Tom turned back to Steve. “Okay?”
Steve seemed oblivious, and so Tom turned back to Tina and winked.
“When he gets here, Ted will probably want to order everything on the dinner menu, so we might wish to start modestly.”
Tina acknowledged the message about the forthcoming guest, and then withdrew, motioning as she did so towards Elizabeth, blonde, buxom, beautiful Elizabeth. There were lots of clients who frequented Fabergé Restaurant regularly on Elizabeth’s account alone, and who tipped accordingly. Tina, sensing a revolt amongst the other servers, decided to pool all of the tips together, and then divide them up equally. She knew that Elizabeth pocketed more than her share by not declaring the full extent of her bounty; but she also knew that the gross intake amongst the servers was double what it had been prior to her arrival, so it was only fair that she should bring a little more bacon home to placate her anxious, insecure husband.
Someday soon Elizabeth would cheat on her poor man, if only to punish him for his insecurity. On that day, she would pay him back for having suspected her for all those days and months and years of silent recriminations for acts for which she was innocent. She’d wonder why it had taken her so long, and then she’d descry the fact that those rushed torrents of passion weren’t worth the arguments, and didn’t justify the betrayal. The cycles of life, passion, and fertility, the production of eggs, and the wilting of desire, and then resurrection in the form of new life, fertilized by the decaying shells that encase my tender self.
Chapter 13
Tom and Steve were now in intense conversation, or was it negotiation? Fabergé Restaurant was no stranger to backroom, dining room, and even bathroom discussions, contracts, and betrayals. Deals, deals, deals. Tom was animated, Steve, very cool, but very serious. He was used to Tom making the pitches, it’s what he did, it’s what he had done since their time together as undergraduates. But this time it was more serious than the usual fare. Ever since Steve had met Tom in college, where they shared a dormitory apartment and, later on, one floor of a small house, he had admired Tom’s enthusiasm. But he also knew that it had all been too easy for Tom, and that he was now looking to make it all feel real.
Steve observed Tom intensely; it had been a long time since they’d been together like this. He looked African American, like his mother, but Tom’s father was actually from the Philippines, a small town called Meycauayan, where jewels had been mined and jewelry fabricated since the late Stone Age. In the sixteenth century efforts came to be focused on precious jewelry, culminating with a large diamond trade. Tom’s father, who was known as Rommel, was born and raised on a sizeable property there, and had known since childhood that people in that region were involved with jewels, and especially diamonds. He didn’t land up exploring the lucrative world of diamonds and jewels, though, despite his substantial inheritance and the value of the land upon which he’d grown up. Instead, he came to be charged with the responsibility of raising Tom, single-handedly, after Tom’s mother had died during complications in childbirth. As a result, Rommel, who was destined to become a major international dealer of precious stones, instead withdrew from the marketplace altogether. For a long time there was speculation as to what he had done with the huge storehouse of goods he had inherited, but years of silence quieted the banter amongst traders, and it was assumed that the stock had been liquidated somewhere along the way, and Rommel, heretofore a major player on the scene, would never re-emerge as a force in the market.
Steve knew Tom’s story well and always thought that its details accounted for Tom’s obsessions, including the obsession that led him to Fabergé Restaurant. Rommel had met Danielle in a restaurant after a day of negotiating sales for rough-cut diamonds, during one of his then-frequent trips to the head office of his company in Atlanta. It was a case of the proverbial “love at first sight” for both of them. They had but five days together, but they carried on an extensive correspondence subsequently, and Steve had even read some of it because of the very few objects Tom had from his early years in the Philippines: a package of his parents’ words and a pile of letters wrapped up and tied with some kind of stems from plants indigenous to Meycauayan. It was through the words they’d shared, and the vision that each held of those precious days together, that Tom’s parents came to be committed to one another and plans were made for a life together.
