Now You See Him (15 page)

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” I said.

My father nodded, as if he expected this. With an effort, he struggled to his feet, and began walking into the bedroom. I saw his frailness, his unsteadiness on his feet, and it took an effort of will to keep up my rage. But I managed, feeding it the pieces of his lie and of the loss in my life I’d never be able to make up. He paused at the entrance to the room and said, “You’re turning this nasty, which must be what you wanted to do. Well, what I want you to know, before I tell you to go to hell forever—”

“Larry,” my mother said.

He raised his hand like a traffic cop, palm up. “What I want you to know is that first of all, people who live in glass houses, you get me? If you’re having an affair, that’s fine and your business. But if out of that affair you have a child, then what? As for myself, I was out of the loop here. I was the injured party. Do you think I was happy with the situation, you little shit?”

I heard my mother gasp. In all our life, growing up, “off-color” words had never been spoken.

“I did my best to love you as my own child and I tried always to think of you that way, as my own flesh and blood. I used to talk about you, did you know that? Yeah, I used to brag about you. Those papers you published in college in the
Biological Review
—I don’t think there was an ear in Monarch I didn’t bend. You forget, because you’ve got this chip on your shoulder, that I walked you through life. Maybe I was shut down on some levels, but you never wanted for anything. What parents do—does it add up to anything in the book of life? Who knows. But you see only one side of things, Nick. I understand you’re grieving now. It was terrible what happened to you—maybe, but on the other hand, maybe not. And I’ve got my grief too. I’m old and heading out into the dark. I could be bitter about it, I could resent and blame, but what’s the point, and why should I? I’m what I made of myself, not what a bunch of other people thought about me. The blame game is a waste of time. If you can make your peace with that, fine. If not, well, have fun fighting.” Entering the bedroom, he slowly shut the door.

I let out the breath I’d been holding and sat back on the couch. Distantly, like hearing Shakespeare from the
back row, I was aware that he’d given a noble speech full of noble thoughts, but mainly what I was just then was disappointed. I was disappointed because what I was craving more than anything else at that moment was to be able to slam a burning spear into his side. Somehow, although I knew my mother was as fully or even more to blame, it was
him
I wanted revenge against first;
him
I wanted to impale painfully upon the truth before I got around to her. I knew this made no sense, but it didn’t matter. I’d wanted him to be able to mark this day as the blackest, direst day he’d ever known, and instead, I felt somehow denied by him all over again.

Left alone in the room with me, my mother was hanging her head.

“I feel like a middle-aged man witnessing his first primal scene,” I said, and laughed mirthlessly. “I feel almost perfectly empty, in fact.”

“I understand,” she said. And then, after a moment, tentatively, she asked, “Do you mind if I say something?”

“No.”

“I’m not sure anything happens finally for a reason, Nick, despite what religion says. Sometimes things simply happen and that’s that. Your brother,” she said in an unnaturally hushed, silent voice, “was a difficult baby, and I was alone in the big new house and your father was elsewhere, for what seemed like months on end. Men do that occasionally, especially when their firstborn children are sons, I think. They kind of go away and watch from afar, maybe out of jealousy a little bit, and other things as well. And then I was so tired, tired like eating sand, tired like forgetting I’d ever had energy and ever would again.”
She stopped, thoughtful, waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on, “But what I want you to know is this, Nick. I loved your father. I loved him then, after what happened, and I love him now. People do foolish rash things, like I did, without stopping loving. It’s the human heart, that strange thing.” She smiled sadly, knit her hands together and unknit them again. “And I can tell you something else as well, which is that finally, after you were born, when the worst of your father’s anger began to lessen, and he could talk to me again, and he told me he still loved me, well, I don’t think I’ve ever loved a person more in my life. Sacrifice,” she said, “is very beautiful in a man. Some of the noblest things in life come as the result of sacrifice.”

She was expecting me to speak, and I raised my head and looked at her from the far side of all I’d learned in the last few weeks. For a long moment, I struggled to find the warm undisturbed deeps of the heart where compassion lived. But compassion at that moment eluded me. I thought suddenly of Rob Castor, and a bitter, strangely copper taste rose in my mouth, and the blood beat hard in my head while I looked at the woman who had brought me into this world and I told her the truth. “You disgust me,” I said, getting up to go.

