Garcia's Heart (37 page)

She painted and he studied and there was silence (a
García
silence, he later told himself, although he was responsible for it too). As the time approached for him to make plans about Boston, first the tentative steps of applications and interviews, followed by the irrevocable decisions about visa applications and deposits on new apartments, he grew frustrated with Celia for the silences, for neither of them having any intervening words. And while he could have said something, simply sat down with her and demanded they clarify how they felt and how they were going to negotiate the next five years in their lives, that would have meant him declaring his need for her. It would have meant risking Celia telling him that nothing had really changed since that first day in Le Dépanneur Mondial, that the need wasn't mutual.

Patrick hadn't slept the night before it ended with Celia. It hadn't been some long dark night of the soul; instead, like any fourth-year student going through a surgery rotation, he'd been up all night as a third assistant in the
OR
, getting a good view of the surgical resident's shoulder, and in the morning he'd telephoned Celia to see if she wanted to go for breakfast before he went to sleep. After calling the Garcías', he called home, thinking she'd be there. He listened to his own voice on the machine and then hung up.

He tried to round up a few friends to go for breakfast, but everyone had plans, so he headed out by himself, ending up at a small bacon and eggs place on Park Avenue. It was a busy little restaurant, close enough to the ghetto to be frequented by students and with prices so famously low that it was widely rumoured to be a front used by the mob for laundering money. Or so the story went, but the eggs were good. He was exhausted, yes, he remembered exhaustion being an integral part of the story. He ate alone and watched people. He was
seated among clusters of friends and couples, and, as much as he tried, he could not block out the sounds of their conversation and laughter. He would have given anything to have a real grievance with Celia, any hint of betrayal would have been eagerly accepted, but all he had was this, having to eat alone and hear people enjoy themselves. Even his loneliness felt paltry and childish.

He didn't go home. He went back to the hospital and drank coffee in the cafeteria for an hour or two. He phoned the apartment a couple of times, not able to wait until the third ring before hanging up and then spent the rest of the afternoon at a movie, stumbling into small potholes of sleep before being shaken awake by the huge planetary faces on the screen.

It was early evening when Patrick got home. When he tried opening the door, it thudded against its chain. A second later, Jane, one of Celia's friends who was storing some canvases in their spare room, appeared in the gap, looking stark-eyed and frightened. She closed the door to unbolt the chain and then reopened it. Hadn't Celia told him she was going to the de Kooning show in Toronto? He shook his head, he'd been working too much to talk to her about anything.

“Celia said I could do some work here, I hope you don't mind.”

He shook his head again.

“I'll be out of your hair by tomorrow, tops.”

“Sure. Don't worry about it.”

“Are you okay?” Jane asked.

“Yeah. When is she coming back?”

“Tomorrow night, I think.”

“Uh-huh.”

He made some dinner and ate wordlessly, Jane joining
him, talking and talking. And even though her mood seemed strange, it appealed to him: Jane was energized with the hum and hiss of a person operating on an unnatural level of alertness. It was unnerving at first, and he tried to dispel the suspicion that maybe she was taking something or wasn't well, but he got past that and decided that he liked her fervour, that there was something distinctly attractive about it. She was speaking quickly and effusively about her work, how she had described her work to so and so over the phone and he said he could tell that it had promise, real promise, but that didn't matter because she was developing her own aesthetic sense now and the dealers could go fuck themselves because she'd found what she was looking for, it was inside her, inside her all the time, she said.

Then she brushed the red hair away from where it had fallen over her face and smiled and said, “Do you want to see it?”

He said, “Sure,” and he listened to the word as he said it, the comfort of it, how it annihilated silence and erased doubt and made any act that followed seem necessary.

Three days later–a full two days after Celia should have returned but still hadn't, the deep space of that extra forty-eight hours confirming that Jane had admitted what had happened between them to a friend and the news had been duly reported to Celia–Patrick was awakened by full-bodied hammering on the door of the apartment. He opened it to find Roberto standing there and he was transported to Le Dépanneur Mondial back in 1986; Roberto staring him down, jaw muscles contracting and relaxing as if he were gilled as well as angry. A shove to his chest followed, not really that much force, but enough at that time of the night to drive Patrick backwards into the hallway and flat on the floor. Then Roberto
stood over him, asking where her paintings were. Patrick remembered being impressed at Roberto's restraint, suspecting even then that he'd eventually pay more completely. Ah yes, in that light the punch on the Churchillplein made perfect sense. Sweeter for the wait, for the self-control shown that night in the apartment. Travelling halfway around the world and across a Den Haag plaza was a detail, just the coordinates of a job to be finished.

Celia phoned him the next week, their last contact until he sighted her in the tribunal gallery twelve years later. She didn't have much to say, except to let him know that Jane wasn't well and she thought he should have guessed as much, and that she expected better from him. Then she hung up.

He squinted to screen out the glare of sunshine. From where he stood on the pier, Nina was clearly visible, still on the blanket, arms straightened out behind her. Further down, near the edge of the beach where the sand flashed a momentary sheen as each wave receded, he thought he could make out Celia and Paul. They were walking. They appeared to stop every dozen or so steps and Patrick imagined the little boy bending down for something on the sand. They were indistinct, the outline of their bodies shimmering, and with each glance it was difficult to tell if they were one or two people. His retinas were capable of discerning shapes from the quarter mile, his occipital and parietal lobes continually parsing the images and creating hypotheses that played against his visual memory. They were real. They were real. They were walking on a beach. Two people. One person. Oh, he realized, they were holding hands. They were coming back.

