Sourland Page 7

  My father owned two residences: a brownstone on West Eighty-ninth Street and, at Montauk Point at the easternmost end of Long Island, a rambling old shingleboard house. It was at Montauk Point that my father had his studio, overlooking the ocean. The brownstone, which was where I lived most of the time, was maintained by a housekeeper. My father preferred Montauk Point though he tried to get into the city at least once a week. Frequently on weekends I was brought out to Montauk Point—by hired car—but it was a long, exhausting journey that left me writhing with back pain, and when I was there, my father spent most of the time in his studio or visiting with artist friends. It was not true, as Adelina implied, that my father neglected me, but it was true that we didn’t see much of each other during the school year. As an artist/bachelor of some fame my father was eagerly sought as a dinner guest and many of his evenings both at Montauk Point and in the city were spent with dealers and collectors. Yet he’d visited me each day while I’d been in the hospital. We’d had serious talks about subjects that faded from my memory afterward—art, religion?—whether God “existed” or was a “universal symbol”—whether there was “death” from the perspective of “the infinite universe.” In my hospital bed when I’d been dazed and delirious from painkillers it was wonderful how my father’s figure melted and eased into my dreams with me, so that I was never lonely. Afterward my father revealed that when I’d been sleeping he had sketched me—in charcoal—in the mode of Edvard Munch’s “The Sick Child”—but the drawings were disappointing, he’d destroyed them.

  My father was much older than my mother. One day I would learn that my father was eighteen years older than my mother, which seemed to me such a vast span of time, there was something obscene about it. My father loved me very much, he said. Still, I saw that he’d begun to lose interest in me once my corkscrew spine had been repaired, and I was released from the hospital: my medical condition had been a problem to be solved, like one of my father’s enormous canvases or sculptures, and once such a problem was solved, his imagination detached from it.

  I could understand this, of course. I understood that, apart from my physical ailments, I could not be a very interesting subject to any adult. It was a secret plan of mine to capture the attention of both my father and my mother in my life to come. I would be something unexpected, and I would excel: as an archaeologist, an Olympic swimmer, a poet. A neurosurgeon…

  At the Boathouse bar, my mother fell into conversation with a man with sleek oiled hair and a handsome fox face; this man ignored me, as if I did not exist. When I returned from using the restroom, I saw the fox-faced man was leaving, and my mother was slipping a folded piece of paper into her oversized handbag. The color was up in Adelina’s cheeks. She had a way of brushing her ash-blond hair from her face that reminded me of the most popular girls at my school who exuded at all times an air of urgency, expectation. “Cherie, you are all right? You are looking pale, I think.” This was a gentle admonition. Quickly I told Adelina that I was fine. For some minutes a middle-aged couple a few feet away had been watching my mother, and whispering together, and when the woman at last approached my mother to ask if she was an actress—“Someone on TV, your face is so familiar”—I steeled myself for Adelina’s rage, but unexpectedly she laughed and said no, she’d never been an actress, but she had been a model and maybe that was where they’d seen her face, on a Vogue cover. “Not for a while, though! I’m afraid.” Nonetheless the woman was impressed and asked Adelina to sign a paper napkin for her, which Adelina did, with a gracious flourish.

  More than a half hour had passed, and we were still waiting to be seated for lunch. Adelina went to speak with the harried young hostess who told her there might be a table opening in another ten-fifteen minutes. “The wand will light up, ma’am, when your table is ready. You don’t have to check with me.” Adelina said, “No? When I see other people being seated, who came after us?” The hostess denied that this was so. Adelina indignantly returned to the bar. She ordered a second Bloody Mary and drank it thirstily. “She thinks that I’m not aware of what she’s doing,” my mother said. “But I’m very aware. I’m expected to slip her a twenty, I suppose. I hate that!” Abruptly then my mother decided that we were leaving. She paid the bar bill and pulled me outside with her; in a trash can she disposed of the plastic wand. Again she snugly linked her arm through mine. The Bloody Marys had warmed her, a pleasant yeasty-perfumy odor lifted from her body. The silver-vinyl sheath, which was a kind of tunic covering her legs to her mid-thighs, made a shivery sound as she moved. “Never let anyone insult you, darling. Verbal abuse is as vicious as physical abuse.” She paused, her mouth working as if she had more to say but dared not. In the Boathouse she’d removed her dark glasses and shoved them into her handbag and now her pearly-gray eyes were exposed to daylight, beautiful glistening eyes just faintly bloodshot, tinged with yellow like old ivory.

