by Bex Brian
“Oh there you are,” he said, his calm so shocking that I burst into tears. “If you were going to be frightened, why did you run away?” he added, paying for my chicken.
When we got back to the Camino Real Hotel, which was where the production office was, Lydia Lester, her face twisted with frantic worry, flew at my father, screaming, “Thank God you’ve finally come,” her voice whimpering with relief at the sight of me. She might have even held my head to her breast and rocked. I realized then that my father had sent his minions out to look for me and it was only after they had failed to find any sign that he came down from the highlands to swiftly locate me in the first place he looked.
My father, never patient with excessive displays of emotion, quickly put an end to Lydia’s fawning. He had something in his eye. It had been bothering him since the morning. Lydia pried open his lid, her trembling fingers giving away her fear and her passion for him, undermining any authority in her voice as she told him to look up, to down look, to swivel to the right, swivel to the left. Nothing could be found, even though the eye looked red-rimmed and feverish.
At nightfall, as we sat eating steaks and grilled scallions in the ruddy light of a Spanish Colonial steak house, his eye started to swell shut. Banging his beer tankard down, my father roared, “You’ve all heard of mud in your eye. Well, a new toast. Here’s to pig shit in your eye, and the happy consequences.” Lydia laughed and asked if he had really spent the night on the floor of a smoke-choked peasant hut, using the soft underbelly of a sleeping sow as a pillow.
“One hopes,” he said cryptically as the first trickle of pus began to ooze out of his eye.
“Gonorrhea of the eyeball!” I would hear the following morning, standing in the static hush of the carpeted hallway outside the production office, my ear pressed to the door that Lydia had stormed through a moment earlier, pushing past me. “How the fuck do you get that?”
“How do you think you get it?” Luke, his soundman, said, his voice thick with sarcasm.
“Jesus Christ, is there anything he won’t do?”
“Anything he won’t do.” . . . “Anything he won’t do.” What exactly is “anything,” I wondered later that afternoon as I swam back and forth across the hotel pool, remembering Peter’s boring guppy kisses and his tremulous touch on my tits. I knew enough about venereal disease to know that it normally didn’t spring up around the eyeball. But how it got there I couldn’t envision. I dove down to the bottom of the pool, hoping the cool blue bottom would knock that river of pus from my mind, only to torpedo out of the water, creating waves that splashed up over the edge of the pool. I drew the nasty stares of some rich fucks and their tarty women who were eating ceviche around cabana tables under polished palm trees, their shine marred only by the flat yellow smear of de-flighted parrot droppings. I was pretty sure, at least, that my father hadn’t turned his eye into a river of pus with one of these women.
Hanging from the diving board, its sandpaper grit warm and pleasing to my pruned fingers, I swung in a slow semicircle, imagining the lunchtime patrons naked. I removed from the men their buffed, tasseled loafers, their Gucci-buckled belts, their tight bikini underwear and knew, from the fastidiousness with which they brushed bread crumbs off their laps, that standing naked, they would each look like a little king, staff in hand, ready to spew himself all over his one subject. As for the women, always careful to stay in the shade, I thought how sad it was for them that their fight for light skin was lost the minute they looked at the thick, mossy darkness between their legs.
All those cocks and pussies had me diving down to the bottom of the pool one more time. When I came up for air, I saw that my father and Lydia had been seated at a table near the shallow end. He was sporting a huge bandage over his eye and was moving his head in that strange, rolling, upward tilt of the blind. They hadn’t noticed me. Treading mid-pool, I watched them through a chlorine film that made my own vision a bit furry. There was a battle going on between them to hold emotions in check. Lydia fussily read the menu out loud, translating the obvious: “There is arroz con pollo—chicken with rice . . .” My father put his hand up to beckon the waiter and proceeded to order without hearing out the rest of the lunch specials. Lydia told the waiter she would order when he returned with Senor’s drink. Very prim.
It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that she must have been his lover, although not the one who had made him sick. Each sentence she began she let drop. I knew my father well enough to know he hadn’t yet offered up any explanations. As the waiter returned with my father’s gin and tonic, wrapped in a napkin and ringed with those juicy little Central American limes, she began to cry. I paddled over.
“Don’t pry into my private life,” I heard him say, after he had let out a deep sigh of satisfaction over his first sip.
“But aren’t I part of your private life?” she pleaded. “What if . . . ?”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t have minded. I love you that much.”
“What a stupid thing to say.”
“Had you given it to me, then would I be part of your private life?”
“Lydia, I have my daughter and I have my work. More than that and I would . . .”
“What? Be a normal fucking man?” she cried.
“No, I would feel incredibly claustrophobic.”
“Is that what happened to Vivienne’s mother?”
“Why on earth are you bringing her up?”
“Did you give her the clap too? Or get it? How many times have you rolled home riddled with some disease or another? At this rate you’re going to end up a syphilitic crazy old man.”
“But alone at least,” he said, looking heavenward. “Pray God alone.”
“How can you be so cruel?” Lydia sobbed.
