I lay on her bed after she was gone and imagined them together, their deep voices a duet in the dusk over the rijsttafel. I hadn’t had any since we left Amsterdam, where we lived when I was seven; the smell of it used to permeate our neighborhood there. My mother always said we’d go to Bali. I imagined us in a house with an extravagantly peaked roof, overlooking green rice terraces and miraculously clear seas, where we’d wake to chimes and the baaing of goats.
After a while I made myself a cheese and sweet pickle sandwich and went next door to Michael’s. He was halfway through a bottle of red wine from Trader Joe’s—“poverty chic” he called it, because it had a cork—and he was crying, watching a Lana Turner movie. I didn’t like Lana Turner and I couldn’t stand looking at the dying tomatoes, so I read Chekhov until Michael passed out, then went downstairs and swam in the pool warm as tears. I floated on my back and looked up at the stars, the Goat, the Swan, and hoped my mother was falling in love.
All that weekend, she didn’t say a thing about her date with Barry, but she wrote poems and crumpled them up, threw them at the wastebasket.
IN THE ART ROOM, Kit proofread over my mother’s shoulder, while I sat at my table in the corner, making a collage about Chekhov, the lady with the little dog, cutting out figures from discarded photographs. Marlene answered the phone, covered the receiver with her hand.
“It’s Barry Kolker.”
Kit’s head jerked up at the sound of the name, a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer. “I’ll take it in my office.”
“It’s for Ingrid,” Marlene said.
My mother didn’t look up from her layout sheet. “Tell him I don’t work here anymore.”
Marlene told him, lying like oil.
“How do you know Barry Kolker?” the editor asked, her black eyes big as olives.
“Just someone I met,” my mother said.
That evening, in the long summer twilight, people came out of their apartments, walked their dogs, drank blender drinks down by the pool, their feet in the water. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue. My mother knelt at her table, writing, and a slight breeze brushed the wind chimes we’d hung in the old eucalyptus, while I lay on her bed. I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.
There was a knock on the door, wrecking the peace. Nobody ever came to our door. My mother put down her pen and grabbed the folding knife she kept in the jar with the pencils, its dark carbon blade sharp enough to shave a cat. She unfolded it against her thigh and put her finger to her lips. She clutched her white kimono, her skin bare underneath.
It was Barry, calling her. “Ingrid!”
“How dare he,” she said. “He cannot simply appear on my doorstep without an invitation.”
She jerked the door open. Barry was wearing a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and carrying a bottle of wine and a bag that smelled of something wonderful. “Hi,” he said. “I was just in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by.”
She stood in the doorway, the open blade still against her thigh. “Oh, you did.”
Then she did something I would never have imagined. She invited him in, closing the knife against her leg.
He looked around at our big room, elegantly bare. “Just move in?” She said nothing. We had lived there over a year.
THE SUN was hot through the screens when I woke up, illuminating the milky stagnant air wrapped like a towel around the morning. I could hear a man singing, the shower pipes clanking as he turned the water off. Barry had stayed the night. She was breaking her rules. They weren’t stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes. I stared at her as she dressed for work, waiting for an explanation, but she just smiled.
After that night, the change was startling. Sunday, we went together to the Hollywood farmer’s market, where she and Barry bought spinach and green beans, tomatoes and grapes no bigger than the head of a thumbtack, papery braids of garlic, while I trailed behind them, mute with amazement at the sight of my mother examining displays of produce like it was a trip to a bookstore. My mother, for whom a meal was a carton of yogurt or a can of sardines and soda crackers. She could eat peanut butter for weeks on end without even noticing. I watched as she bypassed stands full of her favorite white flowers, lilies and chrysanthemums, and instead filled her arms with giant red poppies with black stains in the centers. On the walk home, she and Barry held hands and sang together in deep croony voices old songs from the sixties, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” and “Waterloo Sunset.”
SO MANY THINGS I would never have imagined. She wrote tiny haiku that she slipped into his pockets. I fished them out whenever I got a chance, to see what she had written. It made me blush to read them: Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battleground.
One morning at the magazine, she showed me a picture in the weekly throwaway Caligula’s Mother, taken at a party after a play’s opening night. They both looked bombed. The caption dubbed her Barry’s new lady love. It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man’s anything. Now it was as if she’d won a contest.
Passion. I never imagined it was something that could happen to her. These were days she couldn’t recognize herself in a mirror, her eyes black with it, her hair forever tangled and smelling of musk, Barry’s goat scent.
They went out and she told me about it afterward, laughing. “Women approach him, their peacock voices crying, ‘Barry! Where have you been?’ But it doesn’t matter. He is with me now. I am the only one he wants.”
Passion ruled her. Gone were the references to his physical goatishness, his need for dental work, his flabby physique, his squalid taste in clothes, the wretchedness of his English, his shameless clichés, the criminal triteness of his oeuvre, a man who wrote “snuck.” I never thought I’d see my mother plaster herself against a stout ponytailed man in the hallway outside our apartment, or let him inch his hand up her skirt under the table when we ate dinner one night at a dark Hunan restaurant in old Chinatown. I watched her close her eyes, I could feel the waves of her passion like perfume across the teacups.
In the mornings, he lay with her on the wide white mattress when I crossed the room on the way to the toilet. They would even talk to me, her head cradled on his arm, the room full of the scent of their lovemaking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It made me want to laugh out loud. In the courtyard at Crossroads of the World, I sat under a pepper tree and wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Barry Kolker” in my sketchbook. I practiced saying, “Can I call you Dad?”
I never told my mother I wanted a father. I had only questioned her once on the subject, I must have been in kindergarten. We were back in the States that year, living in Hollywood. A hot, smoggy day, and my mother was in a bad mood. She picked me up late from day care, we had to go to the market. We were driving in an old Datsun she had then, I still remember the hot waffled seat and how I could see the street through a hole in the floorboards.
School had just started, and our young teacher, Mrs. Williams, had asked us about our fathers. The fathers lived in Seattle or Panorama City or San Salvador, a couple were even dead. They had jobs like lawyers or drummers or installing car window glass.
“Where’s my father?” I asked my mother. She downshifted irritably, throwing me against the seat belt. “You have no father,” she said.