18   24 March 91   Daniel came back to Montréal for spring break after all. He explained it frankly: he didn’t want to be alone in New York while Cici was in Florida. And he wouldn’t mind doing a little late-season skiing. But New York has been having mild weather and he was unprepared for a Québec winter. Within two days his sinuses were inflamed, then his throat too. There was no fever. It could be either a cold (that he might have picked up on the train) or an allergy reaction (I was a little slow in changing the air filter of the heating system). I gave him a decongestant, an antipyretic and an antibiotic to prevent a secondary infection but I doubt that it made much difference. It was a situation of “take it and you’ll be better in a week, don’t take it and it will take seven days”. I think that what it really was, holistically speaking, is his body needing a pretext for some rest, which it got. So we did not get to talk very much. All I know is that he is still dating Cici, that his studies are going well, and that he has been talking with Ora (his first-year biology TA whose mother Nili had been Miki’s girlfriend!) about DNA testing. He didn’t tell me what he learned that was new, and I didn’t ask him. He also didn’t mention Miki. Perhaps he knew that it would upset me. In fact he spent most of his time resting and reading. I asked him if he missed skiing and he said no, not really, and I believed him. By yesterday he was mostly better, but I dissuaded him from taking the overnight train back to New York in this weather and in his condition, and took him to Mirabel instead, so that he could sleep in his own bed. Betty submitted her application for admission to cégep de Saint-Laurent in the autumn. I had thought that her going to anglophone secondary school might present a problem, but they assured us that since she took French every semester there should be no difficulty. Tina has a new lover, a francophone pharmacist named Michel (married, of course). Bob and I went on a double date with them. Of course we spoke French, since we francophones were 3:1, and Tina is practically bilingual. The film we went to see was in English (The Doors by Oliver Stone) but afterwards we talked about it in French. Tina had quite a few criticisms of the film; she spent some time as a groupie with The Doors when she was 18, and she thought that the portrayal of Jim Morrison was all wrong. When she knew him, at least (“moi j’ai baisé avec Jim Morrison en 1967” was how she began the conversation), he was gentle and funny and sober, nothing like the arrogant drunk in the film. But I have seen Tina a few other times and we have spoken English. It was she, not I, who occasionally lapsed into French. She likes Bob but doesn’t expect it to last. (Do I? I am not sure.) Michel, she says, is so-so, but better than nothing. The best thing about him is that he doesn’t hide his philandering ways, from his wife or from anyone else, so there is no need to sneak around. When she was younger she didn’t mind it, but now it’s too much trouble. “For a middle-aged slut like me,” she added. And then: “So here we are, two middle-aged sluts who happen to be doctors.” I laughed along with her, but I will tell you, my journal, that I am not a slut. Je ne suis pas une traînée. (At McGill we francophones used to make fun of the students in special programs who in English were called trainees.) If I were a slut then I would not have gone through all that conflict about GK, or the remorse about my fling with GB. I like men, but one at a time (mostly) and for some length of time. It has now been 9 months with Bob. For Tina that would be an eternity, but I feel fine. Tina likes to say that I am just like her, but she is who she is, and I am who I am. Maple Leaf Rag   At the end of March Ora called him. “I have some news about DNA testing,” she said. “The results are pretty good. Would you like to hear some details?” “Well, you of all people should know how much or how little biology I understand, but I’m interested.” They agreed to meet for coffee at the Israeli-owned place on April Fool’s Day, a Monday. In the morning, just before Cici left his place, he told her about the upcoming meeting “I’d like to meet her too,” Cici said. “Really?” “April fool!” “No, really, it’s fine if you meet her.” “I’ll tell you what. I’ll just walk by the coffeehouse and wave hello.” “Okay, if that’s what you want to do.”   “First of all,” Ora began, “even before Mengele, there was a case in England, where a girl disappeared ten years ago in Cardiff…” “That’s Wales, not England.” “Excuse me. Wales.” Her smile made him blush. “Two years ago a body was found, mostly bones, that the police suspected that it might be the girl’s. A woman in Oxford named Erika Hagelberg – she’s the one who wrote the paper about skeletons that I told you about in class – extracted some DNA from a bone and sent it to Jeffreys for analysis. It was only a little bit of DNA, but she used PCR – do you remember what that is?” “Uh… polymer… polymerase chain reaction?” “Very good, Daniel. She used it to make more DNA out of it. They compared it with the girl’s parents, and the match was so good that just a few weeks ago the court accepted the evidence. It was the first time! “Then there is Mengele – he drowned twelve years ago – but for