The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  I’D LEFT my door open again.

  I rolled my bike in, pitched it against a wall. I walked around in the dark and just touched things, all my old furniture. I had the feeling you might get knowing you were about to receive a summons to pack up your belongings. My breath came from the top of me, a high, almost giddy kind of waiting. I squeezed the shoulder of my grandmother’s couch the way I would a person. Maybe I could have liked this life. I was leaving before I really got to know it.

  What had been abstract, diffuse, so one night it was the spell of a vast deep sky, the touch of a stranger’s two fingers on my neck, could become everyday and of this world. I’d need to buy a plane ticket. I’d have to travel, maybe stay in a hotel, rent a car. What would I bring?

  Would I even take my life here into consideration? Wait till it was a good time to leave school, get someone to fill in for me at the hospital? I should really get a haircut, lose six pounds, get my clothes in order, pay my bills. Once I went over to Stevie Howard’s apartment in Madison when he was packing, the bed was a ravage of clothes and dry-cleaner cellophane. A huge suitcase was half full on the sheets. Talcum was spilled on the floor and the open bathroom yawned male smells. His apartment was no better than mine. He’d gone shopping that day. We were still the age when we bought our new clothes for going home. Or everybody else did. Not me. My mother was different. When I went to see her I’d see just her. There weren’t friends and parties, none of that. There wasn’t even a house. She lived in a rented backhouse she couldn’t afford and still, there was no room for me.

  My father, I couldn’t see staying the same place long. I’d paid the detective my money, I’d better jump on a plane and do what I needed to, before he disappeared again.

  It would be his time, not mine. All these years, he lived everywhere, the eye in the seed, pollen in the wind. That was different and maybe easier. Now, if he was going to be a man, just wearing brown clothes, living in some city, then it seemed things should be fair. My turn and then his turn. But we never would be fair.

  I held on to the back of my rocker. I didn’t want to go. Anywhere. I loved my small life, unwatched and unbothered, just as it was, one more night. I loved it for all I hadn’t given it.

  I collapsed on the gray couch, one hand on my belly. I hadn’t had sex for more than a year now. I had never been pregnant. And I hadn’t been perfect either. It was weird. I always felt proud of that—no abortions. It was another kind of virginity. But now I was twenty-eight, and it was something I worried over a little. Why hadn’t I ever been pregnant? Most of my friends had. I’d wanted to, deep at the center of a few nights.

  Stevie had had two girlfriends who got pregnant. When Mai linn was seventeen, the artist in San Francisco used to cry out, “Ooch, I want to make you pregnant.” Once she brought up the subject the next morning while he sat cross-legged on the bedspread unballing a pair of socks. He made his bed every morning and then ironed the shirt he was going to wear that day. He patted her belly and said, “It’s enough just to think it.” She told Stevie and me that she wanted his baby. Stevie looked at her like being pregnant with that asshole’s child would ruin her. His name was Kevin June. I believe in naming the names of assholes.

  Bud Edison asked me once, “Are you preggy?” I’d never heard that word before. I thought he’d made it up. He’d thought up the idea of me being pregnant because of what I was eating. Then he said, “You can’t imagine any circumstances so that you’d be married in the next year?” His voice worked like a knob turning the whole room forty-five degrees more still and permanent.

  “No-oh,” I said, like of course not.

  I hurled onto his lap, my socked feet on his knees. I was like that with him. We’d be in his apartment, allegedly working, books open, and I kept looming across the room falling on him. It wasn’t desire exactly, it wasn’t that. I imagined large twelve-year-olds throwing themselves on their fathers, all girl.

  I pulled at his sweater. It was an odd blue. “Can I have this?”

  “I can’t give that to you. It was Asia’s father’s.” He’d had a real girlfriend before me. She’d gone to Reed College and her name was Asia. She’d left him. It bugged me, her power.

  “Was her father dead?”

  “No.”

  “So why was she giving away his clothes?”

  “She just gave it to me,” he said, picking at a thread. “It was nice.”

