Have a Good Life

Are you Ian Roy?

I’m not, I answer. And then, almost as inexplicably as that denial, I apologize with a shrug.

This was 1997. My wife and I were on a beach in Nova Scotia. It was early fall, a sunny but cool and windy day. The beach was deserted or had been until a man appeared from behind some rocks and started walking towards us. The first thing I noticed about this man was that he was dressed entirely in khaki. He had on a wide-brimmed Tilley hat that cast a shadow over his face and an unbuttoned shirt that billowed and flapped in the wind. He wasn’t wearing an undershirt, and I could see his pale, hairy chest. As he got closer, I saw that he was carrying tools in his hands, like those a geologist might use: a rock hammer, some chisels. As he got closer still, and I got a better look at his face, I felt as if my chest had suddenly become hollow. My breath got caught in my throat. It felt as if my ears were stuffed with cotton: I could no longer hear the wind; I could no longer hear the surf.

There wasn’t time to explain to Caspi—my wife’s name is Sarah but I call her Caspi—why I was so unnerved by this man. All I said to her was, Keep walking.

The man stopped directly in our path, however, and we had no choice but to stop as well. He smiled and said hi. He was looking directly at me when he said it, but it was Caspi who answered him with a quiet hello. The man raised his hand then and pointed at me. That’s when he asked if I was Ian Roy.

I didn’t look at him when I said no. Maybe I was worried he’d know by the expression on my face that I was lying. Or maybe he’d know by my face itself. I also didn’t look at Caspi, but I could feel her watching me, and I could imagine the expression on her face: curious, bemused. We had been married for only a couple months, and we were still learning new things about one another. This—whatever this was—would turn out to be one of those new things she’d learn about me.

Are you not Ian Roy? the man asked.

I looked around—for what, I don’t know. A life raft? A black hole in which to throw myself?

The wind had picked up, and the waves were getting bigger. I imagined myself out there clinging to a piece of driftwood and floating away.

No, I said. And again I apologized.

The man looked at Caspi as if she might provide some clarity, but she only smiled back at him. She may have shrugged.

I nodded to the man without meeting his eye and began to walk away.

You must be Ian Roy, he said, and then he added: Unless you have a twin. He laughed at this last part like it was a joke, but he also seemed to be waiting for me to confirm that I was a twin.

I smiled back at him and pretended to laugh as well.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Caspi’s head swiveling back and forth between the man and me as if she was watching a tennis match. I looked out at the waves. Where would I end up if I floated all the way across that ocean I wondered? France? Portugal?

The man in khaki was still talking.

I could have sworn that was you who came in for an interview at Sanga on Thursday? he continued. Tom introduced us by the elevator?

Everything he said ended with a question mark.

He pointed to himself and said his name: Patrick Milne?

Patrick Milne. Introduced by the elevators. Right. I looked past all the khaki, imagined him in a suit and tie—and recognized him as a man I’d met days earlier, and not the man I thought he was.

Oh, I said. Yes, that was me. I spoke slowly, as if drunk or half asleep.

So you are Ian Roy?

That’s right, I said, as casually as I could. I looked directly at him and smiled sheepishly.

You start Monday? He was smiling, too—and obviously waiting for me to explain myself. But I only nodded in response.

I glanced over at Caspi: her eyes were wide; she was almost but not quite grinning. She was finding this all very amusing.

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, I said: Well, I guess I’ll see you on Monday then.

And I did. And it was exactly as awkward as you’d imagine.

There’s a short story in my first collection called “God Loves A Broken Heart”. In that story, a woman is sitting alone on a beach when a man approaches and asks if she is Claudia Gaines. She is, but she says she’s not. Sound familiar? The man, unwilling to accept Claudia’s answer, reminds her that they met days earlier when she applied for a job at his office. Claudia smiles sheepishly in response and admits that she is in fact who he thinks she is—but like me, she refuses to explain herself. In the story, Claudia initially denies who she is because the guy gave her the creeps. I did it because I thought the man I saw on the beach that day was my father.

