A Bigamist's Daughter Page 8

  “Make something up, huh?” he says. She wonders if he’s patronizing her. “Okay, like what?”

  She doesn’t want to talk about this.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. You’re the writer. Have him decide to mend his ways. Maybe he could fall permanently in love with the fat wife.”

  He grimaces. “And they live happily ever after?”

  “Why not? Or maybe he can meet someone else, say a lady bigamist. Are there lady bigamists?”

  He smiles at her; the smile seems to say, Oh, I get it, you’re being cute. “I’ve never heard of a lady bigamist,” he says.

  “Well, then. There you go. Make one up.”

  He sits back, straightens the napkin on his lap. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?” he asks.

  “Tupper, I leave work at five o’clock.”

  He looks up at her, reaches across the table, takes her hand. “I hope,” he begins, then pauses, pursing his lips. “What just happened, it didn’t have anything to do with my book. I mean, I’m not trying to get you to help me more than you should by going to bed with you. You know that, don’t you?”

  The waitress arrives with their crepes so she answers a quick, “Yes, of course.” She’s beginning to see that she will soon remember this night as a lesson learned: Do not mix your play-pretend occupation with what appears to be your real life.

  “It’s just that I talk about this stuff all day,” she tells him. “I like to leave it alone every once in a while.”

  “I understand,” he says. He looks away, his face sad, struggling, it seems, with some frustration, some desperate tragedy.

  It occurs to her that he thinks she’s lying to him; that he thinks she’s convinced he is interested only in her power. He believes she will never know that his motives for being with her are anything but selfish, she will never trust his good intentions.

  It’s rather a sad, romantic fantasy and she decides not to bother to refute it. Instead, she imagines a scene in which, some day, she turns bitterly to him (they are in her apartment, or in a restaurant having lunch, or, better yet, in a cab at night, returning from the opera or the ballet or even from a carriage ride around Central Park) and says, angry tears in her eyes, her voice a steady hiss: You never loved me. It was only your book that you cared about. You only wanted my ideas, you only wanted to steal my ideas, rob my mind.

  She recalls Ann’s “It sure sounds like an excuse for robbing people,” and marvels at how she has imagined herself into the victim; how she has just turned her schemes to use Tupper Daniels into his to use her.

  “Okay,” he says, facing her again. “I’m sorry I brought it up.” He smiles at her, an ingratiating smile. “So let’s talk more about you. I know where you’ve lived and where you went to school. What about your parents. Where are they from?”

  “Well, my mother was born in Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn?” he says. “God, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was really from Brooklyn.”

  “Your loss,” she says coolly. “And my father was born and raised in England.”

  This he is impressed by. “Really?” he says. “How did he end up with a girl from Brooklyn?”

  He says Brooklyn as if he meant Uganda. She marvels at the rude ignorance of inbred WASPs.

  “My father came to New York when he was about fifteen or so. He lived out on Long Island with an aunt, but he had friends in the city and he met my mother at a party.”

  “So you’re English and Brooklynish,” he says.

  “Irish,” she tells him.

  He laughs, waves his hand. “Same difference. And what did your father do while you lived on Long Island?”

  She pauses, flips through her stories like a pack of cards. Government, traveling salesman, actor, on the lecture circuit.

  She laughs. “He was a bigamist,” she says. And there is the word, pointing at him. She doesn’t like it.

  Tupper Daniels’ eyes grow wide. Light up, she would say. “You’re kidding.”

  She doesn’t like it. Her parents loved each other. Her father was a good man. “Yes, I’m kidding. He worked for the government.”

  He seems disappointed. “What did he do?”

  “He traveled a lot. Some kind of intelligence.” She decides to put an end to this line of questioning. “He died when I was fourteen.”

  “Oh, gee,” he says. “I’m sorry. What did he die of?”

  She turns her glass. “Car accident.”

  “Was anybody else hurt?”

  She looks up at him. “No, he was alone.”

  “Gosh,” he says, shaking his head, “that’s too bad. It must have been hard on you.”

  She shrugs. “He wasn’t around much anyway.” She stares down at her glass. She feels him watching her, feels him questioning the hidden depths of her despair, her sense of abandonment. God, she thinks, he’s a romantic. Or at least she’s imagining him to be.

  “Why did you say he was a bigamist?” he asks. A whisper.

  She shakes her hair away, smiling. “Just kidding,” she says. “I thought maybe it would get you thinking about the end of your book.”

  His voice is dry. “I’m always thinking about the end of my book. But I thought you stopped work at five o’clock.”

  She laughs. “I guess I never really leave. Do you want to go?”

  He straightens up, calls for the check.

  As they walk back to her apartment, she wonders where she should turn him away. At the corner where he can grab a cab, at the entrance to her building, at the door to her apartment?

  He puts his arm around her as they walk. It is heavy, makes walking difficult. He comments on the cold and she realizes for the first time that he is not wearing his blazer. Clever trick.

  “Did you leave your jacket in my apartment?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he says. “I forgot how cold it was getting.”

  “Oh,” she says. “As long as you didn’t leave it in the restaurant.”

  He laughs. “We Southern boys aren’t used to these Yankee autumns,” he says.

