The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (7 page)

I want to know about man hurt—so I can identify it when I find my father—so I'll know if any of his has to do with me. The vignettes of men in my mind don't make sense as goodbye scenes, not really. They don't carry the self-conscious poignancy of movies or novels, but they are a way for me to say goodbye now, each one a distillate of personality. A certain open-armed gesture, curls kinked with sweat at the back of a neck, squared off palms, thick eyebrows that tangled in my own until they looked like shredded wheat the morning after. In the end, the images are with me not as memories culled and kept, but like the imprint of shells on a bank of clay. This year, at twenty, I am a thousand years older, holding hunks of clay in my hands and examining the imprint of trilobites. There's no salt smell here, but still, I dream of home. And there's only one man that I miss.

I see Nigel, the first time he pulled up at the hotel in his dark green Alfa Romeo. The girl with him is wearing a paisley scarf tied under her chin, the way women looked in 1950s French movies. I saw her as a girl even though I didn't see myself as one—nineteen-years-old, pushing a towel cart across the parking lot. I think now that Nigel loved me in part because I
could
leave him; I have the strength for it. He probably already has a new sports car girl … one who will whine and wheedle when his affections stray, his attentions diminish. Always it's a girl, though he's nearly forty now. Yes, we girls are so hungry for the world, measured and poured in Nigel's hands like medicine from a bottle, just the right dose, for just the right effect. But my mother raised me to believe that men weren't there even when you thought they were—that was the moment most to beware of, most likely for them to disappear.

Nigel has a hard incisive look; you wouldn't want to have to ask him to repeat directions a second time. His eyes have the lines of a woodcut, angular, because the line of the lids extends beyond the actual eye. He has high color in a man's way, blood in his cheeks but not a girl's flush—the sign of arrogance in a man with an outwardly calm manner, restraint, not placidity.

He has to unfold his long body like a beach chair in order to get out of the car. He takes the girl's hand and she lets him lead her up the path to the motel office as though she wouldn't have known where to go otherwise. The next morning, when I go to make up their beds, there are marks on the wall behind the bed posts where the plaster has given way. When I finish cleaning, I go to get some Dap and a spatula from the tool shed, to fill the divots in the wall. I see them coming in from the beach, heading for the car. He opens the door for her and as she slides into the seat, he straightens and looks at me. The look conducts a charge like metal; after the initial jolt, it begins to sting. I don't turn away because I want to know why we recognize each other. In a dark room, I would recognize his breathing. That's how I feel. He collects and catalogs hurt too, but it makes him angry at himself that he does it. Then they pull out of the lot and the girl turns her head to see who I am. Just the maid in a man's flannel shirt. She knots the scarf under her neck.

I'm alone in the office when he comes back the next weekend, by himself. He explains that he's here meeting with potential investors for a fish farming operation, doing site evaluation.

I'm unimpressed. “Do you want a room?” I ask as insolently as possible.

He smiles, slow and wise and wan. “Yes, I can provide the girls myself. You don't act the small town part, do you?”

“I'm not from here, not entirely,” I say as I slide the forms across the counter towards him.

He glances at the black plastic ashtray full of my mother's lip-marked butts and asks, “Mind if I smoke?”

“Go up in flames, for all I care.” He laughs and looks at me like he isn't going away before I admit that I like him.

Where the mouth of the Columbia River gapes widest, a thousand boats have gone down. That's where I take him. There are lumpen, grass covered islands half a mile long in the river. Flocks of birds rise from the reeds, fall into the reeds. Underwater, the islands become sand bars. We climb in silence to the lighthouse that stands on the humpbacked promontory of the cape. I resist the urge to ask him any questions about himself. I imagine that he expects questions; that his answers are all script. I know nothing yet of the way his mind plays. He smokes a pipe and the tobacco smells like cognac and chocolate. The smell of luxury, travel, perpetual discontent. I am determined to observe more about him than he would have me know, and I think he senses it. I think it gives him a kind of pleasure.

