by Bex Brian
“No.”
“All these women would have killed to have had your father’s child.”
“I’m not so sure. . . . June, for instance,” I said, picking up a photo of a blond-haired woman. “She went on to work with Goodall. If I’m not mistaken, she was the one who found empirical evidence that chimps eat meat.”
“Fuck meat,” Lydia said, grabbing the photo out of my hand and ripping it to bits. “The point is, whether we wanted to or not, none of us ever got pregnant.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“So.”
“So, maybe you should question whose daughter you really are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Do you think a man like my father would burden himself with a child if he didn’t absolutely have to? I’m sorry you never got knocked up. Sorry none of you did. Perhaps my father was only good at knocking up crazies.”
“She was the only woman he loved, wasn’t she?”
“I doubt that,” I said. Lydia’s eyes softened; I had thrown her a bone, a reason to believe, and had it not been my wedding day I might have corrected her.
The thought of Sonia, her grubby fingers fumbling through my clothes, has brought me back to life, my life, held for so long in abeyance. She’ll take my white sweater and my Cole Haan boots. The rest she’ll throw back in the case without refolding it, and only if I ask will she bring it to me.
What of me is there left, anyway? Jeans that once hugged my ass. A dress with spaghetti straps, cut low to show off my back. A denim shirt with snap buttons—quick release. All the bras black. Clothes to make Ralph love me. God, how I shopped the days before I left for Paris. All new underwear. All new T-shirts. No frays. No stains. All a bit small. A quick change was required, and gallons of water. Pee away my sins. Pee my way to an irresistible body.
Now my pint water glass sits still, alone in the dish rack. The rest of the apartment is neat, ready for abandonment. I’m used to thoughts of an empty apartment. On long shoots with my father, my schoolgirl ears filled with the yelps and whoops of nighttime jungle dangers, I’d think of my maid’s nest at the back of the flat and pray that it was exactly as I remembered leaving it. Now I know better. The minute I closed the door, I’m sure, even my glass, the last thing I touched, left poised upside down on the rack to dry, joined the rest of the place’s inanimates in their quiet riot toward decay.
I wonder if Ralph has been back there, stolen in to collect his things. Had we reached that point? Our last days here in Paris were so violent with emotion. He hated me. That white sweater Sonia will filch—I was wearing it on that final day. Ralph had kept us either outside, sitting on blustery park benches, or in overheated cafes having coffee, the sweater either too much or too little. Just like me as I searched for the right tone, for the exact words, the look, the touch that would crack him open, allow me to fill him back up with love for me.
But everything was against me. The waitress kicked my foot after lightly stepping over Ralph’s long legs. Later, as I’d raised the pitch as high as I dared go, she winked at him and said, “Madam seems a little overheated.” Ralph, with his elbow on the table and his pinky hooked on his soft lips, lowered his eyes and smiled. Why didn’t he hit her? Because he wanted to hit me. The rest of the world was fine, faultless.
At least I remembered to steal her tip. We walked back to the pension. Time had run out. His crew was upstairs, waiting on our bed, surrounded by those hateful reinforced black camera boxes, lenses, tripods, sound equipment. They were taking an evening flight to Manila. Ralph was following the fish trade, backwards.
I thought I would have the stairs, time still to find the man who loved me, but that fucking concierge, her eyes bulgy from years of spying on the comings and goings of guests, came out to wish him well. He stopped, gave her all the time in the world. No thread of love could possibly be retrieved from the tales of her swollen ankles and her no-good son who should only be like Monsieur McCrimmon. A narrow look and a slight sniff was what I got when Ralph informed her I was staying on, for how long he did not know. “Madam will make her own plans.”
And then he was gone. I had vowed to myself I wouldn’t watch him drive away. My first tears were ones of regret that I hadn’t given him the finger or shouted “Fuck you” or shot myself through the head as he drove away. Anything, anything for one last look. Instead I ripped off my white sweater, crushed it in a ball, threw it to the ground, and stepped all over it.
