The Push & the Pull (38 page)

“Breathing, apparently. I wonder if you'd like to do Dad's eulogy.”

“I'm honoured. Of course I'll do it. This is big of you.”

“Yeah, well, hatred is a burden,” Andrew replied.

He turned the ringer off for the next two hours while he ripped up the stained entranceway carpet.

Just a year later, Betty and Andrew knew she was flying to Paris at the end of August, and he to Halifax a few days later, knew this rationally and financially, mentioned it at least once a week. But only after the start of August did it start to become physical: the anticipatory aches, a house they would miss, sex elegiac or admittedly exploitive. And her (reconciled) mother calling all the time.

“Now she couldn't be happier,” Betty described. “She wants to meet me somewhere. Florence probably. What do you think?”

“A nice hotel in an expensive city. Warm food. I'd say do it despite a parent.”

“I mean you too, asshole. You won't have bike school over Christmas.”

“Probably not and I'll probably come. But I may need to do a little research jaunt at Christmas.”

“I forgot. Riding in Utah is research.”

“I'll probably come. I'd also like to drive you to the airport.”

The night before her flight they did try to sleep before the four a.m. drive to Toronto, but where was sleep in laughter and tears, in your body and mine? Rosy-fingered dawn found them in the thick of the 401. They had lanes to watch, terminals to check.

Security regulations would have demanded her freshly purchased Swiss Army knife travel in checked baggage, not carry-on. Because Paris was the destination least likely to require screwdriver or knife blade, he knew as her bag was hoisted onto the check-in conveyor belt that she could be days before discovering he had switched her knife for a nearly identical one. When she had showered that last morning, he had unpacked her knife, wrapped its replacement in a paper note
(For cheese and bastards),
then zipped her pack. A week earlier he'd had a shorter note engraved on the handle:
Again
. See
Again
every day you travel.

At the security check, he sewed this same word into each kiss. “I'll see you again, I will. Again. Again. Again.”

Her speech wasn't much longer. Crying a little she pulled back, looked him in the eye and said, “Get it together.” As she turned, her shoulders were starting to shake, but she marched them down a bright corridor into a crowded lineup without glancing back.

Even by car, let alone bike, the westward approach to Kingston is anticlimactic. A discrepancy between legal and actual borders significantly distorts the posted distance from empty highway into actual city. In its last zoning land grab, Kingston doubled or tripled its circumference, so the well-lit
Welcome to Kingston
signs only welcome you to more wooded highway. So known are these false claims of distance that he refuses to become excited. He keeps the necessary slog going with guarded skepticism for so long that his private landmarks finally catch him in near disbelief. Here was a parking-lot pee with Stan. Here the turnaround point on his one bike ride with Betty. Finally, the city's spill of light grows closer and closer. Then there are the familiar exits announcing the city's prisons, colleges and the military base. Home. Halfway home.

As the prison capital of Canada, Kingston has a density of halfway houses for the recently paroled that is disproportionate to its population. Re-immersion into society is there buffered with a few programs and rules, similar company and cheap living. An observable and proximate concentration of temptations (young flesh, house after house with inadequate protection and portable electronics, walking distance to rivers of alcohol) and absentee landlords unconcerned with neighbourhoods have placed several of these halfway houses in the city's student ghetto.
Halfway house
. Returning, Andrew is caught again by this phrase.
Halfway house
. Twelve kilometres away and he's still only halfway home.

We are each alone at funerals. Andrew's friends were there, the older ones slightly less awkward. More recent friends from campus hadn't even met Stan. Not yet knowing the death of parents (those ambassadors of death), these friends and classmates generally reverted into well-dressed silence. All fine by Andrew. Huddling with them he was spared too many
okay
s. Are you okay? Is everything okay? Heather, an ex-girlfriend eclipsed by just a few years, was lovely and bright. Until meeting Betty, Andrew didn't yet know that he would have preferred a girl who called him on the extended length of his hug, who resisted his cheap press into her breasts. Mark was lithe and fit even in a suit.