  “Cherie, your shoulder! Your left, you carry it lower than the other. Are you aware?”

  Quickly I shook my head no.

  “You don’t want to appear hunchbacked. What was he—Quasimodo—A terrible thing for a girl. Here—”

  Briskly like a physical therapist Adelina gripped my wrists and pulled them over my head, to stretch me. I was made to stand on my toes, like a ballerina.

  Adelina scolded: “I don’t like how people look at you. With pity, that is a kind of scorn. I hate that!”

  Her mouth was wide, fleshy. Her forehead was low. Her features seemed somehow in the wrong proportions and yet the effect of my mother was a singular kind of beauty, it was not possible to look away from her. At about the time of their divorce my father had painted a sequence of portraits titled Bonobo Momma which was his best-known work as it was his most controversial: enormous unfinished canvases with raw, primitive figures of monkey-like humanoid females. It was possible to see my beautiful mother in these simian figures with their wide fleshy mouths, low brows, breasts like dugs, swollen and flushed female genitalia. When I was older I would stare at the notorious Bonobo Momma in the Museum of Modern Art and I would realize that the female figure most closely resembling Adelina was unnervingly sexual, with large hands, feet, genitalia. This was a rapacious creature to inspire awe in the merely human viewer.

  I would see that there was erotic power greater than beauty. My father had paid homage to that, in my mother. Perhaps it was his loathing of her, that had allowed him to see her clearly.

  Approaching us on the path was a striking young woman—walking with two elegant borzoi dogs—dark glasses masking half her face—in tight designer jeans crisscrossed with zippers like stitches—a tight sweater of some bright material like crinkled plastic. The girl’s hair was a shimmering chestnut-red ponytail that fell to her hips. Adelina stared with grudging admiration as the girl passed us without a glance.

  “That’s a distinctive look.”

  We walked on. I was becoming dazed, light-headed. Adelina mused: “On the catwalk, it isn’t beauty that matters. Anyone can be beautiful. Mere beauty is boring, an emptiness. Your father knew that, at least. With so much else he did not know, at least he knew that. It’s the walk—the authority. A great model announces ‘Here I am—there is only me.’”

  Shyly I said, “‘There is only I.’”

  “What?”

  “‘There is only I.’ You said ‘me.’”

  “What on earth are you talking about? Am I supposed to know?”

  My mother laughed, perplexed. She seemed to be having difficulty keeping me in focus.

  I’d meant to speak in a playful manner with Adelina, as I often did with adults who intimidated me and towered over me. It was a way of seeming younger than I was. But Adelina interpreted most remarks literally. Jokes fell flat with her, unless she made them herself, punctuated with her sharp barking laughter.

  Adelina hailed a taxi, to take us to Tavern on the Green.

  The driver, swarthy-skinned, with a short-trimmed goatee, was speaking on a cell phone in a lowered voice
, in a language unknown to us. At the same time, the taxi’s radio was on, a barrage of noisy advertising. Adelina said, “Driver? Please turn off that deafening radio, will you?”

  With measured slowness as if he hadn’t quite heard her, the driver turned off his radio. Into the cell phone he muttered an expletive in an indecipherable language.

  Sharply Adelina said, “Driver? I’d prefer that you didn’t speak on the phone while you’re driving. If you don’t mind.”

  In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes fixed us with scarcely concealed contempt.

  “Your cell phone, please. Will you turn it off. There’s a law against taxi drivers using their cell phones while they have fares, you must know that. It’s dangerous. I hate it. I wouldn’t want to report you to the taxi authority.”

  The driver mumbled something indistinct. Adelina said, “It’s rude to mumble, monsieur. You can let us off here.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are, monsieur! You understand English perfectly well. I see your name here, and I’m taking down your license number. Open this damned door. Immediately.”

  The taxi braked to a stop. I was thrown forward against the scummy plastic partition that separated us from the furious driver. Pain like an electric shock, fleeting and bright, throbbed in my spine. Adelina and the swarthy-skinned driver exchanged curses as Adelina yanked me out of the taxi and slammed the door, and the taxi sped away.

  “Yes, I will report him! Illegal immigrant—I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  We were stranded inside the park, on one of the drives traversing the park from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. We had some distance to walk to Tavern on the Green and I was feeling light-headed, concerned that I wasn’t going to make it. But when Adelina asked me if I was all right, quickly I told her that I was fine.

  “Frankly, darling, you don’t look ‘fine.’ You look sick. What on earth is your father thinking, entrusting you with a housekeeper?”

