The roads aren’t bad until James gets to Granby, and then he hits a whiteout. He slows the car down to a crawl, flicks on his high beams, and turns up the volume on disc one of the Led Zeppelin box set, settling in and singing along.
He got into Zeppelin when they released the box set a couple of years ago. Forget grunge music, he thinks. Give him seventies rock any day. Forget Véronique is what he really means.
He just wants to get back to the city and drink. Not a polite Chianti with his mother and sisters, but a tsunami of booze to drown out the shitty feelings and fill the hole in his heart. This is what he does every year on his father’s birthday. He blacks out.
By the time he reaches the Champlain Bridge, the snowstorm has relented and just a few plump flakes are dancing in front of his windshield. Zeppelin is nearing the end of disc two—“D’yer Mak’er,” a classic—and all he wants to do is get the hell out of the car—and out of his head—and surround himself with people.
He parks in front of his apartment on Ste. Famille and heads over to the Bifteck, an unpretentious bar on a shabby strip of the Main whose mission is appealingly straightforward: offer cheap beer, stale popcorn, and pool. The place is long and dark, cramped and smoke-filled, with round tables that face the sidewalk and a couple of pool tables at the very back. When you walk down the narrow length of the bar, spilled draft beer sticks to your shoes.
In spite of it being your basic crappy drinking hole, the Bifteck has recently become a Scene. Everywhere you look, there are musicians from cool local bands like GrimSkunk or Groovy Aardvark; beautiful girls in secondhand jeans and suede miniskirts, with their flat milk-white tummies and their nose rings and their Montreal Plateau attitudes on display; Concordia communications students discussing their short films, artists discussing their latest installations. Combat boots, tattoos, dreadlocks, and Jane’s Addiction T-shirts. Never mind the filthy toilet or the stench of poorly cleaned vomit. This is the place to be.
James orders a pitcher and spends the next couple of hours drinking warm draft and shooting pool. He feels old. He is old. Everyone else here looks to be in their early twenties. He should be at Winnie’s on Crescent Street, with his middle-aged colleagues. He should be drinking cold pints with other journalists, talking politics.
Not tonight. Tonight is about obliteration.
He’s not the first guy to lose his father, won’t be the last. People tell him he should be grateful he had his dad for twenty-three years—the most “formative” years, apparently. No. He’s not grateful that his dad had a heart attack at fifty-two, standing in the middle of his beloved cornfield. James would have preferred his father to be at his wedding—should there ever be one—and to meet his future children. He would have preferred his father to be there for his mother, to take care of her into their old age. Would have preferred to keep fishing with him, hunting, having their long father-son talks in the cornfield while they examined corn tassels and swelling cobs. He does not feel grateful for having lost his best friend and mentor a year after graduating college.
Gabriel was not a perfect father by any means. He had a temper and could hold a grudge well beyond what was reasonable or rational. One time, when James was sixteen, he borrowed his father’s pickup truck without asking and accidentally backed it up into a parked trailer. Gabriel grounded him for a month, but also didn’t speak to him for the same amount of time. He felt betrayed by James in a way that was strikingly disproportionate to the actual misdemeanor; really, it was nothing more than a teenage boy’s poor judgment and impulsivity, but Gabriel took it personally. Maggie kept telling him the grounding was punishment enough, and that the silent treatment was overkill, but Gabriel had to let his grudges burn off, however long it took. He had similar cold wars with his sisters at various times, the neighbors, even Maggie. He was infuriatingly stubborn. Maggie used to joke that he kept a collection of grievances and resentments in a notebook, referring to it frequently to maintain and update them, like a stamp or a coin collector. He could not forgive easily.
But that heart of his was as expansive as it was sensitive, and full of passion. He loved ferociously, protected fiercely. He was loyal and magnanimous. While Maggie was the backbone of their family, the provider of stability and calm, Gabriel was the heart of it. He loved the outdoors and was the one who taught them to fish and hunt, farm and pick wildflowers, eat blueberries off the bushes. He encouraged them to live off the land.
He was a good father to a son. He was not the type of man to hide his feelings and keep things bottled up, the way a lot of men do. He was open and straightforward, never held back an opinion. When James started hanging out with a group of potheads in high school, his father brought him out on the boat and gave him a serious talking-to. This was usually how he gave his lectures, out on the boat with a fishing rod in his hand.