Hushed drapes swallowed all the low funeral sounds. Just as Andrew realized where his internal voice was going —
Who's the chrome dome beside Dave Westfall? Do you need to go now before it starts? —
he saw Paul's calm briefly break. In seconds, his middle-aged face ran through the gamut of grief: disbelief, pleading, anger, then fear. Looking away, looking anywhere, Andrew met the prompting nod of the funeral director.

With quiet voices and light fingers, the staff directed Andrew and the efficient Pat into a side chamber. With friends nearby but now only half-visible, Andrew could partially feel Stan's legs inside the suit pants he was now wearing. In the past few years he had fully grown into the suits Stan himself would have now been swimming in. Perhaps there was a little vanity, not just altruism, in Stan's decision to leave his body to the anatomy museum. This way, his body wasn't tucked inelegantly into one of his old suits. The knee that started bobbing in the charcoal trousers wasn't sharply pointy like Stan's, yet in the jacket his shoulders filled out a worn stretch in the fabric. Even the suit had a memory.

A minister began to speak.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” Paul Tucker began his eulogy. “We're here to honour and mourn our friend, Stan Day. To do so at all fairly, I'll need to be funny
and
incisive. Can everyone else hear him? Okay, Paul, he's saying, make it good. I'm honoured that Andrew has asked me to speak of Stan and hope that I can rise to the challenge.

“Stan was one of the funniest, most charming people I have ever met. Once at a steak dinner, which ended a conference we were at together, I witnessed Stan win over an entire table of strangers in ten seconds. ‘Which one of you heartless bastards is going to cut this for me?' was his request for help, and we were powerless to refuse.

“Standing here, I know Stan wouldn't let me off by just saying he was funny. Dig deeper, he'd say, keep going. All right, his humour was the intersection of his intelligence and his generosity. We could never forget the mind lurking beneath that body. Here was a man never without a book, the friend who would call your answering machine to recommend novels, who would lend you his and never ask for them back, though don't for a second think he didn't know where each one was.

“It is both fitting and — I'm sure he knows — unfair that I begin today by speaking of challenge when challenge was so fundamental to every one of our thoughts about Stan. More on this later. Back to the laughs for now.

“I'm not quite sure, but I think Stan got funnier as he got — what do I say here? — more ill? That's not quite right. He'd been without pain for decades. His mind never had a cloudy day. I don't need to search for a word to describe his sense of humour; I just have to admit to one. (Stan chose to call a spade a spade, and I can't send him off with anything less than that kind of honesty.) Stan became funnier as he became more
dependent
. He wasn't desperately funny, although he certainly had his share of gallows humour. Nor was his the scheming humour of an aging or ailing man trying to salvage waning attention.
Stan was funny for two very Stanlike reasons: he was generous, and he was demanding. He'd make you laugh, even if you were a stranger, even at the expense of his own vanity, but he also didn't hide the fact that he'd appreciate the favour returned.

“Many of us here have had some experience with prison life. Everyone who's been inside a prison knows something that in polite life we often forget: our bodies make statements. The body language in prison may not be nice, but it's usually clear. Someone else in Stan's body might have walked around with a posture or a face that asked for help or scowled in bitterness. Not Stan. When he needed your help, he asked for it. The statement his body made was much more demanding than
Help me
.
Amuse me
, his look liked to say.

“And, of course, he didn't just talk with his body. I'm not the only teacher or former teacher in the room. In honour of Stan, I'll share a trade secret. At workshops and conferences you'll see that many otherwise strict teachers suddenly become bad students: fidgety, disruptive and talkative. I once saw Stan interrupted repeatedly while he was trying to lead a workshop. He silenced his heckler with one choice word. ‘You can be lippy on your time,' he told a guy half his age, ‘not mine.'
Lippy
. What a word.

