The question my dad kept returning to was Why? Why did I leave Montreal without giving him a heads-up or an explanation? Each of the three days after his arrival, we’d walk the city and he’d pepper me with questions, but always, ultimately, it was back to that one question. I guess my answer was never quite satisfactory.
Maybe because I didn’t quite know the answer myself. The divorce? Mom’s new boyfriend? The pressure to go to Orford, to “succeed”?
Walking around the Friday night before his departure, he asked the question a little differently. “So tell me,” he said, “what is it about Paris that you find so grand?”
I recited the words I’d been rehearsing since the night before, after reading an op-ed in Libération, a local newspaper. “I read somewhere that Paris is a stage where we’re all actors. Ever since I got here, I feel like I’m free to decide what role I want to play. For the first time in my life!”
He didn’t respond but strode ahead.
White stone walk-ups lined the street. We were meeting Moose for dinner at L’Auberge Esclangon, a restaurant my dad had read about, over by Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, the famous flea market.
(Free and I had gone to the Puces one Sunday morning. After his shock at the mass of humanity and his fear that every other person was a pickpocket, he ended up negotiating for a boxful of battered Astérix comic books. He boasted about his “mad haggling skills,” but to me, his purchase seemed a good deal only for the woman that had sold him the books. He paid 90 percent of the price that he could have had he bought them new at the FNAC bookstore, and got some that had been written in or were missing pages.)
“So tell me, Mathieu, what role is it you’re playing on this…stage?”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
The street was quiet, even though we were only a few hundred yards away from the noisy, polluted ring road and the brassy shopping centers that ran along either side of it.
“Star quarterback,” I said.
“You were that back home.”
I was. That was the key word: was, past tense.
“Over here, I get to call my own plays,” I said as a joke, to change the subject.
“It’s great to be in a position to call your own shots,” my dad said as we approached the restaurant, where Moose was waiting out front. “Coming here was the first of millions of decisions that will shape the rest of your life, that will determine the type of man you will become. So let me give you a piece of advice: Don’t lie to yourself. The truth is a much better friend. You stole money. You ran away from your responsibilities. Face the man in the mirror.
“And by the way,” he added, “I read the same article.”
My dad looked genuinely pleased to see Moose again. He pulled him into a big hug. “I don’t know if I should embrace you or put you over my knee for luring my son to run away from home.”
Moose looked really happy to see my dad too. “I’d agree, I deserve the latter,” he told him, “but I can’t take credit for Matt’s actions. You know that better than I do, Monsieur Dumas. Matt’s his own man.”
“You look great,” my dad said to him. “Like a flamenco dancer.”
In fact, Moose was way more dressed up than usual. With his hair slicked back, wearing dark cords, a cardinal-red shirt and black bomber jacket, he had the allure of a Spanish movie star.
Moose and my dad had gotten close in Montreal. Lots of French Under-20s players came every year for our training camps, but Moose was the only North African. My dad took him under his wing. He spent hours teaching Moose how to read defenses and run good, precise routes. Moose said it was my dad who made him realize that he wanted to be a teacher, helping kids from his neighborhood.
My dad asked him now, “So how’s prep for graduation exams going?”
“The bac? So-so.” Moose made a face. “My dad rides me about spending too much time on sports. He doesn’t believe there’s much of a future in it.”
“Well, I’m not going to disagree. I tell Matt the same thing. There’s more to life than sports.” Before I could even say the thing about the pot and the kettle, he added, “Parents want better for their kids than they’ve had themselves.”
Inside the restaurant, Moose stiffened when the maître d’ greeted us. Moose never really seemed comfortable outside Villeneuve, which was probably why he rarely left it. He loosened again once we were alone at a table in the corner.
“It’s too bad your friend Freeman couldn’t join us,” my dad said.
“He had a big dinner with his host family,” I explained again. It was like my dad didn’t remember what I’d already told him. “Georges, the father, invited some family friends to meet him. A government minister or something.”
Moose looked surprised, though I’d assumed Free had told him too.
“What does his host father do?” my dad asked.
“A big businessman. For a telecom company, I think.”
In fact, I knew he was an exec for the national telecom company, Orange S.A. I’m not sure why I was being so evasive. Maybe it was Moose’s smirk, like this information confirmed something he’d always suspected about Freeman.
“Still, I’d have liked to meet him,” my dad said.
He sounded as suspicious as Juliette originally had been, as judgmental as Moose now looked.
“Freeman is a good player,” Moose said. “He’s also very American and a bit moody.”
“Look who’s talking, Mister Personal-Foul-Who-Blows-Up-at-the-Ref-Every-Other-Play,” I said.
“I’m not moody,” Moose said. “I’m spirited.”
My dad interrupted. “What do you mean, very American?”
