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LIMOUSINE ROYALE INC.: DISPATCH LOG Booking #4471 Client: JANE, M. Pickup: 12:50 a.m., side entrance (loading dock), Hôtel Delacroix, boul. René-Lévesque O. Drop: Tour Saint-Patrick, rue Ottawa (Griffintown). Parkade entrance, not lobby. Payment: Cash Driver: W. JOSEPH (Car 12, black Lincoln) Notes: Client requests no conversation.
The first thing Wilner Joseph knew about Monsieur Jane was that Monsieur Jane was not a woman, and the second thing he knew was that Monsieur Jane had put Shane Hollander into the boards in the second period that same night, hard, with his elbow up, and gotten two minutes for it, which was not enough.
It was November. It was the kind of Montreal November that has given up pretending it's fall, with the rain coming sideways off the river and freezing where it landed. Wilner had the radio on 98.5 for the postgame and the heat on high, and he was eating the last of the plantain chips Marie-Ange had packed him at six, one at a time, to make them last. The loading dock behind the Delacroix smelled like wet cardboard and the restaurant's fryer. At 12:52 a big man came out the steel door in a black toque pulled down to his eyebrows, a hood up over the toque, and a scarf up over his chin, so that there was maybe three inches of face showing in total, and he got into the back seat behind the passenger side and said, "Hello. Rue Ottawa. You have the address."
Wilner had the address. Wilner also had eyes, and a rearview mirror, and a nephew, Junior, who had a Rozanov jersey he wore ironically, he said, to make Wilner angry, which worked.
He put the car in drive.
The man in the back looked out the window for the first four blocks. At the light on Peel he took the scarf down to breathe, and the streetlight came in across his face, and Wilner made a decision he would think about later in the shower, which was to say nothing.
He drove.
On the radio, the postgame man was saying that Hollander had looked a little shaken up after the Rozanov hit, that he'd stayed down a long moment in the corner, that the Metros medical staff had looked him over on the bench. Then: but he came back and he scored, folks, he scored the winner with six minutes left, that's who this kid is. In the back seat the man made a sound. Wilner looked in the mirror and saw that he was smiling at his own knees.
Wilner turned the radio down.
"You can leave it," said the man. His English had a Russian floor under it, heavy and flat.
"I don't need to hear it," Wilner said. "I saw it."
"You were at game?"
"I was in this car. I watched the second period at the Esso on Atwater on my phone. Then I watched the replay fourteen times."
"Fourteen."
"Fourteen," Wilner said. "You had your elbow up."
The man in the back seat laughed. It surprised both of them. It was a real laugh, a big one, the kind that comes out of a man who didn't expect anything funny to happen to him that day.
"I thought," he said, "the note said no talking."
"The note said the client requests no conversation. It didn't say anything about me."
Another laugh. Then quiet, all the way down Peel and over to Wellington, past the old grain elevators and the condos going up where the factories used to be, cranes standing in the rain with their red lights blinking. At rue Ottawa he directed Wilner past the lobby, where a concierge sat lit up behind glass like a fish, and down the ramp to the parkade gate, where he leaned forward over the seat and keyed in a code without looking at the keypad.
He knew the code.
He got out at the elevator. Before he shut the door he leaned back in and put a folded bill on the seat, and it was American, and it was a hundred.
"You don't know me," he said.
"Monsieur," said Wilner, "I know you very well. Your elbow was up."
The man smiled at him, a different smile, younger, and shut the door. The elevator came. Wilner watched it take him up. He sat in the parkade with the engine running for a minute, reading the directory by the elevator door in the headlights: TOUR SAINT-PATRICK, CONDOMINIUMS DE PRESTIGE, 34 ÉTAGES. He did not let himself think about who else lived in this building. Everybody in Montreal knew who lived in this building. It had been in La Presse. There had been a little drawing with a dotted line showing which floor.
A woman, he decided, reversing up the ramp. There is a woman in this building. A Russian woman, a model, a dancer. He is a young man. He has a long-distance girlfriend and a terrible job. It's nothing to do with anybody.
On his sun visor, clipped with a binder clip, was a laminated card his mother had given him at the airport in Port-au-Prince in 1991, worn soft at the corners, the ink of the verse going brown. L'Éternel gardera ton départ et ton arrivée, dès maintenant et à jamais. He touched it at the top of the ramp, the way he always touched it when he pulled out of anywhere, and he drove home to Saint-Michel through the frozen rain and got into bed beside Marie-Ange at two-fifteen, and she said into her pillow, "Who won," and he said, "We did. Hollander. With six minutes," and she said, "Good," and went back to sleep, and he lay awake.
*
Nadia Lapointe had been dispatcher at Limousine Royale since before it had computers, back when it was a radio and a binder and a fridge full of Pepsi, and she had seen everything, and she ran the night desk out of a back office on rue Jarry with an ashtray she was not legally allowed to use and a bag of all-dressed Ruffles she bought by the case, and she would tell you, if you were stupid enough to ask, that there were three kinds of clients who paid cash for a car at one in the morning: drug dealers, hockey players, and married men.
Monsieur Jane was not a drug dealer. Drug dealers didn't book ahead.
"He books ahead," she told Wilner, in January, the fourth time. She had the printout. She held it up to the little window between the office and the drivers' room like it was evidence in court. "He books the day the schedule comes out. You know what that is? That's a man with a plan. Boston plays here, he books. Every time. Same pickup, same drop, same time. Now he asks for you."
"Me," said Wilner.
"You. By name. 'The driver Wilner, please, in Car 12.' He spelled it. W-I-L-N-E-R. Like I don't know how to spell my own drivers. Tabarnak." She ate a chip. "So what is he."
"A client."
"Don't. Don't do that to me. What is he."
"He's a young man," said Wilner, "who tips."
"He's married," Nadia said, with total confidence. "He's married to some poor woman in Boston, he has a girl in Griffintown, he takes the car so it's not on his credit card, and you are an accessory, Wilner Joseph, and when she finds out and hires a lawyer, this whole company is going to court and I'm going to say I warned you."
"He's not married."
"How do you know?"
