Becoming the Butlers (9 page)

“Hi,” I said cheerfully. “Did you have a nice nap?”

Why did all drunks look like they desperately needed a shave? My father’s chin was covered with stubble.

“There you are, Rachel, I was wondering what happened to you. I mean, how many postcards can you write?” James didn’t smell nice anymore, but stank of cigarettes and bad breath and booze. “Pablo,” he called out to the bartender. “This is my daughter. My wife named her Melody because she thinks she was conceived at Woodstock.”

“I didn’t know that,” I exclaimed.

“Well, you weren’t there, were you?” James looked terrible. I’ve seen my father in various stages of inebriation: swaying like a scarecrow in a storm, bouncing buoyantly as if balloons were attached to his limbs, even slithering on the carpet like a snake; but somehow this was worse. His face looked so puffed up that his eyes were no more than slits, and his lower lip looked swollen, as if he bit it or was punched. But no matter how smashed, my father was never incoherent. He spoke as directly as if he were giving a lecture, which is probably why he could, most of the time, get away with teaching Geometry drunk.

“I was just telling Pablo here about Mr. Okito and our honeymoon in the Poconos. As I was saying,
amigo
…,” my father declared, not realizing that the bartender had
walked away. “Here was this poor little lost Japanese man who ran after all the newlywed brides in our hotel. Seems that someone in Tokyo gave the erroneous advice that the prettiest girls in the United States could be found in the Poconos in June. Some goon nearly broke Okito’s arm because he asked his wife to dance. I took Okito aside and tried to make him understand exactly who all these very pretty ladies were. He was so mortified that he didn’t leave his room for three days straight. But he was very grateful for my help, and every fall, right around our wedding anniversary, he sent my wife and me the most beautiful fans from Japan.”

My father paused, waiting for a response, and then slammed his right fist so hard on the table that the glasses shook. “So tell me, Pablo, why, last October ninth, no fans from Mr. Okito. How did he know, huh? Did Elizabeth write to him or something? Or was it some kind of Japanese ESP that told him this year nobody wanted to be reminded of any anniversaries?”

My father sat very still, his eyes widening as he realized he had been addressing a liquor cabinet. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked in a low trembling voice. “What’s going to happen to us, Rachel?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. That was the truth. I literally had no idea of what would ever happen again.

“I’ve got to go upstairs and pack,” James said, sliding off his stool and leaving several bills on the bar. “Our flight’s tomorrow at seven
A.M.
Got the tickets here in my pocket.”

“So we’re really going?”

“That’s right. What else can I do? We never should have come. God knows what I’m going to tell Mrs. Vasquez. If I hadn’t married Elizabeth and made her move to New York City, she would never have met George. You don’t have Spanish supers in the suburbs. Hey,” he said with a little smile, “now you try saying that five times fast.”

I was glad to see he still had his sense of humor. I didn’t feel very much like joking myself.

My father walked steadily out of the bar but in the lobby he tripped over someone’s suitcase and fell hard onto the floor. He lay motionless for a few moments, like a corpse. Two porters rushed over but James, wobbling as he sat up, brushed them away. I took his arm and helped him to stand.

“Did you see him, Rachel?” my father asked, peering into the distance.

“Who?”

“George.”

“George?”

“I bet you think I’m loaded, Rachel. But I could have sworn I saw him by the concierge’s desk.”

My father’s eyes grew wide and glassy, as if George’s visage would haunt him forever. A new bruise, which began to swell over his left eyebrow, looked nearly identical to the one he received when he walked into his bedroom wall. My father’s bruises would never heal.

