by Wayne Grady
A walk to Roncesvalles Avenue won’t hurt. He puts on his warm leather coat, the one he bought ages ago in White Falls, God, before Daphne was born. The leaves were late falling and not very colourful this year, he doesn’t know how that works, and now the bare branches lining his street stand stiffly in the gathering air. He’ll go to the Vietnamese grocery and buy a bag of cat treats; jiggling the bag sometimes lures Millie back to the house, although, bacteria-like, she seems to be increasingly immune to that ruse. He’ll also go to the delicatessen and buy some salami, a wedge of Saint André, and a baguette. He feels furtive already, as though he’s planning his own disappearance. Okay, he’ll make a spinach salad to go with it, open some white wine, there’s a very nice Hidden Bench sauvignon blanc in the cooler downstairs, and if it snows he’ll eat in the sunroom watching the ladder getting piled with snow and too wet to be put away. He hasn’t heard from Elinor yet, maybe he’ll email her first, that will stun her, send her a photo of the spinach salad, or “Garage Without Ladder,” or Millie cleaning her paws. None of which he can, at the moment, photograph, because none of it exists. After lunch he’ll call Daphne.
Why is he so reluctant to call her? He knows why: because he’s afraid she’ll tell him why she hasn’t returned any of his calls. Can he not take a hint? Does he not know when someone no longer wishes to have a relationship with him? If a total stranger did not return his first twenty calls, would he place the twenty-first? No. So, stop calling, stop leaving those pathetic messages about the weather in Toronto. You know you only do it because Elinor tells you to. Stop listening to Elinor.
He doesn’t want to hound Daphne. Hounding her will only make her run more determinedly to ground. He isn’t sure about the fox-hunting metaphor, but he is afraid of forcing her hand. He’s afraid of losing her. Elinor says he’s afraid of Daphne, of the power she exercises over him, and of the possibility of her withdrawing that power.
On the subject of hounding, why the hell would Homeland Security have an office in the Toronto airport? Why are they checking up on Canadian citizens? Why would Bernie think this is funny?
* * *
—
On his way to the grocer’s he drops into Lutello’s. At this time of day, two in the afternoon, the restaurant is nearly empty. He waves to Manon, who is folding napkins by the wait station, and walks back to the kitchen to talk to Gaspard, who is at the cold-prep table julienning carrots. Gaspard is a short, burly, iron-haired chef from somewhere in Languedoc; he and Manon bought Lutello’s, a neighbourhood Italian restaurant, and turned it into a French bistro, although they kept the Italian name and the red-and-white tablecloths and curtains. Harry guesses the farther south you go in France the more Italian it becomes, and wonders if that’s also true of the wines. He does Gaspard’s wine list, heavy on underpriced Corbière reds, but also some pricey Gigondases, difficult to find over here, and two ripassos to go with the name and the curtains. He draws the line at wicker-wrapped Chiantis, which he still thinks of as candleholders. Three years ago, he and Elinor spent two weeks in the Côtes du Rhône district, striking out from the tiny hilltop town of Rasteau to explore vineyards and select wines with Gaspard in mind. Now Gaspard wants to change his house red to some kind of bulk plonk produced in Montreal from imported grape juice. The Lutello account needs some massaging.
“Or maybe have no house wine at all,” Gaspard says as he chops. “What about it? Have three or four inexpensive reds, let the customers choose. Sell by the glass.”
Harry has a vision of a small glass of red wine with bubbles floating on the surface. “You don’t want to do that, Gaspard. Get rid of the half-litre, the very symbol of French cuisine? I don’t know if that’s a good idea. You’re still a bistro, right?”
“Customers don’t buy half-litres so much anymore. Too expensive. Too much wine. They drink now by the glass, not so much.”
“A bistro isn’t a bistro without half-litres,” he persists, wondering if even using the word “bistro” dates him. What would it be now? Gastropub? “What about half-bottles?”
