My Father More or Less

1

I had a dream the night before last in which I had already made the trip to London and had unwittingly got into a fight with my father at Customs. We had both bought souvenir penknives from an airport shop and as a joke, as what I thought was a joke, were slicing the buttons off each other’s jackets. He gets angry for no apparent reason — I had done nothing he hadn’t done first — and he says, Tom, I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll remember for as long as you live. I say I’m sorry, but he jabs me with the knife, ripping a fist-size hole in the side of my jacket. The knife withdraws with a rosebud of blood at its point. You’ve gone too far, I say, astonished at the blood. He shuffles around, taunting me with the knife, saying, Come on, come on, let’s see what you’re made of. Although I am angry, I mean only to defend myself, not to strike back. When he thrusts his knife at my heart — it’s as if he really means to kill me — I spear him in the back of the hand, the blade sticking, snapping off at the handle. It seems not to bother him and he comes at me again, slashing the air, pricking me in the thumb, the blade of my knife lodged like a wing in the back of his hand. You shit-faced son of a bitch, he yells. His thrusts are without force, are easily defended against. At some point I notice that the front of his shirt is thick with blood. I think, How will I get back to America if the old man dies.

I keep making this trip to London in my imagination, the same trip to visit my father, sit each time at a window seat in the No Smoking section of a Pan Am 747, the plane taxiing down a runway, changing direction, stopping and starting, trapped in indecision. There is almost always an unspecified delay that prolongs itself beyond my patience. And then without further announcement, just when I think we’ll never go anywhere, we tear loose from the earth. The plane ascends with heartbreaking abruptness, Kennedy Airport reducing itself to abstraction in the distance below. I am on my way, though unready for the trip, without expectation of what awaits me on the other side.

I have a copy of one of my father’s novels on my lap, a book called Interior Corrosions, which I will make an effort to read. Oddly, I have never been able to read any of his books word for word from beginning to end, though I had tried — give me that — had pretended to read them, had carried them with me when I was younger as though they were medals earned in battle. I had never given up the idea of some day reading his books as I had never really fully given up the idea that he would one day return to our family. He left us when I was four and Kate seven, returned inexplicably when I was five and left for good two days after my sixth birthday. Since he had left forever once and returned, I saw no reason why it couldn’t happen again. My mother certainly acted as if she expected him to return, talked of his absence as if he had gone to the supermarket and forgotten the way back. I assumed that he would eventually tire of whatever he was doing (I thought of him as being like Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita) and return to us, his faithful family. As much as five years after he had walked out, his bed, still talked of as his, remained alongside my mother’s awaiting his momentary return. We are still waiting, though with smaller investment of hope than before. He has been gone twelve years, has lived in a different state for most of five and in a different country for the past two.

I mean, it was not that we never saw him after he left. It was that there was no longer any pleasure in his presence for us, that he visited seasonally like a salesman, selling his time at inflated prices. He seemed like an imposter, this visitor from another planet, this salesman of damaged goods, an inadequate stand-in for the father we had lost. I mean, he went through the motions of being our father, tried to buy us with unexpected kindnesses. Nothing we got from him lasting or satisfying, we became tougher and tougher customers, my sister and I. Kate got married when she was twenty and moved to Colorado, got divorced the following year but stayed on among the vanished bison. She would not talk to him again, she said, unless he called to apologize for twenty-one years of damage he had done her.

Although it is a No Smoking section, the conservatively dressed black man in the seat next to me lights a cigarette, takes two drags, then holds it out absent-mindedly as it burns down, the smoke crowding my space. I cough, but say nothing, brush the smoke away with the back of my hand, expect retribution to come from one of the stewardesses passing among us, taking orders for drinks.

“It’s your father’s opinion,” said my mother, “that I make it difficult for his children to see him, but as you can see the opposite is more nearly the truth.”

I had been saying I didn’t know whether I wanted to go to London and I saw no reason to go if I didn’t really want to.

“There’s no question that you’re going,” she said. “You told your father that you’re going and you’re not changing your mind.”

“Come on,” I said. “Okay? He’s changed his mind when it came to seeing me any number of times. Why is everything the way he wants it?”

Her answer to that was made from under the drone of the dishwasher turned on in midsentence, and I had to ask her to repeat her remark.

I had to follow her to her room to get an answer, such as it was, from the other side of a closed door. “It’s important that you have some sort of relationship with your father,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not defending or attacking him. I don’t want to talk about it any more. Is that clear?”

