The Lost Father (21 page)

She gave me the number in Switzerland. There was nothing to do but hoop my purse over my shoulder, turn around and start back to school. It was embarrassing, what happened next. I spent the afternoon in my same wooden library phone booth. I felt like carving my initials into the already scarred-up wall. I’d found a maze and I couldn’t get out or stop. So much of my life has been waste.

The Geneva Mission seemed to have heard of Said Azzam but he wasn’t there.

They gave me another number in Geneva.

The other number in Geneva said he had gone to Vienna and they gave me a number in Vienna.

The Vienna number didn’t answer.

I tried again eighteen times and when it finally did, they said he had gone back to New York.

I called the UN switchboard again. Forty-one rings. Then they said they didn’t know, on their listing he was still in Geneva.

Okay. All these phone calls I’d charged to my calling card number. Just wait till that bill came. I’d developed a kind of shudder in my back, just below the right shoulder.

Said Azzam, whoever he was, had vanished. It was as if my father taught his magic to everyone with a trace to him.

A day like today. “What points do you get in heaven for hours of this total waste?”

Stevie Howard laughed into the telephone. He was in his Berkeley backyard. I heard his kid screeching behind him, the trees beyond. It was a cool day there and windy. “None. I don’t think. I don’t think you get a single point, Mayan.”

“Great,” I said.

“You’ve got to think, how long are you willing to do this and have days like this before you just give up and decide that even if you could find him, what you’d lose wouldn’t be worth it.”

How many people would have turned back there? I knew girls like that. Girls who would measure, weigh, play the odds. Not a swell guy. And they were right, the smart ones. It is not hard as some people think to admit the mistakes of your life. The real ones that cost years and loosen the cohesion of your only heart. It is easy. The waste is irredeemable, the devastation absolute. I am not afraid to say it—what’s lost is already permanently gone.

I
TOLD THE DATE
guy anything because I didn’t care. But half the time when I picked up the phone it was him or I’d come home and he’d be leaning against the building wall.

I’d told him silly things. I said I thought men only looked good in jeans and white shirts and knit ties—I talked like that about nothing, just from the top of myself, because he was listening and I wanted to
sound absolute somehow—and then there he was with that on, the wind blowing his shirt out from his chest a little, his mouth in that way that was embarrassed of what it showed.

Jordan. His name was Jordan. He was some kind of lawyer.

T
HE PHONE RANG
in the middle of the night. It was the international operator.

Calling Egypt was incredibly hard if what you were calling was information. You called the international operator and she worked on it and said she’d call you back in a few hours when she had someone on the line who could help. So she was getting back to me now at four in the morning. I woke up right away. I was glad. This was more like love than love.

My bedroom shades were up and the moon hung about a foot over the top rail of the building next door. The water tower etched plain and drawn on the night and spires impinged on silver clouds. My bare feet touched the ground. What a sky. I paced, nude. The old man’s TV was running upstairs, dropping shreds of noise through my ceiling. I didn’t even mind. Tonight it sounded like comfort.

I heard the international operator, somebody in Cairo, a translator and all our echoes. I pictured three people standing in a line.

“Atassi in Alexandria.” I heard myself shouting into the phone like my grandmother.

My words were repeated three times, twice spelled in the other language.

Finally, the answer came back. “What is the first name?”

“I don’t know. Any Atassi will do.”

That went back again and then rumbled.

“They can’t do it without a first name,” the international operator finally said. “There are more than a hundred Atassis.”

More than a hundred Atassis. I thought of an old monument standing in the dark on a hill, more than a hundred pillars, slanted moonlight, crumbling stone. “Okay, Mohammed,” I said. My father’s name. I didn’t think he was there, but I only had a few chances. The whole relay wouldn’t stay up all night while I guessed. I wished I had a little book of Mohammedan names. Then I remembered I did. The Bible. Where was it? Damn. I pulled the phone cord as far as it would go. My bookshelf had
Anatomy
,
Organic Chemistry
,
Histology
. That architecture book.

