After the class, Novak caught Cyril before he could escape. He had a surprisingly strong sharp grip. “Most people you can’t hold them back,” he said. “All they want is a show, attention, glory, praise, look at me, look at me!” He jerked his thumb at Richard. “Like Little Big Dick there.” Cyril was eager to hear criticism of Little Big Dick, that he was hollow, would soon fall on his face, and was not half the artist Cyril was. But Novak did not say that. Instead he observed that there was nothing wrong with ambition, that ambition was good, that no one got anywhere without it. “But you, you hide.”
Richard, across the room, was taking note of the scene.
In a low voice Cyril said, “I’m not hiding.”
Novak did not deign to argue, nor did he keep his voice down. “Hide much longer you’ll rot. Like a potato in a cellar.”
“We know how successful my last show was,” said Cyril.
“Twenty years ago. And it wasn’t your show, it was a group show. Forget it. Grow up. Accept yourself. You’re good.”
“Good isn’t always enough.”
Impatience hardened Novak’s face. “Don’t fuck with me. You want to fuck with yourself, fine, go into a closet and shut the door and fuck with yourself, but don’t fuck with me.”
Departing students skirted wide around them. Richard was the last to go, a smirk tickling the corners of his mouth.
“What are you?” demanded Novak.
Cyril stared.
“Decide. And soon.”
“Okay.”
But Novak hadn’t finished with him. “Did you know I have a son?”
It was the first Cyril had heard.
“Twenty-five years I haven’t seen him.”
Cyril waited, unsure whether there was pride or lament in that statement and wondering why Novak was telling him.
“His mother called last night. Every year or so she calls. Our son, Istvan, he lives with her. He’s this fat.” Novak spread his arms wide. “He sits. He does nothing.” Novak made a face like a toad. “His mother blames me; I blame her. Same as always. A mess. When we emigrated she was homesick. She wanted to go back. Didn’t matter that in Hungary there was no meat, no milk, no coffee. Didn’t matter that they lived on potatoes, that the phones were tapped, that everyone was a rat. Me, I’ve never been back and I never will go back. I don’t go to Hungarian restaurants. I don’t go to Hungarian clubs. I don’t even talk to Hungarians. Fuck them. All they do is dig up the old dirt. Scratch their scabs and keep the wounds raw. I’ll tell you the happiest day of my life was the morning I woke up realizing I’d begun dreaming in English. Free at last! But her, she was always talking Hungarian to him. He must know his roots! I said bullshit, roots are a ball and chain. She was horrified. It was like I spat on the cross.” Novak exhaled long out his nose and contemplated the problem of his ex-wife and his lump of a son. At last he shook his head as if there was no solution. “And then there is you,” he said coming to the point. “You are doublefucked. And do you know why? Because you are nostalgic for the ball and chain you never even had.” Putting his palms together as though to pray, Novak rested his chin upon his fingertips and after a moment’s thought he stated, “I make it simple for you: join the show or don’t come back to the class.”
Steve sat enthroned in a black leather chair behind an oak and brass desk. Not solid oak, but plastic veneer, a piece of furniture made of particle board slapped together on an assembly line. Cyril felt a faint disappointment in his nephew and at the same time grim satisfaction. He evaluated the sloppy paint job on the office walls: beige colliding like a storm surge against a white ceiling, not to mention the drips and roller marks. Cyril had been running his own painting business for twenty years. Interesting how Steve hadn’t offered him the work; he was slighted though at the same time relieved.
Bad paint job aside, the walls testified to Steve’s success. There was his university diploma, his law school diploma, wedding photos, honeymoon-on-Kauai photos, pictures of Courtenay and Candace at birth, one, two, three, and four years of age. There were pictures of Steve and Marlene grinning beneath the Eiffel Tower and in Saint Peter’s Square. There were pictures from their various cruises, including one of Steve cradling a bottle of Dom Castro port, 1953, and, in the centre of them all, one where he had his arm around the shoulders of Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet. Yet what spooked Cyril were the photographs of Cyril himself. He and Steve rarely saw each other more than twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, but there he was, uncle Cyril, as a kid, as a teen, in his twenties. He should have been touched; in fact he felt as though he’d been spied upon.
Cyril remembered Steve eating flies from the window ledge. The flies had always been alive—fresh meat only for him. Since then his interest in cuisine had flourished.
The office was in a bright new building on Vancouver’s west side, but somewhat tainted by the fact that Steve’s one window looked across an alley at a water-stained apartment with sagging balconies. Still, Steve’s clothes were impeccable, his charcoal suit enlivened by fine silver stripes and his cerise tie charged by bolts of silver lightning. As for his hair, it was styled short and dyed blond and oiled straight back, while his ear gleamed with a red stud. Cyril wore jeans. They were fairly new, not yet faded and thereby demoted to work pants. His shirt was grass-green, button-down, short-sleeved. He wore no watch, no ring.
“Grandma and I were always close,” Steve said. “But toward the end we really talked. She really confided in me.”
Cyril acknowledged the profound depths of Steve’s relationship with his grandmother even though, frau Vogner story aside, he suspected it was Steve who’d done all the confiding, Cyril’s mother never the sort to bare her soul—at least she’d never bared much of it to him.
On the desk were a computer and some papers, a champagne flute full of pens and pencils and a red ceramic bowl heaped with black liquorice. Steve pushed the bowl forward.
Cyril declined.
Chuckie, comatose until now, woke and heaved himself forward with a grunt and pawed up a handful then flumped back into his chair. He wore stained sweatpants and a stained baseball shirt and a grubby ponytail. Slapping the entire handful of liquorice into his mouth he chewed loudly and wetly then dug a wad from a tooth and examined it before sucking it from his finger and resuming his masticating. Steve glanced at Cyril as though to bond over such lamentable manners. Cyril opted for an expression of innocent neutrality. After all, both boys had always regarded their uncle as a chump.
Cyril looked again at the photographs. Steve followed his gaze. “Grandma gave me the ones of you.”
“I wondered.”
“I think she kind of wished you’d have drawn her.”
Cyril was frankly surprised.
“She told me,” said Steve. “All grandpa’s stuff but never her. I don’t know,” he added quickly, seeing where this was going and switching tracks before it was too late, “just what she mentioned.” He shrugged.
Connie and Cyril had once gone into a photo exhibit titled Portraits of Old Europe. Big black and white images of refugees plodding along dirt roads, aristocrats in decayed splendour, peasants in fields, gypsies in covered wagons. Connie had asked if he ever drew his mother? He said she wouldn’t let him. But he’d never asked, he’d have been afraid to. All those statues of the Virgin, did he draw those? He hesitated and said sometimes. But she saw through him. Liar. Yet she was smiling. Then why did you ask? Because I like to see you work without a script.