Wilner opened his mouth and found that he could not say because he is Ilya Rozanov and I would have read about it, and also that he did not want to, and also that a small, stubborn, fatherly part of him, a part he didn't like, had already decided that whatever Monsieur Jane was doing in that building was nobody's business, including Nadia's, including Wilner's own.
"He doesn't wear a ring," he said.
Nadia snorted so hard a chip went down wrong. "Ah, well. A ring. Case closed, everybody, Inspector Joseph has examined the hands." She coughed, and waved him off, and wrote JANE: W. JOSEPH ONLY on a Post-it in red Sharpie, and stuck it on her monitor, where it would stay, curling, going yellow, for nine years.
*
He found out it wasn't a woman in the third winter.
He found out the way you find out anything, which is that you already know, and then one night something happens that makes the knowing too big to sit beside you in the front seat.
By the third winter there was a routine. Boston came to Montreal three times a year, sometimes four if there were playoffs, and Monsieur Jane booked every one of them the day the schedule came out. The pickup moved once, when the Raiders changed hotels, and Wilner was a little offended that nobody told him and he had to sit at the old loading dock for six minutes before Nadia radioed. The drop never moved. Rue Ottawa, the parkade gate, the code keyed in without looking. The pickup going back was always six-thirty, six-forty-five in the morning, in time for the bus to the airport, and the man who came down in the elevator at six-forty-five had a different face from the man who went up at one. Wilner couldn't have said what was different about it. Softer at the mouth. Like a pillow had been on one side of it.
They talked now. Not every ride. Some rides Monsieur Jane got in and put his head back and was asleep by Peel, mouth open, toque fallen over one eye, and Wilner drove slower so it would last. But most rides they talked. They talked about hockey, which was easy, since Wilner hated him professionally and said so. ("You hook. You hook all the time. You hook like it's a religion." "Is not hooking. Is stick on body, very gentle, like a friend." "My friends don't hook me.") They talked about the weather, which in Montreal is a whole field of study. They talked about Moscow, a little: the cold there, the metro stations, a park his mother took him to with a pond where you could skate. They talked about Port-au-Prince, a little. Wilner told him about the heat, and the mangoes on his grandmother's tree that you could smell from the road, and he did not tell him about 1991, or about his brother in Carrefour, whose house fell on him in the earthquake, and how Wilner drove a double shift the day the phone call came because what else does a man do with his hands.
He told Ilya about Marie-Ange's cooking, because he always told everyone about Marie-Ange's cooking.
That was how the patties started.
It was the third winter, a Thursday in February, and Monsieur Jane came down the elevator at 3:40 in the morning instead of 6:45.
Wilner had been asleep in the car on the second level of the parkade. He did that on Jane nights now. It wasn't worth driving back to Saint-Michel for four hours, so he parked in the visitor spot by the stairwell and slept sitting up with his coat over him and the radio on Radio-Canada's overnight jazz. He woke because the back door opened, and the cold came in, and the man who got in was not the six-forty-five man. He wasn't the one o'clock man either. He had his toque in his hand instead of on his head, and his hair was standing up on one side, and his face in the dome light looked like a window somebody had put a fist through and then taped up very neatly so nobody would notice.
"Drive," he said.
"The hotel?"
"No. Just drive. Please. Anywhere. I pay."
Wilner drove.
He went up the ramp and out onto rue Ottawa and didn't think about where, and the car took him where it always took him when he didn't think, which was up. Up de la Montagne, up Côte-des-Neiges, up past the hospital and around onto Camillien-Houde, the road that winds over the top of the mountain, where in summer the cyclists go up standing on their pedals and come down screaming. At four in the morning in February it was empty. The trees were black and frozen and the snowbanks were taller than the car. At the lookout the city lay down below them in orange, the river beyond it dark, and the cross on the summit was lit up white the way it always is, a hundred feet of steel and lightbulbs that the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society put up in 1924 and that Wilner had been nodding at every time he drove past since 1991. He nodded at it now.
In the back seat Ilya Rozanov was not crying. Wilner wanted to be clear about that later, to himself. He was not crying. He was sitting very straight with his hands flat on his thighs, looking out the window at the city, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, slowly, like an athlete told to breathe, like something he'd been taught.
Wilner went around the mountain once. Then again. On the third time he pulled into the lookout lot and put it in park and turned the engine off, then on again because of the cold, and reached over to the passenger seat, where his lunch bag was.
Marie-Ange packed him a lunch every night like he was going to war. Tonight it was two pâtés kode in foil, the fried ones, the dough blistered and golden, with ground beef and pikliz on the side in a little yogurt container with a strip of masking tape on the lid that said in her handwriting PA PWOCHE. Do not come near. Because the last time he'd eaten it with his fingers in the car and touched his eye.
He held a patty over the seat in the foil.
"Eat," he said.
Ilya looked at it. Then at him.
"I'm not hungry."
"I didn't ask if you're hungry. In my house, when somebody comes in the door with that face, my wife doesn't ask. She puts the food on the table. You can sit there and look at it if you want. It's still on the table."
A long pause.
Then Ilya took it. He unwrapped the foil on his knee, carefully, like a present, and he looked at it for a while, and he took a bite, and the flakes of the dough went down the front of his coat and onto the leather, and Wilner didn't say anything about the seat. Ilya chewed. He swallowed. He took another bite, a bigger one.
"Is like pirozhki," he said, with his mouth full. "My mother made. Dough, meat inside. Fried."
"Everybody has this," said Wilner. "Every poor grandmother in the world invented the same food. Dough. Whatever is left. Into the oil."
"We were not poor."
"Your grandmother was."
Ilya thought about that, chewing. "Yes," he said. "Okay. My grandmother was."
He ate the whole thing. He ate it down to the last corner of the crust, and then licked his thumb, and looked down at the foil in his lap, and Wilner handed the second one over the seat without being asked, and the pikliz, and said, "Not too much of that, it's hot," and Ilya ate a whole forkful of it to be contrary and coughed until his eyes ran, and that was the thing that let him cry, so. That was fine. That was how it went. The pikliz got the credit. Wilner kept his eyes on the city and let him.
When he'd stopped, Ilya said to the window: "He is very angry with me."
Wilner didn't ask who.