“You’re going to have to spell that,” the international operator said. Even she sounded very far away.

We spelled the alphabet letters slowly and I heard the far ripple of translation. But then after all that, they had no listing. Later I learned that Mohammed and Abdullah are like John and David, the most common names.

Even so far away, it was the same. So that was done. Egypt ended like any other place.

O
NE TIME
Bud Edison had woken up and walked with his arms out to where I was naked, crouched over the phone on his desk. I felt caught. It was hard to explain. I’d been calling information in Montana. “That was directory assistance. I was trying to see—”

He didn’t even ask what. We had a moment of blunt hug, bones meeting at knee and elbow, awkward, dry, adult. We went back to the bed and lay in the dark looking outside at the night alive and I told him some more about my father. I guess I’d always used men for that. To talk about him.

“It bothers me that he didn’t know me when I was a baby. My mother told me he was back in Egypt then,” I said.

Bud kept looking at me, squinting. He wanted to minister and did, dabbing the edge of my eye with a piece of sheet, but he also looked a little scared. That blue cold night, clouds hung silver-edged, majestic, spread and stretched by wind, a taut wingspan. It felt like a privilege to be awake then, as if all the nights when we slept we were missing this.

We began again, me in his arms, and I was almost asleep when I startled and shocked rigid and then it was over in a minute. That scared him.

The next morning, pulling on his jeans, he said, “You were talking last night in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

“I’m not sure. I think you said, ‘Say my name.’ ”

That was nicer than the truth. What I really said was just what I said all my life, in that time just before sleep. I didn’t tell him.

I
STOPPED AT
the office to pay my rent the next morning. My landlord was occupied with a massive suspendered man, who held the thin
shoulder of a girl curled over the desk filling out a rental application. “Take good care of her, my daughter here. And the bills come to me, you understand? I don’t want you touching her money.”

The girl’s hair half-obscured her face, but her profile was slight and pretty. Thin gold chains hung from her ears and on both wrists. Tiny even pearls like teeth lay on her delicate breastbone.

“She’s gonna be a surgeon, my girl. Columbia Medical School. Top school. Top top school. Sure I’m proud.”

I had to turn the other way. I left my yellow check on the edge of the desk. I didn’t want them to see me. I had this odd feeling, of, oh that’s right, that’s the way it should be, I’ll leave and she’ll take my place. Those are the people who should be doctors. The fathered.

Walking down the street, I pulled my sweatshirt hood up. That was familiar, seeing girls with fathers. It bothered me. I tried to picture mine. I tried to think of him leading me through someplace big that was his. I worked to imagine a factory that made some American product, rows and rows of beige blenders on a conveyor belt, but I couldn’t hold it. All I could picture was the night sky between empty beams like Emory’s toothpick factory. Empty and abandoned in a high field.

If there was money it would be bad money. I believed that, I didn’t know quite why. I could almost get a casino: imagine my high heels on the hard polished stone floor and him taking me through Atassi’s Palace, gold-plate endless fountains and tiled pools of water and slot machines jingling and, above, rapturous Persian shapes, an atrium with blue and green tropical birds, but still it was all his and I was the boss’s daughter.

Maybe he was a terrorist. Yasser Arafat was at least compelling. I thought of the man telling me that in India parents had more important things to do than raise their children. Maybe an idea could be that. Not money.

“He doesn’t sound reliable enough to be a terrorist,” Timothy had said. “Or committed enough.”

Why you are unwanted: that is the endless, secret question, asked over again and again.

I wanted to have been given up for something that was beautiful, even once.

I
SAW ANOTHER
guy in a phone booth, his knee up pushing against the glass. Eagerness, it looked like.

