In helpless tears now, she found herself in Tad’s arms, gagging on her sobs like she was throwing up.
“Ali, Ali, Ali.” He was stroking her hair.
“It’s not true.”
“Okay, okay, so I was wrong.”
But she didn’t believe him: Tad was saying that just to humor her, he didn’t sound like he really believed that he was wrong, and even in his arms she felt the nub of anger still burning inside her. She had the sudden sense that in the last minute she’d arrived at some new place in her life — somewhere colder, grayer, more inhospitable than anywhere she’d ever been before.
Hands gripping her shoulders, Tad held her at a distance, but she couldn’t meet his eyes. She was staring straight ahead, into his white shirtfront, now all mussed up by the imprint of her face, a blurry mask of snot, tears, and flesh-tinted Clearasil.
7
STORIES. For years, Lucy had been telling stories about the absent father in Alida’s life. She had sworn to herself that she would always try to tell the truth, but she allowed herself to ration, stretch, and gloss that truth as circumstance dictated.
Turning three, Alida had asked, “Do I have a dad?”
This, Lucy decided, was really two questions. The answer to the first, about a biological father, would obviously have to be yes. But a dad was something different. Dads read bedtime stories, took out the garbage, dabbed shaving foam on their kids’ cheeks. In this sense, she reasoned, Alida obviously didn’t have a dad, so the answer was a firm negative.
“No, honey, there’s just you and me.”
Alida seemed content with the idea of her immaculate conception until one day, riding home from preschool, she said that they’d been discussing dads in the Rainbow Room. “I said my dad was dead,” she said, sounding rather pleased with herself, and went on to talk about the kites they’d made. Good solution, Lucy thought, and there was no further mention of Alida’s paternity for several months.
Then it was, “Who was my dad?”
Tricky, this one, but Lucy was grateful for Alida’s use of the past tense.
“Well,” Lucy said, playing for time. “I really, really wanted to have a baby. I wanted to have you. But I needed someone to help me, so I found this guy.”
“Like a doctor?”
“Yes. Exactly like a doctor. And he helped me to have you.”
“Did you have to pay him money?”
“No, he did it for free,” Lucy said, remembering the bar tab, the Painted Table dinner, the nightcaps from the minibar in his suite. Alida’s conception must have cost him — or rather, his law firm — a couple hundred bucks at least.
“Did it take long?”
“Oh, no, just a few seconds. Like getting a shot.”
“I hate shots,” Alida said, and moved on.
Another year passed before she asked the hardest question so far: “Where is my dad?” which moved him firmly out of the past and into the present and gave him a potential location in actual space. Lucy had to avoid saying “I don’t know,” which would encourage Alida to imagine a mystery that might be solved by a quest, so she said, “He just flew in and out; he was only in Seattle for two days.”
She’d flubbed on that one, but Alida’s curiosity was so shallow and fleeting that almost any response, so long as it wasn’t “He’s in Tucson, Arizona,” would’ve allowed her to change the subject, which she did. Whatever dad-shaped hole there might have been in Alida’s world was filled so amply, so lovingly, by Tad that recent years had passed without a single question. When Father’s Day came around, Tad got the cards, the lopsided bits of pottery, the clumsily sewn hearts filled with potpourri. The accident of his name helped: he was so very nearly Dad in every sense.
Yet Lucy remained on guard, ready if necessary to field two dangerous questions so far unasked: “What’s my dad’s name?” and “Does he know I exist?” They would be hell to handle, but Lucy dreamed that when Alida was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, they’d be able to share the true story of her conception, woman to woman, fondly and without embarrassment. It wasn’t a story Lucy was the least bit ashamed about, and when Alida was grown up she ought to be able to prize it, laugh over it, tell it to her own lovers as a gift. But it had to be kept secret from her until she was of an age to understand.
It had begun with the Spanish Inquisition of fact-checking at The New Yorker. For eleven days, Lucy had undergone torture at the hands of two humorless peremptory inquisitors, Rosemary and Maureen. Usually the magazine assigned only one fact-checker to each case, but fear of Bill Gates’ phalanx of lawyers had led it in this instance to double the usual allocation of womanpower to the spiked chair, the iron maiden, the rack and the screw. She dreaded the phone ringing. “A couple of people here have read the piece and…” Or, “You mention traveling south on Elm. It’s one-way, going southeast.” Not a sentence of Lucy’s piece was left untouched. She had described visiting the Microsoft campus in heavy rain; a local TV meteorologist had been consulted, and the phrase emended to “steady drizzle.” She had written that talking with Gates had put her in mind of speaking with an autistic, given how he rocked in his chair and evaded eye contact; that passage had been struck out on the advice of a child psychologist, who had sternly opined that “the evidence supplied entirely fails to support the allegation.” Talking to people who’d known Gates in the past, she’d sometimes used a notebook rather than a tape recorder. Called by Rosemary or Maureen, they invariably denied every word they’d said, and, unless it was preserved verbatim on tape, out it went. For “legal reasons,” adjectives and adverbs fell from the piece like leaves from a tree in an October gale. Day by day the piece grew thinner, blander, less her own. She dreaded the ringing of the phone, the “just a couple of details,” the pitiless guillotining of every sentence she was proud of.
But even the Spanish Inquisition came to its eventual end, and, late on a Friday afternoon, her editor called to say that the issue had gone to press and her ordeal was over. “Everyone here likes the piece a lot.” Having come to hate it as a result of Rosemary and Maureen’s brutal ministrations, Lucy said, “I can’t think why — I just wish it could be published under a pseudonym. Why don’t the fact-checkers put their names on it?”
Yet putting the phone down, she was giddy with relief. She had to celebrate. She called Ron, then Jeff, then David, then Alice, but got only their voice mails. She’d try them from her cell later; in the meantime, she meant to down a large and richly deserved martini at the Bookstore Bar in the Alexis.
Hoisting herself onto a stool, she noticed that the man two stools away was reading the “Talk of the Town” section of that week’s New Yorker. He said, she said, he said, she said (entirely free of the stutter that usually afflicted her when talking to strangers), and within minutes of getting her martini she’d told him she sometimes wrote for the magazine on retainer. He had the grace to claim that he remembered one or two of her pieces — even brought up, with no prompt from Lucy, her epic Kurt Cobain interview-epitaph. “I’m way too old for grunge rock, but you made him real to me. I found it very touching.”
His name was Edward; if he told her his last name, she’d forgotten it that very instant. When her cell phone rang in her bag, she reached inside to switch it off. By the time they agreed to have dinner together, she knew that he was an attorney, that his specialty was intellectual property rights, that he was in Seattle for a conference on copyright and the new media, that he’d gone to college at Williams, then on to Yale for law school. His manner was light, quizzical, self-deprecating. She liked his rather-too-big nose and not-too-preppy haircut.