“I tried, Little A. She hung straight up on me.” He pauses. “Can’t say I blame her. Must be hell.”
“I don’t really know how she is, Dad. I don’t talk to her all that often. She’s been very…angry since I left for France, and Zelda said she has fewer and fewer good days.”
“Listen, kiddo, I’m…sorry that you have to deal with this. Her. It’s not fair. On top of everything…” Marlon seems unsure how to continue. This is as close as I will get to an apology from him. He’s very good at apologies. You realize only later that he has accepted responsibility for exactly nothing.
“Let’s not talk about it, Dad. I’d like to…just enjoy the sunshine.” We’ve reached the car, which he optimistically parked in the pickup and drop-off area. He has a ticket, which I’m sure he will not pay. This part of the world has yet to adopt the post-9/11 attitude typical to transit areas in the rest of the country, and airport security rather lackadaisically enforces its modest anti-terror protocol. In New York City, Marlon’s car would have been towed and he’d be in police custody by now. But here in Ithaca, just a ticket.
He has rented a flashy convertible, of course. My dad likes to travel in style, regardless of finances, seemliness, tact. He tends to think of any economic restriction as a dead-letter issue, a rule that does not apply to him.
“Nice ride,” I say. He grins mischievously as we load my bags and ourselves into the car and speed off. I hope he’s okay to drive. I haven’t driven in two years and don’t even have a driver’s license, but I might still be the better choice if he’s drunk. He seems reasonably coordinated, though, and once we’re on the other side of the city, we’ll coast along traffic-free dirt roads, kicking up dust and free to veer across the graded surface as much as we like. I relax as we speed down Route 13, Cayuga Lake on our right.
“So so so. Paris! How the hell is it, squirt?”
“About what you’d expect, Dad.” I shrug.
“C’mon, it’s one of the greatest cities in the world! That’s all you have to say about it?”
“It’s far away from Silenus. Even farther than California.”
He ignores the frosty tone in my voice. He is buoyant, but I can hear the strain in his throat as he tries to be cheerful for me. “Always so lighthearted, Little A,” he teases. “Levity, oy vey.” He whistles a tune as we drive through the city, the breeze ruffling his thick black hair, which isn’t curly like ours but, rather, wavy. When we learned that curly hair was a recessive gene, Zelda and I started speculating about our heritage. But there are too many other stamps of Marlon’s paternity on our genes, and we abandoned the possibility of filial mystery as an exercise in wishful thinking. The letters of our DNA signify our origins, even if they can’t inscribe our futures.
“What did you do while you were waiting for me?” I ask, though I know the answer. I’m wondering if he’ll lie.
“I stopped in to see some old friends, and we went out for a bite to eat.”
“Oh? Where did you go?”
“Uh, what’s that place downtown called? With the cheap margaritas?”
“Viva.”
“Yeah, very average Mexican food.” He grins. “But it’s the only place open between two P.M. and dinner in this one-horse town.”
“The only place with a bar, you mean,” I say, half-teasing.
He smiles again. “I’d forgotten how charmingly…sedate it is ’round these parts.” He signals with his blinker, and we ride silently for a moment or two.
“How is your ‘old friend,’ Dad?” I ask. He blinks. He’s a very good liar, and I can tell he’s considering whether to lie now. But I’m betting he’ll come clean. Because I’m older now. Because my twin sister just died. My twin sister, who, incidentally, inherited this particular talent for deception.
“Sharon, you mean?” he says.
“Who else?”
“She’s okay,” he says uncertainly. We’ve never had a real conversation about the woman he was fucking during my middle school years. I’ve wondered more than once whether he knows that Zelda and I knew. Our mother certainly did.
“That’s good. Do you still see her often?”
“No,” he says softly. “It’s been years.”
“And how is the third wife? Maria?”
“She’s well. The girls are well too. Six and eight, if you can believe that! Scrappy little things. I’ll show you the pictures on my phone, later.” He pauses. “Blaze is a bit of a terror, and Bianca sometimes reminds me of you, when you were little. She’s so…neat.”
“Napa is treating you well, then?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty great! The vineyard’s doing really well—we were in Wine Spectator last month.” I know. We own a vineyard, too, and have had a subscription to Wine Spectator since 1995. Which he knows; he insisted on the subscription, and left us with the bill. “You should come out and visit, while you’re back in the States. I know Maria wants to see you girls.” We both flinch at his use of the present tense, the plural.
“Maybe. I need to get back to Paris kind of soon, though.”
“It’s summer, Little A! Live a bit! You never relax. Your studies can wait until fall, surely.” He nudges me with his elbow, annoyingly.
I nod. “Sort of, I guess. I’m working on my dissertation now, though, so I’m busy. I’m interested in the intersection of Edgar Allan Poe and the OuLiPo movement, their shared emphasis on formal constraint—”
“Poe never struck me as particularly restrained,” Marlon interrupts, presumably thinking himself to be clever.
“Not restraint. Constraint. Specifically, I’m interested in lipograms and pangrams. I’ve got a theory that while both are obviously important for OuLiPo texts, they might appear unconsciously in Poe’s works. So far I’ve focused mainly on alliteration and repetition, and because Poe’s work is explicitly invested in the unconscious—”
“A pangram—that’s like ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’?” Marlon interjects. I expect he’s trying to impress me.
“That’s the idea. So far I’ve been working on this one essay he wrote on poetry—”
“It sounds really erudite, Little A, and I can’t wait to talk about it more. But can’t you take a break? It’s summer, and, well, your sister…”
I capitulate. Marlon is not remotely interested in what I spend my days thinking about.
“Yeah, well, Zelda was the relaxed one. I was the responsible one.”
“You still are, sweetie,” he says, trying to be comforting.