The Mexican was not easily surprised, but Lupita stood as if she were in shock. Recovering herself, she opened the door to the fridge, which she had cleaned just the other day; there was practically nothing in it. (Except when Danny was having a dinner party, there almost never was.)
“No, I mean the door,” Danny told her. “Please clean it off entirely. Throw all those notes away.”
At this point, Lupita’s disapproval turned to worry. “¿Enfermo?” she suddenly asked Danny. Her plump brown hand felt the writer’s forehead; to her practiced touch, Danny didn’t feel as if he had a fever.
“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Danny told the cleaning woman. “I am merely sick of how I’ve been distracting myself.”
It was a tough time of year for the writer, who was no spring chicken, Lupita knew. Christmas was the hardest time for people who’d lost family; of this, the cleaning woman had little doubt. She immediately did what Danny had asked her to do. (She actually welcomed the opportunity to interrupt his writing, since he was doing it in the wrong place.) Lupita gladly ripped the little scraps of paper off the fridge door; the damn Scotch tape would take longer, she knew, digging at the remaining strips with her fingernails. She would also scour the door with an antibacterial fluid, but she could do that later.
It’s not likely that it ever occurred to the cleaning woman that she was throwing away what amounted to Danny’s obsession with what Ketchum would have made of Bush’s blundering in Iraq, but she was. Maybe in Danny’s mind-way in the back, somewhere-the writer was aware that he was, at that moment, letting go of at least a little of the anger he felt at his former country.
Ketchum had called America a lost nation, but Danny didn’t know if this was fair to say-or if the accusation was true yet. All that mattered to Daniel Baciagalupo, as a writer, was that his former country was a lost nation to him. Since Bush’s reelection, Danny had accepted that America was lost to him, and that he was-from this minute, forward-an outsider living in Canada, till the end of his days.
While Lupita made a fuss over the refrigerator door, Danny went into the gym and called Kiss of the Wolf. He left a fairly detailed message on the answering machine; he said he wanted to make a reservation at the restaurant for every remaining night that Kiss of the Wolf was open-that is, until Patrice and Silvestro closed for the Christmas holiday. Lupita had been right: Christmas was always hard for Danny. First he’d lost Joe, and those Christmases in Colorado; then Danny’s dad had been blown away. And every Christmas since that also-memorable Christmas of 2001, the writer was reminded of how he’d heard about Ketchum, who was lost to him, too.
Danny was not Ketchum; the writer was not even “like” Ketchum, though there’d been times when Danny had tried to be like the old logger. Oh, how he’d tried! But that wasn’t Danny’s job-to use the job word as Ketchum had meant it. Danny’s job was to be a writer, and Ketchum had understood that long before Danny did.
“You’ve got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine everything, Danny,” the veteran river driver had told him. Daniel Baciagalupo was trying; if the writer couldn’t be Ketchum, he could at least heroize the logger. Really, how hard was it, the writer was thinking, to make Ketchum a hero?
“Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” Ketchum had told him when it had taken Danny three shots to drop his first deer.
Shit, I should have known then what Ketchum meant, the writer was thinking on that day when Lupita was madly cleaning all around him. (Yes, he should have.)
CHAPTER 17. KETCHUM EXCEPTED
DANNY DID HAVE SOME GLIMMER OF UNDERSTANDING IN regard to what Ketchum was up to-this had happened around the time of American Thanksgiving, in November 2001. The writer was having dinner one evening-naturally, at Kiss of the Wolf-and Danny’s dinner date was his own doctor. Their relationship wasn’t sexual, but they had a serious friendship; she’d been Danny’s medical-expert reader for a number of his novels. She’d once written him a fan letter, and they’d begun a correspondence-long before he came to Canada. Now they were close friends.
The doctor’s name was Erin Reilly. She was almost Danny’s age-with two grown children, who had children of their own-and, not long ago, her husband had left her for her receptionist. “I should have seen it coming,” Erin had told Danny philosophically. “They both kept asking me, repeatedly-I mean about a hundred times a day-if I was all right.”
Erin had become the friend in his Toronto life that Armando DeSimone had been to Danny in Vermont. Danny still corresponded with Armando, but Armando and Mary didn’t come to Toronto anymore; the drive from Vermont was too long, and airplane travel had become too inconvenient for people their age, and of their disposition. “The airport-security goons have taken every Swiss Army knife I ever owned,” Armando had complained to Danny.
Erin Reilly was a real reader, and when Danny asked her a medical question-whether this was a concern he had for himself, or when he was doing research for a character in a novel-Danny appreciated that the doctor gave long, detailed answers. Erin liked to read long, detailed novels, too.
That night, in Kiss of the Wolf, Danny had said to his doctor: “I have a friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand; his left hand failed him somehow. Will he bleed to death, if he actually does it?”
Erin was a gangling, heron-like woman with closely cut gray hair and steely hazel eyes. She was intensely absorbed in her work, and in whatever novel or novels she was reading-to a flaw, Danny knew, and maybe the flaw was why he loved her. She could be blind to the world around her to an alarming degree-the way, with the passage of time, the cook had managed to convince himself that the cowboy wasn’t really coming after him. Erin could joke that she should have “seen it coming”-meaning her husband’s involvement with her receptionist-but the fact that they’d both kept asking Erin if she was all right, was not (in Danny’s opinion) what his dear friend Erin should have noticed. Erin had written her husband’s Viagra prescriptions; she had to have known how much of that stuff he was taking! But Danny loved this about Erin-her acute innocence, which reminded him of everything his father had been blind to, which Danny had also loved.
“This … friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand,” Dr. Reilly slowly said. “Is it you, Danny, or is this a character you’re writing about?”
“Neither. It’s an old friend,” Danny told her. “I would tell you the story, Erin, but it’s too long, even for you.”
Danny remembered what he and Erin had to eat that night. They’d ordered the prawns with coconut milk and green curry broth; they’d both had the Malpeque oysters, with Silvestro’s Champagne-shallot mignonette, to start.
“Tell me everything, Erin,” he’d told her. “Spare me no detail.” (The writer was always saying this to her.) Erin smiled and took a tiny sip of her wine. She was in the habit of ordering an expensive bottle of white wine; she never drank more than a glass or two, donating the remainder of the bottle to Patrice, who then sold it by the glass. For his part, Patrice every so often paid for Erin’s wine. Patrice Arnaud was Dr. Reilly’s patient, too.