Before (16 page)

Tika remembers Jordan Hall, the great egg shape of the place, the hush in musical silences, the “Hallelujah Chorus” being sung beneath them, and the opened choir books looking like a flock of birds wanting to fly. The thing with the handicapped space still bothering her. Evelyn Bristol's face intent, glasses on her nose, and Susan's profile looking already like her mother's.

“Evelyn's always asking Susan these questions, you know, ‘Susan, do I look good in this blouse, should I get my lips Botoxed, should I lift my chin, should I have had sex with this guy on the first date?' Just like, this narcissist. Susan just laughs about it after and says her mom is so whacked, but I can tell it fucks her up. It seems to me some of this is stuff a mother should
never
be talking to her daughter about; then she mixes that with the normal criticism, you know, ‘Susan, you ought to be more careful with your money; Susan, you look heavy in that color,' shit like this. I don't know what happened with Susan's dad but I can see why he didn't hang around.”

Jesse nods thoughtfully, then disengages his hands, saying, “Thanks, Tike.” He takes a bite of his burger. He's ordered the Macho Burger—it is the only thing he ever orders—and he can barely get his mouth around it. His eyes through the glasses, so busy concentrating on the burger, make Tika smile. When he's swallowed and brushed his lips with a napkin he says, “So you mean Susan feels like she has to go to extremes to find her own world, her own, what did you say?
Unconditional
—”

“Yeah, and probably she gets it, somehow, from Stuart. That's what Anna says.”

“Well,” Jesse says, dipping a fry into ketchup, “I'll guess he loves up a good
game,
Tike. Men are good at it. You act a little caring and get the girl in bed as long as you want, and then you say you need some space and go through like a week of her bitching at you and then it's freaking over. Some guys don't even bother listening to the bitching. And this guy's got it good. Because he can come here and have the sex whenever he wants and when it gets too heavy,
pow,
he just goes to Australia. And what can she do to him? Well, I guess she could call his wife?”

Tika considers. “A few days ago I would have said she wasn't capable of it, of breaking up a family. But she's doing it anyway, right? And like Anna told me, I'm realizing that I just don't know her. That's the saddest part of this. I had a friend, and now I don't know who the hell she is.”

Jesse and Tika watch each other, holding their burgers. Neil Diamond is ending his song,
“leaving me lonely still…,”
and Tika knows that Jesse is thinking about her own father, wondering what he can say.

“He was the most
romantic,
” Tika says, and her father is here with her, walking a cobblestoned street, ancient tenements of Rome behind him, a dry evening wind whisking his tie over his shoulder.

“Who?”

“My father. You were thinking about him.”

“I was thinking about how close you were to him.”

“Oh, we
were
close,” Tika says. “You always felt closer to your
self
after being with him.”

“I know what you mean,” Jesse says. “Some people are like that. Some people you hang out with, and when you leave them, after being at a party or whatever—”

“You feel better about who
you
are. Because they care about being with you instead of showing off how great
they
are. Dad was just like that,” Tika says. She is quiet a few moments as Jesse goes after his burger again; she remembers her father meeting her in Italy, bundling her into his arms. Happily buying her the Leica set in Rome, saying,
You will love the photography, it will help you see the world, honey
. Remembers him on the Spanish Steps and at the Fountain of the Naiads; mornings that autumn when he said a cheery,
Hello, pretty lady,
to the heavy woman who owned a market near their hotel and how the woman smiled and peered out at them from her doorway, vegetables and hams and sausage hanging from her walls with twine; the women vendors on that street joked and flirted shamelessly with Tika's father.