Why did I stay? “Madam will make her own plans.” In the silent aftermath of my temper tantrum, another remembered response took over. Just stand still, wait, and he’ll return. I stayed because I dared not leave. And I was right. Look what happened the first time I ventured out.
Mr. Charge! Come to dig up more dirt?”
“Come to dish it actually.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Nothing you don’t know about already, old girl.”
“You’d be amazed at what I don’t know.”
Such a narrow look Mr. Charge gave me. “I see you’re finally standing upright. That’s evolution for you.”
“Well, I’m not sure I can make that claim. Merely healing. I’ve been told I’ll be sprung soon.”
“Back to America?”
“I haven’t decided. Somehow, the idea of being lame in New York doesn’t appeal to me.”
“I was in a bad accident once. You know what I did for my convalescence? Took myself off to Gabon, let the underpaid hotel staff wait on me hand and foot. Worked a charm.”
“Maybe I’ll consider that then.”
“You’ve got money. You could go someplace better. Tahiti, say.”
English blather; it can go on forever. I maneuvered myself over to the white chair. I wasn’t going to let Lionel Charge, with his seam-splitting thighs, torment the poor thing again. I left him no choice but to lean against my bed. It, too, seemed to let out a groan.
“Now that we’ve mapped out the possibilities for a sunny retreat, what have you come to show me?”
“First let me show you these.” He pulled from a large envelope a stash of oversized glossies of me, although for an instant I wasn’t sure who it was in them. The war of attrition mounted by the photographer to scour my normal expression, the hours spent forcing a high-wattage smile, had resulted in a series of garish pictures: me propped up in bed, an afghan throw placed over the offending leg; me bent studiously over the Herald Tribune; me looking longingly out the window. There was even a shot of me holding up the book I wrote about my father. Each shot scripted to remove the taint of a life blown to shit.
“What was I thinking?”
“Ohh don’t mind those. It’s a talent we have. I, for one, think you look smashing. Some of our subjects look like they’d had their natural skin replaced by plasticine. ‘Stiffs,’ we like to call them.”
“Charming.”
“You know whose face, in all the thousands of pictures we have published of her, we could never quite control, never get that true Hello look with?”
“Who?”
“Duchess of York. Fergie. She always seemed a little mussed, a little . . . how should I say . . . uncontained?”
“Well I look as if I have a rod up my ass.”
“Haven’t you?”
“No, Mr. Charge. Pins in my legs, that’s all.”
“I was just having a laugh with you. No harm meant.”
“Hard to trust you, Mr. Charge, when I think harm is the whole reason for your visit.”
“Not true! Like I said, stuff you probably already know.”
“Alright, give it to me.”
Another batch of pictures emerged from Lionel Charge’s envelope. These, however, were contact sheets and the sequential images reminded me of a photo flip-book yet to be put together. “We’re thinking of running these a couple of weeks after your story,” Charge said, handing them over. “People are always very curious as to what the other half in a failed marriage is u
p to.”
There was Ralph, hopping out of a boat, tanned and dashing. Moment by moment, he was captured securing his craft to the dock before turning back and helping out a shy, smiling Martha. Once on solid ground, they’re kissing. Story over.
“This seems more News of the World than Hello,” I said, handing the lot back to Lionel.
“Don’t see any fish.”
“That wouldn’t be Ralph’s job. Those young boys who can hold their breath for half an hour—they are the ones who go down and get them. Round them up into plastic bags, if I’m correct.”
“Did you know that fish are the French’s favorite choice of pet?”
“I did. It’s what they deserve.”
Lionel looked back down at the pictures. “Better, I suppose, to hear it from me, straight, than to pick up the magazine a month from now . . .”
“It doesn’t matter. You were right, Mr. Charge. It’s nothing I didn’t already know.”
