A Second Chance Read online

  Friends call to wish me Merry Christmas and ask for news about Adam. These conversations annoy him, as they hold up my work. He doesn’t raise his head from his drawings, but I can tell what he thinks from the ways he furrows his eyebrows. Adam is right; I have to keep working. I keep at it, with the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder.

  Sara calls to ask if I need help, but she knows I can handle it on my own. I’ve always managed the birthday parties and the big dinners.

  In the afternoon, a sore back forces me to lie down on the couch. I don’t know what causes the pain, but it dates back to my childhood. When I stand for too long in a certain position, a terrible ache seizes the left side of my back, near the bottom of my ribcage. The idea of seeing our family doctor about this terrifies me. So far, she has not even managed to figure out the cause of my stomach aches. The specialists have done no better, so I don’t exactly relish the idea of starting again with a different complaint. I suffer from pains nobody can cure, and I just have to accept this. I prefer to keep them to myself.

  One of my friends, who is a doctor, thinks my bones and muscles must have developed unevenly when I was growing up. When the bones grow first, everything’s fine, but if the muscles develop faster and the skeleton is not strong enough to support them, the result can be a bad back and even nausea. I think this must be what happened, for my spine has been slightly bent since I was eleven. Nowadays, I get tired and have trouble walking.

  It may be the weight I’ve gained. I’ve only put on seven pounds since I was in my thirties, but even that makes a difference. I’m not going to diet, though; I’ve always known my looks would change with age.

  My godmother once told me we don’t get fatter; we get bigger. I was young then, but she was a wise woman, and she wanted to prepare me for a terrible autumn ahead. She said, “Look at a young tree and then at an old one – the trunks, the branches, the bark. You see the difference, don’t you? No living creature can stand in the way of age. Trees don’t know about diets; they wear their age beautifully. We should do the same.”

  Mentally, I’ve been ready to grow old ever since I was thirty, but not physically.

  The sense of well-being that suddenly comes over me makes me forget my backache. The house is neat, the saucepans are ready on the counter, the cake is in the oven. I light three scented candles to cover up the kitchen smells. Boiled cabbage is always the worst; it even finds it way into the bedroom.

  Billy is asleep on his pillow. I think he’s eaten too much, and I’m a little worried. George warned me not to give him too much to eat, as he doesn’t know when to stop.

  We settle down in the living room to watch a movie. Adam is lying on his sofa and I on mine. I give him the sheepskin to lay over the cold leather of the couch. I use a wool blanket.

  Billy leaves his pillow and comes over, looking for company. He stands close to my face until I look at him, then takes the small smile that spreads across my face as an invitation to jump up on the sofa and curl up behind me, his muzzle on my thigh.

  Adam looks more handsome than he used to. These days, his hair is always perfectly cut because I take him to the hairdresser every month. The whiskers of his ears and nostrils are regularly clipped, as are his nails; he doesn’t have to put up with my reproaching him about any of that any more. Even his beard is now properly trimmed, and his Adam’s apple and the top of his cheeks scrubbed clean.

  He’s lost weight too, and looks healthier. He looks younger than I do. I don’t know if he knows I dye his hair. He did ask me once what I was doing, and I told him I was treating him for hair loss. When he looked in the mirror afterwards, the first time, the result made him smile.

  He really is handsome. His lips are as rosy and tender as those of a young man. He’s lost the dark rings under his eyes and the nicotine spots on his teeth. Since Sara is our dentist, she does his cleaning twice a year and checks for cavities. Before, it was very difficult to get Adam to a dentist unless he had a toothache.

  Our new hairdresser, a Hungarian woman, plays an important role in this metamorphosis. I’ve given her creative licence to try out fashionable cuts on Adam, and I never question what she does. Ilona is more than a hairdresser; she’s become a friend.

  I discovered her by chance one day when I went to have the battery in my watch changed at a jewelry store next to her salon. She was sitting in the back, filing her nails. I went in and explained Adam’s condition, said I was looking for a very patient person to cut his hair. I also added that Adam hated to be touched, which was why he always used to delay getting a haircut. I wanted to prepare her for the way he might react.

  Ilona cut me off before I was finished, saying that Adam could complain all he wanted and she wouldn’t mind. She would gladly take him on and promised he would end up looking like a movie star.

  One month, she let his bangs grow on the left, the next time on the right. Once, she even shaved his sideburns. This Nazi hairdo didn’t suit him, though, because he has a flat head. Two days later, I went back to Ilona and asked her to change the look, and she did, for free.

  Ilona was born in Hungary, and when she moved to Canada she married a man who said he was a Hungarian born in Transylvania. What’s odd is that he speaks neither Romanian nor Hungarian. He had come to Canada when he was very young, apparently, and his parents had been so keen to assimilate that they refused to pass their heritage onto their children. Ilona didn’t agree with this. She peppered her English liberally with Hungarian words no one else could understand. I didn’t dare ask what language she and her husband used with one another. For some immigrants, language is as sensitive a subject as sex.

