The Paper Palace
Page 22
“My mother doesn’t believe in throwing away books.”
He shoves the book back onto the crammed shelf. “I think she’s very glamorous. Elegant. I’m surprised she hasn’t remarried.”
“You’re welcome to sleep in her room tonight. Her bed is bigger than mine.”
“Now, now.”
“I finally bring a man home to meet my mother and her first instinct is to flirt? What does that even mean? My mother has barely had the energy to wash her hair the past few years. Between losing Leo, and losing the baby. She’s been wandering around the house in a defeated trance for so long, I forgot she was ever attractive. She spends most of the day in her nightgown. The only reason my mother bothers to get dressed is to go across the street to Gristedes for whatever meat is on sale because it’s reached its sell-by date.”
“Sounds like she lives life on the edge.” Peter laughs.
“Don’t,” I say, and walk away down the hall.
He follows me into my room and tries to put his arms around me, but I shrug him off.
“Elle, I’ve just flown across the Atlantic, in a raging storm, to see my beautiful girlfriend. Who, for the record, I am sickeningly, utterly in love with. I’m exhausted. All I’ve eaten in the past twelve hours is a piece of moldy cheese. And my socks are wet.” He sits down on my bed and pulls me onto his lap. “Be nice.”
“Ugh. You’re right.” I burrow my head into his chest. “I should be glad you’ve cheered her up. I am glad. It’s just been a shitty few days. And I missed you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.” He lies down on my ancient twin bed. His feet stick out two feet off the bottom. “Hmm,” he says, “I may need to sleep in your mother’s bed after all.”
“I fucking hate you, Pete.”
“I know. All the women do. That’s my particular charm.”
And I laugh, despite myself.
1990. January 1, New York.
New Year’s Day, and if today is anything to go by, this will be a truly shitty year. It’s below freezing, I’m sick to my stomach after our annual family dim sum at a loud, overheated restaurant in Chinatown, where I ate ten too many steamed meat-ish things I didn’t even want, and my mother got into an argument with the waiter over the check. Now Peter is pressuring me to return my father’s calls.
“It’s New Year’s. Perfect time for an olive branch,” he says as we head down Mott Street in the biting wind.
“Shit. I left one of my gloves in the restaurant.”
“They’re probably feeding it to some poor sucker,” Peter says.
“Don’t be an ass.”
* * *
—
Twenty minutes later, we’re squeezed inside a telephone booth a few blocks from my father’s apartment. I feel like kicking Peter. I cover the receiver with my hand. “This was a terrible idea,” I hiss.
“This is between you and Mary,” my father is saying.
“How can it be between me and Mary?” I snap.
“You two need to work this out.”
“There’s nothing between me and Mary. I’ve met her once.”
“I know,” my father says. “I want that to change. She’s important to me.”
“And I’m what?”
“Elle—”
“She convinced you your daughters were drug-addict thieves.”
He’s quiet on the other end of the phone. “Look, Mary made a mistake. I know. I made a mistake. And I am very sorry. Can we please move past this?”
“Fine. But if you think there is a world in which I will ever set foot in a room with that chicken-lipped woman, you’re insane.”
“Please don’t make this any worse.”
“Do not try to make this my fault.”
He sighs. “Mary and I are engaged. We’re getting married in March.”
“You just met her.”
“I know it’s soon, but Mary says there’s no reason to wait. We love each other.”
“Wow.” A piece of greasy dumpling rises in my throat.
“I need you to tell me it’s okay.”
“You’re pathetic.” I slam down the phone.
“That went well,” Peter says.
I stare at the receiver in my hand. Someone has scratched the word cunt on the back of it. And a smiley face.
“They’re getting married.”
“Ah.”
“Why did I listen to you? I should’ve hung up the second he mentioned her name.”
“Do not try to make this my fault,” Peter says.
“Mocking me? That’s your choice? My father just told me he’s marrying a woman Anna and I have met once. Who’s awful. And obvious. And fake.”
My steam-breath covers the glass in front of me. I rub a small window in it with the back of my glove, stare out at the street. “And, yet again, he doesn’t choose us.” I know I’m about to cry, which infuriates me even more. Weakness is the only thing I’ve inherited from my father. The afternoon sky is turning to flint. An angry gust of wind pushes a Happy New Year bugle down the sidewalk. I watch until it rolls off the curb and disappears.
“Elle, you’re the one turning this into an either/or.”
“What does that even mean?”
“She made the accusation, not him. He’s in a tough spot. He loves you. And apparently he loves her, too.”
“You don’t even know him,” I snap. “I need an ally, Pete, not some impartial witness.”
“I know it feels like treachery now, but once you calm down, you’ll realize this isn’t about you.”
“Calm down? Very useful.”
Peter opens his mouth to say something, but reconsiders. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Now can we please get out of this phone booth? As much as I enjoy being sweaty and pressed up against you, it’s starting to smell like a whorehouse in here.”
