Eating Memories (33 page)

Had he eyes to close he would have closed them, for the conquering radiance hurt. Until the interval of cooling, darkness was chained in the deep.

And yet darkness held alternative promises. It always had. Creation was his for the asking; that was the lesson he’d had to die to learn. With calm astonishment he realized how wrong, how deluded, he had been. The prophetic black had not been the lights-out at the end of the play; merely an expectant dimming for act one.

Cohen breathed his life into the script of the nascent universe. It would be eons before he had learned his new walk-on part and Cohen the director permitted him to draw breath.

Nothing in creation, even private creation, was hurried. But he could wait.

Author’s Note:
I’m not an autobiographical sort of writer, but I used three stories to explore my emotional conflicts with my family: “Lunch With, Daddy,” “The Holes Where Children Lie,” and “Bluebonnets.” I turned to actual personal history with one novel, Cradle of Splendor. Although Cradle relates a few events in my marriage (buy the book and guess which ones), these three stories are not autobiographical in that sense, but are distilled from various guilts1 and angers and regrets made pure in the hot caldron of fiction. In these stories I explore my relationships with my mother, with my children, and finally with my father. He was not abusive, and for many years we appeared close; but in many ways he remains as unknowable and puzzling and autocratic a figure as the stranger in this story.

She expected the house to seem smaller since her psychiatrist said that memory magnified everything.

But the house didn’t seem any tinier to her, really; it simply looked different. The carpet was mauve now and the wallpaper in the foyer had a neat silver stripe. Even the shadows cast by the few familiar things, the Queen Anne chair, the small inlaid table, seemed slightly skewed.

In the foyer the butler took her coat and she reminded herself to stand up straight and throw her shoulders back. Without conscious effort to the contrary, her head would begin to sag into its natural place between her shoulders and her back would hunch up in sympathetic protection.

She waited for the past to come crashing down around her. That didn’t happen, either.

“This way, please, Miss Sargent,” the butler said. He ushered her into the sunlit dining room where her father was waiting.

She halted in the doorway. The butler accidentally bumped against her.

“Thank you so much for corning,” her father said as he stood and whipped the napkin from his lap.

He looked so young. For the house, time had not stood still; but in deference to her father it had paused.

A dark-suited ghost, the butler made his discreet way around her. With white-gloved hands he pulled a chair out, seating her at the side of her father rather than to his front. The windows of the dining room had been planned as the centerpiece.

The butler was the perfect servant, the sort that understood the subtleties of placement; the kind that left no fingerprints, no marks of his passage. After she and her father sat the butler vanished.

Since she could think of nothing to say, she dutifully glanced out the floor-length windows to the denuded winter trees and then down into her plate. The plate was eggshell porcelain with a cobalt and gold edge, the same pattern as the White House dining room.

A footman brought the first course, an asparagus and spinach salad, then disappeared with the same wizardry as the butler had before him.

The dutiful skill of the servants gave her a sense of continuity, a sense of place. Her father had always believed household help, like children and wives, should be seen and not heard.

She toyed with a spear of asparagus. “Your message sounded urgent.” The memo that had been left on her net had had nothing of this man in it at all. Knowing her father as she did, she realized the emotion in the message had come from a well-meaning secretary.

The blue eyes across the table were cool and appraising, lacking both depth and haste. More like a machine, they’d said. Don’t let it surprise you.

But it wasn’t the lack of emotion that surprised her. It was his smooth-faced youth. He didn’t look much older than she did.

There were some differences of course; but only those who knew him intimately would have noticed. Gone were her father’s private, impatient gestures, the finger-tapping, the secret cigarette smoking. There was no ashtray on the table.

“I’m leaving for Geneva next week,” he told her.

With the ornate, heavy fork she chased a bit of egg yolk across the white china, leaving a yellow trail like a shooting star.

“A dispute between Brazil and France over some mining rights on Mars. I’m being made mediator.”