him also they were able to extract a little bit of DNA and amplify it with PCR. As far as I know Jeffreys is still looking for relatives to match him, though he may have found them by now. The problem is that the DNA can get contaminated, with bacteria and things like that, and PCR is sensitive to contamination. And the older the remains, the greater the chance of contamination. With the body that’s supposed to be your father, let’s say that somebody in Montreal will be able to extract some DNA maybe a year or two from now, then the body will be… twenty years old, right? From the Yom Kippur War?” “Yes.” “What you will have to count on is that the technology will make faster progress than the decomposition of the body.” “That’s quite likely, isn’t it?” “As a scientist, I think so. By the way, when they get the DNA from the body, they will also need samples from you and from your mother.” “From my mother? Why?” Out of the corner of one eye he saw Cici walking past the coffeehouse, wearing a parka with the hood over her head – it was drizzling – and looking at them through the window. She waved at Daniel discreetly and walked on. “You forgot already? Because you get half of your genes from each of your parents, so…” “I get it. So they’ll use my mother’s DNA to eliminate whatever I have that’s not from my father.” “Correct. That’s why with Mengele they are looking both for his son and his ex-wife.” “So my mother will have to agree to the whole thing. That will be a challenge, I think.”   In the evening, during a lull in his studies, Daniel called Cici. “Why didn’t you come in and say hello?” he asked her. “I just wanted to take a look at your friend Ora.” She pronounced the name as though it were Spanish. “So what did you think of her?” “It doesn’t matter. What did you think?” “What do you mean?” “You’ve been fucking her!” “What!” “I recognized her. I saw her coming out of your building about a month ago when I was jogging in your block. I had never seen her in this neighborhood before, let alone your building.” “But she could have been visiting anyone!” “That’s why I wanted to see her with you. Are you going to deny it?” “No, except that it was just that one time. You have to believe me.” “I have to? On April Fool’s Day?” Cici said with a laugh, but for the first time in Daniel’s memory her usually joyous laughter sounded bitter. “Well, there was another time, but … Maybe I should tell you about this in person.” “No way! I never want to see you again!” “What? No! I… I… ” “April fool!” Cici laughed again, cheerfully this time. “I’ll be over in fifteen minutes. Make some tea.” While he waited for her, once again he felt himself a mere boy beside this mature, fully formed, sophisticated woman – una mujer hecha y derecha, as he had learned to say – who was only eleven months older than he was. “How do you say ‘April fool’ in Spanish?” he asked her when she came in and gave him an all-is-forgiven kiss on the cheek. Her lips were cold – the day had been chilly, and she was wearing the same parka as in the morning over her jeans and running shoes. She was evidently not treating this visit as a date. “We say ¡inocente!, except that Hispanics don’t do it on April first, but on el día de los Inocentes, Holy Innocents’ Day, a few days after Christmas.” “Really?” “Yes. We also don’t have a superstition about Friday the thirteenth, but Tuesday the thirteenth. Martes trece. What else do you want to know that’s different about Hispanics?” she asked as she sat down on the sofa, without removing her parka, and began sipping from the mug that was waiting for her on the coffee table, unzipping the parka with the free hand. “What makes you such smart-asses?” he asked in turn as he sat beside her. “Because we’re smarter. We’ve got all the wisdom of the Greeks and the Romans and the Arabs and the Jews and the Indians. Okay?” “Didn’t you forget the Iberians and the Carthaginians?” “I don’t know about them.” She was serious now. “But some of the wisest people of all time were Spanish, except that the world doesn’t think of them as Spanish. People think of Seneca as a Roman, Averroes as an Arab, Maimonides as a Jew, which they were, but they were all Spanish.” She seemed to be reciting a lesson she had been taught with the aim of instilling ethnic pride. “In fact, they all came from Córdoba, like my grandfather. And when it comes to Greeks like Aristotle, people in Europe didn’t know about them until some Christians, Muslims and Jews in Spain translated the books. So, you see, we are smart. Now tell me about your other time with Ora.” “It was over a year ago. I had just come back from Cyprus, and I had some pictures of her mother to show her, and I went over to her place, and it happened, even though she had a boyfriend at the time. So this time she turned the tables on me.” “Look, Daniel. Far be it from me to put myself up as a model of… of fidelity.” Cici hesitated before going on. “And anyway, you and me… we don’t have a long-term commitment. Just one semester at a time, and this is only our second one.” Daniel nodded but said nothing. She put her hand on his for a moment and then withdrew it. “Still,” she went on, “I think we have an obligation, if only a human one, to not hurt each other…” “Of course,” he interjected. “And if you’re fucking someone, not when