by Liam Durcan
He could remember no dinner parties with friends, no landlord knocking on the door with the inevitable demand to turn the music down. Celia needed the same things he did–for the apartment to be quiet–and they both found the silence an unexpected bounty. There were days, with both of them working in the apartment, when they wouldn’t say a word to each other for hours. A solitude without loneliness, a solitude that came to an end every evening. Was that it? Was love just another word for the rare mixture of compatibility and sex and convenience that seemed effortless? A summer camp sort of commitment, a camaraderie of similar needs and circumstance.
No, he believed it was more than that. She confided in him, telling him how she worried about her mother’s moodiness or Roberto’s constant fights with her father. He knew how angry she became when people made assumptions about her, how they expected the Latina to be fiery and volatile and how they overlooked the precision and effort in her work. No, he knew Celia. There was the smell of her when she would crawl into bed after a night of painting. She would wash but she could never get free of the scent. He would kiss her and the taste stung of solvent, the smell of pigment always there in the dark. Celia was a ritual he observed, never imagining it could be routine, never thinking it could require effort.
As much as any allegiance to Hernan, he understood it was his time with Celia that had brought him to Den Haag. But, by the time he arrived at the pension, Patrick was feeling a pincer grasp of panic about having to face her. He hoped she wouldn’t come, but he’d presented the invitation in such a way that made it seem like a dare. She’d be coming, he knew it, if only to prove a point. He then had the sudden realization that a day at the beach with Celia was the single most ill-advised idea he’d ever come up with. Their life together was nostalgia. Now he was an imposition. He was not a solace to her, he was not a friend, he was a means to freeing her father. And he was failing at that.
A day with the Garcías, away from the distractions of the tribunal, able to channel their anger–on, say, him–was a depressing thought. And while he had been, up to that point, able to suppress any feelings of guilt about what had happened the night before, he was certain if Celia came she would be able to smell Birgita on him, that scent of betrayal particularly familiar to her. The beach. What was he thinking? It made him want to turn around and run back to the Metropole. Everyone was unhappy and at each other’s throats and now they were all going to the beach. Fucking. Brilliant. Windburn and jellyfish and riptides would be the best they could hope for. At least some terrors promised silence.
When he turned the corner onto Geestbrugweg, Patrick found the García sisters already waiting on the sidewalk in front of their guest pension. Paul sat in a stroller, one of those technologically advanced models with metal finishes and big wheels, the type of vehicle he imagined capable, with minimal modification, of sending back images to NASA from the surface of Mars. He never thought he would see Celia push such a contraption. From behind the stroller, Celia watched him. She looked different, relaxed, actually smiling as he neared. He was a weak man, he thought, needing to remind himself of the things she’d said the night before in order not to think that this smile meant détente.
Nina was different too, and he thought it was because she wasn’t playing with Paul, or that she was wearing a stylish leather jacket, almost too stylish for the beach. She had her hair pulled up. They looked more like sisters now, enough of a similarity between them to suggest that their beauty was not just an independent occurrence but a variation on a theme. Maybe the beach wouldn’t be so bad after all, maybe it was just what they all needed.
“You’re coming, then?”
“It’s ten-thirty,” Celia said.
“Yes, we’ve been waiting, what, five minutes,” Nina replied.
“Sorry, I thought I’d walk.”
Patrick saw Roberto, standing at the pension door, without a jacket on. He wore the look of a panda, a man showing the effects of not sleeping well. Wordlessly, he waved and closed the door. Nina and Celia turned away, their manner telling him not to ask questions. He would have risked a quick look back if he weren’t certain that Roberto was in the window. It would have startled them both.
