J
ump ahead now to 2004, almost twenty years after that night in Jamaica. I sat on the porch with my nineteen-year-old son on a fall evening in Kensington Market in Toronto. His young face wore a look of controlled horror and I dared barely glance at him. A summertime romance, white hot, had come to an unexpected end a few weeks before. First the dreadful premonitions, then panicky, long-distance calls (she went to university in another city), one of which found the young lady in a bar. To his question, “Are you breaking up with me” (how courageous, the nakedness of it!), she replied offhandedly, “Yes.”So there we were, he and I, sitting side by side, staring at the damp street. “You know that thing I was afraid of happening” he said.
I was almost unable to catch my breath. “Yes.”
“Well, it happened,” he said. Someone had informed him by phone. His girlfriend had gone to bed with an old lover. He couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes and he couldn’t stop imagining the things you should never imagine, but always do. You could see it playing out on his pale, childlike features: she does this to him, he does that to her. We’ve all done it but you’d step in front of a car to spare your own son doing it.
“I think she’s making a terrible mistake,” I said, uselessly. In the long silence (puff, puff), I found myself thinking about Natasha and her betrayal of Prince Andrei.
“I’ll never take her back,” my son said.
Then miraculously (but not surprisingly), a few months later, just after Christmas, his girlfriend suffered a change of heart. It started with an emissary (” She really misses you”), then a surprise encounter at a party (” If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to have to kiss you”). Where did she learn to speak like that Had she read War and Peace too
So there we were again, bundled in coats on the porch. Snowflakes, some large, some small, settled indecisively on the front lawn. I knew what he was thinking. Recriminations and brutal quizzes lay just ahead for both of them. “What if she does it again” he said.
“You know what Tolstoy says.”