“How would you know?” I push open the accordion door and walk away.
Peter follows me out into the bitter cold. It’s starting to snow. “Elle. Stop.” He catches my sleeve. “Please. I love you. This isn’t our fight.” He pulls me into a doorway, out of the wind. “I’m defending your father because I want you two to make up. So I can meet him before I go back to London. That’s all. It’s entirely selfish. But there it is. I don’t want to have to come back to this hellishly freezing city.”
Up the block, a Checker cab appears. Peter steps out into the street and hails it. “Let’s go home. We can tuck up in that miserable little bed of yours and make our New Year’s resolutions.” The cab pulls over. “Mine is to stop trying to win an argument with you.”
“You go. I’ll meet you back there.”
“Elle—”
“It’s okay. We’re okay. But you’re right: I need to calm down. I need to walk this off.”
“And just like that, I win my first fight.” Peter takes both ends of my scarf, wraps them around my neck, pulls my hat down farther on my head. “Don’t be long.”
I watch the taxi’s taillights round the corner away from me into a halo of snow. The street is deserted. No sane person wants to be out in weather like this. Tears have dried in piss-thin icicles on my cheeks. I put my head down and start walking up Bank Street to my father’s building.
All the lights in his second-floor apartment are on. I ring the buzzer and wait. Through the etched-glass windows of the brownstone’s heavy mahogany front doors I can see a stroller parked in the stairwell, my father’s bicycle locked up behind it, leaning against a peeling radiator. It looks warm and clanky inside. I buzz again. My toes are beginning to feel like ice cubes inside my boots. I stomp my feet to get the blood moving, buzz one more time, lean on the bell. Nothing. I know he’s there, but he can’t hear the buzzer if his bedroom door is closed. There’s a pay phone in the Greek coffee shop around the corner I’ve had to use before.
It’s only one block, but by the time I get to the coffee shop, my face has been petrified by the cold.
“Close the door,” a man behind the register says before I’m even inside.
The place is half empty. A few saddies sit in the red vinyl booths eating eggs and bacon for their hangovers. Two old men are drinking coffee at the counter.
The pay phone is all the way in the back, next to the bathroom. I make my way past the booths, past a stack of sticky high chairs, the cigarette vending machine. Some guy is on the phone having a heated argument. His hair is thinning, greasy. A rat tail. There’s a tall stack of dimes on a ledge next to him. I take off my glove, pull off my hat, and fumble around my purse, shaking change. He feeds a few more coins into the slot and turns his back to me. I lean against the wall, wait for him to finish his call.
A waitress sets a piece of banana cream pie down on the counter, refills a coffee cup. The manager sticks a pencil behind his ear and rings up a pistachio-colored check.
“Excuse me?” I say when I see the man at the pay phone reaching for more coins. “Are you going to be much longer?”
“I’m on the phone, lady.”
“I just need to make a quick call. Two seconds.”
He covers the receiver with his hand. “I’ll be done when I’m done.” He leans into the phone and keeps talking. “Sorry,” he says. “Just some crazy lady.”
There’s a cheap antiqued Coca-Cola mirror on the wall next to me. I catch a glimpse of myself. My hair is flailing out in all directions, staticky, my cheeks red with windburn and dry heat. I look like a bag lady. Behind me I hear coffee hissing into the brewer. The door jingles and a gust of air hits the back of my neck.
I’ve just about decided my father isn’t worth this when pay-phone guy shouts, “Screw you, you twat,” into the phone and slams down the receiver. It’s that kind of day. He hits the coin-return lever a few times and checks the box until he’s satisfied that he hasn’t left a nickel behind by mistake. I fish out a dime and move toward the phone.
“You really are in a hurry, aren’t you, lady?” He takes his time buttoning his coat, blocking my way.
“Asshole,” I call after him as he heads for the door. A few people look up, but most of them just keep eating.
The phone rings six times before someone picks up. It’s Mary.
“Hello, Elle. Happy New Year.” Her voice is like treacle. Even through the telephone, I can hear her smiling a lie.
“Happy New Year, Mary. Can you put my father on the phone, please?”
“Your father’s resting.”
“I need to talk to him.” I picture her in her kelly-green twin set, her small, calculating eyes.
“I’d rather not disturb him.”
“I’m just down the street. I rang the buzzer, but no one answered.”
“Yes.”
“Can you please get him?” I try to stay calm.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You made him very upset. He tried to run out of the house with no shoes on. I was worried sick.”
“Just put him on, please.” I can’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“I think you both need some time to cool down.”
“Excuse me?”
“You were extremely rude to him earlier.”
“This is between me and Dad.”
“No,” she says. And this time she doesn’t bother to disguise her venom. “This is between you and me.”
I take a deep breath, try to control my hatred of her, the heartbreak of all my father’s broken promises—of the promise he made the summer after he and Joanne had finally split up.