The Dutch sun, prodigal at mid-morning, exerted itself on their backs as they walked past the bare trees that lined the road to Scheveningen. The silence between them was comfortable. Paul sang a little song to himself and that seemed to calm everyone. Whether it was the warmth of the sun, or the camaraderie of strolling together along a road to the beach, his anxiety faded and he felt better than he had in months. Happiness like the first day of a new drug, side effects unknown. Any wariness he had about Celia seemed ridiculous, almost petty. Thoughts of Hernan and Neuronaut and the subpoena–all of it evaporated in the warm Dutch sunshine. The indiscretion with Birgita–not even that; a half-hearted, semi-drunken romp–seemed forgivable, forgettable. It was Holland, after all. For all of the mighty tasks a brain was capable of doing, nothing was as underrated as the ability to forget. He’d met amnesiacs, duly noted the beatific smiles spread across their faces.
He took a mental snapshot of the four of them, walking, smiling, and registered the moment, as if to say that this memory will be tagged in a different way, that this was more valuable to him than any future happiness, any amnesic calm.
He’d never told anyone, but he’d known a contentedness, known its coordinates, as though it were a place that could be located and homed in on and occupied. A GPS to bliss. Saturday, late afternoon, deepest February. He was in the Garcías’ kitchen, his books were open on the table, and he had been studying the incredibly complicated things a kidney will do to turn everything into urine. Celia wasn’t even in the room (Is that what made this so perfect? The pang?), but captured on a draft from somewhere in the house, he smelled her. The particular scent of linseed and lemon oil, the aroma of the paints she used, an occasional whiff of turpentine. He could hear her, pausing in front of what she was doing. The restless energy as she walked around the room trying to solve something. He never knew there was anything to solve in art. He just thought that people painted what they saw, spilling their talent onto canvas. Celia had shown him, the way she sweated out the composition, the precision a painting demanded at every step of its creation. He heard her sit down and return to work, a dilemma solved. He was happy.
“Are you still exhibiting?” Patrick said to her now. There was a pause that he thought meant no one asked her questions like this any more.
“Paintings? God no, that was a lifetime ago.”
“But you still paint.”
“I illustrate, I do mostly design work. Some photography and some design.”
“You still paint,” Nina said, to which Celia turned sharply. “You do,” she repeated.
“I work in an art department. I’ve done some book covers recently.”
He wanted to see what she was painting. He imagined there would be an easel in the middle of the room, maybe the same huge wooden one it took them both to manoeuvre into the spare room of the apartment. He liked to think that he could look at her art and take something from it, that he could understand her that way still. But he wasn’t sure.
Farther toward Scheveningen, they passed a series of billboards, one of them a monstrosity that was the universal identifier of Globomart, the European version of their Values campaign. He could tell Celia and Nina that he was responsible for this, not its conception but vetting the colour scheme (an orange taken straight from the vest of a road construction crew), the typeface (something called Garamond, which for some reason maximally stimulated the right temporal lobe, which was unexpected but good, very good), and the three strategically placed photos of ecstatic, hyperdental models. No focus groups lying their way through a day of questions, just a monitor flashing design versions and twenty normals in a magnetic resonance machine. Did the ad work? The stroller Celia pushed was a Globomart 2000 limited edition, its provenance branded on one of the aluminum struts that kept her son glidin
g above the ground. Of course it worked. He knew twenty brains that couldn’t say otherwise, and Globomart had sent him cheques testifying to its effect. From hundreds of design permutations, he had midwifed this, he could say, lifting his arm up. By this time though, they’d passed the Globomart ad and were in front of another billboard for which he bore no responsibility at all.
It took twenty minutes of easy walking through the empty weekend streets of Den Haag to reach the Strandsweg, the road that ran parallel to the beach in Scheveningen. From behind a wall of houses and shops, the North Sea appeared, a gorgeous, lurid blue, as though a tanker had gone down with its cargo of dye.
“This is beautiful,” Nina said, clearly surprised, surveying the empty beach. Celia pulled out a pail and shovel from a large bag she had loaded onto the stroller. The weather was unseasonably warm, but still too cold to consider swimming, and what people there were had confined themselves to the boardwalks. The beach was so deserted that the choice of where to settle paralyzed them, and so they watched the water and the gulls wheeling overhead. They could sit down on the spot or walk on with nothing but sand between them and Germany. Celia freed Paul from his stroller, and he started running across the hard-packed sand, clearly the one to decide where they would put their blankets down.
