“These are the longest ones I can find,” John said, handing over a fistful of nails that were about two and a half inches long. Dylan took one and held it flush against the longer board; the nail was only about a half inch longer than the depth of the board.
“Great,” said Dylan. “These aren’t going to work—they won’t hold.”
“Let’s just try it,” John said, anxious to get the damn thing finished, whether it was serviceable or not. “We’ll just use more of them. It’ll be fine.”
Dylan shrugged. He picked up one end of the board and placed it on top of the supporting board. “Hold it level, will you?” he said, putting some of the nails between his teeth. He banged in some nails, his back to John.
Meanwhile, John, whose mind was off with Nicole, slid his support underneath, lined the edge up with the end of the board, and started banging nails in too. He kind of enjoyed banging in the nails. He put in a lot of them so it would hold.
When he’d finished a whole line of nails, only smashing his thumb once, John became aware that Dylan had stopped hammering and was standing back, looking at the bench. John could feel a radiating tension. He stepped back to look too.
“Nice going,” Dylan said.
John immediately saw his mistake. The whole thing was off kilter, because Dylan had put his support about six inches in while John had put his right at the end. John now remembered what the Home Depot guy had said.
“I’ll take it out and do it over,” he said defensively when Dylan didn’t say anything.
Taking the nails out was much more difficult than driving them in, and not as pleasant. It was hard to get at them. After they’d been at it awhile the board didn’t look so good anymore. In frustration, John took a great whack at the supporting board to get it off, which did the job, but the top of it splintered.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Dylan said, instantly pissed off. He grabbed the board and looked at it. “You moron,” he added.
John threw his hammer down. “Fuck you,” he said.
“We can’t even use this now, the end’s all fucked,” shouted Dylan.
“Don’t yell at me, asshole,” John yelled back. They glared at each other for a minute. Then John suggested, “Turn it over and use the other end.”
Dylan tossed the board aside in disgust and said, “That’s retarded. This whole thing is retarded.” Disappointed, he said, “Maybe we can buy him a bench.” He still thought a bench was a good idea.
They both heard it at the same moment—someone coming down the stairs—and turned guiltily toward the furnace room door.
It was their father, in his ratty bathrobe. “What’s going on?” he asked, as his eyes took everything in.
John, desperate to salvage something from the situation, said, “We were trying to make something for your birthday.”
“I see,” said Harold. “What is it—a bench?” He bent down and took a look, trying not to show his feelings, because he really was touched by their efforts. All at once he felt quite emotional. His boys. “These have to be the same distance from the ends,” Harold said, indicating the supports.
“No kidding,” Dylan said. “Tell handy guy here.”
John gave him a vicious look.
Harold picked up the splintered board and looked at it. Then he looked at the one that Dylan had hammered in and tested it. “Nails are too short,” he said. He stood up. “I don’t think this is going to work, kids,” Harold said, “but I appreciate the thought, I really do.”
He looked so proud of their efforts anyway, that it prompted John to say, “What would you really like for your birthday, Dad?”
Harold looked at them and suddenly seemed to brighten as if a light bulb had gone on behind his eyes, and he said, “What I’d really like, if you boys could manage it, is a loan.”
“You mean money?” Dylan asked.
Harold nodded. “I want to buy a new TV and right now I don’t have any credit.”
“We have a TV,” John pointed out.
“Yeah,” Harold said conspiratorially, after a considering pause, “But I thought it would be nice to have one in the kitchen, so we can watch it during dinner.”
“Right on,” said Dylan.
“What’ll Mom say?” John said.
“Let’s just buy it first,” Harold said. He didn’t want to think about what Audrey would say, or he’d never do it. He looked at his watch. It was only eight o’clock and he was pretty sure Future Shop was open till at least nine.
“How much do you need?” Dylan asked.
