We'll Always Have Paris (17 page)

My mother’s voice shot up an octave as we passed the corner and neared the elegant entryway. “The corner is fine. I want to stretch my legs.”

“Are you embarrassed of your limo, Princess Ragu?” my father asked. “Because I can class it up a bit for your new friends.” He tipped his black newsboy cap, which could pass as a chauffeur hat.

“Just drive around the block. I want to stretch my legs before I go in,” she said, laughing nervously because she knew my father was onto her.

“Not on your life,” my father said, pulling his dilapidated ketchup-colored Pinto into the cluster of limousines. “Stay put.” He got out of the car and walked to the passenger door to open it for her. My mother giggled then pressed down on the door lock. She smiled and shook her head to tell him she was not opening the door. My father signaled that she should roll down the window.

She opened it a crack. “Just take me to the corner,” my mother said.

“If you don’t unlock that door, it’s going to get worse,” my father threatened lightly. A long white car pulled behind my father’s, and a short older gentleman, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Monopoly guy, stepped out with a much younger, taller date. My mother sank into her seat and nodded emphatically.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” my father whispered into the crack of the window. He then removed his leather jacket and laid it on the ground for my mother to walk across. “Madame,” he said haughtily.

“Oh for God’s sake,” my mother huffed. Looking back at me, she unlocked the door and opened it. “Your father refuses to grow up.” As the door opened, my father bowed deeply. My mother held out her hand and waited for my father to help her out of the car.

Popping another deep-fried shrimp into his mouth, my father laughed at his afternoon hijinks. “I think I taught your mother a very important lesson today,” he said. “If you ask someone for a ride, you need to let them take you all the way to the door. You understand what I mean by that?”

“Of course,” I replied, eating a few more shrimp than I cared to.

He inhaled another puff and promptly began hacking. “And when you have children, really watch them eat. Don’t just flip it on autopilot, because before you know it,” he said, swallowing, “they’ll grow up and move on.”

Katie and I left for Spain two days after her graduation from middle school, where she gave a commencement speech that offered classmates advice for starting high school given to her by the adults in her life. “Every time I tell grown-ups I’m going to start high school, they say they wish they could go back and do
so
many things over,” she explained weeks earlier as she sat at her keyboard typing. “So I’m making a top ten tips list.” Katie looked at me, her facial features now thin and delicate. “What would you tell kids my age?”

The question alone exhausted me. “I guess I would tell you to enjoy life, to embrace every moment and focus on the journey instead of the destination.”

“Yeah, I’m looking for something a little pithier,” Katie said.

“Fine, tell them that passion is fleeting, but the Internet is forever.”

“That’s good,” she said, tapping the keys.

I thought about whether or not I was really embracing the moments in my own life. Some of them were easy, like dinner parties with William’s great cooking and a houseful of laughter. I organized theater nights for our friends. And Katie was now a good enough piano player to do sing-along nights. Other moments were less embraceable. When the toilet backed up; buying a new phone plan; the time our roof sprang multiple leaks in a rainstorm and our home became an obstacle course of water-filled buckets. Even with the drudgery, though, life was relatively smooth, which in some ways made me more afraid of dying.
This
is
too
good
, I would think, lying awake in bed.
It
can’t last. The other shoe will soon drop and it’ll be a fatal blow to my head.

William warned me that one day we really are going to get old and die. “Why waste energy worrying about the inevitable?” he asked.

I looked at him incredulously. “You are not Jewish, are you?”

***

I was amazed at how fast Katie and I could run down the crowded streets of Madrid. Being chased by bulls didn’t hurt. The ground beneath us rumbled as thousands of human feet—and hundreds of hooves—pounded through the winding streets of the Spanish capital. From the corner of my eye, I saw an angry bull gore a man then leave him bloody for others to trample. I turned back, but Katie grabbed my hand. “Keep moving forward or they’ll kill you,” she shouted. We flew through the narrow, dusty streets until something reached out from a doorway and pulled us in. My back slammed into the stone wall, which was surprisingly cushioned.

Katie was already in the doorway with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. My father reached to light it for her.

“I knew you weren’t really dead!” I said, gasping at the sight of him.

“You say that every time,” he replied, laughing. It was so good to hear his voice again. He sported a vintage Nathan’s T-shirt, well-worn jeans, and leather clogs; his hair was thick with long sideburns.

I grabbed his hand before it lit Katie’s cigarette. “Don’t let her smoke,” I scolded. “How did you get here?”

