The Other Side of the World

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble dwelling with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, milk and butter of the freshest, flowers at my window, and a few fine tall trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did to me in their lifetimes. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”

—Heinrich Heine,
Thoughts and Ideas

O
n the morning Seana showed up for my father's tag sale, I was in Borneo, so that I didn't get his letter giving me the news until I was back in Singapore. Before his letter came, I'd had no plans to return to the States, and my father, who—quintessential Max—had the finely-tuned habit of rarely if ever putting pressure on me and, thus, of not allowing hopes to become expectations, had never asked if or when I might be coming back.

I'd been working in Singapore the previous three years for a company that dealt in palm oil, and during the years I worked for them, palm oil had surpassed soy bean oil as the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world. My job, mostly, was to monitor various stages of development, production, and sales—to make sure the contractors we hired did what we'd contracted for, and that what we promised to deliver was delivered safely and at the agreed-upon price. It was the most lucrative job I'd ever had, and though life in Singapore was tolerable—I worked hard, played hard, and was on the receiving end of a multitude of perks—it didn't thrill me. Borneo did, however, and during some of my visits there—mini-vacations I was able to tack on to business trips—I'd thought of sending my father a round-trip plane ticket so I could show him why it was I found Borneo so
enchanting, and why I sometimes fantasized living there for the rest of my life.

But it wasn't the news about Seana showing up for my father's tag sale that made me put this kind of fantasy on hold and, instead, to put in for a leave-without-pay in order to return home. What did that was Nick Falzetti's death.

It was because of Nick that I'd gone to Singapore, and he had died in a freak accident on the first Saturday night after my return to Singapore from a weekend in Borneo. Nick and I had been buddies, on and off, when we were undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and for a few years after, and when, during our tenth college reunion we hung out together, he'd sold me a bill of goods on moving to Singapore so I could live the kind of good life he'd been living.

Nick's parents lived in Tenants Harbor, a small town a few miles from the Maine coast, about halfway up the state to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and his ex-wife, Trish, whom I'd gone with before she met Nick, lived with their son Gabe not far from Nick's parents. I wanted to pay my respects to Nick's family—to his parents and to Trish—but after I'd made the decision to do so, what began to get me down was thinking about the kind of messy stuff Nick, Trish, and I had gotten into way back, and once I'd gone and booked my flight and wrote my father that I was coming home, I found myself imagining, far more than was good for me, what it would be like to be with her again. And I began thinking, too, that she might be far too pleased by news of Nick's death for anyone's good.

 

By the time I arrived home, my father's tag sale was history, and Seana, who bought the works, had moved in with him. A good deal for them both, she claimed: She got all his leftovers—and he got her.

Here's the ad my father had put in the local papers:

Seana—Seana Shulamith McGee O'Sullivan—had been one of my father's graduate students in the late eighties—his best and brightest, and also, to his ongoing delight, his most successful. Although Seana's first novel,
Triangle
, was far too raunchy to have been chosen by Oprah—it was about a mother-daughter-father
ménage à trois
that had a deliciously happy ending—it wound up outselling most Oprah selections and staying on
The New York Times
best-seller list for over a hundred weeks.

I met Seana for the first time in the spring of 1988, when my father let me sit in on one of his at-home writing workshops. I'd just passed my thirteenth birthday—I know this because I'd been Bar Mitzvahed three weeks earlier—and I remember watching Seana sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the fireplace, chewing on and off at a hangnail on her left index finger while the women in the class kept giving her looks of disdain and envy she clearly relished.

My father always cooked a sumptuous dinner for his students—never boiled up spaghetti or ordered out for pizza—and he served it on our good china, on a white damask linen tablecloth, with napkins to match, and while he and I were doing the dishes afterwards, I asked about Seana and the way the women in the class had been looking at her. “Ah,” my father sighed. And then: “I mean, after all, son, what young woman
wouldn't
be resentful and envious of Seana? All that talent and productivity… and beautiful too!”

For the tag sale—after education, the region's second largest industry, my father contended—what he'd done was to lay out on our front porch and lawn stuff that had not made its way into his published work, and that, in the time he estimated he had left—he was seventy-two and calculated his remaining
productive
years at sixteen—he did not expect ever to look at again.

