by Mona Simpson
Now I looked at the road and let it go awhile. There was nothing I could really say to that. We passed one town, then another. It was hot but the air-conditioning was on. It was an old enough car so that all the controls seemed plastic, not old enough to get better with age. I snuck a look at him sideways.
He was wearing hiking clothes, brand new. Shorts, shirt, the suede boots. He had carefully fitted sunglasses over his ears.
“If you open the glove compartment, Mayan, you’ll see some pictures I brought for you.”
They were of himself, young. He was standing with a group of other students, all Egyptian. A microphone stood in the picture for no apparent reason. I’d take that suit in the picture, I was thinking. It was double-breasted, long, you could tell it was a great suit even now. Almost all of the girls in the picture, one hair-back studious type, two heavy girls, one stray-haired, a voluptuary, were glancing at him.
“Nice suit,” I said. “When was this?”
“At the American University in Beirut. I used to go to Beirut and spend a fortune on suits. I’d buy all Italian, all French suits, and just charge it to my dad. I’d spend eight hundred, a thousand dollars on a suit. Now I spend two hundred. And it makes no difference to me. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
Yeah, good for you, I was thinking, you had your turn. He had his turn, but when would be mine? And when my mother’s? When are most people’s turns but in heaven or in their dreams or in their chests, the first hard run of childhood.
“Now I fly coach and it makes no difference to me. We used to fly around the world first class and never think about it.” On Uta’s money, I was pretty sure. Or on the tour groups’.
When he talked like that I wanted to kill him. There was no guilt. He didn’t look at me nervous or hide it or anything as if what he was saying could have any effect on me. My mother and I, most of those years, were living in Los Angeles, on thirteen thousand dollars.
He spoke as if he were speaking to a stranger, which I guess he was, not to a person he owed anything. Maybe enormous guilt—like that for killing life or the giving away of children—is impossible to bear or maybe it doesn’t exist. The people who feel and live great amounts of guilt are the only faintly guilty. Those who have never been strong enough to do anything.
“See, if my father had put his money in the banks. You know, Mayan, he kept gold coins hidden in pots under the ground, can you believe that?”
“Yeah,” I said. The last time he’d told me it was in banks.
“But if he hadn’t,” he laughed, “we’d all be a lot better off, financially.”
I doubted I would be.
“When they nationalized everything, it destroyed him.”
“I grew up poor, Dad,” I said. I allowed myself some truth. “Those people should be lined up and shot.”
“Honey, he was your grandfather.”
“I never met him.”
“I know that, Mayan.”
Compared to us, my mother and me, he was so mild.
IF MY MOTHER hadn’t been crazy, I was thinking, I don’t know if I could have kept believing.
But my mother lied. She still lies all the time, she is a person altogether without spine or erectness. She bent to anyone’s will and so I would look to the sky and believe it was possible, it was just scarcely possible, that he could be good and have a reason.
I tried to give him reasons. All my life I collected them. The man who told me that in India parents were too busy to raise children because they were building the New India.
But I doubted my father was making the New Egypt. Those people’s names were in the paper.
So, I’d thought, maybe the PLO. He wasn’t Palestinian, but still. Maybe he was somehow underground. I had a picture of Yasir Arafat glued to the cover of a gray notebook I used in college. I’d study his face in the dotted newsprint photograph and see it one way and then another.
That day on our hike, I asked him about the PLO. The hike was unideal. It was hot. And this was no national park. We followed the elaborate directions to a kind of camp, where we had to pay a thirty-year-old hippie twenty dollars to walk on his trails. And if there were trails we never found them. We went along a path that petered out on the banks of a stream, and we gave up, and followed a rutted road up the side of a small hill. The woods were not cleared to any views.
“Well, in 1952 I got my B.A. from the American University in Beirut and George Habash was there too. You know, George Habash is the head of the more intellectual branch of the PLO. That same year he got his M.D. And he was already starting what would become the PLO. He had a reading study group once a week and he tried to recruit me. I went one or two times. Once I remember the subject of discussion was Mao Tse-tung. I don’t remember what the material was the other time.”
“So did you ever think of hitching up with them?”
“Who me?”
WE COULDN’T HAVE HIKED a mile when he said he was tired and we better turn around. I gave him a look like, work on it. This was nothing like Yosemite or Glacier. You don’t really appreciate a national forest until you saw this.
“You see, the PLO really lost its thunder when Israel surrounded them in Lebanon, when was that, ’79, ’80—”
That was 1982. Summer, I was thinking. We were walking through the heat and falling dry pine needles in the ramparts of orange light.
“And they had the choice of staying and having their heads cut off or leaving. So they fled. That’s when Arafat went to Tripoli, Habash went to Damascus. Now, according to leftist doctrine they should’ve fought until they dropped. If they had stayed and fought to the end, their cause would have been eternal. As it was …”
You should talk, I was thinking. And anyway, nothing is eternal, not even the best of what I want to be. Not even the works of better men and women than you and me, not even the lines of their generation. All species are doomed to extinction and who will ever know what we did in the world? Who will uncode the symbols? And will the archeologists of the new world look for us with such blunt instruments as me looking for my father in the telephone book? And does it matter that we will not be found? Not our souls, what was essential. What we loved. Does it matter that all that is beautiful is lost? Not if we die together looking into each other’s eyes and are buried in a common grave.
