22   26 Aug. 91   Daniel just left for New York. He took the overnight bus again; the overnight train, he said, was too slow. But what is on my mind this time is not so much my direct conversations with him, but rather what Greg told me about the one he had with him. He told Greg the same thing that he told me at the beginning of the year: his suspicions that the body buried in Miki’s grave may not be that of his father. Greg then told him about my visits to the cemetery, something I had never told the kids about, and about what he called my almost-breakdown when I learned of Miki’s death. Well, my journal, I don’t remember anything quite so melodramatic. But I acknowledge that I have been holding back too much of my inner life from the kids, especially Daniel, and in a way I am grateful to Greg for bringing it to D’s attention, distorted though it may be. I had the perhaps naïve belief that as Daniel matured we would get closer and become more like friends. But the conversation we had in January was as close as we ever got, and since then he seems to be getting even more distant. Greg told me that DNA analysis of skeletons with PCR is progressing rapidly, perhaps even faster than Daniel knows, and that D is determined to go ahead with it. Greg says that there is no legal way of stopping him. Oh well. So be it. Let the chips fall where they may. –––––––––––––––––––––– George Kenner is not completely out of my life. Last week I found on my desk a belated birthday present from him, which he dropped off in my absence. It was a book, the novel by that young doctor working in the islands, just published. It was ded inscribed to me, à la belle Mireille. So he remembered me! Or perhaps George told him what to write. I have not quite finished reading it. It takes place in the islands, and the protagonist is – what else? – a young doctor, though there is also a murder mystery going on around him. Betty has told me that the teacher of her writing class, Ms. Casey (who was Daniel’s adviser about going to university in the US), told the kids “write about what you know.” The young doctor seems to have been taught the same thing. I told Betty that I didn’t think that it was very good advice, that I thought it would be boring to write only about yourself and what you know instead of letting your imagination carry you to people and places and times different from your own. Shakespeare, after all, wrote about ancient Rome and Greece, and Italy and Denmark, without ever having been there, and his characters are so varied that they could not possibly be based on himself. The young doctor, on the other hand, based his characters, other than himself, on people he knew in the islands, people that he told us about, especially the “crazy English” of Ile d’Entrée. What also bothered me was that, apart from a few English phrases, all the dialogue is written in French, even when it is meant to be in English, as between two anglophones, so it is not always clear who really speaks what. Once I caught on I found myself mentally translating the dialogue into English in order to hear the characters more realistically, but then I heard Tante Clotilde’s voice in my head: Stop translating, Mireille! Arrête de traduire! All that being said, the book is entertaining, what they call a “fast read.” I am near the end, and I still haven’t guessed who killed the woman whose body was found on the beach. I will read a little more now. Perhaps I will guess before I go to sleep. Good night, my journal. Virgo   New York was warm and humid, with an intermittent drizzle that seemed to hover in the thick air, uncertain about whether to come down to earth. Daniel was not feeling well when he got to his apartment. His head felt heavy, his sinuses were congested and his nose was running. It was either a cold or an allergy reaction – even his mother could not always tell them apart – but it didn’t matter to him; he took the same decongestant that we would have used in either case. He stayed indoors, reading, listening to music and gradually sorting through the mountain of mail that the super had handed him – a mountain that turned into barely a molehill after the junk had been discarded. Meanwhile the newsbreaks on the radio described the domino-like collapse of the Soviet Union, as one republic after another declared its independence after the failure of the coup against Gorbachev. Gradually, as the weather cleared, so did his condition. After five or six days, when the heat had been driven away by a thunderstorm and relatively mild weather returned, all seemed right with the world. Cici answered her telephone at last, and agreed to come over the next day. Her return to New York had been delayed by Hurricane Bob, she said. Daniel, who by then had learned enough about American college football to know that the University of Miami team was called the Hurricanes, resisted the temptation of asking if she was talking about a football player named Bob.   