A Gesture Life (10 page)

“I guess so. He’s hardly there.”

“Is he a dealer of drugs?”

“I suppose so. But I don’t do them. I’ve never done them.”

I believed her, for Sunny had never hidden anything from me, or told me untruths. It was actually mostly a matter of my confronting the issues, simply posing the questions.

“So then what do you do there? Are there other girls with you?”

“Some. Not always.”

“So you’re there alone, sometimes.”

“It happens.”

I asked her: “Are you having intimate relations?”

Sunny chuckled a bit and said, “What exactly do you mean?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I guess I do,” she answered. “Is that what you had with Mary Burns?”

“Please don’t speak about her like that,” I said. “You know very well we’re not spending time together anymore. It’s disrespectful.”

“I guess you’re not,” Sunny said, her expression souring. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about that. It’s like she never was, isn’t it? You just decided it was finished.”

“I did nothing of the kind. The decision was mutual. But this is none of your concern.”

“You’re right,” Sunny said. “Why should I care? What does she mean to either of us anymore, right?”

“I’ve asked you a question, Sunny.”

“Yes, then.”

“Yes?”

“I’m having sex, yes,” she answered, “if that’s what you want to know.”

I could hardly speak in the face of her bluntness. Then I said, “Are you in love with this person?”

“What?”

“The person you’re involving yourself with. Are you in love with him?”

“Are you kidding?” Sunny said savagely. “What do you think I’m doing, having a love affair?”

“I don’t know,” I said, confused by her sudden anger. “I’m trying to understand what you’re seeking. What you may want for yourself.”

“I don’t want anything,” she said, as though saying the words harshly enough would make it so. “Nothing. I don’t want love and I don’t want your concern. I think it’s fake anyway. Maybe you
don’t know it, but all you care about is your reputation in this snotty, shitty town, and how I might hurt it.”

“This is nonsense. You’re speaking nonsense.”

“I guess I am,” she said. “But all I’ve ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You’re always having to be the ideal partner and colleague.”

“And why not? Firstly, I am a Japanese! And then what is so awful about being amenable and liked?”

“Well, no one in Bedley Run really gives a damn. You know what I overheard down at the card shop? How nice it is to have such a ‘good Charlie’ to organize the garbage and sidewalk-cleaning schedule. That’s what they really think of you. It’s become your job to be the number-one citizen.”

“I am respected and valued in this town. I’m asked to comment at all the critical council meetings. You have little idea what my position is. People heed my words.”

“That’s because you’ve made it so everyone owes something to you. You give these gifts out, just like to that policewoman, Como. She can’t stand to cross you because you’re this nice sweet man who’s given when he didn’t have to or want to but did anyway. You burden with your generosity. So even when I’m being troublesome, they can’t bear to upset you. It was even that way with Mary Burns, wasn’t it? You made it so that she couldn’t even be angry with you.”

“There was nothing to be angry about,” I replied, trying to remember what it was that Mary Burns had finally said to me, after I had asked for one more chance to convince her of my feelings.
You always try, Franklin, but too hard, like it’s your sworn duty to love me.

“I never gave her any cause.”

Sunny shook her head and walked past me to leave but I caught her by the arm.

“Let me go!”

“I don’t want you sleeping at that house!”

“I’ll sleep where I want,” she said bitterly.

“Then I won’t have you living in my house anymore,” I told her, my blood rising. “I won’t allow it. It disgusts me to think of what you’re doing there. You cannot degrade yourself and expect for me to provide you with things.”

“Whatever you want,” Sunny answered, shaking herself loose from my grip. “I’ll go right now and get my stuff from the house.”

“You’ll also lose the allowance I give you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to open the door and walk her bicycle out at the same time. “I can get by.”

“Sunny…”

She turned around to face me, her eyes moist and fierce, a hundred-meter stare. “I don’t need you,” she said softly, and without remorse. “I never needed you. I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way.”