Celia hurried after her son, arms spread out, assuming that loping, prepared-for-anything stride employed by both parents of toddlers and circus spotters. “I didn’t know this was so close,” she said, turning back to where Patrick stood with Nina.
“I heard it’s packed in the summer,” he said, his voice carrying over the sand.
At this thought he recalled Birgita in a flash of guilt and regret, followed by the irrational fear that she would show up, that she was already at the beach. He felt an anticipatory awkwardness imagining the moment when he passed her with the Garcías. He’d introduce her, introduce the Garcías as his friends. Yes, he thought, we’re all adults here. He’d tell the Garcías that Birgita was the one who had told him about this place. Celia was shepherding Paul into turning around and heading back toward where he and Nina stood.
“I was surprised you wanted to come along,” he said as they neared.
“We needed to do something different,” Celia replied. Paul stumbled and crash-landed onto the hard sand, as unforgiving as asphalt. He lifted his palms up and grimaced at his mother, who scooped him up. “Elyse Brenman has been calling.”
Celia brushed the sand off Paul’s hands, then set him down and looked out at the ocean. A Rothko canvas of complementary blues, sealed at the horizon. Off to the side the pavilion of the Scheveningen pier sat, an undiplomatic curatorial intrusion. The composition must have pleased Celia, though, as she took a large blanket out of the bag hanging on the stroller and unfurled it. It snapped out and hung in mid-air for a moment before floating down to the ground. This was the spot.
“She wanted to interview us. She says she wants to be able to write about it from the family’s point of view,” Nina offered.
“I’m so glad she cares,” Celia muttered, as though to compensate for Nina’s total lack of sarcasm. She dumped a bagful of cars and small plastic toys on the blanket.
“She did the same to me,” Patrick said in commiseration. “When I got here, she cornered me. She’s convinced I know something.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“No,” he replied, frowning and mentally running through the transcript of what was said over lunch that Elyse could possibly work into a new García chapter. “It surprised me, though, how much she knew about all of us. About all of you. About your mother. You do know I’ve never spoken to her about any of you, right?”
Celia sat down on the blanket. The sun shone into her face, and she lifted a hand to shield her eyes. Nina glanced over at Celia, who did not make eye contact. Finally, seemingly harried by Nina’s gaze, Celia sighed. Nina said: “Roberto spoke to her.” Patrick thought he heard the name but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the barking of gulls. “He agreed to be interviewed by Elyse Brenman after Mum died,” Nina continued, taking off her jacket and laying it out next to the blanket. “He even gave her some of Mum’s letters.”
“You’re kidding,” Patrick said, trying hard to mute the glee in his voice, concentrating hard on incredulity.
Nina nodded, avid for an ear. “A lot of notes from her thesis and some letters she wrote that her sisters sent back after she died.”
“Stop it,” Celia said in a monotone of pure exhaustion.
“What, this should be a secret?” Nina asked, and Celia steamed silently, having no rebuttal. “C’mon, Celia, he’s trying to help.” Paul looked up; like Patrick, he found the sound of sharp words from these two women not directed at him a novelty. “After Mum died, Dad and Roberto didn’t get along very well. Roberto talked about taking over the store. They were fighting, non-stop.”
“About the store?”
“That too. But Roberto blamed him for Mum’s death.”
“Elyse started all that nonsense,” Celia said.
“Well, it made sense to Roberto.”
“Still…your mother’s letters,” Patrick said, studying a little grey toy soldier that looked like it came from the basement of his childhood. The green ones were American, the greys, German. He didn’t think you could buy these any more. He remembered their standard poses. This was the one that was about to throw a grenade. Patrick looked up to see Celia and Nina staring at each other. A generation younger than his own two sisters, he nonetheless understood elements of this non-verbal exchange. The glare. The glare deflected.
