I give Tink a quick stare of admonition—a joke and not a joke. She beams, melts me, and goes back to her meal. The entire scene suddenly amuses me greatly, this whole silly ritual of meeting the parents, getting their approval for the inevitable, most of which—in particular the essential proof of the rightness of shared intimacy— has already come to pass.
But I contain my laughter. I act the good son-in-law-to-be and show these kind narrow people, under whose love and tutelage my fiancée grew to maturity, the esteem and good manners they expect.
“Alex, would you please pass the peas?” says Melissa when her mother pauses to inhale. Mrs. Jones has launched into yet another diatribe against an educational system too unfeeling, too inflexible for special students like her Tinkerbell. Already under fire have come the lack of appropriate gymnastic equipment, the unfeeling cretinism of a certain driver-ed instructor, and Tinkerbell’s unmet needs for special testing conditions in all her academic subjects. As I pass the peas, the head drama coach falls into the hopper of Mrs. Jones’
tirade for refusing even to consider mounting a production of Peter Pan and giving Tink a chance to perform the character they’ve named her after, a casting inspiration Mrs. Jones is certain would have brought her daughter out of the cocoon of adolescent shyness years earlier than had been the case.
“But the worst of it, Alex,” she says, and I thank God that she’s spoken my name for the first time (and that it dropped so casually into the conversation), “is that no one in all those years has had the slightest clue how to teach Tink—or even how to discover—the uses of her wand, other than as an odd utensil and for occasional cleaning tricks. It might have kept this family solvent—”
“Emma,” warns Mr. Jones, defensive.
“—well, more solvent than it was. It might have saved peoples’ lives, cured disease, made world leaders see reason through their cages of insanity, brought all kinds of happiness flowing into peoples’ hearts the world over.” She asks me point blank to help her tiny daughter discover the full potential of her wand, and I promise I will. I don’t mention of course that we’ve already found one amazing use for it in our lovemaking, a use that makes me feel incredibly good, incredibly potent, and incredibly loving toward Tinkerbell. It occurs to me at that moment, listening to Mrs. Jones’ spirited harangue, that the wand might indeed have other uses and that perhaps one of them, a healing use, might reduce the failures and increase the triumphs I witness every day in the operating room. I get excited by this, nod more, stoke food into my mouth faster than is strictly polite. We’re bonding, Mrs. Jones and I. She can feel it, I can feel it, Melissa is grinning like an idiot, and Tink is humming snatches of Lohengrin into my head. “I love you, Alex,” she wind-chimes, “I love you and the horse you rode in on.” Looking aside, I watch her playing with her food, wanding a slow reversed meander of mashed potatoes into her mouth, biting it off in ribbons of white mush. Her unshod feet are planted apart on the damask and her wings, thin curved planes of iridescence, lie still against her back.
After dinner, Mrs. Jones is ready to usher me into the parlor for more bonding. But her husband holds up his hand to cut her off, saying, “It’s time, Emma.” “Oh,” she says. He’s got some bit of gristle in his craw, some one thing that’s holding back his approval of me.
“Ah, the study,” I say. “The cigars.”
“Just so,” he says in a way that suggests man-talk, and pretty serious man-talk at that. I follow him out of the dining room. Mrs. Jones and Melissa have odd looks on their faces.
Even Tink’s hum is edged with anxiety.
The study is dark and small, green-tinged and woodsy.
There’s a rolltop desk, now closed, and the rich smell of rolled tobacco and old ledgers pervades the air. He fits a green eyeshade around his head, offers me one. I accept but feel foolish in it, as if I’m at Disney World wearing a Donald Duck hat, bright yellow bill as brim.
Mr. Jones sits in a rosewood swivel chair and motions me to a three-legged ebony piano stool in front of him. I have to look up a good six inches to meet his eyes. “You smoke cigars?” he asks.
“Not unless you count one White Owl in my teens.”
He chuckles once, then drops it. With a soft clatter of wood slats, he scrolls up the rolltop and opens a huge box of cigars.
He lifts out two of them, big long thick cylinders of brown leaf with the smell of sin about them and the crisp feel of currency in their wrappings. I take what he offers and follow his lead in preparing, lighting, and puffing on the damned thing. I’m careful to control my intake, not wanting to lose face in a fit of coughing. The cigar tastes peculiarly pleasant, sweet, not bitter, and the back of my head feels like it’s ballooning.
“My wife,” he begins, “likes you. I like you. And Tinkerbell likes you, but then she’s liked every last one of her boyfriends, even the slime-sucking shitwads—can we speak man to man?—who used Tink for their own degenerate needs and then discarded her.”
I don’t want to hear this.
“Not that there’ve been lots of men before you. She may be a pixie, our daughter, but she’s got the good sense of the Joneses even so. But you know, Alex my boy, you’d be surprised at the number of men in this world who look and act perfectly normal, men whose mild exteriors cover sick vistas of muck and sludge, men who make regular guys like you and me ashamed to be called men.”
“I assure you, sir, that—”
“—and I’d believe those assurances, I really would, even though I’ve believed and been fooled in the past. My little girl, Tinkerbell Titania Jones, is special to me as she is; not some freak, not a thing of shame or suspicion, no, but a thing of grace and beauty.”
“She is indeed, Mr. Jones.”
He fixes me in his glare and exhales a puff of blue smoke.
It hangs like a miasma about him, but he doesn’t blink. His eyes might be lizard eyes. “I had doubts when she was born, of course. What father wouldn’t? No man likes to be deceived by his wife, not even through the irresistible agency of a stray faerie or incubus, if such there be in this world. But there are mannerisms of mine I recognized quite early in my daughter, mannerisms I was sure were neither learned nor trumped up by some phantom lover bent on throwing a cuckolded husband off his trail.”
He cranes his neck and stares, about fifteen degrees askew of my face. It’s a look I recognize from my first meeting with Tink at the miniaturists’ show in Sacramento the previous winter. I’d asked her to dinner and she went all quiet and contemplative, looking just this way, before finally venturing a twinkled Yes. I could tell she’d been stung before, and recently.
“She’s mine,” he says. “Some mutation if you want to be cold-bloodedly clinical about it, but all mine. And I love her dearly, as parents of special children often do.”
He takes a long puff, exhales it, looks at me. “Now I’m going to ask you three questions, Alex. Only truthful answers are going to win my daughter’s hand.”
I feel odd about this turn in the conversation, and yet the setting, the cigar smoke, the close proximity of this beast in his lair, make it seem perfectly normal. I nod agreement and flick a squat cylinder of ash into the open glass hand, severed, of a four-fingered man.
“First,” Mr. Jones says, not stumbling over any of the words, “have you had sex with my daughter?”
My head is pounding. I take a long pull on my cigar and slowly exhale the smoke. My hand, holding it, seems big and beefy, unworthy of my incisive mind. “She and I have… made love, yes. We love each other, you see, and it’s only natural for—”