The Refugees(39)
All through the morning, while I processed refunds and listened in on my service representatives, I pictured my father and Mimi lounging on the white leather couch, watching the Vietnamese channel on television. Mimi was the first of my father’s mistresses and girlfriends that I’d seen, the mysterious women that my mother screamed about to my father behind their bedroom door when my brothers and sisters and I were younger. Now I had a face and a name for the woman sitting next to my father under the gaze of her husband. My father hadn’t even put up my mother’s picture, as custom said he should have, next to the photographs of his dead parents on his dresser.
I found it soothing during my lunch break to call Sam’s home number and listen to her answering machine. “Hey there, stranger,” she said. “You know what to do.” Teaching geometry to tenth-graders had trained her to speak in a gentle and pleasant way. Sam was popular with her students, like my father with his. He was a high school guidance counselor, and every Christmas, alumni would send dozens of cards to the man they affectionately called Mr. P, updating him on their careers and families. I doubted if Mr. P’s students ever imagined that he had mistresses, or that once, in his past, he’d jumped out of airplanes and commanded a battalion of paratroopers. To the students, he’d merely say that he’d been a soldier once. He was a modest man who didn’t like to talk about his other life with acquaintances or his own children any more than I told my coworkers about how, at the end of the day, I drove to a convenience store parking lot and changed in the front seat, wriggling into gray slacks and a red polyester blazer. My coworkers knew me to be a customer service manager for a company in Burbank that sold hearing aids, oxygen tanks, and motorized wheelchairs, but by night I was a watchman at a luxury high-rise on the Wilshire Corridor near UCLA. No one could say I was lazy, as Sam had conceded during one of our arguments last year.
The job was perfect, because after Sam left me and my mother died, I could no longer sleep. Nights at the high-rise were quiet and didn’t require much of me. Every now and then I got up to walk the hallways, stairways, and underground parking garage, but mostly I sat in the marble lobby, watching every corner of the building on a bank of video monitors. When I wasn’t reading one of the several newspapers I’d brought, I played solitaire. In between games I would draw a random card from the deck, and if it was the ace of spades, I called Sam. If she answered the phone, I said nothing, waiting to see how many times she said “Hello?” before she hung up.
She was a patient woman, but her patience ran out last year, when she turned thirty-four. We had gone to Palms Thai restaurant on Hollywood for her birthday, because she was a fan of the Thai Elvis who shimmied and shimmered onstage in a different costume each night. That evening, he was wearing a gold lamé pantsuit as he sang a passable version of “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” pushing rose-tinted sunglasses up his nose with a jeweled finger every now and then.
“I want a child, Thomas.” Sam tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear, almost shyly. “And I want to have it with you.” The strand was dyed purple, while the rest of her hair was its natural brunette. A diamond stud the size of a pinhead glittered above her left nostril, and my initials were tattooed in blue ink on her right wrist, serving as a reminder of me, she said, whenever she checked the time. For some reason her rebelliousness had charmed my father, so much so that after our divorce, he said I was to blame.
“I don’t know if I’m ready yet,” I told Sam. This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. “I don’t know if I’ll be good with children.”
“Get over it, Thomas. You’re not going to turn out like your father.”
My father was someone who, for the better part of a decade, woke my brothers and me from our sofa bed at dawn to perform calisthenics with him. We did push-ups with one of our sisters sitting on our backs, and sit-ups clutching a Webster’s unabridged dictionary to our chests. We ran through an obstacle course of old tires in the backyard and used the branch of an oak tree for chin-ups, straining and grunting until we fell off the limb. After that, we practiced marksmanship with a BB gun, plinking away at Budweiser cans filled with sand. Then we ran for miles, not stopping until one of us vomited, proof that my father was succeeding in his goal of making us into men.
“He’s insane.” I thought Sam would see the risks. “Aren’t you worried I’ll start my own army? Or keep a girlfriend on the side?”
“Like I said.” Sam poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. “You’re not your father.”
My shift ended at dawn. It was a forty-minute drive from the Westside to my Eastside apartment, on a side street off the up-and-coming stretch of Sunset, not far from where the boulevard became César Chávez. Stolen cars and hovering -police helicopters were commonplace here in Echo Park, where I’d moved after the divorce. By the time my mother passed away during the summer, I knew what loneliness was like, and on the day after the funeral, suspecting my father might be lonely too, I invited him to come live with me. I hadn’t expected him to say yes.
Today was my day off from both jobs, but after sleeping for only two hours, I got up, showered, shaved, and dressed in fifteen minutes. Half an hour later, I had crossed from Echo Park to Mimi’s neighborhood, the Chinese mecca on Atlantic and Valley boulevards. She opened the door wearing a pink velour tracksuit. My father was showering after his morning run, and she insisted on preparing me a cup of coffee. I heard him singing in the bathroom as Mimi returned with a glass of ice in one hand and, in the other, a second glass with the condensed milk, a stainless steel filter perched on top. While we waited for the black coffee to drip, she smiled and said, “Your father speaks highly of you.”