“Jesus,” he said, suddenly seeing it. He was flabbergasted. “I need a vacation,” he said with a feeble laugh.
“Or something,” Margo drawled. Ever since, he has been fretting that she is on to him. That everybody is on to him. He hasn’t had a lover in over three years but the desire is there like a compounding debt. Like owing the Mafia, there’s no getting around it, cough up or die. Who
can’t
see the cocks in his eyes is what Gordon would like to know.
So every few pages he finds himself glancing at Sonja and wondering if in her guileless way she has sensed something fishy about old Dad. A far more diabolical possibility is that she knows because Joan knows. That Joan knows and has communicated it to Marcy, and that Marcy has consulted her older sister. Who has consulted Doris.
But hold your horses,
does
Joan know? Even if he has let a few things slip to her, she wouldn’t understand, she’s only
eight, for Christ’s sake. She’s sharp, though, sharper than she lets on. He had better watch himself, stay on the ball. Maybe he shouldn’t lie down, but he’s usually so beat at the end of the day. What is it about lying on that floor? Is it some chemical in the carpet? For a year or so she’s been humming the whole time he’s there, and he finds that really soothing, hypnotically so. Is it her humming, then? No, he has
always
had an urge to pour his heart out around her. Why? And (here’s where it gets out of hand) why can’t he distinguish between what he’s said out loud and what he’s only been thinking? Dead-giveaway words—“lover,” for example, or, worse: “queer,” even “Al Yothers”—will suddenly seem to be booming off the walls, and he’ll jerk up and gape at her alert little face in the back of the closet while the words, whether he spoke them or not, settle like nuclear fallout. “Did Daddy just say something?” he might ask. She’ll nod or shake her head. Or moo. Or click her tongue. Or just go on staring. He gets the feeling she’s giving him the response that suits some rigorous, unfathomable purpose of hers because never in her face has he witnessed reproach or shock. Never, not under any circumstances.
Now take Sonja … He extracts the soaking handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabs his hairline as he studies her. In
her
face, ever since she quit school anyway, he hasn’t witnessed anything other than contentment. He’d love to be able to believe that look. He used to believe it, not any more. Partly it’s her shooting up from plump to fat. He can’t believe that, simple though she is, she doesn’t care. He can’t believe that you can be a twenty-four-year-old woman who has never gone out on a date (okay, you’ve gone out on
one
date) and not be suffering. He can’t believe that a contented person has only one friend and that friend is a snarky, go-go-booted doughnut glazer with a laugh like a pneumatic drill. He stands in the doorway of Sonja’s bedroom, and that almost everything in there is something she made herself—the poodle-patterned
bedspread and matching curtains, the shellacked and framed jigsaw puzzles of the Royal family, the pompom trim around the vanity, the fake fur cover that turns the jewellery box into a poodle, the container of glued-together acorn caps from which burgeons a bouquet of reconstituted china dolls’ heads on candy-apple sticks—this, to him, is the really depressing part. When you consider that she dreamed these things up and poured time and effort into them! Maybe it’s just bad taste. There’s a possibility that what we have here is purely low I.Q. married to craft, but what he sees when he looks around is purely misery. The livid scabbing over of secret mayhem, another configuration of which is her good cheer.
What
is
the mayhem? Getting pregnant at fifteen springs to mind, usually. Now, today, he wonders if it isn’t him. He doesn’t mean her
knowing
that she has a strange father, what he’s suddenly wondering is, if a queer father, by unconsciously failing to emit certain normal masculine impulses, plays havoc with his daughter’s temperamental development. Her
intellectual
development! Jesus, what if she’s slow because he’s queer? No, that’s nuts. He lifts his glasses and wipes his face with the handkerchief. Just let her be genuinely happy is all he asks. If blowing his brains out would guarantee her happiness, if his torso on a spit were Yahweh’s price … Let him tell you, those cut-and-dried Old Testament deals, more than the miracles they’re what he regrets you never hear about nowadays.
“Dig in.”
Her voice startles him. He puts his glasses back down and sees that the elastic neckline of her flowered muumuu has slipped, revealing one sweat-spangled shoulder as sloped and fleshy as a breast.
“You need to eat plenty of salt when you’re perspiring,” she says. She yanks the neckline up before helping herself to a fistful of nuts.
