Selesta recounted scenes from the musical and chunks of our conversation. “And he said he was a hippie, but he didn’t know if you were.”
“Your godfather has it backward,” said Joan. “Everything I owned was in those suitcases. He had a job. It was so cute, every morning in that madhouse, he’d put on his suit and tie and go off to write fashion copy.”
Selesta asked, “What happened to Trebizon?”
Neither of us knew. “I imagine he had a few lives left,” Joan said.
Selesta left us briefly, reluctantly for the ladies’ room, knowing that in her absence secrets would be discussed.
“She asked and I told her a little bit about Trebizon and East Tenth Street.”
“That’s perfect. She’s getting curious, and I’m glad it happened like this and with you.”
“Shouldn’t you tell her about your father?”
She sighed. “She’ll ask and I’ll tell her.”
Over twenty years before, we had known we’d be friends from the moment we met. In late night conversations on the front steps and back fire escape on East Tenth Street, we talked about sex and drugs and parents and trauma.
Joan sat on railings and never lost her balance. She was only a year or two older than I was but knew so much more. Her mother was a well-known lawyer; her father was Antonio Mata, the Mexican painter who did surrealistic paintings that looked like cartoons and who signed himself “Margay.”
That night, for the first time, I questioned her judgment, but said nothing.
About ten years later, when Selesta was in her late teens, a sophomore studying theater at NYU, there was a Friday afternoon when she drove us both out to Long Island. We were going to spend the weekend with her mother and grandmother in the House That Ate the World. It was early June, and the Island was radiant.
That uncanny light you get on that thin, low strip of land on a long afternoon is sunlight reflected off the Atlantic and Long Island Sound.
Selesta was slim but not as painfully thin as she had been a few years before, when her parents divorced and she became bulimic. She had been cured of that, and in high school had lived a tightly scheduled life the point of which, maybe, was to prevent her pondering too much about who she was.
A couple of times over the years, though, we’d talked about her mother and our adventures when we first met. I’d run through my stories of Joan and me dancing at Ondine with Hendrix in the house and talking to Allen Ginsberg in Tompkins Square Park. All the baggage of the tiresomely hip older generation got trotted out.
That day, though, she asked, “You know about ocelots?” I nodded and had a good idea where the conversation was going.
“They’re small; their bodies are a couple of feet long and with a tail almost that long. They have beautiful coats,” she said. “They live all through South America and Mexico. Whenever I go anywhere if they have a zoo I check and see if they have ocelots. San Diego does and Cincinnati.
“Ocelots are shy,” she added. “And, of course, they’re getting scarce because of their fur and the forest disappearing.
“Obviously, though, what I’m really interested in is the margay, a kind of cousin with the same markings. You know about them.”
“They live and hunt in trees,” I said. “They’re nocturnal, very, very shy, and getting rare.”
“You know that because my mother talked to you about this, didn’t she? Back when you were kids. She knew about all this, about her father. You know Margay was his nickname? I first got interested in them when I was about twelve and heard about Grandfather Margay from Grandma Ruth.
“Ruth took me to Mexico last summer. We went to the town where Antonio Mata was born and grew up. There were still people who knew him. We made a special visit to Belize because of this amazing zoo they have. It’s away from the coast with lots of space. More like a nature park with all animals from Central America,” she said.
“I waited outside the margay enclosure, and at dusk I saw one on a high tree branch. Its eyes reflected the light. Other people were there, but it looked at me. Then it was gone.”
As we rolled along the flat prairie that is the Island’s center, late afternoon sunlight made long shadows and gave a kind of magic to the endless strip malls, the buildings with signboards listing dermatologists’ and dentists’ offices, the used-car lots.
Selesta said, seemingly out of nowhere, “Trebizon may have been possessed, but the way he acted with my mother is how a domestic cat reacts to a wild one.”
I realized that Joan must never have talked to her about any of this. “You’re right, honey,” I said. “That’s what it was like.”
Keeping her eyes on the road, she reached over with her left hand and pulled down the shoulder of her blouse. There was a small patch of tawny fur with a touch of black.
“How long have you had that?”
“A few years. It was just a speck, and then it grew. I knew what it was when it appeared. I shaved it at first and was afraid someone would find out. Lately I’ve let it grow.”
I watched her staring at the road, tried to see a cat shape in her head. She glanced my way, and for a moment her eyes did catch the light.
“Your mother had the same thing when I first knew her. She had to get rid of it with electrolysis. Painful stuff.”
“My mother never volunteers information about things like this. When I first got this I asked her what it meant. She mentioned her father very briefly — then told me about laser treatment.”
“But you didn’t want that.”
“I want to remember. Maybe understand something.”
We drove in silence for a while. Then Selesta said, “She was only a few years older than I am now when you met. How much did she know?”
“She had just figured out what had happened to her and to her brother, Luis. She was mad that your grandmother hadn’t been able to tell her more. But I think Ruth must have been in shock herself back then. I think your mother was, too. Maybe that’s what made them so dedicated to their work.”
“Look in that portfolio,” she said and indicated one stuck in between our seats.
It contained photos. The first few were of her grandfather, Antonio Mata. As a young man he was thin and poised. Maybe his head and face seemed a bit streamlined. But I might have been seeing that because of what I knew. He was with a group of young people in one picture at a country house in Mexico. I recognized Frida Kahlo in the crowd. In another picture, Antonio Mata in his shirtsleeves painted on a canvas.
I had seen these before. Joan had shown them to me when I first knew her. There was one of Antonio Mata and Ruth, Joan’s mother, which I remembered having seen. They made a handsome couple. Ruth wore shorts and a man’s shirt.
After her husband’s disappearance, Ruth went to Columbia Law School, married the civil rights lawyer Harry Rosen, and became a legal counsel for Amnesty International.
“Look at the next one,” Selesta said.
This one was new to me. Antonio Mata lay stretched out on the branch of a tree, looking at the camera with cat’s eyes.
“And the next.”
The picture had probably been taken at dusk on a porch. A light was on inside the house. Mata was a bit older than in the other shots. He was poised with his hands on the rails, as if he was going to leap into the gathering dark. He looked like he was trapped. I recognized the porch and the house.
“Your mother gave you these?”
“My grandmother. She took them.”
The next picture was of three children standing on the front porch of the place that Mata had called the House That Ate the World. They ranged in age from nine to maybe three. The oldest was a very serious boy who seemed to be looking at something in the distance. This, I knew was Joan’s brother, Luis. The youngest was Joan’s sister, Catherina, smiling and holding something up to the camera with both hands. Joan was right in between. She gazed up at her brother.