The Forgotten Hours(77)
Her father shoveled the food in, chewing hastily, as though someone might snatch the next unagi roll away from him. Zev replenished their sake, and Katie abstained. She watched the two men feel each other out, Zev tentatively as was his way, allowing John to be the funny man. Once they’d had sufficient sake, Zev became ebullient, too, relaxing back into his chair, swirling the cup in his blunt fingers. They began to compete as to who had the most disgusting story to tell about the foods they were willing to eat. This developed into stories of traveling, and Zev talked about his “starving artist” period, when he’d lived in a squat in Brixton. The antinuke rallies in Trafalgar Square that he and his girlfriend treated like a day out, taking along a picnic of sausage rolls and cans of pale ale. John said he and Charlie had spent two months in London once, when they were first dating. He told them about the bedsit in Hammersmith where they’d had to feed the meter to keep the electricity on.
“So, my friend,” John said, untucking the napkin he’d hung in his shirt collar and wiping his chin and mouth with it. His face was haggard, but his eyes were lit up. “You’re forty. . .what? Forty-one? A Peter Pan type, I guess?”
“Youth is a crown of roses; old age, a crown of willows, as my mother used to say,” Zev answered. He had not caught the slight shift in John’s tone, the sharpening of his focus, but Katie noticed it right away, and she sat up taller. “They say students keep you young, but I suspect it’s the exact opposite. Teaching takes years off your life.” Zev was smiling, still having fun.
“Teachers allowed to date their students these days?” John asked.
“Dad, I wasn’t one of his students, not ever,” Katie said. “We met here in New York. I’d already been working a couple of years.”
“Didn’t you first meet at college?” He reached out to touch her forearm. “I just feel really in the dark, hon.”
He probably thought he was looking out for her, but she hadn’t asked him to do that. She had grown up since they’d last lived together like regular people; she’d become a woman who didn’t need to ask permission to make her own decisions.
Zev looked from her father to Katie and back again, his brows snagged over his heavy nose. “Are you suggesting we’ve done something improper?”
John poured himself more sake. “When I was in jail, I met a man with the name of Emmet. He was a sculptor, covered in tattoos. On his neck, right up to here”—he ran his finger under one ear, along his chin, to the other ear—“skulls and playing cards and girls riding missiles. He was near seventy years old. Boy, he loved those tattoos. Oiled them with some kind of coconut potion he had to bargain for from the commissary. He didn’t think much of getting older either.”
“So, Dad, okay . . .” Katie said, seeing the gap widen between her father’s perception and reality. He was embarrassingly off base. “Zev’s a professor, not a teacher. There’s one of his paintings in the apartment, did you notice? He’s very talented, really good. After his opening, his show at the Gaslight, there was tons of . . . of . . .” She petered out when she felt pressure on her leg; it was Zev, putting his hand on her thigh, asking her to please stop.
“That painting with the hands?” John asked. “The big one—that’s one of yours?”
“He just gave it to me today,” Katie said. “Isn’t it incredible?”
“Yes, it is. Very interesting. She’s in a position of power, the girl, or she’s overshadowed by the others, the dark types?”
“I think that’s probably the point, right? It’s ambiguous.”
They sat looking at the food before agreeing to box it up and head back. When John asked for the bill, the waitress said it had already been paid, and Zev waved his hand, as though it meant nothing. He must have given them his credit card when he’d gone to the men’s room earlier.
“You planning on staying over tonight, Dad?” Katie asked as they approached her place. A drifting sense of disorientation had overtaken her in the restaurant, a tilting of expectations, and she didn’t know anymore what she wanted from him. Earlier, watching the hot-air balloons, she had slipped back into the delicate fold of girlhood, of being his child. Now, there was a surge inside her pulling her away; she was no longer the same person she’d been back then.
“Well, provided the Israeli’s not staying too and we have to wrestle for space, ha ha,” John said.
“Please don’t call him that,” Katie said. “And Zev sleeps in my bed, obviously.”
“Aw, so sensitive,” John said. “I’m just joking, sweetheart.” He shook Zev’s hand and looked him in the eye. “Thanks for dinner. And for taking good care of my girl.”
“You’re very welcome,” Zev said.
John took the keys from Katie and headed up the stairs.
“I should go,” Zev said quietly. “Right? You need some time together.”
“Sorry. It’s been so long. He just wants what’s best for me.”
“You are both finding each other, still. I understand.” A shadow passed over Zev’s face. “Wait—is it tomorrow that you go to London? Already?”
She nodded. “Just a few days,” she said. They held on to each other for a while, kissing briefly, but it seemed as though neither of them could wait to pull away.