Canarino

‘Well, maybe that’s why she left it behind. Or maybe it just marks the end of something. A souvenir.’

‘That’s a huge painting, Dave! They’re lost in it, the three of them—as if they didn’t belong anywhere at all. I mean not anywhere real.’

David just looked for a while. The figures were about life-sized, he thought, but the drawing-room around them had no distinct edge to it. The blue and red oriental carpet flowed away over an endless floor, the walls soared out of sight as if to the sky. There was the great swag of dove-colored silk at the back, curtaining one of the French doors, but none of the other furniture that used to be in the room was shown.

Finally he said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s nothing Elizabeth likes more than empty space, I guess. Big houses, big rooms, open fields, long driveways.’

Leon looked at David. ‘Still trying to get away from everyone, is she?’

They both laughed.

‘Is that a real dog?’ Leon pointed.

David laughed. ‘That’s Puck.’

‘Puck? I hope not! One face-off and his brains would be all over the ice. Jeez, David!’

‘It’s hockey for me; Shakespeare for Elizabeth. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The children thought it was funny. Well, I think it’s funny anyway. Maybe the children don’t even know. I can’t remember.’

The grilled chicken and the rice had grown cold by the time the door slammed behind them and the bike started up. Francine went into the dining-room and looked at the two untouched plates of food she had put out, the bowl of salad, and the bottle of white wine on the little round table. Then she went back into the hall, walked to the front door, opened it, and looked out in the street. She could still hear the bike, maybe half a block away. She shut the door, went back to the dining-room, and sat down in the second chair she had carried up from the kitchen. Quietly, contentedly, she ate Leon’s plateful of dinner; that plateful had been her own to begin with anyway.

David and Leon went to the top of the Oxo Tower because David couldn’t possibly get enough, now, of the London night. The restaurant was noisy and smoky; the city twinkled and floated just out of arm’s reach on the other side of the glass walls, its invisible depths landmarked by the familiar dome of St Paul’s, the carnivalesque Millennium Wheel, the glinting black Thames snaking through it.

There were certain things that had to be established between them; David thought the best way to start was by ordering margaritas. They ordered food, too, scallops, steak. The staring emptiness of David’s house had made them both self-conscious, and they began to recover from it only after their second drink.

Still, they carried on a businesslike series of questions and answers. When was the last time they had seen each other? Why had it been so long? What had each of them been doing during all that time?

‘I remember that place you had in the Village. You sold it?’

Leon shrugged. ‘Sometimes I regret that; I’ve got another place now, much bigger. I’m hardly ever there, though. I was in Boston for a long time. The fund manager thing I went up there for was boring, and at first I thought I should never have quit trading. Fifteen star years I had. Anyhow, I knew right away I shouldn’t have left New York. But I liked lecturing at the Business School. That kept me sane. What kept me in town, though, was the ice hockey team.’

‘What—the Harvard ice hockey team?’ David was surprised.

‘My second youth, man! I went to a few of their home games, and I gave them some cash, and then I wheedled my way into some coaching. Just specialized stuff, you know—mental toughness, into-the-net-not-near-it, winning a man down. It was a blast. Pure boyish fantasy.’

David laughed. ‘You must have felt like a shit when they played Princeton! Who’d you root for?’

‘You root for the team you’re involved with. You can’t help it, can you?’ Leon tried to sound dismissive, but then he grinned. ‘Of course I felt like a shit! And they all knew it—they all knew I had played for Princeton!’

‘So why aren’t you an ice hockey coach now?’ David egged him on.

‘Not enough money. And—’ Leon waved two fingers in the air and called out to a hurrying waiter, ‘Can you bring us two more margaritas, please?’

The waiter fluttered, as if he’d been accosted while daydreaming, then showily collected himself. ‘Of course, sir, two more margaritas.’

‘And?’ said David.

‘And—you’re joking, aren’t you? Hockey is where I came from, man; it’s not where I’m going. It never was.’ Leon sounded impatient.

David looked at Leon, thinking about where he came from—Babbit, Minnesota. David had never been there, but he could remember meeting Leon’s parents the week he and Leon had graduated from college—gray, defiant, taciturn, overwhelmed by Princeton. He remembered his painful sense of obligation to try to like them and draw them into the hectic partying for Leon’s sake and for the sake of some self-conscious idea of social equality, of wanting to come across as an ordinary, unsnobby guy. He also remembered his fear that he would fail and later his certainty that he had failed. It had been impossible, despite vast quantities of alcohol consumed on all sides.

David’s own parents had come down ahead of time for his father’s class reunion, and then they’d gone straight home to New Canaan until the morning of graduation. They preferred their own friends and their own generation. They had barely shaken hands with the Halbergs; nevertheless, David’s mother had quietly observed that people didn’t get to be like Mr and Mrs Halberg without a lot of hardship, struggle, barbarity. It shocked David still, his mother’s remark and his own sense that she was right about the barrenness of their demeanor. The Halbergs appeared to have no conversation, no joy, no desires even. Leon’s father wasn’t even sure that he should have taken a week off from the iron mine to watch his son graduate, to meet Leon’s friends, to see where Leon had spent the last four years.

