The Uninvited Guest (9 page)

“At one point the dog began to piss through the fence at me,” Nicolae says, shaking his head. “I am not sure if the dog actually wanted to do this or if it merely released because of fear. But I stood there and held the dog by the neck as it pissed hard onto my pant legs. All the while I looked at the dog in the same manner as before. Made eye contact and just looked with concentration, and as little fear as possible. Then, after half an hour, I let go of the dog and stepped back from the fence. At this point, I had won. The dog did not bark. Instead it dropped its nose to the ground and looked up at me. Confused, you see. And that is when I picked up my briefcase and walked away.”

For the next three days the dog received the same treatment. A quick determined lunge from Nicolae and half an hour of confused twisting. It pissed again only once, and by the third day the dog was waiting for Nicolae to lunge through the fence. It wanted Nicolae to lunge through the fence. The lunging had become a game to the dog. The dog still would have liked to bite into his arm—he had not removed this instinct from it, but the struggle with Nicolae was no longer a life-and-death struggle for the dog. It knew that after some time, Nicolae would eventually let go, pick up his briefcase and walk away. Now when it was time for him to leave, the animal was disappointed. Nicolae had completely confused its purpose. The dog was supposed to drive him from the fence and the oranges; now, instead, it wished he would stay.

By the end of the second week, Nicolae was able to do what he pleased on his own side of the fence and the dog merely sat and watched, waiting for arms to come through, for the game to begin. With the dog thus pacified, Nicolae was able to put his feet into the holes in the twisted wire and climb to the upper branches of the orange trees for the best fruit. He was able to gather as many oranges as would fit in his briefcase each day, and walk them out of the grove past the fence, and past the now docile, whimpering and thoroughly confused dog. Had he fallen into the dog's territory, no doubt the animal would have been at Nicolae's throat, and therefore he was very careful not to fall. In this way, Nicolae provided his family with fresh fruit, which was so important to them in that early time of their immigration when money was very scarce.

In Ostia, near Rome, there is a five-hour wait in the airport. A crowded bus on the tarmac and customs men with cigarettes hanging from their lips. There was a weird light effect during landing. It was how Tony first realized they were very near the ground. The right-hand windows began to flicker and a soft bank on the way in revealed the Mediterranean, unsettled, bouncing sunlight off a million waves, inviting. Diana's mother began again picking at the rosary she had put away an hour out of Toronto. Someone in coach was singing. Tony watched a man reach across the aisle to hand a large ring-shaped loaf of bread to a woman. Across from him, Dragos and his beautiful cousin checked their tickets and spoke with low tones in Romanian.

On the way over, it had felt like a vacation. Everyone on their way somewhere new. Tony had listened to Nicolae's endless stories of himself as he might watch an inflight movie, with as much or as little concentration as the moment required. A couple near them was beginning their honeymoon and couldn't stop kissing each other. When they thought no one was looking the man would slip his hand into his new wife's blouse, and she would lean in, her hand disappearing between his legs. From overheard pieces of their conversation Tony learned the newlyweds would make a brief stop in Rome to change planes and then continue on to Greece for two weeks on an island. They read and slept and kissed and laughed for eight hours across the ocean. Tony watched them when the movie was boring, and they ignored him.

Now, for Tony and the four Petrescus, it is five hours of waiting in the sunny airport, beside the gate for the last leg of their flight, and already they are surrounded by Romanians. Now everyone is going home. Now the vacations are over. It is time to return for business or to bury someone. Time to bring money and chocolate and toys.

Tony keeps the trophy with him at all times. In airports he pushes it around on a cart, his own personal luggage bungeed on top of it to increase its disguise. Not that he imagines anyone here would recognize it, or care. For five hours he pushes the trophy around the terminal. He looks out of as many windows as he can find. Wall-sized panes of glass that curve overtop of him and let him see more of Italy than he'd expected to.

