Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (18 page)

“So,” her father asked, once they had ordered, “how are things? You look lovely, by the way. That’s a beautiful dress.”

 

 

It was unfair
of him to ask how she was doing. William knew more than he let on. He knew, for example, that she could probably use extra money. Eva had put on one gallery show, in a deliberately spare gallery on a side street in Chelsea. The art paid infrequently; she worked other jobs to support herself. She did paperwork for an art museum. Weekends, she worked in a store that sold sex toys. When Debra told him this, he thought she was kidding, but it was true. It’s also a bookstore, Debra said, by way of consolation. He went to the store once, to see it for himself. The windows were papered in red and when he opened the door he was confronted with a table full of vibrators. He shut it quickly. Sometimes he thought her whole life was an elaborate series of barricades against him.

He knew about the girlfriend, though even Debra seemed uncertain about the current status of this relationship. They were not “roommates” anymore, but he was not sure what this meant, considering they were hardly roommates to begin with. He knew that Eva had been living in her own small studio for the past month, though a few years ago when he’d asked why she couldn’t just get a bigger place instead of paying rent in two places, neither especially nice, she’d insisted that she couldn’t sleep where she worked. She’d been living with her boyfriend at the time. When he’d brought this up with Debra, Debra said,
She just didn’t want to tell you that Cheese isn’t making her pay rent.
He had laughed at the absurdity of this deception. His daughter was dating a white boy with three earrings and a tattoo he said was symbolic of the Great Gatsby, a boy who insisted on going by his high school nickname of “Cheese” when his parents had given him the perfectly sensible name of Charles, and what Eva found most embarrassing was that she wasn’t paying any rent to live with him.

He wondered if Eva really thought he didn’t know these things, whether the charade was for his benefit or hers. Aside from being her father, he dealt with liars for a living, and Eva was no actress. He was not certain whether Eva had fully come to terms with her mother’s inability to keep secrets. Most likely, she just didn’t imagine that they still talked as often as they did. It made him sad sometimes to think that Eva maybe couldn’t understand this, the kind of bond you never lose. It was true, he had blamed Debra for things. He had plans, rules, which were disrupted in the first place by Debra leaving him, and in the second place by Eva herself. He’d had speeches and punishments prepared for the normal things: dating, drugs, slacking in school. Eva never seemed to get in trouble for the normal things. In high school she’d been arrested at a protest for standing too close to a group of kids throwing eggs at the cops. He didn’t have a speech for that. Only once had he gotten a call from the school. Debra was away at a conference and he had taken his vacation time to stay with Eva for the week.
Could someone come get Eva?
the secretary had said. She’d been suspended for biting another student.

“Biting?” he’d asked. Eva was a sophomore in high school. He hadn’t known fifteen-year-olds bit people.

“Biting,” the secretary had confirmed, so he’d gone to the school to sort things out. There wasn’t much sorting. Eva confessed to the biting and could offer no better reason than that the boy had been getting on her nerves.

“I value silence,” she’d said, “and he wouldn’t shut up.”

He’d had no choice but to take her back to the house and wait for Debra to get back that evening. Debra had gone to the school the next day, the first day of Eva’s suspension, and demanded further questioning of the boy. He eventually admitted to having grabbed Eva’s behind earlier in the day. Debra threatened the boy, the school, and the parents, and Eva’s suspension was reversed.

“Why didn’t you tell me he touched you?” William asked Eva later.

“Didn’t matter,” she’d said. “That wasn’t why I bit him.”

 

 

The arrival of
her salad saved Eva from further strained conversation about the state of her life. She’d already claimed, “I like living in the studio,” and “I’m getting so much work done.” She crunched on a crouton.

“I’m glad to see you eating,” her father said.

Eva sighed. “Daddy I’ve been eating for years. We eat together sometimes.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m just saying. You look good. Healthy.”

