This Is My Daughter

by Robinson, Roxana;

  He steps into the restaurant, which is small and crowded and pricey looking. The clientele is sleek, the lighting low. The front room is double height, and he walks through it to the high desk, where a young blond woman in black is standing.

  “My name is Chatfield,” he says. He feels again the reality dislocation. It can’t be true, he thinks, everything else is normal. “I’m here to pick up two dinners I ordered.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Let me go find them.” She heads for the back. Each sentence is a shock to him: everything out here, outside, is ordinary, natural. But inside he faces chaos: the earth yawning, landslides, avalanches, the landscape of desolation. Desolation. He sees again Emma’s face as she says, “Never again.” He feels his teeth grind against each other. “Never again,” she said. Somehow this seems the worst yet, the last straw. Is this the beginning of the end between them? He has heard that couples often split up when something happens to a child. He has thought that he and Emma would be wiser than this, that they would comfort each other, not turn against each other. But how can he stay married to a woman who will not allow him to speak the name of his daughter?

  Emma is not herself, he tells himself. She’s been hit by an avalanche. He can’t make demands on her now.

  The blond woman pushes her way out through the swinging doors. She stalks, awkwardly, on very high heels. She is smiling, but empty-handed.

  “It’ll be out in just a moment,” she says.

  “Thank you,” Peter says. But when is the moment to reach conclusions?

  Emma is irrational now. He should do nothing until things settle down. What if things don’t settle down? He feels those chords again, those bass chords sounding, moving ominously further down in the lower register.

  The blond woman hands him a heavy white paper bag. He is surprised: he doesn’t remember the waiter appearing with it. Synaptic gap, is that what this is, losing moments of perception? Will he start having delusions? Lacunae in his memory? Perhaps Tess is getting better, and he has forgotten that, he thinks hopefully.

  “Forty-nine seventy-eight?” the blond woman says. Her tone suggests politely that she has said this once before.

  “Right,” says Peter, frowning to suggest that he’s been lost in thought, which he has. He pulls out his wallet and fumbles for the green plastic card. He hands it over. He feels Amanda in his arms again, sobbing. He sees Emma’s face, closed. He sees Tess’s face, battered.

  “Here you are,” says the blond woman, smiling at him. Her eyelashes are pale, nearly white. She must be naturally blond, Scandinavian, Peter thinks. He’s heard that in Scandinavia women dye their hair dark, to be exotic. He thinks of Amanda’s ghastly green streak: exotic. Christ, he thinks: skipping the tennis clinic. The thought is agonizing, unbearable. What did it matter? What did it matter?

  “Thank you,” he says to the blond girl. It is excruciatingly painful to speak.

  She hands him back the credit card. Her two front teeth slant, ever so slightly, one folding in over the other. Her lips are chapped. Peter feels himself staring, and looks down. He signs the slip she hands him, then pockets his copy. He picks up the bag and starts out of the restaurant. At the corner table are two men, elbows on the table, talking intently. Business or pleasure, wonders Peter. They look in their early twenties: young to be so serious, so sober. When he was that age he had been less convinced the world was serious, dangerous. Good luck, Peter thinks wildly. Good luck. It seems crucial, right now, for him to broadcast goodwill.

  He pushes through the door and sets out again, back up Madison. Each thought sweeps over him like a new blow. Skipping the tennis clinic, he thinks. He remembers Amanda’s face, when they came home after the cocktail party. When he and Emma arrived, like vengeful Furies, the girls had been so happy, playing some kind of raucous tag, throwing that book across the table at each other, their faces bright, animated. It was what he and Emma had hoped for all summer: to find the two girls happy together, playing.

  He remembers himself swollen with rage, bursting with it. He had felt humiliated, as though he’d been exposed before every single person at Christian Taylor’s party. Everyone on the entire island had known that his daughter had been cheating and deceiving him all summer.

  And so what? What difference did it make? What could possibly justify his behavior?

  It was like everything else, he thinks, you learned these things by doing them wrong. When you’ve learned them it’s too late.

