by Wayne Grady
He looks at Bernie, who has stopped walking.
“Anything wrong, Bernie?”
“No, no, just a little short of breath. Must be this cold air.”
“Take your time,” Harry says. “I’m setting up a wine tasting at Lutello’s. You want to come?”
“I don’t know anything about wine.”
“Doesn’t matter. Good way to learn. You could bring…” What’s Bernie’s wife’s name?
“Dorothy isn’t really interested in wine,” Bernie says, straightening and resuming their walk. “I mean, she likes it, but.”
“Bring her anyway.”
“I’ll ask her.”
They walk on in silence. People go missing for all sorts of reasons, not just because they want to end a marriage or join a revolution. Sometimes they just wander off. They have a kind of brain cramp, a fugue. They walk into a store and instead of forgetting why they’re there, as can happen even to normal people, they forget who they are. They look at their hands and see the hands of a stranger. They pretend to browse for a while, walk around the store touching things, looking anxiously at other shoppers, hoping one of them will call out, Hey, Mom, over here! Or that the familiar feel of fur or wool will bring them out of it, oh yes, I was buying a gift for my husband. But after a while the sun looks warm on the sidewalk, they find themselves in the revolving doors, they’re sucked out into the daylight and gone. Forever.
He compares it to waking up in a strange bedroom and for a split second not knowing where you are. You don’t panic, you lie still, quietly moving your eyes from object to object, the watch on the bedside table—yours?—the keys on the dresser—what do they open? The person in bed beside you—who is this? You almost enjoy the sensation, it’s like an adventure, piecing together the events of the night before. And you know that in a second or two your brain will begin to function and you’ll get your life back again. Wow, you might say to your partner, that was weird!
With a brain cramp, however, you never get all the pieces right, the split second becomes a minute, then an hour. Your dissociative state goes on and on. No bells ring. The keys don’t open anything. Total stranger in the bathroom mirror. No familiar faces anywhere. It happened to a neighbour of theirs, a man with a good job, a happy home, his daughter used to be friends with Daphne; the man went out for a haircut one Saturday morning and it took his wife and daughter two weeks to find him. They put ads in the local paper, stapled his photograph to telephone poles, organized search parties, hounded the police. He and Daphne helped put up the posters; Elinor counselled the man’s wife. The police eventually found him living in a wooden crate in Bentway, a shantytown under the Gardiner Expressway, panhandling cars when they stopped at the lights. He seemed normal in every other way, but he didn’t recognize his family and didn’t want to go home with them. The social worker said there was nothing they could do to force him. Nothing anyone could do. He was gone.
Bernie signs Harry into the Y, he pays his dollar for a towel, and they go down the concrete steps to the basement locker room. It’s an old building, not in disrepair exactly but, like most of the people who use it, showing its age. The handrail is worn smooth, the steps chipped and rounded, the steam pipes covered with years of thick white paint over what is almost certainly asbestos insulation. He walks in a kind of trance. This is what abandonment feels like. Shuffling along below ground, in a perpetual funk, breathing from the top of his lungs. He can’t think in a straight line, it’s as though he’s taken some kind of ScourPrep for the brain. She wouldn’t phone him from South Africa, but she always emails, even when she’s gone for just a few days, a weekend conference in Seattle or Charlottetown. Arrived safely, hotel room ghastly, God they’ve paired me with a hypnotherapist from Toledo (a woman, don’t fantasize), miss you, don’t forget to water the violets from the bottom. Love to Millie, El. PS: Call Daphne. But this time, nothing. His emails to her are delivered but go unanswered: Dr. Elinor Bowes is out of the office until further notice. If this is an emergency, contact Abdi in the departmental office. What kind of emergencies do psychology students have? Is he having one now? To make things worse he isn’t sure what city she said she was going to. Or even if she did say. How can she have gone off without telling him where the conference is? Cape Town? Johannesburg? Pretoria? Why didn’t he ask? If she has disappeared, even accidentally, let’s say she’s lying in a hospital somewhere, in a coma, he has no idea how to go about finding her. If she’s been bitten by some weird insect, or had her purse snatched and been hit over the head, how would anyone know how to get in touch with him? She might not even be missed at the conference. Maybe Abdi will know where the conference is, if there is a conference. Of course, if there’s no conference he’ll know for sure. But it’s after five; he won’t be able to reach Abdi until tomorrow. He still has tonight to get through. Wait, Sandy Hedley is with her. But he doesn’t know how to get in touch with Sandy Hedley, either. What group did Elinor say Sandy Hedley belonged to?
