An Abbreviated Life

by Ariel Leve

  In Bangkok we would take samlors, the three-wheeled taxis resembling a rickshaw, but with a motor. The samlors were colored bright pink, like cotton candy. Back then they ran on diesel fuel and sounded like lawn mowers. As we waited for the light to change, the backseat, covered in plastic, would rumble and heat up. The blazing heat and sultry air would cause the back of my thighs to sweat so that when I stood up at the end of the ride, I would have to peel myself off the seat.

  I had unofficially adopted an elephant, Bimbo, who lived at the Dusit Thani hotel. On weekends my father and I would get to ride him around the pool. In photos of this period, he is holding me tight and I am safe in his arms, smiling.

  MY FATHER WAS good at good-byes. Emotion was real and undiluted. At the end of the summer we would stand inside the departures terminal at the international airport in Bangkok, and he would take me as far as he could go. I would make the prolonged voyage back to New York with a different companion after Kiki died. The airlines would not permit a child to travel such a long distance alone. One year it was my grandmother, my father’s mother, who had spent the summer with me. Another year, it was a colleague from my father’s law firm who had to make a trip to America. I wore a laminated card that year around my neck with my name and age, in case we were separated in Copenhagen during the layover. By the age of nine, I’d been around the world five times.

  AT THE AIRPORT, my father would kneel down on the concrete floor in front of me so that we were at eye level. His navy-blue Izod Lacoste shirt was drenched with sweat, and there were dark pools of perspiration under his arms and in a circle on his back. He had tears in his eyes; I felt nervous that if he blinked, they would roll out, and I didn’t want that because I didn’t want to see him cry. He pulled me in close for a hug and would say something funny that made me laugh. He was never afraid to cry in front of me. And he would choke back tears through a series of finals. Final call for the flight, final check of the ticket. “Okay, kiddo,” he says sweetly, “that’s you.” And as he says this, his voice breaks. He gives me a final hug. There were promises. To see me again soon. To write every single day. And he did.

  THERE WAS A mossy green wooden cabinet in my bedroom in New York. The top part of the cabinet had shelves for clothes. The bottom half had two doors that stayed shut only when the key was turned in the keyhole. It was stuffed with red and pale blue airmail envelopes. Hundreds of them. I loved the bright-colored stamps that decorated the front. Some of them had elephants and golden palaces. These were the letters Josie read out loud to me before I went to sleep. They were my bedtime story. They would begin “Hi, Pal,” or “Hi, Kiddo,” and they would always include how much my father missed me. How he was thinking of me. Every minute of every day. He would ask questions about my schoolwork and friends at school—refer to them by name. He would use only vocabulary words that I could understand. Mentioning things we had to look forward to when we saw each other. And every letter would end with a special sign-off. I love you more than all the grains of sand on the beach. I love you more than all the stars in the sky. I love you more than all the fish in the sea.

  AT THE AIRPORT in Bangkok, my father was never allowed to walk me to the gate because to get past security he needed a boarding pass. So we’d have to say our good-byes in a terminal full of moving strangers. It was the mid-seventies and the airport had no air-conditioning. The heat was dense, and my father, tan and athletic, was always damp from the sweat. I flinched when he stood up and leaned down to give me a final kiss on the top of my head. “Daddy,” I said, “don’t drip on me.”

  AFTER SPENDING TIME with my father in Bangkok, I never wanted to return to New York. But any attempt to extend my visit caused my mother to panic. She would insist she couldn’t live without me. “I’m having a nervous breakdown. I haven’t seen my child in months. I can’t go another day without her.”

  At the end of August when I was seven years old, my mother and Josie met me at JFK airport and we rode back to 180 in the taxi. As soon as we reached the building, my mother dropped me off and said she was continuing on. I told her I wanted her to come upstairs so we could call my father and tell him that I had arrived safely. She agreed to this but went out as soon as we were done. I fell asleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I called Rita.

  Rita answered the phone and I told her my mother wasn’t with me. “I could have stayed with Daddy for three more weeks, but Mommy wanted me home and now she isn’t even here. She went out to dinner and she never came back.”

  FOR THREE MONTHS when I was nine, my father, between jobs, rented a furnished apartment at the Surrey, a hotel in New York. We strolled along Madison Avenue holding hands. I could talk to him every day after school if I wanted. On weekends he took me to the movies; we went jogging in Central Park and ate hot dogs at Nathan’s. I never wanted that time to end.

  But my mother reminded me it wasn’t permanent. “What kind of father leaves his child to move to the other side of the world? If he loved you, he’d live in New York.”

  “He didn’t leave me.” I’d run to my room and slam the door.

  I had a constant companion who would console me. Smashy. Smashy looked like an oven mitt covered with cherry-red synthetic fur. He wasn’t a stuffed animal because he wasn’t an animal and he wasn’t stuffed. He was a hand puppet. Similar to a Muppet. An ancestor to Elmo, with no lower body. My father had given me Smashy as a half-birthday present when I’d last been in Bangkok and turned eight and a half. And from the moment he arrived in my life, he was my best friend. My father accepted this as fact. When we went out to dinner, Smashy had his own chair at the table. My father placed a menu in front of him, addressed him directly, and asked what he felt like eating. When we talked on the phone, my father suggested I put Smashy on the line so that he could ask questions about what I was reading and what my favorite subject in school was and which classmates I liked and which I didn’t.