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED
, I didn’t see Sunny. Not for nearly three weeks. One would think that in a small town, I’d catch sight of her, coming and going into a shop on the main street. But not even that. I did call the school and subtly inquire whether her attendance was satisfactory, and the school counselor told me it was. He seemed to know Sunny somewhat and spoke glowingly of her exploits last fall on the field hockey team, though he wasn’t sure if she was playing again this year. I told him she’d decided to concentrate more on the piano, that she was afraid of injuring her fingers and hands, all those players knocking the hard ball about with sticks. I could say this with confidence because I knew Sunny had in fact quit all her activities at the start of the fall, including the piano, and that really the only thing she had continued to do, strangely enough, was study, particularly her history books and world literature, piles of which always littered the surfaces and furniture of her room. She never ceased being the most avid reader, and I knew she was truly gone from the house when I got home that
night weeks earlier and found the stacks removed, the shelves emptied save those books from her childhood, the ones I’d read to her when she first arrived, nursery and bedtime stories in a language she didn’t know.

As I suspected, she was living now in the Gizzi house, on Turner Street, an unpaved dead-end road on the far east side of town, near the village line of neighboring Ebbington. I knew where it was from Officer Como, who was the only one I’d told of Sunny’s leaving the house. I didn’t want her officially listed as a runaway, as I was afraid the designation would remain indefinitely on her personal records, and I knew I could count on Officer Como to keep a watch on the place and its frequent visitors—mostly men in their twenties and thirties, many, according to her, known troublemakers and felons—and be publicly discreet about Sunny’s habitation. Of course it was fairly common knowledge that she often hung out there, but most of my fellow merchants and colleagues thought she was simply wayward and difficult and not completely gone from me. I wanted to hide the real depth of the trouble, put it away not (as Sunny always contended) for the sake of my reputation or standing but so I could try to forget she was my daughter, that she had ever come to live with me and had grown up before my eyes.

But late one Friday evening I drove the station wagon down to the main road and followed it until it crossed the river, taking a smaller, unlighted road east past the bare land of the power switching station and the scrap-metal yard, to a large older subdivision called The Orchids that had never been fully developed, where Turner Street is. The neighborhood is more like one in Ebbington than in Bedley Run, a mix of cheaper apartments and small one-story houses, and had been left the way it was to satisfy a county requirement for lower-income housing units in towns like ours.
Mostly decent people live there, the few entrenched working-class of Bedley Run and new younger couples who are always fixing up the charming old cottages and the tiny treed lots they sit on. But fifteen years ago there were a number of boarded-up places with weeds and saplings overtaking the porches, the ivy growing through the broken panes of the windows, and among these were the derelict places owned by the likes of Jimmy Gizzi.

It was already late in the evening, and I don’t think I would have found the house on my own had not the lights been on and loud music playing, various older-model pony cars parked in a bunch at the end of the dead-end street and up where the curb should have been. I knew it was the Gizzi place from the way Officer Como had described it, a squat high-ranch house with a bulging bedroom addition over the garage, the sole access to which was an exposed stairwell attached to the side of the building.

I parked halfway down the block and walked up to the property. From the soft light of the house I could see piles of trash and bottles and things like old shoes and undershirts scattered across the filthy yard, wrecked parts of appliances and cars in a heap in front of the open door of the garage, which itself was filled with junk. There was the decrepit, mixed-up scent of engine oil and stale beer and animal spray, the waft of which always seems to overrun certain locales and neighborhoods. And yet with all the lights on and the music and the silhouetted figures behind the curtains moving around dancing, there was a strange festivity to the warm autumn air, as if the place were the site of a favorite seasonal fete, as in those old English novels of Sunny’s that I would glance at from time to time. This, of course, was no manor, but I suppose a house rife with any human activity has something over one unsettlingly spacious and silent.

There were two young men sitting on an old sofa on the front lawn, passing a bottle of liquor and a strange-looking pipe between them. One would tip back the bottle while the other lit the short pipe, and from the smell I knew it was probably marijuana they were smoking. The heavy sweetness of the odor was reminiscent of the time I was stationed in Burma during the war, when some of my comrades would hang certain giant leaves to dry and then cut them up to smoke. Everyone preferred real cigarettes, of course, but there was never enough of them (and toward the end of the conflict, none at all), and the leaves provided a bit of mirth and laxity to our spirits, if also a seizing headache at evening’s end.

