The Lost Father (71 page)

I nodded.

He put the letter down. “Lower class. Uneducated. Your taxi driver fell in love with you.” He laughed. “He wants to come over here and start a life, he says. Study. It’s nothing. Throw it away. You’re not in his class. You are like Princess Diana to him.”

It was not like that. I had seen the house. I had to ask him for the letter back. He walked me to the subway station and waited until the train came. I knew he was already eyeing me to marry. I slipped into the car, waving—at least I didn’t have to worry about him trying to kiss.

M
ARION
W
ERTH CALLED ME THE NEXT NIGHT
, saying, “Well, I think I found an agent for you. His name is Tom Carson and he used to be in the military and then with the FBI. I called seven or eight of his references and they all said they had good luck with him. I’ll tell you what, see if you like this idea, I thought I’d work on it with the agent. And I thought if I learned from this and we found him, then after, we’d hire the same person and I’d help to find Callie’s mother.”

I decided then and there to send her the eight hundred dollars I’d borrowed to pay Jim Wynne, wrapped in tin foil.

J.D. Nash called me an hour later and told me there was no listing in the death index.

“So he’s alive.”

“Most likely,” J.D. Nash said. “Most likely he is.”

I started to go seriously crazy. Now I believed I would find him, and soon. I couldn’t stay still. I didn’t want to be inside. I just walked around on the street. I went into Tacita de Oro and slid onto a stool. I ordered one cafe con leche and drank it hot, fast, scalding.

Now, I decided, writing down my resolves on the napkin, I had to fire Wynne. There was more than one kind of man in the world. And I knew Marion. I trusted her. I understood her methods. They could be explained. I’d stopped trusting people who claimed to know more than they could tell me. In what I didn’t understand being truer than what you could lay out on a table and see plain. Maybe I’d stopped believing in the invisible, even to find him.

From the pay phone outside Tacita de Oro, I dialed Jim Wynne’s number. Then I hung up. This would be hard. But I made myself do it again. “Hi. It’s me. Listen, I decided I need a detective in California.”

“Awright,” he said and hung up.

That was all it meant to him. I put down the phone and started walking. I didn’t want to go home yet. It was spring already, almost warm. Now I began to doubt whether Wynne had done anything he said he had. If he’d really done a DMV check, why didn’t he come up with the older Atassis in Oakland? Farouk must have had a license. Could he have lied about everything?

There was something shoddy about him always. His mystery was all there was to him. “I’m gonna find him. I’m getting close, I know I am.” Yeah, right. He talked that way before he cashed my check. All confidence and then it’s, oh yeah, you, what’s new? He was what they meant with the old name, Confidence Man.

Still I had that one bauble from him, my father’s birthdate, which was precious. I thought of it like one yellow emerald earring.

Marion Werth and this new man in California were completely different. Tom Carson was ex-FBI. Detectives were all either ex-cop, ex-psychologist, or ex-actor. I was learning a little about the trade. No more ex-actors for me.

Marion Werth and Tom Carson called me together Friday morning and said they’d like to do Department of Motor Vehicle and three credit checks in both Nevada and California.

“That’ll cost $90,” Marion said, after Tom laboriously explained the details. “I’m keeping a close eye on the budget.”

I told them I thought Jim Wynne had already done DMV and credit.

“I’d rather go ahead and do it again ourselves, if you don’t mind.” This man sounded square-headed, crew-cutted, level.

If they found him he’d just be visible on the earth. They’d do it the old way, brick by brick by brick. There was no magic to them.

I couldn’t let them do it alone though. By then I needed the work to shape my days.

I called the chambers of commerce in Mill Valley and Sausalito for the names of their big Italian restaurants. And their big seafood restaurants. I did it like a clerk. Black women were my salvation. I called all eleven places. Nothing. They’d never heard of him.

I hated this. I wanted to be done with this and young. I wanted to wriggle into short skirts and go.

I
WAS EITHER ON THE PHONE
or idle. I found myself dreaming of dresses and planning dinner parties. But never for now. For after.

