She said, “I don’t want to have to fight with you too.”
I said, “What are you talking about? I said I would go, didn’t I?”
She said, “I don’t want to hear any more about it from either of you. Is that clear?”
She hurried into her room and slammed the door, an indication that she was about to fall apart and wanted to spare us witness of her humiliation. She was still shut up in her room when the doorbell announced my father’s presence. No one moved to answer. I kept thinking that I would do it — I was the only one that wasn’t in some room with the door closed — but it didn’t seem fair that I should have to do it all the time. “Will someone answer the door please,” my mother called from her room. “Tom, what are you doing?”
The bell rang a second time, and a third. I remember walking very slowly to the door, thinking they couldn’t say I wasn’t trying. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to see him; that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t get myself to the door. At that time, I still looked forward to his visits. I was open to anything.
As soon as he started up the car, he said, “Tell me again why Kate’s not coming with us.”
I said, “Neither of us was feeling well this morning, but I wanted to come anyway.”
He said, “And Kate didn’t want to come?”
I said, “She had a stomachache. It’s been going around, a stomach virus, half my class has been absent.”
“It sounds like an epidemic to me. I’m surprised the streets weren’t closed off.”
“She felt bad that she couldn’t go with you. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go.”
“Tell me something, Tom. Does your mother make it difficult for the two of you to see me?”
“She wants us to see you, Dad. She really does.”
“Like the president wants to end the war in Vietnam,” he said.
He parked at a meter on Hudson Street and got out of the car. It was raining and he offered me his corduroy jacket to put over my head and I said rain didn’t bother me and he said take it for God’s sake. I put the jacket under my arm, then I dropped it, and he said what the hell’s the matter with you?
I was always dropping things, told him about dropping a bottle of gingerale on the way home from D’Agostino’s and then going back to get a second one, which I dropped and broke when I was trying to open the door to our apartment. I thought he would laugh but he didn’t. He had his mind on something else.
He never mentioned the object of our destination, but I knew it was to see one of his women. The building we entered had no elevator. We wallked up a narrow staircase to the sixth floor and after knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, went into this tiny apartment that seemed like a doll’s house. This is my only son, he said. The blond woman who belonged to the apartment laughed.
The apartment was hot and I asked her if she had anything to drink.
This woman, who was too skinny to be really pretty, had the emptiest refrigerator I had ever seen in a place where somebody lived.
“You’ll have to settle for a glass of water,” she said, “unless you want to go out and get some pop.” My father said, “He drops bottles.”
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.
I said I really didn’t want any water, that I never really liked New York water, didn’t she have any milk or juice.
“If he doesn’t want water,” she said to my father, “he can’t really be thirsty.”
I said I don’t think it’s right to call someone you don’t know a liar.
Later, for something real or imagined I had done to offend her, she asked us to leave. My father left me in the hall and went back.
“Look, honey,” I heard him say through the closed door, “give him a chance for God’s sake. He’s not a bad kid.”
“I’m very upset, Lukas,” she said. “This is my place and I don’t have to have anyone here I don’t want to see. Maybe after he’s gone you can come back.”
My father whispered something I couldn’t make out, the word “time” coming through, repeating itself.
“If you mean that,” she said, “then get rid of him.”
I’ve had the feeling for some time — it may even extend back to the day I accepted my father’s invitation — that this is a final trip for me, that I’m either not going to arrive in London or not going to get back. I’ve always thought of dreams as prophetic, a kind of inside out warning, and the dreams I’ve had concerning this trip have almost all looked into the mouth of disaster. In one, a side door of the airplane would suddenly blow open and the passengers nearest to it would be sucked out into the atmosphere. A high jacker was responsible for the door coming open and I shouted at him that it made no sense what he was doing — I want this plane, he said. I need this plane — That’s childish, I said. None of us has ever had a 747 of his own. The man, who was undefinably familiar, said he didn’t want to hear the word childish again from me. He once, in fact, threw acid in the face of a classmate who called him childish — If there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, he said, it’s having my manhood undermanned. The pilot was ordered to jump from the plane though the hijacker, who was not completely awful, said he could use a parachute if it gave him a greater sense of security. The pilot wanted no favors, said he didn’t want to be beholden to a criminal and would take his chances on free fall. I could see that he was dissembling, that he had a parachute under his flight jacket — Okay, said the hijacker, it’s your funeral. When the door was pushed open for the pilot’s jump, the suction dragged us all toward the opening. The next thing I knew I was falling among clouds of parachutists, holding on to the seat in front of me. The pilot, who occupied the seat, said not to worry there wasn’t anything that flew he couldn’t land. What struck me most — it was the first awareness I had of it — was that pilot and hijacker had the same face.
I mean to be dispassionate, to pass out these snapshots, these sometimes moving pictures as if I had no personal stake in them. The central figure in all is that mysterious man, that master of disguise, my father. He appears and disappears, changes his job, his appearance, his personality, the conditions of his life. It is his passion never to be the same twice. My first memory of him is with a mustache, a short thick brush, though he claims he has never worn a mustache (at least not separate from a beard). The picture is there and, accurate or not, I see no way of giving it up. The first face is the businesslike father, head of the household, smoker of fat cigars. I remember him, smelling of cigars, lifting me from the crib to rub his face into mine.
The second face is really two faces or two aspects of the same face. He is clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, hair parted down the middle, a wise guy and stand-up comic, a self-made celebrity beleaguered by admirers. He has published an award-winning novel the year before and is between books, at odds with himself. I am six years old or almost six, thinking myself six in advance of that turning point. My father takes me with him to the town house apartment of his current editor, a man who has made his career, he says, out of knowing less than nothing, a man unencumbered, goes the joke, by the obligations of intelligence. I sit in the corner shyly, playing with a small rubberized plastic Godzilla, while the men talk or rather my father talks and the other man listens. Two other people come in, a man and a woman dressed like models in the windows of expensive department stores. I am introduced and complimented on being the son of my father. More people come in, mostly men, an occasional woman. My father holds forth, holds court, while the others listen respectfully. More people wander in. My father is congratulated again. “How wonderful for you,” a woman says, kissing him on both cheeks.
My father disdains admiration, says all success is fraudulent, others more than some. He is in terrific form. “Your father is in terrific form,” a woman says to me, an odd-looking woman in purple velvet pants.