The damages, p.23
The Damages, page 23
* * *
—
The walk to Lara Yang Projects takes less than an hour, but I didn’t account for Toronto’s clinging humidity, so by the time I get there, my feet are sliding inside my sweaty flats, and my bangs, which I’d just found a cute way to style, are a clumped mess. I am wearing a dress for the first time since the winter because I’m going to Val’s after, and I still have that need to impress her.
On the outside, Lara Yang Projects is fashionably nondescript: a squat mushroom building that reminds me of a portable classroom. The windowless front door is pulled shut, and a masking tape arrow points the way around to the back. I follow the arrow and find myself in front of open barn doors that reveal a gleaming white space. A woman in black denim overalls with a lacy black bra underneath sits at a table and looks up at me without interest as I enter the space. I don’t know how old Lara Yang should be, but this woman seems too young.
I hesitate for a moment under the relief of an enormous ceiling fan before entering room B, which advertises Sue’s show with an expensive-looking glass sign.
Fewer than a dozen prints line the walls, all fairly large. I glimpse the photo of Lukas right away, but I don’t let myself really look yet. I’m not ready. There are quotes stencilled across the four walls, and I make myself read them first: We were eighteen and insouciant/ There is nothing more electric than the edge of danger/ We try to freeze what we can’t keep/ It was not a war, but it looked like one—and is it not a kind of assault, growing up?
Assault, I think. What a word choice.
Once, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lukas accused me of reading too much and looking at the actual art too little. I figured that reading first was respectful, the way it is with birthday cards. “Look first,” he said. “If you’re moved to read after that, go ahead, but you’re not here to read. That’s not what the artist wants from you.” He really could say the most pretentious things.
I start the show in order, beginning with the wall on my right, as if I’ll lose something by jumping too quickly to the main event. First, there’s a picture that I remember Sue taking: a bagged newspaper, trapped under a lumpy shellack of ice. The date, January 5, 1998, is just visible. This one is clearly intended to set the scene. Next to it, there’s a picture of a guy and girl pushing a car down the middle of an icy street. I don’t recognize them, but they look like generic Regis kids. The girl wears a short skirt and knee-high black boots—why did we call them bitch boots?—stretching over her broad calves. Her Regis jacket is creeping up her back, revealing a patch of exposed skin.
On the next wall, the blow job girl comes into focus for me as Courtney. That tiny, pretty face. At a glance, she looks like a child kneeling in prayer against a sparkling white background, something you’d see on a First Communion card. In the next photo, a guy toboggans down a roof on a mattress.
On Lukas’s wall, the three photos are arranged right next to one another, almost like a triptych. In the first image, two girls in pyjamas sit opposite each other on the bed in a candlelit dorm room. They are sharing a licorice whip—each has one end in her mouth, very Lady and the Tramp. I can’t place the room, but it has a familiar feel: heart-shaped pillow, beer cans on the floor, a Pulp Fiction poster above the bed. But the next photo, I can place. A red-brick house, stalactites of ice dripping from a balcony, a hand-scrawled sign on the door: Cold Beer, Dark Rooms, Hot Girls.
And then there’s Lukas.
The photo is artfully grainy, but at this scale, which is at least four feet tall and three feet wide, Lukas is unmistakably himself and unsettlingly young. Young enough to do something stupid, something harmful. I look back over the wall of photos. Was this how the pictures were arranged when Megan saw the show? In this configuration, in this company, is it possible for a young man in a towel not to become sexualized?
I study the image for clues. I want to know what day it was taken. The day the boys moved in? The night we went out to the bar? Sometime after the incident? The photo makes you wonder what he was thinking, staring out that window. Is that what makes it good art?
I move on. The final wall has three smaller photos, black-and-white group shots, kids performing for the camera. A line of girls in high heels on the ice; three guys in Regis jackets pissing onto a frozen fire hydrant. Where was I when she took these photos? We were still friends then, so why wasn’t I there?
