American Appetites (33 page)

“So she asked you for money?”

“I don't think she did, I think I offered it to her.”

“And she accepted?”

“She accepted.”

“And your wife found the canceled check?”

“Yes. Famously. As is known through North America.”

“Do you know what the money was for?”

“An abortion.”

“And was the father this Fermi Sabri?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“And not you.”

Ian cast Ottinger a look of pure hatred. “And not me.”

“So you were not having an affair, in the usual sense of the word, with Hunt.”

Ian shook his head and did not reply.

“You were not in love with her, and you did not want to get rid of your wife in order to marry her. And Glynnis was mistaken in thinking . . . what it seems to have been she thought.”

Again, Ian shook his head.

“But she became very upset, and very angry, and she accused you, and—”

“No. I don't remember.”

“Is it possible that Glynnis attacked you, and you fended her off in self-defense, and—”

Ian got to his feet. “I've told you I don't want to talk about it,” he said. “I will not talk about it. I will not violate Glynnis's privacy; I will not desecrate her, goddamn you, do you understand?”

He left Ottinger's office, plunged blindly down a flight of stairs, hurried out into the street. He'd wanted so desperately to strike Ottinger with his fists, he had to get away. But I am not the sort of person who behaves like this, he thought, in amazement. Am I?

OTTINGER CALLED HIM
that evening, at home. “I've hired a private investigator to look for Hunt,” he said. “We can't sit back and wait for Lederer to find her. He's a fellow I've worked with in the past, with some success.” When Ian did not reply he added, “Of course, he doesn't come cheaply.”

“Do any of us?” Ian said, and hung up the phone.

2.

At Glynnis's grave. In the early evening: a damp greeny quiet, swarms of gnats in the shadows. And mosquitoes: Ian slapped repeatedly at his bare arms, and at the back of his neck.
Goddamn
.

Bianca, squatting in her white shorts, white cotton pullover top, was picking away dead blooms and leaves from a geranium plant in a pink foil-wrapped pot. In the warm airless humidity of the August evening her skin glowed whitely, as if damply; her hair had been braided, not very expertly, and fell in a heavy rope between her shoulder blades. It was a habit father and daughter had fallen into, of visiting the cemetery twice a week, often, for expediency's sake, as they were tonight, on their way to somewhere else. (Ian, at least, was going to the Cassitys', to an outdoor barbecue. Bianca had been invited but would probably not come along.) She said, casually, “I was thinking, Daddy, it wouldn't be any trouble for me to take the fall semester off. And stay home—if you wanted me to.”

Distracted as he was, invariably, at Glynnis's gravesite, for what after all does one
do
, what does one
say
, in such a place, where even grief seems crude and self-assuaging, Ian nonetheless heard his daughter's voice waver: for she'd meant to say, in a voice of heart-rending kindness, stay home with
you
.

He said quickly, “Of course not, honey, don't even think of such a thing. The trial has been postponed until after Thanksgiving now, and Nick is trying to get it pushed back again.” Ian smiled at his daughter, who was looking so earnestly at him. What, he wondered, did she see? Was the man in her vision, as in her imagination, anyone with whom he might reasonably identify? He said, “He is busily filing motions, or writing briefs, whatever it is lawyers do with their days, ostensibly in the service of humanity. He is certain that things will turn out well, and I am certain they will, too. There's no need for you to interrupt your studies; I wish, really, you could put the matter out of your mind. And if . . .”

His words faded. He could not think what he meant to say.

Bianca said, as if enthusiastically, “I could stay home and work here. Reading, I mean. At school, that's mostly what I do, read; it seems so easy to stay away from classes.”

Ian said, “I thought you were involved with other things too. Theatrical productions, dance. . . .”

Bianca looked at him oddly. “Dance? I was never involved with dance. And you wind up spending so much time, you need to have so much energy, for performance things. Things that people do together, in a group. So much effort goes into making one another believe, you know, that it's worthwhile; that it's real enough.”