Her father: Jean-Louis LaFond. A former French tennis ace with a quick, warm smile. A rainy evening, looking from the Gardens of Lucullus over the Piazza del Popolo to St. Peter's Basilica, the wetness on the tar making lights glow, the dome against a pink and purple sky. October. The clean-shirt-cologne smell of him as Tika leaned against him, closed her eyes. Her father's lips on the crown of her head, his hand across her forehead. Now in her memory it is the September before Rome, when her father still lived at home, in Andover, in northern Massachusetts.
Around now, around this time in September,
she will tell Jesse. She will tell him now, and she will tell him again much later, in darkness, in more detail, after they have made love.
I looked down at the light with Kascha.
Tika was thirteen, Kascha sixteen; after school they had gone to the nearby lake on bicycles—swum to rafts that had not been taken in yet, up the ladder and dripping over those dry boards, adjusting bathing suits and then lying out on warm wood, watching the sun drift through clouds. Clouds darkening and a light rain starting, and they rode home, laughing, through increasing downpour. Then they showered, Tika after Kascha, and when Tika came out of the bathroom she expected to hear her father and mother downstairs, getting ready for dinner, but what she saw instead was her sister, in the darkened bedroom, at the window. Tika joined her there, looking through rain at the pool house where her parents were, the light blazing through the dark evening, white squares of evening grass, the pool a long, dark rectangle. The rain made a steady, hushing sound but Tika heard her mother's raised voice sometimes, a sound of betrayal, and in that sound Tika saw her father at the club where he taught most of his tennis lessons, that place that smelled so clean, outdoors and in, smiling at other, younger women. This had never surprised her, for she knew the way that women changed around her father; the way their voices grew light with him, as though they would never offer a burden to him with their presence. And she had seen her mother for years move away from her father's touches in the kitchen, sometimes brushing away his hands; it had always disturbed her. She saw her parents now walk across the window of the pool house, mostly her father in motion, his hands making gestures as if to the sky and then dropping to his sides in futility, their mother's voice, briefly rational, steeping into that sound of betrayal, and the circus of her father's arms would begin again, and her mother's voice would drop low, always putting in the last word.

Then her father stepped out into that straight rain. Not caring about it, raindrops drowning his khaki slacks and white shirt. That rain coming down as he walked to the driveway, to his car; once he looked up at the window and saw his daughters there.
What did we look like to him at that moment?
Tika wonders now, speaking into Jesse's eyes.
That last moment, my dad must have known, when we would be together on the same ground, in the same home.
For even if the bond between Tika's mother and father had been tenuous, and you'd had to force yourself to believe the circle was complete, they
had
been a family. Now that had been broken; they had ceased being a family a few minutes before, in the pool house, when something her mother said convinced her father that he'd had enough, his spirit could not live with her cloying coldness, a woman who wanted him to stay for appearances but who no longer wanted
him
. Tika thought that, on some level, her mother had still needed a certain intimacy, but it was some complicated, unstated intimacy that her father had no hope of creating for her. Maybe in the pool house her mother and father had simply formalized, or recognized, years of lying, of waking in the morning and going through the motions before the liberation of jobs: her mother driving to her job at the public relations firm in Newburyport, her father to the Andover Racquet Club—work neither had to do, for they had come from extremely well-to-do families.

“—he was looking up at us and his white shirt was all streaked and Kascha and I were crying,” she says now. “And he could have been just going to town to get away from her for a while but we knew, and I could tell he was crying, too. Because he wanted to come up and tell us, like all the other times, that everything would be all right, that sometimes he and Mom just didn't get along. But he couldn't lie to us. And he put his head down and walked across to the car and for a moment I thought that he might be back soon, at least, but then Kascha and I just knew he wouldn't come back to the house and we couldn't even fucking
speak,
we started crying so hard. I mean, they both had affairs. But my mother—it was like she just lived in some other fucking
uni
verse when it came to emotions. I can remember how Kascha for a while started playing flute—she really got good at it—but if she picked it up to play anywhere around my mom, my mom just left the room—”

“Why?
Je
sus,” Jesse says.

