The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy

by David Handler

  She puffed out her cheeks, considering this a moment. It was quiet in the room. I could hear the mantel clock ticking. I could hear the reporters outside joking and laughing. “I expected him to grow old with me,” she replied. “I expected him to be by my side. To be true to me—instead of to that goddamned heroic quest of his. Which wears mighty thin as a daily diet, believe me. He’s insane, you know. He’s totally lost control.”

  “He claims he’s in love.”

  “Oh, please! The man’s phallus is in wonderland. He’s found the proverbial honey pot. She’s young. She’s voluptuous. She’s flattered by his attention. What college girl wouldn’t be? He happens to possess one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century.”

  “Do you hate him?”

  “Out loud,” she affirmed. “He killed me, Hoagy. I’m dead inside. If he walked into this room right now I’d claw his goddamned eyes out.”

  “And Clethra?”

  “She’s just a child rebelling against her mother,” Ruth said mildly, rocking back and forth on the sofa. “Nothing more, nothing less. How’s Merilee?”

  “Tired a lot of the time.”

  “Drag her away from that baby if you can,” she advised. “Set aside one evening that’s just for you two—flowers, wine, a romantic supper. It’s vital for young couples.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call us a young couple.”

  “She was a wonderful campaigner,” Ruth recalled fondly. “So passionate. When she believes in someone, she believes.”

  “Yes, I suppose she does.”

  “Cherish her, Hoagy. What you two have together is priceless. You don’t realize it until you’ve lost it like I have. Because you can never get it back. Never.” She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her sweater, shuddering. “Know who’s been like a rock through this whole thing? Barry. I guess because he knows from public humiliation. Went through so much himself when he came out after our divorce. Marco’s been incredibly supportive, too. Gay men, they know what it means to be ostracized, to suffer. If it weren’t for those two I’d never have made it through these past few weeks, believe me. Barry has a country place out near you, in Essex. He and Marco have invited Arvin and me out for the weekend.”

  “How do we fix this thing, Ruth?”

  “Fix it?” She gaped at me, incredulous. I couldn’t blame her. “We don’t fix it, Hoagy. We go to court. When we do I’ll win sole custody of Arvin. And I will win. And then, one of these mornings, Clethra’s going to wake up and realize she has absolutely zero interest in sharing another day of her promising young life with an aging lunatic. And when that happens I’ll take her in my arms and we’ll cry and we’ll laugh and then she and Arvin and I will get on with our lives. We’ll survive. Hell, I don’t blame Clethra. How can I? I just feel sorry for her, that’s all.”

  “I feel sorry for Thor, too.”

  “You can afford to,” Ruth Feingold pointed out. “He hasn’t ruined your life. Yet.”

  Barry Feingold and Marco Paolo shared an airy twelfth-floor corner apartment in a pre-war building on Riverside and Seventy-ninth Street. Their view, which soared all the way up the river to the George Washington Bridge, was to die for. Their decor was not. You’d call it eclectic if you were being tactful. Kitschy if you were not. Not so much because of the marble cherubs and the gold-veined mirrors. Or the overstuffed, over-the-top Victorian rosewood chairs and the matched pair of fainting couches. No, it was their collection of antique dress mannequins from the 1930s—those two dozen life-sized plaster men and women, fully costumed, who were positioned about the living room as if in the midst of some scintillating smart set soiree. And who were exceedingly—well—unnerving. Unless, like Bill Clinton, you can get used to being watched over constantly by a Greek chorus of dummies. I know Lulu found them totally unnerving. She never stopped growling at them the whole time we were there.

  The sun was still rather high over the New Jersey Palisades but we decided on martinis anyway, heavy on the olives in my case. Marco went clomping off to the kitchen to make them while I sat across from Barry, who was draped languorously across one of the fainting couches with his ankles crossed. On the stereo Janet Jackson was going ooh-baby-ooh with what I suppose she thought was feeling. And, compared to Mariah Carey, I suppose it was.

  “So how is old Thorvin these days?” Barry asked me politely.

  “Not well, in my opinion.”

