Head Games, page 18
From the way he said “prematurely,” with an ironic lift, Lisa saw they were turning another corner in the story, getting closer to the truth, closing the gap between the official version and the version that had been playing in her mind for a long time now, the one with Soriano padre in it.
Jorge got up, came over to where Lisa was sitting, and took her hand as if to prepare her for the worst, but she already knew what was coming. “So I arrange for a blood test,” he said. “The results come back, and I have it in black and white: I’m not your father. I show the test to Maria. She cries. I tell her I want a divorce, but it’s not that easy. We are Catholics, and there is no divorce in Argentine law. In the end I decide to make do with the situation. What can I say? We had some good times and some bad times. Así es la vida.”
He squeezed Lisa’s hand. She was astonished by the simplicity of it all. There had been no need to go to Catamarca. Jorge could have told her for the asking. She didn’t know what to say, and he took her silence for shock.
“But it doesn’t make any difference, none whatsoever, chiquita,” he said, patting Lisa’s hand. “I love you just as much.” He bear-hugged her.
Lisa hugged him back and said: “I know, Dad.” She was surprised how natural it came out: Dad. She told him about her visit with Hetta Soriano.
“I had my suspicions already,” she said. “Nothing concrete. Just a feeling. But I didn’t get anywhere with my questions.”
“You actually talked to Hetta Soriano?” he said.
That look again, Lisa thought sadly. He looks at me the way everyone does when I talk about my feelings, as if I was misbehaving, as if I was wrong. He looks at me like that even though I’ve been right all along. I don’t know why people can’t accept feelings as proof.
“I don’t know what you expected from her,” Jorge said. “Even if Hetta Soriano knew about the affair, she wouldn’t have said anything to you. It wouldn’t be in her interest. If you can prove that you are Soriano’s daughter, you are entitled to a share in the inheritance. I’d say: go ahead and sue her, but I see no hope of winning the case. The legal system in Argentina is a jungle. Besides, Soriano’s business was sold years ago. God knows where the money is now – in some tax haven, in Uruguay or Panama. Or she put it into a dollar account in Miami. We’d be in court for years just trying to locate the money.”
Lisa told him it was okay. She didn’t want to sue Hetta. It wasn’t about money. She just wanted to know who her father was.
“Let me tell you another thing, chiquita,” he said. “The money Soriano loaned your mother to go to Canada? I never paid him back. I wrote him a letter and told him I’d put the money into an account for you, and he was welcome to add to it. He never answered. But the money has accumulated interest nicely.”
It was a flat ending to Lisa’s glorious quest. Instead of a father: a bank account with accumulated interest. “I thought I should tell you,” Jorge said. “But really, the paternity thing isn’t all that important. What matters is love.”
The moment he said it, Lisa realized: every single one of his words was a sign. Jorge had planted a row of flashing signs to show her that she was on the right path. She knew the baby she was carrying wasn’t Don’s child, but that was okay, because the words coming out of Jorge’s mouth were all starred, *paternity* *not* *important*. She needed a father for her baby. And there was Don who had handed her a diamond ring and a signed marriage certificate and Jorge who had given her the go-ahead in so many starred words. That’s when Lisa shelved the question of paternity for good. Well, maybe not for good because when Tilly was born, Lisa saw that she had Quechua eyes.
“Tilcara!” Lisa’s mother said when she was told the baby’s name. “I don’t understand this mania for giving children names no one’s ever heard of.”
“What about her middle name?” Jorge said.
“I’ll call her Georgina, after you,” Lisa said.
His eyes went moist. Her mother said nothing. She knew she had lost that round.
BY THE TIME THE BABYSITTER arrived, Tilly was bouncing happily in the Jolly Jumper. Lisa managed to sneak out of the apartment without her noticing. If she saw Lisa putting on her boots, she set up a howl, but it was all show. She stopped the moment Lisa was out the door.
“I don’t understand why you decided to go back to work, Lisa,” her mother said. “You could live perfectly well on Don’s money.” She pushed the guilt button. She heckled Lisa. “You have an obligation toward the child. What’s your excuse for leaving her with a babysitter? There is no excuse.”
“Mom, I love Tilly, but I need to get out. I need a life of my own.”
