Beautiful Lies

five

It’s a little-known fact, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make problems disappear. But of course, they can only do this as long as you’re a child. When you’ve become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they’re not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that’s why so many of us take our time growing up.

After a restless night and a seriously unproductive Wednesday where my major accomplishments included doing a load of laundry at the Laundromat downstairs and making a tuna fish sandwich, I left my apartment and headed to the PATH station at Christopher Street. Every Wednesday since I’d come to college in the city, I’ve taken the train home for dinner with my parents. I’d often go home on the weekends, too, but Wednesday had just become this thing that we had. Esme and Zack often joined us, but not since the breakup. And I felt bad about that. But a part of me was guiltily glad, too. I liked having my parents to myself.

“Ridley, how are you doing, hon?” Esme had asked earlier that day over the phone. We still talked relatively often, which was nice. She’d been the nurse in my father’s various offices for longer than I’d been alive. She was more like an adored aunt and a close friend than someone who worked for my dad and the mother of my boyfriend. In fact, I’d been almost more concerned about losing my relationship with her than anything else when I ended it with Zack.

“Zack said you seemed a little stressed,” she said in a near whisper, as though she were talking about some kind of embarrassing feminine problem. “He’s worried about you.”

I knew this was well meaning. But I didn’t think I had seemed stressed during my dinner with Zack. Isn’t it weird when someone tells you something about yourself that’s not true? They’re utterly certain of their assumption, and the more you try to convince them otherwise, the more they seem to dig their heels in.

“No, Ez,” I said, trying to sound light. “I’m fine.”

“Really,” she said, as if she were talking to a mental patient. “Good. I’m glad he was wrong.” She didn’t believe me and was letting me off the hook. Then I started thinking, Maybe I am really stressed, and the only one who can’t see it is me.

This is something I really hate about myself. I am influenced by people’s erroneous assumptions about me. Maybe you know what I mean. During my conversation with Esme, I started to feel really stressed out. Another thing I hated was the idea that people were talking about me, deciding how stressed out I was, feeling sorry for me and then telling me about it. It seems very controlling and manipulative. As if they want me to seem weak and frayed so that they can feel strong and together, superior to poor Ridley, who’s under so much stress.

We chitchatted for a while about my latest article, her worsening rheumatoid arthritis, gift ideas for my mother’s approaching birthday. Maybe it was just my guilt, but I still felt, six months after the fact, that we were tiptoeing around the fact that I had broken her son’s heart and laid waste to everyone’s dreams of a wedding and grandchildren.

In Hoboken, I got on another train and took the half-hour ride to the town where I grew up. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station to my parents’ house. Built in 1919, but gutted and made completely modern in the late eighties, it sat nestled among giant oak and elm trees, an absolute bastion of Americana. It was one of those towns. You know. So precious with its general store and original gas lamps, winding tree-lined streets, pretty houses nestled on perfectly manicured lawns, a virtual picture postcard, especially in the fall and at Christmastime. It was about four o’clock when I walked through the front door. I could smell meat loaf.

“Mom,” I called, letting the screen door slam behind me.

“Oh, Ridley,” said my mother, emerging from the kitchen with a smile. “How are you, dear?”

She embraced me lightly, then pushed me back the length of her arms and scrutinized me for any sign of trouble: circles under my eyes, a breakout on my chin, weight gain or loss, who knows.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, with a narrowing of the eyes.

That was generally one of the first questions my mother asked me when I called, or when I came home. As if I didn’t see them all the time. I call my father nearly every day at his office, but to be fair, I talk to my mother more rarely.

“No,” I said, hugging her. “Of course not.” She nodded but gave me that look that reminded me that she knew me better than I knew myself and that lying was futile. Did everyone want something to be wrong with me?

She felt so small to me. Where she was bony and angular through the arms and shoulders, I was muscular and round. Where she was boyish through the hips and chest, I was full. Where the features of her face were small, delicate, fair, mine were softer, slightly rounder. I looked into her face and suddenly thought of the woman in the picture I’d received last night. My mother looked nothing like me; that stranger was my image.

“What is it, Ridley?” she asked, putting her head to the side and inspecting me with her ice-blue eyes.

“When’s Dad coming home?” I answered, walking away from her into the kitchen and opening the oven door. A meat loaf sizzled happily in tomato sauce and the heat warmed my cheeks. I was glad for a reason to look away from my mother.

“Any minute,” she said. When I didn’t say anything else, she changed the subject. “So, have you leaped into traffic to save a toddler, rushed into any burning buildings…anything exciting like that?”