On Rommel’s return trip to the US, eight weeks after meeting Danielle, he learned that Danielle had taken ill, too ill to travel. And in the course of the routine exam, the doctor pronounced that she was in the grip of a nefarious infection that had recently been identified as being the result of a class of viruses emerging in the face of heavy use of prescription-strength antibiotics. As a child, Danielle had been given heavy doses for recurrent ear infections that upset her sleep and caused her to miss school for prolonged periods, sometimes a week or more at a time. They eventually subsided, although she was regularly inflicted with flu-like symptoms that seemed ever more difficult to treat with regular prescription medicines. And so a childhood affliction, probably minor in its implications, had become an adult problem with rather serious consequences, as Danielle found herself in need of ever-stronger antibiotics to treat ever-more-frequent bouts of the flu.
Tom had spoken to Steve about his parents’ romance as though it was the very picture of ideal love, the kind of love that occurs when two people know as certainly as they’d ever known anything, that they were meant to be together.
“This I, too, will find someday,” Tom would tell Steve.
Steve never doubted it. The story that Tom recounted to Steve was that when Rommel had met Danielle, who was working as a hostess in a chic Atlanta restaurant, she was in a phase of perfect health, and as a consequence was perhaps a little more open to a handsome foreigner’s advances, and a little more beautiful than usual, which in Tom’s mind could only be explained with reference to Homer’s Helen of Troy, Yeats’s Maude Gonne, or Dante’s Beatrice, the women he’d met in the course of the liberal arts degree that helped teach him such things. Rommel and Danielle went out together on the very night they met, after she accepted, in the course of his paying the bill, an invitation for a drink after her shift. They slept together on the following evening, and he was impassioned to distraction during the rest of his trip. Very little business was conducted, despite his intentions. A lot of love was consumed, however, and Rommel returned home to Meycauayan entirely consumed by the passion, the lust, and the excitement that she provoked in him.
Danielle, as it turns out, felt exactly the same. Tom told this story as though to justify his own precociousness, his notorious sexual proclivities, and his infamous audacity. Strange how the principles and the parameters of our behavior is dictated by our parents, Steve had once suggested to Tom, on an evening following a course on Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics. Tom had thought that funny, and the two of them had continued to (mis)use this label, applying it to all sorts of experiences they had in college, and beyond. Principles became the lust that Tom had when he’d go out at night, parameters the range of beauty represented by the women he’d encounter. Principles were the array of inner abilities Steve drew from for his coveted tennis game, parameters the player he’d challenge in order to represent same abilities.
Tom’s narrative about his parents continued, repeated regularly to his roommates, in those quiet hours between wakeful restlessness and sleep. With Tom’s father back in Atlanta, and the prospects for his mother joining him back in the Philippines rather bleak, they both felt that they needed to solidify their plans. In particular, since Rommel wasn’t slated to return to Atlanta for another few months, on account of important negotiations for substantial sales of some of the diamond inventory that he’d inherited from his father, they made plans to marry quickly. This would ensure that the child would be legitimate, and that they’d be able to secure legal status for him, or her, in the US. All worked out to plan, and Rommel was able to come back to Atlanta regularly.
Danielle’s health improved, and the pregnancy, if anything, seemed to give her radiance and heightened desire for Rommel. Their lovemaking was nearly constant through all of the visits, and right up to the end, when, after a particularly exciting afternoon under the blaring sunlight of a July day, her water broke.
Tom described this scene with great detail, proclaiming that it was his own decision to break out of the womb, since it was becoming far too noisy. When he had first heard this story, Ted, always the most cynical of the three roommates, had told Tom that in fact his parents were just trying to get rid of him, and thought to drown him. Tom’s reaction was swift and brutal. He had stood up, and threatened to kill Ted where he sat. Steve, who was trained in martial arts, was put on high alert, ready to lash out to both Tom and Ted, if only for the excuse to display his wares. Principles, the inner ability, and parameters, the event that led to their being manifested in a particular way.