“Yes. So I read. Is that all? Your going to Geneva, I mean. There’s nothing fatally wrong with your implant or anything?”

He had the voice she remembered, not from home but from news interviews, an affectedly cultured baritone “No. There’s nothing wrong that I’m aware of.”

“Your message sounded as if you were trying to get your life in order the way dying people always do. You know, putting an end to unfinished business, and setting everything in its place.”

He turned to her. His face was a blank page. “The president has posted me overseas. For four years, unless he dies and the vice president puts his own choice in as replacement.”

She had met the vice president. She doubted that he was enough of a man to replace her father. “We haven’t seen one another for five years. I don’t get the point of meeting now.”

His smile had an artifice about it. “Five plus four make nine. That seems too long. Besides, I was at Bloomingdale’s the other day and I bought you a little something.”

The arrival of the main course saved her from pretending to be excited about the gift.

“Have you gone to see Mother?” she asked.

The hands, busy in cutting a paper-thin slice of beef, did not falter. The voice had no edge to it at all. “No.”

“I have. Every week.”

He reached for the mustard pot, the sleeve of his suit riding up to expose the gold band of his monitor. The sight made her flinch and look away. She imagined she could hear the buzz of the micro-pump that fed antioxidants and hormones into his aging cells. The thing planted in his skull acted in absolute silence. Synapses couldn’t be replenished. Instead, they were copied onto a plate of ceramic and metal, an abstract sculpture of thought.

“You shouldn’t make an icon of your mother,” he said. “It’s not healthy.”

“My psychiatrist says it is. He says it’s important for me to remember that someone once loved me.”

Neither shame nor annoyance moved in his face. “Well. Remind me to give you some flowers from the greenhouse. Roses. That might be nice.”

“Should I put your name on them? A card with ‘From your loving husband’ in large, easy-to-read letters? Perhaps I could put up a small, tasteful sign at the entrance to the mausoleum for visitors to see: This way to the eulogy of John Brian Sargent to his wife.’”

She kept her head up, her back straight, waiting with defiant, open eyes for a blow that never came. He dropped a dollop of baby-shit-colored mustard at an edge of the plate.

The taut moment dissolved, leaving her as exhausted as if he had struck her. And as confused. “Daddy? Why did you really want to see me?”

For an instant he froze, probably a brief short circuit between his dying brain and the chip. Then he speared a Brussels sprout, brought it to his mouth and ate.

In the dining room the pale sunlight from the windows darkened. A cottony snow began to fall. She put her fork down and suddenly hated him for eating. “How different are you?” she asked.

He shrugged as if the question had nothing but the most trite of meanings. “It’s hard to tell. It happens so gradually.”

“Like standing in a station and watching bits of you leave, piece by piece on a train?”

The footman came, refilled their wine glasses, and then withdrew in silence.

He said, “You always were poetic. I wonder where you got that from. Your mother and I were never very interested in the arts.”

She pushed her plate aside and turned slightly in her chair to look out the window. The edges of the hills were blurred. A line of far trees were gray. The flakes were falling so thickly that it seemed there was a mist in the air.

It was hard presenting the side of her face to her father, to anyone. The fear of a surprise attack was too strong. Her psychiatrist had said the reason she made people uncomfortable was her intense eye-contact. She wasn’t so much interested in people or what they were saying as she needed to watch for the clenching of hands and for the tell-tale signs of rage so she could duck the blow when it came.

Standing up straight. Looking away. She was getting better at both of them. But turning her cheek to her father brought ancient terrors back. She riveted her eyes to the snow and felt her hands tremble in her lap.

Between her eyes and the bright of the snow fell the shadow of the memory of her father. She was very tiny. He was crouching over her, a giant man in white-tie formal dress with fists like boulders and a face crowded with demons.

She asked, “The implant. Does it let you remember the past?”

“Of course,’ he said.

“You used to hit Mother. Do you remember that?”

