We’re almost through the door when he says, a touch of alarm in his voice, “My aftershave.” I look for the bottle in the small hospital bathroom, give it to him, and he sprays twice. “Enough?”
I move in closer and sniff. “Perfect.”
I push him into the hallway, past the nurses’ office—they’re much too busy to notice us.
In the parking lot we have to go over a rough patch, and I bump a protruding stone. He bounces in the wheelchair. I apologize, but he simply tells me to hurry.
We arrive at the car. When I open the door on his side, he stands up and looks helplessly at the seat as though he doesn’t know how he’s going to get into it. He turns his backside toward the car, his face toward me, and slowly lowers himself down. He almost hits his head on the roof, but I cry “Watch out” just in time. When he’s finally sitting, he keeps staring at his legs as they refuse to obey. I lift them up and move them inside. Then to get the wheelchair folded, heave the thing into the trunk. I’m bright red by the time I get in.
When I close my door, Dad suddenly bursts out laughing. He holds his belly and tries to stop by taking deep breaths, but each time, he bursts into giggles again. How long has it been since I saw him laugh?
“You’ve actually kidnapped me, you realize that, don’t you? A helpless, sick man kidnapped by his dynamic daughter, in the service of an old flame.” Then he squeaks with laughter, like a little girl. Perhaps it’s nerves too, but nevertheless it’s infectious and so we pull onto the road, both of us shrieking with laughter.
Very unusually, Marie has gone out with her cousin for the day. Gilda had insisted on taking her to shop in Holland for the day, which worked well for us.
At first he was terrified when I told him I’d gotten in touch with Joanna and that she wanted to see him again. What if Marie found out? What if he and Joanna couldn’t find anything to say to each other? What if he found it too hard? And now he looked so awful. But the more we talked about it, the less he resisted. A heart never forgets, I thought.
We drive past the flattest stretches of land, the sun is high in the sky. There’s almost no wind. Dad has picked a radio station that plays nonstop classical music. Handel gently spills into the car. For a while, he complains about his nurse, the one with the curls and the noticeably large chin who always speaks in diminutives. He says he feels sorry to whoever’s married to her. But the closer we get to our destination, the quieter he becomes. I park in front of the café where Joanna arranged to meet him.
“What if I don’t recognize her?” Dad clenches my forearm as I pull on the handbrake. “What if I don’t know what to say? What if I bore her?”
I give my dad my everything-will-be-fine smile. I put an old cell phone of mine in his breast pocket and say he can call me when he’s ready to leave by just pressing this one button. I say I’ve brought a good book and some work so he doesn’t have to hurry. I announce I’m going to get the wheelchair out of the trunk, but he wants to walk, he says. Passion fires the foolhardy. He looks in the mirror in the sunshade. I’ve never seen him do this in my whole life. I help him out of the car and guide him on my arm to the entrance. The café has a heavy glass door with cast-iron ornaments. I hold it open so that he can go inside at his own pace. I see Joanna looking and waving.
She still looks very much like in the photo, her hair slightly grayer, her skin looser, it’s true, but she still radiates a lust for life. She sees my father walking over and closes both her eyes, a lovely, small, tender sign of recognition. She gets up and keeps a close eye on him, springy grass and crocuses in her gaze, fiery-red cheeks. They embrace, prolonging the gesture. It’s a shame I can’t see my father’s face.
The shadows fall low across the road. The sky is unhappy. People walk past, some of them slowly, others in a rush. A little girl screams because she’s happy or angry, or both. A dog sniffs at the wheel of my car, I hope his owner isn’t going to let him piss on it. Dad is sitting next to me. His right hand is clenched around the door handle and he stares tensely through the windshield, as though there’s something behind it that demands his attention. Starting the car seems rude, but just sitting there feels nosy. I try not to stare at him. Then I hear him gasping for breath. He’s going to say something, I think. I turn my head, but nothing. When I asked him just now how it had gone, he simply said, “Good, very good,” like a child when asked how school was.