A half-hour later, with a son on either side of him, Harold walked into the store—no trace of a limp—and let Dylan and John show him all the latest gadgets at Future Shop they’d love to have. He hadn’t known half these things existed, but the boys were surprisingly knowledgeable. How had they learned it all? Kids today, Harold thought, admiring his sons, seemed to pick up this technology stuff as if by osmosis.
Eventually they made their way over to the televisions. Harold headed straight for the model he wanted. John hoisted it up easily and carried it to the cash. They paid in twenties, because that’s all that the bank machine they’d stopped at on the way had spit out. Unfortunately, the snotty girl wasn’t there.
Harold was so pleased about the TV that he let John drive the car home.
• • •
AUDREY WAS FIRST puzzled, then alarmed, when she finally got out of her long bubble bath, turned off her music, and found that she was the only one home. She couldn’t believe they’d all left and hadn’t told her. She couldn’t imagine where they might have gone. She looked all over the silent house, and checked the fridge for a note, but there was nothing.
When she went downstairs into the furnace room and saw the wrecked and splintered bench, the tools lying where they’d been dropped, Audrey was more mystified than ever. The logical explanation would be that Harold had taken them out to get more wood, but that didn’t seem likely, because the bench was supposed to be a surprise, and she didn’t think Harold would be willing to get out of bed to go to Home Depot.
It was as creepy as an alien abduction.
She looked outside and the car was gone.
They wouldn’t have gone to get some milk, because they wouldn’t take the car for that, and they wouldn’t have all gone out together for it, and she never let them run out of milk, or anything else, anyway. She was starting to feel panicky when she heard a car and looked out the window again. She saw the car pulling into the drive, John at the wheel, and Harold sitting beside him in the front seat staring straight ahead.
Audrey immediately feared, because John was driving, that Harold had wandered off and that the boys had gone after him and brought him home again—and that this might be just the beginning.
She pulled open the front door and ran down the porch steps in her housecoat, calling, “Is everything all right?”
Her obvious concern made Harold feel briefly sorry for going out without telling her first, for not leaving a note at least. Now that he’d committed himself, he wondered at his own audacity. Was having the TV on at dinner time worth the trouble it was going to cause him with Audrey? He decided that now that he’d come this far, bravado was what was needed. He’d never tried bravado before himself, but he’d seen it work often enough for others.
“You’ll never guess,” he said, with a stab at a happy smile, “what the boys got me for my birthday.” This was pure improvisation, and he was delighted that he’d thought of it.
“I have no idea,” Audrey said cautiously.
John opened the trunk and hefted up the box and carried it across the lawn and up the porch steps where the porch light fell on it on his way inside.
Audrey saw the side of the box and said, “We have a TV.”
Harold and Dylan walked past her and John put the box down on the living room floor and they all gathered around and looked down at it.
“This one’s for the kitchen,” Harold said, brazening it out.
“Isn’t that great?”
• • •
HAROLD COULDN’T SLEEP. His tinnitus was bothering him—an annoying, electrical hum inside his head that often plagued him these days. When it was quiet like this, the whole house asleep, the hum in his head got very loud.
Also, he was afraid. He sensed spirits crowding in on him, imagined them creeping forward on little cat feet and he was afraid that they’d start to whisper, and laugh, and possibly start throwing things. He remembered sounds like these, and table legs thumping against hardwood floors, doors slamming, china smashing, the accelerated beating of his own heart.
Audrey was sleeping beside him, and although she was his wife of twenty years, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, she was not sharing in the electrical hum or the restlessness of the disembodied either. He wanted to shake her awake and use her as a human shield, but what would he say? Besides, she was already mad at him—she’d barely spoken to him since he’d brought the TV home tonight.
He flicked on his bedside table lamp and lay rigid against the pillows. He lay stiffly like this until he eventually fell asleep, and as he was drifting off he felt the lightest brush of a kiss against his forehead, like when he was a boy in Cabbagetown.
