By the Light of My Father's Smile Read online

  Please do not cry, I said. Crying now, myself. I am not worth one tear that falls from your beautiful eyes.

  Don’t break any more of your precious treasures, I said. As a crystal vase we’d kept in storage while in Mexico—a vase she loved—crashed against the door.

  Everything in me wanted to break down the door, pin her flailing arms to her sides, drag her to the bed, lick away every tear, drink from her flowing body, and pour my whole being into hers. But I, my heart breaking, could not rise from my knees. She had seen me turn into a monster; how could I ever expect her to forget? I fell asleep there, growing cramped and chilled as the night wore on.

  In the morning, her face wrinkled as a crone’s and tear-stained, she opened the door, sniffed at me as if I were disagreeable garbage, and stepped gingerly around my cold, ashen, and yellowing feet.

  This nightly ritual seemed to go on forever. During the day I called June June. I took her and Susannah to the YWCA, where they swam and made macramé wall hangings. I took them shopping. I went to Montauk with them, where an old friend of mine had the very last house before the Island petered out into the sea. In the nonexistent traffic there, I taught June to drive.

  Preoccupied, I tried to imagine my life without Langley. I could not. For without Langley all of it was just going through the motions, following the dictate of the voice in my ear, the emptiness in my soul. But there was no warmth without her, no fire. No rebellion of my own angel to enjoy. No surprise.

  She became so weak from her grief that when she stepped over me in the mornings, she stumbled. She was eating next to nothing. I was the same. I think we both had fevers, for our nightly exertions took their toll.

  I begged her to let me take care of her. She laughed, a mean laugh. And tossed her hair, which since our return from Mexico she’d both straightened and bobbed. In her plum-colored silk pajamas and fluffy-toed mules she was a different woman—which I found amazing and almost unbearably exciting. She had also begun taking courses in comparative anthropology at the local college. It drove me crazy not to be making love to her and, while loving her, learning her new thoughts.

  I decided to learn golf.

  It did not work. I disliked the cap. The cart. The balls. And hadn’t I heard somewhere that the green itself, because of the chemicals used to keep it so, was toxic?

  One morning she did not leave her room. By then I had dragged my mattress from my room and slept on it just beside her door. After half an hour of waiting, I went inside. Surprised to find that the door was not locked. She could not get out of bed. Seeing this, I felt—it is almost impossible to describe, except to say I felt the mother in me fully ripen and rise to the occasion. Suddenly I was all over the room at once, tending to Langley; changing the sheets, opening the windows, adjusting the curtains, picking up newspapers and books from the floor. Then, down in the kitchen, I made soup, squeezed oranges, made toast. Got the children out of the house. Then I came back, watched Langley eat, tucked her in, and went to my room to dress.

  During the day I looked in on her. Fed her. Went to the market for anything she said she had a hankering for—the father in me loving the activity of sallying forth! And in the evening I dragged out all the records we’d stored in her parents’ basement before we went to Mexico, the records to which we’d danced before the voice in my head got the better of me, and I lit a candle, only one because it was so hot, and Langley had by now reverted to the woman I knew. The heat had made her hair go back to its naughty kinkiness, and perspiration had ruined the silk pajamas, and she didn’t know where the mules were, and she loved being naked anyhow.

  And now I waited. I was waiting to see in Langley’s brown eyes, which sometimes looked maroon, if she still wanted me, old man, sinner, beast, creature that I was. If she remembered how it felt to be with me. To be pinned to the bed by me. To be herself riding me. Did she think of the taste of me, which she said she loved, or remember the feeling of me tasting her, my tongue eager and intent as a spaniel’s? Or did she remember how hot nights made loving even better because bodies stuck together? And there was more noise and slipperiness and more moisture of all kinds to absorb. And did she remember my telling her, when we made love, and she gave herself completely to me, Baby I love you and Baby I love you is the most erotic thing I know?

  Naked, nappy, bright-eyed, and almost well, she began to study me. I felt it immediately. She did it when my back was turned. On my way to the kitchen. Out the door to the store. Bending to retrieve the spoon she’d dropped. The one she’d licked long and suggestively with her rapidly recovering tongue.

