Father of the Rain (13 page)

We laugh, and Paul helps himself to the food my mother passes him.

“But why were you looking for a sword?” I say.

“Dionysius had a big court full of people and this fellow Damocles was the most obsequious courtier of all. He laughed when Dionysius laughed and hung on his every word—kind of like me with your mother.”

“Ha,” my mother says.

Dionysius got tired of it, Paul continues, and told Damocles he could wear his crown and sit in his seat and be king for a meal. Damocles was thrilled. But the crown was very heavy and he had to wait a long time for all the tasters to taste the king’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, and then, in the middle of the meal, he leaned back and saw a double-edged sword just above him, pointing directly at the middle of his skull and hanging by one long horse-hair. He begged to change places, but the king refused. He said he wanted Damocles to become closely acquainted with the fear that a great king lives with every minute when he is surrounded by his so-called friends. “I didn’t bring any tasters with me tonight,” Paul says, “but let’s eat.”

My mother has put food on my plate, noodles with crumbs all over it and some sort of soupy thing over rice.

“What is this?”

“It’s Thai. You’ll like it.”

It smells very spicy. I don’t like spices except oregano and basil in spaghetti sauce, but this is not bad. The crumbs in the noodles are crushed-up peanuts, and the sauce is sweet and creamy.

“Now, not to undermine your story,” my mother says.

“Uh-oh, here we go,” Paul says to me.

“But I do think you are conflating the two tyrannical Dionysiuses of Syracuse. Dionysius One banished the poet, and Dionysius Two hung the sword.”

“She thinks I’m conflating,” he whispers to me, then turns to my mother. “There was only one. You’re thinking of Hiero One and Two.”

My mother pats her lips primly with her napkin and Paul laughs. He was right—he does laugh at everything she does. Then she stands up and goes to the bookcases and pulls out our huge
Columbia Encyclopedia
. They flip through it together, giggling when a page tears slightly in their haste.

“Dionysius,” Paul says loudly, then he looks at me. “One and Two.”

He reminds me of a younger, more playful Grindy. “How on earth did you know that?” he asks her.

“My classics teacher at Miss Pratt’s School for Girls wrote a book on Greek history. She branded every name and date on our hide.”

After my mother puts the encyclopedia away, she asks about the Delaurio boy, but Paul puts up his hand and says, “We’re not going to inflict our work on Daley.”

We eat a little more and then he asks, “So who are your friends and enemies, Daley?”

Even my mother looks surprised by this one. I look across at her and she shrugs.

“‘You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends,’” he explains to us.

“Who was that?” my mother asks.

“You promise not to correct me?”

“No.”

“Joseph Conrad, I believe.”

“Plausible,” my mother says.

He bows his head briefly to her. And to me he says, “So tell me.”

“I don’t know. My best friend is Mallory. I’ve known her since nursery school.”

“What do you like about her?”

There’s something about the sound of his voice that pulls more words from me than I mean to give. “She’s kind of unpredictable. I’ll go over to her house to make chocolate chip cookies and we’ll
end up wearing wigs and pretending we have our own cooking show. And then we pee our pants because we’re laughing so hard. Who is your best friend?”

He smiles. He wasn’t expecting the question back at him. “That’s a tricky one. There’s Eddie, who was my Mallory growing up, but he lives in Chicago so I don’t see him much. Here I have some good buddies from law school, and this new friend who appeared in my office last fall, but I probably can’t tell you anything about her that you don’t already know.”

They smile at each other. It’s weird. The whole thing is strange, but not awful. He has barely touched the glass of wine my mother poured him.

“Any other friends you want to mention?”

“Not really. There’s Gina and Darcie, but I only call them when Mallory’s busy.”

“And there’s Patrick,” my mother says.

It’s funny to hear her say Patrick’s name. It reminds me that there was a day last spring when she took us to the Mug for donuts and Patrick asked my mother if he could drink the extra creamers beside her cup of coffee and the cream left a tiny crescent of white above his lip and my mother wiped it off for him with her napkin. He told me that afternoon that he thought my mother was the most beautiful mother he’d ever seen. He said she looked like a prettier Jackie Onassis. Now he doesn’t dare say her name.

“And Patrick,” I say. But that’s weird now, too.

“And your enemies?” Paul says.