“That crowd you’re hanging with,” he said, casting his line. “You think they’re a good influence?”
James shrugged. He was deep in a shrugging, eye-rolling, insolent phase at that time. He wanted to be anywhere but on that boat with his dad.
“Your mother put you in English school so you’d have a better future,” Gabriel said, not without some bitterness. He’d been against it—he’d wanted James educated in French—but Maggie had felt strongly that if the kids were fluently bilingual, they would have far more opportunities in the future. Because they only spoke French at home, the only way for the kids to learn English was at school. It was the same agreement Maggie’s parents had made for Maggie and her siblings.
“You’re at an age now,” Gabriel went on, “where your choices and decisions actually matter. They affect your future. You talk about wanting to be a journalist? You need to be thinking about that now.”
“I’m only in grade nine,” James sulked. “Why are we talking about my future?”
“I was working full-time at a factory when I was your age,” Gabriel reminded him. “I wish I’d had the luxury of staying in school.”
“I’m not quitting school.”
“This isn’t about quitting school,” Gabriel said. “It’s about what you do with the opportunity while you’re there.”
“School isn’t an opportunity. It’s not like I have a choice.”
Gabriel was quiet for a while. James will never forget the discomfort of that silence. He never knew how Gabriel was going to react to something, especially when James was being a smart-ass. He might have tossed James overboard and let him swim back home to teach him a lesson.
At last, Gabriel spoke. “I can’t tell you who to hang around with,” he said. “But I’m your father and I’m sure as hell going to tell you my opinion. The guys you’re hanging around are losers and I don’t like them. They don’t look your mother or me in the eye when they’re at our house, and they’re high all the time. Half of them won’t finish school. Their futures are going to happen by default. Do you understand what I mean?”
“No.”
“It means if they continue on like this, they won’t have any say in what they do. They’ll wind up working at some factory or farming—not because they want to, but because it’s all they can do—or they’ll be on welfare.”
James rolled his eyes skyward.
“Roll your eyes,” Gabriel continued. “I get it. I was an asshole at your age, too. Just remember this conversation. You hear me? You’re better than those guys.”
“You don’t even know them.”
“I know you. And I know you’re better than this. You’re not too young to start thinking about your values.”
That was the end of the conversation. Gabriel caught some perch while James sulked, and then they went back home. Gabriel didn’t bring it up again, but his words had penetrated. James started to think about that word a lot. Values. What did it even mean?
Gabriel’s opinion mattered a great deal to him. He wanted his father’s respect and approval, even though he wouldn’t let that be known. The next fall, James grew bored with that group of stoners and they fell away. He started hanging around Frank Pouliot, a football player for Cowansville High, a good student and a stand-up guy. They were best friends until they graduated high school. Frank went on to Bishop’s to study law—he’s a lawyer now in Sherbrooke—and James went to Concordia for journalism. Maybe it would have turned out that way anyway, even if Gabriel hadn’t spoken to him that day, but maybe not. Though he never told him back then, later on, he appreciated that his father had interfered in his life, had cared enough to speak his mind.
That was Gabriel. The way he wore his heart on his sleeve gave them all permission to express themselves, good and bad. There was a lot of laughter and slammed doors and drama and tears, but there was always honesty.
After his death, it was like a heavy curtain had fallen. When James would come home to visit his mother, it felt like all the vibrancy and conviviality had been sucked out of the house. Although it has improved over the past eight years, and they’ve managed to recover some of the spirit they used to have, it’s never been quite the same.
At twenty-three years old, James left his internship at the Montreal Gazette and took off to Europe. It was 1984. He did the backpack thing for a while, and eventually wound up in Greece, living in a tent on the island of Páros. He stayed there for a couple of months, drinking all night, sleeping all day. Forgetting. When the summer wound down and the tourists fled, James headed over to London, where he worked at the Hard Rock Cafe, selling T-shirts to tourists. He quickly established a similar routine—working all day, drinking all night. Oblivion, he discovered, made for an efficient travel companion.
After a while, he started to get bored again. It was becoming his MO, but he could hear his father’s voice in his head getting louder: You’re better than this. And so he returned home and got the job at CNA, first as their Parliament Hill reporter in Ottawa, and then covering the National Assembly in Quebec City.