  She caught me watching, and laughed. You have a tongue fetish, she said.

  Grace

  To love someone over many years is all the opportunity you need to learn how to love them back from anywhere.

  A death in the family? A wonderful chance! Or so it was with us, and with the death of her little brother, Jocko. Why he was called Jocko no one seemed to know, for he was no sportsman. As a child he adopted the persona of Zorro, the mysterious masked man of the Mexican West. According to Langley, he sewed himself a cape and a mask and wore as well a large black hat pulled low over his nearly obscured eyes. He carried a lariat. He rode a fabulous horse, which he constructed out of the sound of pounding hooves.

  So there he’d come, Langley said, prancing and neighing.

  And did he run into things? I asked.

  Never, she said. His horse was well trained. And he kept this up until, nearly, he went away to boarding school. She paused. I wonder who he became there.

  Yes, I said. Who would Zorro turn into at boarding school?

  And, she added thoughtfully, how would he stifle the sounds of his horse?

  Once Jocko came to see us in the mountains. He was tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and a beautiful nose. He smiled easily and often, as if at an inner pleasure. He was vague, however, about his life. All he told us was that he worked “behind the scenes” in Hollywood. Doing stunts, doing hair. Doing whatever. He drove a stylish car, black and shining, and favored black clothing. Except for a pair of silver boots.

  At his funeral Langley wept and held my hand tightly. She had memories that she said suddenly rose around her in the church: memories of being the prized damsel in distress whom Zorro saved and saved. And though he never offered to marry her, as her other brother, who played Tom Mix, often did, he offered friendship, which she imagined—because he offered it and was so dashing in his cape—a much more lasting and final thing.

  Of course, she whispered tearfully, with the trace of a Southern accent that crept into her voice whenever she felt sad, in order to rescue me he had to first place me in distress. Here she wept copiously. Sniffling loudly, she continued. How many times he left me bound and gagged somewhere nobody would even think to look! God, it’s a wonder I’m not the one who’s dead.

  Funerals are an opportunity to grow steadily more capable in one’s protector role. The shoulder to lean on, the ear to whisper into. The calming hand to hold. They are the opportunity to be still and stoic and present for your woman. Responsive to her sighs and moans. And it is not as far as one would think from the gravesite to the bed.

  Jocko left only ashes to be buried, and to Langley he left the silver boots, which fit her perfectly. Inside one of them he’d left a note: Fantasy was the reality of my life. Thank you for enjoying it with me. Of course, wearing the boots, reading the note, tromping about the bedroom feeling the boots on her feet and holding the note in her hand, with me helping her to a glass of wine, turning on the electric fan, and helping her to undress, soon Langley stood before me in her slip.

  Tears had made her eyes red. Wiping her nose so much had made it larger; her nostrils flared. Her carefully coifed hair now sprang up and out from her head like a spiky rose. There was the realization, as well, that her powder was all streaked. She’d chewed off her lipstick. She didn’t smell, in the heat, as fresh as when she’d left home.

  Oh, her favorite brother ha
d died and left her! Tromp of boots. Gulp of white wine. Take the roses away, she cannot bear to see them. Where are her bath salts? Oh, she is a wreck. A hag. Look at that run in her stocking! Oh, death. She’ll soon be dead herself!

  But, lucky for me, I am there to witness this trauma, as well I should be. I am there to say, Oh, it is only a little run. And I’ll put the roses outside the door, and your bath salts are just where they always are, beside the tub. And I will run a bath for you. And here is a dish of black figs, I know how you love them. And can I pour you a little more wine?

  And by now I am completely seduced by the sight of my bedraggled, nearly naked woman, the slip by now wriggled and coaxed down to her knees. And then by my completely naked woman, who, naked, reaches once more for the silver boots, which she’d kicked off in a fit of despair. Puts them on. Looks at herself, looks at me in the mirror across from the bed, looks at the bed. Me. Herself naked in the silver boots.

