Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  Two days after our phone call, I received an overnight package from Dad. He’d sent me crisp copies of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, with their extensive reporting on the quake. Paging through the coverage in my hometown papers, instead of in the New York Times, the news felt more real. The earthquake killed sixty-three people throughout northern California and left more than 12,000 homeless. Along with the newspapers, my father mailed me a t-shirt. On the front, printed in red serif type, was “October 17, 1989. 5:04pm.” Above the type was a black-and-white photo, the same image featured on every front page, showing the Bay Bridge, its upper roadway collapsed.

  Thumbing through these papers and then pulling my new earthquake t-shirt over my head, I felt overwhelmed with love for Dad. Somehow he knew just what I needed at that moment. I ached with a longing to return home, to our apartment, to him. I wanted to fly home for the holidays but he’d already dipped into his savings to pay for the East Coast tour promoting Holy Terror and View Askew and didn’t have the money. So while he was peeling and mashing ten pounds of potatoes for the Hartford Street Zen Center Thanksgiving, I was snacking on shrimp cocktail in the Weiksners’ country home, feeling as fake as the painted papier-mâché fruits that decorated the dinner table.

  I knew I was lonely and unhappy in New York. After a three-month respite from calorie counting in Paris, the margins of my school notebooks were again filling up with my detailed meal accounting. Then one night I hatched a plan. I could transfer to one of the highly rated University of California colleges, which could return me to California’s warm bosom. The next day I phoned UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, both close to the city, and asked them to mail me applications.

  I made an appointment with an NYU counselor to explore what I’d need for a transfer. The counselor had me sit in a chair opposite hers in the dark office cubby where she worked. Adjusting her wire glasses, she asked me exactly why I wanted to leave NYU. I considered telling her about the earthquake, about Dad and his falling T-cell count, but I hadn’t even told the Weiksners about Dad and just thinking about all of this made my head heavy and thick.

  “I want to be closer to home,” I sighed.

  I returned to Third Avenue North that afternoon with a stack of NYU transfer forms, which I kept on the corner of my desk beneath the glossy UC applications that started arriving by mail. They pictured grassy campus quads under clear blue skies, a planet away from my bitter New York winter. But as the year progressed, I found myself caught in a powerful gust of readings, deadlines, and midterm exams. The UC applications and NYU forms were soon buried under a pile of clothes and books.

  In San Francisco, my father was keeping himself busy. He organized an event with poets Judy Grahn and Allen Ginsberg at the University of San Francisco, attended by more than 600 people. And he was invited to speak at the San Francisco Out/Write conference, which brought together 1,800 lesbians and gay men for three days of readings, panels, and talks. His panel was “Outrageous Queer Journalism.”

  The writer Edmund White attended the Out/Write conference the following year, 1991, where my father also organized a number of panels. In his New York Times op-ed about gay literature, “Out of the Closet and Onto the Bookshelf,” White noted the irony that at the very moment that gay literature was flourishing, so many gay writers were threatened with extinction:

  Every other writer at the Out/Write conference appeared to be ill. People who were HIV positive (like me) exchanged T-cell counts as though they were the latest Wall Street figures. Many who were robust a year ago were now dramatically thin or blind or covered with lesions. During the last session of the last day of the conference a member of the audience seized the microphone, ostensibly to denounce [keynote speaker] Edward Albee once again. But in an instant the pale, emotional man had segued into a cry from the heart: “I wanted everything to be perfect since obviously I won’t be at the conference next year.”

  Although Dad didn’t share with me details of either conference, he did mail me articles he was writing on the impact of the AIDS crisis on the gay community for the Sentinel, the Advocate, and a new column of his own in the Bay Guardian. Young guys came up to him in bars and clubs saying how much they liked his writing, which delighted Dad greatly. But his journals reveal that finances were an ongoing concern. He’d cut down his involvement with Poetry Flash, which he’d stopped editing but where he was still a regular contributor, because he wanted to focus on better-paying assignments. Yet the money he was paid for editing Sam’s anthology and for the articles and columns he wrote for the Sentinel and various weeklies was meager at best.

