And Sometimes I Wonder About You (7 page)

T
he rest of the day I concentrated on the e-mails that didn’t need answering. Seventeen of these were replies to my ad in the
New York Literary Review
. Some Bills and Williams, lonely johns, and a few vanity presses thought that I might really be looking for them. But none of these people or places were the self-named Tolstoy McGill, my missing father. For half my childhood and all of my adult life I had thought the anarchist-revolutionary had perished in South America fighting some dictatorship or another. But Tolstoy wasn’t dead. I’d made an appointment to meet him for dinner one night but Katrina decided that afternoon to kill herself and my father once again faded into speculation.

By 7:14 I was through for the day. Mardi was still at her desk. I sometimes got the feeling that she would work twenty-four hours a day if she could.

“Who’s looking after your sister?” I asked.

“Marlene’s staying at our downstairs neighbors’ apartment tonight. Their daughter Peg is her best friend. They move back and forth between the apartments.”

Mardi looked up at me and I turned away before our eyes could focus on each other.

“Am I going crazy or did Kit just knock on the door?” I said to the door.

“I had Bug give me a button to turn off your buzzer when I’m in,” she said. “I figure we both don’t have to be bothered.”

“What if you forget to turn it back on?”

“It’s on a two-hour timer. After that it goes back to both.”

I would have liked to find something wrong with her logic but Mardi was a bright kid with an old soul; just the kind of employee you wanted in a world filled with a starstruck workforce and electronic memories.

Even her smile was knowing.

“In the old days,” I said, “when I was younger than you are now, people would say ‘you’re a good egg’ to people who did right most of the time.”

“Really?”

“You’re a good egg, Mardi.”

“Am I?” she said, looking me straight in the eye.

A microsecond of fear clutched at my heart, not quite long enough to get a good grip.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, thinking for the second time that this week was going to be a challenge.

I ran up all ten flights to the eleventh floor of our family apartment, a block east of Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. There was a new locking system since a pair of East European assassins had broken in and tried to end my career. I used two keys and a remote control so small that it was hardly larger than the button that worked it. The kids didn’t argue about the new process because I left the bullet holes in the wall where the killers missed.

Another reason the kids didn’t mind was because two of them had moved out and the youngest, Twill, rarely spent the night.

I’m not what most people would think of as a family man. I don’t come home for dinner every evening—many nights I don’t come home at all. But over the decades I got used to a wife that cooked and kids that complained. The muted sounds through the large prewar apartment had made a place in what some might call my heart. And so the emptiness in the apartment felt…wrong.

I went to the dining room, poured forty-year-old cognac into a crystal snifter, and sat at the big hickory dining table. It wasn’t lost on me that I’d sat behind a desk all day long only to come home and pull up a chair at another table. Maybe I could invite Mardi and her sister to live with me.

When I was pouring the third drink I decided to call Marella. Somewhere in the afternoon I had picked up the phone and stared at her number. I realized that talking to her would just call for more passion—and I didn’t think I had any more to give. But saying good-bye to Mardi, thinking I should invite her to live with me, made Marella a necessity, not an option.

When I informed the hotel operator of my name she put the call through.

“Hello, Leonid.”

“Hey.”

“Are you downstairs again?”

“No. I’m home.”

“Do you want some company?”

“Who is Alexander Lett?”

“Who?”

“Alexander Lett. That’s the name of the guy I slammed into the wall yesterday.”

“I didn’t know his name. I couldn’t prove that he was sent by my ex. But he did follow me from DC.”

“And this all over an engagement ring?”

“Yes.”

“Why does it seem like more than that?”

“It’s a very, very expensive ring.”

“You called me this morning,” I said.

“As soon as I woke up.”

“What did you want?”

“You.”

“For protection?”

“I never had a man put me on his shoulders backward before.”

“That was my first time too.” I was feeling that beast thing again. I liked the heavy beat it brought to my heart.

“You want me to come over?” she asked. “Maybe I could ride you on my back this time.”

I once knew a man named Robin. He was a handsome man with beautiful eyes. For a while in the
’
90s Robin was a source of information I used quite a lot. He always denied that he was what he was, a heroin addict.

I asked him one day after watching him shoot up, “How can you say you aren’t addicted when you shoot that shit in your arm every damn day?”