  With Adam, she used even more Hungarian, for he didn’t react in any way.“Hercegem. Minden nö szìvét össze fogod törni.”*

  When we first went to her, Ilona would explain what she was planning for Adam’s hair, and I would translate for him. After a bit, though, I insisted she communicate with him directly, with gestures. Or she could say nothing. I wanted to be left alone while she did her work, a few minutes to myself to sip her diluted coffee and flip through her well-thumbed magazines.

  Ilona now talks directly to Adam and doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t understand a word. She’s just pleased to have such a nice, quiet customer. Adam is uncomfortable with her chattiness. A visit to Ilona terrifies him as much as an appointment with the doctor. I’m sure he would prefer another hairdresser, but I feel good here, and it’s close to home.

  On a Wednesday afternoon in late January, I had a phone call from Peter, and I didn’t tell Adam. I was worried the news would bother him.

  It’s only this evening, in front of the TV, that I mention it. “Do you remember Peter?” I ask.

  Adam takes a long time to search deep inside his puzzled memories, but comes out empty-handed. He needs more help.

  “Peter and Lara were our neighbours. In Bucharest, we lived in the same building but on different floors. They have twin daughters. He used to teach at the university, and she had an accounting job with a foreign company. Lara’s family was close to yours. Do you remember them?”

  Adam badly wants to please me, so he pretends to remember them. This is the clearest indication that he doesn’t. He wishes I would abandon this line of questioning, but I keep going.

  “They left for the US two years before we came here. He got a grant to do his post-doctorate somewhere in the south. Lara and the girls followed him after a bit.”

  These details don’t help. Adam accepts his defeat grudgingly. He decides to be fair and acknowledge the big gap in his memory. “Were we good friends?”

  “Yep.”

  He tries even harder to focus. He’s been practising a new way of fighting his weakness, taking different paths into the darkness of his brain. When he badly wants some result, he knows that asking the right questions could help.

  “How come his name is Peter? Is that
a Romanian name?”

  “He’s Russian,” I answer. “Lara went to complete her Bachelor’s degree in Moscow, and that’s where she met Peter. This was during the Communist regime. They got married and moved to Bucharest. Peter always dreamt of going back to Moscow, but he didn’t trust Putin. In the end, they moved to the States.”

  “Where are they now, then?” he asks, confused.

  His question surprises me. Does he know the difference between the United States and Canada? Did he get that far with his geography lessons?

  “They’re in Montreal,” I tell him. “He finished his post-doctorate south of the border and now has a teaching job at Concordia. They moved here a few years ago, bought a house on the South Shore. One of their daughters got married, and the other one is still living at home. Their girls are a bit older than Sara.”

  Adam is happy to track down this new lead, a good reason to continue the discussion in a manageable way. “Are they old?”

  “No, not really. He’d be about fifty-three. And she’s fifty, about the same age as you, if I remember correctly.”

  Adam stays quiet for a while. This makes me believe he is finally looking in the right place to trace them. His silence is a sign that he’s sniffing around, like a dog following a thief. He’s close to locating them in the ruined maze of his mind. The problem is, he can enter this labyrinth, but he can’t find his way out again.

  I let him rummage around in his memories for a while, but his silence eventually makes me think he may be moving away from the initial question. I bring him back to the starting point, “They want to come over one of these days.”

  This news makes Adam miserable. He knows that every new visit is about him. Everybody wants to see him. He thought he had dealt with them all, but no, there are new people who will not leave us alone, new faces that will stare at him. Tears well up in his eyes.

  “Do they know?” he asks me in a desperate voice.

  “Of course they know, Adam.”

  He waits for me to make a decision, as usual, but this time I stall, waiting for his reaction. I need this reaction. After five minutes though, I resign myself to the fact that there won’t be one. Either he has completely forgotten that I’m waiting for an answer, or he imagines I’ve gone ahead and made a decision without him.

  I decide to leave him alone watching the news. Yet a few minutes later, he switches to Animal Planet. I marked this channel with a red marker on the remote, so he can easily find the wildlife documentaries he likes so much. As long as he has the remote, he knows he can choose whatever he wants. Lately, nothing interests him as much as the silence of wild animals, even when the narrator is speaking a language he doesn’t understand.

  Oddly enough, he remembers Romanian and a bit of French, but no English. I put this down to the common origins of the Latin languages. Adam thinks it’s very bad that he can’t speak anything other than Romanian. He relaxes a bit when I remind him that he did a Master’s degree in French and a PhD in English and that he was perfectly trilingual before his stroke. I have even complimented him and told him that his English was better than mine, for he used to work for a Swedish company. Since then, whenever he feels uncomfortable in front of our guests, he tells them, “I did a Master’s degree in French and a PhD in English.”

  This is an attempt to wipe out the shame of forgetting.

  * My prince. You will break every woman’s heart.

  A few days after this, I have to tell Adam that Peter absolutely insisted on visiting us. He wanted us to get together at their place on the South Shore, but I told him Adam has trouble with new places. I also lied and said we don’t visit anyone now, except our daughter.

  I don’t know why I keep justifying this decision to Adam. This is not the first time he’s had to agree to see strangers who were once friends. I could reassure him the way I usually do, tell him everybody is already aware of his condition, nobody will ask a lot of questions.