“Nope. Just that one kid.”

“Good. You probably shouldn’t make a habit out of it. Your luck might run out,” she said, giving me an affectionate pat on the ass.

I sat at the kitchen table and she chatted on about her volunteer work at the local elementary school, Dad’s practice and his work at the clinic for underprivileged kids where he donated his time. I didn’t hear a word my mother was saying, not that I wasn’t interested. I was just eager for the sound of my father’s car in the driveway.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course, Mom.”

“What did I just say?”

“If it isn’t my little heartbreaker,” boomed my father as he came in through the back door. He’d taken to calling me that after the breakup.

I got up and went to him, eager to feel his familiar embrace, the comfort of my father’s arms.

“How are you, lullaby?” he said, hugging me hard.

“Good,” I said into his shoulder.

“Good,” he said with a smile and a pat on my cheek. “You look good,” he said. I was glad he didn’t think I looked like there was something wrong.

But I guess there was something wrong, even then. I’d brought the picture and the note with me to the house. I had toyed with the idea of trashing it, just putting it in the bin where it belonged and forgetting it altogether. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I left the apartment without the envelope but halfway down the stairs turned around and went back for it. I guess I wanted to show it to them so they could tell me how ridiculous it was and we could all have a good laugh. Ha-ha.

After dinner, we all sat full and quiet under the glow of the old Tiffany lamp that hung over the table.

“Something weird happened to me yesterday,” I said, filling a conversational lull.

“I knew there was something,” my mother said, satisfied with herself.

“Mom,” I said with that tone that I think expresses perfectly how predictable and annoying I find her sometimes.

“What is it, Rid?” asked my father, his face open and concerned.

I slid the photograph and note over to them. I watched both their faces since I figured the tale would be told in the first millisecond after they processed the information in front of them. But their expressions told me nothing. My father and mother put their heads together and squinted at the photo. My father pulled glasses from his shirt pocket. I could hear the refrigerator humming and the blood rushing in my ears. The teapot came to a boil but my mother didn’t notice and the clock above the sink ticked quietly.

“What’s this?” my father said finally, a confused but benevolent smile on his face. “Some kind of joke?”

“I don’t get it,” said my mother with a quick shake of her head. “Who are these people?”

I looked at them. It was a perfect innocent reaction and I waited to feel relief, a little stupid for having even brought it to their attention. It was exactly what I had wanted. But instead I felt an inexplicable anger.

“I don’t know who they are.” My voice shook a little and both my parents turned their eyes on me. “This came in my mail yesterday.”

“And…what?”

“And look at it,” I said, tapping it with my finger. “That woman looks just like me.”

My father made a show of looking more closely at the picture. “Well, she does bear a bit of a resemblance. But so what?” My mother, I noticed, had looked at the photograph once but didn’t look at it a second time. Instead, she leaned back and looked at me. I couldn’t read her eyes.

“This person believes I’m his daughter.”

“How do you know it’s a he?” my mother asked pointlessly.

“I just think it is,” I said weakly. “The handwriting is masculine. I don’t know.” Sigh. “I just do.”

At this point my father did something I hadn’t expected. He laughed, a deep belly laugh. “Honey,” he said finally. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Really, Ridley,” said my mother. “This is not funny.”

I looked at them, pulled my shoulders back. “I’m not trying to be funny, Mom. I got this in the mail yesterday and…it resonated with me. I have questions.”

“Well. What kind of questions?” asked my father, his laughter dying. “You can’t possibly be entertaining for a second the idea that you’re not our daughter. This person is having a joke at your expense, Ridley.”

“You’re smarter than this, aren’t you?” asked my mother with another quick shake of her head. “I mean, your face has been plastered all over the television and the newspapers for over a week now. Some nutcase thought you resembled someone he knows or used to know. And he’s either crazy, thinks you’re his daughter…or he’s trying to mess with you. This is so silly.”

I paused, doubt creeping up and tapping me on the shoulder.

“How come there are no pictures of me before I’m two years old?” I asked, sounding more like a child than I would have liked.

“Oh, Christ,” said my mother. “Now you’re starting to sound like Ace.”

I hated when my parents compared me with him, this child who had so injured them, so disappointed them. The one who chose the streets and the life of a junkie over their home and their love. The one who’d caused my parents so much pain over the years. I cringed but I didn’t say anything. I kept on looking at her and she finally answered.

