Coq, page 16
I catch a glimpse of my skinned nose in the mirror, and worse, my posture. I’m slumping. I never slump and then a sudden thought: I’m a coward. I want familiar, low stakes, same-as-yesterday. Is this why I also want Glen?
The CEO continues on about key initiatives, markets, and major projects. She rattles off some stats on plant-based food technology, I’m pretty sure from the same abstract I’d reviewed prior to the meeting. The recruiter interrupts with a comment. A joke I’ve missed. They both laugh. I smile and listen intently as the CEO continues, but I’m still thinking about Glen and is this what he meant when he’d said I’d changed? Was I, at one time, adventurous? Did I used to take chances? Maybe. But also, maybe he took that spark away from me when he left. I couldn’t take risks as a single mom of two young kids. I stayed in the same neighbourhood, and same house, stayed with the same company.
“I hope that’s not a dealbreaker,” the CEO says. “Wanting you here. In Rotterdam.”
Of course it is. “Not at all,” I lie. The recruiter is gleeful.
The CEO leans into the screen. Her skin is lovely. Radiant. And then, to my horror, she points up at her nose. “We have a product,” she says. “It’ll heal that right up.”
A hot surge of embarrassment blows up my cheeks.
“I’ve had some pretty bad run-ins with coral, shoals, my board.” She points to her cheek. “You name it.”
Right. Surfing. I muster a smile.
“I’ll send you a list of places you can find it in Paris.”
Plans for a follow-up meeting are discussed, and we finish our conversation.
I close Zoom.
I open LinkedIn.
I open Felix’s invitation to dinner.
I type: Yes.
thirty
I knock on the door to my dad’s room. When he opens it, I’m surprised to find him standing in swim trunks, his blue legs glowing, torso and chest covered in a froth of white hair. Remnants of McDonald’s litter the overflowing garbage can, side tables, and desk. A half-eaten box of nuggets sits in the middle of the bed. Evidence of Emma is everywhere: gobs of ketchup, donut-themed Band-Aids, fidget toys, markers, half-finished sketches.
“Need some help cleaning up?” He waves a dismissive hand.
“Let me at least tie-off the garbage.”
There’s ketchup and McChicken sauce all over the can, and the ends of the trash bag have disappeared. I have to dig to retrieve them. When I remove my hand, there’s a pickle on my wrist. I knot the bag and toss it beside the door.
“I’m going for a swim,” Dad declares, windmilling his arms. “Wanna come? Mona’s still at the spa. She’s getting a massage once her pedicure dries.”
“Is there a hot tub?”
“And a sauna,” Dad replies.
“Kids got off okay?”
“Glen took all of ’em. And your brother!”
“I’ll grab my suit.”
It was nice of Glen to include Dan. He’s not much of a soccer fan, he’s not much of an anything fan, but he could use the camaraderie, the bright lights, a few stadium beers. I head back to my room, change into my bathing suit, and meet Dad in the hallway. Shiny black goggles dangle from his wrist. He looks weary.
“You okay?” I ask as he presses the elevator DOWN button. The bruises from his bike accident are in full bloom.
He pulls back one of the bandages from his knee. “Tore off the skin.”
“No kidding,” I poke around the crude pink edges. “You know what Mom would say —”
“Keep it clean,” he finishes.
We ride the elevator to the second floor in silence. The pool is empty but there’s a large family marinating in the hot tub, and judging by the location of several pairs of sandals, a convention in the sauna. I take Dad’s elbow and ease him down the stairs into the pool’s shallow end. The lights are hazy, the tiles a tropical blue. There’s a Biblical warmth to the water. I wade until I’m up to my neck, float on my back. Dad bobs beside me, both of us gazing up at the ceiling, which is curved and dark as a mountain tunnel.
I try to force a memory of Mom in keeping with the trip’s theme, but the chlorine reminds me of Dan. The hours we spent as kids at the outdoor pool, diving for rings, racing, jack-knifing off the diving board. The long bike rides home, our towels unfurling and dragging behind us, the stop at the white clapboard corner store for ice cream sandwiches or New York Seltzers.