  During the time my father was in New York, I was occasionally allowed to have sleepovers with him on weekends. I had my own room there, and even though it was a hotel, I pretended it was our apartment. I pretended he had custody of me and that I didn’t have to leave him to return to my mother. At night he tucked me into bed, and lying next to me, with his head on the pillow, was Smashy. My father tucked him in as well. I asked for a glass of water with a straw, and when I was done my father held the straw in Smashy’s mouth so that he could have a sip, too. The three of us talked about visiting the monkey forests or spinning around in the giant teacups at Coney Island, and when he left the room and turned out the light, I told Smashy I wished that when we woke up in the morning, we’d discover my father had found a job in New York. And that he’d moved into an apartment and was never going to have to leave.

  ONE AFTERNOON IT was raining and the three of us were in a cab on our way back to the hotel. It was a Checker cab and I had placed Smashy on the bumper seat; he was seatbelted in. We got out and my father walked around to the front so that he could pay the driver through the window. I waited on the curb. But just as the cab pulled away, I realized that Smashy had been left behind. My father and I stood for a few seconds, paralyzed, as the unthinkable set in. We raced upstairs and went right to the bedroom, and he began making phone calls. I didn’t even unbutton my coat. I just sat next to him while he dialed, holding my breath and whispering, “Please don’t let Smashy be gone.”

  My father stayed on the phone for a very long time. He spoke quietly, his voice grave and direct: “He’s red and fuzzy,” but I corrected him, saying “furry,” so he repeated: “He’s red and furry with a straw sombrero sewn on top of his head.”

  After a few hours of this, he assured me he wasn’t giving up. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked in my eyes. “Don’t worry, kiddo, we’ll find him.” But when I asked, “You promise?” he nodded his head and replied, “I sure hope so.”

  He told me he was going to go to the cab company and to sit tight—he’d be back soon. I waited. And when my fat
her returned, he walked through the door and I saw that his eyes were tender and that he’d been crying. He took off his blazer and loosened his tie. He came over to me, gave me a hug, sat me down on the couch, and took my hand. When he spoke, his voice cracked. He said he’d tried everything he could. He had looked everywhere. But Smashy was gone. So we sat for a while, just the two of us. I cried more than I’d cried in a very long time, and he cried with me.

  A few weeks later, after my father had moved back to Bangkok, Josie told me a special delivery package had arrived. I took it into my room and sat on the floor and opened it up. Wrapped in newspaper was an identical puppet, except that this one had electric-blue fur. There was a note attached in my father’s slanted handwriting: “Greetings. Can I live with you? I’m Trashy. Smashy’s cousin.”

  16

  People say all the time, “Your father is the nicest man.” Local Balinese people will tell me this. How thoughtful he is. How considerate. He can talk to anyone.

  “What I loved about your father,” Rita told me once, reflecting on her time with him, years later while I was visiting her at her house in Connecticut, “is that he was the most intelligent man I ever met, but he never once made me feel stupid.” That his sprawling intellect never bred a sense of superiority is something I admired as well.

  I HAVE NEVER heard my father argue with anyone. I have rarely heard him raise his voice. If there is someone he dislikes, he’ll say, they are “not my favorite person”—that’s as disparaging as it gets.

  He didn’t argue with my mother. He listened. And when he couldn’t listen anymore, he would go out, against her protestations, walk around the block on East 79th Street, and return to 180. We are having breakfast at his house, and as he tells me this, I am surprised that she let him leave. He laughs and says, “Not exactly.”

  He has blocked out the helplessness he must have felt. Likable people don’t warehouse acrimony and bitterness.

  HE RECALLS THAT for the six years they were married and living in New York, he cannot remember a single evening he spent by himself or with friends. As he says this, I take umbrage at the insouciance of his reflection. I have noticed this with others—as time passes, the memory of my mother’s behavior becomes less grainy, the surface is smoothed out, and a fondness for her eccentricity replaces animosity at the struggle to be free of the harassment.

  “I remember going to Dallas once for work,” my father says. “Maybe two years into the relationship. We’d never been apart for one day. And it felt, I don’t know . . .” He smiles, remembering the liberation. “Good. That was the first time I had been away from her.”

  Every evening they had to be together. There was a party. A dinner. An event. There wasn’t an evening together at home, just the two of them. “There was always somebody there,” he says. And as he describes the life he had with my mother, it’s as though he is telling a story of someone else. Someone who no longer exists. He says there was an argument because he went to Hong Kong on a business trip for two weeks, and when he returned, he’d had enough. “How could you do this to me?” she cried. He moved out and spent the next forty years by himself.

  EMILY, MY THERAPIST, once asked me to recall positive memories from childhood. I could talk about time spent with my father in Bangkok that was not turbulent, and when I see photographs of myself with him, I am grinning; in his presence, I was at ease and content. But often these memories were like reciting a poem by heart. I knew the words, but the recitation was devoid of sentiment.