 

SEVENTEEN

For many people, Holland has always been a tolerant country.
The
tolerant country, modern laboratory for the newest idea: gay rights, sexual freedom, total football. It was no different for Patrick Lazerenko; Holland was famous for its tolerance even among teenagers back in
NDG
in the eighties, where the concept of the hassle-free bong hit was pretty much the definition of utopian society.
Amsterdam.
It was cool just to say the word, and impossible to keep a smile off your face as you said it. But Holland was more than just hedonism, it was asylum, the embodiment of relief and protection for those who had been harassed. No melting pot. No assimilation. People could live in peace there. Patrick had never spent any significant time in Holland before, never indulged in the café specialties of
de Wallen
, but Holland remained in his mind, more so since moving to America, occupying a necessary place as that reassuring, pluralistic haven.

But, according to the television, Holland was a different place tonight, with the Right Honourable Edgar van der
Hoeven in the ground and his assailant arrested that morning, now being held in an Amsterdam jail. The assailant had been identified variously: as a Muslim extremist, as a North African, as an engineering student, as a Moroccan, or as a man with no history of violence. Parenthetically, he turned out to be a native-born: an
allochtoon
from the Rustenburg-Oostbroek district of Den Haag. The murderer's identity confirmed what everyone had suspected. Every television channel Patrick turned to was a variation on a theme, in strident voices and clipped sentences whose meanings he was able to parse without the benefit of understanding Dutch. Heated debate had become Holland's new national sport, adopted with a vigour proportional to its novelty.

A half-hour of television was all it took to confirm that Van der Hoeven's death had been the necessary cathartic: now people wanted to say out loud, in front of cameras, what they had only ever privately thought. The moderator cut to a city sidewalk somewhere in the Netherlands. The bulb of a microphone breached the frame and a series of faces appeared, uttering one long indicting sentence: the immigrants are trouble and no one tries to speak Dutch, and they don't assimilate and they fill up the jails, and isn't the largest mosque in Europe in Rotterdam? And they have too many children and they'll be a majority in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and Den Haag by 2010, and they don't respect women or homosexuals, and they fill up the welfare rolls, and they have no interest in being Dutch, and they assassinate politicians in the street, and if they weren't Muslims we would just be talking about them as Fascists, wouldn't we?

There was only one story, and Hernan García was not that story. Hernan's story wasn't even
a
story. Even in the week
before the arrest, a night hadn't passed without a mosque being burned or defaced, and the Muslim community announced it was going to hold simultaneous demonstrations in the major Dutch cities. When their spokesman was asked what they hoped to accomplish by these demonstrations, the first word out of his mouth was “solidarity.” Watching him, Patrick got the feeling that he'd like to take the answer back, that the man already understood the multiple trajectories of the word. But by the time the spokesman had reconsidered, he was off camera and long gone.

Every night he heard the news, the details of the van der Hoeven murder and the escalating invective that trailed in its wake and yet by morning he had forgotten it. For him, Holland could well be the beach at Scheveningen, and Den Haag nothing more than the empty streets he walked through to get to the tribunal building. He saw no sign of discord, no minarets reduced to cinders, no one shaking their fist. But every night it reappeared, a bonfire of reality. It was the amnesia of the strange place, he told himself; it was normal. There was a time when he would have felt guilty about this, this touristic auto-pilot, that ten, maybe only five years ago he would have felt he owed it to himself and others to understand the issue. But he was busy with other things. His head hurt.

The dinner hour news was over and the television shut off with a flash that echoed throughout a newly, exuberantly dark room. He had said goodbye to the Garcías at the beach at around two and had spent the rest of the afternoon wandering alone through Scheveningen and Den Haag. He had spoken to Celia several times in the course of the day. Or tried. Stillborn attempts at chit-chat. By the end of the afternoon, he wished that she had been angry at him, that she'd showed any
emotion, but she seemed to be interested only in maintaining a fixed distance between them. He'd come back to the Metropole and left his half-eaten meal on a plate in the restaurant. And now, with the television off, he considered whether doubling the dose of his Valium would allow him to sleep through to the next morning. He didn't move from the bed, but in the place of sleep came sleep's generic equivalent: a less potent mix of exhaustion and excess serotonin along with the fervent wish for genuine amnesia. Sleep would not come. When the phone rang, he answered it unhesitatingly. Welcoming it.

Her voice was different. Almost unrecognizable at first. Over the phone her voice seemed softer, synesthetic in the dark, full of flourishes and adornments. Melodious words. Floral speech. Not the Celia from the beach. He remembered this voice from years before, its tone and diction strumming instrumental memories, a hand that would be happily numbed holding the phone for an hour of listening to such a voice. The voice made no sense to him now.

“What do you want?” he said, the words stumbling down stairs in the dark.

“Are you doing anything tonight?”

Once, he would have been made happy hearing her say that, but his mood was in freefall. “No,” he said quietly into the receiver.

“I'd like it if you could meet Oliveira.”

“What? No,” Patrick mumbled and sat up, repeating “No” like the first bleat of a car alarm. The vehemence didn't surprise him alone; there was a pause on the other end of the line.

“Please, Patrick, listen to me. I've tried to get this done through di Costini, but he's dragging his heels on getting the
imaging test you talked about.” Celia's voice shed its summer clothes for something heavier. “We have to figure out how we're going to do this.”