I ran into Sid the following morning at the convenience store in our building. He was buying groceries – bread, tins of soup, canned salmon – though he could have got the same things for half the price at the market five minutes away.
“So you’re seeing Rita,” I said.
But he wasn’t playing the matter at all as I’d expected.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, almost peevish. “I’m just going to show her around a bit, that’s all.”
He seemed almost surprised now at his own good fortune, as if he thought of himself after all, despite his talk, his hopes, as simply what he appeared to be, a two-bit drifter trying to make his way. I thought of how his apartment had looked the few times I’d been up to it, how it had reeked of transience: dirty dishes piled up, dirty clothes strewn about, the furnishings mainly milk crates and planks and the windows tacked over with yellowing newsprint that let in a weird, sallow light.
“Anyway it’s none of my business,” I said.
I had papers due for my courses at Centennial but couldn’t put my hand to any work. Everything seemed askew, as if a story had been proceeding in some normal way and then an error, a shift, had sent it off into strangeness. Even the weather, which almost overnight had turned spring-like and warm, seemed a kind of senseless reversion, the melting snow, the patches of greenish lawn re-emerging here and there littered with the debris that had collected over the winter. In the lot of the service station which my apartment looked onto across Huron, a great mound of snow that had been built up by progressive ploughings during the winter was slowly melting down through its layers as if time were moving backwards; in a matter of days only bits of gravel and grime would remain like the insoluble residue of all the past weeks and months.
I called my Aunt Teresa to let her know I wasn’t returning home for Easter.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, as if she’d had to fight to dredge my image up from her memory. It seemed like years since we had spoken, like we’d never been part of a family.
“Say hello to everyone,” I said.
“Well. We can’t force you to come home if you don’t want to.”
Thursday I skipped my classes and spent the whole day searching for a birthday gift for Rita. I was in and out of gift shops, jewellers, antique stores; every item seemed wrong, seemed infected with our strangeness, open to misinterpretation. The shopkeepers offered up their suggestions, laid trinkets out on their counters; all wrong. It was a kind of obsession, finding the proper thing, what would hit the right note, would say, this is where we stand, just here. Then, impulsively, I bought a watch, too elegant, too expensive, already chiding myself as the saleslady wrapped it for me, already knowing it was excessive, that that was the message of it. I couldn’t possibly give it to her; at home, I simply stuffed it away still in its plastic bag at the top of my closet.
It was getting toward evening; I didn’t want to be in if Rita came by the building to meet up with Sid. I got in the car and drove. The streets were clogged with rush-hour traffic; at one point, going down toward the lakeshore thinking to stop in a little park there, I missed a lane change and was forced out onto the expressway. At the end of the on ramp I had a moment of panic as the ramp narrowed and nearly pulled into the path of an oncoming truck. Its lights flashed, its horn sounded, and then somehow I ended up squeezed onto the shoulder, fighting the slide of the wheels against the gravel until I was able to bring the car to a stop.
Another car had already pulled up behind me. A bearded man in a parka got out and came to my window.
My heart was still pounding.
“Is everything all right?” he said.
“I think so.”
“You came pretty close to that truck.”
He eyed my car uneasily, its luxurious bulk. Perhaps he was afraid that I’d stolen it, that I was on the run. I saw myself for an instant as he might, through a veil of fear and good intentions: I could be anyone, capable of anything.
“You sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
More than my near accident, the look in the man’s eyes left me unnerved. It was as if I had suddenly lost any internal sense of what I was: for that instant I was only what he reflected me back as, an unknown quantity, a threat.
I took the first exit and headed north. I had got it into my head to visit my friend Michael, though I hadn’t seen him since the fall. It took half an hour of driving, past older stretches of city and then up through the slow deterioration into discount furniture shops and strip malls, to get out to his suburb. From a distance the little island of tidy bungalows his subdivision formed cast up a halo of collective light like some protective dome that enclosed it.
Michael came to the door looking dishevelled and tired as if he’d just risen from a sleep.
“I was on my way home from Centennial,” I lied.
The television was on the living room, but the rest of the house was dark. There were no toys in the hall, no baby sounds in the background.
“Come on in. It’s good to see you.”
He offered me a beer. I followed him into the kitchen expecting it, for some reason, to be in shambles. But everything was in purest, pristine order, as if in waiting.
“Suzie left me,” Michael said, before I asked. “A couple of months ago.”
“Oh.”
There was an awkward silence. We sat nursing our beers at the kitchen table like two interlopers, out of place there.
“What happened exactly?” I said.
