The Other Side of the World (3 page)

Now, when I looked up at her from my bed, I saw that her reddish-brown hair was still cut page-boy style, that her eyebrows, which she never plucked or trimmed, were as dark and thick as ever, and that she had not had a chipped front tooth repaired. I'd always admired her for leaving the tooth the way it was because its imperfection had the effect of making me aware of how weirdly beautiful the rest of her was.

“It's my apostrophe,” she had explained once when I asked about it. While playing stickball with some guy-friends in Holy Cross schoolyard in Brooklyn, near where she grew up—which wasn't far from where Max had grown up—she'd broken off a corner of the tooth, and the resulting shape—“Why it's a giant white apostrophe!” her high school English teacher at the time, a nun named Sister Maureen, had said—seemed a good thing for a writer to hang on to, Seana had theorized, since in addition to representing something that had been omitted—and wasn't what a writer chose to leave out more important than what he or she chose to leave in?—the word derived from the Greek, and signified a turning away from a large audience in order to direct your words to one person in particular.

“Hey Charlie,” she said a moment after I opened my eyes.

“Hey Seana,” I said.

She caressed my forehead and said she hoped we were still friends.

“Why wouldn't we still be friends?” I asked.

“Well, for starters, I took over your room for a while, though I've since relocated to the third floor guest room.”

“Then you're not…” I began, and stopped. “I mean, you and my father have separate rooms.”

“Sure.”

“I just…”

“You really are an innocent, aren't you?”

“That's what Max always says.”

She leaned down, brushing my forehead with a kiss, and said that I'd had a long trip and probably wanted to wash up and get myself settled before dinner. She'd brought my bags up to the room, and there was a glass of ice water and a snack—cheese and crackers and assorted goodies she'd left on my desk—and later, after I got my bearings, she had something she wanted to show me.

I looked at the clock on my bureau, saw that it was nearly seven, but the shades were drawn, and I wasn't sure if it was seven in the morning or the evening.

She saw the puzzled look on my face. “It's evening,” she said.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Three hours, maybe four. I'm not sure exactly when you arrived, but you were buzzing away—beautiful
Z
's—when I returned from the library. You're good at it.”

“Good at it?”

“At sleeping. It's a talent I wish I had.”

I sat up. “What's the surprise?”

“No surprise. Just something I'd like your opinion on.”

“That's all you want?”

“Don't get fresh with me, young man,” she said. “But yes, that's all I want—your opinion on something I'd prefer not to ask your father about, all right?”

“Sure.”

“And there is one other thing.” She opened the door to leave.
“Some time—
whenever
, as they say these days—I want your story. I want you to tell me
your
story.”

“Sure,” I said. And then: “Is this the way you usually get material for your books—do you go around collecting stories from everyone you meet?”

“Not at all.”

“Then why…?”

“
Why
?” She shrugged, and when she spoke again she did so without looking at me. “
Why
? Because I guess I figure it's the quickest, best way for you and me to get to know each other now that we've both grown up.”

 

For dinner, my father made one of our favorites—
blanquette de veau
, with a spinach and wild mushroom salad on the side—and he served it with a smooth, light-bodied Italian wine. I was still in the grogs from the long flight home, and the wine kept me there, but my father and Seana were in high spirits, especially when they went on riffs where they imagined the way various of his colleagues (some of whom had been Seana's teachers) might have reacted to the tag sale, and to the deal he and Seana had reached on the morning of the tag sale.

In general, they agreed, most English department faculty members had little use for living writers, though they didn't mind the
cachet
that came their way from knowing a writer who'd become a celebrity like Seana, or—what they got off on even more—being able to tell people they were friends with a colleague whose novel had been turned into a movie. In this, Seana said, they were like most people, thinking the highest compliment they could pay you was to say your book would make a great movie—as if novels were merely movies
manqués
.

“Is that why you made sure your first novel would be one that could not be made into a movie?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Seana said. “It certainly
could
be made into a movie—anything can be made into a movie these days.”

“A most depressing thought,” my father said.

“They made
Lolita
into a movie,” I said.

“
Lolita
?” my father said. “Compared to
Triangle
,
Lolita
is very
pale
matter, totally lacking in
fire
.”

Seana groaned.

“And what about
Jules and Jim
?” I said.

“Grim and gloomy stuff,” Seana declared, “and with heavy-handed thematic overlays—The Great War and all that—and without anybody ever really enjoying it.”

“
It
?” I asked.

“The sex,” my father said. “What's so extraordinary about
Triangle
is the sheer joy the family takes in its sexual escapades, the great and uncomplicated delight in one another, and in who they truly are.”

“Shhh,” Seana said. “You're embarrassing the author.”

By this time, Max had opened a second bottle of wine, and was telling us about how at faculty Christmas parties he'd walk up behind a colleague, tap the man or woman on the shoulder, and before the colleague could turn around, ask—“So tell me—how's the new novel coming?”—to which the colleague would usually reply, “Almost done,” or “Coming along,” and then there'd be a double-take, and the inevitable question: “But how did you
know
?”

Somewhere between salad and dessert—my father's delicious bread-pudding-with-maple-syrup—I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes, Max was pouring more wine—we were on our third bottle—and raising a glass to my health. As to his own health, he said, he was feeling terrific—stronger than ever. He glanced down at his lap, then looked at me.

“Now I can bend it,” he said.

Seana rolled her eyes and declared this was the perfect example of the kind of
shtik
that had charmed his students—had made them use the word ‘puckish' when they talked about him.

