Ark (22 page)

Then, that afternoon at 1 p.m., Rebecca knocked on the office door of her colleague Randy Nobel. In the two years since walking out on lunch at the Carnegie Deli, Rebecca had spoken of making it up to him. It had become a kind of running joke for them. Rebecca would apologize. It had happened so long ago, but did he ever think he would forgive her? Could they go back, try again? She would stay the whole time, she promised. Randy would hold his hand at his heart, lower his eyes, and shake his head no.

But today, Rebecca proposed lunch at the Carnegie Deli, and Randy took his brown slouch hat off the door hook and followed her toward the elevators. Every employee in the building seemed to be going to lunch just then; the elevators were packed, and lines of people were backed up at the turnstiles in the lobby. Rebecca checked her pockets for I.D. She would need it to get back into the building. They cabbed to the deli. Last time, Rebecca had taken off before she'd had the opportunity to sample any of the food, and Randy said that if this were a true redo, then they had to keep to their previous order: a Nosh, Nosh Nanette and a Millie's Stuffed Cabbage. But Rebecca couldn't eat or talk or listen, and she wondered in the noisy dining room why she had proposed going out to lunch with Randy in the first place. She observed people devouring foot-high piles of meat stuck between bread, and shriveled salamis hanging above the display case, and a waiter hunkered over a table taking the order of a small child being urged on by her parents, and Randy in his Teddy Roosevelt getup—and she felt herself coming unhinged. She could not trust her own words. To her own ear, they sounded wrong, insincere. Her hands were shaking, her heart pounding. She didn't know if she could stay in her seat in this restaurant just now and not lose it. But she watched Randy finish his meal. Then Rebecca paid with a fifty, and they went out of the deli. She had expected the natural light of day and the fresh air to pull her a step or two back from this vertiginous mental place.

But no.

In a taxi with Randy, Rebecca clutched the strap of the seatbelt crossing her chest and pushed her feet into the floor of the car, doubting that she could hold it together the whole way back. Her fears were exacerbated by a vibration that started up in her tongue and traveled through the roof of her mouth. The sensation weakened when she entered the lobby of the office building. She thanked Randy for joining her. Said she would see him upstairs in a moment, she had to make a phone call. Randy tipped his slouched hat and left.

What happened next was difficult for Rebecca to recall even ten minutes after the fact. A finger began to tap hard against her shoulder, and she turned around: there was her father, in a loose-fitting tweed suit. Perhaps he'd just gone into a public bathroom and doused himself with water. His gray hair was wet and pushed back on his head, and his bearded face, the white hair grown woolish, was damp. His over-exuberant smile was pure unreality, and his eyes projected a sort of “ta-da” expression, as if his appearance were the result of a magic trick. He tried to hug his daughter. But for Rebecca, drawing back from her father was a pure reaction, made without thought or hesitation.

She lowered her head at an angle and circled her jaw in the palm of her hand and listened to the reverberations of sound—the footsteps and voices beneath the two-story-high lobby ceiling—all the while coming in and out of herself.

“…Sheila's back in Los Angeles,” Oliver was saying. “But I won't leave New York. This is my city, my home. I'm best here.”

Now something shifted in Rebecca, and her awareness moved off her father's voice onto the sound and feeling of her own heartbeat. It was so loud, to her. Too loud.

Oliver was telling her that he was sorry, he had broken a promise and called up Laura and seen her more than once. “But just like you said, she's still in love with me. She wanted to be together every day. I told her we could only be friends. And she couldn't handle it. She had a complete meltdown. We had to go to the emergency room to get her a Valium and I took her home afterward and I told her that we couldn't speak. I'm sorry, Rebecca. I should have known better. Of course, Laura and I can't be friends!”

Rebecca said, “Dad, what did you do with all the money I gave you?”

Oliver told her he had been paying rent with it and buying “the essentials.”

“Dad, I wrote you an email. Did you read it? I ran into Mandy. She said you've been living for free in her extra apartment.”

“Free? She was lying to you.”

