My Father More or Less Read online

  His eyes on the screen, Tom transferred whatever he had in his hands to his father’s lap. It had the weight of a heavy stone, and Terman’s first conflicted impression was that Tom meant him some harm by it. His unpursued impulse was to stand up and let it fall to the floor. A glance was sufficient to identify the object as a revolver similar to the one taken from the desk in his study, and he put his program notes over it to keep it out of sight.

  Using his left hand, he moved the gun (sandwiched inside the program notes) from his lap to the side pocket of his corduroy jacket.

  When he looked up again at the screen his eyes burned from the proximity of the image. The presence of the gun in his pocket, its unexplained return, distracted him from the illusory action of the movie, an action that tended, despite his familiarity with it, to take him by surprise.

  The mystery resolves itself through flashback. The woman who resembles the hero’s wife turns out to be his lost, presumed dead daughter. (The exposition seemed beside the point, the demystifying of a dream.) There is the reprise of a dance at the end, father and daughter whirling around and around.

  When they were outside Tom said, “It was fantastic. Very strange.” The experience of the movie seemed to exhilarate him. “It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

  Terman didn’t like to talk about films immediately afterward, liked to be haunted by them for as long as possible. “It makes its own sense,” he said to no one.

  They walked across a footbridge to the Charing Cross tube stop and took the Bakerloo to Oxford Circus where they changed for the Central Line. In transit between stops, Terman had the premonition that the train would never arrive at its next destination, that the shadow zone between stations was the real world stripped of illusion.

  When they came up from the underground at the Holland Park station, Tom said he was hungry. Terman said that the moment Isabelle got back they would go out to a neighborhood Indian restaurant that wasn’t half bad, then he remembered that Isabelle was not expected to return. He was suddenly aware of the weight of the gun in his pocket and he put his hand on it to verify its presence.

  “Did it stand up on reseeing?” Tom asked.

  “There are some things I can’t get enough of,” said Terman.

  On one of their daily outings, Tom broached the subject of Isabelle’s absence. “It ran its course,” Terman said. And another time: “We’re on temporary vacation from each other.”

  From time to time Terman called Max to ask when the man upstairs might be expected to leave. He was told that there was no available hotel space in London during August, but that they (undefined) were trying to work out a solution acceptable to all parties. “I don’t want him here any more than you do,” Max would say in his role of embattled ally subject to forces beyond his control. “We all have our crosses to bear.” Or: “The two of you might like each other if you gave it a chance.”

  Unable to sleep, Terman would hear him in the early hours of the morning, typing in his room on the third floor at seemingly incredible speeds. The man left his room once or twice a day, at least when Terman was there to observe his behavior, to stretch his legs or to go to the bathroom. He seemed to take his meals in his room, though evidence for him eating anything at all was mostly circumstantial.

  Terman thought he might rediscover the physical world through Tom’s eyes—it was one of his secret justifications for sightseeing which he otherwise hated—but objects continued to evade him despite their insistent presence. He urged the visible world on his son, rushing him from place to place, hoping Tom would capture what his father missed. In his father’s company, and out of it, Tom lacked the patience to obeserve. Sights went through him like a sieve, slipped away like unacknowledged feelings. They were there to witness each other’s failure to witness.

  One of the reasons he wrote fiction, he confided to Tom, was to account for exerience that otherwise eluded him.

  “I know what you mean,” Tom said. “It’s like having a reminder of something you lived through.” He thought of his thefts as a manifestation of the same principle, though at this point could barely recall the compulsion to steal.

  “But the reminder is in code,” Terman said, “and the code is impenetrable, so that the writing never reflects on the real life, if any, that inspired it. It invents its own experience.”

  “Which is to say it offers a substitute for real experience,” Tom said. “You make it sound pretty dry.”

  “What the hell is real experience?” shouted Terman, arguing not with Tom but with private voices. “Fiction just exchanges one set of imagined possibilities for another.”

  Henry Berger, travelling with false passport, books two places on the next available flight to New York. He notices a small man with thick-lensedglasses watching him from behind a copy of Vogue. Berger is reading a News of the World when the announcement comes that the plane is boarding. He stands up with the others, signals to the woman who is travelling with him, dawdles, lights a cigarette, hangs back at the end of the line. Why have an operative tail him? he wonders. Is it just a precaution on their part or are they aware of the full danger he represents to them? The woman standing next to him says, Why don’t I turn in these tickets for something a little more convenient?

  Though Tom made no complaint, though he was dutiful in his admiration of whatever his father set before him to admire, he thought that they were doing things backwards, that this was what they ought to have done five weeks ago when he first arrived in London. It had taken all this time to get to first things, to provisional beginnings. He couldn’t seem to remember why it had taken them so long to get started.

  They were faced with a final decision, a last full day, and found themselves, brochures strewn across the parlor floor, paralyzed by a surfeit of choices. Upstairs, the fat man typed away, frightening in his decisiveness. The mot juste, several at once, Terman imagined, sprang to the page at his touch.

  They replayed the same conversation they’d been having for the past two weeks, though appeared to switch roles. “You make the choice,” Terman said.

  “Yeah. Well, what if you don’t like the choice I make?”

  “Try me,” said Terman, who already felt severely tried. Nothing they had done together, not one of the trips they had taken, had fully satisfied his expectations.”

  “I’ll give you my reasoning first, okay?” Tom said, speaking quickly as if afraid the words might escape him if he hesitated even for a moment. “Obviously, there are any number of interesting places we haven’t visited . Okay? Since we can’t go to all of them, and since I have really no basis for choice, what I’d like to do instead is go to a film in the afternoon and say goodbye to Astrid in the evening, if that’s all right with you, Dad.”

  What could he make of such soft treatment from his former enemy? “Why don’t we sleep on it,” Terman said, “and make a final decision in the morning? I think, insofar as we can make out what it is, we ought to do something memorable.”

  Tom looked at the movie listings in Time Out while Terman considered what his life would be like when Tom was gone. He had a book open on his lap but the words he read, or seemed to read, were only occasionally the ones that belonged to the text. He stopped himself and returned to the top of the page—the book was Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis—determined to make connection with what appeared before his eyes. The words refused his attention. Although in English, they seemed to translate themselves into an unknown foreign tongue as he took them in.

  It was almost midnight and the fat man was still typing in his room. He had stopped briefly at nine, then had started again a little after ten with renewed energy. “I’d like to kill him,” Terman said. It was not what he planned to say. Tom looked up, startled. Terman laughed. “I don’t mean everything I say,” he said.

  “I think you do,” said Tom.

  Terman had not seen it before, though he had been the principal writer under an assumed name, and so its rare appearance at the Electric Ci
nema (Tom had brought the movie to his attention) seemed almost providential. “I don’t know if I can sit through it,” Terman warned him, though the idea of going with his son to see something he had once collaborated on half appealed to him. The movie was called Nightowl, which was not its original title, which was the third or fourth title of the unhappy project. According to the note in Time Out, the movie had been discovered in a Worst Films Festival in San Francisco and had subsequently achieved something of a cult following. “The bizzare closure is one of the glories of the independent American Cinema.”

  The print, as it turned out, was bad, the colors faded. The theater seats were uncomfortable. A neon light flickered distractingly to the right of the screen. A handful of the small stunned audience staggererd out before the film’s notable conclusion. Certain lines that he had particularly relished in the moment of creation were missing or significantly changed. Yet the event of the film moved him as if in looking at snapshots of children, he had come across a face he could not wholly account for but with which he shared recognizably some deeply buried secrets. His eyes teared mysteriously and he kept his hand at the side of his face to protect himself from embarrassment. He thought the direction self-conscious and static, though more accomplished than he had reason to expect. By focusing endlessly on the same few characters and objects, the camera forced the viewer, if he survived, to see them without preconception. The film had three false endings before the final unexpected one where the young boarder, the title figure, moves into the wife’s bed in the guise of the husband he has just killed. “Close your eyes,” he says to her in the other’s voice before entering the bedroom. (And she does.) “I want you to remember me as I was.” Her arms reach out in expectation to the approaching shadow.

  Terman didn’t ask him what he thought of it and Tom offered no response beyond an enthusiastic shaking of his head. “Yeah,” he said, an acknowledgement that they had watched this inexplicable movie together, that it was beyond them now, a part of the mutually experienced past. After the movie, he took Tom and Astrid to dinner at an overpriced seafood restaurant in Soho, then drove them both to Astrid’s house. Disappointment that he wasn’t invited in—he had been in top form throughout dinner and thought he rated more than thank you and goodnight—Terman went home alone. He didn’t go right home but stopped off at Isabelle’s apartment, parking just down the street. He sat in the car a few minutes, thinking of climbing out, entering the building, ringing the doorbell to her apartment, thinking of saying when she answered the door that he missed her terribly and wondered if they couldn’t get together again (her answer, as he imagined it, was a mute refusal), then drove away, stripped of false hope. Each moment he seemed to get closer to himself.

  The little man in the thick glasses is tied up, bound and gagged, and propped up in sitting position in one of the pay toilet booths. As Henry Berger leaves the Men’s Room, he is passed by a middleaged Japanese man in a panama suit, the man glancing at him with more than casual interest. Walking briskly to another terminal, Berger boards a Pan Am flight to New York, the last passenger but one. Two attendants are getting ready to disconnect the ramp. “You’re a lucky chap, aren’t you?” one of them says to him. Someone else is coming. A moment later, the dark-haired woman he is travelling with also boards.

  My father was in his study when I came in—it was like 2 AM—manuscript pages (I think that’s what they were) spread out across the floor, his gun on his desk. I stuck my head in to say I was back, and that I thought I’d stay up the night and conk out, if I could, on the flight home.

  “If you really want to do it, I’ll stay up with you,” he said.

  He looked burnt out and his movements seemed barely coordinated. All the desk drawers were open, loose papers in five separate piles on the floor, his waste basket flowing over. There was a stack of eight manuscript boxes alongside the desk. I watched for awhile without saying anything, trying to figure out what was going on.

  “Do you think you’ll ever see her again?” he asked.

  I thought he was talking about my mother at first so I didn’t understand what he meant, but he was referring to Astrid (or talking about himself and Isabelle). “You never know,” I said.

  “Did you make any arrangements with her?”

  “Well, we exchanged addresses if that’s what you mean. What are the boxes for, Dad?”

  “Just cleaning up,” he said. “I’ll be through in a few minutes.”

  There was a tapping at the outside door, which my father ignored or seemed not to notice. It refused to go away, got louder, more persistent. I won’t deny that it scared me.

  “It sounds like he changed the keyboard of his typewriter,” my father said, amused by the idea. “I like this tune better than the other.”

  When he heard the knocking on the door, Terman assumed the presumptuous fat man upstairs had gone out for an airing and had misplaced his key. “Don’t answer it,” Tom said. Terman was thinking the same thing, though after a few minutes he made his way to the door, not wanting to miss the opportunity for some new experience. The knocking, if that’s what it was, had stopped. Terman saw a face in the window which startled him, yet renewed his faith in the possibilities for surprise in this life. He had the impression that the face belonged to Isabelle and he unlatched the door for her in a state of painful joy. “I’m glad you’ve come back,” he said. The face belonged to Astrid, who had come to see Tom. She stood in the shadows, her manner a confusion of anger and abasement, waiting to be asked in. “Come on it,” Terman said. He held out his hand.

  Tom came down—he had been standing on the stairs while his father opened the door—and he and the girl talked in the parlor in soft halting voices. “I’m sorry if I woke anyone up?” Astrid said.

  Terman was in his study sitting inertly in a chair, memorizing the recent past, the door closed against other voices. Nothing would ever escape him again, he decided. He resisted sleep so was taken by it unawares, was stolen from consciousness.

  At some point Tom and the girl tiptoed up the stairs to the room on the second floor Tom had recently appropriated as his own. They were holding hands, as he and Isabelle had on occasion, or so Terman imagined them. It may have been they had their arms around each other and stopped on every second or third step to kiss.

  Terman was thinking, as he slept or didn’t, that someone ought to remind Tom to set the alarm on his clock.

  In a hurry—he had to do it before he fell asleep—he walked in stocking feet down the long corridor to Tom’s room. He slipped into the room, set the alarm for six thirty (Tom’s flight left Heathrow at 8:20), barely glancing at the entangled couple. He imagined himself closing the door behind him as he left the room.

  After his plane lands at JFK, after he and his companion (who may or may not be his wife) clear customs, Henry Berger goes into a public phone booth and dials a long distance number from memory. “I’m coming in,” he says without identifying himself. “Henry,” says the other, “where are you, boy? We’ve been expecting you posthaste.”

  “I’ll be there before you know it,” Berger says. “Leave a light burning in the window for me, will you?”

  “Do you want us to bring you in from the airport? Might be the most effective procedure.”

  “I’d prefer making an unannounced entrance,” Berger says. “And I want the President in the room when we talk.”

  “He understands that.”

  After Henry Berger leaves the phone booth, he takes his companion to a taxi, a gentlemanly excess perhaps not in his best interests. “See you in a couple of days,” he says through the two inch opening in the window. He takes a cab himself to LaGuardia Airport and catches the Washington shuttle, which is already boarding as he arrives.

  The story moves abruptly toward its conclusion, though I confuse in the telling beginnings and ends.

  I couldn’t seem to get out of the house, kept leaving things behind or losing them. After all the false starts, we drove to the airport in
a white heat, my father silent for the duration of the ride, his manner like a reprimand. I asked him if something was wrong and he said if he thought about it long enough he would probably find something. We queued up to check the larger of my two bags, getting at first on the wrong line, investing at least ten minutes in misplaced expectation. After some frantic rushing about, we were told that the departure time of my flight had been delayed forty-five minutes, and we stopped at an overcrowded cafeteria for some breakfast. We had just gotten our food to an unoccupied table when the loudspeaker announced that TWA Flight 144, which was mine, was boarding at some unintelligible gate and we were up again, rushing to no purpose. I bought some chewing gum, an International Herald Tribune, and a copy of E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, my father choosing the book and paying the bill. A flashbulb went off. Someone took our picture or the picture of some people standing directly behind us, the lights blinding me momentarily. There was a point beyond which only passengers were allowed and we said goodbye and then embraced. “Keep in touch, Tom,” he said. I said I would do my best. There didn’t seem time for anything else.

  They frisked me at the security checkout and for a dislocated moment I thought I still had my father’s pistol in my pocket and would have to answer for the theft. The frisking was only a formality—something in my manner, my style maybe, offended them—a last gesture of English hospitality. Then I was on the plane, seated at a window toward the front of the No Smoking section. Not many of the people around me looked like they were going to America and I had that moment of panic (I’ve had it before on other flights) when you think you’ve gotten on the wrong plane or that the plane you’re on has some telling defect that only you have discovered. I thought of making some excuse and getting out. There was time for that, time for everything. The plane sat for another hour and ten minutes and I thought, Well, we’re not going anywhere. The plane I’m on is committed to staying in place. I took a stick of gum and offered the pack to the woman in the business suit next to me. “It’s just what I need,” she said.