But the third photo feels instantly familiar. I move in closer, but it’s not what I thought it was. It’s the upper balcony of the Old Hick, and there are the washroom doors where I stood to kiss Adam, but it’s not the photo from the Ragged Regis. The focus is on three people I don’t know, sitting on a bench. A guy on one end looks directly at the camera, poking his tongue through two fingers. A girl leans into him, laughing, her hand on his thigh. About a foot away, very much apart from them, another girl sits with her head in her hands, an oversized Regis jacket draped over her shoulders.
It could be Megan, but it could also be anyone. It’s hard to tell what the girl is wearing under the jacket, and in black and white, her hair just looks sweaty, not necessarily blond. A tableau like this was hardly extraordinary for Regis—there were probably a dozen girls passed out at the Old Hick that night, and who even knows if it’s from that night. It’s more likely to be someone we didn’t know. Mostly, I just can’t see Sue taking this sort of photo of Megan. If it were me on that bench, she might have snapped it to make fun of me later. But Megan was a different story. Megan never acted like a big shot who could hold her liquor, and it would have felt cruel, heartless to take a photo of her in this state. Sue would have tried to help Megan if she found her like this. She did help Megan.
I look back around the room. Am I disappointed that there are no photos of me? I had shared in these moments, too. Before Megan went missing, they were some of the happiest days of my life. At minimum, I suppose I had hoped to feel the sort of generic, sentimental pull that made these photos popular in the first place: We try to freeze what we can’t keep. But I feel freshly severed from the Regis experience. My being there hadn’t mattered.
The other thing I feel is something akin to jealousy. While we were getting wasted, was Sue finding her legs on that ice? Did she already know what she was doing, who she would one day become? In time, Sue and Lukas both became famous. As for Megan, she started a nonprofit and did something meaningful and brave. What about me? The people captured on the walls here moved on and did things. For them, the ice melted, but I’m still frozen. Frozen in a place that doesn’t care that I was there.
12
In my twenties, I imagined a future home on a street exactly like Val’s: enormous trees, Edwardians with original stained-glass windows and abundant gardens, a mix of trendy cafés and erotica shops around the block. My Orange County cul-de-sac is more or less its antithesis.
Per Val’s instruction, I let myself in through the back gate and onto her deck. She has already set out two wineglasses; two small bottles of Perrier; and two separate plates of olives, cheese and those expensive crackers with seeds and currants.
I hear Val’s voice call down from a window upstairs. “You’re here, you’re here!” A minute later, she comes out with a sweaty bottle of white wine. “Are we doing masks? No masks?”
“Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
She doesn’t have one on, doesn’t put one on. I take mine off and wrap it around my wrist.
“I know you need a hug,” she says, sitting across from me. “But can you believe I’m sixty-two? I’m practically a vulnerable population!”
Val looks great. Her cropped skinny jeans and linen blouse are consistent with her deceptively casual style (I know her clothes aren’t cheap after a year and a half of studying her labels). Her hair is long and still healthy-looking despite her almost immediate apology for not having it “done” in months. I was blond like her when I was little, but she stayed blond into adulthood, whereas my hair went mousy somewhere in puberty. I notice that I am greyer than Val.
At first, Val and I avoid discussing Lukas head-on. I bring her up to speed on the B-story in my life: how Mom’s injury is healing, the claustrophobia of Swallows’ Point. “She’s not easy,” I say. I once avoided mentioning Mom around Val, like it would hit a nerve with her, but now that seems silly.
“It must be awful,” she says.
Awful feels like too much. “It’s fine. I have a close friend next door, so there’s a release valve.” I realize that I’m proud to be dropping this. Maybe I want Val specifically to know I have a close friend. But I also like saying it because it’s true.
“Lucky,” Val says. “My friends turned out to be cautious to a fault. I’ve seen about three people since March.” In my mind, Val is always the popular girl; it’s hard to picture her alone too long.