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I was reminded of this incident after a recent conversation with a friend. We were talking about how so many writers and artists—most of us? all of us? —revisit the same material again and again. We all have our preoccupations, our obsessions—those things that haunt us and that we spend our lives trying to exorcise through writing. Think of Dickens and his orphans; Kafka and his existential dread; John Irving and his bears and dysfunctional families. What’s yours? my friend asked that day. Without pausing to even think about it, I answered: absent fathers, missing fathers, dead fathers, children without fathers. And it was really only as I said it, as the words left my mouth, that I realized how true this was. Fathers are everywhere and nowhere in my work. My very first published story is about a father who makes all the wrong choices. Claudia’s father in “God Loves A Broken Heart” is dead. There’s a story in my second collection about a man who is visited by the judgemental ghost of his father. That story’s called “My Dead Father”. There are a few other stories in that book about fathers, or the absence of fathers, and several more in the book I’m currently working on. Olive, the protagonist in my most recent book, a novel for children, makes a point of telling us that she doesn’t have a father. And that’s just the way it is, she says to put an end to the conversation.

And that’s just the way it is for me, too. For years, when asked if growing up without a father affected me or if it was something I spent a lot of time thinking about, I’d always answer with a quick and dismissive No. And for a long time, I believed that to be true. Meanwhile, the evidence to the contrary was piling up all around me: just take that incident on the beach or all the fathers, present or conspicuously absent, in so much of my fiction. It is largely through reflecting on what I’ve written that I see how my life has been—partly, reluctantly—defined by this absence. But outside of writing—and tellingly so—I don’t give it much conscious thought. Like Olive in my novel The Girl Who Could Fly, I have mostly considered my fatherlessness as nothing more than a simple fact: That’s just the way it is, I’d say to put an end to any conversation in which the question was asked.

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Of the few memories I have of my father, all but two have turned out to be photographs that I unwittingly transformed into memories—like the photo of my mother painting my father’s face to look like a member of the band Kiss. It was Halloween and his band was playing a show that night. I would have only been a couple years old when this happened, so how could I remember it? I came across the photo when I was ten or eleven. It was hidden behind another photo in a thick family album. That’s when I realized I must have seen the photo years earlier and committed it to memory as if it was a memory. The next time I looked for it, it was gone.

One of the memories that is in fact a memory and not a photograph happened when I was about four years old. My mother and I lived in a small basement apartment at the time, and my father was visiting. In my memory of that day, I chase my mother and father around the apartment with a plastic bow and an arrow tipped with a suction cup. My father takes it from me at some point and aims it at my mother. He pulls back the string too hard and breaks the bow in half. It falls to the floor at his feet. We all stare at the pieces. I start crying. My father says he’ll buy me a new one. But he never does.

That was forty-six years ago. And that was the last time I remember seeing my father. But it wasn’t the last time I spoke to him. That happened fourteen years later, when I was eighteen and about to start university.

My second and only other memory of my father begins with a phone call from one of my mother’s brothers. It was rare to receive a phone call from my uncle back then, and I remember being a little wary when I heard his voice; I knew something was up. My uncle told me that he had run into my father earlier that day. It turned out that my father worked at the library where I’d be attending university—and not only that, my uncle said, as my father’s son, I qualified for free tuition. I flinched when he called me my father’s son and had to ask him to repeat what he’d said.

A lot of things went through my mind during that phone call, not least of which was the fact that I also worked in a library back then, a different library, but a library all the same. That we had that in common made me uncomfortable. That my estranged father worked at the university where I’d be attending in the fall also made me uncomfortable. The possibility of free tuition, however, was enticing.

My uncle told me that all I had to do was call my father and arrange to sign some papers.

I said I needed to think about it.

It’s free tuition, Bud. My uncle called me Bud. What do you need to think about?