By ’87, he’d landed the job at the Montreal bureau, covering news and politics, with the occasional plum international assignment. Much to his relief, oblivion was available everywhere he went. He worked by day—he was always a damn good reporter—and drank all night. He’d also picked up a hash habit along the way, as well as a sleeping-around habit. All of it—the drinking, working, drugs, and sex—did what they were supposed to do: keep him numb.
He never spoke of his father, rarely went home to Cowansville—seeing his mother had become too painful—and tried not to form any serious relationships or attachments. It worked until it didn’t. It worked until AIDS scared the living shit out of him.
The summer James turned twenty-six, there was a headline in the papers that profoundly shook him: “Quarantine Plan for AIDS.”
AIDS had been in the news for a couple of years. It wasn’t new; certainly it had been in the media throughout James’s travels across Europe. He’d simply ignored it. But for some reason, early in the summer of ’87, he started to worry. He’d been wildly promiscuous in his early twenties.
He was too scared to get tested. Instead, he became celibate. Stopped sleeping around cold turkey. He continued to drink and get high, occasionally experiencing intense paranoia. Aside from his job, which he managed to hang on to through a combination of talent and youth, he became something of a shut-in, drinking and smoking up in his apartment alone every night.
He suffered his first real panic attack on July 14 of that summer. He remembers the exact date because there was a massive flood in Montreal that day and the city was immobilized. He remembers the rain falling in heavy sheets against his window and water rising on his street like a river. On the news, there were images of school buses and trucks floating on flooded highways, people abandoning their cars and trudging knee-deep in water.
James was on his couch, high as a kite. His heart started pounding really fast. His first thought was, I’m having a heart attack like Dad.
He tried to calm himself, but the palpitations intensified. It felt like his heart was going to break free of his chest. Was this how his father had felt right before he died? He knew he couldn’t call 9-1-1. There was no point; the roads were flooded. He couldn’t call his mother either; it would have killed her, especially because there was nothing she could do from the Townships. First her husband, now her son. He realized that his life had become so small. There was no one he could call.
He considered it was probably better to die of a heart attack than from AIDS. Less stigma attached. At least a heart attack would spare him quarantine and shame.
He closed his eyes and waited to die. There was nothing else to do. His heart was racing; his breath was shallow. And then he remembered. There was Elodie. She lived in the Pointe, so he knew she wouldn’t be able to get to him, but he thought hearing her voice might be comforting.
He called her. She answered on the first ring.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said, and he started to cry.
He realized the burden he was putting on her. She was so fragile, but then he was desperate.
“Did you call 9-1-1?” she asked him calmly.
“Have you looked outside?” he sobbed. “It’s a fucking deluge.”
She was quiet.
“I’m scared I have AIDS,” he said.
“Do you have AIDS, or are you having a heart attack?” He wasn’t sure if she was trying to make light of it or be funny, which wasn’t her way.
“Both,” he said. “I never use condoms and now I’m having a heart attack . . .”
He was slurring.
“Are you drunk?” she asked him.
“No. Yes. A little.”
“I’m coming over.”
“How?”
“It isn’t too badly flooded over here. I’ll drive north as far as I can go and walk the rest of the way.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m leaving now.”
She hung up. An hour and a half later, she was there. He was living on Monkland at the time, in NDG. It had to have been a trek. Her jeans were soaking wet up to her knees. His heart was still racing. He didn’t know what was happening to him.
She silently took in the dozen or so empty beer bottles, the half-smoked joint in the ashtray. She then sat down beside him and let him rest his head on her lap. She stroked his hair, the way his mother would have done. They couldn’t get to a hospital, so he was prepared to die in her arms like that. AIDS or a heart attack, it didn’t even matter anymore. He would be reunited with his father, at least. There was that.
“I miss my dad,” he told her.
“I know.” She kept stroking his hair. “How’s your heart?”
“Pounding. Fast. It won’t slow down.”
“Is there pain?”
“No.”
“I called 9-1-1 before I left. Hopefully they’re going to be here soon.”
“What if I have AIDS?”
“James, it’s going to be okay.”
“I think I’m dying, Elo. I really do.”
He wasn’t dying. An ambulance finally came after two hours and was able to get him to the Montreal General. Elodie went with him and they did all sorts of tests, but his heart was fine. It was a panic attack. The doctor told him to stop smoking drugs, warned him it was making him paranoid. Elodie convinced him to have an HIV test while he was there, to settle his mind.