I tell Val about the small catering jobs I’m doing around Felsbridge. Val runs her own art consulting business, so I figure she can appreciate my vague entrepreneurship, maybe even offer advice.
“You went to baking school or something?”
“Yeah, in France.”
“Right. Your Paris chapter.” Is it weird not to be able to read your sister’s tone?
I ask Val about her kids. She tells me that Richie, her youngest, is out in Australia. He was running rafting tours in Cairns, though the operation is now closed indefinitely. “He’s supposed to come home for the wedding at the end of the summer, but who knows?” Val pauses, studies my face. “Julia is getting married, did anyone tell you?”
“No!” Who exactly would “anyone” be? I try to think of how old Julia is now, somewhere in her late twenties.
“Her fiancé’s an ER doctor.”
“Wow.”
“Thirty-eight. The age gap worried me at first, but now I don’t notice it. Or maybe Julia has matured being with Taryn.”
Taryn. Was I supposed to know that Julia was gay? Would Julia say queer? Or could Taryn be a man’s name? “Is the wedding definitely happening with everything going on?”
“Seems to be. Taryn’s pregnant. She has a timeline she wants to stick with, so.” Val shrugs. “It’s going to be very small, which is exactly how they would have wanted it anyway, but now covid’s given them every excuse.”
I tell her congratulations.
“Very small,” she says again, as though suddenly realizing that I might take offence at not being invited. I do feel a little hurt, but I know it’s not fair. The last time I saw Julia was ten years ago at a busy brunch place when I happened to be in town. Benji, who had just turned one, was screaming because he wanted my phone, and I was so self-conscious about how my parenting skills were being judged that I forgot to ask her anything about her life. I lean back in my chair to show how chill I am about not being invited.
“You’re going to be a great aunt!” Val lifts her wineglass, then takes a sip. “I was so worried that divorce would fuck them up, but both my kids seem pretty grounded on relationship stuff. I say this in case you’re worried about Benji,” she says. “Honestly, if I could go back to the point you’re at now, what I’d change is all the worrying I did.” Did she think I was there for advice? Maybe I was. “Our situations aren’t identical, I get that,” she says. “But whatever you’re doing for your kid is good enough. You’ve always been good with kids. Richie and Julia were wild about you when you used to watch them. Remember how Julia clung to you? I’d get so jealous.” She laughs. “You were young, so energetic. I was exhausted. I was a wreck. We couldn’t have gotten through that time without you.”
This is genuinely a surprise. It never occurred to me that I could make Val jealous. I want to know more, but asking for details feels desperate. Instead, I say, “I didn’t feel energetic.”
“It was a rough time for you.”
“A little.”
“And now? Now how are you doing? You look terrific. I mean, you’ve always been cute, but those bangs are great.”
“Now I’m definitely the one who’s exhausted.”
Val looks at me calmly enough, but I sense the roiling curiosity below the surface. “How is Benji taking this? What’s he now? Twelve?”
“Eleven. I think he’s doing all right.” Though I’ve certainly lost confidence making that call.
“Richie didn’t talk to me at that age. He talked to Julia occasionally, so I still got to find things out. Do you know he lost his virginity at fourteen?” She throws an arm over the back of her seat. “Jesus, right? So I gave Julia a handful of condoms and told her to fill the bathroom cabinets.” She smiles at the memory, and I sense that she loves this about herself. Her liberal parenting. I also wonder if she had a glass or two of wine before I arrived.
“Julia and Richie were lucky to have each other,” I say. “I envied them that.”
Val looks down at her glass, swirls the pale wine. “I wasn’t a great sister, I know.”
“Oh, that wasn’t what I was—”
“I feel guilty about that.”
I shake my head. “Oh God, don’t. It was a weird situation for you. Plus, you were much older.” Then I add, “I mean, it doesn’t feel that way now.”
