Darling? (17 page)

So, yes, I was an overheated child, and so fervid an adolescent I became accustomed to seeing my teachers squirm and look away from me, praying I’d go elsewhere for the extra help next time. By college the pedagogical discomfort was happily transformed, and there was no end to the office hours available for a girl whose palpitating heart was quite nearly visible through her blouse. How I loved school!

With my father I keep my hair shaken down over my eyes like a dog, though I still come twice a year to visit. It pleases him to think of himself as a father, and God has damned me to try and please him. When my mother gave up her quest to draw him back to us and started the divorce, he sobbed like a lost little boy. And now that my grandmother’s dead, I’m the only family he has.

This time I was even “on business”—I was flying to Cincinnati in the morning for a job interview—a Visiting Assistant Professor job of the sort that a person like me would be very lucky to have; a job I needed to escape a debilitating love: a professor, of course, my Louis—an authority on Balzac, about whom no one else gives a damn. When I first met him he was railing at some translator’s disrespect for an original text, and I remember thinking that he was
really angry,
that a crime against meaning was no less brutal to him than a physical assault. Needless to say I threw myself at him, and at Balzac. I swam through
The Human Comedy
as if it were a river I had to cross to reach him, but when I reached the other shore he was gone. By then I’d studied long enough to see Louis had such feeling for literature because ordinary life seemed so empty to him. And I was the very emissary of the ordinary—eating, bleeding, laughing, et cetera—a constant reminder of how much better Balzac had done than God. Louis began to inflict little cruelties, insults and condescensions, like cigarette burns, wherever he knew I was tender, and I slowly found myself entirely absorbed in these wounds—with each I became sicker, but it seemed an ailment only Louis’s gentle care could cure. In a minute of clarity I realized I’d have to tear myself out of his life by the roots, and taking a job in a distant city looked like the surest way.

The cab zipped uptown, switching lanes and skirting bike messengers and double-parked delivery trucks with an ease I should have found alarming, but I leaned back. I had faith in Ahmed. As long as he was talking to my father I was safe.

“Seventy-nine?” Ahmed asked.

“Fifty-six and a half!” my father replied. His age.

“Fifty-six?” Ahmed hit the brake. We were already somewhere in the Sixties.

“Seventy-ninth Street,” I said. “Museum of Natural History.” Natural History in springtime; in September, the Met. Once, when I was maybe ten, we tried something different, a piano concert at Lincoln Center. I had a velvet dress, and Pop kept whispering things about the music to me, pointing out the movements in a concerto, praising the pianist’s fine technique. He had never said a word about music before, and certainly I’d never heard him speak with rapture—he was trying to impress me, I realized—he wanted my esteem. And I tried—I worked at admiring him the way a doubting priest works at faith.

“But you must see plenty of men out with girls who aren’t their daughters,” he was saying to Ahmed, thinking perhaps of Louis, who’s fifty-three. “It happens all the time.”

He made it sound like a horror: something too awful to think about, like a child crushed under a bus or chained in a basement, one of the travesties he absorbs out of the paper, and can’t stop talking about, almost as if he’d suffered them himself. He keeps his eye trained on the pain in the news; he can’t bear to look at real life.

He quit his job during the divorce; he couldn’t stand to give money to people who rejected him. After that he went into business for himself, borrowing office space from acquaintances, empty desks he could use for a few months or a year, in a cubicle on some eighteenth or twenty-fifth or forty-seventh floor where a couple of sour men smoked cigars and followed the ticker tape all day. Visiting, I’d stand at the window, watching the secretaries gather like pigeons on the pavement below, thinking that someday I’d become one of them and work silently all day among people who took no notice of me. Then we’d go home to Grammy, who still called him Skipper, his childhood name. They fought over trifles as if they were married, but she had no notion of money and was happy as long as he didn’t waste food or throw away any reusable string. When she died she left him a pantry full of egg crates and plastic containers, but he had already spent her fortune.