Gaspard chops more aggressively. “Good wine doesn’t come in half-bottles,” he says. “And if it does, it costs as much as a whole bottle of something else.”
“I’m thinking of holding a wine tasting, Gaspard,” Harry says. “What about having it here? Some Sunday afternoon, when things are slow?”
Gaspard shrugs. A year ago he would have embraced Harry and begun planning pairings. “Sure, why not?” he says, still chopping. “You set it up, tell me when.”
* * *
—
When Harry gets home he sets his shopping bag on the kitchen counter, puts the chicken in the refrigerator, and pours a second, no, third glass of malbec. No sign of Millie. He sets the wine down on the sunroom table and, going out into the yard, tosses the dead spider plant onto the compost pile, covering the morning’s coffee grounds, then takes the empty pot into the garage and drops it in the recycling bin marked “Plastic.” Then he retrieves the ladder and leans it in the corner of the garage. His stomach is hollow and his hands are shaking, but it no longer feels like hunger. He wonders if it has something to do with the gastroscopy, a scoring of the esophagus wall, but the thought of a fibre-optic camera inching its way down his gullet is eclipsed by the memory of the telephone call allegedly from Homeland Security. That’s who it was, he thinks, not Bernie or one of the other guys from basketball. Homeland Security, for Christ’s sake. Cleaning up the yard feels like putting the place in order before going away for a long time. What has he done to draw their attention? Nothing. Their trip to Cuba? Last August, after Daphne’s firestorm, he and Elinor went down there for two weeks, a vacation, but it felt more like taking refuge. How would Homeland Security even know about that unless the Canadians were feeding information to the NSA? Everybody knows everything these days. Computers sort through a billion emails a second, picking out the ones that say “Cuba.” Really, Cuba? Isn’t Obama backing off on Cuba, even talking about lifting the embargo? On a whim, he takes the lawnmower from its hook and plugs in the cord. He doesn’t expect it to start, but it does, so he takes it outside and cuts the grass. Like a good citizen. Maybe the president’s softening on Cuba is pissing off some fist-clenching jingoists in the Defense Department and they’ve decided to take American security into their own hands. That has an awful but plausible ring to it.
The smell of fresh-cut grass, even though covered with frost, is a tonic. He rakes the clippings and dumps them on the compost pile, on top of the spider plant and the coffee grounds and the corn cobs dug up by the raccoons. There’s nothing wrong with going to Cuba. Canadians go there all the time. Hell, Americans go there through Toronto all the time, does Homeland Security call them? When he wheels the lawnmower back into the garage and tries to hang it up on its hook, his hands are trembling so badly he misses twice before securing it. What did we do in Cuba? What did we bring back? Nothing. What the hell is he guilty of this time?
* * *
—
“Rupert Kronkman, please.”
“This is Kronkman.” This time the voice is like something from a TV cop show. Could Bernie do a Bronx accent?
“This is Harry Bowes. You called me earlier.”
“I did?”
“You left a message.”
There is the sound of shuffling paper. Harry imagines a cluttered desk in the Kremlin, a clerk wearing fingerless gloves, in-basket bursting with the files of dead souls. The truth is around here somewhere. “Ah, yes, Harold Bowes.”
“Harrison, actually.”
“Harrison? Really? Thanks for calling back.” A pause. “You are in the import-export business, sir?”
“I sell wine.”
“In particular, we’re interested in a trip you made to Los Angeles, let’s see, on the third of September.” Again the sound of paper. “And from LA up to Portland, Oregon, then Seattle, Washington, and then Vanco
uver, Canada. We would like to know why you made those particular trips, sir.”
“Why I made the trips?” he says.
“Yes, sir. And if by any chance you brought anything into the United States that you might not have taken back out with you. What I mean by that, sir, is that it says here, and I’m just reading from the file here, it says that the week before you made that particular trip to Los Angeles, you were in Cuba. We’d like to verify that, whether you were in Cuba, let’s see, that would be the third week in August, before making your trip to California in September.”
