the meal, once Gabrielle had been put to bed, Caroline locked herself in her office to write about the fate of illegal Cuban refugees, victims of the power struggle between Fidel Castro and the United States. Or to reveal to readers of The New Yorker the true motivations and intentions of Slobodan Milošević, the monster tearing through ex-Yugoslavia. Max and Kevin opened a bottle of cognac, put on a few jazz albums, and waited for the sun to rise. Family day, in a sense. A strange little family, but a family nonetheless.
As the first rays of morning light came through the window, Max would fall asleep, and Kevin would put on his track suit and go off running in the neighbourhood. He ran circles around Sunset Park, breathless, forgetting his failures, his disappointments, his wasted youth. Did Kevin have regrets about abandoning his running career? Probably. But Max came to believe that he’d gotten mixed up with the riff-raff in Tribeca precisely because he was looking for an excuse to justify an end to his dreams. As if he wanted some external force to make the decision for him.
Because of Kevin’s new job, his relationship with Caroline changed, naturally, despite his swearing that nothing was different. His secret forced him to create a barrier between himself and his wife. She realized it but said nothing. Max, of course, understood exactly what was happening. It seemed clear that their relationship would slowly be poisoned. The lie, the secret, would only be followed by more lies, always essential ones, of course, all inevitable. Max saw in Kevin the repetition of his own life, of his own strained relationship with women, Pascale first among them.
Why had he done it? Why had he offered Kevin this poisoned apple?
The answer was simple: by making himself indispensable, he was forcing someone else, anyone else, to tie their fate to his. On the surface of things, Max was interested in people, yes, but they’d always been disposable. With Kevin he was trying to act differently, to be different. Max was proving to himself that he was capable of real relationships, ones worth more than a few drinks, quickly discarded and forgotten. Worth more than those he built for a scam, only useful to him for a short time. He’d adopted Kevin, in a sense, and along with him, Caroline and Gabrielle. And, together, Kevin and Max had vowed to protect mother and daughter through their silence and complicity.
Curiously, Max felt responsible for his friend’s professional failures. Giving Kevin work on his team wasn’t showing confidence in him. It was quite the opposite really: with his offer Max was signalling an end to Kevin’s career as an athlete and an honest man. He was saying that Kevin didn’t possess the necessary qualities to compete on the same level as world-class marathon runners. From then on it became necessary to lie, cheat, cover up the truth. What seemed like a hand offered to a man in need was really a way to cover his friend’s failures.
Kevin had lost the will to fight. He’d given up his dreams, which had become unattainable. Max regretted having given Kevin the excuse he’d been waiting for to simply declare that he had forever forfeited his passions.
Something his father had never done.
Kevin rarely spoke of Raymond, and never in kind terms. And yet, in the business world, Raymond’s star shone brightly. His company, Nordopak, founded in the basement of his house on a credit margin and a second mortgage, had become within a few years a packaging company with thousands of corporate clients. At the company’s height in the early 1990s, Raymond had had some two hundred employees, a factory, a warehouse, and a fleet of fifty trucks. Nordopak distributed some ten thousand different packaging products in Canada and the United States. And in Europe, as well. Aspekt-Ziegler, the Dutch giant of prefab furniture, was responsible for forty percent of the Montreal-based company’s revenue.
To his happy employees, Raymond Dandurand was God’s gift to man. Their insurance against joblessness and poverty. Every February 19, Raymond’s birthday, employees got the day off. There were great end-of-year bonuses, a well-funded retirement plan, generous summer employment programs for children of employees. In other words, it was a model company. Everyone at Nordopak called Raymond “the emperor” as a kind joke, but according to Kevin, this affection wasn’t mutual. Raymond considered his employees to be foils for his own genius, his incredible success, his knack for business. He was a man of changing moods, taking all the credit for success and distributing blame to everyone but himself.
“A megalomaniac, seriously,” Kevin said about his father. “And self-centred. A schmuck, plain and simple.”
No love lost between the two of them. Kevin had always felt he was bothering his father just with his presence, by being in the way. Raymond had ignored the existence of his son. His eyes might come to rest on Kevin, but he didn’t see him. While other fathers — normal fathers — played baseball or hockey with their sons, Kevin had had to find his own path. When he’d become more serious about running, when his ambitions had grown, not once had Raymond come to see his son run, never having been interested in his performances.
Kevin had found the affection his father denied him in his mother, Roxanne. A tender woman, but always willing to take a back seat. She was much younger than Raymond and took Kevin’s side when things went from bad to worse between father and son. They spent a lot of time together, and Roxanne’s kindness was the only thing that prevented Kevin from blowing up.
“He loves you, Kevin,” Roxanne would say. “He doesn’t know how to say it, how to show it, but he loves you.”
“He’s an idiot.”
“Don’t say that. Come on, tell me about your day.”
And so Kevin would give her a full account, rocked in his mother’s arms, forgetting for a moment his father, who treated him with complete indifference. Sometimes he caught himself wishing his father beat him or slapped him around from time to time. But no, Raymond never rebuked his son; he remained silent, unbearably silent, disinterested.
One afternoon, as Kevin had returned from school — he was eleven or so — he found an ambulance leaving the house. Inside, his father was standing by the china cabinet. His suit was rumpled, his tie undone; he’d rushed back home from work. Roxanne had collapsed in the kitchen. A neighbour had found her.
Kevin and Raymond sped to the hospital and made their way to her room in neurology.
It had been a stroke.
Kevin’s world fell apart. Just the idea of life without Roxanne sent him into the depths of despair. Kevin simply couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe in this stroke. It had to be some sort of trick to pull them apart. He wanted to get the police involved, sic them on Raymond, force him to admit a crime.
Roxanne never returned to consciousness. After school Kevin would go straight to the hospital and hold his mother’s hand, without knowing whether she was aware of his presence or not.
One Saturday Kevin had hidden out in a stall in the hospital bathroom to cry. He stayed there for hours. At some point Raymond walked in. Kevin didn’t reveal his presence, but Raymond leaned against the metal door.
“Kevin, I know you’re there. I can hear you snivelling.”
Kevin closed his eyes. He’d never played hide-and-seek with his father before. Why now?
“Your mother died,” Raymond said, concise as ever, announcing the death of his son’s mother as if he were telling his employees about a recently fired colleague.
Kevin ripped the door open. “I want to see her.”
“It’s over, Kevin.”
Pushing his father out of the away, Kevin bolted for the corridor. Nurses were busying themselves around Roxanne’s room. A stretcher was waiting a bit farther off. Morgue employees were already on the scene. An orderly brought Kevin back to his father, who said, “It just happened a little while ago. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Kevin ran. He ran away from the hand offered to him in comfort. He rushed down the stairs at the end of the floor, ran into the street, and kept running for hours, hoping exhaustion would kill him so he could join his mother in heaven. Hours later he collapsed from fatigue in a part of the city he didn’t know, hoping he was lost forever.
No