Homeland Elegies(82)
“Please. It’s nothing. Compared to stuff I’ve seen? He’s a kitten.”
“Pretty oversize kitten.”
“Aren’t we all?” Benji said with a smile. “Is it true he was really Trump’s doctor?”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Said he treated him for a heart problem years ago. They were friends.”
“I don’t know about the friends part, but yes, he was his doctor for a while.”
“Wow. What a trip—maybe have a real talk with him tomorrow…”
“Absolutely. And thank you, Benji. This was incredibly kind of you.”
“Good luck next week. With your opening.”
“Thanks,” I said, heading for the exit. I stopped in the doorway: “You want to come?”
“To what? Your opening?”
“Be my guests. Monday. You and Jess.”
“You sure about that?”
“One hundred percent.”
“I’d love that. Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”
Out in the parking lot, I found Father already nestled in the passenger seat. I drove us home in silence, not realizing—until we were in the driveway—that he’d fallen asleep and was now drooling against the glass. After waking him, I took him inside into the living room, where I helped him onto the couch on which my mother had died and where he’d slept every night since. As I unlaced his shoes, he started to drift off to sleep again, mumbling my name and something else I couldn’t make out.
“What was that, Dad?”
“I saaaid…if she waaaas my own daaaughter, I would have dooone the saaame.”
I was confused. “If who was your own daughter?”
“Christiiine,” he blared. He turned away from me again as I pulled off his socks. He kept muttering into the cushions. It wasn’t long before he was snoring.
*
Who Christine was and what she might have had to do with being his daughter I wouldn’t understand until the next morning, when he told me about his case. The reference to his daughter had confused me only because I knew he had one, a daughter, my half sister, whom I’d discovered two years earlier in an episode at once absurd and improbable, which surely merits extended treatment of its own. And yet though I’ve clearly shown neither shame nor compunction about exposing my loved ones—and myself—to the ridicule likely headed our way upon publication of this book, I’ve decided (mostly) to leave my half sister, Melissa (not her real name), out of it. She’s young. She’s had no proper father (she and my dad haven’t spoken for years). She’s still trying to find her way and herself and certainly doesn’t need this headache. Oh, and let’s be clear about one thing before I offer this briefest of ex parte accounts: We did not. Sleep with each other.
It was in February of 2016 that I found myself ensconced deep in the toe of a scarlet tufted horseshoe booth on the main floor of a Manhattan strip club. Trump had just won the New Hampshire primary. I was there with a group of young husbands and bachelors celebrating the impending nuptials of our friend Ashraf, the actor and comedian who’d starred in two of my plays. Ashraf and the other celebrants had all repaired to the private rooms for Champagne and dances (and likely more). A barely clad shapely young woman found me sitting there with only my drink to keep me company. Her skin was not quite as dark as mine; she wore a nose stud, and her eyes were lined with a thin rim of kohl. She went by the name Noor. I wouldn’t buy a dance from her, but she planted herself beside me anyway. I found her lively and acerbic, mature beyond her years. (She said she was twenty-four.) My interest in her choice for an Arab stage name got her on the topic of sexual fetishes. She told me a story about a friend—like her, part Muslim—who turned tricks advertising herself in a face-covering niqab on erotic websites. I was startled to hear, even anecdotally, of the demand among US war vets to act out sexual fantasies on a female Muslim cipher. Most of them, Noor said, wanted to fuck her friend with her veil on. I caught the inkling of a story and gave her my card. Three days later she called me, and we met at a Korean restaurant in midtown. I sat across from her and took notes for an hour as she alternated between tales of her life in the sex trade and a bi bim bop without beef. We saw each other twice more before the evening when I ended up in her living room in Woodside and, on a bookshelf just outside the bathroom, I noticed a picture of my father.
I’ll leave the rest for you to imagine.
I confronted my father that night, in a conversation that had him in shock, and ended with him hanging up on me. The next day, he called, sniffling, humbled, contrite in a way I’d never heard him. He had always planned to tell me someday, he said, and was glad I finally knew. He’d tried to do the best he could given the situation, he explained. He loved his wife; he loved his mistress; he loved both his children. He’d been too weak to make a choice, and Melissa’s mother—bless her heart—hadn’t pushed him. He always assumed my mother suspected something, but—bless her heart—she never asked. To hear him tugging at me for sympathy made me livid, but I kept my anger to myself. I told him Melissa was stripping, which surprised him. She needed money to get back into school, I said. He promised to send her what he could; I would eventually give her more. That summer, she returned to community college, studying to be a stenographer. She’s almost done and, yes, still works in a strip club a few nights a week. Even if she didn’t need the money as much as she did, she says, she wouldn’t give it up; she’s too used to what she calls a “certain intensity of attention” she just can’t get anywhere else.