Wonderland (13 page)

This is what my father and I did together: we looked at art. I could have written,
My Father and I, in the Prado
or
My Father and I, at the Met
or
My Father and I, in a Gallery off the Highway Near Wellfleet
or
My Father and I, at the Corcoran
or
My Father and I, Reading
The Runaway Bunny. My father and I, looking together, everywhere. Let this one stand for all of them. I was twenty-two, and nothing much had happened to me yet. I was living in Paris for the summer, for no reason, on a small loan from my mother that wouldn’t last much past September. I wrote songs constantly, covering page after page of my notebooks with them. They were very wordy songs. I picked out chords on my guitar until my fingers bled, then callused. I listened to everything on my Discman, stopping the CDs every few bars to get the chord, hear the sound. I sang along with my Discman, loudly, on the bus and in the metro and when I was alone at night in my room at the student hostel, until my neighbor pounded on the wall we shared. I smoked cigarettes, though I didn’t want to.

By then, I towered over my crooked father; my red hair cascaded in an electrocuted free-for-all nearly to my ass; I was too thin, which made my jaw look larger, my eye sockets prominent. Men looked at me on the street, then looked again, unsure of what they were seeing: babe or freak? I could wear the shortest skirts, because my legs were so long and thin, but my feet were big, my knuckles were big, my eye sockets were pronounced. I was so nervous that I hardly ate, and I was always hungry, hungry for everything: I wanted to put all of it, every person, every city, every sound, every sight, in my mouth. I was avid, unsteady, jumpy. The men, and sometimes the women, who looked at me on the street looked again, squinting. I knew what they saw—that odd knowingness in my expression. I had seen it in the mirror myself. Sometimes it made them want me. Sometimes it did the opposite. I couldn’t predict which way it would go, and so I was always curious, always gambling.

“Yes,” I said to my father in the Orangerie. “You are a total savage. Come on. Don’t you think these are pretty amazing? The depth, the light?”

“I don’t know, Annie.” He held out his hands to the paintings, palms out. His hands were scarred; the arthritis had started to fold his fingertips. “They feel so . . . they make me itch.” He shook his head hard, like a dog shaking water out of his ears. “And this room. I feel like I’m in a tomb. Or a department store.” He smiled his bright smile, showing his crooked teeth. He glanced up at the skylight. “Maybe if we could pop that off.”

I sat down on a bench, sliding my sandal half off one foot. “No,” I said. “You’re wrong. You just don’t like nature. You don’t like nature poetry, nature writing, nature painting. You think it’s all sentimental.”

My father had inadvertently—I think it was inadvertently—centered himself amid the
Water Lilies.
It was funny, as if someone had pasted a cutout figure, a Polaroid, on top of the famous murals. I smiled. His hair was already gray, but trimmed short. He was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and black canvas high-tops. A battered brown leather jacket, his fists balled in the pockets. His always fragile beauty was turning into something different: a well-proportioned plainness, a visual decency, a rectilinearity. As if, having once been a soaring, bright-plumaged bird, or a flock of them, perched on the tops and ledges of buildings, he was now resolving into a simple box. His eyes were still that saturated blue, his gaze still restless. I could feel his keen disappointment in Monet, his sense that Monet wasn’t giving him what he came for, what he needed. He didn’t look at art so much as ransack it, turn it upside down and inside out, study its seams to see how it was made. Art never bored him, it only failed him. The
Water Lilies,
curving before and behind him, hovered in their pinks and endless shades of green, exuding so many notes of light that I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I wondered if I could write that, a set of songs inspired by the
Water Lilies.
Later on, when my father had limped off to meet his old Paris friends, the ones he’d been with in the collective, I would start. I didn’t care what he thought.

His expression turned stern. “You are totally wrong, Annie. I came up in nature. I know what it is. It’s wrong to take all the weight out of it like this, it’s like pornography. I feel like I’m looking at a huge pair of fake sugared tits.” He cupped his arms out in front of him, fingers spread. A woman with headphones standing nearby frowned, shook her head, raised a finger to her lips.

My father leaned forward, stage-whispering. “He made it too easy on people. It’s pandering. If I ever do that, shoot me.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “You were the one who wanted to come here. We could have gone to the Louvre.”