The first indication that something was wrong came when Cici accepted Daniel’s kiss but did not return it. “Is something wrong?” he asked her, disconcerted. “Not wrong,” she answered slowly as she turned her head away, “just different.” “What do you mean?” “I just don’t have the feelings for you that I had before.” He waited for an elucidation, but when none came he asked, “Like what?” “Well, like… maybe not being in love, but wanting to be with you. I realized it when you called. It struck me that I hadn’t really missed you during the summer, while I missed you a lot during the Christmas break.” She paused. “I thought they would come back when I saw you, but they haven’t.” “And?” “I… I don’t know, Daniel.” He felt a slight trembling inside him. “Is there someone else?” he asked hesitantly. “That doesn’t matter, or it wouldn’t matter if I still had the same feelings for you.” “But… I don’t understand.” “I don’t either,” Cici said quickly with a laugh. “Maybe there’s nothing to understand.” Another pause. “Or maybe there is, now that I’m thinking about it. You know, I enjoyed being with you last semester, but after the spring break it wasn’t exciting like it was before, it was almost routine.” “Because of Ora?” Cici laughed. “You mean, because you fucked her? No, definitely not because of that. In fact, that gave it a little excitement.” He felt on the verge of tears. “I… was so looking forward to being with you again.” “Well, we are together, for now, anyway.” “Yes, but…” “I’ll be frank with you. If there’s one thing I missed, it was making love with you. You wanna do it?” He was nonplussed. “Uh… I don’t know…” “Let’s do it.” She began to undress. “Come on,” she said as she undid his belt. “It’s breakup sex.” She unsnapped her bra behind her and pulled her tee-shirt off together with it. “It’s the counterpart of makeup sex,” she explained as she pulled her underpants down from beneath her skirt. “Some people say it’s even better.” She slipped her sandals off and stood up. “You’ve never done it?” she asked with a laugh as she let her skirt drop to the floor. Daniel began to think back to his breakups, beginning with Angie. There was no breakup sex with her, nor with Vivian or Roxane, and with Megan there had never been a breakup… He stopped thinking when he saw his beautiful soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend ready for him. His mind went on to wondering if he should be doing things differently in breakup sex, but that didn’t matter: Cici took all the initiative. And he let his mind go blank. Afterwards he realized that his mind, after going blank, had been overtaken by the fantasy that he was doing it with Amy Kenner. He knew that it was not unusual for people too imagine being with someone other than the person they were having sex with, but it was something he had not yet experienced. “That was good,” Cici said as she began to dress. “We should do it again some time,” she added with a laugh as she stroked his still-naked left thigh. “I’m going to be under a lot of pressure this semester – I’ve got the GREs and I’ve got to bring my GPA up – I didn’t tell you, but I got a C-plus last semester – and I might need some relief occasionally, so I might call you. Feel free to say no, if you’re busy, or with someone else, or whatever.” There were still traces of Amy on Daniel’s mind, and he found Cici’s proposition too much to deal with at the moment.. “What did you get a C-plus in?” he asked her instead. Cici laughed. She finished buckling her sandals and stood up. “This is embarrassing,” she said. “In Spanish.” “You mean the Latin American lit class you were taking?” “Yes. I wrote the papers in my kind of Spanish, the way I talk, but the prof wanted literary Spanish, which I’d never studied.” “You mean the one you said was a gringa, who you didn’t get along with?” “Yes. Anyway, it’s time for me to get back home.” Daniel was still sitting on the bed, and Cici bent down to give him a kiss. “Hasta luego,” she said as she walked nonchalantly to the door and eased herself out. Once again it was Amy, not Cici, who took over Daniel’s thinking. What was it that he felt toward Amy, whom he barely knew, having met her only once? Lust, unquestionably; he could feel it in the flesh as Amy’s image fluttered across his imagination. But there had to be more. Superficially there was nothing special about Amy. Physically she was almost the opposite of her cousin Megan: an adult, hollow-cheeked face – one that, according to Betty, was “not all that pretty,” though Daniel found it attractive – on a body that still looked pubescent, with small if well-defined breasts and straight hips. Was it perhaps the fact that the lust, once it was aroused at Harvey and Leslie’s party, was not satisfied? Daniel was, by this time, used to having his way with women in short order, with Cici as the exception that proved the rule. With Amy it had simply been a matter of opportunity. He wrote Amy a letter, or rather a postcard tucked into an envelope, telling her that he was sorry that he had missed her, that he was looking forward to the next opportunity to see her, and that he very much wanted to spend time with her. He also asked if she was going to CEGEP. He pondered over his girlfriend-less status, and found it not unpleasant. Not only that: he was about to turn twenty, and after three years of fairly steady sexual activity it might be nice to take a break, for a few months anyway – perhaps for the duration of the fall semester. Once he was in Montreal for Christmas vacation, Amy would perhaps be there for him.   