SIX

My father didn’t speak to me once during the six-hour flight to New York. He sat next to me in Non-Smoking and didn’t even go into the back to light up. It wasn’t easy for him though; he chewed six packs of gum, drank three highballs in a row, and squeezed his pack of Marlboros in his fist until it was a crumbled ball of tobacco and paper. He looked truly menacing: his forehead was covered with a peeling piece of dirty gauze, and his left eye was swollen and black and blue. The woman in the seat opposite the aisle from me kept staring, as if she expected at any moment he’d pull a pistol out of his coat. The movie projector (the same one from our flight over?) was still broken, and the headset only played selections from
Oklahoma.
The flight seemed endless; I had too much time to rehash all that had happened in Madrid. My father gazed longingly out of his window as if the blank indigo sky held all of life’s answers.

We had nothing to declare at customs, except perhaps my bleached hair. James slept through the taxi ride,
and when we arrived home, only grunted as he picked up the suitcases and loaded them in the elevator. He forgot which key went into each lock, and banged on the door as though someone inside could let us in.

“Professor Harris, is that you?” Mrs. Rosen, in a red quilted bathrobe, peeked out of her door.

“Yes, we’re back,” my father told her, “safe and sound.”

The old woman shuffled out into the hall with a stubby cigarette stuck in her mouth. Amplified voices blared from her doorway:
Good Morning America.
Mrs. Rosen played her TV (our old set, I suddenly remembered) so loudly that I would never have to use my alarm clock again.

“How was your trip?” she asked, putting on her glasses to peer at my father. What she saw pleased her; a slow, smug grin bloomed over her face.

“Over,” my father said, finally unbolting the lock with the right key.

“But where’s Rachel?” Mrs. Rosen asked.

“I’m right here,” I said by her side.

“My God! I didn’t recognize you. You look like a very different girl. What did you do to your hair?”

“She stayed out too long on the beach,” James answered for me.

“The sun must be very strong in Spain,” Mrs. Rosen remarked. “When you were gone I collected your mail for you. Hold on, I’ll get it.”

My father pushed all the luggage into our front hall and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. “Damn,” he swore. “I forgot to pay Con Ed.” The apartment was freezing, but that had nothing to do with Con Ed; from November to April our apartment was as damp and cold as a boarding school on a rainy English coast. The winds off the Hudson ripped through our poorly insulated windows
with a howl that never abated, rattling the Levelor blinds and knocking over the few plants my mother tried so hard to cultivate. In Spain, even though the weather could be chilly, she would always bask in George’s warmth.

“Home Sweet Home,” my father declared to the dark silence.

“Here, we are, Professor.” Mrs. Rosen returned with a pile of envelopes that looked to be mostly bills. My father brought the mail into the hall and examined every postmark beneath the light. I knew he was looking for a foreign stamp.

“You owe me one dollar and twenty cents for a C.O.D. package,” Mrs. Rosen announced.

“I’ve only pesetas,” James told her, heading back to our apartment. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Rosen.”

“Wait!” she cried, grabbing my father’s sleeve. “Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” my father said tersely.

“But Elizabeth…”

“We didn’t have much time for sight-seeing. We ate at a restaurant called Museum of Ham. And that, Mrs. Rosen, is what we did on our vacation to Spain.”

“But Professor… Rachel, surely you must have…” My father slammed the door. Now, I thought, he’ll finally say something. But he only went down the hall and disappeared into his bedroom.

“Don’t forget to pay Con Ed,” I yelled. The early morning sun was trying to filter through the filthy panes and I could just see the outlines of our furniture. Even in happier times, the apartment was never hospitable. My parents had no money when they got married (you don’t get checks when you elope, James always said), and had agreed to take the furnishings of the previous owner, a terminally ill French teacher who was moving to Quebec. The Empire sofa with sagging defeated cushions, the heavy drapes with a seashell brocade, a frayed Oriental rug with
coffee stains like the map of the United States, even the spines of the leather books were all that same sickly green of the old man’s face. (Even today I can’t look at the color chartreuse without smelling dust.) The hallways were winding and narrow, and distorted what was being said in other rooms. A kind remark sounded strident, a word of love a complaint, a sigh so hopeless that it would chill the listener. Maybe if we had moved to a different apartment, my mother wouldn’t have left.