  Rehearsed, she thinks. Oh, clever.

  And so they are back in her apartment and yes, there is plenty of wine, but no, she says, she really is very tired. And although she doesn’t want to end up in bed again, she doesn’t want to be left alone in her apartment at eleven o’clock on a Friday night either, and so: All right, she says, a back rub sounds nice and yes, one more glass of wine. And his hands are strong enough and there is just enough pain in the way he grips her shoulders and her neck and kneads her back and sides. So it is another reversal—the literal back rub now feeling like making love, but now, with him fully clothed and her only clinically undressed, only her blouse off, her front hidden against the mattress, the back rub is somehow more desirable, exciting.

  And so she turns, feels his soft sweater against her, his face, the almost imperceptible beard. Then the slow undressing. This will be the last time, she tells herself, the kiss good-by, the graduation drunk, the bachelor party, Fat Tuesday.

  “Where in England was your father born?”

  “London, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, I wasn’t there. But, yes, I’m sure it was London.”

  “And he came over here when he was fifteen?”

  “About that.”

  “And he lived with an aunt?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know. Betty, I think.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “She died before I was born.”

  “Didn’t he ever talk about her?”

  “A little. Not much. Anyway, he always called her his aunt.”

  He gets up, shaking his head. Goes into the kitchen. “There is more wine,” he yells. Comes back with the open bottle. Her bottle. The one she’d bought on the way home. To seduce him with, maybe.

  He pours two glasses, puts the bottle on the end table. Sits cross-legged, opposite h
er. His body is all primary colors: white, red, blue—no muted shades. Especially his feet, which could be sketches from a medical book, an encyclopedia. White from the ankles to toes, red around the side, blue veins crossing through it all. The hair on his pale legs seems blond enough to be transparent, his genitals are red, almost an angry red, veined in blue; his hairless chest is pure white without even a freckle or a beauty mark to contradict what seems to have been chosen as his color scheme. Surely, she thinks, even a medical illustrator would have added a brown freckle or two.

  “Was she married?” he asks. “Aunt what’s-her-name?”

  “Yes. That’s why she lived out there, on Long Island. It’s where her husband was from.”

  “Was she born in England too?”

  “No. Ireland, I think.”

  “How can you say, ‘I think’? She’s only one generation away. Gosh, I can name all my relatives back four or five generations.”

  “Probably because you’ve got huge oil paintings of every one of them hanging all over your mansion. I bet you’ve got headless ghosts in gray uniforms, too.”

  “I don’t live in a mansion,” he says. “And all our ghosts wear heads and frock coats.”

  “Even the lady ghosts?”

  He nods. “The Daniels women,” he says, in an exaggerated Southern accent, “were never above perversity. Some of our loveliest belles are transvestites in the hereafter. We all have our own idea of heaven.”

  She laughs and he looks at her severely, “What’s yours?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Typical Baltimore catechism stuff. God with a long white beard and a dove on His shoulders, angels with curly blond hair and blue wings instead of bodies. Lots of clouds.”

  “And where do you fit in?”

  She looks down at herself, lounging so casually against her pillow, naked, her legs outstretched, spending an intimate evening with someone she hardly cares about and barely knows. With an author, of all things.

  “I guess I’m in the crowd just under God’s feet, right below the clouds, reaching up.”

  “Hell?”

  She smiles. “No, purgatory. Not quite bad enough for hell, not quite good enough for heaven. Just kind of mediocre. I have a feeling everybody I know will be there too.”

  “Your father?”

  She looks at him, slightly amazed that he would ask such a tactless question. But he is looking at her seriously, as if it were important to him.

  “My father,” she says, “could be anywhere. Heaven, hell, purgatory. Wisconsin.”

  He smiles a little. “What did he look like, your father?”

  She brushes back her hair. “Dark hair, like mine. Blue eyes, like mine. My nose exactly, I’m told. But his face was thinner and he had a mustache. A small one, like Clark Gable’s.”

  “Was he tall?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And thin. Why are you so interested?”

  He shrugs, rests his glass on his stomach. “I don’t know; you get kind of defensive when you talk about him. I don’t think you liked him.”

  “I was crazy about him,” she cries. “I lived for the days he came home. Honestly, I think he spoiled me for any other man.”

  “Is that why you’re not married?”

  She laughs. “Could be. He’s as good an excuse as any. If I need an excuse.”

  “There could be a correlation,” he says, seriously. “If your father represented impermanence, then anyone who wanted to marry you would mean permanence, just the opposite.”

  “Very good, Mr. Freud,” she says dryly, although, suddenly, her stomach is dancing, as if she were a child again, playing hide-and-seek, hiding in someone’s dark, cool basement, feeling the searcher come near, stop, turn, walk away, and then walk back. “But not very original.”

  “No,” he says, refusing to joke. “You should think about that. I should think about it too, if I’m going to get involved with you. I always look at a woman’s father; it’s usually a good indication of how she feels about men.”

  “Jesus,” she says, laughing. “Do you want a character reference too? Birth certificate? Fingerprints?” She doesn’t tell him that his basic premise, that they are to get “involved,” is his first mistake.

