The Middlesteins: A Novel(21)

“Of course you deserve to be happy,” she said; and he thought maybe she might be softening, but it was hard to tell with her. “We all deserve to be happy.” Was that almost a smile? But then it was gone. “This is life, though, and—I can’t even believe I have to say this to you, because you are the father and I am the child and I feel like you should know how this works.” She seemed nauseated. She practically gagged, then restrained herself. “You deserve to be happy, yes. But life is not always easy! And when the going gets tough and the chips are down—I know you do not need to hear all these clichés to get the point—you need to stand up for the people in your life, and that especially includes the woman you’ve been married to for forty years. She’s your wife, Dad! Your wife!”

He had never had dinner with his daughter before, he suddenly realized. Not one-on-one. She had her tête-à-têtes with her mother every few months or so. But it would never have occurred to him before this moment to pick up the phone and call her and ask her out to dinner. (Did he even call her? He wasn’t sure. It seemed like it had been a lifetime of his wife making the calls and then handing the phone to him at the tail end of the conversation, he making a few gruff comments about his job, she pretending to care, the two of them forgetting about their exchange the instant it was over. His wife would let him know when there was something he should be worried about.) He supposed this was it, for the rest of his life. Dinner in a series of dingy but serviceable ethnic restaurants, beneath a giant framed print of a waterfall cascading into a beach, the bottom of the photo stained slightly by some sort of red sauce.

“Here’s the question, Dad, and this is the biggie,” she said. She ran her fingers up her sinewy arms, stroking a thin but solid blue vein protruding from beneath the skin. This seemed like an unattractive habit at best to Middlestein, and the kind of thing that might scare a man away. But it was none of his business if she got married or not. Maybe once upon a time, but he knew he would never be able to say a thing to her again about it. She looked up, looked him in the eye, and said, “Do you think she would ever do the same to you? Leave you when you needed her most?”

“Robin, your mother left me a long time ago,” he said, and whether Robin knew it, or Benny knew it, or that ballbuster of a wife of his knew it, it was true.

“When?” she said.

“It has been a lifetime of whens,” he said.

And then he refused to discuss it any further, dissect his marriage for his daughter, because it was enough already, and the food had arrived, and could they just eat and stop fighting for a second? But he did get her to agree to see him again sometime, and to maybe put in a good (but not great) word for him with her brother, and he thought he had successfully convinced her to hate him slightly less than she did when the meal had started, until just before they said good-bye to each other in the parking lot, when he said, “So how is she? Your mother,” and she looked like she was going to kill him, take those powerful arms of hers, her veiny hands, and wring his neck. “How do you think she is?” was her only response, and then she walked off—no hug, no kiss, nothing—toward the train station in the early spring chill, lean, hateful, angry, young, alive.



*

He had Tracy’s number in his phone, but it was almost nine, and he decided it was too late to call. It wouldn’t hurt to send an e-mail, though. Either she was up and would get it, or she’d get it tomorrow, and maybe by then he might have a change of heart. I wouldn’t mind seeing you again. She replied almost immediately—“I’m game if you are,” followed by a winking, blushing smiley face (even her choice of emoticon was seductive, thought Middlestein)—and, to his surprise, invited him over immediately. He hadn’t expected such a quick response to his e-mail. Even some of the women he had met who didn’t work (there were more than a few living on spousal support or inheritance) held on to some semblance of propriety and made him wait a few days to meet even though there they were, online, just like himself, obviously not doing a damn thing with their time. He suspected he knew what it all meant, but he also wanted to make no assumptions, because he didn’t want to get into any tricky kind of trouble. He was no fool. He watched Law & Order, he watched Dateline. He knew about blackmail and con games and the like. But this was the furthest he had gotten with any woman yet, and they were in the suburbs of Chicago not Manhattan, and he was obviously not a rich man, maybe even she could see that he was not a bad man, even though he had left his sick wife all alone (which in the quietest moments in the mornings, alone in bed, he knew was a truly terrible thing), and was there any possibility that maybe she liked him a little bit? Was that the craziest thing in the world?