He straightened up, sober. “No, not today.”

“Why not?” I was admiring my own bare foot, flexing and pointing it. There was a Portuguese boy at the youth hostel who said he’d take me to a party in Montmartre. He had long arms, a tough and sensual mouth. We were going to meet at ten. I imagined singing my first
Water Lilies
song for him, the pleasure in his face. He would be amazed.

Now it was my father’s turn to turn a small smile at me, though I didn’t know why. He seemed to be smiling from very far away. “I couldn’t stand it,” he said.

“God, you’re so egotistical.” Cold-hearted girl I was, twirling my long, bare foot in the diffuse light of the Orangerie. I had painted the nail of my left big toe hot pink. “What, do you have to be Leonardo da Vinci?”

He passed a hand over his face. “I’m thirsty. Let’s go outside.”

“You go ahead. I want to stay a little longer.” I was annoyed with him, but I also truly did want to stay. There was a sound in those colors. I wanted to hum it very softly, alone, and especially not in front of him. I knew what he thought of pretty things.

“Okay, Annie. I won’t be far. Come when you’re ready.” He limped out, passing into the next oval, looking, as he receded, shorter and smaller, like a boy walking into a field of flowers. I turned back to the painting and looked for a long time. The notes were sinuous. I wrote them down as best I could, since I didn’t read music very well, in my journal.

When I stepped outside the museum and walked down one of the long allées of tawny pebbles, the sky had clouded up. Drops of rain were falling. The park looked nearly deserted. A small black dog, red leash trailing, barked and ran in circles, chased by a man in a white trenchcoat, who finally caught the dog, gathering the animal in his arms and kissing its furry head. The dog wiggled with joy. I felt the wiggle, still half entranced by the water lilies, that milky light, the serenity of the air inside the museum, the beginning of my song, the Portuguese boy who was going to take me to Montmartre.

I couldn’t spot my father at first in any of the outdoor café stands that dotted the park. So many aluminum folding chairs triangled open, red umbrellas, low-hanging roofs over the café counters. I crunched over the pebbles, getting rained on; my bare arms were cold. The silver chairs all seemed to be empty. I felt a terrible loneliness, though he would be back at the hotel eventually, I reminded myself. Maybe he was there already. I could take a taxi. I walked across the park toward the Louvre, getting wetter and colder, then turned around and headed back. At last I saw his special shoe, his blue-jeaned leg—he was drawing in his little notebook at a sheltered table close to the Orangerie, his bad leg propped up, chatting to the barman at the same time. The overhang had obscured him. The barman was laughing as I approached, and then that light, the light I liked so much, came into his eyes when he saw me.

“
Ah, oui, c’est ça,
” my father was saying in his Midwest-accented French, half a glass of red wine in front of him on the small table. He turned his head as I crunched damply toward him. “
Ma fille,
” he said proudly to the barman. “
Elle est une chanteuse.
”

“Not yet.” I blushed. “
Pas encore.
”

The barman smiled, showing yellow teeth. “But soon,
bien sûr.
Very soon,
mademoiselle.
”

“Maybe.” I sat down next to my father and took his hand. “What are you drawing?”

His notebook was thick with pasted-in bits of newspaper and the glossy paper of magazines and postcards, various ticket stubs that must have had some meaning to him, cut-up photographs; the pages were scribbled on, some warped from paint or watercolor. Over his shoulder I could see his crabbed handwriting, a page of closely scrawled numbers. He turned the page. In the center of the next page was a diagram of a five-story building that looked institutional, with five horizontal rows of narrow windows and a flat roof. In front of the building was a fence with coils of barbed wire on top. At the base of the fence, a peaked guardhouse. Rain pattered on the overhang above us.

“Are you planning, like, a prison break?” I said.

“Don’t be smart. I’ve never done a prison—”

“Dad, they’re not going to let you cut up a
prison.
” The barman, unasked, brought me my own glass of red wine, filled to the top.

“No, not a working prison. But there’s an abandoned one in Texas I read about. Way out. I’m thinking of getting a crew together, going out there, seeing what we can do. Just have to find someone to pay for it.” He sighed, rubbed his eyes, checked his watch. From his jeans pocket he pulled out two pills, one white, one pink, which he washed down with the rest of his wine. “Hope these don’t turn out to give you brain cancer,” he said with a laugh.