  Once, later, we really thought I was. He called every morning to check. I hadn’t told him about my fasting and my insides. Most of my friends had had abortions already. We didn’t talk about what we’d do. I suppose that was what my parents did. They never planned their lives. I didn’t want to have a life like theirs, but I didn’t want to be one of those sensible people from good schools either, planning every test of their lives as if there were nothing higher. It depressed me to think—this was all there was.

  I PUSHED UP OFF THE COUCH. I slid in the gloom around tables and then dialed the detective, standing in the dark, undressing. First I rubbed off running shoes with my heels, then peeled down socks, shirt, jeans, underwear. It was still ringing. I looked at the underwear. The elastic was frilled from so many washings. I was getting to an age where I wanted better. Young and poor was invisibly changing to just poor.

  “Yeah,” he answered on the fifth ring, and then waited, like I had something to tell him.

  “I’m just calling to see if you found out anything?”

  “We’re working on it, you gotta be patient, these things take time. And so far he’s not coming up in any of the states we’re checking for license or DMV. He’s just not there.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  I angled my hipbones past the corner of our old Formica kitchen table. I knew how to move through the tunnels of my apartment, without hitting myself on edges. I collapsed again on the couch. It was the same furniture, the same darkness, the same lights and moving-wind string instrument noise outside. A siren coasted down from the neighbor’s TV upstairs. I jammed open the window.

  Everything was different.

  I LEFT THE LIBRARY at midnight, riding my bike in the dark, wind separating my clothes from me a hand’s width like a knife under the peel of a fruit. I would pay the bike ticket. I’d call the bank about my card tomorrow. Replace the water glasses. I had ajar. I could drink out of that, I didn’t care. I’d talk to the anatomy teacher. Go back to work in the morning even though it wasn’t my day and see if Emory’d repaired his tower. I’d try this life a little longer. I’d try and forget the butterfly pin because I’d have so much else to do. I hauled the bike in, took my earnings out, put them on the table. But I really did think I’d lost the butterfly pin. It was gone.

  This was tedious. He was locatable. It would take time and patience.

  But I was not as near as I’d thought. Maybe I was no closer than I ever was.

  And then I had that feeling again of when the first blood comes. You’d call him on the telephone—he’s relieved too, you talk soft child-voiced awhile, sweetakins, words you never use, then you sigh and hang up. It is evening, night. Outside, you hear the glass edges of screams, the gay lift of a teenage crowd. You tell yourself, actually say the words, you did not want to be. Not now, anyway. Honey, we really couldn’t have handled it now, you know that, he said.

  I know.

  The apartment feels close. You open a window. Air is anyone’s. You are a woman in rooms which have been other, strangers’ rooms. Paint is such a thin light way we make ourselves feel clean. Like skin, you can scratch right through it with a fingernail.

  You lie down fully clothed on the made bed, your high heels falling off onto the floor.

  When. When will your life begin?

  MY DAYS IN NEW YORK numbered. A month ended, six weeks. Jim Wynne seemed to dwindle. He had that oh-it’s-you in his voice when I called. All the money I had didn’t seem enough to keep up a man’s interest long. By week four I told him I wanted to see him. He said there was nothing to talk abou
t. “These things take time,” he said.

  I tried then to go back to my life. How many times had we come back? After the promise and glitter of tiara and throne. Twice, when we lived in Wisconsin, my father called and my mother and I got on planes and visited him in the West. And then we had to go back, to her work and my school, after our slight wingbrush of glamour. Or just when we called in sick and spent the day dressing up and getting ready and waiting, and then he didn’t come. Our regular life looked different after we’d left even for a day. Walls grew up around it. Even daily life requires our allegiance in order to include us.

  And everything else I did, every subject in school, anything I concentrated on, that became a way to know him. This is a quality of discipline—it will subject any practice to its rules and turn them into prayer.

  I was still in medical school, but barely. I went to classes, I tried to memorize. But I was behind. I didn’t go to my study groups, didn’t do anything.

