On a different trip to the woods, he told me that his love for young girls had started with a nine-year-old named Sylvia, a niece of his second wife’s. He said Sylvia had climbed into bed with him and started touching him and he hadn’t stopped her. It had felt good to him, like playing, being naughty like the time when he was thirteen and he’d let in a pretty twelve-year-old neighbor, a virgin. They’d tried to have sex but her vagina had been too dry. After the incident with Sylvia, he had started being sexual with his daughters. It was innocent, he said, and they seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. His wife divorced him when she found out about it.
It was as though I was watching a foreign film and saw the drama, but was refusing to read the subtitles. Then I thought of something Winnie had told me about seeing a horror movie where a baby’s lips were sewn shut, relaying that image to me as though it were nothing. Like she was proud. As though withstanding the film made her brave. But at what cost? To see it clearly, the most horrible of sights? Why ever did Winnie tell me that, passing it on to me? As though it were a stick of gum or a bobby pin.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You used to say it was just me but now you’re saying you did it with other girls before me. I thought I was special. You said you fell in love with me.” Thinking about this, I felt like a power source with too many of its outlets in use, like my whole brain was having a blackout.
“I love you,” Peter said, his voice cracking. “And you are special. I loved my daughters, too, and I only wanted to show them how much. But now I realize that I was as sick an addict as any alcoholic, gambler, or drug user. There’s no rehab for people like me and I feel so isolated from the rest of the world. I feel like I’m an outcast who can never fit in no matter what I do.”
Peter gripped my hand. “I have to get better somehow. Even if it’s on my own.” He paused and then said, “Will you help me?”
“Yes,” I said weakly, though I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do.
One September day I found a gay magazine in the woods, soaked from a rainfall, and I leafed through it, despite the ants sticking to its glossy pages. Peter looked on wryly while I paged through pictures of guys with bouquetlike genitals, musclemen whose bulging bodies were like mini–solar systems, young, girl-like boys called “twinks.” I liked the twinks best, with their skinny chests, their pretty faces and wanton, sedated, jaded, perpetually turned-on expressions. In one of the pictures, a muscle-bound man held the hair of a twink, who enthusiastically sucked him off. There was tenderness in the picture, I thought, a cooperative energy; the scene was almost parental. The twink looked to the muscleman with wide, long-lashed eyes, searching for love and encouragement, and the man receiving his pleasure looked down upon the boy with benevolence. As I turned the pages, there were other loving scenes: men kissing without fear or shame, men loving each other with their mouths and hands.
Peter said, “Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. About a dream I had a few weeks ago.”
I was surprised he hadn’t told me this dream before, since one of the first things we did when we first saw each other every day was go over our dreams and try to interpret them.
“In the dream I saw an angel standing in a blue light. She was wearing a white dress that was a little like your wedding dress. She didn’t look at me with judgment.” He swallowed, and I quickly handed him a tissue from my travel packet. “She didn’t look at me as if I was disgusting, or a bad man. And I wasn’t afraid. I stepped closer. And I saw that behind the angel was a ladder.” At this point, he began sobbing, and I put my arms around him.
“Don’t tell me anymore. It’s making you too upset.”
“I have to tell you about this ladder. It had a bunch of missing rungs. She stood there in her blue glow and looked at me with perfect calm. After a while, I was filled with horror. You see, I’ve been reading these books while you’re at school, about how children interpret sexuality . . .”
“What about the ladder?”
“I couldn’t really see it all because the top part was covered by fog. Like the fog that covers Manhattan and makes it look like it’s disappeared. And as the angel kept looking at me, I knew what it represented. It was your life, sweetheart. And the missing rungs were the years you’d lost because of me.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” I felt like my circuits were overloaded again.
“Let me explain. Life occurs in stages, like rungs. First, you’re a child playing with dolls. Then you’re a preteen, getting into boys. Then you’re a teenager, dating and such. But for you these stages were skipped. What we have to do is go back and repair the ladder. To do that we have to stop all the sex. Just quit cold turkey. Our love has to be wholly pure and spiritual. I’ll be your father.”
“You’re already like a father.”
