Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

It was bitterly cold in the street outside.

“The thing of it,” Lissie says, “is that I was there, I was actually there! So when I see the television pictures of all these Iranians shaking their fists outside the American Embassy, all I can think of is that man at the border, the one who wanted to do an internal search.”

The two women are sitting at a table in an Italian restaurant called II Menestrello on East Fifty-second Street. Barbara Duggan is the one who suggested the place; until this past September, she was working as an editor at Harper & Row across the street, and sometimes dined here with writers she hoped to impress. Today is the Friday before Christmas, and Barbara has been invited by her former boss to the company’s annual Christmas party. She has asked Lissie to join her for lunch first.

Both women are dressed for their pregnancies and for the unusually mild weather that has wafted into New York for the holiday season. Barbara, in her eighth month and rather larger than Lissie who is in her sixth, is wearing dressy black slacks with medium-heeled black pumps, a white silk blouse with a Peter Pan collar open at the throat and long sleeves cuffed at the wrist. A massive turquoise-and-silver pendant is hanging between her breasts. Her thick black hair is swept up severely onto the crown of her head and fastened there in a small neat knot. Her slanting brown eyes (she still looks marvelously and inscrutably Oriental to Lissie) are touched with fawn-brown shadow and a darker liner. Her lips are tinted with a berry-colored gloss.

Lissie is wearing a navy blue wool jersey dress with an Empire waist, its drawstring tied in a bow just below her breasts, the pleated front cascading over her belly. A flamboyantly patterned Gucci scarf is knotted at her throat, and her straight blond hair is styled in a blunt shoulder-length cut, somewhat longer in the front, and parted in the middle. She wears a frosted peach-colored lipstick and smoke-gray shadow with no liner.

“I know it’s chic to hate Iran these days,” she says, “but I hated it even then. I couldn’t wait to get out of that country, Barb. They had these ditches, you know? These little drainage canals, whatever you call them? Running through the gutters? And the people would wash their food in those ditches, and throw garbage in them, and spit in them, and—” her voice lowers — “pee in them, you know? And then they’d wash their hands and faces in the same water, you had to see it to...”

“Please, not while I’m eating,” Barbara says, and grins.

“What is that, anyway?” Lissie asks.

“Sausage with mushrooms. It’s delicious. How’s yours?”

“Marvelous.”

“This used to be Le Mistral, you know.”

“Ah, right. I thought I recognized it.”

“The murals are still the same. The French Riviera.”

“Is that what it means? Menestrello? Is it Mistral in Italian?”

“I don’t think so. I think it means ‘minstrel.’ You should know, you spent much more time in Italy than I did.”

“No, we just passed through, actually. God, that seems like a million years ago. When I was traveling with Paul, I mean,” she says, and shakes her head. “I don’t even know now if I was truly in love with him. But I felt something with him I’d never felt with anyone else. I just wanted to be with him all the time, near him all the time.”

“I know just what you mean,” Barbara says.

“We never budged from that bed all the while we were in Amsterdam.”

“Heavenly,” Barbara says, and rolls her eyes.

“On the train to Paris, and later on the Orient Express to the Swiss border... do you know what he said just before we got on the train?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria.’ That’s the first line of the Agatha Christie novel. He used to quote first lines all the time. But all the way across Switzerland to Milan and Venice, I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I guess even before we left Paris, I’d already given up any thought of going back to school. It was craziness, I know. But it was so damn exciting.”

“All of it,” Barbara says, nodding.

“Even the trouble at the border. Even those fucking dogs trying to kill us.”

She glances immediately at the table nearby, to make certain the matron there hasn’t overheard her obscenity. She turns back to Barbara, and wiggles her eyebrows at her. Both women begin giggling like teenagers. Now the matron does look at them. They sober immediately.

“What are you hoping for this time?” Lissie asks.

“Another girl. How about you?”

“A boy, I think.”

“Boys are a handful.”

“Yes, but you have to worry more about girls,” Lissie says. “Besides, I think Matthew would like a boy.”

“Matthew won’t have to take care of him.”

“Neither will I, for that matter. Not after the first year, anyway. We’ve already discussed it. I’ll be going back to work again after the first year. You should see him, Barb, it’s miraculous! He weighed three thousand pounds when I met him in that Cambridge head shop...”

“Just like us,” Barbara said.

“Exactly! But he’s been on a diet, and I can’t believe it’s the same man. He keeps looking at himself in the mirror. So do I, as a matter of fact. Looking at myself, I mean. I feel like a horse by comparison!”

“Do you plan on having any others?”

“I don’t think so. I really had the agency going pretty well, you know, when this happened. I’m not sure how I’d feel about leaving it again. I’m not even sure if taking a year’s leave now won’t, you know, ruin everything I’ve been trying to build for the past three years.”

“Sure, the personal...”

“That’s right.”

“Especially with travel.”

“That’s exactly right. Where they have to, you know, trust the agent’s taste and judgment.”

“Your personal taste.”

“And judgment, right. So I hope Matthew doesn’t get any more romantic ideas like he had last July on Fire Island.”

“Is that when it happened?”

“That’s when I figure it happened.” She lowers her voice again. “Did you ever do it by starlight on a sandy beach?”

“In Greece I did,” Barbara says.

“Yeah, well, the sand is finer there,” Lissie says, and both women burst out laughing. The matron looks at them again, and then signals for a check.

“Do your parents know you’re pregnant?” Barbara asks.

“Well, my mother does, naturally.”

“Is she still living in New York?”

“No, no. She went to Paris almost immediately after the wedding.”

“What’s he do?”

“My stepfather? He has a perfume company over there.”

“And she lives there full-time now?”

“Well, she comes to New York for a few weeks every fall.”

“How’d she meet him?”

“Skiing. In Switzerland.”

“Where?”

“Davos.”

“Never been there.”

“Me neither.”

“It sounds romantic.”

“Davos?”

“No, meeting a man on the slopes.”

“Yeah. Actually, he’s very nice.”

“What about your father?”

“What about him?”

“Does he know?”

“That I’m pregnant, you mean? How would he know?”

“I thought you might have...”

“I haven’t heard a word from him in more than eight years,” Lissie says, and hesitates. “It was eight years in October.”