Just as I go to insert the key in the ignition, ready to leave, it breaks like a summer storm: a fit of sobbing like I’ve never seen him have before. Everything in his face tenses and a long, low scream issues from somewhere deep within. He raises his arms and buries his face in his hands and stays like that, sobbing soundlessly now, his whole body jerking. I lay my hand awkwardly on his shoulder. We’re not used to sharing emotions, the two of us. I simply wait, though I don’t know what for. Being able to cry is already something, perhaps.
The sobs become infrequent, he asks me to start driving, starts to worry about the time, he definitely wants to be back in his room when Marie calls after her day out. We drive along without talking. I turn up the radio: Bach at his most fragile, the math a thing of the past, a variation on the most serene silence.
“The fact that you’ve done this for me—might this mean I wasn’t a total bastard of a father?” It comes out as half question, half statement.
“Why do you think you were a bastard of a father?”
He shrugs.
“Of course not, Dad. I love you.”
“I just wonder—I wasn’t—” Dad stares at the road as though the words he’s looking for might be there. He pulls the seat belt away from his chest.
I almost do what I always do, but then I take a deep breath and say, “Not a courageous father, perhaps.”
He doesn’t flinch. “Maybe not, no.” Then he stops talking and stares ahead. “You were so strong.”
“I was ten.”
While we talk, Bach’s strings make the sun shine soberly, make despair dance, and turn roads into festive dead ends.
“I couldn’t cry, after the accident,” I say, trying to overtake the car in front of me, which is dangerous on a road like this one. Don’t hesitate now, I think, go on. There’s a car coming the other way, I hope it slows down, I have to accelerate hard now and just in time to duck back to the right. Dad doesn’t comment. I want to try to explain. “Mom was so—”
Dad interrupts me. “I couldn’t, after the accident, I couldn’t look at either of you. I couldn’t—” His voice breaks, a fit of coughing that won’t come. “I looked for a new mother for you as quickly as possible. Everything back the way it belonged—that seemed like the best thing to me.”
“‘The best thing,’” I repeat his words, keeping my eyes on the road.
Dad spins his wedding ring round and round with his index and middle finger. “I had to keep going.”
“I know. But I wanted—”
“Me too, Mona, me too.”
“I was scared my whole childhood, scared that—”
My father puts his hand on my arm to stop me. “I don’t know how. I was—”
“The father, you were the father.”
The weather has completely closed in now, the sky just as gray as the road, mist over the fields, the rows of trees barely visible. My stomach is full of concrete. Not a courageous father. The responsible adult who looked the other way. I’ve said it. I wish we could say a lot more. I hope he doesn’t start hating me now. It’s good we’re in the car, I don’t dare look at him, not really.
And then, all of a sudden, he says in a thin voice, “Mona, what an unbelievably good idea it was, having you.”
18
Louis only really likes nature in paintings, he hates walking and there’s no sport more boring than swimming, he says, but he’s told me to put on comfortable shoes and bring along my swimsuit or be prepared to reveal my naked body to the world. He felt I needed a break, so he’s taking me somewhere. He doesn’t give me any details, it has to b
e a surprise. Louis can be really sweet sometimes.
When we arrive, he asks whether I know where we are and I shake my head.
“This is the Goovaerts’ family estate. I had to give a reading nearby recently and the organizer told me the house is only used as a vacation home these days. There’s rarely anyone here. We can go for a swim, like your dad and Joanna did twenty years ago.” He lifts a cooler from the trunk. “Bought it myself,” he says proudly.
I try to imagine Louis in the kind of shop where they sell things like that. Disconcerted by all the ugliness but still going over to a salesperson who takes him to the right aisle, and then hesitating, trying to pick out the least hideous cooler, the blue or the green, and then full speed to the checkout, dying of shame that someone might see him there. Louis opens the rear passenger door and takes two large bags from the back seat. He gives me the one containing the towels.
I’m impressed he’s gone to all this trouble just for me. I kiss his neck. “What if someone turns up?”