  Sometimes this works, but not always. There are people who make him very uncomfortable, even if they ignore him. Others he finds more bearable, even likeable. I can tell from the way he makes eye contact with them. He even talks about his diplomas and shows them his dead arm. What humiliates him is the fact that he doesn’t speak either French or English, not that anyone expects him to.

  What Adam does not know is that the prospect of having Peter and Lara over for dinner makes me even more anxious than him.

  I can’t even imagine how they’ll look after all these years. Or how shocked they’ll be to see how we’ve changed.

  I decide not to agonize too much over the preparations. I don’t want to make Adam even more worried by paying too much attention to their visit. I vacuum, dust, wash the ceramic floors in the hall, and leave the windows open for half an hour to let fresh air in, despite the terrible cold.

  I do battle with the smells of illness and ageing. I change the sheets and Adam’s pyjamas twice a week. I bought him both coloured and white pairs so I could wash them every time I put on a load of laundry. Yet the smells are impregnated in the walls, in the rug, in the curtains, and in our closet.

  Adam knows it’s his fault the windows are open in the dead of winter.

  We do our grocery shopping at the usual places: Adonis, Transylvania, IGA. He knows the routine by heart. I make a point of putting the usual items in the shopping cart so there’s no reason for Adam to think there’s anything special about this visit.

  For this unwanted get-together, I decide to go with my usual guest meal: a veal soup to start with and a main course of pork with peas and dill. As I’m cooking, though, I realize the piece of meat is too big and too lean, and it will get tough before it’s cooked through. I try to do something about this by cutting small holes in the pork and filling them with slivers of bacon and garlic. For dessert, I make a flan. This is a failure, too. The missing ingredient is the soul, as my mother would have said.

  I make sure to finish the preparations before the guests arrive, and then I settle in on the couch, next to Adam, and pretend to watch TV. This is enough for him to forget we’re expecting company.

  When the bell rings, he looks at me anxiously. I reassure him. “Here they are. Just in time.” I remind Adam who our guests are. He stands up, the remote still in his hand.

  As I open the door, I understand what Adam goes through each time he finds himself in front of people he doesn’t recognize any more. I’m even more shocked than he is, and I probably don’t hide it very well.

  Lara leads the way, up to her nose in an expensive fur coat. Peter’s face is hidden behind a huge bouquet of roses.

  Adam looks more confident than I do. He’s unexpectedly calm. Does he understand that this couple has nothing in common with us any more?

  Lara is very slim, and her dress fits tightly around her waist. Despite her youthful figure (no doubt she’s on a strict diet), her waxy face gives her age away, as does the fan of wrinkles around her mouth, which get deeper when she moves her lips. Her hair is arranged in an elegant bun on top of her head.

  Peter can only be described as obese. His handsome Russian face has morphed into a shiny, double-chinned mask, and there are dark circles around his once soulful eyes. His hair is still long, but this makes its sparseness the more noticeable.

  They ask for white wine, and I have a gin and tonic with lots of ice and lemon. No other drink puts me at ease in social situations while keeping me alert enough to manage the whole evening. This time though, its effect seems to be delayed. We’re perching on the sofas, and our guests are staring at the walls, the rug, the paintings – anything to avoid looking at Adam.

  “Wow. You decorated the house in the Romanian style,” Lara says with false admiration.

  Judging by her lavish personal style, I know our modest furnishings can’t possibly impress her.

  “What’s wrong with that?” asks Peter in a thin
voice.

  “I didn’t say it was wrong.” Lara laughs nervously.

  I look around the room, trying to see what they see. There’s a Romanian tapestry in the hall that Adam’s mother gave us years ago, and painted plates from Horezu. In the corners of the living room, we have big blue and white pottery from the Transylvanian village of Konrod. It’s cluttered, I know. A guest once asked me if it was difficult keeping so much pottery from breaking, given Adam’s condition. I answered that Adam knows not to play football indoors.

  Lara wants to know how I was able to get all this stuff over here.

  “Bit by bit,” I say.

  “But carrying so many things on your own?”

  “Adam has not been ill forever, as you know.”

  Peter jumps in to rescue Lara, though her remarks have clearly made him uncomfortable.

  “Do you go back much?” he inquires politely.

  “Not any more.”

  Lara chimes in to tell me they haven’t been back at all, and they have no intention of doing so. They prefer to invite their families to visit them — one year the Romanians, the next the Russians.

  I can tell Peter is dying to address Adam in some way, but he doesn’t know how. The only progress he’s made is that he’s trying to make eye contact.

  It’s as though Adam has taken Peter’s gaze as some kind of judgment. “I no longer understand French or English,” he says.

  Lara bursts out laughing. She then apologizes, which is worse. Peter is mortified, but Adam’s comment unnerved him, too. I think he wonders if Adam is making fun of them.

  I try to remedy the situation. “That’s not true Adam, you do understand a little French, and you have made great progress with your English.”

  He makes a “so-so” motion with his hand, but I know my interjection makes him proud. To make him feel even better, I tell Peter, “Adam did a Master’s degree in French and a PhD in English.”