by Wayne Grady
He’d go back to teaching if he could. Definitely. When York let him go, he should have looked for another academic post somewhere. He liked having students, enjoyed standing before them in class and imparting what he knew about journalism, which turned out to be quite a lot, the inner workings of magazine editorial offices, the importance of linear narrative in an otherwise fractured world. But when he left York, he thought starting a wine-importing business would be more stable. Ha! By giving up teaching he lost touch with an entire generation of enquiring minds. Professor Curtis found Daphne’s mind lively and interesting; why hadn’t he? When did his relationship with Daphne begin to go downhill? Wasn’t it about the time he left York? He thinks it was. Maybe her attitude towards him didn’t change; maybe it was his attitude towards her?
Listen to him. He can hear her already: You don’t get it, do you, Dad? There are no jobs out there, we have to make up our own jobs, we have to reinvent ourselves every day. We didn’t cut ourselves off, you cut us off. We were born drifting. It’s the perfect existential universe, exactly what your generation wanted, remember? Except it turns out it isn’t so perfect. It sucks, if you want to know the truth. It is so tempting to just say, Fuck it, I’m not going to try anymore. I’m not going to race to the finish line, because there is no finish line.
If Daphne ever calls him back, they can discuss it.
* * *
—
The wisps of snow have disappeared, but it’s below freezing and the sidewalk feels harder than usual. Gaspard is still in his chef’s bad mood, his enormous kitchen knife making more noise on the cutting block than is remotely necessary. Carrot slices bounce on the board. Something gone wrong with an order, or maybe he just hates chopping. Whatever it is, he has changed his mind about the wine tasting. It is, he says, waving his knife like a baton, too much pain for too little bread. He laughs at his own bilingual pun, not expecting Harry to get it. He stops chopping and pours two glasses of wine.
“What pain, though?” Harry says cajolingly. “Customers pay twenty-five dollars to come to the tasting, I supply the wine, and you serve them ten dollars’ worth of food. It’s a win-win for you.”
“Ten dollars’ worth of food,” Gaspard says, “costs twenty dollars to prepare.”
That can’t be true, he thinks, but says: “Then we’ll charge thirty.”
“How many people?” Gaspard is softening. The carrot slices roll instead of bounce.
“We’ll cut it off at fifty.” They’ll be lucky to get thirty. Twenty.
“So I make five hundred dollars.” Gaspard looks dubious.
“How much do you usually make on a Sunday afternoon? We can do it another time.”
“Tuesday is better,” he says. “In the afternoon. Before five.”
“Fine. Tuesday it is.” He’ll miss another basketball game. They touch glasses. “Not next Tuesday, the Tuesday after that.” Nobody will come to a wine tasting on a Tuesday afternoon, not way out here on Roncesvalles. He’s doing all this just to sell a case of Haut-Brion to Brian Bigelow. This is what he wants to tell Daphne and Elinor about freelancing. “That’ll give you time to do the pairings,” he says to Gaspard. But he’s stung by Gaspard’s reluctance. Gaspard will try to cancel again. He’ll have to keep on him, jolly him along, sell a few tickets, maybe give a few away and hope the wine sales cover it. “I know three people who are coming already, three lawyers, they’ll fall in love with this place and become regulars.” He’ll invite Simon Says, and maybe Dorothy. Why hasn’t he thought of that before?
Gaspard drains his glass and resumes chopping. “Lawyers?” he says. “In my restaurant? Never!”
* * *
—
Next stop is Dorothy’s, to deliver six bottles of a wine he discovered on the Côtes du Rhône trip. A young Rasteau. Not as good as a Lirac or a Cairanne, but okay for the price, and it brings back fond memories of their month in France. They landed in Paris, rented a car, and drove all the way down to Rasteau, stopping almost hourly along the way to eat and drink as though they’d just spent forty days in a desert. As he turns onto Dorothy’s street, he wonders if Elinor will bring him something from South Africa, a nice bottle of Meerlust, perhaps. Hard to resist a wine called Meerlust. The wind has drifted a blanket of dead leaves around the headstones in the cemetery. Will Dorothy have to shovel the snow off her walk this winter? Will Simon do it? Once again, Simon’s blue Nissan is parked in the driveway behind Bernie’s green Taurus. He must have stopped in on his way to basketball. Harry parks on the brittle grass separating the street from the cemetery fence, between two No Parking signs. He’ll only be a few minutes. There’s furtive rustling in the cemetery, squirrels, probably, looking for the acorns they buried in the summer. He closes his car door and locks it.
