‘I haven’t had a chance to read it. I will today, this evening, when I get home. Are we completely alone here?’
‘Why, are you going to kill me?’ she laughed. It seemed an odd joke.
‘I just wondered if you had time for a coffee.’
She led me through the three white rooms of the gallery, which opened off each other in the converted Chelsea warehouse located within spitting distance of the Hudson, and at the back, through a white sculpted door that is itself a work of art, a piece by Castellani probably worth more than what Meredith pays her assistant each year, we came to the offices and the kitchen where she pressed a button that ground beans and made the coffee, drizzling into two stainless steel cups.
Her office always reminds me of an artist’s sunny Parisian atelier, the roof half given over to windows. We sat in the sunken lounge area under the window with the early winter sky above us. It was a room in view of the satellites, the NSA and others able to look down on me having a chat with my daughter in her place of work. I knew this was not fanciful. A friend from Georgetown who until recently worked in the White House told me a few years ago about how they had been testing new satellite technology in the West Wing and called up a live image of another staffer’s children playing in their backyard. Recently my mother showed me on her tablet a map of Rhinebeck in three dimensions, so detailed it gave me a sense of her house and her neighbors and my own property in a way that seemed astonishingly intrusive. How long, I wonder, before each of us can call up live images of the streets where we, our families, our friends and ex-lovers and enemies all live? We are all being watched, all the time, whether we want to believe it or not.
‘How was Rhinebeck? Is Grandma doing okay? She seemed distracted on Thursday.’
‘You know large groups are difficult because she can’t hear well enough to follow the conversation, but she’s in good health.’ I paused, glancing up at the sky as a helicopter passed overhead, and the sudden arc of a gull rose from the direction of the river, bird looping machine. ‘In fact I’m here for selfish reasons. I came to talk about myself.’
‘You’re being very cagey.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not sick or dying. I didn’t lose my job. All things considered, everything is fine. I shouldn’t be in this panic and I probably shouldn’t be as anxious as I feel. Look at my hands, I haven’t been like this since I submitted my doctoral dissertation.’
‘Are you having money problems? You know we can fix that.’
‘It’s nothing like that, but thank you, darling. I want you to understand that what I’m about to tell you does not change the fact that I love you more than anything or anyone. I am so proud of all you’ve accomplished. And you’re still so young! You don’t even know how amazing you are to me. I was a hopelessly lost graduate student at your age and you have a career and a life and everything organized in ways that make my head spin.’
‘You’re flattering me, Dad.’
‘Stop being so modest. And stop interrupting. I have to say this before I think better of telling you.’ She looked at me then, her brows crinkling into a brief flicker of displeasure so that I could imagine, for the first time, what it might be like to see Meredith truly angry with me, or disappointed, and it was a horrible thought that only worsened my anxiety, tugging a bout of nausea from my gut, as though after years of being a teacher I found myself again in the position of the student, the child being governed and chastised by an adult who has promised to fix whatever is wrong, provided I am suitably penitent. ‘When I was in Oxford I had a student, she’s a little older than you, but not much. She and I became close, I taught her for several years, and by chance she lived in an apartment across the street from my house, so we saw each other outside of the usual College contexts, tutorials and lectures and meals, all that kind of thing. This isn’t so unusual in a place like Oxford. It could happen in any college town.’ I was short of breath and paused to inhale deeply a few times, conscious that Meredith’s look of displeasure had settled and deepened. ‘One night I asked her over for a drink. I guess you can imagine what happened, but one thing led to another.’
Meredith sat up straighter in her chair, raising her hands. ‘Please, Dad, why are you telling me this? I don’t — I really don’t want to hear this.’
What must it feel like, I wondered, to hear that your father has embraced someone your own age just as easily, just as thoughtlessly, as he abandoned you in the first place? Why, I suddenly thought, would Meredith possibly want to meet Fadia and Selim? What right did I have to expect such magnanimity from my daughter, from whom I have already taken so much?
‘Believe me, darling, if I didn’t have to tell you, I wouldn’t.’
‘So you slept with your student. I can’t—’
‘She was my doctoral student at that stage, but yes, I slept with her. It happened several times, over the course of a few weeks, and then I didn’t hear from her for a while—’
‘Wait, what? I don’t understand, if she’s living across the street— Was it consensual?’
‘Of course it was consensual. How can you ask me that? In many ways she took the lead.’
‘It just seems strange that you would sleep with your student and then not speak to her, like she was avoiding you, or you were avoiding her.’
‘It didn’t seem strange at the time. She’s very independent.’
‘Oh, Dad, for fuck’s sake! Did you call her?’
‘Please don’t shout, Meredith, this is hard for me. I didn’t want to appear aggressive. I was trying to do the right thing. I was trying to think about what she would want. And eventually I did hear from her, maybe a month after the period when we were seeing each other.’
‘Fucking hell. Can I guess what happens next? I can’t actually believe this. .’
‘I’m trying to do this as well as I can.’
Meredith raised her hands again. I didn’t know whether to read it as a gesture of capitulation or dismissal.
‘She came over to tell me she was pregnant and there was no chance of anyone else being the father. It could only be me.’
‘And you just believed her? Jesus, Dad, that’s the oldest fucking trick in the book.’
‘If you knew her, you’d understand. She isn’t given to telling lies. I’d go so far as to say she lives according to the most fervent belief in truth, and in fact what happened between us has forced her into a compromising position. She has lied to protect me. I know how distasteful that sounds. In any case, she and I discussed the various options available and I promised to support her regardless of her decision, accepting it was ultimately a choice only she could make. After several weeks of deliberation, and further discussions about the way we might proceed, she decided to keep the child.’
Meredith’s mouth knitted into a firm tight line. Her eyes had grown large. She raised a finger to the corner of one eye.