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it was someone he ate.”

  Barry Feingold was in his early sixties, second-generation New York real estate money. His father, Herschel, built those awful brick apartment towers in Queens that are clustered practically on top of the Long Island Expressway, the ones you pass on your way to the airport and wonder how anyone could possibly live there. As far as I knew, Barry had never actually held a real job. During the Koch years, he had served as the Mayor’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Before that he’d been on some board or another at Lincoln Center. Lately, he’d been backing experimental theater, which is a graceful way of saying he was sleeping late most mornings. Not that Barry wasn’t a self-made man. He most decidedly was. He’d made himself into what the British theater people call a laddy boy. Barry was trim and tanned, with a cultivated air of wry detachment and just a hint of the dissolute scamp. He had lovingly coiffed silver hair and a proud, aquiline nose and not a trace of sagging skin. Not under his eyes. Not under his chin. Not nowhere. We’re talking multiple tucks. I think he was also wearing a girdle. Either that or he didn’t exhale once while I was there. He had on a red velvet smoking jacket, white silk shirt, an ascot, gray flannels and black suede lounging pumps with little gold foxes braided on them. It was not an easy outfit to pull off, especially for someone who grew up in Douglaston, Queens. But Barry worked at it, and Barry Feingold was good at his work.

  “That’s a deliciously lugubrious little dog you have,” he observed cheerily.

  “Do you want her?”

  Lulu jumped right up and let out a wounded yowl of protest.

  Barry frowned—or tried to. Definitely multiple tucks. “Why, are you giving her up?”

  “I may have to. We’re having some sibling problems. She’s not adjusting.” This was me taking a stab at tough love. “I’m hoping she’ll shape up, but if she doesn’t …”

  Lulu glowered at me, not buying one bit of it, then curled back up with a snide little grunt. This was her saying: You couldn’t make it without me if you tried, butthead.

  Marco came clomping in from the kitchen with our martinis. Marco Paolo, the former Mark Paul Humberstone of Grand Island, Nebraska, was a boy toy of the grade-A prime beef variety—six-feet-four and heavily muscled and still not yet thirty. Before Marco caused a stir in the fashion world with his Hasidic leisure ensembles he had been a bouncer at a downtown after-hours club, Mrs. Norman Maine, where he achieved modest renown for putting one of Madonna’s entourage in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. It had taken all of Barry’s considerable pull to smooth that one over. Marco had spiky hair, orange, and a two-day growth of beard, black. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. He wore a flowing black linen shirt, awning-stripe bombachas and no shoes or socks. He seemed edgy, as if he was about to either get violent or break into tears. He was also flushed and rather sweaty. When he handed me my glass his fingers were scalding to the touch.

  “I was admiring your suit,” he said to me, his voice unexpectedly hushed and demure. He reeked of that new vanilla scent everyone was wearing. Smelled very much like a bakery.

  I thanked him and he sat and the three of us drank and talked about my suit, which I’d had made for me in London at Strickland’s. And then my brogans, which were also made for me in London, by Maxwell’s.

  “I’ve just ordered my first pair of customized orthopedics from T. O. Dey on East Thirty-eighth Street,” Marco informed me, mopping at his brow with a red bandanna. “They’re costing me six hundred and fifty dollars, but I can’t believe I ever lived without them. They’re dop
e. So well made, and just for me. Everyone’s getting their shoes made there now—Sly, Cher, Liza …”

  “That’s everyone, all right,” I agreed pleasantly.

  Yes, it was all very pleasant. Me, I can drink martinis and talk about clothes, especially my own clothes, for hours.

  But Barry’s glass was empty. “Make us another round, would you, dear?” he said, holding it out to Marco.

  Marco got to his feet and started back to the kitchen, moving rather unsteadily. The big guy crashed right into a pair of those non-mobile plaster partygoers, knocking them flat and sending himself sprawling. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he said quickly, scrabbling back to his feet. “Don’t fuss.”

  “Poor bastard’s running a fever,” Barry clucked as we watched him stagger from the room. “I just know it.”

  “Is it something serious?”