  I wanted to protest, I loved Serena. A sudden panic came over me that Adelina might have the authority to fire her, and I would have no one.

  “Darling, if you could walk straighter. This shoulder!—try. I hate to see people looking at my daughter in pity.”

  Adelina shook her head in disgust. Her ash-blond hair stirred in the wind, stiffly. At the base of her throat was a delicate hollow I had not seen before. The bizarre thought came to me, I could insert my fingers into this hollow. I could push down, using all of my weight. My mother’s brittle skeleton would shatter.

  “—what? What are you saying, darling?”

  I was trying to protest something. Trying to explain. As in a dream in which the right words won’t come. Not ten feet from us stood a disheveled man with a livid boiled-beet face. He too was muttering to himself—or maybe to us—grinning and showing an expanse of obscenely pink gum. Adelina was oblivious of him. He’d begun to follow us, lurching and flapping his arms as if in mockery of my gorgeous mother.

  Adelina chided: “You shouldn’t have come out today, darling. If you’re not really mended. I could have come to see you, we could have planned that. We could have met at a restaurant on the West Side.”

  Briskly Adelina was signaling for another taxi, standing in the street. She was wearing her dark-tinted glasses now. Her manner was urgent, dramatic. A taxi braked to a stop, the driver was an older man, darker-skinned than the other driver, more deferential. Adelina opened the rear door, pushed me inside, leaned into the window to instruct the driver: “Please take my daughter home. She’ll tell you the address. She’s just thirteen, she has had major surgery and needs to get home, right away. Make sure she gets to the actual door, will you? You can wait in the street and watch her. Here”—thrusting a bill at the driver, which must have been a large bill for the man took it from Adelina’s fingers with a terse smile of thanks.

  Awkwardly Adelina stooped to kiss my cheek. She was juggling her designer handbag and a freshly lit cigarette, breathing her flamy-sweet breath into my face. “Darling, goodbye! Take a nap when you get home. You look ghastly. I’ll call you. I’m here until Thursday. Au-voir!”

  The taxi sprang forward. On the curb my mother stood blowing kisses after us. In the rearview mirror the driver’s narrowed eyes shifted to my face.

  A jarring ride through the park! Now I was alone, unobserved. I wiped at my eyes. Through the smudged window beside me flowed a stream of strangers on the sidewalk—all that I knew in my life that would be permanent, and my own.