  I am still fully clothed. I know how fine I look in my suit. Through it all I have not even unloosened (as they say down South) my tie. I know this woman well. To be buck naked while I’m sharply dressed makes her wetter than lying in a fish pond. By now, she will be hot to the touch, sweaty. If she comes up to me, twines herself about me, rubs herself against my leg, she will slime me. I shiver at the thought.

  After many years together you learn how to wait. You want the slime to be there. So that when you touch her there you feel as if the sun is shining in your loins.

  What is your name today? she says, coming up to me and studying me carefully.

  Today my name is … I say, looking into her eyes, feeling the sun raising me up, with only a small fear of saying the wrong thing … my name is husband.

  For just a moment she is completely still. I elaborate: I am Langley’s very lucky husband. I am the man taking care of her. She smiles and moves into my arms, laying her head on my chest. Don’t worry, that is the correct answer, she says softly, exhaling a ragged breath. And my heart breaks around her, oceanic and warm as a kiss.

  I begin very slowly to caress the back of her head, where the naps fairly snap around my fingers. I ease my fingers down the furrow of her back, into the crevice of her backside. I clutch her to me.

  Jocko is gone, she murmurs.

  I kiss her mouth, lightly, a child’s kiss, when she says this. Her bushwoman’s nose. My hands by now cradle her bushwoman’s butt. I linger a long time in her neck. I rub her ears with my own.

  Suddenly, she sniffs. Pulls back. I need a bath, I think, she says. Testing the waters. Okay, I say, not moving. Not letting go of her. She understands. Sighs. Relaxes. Bending, I inhale her, my penis by now an eager puppy against her legs. Over her sloping breasts and erect black nipples I roam, in total time suspension; and when I dip my fingers into the place where life begins I stagger from the wetness of life I have found. I love the scent so much I wrap my whole hand in it and smear it on my hair.

  At this, as if stricken in her womb, and literally frowning with desire, she takes my flushed face between her hands and pulls my head to hers. She opens her mouth and sticks her tongue between my teeth. Pressing hard, without pity. Until I nearly lose my breath. She kisses me so hard and for so long I fall backward on the bed, my knees weak. With one hand she cradles the back of my neck, with the other she seems to flick my clothes away. And when she sees how I have risen she promptly sits on me and fucks me, crying. This is for Jocko, she says, with mournful intensity. Still wearing the silver boots, she kicks the sheet away.

  Later, restored, she came merrily back to the bed in which she’d left me. A jug of orange juice under one arm, toast and fried eggs on a blue plate in one hand. As we wolfed down the food—she was on her way to class—she told me about the blue wisteria that was blooming for a second time, just where it left its trellis and arched over our door. She had thought wisteria bloomed only once a year; and now this one was blooming twice. Just after her brother’s death. She blinked a smile at Jocko. Chewed her egg.

  And had I really been fucked so hard I intended to stay in bed forever?

  Grinning, she kissed me on the forehead, grimaced at the smell of my hair, and dusted toast crumbs from my chin. Commented on the good fortune we enjoyed in my being someone who only needed to work on Sundays, and then headed, her body fluid as grace, to the door.

  Nothing’s wrong with Daddy, I heard her, through a fog, tell the girls two days later. He’s in bed, reading the Bible.

  Inches

  By the time I really looked at the girls again, it seemed they had grown inches in all directions. As though harking back to some unknown ancestral Amazon, both girls were tall enough now to look down on both our heads. It was an unexpected state of affairs that at times puzzled and unnerved me. June especially seemed to take perverse pleasue in gobbling food and, over my protest, being able to hold whatever she was enjoying well above my reach.

  Twenty Kisses

  The Greek is wondering what happened to his marriage. He wonders it because he can hear Whitney Houston singing. She is promising to love someone always. Yes, but not that guy, Susannah had said. He is on a boat in the Ionian Sea near the island of Skidiza, where he was born. The sea is, as the brochures say, impossibly blue. Although today it looks green. In a certain light it is turquoise. He remembers my daughter for the oddest reasons. One is that she taught him so much about himself; his history, culture, heritage. Taught him to look at it, in fact. He’d thought it something to dump. To shed like excess baggage in the New World. He’d get ready to heave something overboard—brocaded pillowcases with tassels handmade by a remote grandma, or a faded, tarnished, bent silver spoon he’d eaten from as a baby, and she’d say: No, wait. Let me feel it. Let me have a look at it. He had a trunk of old junk from when he was a boy. Even the trunk looked grotesque in America. Heavy, wooden, obviously made by a clumsy hand. She saw its beauty. To keep him from throwing it out, she bought it from him. Paid a dollar and twenty kisses. Kisses carefully doled out after any disagreement, any quarrel.

