After the Hurricane(48)
“You came. I didn’t see you here the other nights, figured you weren’t going to show up.”
“I was free tonight, so.” Elena sips her drink. She wanted him to be here but now she doesn’t know what to say, what she wanted, exactly, in the first place. But he just nods, comfortably, and lights up a cigarette. They sit in silence for a moment, and it feels strangely nice to Elena. Like they planned this, like they are friends who decided to meet and spend some time together. She hasn’t done that much lately. Her fear for her father, her engagement ending, the feeling that her life is more and more not what she wants it to be, it has all isolated her. She has isolated herself. She knows this. There are people in her life who would have shown up, been there, but she has not let them, has not alerted them that they needed to. Needing things is weak, pathetic. She does not want people to feel bad for her. She does not want to feel bad for herself. What do you want to feel?
She takes another sip of her drink, closing her eyes at the familiar taste, the familiar sensation. The last time she came to this bar she was twenty-one years old. She sat beside her father and watched him drink himself into unconsciousness, watched him go from expansive, charming, everyone’s best friend, calling every eighty-year-old in the bar joven, “young man,” flirting with everyone, to diminished, softened, sweetly sentimental, until he became nothing, a blank slate, the rum rendering him a man erased. This was why he drank, she decided then, to erase himself, to forget all of the people he was and get to be nothing. She, who knew then and knows now very few things about her father, very few of the people he was, remembering this moment, cannot help but feel rage. It floods her, overwhelms her, she has to grip the side of the bar. How dare he do that? How dare he carve away the people he is, was, like that, leaving her with nothing? How dare he not be better, leave something of himself for her?
She remembers walking him home that night, putting him to bed. It was a graduation trip, his gift to her for finishing college, a trip for the two of them. She spent the days alone, in the ocean, and the nights watching him disappear. She should have realized then that Rosalind wouldn’t stay in this for much longer, and she didn’t, three years later her father left a Korean restaurant in the East Village and came back here, disappearing all over again, over and over again.
Her nails are making marks in the soft wood of the bar. Elena watches this like it is happening to someone else, like her fingers do not hurt.
“You’re all right?” Fernando’s voice is rumbly with smoke. Elena nods. This is what he said to her when she was in the ocean, when she was floating, happy, but she is drowning now. He slides over a seat, and now he sits closer, diagonally across from her, they are at the corner of the bar, the only area of a bar where two people can actually talk to each other and look at each other.
“Where’s your dad? The one you are here visiting?” he asks, like there might be more than one. This is an excellent question, and it makes Elena laugh, hard, the sound bitter to her ears.
“I have no idea,” she says, giggling madly. He looks at her, curious. But she can tell this stranger whatever she likes. “He’s lost. That’s why I’m here.” The rum, little as it is, has hit her mind, and it has already given her that glorious half inch from reality she so badly needs right now. “He’s gone missing.”
Fernando nods, once, as though this is a normal thing to say, and shoots his rum. He chases it with a swig of beer.
“What does he look like?” Fernando asks, his voice quiet. Elena describes her father, realizing she is really describing a picture of him, one he sent her digitally a year ago. She has not seen him in person in a while. She closes her eyes, remembering the photo and how it swirls around with all the other images of her father she has, how tall and strong he seemed when she was a child, how he looked in his suits getting ready for court, how he looked at her bat mitzvah, how he looked when she was graduating high school, how he looked sitting here in this same bar, life leaching out of him with every drink. How he looked in the photos she now has, at his First Communion, a tiny figure dwarfed by his suit, by his own father, by the shadow of the church. She tells Fernando his height, how his stomach has rounded and pushed out beyond his belt line, how his legs have remained skinny, like a frog’s. She describes his hair, still curly and barely gray, somehow, and his big face, his hooked nose, his bright guayaberas, the shirts he wears every day now, he told her, in an email, and she thinks, I could be describing my abuelo. She wonders how her father feels now that he has become his own father.
“Have you ever noticed how Disney villains all have big hooked noses?” the bartender, Rita, asks, and Elena opens her eyes. Fernando is looking at her, something strange living in his face, but her glass is empty, and the bartender has made an excellent point.
“Maybe Disney is anti-Semitic,” Elena says. “Actually, Walt Disney was anti-Semitic. And racist. And anti-communist. Triple threat. Can I have another, please?” The bartender nods.
“Are you Jewish?” Rita sounds excited. Elena nods. Rita mixes the drink, talking about a Jewish friend she has who lives in New Jersey.
“I guess my father looks like a Disney villain, then. Have you seen anyone like that?” Elena smiles, but Fernando’s strange expression is bigger now; it’s taken up all the space on his face. He pulls out his phone, and he shows Elena a photo. It is him, Fernando, his arm around her father, here, in this bar, some other night, both of them smiling, both of their faces red with liquor.