And yet amidst the landslide of seven other children, the Halbergs had produced Leon. They had put him out on the ice in hockey little league by the time he was four. All they had ever seemed to understand about Leon was that year after year he was the best hockey player in his age group that anyone in the town had ever seen. He was the best in any age group by the time he was ten. They couldn’t understand why he wanted to leave Babbit, how he got himself to Hotchkiss, to Princeton, why he didn’t want to play professional hockey. David liked to think that he himself did understand, but for all the comfort of his own upbringing, there was something in David that was just as hard as the Halbergs.

‘So you mean coaching college teams is fine, but not professional hockey, where you could get real money?’ There was a goad in David’s voice, as if he was jealous of what Leon so lightly passed up.

‘Oh, come on, Dave! Get real. It’s no different than when we left college! Hockey’s brutal! We were both out of that years ago. I’m one of the luckiest college ice hockey players ever. I have all my teeth; I never broke my nose; I got a great education basically for free. I have a life no one at home could have dreamed of. Why would I want to coach professional ice hockey? I never even wanted to play professionally. You could have played—why didn’t you play?’ Leon’s voice resounded with some admonition: why are you giving me such a hard time? He was calling David’s bluff.

‘I wasn’t as good as you, Leon.’ It came out quietly; even now, David found it hard to admit.

But Leon took no pity on him. ‘You were plenty good enough! Don’t bullshit me. You would never have dreamed of playing professional hockey! A country-club boy from suburban Connecticut—and wind up in a house like that, with Elizabeth? Give me a break! Why would I want to do it any more than you, David? I may have a rough background, but I left it behind when I was eighteen.’

Now David wanted to change the subject; somehow they had gotten into an ancient rut. They were grating on each other, right down to the bone, and it made him feel tired.

‘So London? What brought you to London?’

‘Well, after Boston I went back to New York and started up a hedge fund two or three years ago. Made a ton of money, bought a new place uptown, on the Park. Then I came over here to find some more clients, basically. Share the wealth. I’m lecturing at LSE a few times a year. Eyeing that new business school in Oxford.’

David resisted making a joke about the new ice hockey rink in Oxford.

Leon went on, ‘And I am seriously planning to pick your investment banking brain for my own benefit and the benefit of my clients, Dave. What are you going to do with all your smarts in Virginia, anyway? How’d she persuade you?’

This elicited a monumental sigh. David wasn’t sure he knew the answer, and the topic seemed endless.

‘She was never happy here. At least that’s what she says. After September Eleventh, this whole American thing got to be such a big deal. She never stopped telling me that the rest of the world doesn’t understand what it means to be American. She got desperate about the children’s education; they had to go back right away. She bills herself as a country girl at heart; just wants to be back in the US of A, riding, walking, whatever. Elizabeth never took to the English countryside, the village life, the county thing. Can’t stand all the competitive socializing. It gives her claustrophobia.’ He shrugged with his eyebrows, half-closing his eyes, giving in. ‘She has a point; it is relentless, the jockeying for position. And the reward for success is having to go on doing it forever. It’d be one thing if you could make money out of it, but it’s all about getting the next invitation.’

Now he gave a sour chuckle, sighed again, smaller, and drained his glass, then fingered the salt still stuck to the rim, tasting it from his fingertip. ‘So she’s found this big place. I guess it’s beautiful—in the sticks, somewhere outside Washington. Well, not in the sticks for her. For her it’s right in the middle of her map of places that matter. She’s got that all figured out—I can tell by the price tag. It’s in Culpeper County, out beyond Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, near some little town I’ve never heard of, Rixeyville. Secluded, discreet, private—whatever the real estate agents say. Nobody will be able to see her in the middle of her thousand acres, not unless she drives to town or lets them foxhunt across her land.’

‘But what are you going to do there, Dave?’ Leon looked comically horrified.

‘Well. She put a lot of pressure on me. I let her, I guess, for various reasons. I got what I came to London for; I came for the money. I’ve got so much money I don’t even count it anymore. I’m literally giving it away now. I mean Elizabeth gives it away. So maybe I’ll help her do that—run this foundation she started. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe eventually local politics.’

Now Leon grinned and threw both arms in the air. ‘Or national politics!’ Then he put his hand on his heart and said with tipsy grandeur, ‘I have a dream…’

Politics had been David’s adolescent obsession—his heroes the Kennedys, Martin Luther King; his music Joan Baez, Bob Dylan; his hair down to his shoulders.

‘Now I see the strategy,’ Leon taunted.

‘It’s not that focused, buddy,’ said David. Again, he felt embarrassed by how well Leon knew him, by Leon’s reminding him of ambitions he had hidden even from himself for the last twenty-five years.

‘Somebody needs to come along and save the world. Just do it, man!’ Leon flagged the waiter again and ordered their fourth round of drinks. He had cleaned his plate; David was still playing with his steak.

‘Aren’t you scared you’ll be bored otherwise?’ Leon asked.

‘Petrified.’ David felt as though his whole life was being exposed as a sham. What he had done up until now was not what he had once, in his youth, idealistically intended to do. And what he was getting ready to do next seemed entirely unclear, half-submerged in shallow, domestic anxiety. If he had ever had a sense of what his life was for, he seemed, now, to have lost it.

‘So why are you doing this? You’re going to hate living on a horse farm.’