  He was well liked at the University of San Francisco, where he was now teaching two expository writing classes three times a week, but a senior administrator there said that unless he got a master’s degree he wouldn’t be able to return in the spring. My father had been pursuing a master’s in English at Emory University when he met my mom in the late sixties, but dropped out before graduation. To secure his job, he was now pursuing a graduate writing degree at San Francisco State.

  For the last year, my father had been supporting himself with freelance legal summarizing which he did from home, but his boss had disbanded the company for “personal reasons.” The AIDS Emergency Fund paid Dad’s rent that March.

  He applied and interviewed for several jobs, including one at Mother Jones. But halfway through that interview he was asked to name his greatest character defect. “Moodiness,” he answered. “I’m not going to write that down,” said his interviewer, “or you’ll immediately be disqualified.” She then advised my dad to pick up some books on interviewing techniques. In his journal he wrote, “She must have liked me to give me this advice.” He didn’t get the job.

  Despite these setbacks, Dad continued to send me money, as he had started to do as soon as I left for New York. “I will be sending you $2,000 of your social security checks over the next four months,” he wrote to me when I started school. “Will make it tough on me financially but its yours & I want you to have every opportunity over this next year. It you don’t need it for school, you could put in into savings & use it to pay for travel expenses or whatever.”

  In fact I did need it for school. When Dede helped me apply to NYU, she assumed it would be priced like the University of California system. Instead NYU, which billed itself “a Private University in the Public Service,” was among the most expensive colleges in the country. What my grandparents couldn’t cover I made up with student loans, financial aid, and my father’s Social Security checks. Another incentive for transferring into a University of California college was that it would be much less expensive. In letters, Dad checked on my progress: “Hope you’ve gotten your applications in for UC Berkeley & UC Santa Cruz too. I hear the latter is best for undergrad, but if you went to Berkeley you could stay here again. It would be nice to see more of you, kiddo.” But for some reason I failed to complete these applications, let alone mail them in. While I missed Dad and the city, I was also ambivalent about returning home—I suspect, because I was afraid.

  In French class that spring I made friends with a Jersey girl named Lauren. The spitting image of Raphael’s Virgin Mary, she loved opera, small dogs, and everything French. She’d even named her shih tzu Bisou (“kiss”). Whenever Lauren became excited, which was often, her face flushed crimson and her voice trilled like a young girl’s. One day as we were heading to a favorite café after class, she told me she’d applied to NYU’s junior year abroad program in Paris.

  “I just spent last summer in Paris,” I told her. “I worked at a law firm near the Champs Elys—”

  “Oh. My. God,” she interrupted, gripping my arm. “You should totally apply! We could be there together!”

  When we finished our cappuccinos, she walked me to the Maison Française, NYU’s “French House,” where I picked up an application.

  Remembering my summer as a Parisienne, the beauty of rural Brittany, and the kindness of the Norman girl, I completed my applicati
on that evening. When I received the letter in April telling me I’d been accepted into the NYU in France program I telephoned my dad, ecstatic. He was thrilled because I was thrilled. But of course, instead of moving closer to him, I was making plans to move farther away.

  18.

  I FELT A DEEP CHILL walking along Avenue Mozart. On a Sunday night, all the area shops were closed. Only a few boulangeries, with their pristine tarts and pastries glistening under glass, still welcomed the neighbor picking up her last-minute dessert or baguette for dinner. Other than the yellow glow emitted by these bakeries, the neighborhood was a resolute gray, all the windows shuttered. There were few if any pedestrians, and the ones I did see were hushed, buttoned up in their secret journeys. Everything here felt sealed, like flower buds before the bloom, all the beauty hidden.

  We are a neighborhood, the 16th arrondissement told me, not a playground. Our streets are walked only by our neighbors.