  There was a narrow wooden box of small cigars on the table next to him. Barry removed one and lit it. “Do you mean, is it AIDS?” he asked, arching his brow at me. Or trying to. “He won’t go to the doctor to find out. Too afraid. He’s HIV positive, you see.” He puffed on the cigar, watching the smoke rise toward the chandelier. “We both are.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Barry.”

  “Ruth doesn’t know, by the way,” he said airily. “In fact, no one in the family knows.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “Just felt like it, I guess. Maybe I’ve had too much to drink. We started with wine at lunch and haven’t stopped since. Have you noticed how no one drinks in the afternoon anymore? I do believe there’s a clear connection between the decline of Western civilization and the death of the two-martini lunch. What do you think?”

  “I think no one has any fun anymore. Which, I suppose, is another way of saying you may be on to something.”

  “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” said Barry, drawing on his cigar. “A certain peace of mind comes with knowing it can all end just like that. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what I haven’t done. Do you know I’ve never been to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon?” He paused, in case I wanted to toss anything in. I didn’t. “What I’ve come to realize is that there’s no sense getting upset about anything. Just enjoy what and who you have.”

  “You don’t have Clethra,” I pointed out.

  “I never did,” he countered. “Thor’s her dad.”

  “She says you are.”

  “Of course she does. It suits her to say that. Otherwise, she’d be doing something terribly dirty, wouldn’t she?”

  “I rather thought that was the whole idea.”

  “I am her biological father,” Barry conceded. “But he’s the one who’s been there for her through the years—bandaged her scraped knees, wiped away the tears.” He let out a mirthless chuckle. “Awfully strange, the two of them ending up playing hasta la grab ass together.”

  “Does it upset you?”

  “I don’t condemn them for it, if that’s what you mean. I don’t feel I have a right to. I don’t feel anyone does.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like the voice of experience.”

  “Oh, it is, Hoagy. It most assuredly is.”

  “Ruth told me you’ve been a big help through all of this.”

  “I’ve tried. Ruthie and I were good together, early on. I just wasn’t being me, that’s all. It wasn’t easy for her, when I came out. People made fun of her, laughed at her. But she was nothing but supportive. She understood. So now it’s my turn. Whatever she needs. Hell, it’s the least I can do.”

  There was a crash in the kitchen—glass shattering.

  “I’m okay, damn it!” Marco cried out angrily. “I’m okay!”

  Barry’s face fell. Or tried to. “His apparel line is in the toilet, too. Loans up to his ears. The Hasidic look came and went. As a fashion statement, I mean. And I know exactly what you’re going to say next …”

  “How can you when I don’t?”

  “If he’s flat broke what’s he doing spending six hundred-some bucks on a stupid pair of shoes, right?”

  “Not at all. In the world we live in, appearances are everything.”

  Barry eyed me approvingly. “You’re very perceptive.”

  “I’m a thin entering wedge, all right. Getting back to Marco …”

  “I’d much rather talk about your thin entering wedge,” he joked.

  “Down, boy.”

  “I may have to sell my country house to bail him out,” he confessed wistfully. “I’ll miss it terribly. It’s so quiet out there you can hear a cliché drop. And we tool around the back roads in this dear little old bug-eyed Sprite. I suppose that’ll have to go, too.”

  “What year is it?” I asked, tugging at my ear.

  “A ’59. Are you interested?”

  “Does it have any rust?”

  “Don’t we all?”

  That one I let him have.

  “My money is in a trust, you see,” Barry continued. “Can’t be touched without being okayed by a committee of bean counters. Bailing out Marco’s line would not be their idea of sound investment strategy. And even if it were, I’m quite certain they’d demand a blood test of him. Anyone who’s backing fashion these days does. And that would be the end of that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you say all of this, Barry. It gives you a motive.”

  He stared at me. “A motive for what?”

  “Peddling this tape of Clethra. Lots of money involved.”

  “But I didn’t,” he insisted, reddening. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. The girl’s my own flesh and blood. I’d never do something like that to her.”

  “You wouldn’t be doing it to her. You’d be doing it to him.”