“It turns out Roberto and Elyse were pretty intimate,” Nina said with the seriousness that weapons-grade gossip demanded. This was too much for Celia, who got up and began brushing the sand from the knees of her pants. He remembered Celia asking him not to discuss Hernan’s guilt in front of Nina; now the request seemed less ridiculous than calculating. Nina watched her sister, revving up a major huff. “Oh, sit down. Our father is in jail, for God’s sake, for torturing people. You can’t be upset about me telling stuff like this.”
Patrick mentally sifted through the evidence in The Angel of Lepaterique. He recalled some letters being mentioned in the book, but any pleasure he derived from imagining Elyse fuming over letters full of details about the children’s first steps and the weather in Tegucigalpa was muted by thoughts of the photo of Elyse on her boat and the twinge he felt as he considered Roberto taking the picture.
“But he’s here with you now,” Patrick said.
Nina shook her head, already a veteran of the brotherly misdeeds: “That thing with Elyse was years ago. Years. He didn’t see her again after the book came out.”
Celia had heard enough. As if wanting a tie-breaking vote, she grabbed Paul by the hand and tried pulling him up to his feet. Having just arrived, the boy plainly didn’t want to go, and his agitation and incomprehension coalesced into tearful insubordination. Celia wasn’t going to yank him up into her arms, so she was stuck there hovering over him, holding him as the boy let his body slacken, an evasive manoeuvre that to Patrick looked so effective that there must be some Darwinian significance, a survival advantage, to it. The look on Celia’s face was indescribable, as she realized she was dangling a crying child, that she was in a state where such an act was defensible and understandable and unavoidable.
“Hey, maybe I should go,” Patrick offered. The threat of leaving the two of them alone seemed to have the right effect: Celia stopped with the gestures of imminent departure, and Paul was released, to squirm on the blanket until he was certain no one was going to take him away. Even Nina looked contrite after the skirmish, but there was a satisfaction there too, Patrick could make it out, the thrill of mutinous impulses publicly displayed.
“Stay,” Nina said.
Celia turned away from her son to face Patrick. “Do you have anything else to do?”
“No.”
“Then stay. It’s fine.”
Patrick grabbed a miniatu
re soccer ball from the debris field of toys emptied onto the blanket and tossed it onto the sand, gesturing to Paul to come and play. This was the extent of his peacemaking efforts, he thought: remove the innocent child from between the sniping sisters. Let them fight it out or finish off their glare-down. For the good deed, his head gave a salutary throb. Paul grabbed the ball from the sand, looked at Patrick and cocked his arm, something Patrick was ready to play along with in a limited way, more than willing to point to his head as a mitigating factor. Then the little boy looked at the ball and smiled; not an en-passant, thanks-for-holding-the-door-open smile either–but a sunrise of a smile, like he had never seen a ball like this or any other ball before. An ecstatic smile. To Patrick the smile was a marvel, less for what it demonstrated about the boy–he was, after all, a boy with a ball at the beach–than for what it did to him. The smile infected Patrick and he smiled too, broadly, a lunatic grin. The pain of the smile was profound and delicious and Patrick could feel it doing something to him, acting on him in some way that kept the smile on his face, a smile that Paul was now responding to with an even broader smile, a positive feedback loop, an escalation in the rictal arms race. Paul laughed, the unhinged mad scientist squeal-and-howl combo, a laugh that caused Celia to look over.
With Celia watching the two of them and smiling herself, he felt something stir, the furnace of Pavlovian response being stoked within him. He wanted to protect the boy. He wanted Celia. The boy needed a father. He could be the boy’s father. They could all be together. Jesus. The blithe intensity of the feeling shocked him, it must be innate, buried deep and waiting to be trip-wired by the appropriate child-and-female stimuli. Maybe if Roberto were here, he’d feel less of the default alpha male, but Roberto was nowhere in sight and Patrick knew if he had plumage, it would be preened and fully fanned. He was thankful he had enough functioning frontal lobe to prevent him from dropping to one knee for a quick Dutch proposal or saying something even more ridiculous. Then, as quickly as it came, the sentiment passed, as if acknowledging that any resolution made on a beach carried the same weight as a Las Vegas wedding vow or a campaign promise. This was not his child, he remembered; and, well, Celia didn’t like him.