She was certain that her mother had encouraged him to say this sort of thing. Eva wished there were a Bat-Signal for the waiter, something to invite him to disrupt them. She hated the inexplicable things between them, the secrets her mother had given away, even though they weren’t hers to keep. She remembered all those school picture days and holidays and recitals, and she liked it better when her father thought of her that way. These days she couldn’t be around him without feeling that, without thinking he was waiting for her to win something and smile pretty.

She stabbed a tomato. She’d been eating normally since junior year of college, since she’d broken up with the last boyfriend her father had actually liked, the charming premed who’d told her she had cellulite and pretended not to hear when she threw up in his bathroom. He’d asked about that boyfriend all the time she was with Cheese, and twice as often when she was with Maya, until one day she’d said without explaining,
Do you want me to hate myself?
after which he’d never asked again.

When she was being honest with herself, which was more often than she was honest with other people, she admitted that Cheese was the first boy who’d ever made her feel beautiful, the first man in her life she was sure was never going anywhere no matter what she did, not that it kept her from testing him. When she talked to Lenny on the phone, or replied to Kim’s sporadic e-mails, or met Irene for drinks, dinner, and conversations that felt increasingly obligatory, she gave them a host of quite rational reasons for why she and Cheese would never really get back together. He was twenty-eight years old and seemed content to be a barista forever; he claimed to love her art but resented the time she spent on it; she had been the first of what was now a line of four artsy ethnic girlfriends in a row, making her feel a bit like he was collecting them the way her old ceramics instructor collected dolls of the world. But the truth was there was something about his availability that unsettled her, that made her want to know what it would finally take for him not to be there when she showed up unannounced.

She’d done it a month ago, the night she and Maya had broken up—thought maybe this time he would finally tell her she couldn’t do this to him anymore, that they both had to move on—but he’d opened the door and let her in. The girlfriend was still living in the apartment then, but she’d been gone for the weekend, meaning Eva got to curl herself into the corner of the saggy orange sofa she and Cheese had gotten for free off of craigslist two years earlier, and drink the cheap bourbon he poured her a shot of, and tell him what had happened.

What had happened, first, was that she and Maya had redecorated, taken to painting the walls in brightly contrasting colors, and then hanging brightly printed fabrics on the wall: red against the kitchen’s deep purple, orange against the green of the bedroom. What had happened a few days after the apartment’s transformation was Eva thought of the stark, yellowing walls of her father’s cramped apartment, the faintly moldy smell of them, the way he shrugged off her gentle suggestions that there were plenty of nicer places he could afford to move; he didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood. He would offer some excuse about the hassle of getting the couch down the narrow stairwell without ruining it, as if he couldn’t afford new furniture these days, or about liking his landlord, as if Phil would hold it against him if he moved out of a building that Phil himself had left years ago. But she never pressed, because under the flimsy excuses she guessed her father’s reasoning was something along the lines of
Why bother?
He saw most of the people he wanted to see at work, had built a network of friends who spent more time at the office than at their own homes anyway. The only person who came to see him on a semi-regular basis was Eva, and although there were only thirty blocks between them—eight subway stops, counting the back-tracking, but walkable, if you were in the mood for walking—it had been over a month since she’d last been to visit, and she almost never invited him to visit her.

When Maya floated in from work,
click-clicking
against the floors, smelling vaguely honeyed from her shampoo and mildly sweaty from her bike ride home from the after-school center where she was a social worker, Eva had already been shopping, planned a menu, bought decent wine instead of the cheap stuff she and Maya usually drank, and was a minute away from inviting her father over for dinner the next night, giving him time to get home before she called.

“What’s the occasion?” Maya asked. She dropped her shoulder bag on the kitchen counter and held Eva around the waist, planting a soft kiss on the side of her neck.

“I’m inviting my dad over for dinner tomorrow,” said Eva. She could feel Maya’s arms stiffen, then drop from around her.

“Great,” said Maya. Her shoes clicked backward, away from Eva. Eva turned to face her, watched her arms fold across her body. “Does that mean I have to make plans elsewhere?”

“Who said that?”

“Your father hates me.”

“He doesn’t. He just doesn’t understand—us.”