When classes began he noticed a familiar figure in two of them: Roger Lehmann, a classmate majoring in history, whom he had met in another history class in the spring. Daniel did not recognize Roger immediately; he remembered him as pale and slightly pudgy, but now he looked fit and was so deeply tanned that if there were a scale of skin darkness ranging from albino to West African, Roger would be above fifty percent. It turned out that Roger’s family lived in Riverdale and owned a beach house in the Hamptons, not directly on the beach but close to it. They were not related to the banking Lehmans (“the one-N Lehmans,” as Roger called them), but were rich in their own right. And Roger had spent the entire summer, up to and including Labor Day, at the house, doing maintenance work, swimming and sailing. He would continue going out there once a month during the semester, probably on the first weekend of each month, beginning in October, when Roger would be celebrating his twentieth birthday with his twin sister Monica, who was going to Sarah Lawrence. “Would you like to come?” Roger asked. “It’ll be just family and a few friends.” “First weekend in October? I don’t see why not. Midterms won’t be for another week.” “You’ve got that figured out already!” “Sure. When’s your actual birthday?” “That Saturday, the fifth.” “I’m two and a half weeks older than you,” Daniel said. “It figures. A Virgo, just as I thought.” “Of course. A Libra would think that.” And both young men burst out laughing.   Amy’s reply came in the form of a birthday card, one of about a dozen that he received from family and friends. There was even a friendly card from Cici, with a postscript reading Call me. On the envelope of the one from Megan he noticed that her return address was no longer that of her parents but downtown, in the Concordia neighborhood. Amy’s card had a note written below the printed HAPPY BIRTHDAY.   Dear Daniel, I’m writing to wish you a happy birthday and to let you know that I was thrilled to get your card and to find out that you’re interested in me. I’ve been interested in you every since Betty (she was Zoe then) pointed you out to me when we were just beginning Grade 9 and I said to myself, he’s going to be my first lover. And, believe it or not, I’m saving myself for you. Only I didn’t think it would take this long. In answer to your question, I’m taking Grade 12 at NORTH AM and I’m hoping to go to college in the US, maybe even New York. Happy birthday! Yours,           Amy             Saving herself for him! Holy shit! Do girls really do that? Not for marriage, but to be deflowered by a particular guy that they have a crush on, even if the guy lives four hundred miles away? And for three years now! Well, he could certainly save himself for her for three months. There was something about Amy’s desire to lose her virginity to Daniel that stirred a vague memory in the deep recesses of his mind, but he could not place it. He wondered for several days about how to reply to both Cici and Amy. He guessed that Cici’s Call me implied a need for stress relief, and the thought of acting as his ex-girlfriend’s stress-relief valve did not appeal to him. But he called her anyway, not sure about how he would communicate his feelings to her. “I’m calling you, like you asked,” he said in reply to her Hello. She laughed, and he joined her. Not much needed to be said for Cici to deduce that Daniel was not interested in a sexual connection. After a few minutes of chitchat she said, “Well, thanks for calling,” and laughed again. “Bye!” she added. To Amy he wrote a brief note, once again on a postcard tucked into an envelope, saying he hoped that he would live up to her expectations.   As Daniel got to know Roger Lehmann he discovered that, for the first time, he was making friends with someone of strongly right-wing views. Roger attributed the collapse of the Communist bloc to the wisdom of the policies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and he was thrilled with the military coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency of Haiti. He did not hesitate to make his view known in class discussions, and chuckled over the sometimes clumsy attempts by his mostly liberal-leaning fellow students to refute them. “You don’t seem to like liberals much,” Daniel said to Roger one day as they were walking from one class to another. “It’s not like I’m Rush Limbaugh,” Roger said with a chuckle. “Who?” “Rush Limbaugh. He’s got a radio program, and he really has it in for liberals, and feminists, and the civil rights movement. I listen to him sometimes, but he’s a little over the top for me. A Canadian liberal like you – I think we can communicate.” “Thanks, buddy. I guess I could say the same about an American conservative. I’m not sure about Canadian ones, especially since they call themselves Progressive Conservatives.” “That’s funny. I wonder what Rush would say about that!”   