  I was a neighbor. I lived at 23 Rue de la Source. My Métro stop was Métro Jasmin, which I jokingly referred to as Métro Jasmine, as though it were a hippie refuge and not the heart of bourgeois Paris. The intersection of Avenue Mozart and Rue de Passy, near the NYU in France building, was teeming with young BCBGs (bon chic, bon genre), French preppies who wore pearls, headbands, and cashmere sweaters. They kissed each other twice on each cheek, instead of the customary one kiss, and were notoriously coincé, uptight.

  But I was not coincée; I didn’t belong to this neighborhood, I simply lived here, in the Lazars’ chambre de bonne, the maid’s room. Through the glass front door I could see the lace curtains of the concierge’s window part, her coal-black eyes suspiciously following me, whenever I came in and out of the building.

  Every year the Lazars took in students from the NYU program. In exchange for lodging in their sixth-floor walk-up attic, the students were to iron the Lazars’ laundry for two hours a day and be an English-speaking “presence” for their twelve-year-old son between his return from school and their return from work.

  Like many French families, the Lazars owned a washer but, with no dryer, line-dried all of their clothing. To remove the resulting stiffness I ironed every article, from their dishtowels to their underwear. Edouard, their doughy redheaded teenager with a lazy gait, preferred to watch TV and eat les brownies than to speak English with me, so I let him. At seven o’clock, when the Lazars returned from work, I walked up the back stairs to my little garret, where I’d eat alone and read back issues of Madame Figaro, kindly given to me by Madame Lazar.

  “I have this private joke between me, myself and I,” I wrote to Dad early that fall. “A lot of my friends are looking into health clubs. For $300 they want access to saunas & Stairmasters and I have to laugh because I get all of this for free at the Lazars’! I steam my face as I iron, and walk 6 flights of stairs at least 2 times a day going to my room.”

  As far as maid’s rooms go, mine was, in fact, quite comfortable. I had a wardrobe to hang my clothes, a small refrigerator, sink, counter, and hotplate where I stirred instant Knorr soups, which Monsieur Lazar brought me from his job at Nestle. I slept in a full-size bed layered in blankets, where I read books for school and watched the French evening news on a small black-and-white TV. Looking out my window I could see the tiled roofs of the 16th, where pigeons gathered in pockets of gray and black.

  I was happy to be back in Paris. My fluency in French and the Métro, and the occasional visits with Camille (who was studying that year in Madrid), gave me a sense of possibility. “In Paris where life is already more liveable, I am a free agent,” I wrote to my dad. “I have my own space and that is important.”

  But by January 1991, a deep malaise had set in. The Weiksners generously flew me to New York for Christmas, but I had to return to France by January 2 to resume my work for the Lazars. School was closed for winter break and the friends I made in the fall were all home for the month. Théophile, a slim blond Frenchman whom I’d met at a Cleary Gottlieb holiday party and had recently started dating, was stationed outside Paris, on military service. The previous August, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and George Bush was counting down the days before American troops were to invade Iraq. NYU faculty advised us to avoid groups of loud Americans, not to sing American songs, and not even to walk home the same route twice, thinking that if we did we might be attacked by local Muslims. All the garbage bins in the Métro stations were removed for fear of bombs. The only thing that made the winter of 1990 bearable for me were my father’s letters.

  Each day I arrived at the NYU Center, the first place I stopped was my mailbox. It was in this thin wooden slot, sandwiched between other mailboxes, that I found the source of my sustaining hope and joy. Arriving two, sometimes three times a week, Dad’s letters made me notorious in the program. No other student received so much mail, especially from a parent.

  My father’s letters always arrived in business envelopes, long and rectangular, deliciously heavy. I delighted in the mountain range of As that crowded the front of the envelope: Steve Abbott, 545 Ashbury, Alysia Abbott. As I tore open the envelopes, the pages of ruled paper, edges frayed from being ripped out of my dad’s spiral notebook, unfurled like Christmas wrapping in my lap. The gift inside this wrapping was the density of my father’s script, filling each narrow college rule: words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages—all for me!