The men noticed me through the hazy light and motioned excitedly for me to approach them. They had longish hair in the prevailing style and swarthy, unshaven faces, though I could tell from their voices that they were in their twenties, the youthful ring still there.

“Hey, man, c’mover here, yeah,” the skinnier one said to me. “Hey, Sonny, look, man, it’s like, ‘The Master.’ Hey, old-timer, c’mover here and have a toke with us.”

I decided to speak to them, as I thought to ask them if they knew Sunny, and whether she was inside.

“Hey, man,” the same one said, handing me the pipe. “Would you mind calling me ‘Grasshopper’? Will you say it?”

“I’m looking for my daughter.”

“Yeah, sure. Will you just say it?”

“Do you know her? Is she inside?”

“Just a sec, old-timer, first things first. C’mon, say it for us. Say, ‘Well done, Grasshopper.’”

“The entire phrase?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

So I said to him, “Well done, Grasshopper.”

At this they instantly broke out in laughter, the skinny one slapping his knee as he bellowed. His thick-cheeked friend was slower in his movements, not laughing as soundly but almost silently, as if he’d tickled himself with a funny idea.

I asked them, “Do you know my daughter, Sunny? Is she inside the house?”

The skinny one kept laughing but thumbed toward the front door, waving me to go in. All the while he kept saying the phrase to his friend in a choppy, halting voice, not at all as I had spoken it. My accent has never been perfect, and was less so then, but I’ve always been somewhat proud of my flowing verbiage, and that I speak in the familiar, accepted rhythms.

“Is she inside?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the skinny one said, hardly able to look at me without gasping, “everybody’s in the house.”

“Thank you.”

I returned the pipe (untried) and ventured up the tumbled, cracked concrete steps to the door. I banged the fake brass knocker but even I could hardly hear it for the loudness of the music inside. The knob hung loose and was almost falling off and the door swung open with a slight push. The place was raucous and crowded. As there was no foyer I was immediately in the small living room, where people were crammed onto the sectional L-shaped sofa, as well as sitting on its back and low arms. People were dancing everywhere, couples and then sole men unsteadily swaying to themselves. What struck me immediately was that a number of the partygoers were black and Puerto Rican; colored people were a rare sight in Bedley Run, especially at social events, and never did one see such “mixed” gatherings. I, certainly, would sometimes find
myself at Mary Burns’s country club for social hours and dances, the only one of my kind, a minor but still uncomfortable feeling, like the digging edge of an overstarched collar. But here everyone seemed unconcerned, and I was strangely heartened by the fact, though my next thought was that Sunny wasn’t simply involving herself intimately with all these men white and brown and black, but was living with them as well, with no other company but theirs.

I didn’t see her anywhere in the room. There were glances and bemused stares but no one seemed to care much about my presence as I went from one group to the next. I was surprised by how few women there were, perhaps a handful out of the crowd of twenty-five or thirty. They looked much older than Sunny, at least twice her age, sallow and fleshy and long-traveled from their youth. I was reminded of the women who sat on stools outside certain alley shops of my native seaside town, their faces painted the colors of crimson and ash, languorous popular songs filtering out beneath the lanterned eaves of their tiny “houses.”

The house kitchen was a rancid, overflowing mess of bottles and ashtrays and spaghetti sauce–stained dishes, the doorless cupboards mostly bare except for a few cans of chili and soup. Down the corridor to the bedrooms there were people sitting on the floor against the walls, drinking beer and smoking while they waited for the bathroom. I could see the doors of the two bedrooms down at the end, and suddenly I was deeply afraid of what I might do if I found her behind one of them. I couldn’t bear to imagine what awful sight it might be, what horrible tangle and depravity. I had only really seen Sunny with boys at the country club, all of them in their tennis whites and sneakers, or at the cotillion-type gatherings in the evenings, their bodies orderly and arranged and the touching in steady orchestrations, the careful waltzes and reels. Even
then I used to wonder how I should feel when I saw some severely slim, tall lad place his hand on the small of her back, let it slip down a notch, whether I ought to burn with indignation or shiver or stand back in prideful and surrendering melancholy. And if she were only mine, of my own blood, would the feelings run different? Would I tremble and shake with an even purer intensity?