“You know how it is. You don’t notice the signs at the time, and then it’s too late. She was pretty young when we got married and all that. I guess she felt she’d never had much of a life. It’s just hard with the kid and everything.”
He set about to make us some supper, setting out foodstuffs and pots with an instinctive carefulness and frugality as if not to disturb the kitchen’s ordered calm. I thought of the three of us having supper there the fall before, drunk on homemade wine.
“I’m thinking of moving back to the city,” he said. “There’s no point keeping a house like this. My father jacked the rent up just after Suzie left, that’s how he thinks about these things.”
He talked a bit about the things he would do, his new freedom, but it was clear that Suzie’s departure had broken him. The baby would be about a year old now – he said the silence was the hardest thing, coming home every day and instinctively waiting to hear a child’s sounds that didn’t come.
“They’re back with her mother now, she looks after the kid when Suzie’s at work. But it’s not as if her mother and I ever got along. I get it coming and going, from her family and mine. You just become this pariah or something.”
His father, though he’d never approved of the marriage, had hardly spoken to him since the split. He was like that, Michael said. Twenty years before, he had disowned Michael’s oldest sister when she had got pregnant out of wedlock. She had eventually married, got a good job, had more children. But in all those years their father had never spoken to her again.
“You have to understand what that’s like. What kind of a mind it takes to cut off one of your children like that. But here’s the thing: a couple of years ago Suzie and I went to Italy and I got talking to this old woman in the village who told me my mother was already pregnant with my sister when she got married. There was even some talk that my dad wasn’t the father. It all made sense then, in a kind of crazy way. But to think we went all our lives without understanding that. Even my sister didn’t know.”
I could picture Michael’s village, its stony houses and mountain solitude, and his father there a gloomy young man like my own, hemmed in by his limited possibilities.
“To tell you the truth,” Michael said, “I think that’s why Suzie left me. She started to see my father in me. She could never forgive him for what he did to my sister. But the funny thing is, I could. Even after I found out, or maybe because of that. You’d think it would have the opposite effect, but all I could see then was the pain this guy had gone through. It’s like something that’s blinded him.”
We were not so different, then, Michael and I, though I hadn’t known this, had the same family entanglements, the same receding into darkness and sin. Perhaps all families were like this, were hard exactly because of their failings, were then fated through that hardness to repeat the very things they sought to avert.
“How are things with your sister?” Michael said.
“Oh. All right.”
“You’re still getting along?”
“Off and on. It’s a bit complicated.”
“It always is.”
It grew late. Michael offered to drive me to the subway.
“I have a car,” I said. “My father’s old car.”
“A sort of hand-me-down?”
I had never told him about my father’s death. It seemed ungenerous not to do so now, but it was too much to cram into a moment at the door.
“Something like that.”
We stood an instant on his front steps. There would be time, I thought, time to tell him things; and yet somehow I had the sense also that time was running out, that soon I’d be past the point of telling.
“If you ever need anything,” I said.
“Thanks.”
I drove home. It was warm out, almost balmy, the air laden with smells that the winter had held in check. In the damp warmth, the lingering piles of dirty snow in parking lots and at the edges of driveways looked alien, anachronistic. As a child in Italy, at this time of year, I would wander sometimes above our village with my friend Fabrizio to search out the snowfields still nestled among the higher slopes, playing with him there as if in full winter while below us the valley lay stretched out already coloured over by the wheat- and olive-greens of spring. It had given me a peculiar sense of disorientation, the unnaturalness of that like some secret transgression, some line between absolutes that we had blurred.
The lights were still on in Sid’s apartment when I arrived home. For a long time I stood across the street in the darkness of a burnt-out streetlight, watching. There was movement across the newsprint over his windows, vague shapes I couldn’t decipher. Then one by one the lights began to go out until only the small, flickering glow of what must have been a candle remained, casting a long shadow onto one of the windows before finally receding from view, as if someone had picked it up and carried it into a far room.
Sid’s bedroom was directly above my own. When he had women home, the floorboards would send messages like code – not even quite so much noise as small, telltale reverberations, what fell between sound and simple tremor, like the groan that went through the building when a streetcar went by. Eventually my body had begun to register these cues almost instinctively, with a strange combination of repulsion and arousal; and sometimes I would awake to them in the middle of the night and fall back into troubled, sexual dreams, dreams of watching, dreams of being exposed.
I waited outside ten minutes, fifteen, then longer, sitting smoking in the car with the window down and the radio on the way I’d sometimes snuck cigarettes at home as a teen. Then finally I made my way up the fire escape to my apartment, and to bed.