They were picked up at the station by Roger’s mother in a Ford Bronco. To Roger’s “Hi mom, this is Daniel” she responded with “Hi, Daniel” without giving her name, and so to Daniel she was Mrs. Lehmann. Her husband, who was back at the house with Monica, would similarly, Daniel reckoned, be Mr. Lehmann. The rest of the party, friends and relatives including Roger’s older sister Sophie with her husband Mark and their children, would not come till tomorrow, Mrs. Lehmann announced, except possibly Peter. “Peter is Monica’s boyfriend,” Roger explained. “He’s also an old friend of mine, from elementary school, but we went to different high schools and lost contact. Then Monica met him when a bunch of girls from Sarah Lawrence went up to Wesleyan for a dance. He remembered her.” The house turned out to be rather modest. It was on one level, and seemed considerably older that the two-story houses around it, possibly dating from a time before the village had become a fashionable destination for New Yorkers. Its clapboard siding seemed newly painted – probably Roger’s work over the summer – but the paint of the trim was peeling. Its plan was simple: the entire front half was occupied by a single hall – the main room, Roger called it – that combined living room, dining room, family room and, in one corner, the kitchen. In the middle there was a fireplace, on either side of which there was a passage to a hallway, each hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom, all facing the wooded backyard. Roger’s bedroom was, naturally enough, in the right wing, as was the room that would be occupied by his guest or guests, in this case Daniel. And in fact, as came to light in the conversation that began as soon as they sat down for pre-dinner drinks, the senior Lehmanns turned out to be far lest rightist than their son. They were liberal Republicans in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, they despised Al D’Amato, and they were among the few who in the preceding gubernatorial election had voted for Pierre Rinfret, whom Roger – who had voted for Herbert London – made point of identifying as “a French Canadian, just like my friend here.” “You’re French Canadian?” Monica said, flashing a dazzling smile. “You don’t sound like it, and Wilner doesn’t sound too French.” “I’ve been bilingual pretty much all my life. Wilner was my father’s name. He was a Polish Jew who became a German journalist and he died when I was two. On my mother’s side I’m Bouchard.” “Nice combination,” Monica said. “Dad’s family used to be Jewish, back in Germany. And you have some French on your side, don’t you, mom?” She had a lovely speaking voice, seductive without being husky. “Yes,” Mrs. Lehmann said. “I had a grandfather named Vernay,” pronouncing the name in an Anglo-American fashion. “You mean Vernet,” Monica corrected with a perfect French pronunciation. “She’ll never let us forget that she spent a year in Lausanne,” Roger said. “Did you really?” Daniel asked. “Junior year of high school, in an exchange program.” “Alors, tu dois parler assez bien français.” “Oui, assez bien.” That beautiful smile again. The telephone rang. Roger got up and walked over to the kitchen area to answer it. “It’s not like it was a finishing school,” Mrs. Lehmann said with a laugh. “It was a public high school, a… gym-nase, right?” “Gymnase,” Monica said. Daniel laughed. “That’s what we call a gymnasium, the kind where you work out. The French do too, I think. But the Swiss…” “In Vaud. Not in Geneva,” Monica said. “Vaud used to belong to Bern and…” Roger came back with the cordless handset and wordlessly handed it to Monica, interrupting her explanation. She took it into the left-wing hallway, perhaps into her room. “Peter?” Mrs. Lehmann asked. “Yup,” Roger said. “He can’t make it.” “You’d better look out,” Mr. Lehmann said, addressing Daniel. “What do you mean?” “Our little girl’s a bit of a flirt, in case you haven’t noticed.” “And with a good-looking guy like you around…” Mrs. Lehmann added with a laugh. Daniel smiled, but could think of nothing to say. In the six weeks or so since his breakup with Cici he had felt no active interest in girls. From time to time he would fantasize about Amy Kenner, but he had been so busy with classes, soccer and learning to use the computer that now occupied most of his desk that he had not even paid any attention to whether any of the ones in his classes might be flirting with him. But Monica was undeniably attractive, and a little flirtation – in full knowledge of an absent boyfriend – might be fun. “This isn’t the first time he’s stood her up like this,” Roger said. Did he imply that Monica might be ready for a new boyfriend? I’ll have to be careful, Daniel told himself. “But enough sexual politics,” Roger said. “Let’s talk about the other kind.” Talk about politics was