Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived

by Lily Tuck

  In Paris, my father had to begin over again. He counted and recounted his losses. He schemed and struggled to recover the expensive Meissen china, the furniture, the Delacroix painting that had hung in the Berlin living room. His sentences began with: If it had not been for the war, or, Before the war, and the French tricolor that hung from the building opposite where we lived flapped in vain. His French passport was but a palliative. He would neither forgive nor forget. He refused to ride in a Mercedes or in any German-made car. It was not a laughing matter. “Don’t tell me about turning the other cheek,” he once told me. “If I had, you wouldn’t be here.” Not religious, he never said anything about being a Jew. I didn’t either. I didn’t know what to say about it.

  “Being a legionnaire is like being a marine.” When he spoke, my father’s eyes gleamed behind his thick glasses—glasses as thick as a book. “There’s nothing like it in the whole world.” He barely looked at me, and I was relieved to be a girl. If I had been a boy or the son I imagined he would have preferred, I would have never heard the end of it. Or if the son I imagined was my brother—I pictured him a sailor—already I could hear my father saying to him: The navy is child’s play compared to the Foreign Legion. And I, unable to resist trying to defend the imaginary sailor brother—he was blond and looked just like my mother—blurted out to my father, “But you never actually fought. You never had to kill anyone in the Foreign Legion.” “No,” my father answered me, “it was hard enough as it was. We marched all day long under the Sahara sun. The desert was hot as hell.”

  While my father was in Ouarzazate, my mother and I went to Peru; we stayed there for four years. During that time, my mother did not know whether my father was alive or dead. “Lima was hot, too,” I wanted to tell him, “and there were earthquakes.” I remember one earthquake in particular because it was on my birthday. I was seven and my mother, to celebrate it, had taken me to a movie, my first one. Halfway through, the theater started to shake. At first, I thought it was on account of the movie itself, the screen was jiggling with cartoons. Then everyone around me started to jiggle, to get up, push, shout, leave the theater. My mother was pulling at me to go but I had taken off my shoes. I was trying to find them in the dark, wriggling around barefoot on the dirty floor. “Leave your shoes,” my mother had to shout. “There’s an earthquake, we have to go!” Later, when the earthquake was over and we went back inside the theater to watch the rest of the movie, I still couldn’t find my shoes. I looked around where we were sitting and under the seats but the shoes were gone. I couldn’t concentrate on the movie after that. The cartoons no longer made me laugh. I worried about my shoes. I never told my father that story.

  More than once, my father suggested that we leave France. “We should emigrate to the United States,” he told my mother. “Opportunities there are better.” My mother refused. “We’ve moved enough,” she said firmly. “I never want to cross the Atlantic Ocean again.” She was referring to our time in Peru. They didn’t argue. I never heard my father raise his voice. I never saw him kiss my mother. He had left his passions behind in Ouarzazate. A bundle, they were fading and disintegrating in the hot Sahara sun—first red rose love turning a gummy pink, then fading to yellow, the color of old camel bones. Though older, I was still afraid of him. I clung to the made-up brother—I had named him Roland for reasons I have completely forgotten. No longer a lowly sailor, Roland was now a full-fledged captain in a spanking navy uniform with lots of gold braid. Even so, I saw his stiff shoulders flinch a little when he had to face my father, and my own heart sank. “I’m getting married,” I had to tell him. “I’m going to live in America.” “Is he Jewish?” my father asked.