From one he watches other planes banking in low over the Mediterranean, though he can no longer see any water. He recognizes the play of light on their undersides. He thinks of Italian pilots smiling to each other as they slide back home over their own personal warm blue sea. Hands warmly slapping shoulders and cuffing the backs of heads. He thinks of clams in tomato sauce, and smells the cigarettes of customs officers and security guards. Twice he is stopped by young men with machine guns and dogs. German shepherds on thick leather leads, low-hipped and snarling, and the young men smoking, tapping their fingertips on the long pocked gun barrels. He is made to stand aside while the dogs circle his cart, sniffing the seams of the trophy case. He hopes the young men won't make him open the case. He believes he understands some words. The guards debating which musical instrument it might be. He stands to the side and smiles, staring out one of the tall windows, hoping the men and dogs will all go away from him.

Near the gate, it is all Romanians. Later, closer to boarding, they will be joined by Italian businessmen, dark-suited and hurried, but for this time, for five hours, this particular gate is part of Romania. They have all been there before. Have all bought cognac and American cigarettes in the duty-free, slept on benches, waited an endless five hours for the two-hour flight home.

“This is what one gets for living in an unimportant country.” These are Dragos's first words to him since leaving the plane. “I've known it my entire life. Germans, Russians, French, Italians—they all fly. Romanians wait to fly.”

Tony wonders if it is possible for a man to physically shrink on his way home. In an Italian airport, the hockey player's famous largeness looks like a bad magician's trick.

“Tony, I would like to drink.”

“So drink,” Tony says.

In a far terminal, at the end of long glass hallways, carpeted to hide the noise of a thousand luggage carts, Tony watches a lightning storm far out at sea. It is the best window he'll find. He watches shuttle buses pull away and circle down a long on-ramp to the highway leading to Rome. He watches tall grass lean back from the asphalt as the buses speed by. There are ruins in the centre of the turnpike. One low stone wall and stone lines of foundation, many rooms, all fenced in by metal spikes and yellow nylon rope. On all sides of it, fresh smooth roadway slides bus after bus of tourists on and off the highway.

Past the ruins the land drops off to a rocky beach. The sea finishes it, pale then, reflecting a sky that has clouded since they arrived. And in one small part of his view, far out to sea, lightning reaches down. Tony leans on the trophy's case and watches the storm blow itself out. This is where Diana finds him. She has been dividing the hours between the café and the duty-free shop. She carries a small paper bag with her.

“So, you are showing your girlfriend the sights of Italy, yes?” she says, without using his name. Tony pulls his gaze back from the Roman sky and takes her in. She looks tired from the travelling, her clothes rumpled and possibly too hot, her hair disarranged by static and lack of care. Nevertheless, he likes to look at her.

“Careful, Tony, she'll get jealous if you stare at another woman.” She stifles a quiet laugh.

“Who are you talking about?”

“This…” she taps the trophy case, “this love of your life. I've never seen such devotion. I think you must even talk to her when no one is looking. Do you talk to her as well, Tony? Does she understand you, like a good woman should?”

“It's just a job. I'm just doing what's expected of me. If I lost the trophy, I'd lose the job.”

“So,” she presses, pushing at a corner of the black case with her index finger, “if you left the case with the airline to take care of, this would not be good enough?”

“Airlines lose luggage. It happens every day. What would be the point of me arriving in Romania for the wedding, and the trophy arriving in Hong Kong? There is no point at all me going anywhere without this trophy. I'm not taking it to your cousin's wedding; it's taking me.”

“That's what I say as well. You are her date—and what a sad thing to say, no point you going anywhere without it. You mean you never travel without it?”

“I just mean it's my job. When you travel for your job, travel is work.”

“So what do you do for fun—for vacation?”

“I stay in one place. I sit still. I don't move.”

“Hmmm. You and your girlfriend.” She jabs at him now with her index finger. He feels the sharp crescent of her fingernail through the cloth of his sleeve. “You are made for each other.”