He and Bernie don’t talk as they change. The others are already out on the court; he can hear them warming up. Bernie is breathing hard already, just tying his shoes. He won’t mention Elinor again, or say anything about her to the guys. They come here to get away from things like this.
It’s pickup basketball, nothing organized. Ten or twelve guys, most of them over forty, one a retired high-school teacher in his sixties. He knows their names, enough to call for a pass. They all have nicknames. Simon, who despite looking like a hippy holdover from the sixties is a lawyer with a penchant for giving unasked-for advice, is called Simon Says. Sheldon doesn’t seem to mind being called Shellfish. Hubert, who once confessed to missing a week because he was being treated for a sexually transmitted disease, is known as Herpes. Sometimes Simon calls him the Love Bug. The retired teacher’s name is Oswald and is simply called Ozzie, although, because he’s gay, Simon sometimes calls him Harriet. There’s a guy whose name Harry thought was Noel until he found out it was Leon; Simon started calling him Noel because “he’s a little backward.” It isn’t good to have a name like Harry in this gang. For a while he was called Armpit; then, after he missed a few long shots, someone came up with Airball, which quickly became Hairball. Before he started coming, he hadn’t played basketball since high school and hadn’t been very good then, but he enjoys these Tuesdays. No one knows or cares anything about him except that he’s a good passer and likes to shoot from the top of the key. Bernie knows a little more than that, but not much. For all anyone cares, he could be the Unabomber when he isn’t playing basketball. None of them are into wine. When they go out after the game, they drink beer.
They play full court, five a side, each game to eleven. They usually get in five or six games in the two hours they have the court, and by then their legs are rubber and their shirts dark with sweat, but they feel fine. They play for the fun of it, for the workout. Afterwards no one really remembers who won, although during the game they are fiercely aware of the score. What they savour afterwards are the moments of exhilaration: the perfect pass, the cleanly blocked shot, the slow drag of the right toe along the floor, almost a dance move, as the body rises for the jumpshot, and then the graceful arc of the ball. In no other aspect of their lives are their eyes and arms, minds and bodies so completely coordinated, so totally in accord.
* * *
—
Despite what his first wife appears to believe, there was no overlap between Elinor and his life in White Falls. For his first year in Toronto, he lived alone in a two-bedroom apartment in Don Mills, two bedrooms so Daphne could visit. Just Daphne, never his wife. He still planned to return to White Falls when the professor he was replacing came back from maternity leave, but by then he and his wife were hardly speaking. He didn’t think too much about the future beyond sending support payments and trying to stay part of Daphne’s life—the long drives to White Falls every second weekend, the phone calls when she was home alone after s
chool. When he went to White Falls, he took Daphne to her flute lessons on Saturday mornings—she had outgrown ballet—then for lunch at East Side Mario’s, where she spent more time texting her friends than talking to him, and to matinees at the Cineplex, watching movies neither of them liked. He felt he’d made all three of them unhappy. During drives in the countryside, she counted cows and calculated how much methane they were contributing to the earth’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
When another colleague at York became pregnant, the department offered him a second year as an adjunct, and he took it. There were no jobs for him in White Falls. The college was definitely out, and on weekend visits he occasionally met up with his former Daily Weekly colleagues in O’Bannion’s, their old watering hole; almost none had found other jobs in journalism. He’d got out just in time, they told him morosely; all the bridges had been burned long ago. He felt so badly for his old friends that any pleasure he’d nurtured at landing a university position, however much it depended on his colleagues’ continued fertility, was sucked out of him by these visits, and eventually he stopped making them. Daphne was old enough to take a bus to Toronto by herself.
