A Visit From the Goon Squad (26 page)

“You live here?” he asked. “Naples?”

“A nicer part,” Sasha said, with a tinge of snobbery. “What about you, Uncle Teddy? Do you still live in Mount Gray, New York?”

“I do,” he said, startled by her recall.

“Is your house very big? Are there lots of trees? Do you have a tire swing?”

“Trees galore. A hammock no one uses.”

Sasha paused, closing her eyes as if to imagine it. “You have three sons,” she said. “Miles, Ames, and Alfred.”

She was right; even the order was right. “I’m amazed you remember,” Ted said.

“I remember everything,” Sasha said.

She had stopped before one of the seedy palazzi, its coat of arms painted over with a yellow smiley face that Ted found macabre. “This is where my friends live,” she said. “Good-bye, Uncle Teddy. It was so nice running into you.” She shook his hand with damp, spidery fingers.

Ted, unprepared for this abrupt parting, stammered a little. “Wait, but—can’t I take you to dinner?”

Sasha tilted her head, searching his eyes. “I’m awfully busy,” she said, with apology. And then, as if softened by some deep, unfailing will to politeness, “But yes. I’m free tonight.”

It was only as Ted pushed open the door to his hotel room, the medley of 1950s beige tones greeting him after each day he’d spent not looking for Sasha, that he was rocked by the sheer outlandishness of what had just happened. It was time to make his daily call to Beth, and he imagined his sister’s dumbstruck jubilation at the landslide of good news since yesterday: not only had he located her daughter, but Sasha had seemed clean, reasonably healthy, mentally coherent, and in possession of friends; in short, better than they’d had any right to expect. And yet Ted felt no such joy. Why? he wondered, lying flat on the bed with arms crossed, shutting his eyes. Why this longing for yesterday, even this morning—for the relative peace of knowing he should look for Sasha but failing to do so? He didn’t know. He didn’t know.

Beth and Andy’s marriage had died spectacularly the summer Ted lived with them on Lake Michigan while managing a construction site two miles farther up the lake. Apart from the marriage itself, the casualties by summer’s end included the majolica plate Ted had given Beth for her birthday; sundry items of damaged furniture; Beth’s left shoulder, which Andy dislocated twice; and her collarbone, which he broke. When they fought, Ted would take Sasha outside, through the razor-edged grass, to the beach. She had long red hair and blue-white skin that Beth was always trying to keep from burning. Ted took his sister’s worries seriously and always brought the sunscreen with him when they went out to the sand—sand that was too hot in the late afternoons for Sasha to walk on without screaming. He would carry her in his arms, light as a cat in her red-and-white two-piece, set her on a towel, and rub cream onto her shoulders and back and face, her tiny nose—she must have been five—and wonder what would become of her, growing up amid so much violence. He insisted she wear her white sailor hat in the sun, though she didn’t want to. He was a graduate student in art history, working as a contractor to pay his tuition.

“A con-trac-tor,” Sasha repeated, fastidiously. “What’s that?”

“Well, he organizes different workmen to build a house.”

“Are there floor sanders?”

“Sure. You know any floor sanders?”

“One,” she said. “He sanded floors in our house. His name is Mark Avery.”

Ted was instantly suspicious of this Mark Avery.

“He gave me a fish,” Sasha offered.

“A goldfish?”

“No,” she said, laughing, swatting his arm. “A bathtub fish.”

“Does it squeak?”

“Yes, but I don’t like the sound.”

These conversations went on for hours. Ted had the uneasy sense that the child was spinning them out as a way of filling the time, distracting them both from whatever was going on inside that house. And this made her seem much older than she really was, a tiny little woman, knowing, world-weary, too accepting of life’s burdens even to mention them. She never once alluded to her parents, or to what it was she and Ted were hiding from out on that beach.

“Will you take me swimming?”

“Of course,” he always said.