“A life of your own! Tilly is your life now. When I was young, that was understood. It never occurred to me to go back to work after I had you. I stayed home.”
Yes, but her mother was typecast for the stay-athome role. She had no repertoire. Unlike Lisa who had a large supply of song and dance routines that needed practicing.
When Lisa got into the elevator that morning with Mrs. Dorner who lived next door, she didn’t say “Good morning.” She had used her polite elevator voice for three days in a row. It was time for a change, for something out of the ordinary, for: It’s a beautiful morning. Lisa liked the old Rascal tune and sang it with the kids in the playroom, with the lyrics cleaned up, because she didn’t want to teach them bad grammar. It ain’t no good when the sun is shining became “it is no good when the sun is shining” in Lisa’s playroom version.
Mrs. Dorner looked startled when Lisa sang It’s a beautiful morning, but what the hell, Lisa thought, it’s crazy Tuesday, the day when I visit Don in the nursing home, when “good morning” isn’t good enough. She kept humming It’s a beautiful morning, all the way to the lobby. She reached under her wraparound scarf and, for good luck, touched the pendant she was wearing. It spelled LOVE in a square, LO on top, VE underneath, her charm for a crazy day.
Her mother kept nagging Lisa. “Why don’t you take Tilly along when you visit Don?”
“Because she doesn’t like visiting Don.”
Lisa took Tilly only once. She held her tight because the white sheets on Don’s bed were too wan, too deathly pale, and Tilly cried at the sight of the room, the scrubbed floor, the plastic and metal surfaces, so hard and sterile. Her desperate cries unsettled Don and made him blow bubbles at the mouth. After that, Lisa left Tilly with the babysitter. She wanted to keep her life pink and lacy as long as possible. She wanted to protect Tilly from the wrinkled ugliness of the nursing home. She protected her own soul by wearing a talisman, the LOVE pendant. She wore it every Tuesday and Saturday when she went to talk to Don.
For a while her mother put up with the phrase “talking to Don.” Then she became edgy.
“I wish you wouldn’t use those words, Lisa,” she said. “Talking to Don sounds crazy. You know perfectly well that you can’t have a conversation with him.”
“But I do,” Lisa said.
“Lisa, I know it hurts, but you have to come to terms with Don’s condition,” her mother said.
This was the woman who still had a hankering for Miguel Soriano, the woman who had never come to terms with the fact that she was married to Jorge, was Maria Martinez now, not Maria Soriano, who thought she could conceal her disappointment under the plumped-up cushions of the French Provincial sofa in her immaculate living room and hide her sad face under a thick layer of creamy foundation and a painted-on smile. Who was she to say: Come to terms with life?
At first, Don was at St. Michael’s, a downtown hospital close to skid row. In the winter the lobby was always full of homeless men looking for shelter from the deep freeze. The hospital was run by an order of nuns. They had to suffer the poor. Religion didn’t allow them to kick out the bums. Lisa did her best not to make eye contact with them. The first time she walked through the lobby, one of them let out a racist rant, or maybe it was a sexist ramble. Lisa couldn’t make out the words, something about fucking immigrants. He was grinning at any rate and leering at her, and his eyes burned a black tattoo into her neck.
There were two beds in Don’s room: the one by the entrance had a heavy white plastic curtain drawn around it. The other bed, by the window, was Don’s. He was dressed in a green hospital gown open at the neck. The tube of the IV was taped to his arm with an adhesive patch, dripping a colourless liquid into his veins, as if his blood was too colourful and needed bleaching. Don’s salt and pepper hair was plastered against the sides of his head and sticking up on top. His eyes were closed. He looked vulnerable, but his brow was smooth, a sleeper’s brow. Lisa wondered, were any thoughts drifting through Don’s mind? His hand was twitching on the folds of the blanket. She whispered his name, and his eyes opened. They wandered vaguely in Lisa’s direction. They too had been washed of colour. They were round with astonishment, straining to make out who/what was moving there by the bed. They fastened on Lisa at last. Don had spotted her. That’s what it looked like at any rate, but Lisa wasn’t sure. Maybe he was looking through her.
