Authors: Mona Simpson
“And now I’m looking for him.” I tried to make a joke. “He’s a wily guy.”
J.D. Nash smiled at me, bashful, as if I were really something. He looked like a melon smiling, his forehead held the same slope.
“I thought you might call someday to do this. I’m glad you did” was what he said.
This man had been waiting for me. Long before I knew he existed. This was so good.
He bent over his desk drawer. “I’ll have to look up the file. I can’t quite recall where I left things.” His fingers raced over the file tops, but he couldn’t resist, even doing that, looking at me. I don’t think I’d ever felt that before: a stranger’s fascination. I could have sat in that chair, arms lax on the armrests, all night.
“We take in exchange students and we’ve had a number of them from your father’s part of the world,” he said. “We had two engineering students and a medical student; last year we had a young woman from India. We’ve got the two boys so when we talk to the cultural group here we always ask for girls. And apparently we were lucky to have her because they tell us everyone wants the girls.”
So he was a man with sons and no daughter. He liked me. I was secure in that already. There are the people who like you and the people
who don’t, even if you work to make them. I knew I could get him to give me a back rub.
“Here. I do have all the correspondence. I think what I’ll do is make you copies of this so we both have it.” All of a sudden I was protected. I could have gone to sleep right then and there. I didn’t panic anymore where I’d be tonight, food, anything. He said, “Now this goes back, oh, prettinear twenty years already. What do you say, why don’t we just have some supper and then, after, we could walk to a copy shop that’s open near campus and Xerox the papers for you then.”
The line of men on the way to my father, they were all different, each one. They could have never been him. They were more like my stepfather or my mother’s boyfriends, when both of us were sorry. I knew there was an underground trail of women who would eventually lead to him too. This guy liked me, though. He liked me easily after I’d tried so hard with the lawyer. I’d always had that—the some men who just liked me and the others I spent my life chasing.
And I felt he’d taken the search from me, like the box I’d been carrying. He could lift the weight and I’d follow. This J.D. Nash had some special interest in us. I didn’t even wonder why. He was like all rectitude. I was just grateful.
He walked out of the door of his study, skating a little on the stones, calling “Paula,” and I followed.
So there were homes like this really. I mean, you always kind of knew but then you think, no, everyone’s life feels more or less the same from inside. Everybody has their forty-two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four minutes of happiness. But we sat around a plain wooden table, a modernish iron candle holder supporting candles with rich, wavering flames that smelled vaguely of warm honey. Dinner was like a restaurant. Paula Nash passed out a plate to each of us with a chicken portion, a sauce with some kind of liqueur and cherries and herbs and vegetables. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. Hot biscuits. It was just the four Nashes and me. The exchange student was at a lecture at the International House.
All of sudden, I felt sorry for the Briggses. I’d always guessed they didn’t know how to live. But I’d thought that was just jealousy. Jay Nash was explaining who I was to the two boys and Paula chewed evenly, her forehead so high and rounded I thought, ballet, and then I bumped my elbow on the son next to me and realized I had someone on my left and I dropped my napkin and then, to make matters
worse, knocked my knife down, too. When I was under the table retrieving, I saw Paula Nash’s two feet, long and thin, the beating beagle held between them.
“So you’re from New York?” One of the boys spoke when I popped up.
“Well, she’s from Wisconsin, but she moved to New York. She lives there now.”
“And do you like it there?” That son, across from me, wore glasses. I glanced at his brother on my left. Both boys were their parents’ length, wand-touched, handsome. Their hair was corn-blond, their skin young and just fitting, their features rounded and tentative.
“Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s a fun place to be young.” They were looking at me for more and so I lied. “There’s a lot to do. Lot of parties, and wonderful restaurants, museums.” I was trying to remember things I’d read about in magazines.
“You’re not scared or anything?”
“No. Oh no.” I giggled. “Sometimes I even forget to lock my door.”
At that Paula Nash looked at me sternly. It was hard for her to seem stern because her chin was rounded to her neck.
