Hardly Working (25 page)

It was almost like looking at myself.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“An old flame of mine.” He spoke quietly. “Alicia Ferrer.”

“Ferrer? Hector's sister. You were…”

“We had a little entanglement. That was in my younger,
more headstrong days. Yeah. I have to say, you gave me quite a shock there, Dinah, that first time I saw you.”

“She looks like me,” I marveled.

“She does, doesn't she?”

I gazed for a long time. “Can I keep this?”

“Hell, yes. Sure. She's a member of your family.”

I put the picture in my purse, then got to the point. “I've been taking tango lessons with Hector while you've been away.”

“Aha. How's it going?”

“It's not going. It's all over, I think. It was going okay. He must have seen the resemblance too. Maybe that was why he was being nice to me. Then I had to go and ruin it by telling him who I was. He doesn't want to know me, Rupert.”

Rupert shook his head and said to the floor, “Well. He didn't handle the thing with your mother very well.”

“What happened?”

“Well now. From the start?”

“Might as well.”

He poured another dose of Bahia into the paper cup and sat back on the bed. “I met Hector and Alicia in the seventies in Buenos Aires. It was at the start of the protests and I'd gone down there to see what I could make of it, in terms of a film. I was just getting started back then. Alicia and I met in a crowd of demonstrating students and got involved. She was a very single-minded woman. But what a woman. She had such spirit, never a doubt about anything. She was the kind to wave a red flag at a bull. You couldn't stop her. Then after Alicia and their parents lost everything…I still miss her to this day… Hector was without a home really. He'd been knocking around with some jazz musicians in New York, and then he was stranded with no home to go back to, no family. He came up here to Canada because he knew me through his sister. When he asked for help to stay
in the country, I introduced him to your mother. Hell, she was single. Well, we were all pretty young then. Your mother…wait a second now…has she told you any of this stuff?”

“She refuses to.”

“Then maybe I shouldn't…”

“No, you have to. I have to know.”

“Yeah, well, she'd been seeing a professor of hers. But I think he must have ended it with her. So the next thing I know, Marjory is marrying Hector. Not just to help him stay in the country, but to get a little revenge on the professor, I think. Except that she didn't know Latin men.”

“What happened?”

“Well, in Hector's culture, the man has the wife, and then he has all the other women. As many as he can cram into his schedule. It wasn't a very successful marriage. It lasted just under a year. They lived together over there in your great-grandparents' big house. Your mother was taking care of them a lot then, but I don't think they thought much of Hector. He was too foreign for them. For a few months, I think your mother and Hector were really crazy about each other. And then Hector started being Hector and they fought like hyenas after that, until the marriage fell apart. Finally, Hector left, and I confess that I helped Marjory get rid of him. She enlisted my help and I gave it, because hell, I would have done anything for your mother. Unfortunately, she didn't really want me. She had decided early on she was going to raise you without the help of any man. Emotionally speaking, I mean. She did have men around, does still I imagine, helping her with the heavy work, but they were never allowed to get too close.”

“That's what she's like now. They all think they have a chance with her and she lets them think it, but they don't.”

“I could well imagine. I think her pride was badly hurt by Hector and his…uh…women.”

“What about Victoria?” I asked.

“She let him do whatever he wanted. She picked up the pieces. She gave him credibility and helped him build his credit rating. They were a dance team. And she put up with the affairs and his bad periods.”

“The drinking.”

Rupert swirled the liquid in his paper cup. “Uh…yeah.”

There was a long silence. We both took a few sips of our Bahia.

I put my glass down. “So now what do I do?”

“That I can't answer.”

And then Rupert Doyle began to gaze at me a little differently, as if he were daydreaming. With a longing look in his eye, I thought.

In a fluster, I said, “I've got to go.” He began to protest but I hurried out of the room with just a hasty goodbye and a promise to get in touch soon.

I took the stairs two at a time, raced out to my car and drove through the Vancouver streets, the Christmas lights everywhere blurring and making haloes in my tear-stained vision.

I could write a self-help book for others in my situation.

How to Find a Long-Lost Father and Lose Him Again in Five Easy Lessons.

 

My phone was ringing as soon as I came through the door. I considered not answering but in the end, curiosity made me pick it up.