The first door was half-opened, and when I peered inside a group of a half-dozen or so young people were sitting in a circle, passing around a large pipe. Someone jeered at me and as I didn’t see Sunny among them, I quickly shut the door. I knocked on the other door and announced myself as loudly as I could, but there was no answer. I repeated the action but to no avail. I tried the knob and found it, like everything about the house, unsecured. A stereo was playing its own blaring music. The room was illuminated by a bizarre flowing-liquid bulb of a lamp, the light poor and in a dizzying mix of colors, and in the dim I saw a large bed with high corner posts, a gauzy sheet thrown over as a makeshift canopy. Two figures languidly wrestled within the lair; I called to them, but again could hardly hear my own voice. Then one of them, I thought the man, kneeled up on the bed and lay on the other. The two began then, moving in that clipped, rolling action I dreaded to see. I shuddered with the thought that she was under him. I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear me, and I approached the veiled bed. They didn’t see me, being in their own realm. Were I an assassin, they would have been doomed.

I touched the netting at the foot of the bed, and at that moment the music paused and a murmur rose up—she had noticed me. And yet she didn’t rebel. It was hard to see and I called her name and she cooed, and what I could make out finally was that she was beckoning me, darkly, taunting me with the vile display of her
carnality. I had with me a small dagger, which I sometimes carried for self-defense, but now I felt its menacing weight in my breast pocket, its leather scabbard hard against my chest. My heart flooded black, and at that moment I wished she were nothing to me, dead or gone or disappeared, so that I might strike out at the bodies with the full force of my rage, tear at them with whatever strength I could muster.

“Hey, man, it’s not like a block party,” a gruff voice said. “You gotta be invited.”

“Sunny,” I said, suddenly unable to speak but weakly. “Sunny…”

“Let him in, sugar,” a softer voice lazily answered. “C’mon. C’mon, sugar, yeah, come inside.”

The record repeated and the woman inside the bed reached out to me. She had turned on a bed lamp. Her fingers were long and thin, and I realized it wasn’t Sunny at all. She had a narrow, drawn expression with sleepy eyes. She smiled faintly, her lips moving, saying something. Her partner had already ceased caring about my presence, and he went back to his business, his hips working their way between her heavy, stippled thighs. But she kept her attention on me, unctuously gesturing, and even as he leaned and bucked into her she held out her open hand to me, as if I should take it when I crept my way inside.

I left the room straightaway, nearly stumbling over the huddled drinkers and smokers in the narrow corridor. All of a sudden the house seemed unbearably small and stifling. Someone was flicking on and off the hall and living room lights, and the effect was maddening and disorienting. Most everyone in the house began to dance, the music having changed from rock songs to the incessant beat of disco music, which was immensely popular at the time. But to me everything seemed a jangle of limbs. I began to feel that
this house, these people, the party, were spinning out of control. The living room was transformed into a rank swamp of bodies, and having no path of exit, I stepped outside the back kitchen door as quickly as I could.

It was a great relief. And there, as I stood on the ruined cobble of the patio under a wide starless sky, the reports of music and voices playing off the hidden trees, an image of another time suddenly appeared to me, when I began my first weeks of service in the great Pacific war. I was initially stationed in Singapore, awaiting my orders to whatever front I would be sent to.

One evening, my comrades and I were on our way to a welcoming club, a grand house which was once a prominent British family’s residence but was now used as a semi-official officers’ club, with the usual entertainments. There was no sanctioned establishment as yet, and we young officers were more than grateful for the outpost.