“My wife and I went to Cuba on vacation, yes,” Harry says. “We’re Canadians, we’re allowed to do that. And then I went to California and then up to Kelowna on wine business. I visited wineries. There’s no connection between the two trips. One was pleasure, one was business.”
“I guess the question is, sir, whether you or your wife brought anything back from Cuba that you subsequently brought into the United States. Or if there was anything you brought back from the United States that you subsequently sent to Cuba? You might want to take a moment to consider your answers to that question, sir.”
“Which one?”
“Both of them.”
“Absolutely not,” Harry says, feeling the sand firming up beneath his feet. “The only things I brought back from Cuba were a bottle of Havana Club rum and a Cuban All-Stars baseball cap. Both legal, both declared. I drank the rum and I still have the cap.” Somewhere.
Elinor was convinced that the Cuban revolution had been a glorious and noble experiment, and that Cuba’s current problems were the result of the American embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviets and the Chinese turned Communism into tyranny, she said, but in Cuba the Marxist dialectic was still functioning beautifully. Capitalism has had its day. Even democracy has become a hollow farce. She didn’t call him a capitalist pig, and he doesn’t think she said any of that in the airport. Nor had either of them mentioned Guantánamo Bay or even hummed “Guantanamera.”
“I didn’t bring anything back from California,” he says, unprompted. “I import all my wine through the Ontario Liquor Control Board. I can give you my importer’s registration number if you want.”
“No, sir, we have all that. Sorry to bother you, sir, but we do have to look into things that seem strange to us, even if they’re just coincidental. Two trips like that, back to back. There’s lots of people in the States who would like to sell their products into Cuba, as you can no doubt appreciate, sir.”
“Really?” says Harry. “Cubans don’t have enough money to buy American goods.”
“Or they have relatives in Cuba,” Kronkman goes on, “and want to send money back to their families. They tend to transit such things through Canada. We just want to make sure that that’s not the case here.”
“I thought you were ending the embargo,” Harry says, and then regrets it. Why should he know about that?
“The current administration is thinking about doing that, yes, sir, but nothing has changed yet,” says Kronkman. “And we still don’t have to let anyone into our country if we suspect they’re going to be a threat to national security.”
“Well,” says Harry, recognizing the thinly veiled threat, “the only wines I saw in Cuba were from Latin America. Argentina, Chile, Mexico. No American wines at all, and I didn’t try to sell them any.” It actually hadn’t occurred to him to try. They drank Cuba libres and watched kids play baseball with sticks and rolled-up wads of masking tape. Next time he’s going to take a box of Rawlings balls and some old gloves.
“It isn’t just wine, sir. It could be anything. Money, electronics, food items, even car parts. Nobody approached you about anything along those lines, did they, sir?”
“No,” he says. “No one.”
“Okay, then, thank you for your time, Mr. Bowes.”
“That’s it?” Harry asks. Even though he hasn’t done anything wrong, he feels he has got away with something, that he is being let off lightly.
“For now, yes,” Kronkman says. “But if you’re planning any more business trips into the States, or anywhere else, for that matter, we’d appreciate your dropping us an itinerary of some sort.”
“An itinerary?”
“Nothing carved in stone, you understand,” Kronkman says. “Just a heads-up. To avoid this kind of confusion in the future. You can email it, I’ll give you my address.”
“What if I don’t have an itinerary?” Harry tries to imagine where in Pearson International the Homeland Security offices might be. “I mean, I usually don’t know where I’m going until I get there.” Once, on his way to a wine conference in Chicago, he said something that rubbed a customs and immigration agent the wrong way, something about being on a pleasurable business trip, and was told to step into a waiting area in a huge, unsuspected part of the airport containing dozens of windowless offices in a warren of hallways. The other detainees looked like they expected to be taken up in helicopters and dropped into Lake Ontario. He imagined Rupert Kronkman in one of those offices, no windows, no plants, fluorescent lights making everything look sickly green, the air thick with cigarette smoke—Americans would allow smoking in their security offices—a pale man with a nagging cough and a wife who never stops asking him when he’s going to be promoted to a post in Washington.
