In Prague, my father sat on chairs and read the paper in another language and never tried to defend anything. He never said, "Your mother, Emily, she was just too much." He never tried to prove that Laura wasn"t his. Instead, he bought her pets and sent her to a horse camp last summer. He was very settled in his late fifties, comfortable in a chair he didn"t care about. Resigned to a certain solitude. My mother had been wrong. He didn"t need ivory elephants lining his desk or Italian vases on his dining room tables.
"What can you do with a pigeon?" my father asked. It was Wednesday. I hadn"t heard from Jonathan in two days. We were at Findi, but I couldn"t eat, couldn"t think.
"Feed it," I said.
"Put it in the mailbox."
"Paint its wings."
"Follow it to the park."
"Say, "h.e.l.lo, sir, please don"t s.h.i.t on me," to it."
"That one doesn"t work," he said. "You can say, "h.e.l.lo, sir, please don"t s.h.i.t on me," to anything."
"You can put anything in a mailbox."
"Certainly not. Not a tiger. Not a hot air balloon."
The couple next to us was loud, laughing. It felt like at any second, the wine could spill and we could start fighting. At any second, one of us could say something stupid, and anything could happen.
"I don"t think it"s going to work out," my father said. My father was light, airy, twirling his linguini on his fork.
"Huh?" I asked.
"Me and Ester."
"What do you mean?" I said, and I almost dropped my fork. I never saw anything that I was supposed to see, headed straight for me, and for some reason, my first tendency was to release my grip.
I had come to develop affection for Ester. Sometimes, she felt like a sister. A sister who was sleeping with my father, I suppose, but a woman who sat on balconies with me and laughed about the way my father shouted out "Groovy!" in his sleep.
"She"s just," he said, and paused. "Not for me."
"Who is for you, Dad?"
"I don"t know," he said.
"You can"t run around by yourself forever," I said.
"As a matter of fact, you can."
"Dad."
"I don"t need anyone, Emily. Why does anyone need anyone? I"ve always been on my own, and I"ll die on my own."
"Don"t talk like that."
"Talk like what?" he said. "It"s the truth. You"re not a little girl anymore. Time you face the facts. Your father is a loner. Your father just likes to be alone. Too much company creates too much fuss."
"You like the fuss," I said. "You like the wine and the chatter about fixing the coffeepot when it breaks. The fuss is annoying and who wants to argue about a painting or why the coffeepot is leaking water, but it"s fuss and fuss is just what we do, right?"
"Truth is," my father said, "there"s just too much. There"s you, your mother, there"s Laura, there"s Mrs. Resnick. There"s the dog. I just can"t get involved in another commitment at this point."
"Drop Laura," I said, and as soon as I said it, I was horrified. But I couldn"t stop. "We both know she"s not yours."
"Emily," he said, "I don"t like it when you"re cruel like this."
"I"m sorry," I said.
I didn"t necessarily want to prove that Laura wasn"t his daughter, it was just that I couldn"t stand not knowing.
"I wasn"t around enough for you, Emily," my father said. "I wasn"t. And I"m sorry for that. Sometimes I feel like I know exactly who you are, and sometimes, I confess, I have no idea. But I do feel we are close in our own way, and I feel that I have the right to ask you about that man in our apartment, your teacher from high school."
"Jonathan," I said.
"Okay then," my father said. "Jonathan. Tell me about Jonathan."
"He"s my boyfriend," I said, and I felt foolish calling him my boyfriend for some reason. I"m not sure why other than the fact that Jonathan would not have described himself this way, if he were there to do so.
"What do you mean he is your boyfriend?" he asked. "He was your teacher for Christ"s sake."
I chewed on my pasta. My father leaned forward over the candle and hushed his voice.
"Did he ever touch you while you were his student?" my father asked.
"Jesus, Dad," I said, wiping my mouth.
"Well I"m sorry if this is embarra.s.sing for you, Emily, but it"s an important question. The only question somebody in my position should ask."
"Somebody in your position?" I asked. "You mean, the position of being my father? It"s not a job, Dad."
"I realize that, Emily."
He sighed. He took a sip of wine.
"I"ve spared you a lot of questions," I said. "I wish you would spare me this one. Just this one."
"You don"t need to spare me anything, Emily," he said. "I am your father. If you have something to ask me, then ask it."
"Okay," I said. "How do you know Laura is your daughter?"
"We"ve been through this," he said, which meant, he had been through this-with my mother.
"You took a blood test?"
"I just know."
"But how?"
"You want to know the truth?" he asked.
What else would I want?
"Because Tom, Mr. Resnick, didn"t sleep with her for years," he said. "That"s how I know. He couldn"t. He couldn"t have s.e.x."
I stared at him.
"He was a wobbler," my father said, and at first I was horrified because a wobbler sounded like the name for a man who couldn"t have s.e.x, a man whose p.e.n.i.s was too unstable to be inserted. "He was a wobbler," Janice would have said, and rolled her eyes. But my father explained he had taken this antibiotic that ended up destroying the part of his ear that controlled his balance. It happened to a lot of people right after the drug came out. He had increased difficulty walking or standing up for long periods of time. A wobbler. Wobblers often did not attend social functions or perform regular everyday tasks.
"Joan started calling me during the worst of his condition, when he could hardly stand up. He would fall down the stairs sometimes, you know."
"Why did she call you?"
"I don"t know," he said. "Proximity. I guess she trusted me. We were neighbors, friends."
"You wrote her checks for thousands of dollars," I said.
"Tom lost his job," he said. "They had no health insurance. They couldn"t afford all of the bills."