  “Tell me about Ouarzazate and what the house was like.” I used to ask my father to change the subject. Already as a child I knew the question was like flirting. It was like asking him: Tell me about the women, the other women in your life, besides my mother, that you loved. “The house was an ordinary one-story Moroccan house,” my father began. “Inside the rooms were large and cool—” He warmed slowly to the subject while I rushed ahead to picture a pastel house with plants and painted tiles—a Scheherazade house. “And what about the monkeys?” Unaccountably, my father shared the house with two pet monkeys. “Oh, I’ve told you about the monkeys a dozen times. The monkeys were dreadful. I hated the monkeys.” I should have outgrown the monkey story but I clung to it—the same way I clung to handsome Roland. “To make matters worse, the monkeys crapped inside the house. One day I couldn’t stand it any longer, I was fed up,” my father said. “I decided to teach the monkeys a lesson once and for all.” I had begun to laugh. “I waited until they were doing their business in the living room then I grabbed them. Both of them. I spanked them as hard as I could and I threw them out of the window.” We were both laughing. I knew the joke by heart. “And from that day on, do you know what they did?” I nodded happily. “They continued to crap inside the house the way they always did but when they were through, they spanked their own bottoms hard, and jumped out of the window.”

  I jumped at the chance to go to America. My husband was a musician and we moved around a lot. We traveled light and fast. Then my mother died. The letters from my father were full of petty complaints, things he did not have. It was difficult to think of him and his long inventory of losses. I wanted none of it. I packed only essentials, like on a small boat. Like a sailor, too, I could hoist them on my back. I kept one picture of my father, a faded snapshot of him in the desert. In it, his hair is lighter—no doubt bleached by the sun. He is wearing his legionnaire’s uniform and his puttees. He is holding a bayonet and he looks nearly handsome. “Why was your father a legionnaire?” my husband asked me once. The picture looked so outdated, my father could have been a gladiator. I shrugged my shoulders. “He wanted to, I guess,” is all I answered.

  It was early spring when, several years later, I returned to Paris. I was divorced. The first afternoon, my father and I went for a walk in the tepid sunshine. Still cold, he took my arm. He was crippled with arthritis and could barely walk. When we crossed the street, I had to hold up my hand against the traffic. As yet, he had not asked me a single question. Grown shorter, he looked wizened, a frail monkey himself. He must have read my mind. He told me the truth—the truth about the monkeys and why he tolerated them and their mess in the house in Ouarzazate. They were a gift from a woman. She was a dancer. “Was she Moroccan?” I wanted to know. “No, she was American,” my father scoffed. “She was the loveliest woman in the world.” He said it with such finality, the way old people make pronouncements, that there was little left for me to say. I invoked Roland one more time. Surely, in his peregrinations around the world, in all those ports, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Gibraltar, he must have seen a lovelier woman. Roland did not bat a single seafaring lash. He, too, was getting old. All that wind and sun in his face had taken a toll, he was tired of confrontations. He didn’t say a word about lovely women. “Was she on tour in Ouarzazate?” I pressed my father for more information. “Was she entertaining the troops?” But my father would say no more about the dancer.

  My father died while he was making his slow, painful progress up the Avenue de la Grande Armée in the direction of the Arch of Triumph and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, poor old unknown soldier himself; his heart had stopped. About half a dozen people, mostly bent old men and expatriates like himself, came to my father’s funeral in a nondenominational church. The service was brief. The organ stayed shut. I had planned it that way but the minister’s well-intentioned phrases only made it worse. He had not known my father and the heaven he alluded to was featureless and for the homeless. I should have gone to a synagogue instead, a place more accustomed to wanderers. The only place my father had was a town with a ridiculous name in the middle of the Moroccan desert. Chances are the minister had never heard of Ouarzazate. I would go there myself, I decided in the dull church, and find my father’s house. I would start immediately. Perhaps, I could persuade Roland
to go with me: “You need a vacation, a change from the sea, like the desert,” I would tell him, “and don’t wear your uniform.”

  Next of Kin

  When Karen and Richard got married—or right after as they were walking arm in arm down the aisle to the strains of Henry Purcell’s “The Prince of Denmark’s March” and out the door of the Greek revival church in a small town in upstate New York—eighty-nine-year-old Herbert Mirsky, who was on his way home from the hardware store where he had gone to buy fluorescent lightbulbs guaranteed to last a lifetime, suffered a stroke and lost control of his car, a light blue Honda Accord. The light blue Honda Accord jumped the curb in front of the church, and, because Herbert Mirsky’s foot was pressed down on the accelerator, the Honda Accord gathered speed and sped across the church lawn—the car narrowly missed a hydrant, a hydrangea bush, and also, by inches, a maple tree whose leaves were turning orange and yellow—and nearly ran down Karen and Richard, who, oblivious, were just then making their joyful and triumphant exit from the church. The couple parted—Karen ran left, Richard right—behind them, the maid of honor missed a step and would have fallen if the best man had not grabbed her arm, as the Honda Accord came to a metal-crushing stop against the wall, at the entrance of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church.