“You know,” Moose said. “He’s kind of what you’d expect. His father is in the army in Iraq, and he believes America is the world’s savior and that all Muslims want to fly planes into American skyscrapers.”
“What?” I said. “He doesn’t think that”—even though Free kind of did—“not any more than you consider all Americans oil-thirsty capitalists.”
“Aren’t they?”
“That’s like me saying that all North Africans think the same. Like me calling you Moroccan when you’re Algerian.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m French,” Moose said.
“Are you two finished?” said my father, putting on his reading glasses and passing around the menus the maître d’ had left in a stack on the table.
We read them in silence. I didn’t know why I was defending Freeman so aggressively. I guess I didn’t want my dad to disapprove of my friendship with him, even though he’d probably never meet him.
After the waiter took our orders, my dad asked Moose, “Do you plan on coming back next summer?”
“To Montreal? I’d love to, but I still have to reimburse the Diables Rouges the money they lent me for last summer’s trip.”
“Just know that you’re always welcome to stay at my house,” my dad said. “I have a spare bedroom.”
Then he added, “To pay off your debts is very important. Staying free of debt, that’s the only way to be truly free, free from the control of others.”
And I couldn’t help it: I laughed.
“Someone trying to send a message?” I said.
“You’d do well to take heed of it, petit gars! The world’s not just fun and games, and it sure as hell doesn’t revolve only around you.”
I was as surprised as Moose seemed to be by the outburst. I stared off into the room.
The rest of the meal went like that, me mostly silent, Moose and Dad seeming to have a pleasant enough time without me.
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When I showed up at his hotel the next morning to accompany him to the airport, my father was already standing outside, the old backpack he’d had since his traveling days in the ’80s at his feet. I was carrying my gear bag with me; I wouldn’t have time to go back to the apartment before our game that afternoon. We walked toward the Arc de Triomphe to catch the RER.
“What about those Anges Bleus?” my dad asked. “Are they any good?”
I knew he was genuinely curious, but by his tone of voice I could tell he was also trying to make up for his outburst at dinner in front of Moose.
“They’re ranked two higher than us. And they’re big—Gold’s Gym types. One-on-one, any one of them can pancake any of our guys.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“They have this QB from Ottawa, likes to fling the ball around.”
“Anyone I’ve heard of?” he asked.
“Alain Laplante or Lamarque—I don’t remember.”
He paid for our tickets at the kiosk in the RER station and shook his head, not recognizing the name. We walked toward the platform.
“They always start him in the first half,” I said. “Try to run up the score. To protect their lead, they hand the ball off to their star running back in the second.”
The train arrived, and we boarded.
“So what will you do, then?” my dad asked.
“Mix it up. The coaches and Free and I came up with the idea to shut down the pass in the first half. We’ll line up in our nickel and dime packages on defense and give them the run. Then I come out slinging in the second half, when their Canadian QB’s on the sideline and they can’t play catch-up.”
“That’s one stone-cold bluff,” he said.
“It’s a stone-cold world,” I said, sounding like Freeman.
“I wish you luck.”
We were switching trains at Les Halles station, from the A to the B line, struggling with our bags in the rushing mass of people.
“Don’t we make our own luck?” I said. “Isn’t that what you always taught me?”
He didn’t say anything, just pushed forward through the crowd.
We were sitting side by side on the train. My dad still hadn’t responded. Finally he said, “Promise me, Mathieu, that you’ll never run away again.”
He stared at me until I met his gaze.
“It’s okay to run after things, but not away from them. They always catch up to you.”
We sat in silence. The train we were on, an airport express, zoomed by Villeneuve-La-Grande but didn’t stop.
I pointed to the Cinq Mille projects. “That’s where Moose lives. Our field is right behind those buildings.”
“Now I understand why you prefer to live at Juliette’s. It looks like East Berlin before the fall of the Wall.”
You start to forget after a while, I thought. The bleakness just becomes normal.
I pointed to the parabolic antennas riveted to what seemed like every other window. “At least they all have satellite TV.”
“Great. They can watch Al Jazeera.”
“You sounded like Mom just then,” I told him.
My dad laughed. “I did, didn’t I?”
» » » »
I had to leave him at airport security. We stood there. I tried to act like I wasn’t choked up. Dad wasn’t even trying.
An old Air France 747 rolled by the giant plate-glass windows, on the other side of the metal detectors and X-ray scanners. I told him, “Between what I’ve gotten from the team and what I took, I still have about $450, tucked away at Juliette’s. I could send it to Mom as a sign of good faith.”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s a little late for good faith.”
He removed his wallet from his back pocket and handed me one of his credit cards.
“In case of emergencies,” he said. “But only in case of emergencies.”
We hugged each other a long time before he finally let me go.