  It was she who said the Ancients. Who? he’d asked. And she had laughed, tugging a handful of his wiry locks. The Ancients had no word for blue—which made them stupid, in his opinion—and so they described the Aegean and perhaps the Ionian too as being maroon. Purple. Red, like dark blood.

  And so he thought of her, as the boat headed into the sunset and the water turned to wine, and as he rubbed oil into the back of the starlet he’d pursued since spotting her slinging tofu burgers in a restaurant in Brentwood, on the very far side of North America.

  Susannah had longed to visit Greece, and Skidiza. They’d left New York on a Friday and arrived in his village on Sunday, just as his parents were coming home from church. It was as if they’d changed worlds.

  He was self-conscious about the backwardness of his parents’ home. The gullies in the road leading up to it, the dust in the courtyard, the cracked mud of its whitewashed walls. The humanlike bellowing of the goats, the bray of the ancient (a true Ancient, he joked) donkey. His father’s rough hands, his mother’s fat. Susannah did not seem to notice any of these things, but commented instead on the warmth of his mother’s smile, his father’s tender embrace of his long-wandering son. The way the white walls complemented the golden grass, the rows of olive trees.

  The food was delicious, as it had always been. Grilled lamb. A salad of tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers, olives. The fresh bread melted in their mouths. Petros translated for them. They wanted to know Susannah’s age. A woman in her forties, and looking so young! That was America! Her family background. Whether she had siblings. Whether they all lived. What were the diseases that took the lives of babies in America? Petros was surprised to hear this question from his mother. She went on to tell Susannah, who leaned forward in her chair to touch his mother’s hands, that three of her own children died shortly after birth. Of a chill or of a sweat or of a cough that would not go away. His mother wiped her eyes as she recalled their deaths. His father looked sad, and exhibite
d as well an air of helplessness, as if the losses had occurred only yesterday. No one had told Petros of his lost siblings, or if they had he had not registered a meaning. Now his mother looked tenderly at him, a look that felt as if she were cuddling him with her eyes. Petros, and his brother Anand, who always wants to be looking after people and who should have been a priest, are all God has left to us, she said, bowing her head slightly and crossing herself.

  He was grateful to Susannah for drawing them out—two dour old Greeks dressed in black (as he assumed they must look to her, an American); he cherished her for being present, receptive. He could not quite believe his good fortune: to have gone to America poor, and to have found a well-educated, middle-class wife who loved Greece and was genuine. It did not seem, Susannah’s interest in his parents, in his culture, American. No, he thought of coolness when he thought of America, the real America. He definitely thought of blue eyes. And yet, here he sat with his brown-skinned wife, her big brown eyes as expressive as his own. The puzzle of his attraction to her, who might have been a darker sister, a slight exasperation to him.

  There was a day, perhaps it was even the evening of the day of their arrival: out in the courtyard that was slowly cooling from the day’s heat, the sunflowers nodding in the corners like drowsy old men. They sat around a wooden table, the very one into whose sides he’d carved his and Anand’s names while they were boys, the day that Anand had vowed never to abandon Greece and he had vowed to leave it as soon as he could, and Susannah, her eyes watering, drank ouzo for the first time, and nibbled a home-preserved olive. Look! she whispered urgently to him. Look at this! She was looking down and pointing at the table. Was he to look at the brown loaves of bread, with their soft white ends; or at the dark olives in an old blue crockery dish he remembered from when he was a boy? Did she mean the two dusty green bottles of wine? The fava beans swimming in oil? Did she mean, Look at the peaches—which did, in fact, smell exactly of heaven? Did she mean, Regard the plums, luscious and dark as goddesses? But no; she meant, giving it a tug, Look at the tablecloth!