The Alcoholic's Daughter Read online

  “You hardly have any free time and you book a lunch with Allison, you don’t even ask me what I’m doing next week.”

  “I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. He was tired. The long shifts on the desk were killing him. But not as tired as this argument over why he didn’t spend all his free time with her. “It’s next week for Chrissakes.”

  “I hate that fucking job,” Danielle said, twirling her wine glass, something she did only after she crossed the line from sobriety to anger. It usually took two glasses and a bit. “You never asked me about it, you just took it and I have to spend all my nights alone.”

  He wanted to tell her if she had friends she wouldn’t have to be alone but he didn’t. He could be an asshole but he didn’t want to be cruel.

  “Nothing is written that I have to check my work choices with you. I love newspapers. It was a great chance to get back in.” He could’ve said he used to love newspapers ‘cause where he was working was a far cry from what a newspaper used to be. He remembered when he started out as a feature writer. There was a day desk and a night desk. Editors took the time to talk to you. Writers had the time to research, write and rewrite. The newsroom was thick with cigarette smoke and the clack of typewriters and the jangle of phones. Now the only noise was your heart thrumming from caffeine as you raced to push the pages out, no time to talk to anyone.

  “Look, the lunch is next week, can we just enjoy tonight?” Evan asked, knowing there was no chance.

  “Sure, if you say so,” she said, talking with the glass hung on her lower lip, another sign she would soon be radioactive. “Let’s always do what Evan says, what Evan wants. My feelings have no importance. It’s always about you. Why should you care that I spend every night by myself.”

  “Make some fucking friends,” he said. And he was off. God, he was tired of this. “My criminal lunch is not until next week. This is my night off, we’re out at a great restaurant. Can we just be here now, kind of thing?”

  “Of course, Mr. Evan, anything you want, isn’t that the rule? You want to work nights, who gives a shit Danielle is home staring at the walls? You want to have lunch with Allison, Danielle can just go screw herself. That’s what I have to do anyways.”

  “You know what? You can go screw yourself,” Evan said, standing, reaching into his pocket. “Sit here and argue with yourself.” He dropped five twenties on the table. Inside he was laughing at the gesture, too clichéd to make it into a script, he would’ve told the workshop. “Have another bottle of Bordeaux. I’m going to enjoy my night off.”

  He left Danielle at the table, sipping wine. Yeah, Annie had him hooked.

  Thought about her all week and after the second session he skipped down the stairs to track her to where her bike was locked. Seemed to take her a long time to get that lock pacified.

  “How about dinner? We could discuss your script,” he said. They both knew he didn’t give a shit about her script.

  Staring at the bottom of the glass, wondering if he should pour another finger or two, he remembered she probably ate the salmon, that’s what she usually ate and that he let her do most of the talking and she was fine with that. She talked about her radio adventures in a little Radio Canada studio that was without air or natural light, a magazine she worked on without a budget or readers, a little television that she worried showed her age flagrantly, her books which sold poorly but paid the bills thanks to grants and lecture fees and a lot of travel.

  She liked flying, the airlines pampered her, the hotels pampered her, she hobnobbed with ambassadors and consular officials and here and there a head of state or two. But she was used to that, she said, shrugging. She was born to upper echelon public servants, raised in the good life in various embassies and consulates in Italy, the Soviet Union, Colombia. Had a full-time travelling nanny who taught her three languages. She was raised on a set of sterling silver spoons.

  “I don’t tell too many people that,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I usually say I learned Spanish and Russian and Greek travelling. But it was my nanny. She had worked all over and spoke to me in a different language every minute.”

  “Must’ve been nice. You stay in touch?”

  “No. I don’t know where she is. I went off to college out west and my father died and I guess my mother let her go. I guess she’s dead now. I don’t know.”

  In a way they were both orphans, his parents irrelevant, hers dead, and they had left the Mother Corp., the CBC, behind. Evan had checked out of the chattering classes two decades ago. He had produced a current affairs show on CBC radio for a few years and found it a mad rush to fill airtime, one guest as good as another, with minor variations, shovelling coal into a giant tireless locomotive, a constant chattering machine. Where else but live radio do you have to worry about two seconds? Maybe when you’re launching a space shuttle.