“I was curious about you,” Val says. “You weren’t the one I had a problem with. But honestly, I do feel badly. I couldn’t stand your mother. Jesus, I can’t even tell you. I actually shouldn’t, she is your mother.”
“It’s fine, it’s understandable.” But I want her to go on. I am lightheaded, giddy. I have wanted to talk like this with her my whole life.
“I was awful to her. Poor thing. And God, she was young! Not even ten years older than me.” I don’t need Val to do that math for me; I’ve considered the delta many times.
“Do you ever think about what happened there? Dad was this fortysomething, and she was his student? That would definitely raise some eyebrows now,” I say.
Val tops up her wineglass. “Different times. But I don’t blame your mom for what happened. If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else. It’s the kind of guy he was.” She extends the wine bottle and fills my glass. “I used to swear up and down that I wouldn’t marry a cheater, but then look what happened!”
I never officially knew that her ex cheated.
“Happens to the best of us,” I say, raising my glass.
“Your mom powered through it, though. It’s not the life anyone would choose.”
I blink, feeling a burn of shame, of stupidity. Is Val saying that my dad cheated on Mom also? Is this something I should have known?
But it’s not necessarily true. Maybe it’s just something Val needs to believe: that Dad’s behaviour was part of a pattern. Maybe that blunts the sting of what happened to her family.
“I’m sorry, did you not know about Dad?” Val takes in a breath and shakes her head like she’s said too much, but I don’t get the sense she is sorry. I think that telling me is satisfying something inside her.
“I never really considered it,” I say.
“I actually ran into him once with some girl at a supper club in the ’90s,” Val says. “Incidentally, I was on a date with a much older guy myself. Between our two tables, you’d think it was take-your-grandpa-to-dinner day.”
“But just seeing him there, does that necessarily mean—”
Val gives me a pursed look as if she’s trying to gauge my naïveté.
“And you think my mom knew?”
“Your mother? My God, yes, she knew.” How did Val know this? And what was the implication here, what was I supposed to automatically understand about my mother? That she was hard-hearted? A martyr? A gold digger? Val’s mother, Alice, is so much clearer in my mind than my own.
“Remember all the crying women at his funeral?” she says.
There were many weeping women at Dad’s funeral, but I figured that was normal for a funeral—and he knew a lot of people. The woman I watched was Alice; it was hard not to be curious. She sat very still, stared straight ahead.
“How is your mom?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Bored as a teenager. She’s still in the old house, hasn’t been outside since March.”
Alice Martindale would be in her nineties by now. She and Dad married in 1952, after they graduated from architecture school. She was ultimately more famous than Dad, and there is an award at U of T in her name. During my time off from university, Dad took me to a retrospective of her work, which now strikes me as a little odd, but she’d been friendly to me there. It was the only time I really met her, but I’d spied on her—or tried to—for a while in elementary school. Her house backed onto a ravine that we often ran through during gym class. She had an Airedale who barked, but I always slowed down for as long as I could, trying to catch a glimpse of the life inside. Looking at that house, which had also once been Dad’s, I had the feeling that I was looking at the true centre of his life. Like I could learn something from it. Around the time I was spying on Alice, I saw a birthday card on Dad’s desk that he’d written to Val before her thirty-third birthday. It said: “Lord, 33! To me, you will always be ten, your artwork stretching across our kitchen table, your whole life stretching ahead of you.” There was so much wistfulness there. Our kitchen table. Alice, Val—these were the players in his life’s main act, I thought. Mom and I were just something added later to spice up the ending.
“So you’re seeing Lukas’s lawyer tomorrow?” Val says.
“Not his lawyer, actually. Hers.” Val’s eyes open wide. “I’m trying to be cooperative.”
“But wait—did he do it?” She whispers this.
“I don’t know.”
“But you want to know the truth.”
“I guess I do,” I say. And I’m struck by the simplicity of that.
“And if he did it?”
“It would be awful, but at least I’d know what to think. I could give Benji some real answers. It’s all so murky right now.”