He slept, and dreamed about Tom.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, Audrey sipped her coffee and fretted about Harold’s increasing unpredictability. One minute he was curled in the fetal position, looking like he’d never get out of bed, and the next he was all jaunty about a new TV. She didn’t really believe the TV was the boys’ idea, either. But what could she do? They’d obviously ganged up on her. Now, apparently, they were going to have the TV on at mealtimes. This was the last straw—the one that convinced Audrey that the whole family was going straight to hell. And she was the one in charge, she felt responsible. If she didn’t take care of their moral development, who would? As concerned as she was about Harold’s depressed state, as much as she wanted him to be happier, she asked herself if she should put her foot down about the TV.
She wondered how other women did it. She wondered how you could put everything you had into your family and still have anything left of yourself. She wondered if love was enough, or if something else was necessary in order for your kids to turn out. Luck, maybe. Or genetics.
What would it be like, Audrey asked herself, to put on different clothes every day and go to work, where people saw you as someone who did a particular job, rather than as a mother and a wife?
Audrey thought she might be becoming a little depressed herself. She didn’t want to do the laundry, couldn’t summon up the energy to even empty the dishwasher. She didn’t want to think about what to make for supper. She didn’t want to do anything. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table and thought about Tom.
Tom had made her feel like anything could happen, at a time in her life when she could no longer imagine anything happening to her. Tom made things happen. He charged through life making things happen. She was so accustomed to seeing him this way that when he actually made a pass at her, she saw it as just another example of Tom making things happen. At least, this was how she looked at it after three drinks with him in the middle of the afternoon at the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza Hotel.
He’d asked her to meet him there, one of his favourite spots.
“You’ve got to get Harold to take more risks,” he said. “He won’t listen to me—I’ve tried.”
Audrey knew that Tom was making a great deal of money on the markets—at least that’s what he told her—and that he was successful, smart, and could be trusted.
“You and Harold should invest,” he said, persuasively. He took another sip of his drink and said, looking at her, “You could be rich.”
And the way he said this, and the way he looked at her when he said it, made her believe that not only could she be rich, but also that if she were rich, she herself would be fascinating. The world would be her oyster. She could do anything, go anywhere.
He smiled, finished his drink, and added, “Like me.”
For a girl who’d grown up on the outskirts of a small Ontario town, the oldest child of small-minded parents, it was the ultimate fantasy. She’d finished her drink too, and there was something so heady about being alone with Tom, being the sole focus for all that charisma, all that confidence and unrestrained optimism, that it quite undid her. And three drinks in the middle of the afternoon were too many, but hindsight was always 20/20.
“Come,” he said, dispatching the bill and taking her arm when she stumbled slightly.
He took her to the Four Seasons Hotel next door. She’d never been in a hotel so grand, never been with such a man of the world. It was electric; it was like living in a movie for an afternoon. The sex wasn’t even the most exciting part.
He spirited her away to a suite and ordered strawberries and champagne from room service. He fed her strawberries and slowly undressed her on the king-sized bed, describing for her the light in Tuscany in the late afternoon, the saltiness of ripe olives on the tongue, the view from the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. She was down to her bra and panties, and she wasn’t even questioning what she was doing, what with the champagne and Tom’s equally intoxicating accounts of twisted corridors and romantic bridges in Venice. Her brassiere came off while he was whispering to her about the treasures in the Musée d’Orsay; her panties were lost in a description of the Château de Chenonceau, how its arches span the River Cher, how it looked at sunrise, with the mist rising off the water.
“You could have all that too, Audrey,” he said to her afterward, leaning on one elbow, caressing her cheek. “Talk to Harold.”
She’d gone home feeling guilty but energized, thinking not about a life with Tom, but of the possibility of a grander, more exciting life with Harold.