* * *
—
It was August. Anna had a summer job as a mother’s helper in Amagansett and Conrad was in Memphis, so I was going to stay with my father while Mum and Leo were on tour in France. Dad had sublet Dixon’s apartment for the summer.
Mum and Leo put me on a Greyhound bus on their way to Logan, with enough money for a sandwich and a drink if the bus stopped at a rest area and a taxi from Port Authority to Dad’s apartment.
“Why can’t he pick me up at the bus?” I asked.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Mum said. “You’re thirteen years old. He said he’d have supper ready.”
“Fine. Don’t blame me if I get kidnapped by some pimp looking for runaways and end up as a fourteen-year-old hooker.”
“You watch far too much television,” Mum said.
* * *
—
When I woke the next day, it took me a moment to recognize where I was. A dark room. Dim, air-shaft light. The smell of someone else’s laundry detergent. The bunk bed, crayon marks on the walls, brown floral sheets. Becky’s room. The last thing I could remember was my father giving me one of his sleeping pills. I rubbed a dreamless sleep from my eyes and wandered down the long hallway looking for him. He was sitting at a big oak table in the cavernous, sun-washed living room of Dixon’s apartment reading a manuscript, wearing his usual weekend uniform—Levi’s, bare feet, a faded navy-blue Lacoste, the faint smell of peppermint castile soap.
He looked up and smiled. “Hey, kiddo.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost three. You slept for seventeen hours. Hungry? There’s half a turkey sandwich in the icebox.”
“No, thanks. Why didn’t you get me up?”
“Or I can make a pot of coffee.” He put the manuscript down. “Do you drink coffee?”
“I’m not allowed.”
“New rules.”
I followed him into the kitchen and sat down on one of the stools at the counter. He took a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer.
“You have to keep them in the freezer or the beans lose their flavor.”
I watched him grind the coffee, stopping the electric grinder twice to give it a shake. “Makes sure it’s evenly ground,” he said, getting two glass coffee cups from the cupboard, heated up milk in a saucepan. My father is fastidious about the details of cooking.
“I love this song,” he turned up the radio, started humming “Rhiannon.” “English muffin?”
“Sure.”
He took a fork out of a drawer, made little holes in the muffin all the way around, split it in half and put it in the toaster. “It’s so good to have you here,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “I made you a key.” He beamed at me as if this was an extraordinary achievement, pulled up a stool beside me. “So. My divorce is finally final.”
I wasn’t sure what I was meant to say—whether I should be happy for him or sad. I opted for silence.
“Joanne made it a pretty easy decision. She gave me an ultimatum: my marriage or my girls. And obviously that was a no-brainer.” He took a dramatic pause. “You and Anna didn’t know this, but Joanne never liked my having kids.”
I feigned a look of surprise, tried not to laugh.
The toaster popped up. “I’m so sorry I disappeared on you girls. Joanne made it all so difficult. Anyway,” he said, taking a stick of butter and a jar of English marmalade from the icebox, “good riddance to bad rubbish. Never again. From now on it’s you, me, and Anna. No one will ever come between us again. And that’s a promise.”
* * *
—
“Mary,” I hiss into the pay phone now. “Go tell my father I need to speak to him. And tell him if he doesn’t come to the phone, I’m never speaking to him again.” I hear her taking a mental pause. “Do not mak
e this decision for him, Mary, if that’s what you’re thinking. Believe me, it’ll backfire.”
She puts the phone down on the counter. I listen to her steps moving into the bedroom. I can hear her talking to my father. After a few minutes, she picks up the receiver. “He says, ‘Fine, if that’s what you want.’”
“You told him that would be it?”
“Yes,” she replies sweetly, “I repeated your exact words.”
I feel sick, sucker-punched. “Well then, I guess there’s nothing else to say. Have a lovely wedding. Last time Dad got married, the bride wasn’t wearing any underwear. I think he likes that bare-crotch thing.”
I hang up the phone and run into the coffee-shop bathroom, dry-heaving over the bowl a few times until the nausea subsides. I’ve never been able to make myself throw up, no matter how hard I try. I hate him. I hate his weakness. Everything he has never done for us. Everything he has promised. The endless betrayals. I splash my face with cold water. I’m splotchy and bloodshot, but at least I can breathe. I need to get out of here. I need Peter.
I’m almost out the front door when someone in the booth behind me says, “Elle?”
His voice has changed. Deepened, of course. But I would recognize it if it were in a chorus of a thousand voices. I’ve imagined this moment for so many years. What it would be like. Who we would be now. In my version, I’m carrying a rough draft of my thesis on Baudelaire, running to meet a corduroy-clad professor; or coming out of the pond after a vigorous swim—tan, fit, mature; no regrets. I run my fingers through my wild staticky hair. I could walk out the door, let him think he’s made a mistake.
“Elle,” Jonas says again, in his soft, easy voice—monosyllabic but perfect, like a pressed shirt.
And I turn around.
He looks different. Less woodland, less feral. His thick black hair is cut short. But his eyes are the same sea green: unwavering, pure.