Going Home Again Page 4

  Now, on that September afternoon we embraced with what—a cautious enthusiasm? Certainly it was brief and self-conscious, as if we’d both agreed that a moment longer might have induced some unwelcome but familiar intimacy, that it was best to stay on the surface and in the moment.

  “This is—oh my God,” she said. “This is wonderful.”

  “It’s great to see you. How are you?”

  “Wow,” she said, nodding and smiling. “This is really something.”

  These exclamations of disbelief and pleasure went on back and forth for a time, then I told her whom I was here with—I think I pointed to them in the queue—and said that the older of my nephews had read and loved everything by the author she’d just presented.

  I led her over to my brother and his kids and introduced them, and we hovered there, the two of us almost blushing with possibility, I thought, and busied the air between us with talk about everything other than what really lay between us, which was, to my mind, nothing less grand or pressing than the eternal mystery of first love. Nate helped, thank goodness. He was at ease and polite and charming, as he always was with attractive women, and smiled and nodded when Holly told him we’d lived together for a time in Montreal and West Berlin back in the eighties. He said he remembered her, though I don’t recall ever mentioning Holly to him, and I knew they’d never met.

  Titus got his books signed—an act that seemed less impressive and exciting for him than I’d hoped—and afterward the five of us cut across the park, books in hand, Nate and the boys out front, Holly and I trailing behind. Once the initial surprise of our meeting was over, she seemed confident and relaxed and walked with a floating stride that made my own shuffling gait feel willfully flatfooted. She told me about the large publishing house she’d been working at for the past ten years and how she traveled more than she liked to but that she’d been in love with the book trade ever since the very first day of the internship she got soon after returning from Europe once our relationship ended.

  “And you?” she said. “Language academies? That sounds fantastic. Five of them?”

  “Four and a half, I’d say.”

  I’d already told her what had brought me back to the city after so long and how work on the new academy was coming along. Then I handed her a photograph of my daughter from my wallet.

  “She’s beautiful! Absolutely gorgeous. Where is she hiding? Is she here today?”

  I went on to tell her that Ava lived with her mother in Madrid, which itself was a long story.

  “That must be hard,” she said, handing back the photograph. “Being so far away from your daughter.”

  “It’s harder than I thought it would be.” I was surprised by my truthfulness.

  It was clear after only a few minutes there was something about Holly that Titus was drawn to, and I wondered if she could read me as easily as I could read my nephew. He was hovering, listening in. I’d noticed him turning his head, trying to catch what we were talking about. Maybe he was simply intrigued that his uncle had bumped into an old friend and that she seemed to possess some powerful allure. It might also have had something to do with the fact that this old friend of mine was a good-looking woman. I can’t be sure of this. But I saw his eyes follow her with a direct and unguarded note of sexual longing. I wondered if he sensed something between Holly and me similar to what he’d felt between his mother and her new boyfriend, the man who occupied the part of her life recently vacated by his father.

  We walked along a row of white booths and tents lined with books and faces, and suddenly Holly pointed and waved and said, “There they are!”

  I was surprised—I don’t know why—to hear she had a family. It seems absurd to recall that I hadn’t asked her about this, and she hadn’t volunteered as much, but I can appreciate now that some remote, shared part of us might have wanted to delay this revelation, if only for a few minutes more. But then her son, a tall, skinny, good-looking adolescent named Luke, came striding up, wearing a longboard strapped to the backpack he carried on his shoulders. “Hey guys, I found her,” he called, and the face of a very pretty girl appeared beside his.

  “Finally,” the girl said.

  This was Riley. She shook Nate’s hand, then mine, and turned to her mother. “Where were you?”

  Riley looked so very much like Holly that I found myself staring at her. She had long brown hair and freckles and such a natural and effortless beauty that I consciously forced myself to take my eyes off her for fear that I might embarrass her, or myself. As we stood beside Holly’s children, I saw how we each had aged; and pressed against the flesh of youth, it was clear to me the best years of their lives still awaited them and ours were perhaps moving off into the distance faster than we cared to admit. It was an astonishing thought at that moment—now, not at all—but I remember the surprise that came when I understood that an ex-girlfriend of mine could have children so grown, so independent, so lovely. That I had a daughter of my own who was only three years younger than Riley didn’t seem to lessen the impact of this realization. Titus and Quinn were now talking to Luke about his longboard, and his sister, who was quicker to smile, lingered at the edge of our grown-up conversation. I didn’t know at the time that Riley and Luke were twins, fifteen years old. Luke was taller than his sister but looked at least a year older.

  “Do you know where your dad is?” Holly asked her daughter, and then, as if on cue, a man emerged from the crowd carrying two bags of books.

  “Look who I found, Glenn,” Holly said. “Charlie Bellerose. You remember me telling you about Charlie. And this is Nate, Charlie’s brother.”