  MY FATHER WOULD go jogging every day. He’d been doing this since the early sixties, before it became popular. It seemed messy, an unpleasant sweaty habit, but he jogged every morning. He would jog through the streets of Bangkok, on the beaches of Indonesia, in New York City—he would run around the reservoir in Central Park. When it was winter, he would jog in a T-shirt and shorts. When I asked him why he did this, he said, “Because I am putting miles in the bank.” When he was sixty-five, he ran his first New York City Marathon. At eighty-five, he can no longer run, and it’s one of the great losses in his life. But he is fit, and the years of exercise bequeathed him good health.

  When I think back now to our time together, it was episodic and I knew it would end, but the attention he paid and the love that he gave was solid and true and it left a footprint on my psyche. The happiness miles were logged in the bank.

  17

  When Rita first told me about the letters she wrote, I wasn’t prepared. Neither of us can recall what prompted her to tell me about them or offer them to me to read. I was in my early thirties and living in New York. They arrived in a FedEx envelope with a note:

  Dearest Ariel,

  As you read through these, it may seem like you’re watching a television soap opera in which you are the star. I sincerely hope this experience doesn’t upset you. You may get some laughs from what you read. You will surely be angry and cry either from a recalled joy or a remembered sadness. Sending these letters is a bit of a risk. I’ve no idea how the adult Ariel will feel reading intimate things of her life as a child.

  Love, Rita

  HER LETTERS TO my father were typed single space on a manual typewriter. There is barely any room on the page not covered in print. There are hefty paragraphs and few indentations. Most of the letters are more than one page. Two or three pages each. The volume of correspondence is staggering. There are weeks at a time when she wrote every day. December 18 is four pages. December 19 is two. Then there will be a break and the narrative will pick up again one week later.

  THE LETTERS BEGIN in 1973 and end in 1976. She had used carbon sets so that there were copies. A one-time-use carbon sheet was attached to a tissue-thin piece of paper. She slipped it behind the regular bond paper and an automatic copy was made.

  The paper from the carbon set is lightweight and durable. It is used for permanent records. It is impervious to age and elements that would destroy it; resistant to oil and grease. What happened could not be deleted. Could not be smeared. The transparency was undeniable.

  When I opened the FedEx envelope and held the letters in my hand, I was holding a black-and-white archive. She had traced my childhood onto the page.

  I TOOK THE letters into my bathroom in New York and sat on the cold tile floor, with my back resting against the ceramic bathtub. I closed the door, even though I lived alone and no one would interrupt. The pile was about an inch and a half thick. I began to read but then had to stop. It took me months to get through them all. I got no laughs from what I read. I did not cry from a recalled joy or a remembered sadness, as Rita had noted.

  I read them as though reviewing documents that would serve as evidence in a trial. I read about a little girl who had to navigate an unsafe world, a world without boundaries. This child was left alone most of the time—if not physically, emotionally. And then every once in a while, it would hit me that that child was me.

  WHAT I SAW was a diplomat. At seven years old I was strategizing. Understanding that asserting myself was not just useless but harmful. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong, what mattered is that I didn’t make it worse. What mattered was making sure my mother was taken care of.

  The letters are my ally. Above all else, they confirmed what I knew: my anger was justified. The distrust that had shaped who I became had a substantiated origin.

  MY MOTHER MADE me doubt and question my perceptions. The loving and warm persona that followed the tirades confused and destabilized me. I wanted a witness. An ally. To verify. To have proof.

  Someone I could turn to and say, “This happened, didn’t it?”

  Someone who could see the transformation I saw.

  “I have a right to be angry, don’t I? I don’t trust her,” I say.

  Only I didn’t say this. Because I was seven years old and I didn’t know yet that’s how I felt. And not trusting one’s mother is, on a cellular level, unjust.

  I needed to be heard and kept hoping she would hear me. As a child, it was too overwhelming
to believe that she couldn’t recognize reality. My craving for her to be different was powerful. It inoculated me against the tumult.

  I descended deep within myself, far away to a place in the future. Where things would make sense and right was right and wrong was wrong. I was able to crawl away from my rage.

  But I never crawled away far enough.

  MY FATHER DIDN’T respond to what Rita wrote, though he acknowledged the letters when he received them. Why did she write? She loved me, she loved him, and she believed he needed to know. He expressed his gratitude that she was informing him. I imagine him reading the letters while in Thailand, half a world away from 180 East 79th Street. What could he do? The circumstances were beyond his control.

  While she was sending him these meticulous dispatches, he was writing to me directly. Beautiful letters were his way of giving loving and caring thoughts to counter the angst. Rita writing to my father, my father writing to me, my mother writing poetry. Everyone was writing their way out of the helplessness.

  “How could we all be true to ourselves and still get out of the quagmire?” Rita asks. We are older; forty years have passed. We are standing in Grand Central Station before she catches the train home to Connecticut. “I was never able to answer that. Perhaps your father couldn’t either. And you, dear child, were in the middle.”