“Not much,” I say. “I know it was going on at the time of the accident.”
“It was a bad phase in our marriage,” Jerome says. “I was distracted. Trying to get my career to the next level. So we’d have the stability we needed to start a family. It ended between them after that goddamn machine of his imploded. You know it could’ve wiped out half the continent, right? That moron almost caused the apocalypse with his lunatic invention. Harnessing the rotation of the planet. I mean, it was nonsense. I never should’ve signed off on it in the first place. His paperwork was flawless, though. He said all the right things. Because she helped him write what she knew I’d approve.”
“What happened to the machine?” I say.
“What happened? He destroyed the lab, almost killed more than a dozen people, and cost me my arm. I had that thing disassembled and melted down, piece by piece.”
“And Lionel?” I say.
“I should’ve pressed charges,” Jerome says. “Had him locked up. But she asked me not to. We never talked about what had happened between them. It wasn’t how things were done back then. But I understood. Without either of us saying the words.”
With his remaining hand, Jerome squeezes the biceps of his amputated arm, massaging it, a nervous habit.
“She was thinking about leaving me for him,” he says. “But I saved her life that day. So, the trade was I lost my arm but my wife stayed. And I’d make that trade every day of my life, even now that she’s gone. That accident was my defining moment. Whatever came out of that machine, it was a purifying fire. It burned away all of my bitterness and stupidity. When my arm was taken, it took my mistakes with it. Three years into a marriage that wasn’t working, Ursula and I got a chance to start again. And we had a happy life together, after that. We changed the story. We had another forty-nine years together. That terrible time in our lives was forgotten.”
Jerome’s not really talking to me. He’s talking to Emma.
“Or maybe not forgotten,” he says, “but forgiven.”
Tears stream down her cheeks. His too. He massages his biceps, kneads the skin. I sip my coffee, awkward, catalyst and intruder.
“Do you know what happened to him?” I say.
“I can’t believe he had the stones to show up at Ursula’s funeral,” Jerome says. “How he even knew she died, I don’t know. Creepy son of a bitch was probably stalking her online.”
“Wait, you’ve seen him?” I say. “He’s alive?”
“Yeah,” Jerome says, “as of two years ago he was.”
“Do you know where he lives?” I say.
Jerome shakes his head. He gives a little shudder and his gaze goes slack. His face seems to hang looser, like he’s abruptly fallen asleep.
“Grey,” he says.
“Sorry?” I say.
“Motherfucker doesn’t go by Goettreider anymore,” he says. “He’s Grey. Lionel Grey. He tried to apologize or some shit but I wasn’t interested. I blew him off and went to speak with someone who didn’t steal my goddamn arm and sleep with my goddamn wife. Sorry, Emma.”
“Was there any even, like, indirect mention of where he might live?” I say.
“No,” Jerome says. “And I didn’t ask. He’s bad news. I could smell it at the funeral, a cloud hanging around him, like when the air gets charged up before a lightning storm. Bad news.”
And, with that, Jerome kicks me out of his house.
102
Emma walks me to my rental car. Neither of us says anything but she keeps glancing at me, like she’s graphing emotional geometry on the genealogy of my profile.
“Do you really think Lionel Goettreider is your father?” she says.
“Do you?” I say.
There’s a lot of pain in the look she gives me and I realize I overstepped, too glib, kicking over stones with complex, shadowy ecosystems growing under them that may react unpredictably to light.
“If you find him,” Emma says, “let me know what kind of man he is.”
“I don’t even know where to start looking. It’s a big world.”
“You didn’t ask me if I spoke to him at the funeral,” she says.
“Did you?”
“Yeah. It was funeral talk, mostly. I’m sorry for your loss. She was a brilliant woman. That kind of thing. My dad’s right, you know? He had this odd smell hanging off him, Lionel Grey or Goettreider or whatever. Not bad. Just odd. Staticky and, I don’t know . . . elemental.”
“He told you where he lived?”
“He invited me to visit if I’m ever in the area,” she says. “I couldn’t say anything in front of my father because it’s, well, the primal wound of their marriage and he wears it on his sleeve. Sorry, literally. He never talked about it until after she died. It’s strange to discover both of your parents are very good at keeping secrets.”
“I didn’t mean to cause anyone unnecessary pain,” I say.
“I don’t think it is unnecessary,” Emma says.
She looks away and there’s something childlike and moving in the way she gives the sidewalk a little punt with her toe, like a kid protesting some magnificent slight.
“My mom and I talked a lot in the hospital,” Emma says. “I slept there every night of that final week. My dad couldn’t bear it. He took the day shifts. But I captained the night. And the night’s when it got bad.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “My mother died too. Sort of.”
She gives me a look, like, how does your mom sort of die? But she lets it lie. She has her own story to tell. In the house, Jerome peers out the kitchen window at us, like a widow in a soap opera.
“The cancer took its time with her,” she says. “I watched it gobble her up, but slow, over months, like it wanted to enjoy every morsel of the feast. And then, like a switch had been flipped, it got fast, unbelievably fast. She collapsed in the kitchen. The cancer was suddenly everywhere. We had six days together in the hospital before it took her. She knew this was it, and, so, she told me about him. She said she always loved him. She said she always loved my father too. You have to understand that my mother was not a melodramatic person. She was tough as hell right to the very end. But she told me that the human heart was as complex and intractable as the thorny physics problems she spent her life trying to unpack. Worse, actually, because physics has solutions and the heart only has questions. She said compared to love, physics was a relief.”
Emma wipes her eyes on her sleeve. She gives me an embarrassed smile and I make a wordless gesture that I hope conveys enough empathy.
“My mom told my dad that she never saw Lionel again after the accident. But I know she did, at least once. She went to a conference at the University of Hong Kong in 1968. My dad didn’t go, some work commitment. I was born about forty weeks later.”
She looks at my face, analyzing the schematic features and comparing them to a mental image of herself that may or may not be wholly accurate.
“As far as I know,” Emma says, “he lives in the same place he has for the past five decades. Hong Kong Island.”
“I don’t know what kind of man he is,” I say. “But I know what kind of man he should’ve been. A great one.”
Emma shrugs and goes back into her father’s house.
103
On the plane from San Francisco to Hong Kong, I tap through the movie selection on the seat-back screen in front of me, but my brain feels too poached to latch onto anything involving a plot. So instead I watch my fellow passengers, four hundred people staring in blank silence at glowing rectangles.