I act the tour guide. I tell him about the first ship bearing a great glass bell in its hold, the one that went down in the 1840s. And about the gradeschool stories of a beacon that burned beneath the breakers. But I stop there. My mind always fills in the picture with a convocation of willowy gnawed shapes in a half-light dancing and sharks skimming between. My mother peopled the sea with immortals in an effort to turn me from a childish preoccupation with decay and dying—Poseidon and his trident, Bottocelli's Venus in her shell—but I only mixed the images indiscriminately, forming a court of the deep where immortals held forth and the dead talked until their jaws fell away. When we come to the sharp escarpment that faces south, we stand awhile.

“Bones and shells roll across them together,” he says, nodding towards the sandbars. I back into him awkwardly as I step away from the edge.

He leans down and makes the scary wind-noise that children make.
Weeeeee
—
yeeeeew
. Long and sing-song against my neck. I turn to run up the hill, and the wind lifts my hair, whips strands of it into his mouth.

The lighthouse extends skyward from a platform of fenced-in flat, while all around ascent or declivity immobilizes hardy picnicers who watch their thermos bottles fly off cliffside and their hard boiled eggs tumble into tangles of madrone and red cedar. “I love slants,” I shout, my words torn in streamers from my mouth. But he has heard me. He comes up close alongside me then, saying, “Show me how you love,” and he watches my face for the telltale hesitation he hopes to find. I falter but it doesn't embarass me because I'm no innocent. I make a gift of it. I smile when I see how he enjoys this brief admission of attraction. Then I invite him to lie in the grass with me beneath the lighthouse. He doesn't hesitate at all.

With our feet downhill and our heads tilted back, the huge black and white cylinder tilts against the sky as though we had caught the moment just before its fall from the cliff and crescendo below. Then we lie with our feet uphill, and the blood pouring down into our heads swells our eyelids, and the turret tilts towards us, filling the whole frame of our view as though it were falling right onto us. We listen to the boats sounding the first and fifth of a chord and buoy bells between, the notes lengthening in the moist air like the slowing of my heart. Gusts of wind travel up the cliff and fold over the headland, mixing the stench of the cormorant rookeries with the sweetness of new grass. Acid and salt, that which has passed into the gullet alive and died on the way down, the smell is sharp and merciless as first desire.

Nigel's apartment in Los Angeles is grand, parquet floors and built-in china cabinets with beveled glass doors and a cupola for a breakfast nook. The windows are old glass, hand blown, you can tell because they shimmer with rainbows like bubble solution stretched across a frame—corn syrup mixed with dish soap. His bed is built into the ledge of a bay window. As Nigel's hands stroked me, I followed the swirls of color in the window and listened to the harbor chimes and the air loud as sails luffing.

When I first came there it was a cloudy afternoon, after a fancy lunch, full of wine. His blue-beret tipped barward and his lips tipped towards me. His bite for mine, we fed each other.
What would our love smell like? Calmata olives, tangy and sun-dried? Sea bass wrapped in grape leaves? Rabbit in a cognac cream?
But once at his place I turned shy. I could hear voices in the street, syllables pattering like rain in a pot. He uncorked a stubborn bottle and I couldn't watch as he rocked the cork out though I heard the slippery sound. I began my little bit of lying, because I thought that too had to be done.
I should go back now
. He laughed.
Before there is no going back? I like to watch you teeter at the brink. You said you loved slants
. Then I laughed. I'd wanted all my life to feel something inevitable and random at once. A moment to yoke contraries, and here it was. My hands moved across the table like leaves blowing along a road, hands out walking alone. He stroked my fingers and the soft web of skin between them, and he sat at the table not suggesting anything but letting me see his shyness, his ferocity, his need for mercy.

It was getting away from me, this moment we were studying carefully, its predecessors pushing it aside. I had to tell him about my collection of hurt ones, how I learned to be the maiden drawing water from the well, to bring up in my bucket this need to
do it like a man
. Soon they were all the same: men I overpowered and then tended to and pretended not to know about. What a weight. The tired ballad of bed. And if I made a little associative leap, if I let my eyes change color, let myself rhyme sounds or sucks, well it was all a shock they tried to be up for, to please me, and it wasn't a leap at all, it was my invitation, my lead, and them waiting upon it, until I'd have given my soul for an unexpected free fall.

