My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  He started to sob right there in the bar. If I hadn’t been so shocked I would have marveled at the beauty of a cute guy crying. I put my hand on his back and handed him a bev nap. He sniffled noisily into it. “Fuck, this is embarrassing,” he said.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “My dad cries a lot, actually.” He wiped his nose and smiled faintly, like a kid who’s momentarily forgotten both knees are gushing blood.

  “Look,” I said, “sounds like she wasn’t cut out for you. Sounds like she was psychotic.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he said, frowning. Insulting a guy’s ex-girlfriend was like insulting his mother—it’s one thing for him to do it, it’s another thing for anyone else to.

  “I know it’s hard right now,” I said, “but time will make it better. The only part that sucks is that you can’t rush it. Just try to be active. Watch bad TV. Get out and do things.”

  “Like what?”

  “We have three-dollar drafts every Tuesday.”

  “Thanks,” he said dryly. He took a swig and set it down, fingering the label. “I guess part of the reason I’m so mad is that I was so blindsided. I wish I’d had some inkling. But even when she was two-timing me there weren’t any signs.”

  “Come on—you didn’t find any gifts? She never came home smelling funny?”

  “No. The only thing that ever made me wonder was, right around the time she started seeing Shaggy, she got really into working out.”

  The bar started to feel a little stuffy and it wasn’t because it was crowded. “What do you mean?”

  “She was going to the gym all the time and working on her obliques. She’d never been into any of that stuff—she was always curvy but I liked her that way. And suddenly she started losing all this weight. She dropped like ten pounds in a month, and then she got a six-pack.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “I was such an idiot,” he said. “I told myself it was a good thing that she was starting to care about her health. She even quit smoking. I thought it meant she was growing, not cheating on me.”

  His Corona was finished and he asked for another. I bent into the cooler, glad to get away so I could slow my thumping heart. I had to think logically. None of this could apply to my father. He’d told me why he was doing his sit-ups: for the job market. And despite the fact that he had never taken any interest in exercise beyond bicycling and squash, I couldn’t jump to any conclusions.

  But what other logical explanation was there for his newfound interest in his abdominals? Maybe he was getting something on the side. But with who? A person could only cheat if they could find someone to cheat with and there was no woman in all of New York City besides my mom who could possibly find my dad attractive. The woman would have to be a hag and a half. She’d have to be old, and desperate, and very very lonely.

  Maybe it was Shelly Katz. She never talked to me as much as the other women did and when I really thought back on it, she’d been distant the whole meeting. He’d bumped into her in some local bar and gone out to join her for a smoke when he suddenly realized just how firm her tits were. If she was tipsy enough, and lonely enough, and my dad was turning into the most active bar crawler in Cobble Hill, then it wasn’t totally inconceivable. Maybe this was why he’d stayed downstairs during the meeting—so he wouldn’t act suspicious in front of my mom.

  But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make the image of a scoundrel mesh with the image of my father. As long as I’d known him the only things he’d gotten really orgasmic about were New Yorker cartoons and spackle. He had forty pairs of nonprescription drugstore reading glasses. He wore extra-wide shoes.

  And men who cheated had to at least have a modicum of confidence. When I ran into him at the movies he’d seemed more down in the doldrums than he ever had before. I had to keep my head on straight and think about just who I was dealing with here. If I identified with every story my alcoholic customers told me I’d go insane. I had to compartmentalize, just like Bill Clinton.

  I slipped my badly dumped boy a new bottle. “I shouldn’t even be drinking anyway,” he sighed. “It’s really bad for my kidneys.”

  “You can make an exception,” I said. “Look, just think of her rejection as a favor.”

  “How’s it a favor?”

  “She was letting you know she was wrong for you. Why would you want to be with someone who never loved you?”

  “You think she never loved me?” he asked, panicked. I was trying to make him feel better but instead I was making him feel worse.

  “Not if she could cheat!”

  “I was harboring hope that she might come around.”

  “What are you—outta your mind?”

  He stared at me for a moment, incredulous, like he’d suddenly seen the light. I was about to pat myself on the back for being such a good motivational speaker when his look of shock collapsed into one of total pain. “How long have you been a bartender?” he said.

  “Two months,” I said.

  “That explains it.” He plopped down a buck and left.

  “Come back!” I shouted. “The next one’s on me!” But he was already gone. I fucked the washer with a glass and set it upside down on the rack.

  ON my way over to the deli for coffee on Tuesday, as I was crossing Court Street, I almost got run over. “Hey!” I shouted, leaping back onto the sidewalk.

  “Sorry!” the driver shouted, as the car squealed to a halt and then pulled over. It was white and small and on the side it said US AUTO SCHOOL—WE HELP YOU PASS in bright blue letters. As I leaned down and looked through the passenger side I saw my dad sitting next to a bearded black man. “Hey, Rach!” my dad cried, waving.

  This made no sense. He had resisted even getting a learner’s permit for twenty-five years. My mom, who hated the burden of driving him to the country all the time, would nag and nag but he always said, “At a certain point it’s just too late to learn something new.”