—
The walk to Lara Yang Projects takes less than an hour, but I didn’t account for Toronto’s clinging humidity, so by the time I get there, my feet are sliding inside my sweaty flats, and my bangs, which I’d just found a cute way to style, are a clumped mess. I am wearing a dress for the first time since the winter because I’m going to Val’s after, and I still have that need to impress her.
On the outside, Lara Yang Projects is fashionably nondescript: a squat mushroom building that reminds me of a portable classroom. The windowless front door is pulled shut, and a masking tape arrow points the way around to the back. I follow the arrow and find myself in front of open barn doors that reveal a gleaming white space. A woman in black denim overalls with a lacy black bra underneath sits at a table and looks up at me without interest as I enter the space. I don’t know how old Lara Yang should be, but this woman seems too young.
I hesitate for a moment under the relief of an enormous ceiling fan before entering room B, which advertises Sue’s show with an expensive-looking glass sign.
Fewer than a dozen prints line the walls, all fairly large. I glimpse the photo of Lukas right away, but I don’t let myself really look yet. I’m not ready. There are quotes stencilled across the four walls, and I make myself read them first: We were eighteen and insouciant/ There is nothing more electric than the edge of danger/ We try to freeze what we can’t keep/ It was not a war, but it looked like one—and is it not a kind of assault, growing up?
Assault, I think. What a word choice.
Once, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lukas accused me of reading too much and looking at the actual art too little. I figured that reading first was respectful, the way it is with birthday cards. “Look first,” he said. “If you’re moved to read after that, go ahead, but you’re not here to read. That’s not what the artist wants from you.” He really could say the most pretentious things.
I start the show in order, beginning with the wall on my right, as if I’ll lose something by jumping too quickly to the main event. First, there’s a picture that I remember Sue taking: a bagged newspaper, trapped under a lumpy shellack of ice. The date, January 5, 1998, is just visible. This one is clearly intended to set the scene. Next to it, there’s a picture of a guy and girl pushing a car down the middle of an icy street. I don’t recognize them, but they look like generic Regis kids. The girl wears a short skirt and knee-high black boots—why did we call them bitch boots?—stretching over her broad calves. Her Regis jacket is creeping up her back, revealing a patch of exposed skin.
On the next wall, the blow job girl comes into focus for me as Courtney. That tiny, pretty face. At a glance, she looks like a child kneeling in prayer against a sparkling white background, something you’d see on a First Communion card. In the next photo, a guy toboggans down a roof on a mattress.
On Lukas’s wall, the three photos are arranged right next to one another, almost like a triptych. In the first image, two girls in pyjamas sit opposite each other on the bed in a candlelit dorm room. They are sharing a licorice whip—each has one end in her mouth, very Lady and the Tramp. I can’t place the room, but it has a familiar feel: heart-shaped pillow, beer cans on the floor, a Pulp Fiction poster above the bed. But the next photo, I can place. A red-brick house, stalactites of ice dripping from a balcony, a hand-scrawled sign on the door: Cold Beer, Dark Rooms, Hot Girls.
And then there’s Lukas.
The photo is artfully grainy, but at this scale, which is at least four feet tall and three feet wide, Lukas is unmistakably himself and unsettlingly young. Young enough to do something stupid, something harmful. I look back over the wall of photos. Was this how the pictures were arranged when Megan saw the show? In this configuration, in this company, is it possible for a young man in a towel not to become sexualized?
I study the image for clues. I want to know what day it was taken. The day the boys moved in? The night we went out to the bar? Sometime after the incident? The photo makes you wonder what he was thinking, staring out that window. Is that what makes it good art?
I move on. The final wall has three smaller photos, black-and-white group shots, kids performing for the camera. A line of girls in high heels on the ice; three guys in Regis jackets pissing onto a frozen fire hydrant. Where was I when she took these photos? We were still friends then, so why wasn’t I there?