Nigel turned my hands over in his lap; he rubbed the hearts of my palms and made my fingers curl. Without his eyes on my face, I never could have said what had been the matter for so long. He whispered into the shade that had crept over the room. The house plants made a lace of leaves on one wall. Someone in the building was baking custard, the resplendent smell of carmelized sugar. The windows were turning blue.
You may regret things in your life, but don't ever apologize for it. Not to anyone. You want to play the instrument for every sound it will make, there's nothing wrong with that. You're easily disappointed; I won't disappoint you
.

I felt that he wouldn't. Later I learned why. He is a man who is fascinated by women, who has submitted himself wholly to this fascination. His knowledge is vast, but unlike most men who want only to know that they are good, he wants to know women, he wants to breathe in their exhalations and live on it. His is the seduction of the willing novice. To each woman, he apprentices himself utterly, does not for a moment apply the likes or dislikes of any woman who has come before her. Because it's for you, all for you. He makes himself a slave to your desire, and therein lies the attractive strength—
I make myself a slave to your desire
.

On the day I remembered all this, I was wearing a sweater I found in the bottom drawer of the dresser designated mine. Black cashmere with an embroidered name tag sewn in: Constance Delacroix. I laughed when I found it, imagine, a name tag as though she were going to camp. Now I suspect she was a foreigner. When I read her name, I said it aloud, I elongated the second vowel until my voice got husky, elongated it into absolute beseechment. Constonnnnnnce. The sweater was slack on me. Her fatness must have been a delicious luxury, a softness yielding to heaven.

It was not the first thing belonging to a woman that I had found. A lipstick: tea rose. I was wearing that too, as we lay together, listening to the sounds of the corner market—casual greetings, children counting change for candy—the sounds overlapping like wet pieces of paper. He didn't notice the sweater or the lipstick. He stroked me and I stroked the cashmere. The next woman would obliterate me.
Constonnnnnnce, where are you?
Fleetingly, I longed to go to her.

But that first time in his apartment, the blue twilight washed down the walls, and the smell of whole milk and eggs baking filled the hallways. What if I can't feel? I asked him. What if I can't feel? He asked me if I liked my hair brushed. If I liked my back scrubbed. If I liked warm soup on my tongue. I put my arms around him then and began to laugh. Of course I can feel, I told him, it's only when I should start to feel more, that I begin to feel less, until it diminishes down to nothing. Usually the man comes then.

He said I must tell him, I must describe each sensation with each touch, so that he could be like the shadow I cast, never losing me. I kissed him on the cheeks, on the forehead, and we left our shoes under the table toppled upon each other. But I couldn't write on the air with my feelings; I couldn't give that much away yet. He told me then I must only say warm, warmer, warmest. Then he stroked my face, the smooth underside of my jaw, the death opening at the base of my throat, the bony hollows of my collarbone, the incline of my breastbone. Stroking to the sound of the little waves that rush up to the sand but sink in before they can recede.
Warm … warmer … warmest
.

Warm … warmer … warmest
.… I said it.

I stayed with him in L.A. and began by doing temporary secretarial work in the garment industry. Nigel bought me the clothes he thought women go to work in, dove grey skirts with slits that didn't allow me to walk in my normal stride, and I had to learn to take short, mincing steps, and sit at my desk slightly knock-kneed. Real silk blouses with covered buttons and choir boy collars. Was I so sexy even my buttons must be covered? Nigel said I was and that he would begin his seduction by stripping the buttons with an an exacto knife.

I got offered a job with a company called Saylor that made designer knockoffs in much cheaper fabrics. At first, I worked for the regional vice president of the western division, Mr. Tobin, a gruff, comforting man who wore a suit the way an overstuffed chair does its upholstery, pulled taut and tacked down with brass tacks, in his case, cufflinks and tie pin. He had eyes like buttonhole slits and a reputation for ruthless business. But he treated me with an offhand affection because I was not cowed by him.