The six bottles rattle in their cloth bag. The wine is a shibboleth, a small gift that gains him entry to something bigger, like offering up a heart at the gates to the afterlife. Sophie the Temperance Maven glares at the bag before leading him to the kitchen. What is it with her? He pours himself a glass from a bottle that is already open on the counter and goes into the living room. He sees Ozzie talking to Nathan and raises his glass to them. Simon is standing next to Dorothy beside the fireplace.
“Hello, Harry,” she says. “You’ve come back.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine. Thank you. Really, I am.”
“I brought some wine.”
“I saw that. We’ll have to drink up.”
“How’s Elinor?” Simon asks.
“I’m picking her up at the airport this afternoon.”
“South Africa,” Simon says to Dorothy. “Land of milk and honey for lawyers.” He looks at Harry. “Why didn’t you go with her?”
“Yeah, well,” says Harry, “do you know what a ticket to South Africa costs? I didn’t have a university to pay my way.” Actually, he wasn’t all that interested in going to South Africa. Nothing he’d heard about it made him want to see it. Hot and dry, political unrest, lingering racism despite the end of apartheid. Besides, Elinor didn’t ask him. She wanted to spend the time getting to know Sandy Headway. “Anyway,” he says, “I probably would have had to clear the trip with Homeland Security.” And he tells them about his conversation with Rupert Kronkman. They are both suitably shocked. Simon is so enraged he steps away from the fireplace and bends over as though he’s been punched in the stomach.
“Those bastards!” he says loudly. People stop in mid-conversation and look over. “They have no right! They have no right!”
“Who has no right?” Nathan says, coming over to join them. He isn’t as tall as Bernie was, but he has the same genial face and almost the same voice. Harry wonders why the two brothers didn’t get along. Nathan sets his plate on the mantel and wipes crumbs from his lips with a crumpled paper napkin. “No right to do what?”
Harry repeats what he told Simon and Dorothy, this time putting more self-righteous indignation in the telling. “The guy even said I have to file an itinerary with them the next time I want to go to the States,” he says, “or they won’t let me in.” He’s embarrassed by Simon’s response. Or, more accurately, he’s embarrassed by his own feeble response. Simon is right, it’s an outrage. He should have been angrier. He should be angrier now.
“Or anywhere,” he said, “before I go anywhere.”
“Well, don’t do it,” says Nathan.
“But what choice do I have?” Harry asks.
“You can tell them to go fuck themselves,” Simon explodes, leaning forward to emphasize his fury, wine sloshing in his glass. “No, you can tell them to call me, and I’ll tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“You mean that?” Harry says. “I can tell them to call you?”
“Goddamn right,” says Simon. “Tell them to talk to your lawyer. Those bastards have no jurisdiction in Canada. They can’t go around t
elling us what we can and can’t do! What do they think this is, another one of their goddamn puppet states? They think they’re Germany and we’re Poland? Goddamned fascists!” says Simon. He goes into the kitchen, comes back with an open wine bottle, Harry’s Rasteau, and fills Harry’s glass, then his own.
Harry finishes his wine and thinks it’s time to leave. On a high note. Except for himself and Ozzie and maybe Simon, all the people there are family, they understand these things. Rallying, uniting, circling the wagons. Even scattered, they haven’t grown up thinking they have to face life on their own. Is that how Daphne feels? Would she call him in a crisis? No, he doesn’t think she would. She wouldn’t think she could rely on him. He cringes at the thought. He shakes Nathan’s hand, says goodbye to Sophie, gives Dorothy a chaste hug. He wants to say something consoling to her, tell her Bernie was a good man, that he’ll be missed, that she’ll be well looked after, but instead he almost says, Watch out for Simon—there’s something broken in Simon.
