Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

Katya had called to accuse me of having the genes for mental illness on my side of the family because she knew about my father. She was the only one I had told. I had written her a letter, pouring out the whole truth at the end of that summer, and it was the only one she had responded to. “He sounds like a nut job,” she wrote. “Try to forget him.” At the time, I thought it was hilarious that Katya of all people would impugn someone else’s mental stability. She was herself such a nut. But the idea stuck with me. There was no proof that my father was actually mentally ill, but there were details that suggested it. When he had shown up to that “date” with my mother, he had been wearing a trench coat, and he kept asking her questions then scribbling her answers in a small notebook. She found out later he was also tape-recording all their conversations. Was he really mentally ill? I didn’t know. But I worried about it enough. Enough so that when Vera was first diagnosed, I felt guilty.

It was my greatest fear — that I was carrying his genes like undetonated grenades, and I had given them to Vera by mistake. Maybe that was why I had wanted to believe Herkus was the grandson of a Nazi. I wanted to believe there was someone who was more genetically tainted than myself. Or I wanted to believe that genetics didn’t matter, that even though my father was inside me, in every single cell of my body, he couldn’t touch me. He didn’t know me. He had nothing to do with my fate, with my life, with my choices. I had to believe that or else the quarantine that I had spent my life building against him would be for nothing.

I left the portrait gallery when I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. Outside, it was bright and sunny. I realized I was in front of the jewelry shop where I had bought the amber necklace that I had given to Susan, and the guilt was immediate and lacerating. I had given Vera’s necklace to someone else. I had taken something special, and I had given it away like it didn’t matter. Obviously it was absurd to think Vera wouldn’t have had the episode if I had just given her the necklace, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I went inside, determined to buy Vera something. It was the same woman who had helped me before. She had long curly hair and she wore glasses on a chain around her neck.

“Back again,” she observed, and I only murmured, not wanting to talk. I was scanning the cases and cases of jewelry, looking. I ran my fingers through some necklaces hanging on a stand on the countertop and they seemed too light, made of plastic. Was any of this amber even real? It all looked so cheap.

I left without buying anything. A blister had burst on my heel. The blood and fluid had stuck my sock to it. I walked quickly, finally understanding where I was going, where I had been trying to walk all along.

—

I banged on the door to Susan’s hotel room with my fist like I was in a rainstorm, waiting to be let in, but there was no answer. I don’t know why I had been so sure she would be in. Perhaps because I needed her to be. Feeling weirdly off script, I wandered back downstairs and was just about to leave when I saw her eating lunch in the hotel restaurant. When she saw me, she waved, delighted.

I sat down at her table. I felt like I was intruding into another world. She was wearing a white button-down shirt that seemed too white, impossibly white, and she was eating salmon carpaccio and drinking mineral water. Her skin was visibly moist and soft-looking, as though she had just applied lotion. The sun shone in her hair. I felt like a crusty monster and I had an instinct to hide my hands under the table even though they were perfectly clean.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “I’ve been having the most gorgeous lunch and then what could be more perfect but that you show up! Order something. I’ll get you a menu.”

“I’m not really hungry,” I said. I would have preferred to have this conversation in her room. I felt exposed in the bright and airy restaurant.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, and I was grateful to be given such a clear cue to begin my narrative. I told her as best I could about the night before, about the situation with Vera, her episode earlier in the fall, all of the complicated reasons we had taken this trip together. She listened sympathetically, nodding, her brow knit. And the more she listened, the more I let the story pour out of me. The sense that there was something tainted in our very bloodline. My growing unease with Grandma Sylvia and who she may have been. What did it mean to escape with your life? What did it mean to live through all of that? Was it possible ever to heal?

“I just feel like an utter failure as a father,” I said, “and an utter failure as a human being.” My eyes were hot and stinging and I worried that soon I would begin openly weeping at her table.

She nodded, pressed her lips together. I waited, but she didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly aware that something was wrong. “Should I not have told you that?”

“No,” Susan said. “No, I think it’s very natural that you would need to talk about all this. And it seems like you’ve had a very traumatic experience with your daughter. And I’m very sympathetic. I am.”

“I knew you would be,” I said. “I was just feeling so completely lost and adrift in this city. You know, when you’re in a strange place you don’t have any cues as to who you are, and I thought: Susan is the only person I really know here.”

She grimaced, then smiled, a confusing combination. “See, that’s where I feel like we aren’t quite understanding each other.”

I stared, stupidly, my ears already burning hot. I had a hard time listening as she spoke. “See,” she said, “as you were talking, I realized, you know, I’ve done this a hundred times before. Not with you, I’m not saying you’ve done this to me a hundred times. But in my life, I’ve listened to a man cry and sob and bemoan what a failure he is or what a bad person or tell me how tragic his life is. And I have always let my heart go out to them, and I have always tried to mother and to fix and to help, but you know what? It never actually works. I’m just getting too old to keep doing it, Lucas. You can’t imagine how surreal it was, as you kept going on and on, it was like I was trapped in a scene I had played a thousand times. And the truth is, we don’t really know each other, do we? It’s not my job to leap in and help you get your life sorted. You need to grow up and do that on your own. We’re just strangers, really. We’re both only here on vacation.”

I nodded. “Right,” I said, my mouth dry, my voice cracking. “You’re right.”

“You’re going to be okay,” she said, and she reached out and squeezed my hand. “I’m going to go pay my bill and go to the afternoon tour. It’s the last one, and then there is the goodbye dinner after. Are you going?”

“No,” I said.

“I know I’m being harsh,” Susan said, withdrawing her hand.

“Yes,” I said, “you are being harsh. But I understand.”

“I’m very sorry about your daughter,” she said.

But I couldn’t make my throat work to answer her, so I just nodded again and stared at her plate of half-finished carpaccio, the beautiful streaks of olive oil, yellow green against the white of the plate and the pink of the fish, gleaming in the sun.

—

It was only when I got back to my apartment and I felt the familiar buzz of my phone notifying me of an e-mail or some kind of status update that I realized I hadn’t ever turned it off after calling Katya that morning. The roaming charges would be insane. I was about to shut it off when I saw that I had four new voice mails, one of which was from Fang and was dated day before yesterday. I listened.