The Lost Father (12 page)

“What happened there?”

“Aw, I don’t know.” He held his fingernails up towards his face. “My wife called and said, let’s go out for dinner tonight and see a show, and I took her to dinner and I said, I want a divorce. Just like
that. I worked all the time those years, I never came home, slept on benches, in cars, whatever. I’m talkin’ severe workaholic.”

“And you’re not anymore?”

“I’m a little better now.”

Tina tilted in. Her shoes, her skirt, everything on the bottom was tight. She handed him the freshly typed sheet of paper.

“Awright,” he said, “here’s your contract. Eleven hundred fifty, plus eight and a quarter state tax, there’s nothing I can do about that. How would you like to pay me?”

“I could give you a check, but can you not cash it for a few days? I have to put money in.”

“No problem.”

I wrote out the check, then I walked over to hand it to him.

The meeting seemed over but I didn’t feel like leaving. The detective was kind of handsome.

As I walked out, I looked over his desk and found a girl in a framed picture. She stood wearing a bikini with her hair frilly in the wind and then I saw it, it was Tina and all of a sudden I understood, oh, okay. People were living all that right now, here it was rushing by. Then, I noticed an open blue box of graham crackers on the plastic bank under her chair. That was it, the smell, graham crackers. That was a disappointment, a small one.

E
VERYTHING
I’
D DONE
before had been secret. At night I kept a kind of record. I had hair from when I was a child. I’d kept all kinds of things like that. In case he wanted to see.

I fasted. In all my fasts, I learned, my body stayed the same shape, translucently thin but the same, girllike. The curves and outlines shrank but didn’t change. And that was what I had wanted to eradicate. That shape was what I hated and tried to starve out. But even bodies seemed to have a soul. Something given, what you cannot alter.

At times, I abandoned sacrifice. When I lived with my mother in California, we went to sleep hungry some nights. I’d lie in my bed imagining food, tender pork chops, mashed potatoes. You’d think that time with not enough we would have wasted thin. But I didn’t. That was the fattest I ever was. I couldn’t stop myself. Our poverty was not starving, it was eating the box of old saltines for dinner
because you were alone in the apartment and that’s all that there was and not feeling bad about it, really, it was just a night, a nothing night in a million nights. All our time together was like that. It never had any height for her. She never felt that I was the life she was supposed to be living. And after we waited two hours sitting on the hard plastic chairs in the Western Union office and the wire finally came in from Wisconsin and we had some money, we drove to a restaurant and we stuffed.

I baby-sat for the food. There in California, the neighbors got to know me. When the kids went to bed, I’d open all the cupboard doors and leave them hanging on their hinges, and look for a long time at the food. I tried to figure out what I could eat without them seeing. I took one or two things out of a box or ajar. One pickle. A cinnamon Pop-Tart. After the first few times, one wife left notes about what might be good. “There’s leftover brisket and a strawberry compote. Help yourself,” she wrote. That house always lay open, strewn and messy, the kitchen cleaned only on the top layer, but there was something about the wife. When she smiled, there was something sad in it, wise and sad. She motioned to her husband with her eyebrows to give me the dollar more. While they were gone, I looked in her closet at the glittery purses, the delicate gold-colored shoes with worn places from her heels and each of her toes.

I could only fast at my grandmother’s house where there was always plenty. My father then lived far away. I kept a kind of vigil and twice, I became thin in a terrible way. I got so I couldn’t stop losing. But my father never saw me that way.

I did things to myself for him, but that wasn’t the only part of my life. It didn’t take time exactly. It wasn’t even the main thing. It had about the same relation to my life as buying a lottery ticket might. You’d see it in your wallet a few times a day, you’d remember it, but it was not really anything. Still, if you took it away, your life would be different.

E
VEN THOUGH
I was always looking, sometimes I didn’t want to find him. It was the way you touched a sore. It depended. Some days I was too tired and solace mattered more. Solace was women, kind hands on foreheads, my grandmother. Once, when I was a child raking
leaves in old loose clothes with my grandmother, the autumn gathering its huge skirts of wind, fall dark threatening, the window lights in houses blurring deeper orange, I saw a man in a shiny dark suit walking, turning in our drive. I couldn’t tell if his suit was green or black. He walked with a slight drag on the left. At that moment, I didn’t want him to be my father.