“I mean, a father who doesn’t have sex with you.” He looked to Paws as if for support. “We have to stop. I’ve started rebuilding the dollhouse. You know, the wooden one I started building you a long time ago but didn’t finish. I thought you could play with it. I would get you some dolls. And, eventually, you need to start going out with guys your own age. I’ll be the proud father anxiously awaiting his daughter at home so she can tell him all about her date.”
“There’s this one guy I like at school. He doesn’t like me. I told this girl in confidentiality I liked him and she went and told him. God, I hate high school. I want to drop out. But I can’t; I’m not old enough.”
“Did you hear what I said? We can’t be sexual anymore.”
“We’re married!”
“Not legally.”
“This isn’t fair! This is sick! I can’t be a little girl again! And now you’re telling me I’m not allowed to be a woman!” I knew the most important thing was that I keep moving forward, that I leave the girl I was behind me, but now he wanted to stop me from doing so.
“We can start over. I know we can. This time, we’ll do it right.”
“You’re just pushing me away like everyone else! I’m too old and this is your way of getting rid of me! You don’t want the hassle! The people gossiping and Inès putting pressure on you! She wants me out; I know it! It was okay when it was in the basement! When it was just you and me, in the basement—” “This is why it has to stop,” Peter said, trembling. “Look at the effect it has on you.”
“Are Miguel and Ricky saying anything about me?”
“No, I promise, they’re not. They don’t talk to me, not really.”
“Because of me, I bet! Nobody can stand me! Inès, your precious Inès, never says one word to me!”
“Inès is shy. She’s always been. And she hears us fighting sometimes and that makes her uncomfortable.”
“Oh, I feel so guilty! I feel so bad for disturbing the peace! Defend Inès some more, why don’t you? Why don’t you live out your happy little life with her? And I’ll just disappear. Don’t worry, whether I’m dead or alive, you’ll always have my pictures! And they never say a word!”
Before he could reply, I ran off into the woods, down the road, through the parking lot, and finally, to the boat docks, where I sat on the edge of an empty pier, over the gray water of the Hudson River, until Peter, limping, holding Paws by his leash, begged me not to jump.
T
hat November Peter bought a car, a 1978 Ford Granada, and my mother was hospitalized again for depression and paranoia. Poppa woke me up at five thirty in the morning to tell me she’d admitted to swallowing some 409 glass cleaner and was throwing it up; we would need to get her into the psychiatric ward immediately, so could Peter come even though it was an odd hour? I said Peter had a car now, and Poppa was relieved.
Before he left my bedroom, Poppa said: “I have stayed here constantly, you understand, because she was so suicidal. I could not go out at night for three weeks. Every night I listened to her nonsense. Even the drink could not keep me calm; I felt like the blood would leap from my pores. The talk of the Mafia. Oh, the Mafia is out for Margaux! I told her it was just prank callers. She insists it is the Mafia, whether she really believes that or because she wants to drive me mad, I do not know. Then she says that she sees people on the street wiping their eyes as though they are crying. And she thinks the police are going to arrest her. For what? I ask, and she doesn’t answer. She sings to herself in the street, humiliating her family! Driving us to the point where we would need masks to go outside so no one would know we are related to her. She said she wants to climb to the roof and set herself on fire like a witch at the stake, not realizing she will burn us all away with her!” He was quiet for a moment, hunched over on my bed, shaking. “I was at work the other day. I went into the bathroom. I looked into the mirror at myself. I could not believe how pale I seemed. I had the expression of a two-thousand-year-old mummy. The scariest recognition is to look in the mirror and a stranger stands there wearing your clothes. I put water on my face. I thought: I must straighten my tie. I must go back out there. This is my lot. I should stop questioning it. But do you know what happened to me in that bathroom? Water ran down my face. At first I thought it was from the faucet but then I realized it was coming from my eyes, it was tears, and I was helpless to prevent them! What has happened to me? What has happened?” He got up. “Let’s take her, all of us. In that car he bought—what did you say it was?”
“A Granada,” I said, not wanting to go anywhere with Poppa; I couldn’t stand talking about my mother, and that was all he did. Poppa had left me with the image of my mother on the roof, burning to death. I looked away, unable to block it out.
