Now that he’s on the other side of Broadway, now that Cowboy Boots and his laughing wife have veered south, isn’t he moving step by step closer to the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in which he himself is every bit as bourgeois; every bit as pompously, cluelessly dressed? He lives in a goddamned loft in SoHo (how eighties is that?), he has employees, and up ahead, mere blocks away, there are gaggles of young headbangers who live in walk-ups, who are buying beer with their actual last dimes. Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy’s Tony Lamas do to you? There’s a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon.
Head downtown, then. Toward Tribeca.
What is Bea doing tonight?
Her life has been, for more than a year now, a mystery, and Peter and Rebecca have decided (wrongly?) not to press her for more details than she cares to volunteer. Why did she leave Tufts? She wanted some time off, she’d been in school all her life. Okay, that made sense. Why, of all the places there are to go and the things there are to do, has she elected to work in a hotel bar in Boston, and to live with a strange, older woman who seems to have no occupation at all? That question has been neither asked nor answered. They have faith in her, they’ve elected to have faith in her, though faith can be thin and unsustaining, over time. Worry, of course they worry, but worse than that, they’ve begun to wonder what mistake they made, how they infected their daughter with some virus of the spirit that’s taken twenty-one years to bloom.
The thing with Mizzy has got Peter hopped up.
He takes out his BlackBerry and speed-dials Bea’s number.
He’ll get her voice mail. She picks up for Rebecca on Sundays, she still harbors a fondness for her mother, or at any rate a sense of duty toward her. Otherwise, she never answers. They leave messages occasionally, wait for the Sunday connections.
Tonight, he needs to leave her a message. He needs to leave a bouquet at her doorstep, knowing the flowers will wilt and die there.
Her phone rings five times. And then, as expected:
“Hello, it’s Bea, please leave a message.”
“Darling, it’s your father. I’m just calling to say hey, really. And to tell you…”
Before he can say I love you, she picks up.
“Daddy?”
My God.
“Hey. Hey there. I thought you’d probably be working.”
“They sent me home. It was slow tonight.”
“Well. Hey.”
He’s as nervous as he was the first time he called Rebecca to ask her out. What’s going on here? Bea hasn’t accepted a call from him since she left for college.
“So I’m just home,” she says. “Watching TV.”
He’s on Bowery by now. Where is Bea? In some Boston apartment he’s never seen—she’s made it clear that she doesn’t want to be visited. Impossible not to imagine elderly shag carpeting and stains on the ceiling. Bea doesn’t make much money (refuses help from her parents), and she, the true child of aesthetes, rarely does more to a room than tack up a poster or two. (Does she still put up Flannery O’Connor posing with a peacock, and Kafka’s mild handsome face, or has she moved on to other passions?)
“I’m sorry for calling so late,” he says. “I thought you’d be at work.”
“You called because you thought I wouldn’t answer.”
Think fast.
“I guess I thought I’d just leave a little love note for you.”
“Why tonight?”
He walks down Bowery toward the nameless strip that isn’t quite Chinatown and isn’t Little Italy either.
“I could call any night, sweetheart,” he says. “I guess you’re on my mind tonight.”
No, she’s always on your mind. How can this conversation feel like a date that isn’t going well?
“You’re up late,” she says. “Are you outside? It sounds like you’re outside.”
“Yeah, couldn’t sleep, I’m out for a walk.”
Where he’s walking now it’s just warehouses and shuttered, unprospering shops, wan streetlight shining down onto puddled cobblestones, so silent you can hear a rat browsing through a paper bag on the sidewalk; our own nighttown… no, we’ve got no nighttown, the true squalor, the tranny hookers and the serious drug dealers (not those sad X, coke, smoke? guys you pass in the parks) have been run out, by Giuliani, by the rich; New York still has its desolate stretches but you’re rarely in real danger anymore, no one’s selling heroin out of that gutted building over there, no misshapen beauty with gassed-out eyes is going to offer to blow you for twenty. This is no nighttown and you, sir, are no Leopold Bloom.
“We’re both insomniacs,” she says. “I got that from you.”
Does she mean that as a gesture of affinity, or is she reciting a curse?
“I do wonder why you called me tonight,” she adds.
Oh, Bea, cut me some slack, I’m penitant, I’m penniless, I’m at your mercy. The ratty desolation through which Peter walks builds rather quickly into the outskirts of Chinatown, Manhattan’s only thriving nation-state, the only one that’s growing without the intercession of coffeehouses or cool little bars.
“I told you,” he says. “I was thinking about you. I wanted to leave a message.”
“Are you upset about something?”
“No more than usual.”
“Because you sound like you’re upset about something.”
Peter fights an urge to hang up on her. Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can’t. Still, impulses run rampant: You’re plain, you’re not that bright, you’re a disappointment. He can’t. He’d never.
“I’m just upset about the usual things. Money, and the end of the world.”
He can’t get flippant with her, won’t even try his seductive wit. This is his daughter he’s talking to.
She says, “Do you need me to send you a check?”
It takes him a moment to realize she’s joking. He snorts out a laugh. If she laughs back, he can’t hear it for the traffic.
He’s crossing Canal now, headed into the lurid neon and fluorescence of Chinatown proper, all gaudy reds and yellows; it’s as if blue isn’t in the spectrum here at all. They never turn the lights off, they don’t take the dangling, stretch-necked cooked ducks out of the windows; as if it possesses a continuing, unquenchable place-life that can be populated or not. A yellow sign says good, just that, and offers by way of demonstration a murky tank full of sluggish, mud brown catfish.
“And, okay,” he says, “your mother’s brother is kind of a big dose.”
“Oh, right, Dizzy. He’s a spoiled brat.”
“That he is.”
“So you thought it would be a nice contrast to talk to your happy, well-adjusted daughter.”
Please, Bea. Please have mercy.
Children don’t. Do they? Did you, Peter, have mercy on your own parents?
Even he doesn’t buy the low chuckle he forces out. “I’d never ask anything as impossible as happy or well-adjusted from you,” he says.
“So it’s a comfort to you, to think of me as unhappy.”
What’s up with you?
“How’s Claire?” The roommate.
“She’s out. It’s just me and the cats.”
He says, “I don’t want you to be unhappy, Bea. I just don’t want to be one of those parents who insist that their kid be, you know, happy all the time.”
“Are we going to have a serious talk?” she says. “Do you want to have a serious talk?”
No. It’s the last thing I want.
“Sure,” he says. “If you want to.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She says, “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Our Town.”
“Your senior pla
y.”
She’d played the mother. Not Emily. Banish that thought.
Bea in high school—a solid and ironic girl with two close girlfriends (now at Brown and Berkeley), no visible boys, a young life not devoid of pleasure but not in any way voluptuous, not even a little bit reckless. Long, earnest talks with the friends, then homework and bed. She and the friends (their names were Sarah and Elliott, solid and ironic as well, Peter liked them, will he ever see them again?) went to movies on the weekends, shopped sometimes for the heavy sweaters and lace-up boots to which they were devoted. They went skating once, at Wollman Rink, but never again.
“You seemed so unconcerned about it,” she says.
“No. I thought you were great.”
“You didn’t tell me that. You were talking on your phone the whole time. Some sort of deal you had to make.”
Didn’t he? Was he? No. She’s inventing this. He did tell her she was great, he used that exact word, and he wasn’t talking on his phone after the play, what kind of man would do that?
She says, “I know it’s sort of pathetic, but I’ve been thinking about it lately.”
“I don’t remember it that way.”
“I do. I remember it perfectly.”
This is a false memory, Bea. Do you believe, do you actually believe, that I’d go backstage after my daughter’s senior play and talk to some client on my cell phone?
“Wow” is the best he can do. “Hey, if I didn’t say the right thing, I’m sorry. I did think you were great.”
“I wasn’t. That’s the thing. I couldn’t act, and we both knew it.”
“No, no,” Peter says. “I think you can do anything.”
“You don’t have to lie to me, Daddy. I don’t need you to.”
It is true? Of course she can’t do anything, no one can do anything, and yeah, of course, you see your child’s limitations, you’ve had parent-teacher conferences about her limitations, fatherhood doesn’t render you blind, but you love her, you truly do, and you encourage her, you tell her (I did, I swear I did) that she was great as the mother in Our Town.
She saw through it, didn’t she? She was smarter than she let on.
How do you tell her that her quote unquote limitations don’t matter to you?
He says, “I love you. I love whatever you do.”
She answers, “I think you did your very best to love me. I think you had limitations of your own.”
Fuck.
Is that why you’re so maidenly, is that why your bed remains narrow? Is that why you seem to want so little?
Chinatown dissipates, and is replaced by the brooding brown bulk of Tribeca, the solemn quiet of its streets.
Unlike Chinatown, Tribeca’s nocturnal quiet doesn’t feel anticipatory. If, for a few hours every day, it’s possible to get a haircut or buy a lamp or have a three-hundred-dollar dinner, that doesn’t appear to matter much, not to the broad light-bleached streets or the brown-and-gray rectitude of the buildings, which have been cutting exactly these shapes out of the New York sky since before your grandfather was born.
He says, “I’m sure I did. I’m sure I do.”
He is taken by a strange, almost luxuriant desire for her to scream at him, to let him have it, nail him and abuse him, accuse him of every known crime, so he doesn’t have to keep responding, doesn’t have to struggle for the next thing to say.
She’s not going to do it, though, is she? She is, has always been, sullen and inward, prone as a child to singing soft, angry little songs she’d made up.
She does say this. “I hate being the wounded daughter who needed more attention. That’s not who I want to be.”
“How can I help you now?” he asks. “What can I do?”
Please, Bea, either forgive me or excoriate me. I can’t have this conversation much longer.
You have to have this conversation, though. For as long as she asks you to.
She says, “You can see awfully well, but I’m not sure how well you can hear.”
She’s been saving that one up, hasn’t she?