M
AYBE BY THE TIME
you found a person, they were always beside the point. You don’t need them so much anymore. What I needed most now was to find a way back to my life.

I called Marion Werth Thursday night. Just the routine checking-up-on-the-detective call. She was at the millinery store. I heard the friss of people in the background. “Mayan, I think we’ve found him. He’s in Modesto. He works in a restaurant. I wanted to wait a day before I told you and let Tom do all the double-checks.”

All I could do was ask for more. “Did you hear anything else about him?”

“Not really yet. He turned up with a California driver’s license. It all cost seventy-five dollars.”

I wanted to sue Jim Wynne. That was the first thing I thought.

He was there all along, the first place we checked. It was probably the laziness of one assistant, one of the contacts he’d talked to on the phone. Just a random typical sloppy error in the world which mattered to me and no one else. What if I’d believed Wynne and stopped?

One thing I knew, I didn’t know many things now, but one thing I did know was that waiting would have never worked. My father had no plans to find me.

The infinite ended that day.

I
MADE AIRPLANE RESERVATIONS
. For tomorrow. And then I had nothing to do. For the first time, maybe ever.

I wandered through the rooms, rubbing my hands on my jeans. Everything seemed already done. In a flurry, I went outside to the small corner market and bought oranges and flowers, waxy anemones. I bought new milk for coffee. Then I rushed back and set the oranges on the table, the flowers in a pitcher. I began to dust.

My suitcase was packed. That took no time. Now that he was found, only in California, I didn’t even think of buying a new suit. My ordinary clothes would do.

I was disappointed in more ways than I understood. That he could be found.

Disappearing was all you had to do to become somebody’s god. And maybe being found was all it took to be mortal again.

I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was discovering here. Later I dusted and cleaned the bathroom and the windowsill. I shoved open the window to the clear night air. I looked at small things randomly and for a long time. I opened my anatomy book and memorized two charts just for pleasure. The hand bones and the eye muscles. Wonder is a luxury of a certain emptiness of purpose. Wonder is the rest of the day after you find what you were looking for all your life.

On my desk, in the mess of papers where I had my father’s tiny picture, was the engraved invitation, brown on white thick paper. Emily’s wedding. It was in a week. I didn’t even know if I’d be back.

I
WENT OVER TO
E
MILY’S
, but she only had a few minutes before she had to be somewhere. I zipped her up. Still, something lovely rose in the shape of her spine, it was straight like a tulip stem.

“Listen, Emily, I found him. And I’m going tomorrow to California. I think I’ll be back for the wedding and even the dinner the night before, but I might not be. I don’t know anything right now.”

“My God, you found him. Where is he?”

“Modesto, California. He works in a restaurant.”

“Shit.” She sat down on her bed. “You’re just going to fly out there? Have you called him yet?”

“Huh-uh. I’m not giving him the chance to get out of town.”

“God, I’m jealous, kind of. I mean, what an adventure. Can I come?”

“You probably have every hour booked between now and next weekend.”

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “Three meals a day.”

“How’s all that going?”

“I saw my dad this afternoon and he told me, ‘Honey, if I’m walking you down that aisle and you don’t feel right, you go ahead and turn around and I’ll walk you back out.’ ”

“After all that money?”

“Three hundred people. And the tent. I wanted it to look like a circus tent. And it does. It’s white, with a hole in the top. So you can see the stars. Hey, I don’t have to go to this dinner. Or you could come. I could lend you something to wear. Why don’t you stay here tonight? Sleep over.”

“Okay, I will.”

“God, let me know from out there how it goes. I mean I completely understand if you can’t make it back, but I don’t even want to go through with it if you and Mai linn aren’t there. That’s the best part, you guys in those dresses. I wanted them to be like flowers. I think you’d wear it again after. I know everybody says that about bridesmaids’ dresses, but these I think you really would. And you need something like that.”

Yeah, right.

I called the detective from Emily’s phone while she was finishing in the bathroom.

“How’s New York?” Tom Carson asked. He said Marion had left to drive home. She and this man I’d never met had found my father, whom I’d been looking for all my life.