“But they help, right?”

“Like water wings in the ocean.” He winked. “Look at this, Annie, this would be something else.”

Sitting close to him at the little table, I could smell the wine on his breath, a hint of garlic from our long lunch earlier in the day. His bent fingers rested on the notebook page, holding it open for me to see and approve, a worn rubber band around his wrist. The nail on his left pinkie was gone, leaving that finger permanently blind. The skin of his neck was ropy, weatherbeaten. He sat up very straight because of the rod in his back that the doctors put there after the accident in Rome. I knew he had at least two girlfriends, one in New York and another in Boston, both younger than him. My mother had already remarried, already settled into her pretty house in Asbury Park with her round-bellied potter. What did the two girlfriends I knew about, not to mention whomever I didn’t know about, think when he showed them his prison diagram, the barbed wire coiling in soft charcoal loops across the page? Did he show them at all? Did they understand how long it had been since he did anything like this?

“Can I go with you?”

He closed the notebook, rubber-banded it. “No,” he said. Then, “Honey, didn’t you and your sister have enough of that, being dragged from pillar to post? If it even happens, which could be years from now, it’s going to be long, hot, boring work.”

I gulped my wine. “I wouldn’t be bored. I was never bored.”

“Well.” He shook his head. “We’ll see. Look at that rain. It’s really coming down.” It was—rattling the tawny pebbles, splashing in the fountains, silvering the air almost to the shade of the air inside the Orangerie. Above the noise of the rain came a loud, whooshing sound, shouts.

“
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
” I asked the barman.

“
C’est la Tour de France,
” he replied. “
Les cyclistes.
” He turned on the radio. Pop music bounced out.

“Oh, I love this one,” I said, singing along.

My father stood up, leaned outside the overhang. “Annie, come look, you can just see all the wheels.”

The barman smiled. I inclined my head, letting my hair fall over my face. Was it my hair, my eyes? “Later. I’m listening.”

My father turned back to me. “Later? There is no later. It’s going past now.”

I shrugged. “Next year, then.”

The barman held my eye as he turned up the radio. The sound of the rain and the sound of the wheels disappeared into the music. My father held out his hand to me, to come look.

C
OMING BACK TO
Simon, I knew him fully for the first time. The proper order of things; the return. As if it had been one long, continuous night subtending the year since I had met him, and now we were simply waking up together the next day, telling each other our lives. He came to the shows; I was opening for TV on the Radio, enjoying the last ripples of
Whale
’s wake, waiting for the next bit of sonic bricolage to make itself known to me. After the shows, we returned to the room with the long, ornate drapes, the place that had become so important, the place where it tilted. We ordered up a late dinner; he often insisted on champagne, which I found touching—a cliché, and a sign of how little of this there was in his life. He had a lot to say about the music, which was a revelation to him. I brought him my glamorous sweat, my boho childhood, my eccentric education. I showed him my bruised arms, which he kissed. He showed me the seams in himself, the ragged gap between the outward order of his conventional life and the inner chaos, the nightmares, dreams of Israeli soldiers coming to take him, his children, his wife. He was not the cosmopolitan, discerning man he seemed: inside, he was still at war, still a skinny, blade-faced teenager throwing stones at the tanks during the first intifada. He had unpredictable periods of melancholy. He worked like a madman, always had. There were other things he wanted to build, fluid structures for refugees using inexpensive building materials, but he had important commissions, he had a family to support. So. The tether. I loved the irregular lines of his face. His nose that looked as if it had been pushed slightly to one side. His abashed vanity.
This shirt?
He would say to me.
Or this one?
Both shirts, impeccable. Gorgeous cuffs, like wings. His desire to dress well for me, his insecurity about
making a fool of myself at this age.
I have fallen in love with a rock-and-roll star, am I ridiculous?
You’re the furthest thing from ridiculous, I said, lying in bed watching him scrutinize the shirts, one with the subtlest of stripes, the other with the subtlest of tiny dots. And I’m not a star. I’ve made exactly one record that a few people liked. And it wasn’t really rock-and-roll. And it didn’t make any money.