Читать книгу The Question Authority - Rachel Cline - Страница 10

From: bear@nyc.rr.com

To: PBJ@nyc.rr.com

Date sent: Feb 18 2009 12:32 AM

Subject: On the Road

Peanut,

Here I am in Tuba City, at what they call a “family restaurant.” I thought you would appreciate the irony, as I make my journey of fatherly remorse. The wait-a-little is cute. Just now, she caught me staring and, to my absolute amazement, smiled—probably why I decided it was time to make my report to you. I guess, out here, even a used-up hulk like me might still look like a ticket out. I’m wearing Dad’s old Rolex, which is definitely a rich guy’s watch, so maybe it’s that. You convinced me it was too beautiful to leave in the lockbox. When was that? Five years ago? He’d been dead for ten. You said no one was ever going to mistake me for a Connecticut Yankee insurance man and that was true. But in Tuba City I could be anyone!

“Where you headed?” she asks me. She refills my water glass and I see she bites her nails like I do. Involuntarily, I close my fingers into my fist so she won’t see the connection.

“Laramie,” I say. “Flew into Phoenix though, so I could drive through here, again. It’s been maybe thirty years.”

She nods, but without interest. It’s hard to imagine someone finding this landscape boring but I guess if you’re seventeen and it’s where you live . . . She’s barely seventeen. And she has that mix of cockiness and uncertainty that always kills me. I decide I’ll call her “Catnip.” Don’t worry, I’m still on the straight and narrow, here. But part of that is telling the truth about it from the get-go, so there’s no tantalizing forbidden thing, just ordinary desire that happens to everyone. Right?

“So, what’s in Laramie?”

If I were on the make I’d tell her about Doria. No one suspects a dad. But I lie: “Just on a break.”

“I’ve never been on a vacation,” says Catnip, without self-pity. “If I had the time off, I don’t think I’d spend it driving around stupid towns like this one, though, but to each his own.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I say, lifting my water glass. But there it ends, so I’m going to put the laptop away and get back in the Chevy Cruze, which is surprisingly fun to drive.

Pulled over:

This landscape looked so different when I had you with me. Grown-up you, I mean—the trip I think of as our honeymoon. We were listening to Moby-Dick on tape. You’d never read it. “All talk, no whale,” you said, and I was shocked at your ignorance. I gave you a “teacher” look, and you called me “Miss Crabtree” and we thought that was the funniest thing ever because we were so happy, then. Happy Version 2.

Happy Version 1 is ancient history, of course: holding Doria’s sweaty little hand when it fit into mine like a baby mouse. Sleeping together, all of us in a pile, when the kids still called me Daddy and thought I could do no wrong. Watching Archer learn how to flirt by hanging around with girls twice his age. Chasing your own sweet self through the mirror maze at the Topsy Turvy House.

But let’s go back to Version 2: your bare feet on the dashboard, that stupid toe ring you bought at Wall Drug. Lounging by the pool in the middle of the night. I made up new constellations and tried to fool you, Brooklyn girl. The Dragon’s Tooth, the Great Loom, the Salt Crystals. You said, “I could see that.” You said they should be called “Cold Fire” and “Light Storm,” like fast cars. Your accent made it sound tough instead of sappy. Or was I just too far gone? I’m going to look for that motel we stayed in, near Flagstaff. The morning we left, there were girls in the pool. I heard them but I didn’t look. I thought I was cured—that finding you again after twenty-odd years had cured me.

I didn’t bring the fifteen cassettes of Moby-Dick with me this trip. I’ve got Jeremy Irons reading Lolita. He sounds like he wrote the thing, or lived it. But no one will ever pity Humbert, not even me.

I was smart to give myself a good running start—plenty of highway for me to go all Woody Guthrie on, plenty of versions of small-town America to remind me of where I didn’t wind up: waves of grain, ribbons of highway, Tucson to Tucumcari, don’t forget Winona . . . I was so caught up in those images, that fantasy of escape. This is how I know I’ve changed: Nabokov's version is my version now, where bits of roadside refuse pose as flowers and the placidity of cows is a plea to be made into meat. I used to think I might write a novel someday, or at least a song. Nope. What I produced, all I produced are Archer and Doria and Naomi’s ghost.

In a life overpopulated with uncalculated risks, gross oversights, and shithead moves, my kids’ pretentious names turned out to be whoppers. Archer was supposed to be a doer, a warrior in the world. I don’t have to connect the dots of that irony for you. And Doria was meant to be seaworthy, golden—only instead of Naomi’s beauty and my ego, she got the reverse and now she’s a ghost ship, sunk in the Great Plains somewhere, pretending to be an orphan. She never got over the loss of her mother, and I’m worthless since I didn’t show up at her wedding. I didn’t think she really wanted me there, but that’s a ratshit excuse, and I could have at least made an effort. I did send them that tandem bicycle—I thought that was kind of brilliant for a couple with one blind member, who live in a flat place, and one of whom could definitely use a little exercise. But I didn’t say any of that. I just wrote “Have fun, I love you.” Hell, what do you say to your thirty-five-year-old daughter who hates you on the occasion of her second marriage? What am I going to say to her tomorrow, more to the point? “I’m sorry,” is so old, and so out of character. I’ll say it, of course, but she’s not going to accept it. I’d turn around right now if I didn’t think you’d never speak to me again. It’s just that whenever I play the scene out in my head it goes south after about the third sentence—after I’m sorry but before I love you more than anything in the world. She won’t believe me; why should she?

There’s a remedy for this line of thought—a fantasy that starts with that nail-bitten hand, which I casually cover with mine on the yellow Formica counter, and then look up to see the look on her face, if there’s a flicker. There is. I look away, out the window, and ask Catnip about herself. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? She smiles a little, but resists, says something sarcastic. Oh, a feisty one. I always like the feisty ones.

I pulled over and called you—left a coded message: “Road trouble.” Then I tried Henry—that’s what sponsors are for, isn’t it? He picked up but, like you, he’s at work. He said I should work on my inventory while I’m driving. He said I’m still in denial, that I haven’t gone far enough. I still say that until I got caught I was just a horny young guy like any other. The remorse, regret, obsess, seduce, self-hate go-round didn’t kick in till I was in that holding cell in Window Rock, till Dad showed up. I’ve been meaning to ask you how much of all that you remember. We never talk about what happened that night, or after that, to you girls. Am I still allowed to give you a writing assignment?

I just called Doria, thought I’d give her a heads-up, let myself off the hook a little, right? It didn’t go so well:

“Tonight’s not good, Dad.”

“Well, I didn’t mean tonight, obviously. I’ve got plans for tonight—” I don’t know why I lie about shit like that when it’s perfectly obvious I’m just covering up.

“Tomorrow, after church, might work,” she said. “First Baptist. Anyone in town can tell you how to get there.”

I was about to ask what time that is but she hung up. I guess anyone can also tell me when “after church” is, too. At least she said “after”; I don’t think I could have managed “at” or “in.” And maybe that means they’ll invite me over for donuts or whatever. My parents used to take us out for ice cream. But they were Episcopalians.

Later:

Checked into the Motel 6 in Shiprock to watch girl-porn on my laptop like the disgusting old pervert my daughter believes me to be. I tell myself it will be easier to own up to my crimes tomorrow if I can gin up enough self-disgust tonight. But it’s always the same old problem—how much is enough? Long day, Peanut. Time to hit send.