“Hi, Don,” she said. Maybe he was mad at her because she had deserted him, left him on the sofa in Mar del Plata, his brain fuzzy with alcohol poisoning or a stroke. “It’s me, Lisa.”
His eyes came into focus. The corners of his mouth straightened up. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. Lisa sat down on his bed, perched on one half of her butt, careful not to edge into the territory occupied by Don’s body outline, and he pressed her hand. His mouth started working. A burbling sound came out.
Lisa leaned over him and listened to his strained breathing, a whistling breath. She felt his fingers creeping up on her hand, feeling for something, and realized he was feeling for the ring.
“I’m wearing it,” she said. She disengaged her hand and held it up close to his eyes. “See?”
He sank back further into the pillow, exhausted now that he had managed the first task he had set himself: trying to pick up where they had left off in Mar del Plata when she told him she’d give him an answer on her return, at the airport in Buenos Aires where he was supposed to pick her up.
“The answer is yes,” Lisa said. She knew she should follow that up with “I love you” but she couldn’t. It seemed ungenerous to hold out on Don like that. She had lied for trivial reasons before, so why not lie out of charity? She gathered air in her lungs and made herself say: “I love you.” Don didn’t react, perhaps because lies didn’t carry in the thin atmosphere of a hospital. She was wracking her brains what else she could say to cheer him up. She felt bad that she hadn’t brought him flowers. The other guy behind the curtain had flowers arranged in a vase on a side table.
“I tell people that I’m your fiancée. That’s what you want me to say, right, Don?”
She asked him to squeeze her hand for yes, if he wasn’t up to saying anything, and there was a slight increase in pressure, but she couldn’t be sure. He had closed his eyes again. His eyelids were like the curtain around the other man’s bed. They protected him from prying minds.
Was she condemned to this nudge-nudge, winkwink, pressing hands, quirky conversation from now on? Lisa almost succumbed to the tragic atmosphere of the room until she remembered the act she had developed in Tilcara: the madwoman’s dance. She got up from Don’s bed, turned on the music in her head and began swaying her hips. She leaned over Don’s bed, doing a kind of Indian belly dance, gyrating, jiggling her tits and waving her hands, and Don’s eyelids fluttered. Or maybe it was just that the jiggles were travelling along the surface of the bed, like the tremor of an earthquake, rocking him. Lisa segued into a twist. Let’s twist again like we did last summer. She hummed the Chubby Checker tune. It was a hit with the kids at the nursery. She was twisting down to the floor when the nurse came in, a big woman with broad see-saw hips that came to a wobbling halt when she saw the dancing madwoman.
Lisa got up.
“Just trying to make it a bit lively for him,” she said apologetically, and the nurse gave her a reassuring smile, but at the back of her eyes Lisa read: “She’s nuts, for sure.”
“I can’t get any reaction out of him,” she told the nurse, trying to sound matter of fact to re-establish her credentials as a visitor. “When I first came in, he pressed my hand and tried to speak, but now: nothing.”
“If he pressed your hand, that’s good, honey,” the nurse said. “That’s something. He is probably tired now.”
“Do you think he’ll come around?” Lisa asked. “I mean: will he recover from the stroke?”
The nurse had her professional response pat. “I can’t tell you, love,” she said. “Ask Dr. Snell. He has the information for you.”
She busied herself changing the bottle on the IV line. It was Lisa’s chance to slip away. There was really nothing more for her to do except to say good bye and kiss Don on the cheek. Am I doing this for the nurse? she thought. No, a kiss is the ultimate gesture between lovers. Why didn’t I think of that before? Instead of bringing out the phony “I love you,” I should have kissed Don. A smooch is a smooch. It’s something real.
She decided to use more body language once she got Don to a nursing home, once he had settled in.
THEN CAME SUPER TUESDAY, SUPER crazy wedding Tuesday. Lisa could not shake off the one-two zombie mood that had swooped down and seized her brain at the bridal store two weeks earlier, when her mother held up a white and cream-coloured dress and made whining noises. “Isn’t this gorgeous?” she said, meaning: Pull yourself together, Lisa, and try to look like a happy bride. Lisa’s skin turned to plastic. Ruches and ruffles swept through her mind, blocking whole sentences, and leaving her in a pearly stupor. From time to time she managed to say no in response to crystals and rosettes or wave off something satiny, but the zombie rhythm made her head nod one-two, one an ivory dress, two a lacy jacket, and now they were at Don’s apartment, waiting for Jorge to pick them up and drive them to the nursing home for the wedding ceremony.
