Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (25 page)

These missives are all the more poignant for me now because I know that he was suffering from a fatal disease. He was the one facing his mortality and living in a community steeped in death. The week before I left for France, Issan Dorsey, Hartford Street’s abbot and Dad’s beloved spiritual teacher, died of AIDS.

Despite the loss of his friends and countless acquaintances, Dad spent page after page attending to me in far-off Paris, especially when I worried over the idea of a life without him.

I asked Theo whether he thought it a good idea if you stay with me when you come to Paris. “I don’t know,” he answered, “you have 6 flights of stairs and your dad’s not that young anymore.” I started thinking about not having you around to give me your words of wisdom and unconditional love . . . I ended up going into the bathroom and weeping until I regained control. I didn’t feel like crying in front of Theo. That’s not to say we’re not close. In fact, I become more in love with him each day. I just don’t feel like going into the details of your
maladie
. And of course, your sexual preference.

When I wrote this letter in April 1991, Dad had just had a tube put into his chest so he could give himself infusions of ganciclovir, prescribed for the CMV retinitis stripping him of his vision. “I feel like both Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster,” he joked. But he was sad too. He wrote how he would never swim again, would never take a sauna again. But I, an oblivious twenty-year-old, didn’t respond to these reports or even consider the effect of these losses on his morale. Instead it was he who did the heavy lifting, the hard work of calming and distracting me from that terrible inevitable.

As for my health, you needn’t weep until I die. I mean I know you’ll die sometime soon too, everyone will, but I needn’t focus on that. You needn’t either. What you tell Theo about my health is up to you. I think the more honest you can be (esp. with those close to you) the happier one can be. Secretiveness = loneliness. You could tell him I have health problems w/o going into details – like I have retinitis & lung trouble or something. The girl in Femme Nikita doesn’t tell her boyfriend anything about her past, esp. that she’s an assassin – but he finds out anyway. And still loves her.

It was easy for me to minimize the decline of Dad’s health because his letters were still so full of humor:

Odd, the more trouble my health is in, the better my spirits. I can hardly read or see to recognize anyone on the street so I make jokes about it, say it’s like being on an acid trip. What else can one do?

In another letter:

I’m getting fat since I stopped smoking. I did weigh an average of 145 lbs. now it’s a bit over 150. I can hardly squeeze into any of my jeans. But I’m going to keep all these smaller jeans cuz I may end up w/ wasting syndrome sometime & they’ll be baggy on me. (a little joke, hee hee).

I didn’t respond to these reports beyond the occasional “Please be healthy” because I was reluctant to invest in them any more power than they already had. I also hoped that if I ignored this subplot in our story, it might recede and I could freely enjoy my Paris adventures unhindered. For the most part, this strategy worked. That is, until my father came to visit me in the summer of 1991.

19.

W
HEN MY FATHER
came to visit me in Paris that June, I was already living the life of
une femme
, a woman, or what I then considered the life of a woman. I’d completed my junior year and now, at twenty, I was in my first serious relationship, living with a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman in his apartment in a mostly Muslim section of the 18th arrondissement. Théophile was the youngest in a good Catholic family of six but considered himself
branché
, “plugged in.” When we started dating, he told me he liked the Smiths, adding, “I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside.”

Over my six months dating and two months living with Théophile, or Theo, as I called him, I transformed myself into a model French girlfriend. I cultivated my own version of the BCBG style—less
coincé
, more retro. I wore my hair in a neat bob, with flirty dresses and lipstick, and a polka-dot scarf knotted around my neck just so. And every night I prepared us a three-course dinner: appetizer, main course, followed by a dessert or cheese plate. I enjoyed finding recipes in the small paperback cookbook given to me by Theo’s elegant, perfumed mother.

It wasn’t so difficult to prepare a decent trout almondine or chicken dijonnais with crème fraîche, I discovered, as long as you had fresh ingredients. I loved shopping at the outdoor markets, planning our meals for the week, and making sure the bowl on the front table was always full of fresh fruit.

Living with Theo, I cultivated a fantasy of my adult self: independent, sophisticated, mature. We played the Sundays and the La’s on our stereo, their dreamy pop harmonies filling the apartment, providing the soundtrack to our still new love. I felt that everything was as it should be.

One June afternoon, sitting in our living room, I wasn’t planning a meal but sifting through a stack of Paris hotel guides, while Theo sat in the sun-dappled kitchen drinking his morning
café
and reading
Libération
. Applying myself to this task with the same rigor I’d applied to my research papers earlier in the year, I copied numbers out of
Paris Pas Cher
into a small notebook, phoned each hotel, noting their rooms’ availability and cost, and then marked a neat check next to those that had a refrigerator guests could use. Dad needed a refrigerator for his medication.

I’d been urging Dad to visit all year. “What I’d really like for Christmas is
you
,” I wrote to him. But he kept insisting he hadn’t the health or money to travel. Finally he booked tickets for May with his friend Alex, but had to cancel this trip because of a complication related to his CMV retinitis. Determined to visit, he rescheduled the trip for June against the advice of his doctor and friends.

