I interrupt Sally: “Good for you! And what did Gordon say?”
“Well he sat there stunned. As anyone might. No doubt asking himself, Who is this lunatic of a woman sitting across the table from me? I mean honestly, Luke, isn’t that the dumbest boast you ever heard?
“But now I’d really gotten started. There was no stopping me. There was absolutely no stopping me and I said, ‘And another thing, Dr. Planter, you apparently do not realize who else you are dining with. You are dining with a boy with a highly unusual mathematical gift. You’re dining with someone who is going to attend’—where in the world did I ever come up with such a notion?—‘to attend Princeton University!’”
I interrupt again: “Well, I’m glad that at that very moment, when you were deciding my fate, you didn’t pick Yale or Harvard. Princeton’s a much pleasanter place.”
“Truly, it was the devil himself inspiring me. For how else would I have come up with Princeton? It was as if I somehow knew that Gordon, as the seventh of eight children, as the poor kid from Newark who considered himself lucky to struggle through Rutgers, had always felt awed and intimidated by Princeton. Oh I couldn’t have delivered a more telling reproof.
“But was I finished? Oh no. I said, ‘Let me show you something, Dr. Planter.’ And then I turned to you. I asked you (and I still recall the exact numbers, because I remember I combined your birthday with mine), I asked you, ‘Luke, what is twenty-eight times nineteen?’ And you, one split second later, you said—what would you have said?”
And it pleases me how rapidly I volley the answer right back at her—pleases me, even now, to be the boy with a calculator lodged in his head: “I would have said, Five hundred and thirty-two.”
“Five hundred and thirty-two. Precisely. That’s what you said. And then a long pause. Gordon looking from you to me. From me to you. And then he gets out a pencil and paper and methodically works out the problem, and of course he comes up with five hundred and thirty-two. And then he looks us both over again, and I realized the three of us were on an entirely new footing. And you’d done it, my seven-year-old owl/boy. You’d put us there.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You’re Luke?”
No mistaking her tone. This is more than mere surprise—it’s naked disappointment—and I suppose I should be used to this by now. Disappointment? It’s what I reliably inspire on meeting for the first time someone who knew my biological father.
“I’m afraid so,” I reply, which I hope will come off sounding winningly modest and wry but which turns out to be simply maladroit: I’ve made her conscious of how potentially insulting is the tone she has taken.
“Oh I didn’t mean—” Tiffany begins. “It’s just, it’s just—well I’m so delighted of course to see you, wow to see you finally.”
And I extend my hand in greeting just as she, on a kindred mission, hurries forward to embrace me. My fingers collapse up against her belly as, with a crisp snapping sound, she pins a kiss to my cheek.
I’m sure my face pinkens too—Tiffany’s does. She swings round and cries, “Welcome to the humble abode . . .”
My appearance has surprised her, obviously; hers, on the other hand, closely approximates the mental portrait I’ve painted of her. She’s a little shorter even than in my imaginings (she can’t be more than five feet two), and broader across the hips, but even so, the dark-eyed face under the forest of brown curls seems familiar, as if I recognize her from photographs, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen any photographs of Tiffany. She’s pert and pretty and remarkably youthful. She might almost be a coed—a communications major at Restoration Community, say.
“I was just so pleased to get your letter, Luke. And I’m just tickled pink you could come by. Wait till you meet the twins. I hope it’s okay, we’re going to have barbecue.”
“That’s fine, just lovely, but honestly you don’t need on my behalf—”
“Why it’s no bother at all. Summer, most nights we eat barbecue. Maybe I’ve learned one thing anyway, being a mom these past six years? Kids’ll eat most anything you burn a little on the grill first.”
Tiffany laughs—or giggles—and winks at me. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of the nervous, overflowing warmth she’s showing me (on the phone, she sounded a little aloof or wary). Or what to make of her deliberately quaint and cutesy vocabulary— “tickled pink,” “humble abode.” In truth the place is extremely humble—and as she breezes me through the house I catch a sense of superficial tidiness overtopping a deep disorder. An unwatched TV is running in the living room and in the kitchen I smell cheese, and maybe dill pickles, and then we’re standing on the creaky wooden deck of her patio and she’s calling, “Girls, girls, get over here. I wantcha meet somebody.”