In his new flat on Staten Island, he was perfectly content, he told me again and again. Yes, it faced north, but he wasn’t one of these people who had to have sunlight, and what a relief just to cook for himself. It wasn’t as if he were isolated—he had the
Times
and fifty-two channels. He would have been amazed to realize that the pretty morning news anchor he admired was younger than I was, that if he were to meet her by one of the fabulous accidents he imagined, he, too, would be “out with a girl” right now.

“Have any children yourself?” he asked Ahmed, with his salesman’s hearty voice.

“Seventy-nine!” Ahmed declared.

“No English,”
I mouthed to Pop, twice before he understood.

“Aha!” he said. He cleared his throat. He had that tutelary gleam in his eye—he was going to show me how little distance there is between cultures, how much can be accomplished with a smile, a concerned tone. He thought, quite rightly, that I was an awkward, inward girl, in need of social training. Where did Ahmed come from, he asked—Syria? Lebanon? India, perhaps?

When Ahmed said Karachi, my father turned out to have a few words of Punjabi, and an enthusiastic accent, too.

Ahmed burst into speech.

“Whoa, whoa, you’re way beyond me!” Pop said. “Slow down, wa-a-a-y down.”

By Seventy-ninth Street Ahmed had taught him some basic insults, and the words for
father
and
daughter.

“Nice guy,” Pop said as the cab fishtailed away from us. “Wish I could have tipped him.”

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“Isn’t it a beautiful evening,” he told me. “The janitor at the office taught me. He has a wife and three kids back there.… He doesn’t have much hope of getting them over, but he sends money.…”

He sighed so heavily, thinking of this family torn apart, that I was afraid he was going to cry. He’s so tall, has such broad shoulders, that when he gets weepy it’s like seeing a statue melt. Even now I’ll be doing the dishes or walking the dog and I suddenly feel his sadness go through me. I think of him as a little boy, his own father dying—he’ll say “when I died,” by accident, when he speaks of it—I never know what to do to assuage it, any more than I did when I was ten. One morning back then he told me that my mother didn’t want to make love to him anymore. I had only the vaguest idea of what he meant and I sat stupidly over my cinnamon toast searching for something helpful while his lip began to tremble, as if I was his last hope and had failed him.

By now he’s so solitary he expects no consolation, and he walked along tightly for a minute, entirely constricted by sadness, and then threw it off with a quick little gesture, like breaking a chain.

“He taught me to say, ‘Wow, get the legs on that babe,’ too,” he laughed, holding the door to the automatic teller open for me. There was hardly room for two people in the booth. I edged into the corner while he fed his card to the machine.

“We’ll have to see,” he said. “Last week they credited me with sixty dollars by mistake. In fact, I’m overdrawn.” He punched in his number: 1014, the date of his marriage to my mother.

“I’ve got money,” I said. I was embarrassed how much—Louis never let me help with the rent, so my salary went straight into the bank.

“No, no, honey,” he told me. “I think we’ll be fine here. I’ve
been
making money. I started with five thousand and I was doing great all through March—I was up to twenty-five. Then I lost a few thousand last week, a few more Monday, and Friday another seventeen…”

By my math this meant he was broke. I’d guessed it, seeing his posture from the train window as he waited on the platform, and when, over the whole course of lunch, he never spoke of buying any islands at all.

“As long as they didn’t catch the error,” he said, “we ought to be all right.” We heard the rollers inside the machine as they shuffled the bills; then it spat three starched twenties at us through pursed rubber lips.

“The town’s ours,” said Pop, as if we’d drawn three cherries on a slot machine. His luck was turning, he could feel it. I could hardly keep up with him as he strode back toward the museum.

“Two adults,” he said to the cashier, and “Can it really be, you’re an adult?” to me, and then, to the cashier again, “She’s my daughter. What do you think?”

Her badge read
CYNTHIA POST, DOCENT
. She had a kind of brisk official grace, and she glanced at me and gave him a perfunctory smile. As I accepted my museum pin from her, I thought that although she might have been unhappy in her life she did not look as if she’d often been confused. She would have spent her whole life here, walking to the museum past her grocery, her florist, her dry cleaner, the school she and her children had attended, the church she had been married in. I regarded her with both condescension and jealousy—I would never belong so squarely to anything. I’d put on a hat that morning because it seems to me that only very confident people wear hats—so that I’d appear to be self-assured—but I felt only foolish and ostentatious, like a child dressed up in her mother’s clothes.