"I said a thing," said Ilya. "A stupid thing. I am very stupid sometimes. I am famous for this, it's in newspapers. I said maybe we stop. Because is too hard. Because of the hiding. I said it like a joke, so it's his fault if he gets upset, you understand? So I can say, Is just joke, Hollander, relax. And he did not get upset. He said okay. Very quiet. Okay, if that's what you want. And then he went to bathroom and turned on shower and did not come out."
The heater ticked. Down below, a snowplow went along Avenue du Parc with its orange light turning.
He. Hollander.
Wilner sat with it.
He thought, in no particular order: of the dotted line in La Presse showing which floor. Of the code typed in without looking. Of the six-forty-five face. Of Shane Hollander on his television, every week for three years, so polite, so good, so careful with every word, Canada's son, the boy his own mother would have wanted him to bring home. Of Father Lindor at Notre-Dame-de-la-Guadeloupe, who said things from the pulpit about men like this that Wilner had sat through for twenty years without saying anything. Of Junior's Rozanov jersey. Of his brother. Of what you do with your hands.
"So," he said finally. "You left."
"I left."
"While he was in the shower."
"Yes."
"Without saying anything."
"What do I say? He said okay."
Wilner turned around in his seat to look at him properly, which he had never done in three years, not once, not even to take the money. It felt like taking off a coat.
"Monsieur Jane," he said. "When my wife says okay like that, in that voice, and goes in the bathroom and turns on the water. Do you know what it means?"
Ilya looked at him.
"It means, I'm crying, you idiot, and I don't want you to see me do it, and if you are any kind of man you will be there when I come out."
A long, long silence.
"Fuck," said Ilya.
"Yes."
"Fuck."
"I know."
"Drive back," said Ilya. "Please. Fast. You can go fast?"
"No," said Wilner, putting it in gear. "But I can go the speed limit with great feeling."
He went down the mountain faster than the speed limit. He went down Côte-des-Neiges like the cyclists in summer, and through every yellow on René-Lévesque, and down the ramp into the parkade so hard the undercarriage scraped, and Ilya had the door open before the car stopped and was out and across the concrete to the elevator, and then stopped, and came back, and leaned in the door with his face red from the cold and the pikliz and everything else.
"The patty," he said. "Tell your wife. Is best thing I ever ate."
"I'll tell her."
"I mean it. Tell her best thing. Tell her Russian man says."
"Monsieur," said Wilner, "if I tell my wife a Russian man ate her patties in my car at four in the morning, she will want to know a lot of things."
Ilya looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, very seriously, "So don't tell her I'm Russian."
He shut the door. He ran.
Wilner sat in the parkade and watched the numbers over the elevator climb, all the way up, all the way to the floor the dotted line had been pointing at all along, and stop.
He touched the card on the visor.
Then he drove home and woke his wife up, which he had never done in twenty-six years of marriage, and told her a man had said her patties were the best thing he ever ate, and she said, half asleep, "Which man," and he said, "A client," and she said, "Wilner, it's four-thirty," and then, "Was it the beef or the herring," and he said "Beef," and she said, "Of course it was the beef," and went back to sleep satisfied.
The next Boston game, there were four patties in the lunch bag instead of two. A note on the foil, in her handwriting: Pou kliyan an. For the client.
He never told her. He also never asked why there were four. Twenty-six years.
*
Stéphanie Joseph was twenty-two and in her second year of nursing at McGill and she was, she would tell you herself, a genius, and nobody in her family appreciated it.
"Papa. Papa. Look at this. No. Look."
"I'm eating."
"You can look and eat. You're always telling me you can drive and eat. Look." She put the phone on the table between his plate and the rice. It was a picture from the league awards in Las Vegas: two men in suits on a red carpet, not touching, not looking at each other, standing about a foot and a half apart, with a sponsor wall behind them. Hollander was smiling his television smile. Rozanov was smirking at the photographer. It was the most normal photograph in the world. Hockey players had been standing a foot and a half apart from each other on red carpets since there were carpets.
"Okay," said Wilner. "It's Hollander. Good suit."
"Look at Rozanov's hand."
He looked. Rozanov's right hand was hanging at his side. His thumb and first finger were pinching, very lightly, the very edge of Hollander's jacket, right at the hem. You'd never see it. You'd have to be looking. It looked like he was steadying himself. It looked like nothing at all.
Wilner put his fork down.
"It's a thing," Stéphanie said. "People on Tumblr have been saying it for, like, years. Years, Papa. There's a whole, there are spreadsheets. Who sat with who at the All-Star game. They have the same water bottle. Rozanov did an interview in Russian where he said, okay, the translation's disputed, but he said Hollander has a face like the moon, and then the Russian reporter laughed and he said Fuck off in English, on camera, and they cut it. Somebody found the raw feed."
"Stéphanie."
"And Rozanov is always in Montreal, have you noticed? Like, in the summer. He was spotted at Schwartz's in July. July, Papa. Who goes to Schwartz's in July."
"Tourists."
"Rozanov is not a tourist! He's never anywhere! He hates Montreal! He said so on a podcast! But then he's always here!" She sat back, triumphant, and ate a forkful of diri ak djon djon. "I think they're in love," she said. "I think it's the most romantic thing that's ever happened in hockey and nobody knows about it except me and fifty thousand girls on the internet."
"Stéphanie, ma fille," said Wilner. "Your rice is getting cold."
She narrowed her eyes. She had her mother's eyes. They were the kind of eyes that had run a household of seven in a two-bedroom on Boulevard Pie-IX and could tell from the sound of a key in a lock if it was a good day or a bad one.
"You know something," she said.
"I know your rice is getting cold."
"You do. You do know something. You're doing the thing. Manman, he's doing the thing with his face."
"He's always doing the thing with his face," said Marie-Ange, from the stove, not turning around. "Eat, both of you. Stéphanie. Leave your father. Your father knows nothing about anything except that Boston hooks."
"They hook like it's a religion," Wilner agreed, and picked up his fork.
His daughter watched him the whole rest of the meal. He could feel it. She had his stubbornness too, unfortunately. On her way out, kissing him on the head, she said very quietly into his hair, so her mother wouldn't hear, "Papa. Is it true?"
He thought about it. He thought about the thumb and the finger on the hem of the jacket. He thought about the six-forty-five face.