The backyard is narrow, but deep. At the far end of the yard, in the slanting, purply, late-afternoon light, twin sisters are playing in a sandbox. Doubtless the precious light is enhancing the effect, but it would have been an unforgettable tableau in any case: One of the girls, a beautiful thin child with short-cropped dark hair, wearing a lime-green T-shirt that glows unreally against the dull-green bushes behind her, raises and tilts her head, peering at us, the slant of her jaw highlighting all the more dramatically her face’s exquisite bone structure. The resemblance is more than striking: it’s eerie. Yes: she has my father’s face.
The other girl (I’m afraid I hardly notice the other girl) glances up as well. But neither child gives any sign of a willingness to leave the sandbox. Our presence on the deck seemingly has little to do with them. They might be animals—a pair of fawns by the bank of a stream, for a moment halting their green browsing to stare, with less alarm than curiosity, at the fire-engine-red canoe gliding past them.
Then the small girl in whom my father is so painstakingly resurrected rises to her feet and her twin sister follows suit. They march toward the patio, each bearing in her arms a limp doll.
I feel some relief (and some regret—oh, I’m feeling all sorts of things!) when a little of the eeriness in the girl’s appearance peels away as she approaches. She’s just a girl, after all, and a grubby one at that—with orange popsicle stains around her mouth, and gray and brown smudges of yard dirt on her green T-shirt.
“Now this one’s Jess,” Tiffany announces. “And the other one’s Winnie. Now I want you two girls to shake hands. This is Mr. Planter—this is Mr. Luke Planter.”
Are they to be informed tonight that I too am Wes’s child? And if so, is this a disclosure that ought naturally to fall to me? Jess’s hand is sticky. The other girl, Winnie, does not extend a hand. Her right arm is already occupied with her dolly.
“Put it down, baby,” Tiffany says—but the girl only hugs her dolly tighter.
“Put your dolly down. Do it now.”
“Oh it’s all right,” I intercede.
“Now, baby. You do it, now.” And this time there’s a razor’s edge in Tiffany’s voice. Tough. This is the woman, after all, who chucked my father (my sixty-two-year-old unemployed father) out into the street.
But the child—Winnie—only presses the dolly to her chest. She has retreated a couple of steps and is canting forward, until the exposed plane of her downturned face, framed top and bottom by hair, is reduced to a few square inches: Her forehead has disappeared under her sandy bangs, and her chin and mouth are submerged in the dolly’s frizzy locks.
Perhaps I’m predisposed to find in this girl’s face a resemblance to Conrad . . . For wouldn’t it be a wonderful poetic stroke if those two competitive Sultan boys were repackaged, a generation later, as the Sultan twins—a pair of strikingly handsome girls who looked no more alike than the boys had? So maybe I’m merely seeing what I want to see, but I believe I detect, in the confident breadth of the girl’s face, and the sly obstinacy of those steady slightly hooded eyes of hers, a few touches of the old Master of the Mats.
Tiffany stares and stares with utter fixity at her daughter. If she were a magnifying glass, and Winnie a leaf, the
girl would burst into flame. Finally, a tiny hand extends itself.
Eagerly I reach out my own hand and take a limp, sandy cluster of fingers into my palm.
“There you go,” Tiffany says. “That’s better. All right then, you kids can go back to your box.”
And the liberated little girls, suddenly cheerful as can be, scamper off across the lawn and settle themselves once more in their shadowy sandbox. Tiffany drops into a white plastic lawn chair and motions me to sit down. I choose the farther of the two remaining chairs. She beams at me and says, “It’s so fabulous seeing you here. Wes talked about you constantly.”
Is this, I wonder, something of an exaggeration—or is it a polite, an outright lie? I say, “I didn’t see him much.” I add, “He never made any effort to keep in touch.” And add further: “He left us when I was so young, it’s almost as though he never was my father at all.”