Only then would he allow her to doff her protective cap. Her hair was long and silken; it blew in his face when he carried her (as she always wished) into Lake Michigan. She would gird him with her thin legs and arms, warm from the sun, and rest her head on his shoulder. Ted sensed her mounting dread as they approached the water, but she refused to let him turn back. “No. It’s okay. Go,” she would mutter grimly into his neck, as if her submersion in Lake Michigan were an ordeal she was required to endure for some greater good. Ted tried different ways of making it easier for her—going in little by little, or plunging straight in—but always Sasha would gasp in pain and tighten the grip of her legs and arms around him. When it was over, when she was in, she was herself again, dog-paddling despite his efforts to teach her the crawl. (“I know how to swim!” she would say, impatiently. “I just don’t like to.”) Splashing him, teeth chattering gamely. But the entire process unsettled Ted, as if he were hurting her, forcing this immersion upon his niece when what he longed to do—fantasized about doing—was rescue her: wrap her in a blanket and secrete her from the house before dawn; paddle away in an old rowboat he’d found; carry her down the beach and not turn around. He was twenty-five. He trusted no one else. But he could do nothing, really, to protect his niece, and as the weeks eked away, he began to anticipate summer’s end as a black, ominous presence. Yet when the time came it was strangely easy. Sasha clung to her mother, barely glancing at Ted as he loaded up his car and said good-bye, and he set off feeling angry at her, wounded in a way he knew was childish but couldn’t seem to help, and when that feeling passed it left him exhausted, too tired even to drive. He parked outside a Dairy Queen and slept.

“How do I know you know how to swim, if you won’t show me?” he asked Sasha once, as they sat on the sand.

“I took lessons with Rachel Costanza.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

She smiled at him a little helplessly, as if she longed to hide behind her childishness but sensed that, somehow, it was already too late for that. “She has a Siamese cat named Feather.”

“Why won’t you swim?”

“Oh, Uncle Teddy,” she said, in one of her eerie imitations of her mother. “You wear me out.”

Sasha arrived at his hotel at eight o’clock wearing a short red dress, black patent-leather boots, and a regalia of cosmetics that sharpened her face into a small, shrill mask. Her narrow eyes curved like hooks. Ted glimpsed her across the lobby and felt reluctance verging on paralysis. He had hoped, cruelly, that she wouldn’t show up.

Still, he made himself cross the lobby and take her arm. “There’s a good restaurant up the street,” he said, “unless you have other ideas.”

She did. Blowing smoke from the window of a taxi, Sasha harangued the driver in halting Italian as the car shrieked down alleys and the wrong way up one-way streets to the Vomero, an affluent neighborhood Ted had not seen. It was high on a hill. Reeling, he paid the driver and stood with Sasha in a gap between two buildings. The flat, sparkling city arrayed itself before them, lazily toeing the sea. Hockney, Ted thought. Diebenkorn. John Moore. In the distance, Mount Vesuvius reposed benignly. Ted pictured the slightly different version of Susan standing near him, taking it in.

“This is the best view in Naples,” Sasha said challengingly, but Ted sensed her waiting, gauging his approval.

“It’s a wonderful view,” he assured her, and added, as they ambled among the leafy residential streets, “This is the prettiest neighborhood I’ve seen in Naples.”

“I live here,” Sasha said. “A few streets over.”

Ted was skeptical. “I should’ve met you up here, then. Saved you the trip.”

“I doubt you would have found it,” Sasha said. “Foreigners are helpless in Naples. Most of them get robbed.”

“Aren’t you a foreigner?”

“Technically,” Sasha said. “But I know my way around.”

They reached an intersection thronged with what had to be college students (strange how they looked the same everywhere): boys and girls in black leather jackets riding on Vespas, lounging on Vespas, perching and even standing on Vespas. The density of Vespas made the whole square seem to vibrate, and the fumes of their exhaust worked on Ted like a mild narcotic. In the dusk, a chorus line of palm trees vamped against a Bellini sky. Sasha threaded her way among the students with brittle self-consciousness, eyes locked ahead.

In a restaurant on the square, she asked for a window table and ordered their meal: fried zucchini flowers followed by pizza. Again and again she peeked outside at the youths on their Vespas. It was poignantly clear that she longed to be among them. “Do you know any of those kids?” Ted asked.

“They’re students,” she said dismissively, as if the word were a synonym for “nothing.”

“They look about your age.”

Sasha shrugged. “Most of them still live at home,” she said. “I want to hear about you, Uncle Teddy. Are you still an art history professor? By now you must be an expert.”

Jarred once again by her memory, Ted felt the pressure that arose in him when he tried to talk about his work—a confusion about what had originally driven him to disappoint his parents and rack up mountainous debt so he could write a dissertation claiming (in breathless tones that embarrassed him now) that Cézanne’s distinctive brushstrokes were an effort to represent
sound
—namely, in his summer landscapes, the hypnotic chant of locusts.