"I drive people," he said. "That's all I do. I take them where they're going. Then I go home."
She stood up. She looked at him for a long time.
Then she said, "Oh my God," and put both hands over her mouth, and left.
*
The night with the scarf was the fifth winter, and it was the worst storm of the year, and it was the first time Wilner Joseph met Shane Hollander, if you could call it meeting.
He'd come for the six-forty-five pickup at six-thirty because the snow was so bad. Montreal had been under a storm warning since noon. The plows were out and losing. The car's wipers were going full speed and still the windshield was a white wall every four seconds, clearing, filling, clearing. He sat in the parkade at the bottom of the ramp with the heat blasting, and Ilya came down at six-forty-four in his toque and his hood and no scarf, and got in the back behind the passenger side, and said, "Okay, quickly, the bus is at seven-thirty, the coach will kill me," and then the elevator dinged again.
Wilner watched it in the rearview mirror.
The doors opened and Shane Hollander came out of the elevator in grey sweatpants and a Metros practice shirt and socks. Socks. No shoes, no coat, in the parkade, in February, with the snow blowing in through the gate. He had something in his hand. He came straight across the concrete to the car with his arms around himself and his face set the way Wilner had seen it set in a thousand faceoffs, and he knocked on the back window.
Ilya rolled it down. "What are you doing? You are insane. You are in socks."
"You forgot this." It was a scarf. Grey wool. "It's minus twenty-eight with the windchill, Ilya, I checked, you can't walk across the tarmac in Logan in minus twenty-eight with your neck out. You'll get sick and then you'll give it to the whole team and then you'll lose and then you'll blame me."
"Logan is in Boston. Is not minus twenty-eight in Boston."
"It's minus fifteen in Boston. I checked that too."
"Of course you checked."
"Give me your head."
"Shane..."
"Give me your head."
Ilya leaned out of the window and gave him his head. And Shane Hollander, the captain of the Montreal Metros, the boy on the cover of the Hockey News, Canada's son, a man Wilner had personally seen thank a referee who had just called a penalty on him, stood in his socks in a parkade in a blizzard and wrapped a scarf around Ilya Rozanov's neck twice and tucked the end in at the collar of his coat the way you'd do for a child going out to the bus. He was concentrating very hard. He had his tongue between his teeth. He smoothed it down flat with both hands, and his hands stayed there a second too long on either side of Ilya's neck.
And Ilya turned his head and kissed the inside of his wrist.
That was all. Just that. Very quick. Like you'd kiss a medal.
Then Shane looked up, and saw the mirror.
Wilner had driven a car in Montreal for more than twenty years. He had driven drunk men and crying women and a man who'd just been fired and a bride who changed her mind at a red light on Sherbrooke and asked to be taken to her mother's. He had seen a lot of faces in the rearview mirror. He had never once seen a face do what Shane Hollander's face did then, which was go, in less than a second, from something open all the way through to the back, to nothing. A wall. A rink in summer with the ice taken out. He took his hands off Ilya's neck. He took a step back from the window, in his socks, in the slush, and stood there very straight, with his arms at his sides, and he said in a perfectly normal, polite, television voice, "Hi. Sorry. Hi."
"Bonjour, Monsieur Hollander," said Wilner.
"I'm sorry. I'm, I'll." Shane looked at Ilya. Ilya was looking at Wilner. Shane looked back at the mirror. "Please," he said, very quietly, still in the polite voice, and Wilner understood that this was a man who had been raised to say please and thank you to everyone, and that he had never in his life said it like this, from this far down.
Wilner turned around in his seat.
"Monsieur Hollander," he said. "I am a driver. Drivers look at the road. That's the job. You know what's in the mirror? The road behind me. That's it. That's all I ever see in there."
Shane stared at him.
"Go upstairs," said Wilner. "You're in your socks. Your mother would kill you."
Something in Shane's face came back on. Not all of it. One light. "She would," he said. "She would actually kill me."
"Go."
He went. At the elevator he turned around and looked back at the car, once, and Wilner raised one hand off the wheel, and Shane raised one hand back, and the elevator doors closed on him, and Wilner put the car in drive and went up the ramp into a white wall of snow.
They didn't talk for a long time. It took forty minutes to get to the hotel. The radio said the airport was delayed and the Raiders' charter would be late and the 40 was closed at Décarie because of a jackknifed truck. Wilner went the long way. In the back seat Ilya sat with his hands in his lap and his chin down in the grey scarf.
At the light on Guy he said, "You will tell?"
"Tell who? Nadia? Nadia thinks you have a wife in Boston and a girlfriend in Griffintown."
"I mean anyone."
"Monsieur Jane. I have been driving you for five years. If I was going to tell anyone I would have told someone by now. I would have told my wife. You know how hard it is for me not to tell my wife anything? I told her when I got a parking ticket in 1998. I told her when I ate a hot dog in Laval she didn't know about. I didn't tell her this. She thinks you're a dentist."
"A dentist?"
"I needed something. You have very nice teeth."
Ilya laughed. Then he stopped laughing. The wipers went. The light went green, and Wilner went through it, slowly, in the snow, and when he looked in the mirror again Ilya was looking straight at him, and he wasn't smirking, and he wasn't joking, and he wasn't wearing the hockey face or the Moscow face or the four in the morning face, and he said:
"I love him."
The wipers went.
"Yes," said Wilner. "Okay."
"Nobody knows. You are first person I say."
"Okay."
"Is terrible," Ilya said, to the window, and it was coming back now, the voice, the bit, the whole act, like a man pulling his coat back on in the cold. "Is the worst thing that ever happened to me. You understand? He folds his socks. He folds socks, Wilner. In balls. He has a drawer just for the balls. He eats chicken breast with nothing on it, just chicken, just like a dog. He goes to sleep at ten. He is the most boring man in Canada. In Canada! Do you know how hard that is to be? And I love him. Is a disaster."
"My wife," said Wilner, "irons my underwear."
A pause.
"She irons..."
"Every pair. Twenty-six years. She says it's for the germs. It's not for the germs." He turned onto René-Lévesque. "It's a cross we carry."
In the back seat, Ilya Rozanov put his face in Shane Hollander's scarf and laughed until he couldn't breathe.