“That’s right,” he says, overly impressed, as always, when
she knows anything. He fishes out a single nut, pops it in his mouth. “Wow, is it a scorcher,” he says boisterously. Like an ordinary father in a lawn chair he leans back with his fingers laced behind his neck and looks up at the sky. To the east it is marbled by dense grey-mauve clouds. Straight overhead the aspen leaves shiver, effervescent. He hopes another thunderstorm is on the way. Some water on this fire. It’s too hot to even breathe but people are out doing things. The amplified purr of a manual lawnmower. A screen door banging. Screams of little girls. Or of seagulls.
His own little girl, the one who has never screamed, is playing “Take the A Train” now.
Not for the first time he wonders if Joan was drawn to the piano because you can get ten notes out of it at once. He himself doesn’t play an instrument, but if he did it would be the piano for how it is capable of simultaneously reproducing the pitches of an entire orchestra and as such is the instrument that comes closest to resembling the life of the mind, the only life that allows you to live so many other lives. He listens to her. He thinks of how Doris is always saying to people, “You can be a genius in one part of your brain and still be brain-damaged in another part.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say brain-damaged,” he tells her.
“What do you want me to say?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Nothing, preferably. Not braindamaged.”
“But she is brain-damaged.”
“According to the neurologists certain functions appear to have suffered some degree of injury, yes. But whether or not these injuries are permanent has yet to be established.”
“That’s what I said. Brain-damaged in a part of her brain. Sweetie, let’s call a spade a spade.”
They’ve had this conversation, verbatim, a hundred times.
He drains his glass of lemonade and glances at the bedroom window. The poor kid must be sweltering in there. She’s got
the electric fan, but an air-conditioner is what she could do with. He sighs, and Sonja says, “A penny for your thoughts.”
“Oh, just wondering what mountains I’d have to move to afford an air-conditioner.”
“I’ll buy you one,” she says. “I’m Miss Moneybags.”
He sits up straight. Joan’s deliverance might be a lost cause but Sonja’s has just been revealed to him. “Listen,” he says.
“Hmm?”
“I want you to use some of that money and go on a trip.”
“A trip?”
“To Europe. Or around the world. Around the world! Why not? On a ship, first class. I’ll tell you what, I’ll arrange the whole thing for you, the whole shebang! All you’ll have to do is pack.”
“Mommy says the money is my nest egg for a rainy day.”
“Ah, to heck with that. You can build it back up again. You’re young, you don’t have any responsibilities. Now’s the time to see the world.”
She grabs a bunch of bobby-pins.
He puts his hand over hers. “Hold on a minute.”
She swipes her tongue along her upper lip. She smiles, but her hand under his is not still.
“I’m serious, honey. You could see Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower, Paris, French poodles—“ He thinks of her bedspread and jewellery box—
“real
French poodles! And you’d meet all sorts of interesting new people. A trip around the world! It could change your life.”
“Oh, I don’t want to change my
life,”
she says.
They blink at each other. “Well,” he says, “think about it, just think about it, okay?” He has lost his steam but he adds, “Monday I’m going to check with a travel agency, get some prices.” He gives her hand a pat and instantly she is back to her pins.
The sun beats down. He moves his chair a little to the left for
more shade. Charred is how he feels, in cinders. That black thicket of bobby-pins, that’s him, in cinders. He picks up his pencil, puts it down. Pours himself more lemonade and stretches and flexes his bum leg. Bellowing “D” words—“Degenerate! Depraved! Deviate! Dystopia!”—he wrapped the convertible around a tree and shattered his femur in three places. His suspicion is that when his leg stops seizing up, on that day so will his heart. “Do you know who I am?” Al said. “Yours,” he said. “Daddy, I’m yours.” If somebody says what you’ve been dying to hear without knowing it, it’s like the countdown on ether, you can’t resist.
Yours. Daddy, I’m yours.
Gordon sets the glass on the table as steadily as he can, but his hand is shaking too hard and lemonade splashes out.
“Oops,” Sonja says, and then, squinting at him, “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” He can only mouth it.
“You’re white as a ghost,” she says pleasantly.
He clears his throat. “Sonja.”
She drops a completed card of pins into the box beside her chair. He clears his throat again. What he is thinking is so fantastic, so evil, that it should have occurred to him at all has already given it intolerable substance. “Honey,” he says.
“Hmm?”
“What—“ He takes a breath and glances around. One last look at the world intact. “What did Joan’s father look like?”