Dan used to be fun. When did he stop? It was long before Allison-Jean left him. Maybe it was the anxiety of being a father, a provider. The incessant worry over whether the kids were getting enough potassium, or too much screen time. Whether he’d put enough money away for RESPs and would they be able to fix the roof if any more shingles blew off and is that mould in the bathroom? And God only knows what went on in their marriage. They seemed to have their shit together. Date nights (scheduled), chores (divided), driving responsibilities (shared), gifts (exchanged). But did they care about each other? Did they really see each other? Could they distinguish between indigestion and resentment? An unfinished task and despair? An empty linen closet and a lack of fulfillment?
Dad’s floated over to the deep end. I flip onto my stomach and swim to join him. I want to talk about Dan. Ask Dad what he thinks about Dan’s idea to live with Allison-Jean and Cindy. What that might look like if he were to meet someone new. Would she move into the basement with him? But Dad looks like he’s in a coma. Eyes closed, mouth open, palms up as if waiting to be baptized.
There’s a ruckus in the hot tub. School-aged siblings pinching each other. Their parents become reluctant referees. It goes on for several minutes before one of the children is evicted, a boy about Emma’s age. He wraps himself in a pool towel and sulks on a sleek deck chair, black curls dripping.
“Your mother loved another man.” Dad kicks, triggering a tiny tsunami so that when I open my mouth to respond, I swallow the deep end. I scramble to find my footing on the pool’s smooth bottom, and sputter. I can’t derive any sort of tone or intent from Dad’s statement, so I focus on draining the water from my ears. “Émile,” I eventually say.
“He was a lawyer. Real ugly fella.”
I feel an odd desire to defend my mother’s former lover from my father. It’s as if by insulting Émile, he’s insulting her. Also, Dad is no Emmanuel Macron. I look at him now: wooden nose, spotty complexion and ruined knees.
“Maybe it was his accent,” I offer, thinking of Felix.
Dad smiles. “It never bothered me,” he says. “Your mother loved me. We had a good marriage.” He drags his fingertips across the water, back and forth, creating ripples. “But sometimes I wonder if they weren’t a better match.” He looks beyond me, wistful, contemplative, and I let the comment sink between us.
There’s so much I want to ask but I tread lightly because the direction of this conversation is still a mystery and is equal parts horrifying and scintillating. I say nothing, focus on my dad’s gargantuan hands, like baseball gloves, paddling the water, while the family vacates the hot tub and files out of the pool, shrink-wrapped and in single-file.
“I gave your mom an ultimatum,” Dad blurts. “I wasn’t even ready to get married. I just wanted her to choose.” His voice croaks to a whisper. “I wanted to win.”
What to do with this information?
I kick onto my back so that I’m once again staring up at the dark ceiling. My head dips below the surface, my ears fill and Dad says something I miss. What I really want to know is, where is this coming from? Guilt? Regret? Did he read the emails? Is Mona his Émile? Was my parents’ entire marriage just two people making the best of a very large mistake?
“Not a good reason to get married,” I finally say, more thinking aloud than deliberately chastising my father for admitting that their “happily ever after” was born of some egotistical misplaced bravado. “Did you even love her?”
“Claudia,” Dad says, indignantly. “Of course I loved her. I still love her.”
“Then why are you telling me this?”
“The thing about swimming is that you often can’t see the bottom, can’t make out what’s below the surface. I’m getting old, Claudia. I’m trying to show you what’s on the bottom.”
The sauna door opens and a stream of lithe men in Speedos tumbles out. Each wrestles for his sandals, while clinging to the towel knotted around his waist. They speak Dutch and I think for a second about the job interview and the wild prospect of uprooting my life and moving to Rotterdam just as Glen has decided to come out of parental retirement, a quarterback in a midlife crisis, and as my father before me floats towards the menacing pool drain contemplating his life choices, as he moves closer to the end.
“I used to think your mother and I met at exactly the right time. Both of us had just finished school. I was already apprenticing and she got a job teaching grade one. Your mom was so different than anyone I’d ever met. She was introspective. In tune with the little things I never even noticed: crickets, chickadees, the plants that used to climb up the side of the house. She loved art and yet we never bought any.” He pauses to tug the rubber strap of his goggles. “And now, when I look back, I think the opposite. That maybe we met at exactly the wrong time and she settled because I wanted her all to myself.”