“But isn't it fun, too, working with other people? You seem to have enjoyed it, in the past.”

Bianca crinkled her nose, as if she were trying to remember. The past? Which past? She said, stubbornly, “It requires a lot of faith to make some things real, that's all.”

Ian had developed a fatherly distaste, a nervous tic of a reaction, when Bianca drifted onto her subject—it had become so specifically
hers
—of what is “real” and what is “not real.” He said, “I suspect that all things are equally real, and that's the problem—how to choose.”

“No,” Bianca said, with her maddening serenity, “it isn't a problem for all of us.”

Ian smiled and fumbled for his cigarettes, which, it seemed, he had left back in the car, or had not brought along at all, and said, more energetically, “Of course I don't want you to sacrifice another semester for me, Bianca. You've done so wonderfully; in fact I am filled with awe at you, not only your academic performance last spring but—how can I say it—
you
. You have held us both together, somehow. Everyone says—”

He paused, and added, “Not that I think it has been easy for you. My God, no.”

Bianca frowned, picking now at another plant, one of those voluptuous flowering plants with the enormous blooms that looked, and perhaps were, dyed: this one was deep blue. Hydrangea? There were a half-dozen potted plants at the head of Glynnis's grave, each quite large and surely expensive; all were overblown, now, and required trimming. You could see, quickly scanning this section of the cemetery, that Glynnis McCullough's was a
popular
grave.

And would that please her? Ian wondered. As, in life, it had meant so strangely much?

Bianca was saying, in her low, murmurous, rather too restrained voice, “. . . as things work themselves through, in another year or so; I'm not impatient and I can wait, but—well, when they do . . . maybe my junior year . . . there's this program in Thailand, for teaching English and just sort of helping out, in, I guess you could call them, rural villages. . . . It's no big deal: nothing like the Peace Corps. What I'd hope for is that I'd learn, you know, from the Thais. Their way of life, you know, and their tradition. I'd learn, I'm sure, a lot more than I'd be teaching
them
. Then I could come back and get my BA, East Asian Studies probably, and I'd have an advantage; I will have learned the language, and learned about the religion, the specific kind or kinds of Buddhism they practice . . . it's all very complex, you know, like a language with any number of dialects. The only way to learn anything genuine is from the inside, Daddy, don't you think?”

“A program in Thailand? Teaching English?”

“Actually it's in Burma, Ceylon, Laos, and Nepal, too. But from what I've read, and people have told me, Thailand seems just right.”

“You'd spend a year of your life in Thailand, teaching English in a village?”

“Did I say a year? It might be less than that, or more. The program sets you up, you know, it's all very structured; my adviser at school was saying . . .”

Ian listened to Bianca and did not interrupt. He saw, in her hopeful face, in the glisten of her wide intelligent evasive eyes, that if he loved her he must not interrupt. His daughter was plotting the desperate way she might escape from him, while, beneath her, so very literally and precisely beneath her, the dead woman who had been her mother lay in her ebony coffin, sheerly matter now. Matter disintegrating into its elements. How Bianca might escape him, and how she might escape
that
.

Bianca said, “Mainly I just want to
learn
, I want to be filled with something—well, I don't know how to put it, something that isn't, you know, just
me
.” She paused and wiped at her damp upper lip. “Just—
us
.”

“Of course, honey. I see.”

Still, on the way home, Ian, always the professional, the professional father it might be said, thoughtfully named the friends, acquaintances, colleagues, professional contacts of his who were involved in one way or another with East Asia and who might be of help to her: economists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians; an ex-student of his in population research and demography, at the Center for East Asian Studies in Washington; an old classmate from Harvard who was deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Rangoon. Bianca listened politely and did not interrupt.

3.

It was a season of stasis: each day interminable, unimaginable. Had it not been for his work, the consolation of hours—for there is no end to statistics, nor to the ever more refined programming of variable futures—he doubted he could endure. For one must live after all in the present tense: the next five minutes is the great challenge. Except for accepting an invitation to Cape Cod, to spend a few days with Denis and Roberta, at the cottage they usually rented for the month of August, Ian had made no plans for the summer except to get through it.