When I pushed the door open — the scene plays itself in slow motion — my mother let out a small cry and lifted the blanket up over her breasts, which were in any event fully clothed.

“Don’t you dare,” she said or something equally inappropriate. “You don’t come into this room without knocking first.”

I open my eyes to glance at my watch — we’ve been an hour and twenty minutes in the air — read a few more lines in my father’s book. How much silence could we bear without beginning to rave, how much talk that was only silence amplified and distorted into language? Her face pressed to the window, she watched the discolorations of the leaves as if they were… His sentences exhaust me and I close my eyes to filter the words, to sift the meaning from the sound.

A stewardess named Marlene is talking to the man next to me. She holds her smile as if it occupied her face against her will. “And what about you?” she says to me.

“I’d like a beer,” I say. “What kind do you have?”

“How old are you?” she asks.

“How old do I have to be, Marlene?”

Kate had a stomachache that day. She tended to get sick whenever my father came to take us the way some kids get sick when they have to take a test in school. My mother said that I should go alone with him because she didn’t have the energy to fight with Kate and she didn’t want to listen to her whine.

I said if I had to I would.

She said, “I don’t want to have to fight with you too.”

I said, “What are you talking about? I said I would go, didn’t I?”

She said, “I don’t want to hear any more about it from either of you. Is that clear?”

She hurried into her room and slammed the door, an indication that she was about to fall apart and wanted to spare us witness of her humiliation. She was still shut up in her room when the doorbell announced my father’s presence. No one moved to answer. I kept thinking that I would do it — I was the only one that wasn’t in some room with the door closed — but it didn’t seem fair that I should have to do it all the time. “Will someone answer the door please,” my mother called from her room. “Tom, what are you doing?”

The bell rang a second time, and a third. I remember walking very slowly to the door, thinking they couldn’t say I wasn’t trying. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to see him; that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t get myself to the door. At that time, I still looked forward to his visits. I was open to anything.

As soon as he started up the car, he said, “Tell me again why Kate’s not coming with us.”

I said, “Neither of us was feeling well this morning, but I wanted to come anyway.”

He said, “And Kate didn’t want to come?”

I said, “She had a stomachache. It’s been going around, a stomach virus, half my class has been absent.”

“It sounds like an epidemic to me. I’m surprised the streets weren’t closed off.”

“She felt bad that she couldn’t go with you. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go.”

“Tell me something, Tom. Does your mother make it difficult for the two of you to see me?”

“She wants us to see you, Dad. She really does.”

“Like the president wants to end the war in Vietnam,” he said.

He parked at a meter on Hudson Street and got out of the car. It was raining and he offered me his corduroy jacket to put over my head and I said rain didn’t bother me and he said take it for God’s sake. I put the jacket under my arm, then I dropped it, and he said what the hell’s the matter with you?

I was always dropping things, told him about dropping a bottle of gingerale on the way home from D’Agostino’s and then going back to get a second one, which I dropped and broke when I was trying to open the door to our apartment. I thought he would laugh but he didn’t. He had his mind on something else.

He never mentioned the object of our destination, but I knew it was to see one of his women. The building we entered had no elevator. We wallked up a narrow staircase to the sixth floor and after knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, went into this tiny apartment that seemed like a doll’s house. This is my only son, he said. The blond woman who belonged to the apartment laughed.

The apartment was hot and I asked her if she had anything to drink.

This woman, who was too skinny to be really pretty, had the emptiest refrigerator I had ever seen in a place where somebody lived.

“You’ll have to settle for a glass of water,” she said, “unless you want to go out and get some pop.” My father said, “He drops bottles.”

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

I said I really didn’t want any water, that I never really liked New York water, didn’t she have any milk or juice.

“If he doesn’t want water,” she said to my father, “he can’t really be thirsty.”

I said I don’t think it’s right to call someone you don’t know a liar.

Later, for something real or imagined I had done to offend her, she asked us to leave. My father left me in the hall and went back.

“Look, honey,” I heard him say through the closed door, “give him a chance for God’s sake. He’s not a bad kid.”

“I’m very upset, Lukas,” she said. “This is my place and I don’t have to have anyone here I don’t want to see. Maybe after he’s gone you can come back.”

My father whispered something I couldn’t make out, the word “time” coming through, repeating itself.

“If you mean that,” she said, “then get rid of him.”

I’ve had the feeling for some time — it may even extend back to the day I accepted my father’s invitation — that this is a final trip for me, that I’m either not going to arrive in London or not going to get back. I’ve always thought of dreams as prophetic, a kind of inside out warning, and the dreams I’ve had concerning this trip have almost all looked into the mouth of disaster. In one, a side door of the airplane would suddenly blow open and the passengers nearest to it would be sucked out into the atmosphere. A high jacker was responsible for the door coming open and I shouted at him that it made no sense what he was doing — I want this plane, he said. I need this plane — That’s childish, I said. None of us has ever had a 747 of his own. The man, who was undefinably familiar, said he didn’t want to hear the word childish again from me. He once, in fact, threw acid in the face of a classmate who called him childish — If there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, he said, it’s having my manhood undermanned. The pilot was ordered to jump from the plane though the hijacker, who was not completely awful, said he could use a parachute if it gave him a greater sense of security. The pilot wanted no favors, said he didn’t want to be beholden to a criminal and would take his chances on free fall. I could see that he was dissembling, that he had a parachute under his flight jacket — Okay, said the hijacker, it’s your funeral. When the door was pushed open for the pilot’s jump, the suction dragged us all toward the opening. The next thing I knew I was falling among clouds of parachutists, holding on to the seat in front of me. The pilot, who occupied the seat, said not to worry there wasn’t anything that flew he couldn’t land. What struck me most — it was the first awareness I had of it — was that pilot and hijacker had the same face.

I mean to be dispassionate, to pass out these snapshots, these sometimes moving pictures as if I had no personal stake in them. The central figure in all is that mysterious man, that master of disguise, my father. He appears and disappears, changes his job, his appearance, his personality, the conditions of his life. It is his passion never to be the same twice. My first memory of him is with a mustache, a short thick brush, though he claims he has never worn a mustache (at least not separate from a beard). The picture is there and, accurate or not, I see no way of giving it up. The first face is the businesslike father, head of the household, smoker of fat cigars. I remember him, smelling of cigars, lifting me from the crib to rub his face into mine.

The second face is really two faces or two aspects of the same face. He is clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, hair parted down the middle, a wise guy and stand-up comic, a self-made celebrity beleaguered by admirers. He has published an award-winning novel the year before and is between books, at odds with himself. I am six years old or almost six, thinking myself six in advance of that turning point. My father takes me with him to the town house apartment of his current editor, a man who has made his career, he says, out of knowing less than nothing, a man unencumbered, goes the joke, by the obligations of intelligence. I sit in the corner shyly, playing with a small rubberized plastic Godzilla, while the men talk or rather my father talks and the other man listens. Two other people come in, a man and a woman dressed like models in the windows of expensive department stores. I am introduced and complimented on being the son of my father. More people come in, mostly men, an occasional woman. My father holds forth, holds court, while the others listen respectfully. More people wander in. My father is congratulated again. “How wonderful for you,” a woman says, kissing him on both cheeks.

My father disdains admiration, says all success is fraudulent, others more than some. He is in terrific form. “Your father is in terrific form,” a woman says to me, an odd-looking woman in purple velvet pants.

Whatever he says, sometimes a grunt or clearing of the throat, produces laughter. “Your father is a very funny man,” the woman says to me. “Are you also a funny man?”

“I’m funnier,” I say. “I have to be because no one laughs.”

My questioner laughs, goes back to look for my father to repeat this remark to him. When she finds him, when she is able to dislodge his attention from elsewhere, when she repeats my remark with slight variation, my father looks puzzled then laughs extravagantly. The picture that remains is of my father and the woman laughing together with exaggerated amusement.

And there’s the other side of that face: suspicious, vulnerable, stern, glowering. He would fly off the handle, as my mother called it, at invisible provocations. “I won’t put up with that kind of behavior any more,” he would shout. “Do you hear me, Tom?” How could I not hear him? And sometimes after one of these rages he would apologize, saying that he loved me and wanted me to forgive him, tears on his face. Kate used to forgive him (I think she was afraid not to), but I refused him that satisfaction. I put my hands over my ears when he apologized, pretended not to be able to hear him. When he left home the second time, never to return, I could take some of the responsibility for his departure.

The third face, which comes in several variations, is the face of the visiting father. It sometimes comes with full beard, sometimes artistically unshaven. Sometimes the eyes seemed so far back in the skull that I had the impression that the sockets were unfilled, that the eyes had retreated beyond return. I remember thinking that the eyes had turned around to get a view of the other side. I think of the beard as a kind of mask, and the third face, the several third faces of my father, as the old man’s disguise. The beard changes shape, is pointed, is rounded, covers the entire face, covers only part of it, goes to seed like an untended garden. It is as if he were trying to hit on the most impenetrable disguise. If you can’t pin him down, can’t say exactly how he looks, he is safe from your knowledge.

In his most recent phone call, he said he had been thinking of shaving his beard, not to be surprised if he were beardless when I saw him.

“How will I recognize you?” I asked, only parly in jest.

“I will be the only one there who can claim to be your father.”

I see it this way. Or this is one of the ways I see it. I am the man’s enemy and he knows it. He has made me his enemy and is aware that he has and so he must resent and fear my presence. If that’s the case, and it’s the only case I have, why did he invite me to London? Certainly not for the reason he offers — to get to know me better, to make up for past failures — which he would mock as clichés if I offered them to him. I acknowledge that he may feel some guilt over the way he’s treated me in the past, but I doubt that that’s the main reason for his invitation. There’s evidence for a completely different interpretation of his motives. The natural hostility of sons and fathers is the central theme of his novels, a friend of my mother’s once told me, thinking the idea would amuse me. Let’s take the argument where it goes, okay? It’s dangerous not to know where your enemy is at all times. So he brings me to London to have me where he can see me, to have me in his sights. What follows? He converts me if he can to his view of things, tries to pacify my resentment. And if he can’t — the reasoning seems extreme, is meant to be extreme — he gets me out of his way. The idea seems inhuman, perhaps crazy, and I neither believe it nor disbelieve it. I see it merely as one possibility on a spectrum of possibilities.

I am susceptible to motion sickness, have always been, my mother says, and on long car trips usually have to ask the driver to stop and let me out. When the sickness doesn’t come its absence is itself cause for wonder. An hour and fifty-five minutes have passed on this flight and I’ve had a beer, dozed, read a half-page of my father’s first or second novel, and I’m still all right. Queasiness, or maybe only expectation of, rises and subsides. I open the book in my lap at random and read whatever the eye chances to record.

On the other side of the closed window, in the dusty courtyard where rough gravel gathers into heaps, the truck has its hood turned toward the house. There were a few people around as there always were, no matter the hour, at the gate along which the road, connecting with the Skyline Highway, ran. I understood the signification of their continued presence, like mysterious plants that spring out of the soil, though found it without weight or interest, a familiar and ominous landscape belonging to itself.

Someone said (I forgot where I read it) that my father writes mystery stories in which there are neither corpses nor murderers, in which almost everything is suggested and almost nothing happens. I quote this judgment sometimes as if it were my own discovery. Whether accurate or not, it has the ring of profundity. Mostly I think it’s a lot of shit what people say about books, just words to fill the empty spaces. I’m pretty good at shooting a certain kind of literary shit myself before a friendly audience, though with teachers and fathers I can barely put together a complete sentence. I signal to a stewardess as she goes up the aisle, holding up the Coors can to indicate I’d like another. “Someone will be taking your lunch order in a few minutes,” she says, moving away, called invisibly to some other business. I read somewhere (or am I making that up too?) that stewardesses have sex all the time on the ground because it reminds them of being in the air.

I don’t recall my father talking to me about his own work, though he had opinions about almost everything else. I don’t know why it was so, but we tended to avoid the subject of books altogether. Sometimes as a joke I would say to him, “Write any good books lately?” I don’t remember what he answered; he may not have said anything at all. Our main topics of conversation were movies and sports (baseball and basketball mostly) and how I was doing in school. He was full of theories about winning and losing that always seemed to me beside the point. “If they weren’t committed to losing,” he’d say about some team we supported, “they’d find some way to win.” “Doesn’t everyone want to win?” I’d ask. “It’s dangerous to get what you want,” my father would say. “You don’t understand that, do you?” I’d nod as though I understood, but then a little later the question would come out, “What happens to you if you get what you want?” Then he would explain or he wouldn’t, and it would make no difference which, his explanation beyond my reach, that it was death-bent to challenge the gods. (Could the gods field an entire team? I used to wonder). The teams that didn’t want to win — they were always somehow ours — lacked character, he would say. The teams my father supported were underdogs of degraded character, frightened to the point of ineptitude at the distant prospect of victory. I didn’t always enjoy going to games with him. When his team was losing he could be embarassing to be around, complaining about the referees in a self-pitying voice that made me want to pretend I didn’t know him. “It’s just a game,” I would say, giving him back his own wisdom of an earlier day. “They’re calling them all against us,” he’d say. “They won’t give us a break.” He would calm down for moments but the slightest turn against his interests would set him off again. It was like being with a madman. Then there were times he held me responsible for his teams’ failures as if I had some magic I was refusing to employ on his behalf. I took it to heart, began to root secretly against his teams, wanted to see them fail because of his stake in their success. If I couldn’t will them to victory, I could at least take pleasure in their defeat. My own theory: a man committed to losers got what he deserved.

It is not one time but several times coming together as one. Not memories but invention, as he would say, given the shape and condition of recollection. I know it is my father before I am fully awake. His heavy walk rings the floors. My mother asks him to leave in a soft reasonable voice, says she doesn’t want the children’s sleep disturbed. He says — I am pressed agaist the closed door of my room — that he has as much right to be in the house as she. He won’t stay long, he says in a wheedling voice, he just wants to see his kids for a few minutes. Be a sport, Magda.

You don’t want them to see you like this, she says.

Like what? I wonder and open the door to see for myself.

Is this your idea of seeing the kids? she asks. He has her backed against a wall, his arms out.

She slips out from under his arms. I think you should leave, she says. Goodbye.

He has his arms around her. Let’s go into your room, he says, kissing her, my mother drawing back her head.

The children will wake up, she says. I want you to leave.

They are out of view when I hear her say in a loud whisper, I don’t want to, don’t you understand.

They go into her bedroom and close the door.

The man next to me is asleep, his mouth open, a faint sound coming from him, an industrial hum. I get up to go to the bathroom, slide by two sets of knees. The plane lurches slightly. A child lets out a heartbreaking cry. In the bathroom cubicle, after peeing, I stand slumped over the bowl, waiting out a bout of nausea. When it passes — it is as if it never quite arrives — I have the illusion that I glimpse my father’s face in the mirror. Actually there’s hardly a resemblance between us, except perhaps at the mouth, in the thin red line of the lips. On the face in the mirror, sweat sprouts like a rash. I am allergic to small enclosures, to other people’s reflections staring back at me. I wash my face and hands, comb my hair, flush the toilet, the poisonous liquid raining thirty thousand feet into the ocean.

I have this idea off and on that my life is a movie or made up of pieces of old movies. A girl about my own age stops me as I step out of the bathroom, says amazing as it may sound her travelling companion, a lady named Mrs. Karp, had gone up front about twenty minutes ago to get a magazine and hasn’t returned. She has searched the entire plane and there is no sign of her friend. I don’t know what to believe, suspect the girl is on something, but her story as she tells it is full of convincing detail. When I get back to my seat I begin to wonder if there isn’t, as she suspects, some kind of conspiracy aboard this plane. She sits, empty seat next to her, with her hands over her face.

It often strikes me that almost everything we take for granted is something of a fraud. I’m not dogmatic about my conclusions. One thing is true for me at one moment and another, maybe the opposite, is true the next. We are suspended in the air, going nowhere; the plane is going on course at the speed represented by the pilot. The girl in the Grateful Dead sweatshirt has lost her friend on the plane; there is no friend and never was. My father wants to see me and my father wants to get rid of me. I am making this trip to see my father; I am making this trip to see what my father wants.

Once the connections break, it is hard to put things together again.

I feel at times like an old man, older than my father, as if I had already lived through my future on some secret wave length. My mother likes to say that her friends think of me as an adult, forget when talking to me that I’m her little boy. Someone had to take his place, I suppose, and after the first few years there was no one else. It’s like it’s so far back I can’t remember having been a child. I mean, I don’t know if I even had a childhood. I just turned eighteen and I haven’t the faintest idea what it was like to be twelve.

My mother won’t say anything directly, but I know she feels he’s ruined her life. I’ve never gotten anything from him either, not anything I’ve ever wanted. For some reason this complaint always fits itself into the same words as if it existed independent of any specific reality. When I think of him I say to myself: I’ve never gotten anything from my father. It’s always the same words, the feeling stuck in the same flag of language. I’ve never got anything real from him. All the time I’ve spent with him has been wasted time. I don’t expect anything from him; I don’t really want anything from him. All of this, which I know to be true, rings false. Language, which is his weapon, has put me in a false position. Who’s to blame for that? Sometimes I think I could kill him for putting me in the wrong.