With that, he ungracefully suctions his goggles to his face and launches into a rheumatic front crawl. I watch him swim to the far wall, touch and then throw himself back in, slapping the water with the recklessness of a whale, all sound and big splash.
I consider the possibility that Glen and I too met at exactly the wrong time. It’s such a bewildering concept that I have to steady myself on the pool’s sloping brass ladder. Would things have worked out differently if we’d met in our thirties? Our seventies? Now? Does it even matter? We’re so entangled and yet there’s something oddly comforting about the possibility of blaming our failed coupling on something intangible: time.
Dad is charging toward me on a diagonal. I pull myself halfway up the ladder to get out of his way, but he still manages to swipe the backs of my legs. He stops to assess what’s happened and looks annoyed when he sees me clinging to the ladder, as though it’s my fault he can’t do anything, other than marriage, in a straight line.
“You’re in the way, Claudia,” he scolds.
I heave myself up another rung as Mona appears at the pool door dressed for a cruise. Bold floral suit, fuchsia sandals, a sheer cover-up with fringe and beading. She waves, before barrelling through the heavy door, shoulder first.
“What’s Émile’s last name?” I ask, wiping my face.
Dad eyes me suspiciously and then says, “Fontaine,” before he dunks under the water, only to resurface and slick back his gnarly hair.
Mona heaps her belongings on a lounger, removes her shoes, and then limp-runs across the deck, cannonballing herself into the deep end. Freezing, I tiptoe to the sauna, shutting the door firmly behind me. Through the opaque window, I watch Dad and Mona embrace.
thirty-one
It seems Glen wasn’t the only one who was able to get tickets to last night’s game. Wes has a hickey on his neck. A red card. He’s asleep on the pull-out. I tug the comforter to cover him. Joan is sprawled in the other bed snoring lightly, her phone at her fingertips playing YouTube videos. They’ve been playing all night. Clip after clip of climate films. I scroll her screen. Emaciated polar bears, koalas burnt to a crisp, trash flotillas. I toss her phone back on her bed screen-side down, beside her new cleats, which are untied in a lump beside her pillow. Next to them, a crumpled souvenir jersey. I check the tag still attached to the neckline: one hundred forty euros. Glen’s not fucking around.
I dismantle a still-warm croissant purchased this morning from a bakery two streets over. It’s moist and flaky, nothing like the lard crescents we mass-produce back home. The coffee’s a bit sketch, but I sip it anyway, catching up on work and sending emails to the recruiter and the CEO, thanking them for their time. No commitment, other than a follow-up meeting when I return to Nova Scotia. My counterpart at Petit Vert is in Japan this week, but Marcus has arranged for me to meet with their sales and marketing manager at a hotel in the 5th arrondissement this afternoon. I plug the coordinates into my phone and prepare a list of questions. Executed precisely, a Canadian version of Petit Vert could be a crowning achievement in my career. One more decade of intense output, and then I can coast to the finish line. That, or move to Rotterdam.
I check my phone. In fifteen minutes, I have to wake the kids because we’re going to Disneyland Paris. I would rather be handcuffed to a mime than go to Disneyland, but Dan is determined to make it happen. As a new member of the recently-separated parent club, he needs to get Emma to Disney before Allison-Jean does. He needs to win. And as sad and spiteful as it sounds, I understand. When you can’t give your child a second parent you load them up with mouse ears and magic, fireworks and best-days-ever. Tickets to a football game in Paris. Box seats. Dan will eventually learn these things don’t matter. That his kids will remember the stuff we perceive as insignificant: hanging around to read one more chapter, making them hot chocolate after a shitty day at school, cleaning their bedroom for them after their first major break-up. But for now, glass slippers.
While they sleep, I eat another croissant, and google “Émile Fontaine” “lawyer” “Paris.” I click on a website for Chalamet Avocats.