“Well, sir,” Kronkman says. “Showing us an itinerary would be a sign of your willingness to cooperate.”
“But what if I can’t cooperate? What if I give you an itinerary and then I don’t follow it? Are you going to track my movements or something, I don’t know, follow the pings from my cell phone?”
“Are you aware, sir, that half the terrorists entering the United States come in through Canada? And most of those go through Toronto. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we have carte blanche on that now. Carte blanche powers.”
“You think I’m a terrorist?”
“I’m not saying one way or the other,” Kronkman says. “I’m just saying, if you don’t have anything to hide, then you don’t have anything to worry about. You have yourself a good day, sir.”
But that isn’t true, Harry thinks as he ends the call. It’s precisely those who have nothing to hide who have the most to worry about.
* * *
—
Defiantly, with bold strokes of the knife, Harry makes himself a salami sandwich with mustard, cuts a thick wedge of Saint André, pours a glass of pinot noir, and takes it all into the sunroom. It is now four thirty, the sunroom is cooling off, but only one thirty in Vancouver. If Daphne went home for lunch he missed her. She’d be back at school now, if she’s still going to school. His hands are shaking and his blood pressure is up, he can tell by the ringing in his ears, and his stomach hurts. Why hasn’t his doctor called? Why hasn’t anyone called? There is still no word from Elinor, and he would like to talk to her about Daphne. The day hasn’t gone well. Tomorrow he’ll make a few client calls, set up the wine tasting. Get things back to normal. Have a long lunch at Lutello’s, order a half-litre of the house red, whip up some enthusiasm in Gaspard. This recession must be hitting him hard. Manon always seems cheerful enough, but Gaspard is a chef, a born worrier.
He looks again at his watch. He could call Daphne now and leave another message, some evidence that he’s willing to put their relationship back on an even keel. Although he’s visited her in Vancouver twice, he hasn’t been in her apartment. It’s always, “Meet you downtown,” or “I’ll be waiting at the park entrance.” He doesn’t know why, a privacy issue. So now, each time he calls her and tries to imagine her apartment, he confuses it in his mind with El’s old apartment, the one she had when they met. He remembers the first time he went there. It was after his divorce. El left a message on his machine, not one of those “just wanted to say hello” messages but a real message, asking him to come over for tea the following Sunday afternoon, very deliberat
ely, as though she’d given the matter much thought and decided that the time was right. “Come at three,” she said. She lived on the ground floor of a large Victorian house in the Annex, in a room filled with air and light, with French doors giving onto a walled garden, which she tended, along with her indoor plants, with a quiet, monkish devotion. Watering every morning, dead-heading the crisped petals, giving the pots a quarter turn at noon. She had an antique daybed that doubled as a sofa, lots of books on deep pine shelves, a scroll-top desk, everything neatly arranged, nothing out of place. He felt like a child she was looking after for the afternoon. He scanned her books while she went behind a counter to put on the kettle. Gardening and cookery. Freud and Jung. The James brothers. Said and Kingwell. And photographs of her family. The room was peopled with them. He picked one up from the desk, a black-and-white in a rosewood frame, a young man grinning at the camera, self-consciously handsome, standing beside a mud-splattered Jeep. He asked her if it was a boyfriend.
“No, it’s my brother,” she said, coming around from behind the counter. “Actually, Dick is my half-brother. And those are my mother and father.” She pointed to a studio portrait of a dignified elderly couple, the woman seated and the man standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. “And my three older sisters.” A group shot, taken outside, sunlight filtering through foliage onto their faces and dresses. “Maggie was born in 1954, Sara in 1958, and Jane a year later. I’m the baby,” she said. “My mother was forty-six when I was born. I think I was a surprise.”