“Wes didn’t mean things deliberately.”
What I’m obviously tempted to reply is, Are we to assume he all but abandoned his child accidentally? Temper, temper. What I say instead is, “They’re beautiful children. Your girls.”
“I think so, but then I’m their mother.”
And Tiffany laughs briskly, as though she’d gotten off a witty retort, winks heavily at me, as though she were flirting, and somberly—almost lugubriously—observes, “They’re a big responsibility. Twins.” Really, her tone, her demeanor, her body language . . . she’s all over the map. She doesn’t yet know how to respond to my presence, nor I to hers. Some degree of awkwardness must be expected, I suppose, when a man meets for the first time a stepmother who’s younger than he is—and all the more so when the figure who unites the two of them is dead.
“Luke, can I get you something to drink? A wine cooler?”
“I’d love a beer if you’ve got one.”
“They’re homemade. The wine coolers. I made them myself.”
“Well then a wine cooler sounds wonderful.”
Tiffany bustles into the house—she has a bouncing, bounding walk—and returns a minute later bearing a tray that holds a large pitcher and some glasses. The drink she offers me is nothing I can name or identify. It’s iced and pink and frothy on the top—sweet, with a slight burn underneath.
I’m glad for the drinks. Having the tumblers to play with eases our mutual awkwardness; we sit, and sip, and watch the children, and sip again. Tiffany asks after Sally and Conrad and I tell her a little about my recent visits with both.
In the distance, though rosy sunlight still hovers in the air, a cricket shakes its rattle. We’re in the middle of an Indian summer weekend and the cricket is a reminder of what it’s easy to ignore on such a day: September is waning.
“It sure is calm,” I say.
“It hasn’t been a calm week. I’ve been twice to the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“Winnie was stung by a bee and she’s hyperallergic.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tiffany launches at once into an elaborate tale: the bee’s arrival; its unprovoked assault; the roaring drive to the hospital; the shocking inattention of the doctors. Hers is a wandering story, but one whose theme is unmistakable: Winnie is one lucky girl to have so attentive a mother. Tiffany asks me about Manhattan (“I’ve always fantasized of going there”), and now I take over the conversation— hoping to demonstrate, I suppose, what a successful cosmopolitan go-getter Wesley Sultan fathered. We’re staking out our territory, stepmother and stepson. Of course I mention nothing about having left Gribben Brothers.
Tiffany is the one who again steers the conversation over to my father: “You know, I miss Wes. Despite all the problems we had. I think about him every day.”
And with this admission, Tiffany settles on me an expression so winsome, so poutingly doleful, so prettily proud, it takes me a moment to discern just how laughable her claim is . . . Do you mean to say that less than a year after the man who is the father of your children died, you still think about him daily? Oh, this Tiffany seems charming—and hopeless! How could my father have failed to find her attractive?—and how could he possibly have concluded that this was the woman he wanted as a partner into eternity?
My drive has left me feeling thirsty and I drink deeply from my peculiar pink drink. Tiffany drinks deeply from hers.
After a while she says, “Jess was Wes’s favorite, I suppose because she looked so much like her daddy. My favorite’s Winnie. With young kids, it’s important you balance these things.” And she fixes me with another self-congratulatory look. (Of course it’s all too perfect—Tiffany’s playing out her favoritism with the same transparency once displayed by Dora Sultan, that dour dutiful woman who sewed a name tag into Conrad’s bow tie and left Wes’s blank . . . And have I perhaps identified another variable in that straggling polynomial equation which in the end is Wes’s life? Had he, at some level, married the image of his mother?)
Tiffany says, “But now when was the last time you saw Wes?”
“Quite some time ago.”
Somehow I’m not going to admit to her—or admit to Wes in the grave—that I have the exact figure at my fingertips: nine years and a little over three months. “It was before you came on the scene.” I add: “First my mother and Gordon moved part of the year to their condo in North Carolina. Then Wes moved to Cincinnati. Somehow he and I just didn’t seem to cross paths.”
