Cities of Refuge (9 page)

There was a weight to Greg. She felt the pull exerted on her by his mass and solemn conviction. He was not without wit, but any little joke never rose beyond its rightful place, never fully inhabited him. Whatever the opposite of a belly laugher would be, she thought, that was Greg. And yet he enjoyed being social. One winter night the
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volunteers had been invited to one of the home screenings in his condo. Kim told herself not to arrive early, but did anyway, and found herself reading book titles while he prepared finger foods in the kitchen and asked about her abandoned studies and basically where she was going in life. In the twenty or so minutes before the others arrived, she managed to make no real impression at all.

The movie that night had been French. Catherine Deneuve as a philosophy professor who gets caught up in a criminal underworld. Some of the criminals were French, some North African or Arab, and there was an ugly, snivelling little boy of the kind never admitted into American films. In one scene a suicidal young woman ate glass. At the end of it, with the credits rolling, Greg had left the room, had seemed to need to leave the room. She took her empty wine goblet to the kitchen and found him looking out a window. She said nothing. He turned. Then they said nothing together – it wasn’t like he was weeping or anything, he just needed to be alone, she guessed – and she left him there. But she made a note to herself right then to remember that moment, that fact, that a solid man who spent his days
mucking around in real human misery and the occasional triumph could still be flattened by French cinema.

When Greg appeared, when they were back in his Protégé and moving, she learned that Robert would get a hearing.

“Good,” she said.

“If we were in his country, he’d be the enemy.”

“We don’t get to pick and choose. That’s the government’s job.”

“Of course we pick and choose. But just because a man’s an asshole we can’t stand by and let him be shipped off to his death.”

“We can if he’s a war criminal or terrorist. Each case on –”

“Its merits, yes. But sometimes there are no merits. And sometimes you can only make them out if you peer into the dark and kind of use your imagination.”

They were only ever together in the service of this higher thing, tossed together by global forces, if you thought about it, which allowed them to share confidences, though not personal ones. Before the attack there had been something sexual in their connection – she hadn’t imagined it – but she couldn’t read him well enough because he was on an established course professionally, and he was older than any man she’d gone dreamy about, in his early forties, she thought, and what did she really know about such men. And now there was the problem of what had happened, and who she was these days. But then he seemed to know (how had he conveyed this?) who she was now, or that she wasn’t.

She wasn’t dreamy anymore.

He tapped his cellphone and handed it to her. In the little blue window, up came a photo of a photo of a country scene. Four teen girls in white dresses and plaited straw bracelets in the back of a very old pickup truck on a dirt road with furrowed fields in all directions.

“It’s hanging in a gallery on Queen West this very minute. We should see it together sometime. I don’t know when ’cause my life’s sideways at the moment.”

“And mine’s upside down.”

An accidentally suggestive pause. She wondered if he was picturing them sideways and upside down, and she went a little cold. She looked at the faces of the girls in the picture, four captured infinities, so beautiful she thought she might cry.

When they were on her street – he’d driven her home before but had never been inside – he pulled over and she realized that everything about them was between categories. She almost reached over to squeeze his arm before she got out, but didn’t, and then just leaned back in and smiled but didn’t say thank you and closed the door. When she made it into the entranceway he was still sitting there, looking straight ahead.

By evening she still hadn’t settled into her space. Her thoughts were skipping again, from the home-theatre seats in Greg’s condo to the planetarium chairs she used to love as a girl and the radio sound of voices at her shoulder at the museum to the cellphone in the car, the picture disappearing into streaming blue words with the time at the tail. Then she thought of Greg and felt, briefly, what she felt. Her desires now all died in the hand.

The beginning was still out there, somewhere earlier in time. Of course it was. She imagined it all began centuries ago, continents away, during the religious wars or a plague or in a sandstone cave lit by torches, with an ibex painted on a rock wall. All beginnings were arbitrary, yet she believed in something like a knowable first cause, one that began in her, or that she’d witnessed, was some part of.

There was no hope of finding the cause in the replayed hours and days, but she did still find herself looking for mistakes, misperceptions, an inattentiveness with which she could accuse herself. The mistakes were there – she hadn’t looked after herself, hadn’t slept enough, hadn’t obeyed her intuition to avoid the dark street – but the self-blame was thin. And so she began retracing the long arc of her life, and the lives of others, and things like chance and the city itself, the zones where lives collided. And then there she was, on the long-ago June weekend. She was thirteen years old. Though she didn’t yet know it, Harold was conducting her along what would be the last of their Saturday-morning walks.

As a tradition the Saturday walk had begun three summers earlier, and each year they made it farther from home, sometimes walking back, sometimes taking the subway and then trekking uphill to their neighbourhood. The conversations ran as did the morning itself, inevitable, full of pattern and variation. Typically they argued over whether to plan the route. Harold liked to have it set out – it was a matter of time management, he didn’t want to lose the day’s work – but Kim preferred the possibility of improvisation. At some point she’d strike upon some inefficiency, a new street or a schoolyard to cut across in the wrong direction, and she would get her way. Both directions along the route they made stops, to buy ice cream or find a park bench to rest on as the heat built and the day entered its swerve.

In this last summer they were accompanied by family tensions and the half-formed theories that Kim would have evolved over the week, gathering what she could from each fight between her parents, each chill silence. In her theories, Harold was the culprit. Kim’s anger towards him had only recently started to surface. She had interrupted an argument ostensibly about, of all things,
whether Marian had parked the car too far from the curb. Kim walked through the middle of the debate and looked out the front window at the car hunched in more or less its usual spot. She then turned and, in the lull brought on by her presence, asked Harold why he was being so stupid. He told her not to get involved. The next day she told him she didn’t want to go on any more walks. That it was her mother who asked her to continue them did nothing to promote Harold’s standing.

