Last Night in Twisted River (51 page)

“You guys know what I think,” Silvestro said, with an insincere, insouciant shrug; he was handsome and confident, the way you would want your son to be.

The young chef had been struck by the effect of the frosted glass on the lower half of the restaurant’s large front window, facing Yonge Street. Passersby on the street could not see through the clouded glass; the customers, seated at their tables, were not in view from the sidewalk. But the top half of the big pane of glass was clear; diners could see the red maple leaf on the Canadian flag above the Summerhill liquor store, across Yonge Street, and (eventually) those two high-rise condominiums under construction in what would be called Scrivener Square. The lower, frosted portion of the windowpane had the effect of a curtain—such was Silvestro’s convoluted reasoning for the restaurant’s new name.

“La Tenda,”
Silvestro said, with feeling. “‘The Curtain.’”

“It sounds ominous to me,” Dominic had told the young chef. “I wouldn’t want to eat in a place with that name.”

“I think, Silvestro, you should save this name for the very first restaurant you own—when you become an owner-chef, which you certainly will!” Arnaud said.

“La Tenda,” Silvestro repeated, fondly, his warm brown eyes watering with tears.

“It’s too Italian,” Dominic Baciagalupo told the emotional young man. “This restaurant may not be strictly French, but it’s not Italian, either.” If the former Patrice were given an Italian name, what would Ketchum say? the cook was thinking, while at the same time he saw the absurdity of his argument—he whose Sicilian meat loaf and penne
alla puttanesca
would, after the Christmas holiday, be added to the more low-key menu.

The baffled Patrice and the shocked Silvestro stared at the cook in disbelief. They were all at a standstill. Dominic thought: I should ask Daniel to come up with a name—he’s the writer! That was when Silvestro broke the silence. “What about
your
name, Dominic?” the young chef said.

“Not
Baciagalupo!”
the cook cried, alarmed. (If the cowboy didn’t kill him, Dominic knew that Ketchum would!)

“Talk about
too Italian
!” Arnaud said affectionately.

“I mean what your name
means
, Dominic,” Silvestro said. Patrice Arnaud hadn’t guessed Baciagalupo’s
meaning
, though the words were similar in French. “‘Kiss of the Wolf,’” Silvestro said slowly—the emphasis equally placed on both the
Kiss
and the
Wolf
.

Arnaud shuddered. He was a short, strongly built man with closely cropped gray hair and a sophisticated smile—he wore dark trousers, sharply pressed, and always an elegant but open-necked shirt. He was a man who made ceremony seem natural; at once polite and philosophical, Patrice was a restaurateur who understood what was worthwhile about the old-fashioned while knowing instantly when change was good.

“Ah, well—Kiss of the Wolf!—why didn’t you tell me, Dominic?” Arnaud impishly asked his loyal friend. “Now
there’s
a name that is seductive and modern, but it also has an
edge!”

Oh, Kiss of the Wolf had an
edge
, all right, the cook was thinking—though that wouldn’t be the most salient response Ketchum might make to the restaurant’s new name. Dominic didn’t want to imagine what the old logger would say when he heard about it. “Mountains of moose shit!” Ketchum might declare, or something worse.

Wasn’t it risky enough that the cook had taken back his real name? In an Internet world, what danger did it present that there was a Dominic Baciagalupo back in action? (At least Ketchum was somewhat relieved to learn that, at the height of her phonetic sensibilities, Nunzi had misspelled the
Baciacalupo
word!)

But, realistically thinking, how would it be possible for a retired deputy sheriff in Coos County, New Hampshire, to discover that a restaurant called Kiss of the Wolf in Toronto, Ontario, was the English translation of the phonetically made-up name of Baciagalupo? And don’t forget, the cook reassured himself—the cowboy is as old as Ketchum, who’s
eighty-three!

If I’m not safe now, I never will be, Dominic was thinking as he came into the narrow, bustling kitchen of Patrice—soon to be renamed Kiss of the Wolf. Well, it’s a world of accidents, isn’t it? In such a world, more than the names would keep changing.