  I had this secret life about to begin—and I was happy. That is the only way I’d ever lived. I’d never been so what I did every day was the point. People like that with their normal ambitions seemed so plain to me, like drills. Jobs, school … I was drawn to people who did them but always gave their best to something else hidden and invisible.

  I suppose that is what my parents did. My mother’s jobs were never really jobs, they were what she clunked out to do every day for a paycheck, skimping out early afternoons, the files settled in her cradled arms, guilt’s assuagement, the paycheck a means to dinners, running butter and sour cream on potatoes, and dresses like dream, filmy things we wanted and couldn’t afford that wouldn’t last anyway but we couldn’t get out of our minds until we possessed them.

  BY WEEK FIVE I said I needed to go over everything we knew and didn’t know.

  “Mayan, for what we’re paying these guys they’re gonna do the checks on their own sweet time. I’ll call you the minute I know anything. Period.”

  Meanwhile, things were going on at school that I should have been doing. There was a party at somebody’s house, after midterms. I stayed until eleven-thirty. The next day when I came home, a guy called me and said, “Hi, this is Jordan David. Remember me? I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner some night.”

  It was a big party. I didn’t know which one he was.

  At work in the hospital and in my apartment, I grabbed the phone after the first ring. I always expected it to be the detective, with news. So far the answer to everything was Nope.

  I hated phones. They were one of the things like airplanes I was convinced were ruining life. They were made to save time and cure distance but did the opposite, only teasing, the way the mirage of food and water must be in the desert.

  And I spent too many of my nights on the phone. Most of my friends were far away. I still didn’t really feel like I lived in the East. I said, all the time, that after this was done I’d move back. I promised that on the telephone to people at two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning, the TV sounds from my upstairs neighbor filtering down. Now I wonder what I could have done in my life then if I’d only been paying attention.

  I walked to school, dumb and used in the morning from too little, vivid sleep. All my dreams happened in dark red. A flier rasped at my feet. I passed an empty school yard, then just a lot; even here there was unused land, you felt the value drop in Harlem from the peace of the sky, the feel of the side streets. If you are here you will stay slowly. Time is not for you until the end.

  THE DETECTIVE had definitely become like a lover. He was sick of me. I begged. I called him from a pay phone at the library. I cared and he didn’t. He hadn’t returned my messages for days.

  Then one night taking an old woman’s pulse, counting, they paged me and it was him, excited again, pleased with himself. He had that bouncing-on-his-chair sound. “Listen, we got a lot of stuff on your father. We’re typing up a report right now, I’m gonna send it to you.” My heart stilled when I heard that and then it started again fast and regular like a small bird just held in the palm, after hysterical flight.

  “Send me a report? Forget it! I want to see you today. How about dinner?”

  “Wha, tonight? I dunno if I can do it.”

  I had plans that night too. I had a date with the guy from the party, whoever he was. But I knew if I let the detective off the phone without a promise, I might never get him again.

  “Listen, Jim, I just want to sit down with you and hear what you’ve found and that way I can ask questions if I have them and we won’t waste a week in the back and forth.”

  “Hold on a second, lemme see where I am.” I held on. He was gone a long time. Two orderlies passed, pushing IVs, in the slow, regular pace of early evening. Hospital time. “Awright, well, I gotta be in Manhattan for a seven o’clock meeting, that’ll go on, I don’t know two hours, maybe longer. So it’s gotta be late, you see what I’m sayin’?”

  “Fine.”

  I knew I should have named a place, but I really couldn’t think of one. My insisting was just bluster. I would have perfectly accepted a no. It’s what I expected really. “Where do you want to meet? I should know a good place, but I’m in the library all the time, I don’t even …”

  I was working through my closet. I tended to keep an outfit four or five years and just wear it every time I needed dressy. But he’d already seen the one. “The dress,” a guy at school had said, lifting my sleeve between his fingers. I’d been surprised to hear it cast in a dowdy way. It had been fine just a year ago. It was the same. Nothing about it had changed.

  My mother once shook her head badly and screamed, “How can you do this to me! I only see you once a year, can’t you just look nice once and let me be proud of you?”

  That time I’d wheeled back on her and yelled. “You bought this for me! You bought this for me three years ago and you loved it then!”

  “Then! Honey, that was three years ago. And you’re not twenty-five anymore.”

  “LEMME SEE,” Jim Wynne was saying, “I’m gonna be midtown, meet me at a place called Polanciani’s—on, what’s, damnit all. Tina,” he screamed, “where’s the Italian place with the red booths that I like? Awright. Forty-five, between Seventh and Eighth, you got that? Nine o’clock.”

  The two plastic trays on the cart outside Emory’s room were lukewarm now. I lifted one. The potato dish with bits of hamburger clinging. Thursday. I felt bad for letting them cool and hurried to Emory’s room. I still took both trays. If I didn’t eat, it’d be a change for us. I could skip food tomorrow. I had to call that guy too and cancel our date. If I even had his number. But not now.

  The toothpick factory rose under the window. He’d rebuilt and changed the place I’d bumped. Cardboard boxes lined the room, a pile of newspapers stacked next to the door. Emory had to move. A diagnosis of periocarditis allowed nine weeks in the hospital. He had been there eight. After that, they decided Emory was okay. Or okay enough to let out. We’d prescribe prednisone for when he got out. It cost too much money to keep a person here.

  I kept imagining a safe place, one room, a small bed in the corner, regular meals on a plain wood table and Emory left free to work and roam the grounds, grounds like the ones at the Belgian monastery back home in Racine. The monastery had tiny rooms, just a bed and a dresser. It had rolls of land, going from the top of the hill down to the river. They had lawns and gardens and a vineyard. It all had that quiet static feel of private, almost unoccupied land. The place was nearly empty now. There were old men and a few young boys who were studying to enter the order. There were more flat white stones in the graveyard under the ash trees. They rented out rooms to people like me for seventeen dollars a night.

  That was the kind of place I’d always wished for for my mother. A place in the country, almost anywhere, it didn’t have to be beautiful in a spectacular way. Let the rich keep the beaches, this could be plain land, glory would come not from heights or size or jagged contrast but just the sky. Trees would g
row there, an uneven orchard, land bound in beyond sight with a solid wood fence and old gates. Institutions exist to give adults childhoods, the ones who needed them now. Everyone would have a clean room where they were allowed their own few things. A chair brought from home, a few pictures on the wall, my mother’s hairbrush, Emory’s shirt that he works in hanging on a peg, an old backpack sagging against the corner. And food served by an ample older woman with a regular eye towards kindness, who refused any seasonings even with the good kitchen garden just outside, and went by the day and recipe so that nothing was ever unknown and new except the sky.

  Emory’s foot was tapping. “Makin’ me leave. To stay, I gotta do something else. Find something bad enough to get in somewhere for a while, but nothing so that I’ll suffer. No place low.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got a record, couldn’t get worse.”

  “Sure could.”

  I was sitting on the bed, he was at his desk, twining string around his hands. This was more my life than the date I was supposed to be having. Dating never seemed true. I mean I wanted it, but I never had the right kind of time. Either I fell in love and that was enough to darken out everything else or I felt like I was lying. I always had something big in the front of my life that I couldn’t tell the guy. Those nights when he told you his interests and you told him yours, they made me feel less where I was than just staying at my job or going home. Or calling a friend far away. And there was always the movies.

  “There is no nice place to go, Emory. And then you’d lose all control.”

  “I know.”

  Emory had two arrests, on five counts, but no convictions. His crimes were simple thefts. He’d once worked in a large art supply store where he’d been caught stealing. When he was a school janitor, he was arrested for taking items, not of material but sentimental, even intimate, value from teachers’ and administrators’ desks and, in a few cases, students’ lockers. The largest object stolen was a child’s rain slicker and black buckle-up galoshes. A letter was removed from a teacher’s desk, a small mirror from the principal’s secretary, drawings were ripped out of students’ notebooks. In both cases, the judge dropped the charges.