The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  I’d imagined a low building, two or four stories, square. I pictured thick Venetian blinds, plain metal file cabinets. A trenchcoat on a wooden peg. No clutter. I wanted an office from the forties showing spare male taste, like a nun’s cell.

  This detective’s office was male, but a different way. You could smell him. I didn’t like it. The room had shag carpet and fake wood paneling. Another vague smell of food tinged the air, but I couldn’t place what it was. On a center island, Tina wiggled in her chair, surrounded by necessary machinery. She leaned forward, hair spilling, free to swivel on the four feet of plastic covering the carpet like a nylon stocking over a hairy leg. Her breasts looked like they were made of pure soft fat.

  “You Maya?” She seemed very friendly, and like many friendly people she had extraordinarily large teeth. She yanked up a ringing phone.

  A floor-length dirty curtain hid most of the one window, but a painted brick wall outside said: SHORT STAY RATES. Radio dispatches crackled up from the desk. “Following her from the garage on Lexington and Eighty-one. Entering building on northwest corner.”

  Then he stood there. The detective. He was older than he’d sounded on the phone, about—I didn’t know—father age. He showed me into his office and slid behind a desk. He had light hair and freckles on top of a tan. I didn’t think any of the wood in there was real. Clutter balanced on table tops, bookshelves and the window ledge. An old newspaper page on the bulletin board had a picture of my detective with the caption THE BOGART OF BROOKLYN. The kidney-shaped coffee table held stacks of legal-looking papers. I sat on the edge of an orange couch.

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms up to touch the wall behind him, one fist knocking the plaster. “So what have we got?”

  In the newspaper picture he was young, full-lipped, leaning against a lamppost in a sloppy trench coat. It amazed me to see young men, men I could fall in love with, in pictures and then meet them the way they were now. He was still kind of handsome.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “How old a man would your father be now?”

  “Fifty-five.”

  “You got a date of birth?”

  “I have a year, but not a day.” I didn’t ever think of it until just then, that I didn’t know my father’s birthday. “He’s the same age as my mother. So that’s what, 1931.”

  “You have a social security number?”

  “No. He’s been immigrated, I mean, my father’s Egyptian, he became a citizen sometime when I was a child, I don’t remember when.”

  “ ’31. Awright. We’ll have to yank a date of birth and a social.”

  Then he picked up the phone. “Listen, I’m looking for a guy with a very unusual name. I’d like you to run him through computers in several states, uh—” He looked up.

  I whispered, “Wisconsin, Colorado, California.”

  He said, “Wisconsin, Colorado, California, Illinois and Arizona.”

  “And Nevada,” I said. “He’s kind of a gambler.”

  “And give me Nevada too. I really got to get this guy.” He was bouncing now on his chair. “So I want you to do everything you can, okay, don’t embarrass me, awright. I want you to pull up a birth date and a social. Hit the gambling areas in particular. The guy’s a gambler so you want to ask around the casinos for debts. I gotta find this guy. So hit the computers and hit the DMVs. Tell you what, you get this for me, I’ll buy you a steak dinner, not that it’s any pleasure to watch you eat. Awright, T-bone at Calabresi’s. What’s this gonna cost me? Ouch. Wait a second.” He palmed the telephone. “Sweetheart, you sure you’re gonna retain us ’cause this’s expensive.”

  I waved my arm. “Sure.”

  “Awright, can you bring that down a little because you’re cutting way into my profits. Get me a date of birth and grab the social. How long will it take you to hit those computers? Awright, awright. Now the name is—sweetheart, you’re gonna have to spell this …”

  I started. He repeated after me into the phone. “M like mountain, O like orchard …”

  “Uh-oh. I’m not sure if it’s one or two M’s.” Mohammed. I knew this looked bad, not knowing how to spell my father’s name, but if I was spending all this money, I was going to be honest. I wasn’t going to lose him because of an M.

  “Awright, that could be one M or two M’s and the last name is—” And here he glanced at me again. “This you got to be right on.”

  It was my name too for so long.

  I said the name and he repeated it and then he hung up the phone. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Dealing with that guy will give you a headache.”

  “Sometimes he went by the name of John,” I said. “Over here, I mean.”

  “John,” he said. “Awright. John.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Oh, there’s lots of ways. First I’m gonna see if he’ll get us a birth date and when I’ve got a birth date I can run him through DMV. I found somebody in an hour once with DMV.”

  “Really? How’d you do that?”

  “Oh, a woman walked in here one day, she’d put up a boy for adoption, long time ago, sixteen years ago. And she knew the birth date and she knew the state he was in and I thought, the kid turns sixteen, what’s the first thing he’s gonna do, he’s gonna take his driver’s test, get a license.” He punched the wall behind him. “Had him in an hour.”

  “Then what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t get involved in that. There’s so many people. I handle hundreds of cases, thousands over the years. ’S up to them what they do with it.” That made me a little sad. My heel hit something granular, like a paper-covered ant hill: Sweet ’n Low packets, one punctured, on the carpet, next to a book called B Is for Burglar.

  “See if he has Blue Cross Blue Shield. There’s many ways, all right? Many ways.”

  I doubted that my father had Blue Cross Blue Shield. Three things my family never has used: umbrellas, sunglasses and medical insurance. We never did. Any of us. We lived streaking lives, unsheltered.

  “But I don’t think he’s going to have any insurance.”

  “How old’s your father, ’31, let’s see, you’re telling me a fifty-five-year-old man doesn’t have health insurance, and a guy who’s taught college, a lot of jobs he had, it just comes with them.”

  “I know, but he didn’t keep jobs for long. He was more the type to run off with a student or marry a rich older woman, that kind of thing.”

  “Kind of a con artist, you’re saying.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t think he’ll have health insurance.”

  “Awright, well, we’ll go another way then. Do you know if he ever had any health problems?”

  “He had liver problems, I think. He’d had hepatitis once and sometimes his liver swelled. He couldn’t eat fat, I remember.” In Los Angeles, that last breakfast, he’d ordered coffee black and a glass of grapefruit juice.

  “That’s good. Hepatitis is good. See, he checks into a hospital, there’d be a record there. Do you know if he has any credit? Bank loan, credit cards, anything like that? You say he’s a gambler. Well, a lot of gamblers are gonna have credit lines around the gambling areas.”

  “Bad credit probably. I doubt he has any cards.”

  He slapped the wall again, this time with an open hand. “Good. Debts are good! Bad credit is good! Now tell me a place I can start, somewhere he actually worked and was employed.”

  “University of Wisconsin at Madison.”

  “Now, you’re sure of that.”

  “Absolutely sure. He met my mom there.”

  “Good, I’ll start there then.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Oh, we have ways, we can do a lot of different things, but I’ll call the college and feel around, try and get somebody to cooperate with me, see. I don’t do anything illegal, mind you. What’s your father’s field, his specialty?”

  “Political philosophy, I think.”

&
nbsp; “So I might say I’m looking for him to contribute to a magazine I’m doing on Egyptian political philosophy, say. I lie. I call it pretexting but I lie. What we really do is lie. You develop your ways. Technique. I’ve been doing this a long time, my intuition and timing, they’re refined. When I started I had talent but I tried a lot of things that didn’t work. There aren’t two people in the country doing what I’m doing, with the sophistication, you know? You’re getting the benefit of experience.”

  “Do you think you can find him?”

  “I can find him if anybody can. You ask a lot of questions. I like that because I’m good. I’ve been doin’ this for thirty-some-odd years now.” He stood up then, shouting, “Tina, gimme a contract for Ms. Stevenson here, would ya?”

  I noticed the holster dropping on his hip, a handgun. He had slim hips. He never asked me how it was I didn’t have my father’s name. I suppose he could have assumed I was married.

  He arched back in his chair, arms crossed over his head. I’d always associated arched backs with sex.

  “How’d you start in this line of work?” I still had to wait for the contract, I figured I could stay awhile. I wasn’t bothering anybody.

