Talking Heads (27 page)

Though that last bit should be redone, don't you know, that “someone who loved me”—that bit should give me a chance to exercise my Delete (maybe); because this was someone who loved someone else in my family, not me .

Indeed, Providence itself presented rather a mystery. God knows there are mysteries, and this was another, finding what I wanted in Providence, RI; I had to do rather some digging, some research. You might say that I lifted a page from your stepfather's book. The person I was after, the person who I think used to love me—oh God, why can't I simply say it: the one she loved was my
father
—at any event I'd heard she'd remained single, this person in Providence. And so I'd come to town believing the next step would be a simple one, my business with you would be over in a trice; but I at first I found myself calling strangers. In an entirely different culture …

O, I tapped my feet, on the unknown street—Delete; back in my seat, I cranked up the heat—Delete.

In this corner of the continent, don't you know, every culture has its Women's Crisis Center; it's rather a new development on the local charts, and a good one too, I'd say: every culture its own Crisis Center, each with its own Service Directory, a book of one's own. And, well, I am a woman, and I am having a crisis … “am,” yes am, present tense, my baby; the lacerations itch, they ooze (sometimes I believe I'll never pull anything from this Apple except worms) …

And so I borrowed a page from your stepfather; he's quite the prize muckraker, o yes; and I called a Women's Crisis Center. After all it was a woman I'd come to Providence to find. It couldn't very well have been a man, could it, this person who used to love my father.

She was an unusual woman, my father's lover, though she was also, well. She was one of us—one of our kind—with the same lapsed-Episcopal pretensions as the rest of us: the jean skirts and the nic fits. She too had gone half-blind before the endless slides of Art History, and she too was forever stopping by the mailbox to see if there wasn't another check from home; and our paths crossed occasionally, you see, our charts overlapped (though you should understand, my baby, that this was before the proliferation of Women's etc., a significant absence)… Though you should understand, she was unusual; she was only a year older than me, a year “ahead” of me, but already this girl possessed—at least, among us lapsed Episcopalians—a rare sense of how she was going make her way: a rare, unsullen practicality about her likes and dislikes, and about their funding. And yet she was one of us: she met my father when they shared the same seat-row on the North Shore commuter train.

Now, I came to recognize this woman's difference, her rarity, not simply because she had an affair with my father, no; also, shortly thereafter, I myself fell into a period I've come to call The Rampage.

The Rampage, The Rampage!—oh, don't the “Cut” and “Paste” keys make it easy—The Rampage, The Rampage! “Cut” and “Paste:” just the thing for lacerations, my baby. Indeed as I consider it now, as I consider my wounds, I think that perhaps you would've done better to discuss this, um, “difficult period” (The Rampage!) with your stepfather, if you'd ever known your stepfather. He could have handled the subject more objectively, your handsome prince of a stepfather; he might even go so far as to say there was a prince or two before him; whereas your mother, my baby, your mother can't think of them as princes. She finds this far too packed and painful a corner of the world for princes, your mother.

Oh, who shall I mention? perhaps that violent French post-doc who'd studied with Roland Barthes?—absolutely chockfull of theories, he was, and gifted with an innate fucker's rhythm besides, but you had to watch him once he'd cracked the absinthe, you had to make sure there was someone else in the apartment. My baby, when I think of my Rampage partners, it's like the old song: No way my prince will come—no way, not even if he's that sweet teenage drug fiend who later turned up in Aerosmith: a wild thing on stage but a cuddly stuffed teddy bear off it (because you see he was far too much of teddy bear, all soft and marble-eyed) … Yes, your mother believes she ran a shameful gamut: shameful, rather predictable really, and utterly devoid of princes. Your mother's starting to think this entire section should be redone; I scroll back up the screen and I can't help thinking of your stepfather. One marvels at the man. Before I came upon his muckraking, I'd never thought that mere newsprint could carry such
fervor
; my baby, you'd have done better to discuss this with him.

But your mother, well. I'm starting to think I should have confined my input to more subtle business: to my schoolgirl self and the others who crossed the quads with me—to the whole intricate process by which “one of us” came of age. Your mother should never have mentioned her wicked past, because the mystery that matters is nothing so sensational; the mystery that matters is this other girl, the one with the unsullen practicality etc., who fell in love with my father. You need to know, you and your stepfather both—you need to understand how one of us came of age, and how my father's one turned out, in the end, different. Let's see … there was that thing she said to Hildreth that time Peggy and Alison were talking about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and then there was the way Hildreth reported what she'd said, the angle of her smile (I mean Hildreth's smile) and the way she (Hildreth again) wagged her bottle of Boone's Farm Apple Wine, and then there was that time while Megan and I were waiting for her boyfriend (Megan's boyfriend) to call and I myself brought up the Patty Hearst affair, and the particular angle of the irony I gave to what I said by repeating what this woman (Our Woman Now In Providence) had said … let's see.

A subtle business, isn't it, my baby? O, subtle—o, silliness. There were a thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how one of us came of age, don't you know; there's a veritable
War and Peace
to be written about us, the New England Natashas; it would include even the palest prism in a sunstruck dorm window on that long afternoon when, say, the '60s shaded into the '70s…

Am I playing games, here at my Apple? playing giddy teen games after all? I came to this with something serious to say: I'd decided that you were born out of my father's affair.

