Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (8 page)

“We've been married for thirty years,” she said. She was standing in her bedroom holding a stack of wool sweaters in her hand. Her housedress was buttoned wrong, one end sticking up by her ear, and her small, narrow feet, blue-veined and pink-polished, were bare.

“Twenty-nine,” I said.

“Almost thirty.”

“And how much of that time was he cheating on you?”

“I don't know.” She put the sweaters into a suitcase, layering tissue paper between them.

I pulled the paper out, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the trash can. I pulled open my father's underwear drawer and, holding my breath, dumped the contents into a carryall.

“He says this Russian girl loves him.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “And were there other Russian girls? Did they love him too?”

I stood over my mother while she sent my father an e-mail telling him where his belongings would be, and then I drove the suitcases to a Ramada Inn on Route 17, not too far from his office. I took a room in his name, putting the charge on my mother's credit card and forging the signature I had perfected in high school. When I got back to the house she was standing in the front hall, still in her housedress.

“I don't know if I can do this, Emilia,” she said.

I stood in the doorway, the keys jingling in my hand. “I will never forgive you if you take him back, Mom.”

My mother stared at me, her face spongy and pale. “Oh,” she said.

She swayed on her feet and I saw that this was too much to bear. I saw, too, what she would never say: that no matter what I felt, no matter what I imagined, my father's betrayal had been of her, not of me.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, and rushed across the room. I wrapped my arms around her and she sagged against me, soft and moist, as if desperation was leaking from her, dampening her skin and clothes. “I had no right to say that.” And I had no right, of course. But it is true that I never would have forgiven her, and she knew that as well as I did.

Now, sitting in a Soho café across from Simon, I cannot get an image out of my head. It is of my father and a young Russian stripper. I see his naked back, skin loose and gray, pocked with brown birthmarks. I see her smooth and unlined face over his shoulder, bored and anxious as she watches the clock above the door; she will be punished if he takes too long. I know I have a very active and vivid imagination, torqued and twisted by too much television, a steady diet of gothic novels, and an Electra complex worthy of twenty years on Freud's couch. I also know that, like my friend Simon, my father is a sensitive man. How can he possibly live with himself?

“Emilia?” Simon says.

“Excuse me?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“No, I'm sorry.”

“I was telling you about the lap-dancing sixteen-year-olds.”

“I think I'm going to be sick.”

“I know. It's totally disgusting. And meanwhile, what are the cops doing with themselves? What's the FBI up to? Busting medical marijuana users. Making the world safe from all those little old ladies with ovarian cancer growing reefer in their backyards. And let's not forget the time and money the Justice Department is spending writing amicus briefs in favor of the so-called partial birth abortion ban.” He makes little quotation marks around the phrase with his fingers. “Gotta make sure those women with the hydrocephalic babies get the jail time they deserve. We live in one fucked up country, you know that?”

Simon's voice has gotten louder. He is normally a fairly sedate person whose wit is of the sardonic kind, spoken under the breath rather than aloud. But when he is angry about some injustice, when he has a political point to make, Simon can climb up on a soap box with the best of them. I allow him to go on, hoping that his highly vocal outrage will camouflage my quiet. It is mysterious to me why I have not told Simon about my father. It is almost easier to understand why I have kept the secret from Jack. Jack, after all, must see my father on a regular basis, must interact with him and pretend affection. Simon has met my father only a few times, and those meetings did not go well. Although my father would never admit to it, although he would, in fact, shake his fist in the face of anyone who accused him of it, my father, longtime donor to the Democratic Party, onetime member of the Young Communist League, sexual sybarite, is a homophobe. Only my father seemed to require an explanation for why my cousin Seth, who lived one town over from us in Fair Lawn and whom we saw frequently throughout my childhood, wore eyeliner and leather hip-huggers to nearly every family occasion. When my aunt Irene finally explained, in language you would use with a simpleminded child, that Seth “liked boys better than girls,” the blood drained from my father's face and his silver tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. I have never seen him hug his nephew since then, and on the few occasions when he and Simon have met, he has managed somehow to avoid shaking Simon's hand. Simon would be only too glad to hear a story this vile about my father, and I do not understand why I cannot bring myself to tell him. Why do I feel such loyalty for a man who seems entirely unfamiliar with the concept?