Now he’s in the Financial District, the World of Buildings, no way of knowing—except for the actual Stock Exchange—what goes on in any of them except, of course, that it’s all Something to Do with Finance, it’s like Mizzy wanting to do Something in the Arts; it’s the effect these citadels have, whether they be the New Museum or this titanic, vaguely seventies monolith he’s passing now, that purposeful inscrutability, those fortresslike heights—what wouldn’t lead the young and lost to stand at their bases and think, I’d like to do Something in There?
Mizzy has sat with the sacred stones. Now he wants to be part of something that recognizes him.
“I’m listening now,” he says. “I’m right here. Keep talking to me.”
Bea says, “I’m all right, Daddy. I’m not some kind of basket case. I have a job and a place to live.”
Hasn’t she always insisted, even as a little girl, that she was all right? Hasn’t she always gone uncomplainingly to school and had her two or three friends and lived as privately as she could behind the leaky walls of her room?
Weren’t he and Rebecca relieved that she seemed to require so little?
He says, “That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s something.”
A silence follows.
Jesus, Bea. Just how guilty do you need me to be?
And now, finally, Peter reaches Battery Park. There to the left is the arctic glow of the Staten Island Ferry, up ahead are the tall black-granite pillars that bear the names of the war dead. He walks down the broad aisle formed by the memorials. Moby-Dick opens in Battery Park, first it’s “Call me Ishmael” and then—impossible to remember it beyond the vaguest paraphrase—there’s a riff about this mole assaulted by waves, that’s not it, but he does remember that the land is called a mole. There it is, up ahead, the black roil of the harbor, netted with light, he can smell it suddenly, and sure, it’s urban sea-smell, brine mingled with oil, but exciting nevertheless, that eternal, maternal wildness though compromised by all the crap that’s dumped into this particular seawater, seawater it remains, and this finger of land, this mole, is the city’s only point of contact with something bigger and more potent than itself.
“I suppose you know what’s best for you,” he says. Can she hear the impatience in his voice?
Peter stands at the railing. There it all is: Ellis Island and Miss Liberty herself, that verdigris apparition, so fraught with meaning that she’s transcended meaning. You love (if you love anything about her) her greenness and her constancy, the fact that she’s still here even though you haven’t seen her in years. Peter stands with the dark glitter-specked water rumbling in in humps—no waves, just rolls of water that break against the seawall with a deep phloom sound and send up modest tiaras of spray.
Bea doesn’t answer. Is she crying? If she is, he can’t hear it.
He says, “Why don’t you come home for a while, baby?”
“I am home.”
He stands at the railing, with the black ocean hurling itself at his feet and the little Christmas lights of Staten Island strung along the horizon as if they’d been placed there to delineate the boundary between dark opaque ocean and dark starless sky.
“I love you,” he says helplessly. He hasn’t got anything more helpful.
“Good night, Daddy.”
She clicks off.
AN OBJECT OF INCALCULABLE WORTH
When Peter awakens the next morning he’s alone in bed. Rebecca is up already. He rises, sleep-smeared, slips into the pajama bottoms he ordinarily doesn’t wear but he’s not going to walk out there naked with Mizzy around (never mind about Mizzy’s own policies in that department).
In the kitchen, Rebecca has just finished making a pot of coffee. She, too, is dressed, in a white cotton robe she’d not ordinarily wear (they aren’t modest at home, or anyway they haven’t been since Bea left for college).
Mizzy, it seems, is still asl
eep.
“I thought I’d let you sleep in,” Rebecca says. “Are you feeling better?”
He goes to her, kisses her affectionately. “Yeah,” he says. “It has to have been food poisoning.”
She pours two cups of coffee, one for herself and one for him. She is standing more or less exactly where Mizzy stood last night. She’s slack-faced from sleep, a bit sallow. She does this semimiraculous early-morning thing whereby at a certain point in her preparations for the waking day she… snaps into herself. It’s not a question of putting on makeup (she doesn’t wear much) but of a summoning of energy and will that brightens and tautens her, gives color to her skin and depth to her eyes. It’s as if, during sleep, some fundamental capacity of hers to be handsome and lively drifts away; as if in sleep she releases all the faculties she doesn’t need, and prominent among them is her vitality. For these brief interludes in the mornings, she not only looks ten years older, she looks ever so slightly like the old woman she will probably be. She will in all likelihood be thin and erect, a bit formal with others (as if dignity in old age required a certain cordial distance), cultured, beautifully dressed. For Rebecca, a certain part of not becoming her mother involves the eschewing of eccentricity.
He says, “I called Bea last night.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. We’ve got this faux child on our hands, I suddenly wanted to talk to our actual child.”
“What did she say?”
“She’s mad at me.”
“Stop the presses.”
“She specifically chewed me out for talking on my cell during Our Town.”
Please, Rebecca, stand with me on this.
“I don’t remember that.”
Bless you, my love.
She lifts a coffee cup to her lips, standing where her brother stood, almost as if to demonstrate the likeness and the un. Mizzy, who might be cast in bronze, and Rebecca, his older girl-twin, who has with age taken on a human patina, a hint of mortal weariness that’s never more apparent than it is in the morning light; a deep, heartbreaking humanness that’s the source and the opposite of art.
“She swears I did. She won’t be talked out of it. I didn’t, right?”
By Nightfall Page 13