“Because it was
emo
tional,” Tika says. “Like anything
emo
tional she walked out on. She still does. Kascha took things like that hard. She won't admit it, but she did. Who knows how it happens? I mean, my mother's parents were all right but
religious
as all get-out, and sometimes my grandmother could be a really cold fish. Shit like that just runs in families, that coldness just goes on and on until somebody stops it—”

Jesse is watching her; his family, blue-collar and close, from Haverhill, is a loving one, and he doesn't understand this. She watches him think about it. Then he says, “But your dad must have seen something in your mom, early on—”

“Oh yeah.” Tika waves a French fry, dips it into ketchup, and takes a bite. “Oh, my mother was bea
u
tiful all right, and I'm sure she was warm once, before the marriage started going south. She's a good enough actress when she needs to be. And my dad was this handsome tennis professional who had competed at Wimbledon, and she could show him off to all of her society friends. And he tried a few businesses of his own and when they didn't work out I think my mother saw him as a failure. You could hear it in their conversations. Like she started talking down to him.”

“And suddenly being the handsome tennis pro you could show off wasn't good enough.”

“Exactly.” Tika has a moment of remembering her father teaching her to serve when she was twelve, the easy toss, the smooth bend of body, his racket back and coming forward powerfully, and people above the court, pressed against glass, watching. There was the father-smell of the place, of newness, plastic and rubber, nylon netting, tennis balls, aluminum rackets, the sound of being within a huge funhouse cave.

“But after the split-up he went to France, and Kascha was already on her first modeling assignment in Milan, and Dad called her and she spent time with his family in Aix-en-Provence—they're really great people, I want you to meet them”—she imagines this, Jesse being hugged in the living room of the old stone château, seeing this warm part of her family—“and then he called me, and I was pretty angry, ending up in high school in Andover, my sister and my father gone, my sister having this glamorous life and my mother not wanting me to see my father. And my father called me up when he knew my mother would still be at work, and he said, ‘Why don't you fly to Milan, and I'll pay for it, and we'll visit your sister and then the two of us can go to Rome? And you can tell your mother you've just gone to see your sister, if she has a problem with it.' Of course she had no problem with Dad paying the ticket. And I didn't tell her about seeing him. And Dad knew Rome really well and he took me everywhere. And he was so happy I was there; he'd just spent a week with Kascha, and he was really proud of her and her career, and I could feel he was proud of me, too, even though I hadn't done anything that year but flunked geometry and advanced biology
both
—”

“But you were his daughter. None of the rest of it mattered.”

Tika nods, feels her eyes brimming. “Mostly, in Rome, we just talked. There are these steps near the Spanish embassy, and we would sit there for hours together talking, watching the world go by. Things were easy with Dad. He made you feel like anything was possible.”

She wipes her cheekbone with the back of her hand, and Jesse takes the hand and kisses it. Billy Joel is singing about how it is such a lonely world, and Tika is imagining a week after she left Rome, her father driving in the Italian Alps. There was a woman with him. In newspaper accounts afterward the woman looked stunning, with long dark hair, demure eyes and lips—nothing like Tika's blond mother. Tika feels—she always does when she thinks of this—the highway blurred in front of the Citroën, clouds over the breathtaking valley. Then bikers there, by the side of the road, one of them falling and others swerving and her father swerving the car and another car rushing up around the curve and hitting the Citroën solidly in the back right side, sending it into a spin, and how it must have sounded when they went through the guardrail and the tires lost the ground and the car went into space: light, a moment of sun spinning above and the rushing in your ears, the screaming of the woman.

Tika stood there, at that curve in the mountains, a few days later, with Kascha, the two of them holding each other. The light was flat and together they'd watched the mountains, the valley.

Jesse is holding her hand tight against his forehead, his eyes closed, as if joined with her in prayer. Then he opens them and looks very directly at her. In Aix-en-Provence it was snowing, the flakes landing on the backs of her fingers as she touched the earth, her father's grave. Kascha beside her. Her French family, her mother, standing around the girls.