by Lisa Taddeo
—Were you with my father?
—We went to dinner every night.
—And he stayed overnight with you?
—No, I said. Which was true, because by then our sexual relationship was completely over. He would just sit across from me, watching me eat, listening to me talk.
—Why not?
—Because I didn’t want to. I was in love with another man.
—Another married man?
I nodded.
—How did you become such a fucking whore?
—It’s a long story.
—I don’t want to hear your long story. I want to tell you about Anguilla. My mother tried to kill herself.
—What?
—That’s funny that he didn’t tell you. That’s really fucking funny to me.
—He didn’t tell me.
—That’s probably the sickest part of it. My fucking mom tried to kill herself because she knew he was fucking you, or whatever, not even fucking you, but paying for your whore dinner. Actually, I think that’s the part that really got to my mom. All the dinners. She spent like two weeks after his funeral just going over all the credit card statements and looking up the restaurants online and checking out what you both ordered. Looking at the dishes on Yelp.
I felt tears coming to my eyes. Not for Vic’s wife but for my mother.
—Oh, are you feeling something for us? Wow. Cool. So let me give you the full picture. We ate dinner at Picante, our favorite Mexican place. It was really fucking weird to be there without my dad. And Robbie, who was three years old and would always have been three years old, you know he had Down’s, right, Robbie was acting out. He threw a fork at the waitress. The fork hit her in the face and she started bleeding. And that was the last straw for my mom. We’re there with the crab guacamole appetizer that was my dad’s favorite and Robbie throws a fork at the waitress and Mom was just staring at this family at the next table, this young family with two little kids, a boy and a girl like us, but this boy was normal and the mom and dad looked happy and they were both in shape. Even though my dad wasn’t, like, the most good-looking man, my mom always treated him like he was a movie star. Anyway, Mom didn’t even apologize to the waitress. She left a bunch of bills on the table and walked out and I picked up Robbie and we followed her. None of us had eaten. Robbie was crying and hitting himself and Mom just kept moving. We took a taxi back to our bungalow. Later that night I found her in the bathroom, passed out on the floor. The grimy-ass bathroom that wasn’t even nice because my dad had been renting a cheaper house the past few years. Probably to save up for buying you dinners and following you around Mexico.
—Jesus Christ, I said. I remembered the night she was talking about. Vic and I were having late drinks at a tiki bar in SoHo that dressed their drinks with pink orchids and green shards of shiso.
His phone vibrated in his pocket and he took it out. When he answered the phone in public, he always covered his mouth. I believe this was somewhat out of decorum, but likely he also did it for privacy. Vic kept so many secrets from all of us.
He rose and walked out the door of the bar. He was gone for ten minutes or so. In that time I sipped my drink morosely and checked all the relevant outlets of social media for new information on Big Sky’s vacation. His wife had posted on Facebook, He’s home! with a kissing emoji, plus one of champagne and a bubble bath. Would they fuck tonight? I wondered. I had no idea how often they did. He never talked about her. Just as Vic rarely talked about his wife. The wives of cheaters lived in private rooms with white lotions in thick jars and soft lighting.
When Vic came back inside, he was not visibly shaken. But he was changed. I didn’t think too much of it. Often after a few drinks he would begin to sulk in my presence. He spent so much energy during the day trying to convince me that he only wanted the best for me—even if the best thing for me was not him—that at night his goodwill would run dry and the whiskey he drank would turn him into a goblin.
And when he came back in from outside, he simply looked like he was in one of his brooding states. When he sat, his elbows dug forlornly into his navy knees.
—Were you with him that night? Eleanor said.
I stuttered and she cocked the gun. I couldn’t believe it. She repeated the question angrily.
—Yes, I said. We had drinks and he walked me home.
—Do you remember him taking a phone call?
I nodded.
—I called to tell him Mom tried to kill herself. I called from the hospital in Anguilla that looked like a run-down motel and nobody wore gloves and Robbie was screaming so loud, Momma’s dead, Momma’s dead, and beating himself and slamming his head against a wall over and over and I was so scared, and I want to know, did my father take the phone call before or after he walked you home?