The conversation went on like that. I asked Paula if she worked. She did, she said, she was a nurse. Curtains over the long span of windows were almost floor-length, they left about three inches showing.
I sat back in my chair. So there were families like this in Wisconsin. Jay was telling me about his sons, that they liked to go ice fishing. He reached out and touched the smaller one, on the side of his neck below his ear. That was it—fathers. Those two boys charmed him without doing anything. But I did too. From being a girl.
Later Jay Nash and I sat in front of the fire. He’d made us a pot of coffee and lent me big hand-knit socks. He opened TV trays for us to write on. He had his glasses affixed again.
“I’m giving you both my numbers, my work number and my home number,” he said, inscribing a clean manila file.
This helped me. I was used to things not working. I loved knowing where to find somebody. God, I thought, I am far away.
We’d already decided that I’d stay the night. In the morning, we would make copies of all the papers.
“So then you’ll have the story from beginning to end,” he said.
End, I thought, what end? There is no end.
“For example, I am not sure you know about the, as the attorney
called it in one of his letters, the Cairo Caper. I notice that I’d written about that in detail, but then I decided not to send the letter. You’re never certain whether you’re telling people anything they want to hear or—”
“I want to hear everything.”
“Well, I left it out. Later, I think I sent a summary of it all to your grandmother and so she in the end had it.”
He handed me the file. “Now, this is the more detailed paragraph that I did not finally send to Fenwick, Stone and Arbinger.”
I held the yellowed paper, marked with the State of Wisconsin Seal. “Apparently, events took a sad turn for Dr. Atassi after 1973. According to Firth Adams College, Dr. Atassi conducted an extension course tour of alumni and local citizens interested in Egyptology to the Middle East. The participants reported that Dr. Atassi was an amusing and informative guide through the Holy Land, the Pyramids and the Sahara. Several women particularly mentioned an enjoyable trip up the Nile. But apparently in Cairo, a group of women led by Dr. Atassi were cruelly deceived in a casino and were left stranded the next day when he disappeared. It was first suspected that he had run into foul play; however, it was later discovered that he went to Europe. He eventually made his way back to the United States and resigned from his position at Firth Adams College. He never returned for his papers or other possessions. A Firth Adams graduate later reported having seen him working as a maitre d’ at a restaurant in Southern California. Dr. Gunther did not know the name of the city or restaurant where he was reported to have been seen.”
“That’s a dead end,” J.D. Nash said.
“Yeah, that sounds pretty dead end.” We sat staring at the fire for a while. It was a clean stone fireplace, the flames leapt against the dull rock sides. I tried to think of my father in Cairo. On a camel. Casinos probably looked about the same anywhere. The line that got me was about him leaving his possessions behind at Firth Adams College. Maybe they were still there. A pipe, one of those felt desktop blotters with leather on either side. Maybe a cup for pencils and pens. I wanted it preserved, the whole office, so I could walk in and find the vertical-ribbed glass on the door, the brass peg, his jacket on it, a smell still in the sleeves. But of course, the things would be packed in standard boxes and stored somewhere. Probably thrown out.
I went slowly through the rest of the letters on the TV tray, thin
tissue paper with raised typewriter marks, sometimes a hole where they dotted the i. Most of them seemed to be written by Mr. J.D. Nash to various members of the faculty at this Montana college. The answers to his letters all told one or another form of no. I finished them, closed the file. Montana.
“But,” he said, “what I thought would be most helpful at this time, what we could do is check the indexes, the vital statistics indexes in likely states.”
I guess he would think of that. Sometimes the world is wonderfully coherent, with a place for everyone. Officers of law and order, managers of vital statistics.
“Each state retains its own vital records,” he told me, “and there’s always an index to those vital records, a death index, a marriage index, a birth index. Do you know if the person you have hired explored any of these possibilities at all?”
“I don’t think he did. What he did was he looked at DMVs and at credit—” At credit whats I didn’t know.
“And he found nothing, huh?”
“No. Nothing of any use. I keep wondering if, do you think Firth Adams College would possibly give us the social security number?”