“Are you okay to drive?” Dorothy asks him.
“Of course.”
“Be careful,” she says. “The 401 is a madhouse at this time of day.”
“I will,” he says.
“And say hello to Elinor for me. Bring her around sometime, I’d like to meet her.”
“I will.” He meant to invite her to the wine tasting, Simon, too, but decides this is not the best time. “I’ll call you when everything is settled,” he says.
Simon and Ozzie accompany him to the door, where Simon engulfs him in a bear hug. For a moment, he enjoys feeling part of something like a family. “I’m serious,” Simon says. “You tell those motherfuckers to call me next time. They think they can intimidate everyone.”
“I will. Thanks, Simon.”
“And don’t go feeling guilty about Bernie,” Simon says, patting Harry’s arm. “It could have happened to anyone.”
Harry looks at him. A chasm opens up somewhere inside his chest. “What can happen to anyone?” he says.
“Missing that pass, forget it.”
“What pass?” he says. “What are you talking about?”
Simon squeezes Harry’s arm. “I passed you the ball. Don’t you remember? I passed it to you, not to Bernie, you missed the pass, and the ball went right by you to him.”
“Sorry, Simon, you’ve lost me.” He looks at Ozzie. “What’s he talking about, Oz?”
Ozzie shrugs. “Things happen, man.”
“What things?”
“Bernie’s breakaway,” Simon says, as though explaining something obvious to a five-year-old. “I got the rebound, I passed the ball to you, you missed the pass, the ball went to Bernie, and he ran the whole length of the court with a bum ticker. That’s what killed him, that breakaway.”
“Simon, I didn’t miss any—”
“You catch that pass, Bernie’s probably alive today. But like I say, anyone can miss a pass.”
“I didn’t miss it, I…I wasn’t…” He turns to Ozzie, who is looking down at his glass.
“See you next week, Hairball,” Simon says. “Thanks for the wine.”
* * *
—
Harry sits in his car for a long time, window down, slowly breathing in the cold November air and listening to the dismal rustle of squirrels in the cemetery. Simon is an ass. He remembers the incident clearly. Simon passed the ball to Bernie, not to him, and Bernie’s heart gave out, so now Simon is trying to pretend he passed the ball to Harry. So much for feeling part of a family. He looks at the clock on the dash, takes a deep breath. He doesn’t have time for this, he’s going to be late meeting Elinor. He turns on the radio and listens to a traffic report: the usual gridlock, slowdowns in the collector lanes, an accident on the Dufferin on-ramp. He likes sitting in his car, the calm cemetery outside his window, snow softly accumulating on his windshield. He isn’t hurting anyone here. He can roll up the window, turn on the heater, lock the doors, turn off his phone. No one can reach him. Eventually, though, someone will come out of the house, Simon, maybe, or Dorothy, and wonder what he’s doing, just sitting there, and he’ll have to explain, maybe defend, himself. I’m not doing anything. I haven’t done anything. He starts the engine and puts the car in drive, but keeps the window down and his foot on the brake a while longer. For one exhilarating second, he considers flooring the accelerator and piling into the back of Simon’s Nissan. Sophie will rush out and think he’s drunk. Police will be called. He will have to explain. He looks again at the clock. Elinor’s plane is due to land in an hour and a half. He takes his foot off the brake and the car begins to roll on its own, slowly at first, then faster, until eventually he has to steer.
Daphne
MARCH 4, 2010
Sitting in Coffee Guy’s bathroom, you tried to remember if you actually sent that email to your father or just imagined you did. And if you did send it, maybe you’d been a bit, um, precipitous. You should call him, sound him out, see if he mentions the email. But to do that you needed your phone. And first you needed a line.
Everyone was addicted to something. You were far from alone. You knew someone at UBC who drank twenty-four litres of water every day. She went into a forty-minute class with six bottles of water in her backpack. She wasn’t worried, she said, because it was just water.