A couple days later, I called my father at work. He was surprised to hear from me: I could hear it in his voice. He actually put the phone down and exclaimed loudly before picking it back up and resuming the conversation. He asked if we could meet. That way, he said, we could catch up and sign the papers in person. Catch up, I repeated those words back to him but didn’t say anything else. He gave me his home number and asked me to call him that night to arrange to get together in the coming days.

I hung up and immediately broke down. My roommates and I had a worm composter by our front entrance. Several of the worms had escaped and were dead and dried out on the floor all around me. I stepped over them and made my way to my room. My roommates asked what was wrong, but I was crying too hard to answer.

I called my father that night and told him that I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want to meet with him; I didn’t want to sign any papers; and I didn’t want his help. The last thing he said to me before I hung up was: Have a good life.

Those were the last words I ever heard my father say.

That makes it sound like he’s dead. But he’s not, as far as I’m aware. Part of me thinks I’d know if he was, but another part of me thinks I wouldn’t know at all. As I reach the age where my friends are losing their parents and talking about things like closure and making amends and having the opportunity to say those things they needed to say or hear those things they needed to hear, I think about how I’ll feel when my father dies. Have a good life is not bad in terms of the last words to hear from one’s father. But is it enough? I can’t help but wonder sometimes if I’ll feel regret for all the other things, I never heard him say to me or those things I never said to him? Will I feel a loss? Will I feel anything at all? Right now, the answer to those questions is—sadly but perhaps not surprisingly—a dismissive No. My uncle, the only one who might have informed me of my father’s death when that day comes, has been gone for ten years now. That was a loss I felt and continue to feel. I am not entirely heartless, after all.

A couple months before that day on the beach in Nova Scotia, a card arrived for me at my mother’s house. There was no return address on the envelope, but I could tell from my mother’s expression when she handed it to me—a little bit impassive, a little bit resigned—that she somehow knew who it was from. I remember that it was hot that day and the sun beat down on us there on my mother’s driveway. I remember that the envelope was the colour of a ripe lemon and the card was decorated with the image of a garish floral arrangement. I had gotten married days earlier and had received many such cards. I smiled at my mother as I turned the card upside down and shook it as if expecting money to fall out. But the card was empty save for an impersonal handwritten note, something about wishing the bride and groom a happy future.

It was signed by my father.

That card, that laughably generic card, was the first—and only—correspondence my father ever sent me.

Two months later, I would see that man on the beach and mistake him for my father. These two things are connected.

At that time, I had only the vaguest memory of what my father looked like based on a shaky memory and a few old photographs that I hadn’t seen in years—but there was something about that man on the beach that reminded me of him, of what I thought he might look like twenty years later. It seems absurd now that I could have imagined it to be him. His presence on that beach was so improbable, so unlikely. But receiving that card months earlier is what made it feel possible, plausible even that my father would appear before me that day—because that card had served as an unwelcome reminder that I had a father out in the world somewhere, something I had all but denied for most of my life and continue to do even now. And so, to suddenly be confronted by a man I thought was my father threw that all up in the air. That’s what unnerved me that day; that’s why I denied who I was. Because if I wasn’t father-less, then just what was I? I had formed an identity for myself that didn’t involve him, didn’t even involve his existence in this world. His presence, real or imagined, upended that. What I so seemingly inexplicably did on the beach that day is what I do each and every day—in a sense: I pretend I am not the Ian Roy who has a father out there somewhere. But I am. And I was reminded of it when my uncle called and told me he’d seen my father that day; I was reminded of it when I called my father and heard his voice on the other end of the line; I was reminded of it when I received that card at my mother’s house; and I was reminded of it when I saw that man dressed in khaki on the beach carrying chisels and a geologist’s hammer. I am occasionally reminded of it when I see a man of a certain age sitting behind a desk in a library or walking past me on the street. And I will be reminded that I have a father out there in the world one last time when my father dies—and then never again.

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash