My Father More or Less Read online

  “If you want to Tommy,” she said, all acquiescence and self-denial. If I were capable of believing anything, I would have believed at that moment that she imagined herself in love with me.

  The cruelty of my mood resisted compromise. There wasn’t a passing figure in the street for whom I didn’t have an unexpressed contempt. I raged at the bus for taking so long to arrive, all the time pretending it didn’t matter, pretending to an almost catatonic self-control. Astrid held on to my arm, chattered.

  The 77 Bus finally came (two others of its kind in close succession), and we went, at my insistence, to the upper level. It was crowded and we had to take seats on the aisle behind one another. As soon as we were seated, Astrid clutched my arm, whispered something I was not prepared to hear.

  Someone she didn’t want to see was on the same bus, Astrid in a panic.

  She looked around to see who else might be listening, then pursed her mouth to my ear, “It’s the man I’ve been going with.”

  I waited for the import of this discovery to sound itself, but Astrid had nothing more to say at that moment. Each time the bus stopped she looked out the window to see if he had gotten off.

  Later I learned, or am I making it up, I’m never sure, that the man was married and almost twice her age and that she had been sleeping with him since she was sixteen.

  The woman next to her got up and Astrid took the window seat and I moved into the vacated seat alongside her. Everything had changed. “Why do you care if he sees you?” I asked.

  “I just don’t want him to,” she snapped. “That’s enough reason, isn’t it?”

  Stop after stop she stared anxiously out the window, her head drawn back, wanting to see without being seen. He didn’t get off, or she didn’t see him get off, his (real or imagined) presence barring our way.

  I mentioned that it wasn’t possible to see everyone who got off at every stop.

  I tried to amuse her but I was in no mood to be amusing . “I’ll plug him for you,” I said.

  She looked at me in alarm, shocked or frightened. After we turned the corner at Oxford Circus she got up without a word and made her way to the stairs in back. I waited to the last possible moment before following.

  The streets were mobbed, tourists packed three and four deep, not everyone moving in the same direction. I thought I saw Astrid just ahead of me when I stepped off the bus, but before I could get to her she had merged with the crowd.

  It didn’t strike me at first that it had been her intention to lose me. Only afterward when I had pushed my way through the mob did I recognize the obvious and even then it was not easy to accept. I called her name once, shouted it in a voice that might have made her wince had she heard me. Once seemed sufficient. She had gone off, I had to believe, with the other guy. It was like a recapitulation of everything in my life, so I had no business being surprised or hurt.

  I stood on my toes, observing and I suppose being observed, then I joined the human race and let it take me where it was going. I took my revenge in indifference.

  Later in the day, I thought I saw Astrid from the back walking with a man that could have been my father. When I got closer I saw it was two other people, and I began to wonder how much of what I saw was real and how much hallucinatory. Perhaps I hadn’t yet arrived in London, perhaps I was on the plane coming over and had imagined what might happen when I got to London, or perhaps I hadn’t yet boarded the plane and was in my bed at home thinking of the trip.

  7

  He thought it odd that Isabelle hadn’t answered the phone, tried to imagine where she might have gone, was angry at her defection. A taxi went by, was gone before he could call to it, before he could step from the booth and make himself known. Through the glass of the phone box, the street, the one he had come to through the small park, gave off glints of familiarity. He had visited it before, perhaps earlier that day. The peeling facade of a yellowish frame house directly across from where he stood had been a point on some trip he had once taken or dreamed.

  He had the idea that Isabelle, worried about his prolonged absence, had gone out to search for him, had taken a bus or taxi to his son’s apartment with certain disastrous consequences.

  He also had the idea (one didn’t cancel out the other) that Max Kirstner had arrived at his house and finding Isabelle alone, had persuaded her to go off with him to his flat in South Kensington. It was no less possible that she was in the shower or had gone to work.

  In five minutes, or ten (or twenty-five), he was at his car, was in the driver’s seat, his head against the steering wheel. He didn’t have to raise his head to notice that there were three men across the street, staring at him, one of them the devious Pakistani that had dogged his steps.

  Terman started up the car, considering only briefly what options remained to him if it didn’t start. All the while, a mist of rain coming through the half-opened window, he sweated from some private heat. He imagined himself taking a hot bath, a recuperative bath, soaking his swollen ankle, washing the sweat from his face. It was better than any real bath might have been, this imagination of bath, calmed his terrors.

  He drove home, sat in the car for no time at all after he parked, felt incapable of letting himself out, of crossing the street, of unlocking the door to his house.

  A furious woman, unimaginably familiar, was tapping at the window with a key.

  “Didn’t you see me?” she was asking. “I was standing at the entrance to the park when you drove by and I was calling you, wasn’t I, and waving my arms.”

  Isabelle came around and got in the other side of the car, though neither of them was going anywhere. “Tell my about it,” she said. “Did it go all right?”

  He misjudged her sympathy and tried to kiss her on the neck, the collar of her blouse obstructing his intent. She pushed him away, using all her strength, drove him into the handle of his own door.