  Karen and Richard had felt obliged to wait along with the rest of the wedding party, the minister, the organist, the members of the choir, their relatives and guests, for help to arrive. Actually, two of the guests were doctors—an orthopedic surgeon, and an endocrinologist—and together, the two managed to get Herbert Mirsky, who was bleeding profusely from his nose and from his ears, out of the Honda Accord, and into the church vestry where they covered him with the minister’s white cassock. Then, everyone, except for the doctors who busied themselves taking vital signs and trying to stem the flow of blood, stood around trying not to look but looking at dying Herbert Mirsky anyway.

  In his short shirt sleeves with only his collar on, the minister looked undressed as he knelt next to Herbert Mirsky and prayed. The minister’s arms were surprisingly tan and muscular; Karen noticed a tattoo on his forearm. The tattoo was in the shape of a heart, a bleeding heart, a name was inside it. The name was upside down, and Karen tried to read it: Jesus? Janice?, at the same time that a woman said something about administering the last sacrament.

  “Poor soul. I’ve never seen him in this church before,” another woman, the organist, who was standing next to Karen whispered back.

  Richard, as if duty-bound by his role as principal player in the wedding, had gone over to try to help the two doctors. One of the doctors, the endocrinologist, handed Richard Herbert Mirsky’s wallet, a cheap wallet made out of nylon and Velcro, and Karen watched Richard go through it. When Richard was finished, out of habit, he rubbed a finger along his upper lip where his mustache had been.

  When Karen first started going out with Richard, Richard had a mustache. The mustache tickled when Richard kissed her and the mustache, Karen said, made Richard look like Dr. Zhivago in Dr. Zhivago, or more precisely, like Omar Sharif. But the truth was Karen preferred clean-shaven men; also she was afraid of offending Richard. When Richard threatened to grow a full beard, Karen suspected that he might be testing her.

  “You don’t look like Omar Sharif, you look like Groucho Marx!” Karen told Richard and Richard answered, “What’s the matter with Groucho Marx!” But Richard had shaved off the mustache.

  Now Karen was standing next to the crushed Honda Accord with her three bridesmaids—the maid of honor had sprained her ankle and was sitting down, her leg and ankle outstretched on the grass. The four of them were still holding their bouquets, pink and white roses and some kind of lilies, and Karen felt bereft and not married to Richard yet.

  The ambulance finally arrived and Herbert Mirsky, with, Karen imagined, only the merest hint of a pulse left in his veins was placed inside it, and Karen and Richard and the others got into their respective cars—Karen and Richard into a limousine that had a sign with JUST MARRIED stuck on the back—and they drove on to the reception. It was only then that Karen noticed the stain on the antique lace train of her wedding dress—the lace train had belonged to Karen’s mother, and before that to Karen’s mother’s mother. The antique lace train had a black tire track on it.

  We could have been killed! Karen, each time she thought about the incident, said to herself. We could have been killed!

  And the near-miss, she thought, was an omen. But an omen for what? Richard, she knew, was not superstitious. If she voiced her fear to him, he would have shrugged his shoulders and answered: “An omen for Herbert Mirsky.”