“I’ve told you that we used to keep the photographs in the rec-room closet in the basement. The basement flooded and the pictures were ruined. All your pictures from the hospital, taking you home, and much of your infancy.”

She had told me that, but I had forgotten. I was starting to feel a bit unstable. But something compelled me to press on. “And I suppose all the pictures of your pregnancies were in those albums as well.”

“No,” she said slowly, drawing out the syllable as though she were talking to an infant. “I got very big during both pregnancies and was self-conscious in front of the camera. I know it seems silly but I was young.”

My mother was a beautiful woman with creamy skin and almond-shaped eyes. She had this wide mouth that could curl into a megawatt smile bright enough to light the stars in the sky. But when she was angry, her beauty turned to granite. She had always been one of those mothers who didn’t have to say a word to reprimand; just one of those looks froze you in your tracks. She had turned that gaze on me now and it took real courage, dredged from deep inside, for me to keep at it.

I leaned into them. “I don’t look like anyone.”

My mother looked away from me and made a grunt of disgust. She got up from the table and walked over toward the stove. My father glanced at my mother uneasily. He’d always kowtowed to her temper, and an old resentment about that rose in me but I kept silent. He looked back to me.

“That’s just not true, Ridley,” said my father. “You look a great deal like my mother. Everyone has always said that, don’t you remember?”

Now that he mentioned it, I did. There was a resemblance around the eyes. I did share her dark hair and high cheekbones. For a second it dawned on me that perhaps I’d lost my mind. That I was suffering from some form of posttraumatic stress. You always hear about that on shows like Dateline, you know. People whom the world regarded as heroes for a few days and then forgot about; how they lose it, get depressed. Maybe that was happening to me. Maybe I was creating a drama because I craved the attention I had had for a short time.

“But what about Ace?” I persisted. “What he said that night.”

“How can you ask me to explain the things Ace says?” my father said sadly, and I could see how the mention of Ace pained him. Suddenly the air around us was electric with his grief for a son who lived but chose to be dead to his parents. “I don’t even know him anymore.”

We were all silent for a moment, my mother standing at the stove with her arms crossed and head down, my father sitting across from me at the table, his eyes on me with a gaze that at once implored and accused, me leaning back in my chair and trying to figure out why I had brought this to them and why I was so passionately pressing them for answers, why I felt my heart thrumming and my throat dry in some kind of adrenaline response.

My father pushed the picture back toward me and I picked it up, looked at it closely. It had lost its power; there was just a couple with their child. Strangers.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sticking the photograph back in my pocket. Shame burned at my cheeks and pushed tears into my eyes. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

My father reached out to touch my arm. “You’ve been under some stress, Ridley, with everything that happened last week. Someone preyed on that. I think you should call the police.”

I rolled my eyes. “And tell them what? That some mail really freaked me out?”

He shrugged and looked at me with a compassion that I didn’t feel I deserved. My mother walked back to the table with our tea mugs. She sat and kept her eyes on me. There was something there I hadn’t seen before and then it was gone. I thought it was disdain for my lack of faith, my willingness to hurt them.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“That’s all right, dear. I understand how you could become confused. Especially with all the stress.” I heard in her tone that she didn’t understand and it wasn’t all right.

Later, on the train ride back to the city, I watched burbs roll by me as I sat with my feet up and my head pressed against the glass. I’d shared an awkward dessert of chocolate ice cream with my parents and then left after helping my mother clean the kitchen. My mother had turned cold on me and gave me only the briefest embrace as I left. She was like that. She demanded absolute loyalty; anything less and she would freeze me out until I had made penance.

A metacommunication had passed between us years ago and I had always accepted it on a cellular level. She could accept the loss of one child and blame it on him, blame it on his addiction. But the loss of two children, and she saw any digression on my part as a kind of loss, would cause her to look within herself. And this she was not willing to do. As a child, I feared her anger and disappointment. As an adult, I could accept them but I still didn’t like it. I felt bad about the evening, unsure how I’d allowed myself to be so rattled by an anonymous note and a photograph of strangers.

As the upper-middle-class burbs morphed into the urban ruin of Newark, I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he’d paid an obscene sum and never wore. And I loved him for all those things as well. Pitied him, worried after him, adored him, and despised him. I remembered how it was to be pinched by him, chased by him, teased by him, hugged by him, comforted by him. There was an open wound in my heart for my brother. When I thought of him, a tsunami of emotion always welled and crashed within me.