The man was a knife sharpener. My grandmother had a whetstone in the kitchen. We sent him away.

Other days I had surges of animal strength and longed for the circus, whatever the end. Those were the days I did things to myself. I learned about pain from teeth. I pulled at the loose ones, I tested pain.

Sometimes it went gentler. I collected things from outside to save, to show him what he’d missed while he was gone. I had a wasp’s nest from Wisconsin I’d moved with me everyplace I’d lived, I still had it, and my butterflies in cigar boxes, all my saved things.

My grandmother called me outside—this was always—and said, come here, lookit see. She’d whisper if it was a bird or an insect or cat babies, something animal and skittish. But she’d point at the shape of a flower, slight as a lily of the valley or as large as the oak. Even a cloud. She took a walk every day.

“I’m glad you saw that,” she said after, as if there were some positive good in just seeing.

We were different. I had to take everything and keep it, so it meant something. I wanted him to see it too. I liked to own. I filled my pockets with stones and acorns. My grandmother just left it all where it was. While she watched, her mouth grew nervous with the tension of someone frightened while receiving a pleasure, frightened that she would move or do something to make it stop and go away. If she ever had sex, she’d have been like that too, I know that. She’d have kept still until it was over and only then could she laugh and spill over relief that she hadn’t spoilt it somehow. By doing something herself, something that she’d thought of on her own. You understand that about people you know from every day. How they’d be in love at night or anywhere. She felt ashamed of herself. She most often wanted to make herself invisible.

I hope she had real love. There’s no way to find out such things. It is a constant and sad thing to love a person whose lifetime only barely intersects your own.

She was best later, smiling with that after gasp of “I’m glad you got to see that too.”

But what is it if a person sees the change of seasons all her life, studies the progress of flowers, wonders at the sky. What do they leave? They leave no record.

Maybe though there was more to it than I understood. Maybe she was trying to show me religion. My own attempts now seemed to me just superstition, a thousand teeth and dry leaves and acorns and nests. But even my father, whom they were all meant for, he would not know picking up a nest, what I had felt when I ran with it to the house. If he is only a man.

Maybe she tried to teach me to see a part and get something from the symmetry that would change me, and then, it would not be from her to me, personal, but from me to something bigger, her taking my child’s hand and touching it to the wide flat cloud thin eternal so I could feel the glacial weightlessness fill inside.

Where did the day go? My grandmother always asked that at dusk. Whatever she was doing, wherever she was in the house, she’d step out on the porch and lean her chin on the broom top, and hold each of her elbows with the other hand and say, “Where did the day go?”

B
ACK IN
M
ANHATTAN
, as I walked up from the subway, the sky was already feathering, coming to dark. At a cash machine, I took out my last forty dollars. I’d have to call the bank at home again in the morning. Now the street was falling under the spell of late afternoon, silence and ending. Beyond this block, the space between trees filled gray-blue, and a dark haze smudged the tips of bushes.

I was walking to the Pleiades Palace. I thought of Venise King, her “see a therapist.” Timothy was not exactly a therapist, he was a movie usher, but we were trying. He was trying to analyze me.

I believed it was my father. I didn’t love right. Sometimes it seemed I only loved people who would be better off without me.

I’d always had a type. But the type changed. At one time, they were all very stumbling-young blonds, fair-haired. Virgins. The sort of boy you found yourself baking cookies with. Then for a long time they had to be dark. Dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes—everything a certain way.

Timothy—it wasn’t my first time at this either. It seemed I had
already tried and failed at everything. In college once, I went to a therapist. He was cheap almost to the point of free. It was probably my mistake. I had gone to the Community Counseling Center, because they had sliding fee scales, but then I demanded a man. I wanted an MD and a man. That was the way I was then. The woman I said this to frowned. Apparently the vast majority of Community Counseling Center therapists were women. UnMDed. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“I know,” I said. “I need a man.”

And so they found me Garth. I told Garth I was there because I kept ending up with guys who weren’t my type, and then, when I was with them, I fell for other ones who were. Garth nodded too sympathetically. The next week he had a whole theory worked out about my father and my stepfather and their hair colors. Except he got Ted’s hair wrong.