“Let us all go in the Granada, get her checked into St. Mary’s Hospital, and then go out to eat together. What about we go to City Island?” The worst place in the world, I thought. Where we used to go as a family—me, him, Mommy.
He saw the look on my face and said, almost pleading, “We can feed the gulls French fries. We can eat fried shrimp. You can have piña coladas. When you were little, you saved the paper umbrellas. You had a tin container filled with about fifty of them. I found them all once and thought, ‘What is she doing, saving them for a lifetime of rainy days?’ ”
I wore a floppy velvet hat to City Island that the ocean wind kept trying to snatch. Poppa and I were drunk; Poppa had tried to get Peter to drink but he used the excuse of being the designated driver. Poppa was so drunk that he nuzzled his nose to mine and Peter took a picture. On a wooden picnic table, Poppa and Peter sat discussing what would be best for my mother if she didn’t improve: state hospital, electroconvulsive therapy? Or simply a change of medication? I let them talk alone. I blamed myself. If only I was home more often. And the prank callers from my high school had made her paranoid. Some boys had gotten my number from a snow list, which was a photocopied sheet of paper listing everyone’s phone number so students could notify each other of school closings. Despite our precautions of late, Peter and I had been seen walking together. The prank callers had threatened to rape me and asked if I was fucking the old man. I had gotten so upset once that I had put the portable phone in the freezer, where it couldn’t be heard.
I stood by the wire fence at twilight as they talked, watching the gulls swirl over the green water, smelling the green air, the fried shrimp, and the crowds of people. I put a quarter in the binocular machine and turned it right and left. Sometimes I would capture a lone boat, sometimes a wooden post, one time a white gull floating on the water. Peter came up behind me and said, “Your father is so drunk that I hope I don’t have to carry him back into the house tonight. You know something? He was decent tonight. I wonder about the person he could have been if his life had turned out differently.”
“No point in wondering. He is who he is,” I said, and silently we took turns looking through the binoculars. Every time the money ran out, Peter would put another quarter in; we did that until he was out of change.
We went back to the wooden picnic table behind Tony’s restaurant where Poppa sat, running his gold toothpick through his teeth. “A gull took a French fry right out of this basket. He came down and snatched it with me sitting here. A rare thing to happen! Do you think it is good luck, Peter? Possibly a sign of better things to come?” he said, with a wry smile, and then entertained us by shuffling a dime under three pistachio shells he had gotten from the bar, testing how fast our eyes could follow his hands. I won every time over Peter, who said his eyesight and reflexes weren’t as good as they used to be.
On the way home, Peter’s favorite song, “Hotel California,” came on the radio and Poppa drunkenly sang along about wine, knives, and a beast that can’t be killed no matter how many times you stab it.
Winter passed with Peter true to his word: we were not intimate. I missed it intensely when Peter stopped even hugging and kissing me, saying that would tempt him. There was no more watching porn and reading lascivious novels. I missed the girls in the porn movies as though they’d been friends of mine; that was how many times we’d watched them. I’d imagined background stories for each one and reasons why they worked in the sex industry and ways that they were happy despite society’s condemnations. He said there shouldn’t be any more talk of violence and sex, even in the Story, because talking about violence had led him to be violent. Without the sex and violence, though, where was the story? I continued to write my novel while he was out with Inès, juicing it up in secret protest of these new rules. I tallied up my novel’s mortal sins: five rapes including one gang rape, six murders, three suicides, three kidnappings, four cases of incest, and one threesome.
Peter even wanted me to dress differently now, more like a “young lady”; so, at a flea market, he bought me a baggy gray, red, and black striped dress that went past my knees. The other thing, which was almost too bizarre for words, was that he wanted me to play with the dollhouse and the gray felt mice like I was seven again. I did it once, to humor him, and then refused to do it ever again. I was more confused than ever, annoyed by the way that he completely controlled whether the intimacy happened or not, just as he had been in charge of starting it. What did he think I was—a windup toy he could play with to his heart’s content and then toss into some dusty corner? I really missed him holding me, caressing me, calling me Snuggle Bunny, his sweetheart. There was no one else to do it.