W
HAT WAS HAPPENING TO ME
? I
T WAS AS
if the violent subtraction of Rob from life had produced a wind of sorts, a strong cross draft that had blown away the fake stage set of my paternity, and in doing so, helped speed the ruin of my marriage, estranged me from my children, sent my father into the hospital and, most recently, driven a stake through the heart of my relationship with the only biological parent I had left. If his death hadn’t actually caused these things, it had somehow crucially been a party to them. At bottom, added to the vulnerability of all that sheer exposure, was bewilderment. How was it that the demise of one person could have started such a spiraling, near-fatal injury cascade in another’s life?

In the days after I returned from seeing my parents, I often had the sense of fissioning into two people, one of whom, corrected by the harsh truth, could watch the other still enacting the dream of his own biological continuity.
I knew that I’d constructed an entire personality around my supposed father’s vocation of industrial chemistry. His worn books on the shelf with their endless replicating carbon-molecule diagrams had sent me floundering along the track of science and the march of deductive reason in life; his seeming inability to talk with me about any of the things I’d held most dear had produced in me an expertise in certain muted interrogatory conversational styles, the better to cross this breach, while driving me steadily toward my mother and producing in me a nearly feline awareness of other people’s thoughts. These things were the essential, originary facts of my life. They were already in the bank. They’d happened. They could not be undone. But what did it mean that they were false? Leaving aside the sickness I felt at heart, what did it mean? And what did it mean that my real father, week after week, year after year, had stared at me living my life literally fifty feet from his front door until the day of his death, and never once, for my sake, let the mask slip from his face?

Under the circumstances, it was clear that there was only one person in the world I could talk to about this. Belinda and I had had little contact after our initial liaison beyond the few scattered affectionate e-mails, because both of us, I think, had reacted to the event by retracting back, in the manner of adulterers eager to conceal our crime. Though I’d been shocked and intermittently repentant about what I’d done, I was also aware that I was capable of repeating it. The icky knowledge that she was officially my half sister gummed up that desire, even if it did not entirely extinguish it. But I called her anyway. Heartfelt conversation with Lucy was impossible right now, and as regards
other close friends, my life (like that of most men) has in part been a slow, steady shedding of the confidantes and close acquaintances of youth.

“I know everything,” Belinda said as I entered her hotel room. She was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Killbilly,” and she was holding her hands over her ears, and shaking her head with her mouth in a perfect ridged
O
of shock. “My mom told me this morning when I went over with Hiram to stage the intervention,” she said. “Oh, God”—reaching out to hug me—“but is this too wild for words or what?”

Rather than talk, for a moment, I simply held her in my arms, relishing the sturdiness of her, the warmth, and beneath that warmth, the familiar budding live energy of the front of her body.

“Belinda,” I said finally, letting go of her.

“How are you, Nick?”

“How am I?” I made a face. “Basically, numb. I feel like I’m on a reality television show and I stepped through a door and woke up in someone else’s life.”

“Well, in a certain sense, that’s exactly what happened. Come over and sit down, honey, you look bushed.”

Smiling, she beckoned me to the couch, and held my hand as we sat down together. Then she leaned forward, and stared at me a moment, big eyed, blinking.

“Brother?” she asked.

“Sister?” I responded.

“Can you believe this shit?”

“Barely,” I said.

“Actually, I’m trying to think,” she said, “if there’s an opportunity here somehow.”

“For what?”

She smiled at me from far away. “Growth.”

“I’m not sure I compute.”

“In the words of my roshi, ‘Every treasure is guarded by dragons.’ The fabric of your world got ripped open, Nick. Maybe you now have the chance to go through that opening and find your truth.”

“I appreciate the beautiful sentiment,” I said, frowning, “but practically speaking, what do I do once I find this truth? How do I process it? Are there fake-dad classes? Are there lessons you can take in how not to hate the people who brought you up in a lie?”

“Nick,” she said gently, shaking her head. “Come on.”

“No, really. I mean it. I already know I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to find out why this happened and who this man named Marc Castor was at bottom. I mean, who was he really? I know he was basically a nice guy who smelled of dry-cleaning fluid and had a year-round tan, but what motivated him to do what he did? He couldn’t have been the simple person he seemed, because simple guys don’t bang the lady across the street and never tell their own bastard kids the truth, do they?”

Saying nothing, Belinda lit a cigarette.

“The hardest thing of all,” I said, “is the knowledge that he’s not coming back, ever, and that there’s this whole world that brought me into being, and of about a million conversations to do with me and my future that I’ll never know. At the center of it all is our father.” There was a pause. “Our father,” I repeated the word, tasting it. Before I knew it, I was adding harshly, “That piece of shit!”