I am in no pain. Physical pain, I mean. I have just noticed. I feel strangely whole, unified. You could say that my leg has resumed its place in the orchestra after being a soloist for so long. It’s nice, but unremarkable, which I quess is the nature of normal.
Lionel left me with all my pictures, but not the contact sheets of Ralph and Martha. “Not really your right, is it?” he said. I could have given him ample reasons why it was more my right than his but his smarmy sympathy, so thoroughly undercut by the twinkle in his eye, would have made me hate him even more. If I were an emperor, he would have definitely been one dead messenger.
Pictures, I once heard, are the most troubling purveyors of history. I can see why. Whenever I see an obituary shot or even the smiling face of a reported missing person, I can’t believe that this is all that is left of something so noisy and grand as a human being. These pictures make me look like my father, or at least how he did in his last set of publicity stills. Now there’s an oxymoron. Pictures that look nothing like you meant to lure the public to your side. Ohhh how he hated them. He reacted as if they were a bad death mask, cast, unnervingly, before the subject had breathed his last. Had we a working fireplace he would have demanded they be burned. As it was he had to be satisfied with watching me rip them to bits.
He was dying, of course. I didn’t know. Those pictures did. If only I had given them a good look. All I saw was humiliation. If I could do anything for the dead, my dead, it would be to take back, to erase, their last big fuckup, their last boneheaded attempt to recapture what any sane person should have known was irretrievably lost. In my father’s case, it would be the trip to Vietnam, all those delicate miniature deer he was tricked into believing he would find. Madness. But I didn’t know he was dying, and he sure the fuck wasn’t going to tell me. So I drove him to the airport and into the ambitious clutches of Norman Yates, who, on the frail back of my father, was going to shoot the best film yet about the great Maurice Yellow. The vanity of men. Not worn down by time or age. And when it is undermined, the fallout, the tremor . . . well, it’s enough to kill a man. It did my father.
The trip went badly from the start. Butter. It was all my father wanted for his morning toast, and only margarine could be found. Christ, how crotchety we can become. And why the fuck not? Pleasures are few, butter among them. Too much, though, for young Yates, who assumed that old-hat travelers like my father never need what isn’t available. One day, when seeing him won’t make me wail with hatred, I’ll show him my father’s cocktail case, which, over the years, was passed like a talisman from porter to porter, through every country in the world, so that he would never be deprived of his seven o’clock gin and bitters. Yates did eventually find my father butter, probably pressing some rice-paddy water buffalo into service, her fatty milk churned and churned into some rank spread. But that would be the last of his concessions.
There was a time, my father’s time, that is inviolate and frozen in my memory: him on the trail of, on the scent of, a panther, stealthy, silent, sublime. But the Vietnam rushes, when I finally saw them, broke my heart. Sure the pursuit was on, the deer just over the next ridge. But nobody was fooled. His wild crashing about would have scared off a herd of elephants, let alone tiny timorous deer. They found nothing, not even a wild pig. Young Yates, with no cloven fawn to show for his efforts, kept turning the camera on my father. Ashen, old, he was caught in one long complaint, a child’s whine: tea not hot enough, pillows not plump enough, girls not attentive enough, bones creaking, head hurting, nose running, bowels stopping up or vice versa.
Worse, far worse, is the thought of one’s place in the world, how one will be remembered. With the canopied jungle heat acting as truth serum, there was Maurice Yellow at once bitter, unrepentant, misunderstood, smarter than all the rest. “Nature is boring,” he said, at one point, looking horribly peevish as he spit out seeds from the orange he was eating during the interview. “It’s only how I interpret it that seduces people into believing something sacred has been found.”
When the last of the rushes sputtered to the end, I wanted my father to disappear, to do his usual act, be anywhere but beside me. I turned so he wouldn’t see my tears. I thought with shame how I never let him take my hand as a child when we crossed a road, and how I couldn’t take his now. But there was no need. As I say, the vanity of men, hardy stuff. His mind, already in the thrall of the cancer that would kill him, saw in the film exactly what he wanted to see. My father was pleased as punch. Three months later he was dead.