It was then my father noticed me, my arms folded and resting on the warm patio, chin in hands, being buoyed, somewhat, by a strong jet of water that fed the pool. The water flowed hard past my abdomen and down my legs.
“Oh there you are,” he said. Lydia let out a small cry and fled.
My father drained his drink, then held it up, tapping the glass for the waiter to bring him another before turning back to me.
“For Christ’s sake, Vivienne, stop masturbating in the pool.”
My mother. Funny that she would come up. I have no memories. She herself died with very few of them, or maybe too many for all I know. A depressive, she must have seen deeper into things than the rest of us. Perhaps her parents, Latvian Jews who narrowly escaped some pogrom or another, bequeathed sadness to her. Franka, the last of a brood and the only one to survive past childhood. An American dream. A New York miracle. Except that she seemed to have lacked the pep of their new homeland, lacked that optimism in the face of crushing history. She didn’t speak, I’m told, until she was nearly five. Liked books, though—great reader, great listener. Her parents didn’t fret too much, they themselves feeling a little shell-shocked by the hustle and the bustle. Then, at the age of eighteen, she started to develop acute melancholia. (It sounds so archaic, like grippe of the kidneys. I have thought to try and update her prognosis, but I find the terms for modern mental distresses, bipolar and so on, well, distressing.) She died giving birth to me in Bellevue. I have gathered from my father that her life wasn’t all sordid decline, that in the early stages of her disease she was a beguiling woman. Her madness then lay on her lightly, a thin sheen of intensity, of coltish nervousness.
She was my father’s student. What else. I said as much when he finally told me, his own mind addled with cancer drugs, about my beginnings, but he squeezed my hand hard. This, he wanted me to know, was different. He was a guest lecturer at Columbia University for a term, recovering from a nasty bout of typhoid he’d contracted in India. Gaunt, jungle-worn, he was a wildly popular teacher. He noticed my mother right off. She sat by the window and spent most of his class seeming not to pay the least bit of attention to his stories. Over time, however, he began to realize that
while she glazed over during his admittedly goosed tales of derring-do in the field, she listened with trembling intensity to his thoughts on the nature of nature. Transience. His central theme. My father might have spent a lifetime studying the private habits of animals, but he wasn’t a big believer in conservation. He always said there is no correct natural order and if a species were to die out, whatever the reason, so be it.
He began to recast his lectures, dropping in, here and there, his more heretical theories. Not enough so as to get embroiled in some endless class debate, but just enough to claim her otherwise fleeting attentions. Later, he would reverse himself, devoting his allotted hour to plain, old-time storytelling, because he couldn’t decide which he found more alluring, her distance or her attention. Perhaps, as he watched her, her face turned toward the light of the window, he recognized his own nascent desire to look for ways of escape.
Still, as a guest lecturer and with no papers to grade, no tests to be given, and no office hours required, he had no occasion to meet her. He grew lonely. Cut off from the built-in society of his film crew, and not that familiar with New York City, he began after class to pop into the West End bar, where usually one or two of his students would be having a drink. There, not wanting to alienate the other students, especially the girls, he would ask about her in an offhanded way. But nobody seemed to know anything about this silent student called Franka.
Then one night, she was just there, out on the street, waiting for him, or so he thought. She had only paused for a moment to tie her shoelace. “I have to water the bell ringer’s plants,” she said when she saw him. “He’s in Montreal to peal bells for the queen.”
“Which queen?” my father asked, following her. She had made no move to invite him along, but neither had she dissuaded him.
“Your queen,” she said to him as she turned toward Riverside Church. They said nothing more as they wound their way round to the back of the church, up the private elevator high into the tower, where the bell ringer had his office. The room was gabled and small and with the queen still on my father’s mind he thought about how, as a rule, towers are places where terrible evil happens. There were lots of plants and Franka, with only a coffee cup to use as her watering jug, traipsed repeatedly back and forth to the bathroom to refill it. Maurice Yellow sat before a giant organ, its pedals seemingly far below his feet, its bone ivory keys climbing up beyond his reach. In the absence of conversation, he listened to the scratching and cooing of birds nesting in the church tower eaves. He wondered if they took flight when the bells started up.
“A lot of elephant tusks went into this thing,” he said, finally pressing down on a dead key of the sleeping organ. Its noiselessness reminded him of a shooting star.
“He looks like a mad scientist when he plays it,” my mother said, turning for the first time to look at him. “But not half as mad as he looks when playing the bells.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“It’s a bit disconcerting. He plays for a long time before you hear anything, and then he’s finished long before the music stops.”
“Home before the waltz has ended,” my father said. He was trying to figure out the best way to get her to take her clothes off. Telling her to, which was his normal approach, didn’t seem right.