That did it. I veered into a lingerie store. I’d never been inside one. They’d always given me the creeps. But this one looked sort of athletic. There’s athletic and there’s intimate. It’s a distinction. You get to be an age, I guess, when you want good underwear. I used to never think about it. Then the last time I’d visited my friend Stevie Howard in Berkeley I was really shocked because on his comforter was a pair of black lace underwear. I asked. I couldn’t believe his wife didn’t wear regular underwear. Helen was a botanist. He was a tree pathologist. They were both, most of the day, in dirt.

We were sitting at Stevie’s little kitchen table drinking herb tea and he was looking all over away from me. The stove pipe. The corner. Baskets above the refrigerator where they kept the napkins and bananas.

“What do you mean regular?” he’d said then.

“You know.”

“Well, I guess she doesn’t.”

I’d always thought he would marry someone like me. “What do you mean, you mean bikini or you mean not cotton?”

“I don’t know, I guess sort of both.”

“I can’t believe this. You mean like fancy lacy stuff?”

“Well, it’s very tasteful.”

“Silk?”

“I don’t know but I guess so, kind of silky.”

“Lace?”

“I suppose some lace.”

“What color?”

At that point he stopped me. He’d lost interest. I wanted to see. We actually had an arm fight over her dresser drawer. She was gone to work at the lab.

I was twenty-eight. I’d never had anything but plain cotton underwear. I had poor people’s underwear. Some of it not even mine. My own closet and dresser were filled with clothes I didn’t buy. When I was young, Mrs. Briggs used to send over her old clothes, maid-laundered, after she’d cleaned out her closets. But she kept things so long, they were years out of style and hardly ever worn by the time I got them. My mother did that now. She hated throwing things out so she sent them to me, but even her old clothes were never gifts. She
was letting me use them, she would say. Any time she could decide she wanted one piece back and she’d call me, demanding I send it overnight mail. Once I was wearing her eight-year-old flowered skirt that she’d said came from Paris and I was ducking through a metal fence in college and I tore it. I freaked out, shuddering and crying, Stevie Howard stood with me as I begged and tormented a Chinese tailor at the dry cleaners because it was my mother’s and expensive and it was from years ago and I could never find one like it and she would kill me, kill me when she saw. “I don’t know why you wear that thing,” Stevie had said, “you have a lot of your own clothes that’re nicer.”

Most of mine were old and grayed and some of the elastic frilled from so many times washing. Years ago, when Stevie and I had lived together in Madison, he used to do our laundry in one big scramble and when I ran out of mine, I’d just wear his. Mai linn quit wearing underwear altogether. She just wore jeans. “Except with skirts,” she said. “I don’t like the feel. Actually it’s a really sexy feeling to wear a dress without any.”

Emily had a boyfriend once in college who used to buy her stuff like that. She never wore it. You wouldn’t guess from knowing him that he’d have ever been the type either. It was supposed to be knitted silk or something. Then one day she came home and he was in their futon with the covers pulled up to his chin. He had on all of the stuff he’d given her, layer over layer.

But now, I was in this store fingering panties and bras and one-piece things. All of a sudden these skimpy soft things didn’t scare me anymore. When I first saw them, they seemed almost dirty. But the fragile fabrics felt good against your skin. I was embarrassed, though, about the salesgirls. They didn’t hover. They looked distracted, following the traffic outside. It was a job, I supposed. I’d worked in stores. This time of day especially was slow.

I didn’t think about my body much. But when I did I knew I didn’t have a body like other people. It didn’t have what it was supposed to. Clothes didn’t go right on me. My mother talked about it like a deformed thing. A year ago, I was home and she shook her head and said, “We look better in pants. I do too, so don’t feel bad. That’s why I’m telling you, it’s not morality, if you’re one of these big models or starlets with the long long legs, sure, go ahead and sleep with him the first night. But with legs like ours, they’re better off seeing you
dressed up in great pants until they’re really in love. Then, when they’re hooked, you can take it off and it’s no big deal.”