He rose and walked out the door of the bar. He was gone for ten minutes or so. In that time I sipped my drink morosely and checked all the relevant outlets of social media for new information on Big Sky’s vacation. His wife had posted on Facebook, He’s home! with a kissing emoji, plus one of champagne and a bubble bath. Would they fuck tonight? I wondered. I had no idea how often they did. He never talked about her. Just as Vic rarely talked about his wife. The wives of cheaters lived in private rooms with white lotions in thick jars and soft lighting.
When Vic came back inside, he was not visibly shaken. But he was changed. I didn’t think too much of it. Often after a few drinks he would begin to sulk in my presence. He spent so much energy during the day trying to convince me that he only wanted the best for me—even if the best thing for me was not him—that at night his goodwill would run dry and the whiskey he drank would turn him into a goblin.
And when he came back in from outside, he simply looked like he was in one of his brooding states. When he sat, his elbows dug forlornly into his navy knees.
—Were you with him that night? Eleanor said.
I stuttered and she cocked the gun. I couldn’t believe it. She repeated the question angrily.
—Yes, I said. We had drinks and he walked me home.
—Do you remember him taking a phone call?
I nodded.
—I called to tell him Mom tried to kill herself. I called from the hospital in Anguilla that looked like a run-down motel and nobody wore gloves and Robbie was screaming so loud, Momma’s dead, Momma’s dead, and beating himself and slamming his head against a wall over and over and I was so scared, and I want to know, did my father take the phone call before or after he walked you home?
She was crying and her face was mottled, white and red. I thought about what to say. I almost always lied. Did that make me a bad person? I don’t know the answer.
—Answer the question, she said, her hands trembling with the gun. If you lie to me, I’ll fucking kill you so slow, man!
—He walked me home, I whispered, after he found out your mom tried to kill herself.
19
MY FATHER RETURNED TO THE Poconos the following afternoon. In my memory it was the sunniest day. They asked me if I would like to get dropped off at the pool. Later I would realize it was because they needed to talk, but in the moment I remember thinking they were going to have sex. Sex defined their relationship, at least in my mind.
I couldn’t believe they were willing to drop me off without supervision. I was excited by the prospect but more so wounded. My mother had exiled me from her bed the previous night. And now this. That was when it dawned on me, the unsettling feeling that my parents’ lives did not revolve around me. I’d grown up thinking I was the center of their world. Even when my mother yelled at me or locked me out of her bedroom, it was because I had the power to infuriate her. It was because she loved me. It could be argued that my learning it when I did, at the age of ten, was perfect timing. Old enough to have experienced cozy solipsism for many years, young enough to change the way I walked through the world. To be cautious.
I went to my room and put on my black two-piece with the Technicolor butterflies. I applied coconut-flavored lip gloss and clopped out in my wood and leather Candies with kitten heels. I said, I want to go to the Top of the World.
My father acquiesced and took me to the rich pool. Rich! To think of it now. Perhaps it was the drab tiki bar that attracted me. All my life I have been charmed by the trappings of the South Seas. I’ve looked for establishments with lighted puffer fish in tanks, with towering fake palms, rock walls, and outriggers dripping down from the painted ceilings. And it started with that tiki bar at the Top of the World.
In the car my father was not himself. And yet my father was always my father in a way that my mother was not always my mother. There were hours, entire days, that my mother was an individual apart from me. I think it’s mostly because of this—and not the devastation that would happen very early the next morning—that I thought I would always love my father more.
—You’re not going to leave the pool area, you understand?
—Yes, Daddy. What if I want a snack?
—I’m giving you five dollars. You can buy a snack and eat it in the pool area.
What he didn’t know was that there was no traditional snack bar at the rich pool, only a vending machine indoors, up two flights of sapphire stairs. It wasn’t part of the pool area. Only the tiki bar was in the pool area. I was always making sure to follow rules, but I knew how to bend them. They were so strict, and my mother was so observant, but there were hours, like I said, when her eyes were closed to me, and these were the hours I figured out how to lighten my arm hair and have an orgasm.
—Daddy, I’m sorry about Grandma.
He kept his eyes on the tree-lined roads ahead. He nodded and swallowed.
—She’s going to be fine, he said. My father accepted succor from no one. I can’t imagine what it was like for a man like him to know his elderly
