There had to be a way to turn this to my advantage. It had that feel to it, like if I thought about it with my whole brain I could figure it out. Like a chess move that you know is there, and then you discover it.
What couldn’t happen was that the Polack would find out about me and Lisa.
I could watch Jim’s eyes when I told him. If he blinked too much I’d know they were already talking.
But then, if they weren’t talking yet, and I told him, they’d start talking.
How could I keep them from talking? That’s what I needed to figure out.
Lisa and I were about to go away for a weekend — she knew about a house you could rent on the Oregon coast — when Dad called to tell me he was coming to town.
“We’re pretty busy, Dad,” I said on the phone. “Christmas is practically right around the corner. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get away.”
“It’s August, son,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Christmas isn’t for six months. I want to meet my granddaughter. Are you trying to tell me I can’t meet my own granddaughter?” He laughed. It was a deep, happy laugh, one of those good laughs I’d known for years, and it fooled me.
My dad met his granddaughter in an IHOP off I-30. He told us he was on his way to Sedona. “To meet John Denver,” he said. “I gave him the title for his new album.” Uh-huh, I thought.
Wendy met me there half an hour before he arrived. Claire walked in with her, holding her hand. With the other arm she clutched a stuffed black poodle.
“Thanks for doing this,” I said. I picked up Claire and held her in my lap.
“Daddy,” Claire said. “Hi, Daddy.” Suddenly she was shy. She placed her face against my neck. I took off one of my cufflinks for her to play with. I showed her how the back flipped on its platinum spring.
“I wanted to see your dad,” Wendy said.
“You won’t recognize him. What are you going to eat?” I asked her. “What should Claire have? What are you hungry for, honey? How about some pancakes? They have chocolate chip pancakes.”
“She doesn’t like chocolate chip pancakes. It’s dinnertime. Why don’t you have a hot dog, Claire? She should eat some protein,” Wendy said. “Have you seen your dad yet? How is he?”
“I want pancakes, Daddy,” Claire said. “I want chocolate pancakes. I do too like them. Yes, I do. I do not want a hot dog.” She spoke precisely, emphasizing every sound, as if she had invented the word at the moment she used it.
“Yes, I saw him,” I said to Wendy. Dad had come by the store earlier. I didn’t want to talk about it. But Wendy always missed those cues or, more likely, ignored them. She used to tell me, “Don’t make that face,” and I would say, “You can’t edit my facial expressions.” But really she was in the right.
Jim and I had cleaned out his car that afternoon. It was full of clothing, books and tapes, old food, and cockroaches. There were other, smaller bugs. There was even a mouse. It jumped out of the car and ran away across the parking lot. Good for you, I thought. Better luck. Our dad had been sleeping in his car for weeks.
“Your poor dad.”
“You are the only one who ever feels sorry for him,” I said.
“You, too. You do, too. You feel sorry for him.”
“Well, I’m still talking to him. Jim won’t even talk to him now. But he helped me clean out his car.”
My dad walked in the door. He had lost weight and there was more gray but he still had that aura around him, like his body was charged with a magnetic field that stimulated the nearby air molecules, atoms that were listless around the rest of us. His hazel eyes shone at me behind his heavy tortoiseshell glasses just as they always had. If things had been better in my own life I could have believed, maybe, looking at him and the easy way he walked, the same old Guccis and his gold rep tie, that he was not in this terrible state of degeneration. When he hugged me I smelled the cinnamon pipe smoke and the Yves Saint Laurent cologne in his beard.
“This is your grandfather, Claire.”
“Yup, she’s a girl, all right,” he said, and sat down. “Did you order for me, son?”
Claire hid her face in my neck. I hugged her closer.
“Hello there, Claire. She has her mother’s eyes,” he said, and smiled at Wendy. You can’t even see Claire’s eyes, Dad, I thought. But Wendy looked encouraged already. He was crazy, but he was sure the same good old Dad, too.
“Are you two doing all right? Are you better?” he asked my wife. She looked at her pancakes. She had ordered the chocolate chip pancakes and split them with Claire.
“Always take care of your family, son,” he said. “A man takes care of his family.”
I felt Wendy eyeing me, so I did not look over there.
“Let’s talk about you, Dad,” I said.
Over dinner he told us about his travels and his plans. He was going to open a church in Las Vegas or buy a motel in the mountains near Carmel. “I think Shirley is interested in investing, son,” he said. “I’ll ask her about jewelry if you like. But I think she prefers natural stuff. She’s not into the material thing, you know. She’s well beyond that.”
“What’s he like? John Denver. In person, I mean. You guys have been friends for years, right? Didn’t you first meet at Ananda?”
I gave Wendy a look to say, Please don’t encourage him. But that started him off. Claire and I sat back and played until he was done.
After Wendy and Claire left the pancake house my dad tried to extract the whole story from me.
“Fess up, son. I can see what’s going on here with my own two eyes. Your old man’s not an ass.”
I did not tell him about the separation. I explained that business was booming.
“Not the way your brother tells it. He says you guys are in serious shit with one of your big investors.”
I was surprised that Jim had told him that. We had two one-year notes coming due for nearly a million bucks and our line of credit at our other bank was maxed out. And even Granddad was in no mood to float us. He said he wanted to see some green coming the other direction, for a change. But we had made it through the summer. Everybody was hurting in the summer.
“Dindy says you guys spend more time playing backgammon than you do balancing your books. He says you’re three months behind on your P and Ls. That’s no way to run a business, son.”
“So where are you headed next, Dad? A new church, huh? That’s the plan? What are you going to call it?”
“We are talking about your marriage, Robby. Your brother tells me things are on the rocks for you two. You can’t afford a divorce, son. Emotionally, I mean. You can’t do that to that beautiful little girl. That’s what your mother did to me and look at the problems it’s given you boys. Your mother’s the reason you’re in this mess right now.”
Was Jim on drugs? Surely all of this wasn’t coming from my big brother.
“This is not about Mom, Dad. And Wendy and I are fine. Jim doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Are you sure you got this from Jim?”
“How’s your sex life, son? How are things in the sack with you two? Marriage can cool things down. You know the old saying. It’s a great institution, if you want to live in an institution.”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“You can tell me, son. Does she have orgasms?”
“Dad, I do not want to talk about this.”
“I understand. That can take time. That may be the heart of the problem. It can take years to learn how to make a woman come. But it’s important, son. I can give you a book. If you need a little help, I mean.” He gave me that sideways glance.