Hmm. He’s . . . interesting looking. A small face stretched thin as a shoreline. Olive-skinned, dressed practically in a grey suit, and the most spectacular eyebrows I’ve ever seen. They look embroidered. His eyes are dark, more slate than brown, but there’s an undeniable warmth in his gaze, surprising for a legal portrait, and yet so endearing, so capable. The kind of man that, if he was a doctor, you’d trust to perform your child’s surgery. If he were a hair stylist, you’d tell him to do what he wanted. And if he told you he loved you, you’d know it was sincere and forever.
My heart seizes. A quick, hard contraction that sends a wave of emotion through my body so potent I nearly see it travel beneath my skin. It climbs my spine, pricks the back of my neck, stings my nose. I know this feeling: grief. I inhale, my breath ragged as a shift worker, and close my eyes. I can’t pinpoint exactly why I’m crying. Whether the grief circulating through me is mine, or Mom’s, or Émile’s, or someone else’s entirely, but it’s acute and I wait, bare and unmoving, until it passes.
When I open my eyes, Wes is awake, sitting up, headphones wrapped around his neck, a pillow on his lap, watching me curiously through the mirror. He does not know what to say. All of his life when he’s caught his mother in these moments, crying alone in the middle of the night, or on the drive home or standing in line at the grocery store, an endless silent film, he has never known what to say, but he always knows what to do. He shoves the blankets aside, pads across the hotel’s jewel-toned carpet, and hugs me.
And now it’s me who doesn’t know what to say because I want everything for him. I want him to experience all the love, but in that wish, I’m simultaneously condemning him to a life of pain, and I can barely cope with that idea. In less than seventy-two hours he will have to say good-bye to Célestine, and he will experience a supernatural grief. The grief of love.
I hand him a croissant and he finishes it in three bites, helps himself to another.
“You can see her tonight,” I say. “If your dad agrees. And with some rules. But,” I caution, “rules.”
He’s already texting her. I nudge Joan awake and then jump in the shower with a sudden attitude change toward spending the day at Disney. How will Paris Disney differ from American Disney? I doubt there will be fathers of unusual size wearing NFL shirts and gnawing turkey legs as if their survival depended on it. Fewer mothers with rhinestone sunglasses, NASCAR strollers and cleavage you could plant a tree in. Besides, if it’s horrible at least I get to leave early for my meeting.
I squirt shaving foam onto my legs, perch my foot on the soap dish. I haven’t told anyone that after my Petit Vert meeting, I’m having dinner with Felix. I haven’t told anyone what he wrote when I’d accepted his invitation. Not even Georgia, with whom I would normally share these details. By keeping it private, his response grows more reckless in my heart. Like thistle.
I meet my family in the hotel lobby, each of us carrying a kingdom-friendly backpack. Mona’s raided the hotel breakfast. Bread and oranges jut out from the unzipped top of her bag. Dad wears a California Raisins T-shirt from 1986, his hair slicked back like a vampire’s. Dan and I both stare. The hairstyle has given him the appearance of an entirely different man.
Emma is beside herself, talking incessantly, scrawling things in a cheetah-print notebook, her shirt starched and stiff as a Hitler Youth’s. At least she’s wearing shoes and not lettuce wraps.
“I thought she didn’t like princesses?” I whisper to Dan.
“She doesn’t. She’s made a list of villains she wants to get autographs from.”
We bus, and then board a train for the short trip to Chessy. From the station it’s only a five-minute walk to the gates. Our first stop inside the park is the scooter rental hut, a surprise courtesy of Dan. Dad is initially insulted.
“I don’t need a scooter,” he protests while simultaneously stroking the machine’s metallic blue chrome.
“Gerald,” Mona interrupts, pushing a squat splayed hand onto the seat of the smaller model she’s been presented with. “Feel how comfortable.” I notice the imposter ring, which has been absent the last few days, gleaming from her hand.
Dad relents, mounts the scooter as though it’s a skittish horse that might take off without him, and places his backpack in the machine’s handy basket. “What would the guys think of this?” he says with a geriatric harumph.
“What ‘guys’?” I reply. “Harold can barely walk and George’s in a wheelchair.”
