The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (14 page)

“But the rest of them,” he muttered. “Where's Elaine?” he asked Blue.

“She's at home—Niagara Falls. She's working a lot.”

“And what about Emma?”

“Emma? Well, she's … I don't know. She thinks she's in love with this guy and she's living with him in his parents' house.”

“She's left you two?”

“Yeah, Dad. She's left. You know, just like you did. She's a lot like you actually.”

Oliver looked confused.

“Dad. Whatever it is—don't worry about it. You're sick. Everything will be okay.”

After the wretchedness of that night, Oliver showed some signs of improvement. He ate a little chicken and sat up for the first time in what might have been several days. “You look like you could use a bath,” Blue said to him.

“Can't remember the last time I had a bath,” Oliver smiled weakly.

“Let me see what I can do,” Blue said. “I'll be right back.”

Faith gave him the key to her place and said he'd find clean towels under the bed. He couldn't thank her enough, and promised to be in and out quickly and not make a mess. “As long as you're out of there before my boyfriend gets home from work, it's cool,” she said.

Oliver looked about two shades lighter after lying in the bath for forty minutes. An oily film lay across the surface of the water.

“Is this your girlfriend's place?” Oliver yelled from the bathroom.

“Nah. Just a friend.”

“You're not screwing her?”

“Dad,” Blue protested.

“Come on, you can tell your old man.”

“No,” Blue lied.

“You're not queer, are you?”

The hairs on the back of Blue's neck stood on end. It was only during the recent night spent between the freckled thighs of a woman he barely knew that he'd recovered that piece of himself that he'd lost in the schoolyard. He felt rage now—enough to storm into the bathroom and shout, “Look! I'm not a fucking faggot!”

“Hey!” Oliver said, raising his palms defensively. “Just teasing you. Good-looking boy like you should have plenty of women, that's all. You know, my old man took me to a prostitute when I was fourteen so I could get properly laid. I still see a prostitute now and then.” Blue stared at the man lying naked in the bathtub: skinny and drawn, big boorish talk coming from his helpless, pathetic body. “If I had the money, I'd do the same for you. Best thing for a boy your age,” Oliver went on.

Blue left the room, suppressing anger and sadness. He wondered if Elaine had ever heard this story about the prostitute. He knew Emma would want to hurl a brick at her father's head if she ever did. Blue wasn't sure how to react. Maybe this was normal: maybe most fathers found prostitutes for their sons. Maybe that was what male bonding was all about. He didn't have a clue, and there was no one he would ever dare ask.

Blue spent most of the following week lying on his bedroom floor, high as a kite, calling in sick to work. Oliver called him from a payphone at the end of the week to tell him he had a job interview. “All sorts of perks. Even a company car!” Oliver enthused. “Thing is, Blue,” he said, with some degree of embarrassment, “I haven't got a clean shirt to wear.”

“I'll bring you a couple of my white shirts when I come on Saturday,” Blue said in a voice as grey as February. “Anything else?”

“Well, I don't really have any shoes.”

“What size are your feet?”

“Thirteen.”

“You'll fit into my dress shoes. I hardly ever wear them. What kind of job is it?”

“Sales manager.”

“I'll see you on Saturday.”

Oliver was in fine spirits that weekend, rattling on about pensions and benefits and a company car. Blue didn't have the heart to burst his bubble, but he wondered how realistic his father was being. He nevertheless handed him a bag containing two white shirts, a silk tie, a razor, and a pair of shiny burgundy shoes.

“Thanks, Blue. You're a sport,” he said, slapping his son on the shoulder. “You know, I'm starving. I could really eat a steak about now. You?”

“Sure, Dad. Maybe you could even shave and wear one of those shirts. You could think of it as practice.” At being of the world, being human, Blue meant.

“Great idea,” Oliver laughed.

Blue couldn't help but feel proud standing beside his clean-shaven father in a white shirt at the entrance to a Finnish diner downtown. Oliver was perhaps a little too flirtatious with the waitress but Blue was glad to see him in such good spirits. Their conversation flowed easily enough at first, but in the process of drinking three gin and tonics in quick succession, his father's enthusiasm mutated, becoming progressively more aggressive.

“Who's this boy your sister's seeing?” he asked Blue.

“Guy named Andrew. University student. A total geek.”

“And she's living with his family?”

“Yup. You know that massive house just past the botanical garden?”

“The limestone one,” he nodded. “I delivered an antique headboard there once.”

“That one. Well, that's their ‘country home,' ” Blue said, rolling his eyes.

Although their conversation meandered from there, Oliver came back to it after he'd downed another gin and tonic. “I wonder what sort of favours she's giving him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sexually.”

“What?”

“Her rich boyfriend.”

“Uh, Dad. I don't think it's like that. She thinks she loves him. I mean, it might be that she's more in love with the idea of him, but it's not what you think.”

“What do you know about what I think, Blue. Huh?” he said, poking him in the rib. “Don't tell me what I think.”

Blue blinked back tears, swallowed hard, and tried to change the subject to Oliver's upcoming interview. But Oliver, now that he was on a roll, could only shut his son down. “I've had plenty of interviews in my time. I hardly think you should be giving me pointers.”

