Читать книгу My Favourite Crime - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 9

It was two days before Christmas 1992. I was eighteen, and my father wanted me to meet my future bride even though I’d made plans to travel the continent.

“I got you an invitation to their Christmas Eve dinner.”

“You want me to have Christmas dinner with people I don’t know?”

“They’re good people, and she’s perfect. She’s blonde and was really good in school.”

“Come on,” I said. I was a good student only by his standards, and he was the one obsessed with blondes.

My father and I had never managed to figure out our relationship. As he encouraged me to get my life in order, he worked hard while courting ruin with reckless spending, reminding me of how, in a story he told, he pulled a near-perfect burglary but later got arrested for a bar fight.

But in the weeks before the Christmas dinner, he was different. If he drank, he talked of death. He made me promise to bury him in the mountains overlooking the ocean. He told me to lead a better life than he had. I suspected that the dinner was an attempt to keep me from travelling, but maybe he really wanted to offer me a better life.

The family’s last name was Goodman. This wasn’t a joke. After I arrived, Mr. Goodman talked to me in the basement where he played golf on an artificial green, knocking the ball into a cup that swallowed it and spit it back out.

Then we all gathered at the table: Swedish-looking Mr. Goodman, fluttery Mrs. Goodman, a heavyset family friend whose reddish highlights gleamed under the lamp, and Elana, like a 1950s actress in a yellow dress. I could feel her confusion, the entire family’s confusion.

Everything about them was good: their posture at the table, the polite comments they made about the food, about the Christmas tree, about each other. Where the hell was my father? My shoulders hurt from sitting straight. The phone rang, and Mrs. Goodman got up.

“Yes. Oh, yes. I see.” She looked at me. “Your father, he can’t make it.”

“Can I talk to him?” I asked, but he’d already hung up.

The evening dragged on. Eating properly was stressful and exhausting: not resting my elbows on the table, sustaining a respectable posture, limiting the rate of my consumption to that of the people around me, carefully portioning the food with fork and knife while resisting the impulse to sate my hunger by shovelling it all in.

After dessert, Mrs. Goodman threw herself on the grenade: having heard I liked books, she asked me to read her poetry. She told me they’d had a guest from the university, a poetry professor. She’d given him hers, and he’d returned it with every line but one crossed out in each poem.

“Do you think my poetry’s that bad?” she asked.

Elana screamed at the living room window as headlights outside lit her up.

A young man in a leather trench coat came in, and she jumped into his arms. The hair above his right eye was bleached. He turned and shook my hand. Then he gave me a music cassette. On the front, he and three other guys posed, arms outstretched.

“We’re Christian a-cappella rappers,” he told me.

Shortly afterward, I said goodbye. As I drove home, I played the cassette.

“He was the Man,” they sang in baritone.

Falsetto: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

Baritone: “Get ready to be saved!”

In the restaurant where I met my father that same night, I told him I didn’t belong with those people.

“But you could,” he said. “I could see you with them.”

Eventually, he gave up and boisterously told crime stories. This was how his entire life seemed, as if he tried to get it right but failed, and then let out his wildness, showing everyone that he was happy the way he was.

Weeks passed, and I left. I travelled the continent, went broke, got a job, started college, and two years later he filed for bankruptcy and took his life. I often thought back to that strange Christmas Eve dinner, uncertain as to whether he had been trying to keep me close or save me from himself by giving me to the kind of family he wished he could have provided. But now, so many years later, in my memory of our conversation that Christmas Eve, I am the adult and he is child, looking to me for my reaction, to see if I liked the family he found, and then, not receiving my approval, returning to his old self.

My last image of him is from when he dropped me off at my car. As I stood in the parking lot, he laughed and jammed his accelerator, spraying slush and oily grit so that I had to cover my face. He made it seem as if he was the one leaving. He raced into traffic, cars braking and swerving, and was gone from sight.