  BITCH

  It was a bitch. The summer was jinxed. Her father died on her birthday which was July 1. Then, things got worse. Though before that, things had not been exactly good. There were clouded memories. There had been a fear of entering the hospital. Her father had joked that hospitals are dangerous places, people die in hospitals. Her father had believed that hospitals are to be avoided at all costs. The air of hospitals is a petri dish of teeming microorganisms. Her father had rarely stepped into hospitals in his former life. Her father had had to be taken by ambulance to this hospital. Her father had not returned from the hospital. Her father had seemed to know he would not return from the hospital. Her father began to call her Poppy in the hospital. Each time she entered the hospital with dread. Each time she entered his room shivering with dread. Why are hospitals refrigerated? You don’t want to ask this question. Each time she entered his room, if he was awake, if he was awake and in his bed and able to see her, he would say Is that you, Poppy? He would squint and smile eagerly and say Is that you, Poppy? Her name was not Poppy. Poppy was not a name much like her actual name though it was rare, it had become rare, for anyone to call her by that name, either. She wondered if Poppy had been her baby name, and she’d forgotten. This thought frightened her so she tried not to think it. Nor could she ask her father Who is Poppy? Before the ambulance and the hospital and the elevator to the eighth floor which had become her life things had not been exactly good and yet not-good in a way of meaning not-bad, considering. You might have said not-good in the way of meaning pretty-good, considering. She wished now that that simple happy time would return but it wasn’t likely. She was visiting her father in the hospital because she was the daughter. The two of them were marooned alone together as in a lifeboat. Somehow, suddenly this had happened. There had been a family at one time, there were other relatives living now but the father did not wish to see anyone else. The father could not bear complications in his life. He had been an aggressive man in his former life but he had had to surrender his life as a man, now he would endure the life of the body. And so they were a father and a daughter alone together as in a lifeboat in the midst of the ocean. They had to shout at each other to be heard over the rushing winds and the slosh of six-foot waves. The hospital air was teeming with microorganisms poised to devour them. These were sharks too small to be detected by the human eye but obviously they were there. Disinfectant could keep them at bay but not for very long. The smell of disinfectant had seeped into her hair and could not be washed out. The smell of disinfectant had seeped into her clothing, her skin, even her fingernails. Beneath her fingernails, a sharp smell of disinfectant as if she’d been scratching her own skin, or scalp. No one would ever kiss her mouth again. No one would ever draw close to her again. What a joke! The summer was jinxed. The entire year would be jinxed. The preceding year, seen in retrospect, must have been jinxed. Though she had not known then, for she had believed that the not-so-good present was a “phase,” a “stage,” some sort of “transition.” Until the hospital, much can be interpreted as “transition.” She hadn’t known that her father had loved her. That was a surprise! She hadn’t known that her father had taken much notice of her. As a girl she had loved her father but eventually she’d given up, as we do when our love is not returned. Though possibly she’d been mistaken. Oh, it was a bitch! It was a bad joke. She was a bitch to think such thoughts at such a time. Though it was a comfort in this, that she was a bitch who deserved bad luck and n
ot a nice person who deserved better. There had been a previous life involving her but in the hospital at her father’s bedside she could not recall this life very clearly. Perhaps it had involved someone else, in fact. Perhaps her family had been other people. Through a glass darkly came to her. She was envious of those other people she had not known. The nurses on the eighth floor knew her. Some of them, the nice ones, smiled encouragingly. Some of them smiled in pity. Some of them did not smile but glanced quickly away. Some of them ducked into supply closets. The attendants who spoke little English knew her. Everywhere were hospital workers who had no idea who she was yet knew her. Each time she entered the hospital with an eager dread. She shivered with an eager dread. The hospital was refrigerated in summer. You had to wear heavy clothing. You had to wear warm stockings. You had to clench your hands into fists and squeeze them beneath your armpits for warmth. She stepped out of the elevator on the eighth floor with her eager dread. She pushed through the doors of the cardiac unit with her eager dread. She was bringing flowers, or a basket of fruit. She was bringing the local newspaper which she would read to her father. Yet, she entered his room with her eager dread never knowing what she would encounter. For each time, her father was a smaller man in the ever-larger bed. Each time, her father’s eyes were sunk more deeply in their ever-larger sockets. Each time, something was missing from the room. Her father’s wristwatch that had been on the bedside table. Her father’s fuzzy bedroom slippers that had been neatly positioned on the floor beside the bed. Her father’s reading glasses were taken from him, who would want a dying old man’s reading glasses! Her father’s dentures were taken from him, who would want a dying old man’s dentures! Tears glistened on her father’s sunken cheeks. His collapsed mouth was frantic. She was his only hope. Her voice became excited. A nurse warned of calling security. You can’t accuse theft. You had better not accuse theft. You had better have evidence for theft. He was saying, You are my only hope. You will live on. I will live in you, my only hope. My beautiful daughter. Only you. She was terrified by such words. She began to tremble, such words. There was a roaring of wind, a terrible sloshing of waves. She wanted to scream at him, I’m not the one! Don’t count on me. No one had said she was beautiful in a long time. No one had kissed her mouth in a long time. Her father looked at her with love—but what is love, in a dying old man! What is love, in a deranged old man! On the eve of her father’s death, the missing dentures turned up. “Turned up” was the explanation. Yet her father died with a collapsed mouth, for it was too late for dentures. She was wakened from a stuporous sleep by a ringing phone. She who was his daughter who’d been claiming to be insomniac and sleep deprived yet she’d been wakened from a stuporous sleep to be informed by a woman’s voice that her father had passed away and she must come to the hospital as quickly as possible to make arrangements for the disposal of the body and to clear out the room. Now the summer stretched ahead like an asphalt parking lot to the horizon. Through a glass darkly rang in her head. She had no idea why. Though she’d been warned, there was the shock of entering an empty room. There was the shock of the stripped bed, the bare mattress. There was the shock of an overpowering smell of disinfectant. It was her task to clear this room of her father’s things. She was capable of this task, she thought. Her father’s dentures were given to her. Her father’s dentures had “turned up.” Later she might wonder if these dentures were in fact her father’s dentures but at the time she had not doubted that this was a happy ending. Later she would doubt for there was no way of knowing, really. She took care to wrap the dentures in tissue paper, though her hands were trembling. She was terrified of dropping the dentures onto the floor and breaking them. She was her father’s only hope. She believed that she was equal to the task except she was distracted by something murmurous. It sounded like an anxious Is that you, Poppy? But she couldn’t be sure.