Lily King - Father of the Rain

“You have your Jews,” my father says to me later, when we are all showered from the beach, waiting to go to dinner, “and I have my magazines.” He picks up the Penthouse he got Frank to buy at the airport.

“Read another letter, Gardiner,” Patrick says.

“All right.” My father flips through the pages. “ Dear Penthouse Forum ,” he begins. “ I never really believed these letters were written by real people, but since last Thursday night, I’m ready to believe anything .”

“They always start like that. It’s so fake,” I say.

“Shhh,” Patrick says

“Yes, Daley, shhh. This is serious literature.” My father grins at me. He is in a good mood, with his drink at his elbow and the magazine in his hands. He reads about a girl who describes everything in her life as boring — her job, her boyfriend, her dog. My father thinks this is hilarious. “Even the fucking dog is boring!” She works in an office building in Chicago.

“Is she ever going to get to the point ?” Elyse says, and everyone cracks up. It is cozy in our little cottage by the beach, sitting all of us together on the wicker furniture with big comfy cushions. My father continues to read.

One night she has to stay late to catch up on some work. She gets a little uneasy when the last person leaves, but then she waves her fear away. She knows she’s being a baby. About an hour later she hears the elevator rise and her fear returns. She shuts off all the lights. The elevator stops on her floor and opens. She stops breathing. She thinks if she stays very still — she’s in the corner, facing the wall — he won’t notice her. She doesn’t dare turn around. She thinks she hears something but she can’t tell because her heart is beating so loudly — and then she feels hands on her neck. They are warm. “ For some reason I feel myself relax then. I know everything’s going to be okay. His hands are so big. They slide down over my shoulders and around to my breasts. I’m wet instantly. I can hear him breathing and I smell cigarettes on his breath and I feel his stubble on my cheek but I never see him. He takes off all my clothes and pleasures me in every way imaginable and then, finally, he puts his long rod-hard cock inside me and— ”

“Gardiner, really, this is going too far,” Catherine says. “Elyse is going to tell this to her class when she gets back.”

“Elyse Tabor! Well, I never!” Patrick imitates the first grade teacher’s constipated grimace.

We all laugh.

“Two more sentences,” my father says. “ —and I feel him explode. And then he leaves the building. I never saw his face. I’ll never know who he was .”

The first morning in St. Thomas I went with my father to collect our passports at the front desk in the main building. Everyone else was still asleep. At home there was three feet of snow on the ground but now I was in bare feet and shorts. Our cottage was one of the farthest away, right on the water. We walked on the wide stone paths that connected everything at the resort, and, because it had rained a little before dawn, the stones were wet but warm. We watched a lizard chase another up a palm tree until we couldn’t see them anymore.

“Your mother and I stayed in a place like this in Barbados,” he said. It almost sounded like a fond memory. He never spoke about my mother in front of Catherine except to insult her. It was so much better when we were alone, but we were never alone. I pretended all the way to the front desk and back that we had come by ourselves to St. Thomas.

I have a crush on a blond boy I see at the pool in the afternoons. He’s small and slender and wears long green swimming trunks with orange fish on them. He knows I like him. I can tell from the way he’s always checking to see if I’m still watching him. He’ll pretend to look beyond me, leave me off to the side of his gaze. When we first got there he was hanging out with two girls who looked a lot older than us, but they left after a few days and now he has no one.

“Stop looking at him. He’s a total jerk,” Patrick says. “Do you know what he did in the shop yesterday? He—”

“Shut up. I don’t care.”

We’re finishing up our papaya juices. We’re so badly sunburned that we sit at the edge of our chairs, careful to let our skin touch the least amount of chair as possible. We don’t have sun lotion. We only have something called Hawaiian Tropic, which is coconut-smelling baby oil that promises to increase the sun’s rays. We’re obsessed with getting the deepest darkest tan possible. Elyse has had the worst reaction to the sun. Her skin has bubbled up on her arms and back, and the Salt Lake City family took her to the clinic in town where they wrapped gauze around her forearms, which had become infected. They bought her a long-sleeved shirt and sunblock and have hinted that we should be using those things, too. But we don’t have blisters, just a good burgundy burn that will turn into a deep dark tan by the time we go back to school.

My father and Catherine appear behind the blond boy in their tennis whites.

“Let’s go,” my father says.

We pick up our racquets and loop around the pool.

“Ace ‘em,” the blond boy whispers to me.

I smile, relieved that my sunburn hides my blush.

The courts are clay. A black man in tennis whites is sweeping ours. The instruments are the same as at the club at home, a wide broom the size of a narrow hallway that you pull behind you like a cart, and a small round brush on rollers. We sit on the green bench and watch him drag the big broom in long dramatic curves across one side and then the other, then clean the lines with the small brush that makes a scritch-scratch noise as it passes us. The lines he cuts are crisp and perfect, which is not easy to do. I can’t tell how old he is, in his teens or twenties or thirties, his hair cropped close, his thighs no thicker than his calves, and his legs and arms so long and so very black against the white of his clothes. I wish I could watch him do the other courts, but ours is ready and my father walks onto it with his big splayed feet, bouncing a ball off his racquet and scuffing it up immediately.

I think my father hopes, each time we step on the court together, that since our last match I have transformed myself into Chrissie Evert. I think he actually believes, despite years of witnessing the raw truth, that I possess that kind of talent and am stubbornly withholding it from him, deliberately making him suffer. He insists on getting me out on the court, even though it makes him miserable.

Garvey was the tennis player. His room, before Frank moved into it, was filled with trophies of little gold men getting ready to serve and Garvey’s name on the plaques at the bottom. He played on the varsity team at St. Paul’s his freshman and sophomore years and then quit. My father often refers to that moment as the greatest disappointment of his life.

So now there is just me, who’s never done any better than the improvement prize in any sport.

“Daley and I will take you two on,” my father says, to my relief. It’s easier playing with him than against him.

We confer at the baseline. My father has that hopeful look on his face. “Catherine’s wrist is hurting again. Play to her backhand. She barely has any strength in it. And Patrick — well, you can take on Patrick.” Patrick is a very good tennis player. I’ve gotten about four games off of him in all the sets we’ve played, but my father hasn’t forgotten them. “Okay, let’s go get ‘em.” He pats my shoulder and gives me the three balls.

My practice serves go in.

“Look at that!” my father shouts. “Look at that!”

My real ones are abysmal. The first slaps the bottom of the net. The second hits the fence. My father comes down to the baseline.