“What's in the bag?'

“Sugar,” she says. “Not sugar… the other kind, the fake one. Fake sugar packets.” She opens the bag and shows Tony hundreds of pink and blue envelopes of synthetic sweetener. “I picked them up from the café. My grandfather is diabetic, and these are very hard to get in Romania. When I see them, I take them.”

“You steal sugar packets wherever you go. You steal fake sugar.”

“Yes,” she says, nodding her head in mock disgust. “I am a thief, a pathetic immigrant. I also take those very soft paper napkins. Half of my suitcase is sugar packets and napkins. Do you know what paper napkins feel like in Romania? There are no paper napkins in Romania, that's what they feel like. They feel like nothing because they don't exist.”

“No paper napkins,” Tony repeats. “I had no idea your childhood was so horrible. You must be so happy every day you wake up in Canada, knowing you can wipe the corners of your mouth with paper.”

“Delirious,” she says flatly. She stares at Tony's face for a long time. Long enough to make him uncomfortable. He turns his eyes from her and watches a tourist bus drive off from the terminal.

“You are ugly,” she says. “Not very handsome at all. But you are ugly in a different way from most Romanian men. It's an attractive sort of ugliness. Still, I can see why this is your only girlfriend.”

“Okay.” Tony nods slowly, his eyes dropping to the carpet. “I'm sorry I said the thing about the napkins. I'm sorry. I don't know shit about your country or about you.”

“You don't know shit about anything, Tony.” Diana smiles at him and lifts his chin with her finger. “But I'll say again, it is an attractive ugliness.”

By the time they return to the gate, the businessmen are gathering. Petrescu stands seventh in line for boarding, beside his father and aunt. In his oversized suit, he might be fifteen.

After everyone has boarded, there is another delay. The pilot himself comes back into the cabin to ask about the Cup. He has heard of it; wants to touch it. Tony unstraps the seat belt and cracks the case. The pilot leans over Tony's seat. His hand disappears to the wrist.

“Like a woman,” he says, and Diana giggles. “Like the hip of a beautiful woman.” And then he laughs himself.

Tony wonders what it must mean to this man to fly planes. He looks at his forearms and wonders about electrical impulses, the instincts those arms have that his do not. The pilot shakes his hand then, and Tony squeezes, thinking about lift and drag.

“Have you kissed it?” the pilot asks, smiling. “It is like a woman. Surely you have kissed it.”

“You have to win it to kiss it,” Tony says. “Otherwise, what would be the point?”

They all laugh then. One of the businessmen from across the aisle speaks to an attendant in an annoyed voice. The pilot shakes his head and says something too softly to be heard. His eyes widen when he looks back at Tony.

“Still, I would like to kiss it.”

Tony climbs out of his seat and moves back down the aisle to give the young pilot access. He knows the plane will go nowhere until he does. Tony is unable to see the kiss because there are too many bodies in the way, but he knows when it happens because there is cheering all around. On his way back to the cockpit, the pilot shakes Petrescu's hand and then kisses him on the forehead.

“You have won her, yes?”

Petrescu nods. The pilot kisses his forehead again.

“For luck,” he says.

In the air, Petrescu leans toward Tony and smiles.

“If it had been for soccer,” he says, “we'd still be on the ground.”

Around them, dark-suited businessmen snap their newspaper pages. Within two hours, they are circling Bucharest. From his window, Tony cannot get a sense of the city below. There are trees and lakes, but very few roads. He leans over the trophy case and stares at the ground below them. They circle the city several times, reluctant to land. Tony begins to wonder what the delay might be. He shifts in his seat and looks around for an attendant. Across the aisle, he hears Diana mumble in a half-sleep.

“Tony, don't worry. Probably, there is a dog on the runway.” She is looking at him tiredly from just above the lip of her blanket, and he can tell from her eyes that she is smiling. “In Romania, there are no paper napkins, very little fake sugar, and dogs run wild at the airport. Welcome to my childhood.”

Antonio Esposito Chiello, the keeper of the Cup, is sent to Romania in only his second full year on the job. It is a job passed on to him by death, a job he tries not to think about very much because he loves it too strongly to consider it real. Real, it might somehow go away. Other things, loved things, made real, had gone away. They always do.

In his new job, Tony practises a new way of working. He breathes; he looks around; he tries to interest himself in where he is and what there is to see and remember outside of the fact that he is there with the Cup. He refuses to think of the trophy as his responsibility, something to be taken care of. Instead, it is simply part of everything he sees and everywhere he goes. It is attached to his experience of everything, attached to him. For him, the trophy is just another arm.

Tony travels for three months every summer with three arms. He can lose sight of the Cup only as easily as he might lose sight of his own flesh. To leave it behind, he would first have to cut it away. It isn't there to be watched and looked after; it is simply there, part of Tony wherever he goes. And he goes wherever the League tells him to go. He asks no questions and makes no suggestions or complaints. He has learned all this from his old friend Stan.

There had been thoughts of winning the Cup. Early thoughts, like those of everyone else he knew. Born in Toronto in 1965, Tony had, in a way, already won the Cup twice, but as a child he had no memory of the celebrations. He knew the significance of his middle name, and understood why it was there like that. He wondered sometimes, “Why name me after a
Chicago
goalie?” but it was clear that for Tony's family being Italian was more important than being from either Toronto or Chicago. He remembered his father's friends at the house on Saturday evenings. Beer spilled into orange shag carpet. His mother laughing at him when he skated toward her across the backyard.

He remembered feeling no pressure, as though the winning of the Cup was there for him in his future, unquestionably. It would be done, and the way it would be done was by simply living a life the way he was living it. Posters on the wall, a bed held off the ground by four hockey pucks, a slice of oozing honeycomb in his mouth for the drive to the arena.

Coaches and referees praised him for his speed. His parents smiled at him from three rows above the glass. He grew and waited for time to bring him what he deserved. In the summer, he swam at Riverdale Pool during the hot days and played ball hockey on Grandview Avenue into the evenings. Things happened in his family. His father changed jobs every once in a while. The family sat at the kitchen table and his father would explain what the new job was all about. Where it was, how long the drive would be, when he would be home in the evenings, what kind of free stuff he could get. Always it seemed to be a better job. His mother smiled and laughed and made them all drink wine in fancy red-stained glasses.

His sister married a Scottish boy from the neighbourhood. There were three days of flowers and large meals. His father took pictures of everybody in the backyard, by the fence, in front of the roses. Antonio danced with his sister and she lifted him off the ground, kissing him and calling him her little Tony Esposito, her little goalie. There was endless cake.

Sometimes, his parents would bring another child home from the hospital. Twice it was sisters and the last was a brother. All of their cribs were held off the ground by four hockey pucks.

“That way,” his father told Antonio, “the legs won't dent the carpet.”

Twice a year, his father would take him to the game with tickets he got from someone at work. Antonio sat watching the players while his father walked from section to section, looking for better seats. Only once, he managed to sneak Antonio into the Golds. His father lifted him from the tunnel into the only available seat, beside a young woman and her date. He told Antonio to watch out for him across the ice, and then disappeared back into the tunnel. A little later, the girl tapped Antonio on the leg, smiled, and pointed out his father to him, across the ice in the Greys, waving both arms. When Toronto scored, the girl gripped Antonio's leg with her long fingernails and bounced on her seat. Her breath smelled like vanilla ice cream. The crowd yelled “Espo seeeeeeeeto!”, taunting the goalie, cheering for Tony.

Late in the third period, a Chicago player was checked hard into the boards directly below Antonio's seat. The girl beside him covered her face. The game stopped and all the players skated slowly in circles, looking over toward Antonio. A man in a jogging suit and black shoes came running across the ice from the benches. Two other skaters lifted the injured player to his feet. He leaned on the boards and breathed heavily. Blood ran in lines down his face, and he spat red onto the ice. He was crying. He looked huge, much bigger than players ever looked on television or from the Greys. All the players suddenly looked huge. The girl's fingernails dug into his leg again.