*
Shane Hollander had made a list.
He made it in the Notes app on his phone, the night after the scarf, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with the door locked even though there was no one else in the condo, because some things you can only think about with the door locked. The list was called Driver (W.) and it had fourteen items on it and he edited it for five months. The items were things like Find out his full name (Ilya knows? Ilya says "Wilner" and then nothing, "is just Wilner, like Madonna") and Company = Limousine Royale, rue Jarry, owned by? and Ask Jenna (agent) re: NDA template, DON'T say why and Does he have kids and What does he want.
That last one had a lot of sub-bullets.
Money (how much is reasonable?? is there a number that isn't insulting) Tickets (season? lower bowl? would that be weird) Signed stuff for kids/grandkids Nothing (what if he wants nothing, then what) What if he wants something I can't give him
He didn't know what that last one would be. It was three in the morning when he wrote it. That's when he wrote the bad ones.
In July he booked a car to the airport through Limousine Royale, for a flight to Vancouver for a sponsor thing, under his own name, and in the special requests box he typed Driver Wilner if possible and then deleted it and then typed it again and then deleted it and then called the company on the phone and got a woman who answered "Royale" in a voice like she'd been smoking since the Expos left, and he said, "Hi, I'd like to request a specific driver, please, for tomorrow, his name is Wilner, I think he drives Car 12?" and there was a long, long silence on the line.
"Who is this," the woman said.
"Shane Hollander."
Another silence.
"Câlisse," said the woman, softly, with feeling, to herself. And then: "Seven a.m. He'll be there," and hung up.
He was there at six-fifty. Shane came down to the lobby, not the parkade, because he'd thought about this and decided that coming down to the lobby was the honest thing, and the black Lincoln was idling at the curb on rue Ottawa, and the man who got out to put Shane's bag in the trunk was older than Shane had thought from the mirror, maybe sixty, compact, grey at the temples, in a pressed white shirt and a dark tie in July. He had a careful, unhurried way of moving, like everything he did he'd done ten thousand times and saw no reason to rush the ten-thousand-and-first.
"Monsieur Hollander," he said. "Good morning."
"Hi. Good morning. Thank you. Can I, is it okay if I sit in the front?"
Wilner looked at him for a second. Then he opened the front passenger door.
Shane sat in the front. He had his backpack on his knees. In the backpack was a folder, and in the folder were three things: a two-page nondisclosure agreement that Jenna had drafted without asking any questions because she was a very good agent and also, Shane suspected, not stupid; a cheque made out to W. Joseph with the amount left blank; and a list, printed, double-spaced, of everything he wanted to say, in order. He'd practiced it in the shower.
They got to the Ville-Marie tunnel before Shane managed the first item, which was "So, uh. I wanted to say thank you."
"For what?"
"For. You know."
"For driving you to the airport? I haven't done it yet. Maybe I'll crash."
Shane laughed, a short surprised bark, and felt something in his chest unlock about a quarter turn. He looked at the man. The man was looking at the road. There was a card clipped on the sun visor above him, laminated, worn soft, with French on it in faded blue printing, and some kind of decorative border with a dove.
"I brought some things," Shane said. "I hope that's not weird. I don't, I'm not trying to make it weird. I just, I don't know you. And you know. A lot. About me. About us. And I've never. Nobody has ever." He stopped. He started again. "I brought an NDA. My agent drafted it. And a cheque, I left the amount blank, you can, whatever you think. I'm not saying you'd say anything. I'm just. I have to think about. He has a lot to lose. He has a lot more to lose than I do, his family is, it's Russia, it's. I need to know that he's. That it's."
He stopped. He was breathing too fast. He'd known he would do this. It was on the list. Item 9: Don't talk too fast.
At a red light on Notre-Dame, Wilner held out his hand without looking.
Shane put the folder in it.
Wilner opened it on the steering wheel. He read the NDA. All of it. Both pages. He read it the way Shane's father read contracts, slowly, with his lips moving very slightly at the long words. The light went green and he didn't move, and somebody honked behind them, and he raised one hand at the rearview mirror without looking up, and kept reading. When he got to the end he looked at the cheque for a while.
Then he closed the folder and gave it back.
"Monsieur Hollander," he said, and pulled forward. "I have been signing this every Boston game for five years. In here." He touched his own chest, once, with two fingers. "You can keep the paper."
"But."
"And the cheque. No."
"I want to. Please. I want to do something. You don't understand, you've been driving him around for five years in the middle of the night, he says you're the only person in this city he actually talks to, he says you, I don't know. He talks about you. He talks about your wife's food. He said one time you took him up the mountain." Shane swallowed. "He doesn't tell me what happened up the mountain. He just says you took him up there. He says it like. Like it's a church."
Wilner drove for a while.
"You want to do something for me," he said.
"Yes."
"You want to pay me."
"Yes."
"Beat Boston," said Wilner. "Saturday. They're coming in Saturday, I have the booking already. Beat Boston. Make him so angry in the third period he breaks his stick. Then let him come over anyway. That's what I want."
Shane stared at him.
Then he laughed so hard he had to put the folder down on the floor of the car.
Wilner let him. At the airport he got Shane's bag out of the trunk and put it on the curb and pulled the handle up for him, and Shane stood there holding it and didn't go in.
"What does it say?" he asked. "The card. On your visor."
Wilner looked at him. Then he went back to the driver's door, and leaned in, and took the card off the visor, which he did not do, which he had never done for anyone, and held it out over the roof of the car so Shane could read it.
Shane's French was good. He'd grown up in Ottawa, he'd had to be; it was the one thing his mother and the Metros PR department agreed on. He read it slowly. L'Éternel gardera ton départ et ton arrivée, dès maintenant et à jamais.
"The Lord shall preserve," said Wilner, "thy going out and thy coming in. From this time forth, and even for evermore. Psalm 121. My mother gave it to me at the airport in Port-au-Prince the day I left. For the trip." He clipped it back on the visor. "I put it there the first day I drove a car in this city. Every trip. Going out, coming in. Every trip."
Shane stood on the curb at Trudeau with his suitcase and didn't say anything at all.
"Go," said Wilner. "You'll miss your plane. Your mother would kill you."
