The Push & the Pull (39 page)

Paul's closing words were not the final words of the funeral. When Andrew had invited Paul to deliver the eulogy, he neither anticipated nor disliked Paul's suggestion to “open comments up to the floor.” Standing at the lectern, kings and princes freshly praised, Paul switched gears.

“And the man loved a chat,” he said in closing. “The family has invited me to invite any of you to share your thoughts here today.”

Pat did not go first. The first guest to rise was a short mustachioed man in an acrylic sweater whose darting eyes and column of visible tension running up his body gave him a weaselly appearance his speech would quickly belie.

“I'm Joe Buj. Stan Day taught me to read, as an adult, so you can probably guess where. I could stop right there. Stan Day taught me to read. That says enough, doesn't it? He changed my life. Or, as he kept insisting, he showed me how I could change my own life. But like this other guy here,” Mr. Buj nodded his head at Paul, “I want to let Stan speak for himself. Most guys in prison are in prison their whole lives. Prisons here and here,” he said, tapping temple then heart, “in prison by the time they're six years old, put in prison by fathers whose fathers put them in prison. I had a lot of walls around me. I didn't go to this man and ask him to teach me to read. He came to me. More than once. And I wasn't exactly church polite. I had a hunch his third offer would be his last. I understand impatience.

“Inside, with the teachers, you meet in rooms, never cells, and almost always in groups. He paid me the courtesy of dropping his voice for his final offer, but he kept his eyes on mine. He was standing, you know —” Joe Buj stretched out one hand to demonstrate Stan's crooked spine. “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘How do you think I get out of here?' He shrugged those shoulders best he could.

“Thanks to Stan Day, I read every day now. I read every word I see.”

After the funeral and its various speeches, as Andrew circulated among food offers from older women and fiercely strong handshakes from aging men, Joe Buj had just two private words for him. “Be careful,” he said, jutting his chin.

Fittingly, mercifully, he gets to roll downhill into Kingston. More than anything else, the hill running from Fort Henry and Canadian Forces Base Kingston down to the La Salle Causeway welcomes him home. This is the hill he climbed a thousand times to start a trail ride. He made his legs and lungs climbing up what he's now screaming down. In the early morning light, as the Cataraqui River meets Lake Ontario, he can smell the fresh water of home. After nearly nine months of the salty tang of the Atlantic Ocean, the very air munching and corroding everything it can reach, fresh water seems so friendly.

Near the bottom of the hill, Royal Military College sits tucked on some of the best waterfront real estate in the country. From the outside, the national kill school looks like a yacht club decorated with cannons. Once again, Andrew's hunched back and buzzing bike roll on past the school's Memorial Arch. Over the years he has heard various rumours about RMC. Only cadets who volunteer for drug tests are allowed to leave the base out of uniform. Supposedly the torpedo monument on campus points in the direction of the shortest path to the United States. More lasting enmity has a sword-shaped weather vane atop one building pointed in the direction of Chown Hall, a female residence at Queen's. More probable are the drill stories about the Memorial Arch Andrew now rolls past. Apparently, incoming students are marched through that arch on arrival and then forbidden to do so again until they are paraded through at graduation.

The short metal causeway at the bottom of the hill feels like Andrew's own private Memorial Arch. Forts and trails fade behind him. Betty isn't here for his graduation parade, but he'll send her photos.

Past RMC, the Wolfe Island ferry awakens to its day.

At the funeral, when Pat rose to speak after Joe Buj, Andrew was flooded with relief. And trust, confident trust. However sad his parents' divorce was, it wasn't one of those theatrically vicious divorces in which any public microphone, even one at a funeral, was a chance to parade grievances and insults. More than just relieved, Andrew was keen to hear Pat. Yes, Mother, tell us what you can.

Her clothes were crisp and she kept her chin high. Gordon stared at her casually, but she didn't fixate on him or on Andrew.

“You two are hard acts to follow, but I guess we're all following a hard act. I'll be brief, and I too will let the man speak for himself.

“Falling in love and staying in love are two different” — she nodded at Paul — “
challenges
. In that ledger, Stan and I broke even. Fall, I once did, though, and he really got me with a book. When I agreed to marry Stan, he gave me an obligatory ring and understood when I returned it for something more to my liking. He always played to his limits. No, his real engagement gift was a new novel, Mordecai Richler's
St. Urbain's Horseman
. His inscription included the bravest statement I had ever seen: Test everything, especially my courage.

“Sadly, we did test everything, tested more than we knew we had, good and bad. I'm confident Stan grew to see that such is life.

“I relinquished his affection, but retained, I hope, some of his respect. Many of you in this room have felt that respect and know that we are rarely so flattered. Now we must shift our respect into memory. Memory, emotional memory,
is
respect. And Stan Day will always have mine.”