Her mother was pinning a corsage on the lapel of Lisa’s jacket and looking at Lisa’s waistline, at the bump showing there. She pursed her lips. Lisa expected her to say: We should have left more slack in the waist, but instead she said: “So Jorge told you,” meaning now you know that he isn’t your father, now you know the whole story. The zombie weight lifted from Lisa’s shoulders, bumped by the half-words only she could hear, the whole story her mother had spent a lifetime blocking but couldn’t go on blocking. The words were pushing up against the hedge of her teeth, against the barrier of her lips, wanting out. It was a story that took more than a simple one-two step, even if her mother wasn’t about to ask anyone’s pardon for what she had done, not Lisa’s, not Jorge’s, even if she crossed her arms and kept her eyes on Lisa’s waistline. There were more than one-two words in this labyrinthine story, enough to break Lisa’s zombie mood.
“I did what I had to do,” her mother said. “But when I got married, I kept my vows.” Unlike Jorge, who had affairs, who lied to her, who cheated on her. “I was a good wife.” And she reeled off a catalogue of things she had done for Jorge: kept the house dustfree, did the laundry, ironed Jorge’s shirts, had dinner on the table every night without fail, packed nutritious lunches. She named each one of her chores, reciting them like poetry. She had given Lisa and Jorge a home to be proud of.
But Lisa caught the whining at the end of her mother’s list. She meant to say: I needed a father for my child. Lisa understood. She, too, needed a father for her child. She too was getting married to the man at hand. Lisa kept a sympathetic silence, but silence was not good enough. Her mother wanted – what did she want? She stepped up her defence and launched into complaints. It could have been a perfect life, they could have been a perfect family, she said, but the happy picture was marred by a philandering husband and a crazy daughter.
There was no more whining in her voice when she came to the crazy-daughter part. She meant what she said, although, really, Liza thought, what does she know about craziness? She doesn’t understand. It’s not an unfortunate condition. Craziness can be sweet and comforting, it can be glorious and triumphant.
Perhaps I should put on a banshee dance for her, Lisa thought, like the one I did in Tilcara. Maybe I should let off steam and blow her mind with a glassshattering, hurricane force scream to teach her a lesson in craziness! But now that the zombie mood had broken, Lisa saw her mother with unexpected clarity and realized, surprise! Her mother was not without dramatic talents after all, had written her own skit and performed on her own stage, a marvellous set built on the ruins of her unrealized past, the romantic Soriano past. She had built herself a new life that was earthquake and hurricane proof. No foot stomping dervish dance, no blasting scream from Lisa could shake her mother’s palace of illusions. No crazy act could break down her whining mind speeches, and in any case, a wedding in a nursing home was enough madness for one day. Lisa let her mother have the last word.
“You and George!” she was saying. “Sometimes I think I can’t take it any more. But it’s God’s punishment for my sins. I know.”
Maybe Don was paying for his sins as well. The Saint has cast a paralytic spell on him for taking away a soul belonging to Tilcara, Lisa thought. There is a sequence of events, a series of moves to go through, each step adding to the score. Asu’s return to the chacra and the Saint’s revenge: two strikes in favour of Tilcara’s home team. Lisa breaking out of the cage and absconding with Tilly hidden inside her: two strikes in favour of the visitors. A perfect balance, an end to the cycle of evil.
JORGE ARRIVED AT THE APARTMENT and chauffeured them to the nursing home. A nursing aide had wrangled Don into a white dress shirt and propped him up on pillows and laid his hands out in front, settled them on the coverlet. The creases in the new shirt, fresh out of the package, and the papery skin of his face gave Don the appearance of a mannequin. The staff had decorated the IV tree and the headboard of Don’s bed with white streamers and balloons. Lisa’s mother couldn’t hide her distaste. The party theme clashed with the fancy bouquets she had set up around the room in large vases. And no one could do anything about the pale turquoise walls and the institutional smell of cleaning fluids and the hectoring voice of the intercom pager in the hall.