She was crying and her face was mottled, white and red. I thought about what to say. I almost always lied. Did that make me a bad person? I don’t know the answer.
—Answer the question, she said, her hands trembling with the gun. If you lie to me, I’ll fucking kill you so slow, man!
—He walked me home, I whispered, after he found out your mom tried to kill herself.
19
MY FATHER RETURNED TO THE Poconos the following afternoon. In my memory it was the sunniest day. They asked me if I would like to get dropped off at the pool. Later I would realize it was because they needed to talk, but in the moment I remember thinking they were going to have sex. Sex defined their relationship, at least in my mind.
I couldn’t believe they were willing to drop me off without supervision. I was excited by the prospect but more so wounded. My mother had exiled me from her bed the previous night. And now this. That was when it dawned on me, the unsettling feeling that my parents’ lives did not revolve around me. I’d grown up thinking I was the center of their world. Even when my mother yelled at me or locked me out of her bedroom, it was because I had the power to infuriate her. It was because she loved me. It could be argued that my learning it when I did, at the age of ten, was perfect timing. Old enough to have experienced cozy solipsism for many years, young enough to change the way I walked through the world. To be cautious.
I went to my room and put on my black two-piece with the Technicolor butterflies. I applied coconut-flavored lip gloss and clopped out in my wood and leather Candies with kitten heels. I said, I want to go to the Top of the World.
My father acquiesced and took me to the rich pool. Rich! To think of it now. Perhaps it was the drab tiki bar that attracted me. All my life I have been charmed by the trappings of the South Seas. I’ve looked for establishments with lighted puffer fish in tanks, with towering fake palms, rock walls, and outriggers dripping down from the painted ceilings. And it started with that tiki bar at the Top of the World.
In the car my father was not himself. And yet my father was always my father in a way that my mother was not always my mother. There were hours, entire days, that my mother was an individual apart from me. I think it’s mostly because of this—and not the devastation that would happen very early the next morning—that I thought I would always love my father more.
—You’re not going to leave the pool area, you understand?
—Yes, Daddy. What if I want a snack?
—I’m giving you five dollars. You can buy a snack and eat it in the pool area.
What he didn’t know was that there was no traditional snack bar at the rich pool, only a vending machine indoors, up two flights of sapphire stairs. It wasn’t part of the pool area. Only the tiki bar was in the pool area. I was always making sure to follow rules, but I knew how to bend them. They were so strict, and my mother was so observant, but there were hours, like I said, when her eyes were closed to me, and these were the hours I figured out how to lighten my arm hair and have an orgasm.
—Daddy, I’m sorry about Grandma.
He kept his eyes on the tree-lined roads ahead. He nodded and swallowed.
—She’s going to be fine, he sai
d. My father accepted succor from no one. I can’t imagine what it was like for a man like him to know his elderly mother was raped. To what extent the reel of that scene would play in his mind.
—Is she… scraped up?
—Not too bad.
—Does it look like she fell down some stairs?
He looked at me. He had no conception of what I knew. Fathers never know that about their daughters. Partly it’s because they don’t want to know, but really it’s because they cannot know. It’s psychologically dangerous to see inside your daughter’s brain. And I knew so much more than most girls my age because of the way I listened.
—Tonight do you want to go to dinner at Villa Volpe?
—Yes!
—Maybe just the two of us? We’ll give Mommy a break, let her take it easy at home.
My shoulders fell far down beneath my neck. I nodded. I longed for something that was in the past, only I didn’t know it yet. Vic once said to me, Families are silly. The whole concept is silly. He said that because he didn’t want his family. But he would have wanted one with me. Me and him at the supermarket, pushing around a pudgy Vic Jr. in a cart, buying grape tomatoes.
We pulled into the parking lot. I was saddened by the glass of sunlight on the macadam, by the fake smile on my father’s goateed mouth. He would have died for me, but because he was a man, he didn’t know how he was hurting me by doing the things he thought had nothing to do with his daughter.
—I’ll pick you up at four thirty. Right here. The car will be right here, but I want you to wait inside the gate, do you understand?
—Yes.
—No disobeying.
—No disobeying, I repeated. He kissed my forehead.
I brought the book I was reading. All the books I read were hand-me-downs from my parents. My mother’s V. C. Andrews, my father’s Dean Koontz. In this case it was Stephen King’s The Stand. I liked how massive it was, that it would last me a month.
I chose a chaise longue near the tiki bar. I removed my terry jumper and laid myself down like my mother, legs bent and knees pinched together. I read my book and concentrated on the way I looked reading it. I was only ten years old and yet I remember having that thought that day. Only a few years earlier I’d been a pure child. Reveling in the space between the Christmas tree and the corner of the wall where the colored lights blinked for me alone and it looked like heaven. Or wearing a princess dress to go to Maggie’s Pub, this seamy place with a green plaid carpet and high-top tables. We’d go when my mother was in the mood for chicken wings. She loved the cheap parts of an animal, all varieties of offal, but wings were the easiest parts to come by, and we’d go for nickel-wing nights and I’d play on the crummy carpet beneath our table; they would talk and I would play with my dolls down there. Their voices, their love, above my head. Below, all the independence I needed. I didn’t yet know my mother was a hypochondriac or that she could be crueler on occasion than she already was. I didn’t yet know my father’s secret, or maybe he didn’t have it yet. There is nothing in the world better than the past.
That day at the rich pool, as I moved my body like an older girl, I noticed a man at the bar, perhaps because he noticed me. He had a mustache and wore a white linen shirt and khaki swim trunks. He was in his mid-forties, the age of my parents. He was sitting sidesaddle on the stool so that he could take inventory of the landscape. He was sipping something tall, reddish, and tropical. His bare knees made something thump inside of me. The way he held his drink. I could see up the hollow of his shorts, a miraculous darkness. I imagined my parents a few miles away, rustling in a hot, damp bed. I imagined my grandmother in Orange, pinioned against her brown couch with the Doberman piss.
I made a fire between the insides of my knees. I thought of the word fucking. I wrote it inside my skull in Lite-Brite.
The man was close enough to talk to me from the bar. He waited until the bartender made drinks from his gun at the other end. I heard the man clearly over the splashing water and the summertime songs on the speaker.
He engaged me, to begin with, about Stephen King. He said he admired a young woman reading such a big book. That he called me a young woman was both tantalizing and repulsive. He told me his name was Wilt and that he was from Boise, Idaho. He was getting his parents’ place ready to sell. They had just died, his dad of emphysema and his mom of suicide by cancer shortly thereafter. He laughed and I laughed, too, as though I knew what he meant.
—Joan, he said. I’ve never met a woman under the age of forty with the name Joan. Isn’t that funny?
I didn’t smile or nod. I’d learned that from my mother. Men go wild for a woman who is quiet like a cat. A woman who doesn’t always approve.
—Joan likes mystery and horror and long walks on the beach.
—I don’t like the beach, I said.
—She doesn’t like the beach because it’s very sandy. The sand is insidious. The sand makes her skin crawl.
—Well, I like the beach in Italy.
—Ah. Joan makes an exception for the Mediterranean. The sand there is more like pebbles. Less insidious. She enjoys fruit cups on the blue and white hotel towels.
I smiled. In the water a girl about my age was tossing a penny and diving for it. She was pale and wore goggles.
I knew what rape meant but only vaguely. I knew it meant sex against one’s will, but sex to me was what I saw on HBO. Soft-core hydraulics. Fit bodies moving against each other. Very involved French kissing. So that when I pictured my grandmother being raped, she was one of those HBO women, only older, and her rapist was one of those men, only rougher. I pictured my grandmother openmouthed kissing during her rape. Accepting a tongue into her mouth but with a look of dismay on her wrinkled, rouged face.