  Now, suddenly, he was snapping into action. He was showing enough drive to learn how to drive. I didn’t want to believe it but maybe he really was kicking it to Shelly Katz. When you had an affair you had to be able to go for secret weekend getaways, so maybe he’d decided he had to step up.

  I went to the driver’s-side window unsteadily. “Rachel,” my dad said, “this is my instructor, Mr. Goddard.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” he said, with a hint of a southern drawl, sticking his hand out the window.

  I shook it fake-warmly, wondering whether my dad had told him things he hadn’t told me. I figured driver’s-ed guys got to hear everybody’s stories.

  “Since when have you been learning to drive?” I asked.

  “This is my second lesson. I got my learner’s permit last week.” He opened his wallet and passed me a card with a photo of him on it smiling as happily as if it was the first day of first grade. I broke out in a cold sweat.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I don’t know. I just decided there was no day like today.”

  “Dad,” I said. “Are you quoting Rent?”

  “I have all this time on my hands now with my unemployment, so I went over to the DMV, stood on line, and passed the written test on my first try! I missed the one about what to do when your front wheels skid in the rain.”

  “Ease into the skid,” I said.

  “How’d you know?” he said, like it was some sort of million-dollar game show question.

  “I took the same test,” I said. “When I was fifteen.”

  “So? Don’t I look good? I’m driving!” he said, jutting his elbow out through the door. “I feel like Harrison Ford in American Graffiti.”

  “Try Charles Martin Smith.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  He looked at Mr. Goddard and put his palms up. “Is your daughter like this to you?”

  “Daughters are difficult,” said Mr. Goddard.

  “You see? You see?” my dad said. “This is a wise man h
ere. We give our children all the love in the world and what do they give us in return?”

  “Bubkes,” said Mr. Goddard.

  “You know Yiddish?” I said.

  “Sure I do. I’ve taught driver’s education for twenty-one years.”

  “How can you even afford these lessons, Dad? Given your circumstances?”

  “Mr. Goddard says half of his students are unemployed. It’s the only thing that makes people finally decide to do it. Mom is in full support of this and I thought you’d be too.”

  “I think you’re making a big mistake. You’re not only a liability to yourself but to innocent people. Some people just aren’t meant to get behind a wheel. I thought you were afraid you were going to kill someone.”

  “Mr. Goddard is teaching me to let the mind go.”

  “You’re going to hurt someone. Tell me the truth, Mr. Goddard. Is he the worst student you ever had?”

  “There was one worse,” Mr. Goddard said.

  “You see? You see?” my dad cried.

  “She was blind in one eye.”

  I turned and made a wide circle in front of the car so he wouldn’t run me over. When I got across the street I heard someone shout, “Watch it!” and I turned around to see the car about six inches from a woman with a stroller. My dad was waving his hands sheepishly through the rearview as Mr. Goddard sank into his seat.

  I DRANK two cups of coffee that morning and spent the afternoon feeling like I was going to bounce off the walls of the apartment. He had to be getting something on the side. Nothing else could make him care so much about his own well-being. People didn’t just change on their own, for no reason. Something was going on; I just had to find out what. But what could I do? Call Shelly Katz and ask her point-blank? I wanted to bring it up with my mom but how do you casually bring up your suspicions of your own father’s philandering? There’s just no way to do it. Powell would have a solution. I just had to wait till I saw him.

  At three forty-five on the dot I left for the date so he wouldn’t complain that I was late. He had said to wear high heels and at the last minute I’d found these white vinyl stripper-style shoes with a three-inch platform that I’d bought online a few years before for a Halloween party. For attire I selected a polyester blue-and-white polka-dotted dress that pressed tightly against my boobs.

  It took me five minutes just to get down the stairs of my building because I was so worried I was going to fall in the heels and break my neck. As I passed the Korean grocery at Kane and Court I saw a bouquet of mixed flowers in a vase out front. I knew that my job was to free myself from my animus, not burrow in it, but I felt an instinct to buy them for Powell. I wanted to bring him something beautiful, something the woman in him would appreciate.

  On my way down Strong Place I passed a strange-looking man, a kind of man who didn’t look like he lived in the neighborhood. He had gaunt cheeks and messy grayish-brown hair that hung down over his face, a denim jacket, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he wasn’t a murderer, should have made a lot of money playing murderers in movies. As we passed he gave me a once-over, cool and even. When I was on the other side I turned around and looked at him over the shoulder and he was still looking at me.

  Powell opened the door in a long turquoise blue robe. His hair was messy and he had a crazed though not drunk look in his eye. I had the flowers hidden behind my back.

  “I saw a weird guy on your street,” I said.

  “That was Abel Ferrara,” Powell said. “He directed The Bad Lieutenant.”

  “What was he doing here? You working on something with him?”

  “No, he left his heroin.”

  His eyes were even and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “Do you do heroin?” I said.

  “No! It fell outta his pocket the last time he was here! I been bugging him for weeks to pick it up.”

  He opened the door. “For you,” I said, proffering the bouquet. He backed off like he was a vampire and it was garlic. “What’s the matter?”

