on the merry-go-round, keeping track of street traffic. At the word
“Dad pissed on her?”
“That’s what Lydia says.”
We were quiet a long time after that. She looked down at the floorboards. I could see her jaw, clenching and unclenching beneath the skin. Her hair was very blonde, right up to the scalp.
“I don’t know Dad well,” she said. “They shipped me off to boarding school in the eighth grade. Then I was accepted at Georgetown. The last four months is the first time I’ve lived with him since I was a little girl.”
“You went to prep school?”
“Boarding school.”
“You tied sweaters around your neck and wore shorts with baggy pockets for tennis balls? You played field hockey and compared boys of the Ivy League?”
Gilia almost smiled. “The cheap preppie label comes off after your first divorce.”
“You’re too young to be divorced.”
“There’s no such thing as too young to be divorced.”
She told me about the art history professor at Georgetown who could order off a French menu and recite Shakespearean sonnets, substituting his own feelings for the final couplet.
“I’d never dated a boy over twenty-one. Jeremy was so forceful when he said Salvador Dali was a no-talent bum.”
“You married the guy because he trashed Salvador Dali?”
Gilia’s face was amazingly expressive. Watching her was like reading a newspaper; everywhere I looked was a story.
“I guess so. And he was good in bed. I’d never slept with an experienced man before.”
I almost told her about Maurey training me to get the girls off every time, but I still wasn’t certain of our genetic relationship. It’d been so long since I’d met someone I had anything in common with, the tendency was to suspect shared parentage.
“Why did you get divorced?” I asked.
She gave the shrug I was already fond of. “He was a humanist who believed in situational fidelity. I talked myself into not seeing it until the night he got me in bed with him and a coed bimbo. After that I had to leave.”
“But you went through with it the once?”
She shrugged again.
“How did group sex make you feel?” I asked.
“Suicidal.”
“No sex is worth suicide.”
“To save myself, I stopped thinking and feeling and I slithered home to Mommy and Daddy. Now I shop, swim, and watch network television. Far as I see, that’s considered normal here. Everyone in my family stopped thinking and feeling years ago.”
A woman in a red Volkswagen bus pulled up at the other end of the park and hollered something at the children on the merry-go-round. They pretended not to hear her. The little boy fell off, picked himself up, and ran to the teeter-totter. He ran up one end of the teeter-totter and made it a couple steps onto the high side before his weight brought it down with a bang. The woman came out of the Volkswagen with her hands on her hips.
“So I went through the motions of behaving the way I was expected to behave,” Gilia said. “Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have nothing in common with anyone I know or will ever know.”
“That’s a good way to get depressed.”
“Tell me about it, Jack. Then one morning when I’m in the depths of numbness, a funny-looking man walks into the family room and announces my solid-to-the-point-of-nauseating father once gangbanged a girl and this funny-looking man may be my brother.”
“Funny looking?”
“In a cute way.”
“I’m funny looking in a cute way?”
Gilia leaned toward me. “Don’t you understand, Sam. You’re my wake-up call.”
Some people, especially women, put tremendous stock in eye contact. These people, especially women, have the strange notion that by locking their eyes to yours and staring deep into your soul via the cornea and pupil they can detect a mistruth. Or even the smallest hint of insincerity.
Personally, I don’t buy the gig. It may work on amateurs and children, but the pros are well aware of the eyeball-to-eyeball test. When she bullshits, Lydia is the queen of sincerity. She’ll get up breath-smelling close, gaze solemnly into the sucker’s eyes, sometimes even touch his hand with hers, and lie like a dog. Conversely, honesty makes her so uncomfortable that she disguises it behind glib patter. I learned at an early age to distrust her when she tries to tell the truth and believe her when she doesn’t.
Hank Elkrunner says the Blackfeet consider it rude to look at a person you are speaking to or a person who is speaking to you. Beyond rude, it just isn’t done. I asked him if all Indians practice this custom and received a short but direct diatribe on the white’s stupid belief that all Indian tribes are the same.
“I don’t know anyone but Blackfeet,” Hank said. “You want Apache taboos, call Hollywood.”
Gilia obviously did not follow Blackfeet tradition. Her blue eyes bored into me with the intensity of a lunch whistle. Made my stomach flutter and my brain feel like I was inhaling pure oxygen from a tank. She had a way of cocking her head to one side, as if to give herself a new angle on the truth. Suddenly it became very important that she not find me wanting.
When Gilia finally looked away and I was once again able to see the world around us, the two children had disappeared along with the woman in the red Volkswagen bus. A healthy couple rode down the street on bicycles. An older woman in a tweed sweater walked a cat on a leash. It seemed like a long time had passed since Gilia got into my car. I imagined the autumn leaves were redder than they’d been before we locked eyes.
“Why choose today to start popping in on your possible fathers?” she asked.
Why choose today? It’d been twenty years since I learned they existed. I couldn’t recall why I hadn’t acted earlier.
“My wife left me last week. She ran off with the pool man.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
I shrugged, keeping up a brave front. “I don’t handle grief well, so my daughter stole these old yearbook photos Lydia cut out of the boys who did her.”
“Your mother knew who raped her?”
“She never told me. Shannon—that’s my daughter—went to the library and researched the names and addresses. She thought I would cope better if I had something to do.”
Gilia’s mouth opened slightly and her pink tongue pressed against her upper front teeth in one of those gestures people do when they’re thinking. She said, “You’re turning the lives of five men and their families upside down because your daughter thinks you need something to do?”
“That’s a harsh way to put it.”
“How would you put it?”
I didn’t answer. The truth was I hadn’t given much thought to the men or their families. I hadn’t given much thought to anything. The search for an unknown father seems to be a primal drive. An instinct.
“How do the men react when you appear on their front porch dredging up old sins and claiming to be a son?”
“Billy Gaines wants to do lunch.”
“Billy Gaines works for Dad. It’s hard to picture him raping a flea.”
“Babe Carnisek denies the possibility.”
Her head did the cock thing again. “He denies what he did to your mother?”
“No, Babe seems kind of proud of that, which is odd. What he denies is that anyone who looks like me could possibly be related to him. Says I’m too scrawny for his son.”
I paused in case Gilia wanted to disagree with scrawny. “Your father threatened legal action and Skip Prescott is ready to hire a hit man.”