you’re on vacation but right here in New York, when I’m in town, and I find out about it by accident, then that hurts. It hurts like hell.” She put both of her hands around the warm mug, as if seeking comfort for the pain. “Don’t say anything,” she added, though he had not given a sign that he was about to, “just take it in.” She now drank the tea slowly and steadily, holding the mug to her lips in a manner reminiscent of a kiss. Daniel would have liked nothing better at that moment than a kiss from his beautiful girlfriend, but he did not dare ask for one. Cici’s eyes alternated between looking at the tea inside the mug, perhaps following the motion of the leaves floating in it, and glancing sideways at Daniel. Finally she put the mug down and zipped her parka back up. “Okay,” she said as she stood up, “I’ve had my say. End of drama. Now I’ve got to go home and learn some psychology.” She giggled. Daniel stood up with her, and she gave him another kiss on the cheek, her lips warm this time. Daniel reciprocated. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t put his arms around her. “Bye!” she said with a dazzling smile as she walked away from him and out the door. Soon he was back in his studies, writing notes for a paper on Kafka. The drama had not ended; there hadn’t even been one. Thoughts of Cici were receding from his mind till they were no more.   Soccer play resumed with the advent of spring, and Team Canada won the first match, 1-0, against a Colombian club. Fred Maillet, the team’s other French Canadian (an Acadian from New Brunswick), scored the goal on a pass from Daniel. “It takes Latinos to beat Latinos,” Fred said over beers after the match. “What do you mean?” Bill McKenna asked, a ring of suds around his lips. “We French Canadians are Latinos too,” Fred explained. “French comes from Latin, just like Spanish and Portuguese. In case you didn’t know, the term ‘Latin America’ was invented by the French as an excuse for France to meddle in Mexico.” “That’s true,” Daniel confirmed. “I had a teacher in secondary school,” Fred continued, “who insisted that we were Latinos. Nous sommes des Latinos, she used to say. Short for Latinoaméricans.” “What was she a teacher of?” Daniel asked. “Latin?” “That’s right!” Fred roared. Everyone laughed. “We should now sing our team song,” Jason Arnold proposed after the laughter died down. “If we had one,” Bill said. “How about Maple Leaf Rag?” Daniel suggested. “Does it have lyrics?” Hugh Barron asked. “Something about I came from ole Virginny,” Alan Silver said. “Is that appropriate, or what!” “We can make new ones,” Daniel said. “How about this: Canadians doin’ the Maple Leaf Rag… and so on. I could write us a set of lyrics.” “Do it, man!” Fred said. There was more laughter. “Just make sure you don’t rhyme it with Maple Leaf Flag,” Hugh said. “I’ll do my best,” Daniel said.   Daniel and Cici never did get to go to the ballet together that spring. Indeed, in what was left of the semester in April and May, their need to study – real or pretended – allowed them only five dates, barely one a week. Daniel did, however, treat himself to some performances at the Met that semester. Opera was something that Cici didn’t mind listening to, but going to the Met didn’t interest her, so he went alone, three times, each time to see Plácido Domingo: singing Rodolfo in La Bohème and Parsifal, and conducting Tosca. In La Bohème Mimì was a beautiful Korean soprano who reminded him of Carol Choi in German class, and Musetta was black, as was the famous Jessye Norman who sang Kundry in Parsifal. There he also noticed that one of the Flower Maidens was the same sexy blond soprano about whom he had fantasized a year before. This time Cici was so much on his mind that he had no room for such fantasies. Cici’s lessons on Hispanic culture served as the catalyst that crystallized his plans for the summer vacation: he would travel to Latin America. The chats with the people of his neighborhood and the post-game banter with his soccer opponents, many of whom were Latinos, made him feel sufficiently at ease in speaking Spanish to make such a trip a pleasant experience. He would start by going to Cuba, then Mexico, and once there he would decide where to go next. He told Cici about his plan on the date that followed his decision, as they were walking to the subway. “How are you going to go to Cuba?” she asked. “By getting on a plane in Montréal” – he made a point of saying the name of his hometown with a French sound – “and getting off in La Habana. Have you forgotten that I’m Canadian?” “Sorry,” she said. “To you I’m just a gringo, huh?” “I know you’re not, but you don’t seem any different, so I forget.” She laughed. “You don’t say ‘about’ like Canadians do, not to mention that you don’t have a French accent.” “Would you like me to ‘ave one?” She laughed again. “That would be cool,” she said. “Sería chévere. You French, me Espanish.” “If you didn’t always remind me that you’re Hispanic, I wouldn’t necessarily know.” “But that’s the point, don’t you see? You’ve got to assert your identity!” “What’s my identity? A half-Polish-Jewish French Canadian who mainly speaks English? How do I assert that?” “I don’t know how to explain it, Daniel. I also mainly speak English, but I’m Hispanic, and specifically Puerto Rican. I just