Yet he was cheerful enough, with an air of energy, resigned goodwill. Smiling when necessary, proffering his hand to be shaken. Hello, how are you! Hello, how are
you!
These many months, he could not once recall being rebuffed. For those colleagues, acquaintances, former friends who wished to shun him were discreet enough to do it without calling attention to themselves. Hazelton-on-Hudson was one of the civilized places of the world.

Of course, social invitations were down. The telephone rarely rang. Glynnis would have been crushed, mystified. What has happened to us, she would have said, what on earth has happened to us, we tried so hard, we tried so very hard, what has happened?

4.

The kind of s.o.b. you'd like to stick a hot iron up his ass, see how he likes it
. That was Ian's father's voice: unbidden, unanticipated, asserting itself ever more frequently in Ian's consciousness, in that uncertain state between sleep and waking, when the soul is thin as a wisp of smoke. He had not heard the voice in years, in decades, had not wished to hear it, and had not supposed its recall his prerogative. His father had been a complex man, Ian supposed, in retrospect: clearly intelligent, and yet deliberately stupid; suffused with anger, yet insistently maudlin, if not sentimental; a chronic alcoholic, yet given to frequent campaigns of reform.
Your mother will have to meet me halfway
, Ian's father often said to Ian, and Ian, a small child at the time, had a confused and frightened vision of his mother walking something like a workman's plank stretched between buildings, or a tightrope.
I can't do it alone and the bloody woman well knows it, wants me to fail I wouldn't doubt, but I'm my own man and I do what I want to do, self-righteous bitch like all of them in her family
. The words were incoherent when most impassioned, but his son always understood their meaning.

A small-time merchant with a store, rented, on a block of failing stores, in a “transitional” neighborhood in Bridgeport. A sales representative for a failing company, working out of his car—a Nash? Studebaker?—driving hundreds of miles a week.
Think I'm made out of money
the voice intoned, in the midst of thudding noises, the kitchen chairs knocked about:
Bloodsuckers
, the refrigerator door opened and shut, hard, in a fury of disappointment;
Think I don't know you're listening well I know it and I don't give a good goddamn, hear me? Don't give a shit
. Ian and his mother were hiding in the back bedroom; Ian's mother had dragged a chair against the door, as if a mere chair were adequate to keep that fury at a distance, a mere door adequate to muffle the terrible droning voice.

But there was little physical violence. Ian recalled some slaps, shoves, punches with closed fists, yet, strangely, could not recall if these were directed against his mother, or against him, or against them both. Most nights, the rampages in the kitchen played themselves out; the ravings came to an abrupt end; Ian's father would collapse on the sofa and begin almost at once to snore, or slam melodramatically out of the house and stay away for the night, or for days, or, eventually, for weeks. His presence was reduced to infrequent and unexpected telephone calls that terrified Ian's mother as much as the man himself had done.

So gradually did Michael McCullough disappear from the life of the household, with so much the waning energy of a moribund comet, there was never an hour, still less a profound moment, when his son might have said,
At last we are free
, or, more somberly,
I will never see him again
.

My father did not die, Ian realized. His death had merely been reported.

5.

It was Roberta Grinnell who telephoned Ian, from Cape Cod, to remind him he was expected to visit. To stay for as long as he liked. And why didn't he bring Bianca along? There were plenty of beds.

“Our sons,” Roberta said, “are off on their own this summer. Jobs in Maine and Colorado; did Denis tell you?”

“Yes,” Ian said, though he wasn't sure Denis had told him. “And Bianca too has a job.”

“That YM-YWCA thing she did last summer, at the camp? Swimming lessons?”

“Yes,” Ian said. He thought it touching that Roberta should remember what his daughter had done the previous summer. He wasn't certain he would have remembered, himself.