“Dad—”

“This is fucking outrageous. You know she's in love with me, don't you? She thinks just because I live in her apartment that I should have to sleep with her.”

“Dad, please.”

“I can't be in that place anymore. I have to move, but you ripped away my funds—I don't know why.”

Rebecca looked over her shoulder. She touched her head. The blood was leaving it. She said, “You stole from me.”

“Stole!”

“Yes, Dad. You stole.”

Oliver, bending low, his arms almost sweeping the floor, said, “That's insane, Rebecca.”

“It is insane, Dad. But you did.”

“Well, I need money.” He blurted this out. “You have to give it to me. You can't say no.”

His begging horrified her. Who was this man? She said, “I'm sorry, I won't give you any more. Not now.”

“Not now!”

“No.”

He said, “Well, when? Give me an idea. In a week? A month? Six months?”

“Dad.”

“In a year?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe when I'm old and I can't stand and my mind's gone and I'm totally fucking goddamn helpless? Then you'll give me money? Is that what you mean?”

“Maybe, Dad.”

Oliver opened his shirt at the neck to let out heat. He said, “You have to give me something, Rebecca!”

“I can't, Dad.”

“Yes, you can!” He took a deep breath, heaving. He said, “What do you expect me to do?”

“I don't know.”

“How will I eat!”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know! What do you mean you don't know? You do know. I need money and you're going to give it to me! I won't leave here without something.”

“I'm sorry, Dad.”

“I won't. I won't, Rebecca. You're going to give me something. You're my daughter and you have to.”

“No,” she said. “I'm not going to do it.”

“So what, you'll just let me die out here? Is that it?”

Passersby were beginning to stare. Rebecca saw one of the partners at the firm glance in their direction. She took a step back. But Oliver caught her by the arm. He said, “You have to help me, Rebecca. I have nothing.”

Rebecca pulled away from him. Her father's nails left scratch marks on her skin. Rebecca searched her purse for her I.D., said goodbye. At ten feet away, at twenty, at thirty, she could still hear her father screaming. She was a terrible daughter. She should know her life was ruined now. Between them, she would suffer worse. Guilt and remorse would follow her everywhere. She shouldn't think there was any way to get out from under it.

“Mark my words: this—this guilt—this is the whole meaning of your life now!”

XII. ESCAPE

 

The following morning, Rebecca woke with an idea. She wouldn't go to the office today, but instead, fly to Los Angeles, California. There was no vacillation. Her resolve was strong. She booked herself a ticket for that afternoon, and arrived at LAX just after 7 p.m. She had no luggage to wait for at baggage claim. The car rental outside the airport gave her a white convertible, and she was at the Surf and Sands in Malibu by 8:30 p.m. In the hotel lobby, she took brochures for local attractions. She roamed the gaming room. There was a pool table. The paneled walls were painted canary yellow. The smell of mold was strong. Most of the books were supermarket romances. Rebecca took a copy of
Life Magazine
off the shelf, opening to a photo of Elizabeth Taylor, and she heard grains of sand slide between the pages and land on the floor at her feet. The sun was down. She returned to her room with the magazine and fell asleep reading.

The next day, she went out to the beach early and dozed. She ate a bran muffin and rejected a call from her office. She got in the convertible and went a few miles north to see what was there. She sat at too many traffic lights. The car wasn't as perfect as she'd hoped. The radio didn't work and the roof wouldn't open. But while dialing the rental dealer, she stopped herself. Why, she'd left the beach too soon. She had to go back there. What was she doing out here anyway? Fifteen minutes later, she was jogging beside the ocean. She got down to the Santa Monica Pier and then reversed directions, running slowly all the while. She cooled off in the ocean. Lunch was a banana and a cup of coffee, compliments of the hotel. Afterward, she pulled a sunhat over her head and lay down only a short distance from where the tide came in and the sand became an escarpment, and she rested.

Sometime in the early afternoon, she opened her eyes and there was her mother on the back patio of the hotel. Helen Bloch had a way of making an entrance, even on the beaches of California. At the stairs leading down to the beach, she took the hem of her white dress in her hands. Now she brought her feet together and let go of the dress so that she could undo the pin holding up her black hair. It fell past her shoulders.