  Later, after he had taken his hot bath and gone to bed, she tiptoed into the room and apologized for having been so upset with him. Terman feigned sleep, feigned dreams, feigned dying.

  She cuddled his head against her chest or he dreamed her doing it.

  He imagined or dreamed, imagined he dreamed or dreamed he imagined, the following conversation.

  “I never got to see him.”

  “That’s odd, isn’t it? You were gone such a long time I thought surely you were with him.”

  “I ran into difficulty, a series of difficulties. I was going to call you and tell you about it but I couldn’t find a public phone and when I did and called you there was no answer.”

  She was holding his hand to her mouth (or so he imagined) when the phone interrupted. “Why don’t we let it pass,” he dreamed himself saying.

  Isabelle left to answer the phone while Terman imagined that he was the one that had gotten out of bed to confront the unknown. Isabelle said Hallo. Max was on the line to announce he was flying to Los Angeles in the morning. Isabelle said Hallo, the sound returning like an echo from a distant place.

  She shouted something unintelligible, her voice unusually shrill, then hung up the phone.

  Isabelle waited for him to ask what happened before committing her story to him. As it was, he had no intention of asking. Her experience with the silent phone went unshared.

  A second phone call seemed to wake him several hours later and he picked up the receiver to hear Max do his well-worn imitation of English fatuity.

  “BBC here,” he said. “Not disturbing anything, old boy, am I? We’re all wild over here about televiewing the story of your life if you could condense it into five or six absolutely smashing words.”

  “I think you have the wrong number,” Terman said.

  “This isn’t the brilliant, Dr. T? I’d know that voice anywhere, luv.”

  “Dr. T done gone away,” he said.

  “When you see the scoundrel, old boy, might you tell him that Max Kirstner will be in California for the next half week, some business to transact. The internati
onal director will be appearing on the show, Let’s Make a Deal.”

  “Don’t expect ever to see that man, boss.”

  “If you do run into the old boy, tell him that Max liked what he read of his latest rewrites, liked but not loved, though he is willing to compromise on matters of the heart. To keep up the good work and all that. Ciao, bambino.”

  Terman called to Isabelle and got no answer, merely the return of her name, the echo of her absence.

  When he found himself fully awake it was about midnight, he guessed, though it could have been any time. Days might have passed, whole lifetimes. A woman was asleep next to him, one of her legs curling about his like a vine.

  He woke hungry and went downstairs in the dark to fix himself something to eat, the sore ankle still somewhat tender, though vastly improved for its rest.

  The sleep had refreshed him—he was maneuvering down the stairs in the dark—and he considered that he was having, or had had, a condition known as breakdown.

  He felt remarkably good at this moment of reckoning, felt like whistling or making love or watching an old American movie on television, preferably a western or mystery.

  The house was absolutely dark, was dark the way a religious mystery is dark; it was illumined by dark.

  The chairs in the large parlor were occupied by shadows. He saluted them as he passed, raising two fingers to his forehead, a gesture out of some other time or place. The shadows ignored his passage or took it for granted.

  He was in the kitchen, had found his way there without turning on a single light, and was standing in front of the refrigerator.

  He was on the steps coming down, his ankle paining him, holding on to the bannister as he made his way.

  He poured himself a congnac, sat down on the maroon velvet couch in the large parlor and adjusted his eyes to the nuances of blackness.

  He took a slice of baked ham from the refrigerator and made an open sandwich with it on a thick slice of stale black bread. He took a bite out of it then decided it wasn’t what he wanted and returned to the large parlor without it. His son Tom was waiting there for him.

  He came down the stairs with both hands on the bannister, each step a plunge into the unimaginable. They had the following conversation.

  “Is that you, Dad?” one of the shadows asked him. “I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

  “I may have been. I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember that you drove down from Ramsgate or Kent or whatever to say something to me that couldn’t wait?”

  “It’s true that Isabelle and I drove down from Ramsgate through the night.”

  “In the morning you got into your car—I don’t know if it’s yours or if it’s a rented job—and went looking for me.”

  “The fact remains, and I think we ought to stay close to the facts, the fact remains that I didn’t find you.”

  “Let me get this straight, Dad, okay? You’re denying that you were looking for me at all. It was coincidental that you were flashing around in my neighborhood and lost your way.”

  “No. What I’m saying is this. The outcome of an act more or less defines its intention. I may have been looking for you or thought that that’s what I was about, but there’s no evidence that I actually wanted to find you.”

  “It’s about time you admitted it,” Tom said.

  An uneasy quiet followed, in which Terman got up and walked about.

  “Is there something you want to say to me, Tom?” he asked.

  Tom shook his head or so it appeared in the dark room. The abrupt movement of a shadow, dark against dark, darker against darker.

  “Do you have the pistol with you?” Terman asked.

  “With me?”

  “I’d like to have it back if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s in the pocket of my jacket. I take it with me everywhere.”

  “I appreciate that,” Terman said under his breath. “Still, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have it back.”

  “Do you need it right away, Dad? If you don’t, I’d like to , you know, hold onto it a while longer.”