This had happened in the late 1980s, and Tom had been trying to talk them into buying Microsoft for their own good. They hadn’t— perhaps partly because Audrey wasn’t so sure Tom could be trusted after he’d taken her to the Four Seasons Hotel, but mostly because Harold couldn’t be nudged out of his habitual caution—but Tom had invested heavily, and had no doubt laughed all the way to his bank in the Cayman Islands. Audrey had almost fainted when she’d seen recently, in a short clip on the TV news, that Microsoft stock had increased in value over 7,000 per cent since the late eighties.
They could have been rich.
But there was something Audrey found far more demoralizing than having lost out on potential wealth, and that was the possibility of Harold losing his mind.
As a teenager, growing up near that small town, Audrey had worked summers and weekends in the local old-age home, bringing trolleys of weak tea and packaged biscuits around the wards to the elderly and infirm who’d been sent there by families too overwhelmed to care for them.
She’d hated it. It was only the fact that it paid relatively well and she was saving for university—she was desperate to go away to university—that made her stick with it. It wasn’t the smell, or the brown polyester uniform and the ugly shoes she had to wear—it was that the nurses seemed pitiless, inured to the suffering of those in their care, especially to the ones—and there seemed to be lots of them—with dementia. The nurses spoke to them and scolded them as if they were naughty children, while Audrey watched in silent, cowed disbelief. When the nurses weren’t there, Audrey spoke to the inmates, who sat around all day in wheelchairs, as if they still had all their faculties—whether they did or not. She poured their tea, wiped up their drool, buttoned their sweaters.
If Harold was losing his mind, Audrey told herself, he wasn’t going anywhere.
But she wondered whether—if she’d worked there for years and years—she would have been like the nurses. The thought terrified her.
Audrey finished her coffee and forced herself to get up and go downstairs and sit at the computer. She pulled up the website of the company she’d decided to use for the paternity test and reviewed the details one more time.
&n
bsp; The test was quite simple; all she needed was some strands of hair from Dylan and some from Harold—four to seven strands from each, with the roots attached. She couldn’t do the mouth swab, obviously, without them knowing about it. She didn’t think she’d have any trouble procuring the hairs. Good thing she didn’t need any from Tom. The test was accurate to 99.99 per cent, which was good enough for her.
Audrey got pulled into the computer and was surprised when she read that an estimated one in ten children is not fathered by the man who thinks he is their father. She’d had no idea! She read with raised eyebrows about women whose various children, on DNA testing, showed a number of different fathers. Modern science had now made all this possible.
She ordered the home testing kit by phone, opting for discreet shipping. She used her own credit card. She balked a little at the cost—but thanks to the financial mess they were in, Harold would probably never even notice that she’d spent the money.
• • •
DYLAN WAS RESOURCEFUL, and soon found someone willing to look the other way. The Adam Fox Agency didn’t have a glamorous office like Dylan had imagined, but at least this guy could get him auditions, no questions asked. What, exactly, they’d do about signing a contract when the time came, the agent didn’t say, other than that they would cross that bridge when they got to it.
Adam Fox had even sent Dylan to a photographer he knew to have some photos done—a photographer who was willing to work on credit. All Dylan had had to pay up front was a hundred bucks.
Dylan was sure that once he got his big break his parents would come around, and then he could ditch the Adam Fox Agency, sign with the big leagues, and never look back. In the meantime, it was all about perfecting his craft.
In his bedroom, Dylan had switched his desk and his dresser around, so that when he sat on the side of his bed he could see himself in the dresser mirror. Today, for his first exercise, he was doing his dad, sitting in his La-Z-Boy. He leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs out on the bed in front of him, bending his knees and propping a pillow underneath his lower legs to simulate the La-Z-Boy’s reclining action. Once he was in position with his props, Dylan tried to imagine himself as a depressed, middle-aged man. His shoulders sagged, a bleak look came into his eyes—they even felt a little puffy and hooded if he creased his brow just right. He could actually feel his spine curving, his muscle mass shrinking; he felt himself go flabby. After a few minutes, he glanced at himself in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, and thought that he’d nailed his dad pretty well.