The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to go out tonight,” Elinor says.

  “We can order in,” he says. “The Vietnamese place delivers.”

  “I know. Let’s just sit in the living room for a bit before we decide.”

  She has brought him a gift, two gifts, in fact: two bottles of 2006 Meerlust. “A merlot from me,” she says, “and a rubicon from Sandra. She wants you to like her.”

  “Sandra?” he says. “I thought her name was Sandy.”

  “It was, but she prefers Sandra now. It sounds more professional. She doesn’t think a person with psychological difficulties would want to confide in someone named Sandy.”

  “Especially not in the Beaches.”

  Why did he torment himself with morbid imaginings? Did he think that placing the women he loved in a series of horrific scenarios—shallow grave, drug cult—would somehow ward off their happening in real life? That they wouldn’t happen in reality because they had, in a sense, already happened in his imagination? If so, then he should stop imagining Daphne living happily with her lawyer boyfriend in a luxurious home in Vancouver. He could be making his own nightmare come true.

  Elinor takes a shower while he sits in the kitchen with a second glass of wine, not the Meerlust. He offered to join her, but she said she was too tired after the long flight. He opens his mystery novel and has to go back a few pages to remind himself where he was when the book fell off the bed, which was when, Wednesday morning, when Simon called about Bernie. Simon the jerk. In the novel, the police still haven’t found the missing woman. They widened the search perimeters, checked and rechecked CCTV footage, carried out more door-to-door interviews. Still nothing. She’ll turn up, he tells them. She’ll have gone off to a conference, and will soon be back to badger her husband about all the things he didn’t do while she was away.

  When Elinor comes downstairs, he suggests they go out to Lutello’s for dinner.

  “Lutello’s?” she says. “Okay, sure.”

  “What’s wrong with Lutello’s?”

  “Nothing. They don’t have very much I can eat, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean? We’ve been eating there for years.”

  “I know. But in South Africa I ate so well. I felt so healthy. No carbohydrates, no sugar, no alcohol.” No emails from a burdensome husband. “I had fish every day. Kingklip, it’s delicious.”

  “Is that a fish?”

  “Sort of. It’s actually a kind of eel, I think.”

  “Lutello’s has fish.”

  She sighs. “Tilapia. Farmed. But okay. Let’s go to Lutello’s.”

  “Or we can go somewhere else.”

  “No, Lutello’s is fine. I just don’t want to slip back into the same old, same old, that’s all.”

  “The same old what?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. Did you call Daphne?”

  “Many times, but she didn’t call back,” he says. “I left messages. Then my phone was dead. But I’ll keep trying.”

  “When?”

  “Later. Tonight.”

  She sighs again. “You keep putting things off,” she says. “You put things off until it’s too late to do them.”

  “Look,” he says. “You just got back. Maybe we can talk about my failings some other time.”

  Her disappointment was apparent in the car on the way home from the airport. She was quiet, as if there were a third person in the car she didn’t want to talk in front of. He thought she was just tired after a long flight, but she must have been resigning herself to losing the freedom she’d found in South Africa. The conference had been a turning point for her, she said. She and Sandra got on amazingly well, even sharing a room almost entirely taken up by two single beds and a wardrobe. She has decided to join Sandra’s clinic. She’ll start there in the fall. She wants, she said, to get back into the real world, to confront real problems, help real people.

  “There are real people in the Beaches?” he said.

  “That’s the trouble with you, Harry,” she snapped. “I try to share with you something that, to me, is extremely serious. I’ve said that the past ten days have changed me, I’m about to leap into a whole new exciting phase of my life, and all you can do is make a stupid joke about the last words out of my mouth. You entirely miss the heart of it.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I didn’t want to get into a big discussion about your decision to leave the university, that’s all. I thought that could wait.”

  He felt her look boring into him. “I wasn’t suggesting that we discuss it,” she said.

  “But it affects me, too,” he said.

  “All right, fair enough,” she said, as though thinking of something else. “When, though? When do you think would be an appropriate time to discuss my big decision?”

  And he realized that the other person in the car, the one she didn’t like very much, was him.

  * * *

  —

  “We should drive to Lutello’s,” he says as they leave the house. “You’re too tired to walk all that way.”

  “I walked every day in Cape Town.”

  “Do you want to walk now?”

  “No, it’s cold. Let’s take the car.”

  But their argument is still unresolved. They sit in the car, parked in the driveway, because Harry can’t bring himself to put the car in gear. He can’t even do up his seatbelt. His hands are shaking. He feels himself being sucked by a powerful vacuum into the vortex of a middle-aged, middle-class couple having an argument while sitting in their car in their driveway on their way to a night out after what is, apparently, a not-long-enough separation. His estrangement from Daphne, if that’s what it is, is at the centre of the vortex.

  “El,” he says, turning to her, “I haven’t talked to Daphne because she never answers her phone or returns my messages.”

  “Did you email her?”