Shane went. On the plane, somewhere over Saskatchewan, he took out his phone and opened the note called Driver (W.) and deleted fourteen items and five months of sub-bullets and wrote one new one:
Beat Boston Saturday.
They lost four to two. Ilya scored twice. He was unbearable about it all the way down rue Ottawa, Wilner said later, unbearable, and he came over anyway.
*
Things Shane Hollander left on the back seat of Car 12, years five through nine, as catalogued by Wilner Joseph, who did not report any of them to lost and found:
- A protein bar, chocolate peanut butter, with a Post-it: For W. Don't let him eat it. Ilya ate it.
- A protein bar, cookies and cream, with a Post-it: For W. I'm serious. Ilya ate it.
- Four tickets, lower bowl, center ice, Metros vs. Toronto, a Saturday, with a Post-it: For W. + family. Not Boston, I know you'd have to work. Wilner took Marie-Ange, Stéphanie and Junior, who wore his Rozanov jersey to provoke him and was asked to leave the row by a woman from Laval.
- A toque, Metros, official, the expensive kind with the pom-pom. No note. It was clearly a hint. Ilya refused to wear it and then wore it, inside out, so the logo didn't show, every Montreal trip for three years.
- A grey wool scarf. The scarf. No note. Wilner kept it in the glove box for the winter Ilya was hurt and didn't come to Montreal at all, and brought it back out in November, and put it on the back seat without a word, and Ilya picked it up and held it in both hands for the whole drive down to rue Ottawa and didn't say anything either.
- A Tupperware, clean, with a Post-it: For Marie-Ange. Thank you. (He told me about the patties.) (I ate one. Please don't tell my nutritionist.) (It was the best thing I ever ate too.)
Marie-Ange read the Post-it at the kitchen table, twice, with her reading glasses on, and then looked up at Wilner over the top of them for a long time.
"Wilner," she said. "Who are we feeding?"
He sat down across from her. He took his hat off. He'd known this day was coming. He'd known it for six years, since the first time there were four patties in the bag.
"A dentist," he said.
She waited.
"Two dentists," he said.
She took off her glasses and folded them and put them in her shirt pocket, and he saw that her eyes were wet, and he didn't know why, and then he did, and then she said: "The whole time?"
"The whole time."
"Bon Dye." She put her hand over her mouth. Then she took it away. "Stéphanie's going to be impossible."
"Stéphanie already knows."
"Stéphanie knows and I don't?"
"Nobody told Stéphanie. Stéphanie has the internet."
Marie-Ange looked at the Post-it again. Then she got up, and went to the freezer, and took out a bag of the dough she kept for emergencies, and put it on the counter to thaw, and said with her back to him, "When are they coming in next?"
"Boston, the fourteenth."
"I'll make the herring too," she said. "I want to see if the Canadian likes the herring. The Russian can have the beef. The Russian always has the beef."
*
LIMOUSINE ROYALE INC.: DISPATCH LOG Booking #12960: CANCELLED Client: JANE, M. Note (N. Lapointe): Client called personally. Says traded. Says Ottawa. Says will "see us on other side." What does that mean. W. JOSEPH NOTIFIED.
The trade was in July. Nadia read about it in Le Journal like everybody else, Rozanov to Ottawa, the Raiders' captain to the Centaurs for a bunch of picks and a defenseman nobody had heard of, and she sat at the night desk on rue Jarry and looked at the yellow curling Post-it on her monitor that said JANE: W. JOSEPH ONLY and thought, Well, that's that, then. Ottawa was two hours down the 40. Nobody hires a car from Montreal to Ottawa for a girlfriend in Griffintown. The married man with the wife in Boston would get a new girlfriend in Ottawa. That's how married men were.
She didn't take the Post-it down. She didn't know why. She just didn't.
Two years later, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, she was at the desk doing the crossword in pen and eating Ruffles and the radio was on 98.5 with the sound low, and the man on the radio said, ... and that's confirmed now, folks, the Ottawa Centaurs and the Montreal Metros have issued a joint statement this afternoon, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, longtime rivals on the ice, have confirmed that they have been in a relationship for... and Nadia Lapointe stood up so fast her chair went over backwards.
She didn't call Wilner. She got in her car. She drove to Saint-Michel. She parked on the lawn, which you are not allowed to do on Wilner Joseph's street, he'd told her many times, and she went up the walk and banged on the door with the flat of her hand until Marie-Ange opened it in an apron with flour on it up to her elbows.
"Is he here," said Nadia.
"Nadia! Come in, come in, sit, he's in the back, he's watching the..."
"MONSIEUR JANE," Nadia roared down the hallway. "NINE YEARS. NINE YEARS, WILNER JOSEPH."
Wilner came out of the back room in his reading glasses and his undershirt with the remote in his hand. On the TV behind him, through the doorway, Nadia could see the press conference, two men at a table with microphones, one of them in a suit and one of them in a Centaurs hoodie, one of them looking at his hands and one of them looking at the other one. Both of them were wearing grey wool scarves. In July.
Wilner looked at her. He looked at the TV. He looked back at her.
"Who?" he said.
Nadia picked up a throw pillow off the couch in the front room and threw it at his head.
"A girlfriend in Griffintown," she said. "A wife in Boston. You let me. Nine years you let me sit there with my Post-it and my... and I said married man, I said to the other drivers, I said, Wilner is an accessory, and you let me!"
"You never asked me."
"I asked you every week!"
"You asked me what he was. I told you. A young man who tips."
Nadia stood in the front hall breathing hard. Then she started laughing. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the stairs. She laughed so hard Marie-Ange had to bring her a glass of water and a patty, a fresh one, hot, the herring, and she ate the whole thing sitting on the stairs with her eyes running, and every few bites she said "married man" and started laughing again. Wilner stood over her in his undershirt with the remote, extremely dignified, and let her.
Later, when she'd gone, Stéphanie called. She didn't say hello. She just screamed for eleven seconds, happily, like a kettle, and then hung up.
Then the phone rang again. Wilner didn't recognize the number. It was a 613.
"Royale," he said, out of habit.
"Wilner," said Ilya Rozanov. "You watched?"
"I watched."
"How did I look?"
"Hot," said Wilner. "You wore a scarf in July."