My father wears on this occasion a three piece tobacco-brown corduroy suit with the texture of velvet. He is two years late for our appointment. We go to a restaurant called Toros, which is a hangout for writers and literary groupies. My father is fussed over by the proprietor, a hard-bitten type who professes to admire everyone’s work, and we are conducted to our table like visiting dignitaries.

“How’s school?” my father asks.

“It’s okay,” I say. “As a matter of fact I’ve stopped going.”

He nods, refuses to comment, purses his lips in disapproval.

“Do you know who that is?” he asks, pointing to a red-faced man in a belted leather jacket at a table perhaps ten feet from ours. The man, being pointed at, looks up, nods to my father, says something amusing to his companion.

“Do you see that man?” my father asks, his harsh whisper too loud not to be overheard. He mentions a name vaguely known to the general public, a figure of minor celebrity. “He was functionally illiterate until he was twenty-five. The man couldn’t write a business letter, could barely spell his own name. He was working in the garment district in New York as an assistant buyer and he had a nervous breakdown. He began writing as a form of therapy. His wife, Minerva, who was a high school English teacher, edited his manuscript into recognizable English, taught him the rules of English syntax.”

“Dad, he can hear you,” I say, speaking behind my hand.

“Doesn’t matter. He knows what I’m saying is true. After he made a lot of money — on his third book if I remember — he left Minerva and the kids for a seventeen year old girl. The girl was at most a year older than his oldest daughter whose name unless I’m mistaken was Loretta. The man hasn’t written a creditable book since then because he has no one to rewrite them for him. Critics take the cramp in his syntax for evidence of a deepening of purpose. The truth is, he’s unable to write a lucid sentence.”

The object of my father’s cruel description is talking in an equally loud whisper about my father. I hear the name Lukas Terman rise and fall in the buzz of the room.

A couple come to the table to greet my father. “I want you to meet my son, Tom,” he says.

“Your father’s the best writer in this room,” the man says.

“Is that right?”

“He’s also the sexiest man in the room,” the woman says, kissing my father on the cheek.

“That’s the nicest compliment of all,” he says.

When the couple move off to their own table, I ask my father if they are writers too.

“In a manner of speaking,” he says in his loud whisper. “Talented beginners. The girl has a telling way with a phrase but doesn’t know when enough is enough. The man can speak in tongues but hasn’t yet found his own voice…. Tell me why you aren’t going to school.”

“I don’t know why,” I say.

The answer seems to close the subject for the moment. His attention moves elsewhere. He gives me a brief biography of a bearded man standing with his back to us at the bar.

“Do you know everyone in the room?” I ask.

The waiter comes over and my father asks him what’s good. “Everything,” the waiter says, winking at me.

“As I don’t have to tell you, everything also means nothing.” says my father. “Isn’t that so?”

“In this restaurant, everything means everything. What do you want me to tell you? You want me to tell you bluefish, I’ll tell you bluefish.”

“Is it fresh?”

“Like my daughter’s tongue,” he says.

They joke back and forth like characters in a play or a movie made out of a play. I have the idea that there are cameras filming them, that hidden microphones record their conversation.

When the waiter finally goes off with our order, my father asks me what I think of him.

“He’s not very fast,” I say. “He talks too much.”

“What I’m asking is if you recognize him,” my father says. “He looks familiar, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Where would I have seen him?”

“He’s a comedian. He used to do commercials on television.”

I’m willing to believe his other stories — it’s like not bothering not to believe them — but not this one. “I’ve never seen him on television,” I say.

“He used to be on all the time,” says my father. “You couldn’t turn on the set without catching him doing something. He was a man of a thousand faces and two thousand voices. He was a brilliant comic, too brilliant for his own good. Viewers tended to remember his persona and not the product he was selling. The agency that was using him let him go — there was some scandal in the background as well. When they tried to hire him back he refused their offer. He would not be bought off by any amount of money. Besides, he liked being a waiter at Toros, liked the idea of having a secret, of being other than he seemed.”

“Well,” I say, skeptical to the last, “maybe when he was working as a comedian he was realy a waiter in disguise.”

