The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  The pigment under his ear was pale again and blended into a leather neck, cracked with fine lines like old stucco or baked earth or cookies. These observations were a pushing against the suffocation closing on her, a trick developed in the unbearable moments of childhood; look at the thing in front of you, give it your concentration, don’t look up. Then the hotness would go and another little drawer was safely locked. She had known he was old but now experienced it. She had shocked him; she must give him a chance.

  “You lived in Wisconsin.” He had checked up. “All those Norwegian Lutherans who don’t dance in case people think they’re having sex standing up.” The woman in the corner gagged on some different gem of wit and Max wondered what she found so fucking funny. “I mean... they don’t have sex standing up in case people think they’re dancing. I think in Georgian and I never could tell jokes, but you probably follow my...”

  “Drift.”

  “Drift.”

  “How did you know we lived in ....?”

  He knew. Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi; they had dragged themselves through an alphabet of unhappy locations under a series of pseudonyms. He had been fed the information by a poisonous shit at the Lubyanka precisely because he knew Max didn’t want to know, and had occasionally caught himself browsing maps of the States.

  Cutlery was being shifted somewhere; the pair of them strained to end silences. Max asked what she had seen. The dog was mentioned and he seemed to listen with intense concentration while keeping his head partially turned away. He wouldn’t look at her. He coughed then rapidly barked into a brief, hanging dry heave that gathered looks from the women and tempted Lucy to announce he was nothing to do with her.

  The man in the corner pressed the spine of his book again and the women turned back to their gossip. The laughing woman had fallen into a depression. Sunlight blanched the white haired Cossack as he watched the passing trade in the street. Outside and in, people passed with the troughs, peaks and long flat-line of lives wrapped in ordinariness. She wanted a drink. He wanted a drink. They could handle each other if they had a drink.

  “From certain angles you look like your mother.” It took courage for him to say that and he hoped he hadn’t revealed that Peg still had some strange hold on him.

  Lucy let him in a little on her mother’s Long March from Day Zero and described her third husband without trace of her own antipathy to him. “He’s a paint millionaire from Phoenix Arizona. Made millions out of house paint. They live in the Biltmores. It’s kind of like a gated Nirvana for her. She likes to shut herself away anyway, so she can finally do it in style.” She could remember nothing about Peg’s second husband who was gone as quickly as he arrived.

  “Well, I’m one divorce ahead of her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Two Russian wives. One was the daughter of an eminent scientist, the other was well, it doesn’t really matter, it’s a long time a...”

  “Any children?”

  “No.”

  “So, no Russian stepbrothers or sisters?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He had opened up dangerous avenues of conversation and braced himself for an assault, but it didn’t come; she seemed as wary of this minefield as he.

  “You two made a lot of divorce lawyers happy.”

  “Yes, I suppose we did.”

  “I’m to be married soon.”

  “I hope you break the pattern.”

  “In Maui. Next to Hawaii.”

  “Hawaii? That sounds very exotic.” He coughed at the ceiling, said “Good luck” and brought the beat of that small exchange to an end.

  He was pining for control; everything was picked over and evaluated as a potential threat; he realised he and his daughter were communing on the outer edges of paranoia. He felt her need to find something at the heart of this fragile exchange and she owed nothing in this story. All the debt was on his side.

  “I don’t expect anything.” Her affected honesty was merely an old negotiating technique that usually meant precisely the opposite of what she said, but it swiped the legs from under him. “Kinda like unfair of me to arrive unannounced, you know, invading your private citadel like some Trojan horse.”

  “No, no.. You have every right to …”

  “I should have phoned and asked but I was scared you would have said no. It’s kinda childish uh? Just arriving here.”

  “Well I don’t know, sometimes it’s good to catch a passing wave, you know. Throw caution to the wind and all that. Anyway you’re here. And I’m here and… Are you familiar with Homer?”

  “Homer?”

  “Wooden Horse of Troy?”

  “I read it.”

  “I read it in Greek.”

  “Wow. Greek! You speak Latin?”

  “I did. A long time ago.” He moved Schubert an inch forward. “I can’t remember a thing now.” He continued to cover a noise snaking up through his lower intestines. “We stuff ourselves with all that education and..” a loud bowel groan reddened him. Something in his lower trunk bayed for release and he excused himself and rose. The intensity of her fear shocked him; he reassured her he was only answering Nature’s call, and as he entered the lobby the manager and the Cossack rose like bouncers. He explained himself, they looked at Lucy and she smiled and nodded in a way that suggested it was a desperate emergency and they should let him through. That little gesture revealed wit and he felt strangely pleased as he headed down the stairs to the basement lavatory.

  In the lavatory a benign state settled on him. One of the nightmares that ran through his exile had come true. Oddly, he felt lightened now it had happened. At the moment it was academic, it could not be grasped except as cold information and shock. The irony that he had given the most sophisticated security service in the world every chance to catch him and had been brought to ground by someone he last knew in a state of helplessness in his American kitchen was not lost on him. He detected a fine anger and wit bubbling beneath his daughter’s diffidence; she was attractive and bright, although perhaps frail psychologically. But that of course could simply be because she was in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, from what he could see so far, he would have no need to be ashamed of her in public. She had grown up to be a bonny woman too, and it intrigued him that the little pile of sleep he had first seen behind a hospital glass screen had grown into this fine looking person.

  A curious relief motored him along the corridor back towards the stairs and his daughter. But Max was a slave of fantastic organs that gainsaid his best intentions. An invisible arm would reach out of his chest for the drink he wasn’t going to have, his mouth would say “no” when it meant, “yes”.

  A door was open on the basement corridor. Heat, city sound and light beat through. Outside a driver and a hotel porter were unloading crates of Pepsi from a truck. The crashing sound of the bottles caught his attention, the invisible arm ushered him through the door and he said good morning to the men as he walked past into the street.

  She caught the flare of the Cossack’s lighter as he lit his fortieth cigarette of the day and looked at her watch. Still an hour to lunch. Max had been gone some time. Relax, she said, old men and lavatories are sometimes long negotiations.

  She had never considered what she hoped for by coming, but arrived as unconsciously as an amoeba attracted by an agreeable stimulus, and now was blank. He was nothing like the fictional father she had carried from childhood; in some ways he was rather repellent. All the booze graffiti was hung out to view: the chafed pink patches on the skin, the liverish eyes, pitted nose, the deep shake and stale smell of wind dried hide. It might have been worse had he stayed, dry heaving his way through her childhood. But he had been a member of the generation who created the peace and black rights movements and the last turbulent shake down of a nation that had s
ince gone cosily to sleep in its dollar papered nursery. All her life she was aware of the American-Way being fed into the national consciousness, in movies and marine corps rhetoric, in the steady voices of patrician newsreaders, the perfection of advertising, and the reverence for the Flag and the Dow; a tranquilizing narcotic that produced a national absence of curiosity. Perhaps the best thing Clinton had done for somnambulant America was to take his dick out in the Oval Office. She reflected wryly how her disagreements with the national mores had usually been articulated in bars and toilets with dollar bill tubes and Jack Daniels in a campaign to become a legend in her own mind. She had wanted to be a person of principles but never found the technique. Her father has at least acted on his convictions – questionable though they had been, but the great dynamic that ripped him from country and family seemed to have left no visible marks. Instead a suspicion of being lost lingered about him, of something huge having leaked and left.

  Tilting back to absorb the warmth, the light and the quiet sounds rustling through the hotel, hunting him down suddenly seemed a bogus act. All the problems of abandonment, absence, the resentments and problems, drugs and alcohol, the sense of being an outsider had orbited around the conviction that it could all be traced back to Max as source. But she was three weeks old when he vanished in the baby shop, nineteen weeks when the first news was allowed to hit the headlines. He was nothingness: an enigma, a romantic tragedy, a stranger in another country. She had to be told about him. Was this dowdy pensioner with colonic problems really the hole in her childhood she could never fill?

  “How much is your father, how much is your shit?” had been an AA theme. She could see how Max was the excuse for her mother’s sustained misery. At school her friends cast her out with the chant “traitor’s girl” but kids love cruelty and instinctively sniff out everyone’s weakness.

  The Cossack rose and looked at her.

  “Shit..!” she hissed. Everyone abandoned Lucy and that information loaded her to her seat. Noises distanced. Tinkling spoons were a mile off on the far side of the tea bar. The tea drinkers conversed in a free world, while she watched from behind the wire. She had seized her life for a moment, but with the seat beside her still warm from her father’s ass, it had been torn back.

  She knew everyone in the tea bar knew. The radio signals were being received loud and clear; the two women stood in embarrassed silence, eyes cast down while the eyes of the man with the book scanned the words without reading them. She was pinned in a time warp. They all witnessed the manager and the Cossack swing round the arch with the burden of her humiliation and watched her go down like a street execution.

  “He went out to buy music and hasn’t been back.”

  She remembered Schubert, lying face down on the tea bar Formica. A man, much younger than she stood at her father’s door with a proprietorial confidence that suggested he had certain rights. The Cossack who had accompanied her and now took command of the crisis, spoke to him in Georgian. The young man was neatly dressed and handsome in a haunted way. It crossed her mind that her father may have gone across in more ways than one. But what would this young man find in a figure who would not be out of place on a park bench sucking a quart of Coors? Still, she thought, it takes all kinds and if Max had gone gay in his dotage, it would be the crowning evidence to her mother that her youth had been steered into a marriage with a complete aberration. And it also offered Lucy a rationalisation of why he had abandoned her for a second time. He was too embarrassed to let his daughter know.

  The neighbours picked up the threads of Max’s latest defection and made universal noises of sympathy. An old bony hand stroked her hair like a child’s and Lucy wanted to bat it away. The man introduced himself as Gia and made way. The women pressed them into her father’s house where perfumes from jugs of flowers mixed with the aggression of furniture polish. Lucy expected the apartment to smell and look like her father, but it was neat; the hoover was plugged in; they had interrupted Gia’s housework. Was this relationship one of a young ingénue keeping the clutter of an old eccentric’s life at bay? Yet there was something eerily sexual in the attention Gia gave her. He spoke Russian to her but she was convinced the real meanings were being conveyed in the Georgian arcing between him and the Cossack and keeping her out.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Join the club.”