“Not every day,” he murmured, his eyes like twin planets bathed in the radiance of the sun. “Every once in a while when the hunger gets too strong I make myself wait for two days before takin’ it. As long as I can do that I keep my options open.”

“How about dinner tomorrow night?” I suggested to Marella, thinking of how Robin died of an overdose before the new millennium. “There’s a French place not far from your hotel. It’s called the Chambre du Roi.”

“Why not now?”

“I have to talk to a man I know,” I said. “His name is Robin and he always has good information for me.”

“Well, I guess if I have to…I’ll wait.”

There was a short spate of silence then, the kind of quiet that occurs when two strangers feel a passion in full bloom—what else is there to say? They have no history, only a future.

Marella was the wrong woman at the wrong time, but how long could I hope to survive anyway?

The buzzer from downstairs interrupted our communion.

“Somebody’s at the door,” I said.

“That Robin guy?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s the name of that restaurant again?”

“Chambre du Roi. I’ll make the reservation for eight.”

“Don’t stand me up,” she said.

“Not even if I could.”

We ended the call and I just sat there a little stunned by the teenaged hormones flooding my good sense.

The buzzer sounded again.

I walked down the hall to the foyer and pressed the onyx button on the brass-plated intercom.

“Yes?”

“It’s your father, Trot.”

I
pressed the button to release the lock eleven floors below, then opened the front door and went out into the hall. Standing there, I watched the digital number plate that the landlord had installed over the elevator doors on every floor. I preferred it when there was a pewter arrow that swung in an arc, pointing to copper numbers beaten into a black iron half-circle that had flames coming from it like it was a sun and the elevator car was some kind of spaceship.

The display was counting backward,
8, 7, 6, 5…

Trot.
That’s what he called me when I was a boy; Leonid Trotter McGill. He had given both Nikita, my brother, and me Russian names in honor of the Revolution he harbored in his heart.

“I’m leavin’ your slave name McGill,” he often said, “because it’s slaves that riot and revolt. When you boys come to the end and the slave master has been overthrown, then you can choose names that will usher in the new world.”

The display had an emerald
1
glistening in its blackness.

“It’s only men with blood on their hands can claim the end of history,” Tolstoy, my father, would say. “That’s because the capitalists and their lackeys have blood from the soles of their feet all the way up to their ankles. They walk on the workers’ blood, stride through it like hyenas after slaughterin’ a whole flock’a sheep.”

Whenever my father talked about the workers I got a little confused. Of the four of us only my mother had a job. Was it my mother’s blood that the hyenas strode through?

The display made it to
3
and then stopped. I felt like I did when I was a boy waiting for the clock to tell me when my father was coming home.

“You’re a good boy, Trot,” my father said one afternoon shortly before he went away forever. “But you’re a little soft. You don’t understand that the police and the army and the government are your enemies. The school and the corner store, the tax collector and even the traffic lights are dead set against you. You will have to fight every day of your life against these enemies. They’ll probably kill you but your brothers in arms will walk over your body to take the world. That’s how tough you gotta be.”

I remember wondering what the difference was between the capitalists walking in my blood and the
revolutionaries
walking on my body.

The elevator doors came open and a slender black man in a long black trench coat came out. He was an old man balding on top, and then some, like me. When he saw me he smiled and tilted his shoulders forward to get his feet moving in my direction.

I honestly wondered who this man was. The father I remembered was a giant with fists the size of cantaloupes and teeth that could bite through iron nails. Tolstoy had wild hair and eyes that often seemed to be electric with their intensity.

“Trot?” the old man said when he was just a few steps away.

“Yes?”

“Don’t you recognize me, son?”

Even his voice was nothing like the man I had known. When Tolstoy spoke it was almost always in the tone and timbre of a rabble-rousing political speech. This man’s tones were soft and palliative, like a doctor with bad news.

“Dad?”

He walked right up and put his arms around me, murmuring, “Trot, Trot.”

“Dad, is that you?”

He took a step back and looked into my eyes. His smile was sad but resolved, knowing and somehow wishing he didn’t know.

I still did not recognize him. He was a good-looking man, pretty far up in his seventies. But he was not the father I remembered—not at all. I tried to think of why someone would want to impersonate my long-dead father. What possible profit could anyone make from such a scam?

“Leonid,” he said in a solid tone that was somewhat reminiscent of the father I knew.