A harsh woman's voice bit into my eardrum. “What did you say to him?”

“Who is this?”

“It's Victoria. Hector's companion. What did you say to him?”

“I…nothing. It's private.”

“What did you tell him?” she demanded.

“Why? What's happened?”

“He came back from your lesson and went right out again. I know this look. It's serious. And it's Christmas. When this happens at Christmas, it's worse.”

“He told me he didn't want to see me again. And that he wouldn't teach me any more lessons. So you have nothing to worry about.”

“It's just as well then. You've brought nothing but trouble.”

“Is that so? I think I have every right to bring all the trouble I want as I happen to be Hector Ferrer's daughter.”

There was a thudding silence at the other end. Maybe she was doing sums. With all of Hector's alleged womanizing, perhaps I was one of many daughters.

Her voice was calmer when she said, “I had no idea. Who's your mother, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Marjory Nichols.”

“Marjory Nichols,” she echoed, as if it were all making sense now.

“We have to find him,” she said. “This isn't like the other times. I didn't like the way he looked and I really don't know where to start.”

Thursday

L
isa's sing-song voice was at my office doorway. “Only seven more shopping days left till Christmas.”

“Please don't remind me.”

“Oh, Dinah. There you go again. Always looking at the can't, won't, don't side.”

I could hardly remind Lisa she was maybe about to be made redundant along with quite a few other GWI staff members. How could she be so flippant about it? It was nearly Christmas, for crying out loud. In the last few days since discovering Ian's plot, I'd given Green World International a lot of thought. I was curious to know when exactly that bastard with the pretty face was going to bring down his streamlining axe. Although I assumed he would wait until his office was finished so that he could call peo
ple up to the brand-new chopping block, one by one, in private.

“How's it going with Roly?”

She blushed a little. “You know, I can hardly believe it. But Roly is really a very nice man. We had dinner together at Umberto's last night and it was so delicious. Gosh. I'd never been there before and all the food was just so yummy.”

“Umberto's?” I squealed. “Umberto's? Are you having me on? That place is bloody expensive.”

“Oh, I know,” said Lisa, smiling. “I kept telling him we should have picked someplace else but he insisted. Gosh, it was just wonderful.”

“He insisted? Who paid, Lisa?”

“Roly did. I can't afford a place like that. Are you kidding me?”

Something was very strange here. Perhaps the Yellow Slicker Guy was pulling bank jobs on the side. It wouldn't be the first time Lisa had innocently hooked up with criminal elements.

I said casually, “Ask him if he ever runs across a drunk named Hector Ferrer out there on the street.” A bitter little laugh escaped me.

Lisa became confidential. “You know, I don't know. I've never seen where he lives. He's awfully secretive about that. But I will ask him when I see him tonight. I promise.”

Tonight?

Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.

That was the start of my hunt for Hector. Where do you look for someone who has decided to go on a drinking binge in metropolitan Vancouver? If that's where he was going to do it. Maybe he wasn't even in town. Maybe he went somewhere else to do his misbehaving. So I called up every connection I had, everyone I knew, every donor and corporate donor that might be able to help, including the radio stations, TV stations and the police and fire departments. They were all very nice to me. I explained that they
had to find him because he was a musician and the cold and drinking would ruin his health and his pianist's hands. I told them that he was my father, that I'd just recently found him and now I'd lost him again and really wanted to get him back. I repeated the name Hector Ferrer several times over the course of the conversation. Then I sent each of them a MP3 download of “Scarlet Tango” just to clutter up their already cluttered computers, and so they'd know what kind of musician I was talking about.

Everybody was very kind and said they'd do what they could and I have to say, the response was fantastic.

Friday

I got the call telling me where Hector was. Someone had found him trying to get close enough to hug the sulphur mounds on the North Shore waterfront. He'd been deliriously drunk and raving something about going home. They told me that they had been holding him at the closest police station but that he needed medical attention and had been transferred to St. Paul's Hospital. They said that when they'd found him, he looked and smelled like a cesspool.

I got to St. Paul's within the half hour.

When I finally found the room, a doctor with scruffy gray hair and a bloated raspberry bon vivant complexion said, “We'll keep him for twenty-four hours or so. He's suffering from dehydration and hypothermia. We don't think his system and, particularly, his liver are going to be able to take much more of this kind of abuse. His health is severely compromised by the drinking. We recommend that he refrain from all use of alcohol in the future.”

