A Bigamist's Daughter (11 page)

“I was crazy about him,” she cries. “I lived for the days he came home. Honestly, I think he spoiled me for any other man.”

“Is that why you’re not married?”

She laughs. “Could be. He’s as good an excuse as any. If I need an excuse.”

“There could be a correlation,” he says, seriously. “If your father represented impermanence, then anyone who wanted to marry you would mean permanence, just the opposite.”

“Very good, Mr. Freud,” she says dryly, although, suddenly, her stomach is dancing, as if she were a child again, playing hide-and-seek, hiding in someone’s dark, cool basement, feeling the searcher come near, stop, turn, walk away, and then walk back. “But not very original.”

“No,” he says, refusing to joke. “You should think about that. I should think about it too, if I’m going to get involved with you. I always look at a woman’s father; it’s usually a good indication of how she feels about men.”

“Jesus,” she says, laughing. “Do you want a character reference too? Birth certificate? Fingerprints?” She doesn’t tell him that his basic premise, that they are to get “involved,” is his first mistake.

“You see,” he says calmly, pointing at her. “You get touchy when you talk about your father, even though you say you liked him. And you called him a bigamist.”

“I was joking.” Her voice is higher than she wants it to be. Sounds touchy.

“Yes, but you see,” he says, “if you don’t like your father, then it says something to me about how you feel about men like him.”

She gets out of bed, goes to her pocketbook for a cigarette. Although she tries not to smoke in her apartment, this gives her something to do, something that might remind him of her professional status. “Perhaps my ‘touchiness,’ ” she tells him, blowing smoke through her nose, “has more to do with my dislike for you, not my father. You are, you know, being totally obnoxious, analyzing me when you know nothing about me, looking into my ancestry to discover my temperament. Jesus.”

He throws his head back, looks up at the ceiling. “I made you angry,” he says, his voice full of self-disgust.

She laughs at the ploy. No, you didn’t, she’s supposed to say. It’s okay, really, I don’t mind. At least you’re interested. “Maybe you should go,” she says instead.

He gets off the bed, stands by her, hands at his sides. Eyes mournful. “I’d like to stay.”

She shakes her head. “I think you should go.”

She walks to the closet, puts on her robe, goes to the love seat. “Really, it’s getting late.” She sits down, waiting.

Slowly, he puts on his jeans, his shirt, his sweater. Then he sits on the edge of the bed, before her, and puts his hand on her knee.

“Listen,” he says, “I’m sorry. Maybe I was prying, maybe I was being, I don’t know, calculating. But I thought maybe …” He rubs his thumb along her knee. “When you said your father was a bigamist.” He holds up his hand. “I know you were kidding, but you did say he was never home, so I thought maybe he could be a clue for how to end my book. I mean, Bailey has no ending, but your father, well, he might give me a different perspective. Maybe I could use something that happened to him, or even you.”

She doesn’t know if she should scream or laugh, slap him across the face or merely brush him aside. “It’s an unusual way to be used,” she says quietly.

He seems to take this as some sort of acquiescence because he smiles, shaking his head. “Oh, all writers do it,” he says. “They use everybody. You should know that. One of my teachers at Vanderbilt once said that a good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.”

She smiles at him. If she were to tell him now what Vista is about, what the fate of his masterpiece will be, what kind of “writer” he is, what kind of “editor” she is …

He moves his hand up her leg, grips her thigh.

“But I’m sorry I made you angry,” he says. And then, looking down, “I’ll go.”

She makes no move to stop him, but watches him put on his coat, his shoes.

He stands in the middle of her room, face once again sad. “Can I call you?” he asks. “At home?”

She nods, realizing she feels a certain disappointment. Not, she thinks, because he’s finally leaving, or because she’s made up her mind not to sleep with him again, but because the questioning has stopped. Or maybe because the questioning had nothing to do with her, was for himself, his book.

She nods, feeling again like the child hiding in the dark
basement, crouched on the cold linoleum behind an open door. The child who hears (her stomach dancing) the footsteps approaching, stopping nearby, turning, and then walking away, up the stairs to the light, to other, perhaps easier, discoveries. Feeling like the child in that minute when the hiding becomes being lost, forgotten.

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Call me. Please.”

Chapter 6

It was at a party, she began. I’ve told you the story, haven’t I?

I said that she had, a long time ago, and then realized she had not asked the question to avoid repeating herself, but merely to determine what part of my own memory I would bring to the story as she told it, the way a recently returned traveler might ask: Have you ever seen this part of the world? with the lights already out and the slide projector humming beside him.

I told her I didn’t remember it very well. We were on the beach, sitting on some large black rocks, a pale-blue comforter beneath us. It was where she liked to sit while it grew dark.

Betty had invited us. You remember poor Betty?

The
poor
was for a small patch of oil and rain that, six years before, had sent her car into a utility pole on Queens Boulevard as she drove from the beauty parlor to her semidetached ranch.

I said of course I remembered her. And remembered her again as heavy perfume and coats with fur collars and cuffs. As cigarette butts stained darkly with lipstick. As my mother’s eternal “girlfriend.” I remembered that she always clinked with
bracelets and seemed unaware of the thin husband who followed her into our living room; that she had spent the last hour of her silly life under a hooded dryer, tales of the Lennon Sisters on her lap, the tips of her small ears burning.

My mother pulled her legs to her chest, hugging her knees like an uncertain survivor. It was a girlish pose, made possible by her new thinness.

It was quite a party. Park Avenue, very posh.