Her father was slicing beef. Her question didn’t still his knife and fork. He’d always been one who put tasks ahead of family. “Yes.”

“She’d run and hide in a comer and you’d follow. You’d hit her anywhere but on her face where it might show. She lived all her life in quiet terror, afraid to scream because the servants might hear. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” he said in a bland voice. He reached for his water glass and took a measured sip.

“When I try to imagine Mother’s face, I always see her crying.”

Her father popped the last of the rice into his mouth. The footman appeared and took both their plates. In a moment he returned, put a slice of chocolate pie in front of each of them and pouted the coffee.

“When I imagine you,” she said when the servant left, “all I remember are your hands.”

Studiously he put cream and sugar into the coffee and stirred. The spoon made an understated
tink-tink
against the sides of the cup.

“You told me why you invited me. Do you want to know why I came?”

Tink-tink
went the silver spoon against the fragile china, when he wanted to be, her father could be quiet, he could be gentle. He’d always been good with inanimate things.

“I wanted to tell you I hated Mother,” she told him, “because appearances were more important to her than I was. After you’d hit me she’d say how much she loved me. And when you’d hit her she’d say you didn’t mean it. She was a liar. It’s taken some time, but now I don’t hate either of you. My psychiatrist says that both hate and love form bonds. I don’t care to have any bonds, I don’t think.”

He placed the spoon carefully on the saucer, picked up the cup and drank.

“Aren’t you going to say anything? Don’t you want to know what you created? I don’t have any friends. I’ve lived my life afraid to ask questions. I’m terrified to say what I think of the weather or if I liked a movie, because I believe the proper response is a beating. Living with you has made me learn to loathe surprises. God, don’t you remember how it was?”

“I remember,” he said. “But I can’t feel guilty.”

“Because job and country come first? Like appearances were first with Mother? So where the hell did I come in?”

“I can’t feel guilty,” he said simply.

She had opened her mouth to shout at him when she finally understood what he was saying. The sound died in her throat. Not wouldn’t—couldn’t. With the implant, regret was beyond him.

The train that she had come to confront had already left the station, and she’d never had the chance to wave goodbye. She wondered which train the last of his demons had taken.

Swallowing hard, she looked out the window again. The day was muffled as if it were wrapped in blankets. The room was warm and much too comfortable in the onslaught of cold from the windows. “So. Do you still have Ribbons? I haven’t seen him.”

A gray eyebrow quirked. “The spaniel? It died.”

“You always loved that dog,” she whispered.

“Did ? I don’t remember. I mean I recall the spaniel, but I don’t remember loving it.”

Outside on the lawn the wind failed. The snow dropped heavily and with a softness that didn’t seem quite real. In an updraft by the windows, flakes danced a vague Brownian waltz. “You remember facts, but the emotional content is gone, Is that it?”

“I can’t be sure anymore, but I believe so.” He finished his chocolate pie, drained his coffee cup, and sat back in the chair, his huge hands inert on the tablecloth, his face at rest.

“You let them kill you,” she said.

He looked at her with those odd blue eyes. There was intelligence in them, but nothing else. In his brain a quiet revolution had taken place, a bloodless coup d’etat.

“I don’t mind, really,” he said. “I don’t miss anything, I suppose. That’s the problem with making yourself important. In the end, they just couldn’t afford to lose me.”

Jack the Giantkiller had come and taken the ambition, the pride, and the impatience away, leaving behind the kindly man she’d always wanted as a father. She swiveled her head quickly to the window, wiping her eyes.

He pulled the napkin from his lap. “I have your present in the other room.”

As soon as her father started to stand, the footman was there, pulling out first his chair and then hers. With a young man’s stride, her father led her to the study. On the polished wood on his desk was a wrapped gift.

She picked it up. The paper was pink with silver bunny rabbits. The bow was white lace with a sprig of baby’s breath. It looked like a gift for the baby shower she had never had. “Birthday or Christmas?’ she asked.