Many people were addicted to TV. In White Falls, you went into friends’ houses where the TV was on all day, even when no one was in the room, giant screens that took up a whole wall, like in 1984, prattling on about hurricanes and mass shootings. Your father said he remembered when televisions were more obedient. They were called sets then, and they stayed in the corners of rooms.
Airline pilots were addicted to flying. It wasn’t the job, or the practical aspects of it, the reading of gauges and flipping of toggle switches; it was the high they got from knowing that everything they did took place thousands of feet above the earth. Every takeoff was like a hit of MDMA, a sweet victory over the laws of gravity. Flying reduced everyone below to meaningless, invisible specks. It wasn’t just pilots, either, it was the whole flight crew. They couldn’t get enough of it. There had to be regulations to limit the amount of time they could spend in the air, otherwise they’d live up there, never come down. They’d beam passengers and supplies aboard, if they could, refuel in the air, take their vacations on the holodeck. When you flew in an airplane, you were delivering yourself into the hands of addicts. But then you, too, were an addict, so you felt you were in good company.
You didn’t have the rolled-up fiver anymore, and there was nothing in the washroom you could use. You dumped a small pile on the back of your hand and pushed it into your face while inhaling deeply. Not pretty, a bit wasteful, but it worked. The right side of your brain sizzled. You did it again. You licked your wrist. You licked your watch-band. You sucked on your coat sleeve. You were in the zone.
You remembered you and your father watching an interview on TV with a Blue Jays pitcher, you thought it was Dave Stieb, and the interviewer asked him how he could keep his concentration in front of fifty thousand screaming fans, and Stieb said it was a matter of focus, you had to get into the zone, and when you were in the zone, you didn’t hear the crowd, you didn’t see the crowd, there was no one there except you and the catcher and the batter, you were in the zone.
Spoken like a true addict.
You used to like watching baseball with your dad. He would come home with a bag of popcorn and a Sprite for you and a bottle of wine for him, and he’d yell at the umpires and, occasionally, at batters who struck out. “You bum!” he’d shout. “I could do that for half your salary!” He’d quit working at the newspaper then and was teaching at the college. He seemed happier, even buoyant. He said it was because of the steady paycheque, no more sitting in the old Esso station waiting for someone to set fire to their trailer. But now you realized it was because, as a teacher, he taught every day, five days a we
ek, week after week, year after year. He was addicted to the adrenalin high he got from standing in front of a class, so much better than standing in front of a burning house asking the parents for a photograph of their dead son. He still did a little freelance writing on the side, went off on short assignments, usually in the summer when he wasn’t teaching, and came home with gifts for you, little things like key chains and decks of cards with pictures on them of where he’d been. When you were older and he drove you back to White Falls after a weekend in Toronto, he’d ask you about school, about your friends. He listened to you the way he listened to his students. You didn’t tell him about Kyle, or the dope, you wanted to protect him from the knowledge of that. You wanted him to love you like he loved his students. You told him about the novels you were reading, and sometimes he’d say, “I’d like to read that,” so you read books you thought he’d like, the classics: Austen, Hardy, Trollope, Eliot. Somehow he skipped the nineteenth century when he got his English degree, so they were all new to him. On those long drives you laid out the whole crowded landscape for him, the East Midlands, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Middlesex. Wasn’t Miss Brooke a pill? Everyone told her not to marry that Casaubon, why didn’t she listen? Ironic, now, looking back on it. The uninstructive past. Rural Ontario is full of Miss Brookes, your dad said. She could have been the dean of Madawaska College.
When you asked him if you could come to live with him in Toronto when you were fifteen, you told him White Falls was beginning to scare you. You actually said bore, but you meant scare. The whole Kyle thing, the feeling of being trapped, that your life was going to be an endless loop of diapers and Walmart. He said if your mother agreed, nothing would make him happier. He was with Elinor then. Your mother said she would drink a bottle of Clorox. So that was that. Parents should be careful what they let their children look forward to.