  Terman held out his hand, which was invisible in the dark room. “It’s out of the question,” he said. “What did you want it for in the first place?”

  “I had nothing, you know, in mind. I just liked having it, just liked the idea of having it with me. Do you know what I mean? It was there for me.”

  The same question kept returning. “There to do what with?”

  “To do whatever. I mean, what use did you have for it?”

  “The hero of the movie I was writing carried one and I acquired the gun as a form of research.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “Right. If our reasons weren’t exactly the same, they weren’t so different either. Did you ever get to shoot it?”

  The shadow leaned forward to ask the last question, the question pulling him forward.

  “I went to a shooting range once,” Terman said. “It was a place for members only but Max knew the people in charge and so got us access. They had silhouettes of people and if you hit one in a vital part it would keel over.”

  Tom laughed nervously. “Did you get off on it, Dad?”

  “It was like eating forbidden fruit, had that fascination. Still, we were only playing.”

  “You were doing research, right?”

  “Are you being ironic with me?”

  “If I am, it wasn’t intentional,” said the disingenuous shadow. “Do you think I was being ironic, Dad?”

  The smarmy sincerity was more offensive to him than the irony, though he choked back his disapproval.

  “I’m really sorry if it sounded that way,” Tom said. “Forget it, okay?”

  “Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive or projecting my own view of myself on to you.”

  “Let it go,” Tom whispered.

  “I accept your version of it,” Terman said in a voice that engendered irony in his own ear.

  “You may have been right about my tone,” confided the shadow. “I have a hard time—other people have told me this—letting people be the way they are. My mother says I disapprove of everything.”

  “Does she?”

  “Hey, who’s being ironic now?” He laughed goodnaturedly. “Anyway she didn’t really say that. I like to attribute my own perceptions to others. It gives them the voice of authority.”

  Again Terman held his hand out in ambiguous demand. “I think it would be a good idea, Tom, if you gave me back the gun.”

  “You don’t have to keep after me about it,” said the shadow. “Anyway, there are a few things I want to get off my chest first.’”

  “Do you want to tell me for the hundredth time that I’m a disappointment to you?” The subject was sore to him, a perpetually reopened wound, and he regretted advancing it. What was this conversation about anyway?

  “You could at least hear me out,” the shadow said harshly, “before you tell me I’ve nothing to say to you.”

  “It’s no pleasure to me to be told once again that I’ve disappointed you. If you have something else to say, something that adds to the store of knowledge between us, I’ll listen to that.”

  The shadow laughed, then lapsed into silence. He stammered something.

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t your pleasure I was thinking of,” he said. “It’s my recollection, okay?, that I never told you what was really getting to me. I never told you because I was afraid to. Even now in the dark where we can’t even see each other’s face, I can’t get a fucking word out.” The news Terman awaited was like a delayed time bomb. His only escape was to run from the house and keep running.

  Tom seemed on the verge of speaking, but nothing was said.

  “Would it satisfy you if I apologized in advance?” Terman asked. “I’m terribly sorry I’ve failed you.” He stood up as if the couch had suddenly released him. “What the hell do you want from me?” Tom said nothing. Terman said he was sorry he had shouted and sat down.
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br />   “I hear you want me to go back to New York,” Tom said after a prolonged silence.

  Terman resisted inquiring into the source of Tom’s information, though couldn’t imagine how the news had come to him indirectly. “That was one of the things I wanted to say to you,” he said. “The reason is self-evident.”

  “Yeah,” he said, the word barely leaving his mouth. “I remember a time in California when I was supposed to stay with you for three weeks and, for some reason never explained to me, I was sent home in disgrace after five days. I remembered that for a long time.”

  “I don’t remember it at all,” Terman said. “This happened in California? Are you sure it was California?”

  The recollection came supported by a wealth of corroborating detail. The color and texture of a couch in the living room of a rented cottage. The insufficient room in the back where he was made to stay, a place with grease-stained yellow walls and infested spider webs, the floor made of dirt. Lizards darted across the ceiling at night like dismembered fingers. A blond girl in braids named Alma who liked to sunbathe nude on the terrace stayed with them.

  “What did I do that you had to send me away?” Tom asked.

  “I never lived with a woman named Alma,” Terman said.

  “I remember the two of you talking about me one night after I was supposed to be asleep,” Tom said. “You were both complaining at how I made things difficult for you, was always underfoot or something. ‘Snooping’ was the word Alma used. The kid is always snooping around, she said, and you did nothing to dissuade her of the notion that I was this mutt you had taken in off the street that had shat on the rug without permission.”

  “You’re making that up,” Terman said, smiling in the dark despite the tightening in his chest the conversation had caused him.

  “I stayed awake the whole night,” said the shadow, “unable to get out of my head the creepy picture of myself the two of you had given me. I remember, though I was totally depressed, that I didn’t cry. I realized, you know, that I didn’t need to cry, that I used to do it to attract sympathy and I was beyond that. I didn’t want to trivialize my pain by making a public demonstration of it. A couple of days after that you told me I was flying back the next morning, that you had called my mother and that she would be at the airport to pick me up.”