But the third photo feels instantly familiar. I move in closer, but it’s not what I thought it was. It’s the upper balcony of the Old Hick, and there are the washroom doors where I stood to kiss Adam, but it’s not the photo from the Ragged Regis. The focus is on three people I don’t know, sitting on a bench. A guy on one end looks directly at the camera, poking his tongue through two fingers. A girl leans into him, laughing, her hand on his thigh. About a foot away, very much apart from them, another girl sits with her head in her hands, an oversized Regis jacket draped over her shoulders.
It could be Megan, but it could also be anyone. It’s hard to tell what the girl is wearing under the jacket, and in black and white, her hair just looks sweaty, not necessarily blond. A tableau like this was hardly extraordinary for Regis—there were probably a dozen girls passed out at the Old Hick that night, and who even knows if it’s from that night. It’s more likely to be someone we didn’t know. Mostly, I just can’t see Sue taking this sort of photo of Megan. If it were me on that bench, she might have snapped it to make fun of me later. But Megan was a different story. Megan never acted like a big shot who could hold her liquor, and it would have felt cruel, heartless to take a photo of her in this state. Sue would have tried to help Megan if she found her like this. She did help Megan.
I look back around the room. Am I disappointed that there are no photos of me? I had shared in these moments, too. Before Megan went missing, they were some of the happiest days of my life. At minimum, I suppose I had hoped to feel the sort of generic, sentimental pull that made these photos popular in the first place: We try to freeze what we can’t keep. But I feel freshly severed from the Regis experience. My being there hadn’t mattered.
The other thing I feel is something akin to jealousy. While we were getting wasted, was Sue finding her legs on that ice? Did she already know what she was doing, who she would one day become? In time, Sue and Lukas both became famous. As for Megan, she started a nonprofit and did something meaningful and brave. What about me? The people captured on the walls here moved on and did things. For them, the ice melted, but I’m still frozen. Frozen in a place that doesn’t care that I was there.
12
In my twenties, I imagined a future home on a street exactly like Val’s: enormous trees, Edwardians with original stained-glass windows and abundant gardens, a mix of trendy cafés and erotica shops around the block. My Orange County cul-de-sac is more or less its antithesis.
Per Val’s instruction, I let myself in through the back gate and onto her deck. She has already set out two wineglasses; two small bottles of Perrier; and two separate plates of olives, cheese and those expensive crackers with seeds and currants.
I hear Val’s voice call down from a window upstairs. “You’re here, you’re here!” A minute later, she comes out with a sweaty bottle of white wine. “Are we doing masks? No masks?”
“Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
She doesn’t have one on, doesn’t put one on. I take mine off and wrap it around my wrist.
“I know you need a hug,” she says, sitting across from me. “But can you believe I’m sixty-two? I’m practically a vulnerable population!”
Val looks great. Her cropped skinny jeans and linen blouse are consistent with her deceptively casual style (I know her clothes aren’t cheap after a year and a half of studying her labels). Her hair is long and still healthy-looking despite her almost immediate apology for not having it “done” in months. I was blond like her when I was little, but she stayed blond into adulthood, whereas my hair went mousy somewhere in puberty. I notice that I am greyer than Val.
At first, Val and I avoid discussing Lukas head-on. I bring her up to speed on the B-story in my life: how Mom’s injury is healing, the claustrophobia of Swallows’ Point. “She’s not easy,” I say. I once avoided mentioning Mom around Val, like it would hit a nerve with her, but now that seems silly.
“It must be awful,” she says.
Awful feels like too much. “It’s fine. I have a close friend next door, so there’s a release valve.” I realize that I’m proud to be dropping this. Maybe I want Val specifically to know I have a close friend. But I also like saying it because it’s true.
“Lucky,” Val says. “My friends turned out to be cautious to a fault. I’ve seen about three people since March.” In my mind, Val is always the popular girl; it’s hard to picture her alone too long.