He has never before asked about Joan’s father, and neither, he is almost certain, has Doris. Right from the beginning the guy was out of the picture—what was the point? So you’d think that Sonja might register surprise at his question. Think again. She chuckles. Still clipping pins, not missing a beat with the pins, she chuckles! And because in the marrow of his bum leg Gordon knows what she’s going to answer, her chuckling sounds mad to him, the implacability of her serenity is what
strikes him, in the second before she speaks, as the true mad thing.
“All I ever think of is his nostrils,” she says. “He had the hugest nostrils I’ve ever seen. Like this.” She circles her thumb and forefinger. “That huge. But he was just huge all over, gigantic, way over six feet. In a million years you’d never think he was related to Joanie. Oh, jeepers, I almost forgot! He was a carrot top!” She beams at him. “Honest. He asked me to guess his nickname and I said Red, of course …”
Her voice fades into the sound of a tennis game, the sound of popping champagne corks. The light dims. There goes the light, all concentrated into a single ray that burns through the pocket of his shirt. “Court-jester shoes,” Sonja says, and it sounds as if the volume is being turned up and down. “Daddy!” she calls from the deck of a ship already out to sea, but the ray has whipped into a flaming lasso that binds his arms and he cannot wave to her.
He is in the hospital two weeks, in a private room paid for by his company’s insurance plan. The saver of his life, through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and a tire-screeching drive to the hospital that flattened his own cat, was his neighbour to the north, Harry Jolley. Harry’s wife, Mabel, bakes a cake for Harry to take to the hospital. It is in the shape of a cat with chocolate-stick whiskers, a tail extending into a halo and with the words, in pink icing on the body:
GET WELL SOON
! Harry reads the inscription aloud to Gordon, whose glasses shattered when he toppled over in the lawn chair. “She really means it,” Harry says apologetically, setting the cake on the window ledge among the flowers. “She doesn’t blame
you.”
He smacks his lips. He and Mabel are childless. Harry sells asbestos insulation and every summer makes a new building for the thigh-high turn-of-the-century toy village he is constructing in his back yard. The village is called Tibbytown, after the cat. The
signs on the stores are Tibbytown Feed and Grain, Tibbytown Dry Goods and so on.
“The old girl came down with bladder failure last year,” Harry says.
“That
was no day at the beach, no siree bob.” Gordon thinks he is speaking of Mabel until he says, “So how I’m looking at it, she’s out of her misery.” He smacks his lips, he keeps smacking his lips. He is the spitting image of Charles Laughton, the bloated head, the blubbery lips. In three years the first male lips to touch Gordon’s turn out to have been Harry Jolley’s. During Harry’s visit this is Gordon’s only thought. He feels neither gratitude nor sympathy nor repulsion. He feels the chill of a perfect irony, compared to which the chill of his near death is nothing.
When Doris sees the cake she says, “What nitwit gave you this?” Behind his closed eyes Gordon comes close to smiling. “For crying out loud,” she says, “you don’t give chocolate cakes to heart-attack victims!” He hears her tasting the icing, sucking it off a finger. “Well,” she says, “Sonja will make short work of it. I’ll bring it home if it’s all right with you.”
Gordon goes on pretending to be asleep. Since there is no dissuading her from showing up three times a day and since he has nothing to say to her, he fakes the exhaustion she is so certain he must be suffering anyway. She races around, watering the flowers, dusting, moving the electric fan, searching through the stations on the transistor radio, giving his nails a fast clipping, pumicing the soles of his feet (which overhang the end of the bed), dry-shampooing his hair, opening the window, opening it again when the nurses slam it shut, shaving him, feeding him … her frenzy tracing occult intaglios around his body. Occasionally he yields as if to an incantation and then, even while she’s scraping a razor over his face or shovelling food down his throat, he really does doze off.
In the evening, when she brings Marcy and Sonja, he keeps
his eyes open. He hardly speaks though, and this is no act. Marcy’s thin, scared face, her myopic eyes peering into his, is an occasion he can’t imagine ever having the wherewithal to rise to. Sitting on the edge of the bed she twists his fingers. Her fingers are hot, in the hearth of each nail her chipped red polish a flame. Every night her first order of business is to deliver a message from Joan. “Joanie went outside all by herself last night.” “Joanie says to keep the radio for as long as you like.” One evening she arrives lugging Joan’s tape recorder because she and Joan have recorded, especially for him, Joan playing “Mister Sandman.”