Chapter 22

“THAT DOCTOR CAME in again,” said my father, after I had slipped into his room, trying to avoid that very same doctor.

“Which doctor?” I said with sincere disingenuousness.

“The cute one.”

“I thought you said she wasn’t so cute.”

“Cute enough. She came in again. She asked about you.”

“Wonderful,” I said, my smile tight.

“What’s the matter.”

“She’s a vegetarian, Dad.”

“Oh.”

“And she’s got cats. A swarm of them. She takes their pictures.”

“See, I told you.”

“Yes you did.”

“Ohio.”

“How are you feeling?” I said, though the room itself provided my answer. Two new monitors had been installed. One showed the rate of his breaths, now at nineteen per minute, which I knew already was dangerously high. The other monitor showed the beating of his heart, one hundred and nine beats a minute, his heart struggling to keep up his respiratory rate. Things were not going well for my father.

“I feel like crap,” he said, wincing as he shifted on the bed, “which is good.”

“Why is that good?”

“Because as soon as I start feeling better they’re going to open up my chest and cut out my lungs.”

“That’s true.”

“You don’t got to be so damn cheery about it.”

“I just want you to get well.”

“Why?”

Good question, why indeed? What wondrous marvels of life awaited my father as he stepped out of the hospital with his lungs slashed in half? My father had always been able to cut through the noise and ask the telling question, which was one of the things I couldn’t stand about him.

“Where am I?” he said.

“Dad?”

“Where? Where am I?”

I felt tender toward him for a moment, an old ill man who had completely lost his bearings. “You’re not well, Dad,” I said. “You’re in the hospital.”

“I know that, you idiot. In the story.”

“Of course,” I said. “The story.”

“Oh yes,” he said, closing his eyes. “Now I remember. Yes. The morning after.”

The morning after the night before. The world seems new, cleansed somehow. He doesn’t get up before the sun this day, not with his newly minted love still asleep on his chest. Aaronson and his damn mowers can get along without him for once. He lies there, staring at her, feeling her hair tickling his chest, waiting for her eyes to open, for the expression of pleasure to brighten her features when she sees that it is him there, that his body is the pillow beneath her head. And they do, and she does. And my father didn’t say it, but I knew what also he was waiting for, waiting for her to awaken so he can kiss the sleep from her eyes, to lick the film from her teeth, to reach again for the perfect closeness, the perfect urgency of the night before. And the way my father’s eye’s widened at the memory told me it was just as perfect, and maybe, my God, even more.

“I said it,” he told me. It. “And she said it too.” It. The word that had so pained my father that he had been unable to pronounce it more than a handful of times for as long as my entire life, and I had an inkling now of why. They say it, back and forth, it, and the it he proclaims is not the rote mewings of habit or the smooth lies of the Casanova, no. For my father it is a declaration that cements for all eternity the swirl of emotion that has overwhelmed him and defined him anew. I love you. I love you too. Yes I do. Me too. Oh yes. Yes. I love you I love you I love you. There, in that most unlikely of places, that narrow bed in that cramped decaying apartment in North Philadelphia, there my father and the love of his life promise the world and their hearts one to the other.

Tell me we’ll be together forever, he says.

Together, she says.

Promise me, he says.

Forever, she says.

Promise me, he says.

I promise. You and me, Jesse. Together forever. I promise and now you promise too.

I do, he says. I promise.

And so it is asked and answered, promised, sealed. The crucial most difficult steps have been taken with remarkable ease. The rest are mere details. Details, where, according to the sages, both God and the devil reside.

Let’s go somewhere, he says.

Okay, where?

I don’t know. California maybe.

They are lying on the bed, the morning sun is now slanting in the window, a soft cloud can be seen floating by in the distance. His arms are behind his head, the future rolls ahead of my father like a long lazy river to be savored and explored together with this girl, this naked girl in his bed, their love the raft keeping them dry and buoyant.

California sounds nice, she says.

San Francisco, or maybe Los Angeles.

Hollywood? she says.

Sure, Angel, anywhere you want.

Hollywood then. Anywhere, really, so long as it’s away from him.

The cloud drifts across the sun and the room suddenly darkens.

Who is he? he asks.

Nobody.

So why does he matter?

Because of who he is.

And who is he?

He is rich, greedy, grasping, she says. He is a soulless spider. And then she tells my father of how she became entwined in his web.

“Her mother had been sick,” said my father, fighting now for breath as he struggled to explain. But he didn’t have to struggle so hard. As soon as the sick mother was marched to the fore all the other elements fell in behind her. The financial need, the golden opportunity, the lifesaving stream of income, the financial dependence. And once the dependence was settled upon her shoulders like a yoke, the more unusual secretarial requests. The personal letters. The inventory taken side by side on the large dining room table. The late hours. The working dinners. And then the rainy evening, the roads awash. You mustn’t try to go home in this weather. It isn’t safe. I insist you stay the night. I simply insist. And so there she was, tossing awake in the big iron guest bed, as the sounds assaulted her from every side. The lashing of the rain against the windows, the wind scraping the tree limbs across the stone facing, the old house settling down upon itself. And then something different, the creaking of the floorboards, the whispered entreaty, the low whine of the door as it slips open, only the long bony fingers visible at first. “Her mother had been sick,” said my father, which was explanation enough for all that followed, the gasp in horror, the calm voice of age and authority, the tears, the sobs, the ultimate submission as the old man rutted atop her like a bearded billy goat, while she stared at nothing and thought only of her mother, her sick, old mother, and the medical bills that were piling against their door higher and higher with every visit to each new specialist.

My father had always been quick to anger, anger being his natural state, so it wasn’t hard to imagine his reaction, the bile flowing through him at the thought of the old man taking advantage of his love, the old man turning his love into something ugly, something unclean. “I wanted to kill him,” my father said and of that I had no doubts. He wants to smite him as the defilers were smote in the olden days, to stone him to death for what he did to her, to his love.

No, she says. You can’t. No. Let’s just go away.

What about your mother?

She passed away, her illness, she was too weak even with the specialists.

When?

A month ago. Maybe two.

So why are you still with him?

Where was I to go? I had no place else. No place else, Jesse, until I met you.

She would have kissed him then, kissed him hungrily, urgently, sucking the air from his lungs. And I knew how he would have reacted, how her kiss would have dissolved his anger, banished his questions, how it would have stiffened his devotion, I knew all of that without him telling because he and I were of the same blood.

All right, he says, the sweat pouring off of him, her taste like an opiate on his tongue. All right, let’s just go, go away somewhere. Let’s go.