Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

“Nice cigar,” she allowed.

I leaned toward her. Julie leaned toward me. Our faces got closer until finally our foreheads were almost touching. We stayed like that for ten or so seconds. Then I said, “Let me tell you why I didn’t call you.”

I took a long breath and began: “There’s something you should know about me.”

My story began in 1922 and there were concerns about the flow of oil. In 1975, when my story ends, dwindling oil supplies again had people worried. Two years earlier the Organization of Arab Oil Exporting Countries had begun an embargo. There were brownouts in the U.S. and long lines at the pumps. The President announced that the lights on the White House Christmas tree would not be lit, and the gas-tank lock was born.

Scarcity was weighing on everybody’s mind in those days. The economy was in recession. Across the nation families were eating dinner in the dark, the way we used to do on Seminole under one lightbulb. My father, however, took a dim view of conservation policies. Milton had come a long way from the days when he counted kilowatts. And so, on the night he set out to ransom me, he remained at the wheel of an enormous, gas-guzzling Cadillac.

My father’s last Cadillac: a 1975 Eldorado. Painted a midnight blue that looked nearly black, the car bore a strong resemblance to the Batmobile. Milton had all the doors locked. It was just past 2A.M. The roads in this downriver neighborhood were full of potholes, the curbs choked with weeds and litter. The powerful high beams picked up sprays of broken glass in the street, as well as nails, shards of metal, old hubcaps, tin cans, a flattened pair of men’s underpants. Beneath an overpass a car had been stripped, tires gone, windshield shattered, all the chrome detailing peeled away, and the engine missing. Milton stepped on the gas, ignoring the scarcity not only of petroleum but of many other things as well. There was, for instance, a scarcity of hope on Middlesex, where his wife no longer felt any stirrings in her spiritual umbilicus. There was a scarcity of food in the refrigerator, of snacks in the cupboards, and of freshly ironed shirts and clean socks in his dresser. There was a scarcity of social invitations and phone calls, as my parents’ friends grew afraid to call a house that existed in a limbo between exhilaration and grief. Against the pressure of all this scarcity, Milton flooded the Eldorado’s engine, and when that wasn’t enough, he opened the briefcase on the seat beside him and stared in dashboard light at the twenty-five thousand dollars in cash bundled inside.

My mother had been awake when Milton slipped out of bed less than an hour earlier. Lying on her back, she heard him dressing in the dark. She hadn’t asked him why he was getting up in the middle of the night. Once upon a time, she would have, but not anymore. Since my disappearance, daily routines had crumbled. Milton and Tessie often found themselves in the kitchen at four in the morning, drinking coffee. Only when Tessie heard the front door close had she become concerned. Next Milton’s car started up and began backing down the drive. My mother listened until the engine faded away. She thought to herself with surprising calmness, “Maybe he’s leaving for good.” To her list of runaway father and runaway daughter she now added a further possibility: runaway husband.

Milton hadn’t told Tessie where he was going for a number of reasons. First, he was afraid she would stop him. She would tell him to call the police, and he didn’t want to call the police. The kidnapper had told him not to involve the law. Besides, Milton had had enough of cops and their blasé attitude. The only way to get something done was to do it yourself. On top of all that, this whole thing might be a wild-goose chase. If he told Tessie about it she would only worry. She might call Zoë and then he’d get an earful from his sister. In short, Milton was doing what he always did when it came to important decisions. Like the time he joined the Navy, or the time he moved us all to Grosse Pointe, Milton did whatever he wanted, confident that he knew best.

After the last mysterious phone call, Milton had waited for another. The following Sunday morning it came.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Milton.”

“Listen, whoever you are. I want some answers.”

“I didn’t call to hear what you want, Milton. What’s important is what I want.”

“I want my daughter. Where is she?”

“She’s here with me.”

The music, or singing, was still perceptible in the background. It reminded Milton of something long ago.

“How do I know you have her?”

“Why don’t you ask me a question? She’s told me a lot about her family. Quite a lot.”

The rage surging through Milton at that moment was nearly unbearable. It was all he could do to keep from smashing the phone against the desk. At the same time, he was thinking, calculating.

“What’s the name of the village her grandparents came from?”

“Just a minute.” The phone was covered. Then the voice said, “Bithynios.”

Milton’s knees went weak. He sat down at the desk.

“Do you believe me yet, Milton?”

“We went to these caverns in Tennessee once. A real rip-off tourist trap. What were they called?”

Again the phone was covered. In a moment the voice replied, “The Mammothonics Caves.”

At that Milton shot up out of his chair again. His face darkened and he tugged at his collar to help himself breathe.

“Now I have a question, Milton.”

“What?”

“How much is it worth to you to get your daughter back?”

“How much do you want?”

“Is this business, now? Are we negotiating a deal?”

“I’m ready to make a deal.”

“How exciting.”

“What do you want?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“All right.”

“No, Milton,” the voice corrected, “you don’t understand. I want to bargain.”

“What?”

“Haggle, Milton. This is business.”

Milton was perplexed. He shook his head at the oddity of this request. But in the end he fulfilled it.

“Okay. Twenty-five’s too much. I’ll pay thirteen thousand.”

“We’re talking about your daughter, Milton. Not hot dogs.”

“I haven’t got that kind of cash.”

“I might take twenty-two thousand.”

“I’ll give you fifteen.”

“Twenty is as low as I can go.”

“Seventeen is my final offer.”

“How about nineteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen five.”

“Deal.”

The caller laughed. “Oh, that was fun, Milt.” Then, in a gruff voice: “But I want twenty-five.” And he hung up.

Back in 1933, a disembodied voice had spoken to my grandmother through the heating grate. Now, forty-two years later, a disguised voice spoke to my father over the phone.

“Good morning, Milton.”

There was the music again, the faint singing.

“I’ve got the money,” said Milton. “Now I want my girl.”

“Tomorrow night,” the kidnapper said. And then he told Milton where to leave the money, and where to wait for me to be released.

Across the lowland downriver plain Grand Trunk rose before Milton’s Cadillac. The train station was still in use in 1975, though just barely. The once-opulent terminal was now only a shell. False Amtrak façades concealed the flaking, peeling walls. Most corridors were blocked off. Meanwhile, all around the operative core, the great old building continued to fall into ruin, the Guastavino tiles in the Palm Court falling, splintering on the ground, the immense barbershop now a junk room, the skylights caved in, heaped with filth. The office tower attached to the terminal was now a thirteen-story pigeon coop, all five hundred of its windows smashed, as if with diligence. At this same train station my grandparents had arrived a half century earlier. Lefty and Desdemona, one time only, had revealed their secret here to Sourmelina; and now their son, who never learned it, was pulling in behind the station, also secretly.