All I can think of is Catherine Tabor. But my mother wouldn’t like me to say that. “With a family like mine, who needs enemies?”

“What’d she say?” my mother says, but Paul is laughing a loud hiccuppy laugh. I feel all warm inside, making him laugh like that. It’s almost as good as when I can get my father going. But that’s becoming harder and harder.

My mother serves dessert in the living room area. Paul takes a seat on one side of the sofa and my mother folds her legs up beneath her on the other side so I sit on the middle cushion. I catch them smiling at each other.

“What?” I say, but they won’t tell me.

“No homework tonight?” my mother asks.

“I did it in study hall.” The ice cream is coffee and I swirl it around until it’s soup. Paul has big shoes, dark brown leather with laces, and thin socks that show the boniness of his ankles. He jiggles his leg a bit, like Garvey. Everyone seems to have run out of things to say.

When he stands to leave, Paul puts out his hand and we shake. “You are everything your mother said you were, only more so.”

“You too.”

I don’t know why he thinks I’m so funny, but it’s nice.

My mother has a huge grin on her face when he says, “Adieu, m’lady,” and doffs a pretend hat.

“Not quite so fast,” she says. “I’ll walk you out.”

They put on their coats and shut the door behind them. I race to my room. The lights are off and I have a perfect view of the parking lot where they stop beside his car.

I know they’re talking about me. He’s pointing back toward the door and she’s laughing. I hope I’ve made a good impression. They talk for a long time, leaning against the door of his car, looking down, looking up, looking at each other. He takes her hand and then the other hand and when he tells her something she nods and says something and they laugh at the same time. He bends down and they kiss on the mouth, not for a long time, not any longer than my last kiss with Neal. They end up in a long hug. She pulls away to look at him and says something and I wonder if she’s telling him she feels like she’s in a novel. I do, just watching them.

“Oh my God, it’s not possible,” Catherine says. “Gardiner, look at this. She’s got another one.”

My father looks up from where he’s spreading the large hotel towel on the chaise. “Oh Christ. What’s that called,
Out to the Out-house
by Willie Makit?
Overpopulation in China
by Wee Fuckem Young?”

I’d heard these jokes so many times. “
It’s Not the End of the World
by Judy Blume.”

“Blume,” he says and shakes his head. “You’re always reading the Jews. Just like your mother.”

He has no clue about Paul yet.

“What’s it about?” Catherine says.

“A kid whose parents get divorced.”

She snorts. “What would you want to read about
that
for?”

She doesn’t like all the reading I do. Neither does my father. They say it’s rude. They make fun of the titles, the covers, and the way I chew on the skin of my lower lip when I get deep in a book.

But I have nothing else to do. We’re in St. Thomas for spring vacation, and Patrick has made friends with the golf pro and now drives his own little cart, picking up elderly players at their cottages and driving them around the eighteen holes. He gets paid for this in snack bar tickets, so every afternoon when he gets off work we go have peanuts and papaya juice by the pool. Elyse has attached herself to another family for the ten days, a couple from Salt Lake City and their one-year-old son. Elyse loves babies. The mother from
Salt Lake sensed her usefulness immediately, and now Elyse spends her days under their cabana on the beach. No one knows where Frank goes. He leaves after breakfast and comes back before dinner with a secretive smirk and half-shut eyes that scare me.

Almost everything scares me these days. I have been on planes before, but this time I was terrified of the distance from earth, the smallness of the plane, and the flimsiness of its metal walls. When we actually landed, my gratitude didn’t last long. There are lizards on the floor, red jellyfish at the shore, and shark fins farther out. I don’t want to snorkel or water-ski or windsurf. And it isn’t just the outside world I’m scared of. I’m scared of inside of me, too. On the second day I ran back to our cottage to go to the bathroom, and as I stood there on the tiles pulling down my suit, a feeling wrapped around my chest like a boa constrictor. The dead star feeling, out of nowhere. I struggled to breathe. I knew I was alone in the cottage and yet the bathroom felt crowded. My heart began to pound and made me so scared it pounded harder and harder until I thought there was no way my body could withstand the force of its beating. I’m just going to the bathroom, I kept telling myself, but my body felt something completely different, as if it were having a whole other invisible experience. Back on the beach, I felt weak and shivery and wrapped myself in a towel. I’ve been in the cottage alone since then, but at night the feeling edges in and I have a hard time falling asleep. Reading is the only thing that calms me down.