  He reaches the corner of Ninety-sixth and Madison, and turns west, toward Fifth. The streets are shadowy now, and Madison past Ninety-sixth is tricky. The blocks up there are poor, not gentrified. At night, the shops there do not have brightly lighted windows with ribbons in them. They have steel shutters, that rattle all the way down to the sidewalk. Up here people stand in the shadows, watching the passersby. If the passerby is white he feels uncomfortable.

  A man walks slowly past Peter, pushing a shopping basket crammed with empty cans. Reagan’s trickle-down economic plan had not trickled down to the streets in New York, the poor buggers. And now Reagan had Alzheimer’s, and would never know what mistakes he had made. Bush thought every decision had been correct. Maybe it had been, but what about these people in the streets, in tattered clothes, who look you in the face? Even if they were lying, conning, scamming, they were still poor.

  Peter turns north on Fifth. On his left the trees in the park rustle, dark and promising. On the West Side the sound of a siren rises suddenly, insistent, insane.

  “Never again,” Emma has said. “Never again.” She has said this, declared it. He feels a rush of rage.

  Peter turns in at the hospital, nodding at the black security guard. The man nods back, unfriendly. Peter walks to the elevators and pushes the slippery plastic button. It has been pushed by someone else, and is already lit from within, a ghastly glow. Beside it a man and woman are standing. The man is pale faced, and wears metal-rimmed glasses. The woman too has pale skin and bright dark eyes. They both look rumpled, and the woman dowdy in a long floppy skirt. They are silent and intent. The two stare at each other without speaking: they look like old enemies, practiced antagonists, each one waiting for the other to make a move.

  Peter wonders, his own marriage so hot and hostile in his mind, what they are thinking, what holds them in that stare. Maybe all the parents with stricken children turn against each other, maybe it is unavoidable. Who else is there to turn against?

  The elevator doors slide open and the three of them get in together. The man turns his back on his wife, facing the door. On the third floor they get off. The man walks away, without turning to see if his wife is following.

  Peter goes on up to seven, carrying their dinner. Tonight he has ordered lamb stew, with warm rosemary bread, and a real salad. At least he is learning about take-out meals, knowledge he resents needing.

  In the room Emma is bent closely over her magazine, and does not look up. Peter opens the food in silence, spreads it out. Emma takes a plate. They eat without talking.

  They do not speak all evening. Once the phone rings; Emma answers it. “Hello, Mother,” she says, her voice strained. “No,” she says. “No. No news.” There is a pause. “It’s the same. No.” There is another pause. “I know. Thanks. Thanks for calling.” Then, “That would be great. Fine. I’ll see you in the afternoon. Good. Okay, good-bye.”

  When she hangs up, her face closes down again. Peter waits, but she says nothing.

  “That your mother?” he asks finally, angry.

  Emma nods.

  “Is she coming down?”

  Emma nods again.

  “When?”

  “On Thursday.”

  “That’s tomorrow.”

  “I know that.”

  When Emma says nothing more, Peter returns to The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp was moving irrevocably toward his own doom. Every aspect of his life spoke ominously of his destruction. It troubles Peter, to have to live through this slow decline with Castorp. He
feels trapped in the book, but he feels obliged to finish it. It would be somehow shameful, cowardly, of him now to give it up.

  Each time there is a movement from the bed, Emma rises. She goes to Tess and speaks in a low voice. It is terrible for Peter to listen. He can hear in her voice that this is all she wants, this one thing. He remembers Amanda in his arms, the terrible ratcheting sobs. He still has a daughter.

  At ten Peter closes his book. “It’s bedtime,” he says.

  Emma does not look up. Her head is down, over her book, and he can see from the fixity of her chin that she does not want to hear him, does not want to respond.

  “Emma,” he says, “come back with me.”

  Without looking at him she shakes her head slowly.

  “Then I’ll wait for you,” Peter says, and she turns to him.

  He sees how grief has tightened her mouth. Her chin is pointed, her eyes narrow. Beneath her eyes there are half-moon hollows. The skin there is translucent and dark, shadowy. She looks at him steadily.