Belinda watched me, saying nothing.

“That unbelievable asshole piece of shit,” I said, trying it out.

She nodded, as if in agreement. Then she said, “Go on.”

“Fucking jerk.”

“More.”

“Goddamned weakling. Unbelievable shitbag coward. Total spineless fuck.”

There was another silence.

“I could cry,” I said.

She continued to study me calmly.

“Maybe you should cry, Nick. Maybe that’s exactly what you should do.”

“Will you help me?” I asked.

“Help you?”

“Tell me something to make it happen?”

“To cry?”

“Yes. Tell me something I don’t know? I’m gonna spend the rest of my life filling in blanks. Tell me something solid I can hold on to and get fucked up over, please.”

She furrowed her brow. “Why?” she asked.

“Because I need it. Tell me”—the words appeared in my mouth without me thinking—“about his death.”

“What?”

“Tell me how he died,” I said, relishing the finality of the words, “tell me about it. It’s the last time he was in the world. I wanna know about it. Tell me, Belly.”

She took a long, thoughtful inhale on her cigarette. “You want,” she said, as if to reassure herself she’d heard right, “that I tell you about his death.”

“Yes,” I said.

“His death, right.”

“Please.”

“Okay.” She shook her head, composed herself a second before she spoke. “Well, his death was like most…deaths, actually. One day he was there, and the next he wasn’t.”

“How did he go?” I asked.

“I guess the best answer is gently. It was like smoke drifting out the window.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Actually”—I watched her eyes narrow slightly as she concentrated, remembering—“I’m convinced he wanted to leave, at the end. The cancer had hollowed him out like a seashell, and he couldn’t do much. On top of that, the pain meds had destroyed his memory, and so he just lay there, while we played house around his bed. It was this big theater piece in which we pretended that he was just a little bit indisposed and would get better soon, even though we all knew he wouldn’t, including him.”

I grabbed her hand, squeezed it. “Good,” I said, “this is beginning to hurt. I like it.”

She rolled her eyes, cigarette in her mouth. “My mother was the main actor in the thing. She was such a self-involved bitch that it kind of surprised me what a trouper she became when the chips were down. She spent what seemed like weeks camped out next to him in bed, reciting her lines, which were that everything was going to be okay, and that they were going to try it all over again, the two of them, and this time, they’d get it right. I’d never felt they liked each other all that much, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way she was behaving toward the end. He couldn’t eat or sleep much by then, and she curled him up on her lap and sang him this crazy song about how
young and beautiful he was, and how he was sweeping her off her feet, and he listened and smiled and even seemed to enjoy it. It was his good-bye kiss, his last generosity. That basic kindness of his—I’m not sure what good it ever did anybody, but it makes him a hell of a man in my eyes.”

She stubbed out her cigarette.

“Better,” I said. “It’s killing me. Keep going.”

“Nick,” she said.

“Make me cry!” I was suddenly adamant. “Just do it!”

She muttered something indistinct to herself, and then raised her eyes and looked at me, nearly challengingly. “The last thing he said to me was that he would always love me,” she said in a strong, clear voice, “and that he’d known, even when I pretended to hate him when I was a teenager, that I didn’t, and that I was just being a kid. That was when I started crying, even though we’d all agreed none of us would in front of him. He smiled then, like he knew I’d just busted up our agreement, and I grabbed his hand and held it. We sat there for a while, saying nothing, while I listened to his breathing, which was thick and slow. The hospice worker who was there must have alerted everyone, because then the room silently filled up with the rest of us. I think he was relieved actually, I think he was happy the last part was beginning. Very slowly, his breathing got deeper and raspier, his eyes closed, and someone held his forehead, and each of us held one of his hands. They were beautiful hands, and you could tell they’d belonged to someone who knew how to do things in life. I sat there as the hands gradually unclenched. I don’t know how much time went by. The morphine was hitting pretty
hard, and I held his wrist while the pulse grew slower and slower. It was like his heart was climbing a staircase right out of his body. There had to be a last pulse, and there was. There was a pulse where his spirit took leave of his body. I imagined it as flinging a leg out forward over the void, and then stepping away forever. His face was utterly calm. Good-bye, I said. There was a chorus of whispered good-byes from around me. Good-bye. Good-bye. I kissed him on the forehead. Someone pulled me away from him. I don’t remember much after that.”

“Thank you,” I said stiffly. And then, furiously, I was crying at last. “Thank you very much.”