I looked out over the slate-colored sand, the black water laced with foam, speckled with white gulls. I was, by then, already planning my steps once I got back to New York, and so, I suppose, with my own future once again imaginable I didn’t mind letting her tell the story. She was full of stories that summer, stories about Ward’s long devotion to his late mother, about some woman in town who’d had three husbands, about her childhood and mine—our past selves as useful as any third party in keeping us from discussing who and what we were now.

I sat slightly behind her and looked at her hair tangled around the thin rubber band, pulling from it, looping around it, a fine spray of gray sand, and wondered who and what now.

It was in a Park Avenue apartment with thick brocade furniture and rose-colored rugs. A skinny Irish woman passed around silvery trays of caviar and thin toast. A slick-haired butler, just like you see in the movies, stood behind the long table that served as a bar. The room was smoke-filled, full of laughter, high and deep.

She sat on a couch in a far corner of the room, her two girlfriends on either side of her, and when an older man, balding and well dressed, crossed the room and sat in the chair beside them, the three seemed to ripple with attentiveness, like birds waking.

He found them cute, adorable, perched there on that couch
like three little parakeets (he even made a joke about parakeets, since one of them, Dolores, my mother, wore a dress of powder blue) and sensing this, they answered all his questions pertly, precociously, chirping their names and the names of the companies they worked for, taking short drags on their cigarettes and quick sips from their martinis.

He promised them, if they were good and had not taken up with some young men by the end of the party, that he would take then all to Child’s for an early breakfast.

“There’s nothing,” he said, winking at Betty, the blonde, who sat closest to him and because of her hair was always considered the most forward of the three, “like having pretty girls for breakfast.” He patted the arm of his chair as if it were their collective knee.

When he walked back to the bar, Betty told them quickly, her hand over her mouth, that he was Samuel Southwick, the general manager, which meant that if he took them out for breakfast they would go in the company’s limousine.

At this, Janet and Dolores laughed, although Betty, newly sophisticated since her boss had invited her to this party and asked her to bring her prettiest girlfriends, merely touched her bright hair.

My mother looked over her shoulder at me. The poor man died of a heart attack just a few weeks later, she added. He died on the floor of the men’s room—the executive one of course—before anyone even got to him. It was a shame. But at least he was there that night.

As if his death was in some way redeemed by his presence at what was, for my mother, a fateful party. I remembered that she had included him in the story the last time, too.

Later, there was a commotion at the front door and four young men burst into the room, their faces flushed, ties pulled down and collars opened. One grabbed the skinny maid and
kissed her on the lips. The thin toast slid from her silver tray. People laughed.

“Jerry Case,” Betty whispered, her hand to her hair. “My boss’s son.”

The four men headed for the bar and the girls moved their heads a little and leaned against one another, trying to see.

Suddenly, Betty drained her glass and turned to Dolores. “Do you want to go to the bar with me?” Her breath reeked of peppermint, and my mother marveled at how skillfully she had gotten the Lifesaver from her purse to her mouth without anyone noticing. She laughed a little. “You can’t just walk up there.”

Betty looked at her a minute, considering, and then waved her hand. “Ask Janet.”

But Janet’s thin face was struck with horror at the mere suggestion. “You can’t do that,” she whispered.

Betty sighed, looked at her glass. “Then I’ll go by myself,” she said, touching her hair again, her talisman. But she made no move.

And then (here my mother’s voice grew rich), then, like the waters of the Red Sea or the skies over Bethlehem, the crowd of guests parted and she saw the young men headed their way. She heard Janet take in her breath and she delicately tapped Betty’s toe with her own. She could smell the three sweet odors of their perfumes rise into the air like an offering.

One sat in the chair beside Betty, another on the couch next to Janet, the third stood before them, and behind him the other. Dark hair and gray eyes, a trim mustache and a smile that was somehow pained, somehow lewd. A smile that seen alone, seen just as bright, slightly crooked teeth under a black mustache and a sharp nose could only be an evil smile, a nasty smile, but taken in with the whole face, especially the lovely, long-lashed eyes, was merely bemused.

A smile, I realized as I listened, no longer my father’s, but Bill’s, watching me from our bed, from across a table, from between my legs. Those blue eyes looking up, that smile—the teeth a little crooked, cruel, the sharp nose, the thick mustache—saying, Look what I can do to you. How I can change you, make you laugh, cry, scream.

The light out on the water was changing, playing silver to black to dark blue with each wave. I was tired of listening.

He stepped into the semicircle made by the couch and two chairs and fell on his knees before her. He took her hand from the lap of her pale-blue skirt and raised it to his mouth.

His teeth touched her skin and sent a chill up her neck, behind her ear.

“Madam,” he said, still holding her hand close to his lips, raising only his eyes. “You are lovely.” And his voice, soft, sincere, still British, was Ronald Colman’s or Errol Flynn’s, or even, her favorite, Walter Pidgeon’s. (She told me once as we stayed up until three A.M. to watch
Madame Curie,
that during the war, before she married, while my father was overseas, she would cry each time she heard Walter Pidgeon’s voice. She said she went to one of his movies nearly every night while my father was away. And she’d always cry.)

“You are so lovely,” he went on, “that I know not what else to do but to kneel before you. Forever.”

Here he swayed a little and his friends reached out to support him, laughing and saying, “Whoa!”

“I know not what else to do,” he said again, apparently pleased with the phrase.

And then he looked up at her, placed his hand over his heart.

“Marry me,” he said.

And, hearing her two friends laughing on either side of her, feeling them nudging her, pinching her (it may have been
a night’s drunk for the men, my mother told me, but to the girls, a life hung in the balance), my mother said, quite softly and quite seriously, “All right.”

And while the others cheered and declared this an official bachelor party, my father turned his secret smile on her again.