I went into my room, closed the door and thought,
What Next?
The girl who stared at me in the mirror still looked like a stranger. Mrs. Rosen hadn’t recognized me at all. If only you could swap yourself for another person as a shopper might exchange a faulty purchase. As long as I could remember, I had never been too happy being Rachel Harris. The school I attended, the Winfield Academy, was filled with gorgeous, very rich girls. I was only there because my father was a teacher and the tuition was free for all faculty kids. My arrangement, I realized, wasn’t so very different than Pilar’s situation in our apartment building.

Not only did I need to become someone else, I needed to join another family. My plan made a lot of sense. If your car gets wrecked in a crash, you buy another model. If your home is destroyed in a tornado, you take the insurance money and move into a larger house in a better neighborhood. My family was demolished, razed like an abandoned building that no one wanted to renovate. So why not join another family that was whole and secure? A family where people like George Vasquez simply couldn’t simply break up a home.

I decided to telephone Nicole Rudomov. She was one of the most sophisticated girls I knew in a class of extremely sophisticated Manhattan girls. Although she probably could have joined the small exclusive clique everyone envied, Nicole was very much a loner. I think her family’s upheaval had made her feel like an outsider, and she felt a kinship with me, the teacher charity kid: another oddball.

“Who’s this?” she answered on the first ring.

“Rachel.” Her abruptness always caught me off guard. And that voice. Her magisterial voice was so authoritative that not only did you do what she asked, you volunteered to do more.

“I wondered what happened to you. You haven’t been around. Your doorman said Mr. Parallel Lines and you went on vacation.”

Nicole had given James this nickname because once in class he supposedly shouted: “To Hell with Parallel Lines… Who needs them?”

“Can you meet me for donuts?” I asked. “I know it’s kind of sudden but…”

“Of course, Harris,” she said. “I’ll see you at Twins in half an hour.”

I changed my clothes and went to my father’s bedroom to tell him I was going out. Behind the closed doors I could hear him shouting on the telephone. He could only be talking to my half-deaf and very senile grandmother in the nursing home.

This wasn’t the time to interrupt him. I scribbled something illegible about shopping and ran out of the door.

Nicole and I always met at Twin Donuts at Seventy-third and Amsterdam: a brightly lit shop with shiny tables still wet and redolent with Fantastic spray. A yellowing
New
York Post
was usually crammed behind the leather cushion and no one ever left more than a quarter for a tip. My breakfast consisted of the kind of donuts with sugar that blew up in white clouds all over your face, while Nicole loved those special cream pastries that were so
sticky that flies could get stuck in the frosting. She sat in our usual rear booth by the framed Jimmy Durante photograph, wearing her favorite outfit: her father’s Eisenhower army jacket over her mother’s old sixties black Dior dress, with authentic Rotterdam clogs. My father always said Nicole, with her high cheekbones, slanting eyes, and fair hair, looked like a Czarina or an impoverished Central European Countess, and I knew she had a famous poet-uncle supposedly still languishing in a Siberian jail.

“Hey, Harris,” she said in the midst of lighting a cigarette. Why was I fated to be surrounded by people bent on destroying my lungs along with their own? “Bronoski,” she shouted out to the old store-owner. “Two cups of Java!” Mr. Bronoski lumbered over with a scowl. Nicole said something to him in Polish, which made him laugh and pinch her cheek with fat doughy fingers. Nicole spoke Polish, Russian, German, and a smattering of Urdu. But that wasn’t so unusual for a talented Winfield Academy girl.

“He adores you,” I told Nicole after the old man stumbled off, still chuckling.

“I know. He’s already proposed marriage twice.”

“Really?”

“Christ. You’re so gullible, Harris.”

Nicole’s fingers drummed the linoleum tabletop. Her nails were painted in her usual outrageous shades: this time orange and green.