“Goddammit, just sign it!” The words explode out of me before I can stop them. I stand, the air catching in my throat when I try to breathe. I turn and head off in the direction of my room. My dad follows, calling my name, but I slam the door shut just before he reaches it.
He knocks politely, then asks if I’m all right. Sure, I answer. Perfect. What’s wrong? he asks. This time I don’t answer. I see the shadow of his feet in the small space beneath the door as he waits for a second, debating with himself whether or not to give me my space or keep pressing. In the end, he walks away.
What’s wrong? he wonders. What’s wrong is that I hate this place. I hate Danton and everyone in it. I hate his job and everything to do with it. There are people my age who’ve spent their entire lives in the same house. There are people my age who’ve had the same friends since kindergarten. They have a dog and a yard and a tennis ball on the roof that bounced there when they were ten.
I fumble through my nightstand drawer for my bottle of Lorazepam, work the spit up in my mouth, and swallow one of the tiny pills. It’s a sedative for anxiety I’ve taken for a few years. As needed, it says on the label. But I’m running out because as needed has been way more often since coming to New York. It’ll kick in about twenty minutes from now, putting a warm blanket over my shoulders and telling me Astrid Foogle and the slap and the humiliation don’t matter as much as I think they do. It’s like having a best friend in pill form.
Next to the pill bottle is my other sedative, a deck of playing cards. I slide the deck out of the tattered box and begin shuffling them, over and over. The tangible, mathematical rhythm of the plastic-coated paper against the skin of my fingers and palms is calming in a weird OCDish sort of way. I picked it up after watching street hustlers in Venezuela fleecing tourists with air-quote “games” that are really just cons. I got good at all sorts of tricks over the years, and now cards serve as a little therapy session while I’m waiting for the Lorazepam to start smoldering.
Through my window I hear sirens, big deep voices like those of fire trucks. Somewhere, something is burning. Collecting the cards and shuffling them again, I hear the shushing of a bus’s air brakes and the honking of a taxi’s horn. I hear a drunk on the street howling about how someone took his money, about how Jesus is coming back. Jesus, I want to get out of here. I push the thought out of my mind and work the cards, my fingers creating and re-creating and re-creating again an orderly, plastic world of chance and probability, a new universe of winners and losers every time.
*
It’s 11:36 p.m. when I wake up—fucking Lorazepam—and now his birthday’s almost over. I climb out of bed and open the door.
He’s sitting on the couch with his glasses on, laptop open. I slip into the kitchen and get the box from the bakery out of the refrigerator. Inside, the cupcake with the red frosting has fallen over onto its side and is sort of a mess. I take that one for myself. I dig through the drawers, find matches and a birthday candle—it’s in the shape of a 5, brought back with us for some reason from Moscow, where I’d had my fifteenth birthday. Strange, my dad’s sentimentality for little things.
I stand in the kitchen doorway, holding the plate with the two cupcakes until he looks up and notices me. He closes the laptop and puts his glasses in his pocket.
“Sorry for the crappy birthday,” I say, sitting down on the edge of the couch next to him.
“Aren’t you going to sing?”
“Absolutely not. Make a wish.”
A second passes as he thinks, then he blows the candle out. With careful fingers he lifts the cake off the plate and takes a bite. “Lemon,” he says. “You remembered.”
I notice a paperback book sitting on the couch, half covered by his laptop. “What were you reading?”
With his free hand, he pulls it out and shows me. 1984 by George Orwell, an old paperback, worn out and shabby. “I wasn’t. I’m loaning it to a friend,” he says. “You ever read it?”
“No.”
“You should. Dystopian future. Or maybe dystopian present.”
The present. I grab my backpack from the floor and fish through it until I find the little box. “I got you something this year.”
He takes it from me, squints at it, and wrinkles his nose. “Is it—a fishing pole?”
“Stop.”
“No. A new car.”
“Stop!” I say. “Just open it!”
My dad lifts the cover a little bit and peeks inside as if whatever is in there might bite him. Then his face goes slack. “Gwendolyn Bloom, what have you done?” he says, the same tone as when he’s angry.
He drops the box to his lap and holds the pen as if it were as delicate as a baby chick. I pull a notebook out of my backpack. “Here,” I say. “Write with it.”
He puts the pen to the paper and scratches out something like a signature, but there’s no ink at first, just a dry scribbled indentation. Then it starts to flow, elegant blue, royal blue. Love it! he writes.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“More than love it. I’m crazy about it. It makes me feel like—a real aristocrat,” he says with a bad English accent.
I laugh, and he puts his arm around me. With my head on his shoulder, I can hear his heart beating slowly and evenly. Strip away the house in the suburbs, strip away the scads of friends who’d just turn on you anyway, and so what? A family of two is still a family. It’s enough. I’m about to tell him this, and even though it’s corny as hell, I’m about to say it out loud, but he stops me by speaking first.
“I’ll bring it with me tomorrow on my trip,” he says. “I’ll be the fanciest guy in the meeting.”
Tomorrow? I pull away and sit up. “Where are you going?”
He cringes like he does when he forgets something. “I was going to tell you, but you fell asleep. I have to go to Paris tomorrow.”
My shoulders sink.
“Just two days,” he says. “Fly out tomorrow morning, have a meeting tomorrow night, and by bedtime the day after, I’m home.”
Three
It’s the same note he always leaves—Don’t eat junk food. Here’s forty dollars for emergencies. Go to Bela and Lili’s if you need anything—but this time, scrawled in that elegant royal-blue ink from the pen I gave him. I lean back against the seat of the 6 train headed downtown and turn the note over to where I’d written the address of the used record store on St. Mark’s Place.
On almost everything having to do with music, my dad and I disagree. But jazz is the exception. He’d take me to the clubs sometimes overseas, and I’d pinch my nose against the cigarette smoke and listen intently for two shows in a row. We made a kind of sport in the foreign cities we’d visit by trying to find the smallest, weirdest venues and most obscure local recordings. Too bad about his turntable that arrived in New York smashed to pieces. I’ll get him a good one someday, when I’m rich.