  “We need to spend the night together,” Peter says.

  He feels no liking for her, no physical affection. He knows this is dangerous. Right now they must be careful. They must not allow this silence to go on. He holds out his hand to her. “Emma,” he says.

  She looks at him for a long moment, then closes her magazine and stands up. She has taken off her shoes, and he watches her fish with her bare foot for her flat ballet slipper. She shuffles into it, finds the other one, and goes again to the bed. She leans over it, takes Tess’s hand, and whispers good night.

  In the taxi on the way home Peter can’t bring himself to touch her. The streetlights, as they pass, stripe the backseat with light, and in this erratic illumination he sees Emma’s thighs set primly side by side. The thought of her body is dismal to him, her limbs are useless to his arms. He stares out the cab window as they ride through the summer night. There is a moon, and the air is clear. Insects cluster, dots of pale fire, under the high lights. The cabdriver rattles south on Fifth, then turns west, across the park, swooping around the curves and hurtling through the sudden blackness of the underpass, rising afterward to face the high cliffs of the apartment buildings along Central Park West.

  Peter, swept along in this nocturnal race, wonders what he is doing. What is he attempting? He is acting as though he feels something he does not. But what else is there for him to do? He can’t walk away from the marriage because Tess has been hurt. Someone must protect them from this threat, from Emma. At the thought of Emma’s icy silence he feels rage, not love. He may not be able to do this.

  At home they undress in separate rooms. Emma comes out of the bathroom without meeting his eyes.

  “Did you take a sleeping pill?” Peter asks. Her doctor has given her a new kind, mercifully strong, fast acting, brief. She nods and gets into bed on her side. She curls into a neat roll, but not quite so far away from him as last night. Peter knows this, but he lies still, on his back, reading. He can’t yet bring himself to touch her, not even to pat her shoulder. When he turns off his light she is quiet; he pretends to think she is asleep. He rolls over on his side, away from her.

  In the morning the first thing he feels is his anger at Emma. Without looking at her he feels her burning presence on the far side of the bed. “Never again,” she had said. He feels Amanda in his arms. He opens his eyes, his chest full of rage. He looks over at Emma, ready to talk.

  She is gone. The bed is empty. He feels suddenly cheated, angrier still.

  It is now the sixth day. Peter lies for a moment in bed.

  Never again.

  29

  It is not yet nine, and already it is hot. Peter can feel his shirt sticking in patches to his skin, under his jacket. He has just emerged onto the sidewalk, from the subway. It is not far from West Eighty-first Street, down and across to Rockefeller Center, but this morning the trip seems endless.

  Usually Peter ignores it, his movements through it automatic, his thoughts deliberately elsewhere. This morning it seemed to him like hell: a screaming journey through the underworld, the passengers deafened, jostled, imperiled. Standing in the station, breathing in the sour damp smell of the tunnels. Standing in the cars, surrounded by mute and immobile bodies crammed, sweating, side by side. A short woman in a raincoat had stood so close to Peter that her wiry gray hair brushed the underside of his chin. Next to him, holding on casually to the greasy metal pole, was a muscular young black man in a faded red T-shirt and voluminous lowered jeans. His bulk swayed ominously against Peter on the turns, and his heavy-lidded eye, full, it seemed, of hatred, slid toward him, then away. All around Peter was the physical press of strangers, the intimate unwanted knowledge of their limbs and odors.

  He dreads his conversation with Caroline. He can feel the anger she directs toward him. There is anger all around him.

  Peter pushes through the heavy doors into 30 Rockefeller Center. Once inside he is part of a throng, walking across the long cathedral-like lobby, with its lofty ceilings, its deep tenebrous spaces. Its stylized chrome pseudo-Aztec details, the polished mineral surfaces, all this celebration of style is heartening, in a way more austere modern architecture is not. Those slab-sided featureless buildings ignore humanity; this art deco ecclesiastical style condescends to it, but at least acknowledges its existence. It pays homage to human endeavor. Peter usually finds this thought comforting, but not today. Today nothing comforts him.