I shoved my hands in my pockets. It seemed then that eternity was an old-fashioned idea of youth, with a nineteenth-century charm like ruffled lace collars and the things of exploration, globes and compasses, a relic of the time of expansion and exploration and colonialism and the last vestigial belief in heroes.
His small hiking boots marched up and down in the soft needles as his arms conducted through the air. He was finding this enjoyable, I could tell, a talk about politics with his daughter, on a long walk in the woods. I don’t think my father really had many people to talk to.
I was thinking of how Yasir meant easy. He had been born Mohammed too, both of them named after the prophet. Now they called him Al-Khityar, the old man.
“I WAS JUST to a wedding yesterday, the daughter of a man I used to work for. It was on a boat.”
We began to compare weddings. The wedding on the boat was too much. So was Emily’s. I mean it would have been. We agreed on that. We had that in common.
“If you got married in California, I could do a gorgeous wedding for a hundred, hundred-fifty, I know just what I’d do.” His fingers were precise, calligraphic, his thumb and first finger touching, his lower lip stern. “We start with some light hors d’oeuvres and cocktails.”
“Sushi, maybe,” I interjected.
“Sushi would be ideal and a few other hors d’oeuvres to be passed around, you know, while people drink. And we’ll have a very simple meal. What they do most of the time is they have too much and then they don’t pay attention to the quality. We could either start with a cold smoked salmon or a pasta.”
“Pasta would be good. We could even have pasta for the main dish.”
“No, we would start with a pasta and a beautiful wine, I know what we’ll get, a Far Niente. But people want a entrée, a meat or a fish.”
I was getting carried away. This guy was planning my wedding and he didn’t even know what I ate.
“Fish,” I said.
“All right. Fish. Salmon. We serve that with wild rice and asparagus and then we follow that with a green salad of garden lettuces, we’ll get a gorgeous salad with nasturtiums and wild leaves, everything. And then just champagne with the cake. And that’s it.”
“You know, you can’t get such good lettuces and stuff on the East Coast like you get here.” It was true. Every salad in California was a masterpiece of rare weeds.
“We’ll ship it over. Sure. We’ll box it up, I know who to get it from and we’ll send it overnight Federal Express.”
“I don’t know where we’d have it in New York.”
“See the place itself is going to be expensive there. But if you had it in California, you could have more people. I have a budget for a hundred, maybe a hundred-twenty-five.”
I was stopped again. He was telling me how many people I could have at my wedding. I didn’t even really have a boyfriend.
“There’s a problem, though. What about my mother?”
“What about her?”
“Well, don’t you think she’s gonna want to be involved?”
“Involved how? Either she does it or I do it. And if I do it, I do it.”
“That can’t be. I’m her only daughter and if I get married, she’s going to be a part of it, I don’t know, with the flowers or something, she’s good at all that.”
“Sure, she can do the flowers then.”
“I don’t know how that would be, with both of you there in the same room.” I thought it was possible that she would kill him.
He shrugged, hands in his pockets. We were descending now to the gravel parking lot. “I don’t see why it would be any problem. We both just shake hands and agree to put aside our differences that day to celebrate your wedding.” He was right, in a way, I knew. But wasn’t it always easier for the one who left lightly to say that, to decide, years later, that politeness was possible?
Clearly this was preying on his mind. In the car, going to the hotel where we were going to change for dinner, he offered to write my mother a letter. But what is that? He’s never, I’m sure, been short of soft words. I wanted to get him to promise, this weekend, some kind of reparation to her. A monthly check. What he should have sent, years ago.
I sighed. “My mom’s not well anyway,” I said. “Who knows, if I had a wedding, if she could even come.”
He smiled. His shoulders dropped easily. “Maybe that will solve the whole problem.”
I looked at him.
WE HAD ROOMS next to each other in a large hotel. I sprawled out right away on the bed. This was hard. I wasn’t getting what I had come here for. Every time the talk verged on something really interesting from the past, he veered away from it.
He knocked on my door.
He was holding a gift box wrapped in bright green with a white ribbon. Oh no, I thought. It was a cube of about fourteen inches. It couldn’t be pearls.
“I thought you could use it,” he said. “I don’t know, I just saw it and thought, you know, you might like it.”
It was a crystal clock.
It reminded me of a place I hadn’t remembered for years, a place my mother stopped on her way driving to work in Wisconsin, called O’Malleys. It was a gas station and a little store. Inside, every ledge, every surface was covered with little shiny things.
“Thank you. It’s nice.”
“Do you like it really? Because tell me if you don’t and I can take it back.”
“No, I like it.”
And then he left me alone for an hour before dinner.
I SUGGESTED ONE PLACE I’d heard about but he’d already picked a restaurant in a vineyard. “We will be their guests,” he said. I knew from the way he said that he meant the money.