  She still liked the radio microphone, the platform from which to add her pennies to the deluge of endless opinion that increasingly filled low-budget, no-budget radio and TV. He had seen the sausage being made and had lost the appetite for it. He saw no reason to spoil hers.

  No, she wasn’t full of herself, a rare trait among media types, at least not that night in a dark corner of a little French bistro he frequented when the occasion called for a dark corner, candlelight and a bottle of wine. Romance was his drug, one of many, not the least destructive, and the crash and hangover was right up there on the Richter scale. But he was ready to go all in. Sharing a moment, a table, a bed, it was all good. What else was there, except for maybe finding the groove on a new song?

  “I can tell you’re a journalist,” she said. “You’re asking all the questions and I’m the radio host, doing all the talking.”

  Evan filled her in on himself, mindful the clock was ticking and Danielle was at home, waiting. Yes, he started working newspapers when he was in his 20s and went on to make documentary films and edited magazines and produced public radio and wrote a few feature films and stumbled into the theatre after he went back to work at the paper.

  “I write songs, too, for fun, on the guitar, four-chord stuff,” he said.

  “Do you perform?”

  “No one would want me to, believe me.”

  Evan told her he preferred editing stories to writing them. How many words had he written in his 25 years of banging on a keyboard? He preferred the control room to the studio, being in the audience to being on the stage, singing songs around the kitchen table to no one or for Danielle. Performing held no temptation.

  Annie and he seemed right then, with only an inch remaining in the wine bottle. They were a perfect media match, they knew a lot of the same people. “How come we never met before?”

  He didn’t want the night to end. Here was the future, he told himself. How could they fail?

  The recession had high-priced men all around him falling like trees in a forest being clear cut, while businesses held tight to women over 50. They were in no danger of getting pregnant, their kids were grown and they worked cheap. Free Trade deals were a bonanza for the venture capitalists and the factory owners. Promises that free trade and the flow of goods would create jobs were bullshit. Unions were decimated, factories emptied, salaries slashed, men found themselves at McDonald’s, drinking $1 coffees as their wives went to work. The gender over 50 was being put to pasture.

  But Evan was hanging in, making enough to give the impression of being a successful artist. Staying in shape by wrecking his back on the squash court, lifting some weights, riding his bike. To him, he was scratching and clawing to hold onto everything, each play a nightmare, the magazine a brothel, the newspaper an assembly line where they kept cranking up the speed. His dalliances with the women that had succumbed to his charms — or had he succumbed to theirs — had shown he had market value. But Evan saw the cracks in the tent poles holding up his facade. He was under no illusion. A good storm could wash his life away.

  Then, inebriated enough to ignore he had a woman waiting at home and
knowing there would be lies to tell, they went for a walk around the block, just to be together, to avoid ending the evening. It almost seemed he should take her hand. He wanted to, but he didn’t. But he knew. He wanted Annie. And she wanted him. He could feel it.

  He drove Annie and her bike home, sat in the car as she wheeled it through her front door and waved to him.

  “I went home and smoked a cigarette in the backyard,” Annie told him later. “I knew my life was going to change.”

  The next week after the workshop he had to pick up his cat, Fritz, boarded at his son’s house. Evan and Danielle had flown to Nova Scotia to visit his father. The old man spent his time in front of the TV or the newspaper and resented leaving his armchair so Evan spent much of the time thinking of Annie even as he slogged through the rain and the mud of the Bay of Fundy at low tide, his clothes stuck to his skin, his mind stuck on her while Danielle waited and watched from the car. She didn’t like getting wet.

  The tides in the Bay made the world tilt but she didn’t care. He marched through the red ooze, hoping wind, rain and cold would cleanse his guilt or clarify his confusion. All it did was saturate his clothes.