  “Thor?”

  I nodded. “This is bound to throw even more public sympathy toward Ruth. Hard for people to root for a man who makes videos of his teenaged lover taking her clothes off. It’s unseemly.”

  “Maybe so,” he admitted. “But how would I even get hold of that tape?”

  “You tell me.”

  He turned chilly on me. “I don’t think I like what you’re insinuating, Hoagy.”

  “Okay, if you didn’t do it, then how about Marco?”

  Barry shook his head. “All butt, no brain. Dumb as a salt cod, that one. Actually, I was thinking it was Thor who did it.”

  Marco returned with our martinis. “Thor who did what?” he demanded.

  “Nothing, dear,” Barry said hurriedly, reaching for his glass.

  “Goddamned caveman is what he is,” Marco spat angrily. “He saw a piece of meat and he took it!”

  “Marco, sit down and drink your—”

  “Like one of those animals who rub up against schoolgirls on the subway and come in their trousers!” Marco thundered, clenching and unclenching his big fists. He was shaking with rage. “Someone ought to cut the old bastard’s schlong off for what he did to Clethra. And to poor Barry, too. Hurting him this way. Barry doesn’t deserve this, especially …” Marco trailed off; his features darkened.

  “Especially now?” I put in.

  He shot a look at Barry. “You told him?”

  Barry gave him a mild shrug in reply.

  Marco breathed in and out several times rapidly, his eyes wild. Man looked like he was about to explode. Then he let out a wounded sob and went running off to the bedroom, knocking over several more partygoers en route. He slammed the door behind him. The whole apartment shook.

  Barry sipped his martini, totally unfazed.

  I got to my feet. So did Lulu. “Thank you for your time, Barry,” I said.

  Barry frowned, or tried to. “But you’ve not touched your drink, Hoagy.”

  “You drink it. For some strange reason, I’m not thirsty anymore.”

  I walked up Riverside to my old apartment, the drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street I’d had since before I met Merilee. And still kept as an office. It had little or nothing in the way of heat, and hadn’t been painted since the sevent
ies. Or cleaned, for that matter. Something of a dump, if you want to know the truth. But the apartment on Central Park West was ours. The farm was hers. This place was mine. What can I tell you—it’s a guy thing.

  Lulu made right for the fridge. There wasn’t much in there besides her jar of anchovies and a half loaf of pumpernickel with a bull’s-eye of blue mold growing on it. I threw her an anchovy. Then I called home.

  “How’s my little girl?” I asked when she picked up.

  “Fine, darling,” she answered wearily. In the background I could hear small splashing noises.

  “And how’s the midget?”

  “A holy terror. We’re having a bath. And when I say we, I mean we … No, sweetness, please don’t kick! Mercy, I’ve gotten soap in my eyes six times already. I should start wearing goggles.”

  From the floor next to me Lulu started whimpering. She always knows when it’s her mommy on the phone. Don’t ask me how.

  “I’ve been thinking, Merilee. We haven’t had an evening out alone in quite some time.”

  “We’ve never had an evening out alone. That was all a dream.”

  “We’ll dress to kill. Something black and low-cut and slinky.”

  “Sounds perfect for you, darling. But what shall I wear?”

  “We’ll eat caviar, we’ll drink champagne, we’ll paint the town until we drop. Tracy can stay with Pam for the night. What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve just saved my life. But what of Thor and the bovine girl?”

  “Oh, him. I would have words with him, if he’s available.”

  “They’re out in the chapel, darling.” She lowered her voice. “It’s the afternoon, you know.”

  “It’s important, I’m sorry to say.”

  “I’ll have Dwayne fetch them out a cordless phone. Hang on … Oh, darling?

  “Yes, Merilee?”

  “You’re not too terrible.”

  “You’re not too terrible yourself.”

  Thor got on in a few moments. “How’s the big city, boy?” he boomed, all hale and hearty.

  “I take it you haven’t heard the latest news.”

  “Which news is that?”

  I told him. And he hadn’t known about it. Or at least he gave a very good imitation of not having known about it.