The Lost Father (76 page)

I
FASTENED ON MY WATCH
as I was leaving the motel. I checked out. I could drive back to San Francisco, I promised myself, in eight hours. This I just had to get through. And why? Because they expected it. He did.

When I walked into their duplex it was full of people, and I let myself stand still and answer questions. It was easy once I decided to give up all control.

There were five Egyptian young men, all more foreign-looking than my father, none of whom spoke much English. Then there was their mother, a heavy, graceful woman in several sweaters, and their sister, who was eighteen, ample, pretty in a way with many moles, and neither of them spoke any English.

And there was Diane Thayer. The day was worth it because of Diane. She was large the way some people are large, only on top, as if the bottom half of her body had been squeezed. Her hair was long, a dry limp mouse color, and her face was patched with pimples. She sure wasn’t the horse girl I’d imagined.

“Youse people cut it out,” she said. “Talk in English.”

All day there was a lot of food. First we drove to the Hyatt Hotel and ate from an enormous buffet. A man stood in a little enclave of heated aluminum plates making omelettes to order. There were piles of fruit, bowls of salads, trays of eggs Benedict, hams, bacon, prosciutto. There were two whole long tables of desserts. There was pasta. There were cooked entrees, chickens, hot vegetables. I stuffed myself even though I couldn’t taste anything. My throat hurt and I kept eating. He sat in the middle of the long table, with me on his left, Uta on his right. He kept filling my champagne. He talked raucously in Arabic so Uta had to say, “John remember, Mayan can’t understand you when you’re speaking in Arabic either.”

“I keep remembering you as Momo,” I said. That was what my mother called him.

“His name is John now,” Uta said.

“That’s my name too,” he said.

“Honey, don’t you remember? We agreed. His name here in this country is John. We call him John.”

Fuzil, the lightest of my cousins, kept staring at me. Now he asked me, “We thought you were a TV broadcaster. Or radio. There was supposed to be an Atassi doing that in Ohio, I think.”

“But she isn’t Atassi, is she?” Uta said. “Do you go by the name of—”

“No. Mayan Stevenson.”

He put his head down. No one said anything. That passed.

“But you are part of the Atassi clan now,” Sahar said with flourish, “and you will attend our next Atassi summit!”

There were loud jokes and toasts. More champagne. The aged, large Egyptian mother sat, lifting embroidery from her lap and working serenely, not understanding a word of the English looping past and participating as seldomly in the Arabic, only once in a while reaching a hand over the top of her daughter’s glass. Her eyes had a calm, straight quality of timelessness, as if she would sit in her sweaters and embroider wherever she was, wherever her energetic children carried her and put her, but in her vision there would always be the shimmering deep patch of field I’d seen in her backyard in Egypt.

They were spirited boys, lovely, full of an immigrant’s uproar and victory, a buoyant charm. Nora, the eighteen-year-old girl, kept smiling generously. But the truth was, I didn’t care anymore. Now that I’d found him, I couldn’t have cared less about Egyptian cousins.

It was an indolent day. It had to do I think with the weather. After brunch we went to a place that had steps going down to the river. The boys and my father helped the women down, as they stepped cautiously in their fragile shoes. We sat at tables by the river and then there was more champagne. I lapsed in boredom and felt the sun on my skin, I turned my face towards the easy pleasures. The day after getting what you wanted. The vague twitter of birds shimmering aloft in color.

“Here you go,” my father said, handing me a tinfoil and cellophane bouquet of four grocery store roses. We were standing by my car saying good-bye. I had both his phone numbers now.

I had recognized him and he did not know me, his only child.

13

B
UT THAT DAY
—that—didn’t last.

It hangs there, discreet, a gem crystal, but it’s one day in with all the other days of my life.

Over time he was still a man who had left his family and not tried to find us. I learned that people cannot be more or better than their lives. For one day they can. But everyday matters more. Love is only as good as days.

I think of my grandmother now more than I think of him. “She saved you from a lot worse,” Timothy said once.

At first it seemed amazing. So he was a restaurant maitre d’ living in Modesto. All the time he was just there. A month or so after I came back, Emily was over once and the phone rang and I picked it up and said, “Oh, hi Dad.” And just Emily’s face.

He was only a man with his own troubles who didn’t manage to keep track of his wife and child. After all those years, I was wrong about him. He was only a man.

L
ATER, IN LITTLE BITS
, I tried to get from him what I needed.

You know what I want to ask you sometime and I’m afraid to ask you this because I think you’ll think I’m mad which I’m not—but sometime you have to like, write me a letter or tell me or something why you … got out of touch with me.

Yah.

’Cause I think it’s a—I don’t mean to make you feel badly, I really don’t, just—I think it causes me problems in my life.

Okay.

Not with you, really, but with men almost—

Sure, sure.

I kind of want to know why just so I can know—

Sure. I will.

And I’m not mad!

I know.

It’s not that, it’s just one of those things I kind of need to know.

I think really, I will write it down but in a, you know, in a brief summary, it had nothing to do with my love for you, Mayan. You know what it is—I was totally irresponsible, you know, I was a spoiled little—

Why is that? Because you were from a rich family?

I was selfish. I was brought up without a sense of—that, you know, you, in this life, you really have to really fend for yourself and you have to care and you have to do these things. So I was torn between feeling, here I am, I have a daughter that I really loved but at the same
time I’m saying, gee I want to enjoy life for myself, I want to be selfish.

What was the selfish part? What was fun for you at that age? That was probably about my age now.