As she stood watching him, she let the coffee cup slip and some remaining water spilled onto her leg. He reached down and took hold of her ankle so the last rivulets of water trickling down her shin would dam around his knuckles. My mother was very still. She was not used to being touched. Her family and doctors avoided all contact, aware of the outbursts of panic and claustrophobia brought on when she was hugged, wrapped up in winter clothes, caught under the blankets, left in the car. But she didn’t resist my father. At nineteen, in a room at the top of the church tower, with New Jersey, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn splayed out beneath her, and with a man who had confessed to the whole class that, as a child, he used to try and find a new way home from school every day, she felt unafraid. As my father let go of her ankle and let his hand drift up her leg, she took off her blouse.
They would meet up and make love only a few times. The pregnancy, obviously, was not planned. She kept it a secret for as long as she could, knowing full well that everyone concerned would want her to have an abortion. But as her stomach started to grow the claustrophobia set in and she was overwhelmed. She turned left, she turned right, she even tried standing on her head, but she couldn’t escape the shadow of me. My father would visit her in the hospital, where for twenty-two hours a day they kept her, raving and lost, tied to the bed so she wouldn’t do herself any harm. It broke her, he said, but he didn’t question their methods, because every once in a while, she’d grow still, and tell him that her true reality had long been a fight against metamorphosis. She was threatened constantly—whenever she closed her eyes, thought her thoughts—with change, with disappearance. An arm to sand. A mind to blackness.
“This has always been my terror,” she told him. “And now, now it really is happening. With this child I am becoming something else. It’s time I finally gave in.”
And she did.
How would my father manage alone? Simple. He treated me like an animal. Early photos show me red, squalling, and naked, lying on a patch of bear rug, surrounded on all four sides by pillows. He never bothered with the accoutrements of babyhood. No crib. No changing table, barely any diapers. He did hire legions of nannies, who, each in her own manner, tried hard to civilize this burgeoning wild child, but as my father took me on all of his trips, they never got very far.
Do I miss my mother? Do I feel that fabled hole they are said to leave in one’s life? I’m not sure. I arrived. She died. One in. One out. Perhaps, being the only child of a naturalist, I accept as due course that the maternal thread should be cut; that—with the last regurgitated worm, the last suck on the now rough and ruined teat, or the last snout nudge off to hunt—the mother, with hardly a backward glance, would turn and leave. What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that, in the end, I am grateful for what I was spared.
I was frightened by a spider today. It was crawling down my leg. I felt it first, its liquid movements ticklish over my wounds, and then I panicked. Now, hours after Marcel threw him out the window, I am convinced my itsy-bitsy spider is making his way up the drainpipe, furious at being ousted from his winter refuge. His revenge will be swift. He’ll bite me. The thought makes my skin crawl.
What is happening to me? Panicked by a spider?
Why not? Years of grinning acceptance in the face of every slithering, crawling, creeping creature on the face of the earth, and now, happily, I am a woman who says, “Ick! There’s a mouse!”
Four weeks flat on my back. Why not change? I want a dog that requires a barrette to keep its overbred hair out of its beady little eyes. A new clean life where never, ever again will I have to lie beneath the chassis of a truck because it’s the only shady spot for eight hundred thousand square miles of desert; and never again have to pretend to be wildly appreciative for a chicken back served to me as most-honored-guest in a fly-infested hovel teetering over the edge of the Amazon. And fucking forget ever again having to sit benignly in front of a shaman, a soothsayer, or an ancient holy man and listen to his pagan bullshit. That’s right. No more intestine readings, no more flipping the sandal, no more laying on of the hands or interpreting dreams.
Blasphemy? Maybe. But thirty-five years of being subjected to every piss-poor shit hole on the fucking planet is enough. Thirty-five years of waking up to find boa constrictors, poisonous frogs, and yes, spiders, cozied up at the bottom of my bed. Thirty-five years of having every parasite, every burrowing worm take up residence under my skin, in my bowels, under my toenails.
For what? For what did I live that life? So I could know absolutely the narrow, consistent, inescapable lot of animals, while at the same time seeing firsthand the narrow, barbaric, inescapable lot of humans? NO! I did it because I was the dumb-fuck
animal my father raised me to be, following blindly first in his footsteps and then in my husband’s.
Shit! Shit! Shit! All that wasted time. And where the fuck now is Sonia? Leaving me here like this. Is that all everyone is good for? To do whatever the fuck they want? Well, I want something. I want out of this fucking bed. And, I want that dog, that fabled fucking froufrou dog who couldn’t survive two seconds in the wild.
It’s true. You can’t select memory. I’ve been trying. But the ones I don’t particularly want keep bobbing to the surface. I have found it’s best to just let them. Besides, what the fuck else is there to do?
Ralph and I sat side by side on the plane ride up to New York, far back from the rest of the crew, although I could see their legs sprawled out into the aisle. Leaving Roatán had taken forever, and the day of waiting weighed upon us, inaction producing exhaustion. A storm the night before had washed out the end of the runway and a smaller plane had to be called in from mainland Honduras. No time was given as to when this smaller plane might show up, so we sat in the corrugated-tin airport, watching the sea, the still excited sea, crashing through a newfound hole in the seawall and up onto the remaining outer edge of the runway. The day was clear, tropical, flat, boring, matching perfectly the timelessness of our wait.