  These words were written, I knew, to the rhythm of my father’s twitching foot. Deep in thought, he always wrote with his right leg crossed over his left, his notebook balanced on his right knee, his dangling right foot twitching from side to side as though it alone motored his overactive intellect.

  Even now, when I remember my father writing, I unconsciously throw my right leg over my left and mimic his twitching. It feels remarkably natural, this twitch. That right foot can get going with instinctual ease, but when I try to reverse the legs and twitch my left foot I can’t do it. There’s something in that right foot, something I like to imagine I inherited from him.

  With my yearly trips to Kewanee, Dad and I had been writing to each other for years. But something changed that year in France. With both of us living on our own, thousands of miles apart, we relied on letters to be close. And in these letters we were no longer looking to the other as the cause, or solution, of our respective problems, but instead as a loving witness, a devoted and concerned audience.

  Where Dad had described our needs mixing “like fire and oil” when I was a teenager living at home, in letters we felt free to confide crushes, test new ideas, and wrestle with frustrations and fears.

  I no longer criticized his boyfriends (or the boys he wished could be more than friends). If I didn’t have anything nice to say about another misbegotten crush (Alex, Jeremy, Myles, Olivier), I could easily keep those feelings to myself. I was no longer disappointed by Dad’s preoccupation with work, because I no longer looked to him as the source of my company and care. The ups and downs of his romantic adventures, his professional trials and economic woes, no longer crowded my living space.

  Because we sometimes had to wait two weeks for a response, each carefully composed letter became an act of faith, like a coin thrown into a well, along with a fervent secret wish. After writing, I hoped most to hear that echo, that confirmation that my wish would be heard and answered. Since I didn’t want to wait for Dad’s reply before writing to him again, I decided early on to write whenever I wanted. We wrote each other almost every day, our letters like diary entries, especially Dad’s:

  Yesterday I was thinking you’re the only person I love. Others I’m only fond of from time to time. Sometimes I feel loved but oftentimes I feel that no one loves me, no one I ever want is attracted to me & that I’ve lost the capacity to love. I have to keep constant vigilance with myself so as not to fall in love w/ Alex. What he wants & needs is just my friendship.

  It’s Dad’s emotional availability that most strikes me. Making my way through the pages of his letters, I feel as if I’m settling into a bathtub full o
f warm water. Weightless and floating, at peace, I am caressed by the near-constant expression of my father’s trust and attention. In this watery world I am that version of self that I knew before any other: daughter. And in this role I am loved as only a child can be loved: wholly and without condition. With my father I felt no pressure to behave in any particular way. I could be trite, boring, selfish, petulant. I never felt there was anything I could do or say that would jeopardize his affection. This is the father I always wanted. This is the father that I miss the most.

  There are the many articles and essays he clipped for me from the local paper, about Paris’s Moreau museum or the latest research on why girls suffer low self-esteem. He writes one letter on the back of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” “Certainly a different take on Daddy than you have – or is it?” he jokes before going into an analysis of why it works. “Plath’s genius in this poem is to invest very simple language (nursery rhyme & fairytale) with intense power & anger.”

  There are his own impromptu poems:

  The arms of the bookstore are full

  of postcards & tee-shirts.

  The coffee has triumphed.

  I got several letters today & read

  Yours (of Dec. 4) first.

  And there is the vividness of his San Francisco, which was also my San Francisco—his seeing a film noir series at the Roxie, picking up a biography of Baudelaire at the Adobe bookstore, or sipping on a mocha at the Macondo.

  Am sitting in Tassajara Café. Very cute guy sitting @ next table w/his friend or boyfriend, unfortunately. I assumed he was gay right off, before hearing them talk even – something about his delicate manner. Straight guys tend to be more aggressive, less refined, in their non-verbal behavior. Baseless stereotype? You be the judge.