Fiona and Jane(65)
“Is there a happy ending?” Then, he added, “Not like that, you pervert.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “A date?”
“You’re the only person in my life who makes me feel like I exist.” He paused a moment. “We don’t have to call it a date,” he said.
When we hung up, I went online and bought a plane ticket bound for New York City in two weeks. I forwarded the itinerary to Julian, and the next day he emailed back: “Who have you been going on dates with? Guys? Girls?”
* * *
? ? ?
In New York, Julian and I visited the Guggenheim. We rode the elevator up to the top then strolled down, winding leisurely through the exhibit, a retrospective of a Japanese conceptual artist. Several floors of the museum featured his “Date Paintings”: for a time, the artist worked on canvases with a single date in the center, simple white letters brushed over a monochromatic background of black, navy, red, or gray paint. On one of the middle levels, tall glass walls erected between the galleries displayed tourist postcards the artist had mailed to his friends throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Pictures of the Statue of Liberty washed in sunset hues, the Chrysler Building gleamed silver, the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers loomed above lurid blue water, and on the backs: “I got up at 7:48 A.M.” “I got up at 8:15 A.M.” Next to these were a series of Western Union telegrams, each of them declaring the same refrain: “I am still alive.” “I am still alive.” “I am still alive.”
That night in bed, I told Julian about my father. Baba had moved out on Mah and me when I was fifteen. After living in Taipei for a few years, he’d landed in Shanghai. Another job, the growing economy on the mainland, better pay.
We were kissing a little, stopping every now and then to talk, me in my flannel pajamas and Julian wearing a pair of green sweatpants stamped with usmc on one leg. He didn’t have any blinds over the bedroom windows yet, and a dark orange light passed through the glass, landed on the bare white wall next to Julian’s bed in a long rectangle with black vertical lines cutting through its middle.
“I was twenty-two when he died,” I said to Julian. Back then I had two jobs: weekdays I answered the phones at an eye doctor’s office, and weekends I worked as the hostess at a sushi bar on the west side that turned into a clubby lounge scene at night. I was supposed to be taking classes at Santa Monica College toward making a transfer to a four-year, but whatever cash I had left after paying the rent I spent on partying: dropping Ecstasy at warehouse raves in the Inland Empire, camping trips up the coast to shroom my brains out on the beach, endless shots of Crown Royal at the various Koreatown booking clubs staked along Wilshire Boulevard. Too many blackout nights, hangover days. Fiona was gone—New York, Jasper, her old law school ambitions—those were the years we’d lost touch.
I’d given up hope my father would ever return to LA, I said. Take up position as a regular part of my life again. I was angry with him, and whenever he called me up I’d send him straight to voicemail. It happened like this, every time: he’d call again a few minutes later, and again in an hour. Sometimes he left messages. Five, six, ten times he would call, always on Sundays. I never called him back.
Near the end his call volume dwindled to two or three times on a single day, then just one try, the last Sunday. I remembered declining that call, too. The next Sunday, when my phone didn’t light up with his number, I felt strange. I realized I’d drawn an uncanny comfort from the routine, rejecting his incoming attempts.
The next day, on a Monday, I got a call from an unknown international number. The person spoke Mandarin, but I had a hard time understanding his mainland accent—he was a cop, I finally gathered. The rest of the conversation was a blur, or maybe I’ve blocked it from memory after all these years.
“My father hanged himself,” I said, lying there in Julian’s bed. “From a ceiling fan.”
Julian was quiet for a moment. “A guy in boot camp did that,” he said finally. “It was the first body I ever saw.”
“He was in his forties,” I said. “Just a few years older than I am now.”
“The guy in boot camp left a note for his family. Did your dad . . . ?”
I shook my head.
“Wait, what’d you say?” Julian asked. “Forty—”
“Oh that,” I said. In my reverie, I’d slipped up. Then I told him my real age.
He asked me why I’d lied, and I said I didn’t know. I breathed, waited for him to say something else.
“Come here,” he said, and held an arm up for me to lean against his chest. He smelled like a new bar of soap. “Anything else you want to confess?”
I heard myself tell him about Naima, how I’d been getting close to her.
After I finished talking Julian cleared his throat. “I’m happy for you,” he said. “She sounds like a cool chick.”
Did he mean it? His voice betrayed no bitterness, no sliver of regret or jealousy. I wondered then if I’d wanted him to become upset, to act like the jilted lover. Maybe things would crystallize between us, force one or both of us to make a choice, say something we couldn’t come back from. Then I realized maybe I’d already said enough, telling him about my dad.
I hadn’t talked to Naima about any of that at all; when she asked about my family I’d said that my parents were divorced and left it at that. She didn’t pry. Her parents, too, were split up. Both had remarried, and Naima grew up with younger siblings from the new unions, the beloved big sister to them all. I couldn’t tell her Baba had been effectively ostracized from the family, that I’d been the one to out him to Mah. I’d turned my back on him when I was eighteen, after that trip to Taipei. For four years, he tried to reestablish contact. My father was a gay man, closeted and alone. I was stupid enough to think there’d always be more time with him—I should’ve known better.