No one is what he seems. Everyone in the restaurant, guest or employee, has an astonishing private history, which my father reveals to me in his blaring whisper.

Lunch is being served. Though I think of passing it up this trip, the stewardess vetoes my decision by letting down my little table and serving me.

For the last year or so I’ve been incredibly impassive, sitting still for whatever comes by, unable to put one foot in front of another without being told I had no other choice. Lunch sits in front of me on a plastic tray and I pick at it — not the swiss steak but the potato puff and the salad — trying to determine whether I’m really hungry or only filling time. The man next to me lights up a cigarette to accompany his second cup of coffee. A woman of about my mother’s age turns around to tell him that there is no smoking allowed in this section. My neighbor takes two more drags before snuffing out the cigarette.

“Thank you,” the woman says with heavy sarcasm. “It only took you four hours to get the message.”

“What message is that, lady?” he asks, winking at me. “If my smoking bothered you, why didn’t you say something before?”

The woman, who is English, offers him the back of her head, says nothing that we can hear. An unintelligible whine of complaint hangs in the air. She turns once again and says, “The rules are made for some, I dare say, and not for others.”

“What is she talking about?” he says to me. “We’ve been in the air close to five hours and I’ve smoked two cigarettes, really half of two cigarettes. Does that make me a public nuisance?”

He can’t let go. Even after he opens his attaché case to get at some business documents he’s already read three or four times he continues to justify himself. I turn my face to the window, make no response. “Am I being unreasonable?” he asks me.

“Everything’s unreasonable,” I say.

Do I surprise him? He accepts the remark not as intended, but as a gesture of empathy, the men against the woman, the Americans against the English. “You most of all,” I could have added, though stopped short of saying what I meant.

When the trays are cleared away, the panel in front of our section lifts up to reveal a screen. We are requested to draw the shades over the windows and to put out the pintpoints of light overhead. I seem to be the only one in my immediate area without headphones, had probably been sleeping when the stewardess offered them for sale.

I watch the movie without sound a while, which has its own interest. It concerns a retired rodeo star who is reduced to making drunken public appearances on behalf of an unlikely breakfast cereal. After a scene with in which the cowboy, too drunk to go throuh his paces, watches an impersonator perform in his place, I close my eyes, let them close. The movie washes over me.

The multi-national company that manufactures the cereal with the cowboy’s pictures on the box also has in its employ an international ring of assassins. One of them has been assigned “to terminate” the cowboy’s career. The assassin, however, makes the crucial mistake of perceiving the false cowboy as the real one. I wake before the scenario can play itself out, the assassin waiting in ambush for the false cowboy’s scheduled arrival.

What will the real cowboy do when he learns that his double has been killed in his place?

In the real movie the cowboy redeems his debased life by trekking through beautiful countryside accompanied by a woman and a horse, avoiding unseen pursuers.

The plane begins its descent, stuttering slightly as it falls, the sky darker as we come closer to the earth. I reach in my jacket pocket for a stick of gum, come out empty-handed. Ears ache as if wooden nails had been driven into the drums on each side. I am not ready to come down.

I can imagine my father, beardless with two days growth, sitting in one of these black director’s chairs, his legs crossed, an unattended cigarette smoking in the ashtray. He is going through the manuscript of a screenplay, making notes to himself in the margin with a red pen. The ending isn’t right, isn’t right as an ending or isn’t right as the last scene of this particular film. It’s even possible that the ending is not at fault in itself but symptomatic of the failure of the whole work. My father has been too long on this screenplay to know, has lost all sense of balance. His watch, which he glances at to gauge the time he has before leaving for the airport, has stopped, something he won’t discover until hours later. If he intends to take the car to Heathrow, he’ll have to leave the house in fifteen minutes, he thinks, though in fact he is already several minutes late.

The plane comes out of its descent, begins to level off, offers the illusion of rising again. The man next to me says that he heard there was an Air Traffic Controller’s strike at Heathrow and that we would have difficulty landing.

“What a bore!” one of the English ladies in front of us says.

I am in no hurry, consider the possibility of the plane hanging around for awhile. It’s been my limited experience that anything is possible. The fantasy wills itself. One of the emergency doors is suddenly blown open and everything not nailed down is sucked into the maelstrom of the sky, three hundred or so passengers dropping into London like a rain of hailstones.

I try to imagine what it would be like to fall into my father’s life like a bomb.