—Are you here with anybody, Joan?
—My daughter is playing in the pool right there, I said, pointing at the diving girl.
Now it was the man’s turn to laugh.
—Joan of Snark, he said. When you’re ready to move on from Stephen King, I think you should like Henry Miller. Have you heard of him?
I didn’t say anything.
—No? What a shame. What do they teach in those schools nowadays? Compound interest and fractions and pi. Let me tell you, Joan, you will never need to know pi in your life. School is only good for making other people believe you’re smart. School doesn’t make you smart.
—What makes you smart?
—Reading Henry Miller, for one. D. H. Lawrence a close second. Nabokov ahead of Miller, come to think of it. Have you heard of Lolita?
—No.
—Heavens! But I suppose you can name all six continents.
—There’s seven.
—Aha.
The bartender returned to the man—Wilt’s—corner of the bar and asked if he would like a refill. Wilt said yes and asked for a cup of water as well. I liked the way he spoke to the bartender. He was genteel like my father but a little more authoritative. He was even a little rude.
When the bartender disappeared again, Wilt poured the water out at his feet and filled the plastic cup with some of his drink and then, in one deft movement, placed it on the ground beside my chair.
—Some geographers would say there are six, he said, not missing a beat, if you combine Europe and Asia, to make Eurasia.
I picked up the drink and sipped it. It was sweet and tart at once. I looked across the lounge deck at the mostly female bathers. Holding books or magazines and wearing big sunglasses. Taking the sun, my mother called it, with her accent. It sounded spoiled, the way she said it. But she took the sun, too. She undid the strings of her bathing suit so she wouldn’t get tan lines. She’d drink water from a tumbler and the SPF cream from her lips would melt onto the rim of the glass. Why did I always want to be around my mother? She didn’t make me feel terribly loved. She didn’t give herself up for me, the way many mothers did for their children. At the same time, besides taking the sun and eating chicken wings, she also wasn’t living for herself.
—In Idaho, Wilt said, we don’t traffic much in municipal pools, or association pools. We don’t have any tiki bars.
—I’ve never been to Idaho, I said. Which was such a stupid thing to say because I’d never really been anywhere. My parents didn’t travel much beyond the Poconos and Italy. That went for everything else, too. We ate Chinese on Sunday nights. Otherwise we had steak or pasta. For lunch nearly every day my mother made pastina.
—Idaho is the most beautiful state. I don’t say that because I live there. Pennsylvania, he said, well. I’m from here. In Pennsylvania they grow a lot of bad apples.
—Are you a bad apple? I asked. I don’t believe the words came out of my mouth in a sultry tone, but some lines can’t be anything but sexual.
He laughed and winked.
—New Mexico, he said, is number two. The second most beautiful state in the union.
—Our next vacation is going to be to the American West, I said, echoing my father.
—You and your little girl?
—Yes, I said. Me and Lulu.
—Lulu, what a nice name. How old is Lulu?
—Hmm, seven, I said. She’ll be eight next week.
—Well, happy birthday, Lulu. What does she want for her birthday?
—Damned if I know.
He laughed heartily at that. I spoke like the characters in the adult books I was reading. He swished his drink around in his cup. I drank the rest of what he’d given me. I’d had only one hard-boiled egg that morning because I’d been nervous about when my father would come home. Now I felt the liquid, cool, in the floor of my belly. My head felt like there were star-shaped bubbles inside of it, lifting my skull up from my neck.
—Joan, I need to get out of this heat now, Wilt said rather abruptly. I’m going up to my room for some shade.
I nodded, heartbroken. My hair felt too short and dry. My book seemed like the biggest waste of time and I never wanted to swim like a child again.
—Catch you around sometime.
He rose and I saw how tall he was. I wondered if my mother would find him attractive. His legs were very dark with curls of hair. He wore fine leather shoes, the kind you wouldn’t wear to a swimming pool. I watched him walk up the steps to the clubhouse.