When things calmed down, Ted learned why Tom had reacted so fiercely and, not for the first time, or the last, regretted his well-honed sarcasm. Tom continued his story. There had been no cause for concern. Danielle was due in two weeks. But then, in the midst of what seemed a perfectly normal childbirth, as Tom peered into the world that awaited him from the warmth of his mother’s core, her blood pressure suddenly plummeted, and as the doctor’s hastened Tom’s exit, she died. Rommel was not in the room during the labor, and so when the doctor emerged he uttered just a few carefully chosen words: “We have saved the child.”
Rommel stared into the doctor’s eyes, searching for meaning. He could not understand why news of the birth of his child would be conveyed in such a fashion.
“We have saved your child, sir.” Hesitation. “But not your wife. Not your wife. I’m so sorry.”
Rommel stood in the hospital hallway, a few steps away from the door to the operating room where his son hollered, while his wife slept the eternal sleep, never to enjoy motherhood, never to live with Rommel in Meycauayan, never to fulfill the dreams they had whispered and called out during their long hours of lovemaking, never, never to be together again. Never.
All of this had occurred in a way that betrayed what Tom’s father thought of as “the plan.” The plan predicted that Rommel’s family would enjoy perfect happiness upon this earth. And there had never been reason to ever believe otherwise. Everything had always gone according to plan, confirming its existence, until everything didn’t go according to plan. How was it possible that his beautiful, passionate, powerful, magnificent, young wife should die giving birth to a beautiful baby boy? And how could she die when every possible medical service was available in this modern, sprawling American hospital? Nobody knew, nobody could convey to Tom’s father what could have gone wrong that day, except that there were some inconclusive studies about the virus that she carried and the fate she endured.
Whatever it was, on that day she died, and so, too, did whatever dreams Rommel had for Danielle, for the family he would build with her, for the jewels and joys with which he would shower her. She died. And after that day, Tom was all that his father had left, and Tom’s father was intent upon holding onto him, if only for his own survival, if only, indeed, until he could relinquish his parental responsibilities and rejoin his wife. Tom’s father came to believe that the plan did indeed exist, but it had elements that he’d misunderstood, most notably the one that said it was to be fulfilled in the other world.
Tom’s description of his youth was forever some odd combination of what he remembered, and what he’d added to those memories. “I never got to know my mother,” he had said. Ted felt sick to his stomach. “And I never had a sibling.”
Steve, hardly the sentimentalist, had spoken for himself and for Ted, though, when he said, spontaneously and without any hesitation, “Tom, you’ve got us. You’ve got us, Tom.”
This seemed to all of them a monumental announcement, uttered on that college evening in the depth of the night. But Steve was also the pragmatist and the clearheaded thinker, serious and tender when the situation called for it. “Why did you come here?”
“Here?”
“Why did you come to the United States? Why here? Your father . . .”
“Georgia. I don’t think I could ever go to Georgia, because it’s where my mother died. And my dad couldn’t be there either, but needed time before, well, returning home, and so did I, since I had some kind of jaundice or something. Anyhow, instead of staying near the hospital, he got into his car and drove to the next biggest town—Nashville. Someone who had seen him grieving in the waiting room, an African-American pastor, or priest or minister, told him about a place of healing and calm in a little community in Nashville right near some projects, downtown. My dad went there and stayed for two weeks. He once told me that it was the safest place he’d ever been, a place of love and healing. He, I don’t know, I think he got to know a bunch of people who lived in those projects, especially some of the kids, and he said that without them, and without me, well, anyhow. He waited for me to get better in that little community, and because of that community he loved the United States. He said that those kids were what the United States could be, and the hospital in Atlanta was what it had turned into. Atlanta was cold, sterile, private, corporate, murderous, and he had experienced the opposite in this little community in the Nashville hood.”
“Did he ever go back there?” asked Steve.
“No, he never did. He said that he’d bring me there, but, well . . .” He paused. “It’s funny guys,” continued Tom, emboldened by their closeness, “I feel like my memories are a weird combination of stuff I remember and stuff I made up about things I did with my mom.” He paused. “I feel like it was all my fucking fault.”