Blue bit his tongue, silencing himself, thinking, The last time you had an interview must have been before I was born. Instead, he resorted to saying the things he imagined Oliver wanted to hear: “You look great in that shirt. I'm sure you'll get the job. You're more than qualified …”

What Blue refused to see, though, was that which was obvious to everyone in the restaurant around them. They saw a crazy, homeless man wearing a starched white shirt and a tie under the sleeveless lining of a winter coat, barking at some big bald boy picking at his dinner. The boy looked despondent. Uninterested in his food. His head hung down like he was used to being yelled at. The man's grey pants were stained with grass marks from some earlier season and he'd nicked his
chin in six or seven places. While he looked more respectable than he probably had in years, Oliver had long ago lost the ability to pass for a well-adjusted human.

Blue was used to people staring at his father. When he and Emma were little, Oliver had already developed a few habits that invited stares from people passing by on the street. They had learned to stop asking, “Who are you talking to, Daddy?” They had learned to hear the relentless machinations of his strangely wired brain as normal speech, Daddy speech.

When Blue went to the warehouse to take a photograph of Oliver the day before his job interview, he found him crawling on all fours in the dirt wearing nothing but Blue's white shirt. He was looking for something, although he couldn't articulate what, but given the desperation of his search, it was clearly something essential. There was blood at the corner of Oliver's mouth and Blue eventually realized Oliver was looking for his tooth. It seems he'd anaesthetized himself with gin the night before and yanked out the molar that was bothering him. Only in the sober light of day, did he realize he'd pulled out the wrong tooth.

Blue had hoped to give Oliver back a picture of himself that day—posing proud and ready to re-enter the world wearing a clean white shirt and an affable expression. The potentially proud moment collapsed into tragedy and the photo Blue came away with said it all: Oliver had become animal.

Two weeks later, Blue knew he'd have to call someone. Oliver had slipped over to the dark side and lost his legs. Blue came away from his final visit with a secret, without breath, with a battered face, and without much will to speak. He'd seen something he hoped there were no words for. All he could say was that his father definitely wasn't right.
Faith cleaned up his face and suggested calling the Board of Health rather than the police. She made an anonymous call on his behalf from a phone booth and he took a tab of acid and swam back on a current of guilt to Niagara Falls. He slept for a week, burying secrets without words in hidden caves. He lost his job, took another tab of acid, and decided he couldn't afford to feel any more.

It had been several years since Emma had had any communication with her father at all. So when he called her up a week before her eighteenth birthday she nearly choked on her own spit. “Dad,” she cried. “Dad? Where have you been?”

“Em,” he said gently. He almost sounded affectionate to Emma. “Just had to get my life sorted out, you know?”

“Yeah,” she sighed with the irrational instantaneous forgiveness that sets murderers and rapists free in the minds of their loved ones. How he'd ever found her at Andrew's house would remain a mystery. It never occurred to her that Blue could have inadvertently communicated the coordinates. It never occurred to her that new coordinates couldn't obliterate the fact that she was still, and would always be, Oliver Taylor's daughter. Her father had done a reverse Houdini, and while she felt relieved, she was wary, and rightly so, because although the pretence for the call was her eighteenth birthday, what motivated Oliver was something less benevolent.

“I know you don't want to know,” Blue said when she told him the next weekend. “But I've got to fucking tell you, it's a bad situation,” he said, throwing the photograph of Oliver on all fours across the table at her.

“But it doesn't even look like him,” she said, staring at the image so hard she could have burned a hole through the paper with her eyes. “What's he doing?”

“He's looking for something.”

“What?”

“No idea. Maybe his mind.”

“But I just assumed he was living in some apartment in Toronto and getting on with his life,” she stammered. “You know—like he even had some whole new family and everything.”

“Yeah, well, you didn't want to know, right?” Blue said, a tinge of bitterness in his voice. “I did what I could.”

“But he sounds okay, you know?” Emma said, hopeful. “I mean, he remembered my birthday and everything. My eighteenth birthday.”

“Well, maybe he got some help,” Blue shrugged. “Just be careful, okay?”

“You don't want to come?”

Blue shook his balder than bald head and stubbed his cigarette out in the middle of Elaine's favourite plant.

Emma didn't sleep for a week. On the day of her birthday, she changed her clothes fourteen times and took a bus to Toronto where she met Oliver at Union Station. He was clean-shaven and wearing a brown tie with a worn navy suit jacket and he smelled like Ivory soap. In the photograph Blue had shown her, he didn't smell like Ivory soap. He gave off the odour of wild, unwashed dog. But under the fluorescent light of the train station, he smelled clean and looked like the dishevelled relative of a human.

They took a taxi to the Ukrainian Credit Union where Oliver handed over a slip of paper and got a wad of cash in return. He led her across the street by the elbow as if she was an old woman and they descended the stairs into a dark restaurant, a Finnish diner, where they ordered pork chops and mashed potatoes and gin and tonic.

“I was kind of amazed to hear from you,” Emma told him.

“Why's that? I'm your dad.”

“It's just—you know—I haven't heard from you in years.”

“Has it been that long?” he asked.

“Kinda,” she nodded, wondering if it was just that he'd lost track of time. “So what prompted you to call now?”

“It's your birthday.”

“But you missed the last few,” she said, confused.

“This one's special. Eighteen. You're an adult now. I thought maybe you'd welcome some words of fatherly wisdom,” he smiled.

“But I could have used those years ago.”

“Well, better late than never,” he snickered. “So, tell me, my girl, what are your plans?”

“I'm starting university in the fall,” Emma answered. “I'm going to study archaeology.”

He paused, twisting the swizzle stick in his drink, and she watched as the friendliness of his expression melted away. “Now what do you want to do a thing like that for?” he said, looking puzzled. “What good do you think that will do you?”