am. It’s part of my consciousness. I’m not saying you have to have it, but if you don’t then as far as I’m concerned you’re a gringo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Another laugh. “It’s not like I’m sleeping with the enemy.” It was now Daniel’s turn to laugh, at the reference to the title of the movie they were going to see. “But if someone is Jewish American, or Italian American, then to me they’re not a gringo. That’s all.” “You may not know this, Cicita, but on my Canadian soccer team here at Columbia I was the only French guy, and now I’m one of two, and we sure as hell assert it – to our fellow Canadians who are English, that is. It’s an intra-Canadian thing.” He decided not to share with her Fred Maillet’s notion that they were Latinos. Maybe some other time, he thought. “Well, good, I’m glad you told me. So you’re not a gringo.” They had reached the subway station, and she gave him a quick kiss before slipping her token into the turnstile slot. The downtown train came quickly, and it was too noisy to keep talking. There were no seats, and, holding on to the straps, they put their free arms about each other.   It took Daniel until the end of the semester, just in time for the last game – against the Jewish Student Union team – to fulfill his commitment to write the lyrics for Maple Leaf Rag as Team Canada’s team song. He brought his guitar to the pre-game practice, on the last day of classes, and during the break before the game he played the bass line on it – in E, so that it would fit most guys’ voice range – while singing to his teammates:   Although our life may be startin’ to drag, We don’t let the secret out of the bag, We’ll make a joke or we’ll do a gag. Remember, remember, remember, remember, We’re Canadians, we’re Canadians doin’, We’re Canadians doin’ the Maple Leaf Rag. We’re Canadians, we’re Canadians doin’, We’re Canadians doin’ the Maple Leaf Rag.   You’re on the old highway, drivin’ your Jag, You see the headliner startin’ to sag. Just do a zig and then do a zag. Remember, remember, remember, remember, We’re Canadians, we’re Canadians doin’, We’re Canadians doin’ the Maple Leaf Rag. We’re Canadians, we’re Canadians doin’, We’re Canadians doin’ the Maple Leaf Rag.   In the second stanza Alan – who was a music major – helped out with his falsetto on the last “remember,” whereupon everybody joined in for the refrain. “Congratulations on leaving out Maple Leaf Flag,” Hugh Barron said. “It was a struggle,” Daniel said. “Satan was at my shoulder, whispering ‘Maple Leaf Flag, Maple Leaf Flag…’ But I resisted.” “You and Mulroney,” said Fred Maillet, who was one of the team’s more political-minded members, amid general laughter. “But I like the line about the headliner starting to sag. It’s about Trudeau, isn’t it?” There was more laughter. “He just became a dad, you know,” Jason Arnold, who was from Newfoundland, remarked. “With what’s her name… Deborah Coyne?” Tom asked. “Yes,” Jason confirmed. “Who’s she?” Daniel asked, realizing that he had been out of touch with Canadian gossip. “A lawyer-politician type in St. John’s,” Jason said. “Not an actress or a musician, for a change?” “No, but she’s pretty enough,” Tom said. “How much younger is she than him?” “The usual, thirty-some years,” Bill McKenna said. “Exactly half his age,” Jason pinpointed. “I wouldn’t mind sagging like that when I’m seventy-plus,” Tom said. There was more laughter, in the midst of which the referee came over to announce the start of the game. It was a mild, breezy spring day with scattered clouds, and Team Canada beat JSU, 3-1. Daniel scored the second goal, on a cross from Jason. It was his first and only goal of the semester, and the team’s third win, alongside two draws and four losses. But it was a satisfying way to end the season. While he walked home after the game, he thought about the middle-aged – and by now old – Pierre Trudeau’s penchant for dating much younger women. Will that happen to me? he asked himself. He had enjoyed the company, and the bodies, of women who were older than him by a decade, starting with Gen McGrath and continuing with Angie Accorso and Ora Rozen, but then a woman of thirty – une femme de trente ans – was still in the flower of her youth – dans la fleur de sa jeunesse – and there was no reason why he would not find such women attractive when he was, say, in his forties, when such an age difference would not be inappropriate. His father, after all, was fifteen years – no, fourteen – older than his mother. But what happens to men at forty-five or fifty or so? How about Greg Berman, for example? Marcia Berman was an attractive woman, but she was getting rather plump, and Daniel had noticed some flirtatious goings-on between Greg and his secretary Francine, who was not as pretty as Marcia but definitely younger. What if his father were alive and – as she had hoped, according to Greg, though not by her own admission – living with his mother? If he was faithful to Brigitte all through his young years, would he have been so to Mireille – also an exceptional, youthful beauty – in his middle years? Is there such a thing as male menopause, as the papers and magazines seem to suggest? And why, at nineteen, am I thinking such thoughts? The questions were still buzzing in his head when he reached his building.