Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  It was the second winter I was in New York alone, and graduate school was already beginning to seem like a pointless exercise in pretension and one-upmanship. The loss of Vera seemed very final. My life was deeply hollow. I had been dating a girl named Crystal, but we had broken up and I was on a crash diet. Wrestling had done that to me, given me the bug of bulking up then starving myself to my lowest weight. That winter I survived on a diet of frozen chicken tenders, bowls of broth and hot sauce, and extra-large Diet Cokes. I knew my father was an actor. I thought maybe there was a chance he lived in New York. Most actors did, either there or LA. It was only because I was alone in the apartment too much that I even started thinking about it, decided to look him up. He had a pretty unusual last name, and when I looked in the white pages online, there were only five listings, and one of them was for an R.

  Robert. That was my father’s name. Robert Cogle. I called and left a message on his machine, amazed by how cool and collected I sounded, how casually I mentioned that I might be his son and that if he ever wanted to have coffee or something I now lived in the city.

  He called me back the next day. He invited me to his apartment, which was downtown. He had two bedrooms, and his rent must have cost a fortune. I wondered if my mother had been accurate in saying his career hadn’t been successful. The furniture was a hodgepodge of hypermodern and antique pieces he had saved and restored himself. He liked to find things on the street. He explained that the paintings on the walls were his own. He was just a dabbler, though, he said. The paintings were not realistic renderings or anything like that, but bright whimsical things, a red and green watercolor of a rabbit that looked about to melt and dissolve into thin air, a still life of a candelabra and some fruit done in different shades of gray. What struck me most, when he ushered me in, was that I looked nothing like him.

  He was tall and narrow and dark-haired with a big booming voice. His eyebrows grew into fiendish, pointed tufts. I was very aware of the physicality of him, aware of our differences, but also eager to see any way in which we might be the same. We kept crossing our legs at the same angle, laughing at the same moment, in a way that was intriguing. Being raised by a single mother had made me a fervent believer in nurture over nature. I had wanted to believe that my father had absolutely no influence over my life, over who I was. But now that I was in the same room with him, I could feel a biological relatedness, a kind of hum of sympathy between our beings that was uncanny.

  We made small talk, and I told him about my PhD program, hoping he would be impressed, though he didn’t seem particularly interested. “That’s good, that’s good,” he’d said. It did not seem the time to belabor the point that it was such an exclusive program, that I was excellent at what I did. I also did not tell him about Katya or about Vera. I presented myself as a successful scholar, an ordinary sort of guy, worried he would find me questionable or neurotic if I revealed more.

  When the subject of why he had never been in my life was inevitably broached, he began to embark on a project of persuading me, trying to paint the picture from his point of view. I was more than willing to hear him out. I wanted to know, to know what reason he could have had. I had wondered all my life, after all. I had always imagined his decision not to be in my life as happening on a darkened stage, just him and me in a spotlight, a man incomprehensibly walking away from a baby who could not have yet committed any sin to make him go.

  For one thing, it turned out that my mother had told other people before she told him, and so he heard about her pregnancy secondhand instead of from her. I could see that this would be off-putting. He went on, explaining that they had gone out to dinner to try to talk things through, and she had seemed to think they were on a date, and at one point told him she might be in love with him, which was absurd, he pointed out, because they had only slept together the one time and hadn’t even been dating. “She was obsessed with me, I’m afraid,” he said. His fingers were long and elegant and I was distracted looking at them as he gestured. He had always suspected she had gotten pregnant on purpose, to trap him. “Do you know what it’s like to be with someone who is just—Christ, it was like she was in a romantic comedy and she kept expecting me to kiss her! We couldn’t have a real conversation about any of it. She’d devolved into being a teenage girl.” He said the word devolved as though it disgusted him, as though it denoted a gross metamorphosis like something from Kafka.

  I could see that all of this was entirely possible. I could see his point of view, even. He didn’t know this woman, and here she was, seemingly overly attached to him. His instinct had been to free himself. He claimed my mother began showing up at his apartment, loitering at the theater near his dressing room. They were members of the same company back then. “I couldn’t work with her anymore, and I told the artistic director that, and of course it made her think it was my fault she wasn’t getting any roles, and she turned quite spiteful after that. Honestly, she haunted me for years. I would be up for a big audition, and she would call ahead of time and spread nasty rumors about me.”

  I had a hard time imagining my mother doing this, but I nodded and sipped the coffee he’d given me. He asked if I minded if he smoked. He smoked Nat Shermans. Even now that oxblood-colored box is burned into my memory, as were all the details of his apartment: the dark blue mid-century sofa, the glass kidney-bean-shaped coffee table, the peculiar odor of lacquer or paint drying, a resiny smell overlaid with brewing coffee. It surprised me that he smoked. So few real adults did by then. I lit up with him. “It wasn’t about you,” he said, “you see? But how could I try to raise a child with someone like that? We couldn’t see eye to eye on anything, and any inch I gave, she took a mile. I couldn’t trust her.”

  There were many things I wanted to say. I wanted to say, “If you couldn’t trust her, why would you let her raise your child?” I wanted to say, “But my mother isn’t insane. She just factually isn’t. So maybe she was hurt because she had a crush on you, and she was scared and pregnant.” But I felt intuitively that if we were going to have a relationship, my allegiance to my mother would have to be covert. I was not going to try to argue him into understanding that he had been wrong. And I could also see that my mother’s flair for drama, her tendency to overplay the intimate moment, could strike a man as strange, could keep him from understanding that underneath she was really very practical, almost brutally so, and also, of course, very tender. Very easy to hurt.

  I left that day feeling on edge from all the coffee and cigarettes. I remember I wasn’t paying attention as I crossed the street from his apartment, and I almost got hit by an ambulance. I thought that was remarkable at the time, that I hadn’t heard it coming, that I was so inside my head I had been deaf to the sound of sirens. Probably very few people had been run over by ambulances, and I had almost been among them. He lived near the Hudson River, just a few blocks in, and I could hear the seagulls screaming after the ambulance passed. I didn’t feel like my father had really seen anything of me. That first day had all been about him, about presenting himself to me. But I thought that would change as we got to know each other. The important thing was that I had met my father. And he painted pictures of bunny rabbits turning into air. And he liked to restore old furniture. Everything about him was just painfully cool. And he was my father.

  We spent the next three or four months meeting for coffee or lunch every two weeks or so. He was very charming. A good storyteller. Nice to me. We both loved Shakespeare. “What’s your favorite play?” he’d asked.

  “The Tempest,” I said, without hesitation, and he had crowed: “Mine too!”

  And I felt so proud, proud that we had the same favorite play by Shakespeare. He showed me a novel he was writing and I was dismayed to discover that it was excellent. By that point, I had given up on ever publishing my writing, but I still did write and I could see immediately that my stories, foolish, awkward things about dating girls and not feeling enough for them, were nothing compared to his half-finished novel, w
hich was set in Shakespeare’s time and had a decidedly fabulist bent, told from the point of view of a child who could remember things from the moment he was born. “I don’t know if I’ll finish it,” he’d said, waving my compliments away. His excellent novel was just a lark, a side project.

  “No,” I said, trying to get him to understand. “But this is brilliant. You must keep working on this.”

  I never knew if he did or didn’t. Whether he was pretending not to care to draw compliments out of me, to underplay his achievement the way kids in high school will pretend not to have studied when they ace a test, or whether he really could just toss off such brilliance as if it didn’t matter.

  Gradually, though, I began to feel as if I were behind a partition of glass and Robert could not hear anything I was saying. He never took an interest in me. He rarely asked questions about my life except in the most cursory way. He was always polite about it, but it was clear that I wasn’t very interesting to him. He was the interesting one. That was where he was most comfortable: being the raconteur, being the genius, being the star. For Christmas, he gave me a taped recording of himself playing Iago in Othello.

  He also began to be more and more careless about saying nasty things about my mother. He assumed, because I did not say otherwise, that I was his confidant, that we were bonded together against her. “And I think we both know Rose is a little cuckoo,” he would say. Or, “And my hat is off to you for turning out so well, being able to handle her.” Most of the time it didn’t bother me. I thought of the woman he had known as being entirely separate from my actual mother. He simply didn’t know what he was talking about. But I found it annoying, presumptuous. I was beginning to see that he was arrogant. A bit of an ass. Quick to assume the worst in other people.

  Once, I accidentally slipped and called him Dad. I was just a young guy, twenty-five, wanting to connect with my father, yet I can still feel ashamed when I think of it, that burning, searing shame associated with early childhood. I remember once playing dogs when I was four and licking the leg of a babysitter, the way she turned on me, suddenly serious, and told me no. There had been a warning in her voice that scared me: I had crossed a line I hadn’t even known existed. I felt that way when I accidentally called Robert Dad, that confusion over what I had done that was wrong, that hot fumbling flush, but there I was, a grown man. “Hey now,” he had said. “We don’t know that for sure. We ought to have a DNA test done.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been entirely sure I was the father,” he said. I noticed he said “the father” and not “your father.”

  “But who else would be my father?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he said. I realized he was implying my mother had been sleeping around. Given the fact that I had been conceived during a one-night stand at a party, I could see that it was a reasonable inference that my mother might be sleeping with other men. In fact, she had never told me she wasn’t. But I was incensed anyway. Didn’t he see himself in me? Wasn’t it obvious in the way we crossed our legs, the way we laughed at the same time, the way we both loved The Tempest? And if he truly thought that I wasn’t his son, then why on earth was he having coffee with me all the time?

  “So you really don’t think I’m your son,” I pressed.

  “I have no way of knowing,” he said. And then, as though to make sure I understood he was being perfectly reasonable: “I’m not ruling it out by any means. I’m not saying you aren’t my son.”

  I just stared at him. I was like Schrödinger’s cat then, half alive and half dead. I was nothing but a thought experiment, someone who might be but was also possibly not his son. I wasn’t real to him at all.

  I didn’t exactly cut off our friendship, but things became awkward after that. I felt hurt when he forgot my birthday, but then I realized he might not even know when it was. He stopped calling, I stopped calling. By the time my mother came back the next summer, the whole thing was over. I never told her. I didn’t want her to know. The nasty things he’d said about her and the way I had listened, not objecting. The way he had failed to notice me or see me or claim me. The way I had been so bitterly disappointed. I felt foolish and exposed.

  After that, I scoured myself for any possible influence from him. In part because I looked so much like my mother on the outside, I suspected myself of being more like my father on the inside, and I was absolutely sure that I was genetically destined to become a blind, arrogant, hurtful asshole. It was part of why I second-guessed everything I did, everything I wanted. The part of me that burned, that thought of Grandma Sylvia in the gas chamber, that quivered when I read Virginia Woolf was the same as the part of him that painted pictures of rabbits dissolving into air, wrote novels about boys who could remember being born, played Iago so cunningly I had become nauseated watching him and had to stop the tape halfway. What a shitty Christmas present.

  What an embarrassment, to be that man’s son.

  Chapter 11

  Date: 7/17/2014 11:34 PM

  From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

  To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

  Subject: Marginalia

  Dear Fang,

  I have been contacted by Great-grandmother Sylvia’s ghost. At first, I didn’t know that’s what was happening, but now I feel almost certain. There have been thoughts, insights really, that I know are beyond my own capability, and I think they are her consciousness working through mine, just as we have been discussing.

  Tonight she made a glass fall right off the counter in our apartment.

