The Roma Plot. Mario Bolduc
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in patches of grey snow despite the early spring. They were both incapable of saying a word, immured in their pain. The day was beautiful, the sunlight pouring through the branches of centenary maples. A magnificent day, intolerable, death wallowing in its power.
A few hours later Max found Kevin in a bar on rue Stanley. The two men drank into the early hours of the morning, along with the owner, a friend of Raymond’s. By dawn their humanity had deserted them. Montreal’s streets were empty, grieving. Kevin crossed the parking lot, toward a handful of idling cabs. All of a sudden the young man threw himself on his knees and howled. Max had never heard anything so violent. So unbearable.
Losing your father and your son in the same accident. What kind of cruel and vengeful God would permit such horror?
Max first met Kevin in the fall of 1993 on the corner of Madison and Seventy-Second Street. Kevin was wearing a lumberjack’s checkered windbreaker, but no hat on his head. He was shivering. Around him were a hundred or so Christmas trees, which that day didn’t seem to attract the attention of a single New Yorker. Max hated Christmas. Like all single people, really. A holiday made doubly cruel by its seemingly interminable preparations. At forty-two, while most men his age were living lives within the bounds and lines of owning property, raising children, and getting ready to celebrate Christmas with them, Max wandered through the streets of New York looking for a bar to call home for the night.
Two years earlier Max had learned of Pascale’s death. The woman he loved. He’d gone to India to witness her cremation on the banks of the Ganges. Since then, Max had had a few brief, meaningless relationships. Once trivialities had been exchanged, after the first few encounters, the same issue would arise. When it came time to show his true self, Max was trapped — all he could offer were lies. And so he would walk away, not unkindly, without making any waves, and return to the solitude he was forced into by his work. By his being a con man. The same solitude guided him toward an unknown bar that night as he scanned the storefronts on the corner of Seventy-Second Street.
Kevin was jumping up and down, shadowboxing against the wall. The dance of frozen feet. Seeing the guy jittering on the street corner, Max couldn’t help but smile. Normally, he would have walked on, said nothing at all, but for some reason he engaged with the man.
“Merry Christmas!” shouted Kevin, waving his arms about. He added, “Want to go for a drink?”
So it would be coffee, first, in a nearby deli — a double espresso sweetened with a few drops of the cognac secreted in Kevin’s inside pocket. Cab drivers jostled one another to reach the counter. The large outside window was all fogged up. New York in winter.… After coffee the two men found refuge at the Donohue, Max’s local. They agreed on Irish whiskey, the universal remedy for the blues. Kevin told Max he was from Montreal and wasn’t actually a lumberjack. The trees he was selling weren’t even from Canada, but from a nursery in New Jersey, only a few kilometres away from Manhattan. The whole setup was just for show. Misleading representation? Kevin answered with a smile. Who cares about truth? Max wasn’t about to contradict him.
The whole Christmas tree thing was only to make ends meet. It gave Kevin enough time to concentrate on his true passion: running. A former member of the Canadian Olympic team, he’d been to the Games in Seoul, as well as in Barcelona the previous year. He’d made a strong impression. No medals, but lots of hope for Atlanta — those were the next games. He trained with American athlete Richard Voight in New York.
At dawn Max stumbled home with a dishevelled Christmas tree in tow, which he couldn’t remember why he’d accepted. He didn’t think he’d ever hear from the fake lumberjack again. But after Christmas, Kevin called to invite Max to one of his training sessions at the Tribeca Sports Center. It was a dilapidated old gym next to a bus terminal — you could hear the buses changing gears as you ran around the track. Max sat in the stands and watched Kevin breathing hard, listening to the advice of a grey-haired man in a track suit — Richard Voight, a gold medallist at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
A few moments later Kevin threw himself down the track again. Despite his stature — he was tall, strong, something rather unusual for a marathon runner — there was something vulnerable in his movements, a semblance of fragility. He looked like a big kid who’d grown up too fast, running laps in a park.
“Ah! So you’re the Robert Cheskin who’s been carousing with my Kevin!” a young woman called out to Max from a few seats behind him. He’d been working with the Cheskin alias for a few months now. Max had noticed the woman when she’d first walked into the gym. Black tousled hair, a magnificent smile. Her name was Caroline. She and Kevin had just gotten married. Her belly was as round as a balloon. She was expecting a child soon: Gabrielle.
“Caroline is a journalist,” Kevin explained later after he’d changed back into civilian clothes.
The young woman freelanced for small newspapers and magazines, usually those with a left-wing bent. The sort of papers whose mission was to fight against the cruelties and injustices of the world. The sort that sought to redress all wrongs, be they past, present, or future. Caroline dreamed of a job with the New York Times or the Washington Post; she was always looking for the next topic, the next story that would give her an opening, a foot in the door of those great papers. For now, however, she satisfied herself with what she had: contributing to sincere pamphlets with anemic print runs.
Back at the Donohue, Caroline asked Max what he did for a living. Where he worked, exactly.
“In a bank. Recovery and collections. I take care of outstanding loans and credit margins, that sort of thing …”
“So you pester people who can’t pay?”
Max smiled. “Something like that.”
Failure to pay, deadbeat creditors. They’d heard those words often enough, the both of them, Max would come to learn. Addicted to their credit cards, chronically in debt, they were acrobats of poverty. They lived in a pathetic little rental in Sunset Park in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. And things weren’t easy, that much was clear. Max didn’t yet know that Kevin came from a family of entrepreneurs, that he’d had a golden childhood that had left its mark. Elegance, distinction, good manners. A beautiful garden to play in behind a manor on avenue Shorncliffe in Westmount. A summer home on rivière Saqawigan in Gaspésie — the biggest house in the entire region. Private tennis and horse-riding lessons. Extensive studies in management. Kevin was destined one day to take over the family business. What was he doing in New York pretending to be a marathon runner, selling Christmas trees to make ends meet? After having worked a few years for Nordopak, Kevin had cut all ties with his father. Caroline had told him this one night, not wanting to say any more than that. Max hadn’t pressed. Secrets, like fruit, must be ripe to be picked without effort.
At one point that very night they had stood in front of a giant billboard in Times Square: an ad for the Boston Marathon with the year’s previous winner, trophy in hand.
“Next year, Robert, it’ll be my picture up there.”
It was a dream that wouldn’t come true, not the following year, nor any other. Disappointing performances, an injury that wouldn’t heal. Voight fired, replaced with a guru from California. Yoga, relaxation, transcendental meditation. No results there, either. But Kevin wouldn’t give up. After the Boston Marathon, after New York, he was offered a teaching position in British Columbia — he refused outright. He couldn’t leave Caroline by herself; she’d just given birth. They were madly in love, the two of them, that much was clear. They couldn’t bear the thought of living apart. Max had never seen such osmosis between two people, such compatibility. Even Max’s relationship with Pascale those long years ago, the tormented, troubled, passionate moments spent together, seemed dull compared to the love between Kevin and Caroline. An intense love, destined for tragedy.
Max adopted their family, in a sense. They went out together all the time. Restaurants, museums, theatre, cinema: Caroline’s world. Meanwhile, Kevin took Max out to baseball and hockey games. Max pushed Gabrielle’s stroller through Central Park while the girl’s father trained and trained. On Gabrielle’s birthdays, Max would come over, his arms loaded with gifts. Gabrielle would throw herself at him, emitting shrill,