  The man draped his left arm around his daughter’s shoulder after setting the bags down on the grass. He was handsome, my height, with dark intelligent eyes, a minor dimple in the middle of his chin and long sideburns that marked him, I supposed, as a hip and current husband and father. The three boys were already four or five booths down from where we stood, talking to an artist—a young guy in an army jacket—seated behind a table and surrounded by drawings of colorful superheroes and villains. When we caught up with them, I saw the half-finished illustration the guy was laboring over, a wild screaming mouth at the centre of which snaked a forked tongue. He didn’t raise or still his pencil as he cut his eyes up to the boys and answered their questions. On the wire display racks behind him were dozens of pictures of varying sizes, most of them fearsome-looking evildoers. Each frame was busy with action.

  “There’s no wall space left in Luke’s bedroom,” Holly said when I asked if I could buy one for him. “He’s already got all those pretty girl singers up there. But thank you.”

  We embraced again, quickly, not much more than a close pat on the back, as her husband watched. I was aware that he wouldn’t be sure what to make of me. Suspicion, of course, would’ve registered somewhere in the back of his mind. After he and my brother shook hands, and Nate removed himself from the small circle, I clasped his hand with the grip of an earnest and well-meaning businessman. I knew I would’ve felt uncomfortable if I’d been in his position. I didn’t let my eyes leave his. “You have a beautiful family,” I said. “You’re a lucky man.” I didn’t think I’d see any of them ever again.

  Two

  A lot disappears from your memory in two decades. Things slip and fade and finally vanish. Places you’ve seen, people you knew, those wild revelations you thought would change your life. Where do they go? But there are things about my student days that I still remember perfectly—a view from a window, how an old friend moved when he was in a hurry, the autumn sunshine catching the bright white pages of a book turned open on a desk. Seeing Holly again brought that world back into sharp focus for me. It was like no time at all had passed since that weekend in Montreal when I first met her.

  I’d gone to visit my best friend from high school, a boy by the name of Miles Esler. He was a brilliant kid, skinny with dark trusting eyes and a thick head of curly brown hair. He’d graduated a year ahead of our class an
d had an opinion concerning just about everything. It seemed to me that he got it right—whatever it was that took his imagination on any given day—most of the time. He could talk about the Beatles and make it sound like he’d sat in on the Let It Be sessions or explain how gasoline actually made your car run. School was too easy for him. He handed in brilliant assignments, got perfect grades in calculus and caused his teachers (I can only imagine) to think they had a prodigy on their hands.

  At the end of the school day we’d take the streetcar down to Lake Ontario and smoke a joint sitting on the broken-up sidewalk cement and talk about getting the hell out of Toronto, which was as cold as it was boring in winter and as stifling as it was humid in summer. He wore a small diamond in his left ear, a fake, of course. The jocks left him alone because he wasn’t a direct threat and because we pretty well kept to ourselves. I tried to come up with questions that would stump him. What exactly is a hologram? How does lightning actually happen? No one I knew could answer questions like those. But Miles, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, could explain the mathematics of these curiosities, scribbled formulas that meant nothing to me. He was offered a full-ride scholarship to study chemistry at a prestigious university in the United States but turned it down. Having grown up without a father, he said he wasn’t going to abandon his mom like his old man had. The next province over was as far as he was willing to go. He’d be making serious money at some big research lab in five years anyway, he explained, with or without Stanford’s help.

  Miles and Holly met me at the bus station in Montreal. It was a cold, bright autumn afternoon, and a day of firsts. I’d never been to that city; nor, as I stepped off the bus, had I ever seen a woman as beautiful. I didn’t know who she was or whom she was with or waiting for. It certainly didn’t occur to me that she was with Miles, and the person she was waiting for was me.

  He was waving his hand above the crowd when I saw him. Lugging my backpack, I pushed past a group of people, still wondering who the girl beside him was and thinking up some hungry boyish comment I could share with him the moment we were out of earshot. Imagine waking up beside that every morning or something along those lines. Little did I know. I smiled and glanced at her as Miles and I shook hands the way we thought old college buddies might do, with more eagerness and testosterone than we might normally have summoned—though surely warranted by the occasion—and then he slapped me on the back and said, “I want you to meet Holly.” Looking as proud as I’d ever seen him, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her into him.

  “Good to meet you,” I said.

  She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. I’d never been kissed on the cheek before. It was something they did in Paris.

  “You look different from how I imagined you,” she said, tucking a strand of chestnut-colored hair behind an ear. It had come loose from her ponytail. “Miles has been talking about you forever.”

  He’d been gone only five weeks and already had a girlfriend who was talking about forever. This must have been some sort of campus record. Or did that happen here all the time? Maybe it was par for the course at a university like McGill. All the schools I was looking into at the time had their own particular reputation. Some were preppy, others were party schools; there were the heavily academic ones, and those devoted to granola and Birkenstocks. You heard about a few for the sheer number of beautiful girls who strolled between the buildings wearing tight jeans and adorable smiles. I’d heard there were a lot of pretty girls in Montreal. But this was off the charts.

  Her pale complexion made the freckles on her face stand out, and the dark brown of her eyes—large and full of life—was flecked with gold.

  “Nothing bad, I hope.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know!” she said, smiling.

  I noticed the collection of pins on her lapel. “I guess we like the same bands,” I said.

  The left breast of her army surplus overcoat was clustered with music pins and two small flags, one British, the other German. It was a sort of postpunk tribute by the look of it. The Waterboys, Kraftwerk, the Smiths—the sort of mideighties stuff we were all listening to in those days. She didn’t quite look the part, aside from the army surplus jacket. Tying her hair back in that ponytail seemed more preppy and clean-cut than anything. But I liked her taste in music because, well, it reflected my own.

  What did I feel that day when I learned of their living arrangements? Envy, if not outright jealousy, I suppose. My best friend, a peer, was already living with a beautiful woman and enjoying what I could only imagine was the sort of boundless sex that surely went along with the rest of it. Technically Holly shared a room on campus with a Bermudan girl named Georgia and still made an appearance there once, maybe twice, a week. But this hardly dampened the wonder I felt for my friend’s situation. That his girlfriend was willing and able to sleep in his bed five nights out of seven impressed me terribly. I just couldn’t believe it. He was the luckiest eighteen-year-old kid in the world. We’d talked endlessly about such things, of course—girls and women—but that he’d come as far as this in so little time was nothing short of miraculous. It was something to beat your chest and crow about. Miles, however, did no such thing. He hadn’t even mentioned her on the two or three occasions we’d spoken on the phone while setting up that visit. For that reason he seemed all the more mature. It was as if the position he occupied now, that of the freshman with the beautiful girl on his arm, was a place he’d occupied all along and I’d just failed to notice.

  After the introductions we walked through downtown on our way to my friend’s apartment. The sidewalks and outdoor cafés were busy with people. The sky was clear and bright, and the October air pleasant. Shadows moved on the shops’ plate-glass windows. Pretty girls were everywhere. I felt the excitement of the approaching weekend, the longing for sex, the promise that something in my life was going to change. I wondered if Miles and this new girl were already in love or if by some stroke of luck he’d stumbled upon a girl who sought out sex for its own sake, just because she liked it. I couldn’t get over his good fortune. If fate could shift so swiftly for him, then it surely might offer me some similar opportunity that weekend. It was as if he had always known that something was waiting for him on the other side of the life we’d led back home, as if all the dreaming we’d done was little more than a preamble to the bigger and more interesting game that awaited. And it seemed he was right. In the splendor of Holly’s feminine presence, and the fact that they were together now, I saw that he’d been right all along.

  I tried not to stare that first day in Montreal. But I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering back to her again and again. She smiled easily, and the light scattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose and high cheekbones made her look as wholesome and cheerful as a summer’s day. Her ponytail bobbed delicately as she walked, the way I imagined a ballerina’s would.

  In the heart of one of the student ghettos, the building they lived in was a three-story flat-roof town house of dull, tobacco-colored brick. On weekends, he said, it was usually just one big party up and down the street.

  “Sounds like fun,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. You’ll see.”

  I noticed bicycles chained up everywhere outside and in the entrance by the tenant mailboxes. The flat itself was small and dumpy and smelled vaguely of other people’s food. The afternoon light falling through the windows turned its walls and the bamboo curtain separating the kitchen and living room a beautiful rich orange. The only object of any size familiar to me from Miles’s house back home was his desk. It sat to the left of the door that led out to the small balcony looking over Rue de Bullion. I recognized it from his bedroom and knew its bottom left drawer as the place he’d stored his copies of Hustler and Penthouse. He didn’t need to rely on those magazines anymore, though I still did. That was my first thought when I saw the desk, that he was miles ahead of me when it came to knowing anything about women.

  “Welcome to the garret,” he said.


  I had already noticed the poem he was referring to, ten or fifteen lines called “The Garret” by Ezra Pound, scribbled out on a slip of brown paper taped to the wall beside a Pink Floyd poster. I imagined the handwriting was Holly’s.

  We started drinking early that afternoon. We smoked a joint Miles had pulled from a jar he kept in the freezer and listened to some of the records he kept in milk cartons stacked in a corner. We listened to the Buzzcocks and New Order and The Jam and later made a big pot of spaghetti and ate it sitting on the pullout couch that had been designated mine for the weekend. I told them I didn’t have any fake ID when Miles mentioned going out to the bars. He was turning a ball of pasta on his fork. “Not to worry. This, my friend, is Montreal.”

  We ventured from one end of downtown to the other, the city lights shining down over our faces and leather jackets as we passed old-time taverns and flashy new clubs along Saint-Laurent. In my memory I see a kid I barely recognize now—a tall, skinny boy at the beginning edge of his life, obviously underage, full of nervous expectation. The doormen and bouncers that night didn’t care at all that I looked so young, just waved us through as if we’d been there a hundred times before. Each doorway was a portal leading into a world of beautiful girls. Of course I didn’t know the names of any of the streets or bars or clubs we visited that night, but these would soon become familiar to me after I moved to Montreal the following year. Nor do I remember much about the band we saw at a club that night. I’d heard them on the radio once or twice playing a catchy song about life in the suburbs. What I do remember clearly is watching Miles kissing his new girlfriend as they danced next to the small stage and feeling happy that my best friend had everything you could ever want.