“Is it over yet?” she asked.

The player turned and skated across the ice toward his bench. The crowd stood and applauded. On the glass just below Antonio, a wide streak of blood leaked downward in thin lines. Below it, on the ledge at the top of the boards, a tooth flashed white in a puddle of red. It looked to be dug into the wood. Antonio put his hand on top of the girl's fingers. She looked at him and touched his face.

“Are you okay, kiddo?” she said. Antonio nodded and threw up into her lap.

Tony's stewardship of the Cup began as he'd expected it to. Stan had always described with ironic amazement the disrespect and debauchery with which hockey players treated the thing they worked and sweated and lost teeth for. Sure, it was all kissing and smiling on the night of the big win, but after that, the Cup was just another possession in a long line of possessions. Stan taught Tony that very few players ever really understood the value of what they had won, and so Tony took over Stan's job with the same sense of protective disdain for all who treated the Cup poorly.

On the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with a crowd of press watching, a large seagull landed in the bowl of the Cup. It turned three quick circles, watching the people nearby and also looking out to sea, clicking its ringed yellow beak on the side of the bowl. There was laughter, and newspapers around the country picked up the wire photo, running it on the front page of their sports coverage. A determined, angry-looking bird nesting in the Cup. In the photo, there is an arm in dark suit material reaching for the bird, and the bird has pulled its head back behind its body, either trying to lean out of the way of the approaching arm or preparing to attack with its beak. The headline in
USA Today
ran, “New Jersey Resident Claims Cup as His Own.” Tony wondered how they had determined the bird was a male. After that trip, he bought himself Audubon bird guides for all the regions he thought he might have to visit in his job.

When the bird landed, Tony was himself looking out to sea. Off the New Jersey coast, a cruise ship pushed north through moderate seas. Heading for New York, Tony thought and chuckled to himself. All that morning, Tony was reflecting on the newness of everything on this side of the continent. New Jersey, New England, even old New York was once New Amsterdam. The thought was moving around in his head, trying to incorporate a name like Virginia, but then the seagull had landed and Tony had moved on it.

Tony walked with a limp that entire day. The night before, a boy helping him bring the Cup through the lobby of the Trump Hotel had run into Tony's heel with the wheel of the dolly, opening the skin. Overnight, the wound had dried out and his ankle fused in a painful tightness. When he jumped forward to remove the bird, he felt the wound reopen.

Scott Marston, the Cup-winner from Atlantic City, threw up his breakfast ten minutes before the ceremony on the boardwalk. Behind a screen, Tony draped the Cup in its black velvet cover, noticing for the first time the number of birds that circled overhead. He wondered about bird feces. How one would remove them from black velvet. A scraper first, for sure, several passes with the light alcohol swab and then a good soft-brushing to straighten the grain. Marston had been with him for breakfast, and followed him onto the boardwalk, not wanting to see his family and friends until the ceremony. The morning sun and sea air had turned on him. Hungover from a night of rum and gambling with high school friends, Marston excused himself to one of the portable toilets beneath the boardwalk. As Tony made the final adjustments to the black velvet, he could hear Marston retching beneath him.

Tony watched the gull for a long time after it flew away. It had picked itself out of the Cup with a simple springing jump, like it had bounced. With its wings spread, the bird caught the perpetual ocean breeze and quickly drifted far beyond Tony's grasp. It dropped low over the sand and let loose a stream of white shit that just missed a young girl walking with her father. Over the water, it mingled with the other birds, but Tony kept it in sight despite the crowded skies. Two small grey and white feathers clung to the inside wall of the trophy's bowl. Tony pulled them away and heard a delicate static discharge like the distant ringing of tiny bells.