Oh, a lot of things. I mean, you know, I did a lot of traveling, I did this, I did that.

Girls? Gambling?

Sure, combination of both. But I’ll write it down. I’ll put some of my feelings down on paper in some detail for you. I understand. I will. The old question is when you get to a certain age, you say I wish I could turn the clock back. But you can’t you know. Anyhow. Your mom was a spoiled brat too. We both were. Though we came from different cultures, different backgrounds. They weren’t so rich. But she was spoiled. We both were selfish. We had some bad habits, some artificial goals and artificial values.

What did you want in life then?

Huh?

What did you want from your lives?

Oh, lots of things I guess but, I don’t know. I think the objectives are unrealistic, lots of dreams, you know. Your mom wanted to get a Ph.D. and she wanted to conquer the world with her education and this and that. And I wanted to get my Ph.D. and do other things, you know.

(I’d discovered one reason I’d have never in a hundred years guessed I wanted my father: to quiz him about her, what she was like when she was young. He was already far less mysterious. Her glitter and distance remained a solid crown.)

I always thought she wanted high society and fancy parties and dresses more.

I don’t know. I think she probably wanted both.

But she was really serious about her education at one point?

Sure. Oh sure.

Because she’s not like that so much now.

High society now probably.

No, she’s sort of like semi-spiritual.

Well, spirituality will help.

In her thirties, she wanted beautiful dresses.

Maybe that’s why you take the opposite extreme, huh? My feeling was, maybe you’re rebelling against that.

Actually I’ve been buying clothes lately, too.

I
WAS
. Even though I was supposed to be learning architecture and proving myself all at once. I won one of those competitions I’d sent off sketches for when I flunked out of school. A tiny commission. Still, it was six months’ rent. But I wanted other things too now. Things to the right and the left. Some days all I wanted to do was buy dresses.

I
WANTED PEARLS
. I wanted something from my father.

I don’t know which came first.

I was different now, greedy to catch up all at once. All the things to the right or the left of the straight road, the silly things I never picked up, the glittery things I’d had no time for.

I’d started dreaming of dresses. A perfect black pleated aerodynamically impossible party dress.

And pink luminous pearls, with green and blue echos.

I
N THE YEAR
since we met he’d sent me two presents. The first was for my birthday and he called several times before it arrived; he was nervous about its value. It was a thick gold-chain necklace. I’d noticed that all my Eygptian cousins wore gold chains around their necks. I studied it under the kitchen light. It was marked 18K in tiny letters. By Christmas it was a bracelet, interlocking links, some shiny, some frosted gold. This was gold plate.

I didn’t get the bracelet until late. I went to Racine for Christmas. When I got home I waited two weeks and then wrote a note. He called irate, because I hadn’t acknowledged receipt of his gift.

“Did you get my note?” I asked him.

“No. I never got a thing from you,” he said.

Timothy said it probably made him feel better, that he had something to be mad about.

But we seemed to get over that. And in one of our regular conversations I determined to ask for pearls. But once he was on the phone it wasn’t easy. He was mild but the way he talked didn’t open many nets for questions.

“Not too bad, not too bad,” he said. “Put a beautiful tree in yesterday. What kind, oh, it’s just a tree, I don’t know.”

“Like a pine or deciduous? Does it have leaves?”

“Yah, sure it has leaves.”

He asked how things were with my boyfriend. This was a guy I’d had three dates with. His voice had a nervous quality when he asked that, as if my condition were fragile. He made me feel like I was old, twenty-nine, and not that pretty. So if this guy left, that was it.

But I tried to be jaunty. “Well, he’s kind of short but other than that he’s cute.”

“Sometimes you have to make some adjustment, some compromise. You’d like to wait for everything but then everything might not come along, Mayan. I guess the most important thing really, is if there’s something that clicks inside then you know there’s something that’s going on. But if you’re feeling cold like a fish then you can’t force yourself to like him.”

“But with Uta you didn’t have it really.”

“No, not really.”

“And you had it with my mom and lookit how that worked out.”

“Sure, sure that’s true.”

“What would happen if you ever met my mom again? Do you think you guys would fight?”

“I honestly don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t see any reason to do that. I don’t know. I don’t have that answer either, you know. Crazy life, huh. All kinds of tough questions. Tough questions, yah.”

“You probably aren’t friends with many people from that time in your life and she isn’t either. So those are years that maybe no one else remembers but you two—like your college years.”

“Sure. That’s probably true.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Healthwise? I went to see the doctor day before yesterday and he says I have to give them a five-six day journal of my eating habits.” He always had a certain delicacy talking about his own condition. He seemed to visit doctors a lot. “When you were talking about that other subject, there was somebody standing here so I couldn’t discuss it freely with you. It’s an interesting question, though. I don’t know. It tingles something inside you know.”

“I bet.”

“Well it does.”

“Dad, do you have any things from your family, like jewelry or anything, because all these girls in America have pearls from their families, like pearls their fathers gave their mothers or their grandfathers gave their mothers or something.”

“I don’t know, I’ll check. There’s a few suitcases I have. I haven’t even opened them. But I’ll check. I’m going to work on it. And if we don’t find something, we’ll fake it. I’m going to fake it.”

M
OST OF OUR CONVERSATIONS
now ended up with me talking about my mom. What was she like then. I wanted him to give her something: money, her life back.

I wanted him to have to send her a monthly check. I hadn’t found a way yet, to ask.

M
AI LINN AND
E
MILY
were intrigued by the pearls. It was us again, sitting in a triangle, but this time in a New York restaurant with our elbows on the table.