DANNY ANGEL WISHED
with all his heart that he had never given up the name Daniel Baciagalupo, not because he wanted to be the more innocent boy and young man he’d once been—or even because Daniel Baciagalupo was his one true name, the only one his parents had given him—but because the fifty-eight-year-old novelist believed it was a better name for a writer. And the closer the novelist came to sixty, the less he felt like a Danny or an Angel; that his father had all along insisted on the
Daniel
name made more and more sense to the son. (Not that it was always easy for a stay-at-home, work-at-home writer, who was almost sixty, to share a house with his seventy-six-year-old dad. They could be a contentious couple.)

Given the disputed presidential election in the United States—“the Florida fiasco,” as Ketchum called George W. Bush’s “theft” of the presidency from Al Gore, the result of a 5–4 Supreme Court vote along partisan lines—the faxes from Ketchum were often incendiary. Gore had won the popular vote. The Republicans stole the election, both Danny and his dad believed, but the cook and his son didn’t necessarily share Ketchum’s more extreme beliefs—namely, that they were “better off being Canadians,” and that America, which Ketchum obdurately called an “asshole country,” deserved its fate.

WHERE ARE THE ASSASSINS WHEN YOU WANT ONE?

Ketchum had faxed. He didn’t mean George W. Bush; Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn’t played the
spoiler
role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged—“preferably, in a child’s defective car seat”—and sunk in the Androscoggin.

During the second Bush-Gore presidential debate, Bush criticized President Clinton’s use of U.S. troops in Somalia and the Balkans. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” the future president said.

YOU WANT TO WAIT AND SEE HOW THAT LYING LITTLE FUCKER WILL FIND A WAY TO USE OUR TROOPS? YOU WANT TO BET THAT “NATION-BUILDING”
WON’T
BE PART OF IT?

Ketchum had faxed.

But Danny didn’t relish America’s impending disgrace—not from the Canadian perspective, particularly. He and his dad had never wanted to leave their country. To the extent it was possible for an internationally bestselling author to
not
make a big deal of changing his citizenship, Danny Angel had tried to play down his politics, though this had been harder to do after
East of Bangor
was published in ’84; his abortion novel was certainly political.

The process of Danny and his dad being admitted to Canada as new citizens was a slow one. Danny had applied as self-employed; the immigration lawyer representing him had categorized the writer as “someone who participates at a world-class level in cultural activities.” Danny made enough money to support himself and his father. They’d both passed the medical exam. While they were living in Toronto on visitors’ visas, it had been necessary for them to cross the border every six months to have their visas validated; also, they’d had to apply for Canadian citizenship at a Canadian consulate in the United States. (Buffalo was the closest American city to Toronto.)

An assistant to the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship had discouraged them from a so-called fast-track application. In their case, what was the hurry? The famous writer wasn’t
rushing
to change countries, was he? (The immigration lawyer had forewarned Danny that Canadians were a little suspicious of success; they tended to punish it, not reward it.) In fact, to escape undue attention, the cook and his son had made the slowest possible progress in their application for Canadian citizenship. The process had taken four, almost five years. But now, with the Florida fiasco, there’d been comments in the Canadian media about the writer Danny Angel’s “defection;” his “giving up on the United States” when he did, more than a decade ago, made the author appear “prescient”—or so the Toronto
Globe and Mail
had said.

It didn’t help that the film adapted from
East of Bangor
had released in theaters only recently—in ’99—and the movie had won a couple of Academy Awards in 2000. Early in the New Year, 2001, a joint session of Congress would meet to certify the electoral vote in the States; now that there was going to be a U.S. president who opposed abortion rights, it came as no surprise to Danny and his dad that the writer’s liberal abortion politics were back in the news. And writers were more in the news in Canada than in the United States—not only for what they wrote but for what they said and did.