MY FATHER
was a rich man in Paris. In San Francisco we’d skimped and saved. No piece of furniture was bought new; everything was found at garage sales or marked down, as were our clothes. But in Paris my father was loose with his francs, buying any blouse or dress that caught my fancy. “I like to see you in nice clothes,” he told me as I posed and turned in the shop mirrors. We went out every night and he barely looked at the check before spreading his francs like Monopoly money across the tabletop.

What my father didn’t spend that week he put in an envelope and handed to me before taking a cab to catch his flight home to San Francisco. There was this feeling that we’re in Paris—this world is not our world. This is not real money. Why worry?

But on our first afternoon together in Paris, when we met for a coffee in Montmartre, I didn’t yet know the flush side of my father. I explained to Dad how it was cheaper to take a coffee standing at the bar than to sit at a table. I was still tight with money, still used to being a student. But he wanted to sit. His legs were tired. He was easily tired that trip. So we sat on the terrace outside. The sun was shining, so every other seat was taken. The cobblestone streets were stacked with parked
motos
, the Vespas that young Parisians drove everywhere. The angry wasp buzz of their engines echoed through the neighborhood’s narrow alleys and hills. We sat at Café des Abbesses across from a blinking merry-go-round. The trees were in bloom. The summer air warmed me and I felt good.

Our plan was to walk up to Sacré-Coeur, but Dad didn’t know if he was up for the hill and the many flights of stairs. “It’s not far from here,” I said, splitting a cube of sugar for my espresso. He sat tapping the saucer of his
café crème
with his narrow, cigarette-stained fingers.

“That’s okay,” he said, looking at the table.

I suggested we go to the Musée d’Orsay, my favorite Paris museum, the next day. That semester I’d studied nineteenth-century history along with the French realist writers Flaubert and Balzac. I enjoyed seeing the art of that period against the literary and historical context I knew so well.

“That’s okay,” he said again.

He’d already seen the Musée d’Orsay. Just as he’d already seen Notre-Dame and the Musée Picasso and Place des Vosges and everywhere else I suggested we visit.

“I’ve seen them all,” he said, then after a pause added, “I’m here to see you.”

He spoke his words calmly as he sipped his
café crème
. And for a moment I felt uncomfortable, just as many times in my life my father’s love left me feeling uncomfortable—how at thirteen I had snarled “What are you smiling at?” when I caught him grinning at me with big eyes across the dinner table, and he had answered, “I’m just amazed that I’ve raised this beautiful young woman.”

His love always surprised me. It could be jarring, because it would spring from nowhere and certainly seemed to bear no relationship to my actions. It was as though my father loved me for just sitting there in front of him, before his eyes, and returning his gaze, listening to him, and speaking. This was how he looked at me that day at the café. It was too easy.

It had been a year since my last visit with Dad and I was careful to notice any changes in his appearance. He still wore his round tortoiseshell glasses. He still wore his hair cut short and dyed brown, which made him look younger than his forty-seven years. He still had his smudgy moustache and goatee, which he kept trimmed with scissors from the kitchen drawer. He even still had weight to his face and body. But after we left the café, he stopped every other block to catch his breath. And he talked. He talked a lot, mostly about the past. I remember passing through the turnstile of the Métro back to my apartment and my father’s mouth just going.

“I didn’t really have my first relationship until I was in grad school myself. Sometimes it takes a while to get your self-esteem up for it. But I always had lots of interests—reading, art, travel, getting involved in politics—where I could get my satisfaction, so when I
did
get interested in someone, like your mom, there was something to be interested in . . . Why’s this not working?”

“Dad, you’re putting in the wrong ticket. You have to use a new one. Try again.”

“A main thing your mom and I had in common, at first, was the antiwar movement.
There, that’s better.
We were in a socialist group that sold militant newspapers. Your mom was the top salesperson!”

I nodded. Smiled. And, looking around, felt embarrassed. The French have a habit of openly staring at anyone who stands out, and Dad was standing out. I wanted to explain his behavior but barely understood it myself. It was as if his life were passing before his eyes and he wanted to describe everything he saw, now, before dementia stripped him of his memories. But I didn’t have a tape recorder, and I was still not attuned to this idea—
his end
.

Aside from his fatigue, and the cooler of medical supplies we lugged from the airport to the hotel, and his rambling voice, I was struck by a certain gentleness in his face. It still startles me in a photo we took the next afternoon with Théophile at the Jardin des Plantes. Dad is standing in a window, awash in sun, wearing an R. Crumb t-shirt and a blue denim shirt, unbuttoned and rolled at the sleeves. As he looks at me through the camera’s eye, his head is tilted slightly back, as though he’s both surprised and delighted that I am capturing him on film. Then there’s that sweetness. It was as if all his rough edges had been filed down—all the negativity, the irritability and know-it-all-ness that bothered me when I was a teenager. It was as if AIDS had reduced Dad to his essential core, which was gentle and good.