Oh, easy for you to say, Doc.

I went into the room. Hector was dozing. I pulled up a chair and sat down by the edge of the bed, just watching him, thinking. Ten minutes of this watching had passed
when he opened his eyes, looked up at me and said, “Dinah. I told you to go away. I can't see you.” He closed his eyes again.

Something happened to me. Everything that had been piling up, the whole
bronca
bubble, burst apart.

I raised my voice. “I'm not going away so you can stop saying that. You're my father, goddammit. I've been wondering about you for years and years, all my life, and now that I've finally found you, do you really think I'm just going to let you off the hook like that? No. You can forget it. It's time for you to take a little fatherly responsibility. I don't care if you have a death wish. You can't kill yourself like this, mourning your family forever. What about me? I'm here. I'm alive, and I want my goddamn tango lessons, goddammit. I want to hear you make more of that fantastic music before the gig is all up. You're talented and you're wasting it and in my world, that's almost a criminal offence. And I'm not ever going to let you forget I'm your daughter.”

Hector feigned mild shock. “I did not say that you were not my daughter. Not yet.”

“And just to make a point,” I ranted, “I'm going to change my name. I'm going to change it legally to Dinah Nichols-Ferrer. I think that sounds pretty good, don't you? Dinah Nichols-Ferrer. What do you think of that, Hector? I can do it, and I'm going to do it, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.”

Hector was trying to see me with his squinting red watery eyes. In a weary voice, he said, “I think perhaps you may have inherited the same stubbornness my sister Alicia had.”

A nurse marched into the room at that moment, and gave me a mean look. “I'm going to have to ask you to keep your voice down or leave. This is a hospital, in case you'd forgotten.”

“I'm leaving,” I said, putting up both hands in surrender.

Saturday

I didn't tell Victoria that I had found him. I wanted to keep it to myself for twenty-four hours. So the next day, it was me who drove him home to the little house he shared with her. When she heard my car door slam, she was outside and at Hector's side of the car practically before I could open it. She didn't want me near him, but she couldn't do without my help in getting him to walk as far as the front steps. He was still weak and depleted from his misadventures.

Their house couldn't have been more different than my mother's. It was near the border with Burnaby in a treeless and undistinguished neighborhood. The house itself was small, fussy, tidy, and stuffy, a minimuseum of glass and porcelain figurines, ducks flying north along the peach-colored walls, treacly landscape and religious theme prints, furniture burdened with doilies and antimacassars and crocheted throw rugs, a grass-green carpet for whose protection we all had to remove our shoes at the door. Once the front door was shut, the heat was overwhelming, cranked up high.

I could tell that Victoria felt even more threatened by me than before. For me, being in that house was like wearing a warm sweater that was so tight it was squeezing the life out of me. I helped Victoria get Hector to the couch and when she told me she could do the rest on her own, that she'd had to do this dozens of times before, I was only too happy to get out of there.

As I was about to leave, I turned to Hector there on the couch and said, “I suppose there isn't really any way to convince you that what you did the other night was just so incredibly stupid and futile. I was going to give you a speech about how I haven't finished with you, that I'm only just getting started so you better not try any more of these tricks, but I suppose with a man like you, the best thing to do is just let it go. I would like to have had the chance to be your
daughter and I
am
going to change my name. I like the sound of Dinah Nichols-Ferrer. I think it will help me to feel a little differently about myself, and it fills in that missing piece.

“I would like to have gotten to know you. Learn more about your life, have you learn about mine, but I realize that I'm probably just dreaming a very old and tired dream. If you want to drink yourself into a coma, then be my guest. It won't change anything, except the fact that I won't be coming to your funeral. And by the way, Merry Christmas.”

He reached over to the side table for a packet of cigarettes, knocked a cigarette out of the packet, lit it, and through the smoke genies, began to give me the shrewd up-and-down, assessing me and reassessing me, with a streetwise glint in his eye.

 

I was in a very strange mood after I left Victoria and Hector's house. I stopped at a phone store and bought myself a sleek white combination cordless call-checking phone and answering machine. It was so long overdue. I had it gift-wrapped too, just for the sake of having it gift-wrapped, in a beautiful aqua-blue metallic paper with a silver bow.