He reached in a pocket and came out with a small square piece of stiff paper; this he handed to me. It was a worn Kodak snapshot, from the early days of color. It was a picture of Nikita and me, my mother, and my father posing at a studio on the Lower East Side. The man in the picture was my father and he was also the man standing at my door.

“Can I come in, son?”

Ushering the stranger in, I took his coat and hung it on a cherrywood rack in my office. I brought him down to the dining room and poured him a cognac. He wore black slacks and a gray shirt. Taller than I but not nearly the height of the father I remembered, he was thin, his movements fluid for a man his age. There had only been the slightest limp to his gait. His dark skin and slender grace would have marked him as Twill’s grandfather if I didn’t know for a fact that Twill was the son of an African man that Katrina had a dalliance with.

“How are you, Trot?” the man calling himself my father asked after his second sip of brandy.

“I can only tell it’s you by lookin’ at this picture,” I said.

“Memory is more like art than fact,” he said.

“Are you Tolstoy McGill or William Williams?” I asked.

The question seemed to hurt him. He put down the glass and looked at his upturned hands. They were very large hands; the kind of paws you would expect on a man who was a sharecropper in his youth. The muscle had softened but it was still there.

“Tell me what happened,” I said. The hands had convinced me. This was my father. With this certainty returned all the antipathy I felt.

“When?” he asked.

“When you left me and Nicky to fend for ourselves and our mother to die.”

“I thought that maybe you could tell me a little about yourself first,” he said softly. “That other stuff is so painful.”

“That’s all I’m interested in, man. I watched my mother die praying for you.”

The sadness in his face almost dissuaded me. Almost.

When he realized that I would not back down he said, “I was wrong, Trot. Wrong about everything I thought to be true. I believed in the Revolution but I didn’t know then that it was just a means to an end for people who couldn’t even imagine the great socialist state. I was wrong about your mother being the good party member’s wife who could survive the pain of loss and raise his children to be soldiers. Everything and everyone I believed in either betrayed me or was destroyed.”

“If you knew all that, then why didn’t you come back?”

“I fought for three years throughout Central and South America,” he said, his eyes pointed up toward the ceiling. “I was wounded in Chile. Then I was captured and imprisoned for eight years; sometimes by dictators and then by the U.S. government men. I was under a death sentence most’a that time. Then finally one day me and some other prisoners were bein’ moved in a caravan and there was a mortar attack. I was wounded but got away. Your mother had already been dead for years, and you and Nikita was grown men.

“A man named Cavalas found me and hid me in a cave in Uruguay. When I was better I moved back to Chile. I spoke the language and pretended that I came from Cuba by boat. I was a wanted man, a terrorist. At night I read and reread Marx and Lenin and Mao. And one day it hit me—the perfection imagined by socialist theory was impossible for human beings to attain. The philosophy was right but we were poor vessels for it.”

“My mother is dead and you’re blaming the
misinterpretation
of philosophy?”

“I was wrong.”

“You’re a motherfuckin’ bastard.”

“I’m still your father,” he said with an inkling of the old rebel.

“Not since the day you left Mom to die and me and Nikita to make our way in the streets. Now I’m trying to make up for all the hurt I’ve caused bein’ mad at you, and Nicky is in prison.”

I was ashamed of my self-pity. Here I was holding my father responsible for his crimes and mine, too.

“Nikita’s not in prison.”

“I talked to him there last year,” I said.

“A lot can happen in a year.”

For some reason I didn’t want to hear any more about my brother right then. I had reached my limit since coming back on the train from Philly. Between Marella, Twill, Mardi, Aura, and now my father, I didn’t want to take in another thing.

And so, of course, the phones rang; the house number and my cell phone, too. This wasn’t a regular ring, the kind with another person on the other end of the line. This bell, from both devices, was a fast triple-ring; a mechanical call set off by a specific set of circumstances.

I picked up the receiver of the house phone and a prerecorded pastiche of voices said, “Mr. Leonid McGill…the security system in your office in…the Tesla Building…has been breached. The proper authorities have been notified. Do not attempt to go there yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said, suddenly as calm as Buddha. “Somebody’s breaking into my office.”

“In the Tesla Building?”

“Right.”

“I’ll come with you, son.”

Just those five words almost brought me to tears.