Fuck these crutches! Useless pieces of shit. I missed her, couldn’t get the fucking things under my arms, couldn’t get the door open in time with its fat pendulous weight working against me. When I heard the shouts, I knew she had been spotted. That fucking night nurse must have freaked. But Sonia got away. I wanted one last look. She’ll never come back now. Not that tonight wasn’t all about good-bye. Bad end. The two us smarting under the unspoken. I hadn’t expected her to come. It’s pissing rain outside. But in she pops, startling vision in my black dress, my white sweater, my Cole Haan boots.
“Don’t you look a peach.”
“These clothes are too big.”
“I can see that. Next time I’ll have a tailor waiting,” I said, looking at her. Her boobs didn’t fill the cups; her hips were lost. Still, she looked good.
“You know that’s a three-hundred-dollar dress. I hope you’re not sleeping in it.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. But you can’t be in a good setup if you’re venturing out on a night like this.”
“I was bored.”
“Bored with what?”
“Bored of where I was.”
“And that was?”
“What, what do you want to hear?” Sonia said, shaking the rain out of her hair. “That I am sleeping in the Gare du Nord!”
“Are you?”
“Fuck you.”
“Sonia, I have given you money and clothes. Which by the way you didn’t even think about bringing me an outfit. I’m getting out of here, you know. That will be a fine exit, my ass hanging out because I only have a hospital gown to wear.”
Boy did I feel like a heel when she tossed a paper bag onto the bed. Inside, jeans, a top, a jacket, clean underwear, a bra.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just too much, you coming in here like this. I never know what to think.”
“Don’t be so happy. Those aren’t your jeans. I got them off a girl with really fat legs. Maybe now you won’t have to cut them.”
“One of your Gare du Nord pals?”
Sonia nodded. A train station. She’s been living in a fucking train station. How is that even done? I’m going to have to rethink the head-numbing contempt I feel for those stoned-out kids lining the benches, clogging up the bathrooms in every fucking European train station I’ve ever been in, kids slumming it even though most still carry the taint of the suburbs on them, slumming it to no end. Well, I wonder what the Parisian swells will think seeing one of these wastrels decked out
in a Donna Karan dress? Sonia always did have a heightened sense of the absurd. Ohh Sonia. It was so depressing, our good-bye, the same language, the same promises as all good-byes. I gave her my numbers—London, New York—and I even gave her Alastair’s, although come to think of it, that’s been changed.
“You know what’s funny?” I said, watching her fold that damn piece of paper with all my numbers twenty times before wedging it in her boot, my boot.
“What?”
“You and your pals can be my send-off party.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I have to go back to England. Or I should say I want to. And I’m certainly not going to take a boat.”
Sonia gave me a confused look.
“Does the Chunnel train ring a bell?”
“Ahhh yes.”
“They leave from Gare du Nord—you knew that, didn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“So why were you acting like you didn’t?”
“Well, my plans . . . I don’t.”
“You have plans?”
I could have shot myself then, casting doubt on her future, and I might have repaired it if only I had said, “So, this whole hospital stay was a bit of a hoax, was it?”
But whose? That’s the problem. She wants me to believe the doctors know nothing. I want to believe that. It all kept me silent. I told myself then that she has my numbers, if she wants to she can find me. I even reminded myself of that dull dread one feels when a traveler met once actually does takes you up on a suggested visit. But the sudden shouts, Sonia’s flight, and now this sharp sadness and panic. I’m afraid of the subsequant minutes, accumulating, without rest until I don’t care, until self-preservation blots out all else.
There are no more blank spots. The head is clear, the veins free of drip. Miss that.
I came to Paris to catch him in the act. Did that. Yes. Easy as pie. There he was opening the door, sheet loosely wrapped around his waist. And there she was, groggily turning over in bed. I bowed and went to wait outside.