“I think he was lone-ly,” Tiffany sighs, and isn’t there a hint of accusation in this?
My rejoinder, anyway, is somewhat defensive: “Particularly lonely in the last few months of his life, I suppose. I didn’t realize the two of you had separated.”
My words echo in the air.
“It simply was not possible for me to go on living in the same house with that man,” Tiffany declares, and her words echo too.
For the second time this evening, I sense her formidable resolution. The flinty look in her eyes seems to ask: Have you come to accuse me? Have you come looking for a fight? (And you can’t blame her for thinking this way, not while Adelle is telling anyone who will listen that Tiffany was instrumental in Wes’s death. Deep in Adelle’s heart, it seems clear, the pretty plump woman with the mop-top haircut sitting before me, whose frothy wine cooler I’m drinking, is a murderess.) Oh, Tiffany is ready for a fight.
I take what I hope is a concessive tone: “Tell me about your marriage. You know I’m divorced myself. Tell me anything and everything. I really know surprisingly little about the last years of Wes’s life.”
Up and down this quiet, windless suburban block, within one long rectangular backyard after another, dusk is falling. Restoration shares a time zone with Manhattan, though lying hundreds of miles farther west, and out here in Michigan it stays light far longer than on the East Coast. I’m not usually much of a drinker (and never was—even before, a few years ago, I was placed on medication that theoretically doesn’t mix with alcohol), and Tiffany’s homemade wine cooler has gone to my head just a little. The pink liquid harmonizes prettily with the day’s final hues: the lavender light, the lit wire diamonds of the cyclone fences, and the stubborn fluorescence of Jess’s lime-green shirt.
“Tell me about how you met,” I say.
“Which version you want?”
“Are there many?”
“Wes’s version? Or’d you rather have the truth?”
“Both, I suppose.”
“Well, according to Wes, we met at the Grace Falls Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. But I’d never been inside the place before when I met him.”
“Then where did you meet?”
“A place called Gus’s. It’s not just a bar, it’s like more a sandwich-type shop. It’s a good crowd—lots of businessmen, not many worker-types. Wes always wanted me saying we met at Grace Falls, almost as if he thought Gus’s was a stripper joint. But it was nothing like that. Everything was all in his mind.”
“He could be a bit—”
“He didn’t want to be the sort
of man would meet his wife along when she’s waitressing, you see, while me, I’ve never been ashamed of what I am. It’s just like college. When we moved up here from Ohio, Wes wanted me telling people I graduated Ohio State, me who did two semesters at Holdwell Community, me whose father deserted the family and whose mother was a school cook, how likely was Ohio State, I ask you? It was again the same thing exactly. He didn’t want to be married to the kind of woman that doesn’t have her B.A.”
“Well you know he himself never—”
“Of course not. Right. Exactly. He himself never. But it’s as if if he could never complete anything, I had to have a B.A. from State. Give me a break.”
“I understand how you feel.”
“Exactly. That’s the point.”
We exchange confirming nods and sip our drinks. Over Tiffany’s shoulder, the very first star of the evening breaks through the blue—the winner in a marathon race whose course extends over light-years. Somewhere I read once a memorable statistic. The most distant object visible by day—the sun—lies some eight minutes away at the speed of light. The most distant visible by night— the Great Andromeda Galaxy—lies some two million light-years away. In terms of visible boundaries, then, night is some 100 billion times bigger than day.
“You’ve got to understand, it was impossible to live with him.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I tell her, and feel myself nodding sagely—feel myself exhibiting a vast, multidimensional, astronomical calm. Yes, the drink has gone to my head.
“What it was, eventually? I outgrew Wes. You have to understand, I was only a kid when I met him.”
“Right,” I say. “Correct.”
“Exactly. I was twenty-two, and he was positively this gentleman figure, wearing this glowy silver suit and being all so friendly and kind. But without ever coming on to me was the thing. He’d done that, it’s all over, I wouldn’ta give him the time of day.”
A Few Corrections Page 12