The man sitting opposite me, however, knows nothing except loyalty. For ten years he has been my most stalwart companion, sticking by me even in the past few months when I have been so unpleasant. And, worse, so
boring
.

“Simon,” I say. “Simon, I have something to tell you.”

“What?” He grimaces, reacting to the urgency in my voice.

“You are my best friend, Simon, and I love you.”

“And?”

“And? And nothing. That's what I wanted to tell you.”

“That's all? I know you love me, girlfriend. I love you, too.” He takes one of my sweet potato fries, dips it in aioli, and stuffs it in his mouth.

“I don't deserve you. You're a better friend than I deserve.”

“Oh please. How many bad boyfriends have you saved me from?” He shudders. “Did you or did you not step in and terrify that horrible Christopher until he turned over all my stuff? And where was I? Cowering in the elevator, punching the ‘open' button.”

“He was not a good boyfriend.”

“Exactly! And you bullied your way into his apartment and got me back my two pairs of black Hanro boxer briefs, my good Diesel jeans, and my toothbrush. You even managed to get a bottle of shampoo that wasn't even mine! I love that shampoo, by the way. I still use that same brand. Bumble and Bumble. It is so fucking expensive, it's like a dollar fifty per hair folicle.”

I won't let him distract me. “You've been so wonderful to me, ever since Isabel died.”

“Are we going to get all maudlin now? Because if we are, then I'm going to need dessert. There's only so much drama I can stand without dessert. They're supposed to have incredible pie here.”

“You don't even
like
pie. You and William are the only two people in the known universe who don't like pie.”

“How
is
dear little William? What's he up to? Studying for his SATs? Applying to medical school?”

Simon is faking this snide disregard for my benefit. He actually
likes
William. When he visits they invariably end up wrapped in an animated discussion of their shared appreciation for Philip Pullman or closeted in William's room hunched over some elaborate Lego model of the universe. I have a feeling that Simon sees reflected in William something of the child he once was, awkward and precocious, far more comfortable with adults than with children his own age, an outsider able to explain the shifting orbits of the moons of Saturn but unable to ask another child to join him on the jungle gym.

“He's in fine form.” I tell Simon about the eBay fiasco.

“Oh God,” he says. “You poor thing. What a nightmare.” He sips his sparkling water. “I'll bet he was just looking to earn some money. I was always trying to find ways to get money when I was a kid.”

“He doesn't need any money. His mother gives him everything he wants.”

“Still. It's the
money
. The fact of it. I used to make my grandmother give me my birthday money in singles so I could have more of it. More bills. I just liked having them. I'd spread them out on my bed and roll around on them.”

“He's too little for that,” I say sourly.

“William? He's not too little for anything. Girlfriend, that stepson of yours is older than we are.”

Chapter 8
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I
t is
Wednesday again and today it is raining, and while that will make the pickup from preschool even more unpleasant, I will be able to walk through an empty park. My first visits to Central Park, with my father when I was a little girl, had a quality of dreamlike isolation. I don't mean to imply any sort of bucolic seclusion—in the early eighties the park was a neglected place. Turtle Pond was filled with beer cans, and were there sheep in Sheep Meadow they would have been forced to subsist on dust rather than grass. But my father's middle age was permeated with a nostalgic longing for the park's paths and playing fields, and so visits there were something of a pilgrimage, no matter how seedy and rundown it had become. He grew up on the Upper West Side, in a family that could afford to retreat to the Catskills only for one month of the year. For the rest of the summer, Central Park was his playground. Every six months or so, when we had an hour or two to kill between waiting on line for our half-price theater tickets and the start of our Sunday matinee, my father would decide that we should spend the time not in Bloomingdale's or the Gotham Book Mart but in the park. My mother did not enjoy these excursions; she was afraid of muggers and of the young men who would call out “Loose joints, smoke, shake” as we passed. She was probably not unreasonable in her fears; the park was a much more dangerous place back then, and those young men were likely making their sales pitches to intimidate rather than because they imagined that the prosperous-looking white man, with his fur-clad wife and young daughters in white tights and Mary Janes, was there to buy some pot. But I loved walking through the park with my father. He pointed out the fields where he used to play baseball with his brothers and their friends. He dug with the toe of one pointed shoe at the base of a tree because he thought he remembered that that was where Bobby Finkelman had buried a 1946 Canadian silver dollar.