  The trip had been dark; there was little to say to Danielle and less to say to his father who was riveted to Murder She Wrote and a string of antiquated shows and whatever sport was on in the evening.

  “I have my breakfast and then I take my blood pressure pills and go back to sleep and then I read the papers and I like my programs that start at one so there’s no point coming before 4 o’clock,” his father told them.

  Hmm, if only he had known that before he dropped $4,000 on airplane tickets, rent-a-car and hotel. All he wanted to do was get home. Really all he wanted to do was see Annie. He felt like a two-faced, lying asshole, which made sense ‘cause he was. He took comfort yelling into the wind: “You’re seriously fucked up.” But the great Bay of Fundy didn’t give a rat’s ass. Somehow, he thought of Annie as a last chance at happiness with a woman. Someone to grow old with.

  He wanted an end to Danielle’s anger, drinking, neediness, condemnation. Yes, she loved him, but the price was high. Annie had a life, a career, had it together. She would be the final piece of the great puzzle of his life. There would be happiness there. He deserved it, didn’t he?

  Annie was again fiddling with her bike lock when he asked if she’d like to drive over with him and pick up Fritz, maybe have a bite and then he’d drop her and her bike home.

  “Sure,” she said.”

  In the narrow hallway of his son’s apartment, Fritz came to him, about 18 lbs of furry Maine Coon, as faithful as a dog. Evan lifted him up, his hand under his butt and hoisted him so he could rest his front paws on his shoulder and purr in his ear. Sometimes he liked to wrap himself around his neck like a collar and ride around on his shoulders.

  “When I saw your big hands on Fritz, I knew I wanted them on me,” Annie said many times, a wistfulness in her voice. She loved his hands, always worried when he wasn’t wearing gloves. “Your hands are so warm,” she said over and over again. “I love your hands on me.” And she had no problem taking his hands and placing them exactly where she wanted.

  Evan watched the tall woman doing squats in front of the full-length mirror. She was wearing Spandex tights and a top designed to show off her breasts. She was around 40, which meant looking at her from the corner of his eye from his perch on the bench press was not lechery, only admiration. She never looked at him, but he noticed as he got older, fewer women did.

  But that was okay. The gym was his refuge, an escape from self-doubt, work, home and phone. Here, between sets, he was alone, free to exchange banalities with some of the other guys trying to beat back time, free to sit and catch his breath and ignore the fluorescent-lit sea of machines and mirrors and sweating, grunting and primping. Free to find a lyric or a lead to a story. Oxygen was a great catalyst.

  When more pressing matters didn’t intrude, he puzzled over why women at the gym liked to work out in as little as possible. He had once pinched a finger between two 45-pound plates, transfixed by a woman in a bra top doing barbell lifts. Men could bleed, too.

  Working in the house, living in the house, he needed to get away. Wasn’t sure why but the walls had started to press in on him.

  Evan watched the woman bending over to place the barbell gently on the floor. He enjoyed the view. He had started looking again and he found that curious. He was only being a guy. Things were going okay. Weren’t they?

  He lay back, hoisted the barbell over his head, started doing reps. Maybe different. Maybe the honeymoon was wearing off. It happened to everyone. But there were little flickers of anxiety, like fireflies sparking at the cottage and an uncharacteristic depression.

  Hard to figure. He did his 10 reps, three sets. Took a breath.

  There had been pretty good days with Annie. At Christmas, on the corner of St. Laurent and St. Joseph, someone threw an annual 10-day Christmas party for the poor, with free food simmering in a steel kettle over a fire, lots of evergreens around, games for the kids and at night that year a rock band, each player in a little glass bubble suspended in the air, electric guitars screaming, drums and bass a solid, tantalizing bottom.

  They went that first year and danced in the snow, the temperature just cool enough to let you know it was winter. They grooved liked kids on the scene, the bonfire, the music, each other. Smiling and laughing, the vapour of their breath like smoke around their faces. What could be more perfect? Wasn’t life grand? To find each other at this age. It was a miracle.