In addition to being one upon whom nothing was lost, he wrote, he wanted to be one
from whom
nothing was lost. That, he explained, had been the modest
raison d'être
for what he'd come to call, before Seana's arrival, ‘The First and Last Annual Max Eisner Literary Tag Sale.' But then, as in any good novel, the wonderful and unpredictable had occurred: First (and only) person in line on a bright, chilly New England Saturday morning in early October, there was Seana—gorgeous, voluptuous, brilliant Seana, and in her mature incarnation—eager to pluck up
everything
so that, she announced at once, she would make sure that nothing
would
be lost.

What I found myself imagining when I read about my father's tag sale was that the first sets of folders Seana came to that morning were laid out on three mahogany nesting tables that, one inside the other, had lived in a corner of our living room, by the driveway window, all through my childhood. My father had taken the tables from his mother's apartment in Brooklyn after she died—they'd sat in a corner of his living room throughout his childhood (one of his mother's famous “space-savers”)—and even though my father and I lived in a three-story Victorian house, and had a large living room, along with a larger dining room, smaller music room and library, and lots of surfaces on which to set down food and drinks, my father would, as his mother had, put out the three tables whenever we had company.

When I imagined the tables on our front lawn, one beside the other, what they also brought to mind were my father's wives
and girlfriends, each of whom, as he grew older, was younger than the one before, and all of whom seemed, in the way I pictured them, like a series of older, larger women within whom—as in a set of Russian
matryoshka
dolls—younger, leaner, more beautiful women lived.

My father had had five wives, starting with my mother (who was two years older than he was), and there were also a dozen or so long-term girlfriends, though none of the girlfriends had ever moved in with him. Still, my father was not, he'd state whenever I asked about a new relationship—this usually in response to his inquiries about
my
love life—a philanderer. “I've always been an unregenerate serial monogamist,” he'd say, “though I really
do
love women.”

In all their varieties, he might have added, and as different as we were in most ways, in this we were alike, because whenever a friend would offer to fix me up with someone and ask what my
type
was, I'd be stumped. Like my father, I had no particular preferences because, like him, I found most women, whether girlfriends or friend-friends, more interesting—and better company—than guys. And because just about always—the thing I know my father valued above all, once you'd gotten past whatever it was you found initially attractive, and maybe because, it occurs to me, it was
his
pre-eminent quality—they were usually
kinder
than guys.

Be kind, my father would say to me from as far back as I can remember, and for a long list of situations—whether it had to do with guys I played against in sports, store clerks who were incompetent, strangers who were rude, or friends and relatives who were nasty—be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

The quote was from Philo, he said, and I grew up imagining that the name belonged to the man who'd invented the kind of pastry dough you use to make strudel or
spanakopitas
. When I was ten or eleven, though, I found out who Philo was, and the
way it happened tells you things about my father you wouldn't suspect from the quiet, somewhat shy man he was most of the time.

I was changing out of my uniform after a basketball game at our local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon when my father came into the locker room to see how I was doing, and while we were going over the game, one of the guys along our row of lockers called another guy a faggot. Without hesitating, my father walked over to the boy and told him that using such a term was vulgar and unacceptable, that he hoped the boy would never use it again, and that, to this end, he intended to speak with the boy's father. My father waited for the boy to get dressed, after which he accompanied him to the Y's lobby, where he told the boy's father—a huge guy, six-three or -four, wearing a Boston Bruins hockey shirt—what had happened.

When the man told my father to mind his own goddamned business, my father repeated what he'd said to the boy: that use of such a word was vulgar and unacceptable, and that it demeaned not only the person to whom it referred, but, more profoundly, the person who had the unexamined need to employ such a word.

The man laughed in my father's face, then jabbed him in the chest, told him that it took one to know one and that he'd better watch his own ass or he'd wind up skewered butt-first on a flagpole. Grabbing the front of my father's shirt, the man said that he bet the last time my father had seen pussy was when he shoveled out cat shit at the A.S.P.C.A.

A woman at the Y desk picked up a phone—a crowd had gathered—but my father gestured to her to put it down and, very calmly, he addressed the man who was holding his shirt, and the way he did it made me think ‘Uh-oh!', because even though my father could be a polite and accommodating man most of the time, he could, at times, be seriously roused, and then—watch out!

“Sir,” he said to the man. “I would have you know that I have known more fine women in my lifetime than have ever existed in your imagination.”