“I’ll talk my way out of it. You know me.” He takes me to a section of fence that is loose and lifts it so that I can crawl under.
The house has a beautiful, old-fashioned grandeur to it and the estate looks vast. We walk through tall grass, there are bushes in the distance, old trees in shades of green and gray, white-blue skies. Birds chirp, insects buzz around our heads, and in the distance a horse whinnies.
“Better than your average nature documentary, isn’t it?” I say.
“Mosquitoes don’t bite you in documentaries,” he replies as he shakes his head furiously; his hands are full.
Once we reach the pond, Louis sets everything down in the grass and begins to get undressed. He turns out to be wearing red-and-blue swimming trunks under his clothes, the large, baggy sort, no idea where he got them. And then he stands there in those trunks with his skinny legs and his milk-white belly. When he sees me looking, he adopts a dumb bodybuilder’s pose. “And all this virile splendor is for you.” He laughs and takes some sunscreen from one of the bags before smothering himself from head to toe and then passing the bottle to me. SPF 50, a person should only take risks if they might lead to something interesting, Louis says. Then he gets out a mosquito repellant roller and rolls it everywhere he can reach. Now he smells of the drugstore and a chemical factory combined. I take off my clothes and throw them in a heap. “Sexy lady.” Since he’s standing there in those enormous trunks, I get out my swimsuit and put it on—it’s a musty, faded thing that’s God knows how old. “Sexy bathing suit,” he says. I smile at him. “You’ve got the sunniest lips,” he says. Then he kisses my nose and says, “Into the water with you, woman. Whatever your father and his Joanna could do, we can do too.” I don’t tell him that the point of their swim was that they were skinny-dipping.
When we’re sitting on the towels and almost dry, he opens the cooler. It contains a bottle of champagne, a carton of strawberries, and three types of French cheese. He takes a couple of half baguettes, a knife, napkins, and two glasses from the bag, polishes the glasses with the dish towel they’d been wrapped in, and hands them to me. He gently pops the cork rather than letting it shoot out—Louis knows his way in the world—pours, and says, “To everyone beautiful and sweet and here right now: so, you,” then he grins and kisses me between my breasts.
We sit there and don’t talk for a while, unsure what to talk about. Then Louis starts on about his love of Samuel Beckett and his hatred of James Joyce; he never tires of that. We talk about whether or not people can change. He doesn’t believe they can, or only to a limited extent. “The bad things are going to get worse, I think, we’re going to abandon each other.” About Dad he says that it’s criminal to force people into conversations they don’t want to have. I wonder whether quiet people aren’t just waiting to be asked the right question. Suddenly he gets out a notebook and reads a Robert Frost poem aloud and gets emotional about it. I thought it might be about death or saying goodbye or fathers or something, but it isn’t.
The sun slowly sets and we watch it. I don’t believe we’ve ever consciously done this before. I don’t know whether we stop talking so we can focus on it better or because there’s nothing else to say.
These days schools teach children to understand their feelings. For a while, Marvin hung an angry, or happy, or sad face on the corkboard each morning, as a kind of homework. I look at Louis and wonder why there are different words for loneliness, sadness, and fear because they often all feel the same. Perhaps the problem is me.
19
“Quiet down now, everybody: service announcement.” Everyone looks at Marcus, who is standing theatrically on the table, his bare feet horribly close to me. “I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know when I say that this play has been a struggle.” Finally, I think. Marcus has put the problem into words, which is a start. All that walking away over the past weeks, all that fake enthusiasm from a man who purportedly knew what he was doing as a director, and his unwavering belief in a glorious end result, had brought us not one step closer to a successful production. “And now I think I know why.” Here and there people look at each other, curious about what’s coming. “The adaptation, that’s the problem.” Marcus doesn’t look at me. “And how did I come to realize this? Because no one less than Elise”—his Elise, I can’t help thinking—“came up with her own version. She’s quietly been working on it, apparently, and didn’t come to me until she’d finished.” Elise? Adapting? She’s never done anything like that before. I see the others looking at me, their expressions somewhere between pity and malicious glee. “And I read it and had my socks blown off.” I roll my eyes at the cliché.