  “I was an actor. Trying to be. I auditioned for a part in 0 Mistress Mine, and I got the part. I was Montgomery Clift’s brother, but he cracked up and so they didn’t shoot the movie. I started this business out of a phone booth. Found I was pretty good at it. I’d sleep in cars, benches, anywhere. I used to be a severe workaholic. Been in it thirty years now.”

  That sounded like fun, being a young actor and sleeping in cars and everything. Romance could be urban I guess: ducking under a marquee, staring through big windows into a ballroom, dancing on the pavement outside, pulling up cloth coat collars, sharing a joint or cigarette pulled from a trench-coat pocket inside city rain. Bud Edison and I had been like that—young and in a place. I didn’t have enough of that.

  I mostly stayed in my apartment at the desk with my book open under the lamplight. I drank coffee, bit the ends of my hair, memorizing bones. I tried to plan rewards that would not involve calories. Everywhere outside, parties lit windows in tall grim buildings one by one like so many fireflies on a bush.

  “YOU MARRIED?” I said.

  “Married sixteen years. Divorced eight.”

  “What happened there?”

  “Aw, I don’t know.” He held his fingernails up towards his face. “My wife called and said, let’s go out for dinner tonight and see a show, and I took her to dinner and I said, I want a divorce. Just like that. I worked all the time those years, I never came home, slept on benches, in cars, whatever. I’m talkin’ severe workaholic.”

  “And you’re not anymore?”

  “I’m a little better now.”

  Tina tilted in. Her shoes, her skirt, everything on the bottom was tight. She handed him the freshly typed sheet of paper.

  “Awright,” he said, “here’s your contract. Eleven hundred fifty, plus eight and a quarter state tax, there’s nothing I can do about that. How would you like to pay me?”

  “I could give you a check, but can you not cash it for a few days? I have to put money in.”

  “No problem.”

  I wrote out the check, then I walked over to hand it to him.

  The meeting seemed over but I didn’t feel like leaving. The detective was kind of handsome.

  As I walked out, I looked over his desk and found a girl in a framed picture. She stood wearing a bikini with her hair frilly in the wind and then I saw it, it was Tina and all of a sudden I understood, oh, okay. People were living all that right now, here it was rushing by. Then, I noticed an open blue box of graham crackers on the plastic bank under her chair. That was it, the smell, graham crackers. That was a disappointment, a small one.

  EVERYTHING I’D DONE before had been secret. At night I kept a kind of record. I had hair from when I was a child. I’d kept all kinds of things like that. In case he wanted to see.

  I fasted. In all my fasts, I learned, my body stayed the same shape, translucently thin but the same, girllike. The curves and outlines shrank but didn’t change. And that was what I had wanted to eradicate. That shape was what I hated and tried to starve out. But even bodies seemed to have a soul. Something given, what you cannot alter.

  At times, I abandoned sacrifice. When I lived with my mother in California, we went to sleep hungry some nights. I’d lie in my bed imagining food, tender pork chops, mashed potatoes. You’d think that time with not enough we would have wasted thin. But I didn’t. That was the fattest I ever was. I couldn’t stop myself. Our poverty was not starving, it was eating the box of old saltines for dinner because you were alone in the apartment and that’s all that there was and not feeling bad about it, really, it was just a night, a nothing night in a million nights. All our time together was like that. It never had any height for her. She never felt that I was the life she was supposed to be living. And after we waited two hours sitting on the hard plastic chairs in the Western Union office and the wire finally came in from Wisconsin and we had some money, we drove to a restaurant and we stuffed.

  I baby-sat for the food. There in California, the neighbors got to know me. When the kids went to bed, I’d open all the cupboard doors and leave them hanging on their hinges, and look for a long time at the food. I tried to figure out what I could eat without them seeing. I took one or two things out of a box or ajar. One pickle. A cinnamon Pop-Tart. After the first few times, one wife left notes about what might be good. “There’s leftover brisket and a strawberry compote. Help yourself,” she wrote. That house always lay open, strewn and messy, the kitchen cleaned only on the top layer, but there was something about the wife. When she smiled, there was something sad in it, wise and sad. She motioned to her husband with her eyebrows to give me the dollar more. While they were gone, I looked in her closet at the glittery purses, the delicate gold-colored shoes with worn places from her heels and each of her toes.

  I could only fast at my grandmother’s house where there was always plenty. My father then lived far away. I kept a kind of vigil and twice, I became thin in a terrible way. I got so I couldn’t stop losing. But my father never saw me that way.

  I did things to myself for him, but that wasn’t the only part of my life. It didn’t take time exactly. It wasn’t even the main thing. It had about the same relation to my life as buying a lottery ticket might. You’d see it in your wallet a few times a day, you’d remember it, but it was not really anything. Still, if you took it away, your life would be different.

  EVEN THOUGH I was always looking, sometimes I didn’t want to find him. It was the way you touched a sore. It depended. Some days I was too tired and solace mattered more. Solace was women, kind hands on foreheads, my grandmother. Once, when I was a child raking leaves in old loose clothes with my grandmother, the autumn gathering its huge skirts of wind, fall dark threatening, the window lights in houses blurring deeper orange, I saw a man in a shiny dark suit walking, turning in our drive. I couldn’t tell if his suit was green or black. He walked with a slight drag on the left. At that moment, I didn’t want him to be my father.

  The man was a knife sharpener. My grandmother had a whetstone in the kitchen. We sent him away.

  Other days I had surges of animal strength and longed for the circus, whatever the end. Those were the days I did things to myself. I learned about pain from teeth. I pulled at the loose ones, I tested pain.

  Sometimes it went gentler. I collected things from outside to save, to show him what he’d missed while he was gone. I had a wasp’s nest from Wisconsin I’d moved with me everyplace I’d lived, I still had it, and my butterflies in cigar boxes, all my saved things.

  My grandmother called me outside—this was always—and said, come here, lookit see. She’d whisper if it was a bird or an insect or cat babies, something animal and skittish. But she’d point at the shape of a flower, slight as a lily of the valley or as large as the oak. Even a cloud. She took a walk every
day.

  “I’m glad you saw that,” she said after, as if there were some positive good in just seeing.

  We were different. I had to take everything and keep it, so it meant something. I wanted him to see it too. I liked to own. I filled my pockets with stones and acorns. My grandmother just left it all where it was. While she watched, her mouth grew nervous with the tension of someone frightened while receiving a pleasure, frightened that she would move or do something to make it stop and go away. If she ever had sex, she’d have been like that too, I know that. She’d have kept still until it was over and only then could she laugh and spill over relief that she hadn’t spoilt it somehow. By doing something herself, something that she’d thought of on her own. You understand that about people you know from every day. How they’d be in love at night or anywhere. She felt ashamed of herself. She most often wanted to make herself invisible.

  I hope she had real love. There’s no way to find out such things. It is a constant and sad thing to love a person whose lifetime only barely intersects your own.

  She was best later, smiling with that after gasp of “I’m glad you got to see that too.”

  But what is it if a person sees the change of seasons all her life, studies the progress of flowers, wonders at the sky. What do they leave? They leave no record.

  Maybe though there was more to it than I understood. Maybe she was trying to show me religion. My own attempts now seemed to me just superstition, a thousand teeth and dry leaves and acorns and nests. But even my father, whom they were all meant for, he would not know picking up a nest, what I had felt when I ran with it to the house. If he is only a man.

  Maybe she tried to teach me to see a part and get something from the symmetry that would change me, and then, it would not be from her to me, personal, but from me to something bigger, her taking my child’s hand and touching it to the wide flat cloud thin eternal so I could feel the glacial weightlessness fill inside.

  Where did the day go? My grandmother always asked that at dusk. Whatever she was doing, wherever she was in the house, she’d step out on the porch and lean her chin on the broom top, and hold each of her elbows with the other hand and say, “Where did the day go?”