The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  Gaspard comes back wiping his hands on his apron, and Harry straightens and orders the steak frites and a half-litre of the Saint-Émilion. “You still have half-litres, don’t you, Gaspard?”

  “For you, Harry, anything you want.”

  Elinor asks for a salade niçoise and a small San Pellegrino.

  “I thought you were going to have the fish,” Harry says.

  “We have very good Pacific salmon today,” says Gaspard. “Wild, not farmed.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll have the salad.”

  Across the street, the father and daughter are gone and the shop is closed and dark. It’s as though his fantasies have fled into the night. Gaspard lights a tea candle and sets it in a wine glass at the centre of their table.

  “I’ve been thinking about that wine tasting, Harry,” he says. “I think it’s a good idea. Business has been so-so lately. Maybe it’s a good time to try something new. But not before Christmas, eh?”

  “No problem,” Harry says. “I’ll set it up for the new year. I’ve got six or seven people interested already. Not all of them lawyers.”

  “Good, good.” He pats Harry on the back.

  “I like him,” Elinor says when Gaspard and his psychedelic pants have moved on. “He reminds me of my father.”

  * * *

  —

  Harry is pleasantly surprised when Elinor takes his hand as they walk from the restaurant to the car. She’s a nicer person than he is; he’s always known that. More forgiving. As far as he knows, she hasn’t killed her best friend or ruined anyone’s life. Maybe it comes from having grown up in an uninterrupted family. The middle child, always the mediator. His emotions keep swooping down at him, like bats in the dark. He has no idea how to deal with them other than to survive them, let them do their worst. Wait them out. If that’s what Elinor meant by him putting things off, then she’s wrong. He doesn’t put things off. He gets so staggered by emotions that he has to pause to catch his breath and regain his balance. Holding Elinor’s hand helps.

  Elinor falls asleep during the short drive home, her chin resting on her scarf. He’s reminded of those long-ago afternoons when he took Daphne for drives in the countryside, showing her migrating geese, lambs being born on a colleague’s farm, coyote tracks in snow-covered fields. He deliberately searched out positive, life-affirming things to show her, things he hoped she would recall later as defining moments of her childhood. Things that would at least balance the methane calculations and carbon footprints. On the way home she would nod off, too, her eyes slowly drooping, her head resting against the doorframe. He would watch her as he drove, afraid to turn a corner for fear of waking her up. He felt close to her in those moments. She must trust me, he thought, to fall asleep while I’m driving.

  Maybe he should fly out to Vancouver, sit down with her, and try to re-establish that trust. Elinor would say he should have thought of that long ago. Maybe, as a psychologist, she was waiting to see how long it would take him to figure it out for himself. He suddenly feels anxious, impatient to go, as though time is suddenly of the essence. He accelerates, takes turns a little too fast, comes to rolling stops at corners, barely slows for a speed bump as he approaches their house.

  Elinor wakes up when he stops in their driveway, and he helps her up the front steps, unlocks the door. Millie appears from somewhere behind the house and darts through the door ahead of them. He is so delighted and relieved to see her he tries to pick her up, but she scoots into the kitchen, where her bowl is.

  “I think I should fly out to Vancouver,” he says as they shed their boots and coats in the vestibule. “I want to see how Daphne’s doing. What do you think?”

  “I think that’s a great idea, Harry,” she says. “When?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. I was going to wait until I heard from Winston Curtis, but now I think I should just go.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No, you stay here and get rested up. I won’t be gone long.”

  It’s only nine o’clock, three in the morning for Elinor, but she isn’t ready for bed. She believes that jet lag can simply be told to go away. They go into the kitchen and she starts to make coffee. Harry pours himself a glass of wine, then checks flights to Vancouver on his laptop.

  “Call Daphne now,” Elinor says, yawning. “Tell her you’re coming.”

  “No, it’s too late. I’ll email her when I know what time I’ll be getting in.”

  “Harry, it’s six o’clock in Vancouver, for heaven’s sake.”

  “She won’t be home. She’s never home.”

  “Call her and leave a message. Tell her you’ll call later, give her a time. I don’t need to tell you this, Harry, this is too basic for words. No one is unreachable anymore.”

  “You were for the first four days you were in Cape Town,” he says. “I didn’t know what had happened to you.”

  “Just call her, Harry.”

  She’s right. He knows she’s right. He doesn’t do well when she’s away, despite what he tells himself about coping and dealing. Coping and dealing aren’t the same as solving. If he’s going to have any hope of solving difficulties, he needs Elinor. He calls Daphne’s number, he’ll tell her he’s planning to come out to see her. But when he hears the click that means he’s being switched to voicemail he’s almost relieved. Maybe he should surprise her, not give her a chance to find something to do that will make her too busy to see him. He’s about to hang up when El the Clairvoyant says, “No, leave a message.”

  “Hi, Daphne,” he says after the beep. “Just calling to say hi. Everything’s fine here, beautiful day but cold. Elinor’s back. Did I tell you she was in South Africa? Call when you get a chance. Bye.”

  When he hangs up, Elinor is shaking her head at him.

  “All right,” he says.