"Is his scarf. Is sentimental. Is going to be a whole thing now, they're already making memes. Shane is very upset. He says it was the wrong fabric for the season."
"He's right."
"He's always right, is the worst thing about him." A pause. A long one. Wilner could hear something in the background, a dog barking, a door, Shane's voice saying something in a question. Then Ilya, not as loud: "We wanted to call you. Before. To tell you before. So you don't hear on radio. But the league, the lawyers, they said nobody, not anyone, not even family. So we didn't. I'm sorry."
"Monsieur Jane," said Wilner. "I didn't hear it on the radio. I heard it in my car. Nine years ago. Up the mountain. Remember?"
Silence on the line.
Then Ilya said, "Yes," very quietly. "I remember."
"Okay, then."
"Okay." Another pause. Then the voice came back, the bit, the coat going back on: "Also. We are coming to Montreal. In August. For his parents' thing. I am booking. Online. With my real name, like a person."
"Good."
"Shane wants to book. Shane says it's his turn. We had a whole fight."
"Who won?"
"Who do you think? He made a spreadsheet."
*
LIMOUSINE ROYALE INC.: DISPATCH LOG Booking #31187 Client: LILY Pickup: 6:30 p.m., FRONT ENTRANCE (lobby), Tour Saint-Patrick, rue Ottawa Drop: Restaurant, Outremont (address on file) Payment: Card on file (HOLLANDER, S.) Driver: W. JOSEPH (Car 12) (Requested. Of course.) Notes (N. Lapointe): Who is Lily. WHO IS LILY. Somebody tell me something for once in my life.
"Lily," said Wilner, in the lobby.
The concierge was watching them. The concierge was not even pretending not to watch them. The concierge, a young man with very good hair, had his phone out under the desk, and Wilner was fairly sure that by the time they reached the car there would be a photo of the three of them on the internet, and that by tomorrow Stéphanie would have shown it to him, and he found that he did not mind.
"Lily," said Ilya. "Is me."
"You are Lily."
"In his phone. Since we were nineteen. He put me in his phone as Lily. So if anyone sees the texts, they think, Ah, Hollander has a girlfriend, a nice girl named Lily, very boring, very Canadian, she probably plays the piano."
"And Jane," said Wilner slowly.
"Is him. In my phone. Jane."
Wilner looked at Shane. Shane was standing beside Ilya in a navy jacket, holding a bottle of wine in a paper bag for his parents' dinner, and he had gone a deep, comprehensive red, from his collar to his hairline.
"So for nine years," said Wilner, "I am driving a man named after the other man."
"Yes."
"To see the man he was named after."
"Yes."
"While the other man has him in his phone as a girl named Lily who plays the piano."
"She doesn't play piano," said Shane, faintly. "I never said piano. He made up the piano."
"Is obvious she plays piano," said Ilya.
Wilner shook his head, and opened the back door of the Lincoln, and both of them got in. Both. The same side, then sliding over, Ilya behind the passenger seat like always, Shane behind the driver, so that when Wilner got in and looked in the mirror they were both there, side by side, filling it up.
Shane reached over and took Ilya's hand on the seat between them. Just took it. Wilner saw him decide to do it. He saw it take a lot.
Ilya looked down at their hands. Then out the window. Then at Wilner in the mirror, and he didn't make a joke.
Wilner pulled out of the front entrance of the Tour Saint-Patrick onto rue Ottawa, in daylight, at six-thirty-one on a Saturday evening in August, with the concierge taking pictures through the glass and a couple walking a dog stopping on the sidewalk to stare and a man on a Bixi bike turning his whole body around to look and very nearly hitting a bollard. He touched the card on the visor.
*
He retired at sixty-eight. He would have gone on, but his knees had opinions and Marie-Ange had more, and Stéphanie, who was a charge nurse at the Jewish General now and frightening, had sat him down at the kitchen table with his own blood pressure readings in a spreadsheet, and he knew when he was beaten. He'd been driving a car in Montreal for thirty-three years.
The last booking came in two weeks before. Nadia called him at home to read it to him, because she knew he would want it read out loud, and because she wanted to hear his face, she said, which made no sense, and he understood her perfectly.
LIMOUSINE ROYALE INC.: DISPATCH LOG Booking #58004 Client: HOLLANDER-ROZANOV, S. & I. Pickup: 7:00 p.m., 1140 rue Fleury E., Saint-Michel (FRONT DOOR) Drop: Restaurant, Little Burgundy (address on file). Party for W. JOSEPH. SURPRISE. (He knows. Act surprised.) Payment: Card on file Driver: n/a Notes (N. Lapointe): Client says: "Driver is passenger." Client says they are driving Car 12 themselves, have cleared it with management. Client says this is non-negotiable. Client (S.) has asked for the car's tire pressure, mileage and last service date. Client (I.) has asked "if the radio is still the jazz." I said yes. Client (I.) said "good."
Shane drove.
He drove the way Wilner would have expected, if Wilner had ever imagined anything as foolish as Shane Hollander behind the wheel of Car 12. He adjusted the mirrors for four minutes before he put it in drive. He adjusted the seat. He adjusted the mirrors again because he'd adjusted the seat. He put on his signal to pull away from the curb on Fleury in front of Wilner's house with the whole street out on their porches watching, every neighbor, Madame Desrosiers from next door in her housecoat, the Pierre-Louis boys from across the street holding their phones up, and he kept the signal on for a full eight seconds even though there was no traffic coming in either direction for three blocks.
"Monsieur Hollander," said Wilner, from the back seat. "We will be dead of old age before the light."
"Is how he does everything," said Ilya, beside him. "You get used to it."
"I've been used to it since the scarf. I watched him park this car's competition. I saw him do a three-point turn in your parkade at two in the morning. Seven points. It was a seven-point turn."
"I can hear you," said Shane.
"Good," said Wilner and Ilya at the same time, and Ilya laughed, and Wilner laughed, and up front, at the wheel, at exactly the speed limit, Shane pressed his lips together very hard to keep from smiling and failed.