“A term I deplored,” my father said.

Seana leaned toward me: “Your father never fooled around with us—with his female students—the way the other profs did.”

“One should not shit where one eats,” my father said.

“Still,” Seana said, “there were those among us who thought it a shame.”

“There can be great pleasures in renunciation,” my father stated, after which he stood, inclined his head slightly toward Seana, and began removing dishes from the table while reminding me that, as he'd mentioned in one of his letters, he was planning a trip to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that he hoped I'd join him. Perhaps Seana would come too.

Seana shrugged, said she preferred not to go home again if she could help it, thank you very much, and her face took on a look of such sudden sadness—her hazel-green eyes going to dark brown, her smile sucked inward—that I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine, tell her that everything—
everything
!—was going to be all right. My father continued to clear the table while Seana remained where she was, immobile, so I stood and, on wobbly legs, began gathering plates and silverware.

“Please sit,” my father said, after which he announced that it was past his bedtime but that he knew we young people had things to talk about—Seana had so informed him earlier in the day—and that we should leave the rest of the dishes, along with the pots and pans, until morning.

He kissed Seana on the forehead, then came around the table, told me again how good it was to have me home, kissed me on the cheek, and asked me to give serious thought to accompanying him to Brooklyn, perhaps the following week.

“I need to go to Maine first,” I said. “To visit Nick's parents.”

“Of course,” my father said, and reminded Seana that Nick had been a friend of mine from college who had lived
in Singapore—who was responsible for my going there to work—and that Nick had died recently.

“You didn't like him,” Seana said.

“Correct,” my father said. “I didn't like him, although I didn't wish him dead. I found him a somewhat hollow and manipulative young man.”

“You never told me that,” I said.

“He was your friend, not mine, and doubtless possessed qualities that made you favor him with your friendship.”

“My father's right about that,” I said to Seana.

“Right that this guy was an ass?” Seana asked.

“Right that it was because of Nick that I went to Singapore.”

“So?” she said.

“So I'm just setting the record straight.”

“But surely your decision was not based wholly upon your friendship with Nick,” my father said.

“Not wholly,” I said.

“Good,” my father said, “because although Nick and your friendship with him were clearly crucial to your choice, what I've preferred to believe is that your primary reason for going to the Far East had to do with your thirst for adventure.”

“That too,” I said.

My father turned to Seana. “I'll tell you something about my son that, given his often
faux-naïf
demeanor when it comes to matters intellectual, you might not suspect,” he said. “Charlie was a voracious reader when he was a boy, and the books he loved most were about faraway places with strange sounding names. When he was seven or eight, I started him off with a complete set of
Bomba the Jungle Boy
, and while other boys his age were reading
The Hardy Boys
or sports novels, Charlie was immersed in tales that took him on exotic journeys to the four corners of the world.”

“It's true,” I said and, hoping to pull Seana out of her gloom, I told her about my favorite author in high school, James Ramsey
Ullman, and the book reports I did on his novels—about climbing Everest, going across the Karakorum desert in China, and up and down the Amazon—along with books like
Kon Tiki
and
Green Mansions
, and before that—at about the time I was reading
Bomba the Jungle Boy
—the Tarzan and Doctor Dolittle books.

“When Charlie was eight years old,” my father said, “he came to me at the start of summer vacation with a question he'd been pondering. ‘Do you think,' he asked, and in the most serious way, ‘that by the end of the summer, I'll be old enough to go out into the world to seek my fortune?'”

“Oh my,” Seana said.

“And let us not forget Gerald Durrell,” my father said. “Charlie adored Durrell, so that when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say he was going to be an animal trainer and work in a zoo. Gerald—Lawrence's brother—was a zookeeper at times, you see, as well as a naturalist and environmentalist.”

“I hope he was a better writer than his brother,” Seana said. “Have you ever read those Alexandria novels? Impossibly soppy. Soppy, sloppy, soggy—over-written, noxious, romantic, pretentious…”

“But what don't you like about them?” my father asked, though when he smiled to show he'd meant his question ironically, Seana didn't smile with him. “Given the impressions his early reading made on him,” my father continued, “small wonder Charlie has moved around so frequently, and has become so enchanted by the world he's discovered in the Far East.”

Holding tightly to the stem of her wine glass, Seana leaned across the table. “So tell me something, Charlie,” she said. “Do you enjoy seeing beautiful landscapes despoiled and ravaged? Do you take pleasure in seeing men, women, and children exploited and driven to early graves in order to provide lubricants for our machines, and poisons for our food and arteries? Do you take
pride in your portion of responsibility for the deadly conditions that prevail in the enchanted world you've been inhabiting?”

“Of course not,” I said, and resisted the urge to start talking about just what I
did
feel about Borneo and palm oil. “It's complicated,” I said. “If you'd been there you'd understand that it's very complicated…”

“What isn't?” Seana said. “Nevertheless, our conversation has served to put me in mind once again of George Sand, a woman rarely far from my thoughts, and in particular—the obvious inspiration for the accusatory grilling I've just subjected you to—of her dying words:
Ne détruisez pas la verdure
.”

“Do not destroy the greenery,” my father said.

“I don't need a translator,” Seana snapped. “And ‘greenery' stinks—doesn't begin to capture what she meant.”

“When Seana was considering continuing on for a doctorate,” my father explained, “she talked of writing her dissertation on George Sand.”