  Who would bother answering the bloodless messages he leaves? His heart is so heavy with such a great charge of love, he’ll never get into the afterlife. Ammut will devour his heart and he will cease to exist. He wonders if ceasing to exist is the same as dying. No, it’s worse. It’s more like having your entire life erased, as if you never were. Complete annihilation. As though someone dropped a huge magnet onto the gods’ hard drive.

  He drains his wine and picks up the phone, rehearsing a better message to leave: I love you, Daphne, I miss you, this silence is killing me. I’m coming out to Vancouver as soon as I can get a flight. Please call so we can arrange to get together. Won’t that stop her from ever calling him again? He listens to her phone ringing, picturing her in a bright, cheerful apartment, with hardwood floors and tall windows that let in plenty of sunlight. A counter divides the kitchen from the living area, a small fishbowl beside it with two tiny golden koi. Food in the refrigerator, healthful food, smoked salmon, Boston lettuce, and a jar of real capers, Elinor’s influence, and a small wine rack with bottles of a clear Okanagan sauvignon blanc, his. He could send her some. The table is set for two—Paul the lawyer is coming over for dinner and a movie—with new candles ready but unlit.

  When the message comes on, he hangs up.

  “I’ll just check my emails first,” he says when Elinor frowns. “She may have written.”

  His laptop is on the kitchen table. There actually is an email from Daphne. How long has it been there? He tries to remember the last time he checked. It must have come after he looked up Elinor’s arrival time, when was that? He smiles sheepishly at Elinor. All this fuss. He opens the email.

  “Dear Dad and Elinor,” he reads. “You’re not going to like hearing this.”

  “Oh no,” he says, closing the laptop. “What?” says Elinor. “What is it?”

  “You read it,” he says. “It’s addressed to both of us.”

  Elinor pulls the laptop to her and opens it. “ ‘Dear Dad and Elinor,’ ” she reads aloud. “ ‘You’re not going to like he
aring this, but I’ve decided I need to take a break from our relationship. I need to do this for me. I know neither of you approve of very much that I do, but you know what? I don’t approve of very much that you do, either. You’re a quitter, Dad. You quit two jobs in White Falls. You quit being a husband and a father so you could take that job in Toronto, and then you quit that job, too. And now you’re selling people alcohol to keep them placid and compliant. Typical white colonialist bullshit. Elinor, I know you think you’re helping people, but all you really do is help them fit into the role of the docile citizen. Shame, shame on you both. I don’t think either of you has been a very good influence on me. So I’m backing off, who knows for how long. Not forever, maybe, but for now. Please, neither of you call me, text me, or communicate with me in any way. I need to work this out for myself. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to resume our relationship. Daphne.’ ”

  “Oh, Harry,” Elinor says. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think it had got that bad. What are you going to do?”

  “I deserve this,” Harry says.

  “No, you don’t. She must be suffering terribly.”

  “No wonder she hasn’t been returning my calls.”

  “You mustn’t take her words literally, Harry. She’s in pain.”

  “Well, now we’re all in pain.”

  “I know you’re going to say something about hammers and nails, but I am a psychologist, and I do think Daphne’s behaviour since her outburst in July suggests someone in crisis. Mild, earlier on, but it may have become more manifest lately. Maybe because of drugs, or dropping out of school, or maybe this thing with Paul isn’t working out.”

  “None of which has anything to do with us.”

  “It could be a lot of little things. In any case, she sounds like she needs support, not isolation. It’s good that you’re going out there. People in crisis usually push away anyone they think might be able to help them.”

  He pulls the laptop towards him and reads the email himself.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says to Elinor. He is genuinely thrown. Even though the email is obviously a continuation of the Daphne who left their house in July, it seems to him to have arrived out of nowhere, like the death of someone who’s been ill for a long time.

  “What do you want to do?”

  He can think of several things he wants to do, none of them very helpful. Not answer the email, continue to stew the way he’s been stewing since July. Write back and say, Fine, but estrangement can be a two-way street. Nothing shall come of nothing. But he knows it wouldn’t work. Now that she has Paul to provide for her, his love is the only thing he can deprive her of.

  “Wait it out,” he says. “She’ll come around.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “It’s what she wants.”

  “I know. But I asked you what you wanted. How would you feel while you were waiting it out?”

  “Miserable. Useless. Frightened.”

  “You feel all that already. It’ll only get worse.”

  “You think I should still go out there?”

  “Of course. Find her. Talk to her.”

  “Not much of a homecoming for you, is it?”

  “I’ll rest while you’re away. Stay as long as you need to. I’ll be all right.”

  * * *

  —

  Going to bed proves awkward. He watches her undress, looking for signs of hesitation or reluctance, any difference at all, and is comforted when he detects none.

  “Hurry, it’s cold,” she says, lifting the blanket for him. “Have you not turned the furnace on?”

  He has not. He joins her and they enfold themselves in each other.

  “Hmm,” she says, “you’re my furnace.”

  But his mind is on Daphne. He plunges again into his personal pool of free-floating guilt.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” he says. “Nothing seems to be happening down there.”

  Millie jumps onto the bed and begins walking back and forth across their legs.