“You have your Jews,” my father says to me later, when we are all showered from the beach, waiting to go to dinner, “and I have my magazines.” He picks up the
Penthouse
he got Frank to buy at the airport.

“Read another letter, Gardiner,” Patrick says.

“All right.” My father flips through the pages. “
Dear Penthouse Forum
,” he begins. “
I never really believed these letters were written by real people, but since last Thursday night, I’m ready to believe anything
.”

“They always start like that. It’s so fake,” I say.

“Shhh,” Patrick says

“Yes, Daley, shhh. This is serious literature.” My father grins at me. He is in a good mood, with his drink at his elbow and the magazine in his hands. He reads about a girl who describes everything in her life as boring—her job, her boyfriend, her dog. My father thinks this is hilarious. “Even the fucking dog is boring!” She works in an office building in Chicago.

“Is she ever going to get to the
point
?” Elyse says, and everyone cracks up. It is cozy in our little cottage by the beach, sitting all of us together on the wicker furniture with big comfy cushions. My father continues to read.

One night she has to stay late to catch up on some work. She gets a little uneasy when the last person leaves, but then she waves her fear away. She knows she’s being a baby. About an hour later she hears the elevator rise and her fear returns. She shuts off all the lights. The elevator stops on her floor and opens. She stops breathing. She thinks if she stays very still—she’s in the corner, facing the wall—he won’t notice her. She doesn’t dare turn around. She thinks she hears something but she can’t tell because her heart is beating so loudly—and then she feels hands on her neck. They are warm. “
For some reason I feel myself relax then. I know everything’s going to be okay. His hands are so big. They slide down over my shoulders and around to my breasts. I’m wet instantly. I can hear him breathing and I smell cigarettes on his breath and I feel his stubble on my cheek but I never see him. He takes off all my clothes and pleasures me in every way imaginable and then, finally, he puts his long rod-hard cock inside me and—
”

“Gardiner, really, this is going too far,” Catherine says. “Elyse is going to tell this to her class when she gets back.”

“Elyse Tabor! Well, I never!” Patrick imitates the first grade teacher’s constipated grimace.

We all laugh.

“Two more sentences,” my father says. “
—and I feel him explode. And then he leaves the building. I never saw his face. I’ll never know who he was
.”

The first morning in St. Thomas I went with my father to collect our passports at the front desk in the main building. Everyone else was still asleep. At home there was three feet of snow on the ground but now I was in bare feet and shorts. Our cottage was one of the farthest away, right on the water. We walked on the wide stone paths that connected everything at the resort, and, because it had rained a little before dawn, the stones were wet but warm. We watched a lizard chase another up a palm tree until we couldn’t see them anymore.

“Your mother and I stayed in a place like this in Barbados,” he said. It almost sounded like a fond memory. He never spoke about my mother in front of Catherine except to insult her. It was so much better when we were alone, but we were never alone. I pretended all the way to the front desk and back that we had come by ourselves to St. Thomas.

I have a crush on a blond boy I see at the pool in the afternoons. He’s small and slender and wears long green swimming trunks with orange fish on them. He knows I like him. I can tell from the way he’s always checking to see if I’m still watching him. He’ll pretend to look beyond me, leave me off to the side of his gaze. When we first got there he was hanging out with two girls who looked a lot older than us, but they left after a few days and now he has no one.

“Stop looking at him. He’s a total jerk,” Patrick says. “Do you know what he did in the shop yesterday? He—”

“Shut up. I don’t care.”

We’re finishing up our papaya juices. We’re so badly sunburned that we sit at the edge of our chairs, careful to let our skin touch the least amount of chair as possible. We don’t have sun lotion. We only have something called Hawaiian Tropic, which is coconut-smelling baby oil that promises to increase the sun’s rays. We’re obsessed with getting the deepest darkest tan possible. Elyse has had the worst reaction to the sun. Her skin has bubbled up on her arms and back, and the Salt Lake City family took her to the clinic in town where they wrapped gauze around her forearms, which had become infected. They bought her a long-sleeved shirt and sunblock and have hinted that we should be using those things, too. But we don’t have blisters, just a good burgundy burn that will turn into a deep dark tan by the time we go back to school.