Elinor was a postgrad in psychology, fifteen years his junior, and not his student; their relationship, if they had let it be known, would have been frowned upon but not caused a scandal. Not like poor old George Cramb, who’d been hounded out of the psych department and his name apparently deleted from the university’s database, to be uttered only in whispers after furtive looks up and down the corridor. There was nothing physical between Elinor and him at first, just a growing intimacy, a brief spring of intrigue and anticipation between the long winter of one marriage and the hot summer of the next. A grace period, like the flight of the ball between the time it leaves your hands and when it reaches the net. A gentle arc during which anything seems possible, even though you know the outcome was preordained by your throw.
They’d met at a literary reading; a well-known former television journalist had written a psychological thriller. The reading was followed by a reception, where they’d found themselves talking, never too far from the drinks table, about the alliance of literature and psychology. Jung, she said, had had a writer’s sensibility. Harry was anticipating his own departure from teaching even then, not because he wanted to quit, but because his second term was up and the department had decided to do away with adjuncts (also, apparently, pregnancies), to replace people like Harry with people who had degrees in journalism but no journalism experience. “Students with bachelors in journalism don’t want to be taught by teachers with no degrees in journalism” was how the chair put it. Harry had taught himself out of a job.
Daphne was the only constant in his life, shining through the darkness like a line of gold thread in an otherwise monochromatic tapestry. His wife had taken his second year away with equanimity, as though his defection merely confirmed what she’d always known about him, and filed for divorce so she could marry her ex-mayor. Harry and Elinor met for lunches, then for drinks after his last class, which turned into phone calls and text messages, the careful wordings of which slid imperceptibly into shared confidences and a gradual whittling away of the importance of the difference in their ages. He was forty-five, and she, although of course remarkably mature, was twenty-nine. In her master’s year in Calgary she had lived with her boyfriend, a geology student named Rudd, but that had ended when Rudd took a job poisoning wells for an Alberta oil-drilling company and Elinor had come to York to do her doctorate in early-onset bipolar personality disorder. That was seven years ago, and now she’s a university professor with tenure, and he’s in his fifties, wondering how he can get fifteen dollars for a ten-dollar bottle of wine.
Back then he could keep his weight down, even let himself go a little over the winter and be able to recover during the summer. He cycled to work, played softball every Saturday afternoon in the summer. Elinor came out to watch him play. His first wife had never shown the slightest interest in his life outside the house except to resent it. He brought Daphne to a game when she stayed with him the summer she turned fifteen, that would have been 2005, an age when being seen doing anything with her father was torture. She sat as far from Elinor as the bleachers allowed, earbuds in place, looking hostile and bored. He had no idea what she told her mother about Elinor, but he could guess. He thought it was the kind of thing that would just work itself out as she got older. He wanted Daphne to love Elinor as much as he loved them both, but that didn’t seem likely.
“You made your choice, Dad,” she said to him once. “You chose to leave and you chose to stay away. You can’t force me to love you for it.”
But he wasn’t trying to force her to do anything. Maybe that was the problem.
He’ll call her again after basketball. Leave another message if she doesn’t answer, try again when he gets home. He won’t stay long, just a couple of beers.
* * *
—
Bernie fakes a shot and passes the ball to him under the net. He and Bernie had two glasses of wine at lunch, a petite syrah, not bad for the price, but they aren’t affecting his game. To prove it, he plays harder and faster than usual, as though Elinor and Daphne were watching. He flashes through the key, dribbles out of traffic, turns and takes a long jumpshot, missing the hoop by a foot. “Hairball!” calls Simon Says. He hasn’t felt this loose in years. Sweat pours from his body. When he falls, he has to dry the floor with a towel.