It was strange, the back seat. Wilner had driven this car through all of it, and he had never once sat back here. The leather was cracked at the seams where a thousand people had slid across it. There was a small stain behind the passenger seat that he knew for a fact was pikliz. The car smelled the way it always smelled, a little like Marie-Ange's cooking, a little like the vanilla air freshener Nadia made all the drivers use, a little like, under that, the cold. From back here you couldn't see the card on the visor. You couldn't see the road very well either. You could see the back of Shane Hollander's head, his ears going pink at the top, his hands at ten and two. You could see the mirror. In the mirror you could see, every few seconds, Shane's eyes flicking up to check on the back seat. Not on the road behind them. On the back seat. On Ilya.
So that's what it's for, Wilner thought. The mirror.
"We wanted to say something," said Ilya. "Before the party. Because at the party there will be your whole church and Nadia making a speech, she has a speech, she showed us, it's eleven pages, there is a section about the Post-it. So we say it now. In the car. Is better in the car."
"Everything is better in the car," said Wilner.
Ilya was quiet a moment. He was looking out the window at Saint-Michel going by, the duplexes with their outside staircases, the depanneurs, the church, Marie-Ange's church, where Father Lindor had retired three years before and the new priest was a young man from Jacmel who had, the first Sunday after the press conference, preached on the Book of Ruth. Wilner had sat in the fourth pew and wept and nobody said anything and Marie-Ange had held his hand.
"Up the mountain," said Ilya. "That night. I was going to stop. You understand? Not just stop with him. Stop. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was going to get in the car and go to the hotel and get on the bus and get on the plane, and I was going to call him from Boston and say, That's it, Hollander, is finished, I don't come anymore. And then I didn't know. After that I didn't know what. I didn't have a plan for after. There was nothing after." He said it flatly, to the window, the way you'd read a weather report. "And then you gave me a patty."
Shane's eyes in the mirror. Not on the road at all now.
"Two patties," said Wilner. "And the pikliz."
"The pikliz was terrible. I almost died."
"You ate the whole forkful to spite me."
"I eat everything to spite you. Is how I show love." Ilya turned from the window. He looked at Wilner. "You told me about the bathroom. About the water. You told me what okay means."
"Every man should know what okay means."
"Nobody told me. My father," Ilya said, and stopped, and decided something. "My father never told me anything. My mother, she would have told me. But she died when I was twelve. So nobody told me. You told me." A breath. "You took me up the mountain and you told me, and I went back, and he came out of the bathroom, and I was there."
The light on Jean-Talon was red. Shane stopped at it. He stopped at it very carefully, the whole car rolling gently to a perfect halt with a foot to spare behind the line, and he put it in park, which you do not do at a red light, and he turned all the way around in the driver's seat, which you also do not do at a red light, and he looked at Ilya.
"I love you," Shane said.
Just like that. In the car. Out loud. At a red light on Jean-Talon at ten past seven on a Saturday, with a bus behind them and a woman in the next car eating a poutine with a fork out of the container on her dashboard.
Ilya looked at him.
"I love you," said Shane again. "I wanted to say it in front of him. Because he was there. He was there for all of it, he was there before anybody, he was there when nobody was allowed to be there. I love you. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. You came up those stairs every single time. Every single time, Ilya, for nine years, you got in this car in the middle of the night and you came up."
"I took elevator," said Ilya. His voice wasn't working right.
"Don't."
"Is true, I never once took the stairs, it's thirty-one floors, are you insane..."
"Ilya."
Ilya Rozanov put his hand over his face. He sat there in the back seat of Car 12 with his hand over his face, and his shoulders went once, and then he took the hand down and his eyes were wet and he was laughing and crying at the same time, and he leaned forward between the seats and took Shane's face in both hands and said, "I love you, you boring, you terrible, you sock-folding, you most boring man in Canada. I love you so much. Since I was nineteen. I love you more than anything. I love you, Jane."
And kissed him, in the front seat, at the light on Jean-Talon, while the light went green.
The bus honked.
Wilner looked out the window. He looked very hard at a depanneur across the street with a sign for Loto-Québec and a cat asleep in the window on top of a stack of newspapers. He took out his handkerchief, which Marie-Ange had ironed, and blew his nose.
The bus honked again.
"Monsieur Hollander," said Wilner, when he could. "The light."
Shane let go. He turned back around. He put the car in drive. He checked his mirrors, all three of them, in order. He put on his signal, which was not necessary, since they were going straight. And Wilner Joseph sat in the back seat of the car he had driven through all of it, with Ilya Rozanov's shoulder against his shoulder and Ilya Rozanov's knee knocking his knee, and reached up, out of habit, to touch the card on the visor, and it was not there, because he was in the back.
Ilya saw him do it.
He didn't say anything. He reached into his own jacket pocket and took something out and put it in Wilner's hand, and closed Wilner's fingers over it.
It was the card. Laminated. Worn soft at the corners. The dove. The brown ink. L'Éternel gardera ton départ et ton arrivée. He'd taken it off the visor that afternoon in the parking lot on Jarry, he said, when they picked up the car, so it wouldn't get left behind when Car 12 went to whoever drove it next.
"Is yours," said Ilya. "You can't leave it in a car. Is going out and coming in. You are coming in now."
Wilner held it. He held it in both hands the way Ilya had once held a grey scarf, for a whole drive down rue Ottawa, saying nothing.
Then he leaned forward, between the seats, the way you are absolutely not supposed to do in a moving vehicle, and clipped it to the visor over Shane Hollander's head.
"For this trip," he said. "Then I want it back."
"Okay," said Shane, very quietly. And then, because he was Shane, and because he had been raised right, and because some things you only get to say once, from very far down, he said, "Thank you."
"Drive," said Wilner. "You're going to make us late to my surprise party. Nadia will kill you."
"She would," said Shane, and his ears went red, and he drove, at exactly the speed limit, down Jean-Talon toward the expressway and the city, through the green light, with his eyes going up to the mirror every few seconds, and not, Wilner noticed, to check the road.
*
LIMOUSINE ROYALE INC.: DISPATCH LOG Booking #58004: COMPLETED Driver: HOLLANDER, S. Rating (submitted by passenger W. JOSEPH): ★★★★☆ Comment: Very safe. Very slow. Signals going straight. Would ride again. Note (N. Lapointe): Took the Post-it down. Gave it to the Russian. He put it in his wallet. I don't want to talk about it.
*