“What are you doing?”
“You’ll thank me for this one day,” he said.
“Dad, just tell me about her. What was she like?”
“Are you still harping on about that?”
“Yes.”
“That oughta do it.”
Dad finished hammering, put up the rod, and pulled the beige curtains across the mirror with a drawstring.
“Why do people need to look at themselves while they brush their teeth? Don’t they know where their teeth are?”
“Dad!”
“What? Christ! What do you want to know, factual information?”
“Was she Australian?”
“No, European.”
“From where, exactly?”
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“How can you not know?”
“Why are you so interested in your mother all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I guess I’m just sentimental.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said, showing me a familiar sight: his back.
Over the following months, I pushed and pressed and squeezed and, in dribs and drabs, managed to extract the following scant information: my mother was beautiful from certain angles, she was widely traveled, and she disliked having her photograph taken as much as most people dislike having their money taken. She spoke many languages fluently, was somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-five when she died, and though she had been called Astrid, it was probably not her real name.
“Oh, and she absolutely hated Eddie,” he said one day.
“She knew Eddie?”
“I met Eddie more or less at the same time.”
“In Paris?”
“Just out of Paris.”
“What were you doing just out of Paris?”
“You know. The usual. Walking around.”
Eddie, Dad’s best friend, was a thin Thai man with a sleazy mustache who always seemed to be smack bang in the middle of the prime of life and not a day over. When he stood next to my pale father, they looked less like friends and more like doctor and patient. It was clear now that I was going to have to interrogate Eddie about my mother. Finding him was the trouble. He made frequent and unexplained overseas trips, and I had no idea whether he went for business, pleasure, restlessness, genocide, or on a dare. Eddie had a way of being categorically unspecific- he would never go so far as to tell you, for example, that he was visiting relatives in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand, but if you pressed, he might admit that he had been “in Asia.”
I waited six months for Eddie to resurface. During that time I prepared a list of questions, running and rerunning the interview with him in my head, including his answers. I anticipated- wrongly, as it turned out- a lurid love story wherein my saintly mother martyred herself in a Romeo and Juliet-type scenario: I imagined that the doomed lovers had made a tragically romantic double suicide pact but Dad had pulled out at the last minute.
Finally one morning I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth with the curtains drawn when I heard Eddie’s syrupy voice calling out. “Marty! You here? Am I talking to an empty apartment?”
I ran into the living room.
“Here he is,” Eddie said, and as usual, before I could say “Please don’t,” he lifted the Nikon dangling from his neck and took my photo.
Eddie was a photography nut and couldn’t go five minutes without taking my photograph. He was a great multitasker: with one eye on the lens of his Nikon, he could smoke a cigarette, photograph us, and smooth down his hair at the same time. Although he said I photographed well, I couldn’t disprove him- he never showed us the results. I didn’t know if he ever developed the photos or not, or even if he had film in his camera. It was just another example of Eddie’s pathological mysteriousness. He never talked about himself. Never told you how things were in his day. You didn’t even know if he had a day. He was, body and soul, aloof.
“How’s your dad? Still around, is he?”
“Eddie, did you know my mother?”
“Astrid? Sure, I knew her. Shame about her, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me about her.”
“All right.”
Eddie plopped himself on the couch and patted the cushion next to him. I leapt on it excitedly, unaware of how intensely unsatisfying our conversation would be: in all my anticipating, I had completely forgotten that Eddie was the world’s worst storyteller.
“I met her in Paris, with your father,” he began. “I think it was autumn, because the leaves were brown. I think the American name for autumn, ‘fall,’ is really beautiful. Personally, I like fall, or the fall, as they say, and also spring. Summer I can only tolerate for the first three days and after that I’m looking for a meat freezer to hide in.”
“Eddie…”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I got sidetracked, didn’t I? I forgot to tell you how I feel about winter.”
“My mother.”
“Right. Your mother. She was a beautiful woman. I don’t think she was French, but she had the same physique. French women are small and thin with quite small breasts. If you want big breasts, you have to cross the border into Switzerland.”
“Dad said you met my mother in Paris.”
“That’s right. It was in Paris. I miss Paris. Did you know that in France they have a different word when something disgusts you? You can’t say ‘Yuck!’ No one will know what you mean. You have to say ‘Berk!’ It’s weird. The same goes when you hurt yourself. It’s ‘Aie!’ not ‘Ow!’ ”
“What was my dad doing in Paris?”
“He was doing nothing in those days, the same kind of nothing he does now, except then he was doing it in French. Well, actually he didn’t do nothing. He was always scribbling in his little green notebook.”
“All of Dad’s notebooks are black. He always uses the same kind.”
“No, this one was definitely green. I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s a shame you can’t see the pictures I’ve got showing in my mind’s eye right now. They’re so damn vivid. I wish we could project all the mind’s eyes onto a screen and sell tickets. I think how much you could expect the public to pay would really determine your self-worth.”
I eased myself off the couch, telling Eddie to go on without me, walked to my father’s bedroom, and stood at the open door, staring stupidly at the vast chaos and disorder that may or may not have been hiding the secret story of my mother in a green notebook. Normally I don’t enter my father’s bedroom, for the same reason you don’t walk in and chat with a man when he’s on the toilet, but this was important enough to force me to break my own rule. I stepped into my father’s open bowels, his howling sandstorm; that he slept in here was an achievement in itself.
I set about my task. First I had to navigate my way through a yellowing archive of newspapers that would rival those stored in the public library. They were stacked up and pushed into the dark corners of the room, the stacks so numerous they carpeted the floor all the way to the bed. I stepped on the newspapers and over things I could only imagine he’d pulled out of garbage bins and those I imagined he’d dragged out of people’s mouths. On the way I found things I had long considered missing: the tomato sauce, the mustard, all the teaspoons, the soup spoons, and the big plates. I opened up one of his wardrobes, and under a heap of clothes I found the first pile of notebooks- there must have been a hundred of them. They were all black. Black, black, black. In the second wardrobe I found another hundred, again, disappointingly, all black. I stepped inside the wardrobe- it was very deep. There I found a pile of magazines but tried not to linger on them. From all the photographs inside, Dad had cut out the eyes. I tried not to dwell on this. A man can read a magazine and might be inclined to remove the eyes if he feels they are staring at him insolently, can’t he? I ignored them, and moved deeper inside the wardrobe (it really was a deep wardrobe). Yet another box revealed yet another pile of notebooks, as well as all the cut-out eyes from the magazines. They watched me pitilessly as I rummaged through the notebooks, and seemed to widen with mine at the sight of, wedged under the cardboard flap at the bottom of the box, a green one.