evidently the Lehmann family sport, and it must have been in these freewheeling conversations that Roger honed the skills that he displayed in class discussions. He would always take the rightmost point of view, but sometimes it seemed to be just for the sake of argument. When Monica came back she quickly joined in, and her positions were invariably the opposite of Roger’s. Small wonder, Daniel thought, that her room was in the left wing. She was a registered Liberal, and expressed her frustration with the reluctance of her hero, Mario Cuomo, to run for President. “Who would want to run against George Bush?” Mrs. Lehmann asked rhetorically. “Guess who just announced that he’s running!” Roger said with a laugh. “Bill Clinton from Arkansas!” “What’s so funny?” Monica asked. “I thought you liked Jerry Brown.” “I do, but Clinton’s okay.” The talk continued about American politics. Daniel, as a foreigner, thought it appropriate to stay out of it. But when it came around to the breakup of the Soviet Union, he felt comfortable enough to weigh in. “I see a potential for trouble,” he said, “in that the new independent states are precisely Stalin’s SSRs, so, for example, you have Ossetians in Georgia who don’t want to be Georgians, or Ukrainians in Moldavia who don’t want to be Moldavians – or even Syldavians – and so on.” The reference to Syldavians made Monica laugh. “Syldavians! How about Bordurians?” It was the first time in Daniel’s American experience that a reference to Tintin struck a resonant chord, and the fact made Monica even more attractive to him.   The next morning Roger took Daniel on a long walk along the beach. The twin birthday celebration did not begin until the afternoon, when relatives and friends began to arrive. To Monica’s – but not Roger’s – surprise, Peter was among them. From the moment of his arrival Monica no longer paid any attention to Daniel. Her place was taken by her friend Claire, who, it so happened, went to Barnard, and who lost no time in giving Daniel her phone number with the suggestion that they get together for coffee some time. The party lasted well into the night. There was dancing, eating, drinking and flirting. Claire was not the only one to flirt with Daniel, but the most consistent one, and the other girls seemed to have conceded him to her. About eleven o’clock people began leaving. It was understood that only Peter was to spend the night. It occurred to Daniel that he, too, might as well go home. When, around midnight, Sophie and Mark – who lived in Riverdale – announced that they were driving back, Daniel asked them if there was room for him in their car. “Sure,” Sophie said, “if you don’t mind sitting in the back with the kids.” The children, who were two and four, slept all through the mostly silent ride. Mark insisted on taking a detour through Manhattan in order to take Daniel home. It was two o’clock when he got there, and he was ready for his own bed. As he undressed he fished the paper with Claire’s number out of his shirt pocket and put it on his nightstand. He thought about her briefly and inconclusively before falling asleep.   About a week and a half later, on a Thursday morning when he had no class, he was sitting alone in the coffeehouse on Amsterdam Avenue, reading a history book, when he heard “Hi, Daniel” form behind him. It was Claire, holding a cup of coffee. “Wanna join me?” he said. “Sorry I haven’t called…” “You didn’t have to,” she said with a laugh. They had a pleasant chat in which they told each other about themselves and which they ended after half an hour – Claire had a class to go to – with a mutual “Let’s do this again.” When Daniel got home he found a letter from Amy waiting for him.   13 Oct., 1991 Hi Daniel, I’ve got some news. My father is supposed to attend a medical conference in New York during the weekend of 23 Nov., and I think I can talk him into letting me come with him if you are going to be free to see me. Let me know! We’ll be arriving on the Friday evening before. Love,           Amy             He lifted the October page of his wall calendar to check for November dates, and saw that the twenty-third, a Saturday, was on the weekend before Thanksgiving, with nothing penciled in for either that day or the following Sunday, except that the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturday would be Aida. He wondered if Amy liked opera. He wrote her back, immediately this time, letting her know that he was indeed free, and giving her his phone number so that she could call him when she was in New York. The next day, in class, Roger invited him for another weekend, the first one in November, at the Long Island house. This time it would be only with his parents and Monica, and possibly – once again – Peter. “My folks really like you,” Roger said. Peter was there, and he and Monica spent most of their time with each other. The weather was dry and quite mild for the season, propitious for the project of painting the trim that Roger had pending. With Daniel’s willing help, the job was done by Sunday afternoon, just before sunset.