“Oh. Well, I bet he would. The man I spoke to there was a Dr. Gregory Geesie. He’s there, in the file. He was, let’s see, chairman of the International Relations Department at Firth Adams when your father left there in ’73. It sounds like your father was marking time after that ’73 debacle. You know, your father might’ve just been doing a fill-in job until he …”
Until he what, that was the question. “Yeah, it does sound like that, and it’s been a while. So.”
“But you know there’s always the possibility that he did return to Egypt. On the other hand, given the life-style to which he had become accustomed, he probably didn’t.” He giggled a little.
We talked back and forth like old sisters chatting and speculating. Like my mother and her friend Lolly on the porch, going on about some man’s absence.
How kind. How kind it was for him to take this up with me. He made it feel like it was our search, together. This was another person like Venise King I had to write or call if I ever found him. I could be bad like that. I never got in the habit of courtesies like thank-you notes. Emily sat me down and tried to instruct me at age twenty-two.
It was a funny thing, learning manners people expected from you as an adult. I was no one but my mother’s child. And she had far too much rage in her to develop my steady good habits.
“I guess,” I said, “given that he was in the US, it seems pretty steadily from ’56 to ’73, there’s no particular reason we should think he’s gone back to Egypt except that he’s not showing up on any of these computer checks.”
“Unless he took some a.k.a., you know, another name. If he were avoiding creditors, maybe.”
“Yeah.”
“That could be the case.” He said that carefully, as if it could hurt me. That couldn’t hurt me. I thought probably a lot worse. I turned to the side and through the dark window saw the moon, a yellow sickle moon. This was a good house.
“I tried calling information there in Alexandria, that’s where he’s from, and that was no easy feat. For one thing it’s almost impossible even to just get an operator. And when they finally did get through was at three-thirty in the morning and I gave them the name, Atassi, and they said they had too many listed. They said there were a hundred Atassis.”
“You know, I’m surprised I never met your father and mother because we were all students here at the University of Wisconsin at the same time, well, they were each a year older.” The beagle moved between J.D. Nash’s knees now. The beagle was long-faced too.
“It’s a long time ago,” I said. I wondered what made a man like J.D. Nash join me in this. I was more selfish. Still, good as he was, I would have rather had my father be my father. My parents were big, glamorous. My mother was popular in college. A Tridelt. She would never have gone out with someone like J.D. Nash. She should have, probably. “I wonder. Do you think I could talk to this Geesie.”
“I don’t see why not. You can identify yourself of course as his daughter. He was quite talkative when I spoke to him. Now he might be guarded for fear of offending because obviously that was a great—”
“Nightmare to them, sure.”
“—blow to the college. Apparently they were just starting an International Relations School and that was—”
“I was thinking of driving out there tomorrow. I thought I could do more there, maybe find people who knew him.”
He looked at me a way I’d seen before on faces. “You’re going to drive from Madison to Montana?”
“Just ’cause it’s been years since you asked them, who knows, maybe another student saw him someplace. Or some old friend. Or mistress. I mean, he might have even called them for a reference. I worked for the Wildlife Sanctuary in Racine once and there was a person who wasn’t very good at all and left under bad circumstances. But still, three months later, somebody ended up calling us because the person had put our names down as references.”
“When they leave under bad circumstances they still call.”
“But I mean sometimes people are incredible, so who knows.” I must have sounded pretty bad. I remembered all of a sudden, he just met me today.
But he kept looking at me from the side with a kind of awe.
I
SLEPT PERFECTLY
sealed in the guest couch Paula Nash made up for me. The beagle’s tail beating low on the door woke me in the morning. After breakfast, I followed J.D. Nash’s car to the Wisconsin Bureau of Vital Statistics, where we were the first ones there, standing at the Xerox machine, looking out at the lake, frozen blue. We both had mugs of coffee with the Wisconsin State Seal printed, and the badger, the state mascot, drawn.
“Well, what I was going to suggest last night was looking through indices in the most likely states,” Jay Nash said. “Now, I would guess that California would be one likely state.”