Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “So, are they from the ACLU?” she asked.

  “No,” he admitted. “They are the cleaning lady and her daughter, a nurse.” He gathered her up. “I feel like it’s our wedding,” he said. He loved her, her husband—it always felt strange.

  “Every wedding deepens your own somehow,” she said. “They remind you what you intended.” And what would that be? Only to possess the other, free him, consume him, and become him, that was all.

  “I suppose that’s so,” he said. Something had brightened, softened him—he held tight to her waist and let her carry him away. Over his shoulder she saw Fishman stride over to speak to Len. His curls looked like razor wire, Liane saw with a thrill—exactly like Gabe’s. She could feel again what it had been like, at thirteen, to brush against a real soldier. But she remembered, suddenly, that Gabe had not been a soldier. He’d been an exchange student, spending his year in Jerusalem, and she a girl who was looking for rapture, religious and erotic at once. How she had worried for Gabe, during the Six Day War—thank heaven it had only been six days!

  Marsha had snatched up the rabbi’s husband and, attempting some kind of wild hora beside them, turned her heel and fell down.

  “It’s the citrus,” she said thickly, while Derek, lifting her back to her feet, said, “I thought Jews didn’t drink,” so she grimaced and said, “You never understood,” and Derek, settling her in her chair said in puzzlement, “Come to think of it, the Jews I know drink like fish … The Jews … the Jews…” He put his hands to his temples as if trying to put down a sudden headache or receive an extrasensory communication.

  “Anyway she’s a Unitarian,” Liane said spitefully.

  And the music took a turn into “Take Me to the River.”

  “I love this song!” Liane cried, and Derek said in the voice of an impartial jury that yes, it was a good song, and she held his hands in the air and danced absolutely against him, while he looked simultaneously ecstatic and appalled. The woman of the hips was dancing alone, aswim in the music, without sorrow or joy. Naomi, who would wake up the next morning to ask herself: What have I done? stood smiling up at Trevor, sweet and exhausted, while the singer intoned in her great, up-from-the-earth voice:

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, you’ve been listening to the Twilight Blues Band, and we want to thank you for your wonderful hospitality. I’m a good Southern Baptist and I wish for all of you that you may go to the river and be washed in the waters of the lord…”

  A baptism! Mazel tov! And here was Fishman, the embodiment of something she’d been yearning for for years, standing on the lawn in front of the dance platform, to peer up at her husband. She found her voice: “Fishman!”

  He looked up at the dancers, but seeing no one he knew, looked higher, expecting a hovering angel maybe? Whether it was the music, or the champagne, or the way the tide had risen silently until now a wave lapped, then another, setting up a slow counterpoint as if a second drummer had just joined in … whatever, everything felt Jewish—as if the thread of the sacred was woven through the daily fabric—and Liane wanted to kneel down and say, “Fishman, it’s me, and we can get married and go to Israel where even the wars have meaning, and we’ll live and die for a reason and…”

  “Fishman!” she repeated. “Down here!”

  His eyes lit; he saw her, asking: “Do I know you?”

  Blood Poison

  “You probably don’t believe this is my daughter,” my father said to the cabdriver. “You’re wondering: Where did a broken-down old guy like him come up with a gal like that?”

  It was only an hour since I’d gotten off the train and already my father had explained to two strangers that we weren’t having an affair. The first was the bartender at the Oyster Bar, where Pop had pulled out my stool as if New York were his overcoat and he was spreading it over a puddle for me. The bartender looked as if he had long since stopped seeing individual faces or thinking of anything except whatever he himself was obsessed with—money or football or his prostate or maybe some kind of love or ideal. He nodded without listening, dealing out some packets of crackers like cards. The place was full—of men and women who looked busier and more purposeful than I’d ever been—and the chalkboard listed oysters named for all the places I’d have felt more at home: Cotuit, Wellfleet, Chincoteague—low-tide towns where the few people left behind through the winter huddle in the souvenir shop doorways, stamping their feet and swearing under the clouds of their breath.

  To the bartender I’d given an apologetic smile, which went, of course, unnoticed. The cab driver, Ahmed Sineduy, license number 0017533, cried “Yes!” with wonderful enthusiasm, as if he had indeed been trying to imagine what would attract me to my father.

  “In fact,” Pop crowed, “I created her!”

  I’d convinced him to have a drink at lunch—a mistake, but I wanted one myself. He makes me nervous—I don’t know him very well. He and my mother married young, and after I was born he drifted away, taking long and longer visits to his mother in the city until finally we noticed that he was living with her and visiting us. I’d study the New York news every night, first thinking I might see him, later that if I came to understand the city, I’d get a sense of my father, too. Phrases like “truck rollover in the Midtown Tunnel” were invested with incalculable glamour for me, and when people spoke of the Queensboro Bridge or the East River they might as well have been talking about the Great Obelisk of Shalmanezar and the Red Sea.

  Twice a year my mother put me on the train to the city so I could spend the weekend with him. In my grandmother’s apartment it was still 1945, and I pushed the mother-of-pearl buttons on the radio set, expecting to hear FDR, while Pop made supper and Grammy offered me hoarded bits of chocolate and cake. We tried to act familiar, which meant we couldn’t ask the kind of questions that might have helped us figure each other out, and year after year the distance grew. If Pop was doing well in the market he talked a mile a minute, spreading out maps and showing me pictures of the houses—sometimes whole islands—he meant to buy. When he was losing he was silent, and would start out of his trance every few minutes to ask how I was doing in school. As soon as I could I’d escape to the guest room, pull the velvet drapes, and fold myself into the heavy bed linens, where in my fantasies some man as commanding and enveloping as Zeus the swan held me in the tightest grip you can imagine, while all the lights of the city whirled over our heads.

  So, yes, I was an overheated child, and so fervid an adolescent I became accustomed to seeing my teachers squirm and look away from me, praying I’d go elsewhere for the extra help next time. By college the pedagogical discomfort was happily transformed, and there was no end to the office hours available for a girl whose palpitating heart was quite nearly visible through her blouse. How I loved school!

  With my father I keep my hair shaken down over my eyes like a dog, though I still come twice a year to visit. It pleases him to think of himself as a father, and God has damned me to try and please him. When my mother gave up her quest to draw him back to us and started the divorce, he sobbed like a lost little boy. And now that my grandmother’s dead, I’m the only family he has.

  This time I was even “on business”—I was flying to Cincinnati in the morning for a job interview—a Visiting Assistant Professor job of the sort that a person like me would be very lucky to have; a job I needed to escape a debilitating love: a professor, of course, my Louis—an authority on Balzac, about whom no one else gives a damn. When I first met him he was railing at some translator’s disrespect for an original text, and I remember thinking that he was really angry, that a crime against meaning was no less brutal to him than a physical assault. Needless to say I threw myself at him, and at Balzac. I swam through The Human Comedy as if it were a river I had to cross to reach him, but when I reached the other shore he was gone. By then I’d studied long enough to see Louis had such feeling for literature because ordinary life seemed so empty to him. And I was the very emissary of the ordinary—eating, bleeding, l
aughing, et cetera—a constant reminder of how much better Balzac had done than God. Louis began to inflict little cruelties, insults and condescensions, like cigarette burns, wherever he knew I was tender, and I slowly found myself entirely absorbed in these wounds—with each I became sicker, but it seemed an ailment only Louis’s gentle care could cure. In a minute of clarity I realized I’d have to tear myself out of his life by the roots, and taking a job in a distant city looked like the surest way.

  The cab zipped uptown, switching lanes and skirting bike messengers and double-parked delivery trucks with an ease I should have found alarming, but I leaned back. I had faith in Ahmed. As long as he was talking to my father I was safe.

  “Seventy-nine?” Ahmed asked.

  “Fifty-six and a half!” my father replied. His age.

  “Fifty-six?” Ahmed hit the brake. We were already somewhere in the Sixties.

  “Seventy-ninth Street,” I said. “Museum of Natural History.” Natural History in springtime; in September, the Met. Once, when I was maybe ten, we tried something different, a piano concert at Lincoln Center. I had a velvet dress, and Pop kept whispering things about the music to me, pointing out the movements in a concerto, praising the pianist’s fine technique. He had never said a word about music before, and certainly I’d never heard him speak with rapture—he was trying to impress me, I realized—he wanted my esteem. And I tried—I worked at admiring him the way a doubting priest works at faith.

  “But you must see plenty of men out with girls who aren’t their daughters,” he was saying to Ahmed, thinking perhaps of Louis, who’s fifty-three. “It happens all the time.”

  He made it sound like a horror: something too awful to think about, like a child crushed under a bus or chained in a basement, one of the travesties he absorbs out of the paper, and can’t stop talking about, almost as if he’d suffered them himself. He keeps his eye trained on the pain in the news; he can’t bear to look at real life.

  He quit his job during the divorce; he couldn’t stand to give money to people who rejected him. After that he went into business for himself, borrowing office space from acquaintances, empty desks he could use for a few months or a year, in a cubicle on some eighteenth or twenty-fifth or forty-seventh floor where a couple of sour men smoked cigars and followed the ticker tape all day. Visiting, I’d stand at the window, watching the secretaries gather like pigeons on the pavement below, thinking that someday I’d become one of them and work silently all day among people who took no notice of me. Then we’d go home to Grammy, who still called him Skipper, his childhood name. They fought over trifles as if they were married, but she had no notion of money and was happy as long as he didn’t waste food or throw away any reusable string. When she died she left him a pantry full of egg crates and plastic containers, but he had already spent her fortune.

  In his new flat on Staten Island, he was perfectly content, he told me again and again. Yes, it faced north, but he wasn’t one of these people who had to have sunlight, and what a relief just to cook for himself. It wasn’t as if he were isolated—he had the Times and fifty-two channels. He would have been amazed to realize that the pretty morning news anchor he admired was younger than I was, that if he were to meet her by one of the fabulous accidents he imagined, he, too, would be “out with a girl” right now.

  “Have any children yourself?” he asked Ahmed, with his salesman’s hearty voice.

  “Seventy-nine!” Ahmed declared.

  “No English,” I mouthed to Pop, twice before he understood.

  “Aha!” he said. He cleared his throat. He had that tutelary gleam in his eye—he was going to show me how little distance there is between cultures, how much can be accomplished with a smile, a concerned tone. He thought, quite rightly, that I was an awkward, inward girl, in need of social training. Where did Ahmed come from, he asked—Syria? Lebanon? India, perhaps?

  When Ahmed said Karachi, my father turned out to have a few words of Punjabi, and an enthusiastic accent, too.

  Ahmed burst into speech.

  “Whoa, whoa, you’re way beyond me!” Pop said. “Slow down, wa-a-a-y down.”

  By Seventy-ninth Street Ahmed had taught him some basic insults, and the words for father and daughter.

  “Nice guy,” Pop said as the cab fishtailed away from us. “Wish I could have tipped him.”

  “What did you say to him?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it a beautiful evening,” he told me. “The janitor at the office taught me. He has a wife and three kids back there.… He doesn’t have much hope of getting them over, but he sends money.…”

  He sighed so heavily, thinking of this family torn apart, that I was afraid he was going to cry. He’s so tall, has such broad shoulders, that when he gets weepy it’s like seeing a statue melt. Even now I’ll be doing the dishes or walking the dog and I suddenly feel his sadness go through me. I think of him as a little boy, his own father dying—he’ll say “when I died,” by accident, when he speaks of it—I never know what to do to assuage it, any more than I did when I was ten. One morning back then he told me that my mother didn’t want to make love to him anymore. I had only the vaguest idea of what he meant and I sat stupidly over my cinnamon toast searching for something helpful while his lip began to tremble, as if I was his last hope and had failed him.

  By now he’s so solitary he expects no consolation, and he walked along tightly for a minute, entirely constricted by sadness, and then threw it off with a quick little gesture, like breaking a chain.

  “He taught me to say, ‘Wow, get the legs on that babe,’ too,” he laughed, holding the door to the automatic teller open for me. There was hardly room for two people in the booth. I edged into the corner while he fed his card to the machine.

  “We’ll have to see,” he said. “Last week they credited me with sixty dollars by mistake. In fact, I’m overdrawn.” He punched in his number: 1014, the date of his marriage to my mother.

  “I’ve got money,” I said. I was embarrassed how much—Louis never let me help with the rent, so my salary went straight into the bank.

  “No, no, honey,” he told me. “I think we’ll be fine here. I’ve been making money. I started with five thousand and I was doing great all through March—I was up to twenty-five. Then I lost a few thousand last week, a few more Monday, and Friday another seventeen…”

  By my math this meant he was broke. I’d guessed it, seeing his posture from the train window as he waited on the platform, and when, over the whole course of lunch, he never spoke of buying any islands at all.

  “As long as they didn’t catch the error,” he said, “we ought to be all right.” We heard the rollers inside the machine as they shuffled the bills; then it spat three starched twenties at us through pursed rubber lips.

  “The town’s ours,” said Pop, as if we’d drawn three cherries on a slot machine. His luck was turning, he could feel it. I could hardly keep up with him as he strode back toward the museum.

  “Two adults,” he said to the cashier, and “Can it really be, you’re an adult?” to me, and then, to the cashier again, “She’s my daughter. What do you think?”

  Her badge read CYNTHIA POST, DOCENT. She had a kind of brisk official grace, and she glanced at me and gave him a perfunctory smile. As I accepted my museum pin from her, I thought that although she might have been unhappy in her life she did not look as if she’d often been confused. She would have spent her whole life here, walking to the museum past her grocery, her florist, her dry cleaner, the school she and her children had attended, the church she had been married in. I regarded her with both condescension and jealousy—I would never belong so squarely to anything. I’d put on a hat that morning because it seems to me that only very confident people wear hats—so that I’d appear to be self-assured—but I felt only foolish and ostentatious, like a child dressed up in her mother’s clothes.

  My father, of course, looked great. Age has given him the look of dignity, and he takes a professional pleasure in co
nversation. No one has ever sounded more reasonable, more calm and knowing. If he told you to buy something, you’d buy, or he’d explain it slower, with more stubborn patience, until you did. He solicited Cynthia Post’s suggestion of the best exhibit, and as we took the direction she suggested (something interactive in the Rocks and Minerals) her smile was newly warm. Following him down the corridor, one hand on my hat as I tried to keep pace with his stride, I felt for a minute as I used to when I visited: happy and excited just to be in his company, sure that if I could only manage to keep my hand in his he’d pull me around the corner into a new world.

  “Did she say the second right, or the third?” he asked me. The hallway ended in three closed doors. Two were locked, so we went through the third and down another long passage toward a sign that read ENTRANCE, which turned out to be one of a pile of ENTRANCE signs stored against another locked door. There was hardly any light and I felt terribly claustrophobic suddenly, as if we were trapped here together forever. After all the years of visiting museums I’m still never comfortable in one—even in a roomful of Renoirs I long for a window, and the Museum of Natural History, the final repository of moon rocks and extinct sparrows and other small, dun-colored things whose significance one would never believe if it weren’t written out for you, always seemed to me the loneliest place in the world. To stand here now with my father was to guess what it might feel like in my grave.