My father, of course, looked great. Age has given him the look of dignity, and he takes a professional pleasure in conversation. No one has ever sounded more reasonable, more calm and knowing. If he told you to buy something, you’d buy, or he’d explain it slower, with more stubborn patience, until you did. He solicited Cynthia Post’s suggestion of the best exhibit, and as we took the direction she suggested (something interactive in the Rocks and Minerals) her smile was newly warm. Following him down the corridor, one hand on my hat as I tried to keep pace with his stride, I felt for a minute as I used to when I visited: happy and excited just to be in his company, sure that if I could only manage to keep my hand in his he’d pull me around the corner into a new world.

“Did she say the second right, or the third?” he asked me. The hallway ended in three closed doors. Two were locked, so we went through the third and down another long passage toward a sign that read
ENTRANCE
, which turned out to be one of a pile of
ENTRANCE
signs stored against another locked door. There was hardly any light and I felt terribly claustrophobic suddenly, as if we were trapped here together forever. After all the years of visiting museums I’m still never comfortable in one—even in a roomful of Renoirs I long for a window, and the Museum of Natural History, the final repository of moon rocks and extinct sparrows and other small, dun-colored things whose significance one would never believe if it weren’t written out for you, always seemed to me the loneliest place in the world. To stand here now with my father was to guess what it might feel like in my grave.

Pop took a credit card out of his wallet and slid it down the doorjamb.

“Voilà!” he said, pushing the door open and ushering me through. “I’m way over the limit on that card anyway,” he said.

We were in my favorite room—the dioramas of aboriginal life. It was empty except for us and a troupe of black Girl Scouts whose noses were pressed to the glass to see Cro-Magnon man forage and the Vikings set to sea. I peered in over their heads; I love ant colonies, too, and model trains, quattrocento crucifixions—those representations of life where everyone takes part, whether sowing or winnowing, rowing or raising the sail. You never see anyone like me, loitering at the edge of the scene, too fearful to make an effort, wishing only to escape his little glassed-in world.

My father checked his watch. He had done the fatherly thing by bringing me: now what? He turned his attention to the scouts. He’s friend to all little girls now, watching them on the street, in the library or the supermarket, befriending them in elevators, smiling down over them with an unbearable nostalgia. Nostalgia for me, I suppose, though like most nostalgia this was not yearning for something lost but for something that had never been; an old wish so deeply etched into memory that finally it was clear as if real. Every one of these children was the child I might have been—a child who flew off the schoolbus into her father’s arms and who was gentle and delicate, shy and kind. I had been most disappointing, talking too much, laughing too loudly, though “unnaturally” silent with him. He was still saving elephant jokes for me while I was soldiering my pompous twelve-year-old way through
The Feminine Mystique,
and I could tell from his face, when he walked in to find me reading it in the bathtub, that he was certain it must be filth. He stood there looking down at me with his characteristic puzzled, hurt expression, wondering what could be wrong, how I could have become the way I was. “Does your mother know you’re reading that?” he asked finally, but he left before I could answer as if he had to get away from me. Even my body was becoming obscene.

Now he looked down over these little girls in their uniforms and berets as if he might find a new daughter among them. Two of them, whispering together, became gradually aware of him and grew silent.

“Why you staring?” one of them asked, sharp as her own mother, I supposed. The mother who had woven those hundred braids and fastened them with red and yellow beads.

“I was wondering which badges you have there,” he told her.

She was maybe seven; pride quickly overwhelmed her suspicion. She lifted her sash and began, in a careful, earnest voice, to describe them, pressing a finger to each embroidered circle: there was one for reading, one for learning to swim, one for refusing drugs. He bent to look more closely, asking how how she had earned them, expressing amazement that such a small girl could have accomplished such difficult tasks. The whole troupe, wary at first, then eager, reconstellated around him.