by Mona Simpson
“Why is that?”
“Because you are preconditioned.”
“By who?”
“By your mother.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Why did you find me?” Now he was angry, as if why would I care to find him if I didn’t want to join his shrunken lame chorus telling him again and again that he was still, despite all evidence on the earth, a great man.
“I wanted to hear your side.”
“And now I—” He faltered with his hands.
“You don’t have a side.”
“No. I have a side, but as I said before, you are preconditioned.”
“Do you think it’s that I’m preconditioned or that your actions are inexcusable?”
“Maybe a little of both.”
He was bored with this, tired of me. This was not what he had wanted to have a daughter for.
We sat in silence and chewed our fruit.
“I knew your mother was a difficult person, but I never thought that she would not be a good mother with you. She didn’t let me touch you or hold you or change you. She was obsessed with you. Fine, I thought, you want it you can have it.”
We were walking back to the car. “Dad, I’ve been thinking, I like the clock, but you don’t really know my taste and that’s okay, there’s no reason why you would, but what I’d really like more from you is something to wear, like jewelry.”
“All right, that’s fine, darling, I’d rather exchange it than you just take it and throw it out.”
IN SAN FRANCISCO, we drove right to the restaurant we were going to eat in that night. He had the whole two days planned in terms of restaurants. He had already called his mistress and invited her. He picked the table he wanted and tipped the waitress some amount I couldn’t see so she would make sure we got that table. Probably a hundred dollars.
I was hoping he would just take the clock back with him home and return it later, on his own, and that we could go right to Tiffany’s and look at pearls, but we left the car at the restaurant and took a taxi to Macy’s.
Returning the glass clock took a long time. We had to go up to the housewares department, a long expanse of china and cutlery. Finally, they gave him back cash. The clock had cost a hundred dollars.
“Well where do you want to go now?” he said to me.
“I’d like to look at pearls,” I said. “Let’s try Tiffany’s.”
He snorted. “There’s no Tiffany in San Francisco. The only Tiffany is in New York.”
“No, they have one here. I’m pretty sure they do.” I was absolutely sure and in fact I had their address in my pocket, but we made a show of asking a man behind the counter. He told us it was three blocks away.
We rode the escalator back down to the main floor and then walked past the long glass cases of costume jewelry.
“And you don’t want to look here for pearls?”
“No. I don’t trust Macy’s with pearls.”
He said nothing but just followed me. I didn’t care anymore. I was after one thing. I walked with an uphill hiking energy. He was falling behind in his suede boots. The sky above us was one of movement, clouds in procession to the sea. It was a city of Asians, but Asians who looked and were American. The gates of Chinatown waited on top of the hill we were climbing. The glass doors of Tiffany’s reflected the loft afternoon sky.
I found the pearl counter and he loitered behind, hands in pockets. I asked a woman about pearls. She looked at us and didn’t even take them out of the case. I asked what the smallest ones started at, for the string that went just around the neck.
“They start at nine hundred,” she said, “and they’re very good quality pearls.” I stood looking at them inside the case, set into a wall. They hung them in a cache, there must have been forty strands of them.
He shuffled behind, bored, like someone’s little brother, brought along with his mother and sisters to stores that held no interest for him.
Finally we went out.
On the sidewalk I said, “So Dad, do you have a price limit for this birthday present?”
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars. You do what you want with it.”
I dragged him to a dress store. I didn’t even know what I was doing anymore. But the afternoon was round ahead of us and this was a store Emily had said was the best in San Francisco. It was all new designers she’d said. French. Japanese. SoHo-ish, she’d said.
Here he lurked around too. I would pull a jacket out from the metal rack and just study it. They were having a sale. Right away, I found a dress I’d seen in New York with Emily. It was beautiful, six hundred dollars, marked down from more. I’d never spent anything near this much on clothes, but right away I knew I wanted it. But I kept looking, just to browse.
“Look at that woman’s shoes,” my father said pointing. “They’re like the old shoes my grandmother wore, back in Egypt.”
“Yeah, those are in fashion nowdays. Everybody wears those.”
“I can’t believe you think those are all right.”
I tried on a hat. “I like this,” I said. He picked up a price tag and hissed through his teeth. “Two hundred dollars for this! You’re crazy. I wouldn’t pay fifteen cents for this.”
I shrugged. I moved towards the jewelry. These were handmade, wilder things.
“I can’t believe the stuff in this store and what they’re asking.” He sidled up and whispered in my ear. “This is ugly.” I cannot describe his voice then. It was explosive, almost obscene. “Your mother always had elegant taste in dress and clothes and I would have thought you might’ve inherited it, but I see you didn’t. You like all this stuff that is ugly.”
I knew then, he was saying things I would not forget.
When I tried on the dress I liked, he conceded that it was almost elegant. He said I should try and bargain with the saleswoman. But I wouldn’t. He gave me five hundred dollars cash and I charged the extra hundred on my credit card.
The woman said I wouldn’t have to pay sales tax, if she sent it to me in New York.
