It is not one time but several times coming together as one. Not memories but invention, as he would say, given the shape and condition of recollection. I know it is my father before I am fully awake. His heavy walk rings the floors. My mother asks him to leave in a soft reasonable voice, says she doesn’t want the children’s sleep disturbed. He says — I am pressed agaist the closed door of my room — that he has as much right to be in the house as she. He won’t stay long, he says in a wheedling voice, he just wants to see his kids for a few minutes. Be a sport, Magda.
You don’t want them to see you like this, she says.
Like what? I wonder and open the door to see for myself.
Is this your idea of seeing the kids? she asks. He has her backed against a wall, his arms out.
She slips out from under his arms. I think you should leave, she says. Goodbye.
He has his arms around her. Let’s go into your room, he says, kissing her, my mother drawing back her head.
The children will wake up, she says. I want you to leave.
They are out of view when I hear her say in a loud whisper, I don’t want to, don’t you understand.
They go into her bedroom and close the door.
The man next to me is asleep, his mouth open, a faint sound coming from him, an industrial hum. I get up to go to the bathroom, slide by two sets of knees. The plane lurches slightly. A child lets out a heartbreaking cry. In the bathroom cubicle, after peeing, I stand slumped over the bowl, waiting out a bout of nausea. When it passes — it is as if it never quite arrives — I have the illusion that I glimpse my father’s face in the mirror. Actually there’s hardly a resemblance between us, except perhaps at the mouth, in the thin red line of the lips. On the face in the mirror, sweat sprouts like a rash. I am allergic to small enclosures, to other people’s reflections staring back at me. I wash my face and hands, comb my hair, flush the toilet, the poisonous liquid raining thirty thousand feet into the ocean.
I have this idea off and on that my life is a movie or made up of pieces of old movies. A girl about my own age stops me as I step out of the bathroom, says amazing as it may sound her travelling companion, a lady named Mrs. Karp, had gone up front about twenty minutes ago to get a magazine and hasn’t returned. She has searched the entire plane and there is no sign of her friend. I don’t know what to believe, suspect the girl is on something, but her story as she tells it is full of convincing detail. When I get back to my seat I begin to wonder if there isn’t, as she suspects, some kind of conspiracy aboard this plane. She sits, empty seat next to her, with her hands over her face.
It often strikes me that almost everything we take for granted is something of a fraud. I’m not dogmatic about my conclusions. One thing is true for me at one moment and another, maybe the opposite, is true the next. We are suspended in the air, going nowhere; the plane is going on course at the speed represented by the pilot. The girl in the Grateful Dead sweatshirt has lost her friend on the plane; there is no friend and never was. My father wants to see me and my father wants to get rid of me. I am making this trip to see my father; I am making this trip to see what my father wants.
Once the connections break, it is hard to put things together again.
I feel at times like an old man, older than my father, as if I had already lived through my future on some secret wave length. My mother likes to say that her friends think of me as an adult, forget when talking to me that I’m her little boy. Someone had to take his place, I suppose, and after the first few years there was no one else. It’s like it’s so far back I can’t remember having been a child. I mean, I don’t know if I even had a childhood. I just turned eighteen and I haven’t the faintest idea what it was like to be twelve.
My mother won’t say anything directly, but I know she feels he’s ruined her life. I’ve never gotten anything from him either, not anything I’ve ever wanted. For some reason this complaint always fits itself into the same words as if it existed independent of any specific reality. When I think of him I say to myself: I’ve never gotten anything from my father. It’s always the same words, the feeling stuck in the same flag of language. I’ve never got anything real from him. All the time I’ve spent with him has been wasted time. I don’t expect anything from him; I don’t really want anything from him. All of this, which I know to be true, rings false. Language, which is his weapon, has put me in a false position. Who’s to blame for that? Sometimes I think I could kill him for putting me in the wrong.
My father wears on this occasion a three piece tobacco-brown corduroy suit with the texture of velvet. He is two years late for our appointment. We go to a restaurant called Toros, which is a hangout for writers and literary groupies. My father is fussed over by the proprietor, a hard-bitten type who professes to admire everyone’s work, and we are conducted to our table like visiting dignitaries.
“How’s school?” my father asks.
“It’s okay,” I say. “As a matter of fact I’ve stopped going.”
He nods, refuses to comment, purses his lips in disapproval.
“Do you know who that is?” he asks, pointing to a red-faced man in a belted leather jacket at a table perhaps ten feet from ours. The man, being pointed at, looks up, nods to my father, says something amusing to his companion.
“Do you see that man?” my father asks, his harsh whisper too loud not to be overheard. He mentions a name vaguely known to the general public, a figure of minor celebrity. “He was functionally illiterate until he was twenty-five. The man couldn’t write a business letter, could barely spell his own name. He was working in the garment district in New York as an assistant buyer and he had a nervous breakdown. He began writing as a form of therapy. His wife, Minerva, who was a high school English teacher, edited his manuscript into recognizable English, taught him the rules of English syntax.”
“Dad, he can hear you,” I say, speaking behind my hand.
“Doesn’t matter. He knows what I’m saying is true. After he made a lot of money — on his third book if I remember — he left Minerva and the kids for a seventeen year old girl. The girl was at most a year older than his oldest daughter whose name unless I’m mistaken was Loretta. The man hasn’t written a creditable book since then because he has no one to rewrite them for him. Critics take the cramp in his syntax for evidence of a deepening of purpose. The truth is, he’s unable to write a lucid sentence.”
The object of my father’s cruel description is talking in an equally loud whisper about my father. I hear the name Lukas Terman rise and fall in the buzz of the room.
A couple come to the table to greet my father. “I want you to meet my son, Tom,” he says.
“Your father’s the best writer in this room,” the man says.
“Is that right?”
“He’s also the sexiest man in the room,” the woman says, kissing my father on the cheek.
“That’s the nicest compliment of all,” he says.
When the couple move off to their own table, I ask my father if they are writers too.
“In a manner of speaking,” he says in his loud whisper. “Talented beginners. The girl has a telling way with a phrase but doesn’t know when enough is enough. The man can speak in tongues but hasn’t yet found his own voice…. Tell me why you aren’t going to school.”
“I don’t know why,” I say.
The answer seems to close the subject for the moment. His attention moves elsewhere. He gives me a brief biography of a bearded man standing with his back to us at the bar.
“Do you know everyone in the room?” I ask.
The waiter comes over and my father asks him what’s good. “Everything,” the waiter says, winking at me.