The last walk followed upon a week in which Kim had heard too much. Outwardly the fight this time had been about a vacation. Harold was spending an upcoming week in Guatemala, chairing a panel. As had been their habit in the past, Marian wanted him to take her and Kim along. Harold had said it was too dangerous, they’d spend the whole time in the hotel. At some point, with Kim in her room, hearing it all, Harold said, “Some countries are just off-limits,” and Marian responded, “At least you could tell me her name.” That was the end of the discussion. Harold left the house and didn’t return until after Kim had gone to bed.

The walk now admitted none of this. Kim had little to say. Harold commented on the late-summer gardens. Eventually they ended up a little farther west than usual, and Harold suggested they take a break at Christie Pits, a park with playing fields, twentysome blocks cut out of the city before the First World War. They sat in the shade of a maple, atop the eastern slope, looking down at the mix of roil and formal play, the baseball diamond in the northeast corner, with boys about her age, in their early teens, going through their motions in turn, peering for signs, following long-established codes she knew nor cared nothing about. Beyond the outfield fence and below them was an improvised soccer field,
with men young and old, half with their shirts off, shouting to one another in Portuguese. Far across the park, the huge, teeming swimming pool – they had never been swimming together, she and her father, not even on beaches. And to the south, wanderers, dogs, cyclists, and more young men in groups, some with their shirts off.

“There was a race riot here once. Do you know about it?”

She did not.

“In 1933. On the one side, down there” – he pointed below them – “were working-class Jews and Italians, and on the other” – on the north end – “were Anglo-Protestants waving swastikas. It got nasty, of course.”

Kim had trouble picturing the riot against the spectacle of the city playing out below them.

“The riot tells us one thing about Toronto, and so does the fact that sixty years later there’s still not a plaque to commemorate it.”

“But it’s pretty today.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

A few young Latino men appeared on the sidelines of the soccer game, waiting to join in. One of them saw her. Then they all did.

“Those boys, slouching, dressing like clowns. Playing fools. Never play dumb, Kim. It’s too easy. It makes us blind in the end. The whole world plays dumb and it’s in trouble.”

She thought he was about to dispense another lesson but he said nothing more, presumably lost in thought about the whole world in trouble.

One of the young men separated himself from the others and started up the slope. He wore a short-sleeved, checkered shirt
with a collar and baggy jeans. It was hard to see how he’d play soccer in them. He came up to them and stood a few steps down the hill, at the level of their folded knees, and addressed Kim as if Harold weren’t there.

“You want to come play?”

“No, thanks.” She smiled. There was something tattooed on his forearm.

“We’re not very good.”

— I’d be worse, she said.

— Hah! You speak Spanish –

“She’s not interested.”

The boy laughed but kept his eyes on Kim.

— Does he speak Spanish?

— I speak it better than you do, Harold said. Now clear off.

There was a moment when Kim wasn’t sure what the boy would do, when the boy himself didn’t seem sure, and then he laughed again.

“You come back alone and play sometime.”

He made an exaggerated swing of his leg and pivoted and took one long stride downward, then trotted back to his friends.

“You didn’t have to be rude.”

She turned. There was something wrong with her father. He was sitting as before, hugging his knees, looking at the grass falling away in front of him. But there was now an unblinking, unresponsive stillness, and the shade on his face had turned a kind of grey-green that didn’t look right. He was far away again. Then very suddenly, he wasn’t.

“You never come back here, do you understand?”

She had missed something.

“Come on, Dad. Let’s go.”

“Listen to me. Promise me you won’t come back. You stay away from those boys.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so, first of all. And because those boys, that tattoo he had is a gang marking. He’s Salvadoran. We’re getting some dark characters washing up here because of the mess in mid-hemisphere. And they might look like others of us, but they’re not.”

She looked down at them. They were smoking, watching the game, waiting their turns to play.

“Yes, let’s go.”

They crossed the street to a variety store and got provisions for the walk home. Harold bought a coffee, Kim an ice cream bar, her second of the morning. She insisted she buy her own snack from her weekly allowance, and when she left the store, he was waiting for her outside in what was now the high sun. He looked at her directly, a rare occurrence, then looked away. When they were in stride he said, “Your mother and I have something to tell you,” and it was as if he thought her mother was there with them, and Kim knew then what it was. For a moment it seemed possible to save them if she could only keep free of the news, from the saying of it.

They had drawn even with a pedestrian alley and as they passed it someone spoke to them.

“My friend.”

It was the Salvadoran boy. He was just standing there behind the convenience store, with nothing in his hands, not even a cigarette, facing them, as if he’d come a long way to do so.

“Keep walking,” Harold told her.

“You scared of me, man?”

Kim looked at Harold and he took her arm and began away.

“You hold her like she’s your fuck. Is she your young fuck?”

Kim no longer wanted to look at the boy, no longer thought of him as a boy, as anything but whatever her father called him. But Harold had stopped walking and she didn’t know where to look, so she looked down.

The boy laughed and in its odd melody she was struck to know the character of her father, the physical fact of him. His presence was voice, not movement. Despite which, she thought he would run, go after the boy, but not catch him, or, if the boy didn’t run, maybe step close and shout – he’d been stern already. And so when Harold took her arm again, and led her back into motion, she understood in that flash of the unexpected, that in the guise of knowing best, of steering her clear, he was actually steering himself clear. And it worked for both of them. Other than offering a last, trailing laugh, the boy was no further trouble.

Later that afternoon Marian had summoned her and she walked right through the living room – there was Harold, knotted into his favourite chair, looking at her as if to his executioner – and out of the house, ruining their scene. She left in injury, to injure, and walked, crying on and off, all the way to the lake and back, so that by the time she returned and Marian embraced her, she had missed her father’s actual leaving.