I think I'll name the woman Dee, as in Dee-lete.

Now Dee was well into Med School the last she and I spoke—that is, not long after her fling with old Fudds—and she intended to work in obstetrics (small world), and so you see at the Providence Women's Crisis Center (new world), all your mother needed to do was ask whether there were a Doctor Dee in town. A Doctor Dee, you see, because the at-home Dee clearly had an unlisted number—something your mother's been thinking of getting herself, lately … At any event
le Centre du Crise
proved remarkably helpful, and I couldn't help but think of your stepfather, again: forever helpful and sincere and, unlike your mother, perfectly direct. Yes direct: that's Dee, Ayy, Arrgh .

The entire weekend's been like that, don't you know, I've been forever thinking of some third party even in the midst of trying to reach my second party … Indeed such distractions have been buzzing about my head for longer than that: there's a certain Ms., yes
Mzzzz
, a real bee in my bonnet (your stepfather will know who I mean [if I am in fact doing this input for him]); and there's been another ghost about, lately, another half-mad apparition out of mean times (and shall I nest one clue inside another again? [you really should read this, stepfather]).

You know just last week I visited, well, a medium? A woman who speaks with ghosts?—looking for you, my baby, looking for my little lost loup-garou: that's why I went. Mysteries have their solutions, God knows, and that goes for the mystery of my visiting a medium, too; I got the idea when that other ghost in my life started to groan over the phone (o, how he does groan, over the phone) … and last week I lacked the strength to search out my real Mrs. Dee, my real mystery (o, you input imp!) … and so I began to think of you, my baby. I began to
look
for you—though first, wouldn't you know it, in-Dee-rectly. In unlikely places.

But then it was also an unlikely place, unlikely indeed, to which my father's adultery had brought me originally. Unlikely past, unlikely present. I knew about my Fudds' carrying on of course—He & Dee were no mystery, no, not to an old Tormented Teen snooper like myself, a muckraker to rival your stepfather, really; I began with a phone number scribbled on the stub of a train ticket, and in no time I was eavesdropping on the conversation between Fudds and a certain powerful Old Boy who lent them his Duxbury hideaway (a man, I might mention, not without some power and fame even yet) for fucking. But what I'm trying to get at today, well. This isn't simply about fucking, my baby, about fucking and finding the clues; rather it's about the unlikely place I've been brought to now—a reflection, you see, of what I was brought to then—because briefly I found myself with quite another father, then, quite a different breed of man; and I liked it.

I
liked
it, Tormented Teen guerrilla that I was, that I am; I dug up my father's dirty secrets because I wanted to do damage, I wanted to chart every one of my family's soft spots—but then those very same secrets revealed my dad to be doing the damage himself:
he
liked it, he was the guerrilla. He even began to play roof-ball (is there roof-ball where you are, my baby? the tatty old tennis ball careening from gable to gable crazily before dropping back towards the players, towards a score?). After dinner he'd play roof-ball with my brother, my sister—even with me, a fellow family monster, a hesitant secret sharer … and he was tall enough to be a formidable opponent, on those spring evenings before the humidity wore him down. My sweet uncomplicated child, can you understand? can you suss out the subtle business at work here, the complex and unlikely challenge to the world that I saw in my high-hairlined Fudds, thanks to the complex and unlikely project by which I came of age … My
other
parent, don't you know, never appeared in such a heroic light: your mother's mother, my baby, only went on bending between her roses, her peonies, her gladiolas, her foxgloves (even now she goes on, honestly), all in a humming, loam-spotted oblivion. My father, on the other hand, looked as though he could fly, he could bounce from gable to gable all summer long (o, metaphor!); and it only added that much more to the thrill, don't you see, because
I was the only one who knew
—a little more than kin, and less than kind (o, allusion!). I liked it, my baby, I quite reveled in my father's cheating and the new breed of cat it made of him, of me: two smiling sphinxes who shared the same riddle—and so, don't you see, I was let down badly, hurt worse than I knew, to hear him declare, one evening in the height of the June-wedding season, that he was tired.

Too tired, he declared, as I stood before him tossing and catching the dirty little ball we'd been playing with for weeks now …

Too tired, he sighed, and he put up the closely printed wall of the
Wall Street Journal
: too tired, and (soggily rattling the ice in his glass) he'd love another gin & tonic, with a little more gin in it this time …

Now, my baby (and anyone else who might be on the other side of the screen [
aw, come on
, as your stepfather would say])—now, would it be an exaggeration, would it be rather a sensational exaggeration, if your mother were to say that she went to the family liquor cabinet, that evening, and came back in a Rampage? if she were to say that she fetched her father his damn triple-gin & tonic and then after that, for months to come (interesting word!), she didn't drink with a man she didn't fuck? if she were to say that the next conversation she had of any length and substance was the time towards the end of The Rampage, The Rampage! when she deliberately tried to hurt Dee as hard as she could, by letting the girl know, in no uncertain terms, how much the Steyes family likes to fuck?