On Marcus’s command, the director’s assistant hands out packets to everyone. They immediately start to leaf through them, a din that seems to point to enthusiasm, or at least to curiosity, which I can understand.
“Let’s start the rehearsal today with a read-through around the table and I hope you’ll soon share my great excitement.” Marcus jumps down without affording me a glance.
Elise looks elatedly at Nathan, who looks at me. I stare at the packet. I hate Elise, I love Elise, I want to be her.
I wish I could run away, hide myself somewhere in a dark cave and never come out again, or move to a country where no one has to know what a sad sack I am. I wonder why Marcus didn’t even let me know beforehand. Because that would have demonstrated some empathy, I think. Then I’m angry with myself for trying to pin the blame on somebody else.
“Quiet everyone, Nathan’s got the first line.”
20
Dad’s got peritonitis, Marie told me when she called. I was annoyed that she hadn’t wanted to tell me at first what the problem was. At the same time, there are things that, once you know them, you wish you didn’t. At the place where my father’s intestines were sewn back together, there was a leak. In the beginning it was “spontaneously encapsulated,” so the doctors didn’t suspect anything, but all the same, poop slowly trickled into his belly, and of course, it got infected. This explains why he found it so hard to eat and why his fever came back. When a CAT scan revealed the problem, they operated as quickly as possible and gave him a colostomy bag, “to give his stomach a bit of a rest,” said Doctor Amsons, the man whose name I thought I would be able to forget.
I felt shivery when I heard that. I wanted to swallow and couldn’t. Panic does strange things to your body. The doctor’s line “if everything goes well” was suddenly ominous again, a fearful mantra in my head.
I tried to imagine a world without my father, I don’t even know how to, let alone how I’d live in a such a world. Not right now, I can’t help thinking, not after I’ve just discovered a man I’d always wanted to know. I shake my head to get rid of the images. A person can try.
Under no circumstances does my father want to talk about the colostomy bag. The fact that he and I are having different kinds of conversations now doesn’t suddenly make everything open for discussion. I do understand this
. In the list of all the possible human humiliations, a bag of shit attached to the outside of your body scores fairly high. Marie concluded her story about the operation with the comment that she would be the person who’d have to clean the bag once Dad was out of the hospital. I wondered whether I’d be able to face doing it.
I’m visiting him now for the second time since the new operation, and Louis has come with me. He’s startled when he sees the way my dad is lying there. The sheets are low, it’s hot in here, his pajamas are crooked, making the bag visible through a white mesh net they’ve wrapped around his body. It’s like a car crash on the highway—I don’t want to look but I can’t help it. I see Louis’s gaze follow the exact same route. Then the thing begins to bubble in an alarming manner, like meat stewing in a pan. I don’t even like stewed meat. I hope it can’t leak, I think, and start to feel a little nauseated. I consider pulling the sheets up over it but I’m afraid I’ll wake Dad. Louis says nothing, he just stands there. I feel awkward in a different way than he does, I notice. A person should be able to handle a thing like that with their own father, but a father-in-law, it’s different. I go over to Dad and hover, staring at him. Then he opens his eyes, clears his throat, looks at me in confusion, pulls the covers up to his armpits, and says hoarsely that he’s happy to see me. Then he notices Louis. “Oh, are you here too?”
“Of course,” Louis says. It’s the second time he’s been to visit.
“That’s kind of you.”
“And how are you feeling now?” Louis takes a chair and sits down behind me.
“Not too bad.” People minimizing their suffering always seems sadder than complaining openly. It’s what I thought when Dad finally told me about his reunion with Joanna.
It had been really special the way they’d found each other again. They couldn’t stop talking and asking questions as though they’d forgotten how to answer. They sat there in that café just staring into each other’s eyes, remembering the moment they first saw each other in great detail, and the last time, how lost they’d felt afterward.
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