  Streams of moving people surround Peter; he walks quickly among them, through them. The banks of elevators stand in niches, the ceilings here low, the space intimate, like confessionals. Peter pushes the elevator button with the side of his briefcase, impatient at the wait. It is unbearable to wait here, among this press of people. Everything is unbearably slow.

  The doors slide open before him, the crowd presses forward and Peter moves to the back of the car. He turns to face the door; the car fills, the doors shut, the car rises in silence. Peter looks at the others and realizes that he is the oldest person there. He must be early, he thinks, to arrive with all the young thrusters. But when he looks at his watch, it is quarter of nine. Of course, he thinks, it’s the end of August. Anyone with seniority is away now, on vacation. As he would have been. He sees Tess’s face, the bloom of bruising. Each time the realization is new to him, bewildering, sickening.

  Directly in front of Peter stands a tense young man, with a long narrow head. His tightly curled blond hair is cut very short. He seems unaware of Peter behind him, and stands too close. On the gray shoulder of his suit is a light shower of white flecks. His ear, inches from Peter’s nose, flares out from the side of his long head. The curled cartilaginous flesh looks naked: pink, translucent, indecently intimate. The man smells very clean, soapy. Peter can hear the man breathing, a slow, determined tidal rhythm—in, out, in. Peter feels his teeth clench, grind slightly. He shuts his eyes, not to look at the ear.

  Peter gets off on the thirtieth floor. Here it is air-conditioned, and too cold. The secretaries wear sweaters all summer. In the summer, the thermostat is set at sixty-eight, but in the winter it is seventy-two. If you reversed them you’d save billions of dollars of fossil fuel, but Americans insist on this, being too hot in the winter, too cold in the summer. A convention, a holdover from the fifties, when we were rich and oil was cheap.

  His office is dim and cool, but stuffy. The closed-in air feels dead. The blinds are pulled down, the lights are off. He turns them on, revealing one wall of teak bookcases full of law books. One wall with windows behind two green leather wing chairs. Behind his desk, hanging on the wall, are his framed degrees: Harvard, Columbia Law. Peter puts his briefcase down on the desk.

  He sees Emma’s stubborn jutting chin, her unfriendly eyes. She will hold him off forever. This is how she is: whenever they argue, she withdraws afterwards into cold silence, and waits for Peter to make the next move. She will wait for days, mute, stubborn, implacable. When finally Peter has worn out his anger, when he does make a move, re
aches out his hand, takes her in his arms, she yields at once, turning silky, remorseful. But until he speaks she will not.

  In her family is the story of a nineteenth-century husband—a minister?—who announced his plan to go to New York to hear the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind. “Nathaniel,” said his wife—Ezekiel or Obadiah, whatever Old Testament name it was—“if you go to hear that hussy, I’ll never speak to you again.” And he did, and she didn’t, is how the story is told. Years later, when the wife lies dying, her husband leans over and whispers something into her ear. She turns her face to the wall and, without speaking, she dies. Emma’s family is proud of that story, as though it reveals integrity instead of intolerance, as though it were a victory, not a failure.

  Emma’s family is all like that, thinks Peter angrily. They’re all censorious, stubborn, unforgiving. Worse, they are proud of it. Emma’s father is the most judgmental old buzzard Peter has ever seen; Everett thinks being self-righteous makes him good. He has still never met Francie’s new husband, Carlos.

  Peter goes down the hall to get coffee. He needs fortifying before he calls Caroline. At the little kitchen niche carved discreetly out of the formal hallways, he fills his mug at the Mr. Coffee machine. His mug is a tan one from Starbucks, where he has never been.

  In his office he closes the door and sits down at his desk. He takes a bitter black swallow and picks up his phone. He punches in the numbers of Caroline’s brief atonal tune. He listens to the sound of it, those unnatural plinks. Why not real notes? Why not the regular musical scale? While the phone rings he closes his eyes. He feels himself gathering his energy to confront her, feels himself clench.

  “Caroline? It’s me. Amanda there?” He speaks quickly and briskly.

  “She’s here but I think she’s still asleep,” Caroline says. Her voice is cool.