“Same way as usual.”

“Are you staying?” I asked.

“It’s just a quick visit to say hello,” my father said. “Let me be the first to wish you a good morning and welcome you to Madrid where the local time is now seven o’clock.”

“Am I dreaming?” I asked. He nodded to confirm. “Why do you only visit in my dreams?”

“You couldn’t handle knowing I’m real, but if I come to you in dreams, you’ll always have doubt.” He paused. “The captain has now turned off the seat-belt sign.” He shook my shoulder and told me to wake up. Then again.

“Wake up, Mommy. We’re here.” I opened my eyes to see Katie tilting her head down to look at me.

“I slept on a plane?” I said in amazement.

“You took an Ambien and passed out a half hour after we left New York,” Katie informed me.

“That explains a lot,” I said, standing.

“Another freaky Ambien dream?” Katie asked. I nodded. “You should try counting sheep or something non-hallucinogenic.”

I told her she was right, but that was my third time taking Ambien and the third time in my life I had fallen asleep without a struggle. “How do you feel, Katie?”

“Good,” she chirped as we exited the plane.

“So do I,” I said, amazed. “I totally accept that it’s morning.”

“Me too,” Katie shared. “Is it possible we beat jet lag?”

“I think we did.”

We decided to save the taxi fare and try our hand at navigating Madrid’s subway system. At fourteen years old, Katie was like a giraffe as she towered over me with her long skinny legs, knobby knees, and a head quizzically tilted. Katie walked toward the city map near the subway entrance and plotted our course.

“Aren’t you little Miss Christopher Columbus!” I said.

“Let’s hope not.”

***

We checked our bags at our hotel near Plaza Mayor and walked toward Retiro Park with a few pastries and coffee we’d picked up along the way for a breakfast picnic. Katie and I soon discovered that sitting on early morning grass sounded charming but was actually just wet, so we relocated to a wooden bench under the canopy of a tree and watched rowboats make their way about a small pond rimmed with stone columns and statues.

An hour later, we were walking through the cool halls of the Reina Sofia Museum, admiring one of Europe’s largest art collections. “Isn’t it funny that the San Diego Museum of Art is doing a huge exhibition of Spanish art, and some of the pieces are on loan from Madrid?” Katie said.

“You worried we’re missing out?” I asked.

Katie snorted. “Mom, we’re in Spain. I’d hardly call this missing out.”

“Yeah, and the exhibit will be in San Diego for a month after we get back,” I thought aloud.

“You’re not exactly a Zen master, are you?” Katie teased.

We went on for hours, giggling as we renamed paintings. We replaced our old game of imitating pretentious art critics with pretending we were master painters in psychotherapy.

“Tell me, Pablo,” Katie began in her best Freud accent. “Vhy all ze bulls everyvhere? Bull, horns, horns, bulls. I zink ve have some issues.”

Putting on my syrupy compassionate voice, I added, “Tell the bull how you feel. Now what does the bull say back to you, Pablo? Be the bull.”

Katie giggled. “That sounds like Daddy.” She was right. Nothing pleased William more than when one of us came to the breakfast table with reports of an odd dream. His eyes lit up over his morning coffee as he offered a session of his chair therapy/dream analysis. Why he is an attorney and not a therapist is a mystery to me.

After lunch, Katie turned to me and said she wasn’t well. It felt as through the ground were sloshing beneath her, she said. “I need sleep.”

We returned to the Hotel Regina and I suggested that Katie rest for two hours, but no longer. “Let’s make sure you don’t get a full night’s sleep right before bedtime, okay?” She agreed.

When Katie rose at five that evening, she asked if we could get some breakfast.

“Um, okay,” I replied.

“What are we going to do this morning?” she asked.

“Katie, it’s evening. We arrived earlier today.”

“That’s weird,” she said with a shrug. “So what are we going to do this evening?”

I explained that, while she was napping, I looked in our guidebook and realized that
Guernica
, Picasso’s oversized black-and-white mural, was housed at the Sofia Reina Museum. We were baffled at how we’d missed it.

When Katie and I were planning our trip, we agreed
Guernica
was a must-see. We loved that when Picasso painted the anti-war piece, he brought international attention to the Spanish Civil War. It was a great reminder that art really could instigate political change. And on pure visual appeal, with its more than fifty shades of gray,
Guernica
was a cubist masterpiece.

“We missed
Guernica
?” Katie asked, astounded that we overlooked the enormous canvas.