Once, when I was about ten years old and it was just the two of us—I can't remember why my mother had decided not to join us, perhaps she had a cold, perhaps she and my father had had an argument, perhaps she just wasn't interested in seeing
Dreamgirls
—my father took me up to the Harlem Meer. It was a daring adventure. The gray ski threatened rain, and the old boathouse was a burned-out hulk, stinking of urine and splashed with graffiti. I had never been to Harlem before, and imagined it as a dark and scary place, filled with dark and scary people. My father refused even to notice my trepidation. He led me around the Meer, pointing out the bluffs of schist and the different types of trees growing on the high slopes. He smiled broadly at the few people we passed, even the drunk old men slugging wine from bottles wrapped in crumpled paper bags, in what I now recognize as the self-conscious expansiveness of the uncomfortable limousine liberal. Back then I thought him no less than an emissary of racial equality and, once I overcame my apprehension enough to see beyond the vandalism, of the wild beauty of the north-most corner of the park.

When I moved to New York City I began exploring the park on my own. It was just beginning its slow transformation from an urban wilderness full of homeless people pushing shopping carts and young black men in thick gold necklaces pushing crack, to a pastoral wilderness full of middle-aged white women spotting yellow warblers through expensive binoculars and elderly black men trolling for largemouth bass. There was still something brave and pioneering about my willingness to hike on my own through the more isolated parts of the park, like the Ravine that stretches from Lasker Rink down to the Pool. Now, in the days after the tenure of Rudy Giuliani, for whom none of us good liberals will admit to having voted but for whom we cannot help but hold a certain grudging admiration as we make our way through a virtually crime-free city, even the Ramble is overrun. Once only men bent on anonymous, alfresco encounters would wander the paths, especially out to the Point, where they ignored the birds in favor of more earth-tied distractions. Nowadays, though, it's a free-for-all. The men are still there, God knows (one particularly sybaritic soul upon whom I've happened more than once brings along a folding chair; not for him the discomfort of a rocky path or log), but they've been joined by hordes of tourists, lunching office workers, ambling senior citizens, and groups of schoolchildren with laminated checklists of tree species. Still, in the winter, in the rain, I am lucky enough to find some solitude.

I am not alone in the elevator, but my companions are too entranced by each other's company even to greet me. I stare straight ahead and pretend not to notice that the guitar player has his hand down the back of his companion's jeans, although her yellow rain slicker is bunched up around her waist and she is giggling. When we arrive at the lobby he pinches her on the behind before he pulls his hand free. I have been so busy pretending not to look at them that I have not done any preparation in anticipation of crossing the park. However, the rain is coming down in sharp, cold needles and even hardy New York children will not be out in this kind of weather.

Ivan opens his umbrella over my head and steps outside to whistle a cab down for me. He frowns when I tell him I will walk, and then he tells me he has a spare umbrella inside. I show him the capacious hood of my long raincoat. I lift one of my legs in its knee-high rubber boot. The boots have leopard spots and are very cheerful and cute. I quite nearly left them in the hall closet—it seemed odious to wear something that contrasted so sharply with the mood I have managed to sustain for this long—but not even I am sufficiently self-indulgent to ruin a perfectly good pair of shoes just to prove to myself that I really am as wretched as all that. Besides, with these boots on I will be able to satisfy a longtime urge to march across the park in the rain without heeding path or road; I will be able to ford the Ramble, squelch my way through the mud, the woods, and the bog. Once, a couple years ago, I stumbled across a little wooden structure while walking through the Ramble and I want to slog around and find it again.