Bernie plays hard, too, but not as well. He fumbles, shoots from too far out, travels, misses picks and rebounds, forgets setups. At every stoppage in play he bends from the waist with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, and when he straightens, his face is red and splotchy. Harry notices Shellfish, a paramedic who works nights at a nursing home, staying close to Bernie, keeping an eye on him. Just before halftime Bernie takes a breakaway pass from Simon, charges the length of the court, makes an easy layup, and comes down clutching his chest. Shellfish hurries towards him, calling time out.
“Way to go, Bern,” Harry calls from across the court, clapping his hands.
Bernie nods once, still holding his chest, and walks towards the bench. “A little trouble breathing,” he says. He takes two more steps and collapses onto the floor.
Harry is surprised by how much noise his body makes, a reverberating thud followed by several dull reports as one by one his limbs hit and bounce and hit again. Sheldon turns him onto his back, opens his mouth, and fingers out the tongue. Harry starts to shake. He’s certain Bernie is dead. He hit the floor face first. Sheldon places his mouth against Bernie’s and blows, gives Bernie’s diaphragm a series of short pushes, and blows again. He does this several times. Every time he breathes into Bernie’s mouth, Bernie’s chest rises, but each time he stops it goes down and stays down. The others make a circle around them. Harry takes Bernie’s wrist and feels for a pulse. “Come on, Bernie, get up,” he says. He watches Bernie’s inert body, the bare white parted legs, the red creases inside the elbow, the out-flung hand lying limp in his. Then he feels the hand stir, sees the chest rise and fall. Bernie opens his eyes.
“What the fuck happened?” Bernie says.
“You died, you dumb fuck,” says Simon.
Everyone laughs. Bernie sits up. “No kidding? Shit.”
“Maybe you should sit out for a while,” Sheldon says.
“Yeah, think I will.” But instead of heading for the bench he goes into the locker room. A few minutes later, Sheldon follows him and comes back to say he’s driving Bernie home. The rest of them go on playing four-on-four.
In the locker room after the game, the talk is about Bernie’s fall and miraculous return from the dead.
“We’ve got a name for him now,” Harry says to the others. “Lazarus.”
“Yeah,” says Herpes. “The Laz.”
“Way to go, Hairball,” says Simon. “You put the touch on him, man.”
“
What?” Harry says.
“The touch. You took the Laz’s hand and brought him back to life.”
“No, that was Shellfish. I was just checking his pulse.”
“Don’t matter, man, that’s what did it. You’re my hero.”
There’s more laughter.
“In a more enlightened age, you’d be, like, a saint or something. Saint Hairball.”
“Or a messiah,” says Love Bug. More laughter. “I want you at my side when I croak.”
“Maybe Bernie has some kind of implant that went wrong,” Harry says, “a pacemaker or something that needs a new battery. Maybe that’s why he stopped breathing.” Who knows? A hole in the heart, a wonky valve, a failed transistor. Fifty years without a sign and then wham, out like a light. Happens when you’re driving and you take a few people with you. Maybe that’s what happened to Elinor. Taxi from the airport, driver has a heart attack, car jumps the median, slams into an oncoming truck, luggage strewn over the highway. No, he would have heard by now. Luggage tags.
He keeps Elinor’s disappearance to himself. Let him be the abandoned husband, noble but silent in his grief. No doubt they all have their problems. He might tell them later, when they’re at the pub. They’ll look at him admiringly, maybe even enviously, a man with something tangible to complain about. They won’t say anything, they’ll respect his privacy, but they’ll know. Next week they’ll pass the ball to him more often, praise his jumpshot, pleased that even with his troubles he still comes out for the games, still has his priorities straight. It’ll make them feel important, remind them that they aren’t just a random group of strangers thrown together by the vagaries of work schedules and bus routes. It isn’t just basketball, it’s therapy. The word makes him think of El, but it’s the right word.