“It must be off in a special area,” I explained.

“Let’s go back and see it!”

“Now?” I asked.

“Why not? What time do they open?”

“It’s evening, remember?”

“Oh, right,” Katie said, putting on her shoes. “What time do they close?”

“Not for another few hours.”

“Let’s check it out,” she said.

I grabbed my purse.

Later, we stood before the painting, which stretched twenty-five feet across and reached eleven feet high. It was not, in fact, hidden in a remote part of the museum. It was in plain view where we had walked right past it at least a half-dozen times earlier that day.

“I can’t believe we missed this,” I said with a laugh.

Katie shook her head in disbelief. “That whole thing about us beating jet lag…” She trailed off.

“It’s called denial, my dear.”

***

I was home for the summer after my first year at college, and my father was spending some time with Rita and Arnold while he underwent a round of chemotherapy. Their lush backyard burst with colorful roses that they had planted and pruned together. In the corner was a great weeping willow that arched dramatically, creating a curtain of delicate green strands. A wooden bench faced a narrow canal where ducks visited daily, knowing they could count on my uncle for generous portions of deli bread.

“You know I was the captain of my soccer team at Brooklyn College, right?” my father said, fidgeting with his fingernail cuticles, a habit he’d taken up since he was forced to quit smoking. Well, cut back on his smoking.

“There was one game when I fouled a player and the other team went nuts. They started shouting, ‘Get him!’ For God’s sake, it was an accident. I even gave the guy the peace sign, like ‘Sorry ’bout that, man,’ but these people were out for blood. So a guy finally knocks me down, and while I’m on the ground, he kicks me in the face and his cleat splits my lip wide open.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Blood is everywhere so the coach pulls me out and tells me I need stitches for my lip.”

My aunt came out to the backyard, holding a pitcher of lemonade. A hummingbird hovered as if it were listening to my father’s story.

He continued. “I realize that if I leave the game, I’d be giving those guys exactly what they want. They would’ve taken me out.”

“Are you telling your bleeding lip story again, Shelly?” My aunt placed down glasses.

“It’s a metaphor, Rita,” he said, turning to me. “You know what a metaphor is, Jennifer?”

“I’m eighteen,” I reminded him, rolling my eyes.

“Right. Anyway, I took a sock and put it on my lip. I bit down real hard to hold everything in place.”

“Very unsanitary,” Aunt Rita added.

“I told you it was a clean sock, a spare from my bag,” he snapped. “So after I put the sock on my lip, I ran out onto the field and you know what? I scored a goal. The winning goal.” He paused to see if I understood the subtext. I did not. My aunt disappeared back into the house, and my father sighed and continued. “That’s how I feel about this cancer. I don’t want it to take me out of the game. I want for us to just stick a sock in it and keep going.”

“Stick a sock in your cancer?”

My father paused. “What I’m asking is if we can pretend everything’s normal?”

He had just been complaining that the only thing people wanted to talk about with him anymore was his cancer. My father said no one asked him about politics or music or even the weather anymore. He called himself the all-cancer channel.

On the bench, my father shifted his diminishing weight. “You’ve been staring at my knees for the last half hour. If you’re distracted by this skeleton, just tell me to put on long pants so you don’t have to look.”

“It’s so hot,” I said. “Aren’t you more comfortable in shorts?”

“I’d be more comfortable if you would look me in the eye and talk to me about anything other than cancer.”

Like a soldier receiving orders, I stiffened. “I can do that. No problem,” I lied.

I wondered what the rules of engagement were though. I knew I couldn’t talk about his illness. And I knew that I should carefully avoid looking at the parts of his body that were ravaged, like his jaw and collarbone. Or his knees and elbows as they became more pronounced with his weight loss.

Was I enough of an actress to play the role of the self-contained daughter enjoying a normal summer day with her father though? All of my teachers at acting school said that in order to be convincing in a role, one must truly become the character. I could hear them advising me to fully embody the part, to craft my blinders so skillfully and edit my language so masterfully that, in time, I would lose myself and become the part. They told me that during my time on stage, I should no longer be the real Jennifer, but the character as written by the playwright.

Still, I needed a script.

“Does this mean I can never ask how you’re feeling?”

“I feel like shit. I’m a dying man, which means I am always going to feel like shit, so I’d rather you didn’t ask because neither of us is going to like the answer.”

Don’t cry, do not cry
, I urged silently.
He
has
the
hard
part
of
the
dying. The least you can do is be strong.