Ted and Steve had rushed to Tom’s emotional rescue, to no avail. No matter what they said, and no matter how hard Tom’s father had tried, Tom inherited the guilt for the death not only of his mother, but also the sister, the brother, the amazing family that the plan had promised his father. In Tom’s mind, he had committed original sin: he killed his maker. And to punish him, the universe had conspired to murder his own sister, his own brother, his entire family, a family that was never given the chance to be conceived. It was so unfair.
Worse still, Tom, totally unaware of his actions, had murdered his own mother in the painful labor that she had undertaken in order to expel him from her garden. This alone had earned him a tainted place upon this earth. For years, this is the weight that Tom carried with him, in a childhood that was tainted by absence and sadness and unfulfilled dreams, especially those that his father described to him as being unfulfilled, aborted. Tom would also learn from his classmate’s mother that his father had folded back into himself after her death, spending his next fifteen years a recluse, rarely leaving the homestead, never taking another wife, or even lover. And so Tom came to inherit the guilt for his father’s symbolic death as well, realizing one day that not only did he know nothing of his mother, but that he’d also never really known his father either. He lived with a pale embodiment of a man, a father, a husband, someone who could have been.
When he was old enough to discuss such things, Tom learned that his father harbored ever-greater resentment for her death, not towards Tom, but towards Atlanta, towards Georgia, towards health care, and, moreover, towards everyone who is involved in the perpetuation of the health care business for their own enrichment. But he also had this strange American Dream, connected to Nashville, a vision of all that was so healing for him there, and all that could have been had she only survived, had she only given birth amongst that little community instead of in one of those gleaming hospital towers that perpetuates inordinate spending by sickeningly wealthy people.
And so Tom’s father felt that he and his deceased wife, and his son Tom, had all been stripped of the great and exciting plans for what was to be his grand and august family by, of all things, a fancy hospital in America. Tom heard this repeated endlessly as he grew up, although he had no experience of whateve
r his father meant by “august,” because they had always lived together modestly, and his father, other than gardening, seemed to quite literally have no interests, no passions, no friends, no pastimes. Tom’s father fed his son, helped him off to school, stayed at home, greeted him upon his arrival home at the end of each day, cooked modest dinners, read quietly in the evening, and went to sleep. This was quite literally all Tom had ever known about domestic life, and he assumed, wrongly, that on this account he had come to know all that there really was to know about his father.
In time, though, the story of his mother’s death grew more complex and troubling. Through scattered bits of information that emerged regarding that fateful day, Tom learned that the hospital in which his mother had died had been identified as treating black and white patients differently, to the detriment, of course, of black patients. Medications that could have been used for her condition were not prescribed, experts who understood the effects of the virus she carried were not consulted, and, despite Rommel’s resources, financial and otherwise, precautions weren’t taken in advance of the labor that could have saved her life. And so her death gave birth to a sense of outrage in Tom, and learning about the circumstances of her suffering provided him with the desire to learn more about what had happened to his mother; and then, as a mixed-race black/Filipino boy, he sought to understand what it meant to be an ostracized person in America, and why it was that even people with his father’s resources were subjected to marginalization on the basis of race. Both of these messages resonated profoundly in Tom, feeding his passions and his obsessions.
What happened at the end of his father’s life proved that much remained unexplained, to the very end, even as it did explain Tom’s hand-stitched, custom, Italian-leather jacket with lamb’s wool lining. Tom’s father had explained to him early on that he had a chosen spot on their land where he was to be buried, and, presciently, he died when Tom was seventeen and still living at home. The instructions for burial were so precise that without the slightest hesitation, and even before he could begin the process of grieving, Tom set out about to bury his father. He had been specifically instructed not to call a doctor if his father died at home, and, because his father had died of what was evidently a massive coronary, there would have been no possibility of Tom taking any useful steps to save him. And since doctors, hospitals, medication, and the whole industry of preserving life weren’t realms upheld with any enthusiasm by Tom or by his father, the decision to remain mute in the face of a medical emergency wasn’t difficult to take.
Hatched Page 12