I tell Val about the small catering jobs I’m doing around Felsbridge. Val runs her own art consulting business, so I figure she can appreciate my vague entrepreneurship, maybe even offer advice.
“You went to baking school or something?”
“Yeah, in France.”
“Right. Your Paris chapter.” Is it weird not to be able to read your sister’s tone?
I ask Val about her kids. She tells me that Richie, her youngest, is out in Australia. He was running rafting tours in Cairns, though the operation is now closed indefinitely. “He’s supposed to come home for the wedding at the end of the summer, but who knows?” Val pauses, studies my face. “Julia is getting married, did anyone tell you?”
“No!” Who exactly would “anyone” be? I try to think of how old Julia is now, somewhere in her late twenties.
“Her fiancé’s an ER doctor.”
“Wow.”
“Thirty-eight. The age gap worried me at first, but now I don’t notice it. Or maybe Julia has matured being with Taryn.”
Taryn. Was I supposed to know that Julia was gay? Would Julia say queer? Or could Taryn be a man’s name? “Is the wedding definitely happening with everything going on?”
“Seems to be. Taryn’s pregnant. She has a timeline she wants to stick with, so.” Val shrugs. “It’s going to be very small, which is exactly how they would have wanted it anyway, but now covid’s given them every excuse.”
I tell her congratulations.
“Very small,” she says again, as though suddenly realizing that I might take offence at not being invited. I do feel a little hurt, but I know it’s not fair. The last time I saw Julia was ten years ago at a busy brunch place when I happened to be in town. Benji, who had just turned one, was screaming because he wanted my phone, and I was so self-conscious about how my parenting skills were being judged that I forgot to ask her anything about her life. I lean back in my chair to show how chill I am about not being invited.
“You’re going to be a great aunt!” Val lifts her wineglass, then takes a sip. “I was so worried that divorce would fuck them up, but both my kids seem pretty grounded on relationship stuff. I say this in case you’re worried about Benji,” she says. “Honestly, if I could go back to the point you’re at now, what I’d change is all the worrying I did.” Did she think I was there for advice? Maybe I was. “Our situations aren’t identical, I get that,” she says. “But whatever you’re doing for your kid is good enough. You’ve always been good with kids. Richie and Julia were wild about you when you used to watch them. Remember how Julia clung to you? I’d get so jealous.” She laughs. “You were young, so energetic. I was exhausted. I was a wreck. We couldn’t have gotten through that time without you.”
This is genuinely a surprise. It never occurred to me that I could make Val jealous. I want to know more, but asking for details feels desperate. Instead, I say, “I didn’t feel energetic.”
“It was a rough time for you.”
“A little.”
“And now? Now how are you doing? You look terrific. I mean, you’ve always been cute, but those bangs are great.”
“Now I’m definitely the one who’s exhausted.”
Val looks at me calmly enough, but I sense the roiling curiosity below the surface. “How is Benji taking this? What’s he now? Twelve?”
“Eleven. I think he’s doing all right.” Though I’ve certainly lost confidence making that call.
“Richie didn’t talk to me at that age. He talked to Julia occasionally, so I still got to find things out. Do you know he lost his virginity at fourteen?” She throws an arm over the back of her seat. “Jesus, right? So I gave Julia a handful of condoms and told her to fill the bathroom cabinets.” She smiles at the memory, and I sense that she loves this about herself. Her liberal parenting. I also wonder if she had a glass or two of wine before I arrived.
“Julia and Richie were lucky to have each other,” I say. “I envied them that.”
Val looks down at her glass, swirls the pale wine. “I wasn’t a great sister, I know.”
“Oh, that wasn’t what I was—”
“I feel guilty about that.”
I shake my head. “Oh God, don’t. It was a weird situation for you. Plus, you were much older.” Then I add, “I mean, it doesn’t feel that way now.”