“But don’t you want to wear it tonight, Mayan?” he said. He wanted to show his mistress that he’d bought me something. Or invested in the purchase.
We finally settled: We said I would wear the dress that night, and then I’d bring it back and the woman would ship it to me at home. She didn’t charge me the tax. Of course this was a lie. I was leaving the next morning. Stevie Howard was taking me to the airport.
Outside, with the sky still high and almost foreign, banners of wind cornering up from the small ratchety streets, the paper bag with the dress knocking lightly against my thigh, I said, “I hope she doesn’t do anything when I don’t bring it back.”
“No, it was understood. That was her way of making it clear.”
I wasn’t so sure. And it was easy for him to dismiss it. His money was cash. They had my credit-card number.
And in fact, about a month later, I received a call in New York from the store.
WE STILL HAD HOURS before dinner and there was really nothing to do. We walked around, tending towards the restaurant. He wanted to find a coffee shop or a bar but this was the financial district and everything was closed. We kept walking aimlessly, with no more to say.
“You should just be lucky you weren’t around all these years. That’s a lot of what being a father is, is buying dresses.”
“I guess so, huh?”
I had the feeling we’d both already made final decisions about each other.
We settled on a little outdoor bench and I left him there and went across the street to the phone booth. I called Jordan in New York.
“Just remember,” he said. “You found him.”
“You helped.”
We talked a long time and I watched him, a solitary figure, sitting with his legs crossed by a fountain.
Later we went to the restaurant where we each took our dinner clothes into the bathrooms and changed there. I couldn’t resist pointing out the one waitre
ss’s shoes. She was a pretty girl, no more than nineteen.
“Well that I can see,” he said, “because she’s working and it’s for comfort. There’s a practical reason.”
Then his mistress walked in and I saw right away, not that she looked like my mother, only taller, but that she was wearing large, generous pearls.
14
EVERY TIME HE CALLED, I asked him about the letter he said he’d send. I was pretty relentless. I just need to know, I kept saying.
Finally, five months later, it came.
Dear Mayan,
Who me?
That’s what I really want to write to you, darling. With all your questions. When I was a child in Alexandria growing up, I was the youngest of four, and I remember that feeling, when my mother came into the room or my older sisters or my teachers in school. Who me? I wanted to hide in the well or behind coats in the closet, I’m thinking they got the wrong guy.
All I can say in answer to your question is, It had nothing to do with you. It had nothing to do with you at all. I haven’t been all I wanted in my life. You get to a certain age, you want to turn the clock back and you can’t.
I try and sit down and write you a letter about my life, but the funny thing is too, Mayan, I don’t remember much from the time I came here. Hardly anything at all. I remember Egypt and my childhood much more clearly.
I think, really, I never felt at home here. The men when they get together and talk and make jokes, I never laugh at the same things. With American men. When my brother-in-law came over before he died and now with the nephews, we laugh at the same things.
You asked me about your name. You know, Mayan, I come from a family a thousand years old in Egypt and when I came to this country I got a job in that tie shop and they gave me a new name. First of all you weren’t allowed ever to tell a customer your last name. You were supposed to be just John of Countess Mara. Or Mike. They called me Mike. And after a while I got used to it. It was like having a good costume at a costume ball.
But your name was always Atassi. A name is something you give your children. Maybe the most important thing. You had no right to change it, Mayan. Your mother was wrong to do that.
You know I was named after the great prophet, and our clan, the Atassis, was supposed to be descended from him. I don’t know if I believe that or not. But we are an old family, it’s not like these Saudis or these Kuwaitis you see now who are really two generations away from a tent. My family, Mayan, was a big family, nothing like here. It was eight hundred, nine hundred people. Imagine like the Mafia but all legitimate, all highly placed in the government.
I still remember the house I was born in. It was built around a courtyard, so we had sun in the daytime and then stars. Any hour of the day or night we heard water from the fountain. This was in my grandparents’ village outside Alexandria.
You said you’re sorry you can’t buy your mother a house. Well, darling, don’t feel too bad because that’s just the way it is here. No one owns property but the real millionaires, in America. We rent too. They give me this condominium as part of my compensation for my work at the restaurant.
While my father was still alive, that was different. My father was really a patriarch and he built a virtual empire in his lifetime. When I was growing up, he owned many villages and about a thousand families, who worked the land. He planted a variety of food crops, but after the war it was all cotton. That’s what really made him rich.
My father was the tallest man most people had ever seen. You know, Egypt is not like here—it doesn’t grow those giants. Arabs are small-boned generally, delicate. But my father was 6′6″ and he stood perfectly straight, his spine erect even on a camel or a horse.
I think it helped him in his business. People looked up to him and trusted him. And they were afraid of him too. I don’t think the people who work for me feel frightened. They tell me their problems and their dreams.
We didn’t see our father much at home. He spent most of his time working. He woke up at dawn, rode his horse out to his villages. In the late afternoon he’d ride back, change into western clothes to do whatever business he had to conduct.