When I look at this photo now, I have a powerful desire to swoop in and protect that sweetness. I want to wrap him in a blanket and feed him hot tea. I want to apologize too, for all the trouble I caused: for my disrespect and the petty meanness I sometimes resorted to, wanting to hurt him because I was hurting. I want to make him happy.

But I wasn’t capable of these feelings then. I still wanted him to make
me
feel better, to keep
me
warm and safe. I believed he owed me that security. And his coming to Paris the way he did, lugging that cooler of medical supplies, planning to tell me what he planned to tell me, felt like betrayal.

AFTER OUR VISIT
to the Jardin des Plantes, Dad, Theo, and I went out for an early dinner at a Greek restaurant. It was still warm and sunny when we sat down on the terrace. We drank sweet white wine from a carafe, listened to the music pouring out of a nearby window, and watched the neighborhood Greek restaurateurs accosting potential customers as they passed in the street. Dialogue between Theo and Dad was stilted but friendly. They shared an interest in history and Baudelaire, but the level of Dad’s French and Theo’s English prevented anything but superficial conversation. When Theo excused himself to use the bathroom, I turned to Dad and asked him what he thought of my first real boyfriend. Dad stared into the middle distance before answering, “Bourgeois. You’re both much more bourgeois than I was in my twenties. But I’m okay with that.”

My face crumpled in disapointment before he added with a chuckle, “No, no. Theo seems very nice. But don’t you think it’d be hard to marry someone from another culture?”

Wait, what? At twenty I hardly knew what I was going to do for the rest of the summer, let alone with my French boyfriend. But before I could answer, Theo returned and we changed topics. Later, after dinner, we walked my father to the closest taxi stand, and as we crossed the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain, my father turned to me, looked into my eyes, and said, “I only wish I could see you as a harried mother.”

THEO WAS AT WORK
when Dad and I took the train to the grounds of Château Fontainebleau. We were sitting outside, near the spot where Emperor Napoleon bid farewell to his guard before going into exile in 1814, when my father finally revealed his news: “Last November I was diagnosed with pneumocystosis.”

“I know, Dad. You wrote me about it. It’s like a really bad cold. Sounded awful. I’m sorry.”

“Pneumocystosis is a form of pneumonia. PCP pneumonia. Where before I had ARC—AIDS-related condition—this diagnosis means I now have full-blown AIDS.”

I looked around the magnificent grounds of Fontainebleau, which stretched out across the horizon. The perfect order of the landscape was marred only by a huddle of tourists ambling by, taking pictures and shading their eyes from the severe noon sun. I looked back at Dad, who was staring intently at me with gentle green eyes. His hands were busy, moving in the air, explaining. Though I knew he was talking to me, I felt as if I were far away. I imagined myself joining that clumsy crowd hurrying back to their bus. I could see myself boarding the bus and then watching the father and daughter talking on the bench as the bus pulled away.

“Pneumocystosis means full-blown AIDS,” he repeated. He might only have a year to live. Or six months. “You have to make arrangements to graduate early and move home,” he said, “now that I have full-blown AIDS.”

Such a strange expression, I thought to myself: “full-blown AIDS.” Why “full-blown”? I imagined being blown away, as in, “Wow, that really blew me away.” Or I thought of an orchid in the summer, its petals expanded to their full blossom, exploding with gaudy color, sticky nectar, and scent. I pictured something blown apart, like a dandelion, fully blown until nothing is left but the naked stem.

Before that trip to Paris, my father’s illness was just a series of letters—HIV, ARC, AIDS—and the letters he wrote me describing the ailments that attended these acronyms.
CMV-blah-blah-itis. Pneumo-blah-blah.
No matter how much detail he provided about his condition, these were still abstract concepts scribbled onto a page. I returned the letters to their envelopes just as I put away the feelings these letters provoked. I wrote off Dad’s ailments as just more complaining.

We were both famous complainers, after all. When we lived together in San Francisco, I bought him a card for his fortieth birthday depicting the front cover of a fictitious magazine,
Bad Mood Monthly
, with headlines like “143 Ways to Say ‘I Don’t Like It,’” “How to Make Your Loved Ones Feel Like Hell,” and “Whining & Dining.” We kept that card stuck on our fridge with a magnet for years. It was a playful reminder of our cranky natures. Calling Dad from my NYU dorm, I entertained him with tales of my miserable trip to the A&P and the walk home in the spitting rain, my arms straining from the weight of the grocery bags. He always laughed in the right places. Complaining was our inside joke.

Not until he visited me that summer in Paris did I see how these ailments he detailed were not only real, but as his daughter they were my concerns as well. Each was like a heavy stone being laid on a road toward his inevitable death.

THE CONVERSATION
that had started at Fontainebleau continued later that night outside an overpriced brasserie in Montmartre. As Dad and I meandered after dinner, he started to list what he’d leave me: an old PC that barely worked, his computer table, his shelves of dusty, dog-eared books, and of course any profits from his writing.