Rebecca called to her mother. Helen smiled and took up the hem of her dress again. But then only her shoulders rose and her chin circled the air. She stared down at the beach, staying right where she was. Rebecca rose to her feet then and ran to her mother's open arms.

Helen stood back so that she could see her daughter. Her lips peaked like a sail at the middle. She said, “Baby, how are you?”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Are you sure? When I got your message, I was so worried.”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “I'm okay.”

Helen scanned the beach then. She said, “It's gorgeous out here. Smell the air. You don't get air like this in New York.”

“No, that's true, Mom.” She imagined her mother would appreciate her taking a deep breath, so she did.

“How long are you staying?”

“About five days,” Rebecca answered. She wouldn't take the question to mean that her mother wasn't glad to see her.

Helen said, “To just get on a plane and go isn't like you. Whatever your father did, it must've been awful.”

“Yes.”

Helen took her daughter's hand. She said, “But we won't talk about that now. Come on. Let's go for a walk.”

They went half a mile up the beach to another hotel and drank iced coffees out of ribbed plastic cups and eavesdropped on nearby conversations. There was a canopy to sit under here. Helen talked about the sun and its dangers. She hoped Rebecca stayed out of it. Because skin cancer ran in the family, and who wanted to look old anyway? Helen raised her sunglasses. For the first time in years, Rebecca saw her mother's face, the light eyes kind but proud, the nose bringing softness to the strong bones of her cheeks, the cliffed forehead, the round chin and small ears. Helen said, “I'm sixty-four. Would you ever guess that I'm a day over fifty?”

Rebecca smiled. It was the first time her mother had told her her real age. She said, “You look great, Mom.”

They went farther down the beach and found a teenager selling margaritas out of a cooler, and Rebecca bought two. The way the clouds were positioned, the sun was shining through at one minute and then gone the next. But Helen had a ten-dollar throwaway umbrella that she referred to as a parasol, and when the sun was out she pulled Rebecca close and protected her beneath it.

“Oh my God,” Helen said.

“What is it, Mom?”

Helen brought the umbrella from her right shoulder to the left, and then she began to squeeze her daughter's biceps. This was very impressive. Rebecca was strong. How had she gotten muscles like this?

“Look at my arms,” Helen said. “There's nothing I can do about that sonofabitch gravity. Well, what's your secret, darling? Don't make your mother have to beg now.”

But before Rebecca could answer, Helen excused herself—she wanted to bum a cigarette and a light from a surfer. Rebecca watched her mother from a distance. Oh, she could really turn it on when she wanted, with the boisterous laugh and generous smile and the many incidental touches delighting this blonde half her age. Coming back up the beach to her daughter, Helen flipped her hair and rolled her eyes. She asked her daughter to hold her cigarette, and then chastised Rebecca for taking a drag. “You don't smoke, do you? Please don't start.”

“I don't really smoke, Mom.”

“For me it's too late. I look at a cigarette and I want to consume it, mind, body, and soul. You're not bad like me, are you?”

“No, Mom. I could give it up anytime.”

“Then do, please.”

They started back to the hotel along the beach. The sun wasn't yet low in the sky. Rebecca took her mother's hand. She said, “I might be done with my father.”

Helen became very serious all of a sudden. She said, “You have to think about yourself, Rebecca. Because ultimately that's all anyone is doing anyway. So let's stop bullshitting. If you feel like you're being abused by your father, eliminate him. Don't feel bad about it either.”

“I don't know. I think I've done it.”

And yet Helen was very worked up now. She said, “Even with my daughter…” But then she paused, shaking her head, her mouth opened but ceasing to speak. At last what she said was, “I'm sorry, but a child is only one part of your life. An important part. But it's not as if you have them and your feelings and desires leave you.”

“I don't think that, Mom.”

“You have to fight for everything you want in this life.”

“You know,” Rebecca said, ready to abandon the subject, “I've been riding a bicycle these days.”