"Did he know you were paying for all of this?" I asked.
"Yes, Emily," he said.
"He knew?"
"Yes."
"Is that why he killed himself?"
"I don"t know," he said. "Who knows why anybody kills themselves?"
He was always so right, so dignified, so the father, and me, always the daughter. The waitress arrived with the check and this made us both feel grateful. My father thanked her, put his credit card in the book.
"Now it is my turn," he said. "How did you meet Jonathan?"
I stirred the ice in my gla.s.s with a knife.
"He was my teacher," I finally said. "So, go ahead. Put him in jail. He was my G.o.dd.a.m.n English teacher and he touched me. So what?"
My father sat there motionless. He did not look sad or upset or surprised or pleased; he looked out the window. When he faced me again, he had tears in his eyes. "We had no idea," he said. He picked up his napkin and put it over his face. I couldn"t see his face, but I could see his shoulders shake.
"I mean, it"s not your fault, Dad," I said. "It"s n.o.body"s fault."
He wouldn"t remove the napkin from his face.
"I mean, there is no fault to be had. It"s a good thing."
He put the napkin down and wiped his eyes.
"Right," he said. "It"s a good thing."
Neither of us knew what to say. Talking about it felt wrong. Talking about it made me splice my words, stutter nervously, made me not want to talk about it. That had always been the problem and nothing was going to change that. Talking about it made us feel like people different from who we were, the kind of people who had failed, the kind of people whom other people rolled their eyes at, when we just wanted to be people who loved each other and sat around the fireplace and laughed about the way the shadow of the flames made the figures in the da Vinci painting look like cartoons. So we were silent until the waitress came back with my father"s card, so silent I thought the people eating next to us were going to ask us to quit sitting there so d.a.m.n quietly. We were quiet this way until the cab, when I looked over at my father and he was scratching the bottom of his throat, where his skin was loose and sagging, and he looked so foreign to me, an old man I might pa.s.s on the street and feel bad for. I felt panic rise from my stomach to my chest, the acute anxiety of not knowing my father anymore, of being coffined, in this black cab, this hea.r.s.e, taking us past all the street signs: food store, bank, leftover generic storefronts from Communism, through the hilly dark in a country where n.o.body spoke our language. Talking was too hard-I of all people should have understood that. So I tried to. I tried to understand that my father had his reasons. Whatever they were, they were sure to be reasons. I made a peace offering. "What can you do with a dinner?" I asked quietly out the window.
"Make it unpleasant," he said back. He wouldn"t look at me, and I worried that I disgusted him. That I wasn"t who he thought I was, this whole time.
"Ruin it," I said.
We laughed so softly the cab driver probably couldn"t even tell we had been speaking, and I wasn"t even aware we were laughing until we were stopped at a light and it was silent again. The cane of a pedestrian hit methodically against the cobblestone, and walking sounded like a ch.o.r.e.
When we got back to the apartment, Ester was on the couch, painting her toenails. "Dobr den!" she said, and laughed happily, as she leaned over to give my father a welcome-back kiss. "Honey, our new towel heater has arrived."
Then she turned to me.
"Who in the world needs a freaking towel heater? Your father does, of course. But we love him anyway I guess. Even if he is supremely flawed."
When my father did not laugh from the kitchen, I knew what he was thinking: I did not order that towel heater. If there was one thing my father did need to prove it was how much he didn"t need a towel heater. He was looking at Ester from the kitchen holding up the towel heater, and I could see him thinking: How can I marry a woman who says "freaking"? That"s teenage talk. That"s little-girl talk.
My father only liked words that had been recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary for at least ten years, like "Internet," and "website," and he didn"t believe in the immediate acceptance of slang. "It"s irresponsible," he said once.
"How can you not be for progress?" I had asked him.
"It"s a filtering process," he had said. "May the best functional slang win."
I sat down next to Ester and sank into the same spot on the couch. Our hips were touching. "Hey, scoot, Toot," I said, and she laughed like a little girl discovering rhyme for the first time, even though there were dark circles under her eyes that she didn"t try to hide with makeup. Ester let me get close to her on the couch and share things with her like a sister, but there was still something that she kept shut down, moments when she would avoid eye contact or remind me which countries different perfumes came from even when I had never asked, as if to remind me, I am older than you I am your father"s lover and before you got here we used to drink wine on the balcony and a.n.a.lyze weather patterns. It was a different kind of happiness, I could see her thinking, and so is sitting on the couch with you talking. But my father didn"t notice any of that. What my father saw from the kitchen was his daughter and her red-haired friend on a couch, discussing episode 34 of Merchant Love, and his daughter asking her friend if she thought that the woman at the creperie was sleeping with the man who sold roses, because she saw them licking ice cream together in an alleyway all by themselves. They looked happy, the daughter said. "Anything is possible on Merchant Love," the redheaded friend said, and then leaned back in the couch as though she were at home.
28.
I planned to tell Laura the truth when my father took Ester out to dinner to tell her it was over. It had started to snow. I boiled some tea and practiced telling her slowly, in pieces, but as soon as my father closed the door to leave, Laura was excited about something, running around in circles in the living room and then falling to the ground. She lay down with her arms spread.
"Let"s play Dead," she said.
"Dead?"
"Yeah," she said. "You be fifteen years dead. I"ll be recently dead."
She told me to lie down next to her. I wasn"t sure what to do so I did.
"Okay, so you are wearing your dress with white socks. I"m wearing whatever I had on at the time of death."
She was breathing heavily.
"Then, when you see me for the first time across the bridge, you are going to say, "Patricia, you"re wearing that?""