  “Before there was email, people wrote letters, but they didn’t write them every day. I suppose some did, your family maybe. But no normal person needs or even wants to know that much about another person, not all the time.”

  “You do understand that you are telling a psychologist how normal people behave?”

  “Yes, I understand that. Thank you.”

  “Don’t you want to know how Daphne is doing?”

  “I know how Daphne is doing. She’s not doing well. She hasn’t done well since she was ten years old. I really don’t need to talk to her to be reminded of that.”

  “Harry,” Elinor says, “when Sandra and I open our clinic, you can be our first client.”

  “Harrison,” he says tightly.

  “Pardon?”

  “I go by Harrison now. I didn’t think people liked buying wine from someone named Harry.”

  “Okay. Fine. Be like that.” She sits staring through the windshield at the front of their house. He thinks his cleverness has silenced her. Then he thinks, no, it isn’t that. She’s trying to control her anger. Good, let her. He’s tired of people he loves being angry with him.

  “Harry,” she says, looking at him, “what has happened to you? To us? We’ve never been like this. We used to be able to talk about things. Now when I suggest you do something to mend your relationship with Daphne, you either get angry with me or you nod and say you’ll do it and then you don’t do it. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “When we first met, I admired you. You were a person of principle. You’d quit your job at the newspaper over a principle. You left your teaching job at Madawaska College over a principle. You were hired at York because you understood journalistic ethics. You told me all this yourself, and I believed you. But lately you seem to have grown bitter and old, angry with Daphne, angry with me. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Daphne
has made me realize that I was never a person of principle. Would a person of principle leave his job and his family instead of staying to fight for those very principles? I should have tried to force the college to publish Melissa’s and Blaine’s essay. I should have called every media outlet in the country and told them what the college was doing. I didn’t. I got on my high horse and I rode out of town.” He feels his eyes filling with tears, and looks at Elinor. “It wasn’t principle that made me run away to Toronto, it was cowardice.”

  “It’s not cowardice to refuse to be drawn into a battle you know you can’t win.” She puts her hand over his. “And as for leaving your family, you told me you thought that would only be for a few months. So, things changed. Stop beating yourself up about it, Harry, and do something to fix it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Can’t you see that your refusal to make even a minimal effort to contact Daphne is why she is making no attempt to contact you? That you and Daphne are the same person?”

  “Daphne and I the same person? Well then, she should stop beating me up.”

  “You should stop beating yourself up. This thing with Daphne has unnerved you. Of course it has. You’re angry with her, and you don’t want to be angry with her because you’re afraid she’ll cut you out of her life. And so you transfer your anger to me. I won’t let you do that, Harry. You must see that this is not a way for any of us to move forward.”

  “Elinor,” he says, frightened now that she is telling him something deeper and truer than either of them are willing to admit. “I did call her. I called her many times, I left many messages. She hasn’t returned any of my calls. What am I supposed to do?”

  “When you come for your appointment, my first question will be, why have you waited so long to address this issue with your daughter?”

  “You can’t be my therapist. You’re my wife.”

  Elinor looks as though she’s trying to select one of a vast array of possible responses to that, none of them conciliatory.

  Harry puts the car in gear and backs out of the driveway.

  * * *

  —

  Seven o’clock is early for Lutello’s, and they get their favourite table by the window, looking across Roncesvalles at the Vietnamese grocery. The street lights come on as they are being seated by Gaspard, who wears the obligatory black-and-white checked trousers of the French chef de cuisine. He also sports a red bandana knotted jauntily around his neck. He seems to be in better spirits than he was earlier, his old voluble self, and Manon no longer looks like a Parisian café patronne. She’s as crisp and warm as one of her baguettes. Harry’s hopes rise.

  “You look tired, ma chère,” Gaspard says to Elinor, pulling out her chair. He takes her napkin and spreads it with a flourish across her lap; Harry’s, he picks up and hands to him.

  “Thanks, Gaspard,” says Elinor. “I just got back from South Africa. I’m exhausted.”

  Harry hasn’t told her about Simon’s self-serving theory of the fatal missed pass that killed Bernie. She asks him what their Tuesday afternoons will be like in the future, and all he can think to say is, “Different.” He doesn’t say his basketball days are over. But how can he go back now? As though nothing has happened. No one will mention Bernie. Simon would sign him in, or else Noel/Leon, but otherwise Bernie’s absence will go unremarked. His own absence will be noticed even less. It’s possible Harry will have only one glass of wine at lunch next Tuesday, like a minute of silence, but it’s more likely he’ll have a defiant third, and raise the glass in a mute toast to his departed friend. And then not go to basketball. Maybe a year from now, on the anniversary of Bernie’s death, he’ll go back. No one will ask where he’s been. Simon will sneak a few cans of beer into the dressing room and they’ll drink to Bernie, then hide the empties in their sports bags and go home.

  Studying the menu, Elinor asks how Bernie’s wife is taking his death.

  “She’s coping,” Harry says.

  “Coping how?”

  “She’s calm, keeps herself quiet, surrounded by nieces and uncles and friends.”