  “You see,” he says calmly, pointing at her. “You get touchy when you talk about your father, even though you say you liked him. And you called him a bigamist.”

  “I was joking.” Her voice is higher than she wants it to be. Sounds touchy.

  “Yes, but you see,” he says, “if you don’t like your father, then it says something to me about how you feel about men like him.”

  She gets out of bed, goes to her pocketbook for a cigarette. Although she tries not to smoke in her apartment, this gives her something to do, something that might remind him of her professional status. “Perhaps my ‘touchiness,’ ” she tells him, blowing smoke through her nose, “has more to do with my dislike for you, not my father. You are, you know, being totally obnoxious, analyzing me when you know nothing about me, looking into my ancestry to discover my temperament. Jesus.”

  He throws his head back, looks up at the ceiling. “I made you angry,” he says, his voice full of self-disgust.

  She laughs at the ploy. No, you didn’t, she’s supposed to say. It’s okay, really, I don’t mind. At least you’re interested. “Maybe you should go,” she says instead.

  He gets off the bed, stands by her, hands at his sides. Eyes mournful. “I’d like to stay.”

  She shakes her head. “I think you should go.”

  She walks to the closet, puts on her robe, goes to the love seat. “Really, it’s getting late.” She sits down, waiting.

  Slowly, he puts on his jeans, his shirt, his sweater. Then he sits on the edge of the bed, before her, and puts his hand on her knee.

  “Listen,” he says, “I’m sorry. Maybe I was prying, maybe I was being, I don’t know, calculating. But I thought maybe …” He rubs his thumb along her knee. “When you said your father was a bigamist.” He holds up his hand. “I know you were kidding, but you did say he was never home, so I thought maybe he could be a clue for how to end my book. I mean, Bailey has no ending, but your father, well, he might give me a different perspective. Maybe I could use something that happened to him, or even you.”

  She doesn’t know if she should scream or laugh, slap him across the face or merely brush him aside. “It’s an unusual way to be used,” she says quietly.

  He seems to take this as some sort of acquiescence because he smiles, shaking his head. “Oh, all writers do it,” he says. “They use everybody. You should know that. One of my teachers at Vanderbilt once said that a good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.”

  She smiles at him. If she were to tell him now what Vista is about, what the fate of his masterpiece will be, what kind of “writer” he is, what kind of “editor” she is …

  He moves his hand up her leg, grips her thigh.

  “But I’m sorry I made you angry,” he says. And then, looking down, “I’ll go.”

  She makes no move to stop him, but watches him put on his coat, his shoes.

  He stands in the middle of her room, face once again sad. “Can I call you?” he asks. “At home?”

  She nods, realizing she feels a certain disappointment. Not, she thinks, because he’s finally leaving, or because she’s made up her mind not to sleep with him again, but because the questioning has stopped. Or maybe because the questioning had nothing to do with her, was for himself, his book.

  She nods, feeling again like the child hiding in the dark basement, crouched on the cold linoleum behind an open door. The child who hears (her stomach dancing) the footsteps approaching, stopping nearby, turning, and then walking away, up the stairs to the light, to other, perhaps easier, discoveries. Feeling like the child in that minute when the hiding becomes being lost, forgotten.

  “Yes,” she says, nodding. “Call me. Please.”

  Chapter 6

  It was at a par
ty, she began. I’ve told you the story, haven’t I?

  I said that she had, a long time ago, and then realized she had not asked the question to avoid repeating herself, but merely to determine what part of my own memory I would bring to the story as she told it, the way a recently returned traveler might ask: Have you ever seen this part of the world? with the lights already out and the slide projector humming beside him.

  I told her I didn’t remember it very well. We were on the beach, sitting on some large black rocks, a pale-blue comforter beneath us. It was where she liked to sit while it grew dark.

  Betty had invited us. You remember poor Betty?

  The poor was for a small patch of oil and rain that, six years before, had sent her car into a utility pole on Queens Boulevard as she drove from the beauty parlor to her semidetached ranch.

  I said of course I remembered her. And remembered her again as heavy perfume and coats with fur collars and cuffs. As cigarette butts stained darkly with lipstick. As my mother’s eternal “girlfriend.” I remembered that she always clinked with bracelets and seemed unaware of the thin husband who followed her into our living room; that she had spent the last hour of her silly life under a hooded dryer, tales of the Lennon Sisters on her lap, the tips of her small ears burning.

  My mother pulled her legs to her chest, hugging her knees like an uncertain survivor. It was a girlish pose, made possible by her new thinness.

  It was quite a party. Park Avenue, very posh.

  I looked out over the slate-colored sand, the black water laced with foam, speckled with white gulls. I was, by then, already planning my steps once I got back to New York, and so, I suppose, with my own future once again imaginable I didn’t mind letting her tell the story. She was full of stories that summer, stories about Ward’s long devotion to his late mother, about some woman in town who’d had three husbands, about her childhood and mine—our past selves as useful as any third party in keeping us from discussing who and what we were now.

  I sat slightly behind her and looked at her hair tangled around the thin rubber band, pulling from it, looping around it, a fine spray of gray sand, and wondered who and what now.