I stopped going. Garth wrote me two notes and then called me on the phone once to ask why. I never could give him an answer.

On Amsterdam Avenue I passed Haitian shops that sold love potions and hexes, either one the same price, five dollars.

Timothy and I had started six months ago. This was our experiment. For five years, he had been teaching himself to be an analyst, with books, and so he was ready to try. And I needed help. I figured we had as good a chance as anybody.

He hadn’t finished college. He didn’t like school. That was something I never really understood. Teachers to me always seemed slow and kind. School was outside and apart from the dangers in the world. For me it was always so much simpler than home. Once out, Timothy felt disinclined to go back for so long that it became a decision made in sleep—that his education would be private, unwatched and tested only by life.

I met Timothy at the Pleiades Palace. Nights when I was lonely I either went to the Piggly Wiggly and walked down the bright aisles looking at food or I went to the Pleiades Palace. All I needed was the darkness and close other bodies and the tick of reel-to-reel film. I liked to let my head sink back while the big pictures overwhelmed me. Timothy managed the theater, sometimes he ran the projector, and every month he programmed and ordered the films. He had a taste for dark glamorous movies, with an undercurrent of violence. He had a long black ponytail which pendulumed on his back. He always
wore the same brown bomber jacket and boxy shirts. He moved with grace. All over the neighborhood, people knew Timothy as the charity usher. When he collected tickets, a minute before the film started, if there were seats left, he’d let in anybody who wanted from the street; there were regulars, a woman who was suing the government and carried her voluminous documents everywhere, a woman who lived in her car. Most of the homeless in our neighborhood were women.

I met Timothy there my first year in New York when I applied for a job as an usher. I lasted three weeks. I couldn’t keep with the hours. But it was a nice place to work. You picked up your schedule for the week every Sunday night. If you wanted to change shifts, you asked someone else to switch or just cover for you. And this was the thing: everybody always said yes. Timothy never said no and so everyone else kind of followed the example. And then, because you knew whoever you asked would say yes, even at a cost, you tried not to ask. The bakeries nearby and one cheese shop sometimes brought us leftover food at closing time.

Timothy was always studying some hard-bound, large-printed book. He didn’t read randomly, the way I did, according to craving or whim, but methodically. When he read an author he worked through the novels, the letters and the diaries concurrently. His life was the opposite of most people’s college, where students immersed themselves in desperate scholarship, frenzied before tests, they would never again equal in their lives. Timothy’s education started once he’d left the university classroom, moved in a slow, thorough manner and showed no signs of ever stopping.

Timothy had read every book of Freud’s, most more than once—he’d learned German at night from send-away books and tapes and from Fassbinder movies—and many of the subsequent textbooks of psychoanalysis. He came to his belief in it slowly and, I think, profoundly, and if anyone owned the gift of reception, he did. He was a listener, and his remarks were scarce but dense. You always stopped and listened to what he said. Even at the Pleiades people did. The woman who screamed all day about the government spying on her through her blender raved to him in a lower voice. With him, she was almost talking.

He had a natural authority. My grandmother was like that. Still, but with a dignity so we hung on to whatever little she said. And we fought
over her bitterly. We all wanted her preference and no one seemed to have it. She loved us all, we knew, but she could be truly impartial. That made her unlike the rest of us.

You instinctively looked to Timothy when you wanted a referee. He could be easily fair. Something like goodness seemed to hold him the way he was, the same as my grandmother. My grandmother or Timothy if they had a plan with a friend, any friend, and something else came up, some sweet, high temptation, they would right away say no, it wouldn’t even make them waver. It was as if they decided on rules to govern themselves long ago. I will never be like that. Conduct, in that way, is not determined by the depth or nature of your attachment to other people. It has to do with your fundamental notion of yourself. The way a certain man knows himself would make it almost impossible to endure a secret love affair. It would destroy his own and deepest familiarities to the world. Both my grandmother and Timothy were loners. And they held a certain mystery, a rectitude. Those of us who didn’t have that, and there were so many, sensed this and felt the lure of it, despite any apparent advantages we may have had. Timothy was a person you went to for absolution because there was something contained and steady about his life. I had so many ragged edges, so many desires.