  “Then she isn’t coping,” Elinor says. “Coping is shrieking and beating your fists against God’s chest.”

  “God wasn’t there,” Harry says. Then, remembering the torn skirt, he says, “She may have gone through a bit of that.” Did Simon notice him looking at Dorothy’s knees, was that it? He finds himself feeling possessive about Dorothy’s grief, since he participated in it, perhaps even caused it. He wishes Elinor would stop analyzing everything. Life is a tangled mess, but you don’t untangle it, you learn to live with the knots. You cope. Knots hold things together.

  Elinor returns his gaze and smiles sadly, as though memorizing things about him she’ll miss when he’s dead, and not finding many.

  “When are you going to call Daphne?” she asks.

  “I’ve already said I’ll call her tonight,” he says. “As soon as we get home.”

  “You forgot, didn’t you?” she says.

  “No, I didn’t forget,” he says. “I thought about calling every day, and I did call. It was just never the right time.”

  “There is no wrong time to talk to your daughter, Harry.”

  “There’s a wrong time for everything.”

  Elinor smiles. “She has a cell phone, you know. She’s always there.”

  “She won’t give me her cell number. Doesn’t that tell you something? She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  Elinor looks down at her menu. Harry is unable to read his. He looks out onto Roncesvalles. Across the street, the Vietnamese grocer is hosing down the sidewalk under his emptied vegetable and fruit stands while his daughter, a tall, thin girl of about fifteen, carries a stack of plastic milk crates inside. Father and daughter working together. Must be nice. Why can’t Elinor see what is so obvious? Daphne isn’t always there. She’s always somewhere else.

  “It may seem to Daphne,” Elinor says, “that you don’t want to talk to her.”

  “I do want to talk to her. That’s why I keep calling her.”

  “But you don’t talk to her. You could find her cell number. You don’t have to keep calling a number you know isn’t going to be answered. You choose to do those things.”

  “I even called her professor, Winston Curtis. He hasn’t heard from her, either. She hasn’t registered for any courses this term.”

  “Oh dear. That is bad news.”

  “I’ve been expecting bad news, and now there it is.”

  “And what do you think it means?”

  “That she’s doing drugs. Has dropped out of school. Is living on the street. All those things are possible. Even likely.”

  “Or Paul is looking after her, as she told us he was.”

  He looks away, taps his spoon on the table. “I know,” he says. “And if that’s happening, then I really do need to know about it. But it’s like if I don’t ask, then they aren’t happening.”

  “You know, don’t you, that ostriches don’t really stick their heads into holes in the ground when they sense danger.”

  “They don’t?”

  “Because that would be really stupid, wouldn’t it.”

  “Well, well, another myth exploded.”

  “It may be,” she says carefully, “that what you’re really avoiding is news that would suggest to you that you have not been a good father. Do you feel that Daphne’s difficulties are your fault?”

  “Of course I do. She’s said as much. Aren’t they?”

  “I have no idea. But you feel that she blames you?”

  “Why wouldn’t she? Things started going downhill for her after I left. Her mother used to call me every other day to tell me about things Daphne was doing that I could have prevented if I’d been there. I don’t know if Daphne thinks that, or even if she remembers what our life was like. But she probably remembers wha
t her mother told her it was like. I don’t remember anything that happened to me before I was fourteen.”

  He is still watching the father and daughter across the street, as though they are a kind of hologram of what he wishes he and Daphne could be. He could write his wine blog and Daphne could be his researcher. Or he could open a Vancouver sales office and she could manage it. He savours these fantasies for a few moments. This Paul fellow could be their lawyer. It could work.

  “Swear to God,” he says, “there’s a huge memory block, like part of my tape has been erased. The missing fourteen years.”

  “Harry,” El says, “it’s called a reminiscence bump. No big mystery. Everyone has them.”

  “For fourteen years?”

  “It’s all in there. You’ve just chosen not to go through those doors yet.”

  “I don’t remember my father once talking about his parents, or making any effort to keep in touch with his family. I’m not even sure he had a family. It was as though he came from a distant planet that subsequently vanished. Like Superman.”

  “Why was that, do you suppose?”

  “No idea,” he shrugs. “People come and go.”

  “No, Harry,” Elinor says. “People come, are mistreated or ignored, and then leave.”

  “Are you’re saying Daphne was mistreated?”

  “I wasn’t talking about Daphne in particular.”

  Why are they still arguing? All the time she was gone he felt he was dealing with the things that life chose to throw at him. Daphne’s defection, Bernie’s death, Homeland Security, the inconclusive colonoscopy. He’s been coping. Reducing his life to its bare essentials: eating, sleeping, staying hydrated, keeping warm. And now Elinor’s home six hours and he feels like an incompetent buffoon, a lousy father, a spiteful son, a lazy husband. When the brain senses the body is dying, it begins to shut down the remote outposts of the heart’s circulation, including itself. That’s what he’s been doing since Elinor left. Protecting the core.