He was always good with numbers. He’d sit in his office with a cup of Turkish coffee and an abacus, and we weren’t supposed to disturb him. That was when he was supposed to be making us our millions. He was an extraordinarily healthy person who never smoked or drank. And never, I believe, did he have relations with women.
Even when we got a Ford with a chauffeur, he still used his horse every day. The hours out in the desert, between his villages, were his happiness. Later, he went on the haj and he was always devout, but I think his real religion was out in the desert, horseback. He was never sick, never once saw a doctor, and he died in his sleep at the age of eighty-six.
So you come from some good genes for a long life.
My mother married him at age fourteen. He was a brilliant man, a bargainer, an opportunist. Their marriage was brokered by the elders, who kept an eye on “the blood” and still wanted Atassi brides for all the sons.
My mother was a different kind of person. She was very social. She had a high voice and the sound of her laughter annoyed him. She spent most of her energy watching three daughters and looking for husbands for them.
I always felt sorry for my sisters. They were intelligent and attractive, but their destinies were settled before they were born. They couldn’t go away to university the way I could, and most of their lives at home were very limited, very watched. This was like jail. They could never go out and taste life on their own. Marriage was their only way out.
My oldest sister, Amina, married her first cousin who lived next door. Zohra married an Atassi from Cairo, who was feebleminded. She didn’t want him, but it was not her choice. Cleopatra, the youngest of the sisters, was always my favorite. She and I grew up together. Cleopatra had everything. She was beautiful, tall, smart, gracious. She loved people, was a kind person. If she had been born here, she could have been anything. But there she was married to a bureaucrat, a relative—older, conventional, boring.
It’s like another life, really. Here I do my job, I get up at around nine or ten, I go to the restaurant, check on the morning shopping the sous chef did, I supervise his preparations for lunch. Then I work out at the gym for a few hours. I lift the weights. I’m working on my aerobics for our hiking next time. I’m just a guy working in a restaurant, trying to keep the food coming out looking like something and to avoid the bad cholesterol myself.
I’m going to give you a gorgeous wedding when the time comes. I know just how to do it. It’s my business. I’ve given nine hundred, maybe a thousand weddings.
So you do your part now and find the guy.
You asked about money for your mother. I can’t help you with that, darling. It wouldn’t be fair to Uta. I have to think of her and of my own retirement. But Adele’s probably not so bad off. I wouldn’t worry about her so much. She’s probably all right.
I can’t do a lot of what you ask me. You’re my daughter and I always loved you but I can’t tell you much more than that. I can’t stand all this confrontation.
Now if we were still in Egypt, everything would be different. I could give you whatever you want. You want a house for your mother. Sure, okay, no problem. If I’d have stayed I’d be running the country now. I really could have, with my connections, my family.
I’m telling you Mayan—I was the John F. Kennedy of Egypt.
Epilogue
IT’S OUT OF THE SKY.
What happened next is hard to explain because I became a different person.
Nothing begins absolutely in one instant. Beginnings renew themselves again and again, and what we remember as the beginning—helping the blind man—might only have been the first moment we understood what had already happened to us. But an ending can be instant and absolute, as small as the last match blown out by a breath.
The year I was twenty-eight I found my father. I hadn’t seen him s
ince I was a child, in grammar school. I did not know that he was alive.
And this was the end of many things.
For a long time before, I’d tried to figure out silly things. I had problems with my boyfriends and I knew that was somehow because of my father. In college, my boyfriend and I fought all the time. He blamed me and it was probably my fault. Once, it got so bad, we walked around the block again and again and when we came to his door, he wouldn’t let me in. I fought to force his arms. Later, I felt terrible and wrote him a letter. I said I thought it was because my father had left on a Tuesday.
“Leave your father out of this,” he said.
THERE ARE CERTAIN mysteries that should never be solved. Because they cannot be, they can only seem to be.
I don’t know, honey, he said, his lip lifting a little and eyes crossed in consternation. I really don’t know myself.
Why you are unwanted: that is the only question. In the end, you understand, that is always the question you came here to ask, you crossed the globe for, spent years of your life, and at the same time as you see his face hearing those words in your voice, you understand too, like something falling, that this is the one question no one can ever answer you.
They will talk. There is so much around the thing. Ruining castles, gardens, cities, work in a restaurant where all the night long fountains spoke the sound of hands running through coin.
But there is no answer. Never. You recognize what he tells you for what it is: the truth. He does not know. At that moment, you understand every time you have been lied to and every time a man told you this truth.
Once, in exasperation, Stevie broke out about Bud Edison. “He’s not in love with you, no matter what he’s saying, he’s not in love. That’s not the way somebody acts when they’re in love.”
I understood now, that is true.
“WHAT ANSWERS DO YOU WANT?” Stevie said. “What would make you happy?”
Something that sounded true, I said. But that wasn’t it only. He wants to step in now. He has visions of walking me down the aisle at my wedding. You’d think I’d want that. I think when I dreamed of having a father, I wanted that. I wanted to just sort of have a father. As if you could just have a father.