James waited two weeks for those goddamn results. The worst fourteen days of his life. He didn’t get high during that time, but he drank a hell of a lot and had more panic attacks. They were less scary now that he knew what they were. But he always thought about his father dying of a heart attack. When he finally went back to the hospital for his follow-up appointment after the HIV test, the results were negative.
When he called Elodie to share the good news, she did something she had never done before: offered him some advice. “I’ve tried doing what you’re doing,” she said. “And it doesn’t work.”
“What am I doing?”
“Trying to drink enough to not feel bad anymore.”
“Is that right?”
“I tried a lot of things to make my pain go away,” she confessed. “Drinking, weed. You know why I stopped? Because it didn’t work.”
“Is that supposed to cheer me up?”
“No. It’s just the truth. Maybe it’s okay to let yourself feel sad.”
“Do you? Let yourself feel sad?”
“I have a daughter. It’s different.”
“I’m afraid those feelings will kill me.”
“I know,” she said. “But they don’t. Or I’d have been dead a long time ago.”
He didn’t do anything radical after that. Didn’t go to grief counseling or therapy or AA. He didn’t go to the cemetery and sob openly at the foot of his father’s grave. There was no one symbolic gesture that made the difference, but there was a new awareness that everything he’d been doing to avoid his pain had failed. And if he didn’t make a change, he was going to fail at life, or die. And that would have been the most devastating disappointment to his father.
He gave up smoking dope and never went back to it. He cut back on the drinking and threw himself into work. Black Monday happened that October and the stock markets crashed, which turned out to be a great opportunity for James. His bureau chief sent him to Hong Kong. His life began to take shape. He even started dating someone—an Anglo from the Ottawa bureau. It was a long-distance relationship, which suited him. It was a way for him to ease back into the world at his own pace. And he always, always uses a condom now.
When James is thoroughly wasted, the bartender cuts him off. “I think you’ve had enough, Dad,” she says. She’s about nineteen. He mutters something and leaves the bar.
Outside on the street, he bums a cigarette and looks for another drinking hole. He decides on the Double Deuce, but just as he’s about to head up the stairs, he feels that familiar flutter of his heart. Panic. He leans against the wall and draws a breath, then another. The palpitations gain momentum. No, no, no. Please, no.
He goes back outside and starts walking up St. Laurent Boulevard, with no clear destination in mind. He’s breathing deeply, his hand on his heart. After a few blocks, he turns off onto Rachel and then over to St. Urbain, all the way up to Mont Royal, until he finds himself standing in front of Véronique’s apartment. Imagine that.
He climbs the stairs. It’s one o’clock in the morning. He pounds on the door. His heart is still racing.
To his surprise, she answers. She’s wearing a tank top and boxer shorts, exactly what she was wearing last summer when he showed up uninvited. Her hair, a pile of dreadlocks now, is tied on top of her head.
She doesn’t say anything.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Yes, I am. I’m celebrating.”
“What?”
“My dad’s birthday.”
She cocks her head, that way she does. She understands.
“I just wanted to, uh, apologize,” he says. “For what happened in Quebec City.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“I was a complete dick.”
“Yes, you were.”
“I don’t agree with anything you stand for,” he says, “but . . .” He groans. “Why can’t I get you out of my head?”
She steps aside, allowing him to come in. He hesitates, not sure he isn’t dreaming.
“You coming in?” she says.
He stumbles inside. She’s listening to the Beastie Boys. Check Your Head. He loves this album. “I do agree with your taste in music.”
“I’m so glad,” she says, deadpan.
“You let me in.”
“I did.”
“Does this mean you forgive me?”
She takes a step toward him, pressing her body against his so his back is up against the wall. “No,” she says.
“So . . .”
“So, that doesn’t mean I don’t want you here.”
He reaches for her hand, brings it up to his heart, which has started to settle. It smells like vanilla hand cream. He lets out a little moan.
What the hell is happening to him? He’s managed to go thirty-one years without ever feeling this way. He’s made a point of it, in fact.
“You’ve got balls showing up here,” she murmurs.
Their faces are so close. He debates his next move—she is a bad idea—and then he thinks, Screw it, and he places his hands on either side of her lovely face and kisses her. The grief subsides instantly, along with his racing heartbeat. Everything goes quiet inside. When they finally pull apart, she takes him by the hand and leads him to her bedroom.