  Evan finished the set, sat up, scanned the gym for the woman in Spandex, found her by the Universal machine, doing tricep pull downs. Good arms.

  Another memory came to him. Annie was not much for winter, complained often she was cold, all 110 pounds of her, but after some convincing she came with him to Mount Royal during a pretty good blizzard on a Saturday afternoon. She bitched, but she came. And they walked through the snowstorm as kids flew down the hill in their toboggans and sliding disks and they played in the snow, wrestled like children, laughed, adjourned to the chalet for some hot something or other and she glowed with red cheeks and delight.

  As soon as she was home she called her friend, Isabelle, and started laughing and giggling.

  “My big courageous partner forced me to confront the storm and dragged me to Mont Royal where we battled the elements,” she said, laughing. “It was great. He even bought me a hot chocolate. What a man. He’d make some lucky woman a good husband.”

  The next day they did it again, walked in the fresh snow, holding hands. That was probably eight or nine years ago. Evan lay back down on the bench and hoisted the bar bell and wondered why they had never ventured out in the snow again.

  It reminded him of another winter memory: wrapped in terry robes, running from their borrowed winter chalet in the mountains on an icy night to the hot tub and collapsing into the steaming water, staring at the stars, playing footsie and grab ass until they ran back into the house to make love. He was smiling as he tried to concentrate on lowering the bar as slowly as possible. It’s about resistance, stupid. Isn’t everything?

  Another standout memory grabbed him. They were at the Chateau Frontenac, so it must have been Christmas, just a few months after they met. Annie liked to spend the day and night with an elderly aunt who lived in Quebec. And at three or four a.m., whenever the gargoyles began nipping at his “Need to Do” list, he woke up. He had a play opening in February and it was rewrite time. It was always rewrite time. It was going into the big theatre, 400-plus seats, three-week run, interrupted by Easter and Passover. It was his first play and he was sensing disaster. So he kept working the script and fretting. The hotel room was big and silent but he got up and Annie woke instantly.

  “I’m going to do a little work,” he said, as he climbed out of bed and went to the little desk the hotel gives you in case you’re a businessman with deals to make and contracts to sign, switched on the soft light and o
pened the Mac. Annie got up and walked to the fridge in the dark wearing a T-shirt that barely covered her ass. She took out a bottle of orange juice and laid it down beside the computer, kissed him.

  “Good luck,” she said, and went back to bed.

  He looked at the screen, lighting up a corner of the hotel room and said: “This is the woman for me.”

  Yes, the beginning was magical. Dinner out almost every night. The money was flying in and there was nothing he’d rather do than sit across a table from her and talk and listen. They exchanged opinions; she was open to ideas not her own. When their opinions differed, she admitted on occasion that maybe he was right.

  She was nothing like Danielle who couldn’t say a sentence without the word “I.” Annie could talk about being in Africa and Israel and Central America and Europe and Russia, the idiocies of the Tory party, rant along the pur laine party line about Pierre Trudeau’s betrayal and Jean Chretien’s alliance with the anti-Quebec wing of the party, the PQ’s chances of taking the next election, Jean Charest’s pragmatic approach to politics — go with the party that will win. She grudgingly admitted that Lucien Bouchard had been the same.

  She knew lots of languages, lots of men. She hadn’t lived with any of them, 40 years by herself, lots of guys, but relationships never worked.

  “Men are afraid of intelligent women with their own careers, their own ideas,” she said. “I think I intimidate them. And I had my career and I was always travelling, had no time to settle down.”

  She said her boyfriends kept dying. Or they left her. The only guy she lived with had disappeared, leaving a note: “See you on the other side.” That was about 40 years ago.

  The last long affair was 30 years before. He left her, too.

  “He wanted a woman who was like a mother, a homemaker, someone to cook and bake and wrap him in blankets when he had the flu and say: ‘Poor baby.’”

  Evan came up for air, strolled to the water fountain, breathing hard, his heart pounding comfortably. His arms felt pumped, his chest felt pumped, his ego inflated. He seemed to need more of that lately.