  “You brought me flowers.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said softly. “I just thought they’d look nice.” He yanked them out of my hand and strode into the kitchen. I followed unsteadily in the shoes.

  He ripped off the paper and the cellophane and lay the flowers out on his cutting board like they were a nice loaf of bread, pulled a large knife from the knife rack, and began chopping off the heads. “Hey!” I said. He moved the heads to the side with the knife and then chopped what remained into one-inch pieces, shoved everything into a pile, and began cutting the other way. “What are you doing?” I said.

  He kept chopping and chopping, the sweat glistening on his forehead, like some sort of psychopathic Food Network chef, until the beautiful bouquet was nothing but a big pile of color. He opened his Cuisinart, dropped the entire pile in, slid the top closed, and hit the On switch. I watched with horror as they turned into a vomit-green mush. It was thick so he added some water until it was liquid, and then he poured it into a glass, drank it down, and wiped his mouth, panting.

  “You just drank my bouquet,” I said.

  “That’s right!” he screamed. “I’m a criminal! You bring me any a that crap and I’ll eat it up! I’ll eatchoo up!”

  His eyes were blazing and insane. I cowered against the wall. “Now take off ya jacket and lay it down on the floor,” he said. His gaze was steady but not angry. It was as though telling me what to do calmed him down.

  I did what he said. “Ya so much talla in those shoes,” he said. He walked toward me and ran his hand down the side of my smooth dress and then he cupped my chin in his hand very sweetly. He stared at my tits, which were pressing up against the material and then he lifted one out and bent his head down to suck it, kneading my ass with the other hand. It was too much too fast. Instead of relaxing I kept wondering how the bouquet would affect his bowels. “I wish my ass was fatter,” I said.

  “It’ll do.”

  “But you’re like an ass purist—”

  “Don’t ruin this. The flowers were bad enough.” He moved his finger into me as my lips parted and my head went back. I started to get hot and then he lifted me up in his arms and carried me to the couch. I’d had no idea he was so strong.

  He tossed me onto the couch casually, and threw the big pillows on the floor. He unzipped my dress, pulled it off and lay it on a chair. Then he squeezed next to me, on my right, waving his hand so I could see why he wanted to be on that side. I started to take off my shoes so they wouldn’t get the couch dirty and he said, “Leave them on. Why do you think I wanted you to wear them?” and moved my leg so it was splayed over the side. As he worked me with his hand he put his face very close and smoothed the hair on my head. From time to time he would put his mouth on my nipple and suck, moaning softly while he did it.

  When I came it was long and intense, the kind that hurts your ovaries. This time I cried out and as soon as I did he pulled me close like he had female O envy. “Oh my God,” I said, putting my arm over my forehead. “You’re good at that.”

  “I know.”

  I leaned in to kiss him but he was getting up. He took off my bra, pushed my legs up so I was in pelvic exam position and kneeled on the couch, facing me. He unbuttoned his pants, took it out, and began stroking like it was some sort of magical wand. From time to time he said “Mmmm!” and “Ahhhh!” like he was listening to a very serious lecture that I couldn’t hear, and agreeing with various important points. After about fifteen minutes he cried out “Uhhhhh! Uhhhhhhh! Unnnnnhhhhhh!” and shot it onto my chest.

  I looked down at the puddle of white that had formed above my breasts and as he massaged it into my nipples I said, “Do you think sometime we could go to Manhattan?”

  He scowled like I had suggested something completely perverse. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I thought you might have some events to go to from time to time.”

  “What kind of ev
ents?”

  “Benefits. Like with Abel Ferrara.”

  “You think I got the kind a money to be going to benefits? My friends should throw a benefit for me!”

  “I just thought you might want to show up somewhere with me on your arm.”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded cynically. “Is that why you’re interested in me? You want to rub elbows with Abel and Harvey?”

  “You know Harvey Keitel?”

  “I guess that’s your answer.”

  “No! It’s not that I want to meet famous people! I—I just want to meet your friends. I don’t know why we always have to hide. It makes me feel like you’re ashamed of me.”

  “Do I look like the kind a person that cares what anyone else thinks?”

  “No,” I said. “But why can’t we hang out in any other borough?”

  “I am not hiding you,” he said. “I am a private person. I don’t feel the need to showcase what I do like I’m filing some kind a romantic status report. If you don’t like my rules I respect it and you are free to go find some otha cat. But if you want to be with me, I’m doing you the favor of telling you how it’s gotta be.” I was between a rock and a hard place. I could have him like this or not at all. I figured the former was better than the latter because he made me laugh and gave me a lot to think about but I had a strange dread in my stomach like it didn’t sit completely right.

  He rose to his feet and headed for the bathroom. I watched his wide back, afraid he was going to tell me to get out right now, and I’d have to walk home alone in slutgear, toddling in my strappy stripper shoes in the broad daylight, the smell of his spooge on my skin. He came back with a warm wet washcloth, and as he scrubbed off his come he said, “You wanna come get something to eat?”