Biking onto his Kingston street, the world is not too much with him. If he had thought at all practically of his return to the Kingston house, if he had not concentrated on the romantic living room of memory but rather on the stained and empty living room of fact — with its tenant's pizza boxes, torn paper and dead pens — he would have remembered sooner that the house is without electricity. He cancelled his contract with the power company before renting out the house and by now has long forgotten his original plan to re-establish service via email during a few urban days in Quebec City. All the distance he has covered compacts down into the single inch of travel in a disconnected light switch he now flicks up and down uselessly. Standing in the front hallway, flicking the idle switch, he snorts out of laughter for a change, not exertion.

Paper napkins and newspapers are strewn across the ground floor. Save for a three-legged chair abandoned in one corner, the bike instantly becomes the only furniture on the entire ground floor. Stale air hangs thickly in every room. In the kitchen, several cupboard doors yawn open. Only cold water runs. Upstairs, loose paper litters a palpably dirty floor. His shower curtain appears to have left with the tenants. Last August when he did a naive arithmetic in which the rent he would charge for this house significantly exceeded that of his Nova Scotia apartment, he had foolishly ignored how little he knew of his tenants. More than once, Betty had told Andrew Elaine's line that
love
means
need to live with
. Kicking aside what appear to be calculus notes, he agrees with this definition of love and would like to amend it by saying that to really know a person, you need to live with him or her. He didn't really know the students to whom he rented the house, so he'll now pay for it with days of cleaning.

In the bathroom, crumpled tissues litter one corner of the floor. A skin of grey scum is stretched across the bottom of the tub. As he wanders through the house opening windows and stirring up dust, he
sees that several of the rooms he and Betty had painted already need to be redone. Numerous pockmarks and scrapes on the walls look like his tenants had attached spikes to all their furniture before moving out. In the second-storey stairwell, he recognizes a large black smear on the wall as the mark of a bike tire. Some dude felt he needed to store a bike up in his third-floor bedroom. What use was it in there?

He has never been so forgetful as to think he was biking home to a proper bed. From the packed third-floor room he had converted into a storage space, he's able to extract Betty's yoga mat and one sofa pillow from the dense cube of boxes, furniture and loose books. He heads to his old, old bedroom, its orange paint now scuffed, to stretch out and hope for sleep. Even the floor smells unclean.

At least the absence of furniture will make his cleaning and repainting much faster. By the evening of his first day back, he once again wears sleeves of plaster dust and freckles of fresh paint.

His electricity gets restored on his second afternoon. Resumption of phone service isn't so quick, so he has to bike to a phone booth to call Pat. Already, the sound of her phone ringing is just the sound of her phone ringing, not a chime of relief. He's no longer phoning in the middle of the night, so he gets her answering machine, not her.

“Mom. I made it home. Big news. Give me a call tomorrow or the next day.”

Once again he works from early each morning to past midnight each night trying to improve the look of the house. This time, the work is for a very different type of guest.

On her second last morning in Paris, Betty washes a thin shirt, reliable panties and worn socks in the dull sink of her dingy hostel room. She tries not to look at how the sink's once-white enamel has become porous with grime.

The hostel room came with Internet time she has purposefully saved until this morning. Descending dark stairs to check her email in what was once a broom closet, logging in to remind her mother for the fifth time when to pick her up, she sees a message from Andrew without quite admitting that glancing for his name in her inbox is still a kind of binary, Andrew or no-Andrew. The subject line is “tene nil” and there's an image attached.

The top of the email is one row of a picture she spends nearly two minutes watching arrive. A row of sky meets a roof. Eventually, the front of his house becomes recognizable brick by brick. Yes, okay, I haven't forgotten it. Finally, a new yellow-peaked something stands on the front lawn beside his smiling head. Peaked wood? Great, please send me more renovation pix of your house. Some kind of post. Boy is he smiling. And skinny. A yellow post. And holy fuck tanned. The yellow post holds a wooden For Sale sign that flies off its hinges, off the screen and straight into her. Anything he has typed must be below the image of him smiling beside a For Sale sign on his front lawn. The image arrives row by row like a horizontal, clothed striptease. Brick, body, For Sale sign. Brick, body, For Sale sign. For Sale, For Sale. What legs. The image ends at his bare feet on the tiny lawn, tan lines as stark as socks.

Healing is the admission price we pay for love, she had once written him. Beneath the bottom of the image, beneath his pale feet, he has written
Admission price paid
as if he were standing on it.

Some chapters have appeared in slightly different form in the following journals:
The Fiddlehead
,
Zygote
and
The Windsor Review.

The installation described on
p. 145
is by Jeff Koons.

The author acknowledges the financial support of the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport.