“Fuck you, pervert,” Eastman snapped. He hung up the phone. The man left, just wanting to tell someone off for the heck of it. In the booth was a girl about Helen’s age, putting on her bra, arms pinned behind her back. Her makeup was heavy, especially around the eyes, and the dark eye shadow made her look tired. Her lips, however, painted pink, inspired some excitement. “Man, what do you want?” she said.
Eastman put the phone down. “I don’t know what I want, hon.”
“Well, if you want a dance, ask for Tillary. That’s me. Tillary.”
“Tillary, let me ask you something. If a man wanted a date tonight where would he go?”
“That depends. You a cop?”
“No, I’m not a cop.”
“Because you kind of look like a cop, man.”
Eastman considered the way he was dressed. He still had on the sweatshirt and sweatpants from that morning, which sort of made him look like a police cadet in training.
“Man, I guess if you weren’t a cop or anything and you needed a date, I guess you could maybe see about something like that here.”
“I need a date for a few hours, not just a back-room exchange. I need someone to take a ride with me downtown.” He was considering taking a woman home. He hadn’t been with a prostitute since his days in the marines. He had visited a Filipino brothel while his ship was docked in Manila. She was just a girl, maybe sixteen years old, he didn’t know, and he felt guilty about it after. The challenge was in wooing someone. He wasn’t after just empty sex, there were no stakes in it.
“Man, that’s a little harder, to be honest,” the girl said. “Lot of these girls are working their shifts to real late, man. I dunno.”
He desired this Tillary when he saw her dressing as that asshole came out of the booth and decided to shit all over him. Maybe it was because he had been insulted and wanted to go a step further than the dumb shit who paid her for a dance. He pictured Penny fucking another man. It was evil, the whole mess of it. He looked at Tillary. It didn’t feel right. As she stood there in the booth under the pink light bulb above, fake name, fake desire, he regretted the whole thing.
“Listen, forget it. I changed my mind.”
He glanced out to the front of the Tic Tac, past the red velvet curtains that hid the lap dancers, past the horseshoe bar with poles and strippers and dollar bills. Middle-aged men drank beer from cans and stared up at tits that stared down. He was in the pit of his mind with Arnaud Fleishman and Penny.
Eastman left, and when he hit the street he passed more prostitutes and pimps. What was he doing thinking about paying a woman to take home? What if Penny decided to return, how would that look? She still had this incredible hold on him, it was proof; he couldn’t do what he desired on a whim because he was still a married man, however hypocritical it seemed, considering his own affair with Meredith. He stared at the matchbook from the Tic Tac where he had written down Fleishman’s name and address. He struck a match and set the whole thing aflame.
Get me to Vietnam.
8.
Penny agreed, without much fuss, to let him spend a weekend with the boys before his departure for Saigon. He picked them up in Pequannock and brought them back to Brooklyn. Penny stayed on the front stoop when he arrived. He got out of the car and waved and it was clear she wasn’t going to come down and say hello. The boys, with their suitcases and backpacks, gave their mother a kiss and came running to their father. He met them on the curb and gave them a communal hug, packed them in, and he fought the urge to look back at her. It seemed like all he was doing lately was driving back and forth to New Jersey. The plan, as they had discussed on the phone, was that the boys would move back home first for a long weekend to spend with their father. His daughter, Helen, down from Vassar, would join them, and at the end of the weekend, when Eastman got on a flight departing for Saigon, Helen would watch the boys for a night before Penny moved back. As he drove away from Pequannock, he breathed a sigh of relief. The worst was over. He knew he was acting every bit the angry, abandoned, deserted husband, and hated himself for not being able to control it. Forget it, he told himself, the weekend was about the children, not the mess their parents had made.
Once home, Toby and Lee made a beeline for their rooms upstairs and began unpacking. Eastman occupied himself by making them lunch, tuna sandwiches, his mother’s recipe. Celery, carrot, chopped almonds, relish, garlic salt, mayo, on rye toast with lettuce and tomato. He had bought the wrong tuna, the kind that came in water and not oil. And this made the tuna salad taste too dry. They were out of olive oil, so he melted some butter in a pan and poured that into the bowl of tuna. It had the right consistency, only now it tasted like buttered fish. He compensated with more mayo, and when the dish seemed beyond saving, he began to lose his temper, slamming things on the kitchen counter. He toasted the bread and cut the tomato while he waited, slicing his finger in the process. When the toaster popped, the bread was still soft. The toaster had been unplugged. He’d about had it with cooking and didn’t want to spend another minute making sandwiches. So he gathered everything on plates with his good hand, spread the tuna and then topped it with lettuce and tomato, and cut each sandwich in half with the wrong knife, forcing tuna out the back end. “Boys! Come and get it!” Toby and Lee came down and took their seats around the kitchen table. Eastman put their lunch in front of them, managing to put on a happy face, and he sat down, staring across at the empty chair where Penny used to sit. Soggy tuna salad without their mother. Toby and Lee, it seemed, were doing their best to keep his spirits up and he appreciated that.