After all the heartache Ace had caused my parents, the drugs, the petty crimes, the arrests for DUI, and finally his departure from our home at the age of eighteen, I was an absolute angel by comparison. I did the usual stuff, lied, did some minor drinking, once I drove the car with just my learner’s permit, got caught with cigarettes. But otherwise I got straight A’s, edited and wrote for the school paper, had nice friends whom my parents thought were okay. No major dramas. I felt I owed it to them to be good. Maybe even deeper, I believed that if I caused them any more pain it would destroy them. So I kept myself safe, in line, and out of trouble.

We never talked about Ace after he left. And I mean never. I couldn’t mention his name without my mother bursting into tears and running from the room. We all pretended he had never lived there. The silence allowed him to grow into this mythic figure in my mind. This beautiful rebel who was too bright, too sensitive for the normal life we lived. I imagined him a musician or a poet, hanging out in cafés, stoic in the pain of the misunderstood genius. A secret part of me harbored resentment toward my parents for driving him away.

After that horrible night when he left, I didn’t see him again until I was a freshman at NYU. I was living in the dorms on Third Avenue and Eleventh Street. I’m not sure how he found me, but when I left the building one morning heading to class, I saw him on the corner. His skin was pasty with raw red patches, and even from a few feet away I could smell the stench of his unwashed body. His face was gaunt. He’d shaved the long dark hair I’d always loved and his skull was a mess of black stubble and tiny scars. His blue eyes, my mother’s eyes, were bright and hungry.

“Hey, kid,” he said.

I must have just stood there gape-jawed for longer than it seemed because he cringed beneath my gaze and said, “Do I look that bad?”

“No…” I managed. I felt so awkward, torn between the urges to run away from this person who wasn’t even supposed to exist and to embrace the brother, the hero that I had lost and grieved so desperately.

A stuttering “How are you?” was all I could manage.

“Um…good,” he said, running his hand self-consciously over his head. As he did this, I saw track marks on his wrist. I took a step back. Remember that Batman episode where everyone thinks he’s turned into a criminal, given into the dark side after so many years as the Caped Crusader saving Gotham from the Penguin and the Riddler? That’s how I felt about Ace that day. There was disbelief; there was horror. But most of all there was this deep, wrenching sadness that my childhood hero had been brought low by the forces of evil.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you have any money? I’ve had the flu this week and haven’t been able to work. I need to get some breakfast.”

I gave him all the money I had in my wallet. I think it was twenty-five bucks. And that’s pretty much the way it was from that point on with Ace and me. My parents never knew it, but since that day, I usually saw him about once a month. We generally met at Veselka on Second Avenue. He always had a knish and I usually ordered the potato pancakes. We’d sit in the crowded East Village institution and no one paid any attention to the junkie and the hip (well, I am) student (later, urban professional) sitting across from each other. He talked shit about getting clean. I gave him money. I knew I shouldn’t. What can I say? I was the classic enabler. But I just loved him so damn much, and that was the only way he would let me show him. Besides, I couldn’t even imagine what he’d have done to get cash if I hadn’t given it to him. Actually, yes I could, and that was another reason.

Sometimes he would disappear for months and I wouldn’t hear from him, not even once. I rarely had a way to reach him. For a while he was squatting somewhere up in Spanish Harlem, or so he said; other times on the Lower East Side. I never knew for sure. When I didn’t hear from him I would be sick, absolutely haunted with fear. I took out an ad in the back of The Village Voice once, not even knowing if he ever read it. It was an act of desperation, one that yielded no results. But eventually he would run out of money or get lonely and he’d call me again. I never asked him where he’d been, what he’d done, why he hadn’t even tried to call. I didn’t ask because I was afraid to run him off again.

“When are you going to wise up?” Zachary had wanted to know. “He uses you. He doesn’t love you. People like that don’t even know what love is.”

That’s the thing about love that Zachary never seemed to understand. When you love someone, it doesn’t really matter if they love you back or not. Having love in your heart for someone is its own reward. Or punishment, depending on the circumstances.

The train screeched into Hoboken and I got out with the crush of people heading into the city. I had to push my way onto the PATH train and it took an eternity to groan its way into Manhattan. I walked from Christopher Street home. The cold air and long walk made me feel better, made the conversation with my parents seem farther away, helped me forget that I still had the photograph in my pocket and doubt in my heart. By the time I reached the building, I was feeling almost normal again. I walked right past my mailbox and didn’t even look at it. No mail tonight. I jogged up the stairs and stopped in front of my door. Sitting before me was a bottle of Merlot and two glasses. A note folded into one of the glasses read: Allow me to apologize properly? Jake, 4E.