“Stan was usually too courteous to be lippy himself, but several of his comments have stuck with me over the years (and by years I mean decades). When we were undergraduates, Stan sought me out one day to tell me he had invented a Latin motto for himself. (Forgive us: we had beards; we smoked pipes.)
Tene nil
, he told me proudly,
Hold nothing
. We now know that all of this bravery was to be required.

“One more story. Just before he turned thirty, when his body showed a little, but not much, of the path it would take, he came knocking on my door late one night. His parents had died while he was still young, and he had carefully saved his inheritance, at least until that night. He knocked on my door saying, ‘I've bet their wad, gambled it all.' He wouldn't explain, just hustled me into the car. Soon enough we were holding bottles of beer on the front lawn of what he already referred to as ‘our house.' His speech was brief and totally unforgettable. ‘I've never missed them so much,' he said of his parents, ‘and yet the second most adult emotion I have ever felt is the recognition that I wouldn't be who I am without having lost them, lost
them when I did. To want them back is to not want me.' There was Stan: ‘second most adult emotion.'
Second-most
. I played my scripted part. ‘And the first?' I asked. ‘Fear of failure,' he replied. ‘I didn't buy the house; we did. Pat and I. I proposed to her right here. Gambled it all. She said yes.'

“I hope everyone agrees that all of Stan is in that speech. It is my honour today to chart that gamble. No, it did not run as he planned, not as he then would have hoped. But I also know from my countless conversations with him that he would not have changed his fate for anything. He paid heavily for his satisfactions, but never unnecessarily. I am absolutely certain, certain because of the shine he could not keep from eye or voice, from a visible relaxation I saw enter that body we all snuck our worried glances at, that life had no joy greater, more sustained or more complete for him than the son we all admire.

“Andrew, your father had one word for you, one word that he used above all others, and certainly the one he used most naturally, most affectionately, and, I'll concur, the most accurately. Quite simply he called you his prince. How multiply right he was. Is.

“We all know that this father of a prince did not have an easy reign as king. Stan knew we want to be challenged in life, knew this and taught it. We want to be challenged and we think we'd like to be able to choose our challenges. And yet, as Stan knew, we must also be ready for those challenges forced upon us.

“In closing, I'll go back to that old brick house on Collingwood Street once more. I was there when the population of the house decreased. I finally knew that Stan had righted himself in a new life, had begun to meet a challenge he did not seek, when he took alittle of Shakespeare's Richard the Second along with a glass of my Scotch. This, too, I shall never forget him saying: ‘You may my kingdom and my state depose, / but not my grieves, still am I, king of those.' Although his kingdom would shrink and wane, he remained its king, never its prisoner.”

He has been biking alongside the St. Lawrence River all night, more and more tempted to swim with every kilometre. When he lived in Kingston, he wouldn't have thought of swimming in the industrialized St. Lawrence or the lake it blossoms into. Bilge water. Pollution from both Kingston and across the water in upstate New York. Plus the usual cow shit E. coli. Unlike their parents, Andrew and Betty each grew up beside water they shouldn't have swum in. Not, at least, until this morning. After this trip, what's a little rumoured pollution?

With dawn breaking he's able to see the surface of the water, and even into a little of its depth, as he stands on the shoreline. Before undressing out in the open once again, before he has time to do anything else at the riverside, he reaches out with his right shoe and gently sets just the sole of it into the water. Twisting his ankle just a little, using the exact same movement that clips him in and out of his pedals, he rinses his Achilles cleat.

After his last week, the water isn't even that cold. He dives under to better scrub his limbs and the battlefield of his crotch. Floating on his back, he watches the sunrise spill into a familiar sky. His hair still feels dirty despite being wet.

Back on shore, dressed and chilly, he finds the bike a touch too heavy when he picks it up. The half-novel, part writing paper, part bandage, is lashed to his rear rack with a single skinny bungee cord. He frees the novel then mounts the bike. With his left foot clipped in and ready to go and his right resting briefly beneath him, he flings the damaged book out into the river. He knows how it will end.