He was obviously excited about the restaurant. It was a pretty place. They served us champagne outside in a garden before we went in.
And he was at home here, at his best. “Never order the chef’s special,” he told me. “That’s a one-shot deal, what they’re trying to move out of the kitchen. The real stuff is on the other side, on the regular menu.”
I was already pretty drunk.
We were seated at right angles to each other. My father was ordering for both of us, patiently asking the tall, remarkably formal waiter questions about the menu. I lifted my feet up onto the chair. I was wearing formal black shoes, high heeled, arched like a swan’s neck. My feet looked like a girl’s hands, waiting tentatively, groomed, on something velvet.
There were a thousand graces I had not known about before. They were not less than medicine or architecture, only they did not last. They were perishable.
“We are going to indulge ourselves,” my father was telling the waiter, “with a bottle of Grigich Hill 1982 chardonnay.”
“Very well, sir,” the waiter said with an obsequious nod. I wondered if the waiter knew we weren’t supposed to be paying.
My father began talking about my wedding again. “Wouldn’t it be something to have the wedding and the reception here. Gorgeous.”
I sighed. “At least I hadn’t gotten Emily’s present yet,” I said. “I never know what to get.”
He shrugged. “I just give, like that wedding day before yesterday, I just put a hundred-dollar bill in a card.”
The restaurant was quiet, each table lit with a febrile candle in a glass bowl. The walls were windows to the garden and tiered hills of grapevines. It was a dignified crowd, at ripe middle age, the men in suits, the women in deep gem-colored clothes, their hair as neatly in place as the fitted feathers of birds. Two ladies, I saw, from their reflections in the long window, were wearing hats.
We ate and drank and he told stories about his love affair with the woman named Elizabeth. “She would like to meet you,” he said.
“Invite her tomorrow night.”
“Oh, she’d love to come,” he said.
I was very drunk. I went to the bathroom and tottered on the carpet in my heels. The air was soft and dark, blunting movement. As I stood for a moment, looking over the tables, the people’s movements, the men’s in black and white and the women’s lush color, seemed undulant, aquatic. In the bathroom, I touched my hand to the wall and turned off the light, and let my head hang between my knees. I put water on my face.
The food was so good.
Later, when the tall waiter brought the bill, my father had to say, “Excuse me, but there has been some misunderstanding. I spoke to Judith Nelson in the publicity office and she invited us here as her guests.” He gave the waiter his card.
“Of course,” the dour man said. “I’m sorry for the confusion.”
After he’d gone, my father said, “He’s first rate. Absolutely first rate. If I ever start a restaurant I’d come here and hire him. I would.”
He left the waiter a hundred-dollar tip.
I COULD BARELY OPEN my room lock with the key. I locked it again on the inside as soon as I shut the door. He was in the suite on the left.
The next morning I slept late. I decided to do better today with my questions. This was the last day. And I didn’t want to have too many more vacations like this. Chatting, talking about how great he was. Hearing about him and his mistress.
We were planning to tour a vineyard and then drive through Marin County back to San Francisco. The vineyard was like an office. We were the only people there who weren’t at their job. They asked us to wait awhile and look around at their pictures on the wall. Then they poured us tastes of wine. I refused to touch any. I’d had too much to drink the night before.
And then in the car to Marin, I started asking.
I wondered if he had ever stood in a drugstore by the tall racks of flowered greeting cards and remembered me. And if he did
think of me, what stopped his hand, what stalled the mail, tricked the telephone into silence. It was going to be too easy to blame Uta. She was easy enough to blame. But if she could tilt him, then the weight of a feather could, the stray beautiful seeds of a dandelion weed.
“Dad, all these women you had affairs with, like Elizabeth and Rilella, did they ever ask you if you had children? And what did you say?”
“I told them I had a daughter.”
“And when they asked, did that make you think of me and think of calling me? And since you didn’t, what stopped you?”
“I didn’t think of it in that way. I knew you existed. I knew you were somewhere in California.”
In Sausalito we stopped for lunch. I wasn’t hungry, but we sat by the windows onto the serene bay, where colored sailboats with neat white sails lolled on the evenly ridged water.
“Why were you unlisted?”
He shrugged. “Why be listed?”
I could shrug too. “Maybe because your kid might have tried to call you.”
“You have every right to be mad at me and your mother, Mayan,” he said. “More at me.” He sounded tired, impatient. But that wasn’t enough. To me then that was nothing.
“You don’t seem to want to talk about any of this.”
“I can’t take this kind of confrontation. I need time to reflect.”
“Well, I’ve been reflecting twenty-nine years. I know what I want to know. You must have wondered about me too. So did you?”
“I wanted to close that door, forget about it.”
“Did you think you’d see me again?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have done anything to find me?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. But I would have.”
“Now? In twenty more years?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“You know, we have a problem, Dad, because I have these questions and as nice as it is to go to restaurants and everything, this has really got to come first.”
“I don’t think whatever I’m going to tell you, you’ll find excusable.”