“Good,” I said. “I don’t know, I guess kind of cold tonight. I bought the ticket for tomorrow morning.”

He told me that we had a work address and a work phone number. The place was called The Lighthouse. Its address was 808 Third Street in Modesto. Emily passed me a lipstick liner. I wrote on the back of a receipt. They were all over, in her house.

“Do we know for sure he’s still there?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you what I did. I called and asked about making reservations.
And I said, well what time does the kitchen serve until? They said they usually close at eight but what time did I want?”

“That’s kind of strange for a restaurant.” It sounded shady to me.

“Yes it is. So then after the reservation chat for a few minutes I said, is John Atassi still there? And they said, oh sure. We could, if you want, get a home address but that’ll cost you about another sixty.”

“Let’s do that. And see if we can find out anything more about the restaurant too. Sounds like a front, closing at eight o’clock.”

Nothing would have surprised me.

I
CALLED HIM
again an hour later.

The address was 970 Fifth Street. “That’s as of last June,” he said.

“Sounds near Third Street.”

“Yes it is. Oh, and the restaurant is a nice restaurant. I wanted to tell you we do have an office in Modesto too, so if you run into any trouble, they’ll try to help you out. And you have Marion’s number. She says she’ll stay by the phone all day.”

I sat on the windowsill and waited for Emily to come home. You could see stars and the church across the street and the stores’ awnings on the ground floors, the upstairs lighted windows. New York looked tranquil and small that night. I wanted to come back here already. Maybe by the time you find somebody, they are beside the point.

T
HEN I WAS DRIVING
a rocket-silver car to Modesto. It was the first time I didn’t just rent the cheapest. I flew to Oakland, slept on Stevie and Helen’s little futon on the clean floor. I slept open on my back and woke easily, dark fir branches tapping the high windows, a new blue-and-white streaked sky. Stevie was still asleep, but Helen and Jane were up with me. Helen was taking corn muffins out of the oven. A wind came in from the back door, we heard the turning of leaves and pine needles shifting on the porch floor. Their life seemed simple. Helen’s kimono smelled of laundry soap. Her feet were straight and bare, the linoleum floor clean. Jane sat with her lunch box open, putting in things her mother handed her, one thing at a time.

Then I was driving, first through sleeping Berkeley, then east on
580.I pressed the computerized radio search button and sang along to every AM hit from my life I could catch the end of. Stevie was always telling me how many people died changing stations on the radio. He told me that once from his car phone, on the way to the Sierras. Then when the land spread out clear past Livermore, I turned the radio off and rolled the window down and remembered this wasn’t just any day I wanted to use up and forget. This was a day that would have to make a difference.

So then I watched the sky. I tried to remember things for a while. This was spectacular land anyway. The hills were navy shale and hard in the distance, pure slate, what you’d call mountains in the Midwest. And closer, it was only rolling hills, dry-colored, haylike, with fields and trees and pastures mixed together. The land, though, took up only a small portion, a thin strip on the bottom of what you saw because the sky that day was all things, light and dark, dull and sunshot, full of clouds and windy dashes.

I was remarking to myself to try and remember that it was a clear blowy day, the way you always thought of dumb, simple things like the weather on days like births or deaths or weddings because everything is too big and too small at the same time, and just when I’d wished I could write it down so I’d remember for sure, something broke gently and it was raining around me.

Every time I let myself think too long I started crying, not over anything particular. I was just crying and the rain kept coming over all the slick metal and glass of this warm car. You could control the heat by pressing buttons with pictures on them to blow on your ankles or warm your seat or rush to the back of your neck. I controlled the heat.

Then the road carved into the hills and on the banks of the low rises, cherry trees lurched like a misshapen exercise class half bent down in the old orchard. And the funny thing was that some of these crooked windy trees, glazed slick with rain, bandaged by gray-blue fog, some of them were in blossom, some not yet, and some trees blossomed only in a patch as if a hand had touched one part and made it glow. The way these trees had spaced themselves, twisted and deformed by weather, rain dulling everything, the dark clouds and the shadowing light made the rare blossoms seem almost miracle, a smile on a damaged child.