Danny was still sensitive to what he read about himself in the American media, where he was frequently labeled “anti-American”—both for his writing and because of his expatriation to Toronto. In other parts of the world—without fail, in Europe and in Canada—the author’s alleged anti-Americanism was viewed as a
good
thing. It was written that the expatriate writer “vilified” life in the United States—that is, in his novels. It had also been reported that the American-born author had moved to Toronto “to make a statement.” (Despite Danny Angel’s commercial success, he had accepted the fact that his Canadian taxes were higher than what he’d paid in the States.) But, as a novelist, Danny was increasingly uncomfortable when he was condemned
or
praised for his perceived anti-American politics. Naturally, he couldn’t say—most of all, not to the press—why he had
really
moved to Canada.

What Danny
did
say was that only two of his seven published novels could fairly be described as political; he was aware that he sounded defensive in saying this, but it was notably true. Danny’s fourth book,
The Kennedy Fathers
, was a Vietnam novel—it was read as a virtual protest of that war. The sixth,
East of Bangor
, was a didactic novel—in the view of some critics, an abortion-rights polemic. But what was political about the other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies—none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain—if there was one—was more often human nature than the United States. Danny had never been any kind of activist.

“All writers are outsiders,” Danny Angel had once said. “I moved to Toronto because I like being an outsider.” But no one believed him. Besides, it was a better story that the world-famous author had rejected the United States.

Danny thought that his move to Canada had been sensationalized in the press, the presumed politics of their entirely personal decision magnified out of proportion. Yet what bothered the novelist more was that his novels had been trivialized. Danny Angel’s fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect?

In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up. In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had
really happened
to the writer—or, perhaps, to someone the writer had intimately known—more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story—as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend the
fiction
in fiction writing—because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)

Yet who was the audience for Danny Angel, or any other novelist, defending the
fiction
in fiction writing? Students of creative writing? Women of a certain age in book clubs, because weren’t most book-club members usually women of a certain age? Who else was more interested in fiction than in so-called real life? Not Danny Angel’s interviewers, evidently; the first question they always asked had to do with what was “real” about this or that novel. Was the main character based on an
actual
person? Had the novel’s most memorable (meaning most catastrophic, most devastating) outcome
actually
happened to anyone the author knew or had known?

Once again, what did Danny expect? Hadn’t he begged the question? Just look at his last book,
Baby in the Road;
what did Danny think the media would make of it? He had begun that book, his seventh novel, before he’d left Vermont. Danny was almost finished with the manuscript in March ’87. It was late March of that year when Joe died. In Colorado, it was not yet mud season. (“Shit, it was
almost
mud season,” Ketchum would say.)

It was Joe’s senior year in Boulder; he had just turned twenty-two. The irony was that
Baby in the Road
had always been about the death of a beloved only child. But in the novel Danny had almost finished, the child dies when he’s still in diapers—a two-year-old, run over in the road, much as what
might
have happened to little Joe that day on Iowa Avenue. The unfinished novel was about how the death of that child destroys what the cook and Ketchum would no doubt have described as the Danny character and the Katie character, who go their separate but doomed ways.

Naturally, the novel would change. After the death of his son, Danny Angel didn’t write for more than a year. It was not the writing that was hard, as Danny said to his friend Armando DeSimone; it was the
imagining
. Whenever Danny tried to imagine anything, all he could see was how Joe had died; what the writer also endlessly imagined were the small details that might have been subject to change, those infinitesimal details that could have kept his son alive. (If Joe had only done this, not that … if the cook and his son had not been in Toronto at that time … if Danny had bought or rented a house in Boulder, instead of Winter Park … if Joe had not learned to ski … if, as Ketchum had advised, they’d never lived in Vermont … if an avalanche had closed the road over Berthoud Pass … if Joe had been too drunk to drive, instead of being completely sober … if the passenger had been another boy, not that girl … if Danny hadn’t been in love….) Well, was there anything a writer
couldn’t
imagine?