The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  I’ve got a life and he’s in it. I think I feel the same things other girls with fathers feel, but in miniature. If you would have told me two years before I found him that you’re going to find your father and he’s going to want to spend a week with you on vacation, and you can only find two and a half days for him, I would have said, no way, any time my father would have for me I’d love.

  MAYBE YOU’RE BETTER OFF, my grandmother said.

  WHEN I FIRST RETURNED home it was spring. I took my bike out in the warm night and rode and rode. My tires were soft and wobbly from the winter inside. And air at the closed gas station was free. The wind, when it touched through my clothes, was still warm.

  I was beginning at love. More than ever, I felt behind.

  Was this or not? It was more fragile than the mission I’d thought was love. It hovered, on and around like a moth to a blossom, never exactly still. There’s a certain way you feel in a nightgown with just panties on underneath, walking in the breeze. The tree leaves were ferny, light green and delicate against the sky.

  Love can stun you still, I knew, but it was not that kind of bond. This was more fallen, of the earth, full of practicalities and chatter.

  I began to see the underworld of night. Everyone else was there too, my friends, in the walls and corners.

  But it is always a surrender.

  I WOULD ALWAYS WONDER, how to love. And sometimes I felt, So this is it. This afternoon. We are sunburned from the beach and so it hurts to touch many places and the whole car smells of oil and crumbs, we are in the back seat, him behind me. My head on his chest, my knees bent up against the door. He had an arm around my front, the way you do, a kind of ornament of protection. His skin was a dark olive, changed from the sun to something redder, gold, and his hairs all over it, were black. He had, even a dark-skinned man, seven spaced freckles, and then over the bone by his wrist, the raised pink incline of a bite. His veins were pronounced beneath the skin running into his hands that I used to think too small but which were right now, strong, and the light caught the fingernail of his thumb as light does on fingernails so they shine, not shiny but mat light, the gleam of clouds with a moon behind.

  I thought, we are still young. There is one minute left and then we will be dead.

  Mai linn was in the front, driving, with her roommate. The car kept moving, we were near home, full of chores and obligations and whines of all kinds. There might be a message on the phone from my father. But I did not know him. His name would go on the list with the others. And now there is no more time.

  The problem with forgiveness is there is never enough time.

  I’LL NEVER REGRET finding him.

  I had to find him to stop waiting. And as long as you look for them, you’re looking in the wrong place.

  MY MOTHER AND I only talked on the phone now. One day, she called and left a message on my machine. “I’m calling because I’m moving and I want to give you the post office-box number. I don’t know where I’m moving yet. Maybe in my car.” With an accusing cry, she hung up. The next time we talked, she was all optimism. “I’m going on a trip all over the country,” she told me. “I’ve saved up seventy thousand dollars and I’m going to visit Tallahassee, and an island off of Seattle, Washington, and Petoskey, Michigan, all these places I have friends.”

  I mailed her letters, one every week. I was too old now to write letters I wouldn’t send.

  Finding him has once again left my mother and me alone. A thousand times in my life I have pictured her death. And now it is in a different way. A hospital room lit with floods. We laugh. We are altogether there.

  He gave us ourselves back in real light.

  Does anyone ever love a person again the way they loved their mother?

  SOMETIMES I THOUGHT that anyone who can do it will and that the only point is to get started as soon as possible because time, all our time, is running out, and the depth of love is only known at the end, from the other side of life.

  I WAS FLYING AROUND the kitchen making a pie. I could do that. The air had the soft polleny quality of fine white flour dust. I was rolling. I’d rummaged through my pockets for all the dollars and bought the expensive kind of champagne I knew. This was my way of apology. I’d done something wrong and I was trying to make up.

  Emily sat cross-legged, watching me, brushing her hair. Jordan was over too. I was teaching him how to bake.

  “Do you think it’ll work?”

  “It’s look-what-you-get-when-I-hurt-you,” Jordan said. “But you get the pleasure of knowing you can hurt him. The profound pleasure. The exquisite pleasure.”

  It was true. I had plenty of energy for the makeup. My mother made up to me all my life. We had no rules. My mother meant to. It was like a lover exactly. The same way a child folds their arms and their lover reaches in and takes them apart, opens the limbs up to the world again.

  Sometimes I was dumb in love.

  I’M GLAD I FOUND HIM. I’ll never regret that. But I know nothing I ever do in my life will be that hard again.

  Light a match.

  Blow it out.

  It’s hard to remember, after the end. This all happened very recently. Perhaps I will understand it better later.

  I needed to stop looking. I’d lost time. I wanted other things in the world now.

  Now I just thought of it less. Everyone had secrets. Everyone owned shame. While I was wincing over What does your father do?, Emory suffered from Where’d you go to college?, a question I inflicted, I suppose, as many times as the next person.

  WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME, I say right away I’m half Arab.

  “Which half?” people ask.

  “Father.”

  I RAN INTO BUD EDISON at a party. I was talking about something and I said, my father. “Your father? You found your father?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess you knew me before all that, before I was looking for him. You knew me when my family was still almost normal.”

  “First, there was no before you started looking for your father. And second, normal, you and your mother normal? It was a fucking opera, Mayan.”

  I shrugged.

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “Modesto, California.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Running a restaurant.”

  “Middle Eastern?”

  I smiled. He sent me a new menu a few months back, all excited because he’d added an Egyptian dish. It was tabouli. “No,” I said. “Just a restaurant.”

  I received three more letters in Arabic from Ramadan that I never answered. Finally, at Christmas, I got a card in English. “I wish to see you again as soon as its posible did you Remember me who was help you for to buy carpet.”

  I HAD A LIST OF PEOPLE TO THANK. Venise King, Duke Kemp, Marion Werth, Timothy. More. Everyone wrote back but the old man upstairs. He started playing his television loud again. I moved out a year later and started a new life in building. But that whole time, he never spoke to me again. I guess some things, involving strangers, are too much to forgive.

  “Remember how hard you looked?” Mai linn asked.

  I do remember. But I’m still looking, just not there. I used to think, before I found him, that the sun or the moon had to be my father. And now I’m kind of back to that.

  I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. But I am more like anybody else.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Prize, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, Leon Botstein and the Bard Center Fellowship at Bard College, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, for support, both material and moral, during the writing of this book.

  Many of my old friends read drafts of The Lost Father and contributed their committed attention and belief. I’m grateful especially to Robert Cohen, Jonathan Dee, my editor Gary Fisketjon, John D. Gray, Allan Gurganus, Peter Smith, Laura Truffaut, my agent Amanda Urban, Marie Behan, and Steve Wong. And I’d like to thank my husband, for
everything.