  Maybe it is a coincidence, or maybe not. I have no explanation for how mental energy could affect physical matter, and at the same time, I have clear evidence that it does: How is it different for me to think of raising my arm and then do it? Aren’t I using my mental energy to create a chemical cascade that results in the movement of physical matter? I have no idea if there are other methods of doing this besides brains and bodies, but I don’t think the idea is totally whackadoodle.

  Also, almost every single culture has a mythology about ghosts. Where there is smoke, there is fire, no?

  Anyway, I have a lot of reading to do to try to make sense of things. Darius loaned me a book of poetry and some guy named Daniel gave me a book about Tesla and also told me the very interesting and very tragic life story of Alan Turing. It’s all connected. Especially to what you were discussing regarding the Woolf. I will try to write it out cohesively and then send to you, but in the meantime just do some Wikipediaing of those names: Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, and oh, Hedy Lamarr. I think she is also connected, and of course Woolf, too. Each of their lives contains an echo of a single truth.

  I got an interesting image the other day. I pictured a giant ice wall with people’s heads frozen in it. I walked up to it and it was frosty, and I wiped away the frost, and I could see all these heads just frozen in it, their faces contorted, and I kept wondering what it was. Some kind of astral object? A metaphor? What is an ice wall full of heads?

  Also, I’ve been thinking of starting a Tumblr that is just pictures of whales photoshopped to be wearing sunglasses. I was even thinking there could be music videos to go with it. Wouldn’t that be funny? If I do go to college, what do you think I should major in? I’ve been thinking maybe biology!

  With love,

  From Vilnius,

  Your ghostbuster,

  V

  THE MOMENT I LAID EYES on Herkus’s mother, Grandma Sylvia’s other daughter, I was sure the SS officer was staring right out at me. She had wide, Teutonic, milky-blue eyes, white hair as thin as floss that she wore with bangs in front, the rest pulled into a bun. Her name was Agata. “Yes,” Herkus said, when he was introducing her. “Sylvia named her after her sister, the one who died in Stutthof.” I took Agata’s soft, pale hand. So now I knew the name, the name of the girl who had not been beautiful enough to live.

  Agata was much older than I had thought she would be. I’d been thinking of her as my mother’s age, but of course
my mother had been born in the 1950s and Agata must have been born in 1943 or ’44, which explained why Herkus was older than me. She accepted my handshake, but then held her arms open and kissed me twice on the cheeks. She said something in Polish and Herkus translated, “She says she would give anything to meet your mother.”

  “She would love to meet you, too,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if this was true. My mother’s sense of her history was like a beloved stage prop, a fan she used to hide coquettishly behind or a shawl that she posed with in lavish repose. I wasn’t sure how she would handle having it changed, suddenly having to contend with a sister, which is perhaps why I had avoided telling her about meeting Herkus in the first place. We were standing in the kitchen, which was just one corner of a large room decorated like a lodge with leather couches and wood paneling. The house was made of red-stained wood, a long simple rectangle with a pitched roof that had been done over in some ecological way so that grass was growing on it. I did not know if this was an old tradition or something very modern.

  “She says,” Herkus translated again, “that she wants to call you son because you are her sister’s child. She says she loves you very much.”

  Agata reached again for my face and kissed me full on the lips, then let her hands rest on my cheeks, just staring at me. She smoothed my eyebrows with her thumbs. She said something again in Polish, and her face was pink, her eyes misty.

  “She says you and I are like twins,” Herkus said.

  “I’m the big twin,” I said, and patted my belly.

  “Hey, no,” Herkus said, “I am older than you. I would have been the big one. It would have been me dunking your head under water and pushing you off couches so you broke your arm.”

  I laughed, imagining a childhood spent being beaten up by Herkus, here in the Lithuanian forest. Everywhere I looked, there were little blond children running around. A toddler was naked, his penis bobbing as he ran, and there was a girl who must have been about four in a fairy costume, sparkling wire-and-mesh wings strapped to her back. The party was huge, maybe thirty or forty adults and then an infinity of children.