“I’m writing about the impact of Greek sculpture on the French Impressionists,” he said, attempting liveliness, but it landed like a brick.

“Your wife, Susan,” Sasha said. “Her hair is blond, right?”

“Yes, Susan is blond.…”

“My hair used to be red.”

“It’s still red,” he said. “Reddish.”

“But not like it was.” She watched him, awaiting confirmation.

“No.”

There was a pause. “Do you love her? Susan?”

This cool inquiry landed somewhere near Ted’s solar plexus.
“Aunt
Susan,” he corrected her.

Sasha looked chastened. “Aunt.”

“Of course I love her,” Ted said quietly.

Dinner arrived: pizza draped in buffalo mozzarella, buttery and warm in Ted’s throat. After a second glass of red wine, Sasha began to talk. She had run away from home with Wade, the drummer for the Pinheads (a band that seemed to require no introduction), who were playing in Tokyo. “We stayed at the Okura Hotel, meaning
fancy,”
she said. “It was April, that’s cherry blossom season in Japan, and every tree was covered with all these pink flowers, and businessmen sang and danced underneath them in paper hats!” Ted, who had never been to the Far East or even the Near East, felt a twist of envy.

After Tokyo, the band had gone to Hong Kong. “We stayed in a white high-rise on a hill, with the most incredible view,” she said. “Islands and water and boats and planes…”

“So, is Wade with you now? In Naples?”

She blinked. “Wade? No.”

He’d left her there, in Hong Kong, in the tall white building; she’d lingered in the apartment until its owner had asked her to leave. Then she’d moved to a youth hostel inside a building full of sweatshops, people asleep under their sewing machines on piles of fabric scraps. Sasha relayed these details lightheartedly, as if it had all been a romp. “Then I made some friends,” she said, “and we crossed into China.”

“Are those the friends you were meeting yesterday?”

Sasha laughed. “I meet new people everywhere I go,” she said. “That’s how it is when you travel, Uncle Teddy.”

She was flushed—from the wine or maybe the pleasure of remembering. Ted waved for the bill and paid it. He felt leaden, depressed.

The teenagers had dispersed into the chilly night. Sasha didn’t have a coat. “Please wear my jacket,” Ted said, removing the worn, heavy tweed, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He sensed that she wanted to remain fully visible in her red dress. The tall boots exaggerated her limp.

After a walk of many blocks, they reached a generic-looking nightclub whose doorman waved them listlessly inside. By now it was midnight. “Friends of mine own this place,” Sasha said, leading the way into a tumult of bodies, fluorescent purple light, and a beat with all the variety of a jackhammer. Even Ted, no connoisseur of nightclubs, felt the tired familiarity of the scene, yet Sasha seemed enthralled. “Buy me a drink, Uncle Teddy, would you?” she said, pointing at a ghastly concoction at a nearby table. “Like that, with a little umbrella.”

Ted shoved his way toward the bar. Being away from his niece felt like opening a window, loosening an airless oppression. But what was the problem, exactly? Sasha had been having a ball, seeing the world; hell, she’d done more in two years than Ted had done in twenty. So why was he so eager to escape her?

Sasha had commandeered two seats at a low table, a setup that made Ted feel like an ape, knees jammed under his chin. As she hoisted the umbrella drink to her lips, the purple light leached into slivers of pale scar tissue on the inside of her wrist. When she set down the drink, Ted took her arm in his hands and turned it over; Sasha allowed this until she saw what he was looking at, then yanked her arm away. “That’s from before,” she said. “In Los Angeles.”

“Let me see.”

She wouldn’t. And to his own surprise, Ted reached across the table and grasped her wrists in his hands, taking a certain angry pleasure in hurting his niece as he wrested them over by force. He noticed that her nails were red; she’d painted them this afternoon. Sasha relented, averting her eyes as he studied her forearms in the cold, weird light. They were scarred and scuffed like furniture.

“A lot are by accident,” Sasha said. “My balance was really off.”

“You’ve had a bad time.” He wanted her to admit it.

There was a silence. Finally Sasha said, “I kept thinking I saw my father. Isn’t that crazy?”

“I don’t know.”

“In China, Morocco. I’d look across a room—bam—I saw his hair. Or his legs, I still remember the exact shape of his legs. Or how he threw back his head when he laughed—remember, Uncle Teddy? How his laugh was kind of a yell?”