  No surprise. Herbert Mirsky died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Perhaps, Karen imagined later, Herbert Mirsky stopped breathing while she and Richard were cutting the wedding cake with the raspberry cream filling; or perhaps Herbert Mirsky’s heart stopped beating while she and Richard stepped on to the dance floor—in one hand Karen was holding up the lace train with the black tire track on it—to dance the first dance together: “A trip to the Moon/ On gossamer wings—”

  Karen met Richard at a party eight months before, nearly to the day. They both, it turned out, worked at the same bank, only in different departments, in different branches. Richard was in corporate loans, Karen in asset management. When, after the party, Richard offered to take her home, Karen, it also turned out, lived only a block from Richard’s apartment. The next evening too, on her way back from work, Karen ran into Richard in the grocery store where each was buying the same thing for dinner, a barbecued chicken—another and yet another coincidence—and coincidences, Karen had read somewhere, only she forgot where, were small miracles.

  During the wedding reception, Karen tried not to think about Herbert Mirsky. She tried not to think about the blood coming out of his nose in brown clots and spilling out of his ears onto the priest’s white cassock, soiling it.

  The wedding day was a perfect autumn day: crisp, clear, sunny. The kind of day one feels one can see out forever—or, at least, see out for miles. A green-and-white striped tent had been set up on the lawn of Karen’s parents’ house. The tent overlooked a pond with fat geese swimming in it; in the garden, the orange, red, and purple zinnias, the tall yellow sunflowers, the more delicately hued cosmos were at the height of their bloom. Inside the tent, the tables were set, there were more tables with food and drinks and an oyster bar where two waiters were busy shucking plump gray oysters. A half a dozen smiling waitresses were going around with trays and plates filled with huge mounds of shrimp, a whole baked brie cheese, little sausages wrapped in dough, mushroom caps and endive leaves filled with dips.

  Every few minutes more and more guests were arriving. The guests admired the view—the Berkshire Mountains, and rising behind, the Catskills—the guests drank champagne and ate the oysters, the shrimp, the brie cheese; the guests were smiling, laughing, having a good time.

  We could have been killed!

  Herbert Mirsky kept coming back to Karen’s mind.

  “What did you find in his wallet?” Karen asked, while she and Richard were dancing together.

  “Whose wallet? Oh. Nothing much. His driver’s license, a credit card, a couple of dollars. I was looking for the name of someone to call—a wife, a son, a next of kin.”

  A widower, probably. Since his wife had died, he lived alone in a small house on the edge of town. A shabby house, Karen imagined, with no garden, no flowers, an empty bird feeder hanging lopsided from the branch of a tree. The furniture, too, was old—the La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room no longer reclined, the brass double bed in the bedroom needed new springs, a new mattress, clean sheets. In the kitchen, the motor of the refrigerator could be heard laboring on and off, the faucet dripping into the old-fashioned porcelain sink; overhead, the neon light flickered giving Herbert Mirsky both a headache and a warning.

  If I thought a bit/of the end of it/before I started painting the town—

  “I found a picture—nothing impo
rtant.” Richard squeezed Karen to him, then twirled her around on the dance floor, in time to the music.

  Instead of giving a speech, Richard’s father, a handsome, large man who had been married twice and came from Italy originally—he spoke English with an accent and when he forgot he called Richard Ricardo—sang a song as a toast to Karen and Richard at the wedding reception. He sang without accompaniment and without using the microphone. His voice was deep and strong:

  Some enchanted evening

  You may see a stranger

  You may see a stranger

  Across a crowded room—

  When he was finished—“Once you have found her / Ne-v-er let he-r go—” Richard’s father wiped a tear from his eye for, Karen imagined, the wife he had let go.

  Richard and Karen drove north for their honeymoon. On the way, the first day—more as a joke, a joke on themselves—they stopped at Niagara Falls. Several busloads of tourists were there. A lot of the tourists were Asian. Inside the Visitors’ Center, Karen and Richard watched an informational film, then they walked hand-in-hand through the museum and looked at barrels. The barrels were stuffed with mattresses.

  “You have to be certifiably crazy,” Richard said.

  “Listen to this.” Karen had stopped in front of a barrel. “It says here that a schoolteacher went over the Falls in this one. The schoolteacher was holding a cat, a black cat. When they reached the bottom, the black cat had turned white. Snow white. Can you believe that!”