“I was curious about you,” Val says. “You weren’t the one I had a problem with. But honestly, I do feel badly. I couldn’t stand your mother. Jesus, I can’t even tell you. I actually shouldn’t, she is your mother.”
“It’s fine, it’s understandable.” But I want her to go on. I am lightheaded, giddy. I have wanted to talk like this with her my whole life.
“I was awful to her. Poor thing. And God, she was young! Not even ten years older than me.” I don’t need Val to do that math for me; I’ve considered the delta many times.
“Do you ever think about what happened there? Dad was this fortysomething, and she was his student? That would definitely raise some eyebrows now,” I say.
Val tops up her wineglass. “Different times. But I don’t blame your mom for what happened. If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else. It’s the kind of guy he was.” She extends the wine bottle and fills my glass. “I used to swear up and down that I wouldn’t marry a cheater, but then look what happened!”
I never officially knew that her ex cheated.
“Happens to the best of us,” I say, raising my glass.
“Your mom powered through it, though. It’s not the life anyone would choose.”
I blink, feeling a burn of shame, of stupidity. Is Val saying that my dad cheated on Mom also? Is this something I should have known?
But it’s not necessarily true. Maybe it’s just something Val needs to believe: that Dad’s behaviour was part of a pattern. Maybe that blunts the sting of what happened to her family.
“I’m sorry, did you not know about Dad?” Val takes in a breath and shakes her head like she’s said too much, but I don’t get the sense she is sorry. I think that telling me is satisfying something inside her.
“I never really considered it,” I say.
“I actually ran into him once with some girl at a supper club in the ’90s,” Val says. “Incidentally, I was on a date with a much older guy myself. Between our two tables, you’d think it was take-your-grandpa-to-dinner day.”
“But just seeing him there, does that necessarily mean—”
Val gives me a pursed look as if she’s trying to gauge my naïveté.
“And you think my mom knew?”
“Your mother? My God, yes, she knew.” How did Val know this? And what was the implication here, what was I supposed to automatically understand about my mother? That she was hard-hearted? A martyr? A gold digger? Val’s mother, Alice, is so much clearer in my mind than my own.
“Remember all the crying women at his funeral?” she says.
There were many weeping women at Dad’s funeral, but I figured that was normal for a funeral—and he knew a lot of people. The woman I watched was Alice; it was hard not to be curious. She sat very still, stared straight ahead.
“How is your mom?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Bored as a teenager. She’s still in the old house, hasn’t been outside since March.”
Alice Martindale would be in her nineties by now. She and Dad married in 1952, after they graduated from architecture school. She was ultimately more famous than Dad, and there is an award at U of T in her name. During my time off from university, Dad took me to a retrospective of her work, which now strikes me as a little odd, but she’d been friendly to me there. It was the only time I really met her, but I’d spied on her—or tried to—for a while in elementary school. Her house backed onto a ravine that we often ran through during gym class. She had an Airedale who barked, but I always slowed down for as long as I could, trying to catch a glimpse of the life inside. Looking at that house, which had also once been Dad’s, I had the feeling that I was looking at the true centre of his life. Like I could learn something from it. Around the time I was spying on Alice, I saw a birthday card on Dad’s desk that he’d written to Val before her thirty-third birthday. It said: “Lord, 33! To me, you will always be ten, your artwork stretching across our kitchen table, your whole life stretching ahead of you.” There was so much wistfulness there. Our kitchen table. Alice, Val—these were the players in his life’s main act, I thought. Mom and I were just something added later to spice up the ending.
“So you’re seeing Lukas’s lawyer tomorrow?” Val says.
“Not his lawyer, actually. Hers.” Val’s eyes open wide. “I’m trying to be cooperative.”
“But wait—did he do it?” She whispers this.
“I don’t know.”
“But you want to know the truth.”
“I guess I do,” I say. And I’m struck by the simplicity of that.
“And if he did it?”
“It would be awful, but at least I’d know what to think. I could give Benji some real answers. It’s all so murky right now.”