Then I wandered with my gift bag through to Robson Square. I bought myself a caffe latte and went down to watch the skaters on the little outdoor rink. The place was Christmas Deluxe, with hundreds of colored lights and decorations and everyone rushing around in the dusk to get their shopping done.

Only five more shopping days.

A wire of panic shot through me.

My mother was out of the country, her students in charge over on the island. Joey and I had tentatively been invited over to Cleo's. But how was I going to get through the day, looking Joey, Cleo and Simon in the eye?

I would feel like a spy, the Woman Who Knew Too Much.

Maybe I should cancel and spend Christmas alone?

What would Thomas say about that?

I knew what he'd say.

Dinah. There is self-reflection and then there is antisocial behavior. You are walking a fine line.

I finished my caffe latte and wandered up to the centre of town again to take a last look in the wide windows of Birks jewelers at all the expensive rocks.

That was when I spotted them.

Penelope and Ian. Standing in front of the window with the biggest rocks on display.

The diamond engagement rocks.

I ducked behind a lamppost.

Penelope was wearing a black coat with an astrakhan collar, the same black coat, I'm sure, because the sleeves were a little short on her.

Ian was making circles with his hand at the small of her back.

How about that?

Secondhand man and secondhand coat.

Penelope was under review and they were looking at rings?

Monday

At Notte's we all ordered more pastries than were good for us.

Jake had three cream-filled maritozzis and a chocolate slice on his plate. “So, Cleo, where do you think you'll start looking for work? If you have to, I mean.”

“I dunno, Jake. A job change wasn't in the program. Maybe I'll try phone-sex operator.”

“I did that once,” piped up Ida. “Nice little filler job.”

Fran was helpful. “I say we just march upstairs and trash that fancy office then cut his nuts off. Bastard.”

“Here, here,” Cleo agreed.

Jake chuckled and turned to me. “So Dinah, you heard any more from Hamish Robertson?”

I winced inwardly. “Uh…well, he's still in Japan but he said he'd contact us the minute he gets back to town.”

“So where's Lisa today?”

“On a date.”

We all looked at each other, skeptics.

Thursday

Christmas Day was unseasonably warm. On my way out to the car, I saw a red rose blooming over the back alley fence. I ran over and plucked it furtively, then raced to my car before the rose owner could spot me.

When I got to Cleo's, Joey was already there ahead of me. He must have taken a taxi because he usually rode with me.

“If you'd come earlier, you could have had a champagne breakfast with the three of us,” he said, looking much too twinkly for my liking.

“I have bad news for you, Joey. For all of you,” I said a little louder. “Dinah Nichols is considering going on the wagon. Solidarity with the paternal unit.”

Cleo made an extravagant entrance in black low-riders and a slinky red silk chiffon T-shirt. I gave her the red rose. “This is for the hostess.”

“Wha…wait now, Dinah…did I hear you correctly? Paternal unit? As in a father?”

“As in a father,” I replied.

“My God, Dinah. You've been holding out on us. Who is he?”

“His name is Hector Ferrer. He's a tango teacher and composer of…jazz tango.”

“This calls for a drink,” said Cleo. She sang out toward the bedroom, “Simon, honey. Did you know about this?”

Simon sauntered out, wearing the same gray velour bathrobe I'd seen him in last time. It was if he hadn't bothered to get dressed since then.

“No, I don't. Not a thing. You finally found your father, Di? That's cool. More champagne. We need to toast that.”

“Just a little one. I shouldn't really be drinking with you guys. I'm thinking of going on the wagon, to keep my father company.”

There was a silence and then Joey, Cleo and Simon all said in unison, “More for us.”

Then Cleo said, handing me a full champagne glass, “But while you're doing all that thinking, drink this and help us toast.”

I'd never seen Cleo so domestic. That day she did battle in her tiny kitchen, armed with oven gloves, an apron, and a couple of forks. For a while it looked like the turkey was going to win, but then Joey stepped in and saved the day by changing into SuperChef. Apart from a few charred roast potatoes and some flying carrots, the dinner was a relative success. The wine kept pouring, but rarely into my glass. I watched as my friends got oblivious.