entitled to a refund for the spring term, I decided to put that money toward my plane ticket.

That night I told my roommate Stevens what I had in mind. He had a friend who’d just moved out of his girlfriend’s apartment and needed a place, so my moving out wasn’t a problem, and I was welcome to leave as soon as I wanted. The next day I cleared out my things, got my rent deposit back and moved in with Miles and Holly. Four days later I bought my ticket to Athens. It was a cold afternoon, the temperature having fallen by fifteen degrees in the space of twenty-four hours. I felt like I’d just won the lottery. “But somehow
it doesn’t feel real yet,” I told Miles. “So far that ticket’s just another piece of paper.”

“It’ll take you farther than a university degree,” he said.

I walked over to the
dépanneur
two blocks away to pick up something for the three of us to eat and drink that evening. A pleasant mid-November snow was falling over the city, sparkling in the glare of the streetlamps and swirling in the headlights of passing cars. I bought two roast chickens, a bag of frozen French fries and some wine and beer, and as I walked back, bottles clinking in the bag, I considered my good fortune. In a week’s time I’d be sitting in a square in Athens or nosing around the Parthenon or ferrying out in the direction of one of those mythical islands. The only thing I didn’t understand was why it had taken me so long to take that step.

We opened the wine and tucked into our meal, and once the wine was finished we switched to beer, and then Miles brought out the bottle of grappa he’d been saving for a special occasion. We were sitting at the small table they’d set up beside the bamboo curtain, and by now it was overflowing with glasses and plates and bottles. The Waterboys were playing on the turntable. At the time it was Miles and Holly’s favorite record.

“I don’t think I’ll need to eat for a year,” I said.