“Real good, Dad,” said Lee. Toby was a little more picky. Like Eastman the kid wanted things done his way than his older brother. So Toby nibbled at his sandwich in a manner that exhibited his displeasure.
“What’s the matter?”
Toby looked inside his sandwich then looked at his brother.
“He doesn’t like tomato,” said Lee.
“Since when?”
“He never eats tomatoes.”
“So take it off.” Eastman reached over to Toby’s plate and took the tomato out and put it on the side. But Toby barely touched the sandwich, a few nibbles, that was all. The boy ate mostly pickles from the jar, his little hand able to slip into the jar and fish around for the smallest spears. Eastman wasn’t going to force him to eat more. The sandwich was shit. He’d fucked up a very simple family recipe and didn’t know how he would take care of the little things were the family to separate. Would he get the boys every weekend? How would he manage? The shopping and cooking and cleaning. It occurred to him how much Penny contributed while also working regular hours.
And then Toby and Lee in two different homes, the back-and-forth. He couldn’t redo what happened with Helen when she went to Mexico with Barbara and her new husband—missing out on all those birthdays, not seeing her grow into a young woman, milestones lost in time. He knew he’d failed Helen. But he hadn’t been able to see his mistakes then. Now he could almost see them happening. His love for Penny and the kids felt like a second chance. The thought that it could all go away if he didn’t convince Penny to stay terrified him.
“So how’s your mother really doing?” he asked.
Toby looked at his older brother for the answer. Lee took the reins. “She cries a lot. I think she misses home.”
“I told her she can move back anytime, but she didn’t want to be with us for the weekend.” Don’t be too harsh. “She wanted me to get time alone with you guys before my big mission. She knew I needed your help to prepare.”
“For Vietnam?” asked Toby.
“That’s right. Eat your sandwich.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Eastman let the boy be. “What has she been up to?” he asked.
“She goes out a lot,” said Lee.
“I know all about that. Has she introduced you to her new friend?”
“His name, I heard, is Arnaud. Did she introduce you to this character, Arnaud?”
“Nah,” said Lee. “We haven’t met anyone new.”
“So she hasn’t brought anyone around?”
This scared the boy off a bit, and Eastman regretted being so aggressive.
“She’s being very secretive,” Eastman said. “Look, I don’t want you boys to feel like you can’t tell me anything. If there’s something you think I should know, just tell me and we’ll decide whether we should keep it between us or not. We can’t dance around this. You guys are old enough to sense what’s going on. Your mother is seeing somebody else, somebody she thinks she’s fallen in love with. And she also thinks that I don’t love her anymore, which just isn’t true. It’s the furthest thing from the truth. I want her to come back. I love her. I love our family. And I love the way things are. So I need your help. Remind her how I love her. I’m going to let things run their course, allow her to see this son of a bitch—excuse the expression—and my hope is she’ll see that me, I’m better. I’m more suited to her than anyone else. You understand?”
“Yeah,” said Lee.
It was as if Penny had coached them with silence, because he could sense they knew not to say anything that would upset him. He hated what this was doing to them. Toby looked like he was on the verge of tears. And Lee was nervous with his answers for the rest of lunch.
“Anyway, this weekend isn’t about me and your mother. It’s about us. The three men.” Lee continued to devour his sandwich. Toby took a bite of a new pickle and left it on his plate.
When Helen arrived late Saturday afternoon, the boys were happy and almost relieved to see their half sister. She had gained some weight up at college and it suited her. Helen had Barbara’s flare, a prominent nose like her mother, a wisp of excitement and energy to make things lively around the house. She had turned into a hippie at Vassar, wearing faded jeans and a loose blouse and smelling of patchouli oil. Her energy is what he needed, since his was flagging a bit with the boys after lunch. Helen still called him Daddy, even though he’d been absent from her life except for the few birthdays she spent in New York, and their phone conversations, monthly at first, and then less frequent as time went on. Barbara’s husband, Castle Martinez, was a decent, handsome man who came from a wealthy Mexican family. Eastman knew Castle was true from the very beginning, and trusted him to do a fine job with Barbara raising Helen. It took a certain kind of man to embrace a woman with a young child, a man who could give himself over to someone else’s life without objection. This is why Eastman thought well of Castle. He wasn’t so sure he could have remarried someone who came with a family. In fact, he got along better with Castle than with Barbara.
Helen brought the boys candied apples from upstate and gave Lee a kiss. Toby she picked up off the floor and ran him through the house saying, “Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Su-per-maaaan. Yes, it’s Superman. Strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with abilities far beyond those of mortal men.”
Mortal men. That was something that rang out to him. He was a mortal man past the prime of his life, which meant that he didn’t have as much time as he felt he deserved. Would this marriage split for good and Toby and Lee go to Penny and the Frenchman? He would be miserable. Although what would he do if they were to remain in his care? He’d have to hire help, a full-time maid who cooked and took care of the children. What those uptown snobs called au pairs. He’d have to go on dates, meet women, find a new wife who didn’t mind inheriting two young boys and an estranged teenage daughter. Assuming he won a custody battle, like the one he was anticipating in his imagination.
He knew if Penny didn’t change her mind and work things out, he would have to give up primary custody of the boys. It irritated him to know that he was too selfish with his own time to care for his children. Maybe this is what he inherited from his own father.
Helen settled in the spare bedroom they kept for her. It was still done up as a teenage girl’s room, with white lace curtains, a pink credenza and vanity mirror, four decorative Beatles pillows on the day bed. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. It was Penny’s idea to keep the room like this so Helen would feel right at home whenever she visited. He watched from the doorway as she unpacked her bags.
“It’s really good to have you home,” he said. “I’m glad you could come down and help me out for the weekend. I needed to see you before I’m off.”
“Dad, it’s fine. Finals are over and summer session hasn’t started. Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on? Are you guys separated? I can sense the tension in Lee’s face. He stiffens his jaw whenever he’s nervous.”
Helen was majoring in behavioral psychology, a subject she seemed quite suited for, in his opinion. She was an avid observer of human behavior. Not all children were like that. Some ignored the world, or if they knew the score they shut down. As a girl she could sense what was wrong in a situation even when the adults couldn’t quite grasp it. Helen was one of those children who would speak up when things were not quite right. He remembered her constantly begging him to apologize whenever he acted erratic with Barbara. Lee and Toby knew all about what their mother was up to, her behavior was evident, they were living with it, but it was in their nature to remain silent.
“It’s some kind of unspoken separation,” he told Helen. “We haven’t worked out the details because she’s impossible to talk to right now. Penny’s seeing somebody, and she moved out a few days before that affair commenced. Though I have to believe they were fooling around behind my back already. For how long I’m not certain.”
“Oh my God. I am floored, Dad. She was cheating on you?”
“Not was,” he corrected. “Is.”
“And the boys, to think what they must be going through. No wonder Lee is so tense. He’s stressed out.” Helen moved to the doorway and put her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I don’t know what to say.”
Right then he was sorry he hadn’t spent more time with Helen over the years. He had made a perfect human being with Barbara. The whole thing had been worth it just to see her now, comforting him when he felt so alone. Helen was warm and worldly—he owed that to Castle, for sending her to Europe with her mother at a young age. Not to mention Helen’s big heart. She had the face of a child on the verge of womanhood. And how selfless—she would drop everything, put herself aside and hop on the southbound train for hours to be with him. She was already twice the person he could ever be. And he had been such a lousy father to her. He wasn’t so sure he’d done anything so nice for anyone in his life without thinking what an inconvenience it was.
“Who is this new someone she’s seeing,” said Helen. “Has she told you?”
“No, but I know who it is. I have my ways of getting the information. That’s the reporter in me.”
“You haven’t done anything illegal, have you?”
“No, not at all. In fact, it was a detective friend, Eddie Sheenan, who found the bastard on my behalf.”
“Who is he?”
“An old friend. You met him when you were a baby.”
“I remember Eddie. I mean the guy Penny’s seeing.”
“His name is Arnaud Fleishman. The name’s not important. And what he does, I don’t know. I’m trying not to fixate on him. I’m trying to file it under none of my business.” They were interrupted. Toby shot past Eastman and into Helen’s room yelling “Help!” Lee came after, chasing him from behind.
“This is so unlike her,” Helen said.
“Help! He’s trying to kill me,” said Toby. “Stop him.” The boy hid behind his sister.
“But you’re Superman,” she said. “He can’t kill
you. There’s only one thing that can kill you and you can’t come by it on this planet, Superman.”
“Kryptonite!” yelled Lee as he went storming out of the room. Toby cringed with worry. Lee went along, stomping down the stairs, searching the house for anything that could be used as Kryptonite in their game.
He wanted to know her whole take on Penny, from the beginning. He trusted her, was interested to know what she had read about affairs, divorces, anything that could give him some comfort. He’d be damned if he turned to some self-help book. He still felt he could handle his problems on his own terms.
“If you want the Freudian treatment on what divorce can mean in the development of young boys, I can probably give you that,” said Helen. “Sure, splitting up is bad, it’s going to devastate them. Remember, I went through it. As far as predicting what this will mean for you and her, who knows? You have to give me more details. Here’s where we should probably be careful, because after all I’ll have to see her come Monday.”
“Don’t use that word. Divorce. I can’t stomach it. No one’s talking about divorce yet.”
“Well, Dad, are you going to live in some open marriage?”
“I’m not against it, if it means staying together. As long as this place doesn’t turn into some progressive commune.”
“In as limited but clear detail as you can, what did she say?”
“She said . . . she said that it was over. She claims I’ve fallen out of love! Me. Can you believe that? The reverse psychology that she’s putting on herself. She’s fallen for someone and she’s denying her feelings for me while also placing the blame on me. That I . . . I no longer love her. She had her suitcases already packed before we even talked. She had made up her mind before it even hit me what was going on. So there was nothing I could say or do, the argument was stacked against me. When I think of it now, I realize the work she put into this decision without me. If there wasn’t another man, then maybe I could have had a chance to convince her to stay. But no such luck. I drove her to New Jersey, that was that.”
Eastman Was Here Page 11