  “Sorry, it’s just a shock.” His face betrayed everything he felt and this awkwardness thawed out an edge of her resentment. Both had been betrayed by the same man. “He just walked out?” asked Gia.

  “Yes.”

  “He does unpredictable things.”

  The Cossack spoke Georgian to him and Gia shook his head.

  “He left some music at the hotel. Schubert.”

  “Schubert?”

  “Yes.”

  “He likes Schubert.”

  “Well, it’s at the hotel.”

  She saw how difficult he found it to look at her directly. There was some history in him with her father, but she was beginning to doubt that it was a gay one. “What’s your relationship with him?”

  “He sort of looked after me when I was a child.”

  “Lucky old you” she said in English.

  A brief Georgian sentence from the balcony cued an outburst of laughter from the neighbours. Gia’s crimson signals flagged up again. But she had had enough of secret subtexts around Max, and of the futility of her pursuit. She looked at the Cossack. “I want to go.”

  “If he turns up, I’ll bring him to the hotel.”

  “He won’t turn up.”

  “If he does, I’ll bring him.”

  The Cossack helped her climb the hill back to Rustavelli. She gave in to the pain in her ankle to keep the anger and everything else at bay till she reached the privacy of her room. There she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, watching the light change as the day wore on, trying not to think, just feel, letting the disaster drift through her, snag and hurt, release and move on, compress her with pain, shame and anger, shake out of her, let her sleep for a while, wake her to a deeper sky and the morbid facts, unchanged and present.

  A drink would numb it all. Where would be the harm? Could she be blamed after what she had gone through? Just till she gets home. Then she’ll deal with it. Fuck off Lucy, what would that solve? Nothing is improved with a drink and she would settle into the knowledge that even this awful day would pass and become an anecdote.

  The phone rang and her pulse trebled. Her mind convinced her she didn’t care, her body told her the truth. But it wasn’t her father but Gia, down in the basement bar, if she felt like joining him, which she didn’t but she did because she didn’t know how to say no and perhaps he had some news. His vulnerability mirrored something in her, and she found herself adjusting her make up as she left the room. The wrong kinds of whispers were taking breaths by her ear.

  “I’ve tried everyone I know. But.. No sign of him. Don’t know. The neighbours are keeping an eye out now. If he turns up while I’m here, they’ll march him round. Don’t you worry about that; they’re all on your side.”

  Gia is courteous and considerate, shielding her from the cut-price gigolos stalking the bar where they meet, but he smells of damage and danger.

  “I’m dyslexic and Max tried to teach me to read. When I was a kid. Not much success, but he tried.”

  Dyslexics scent things no one else can smell, hear notes the rest can’t hear, can speak to dogs – she looks at the tell-tale fold in his chinos and knows what he is and how everything is foreplay.

  “Masha would like to meet you.”

  “Who’s Masha?”

  “She was your father’s long term, you know, lover,” he said the word as if it might be inappropriate, “I rang her. Its been a bit of a shock,
you know, your father never.. Anyway its about a five hour drive, so she should be here soon.”

  She feels threatened by the attention and the curiosity, and the winking liquids in the glasses and bottles, by the loud camaraderie of a bar and the stink of cigarette smoke. “I have to get out.”

  They sit in the tea bar waiting for Masha, and her eyes are fixed on the banquette.

  “They were lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  She looks up for the dancing reflections but the ceiling is growing dim as the evening moves through twilight. The day is draining itself out of her.

  “They looked after me. My family was.. I would stay with them sometimes” said Gia.

  “Didn’t they want their own children?”

  “Masha did.”

  The way he said it told the story.

  “It turned out she couldn’t have them anyway..”

  Lucy looks up at his face as he struggles to hide some tortuous message. A strange bond binds him to Max and Masha and she cannot see what it might be. But she is on her knees anyway, taking the count. The last thing she needs is some ex-lover full of curiosity and shock arriving to give her the once over. She feels dangerously vulnerable, but she always feels vulnerable. Maybe she should stab another dog. The local AA meeting waits for her somewhere in an unknown street where she could get it out, but she is weighed down with the lethargy of the defeated, and sits sharing silences with Gia till Masha arrives.

  Masha comes in trailing a sense of tragedy. Her beauty is earthy, exotic, and makes Lucy feel like a beauty parlour product. But her hands are repellent, deformed, white scars tear across broken knuckles. They are the hands of gargoyles.

  Dinner is proposed and Lucy doesn’t have the strength to decline. Tinny noises and faces bleat and shift mistily. Fine silver threads in Masha’s hair, spider-webbing voices and tinkling plates, cups and piano notes from the in-house pianist weave into the hallucinogenic tapestry of the night. Gia insists on paying. When Lucy argues, Masha tells her to let him. They sit with her till the last diners float towards the door.