I walk the paths to the Lake, and somewhere around the Azalea Pond I try to go off-road and bushwhack. The Ramble is cut through with paths, and at first it is hard to imagine myself as at all intrepid. In the winter, however, they do not plow the small trails, nor do they do much in the way of clearing away what the wind brings down, so I finally manage to get lost. The dried and withered winter underbrush crackles beneath my feet despite the damp, and I cannot see very far ahead of me. I cannot even hear the traffic that usually rumbles in the background, because the sound of the pounding rain drowns out everything else. I am blessedly alone; I might be in the Adirondack Mountains or on some secluded part of the Appalachian Trail. I climb over a boulder, holding on to the mossy and cold rock, carefully placing the toes of my boots so they will not slip.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see something moving on the other side of the boulder. I am already up and over the top, and I try to scramble back the way I came, but I cannot get purchase on the slippery stone. I end up sitting down hard, a sharp pain in my tailbone. A man wearing two black garbage bags, one over his body with holes cut out for his arms, and the other like a hood with a hole cut out for his face, unfolds himself from the ground and rears up over me, his face twisted in rage, his mouth open in a snarl to reveal yellowed and broken teeth and a long bluish tongue.

I scream, thinking immediately of the serial murderer who raped and bludgeoned the Central Park jogger, crushing her skull, and leaving her no future other than a best-selling memoir about her struggle to relearn how to read and walk, and the lifelong guilt of having played a role in the decade-long incarceration of a group of innocent teenagers. The ugly man stares at me, dark eyes in an ashy face, his cracked and torn lips working. He looks at my leopard boots and steps backward, growling in his throat. I try to scramble back but I instead I fall forward, off the rock, landing in a ball at his feet.

He howls and throws his hands out toward me. His nails are long and ragged, black with dirt.

Most people assume that they have reservoirs of courage, untapped nerve that they can draw upon in order to spring forth in acts of bravery, should they ever be faced with a situation demanding it. No one ever believes him- or herself to be capable of true, deep cowardice. In the abstract everyone is Miep Gies, smuggling food and notebooks to Anne Frank up in the annex behind the cupboard in the Dutch Opekta Company. Courage is, in large part, a form of self-aggrandizement; the only times I have ever been brave in my life have stemmed from narcissism, a desire to make myself
appear
courageous, to define myself for others as a person of valor, to have a story to tell that will put me squarely in the camp of the Mieps and the partisans. Like the time I rushed to the defense of a woman whom I saw being punched by her husband outside a restaurant on Eighth Avenue. I ordered my cab to stop, opened the door, and invited her inside all in a flush of some thoughtless exhilaration. Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism. It is not that the courageous do not realize or understand the extent of the danger they face. They make a conscious decision not to care.

I leap to my feet, and shout, “Fuck off!” as loud as I can.

The man screams and spins away, crashing through the woods.

I slide down the rock and hit the ground. I get to my feet and run, too, in the opposite direction. Breaking through a thick tangle of brush, I find myself on the back side of Balanced Rock, a massive boulder upended atop a slab of schist. I leap down the four-foot drop, and run as fast as I can along the familiar path to the rear of the Loeb Boathouse. Once I am out of the lonely woods, I bend over and put my hands on my knees, nearly crying with relief. Then I run toward East Drive and up in the direction of the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, trying to put as much space between myself and the man as possible. By the time I reach Fifth Avenue, my fear has been replaced by anger. How dare he have sought shelter in
my
refuge? How dare he have frightened me so badly that I was thwarted in my goal of an hour of solitude? How dare he have evicted me from my park? I am furious with that filthy, crazy man, and I am furious with Central Park, too. The Angel of the Waters has proved herself a treacherous and disloyal guardian, sheltering crazed homeless men with the same benign grace she extends to me. Why is it that loving something provides so little protection from betrayal?