“Maybe he’d understand better if you stopped introducing me as your roommate. He knows you’re bullshitting him.”

“Maya—I’m trying. Everybody’s parents aren’t so awful that they can tell them to go fuck themselves and move on with their lives, and everybody doesn’t have a foster mom who owns a berry farm upstate and makes her own tie-dye skirts and is thrilled to meet her daughter’s girlfriend. He’s lonely, and he’s my father, and he’s never done anything
bad
to you. To me, either, for that matter.”

“Is that the standard for parenting these days?”

“Maya, don’t. I don’t need you to fix this. I’m not one of your kids at the center.”

“No, you’re not. For one thing, my kids at the center can admit to themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, their parents will never love them the way they are. But you sit there and make garlic bread like a moron if you want to—he’s still going to look at you like the last time you did anything right, you were eleven years old. You will never be what he wants.”

It didn’t matter how many times Maya apologized, or how much she’d cried when Eva came with Cheese to move the handful of things in the apartment that actually belonged to her. It didn’t matter that Eva admitted, when pressed, that she’d been out of line bringing Maya’s parents into it. There were moments when you knew things about what was inside of people you didn’t want to, knew how deeply they could disappoint you. There was love, and then there was suicide—and then there was whatever it was she had with Cheese. A place to go whenever she needed it, but where she’d never feel good about being. They’d spent the night she left Maya, and most of the following morning, in bed together, until there was the sound of the phone ringing, and with a glance at the caller ID, Cheese took the call and headed into the living room with the phone. Eva had been ignoring the new girlfriend all morning, but the bedroom suddenly seemed full of things that belonged to her: a woman’s belt, a paint-splattered T-shirt, a bottle of orange nail polish on the dresser. She turned the sound up on the television. On CNN, green bombs were falling somewhere, and Eva felt more chastened by the blurred night vision carnage than she had by the token reminders that another woman lived here now.

Cheese came back into the room a few minutes later. “Kate,” he said. “She’s upset about something. She was visiting her parents for the weekend, and I guess they had a fight. Eva—”

Eva exhaled. “If you’re going to console distraught women all day, you’re going to have to be more gentle about getting rid of them.”

“Look, she won’t be back tonight. But tomorrow—”

“So I can stay until the replacement gets here?”

“Eva—”

“No, fair is fair. But you might have at least been more original. Really, another artistic brown girl? It’s like—”

“It’s not like. It’s not like anything.”

“Right, she’s a painter. And a different kind of brown. Watch, though, Arab is the new black.”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

Now?
Eva thought. She could not remember the last time things had not been ridiculous.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

She could have stayed, she knew that. She was Cheese’s first Meaningful Girl, and she had left him. She could have stayed the night and been sitting there eating breakfast when the new girlfriend came back if she’d wanted to. When she’d left, she’d thought of it as a grand gesture toward Kate, the kind of supercilious magnanimity that was usually out of her reach. She came back again a week later. The silence of her sparse Washington Heights studio had been driving her crazy, and the noisy parade of life outside was no relief. She’d been expecting Cheese to awkwardly ask her to leave, or worse yet, to awkwardly invite her in and expect her to awkwardly socialize with Kate without letting on that anything had changed. Eva was surprised by the intensity of the relief she felt when Cheese told her Kate had gone to California for a few weeks
to think about their relationship.
She preferred not to focus on what it meant.

 

 

William wondered if
there was a way to tell Eva how badly she needed him without insulting her. He worried that the best years of her life were going to look like the last few decades of his, that she’d be too proud to admit she needed him now, needed someone to let her put herself together, get a real job, go back to school maybe, find a decent boyfriend she could present in public, one who didn’t leave her looking so disoriented all the time. While he was phrasing and rephrasing the invitation in his head, the waiter appeared with their food. He leaned over Eva a little too closely when putting her pasta in front of her, and gave her an overly friendly smile.
Watch it, that’s my daughter,
William wanted to say, but he had never been able to say that about Eva. He didn’t know what to protect her from, and anyway, she seemed to have taken her protection into her own hands some time ago.