  “Never mind,” Elinor says, stroking the cat. “I’m too tired, anyway.”

  In a way, he’s grateful to Daphne for giving him something real to worry about. He lies in the dark, imagining his daughter sitting on a sofa, a red Mexican blanket over her shoulders, stroking a cat in her lap, having listened to his messages and feeling better now that she’s broken off with him. Now that she’s officially estranged. Through her picture window she can see a black-and-white tanker anchored in the bay, rusted and almost derelict. At low tide it lists dangerously to starboard, but at high tide it rights itself, lifts gently out of the mud, and tugs at its anchor chain. On his last trip to Vancouver he stayed at the Sylvia Hotel, and from his room at night he could look across a side street into a small apartment occupied by an elderly Asian couple. He tried not to look, but became fascinated by the image of peace they exuded. It was beyond calm, as though after a cataclysm in their home country they’d sailed across a wide, fabulous ocean filled with creatures known only to children and marine gods, until they finally nudged ashore in Vancouver and pieced their lives back together on top of their old lives, living both then and in this new time and place. Before and now. Here they had only each other, and were happy. He watched them watching television. During a commercial the woman got up from her chair and went into the kitchen to make tea. When Harry woke in the morning the old man was doing tai chi on the balcony, so close that if Harry had opened his window they might have conversed across the street without raising their voices.

  That was how he wanted to imagine Daphne, sitting alone in the Chinese couple’s apartment. He wishes her their peace, their sense of having survived a long and arduous journey. He’ll fly to Vancouver and take a room in the Sylvia. Daphne will be in the apartment across the way. She won’t even have to know he’s there. He’ll phone her from his room and watch her talking to him. She’ll laugh and stroke the cat as he talks, the words of love tumbling out of him, and she’ll curl up more tightly on the sofa, looking through her window at the rusted oil tanker gently straining at its leash in the sunlight dancing on English Bay.

  Daphne

  MARCH 5, 2010

  Everything hurt. Everything caused pain. Paul. Wendell. Your hand. The snow falling however gently on your eyelids. Your purse filled with sharp objects made a dangerous pillow. You must have dumped your ear on the side of the bumpster going down. Bless thy five wits. Bless thee from whirlwinds and starblasting. Houston, we have achieved liftoff. We are exiting Earth’s atmosphere. Situation normal. Jane Austen said there was nothing like staying at home for real comfort. What did she know? She didn’t have a purse full of OxyContin.

  Harry

  DECEMBER 2–3, 2009

  Wednesday morning, Harry breezes through airport security, which of course worries him. No one is supposed to breeze through airport security. He always forgets something, coins, the pen in his shirt pocket, his belt. The contents of his briefcase is a jumble of chargers, wires, earphones, all things that when X-rayed look like a bomb. But he is practically whisked through the line, not told to take off his shoes, his boarding pass cursorily checked. It’s a bad sign. They’re watching him. He proceeds towards departure gate 72 like a person with nothing to declare, which of course is the first thing they look for.

  “Harry! Harry Bowes?”

  The voice behind him is faintly familiar. Is it Kronkman’s? When he turns innocently around he sees it’s George Cramb, Elinor’s former colleague whose indiscretion with a graduate student forced him into ignominious retreat from teaching. Harry’s own dalliance with a graduate student turned out well, so far, and he wonders if George harbours resentment towards him.

  “George,” he says, holding out his hand. “Good to see you. Are you coming or going?”

  “Coming,” George says, setting down his carry-on. He’s aged and put on weight, Har
ry sees, but is as carefully dressed as ever. His beautifully tailored fawn-coloured overcoat makes Harry aware of his own off-the-rack special. Christ, he thinks, have I turned into Willy Loman? “Just getting back from South Africa.”

  “South Africa?” Harry says. “Elinor was just at a conference in Cape Town.”

  “I know. I saw her there. She looked well. She and Sandra Hedley seemed always to have had their heads together.”

  “What are you doing these days?”

  “I’m in private practice.”

  “It seems to agree with you.”

  “Oh, I suppose it does. I’m not so sure I agree with it.”

  “Do you specialize in early-onset bipolar, too?”

  “No, no, dear heaven, save me. No, I treat substance abuse. Addictions of various kinds. But since young people with personality disorders often turn to drugs and alcohol as a means of self-medicating, I decided to camp out on the fringes of this conference, see what I could pick up.” There is a slight pause. “Besides, I needed a break from this weather.”

  Daphne doesn’t have a personality disorder. Elinor would have warned him if she did. But maybe Elinor was being more circumspect than George. She did say Daphne was in crisis.

  “Elinor’s thinking of going into private practice, too,” Harry says. “With Sandra. I wonder about the timing.”

  “Depends on what they specialize in,” George says. “These days, anyone who lets clients feel good about themselves has their full attention.” He gives Harry what Harry takes to be an odd look. “Where are you off to, if I may ask?”

  “Vancouver,” says Harry. “I’m going to visit my daughter.”

  “Ah, yes, ’tis the season, isn’t it. Very fatherly of you, I’m sure. She’s well?”

  “Oh yes. She’s fine. I just haven’t seen her for a while.”