What We Are (21 page)

Everywhere I look I see the smeared blowfish face my sister Tali used to make when we were kids. She'd press her palms to her chubby Samoan cheeks and pull them back toward her ears. Her eyes would bulge out and her lips would spread and widen and seemingly fill with blood or fluid or whatever. Women of all ages—twenty-five, forty-five, sixty-five—have the smeared blowfish face on the Row. A few men, too. They foot the bill to be wrinkle-free, but their eyes seem to strain with desperation, like they're trying to tell you something telepathically, like they're in pain.

I look up and across Alyssum Lane at the faux-bay windows of the decorative cardboard flats and at the nondenominational flags hanging like T-shirts on a laundry line, two sheet-large banners that read,
DINE IN THE SEASON
and
LIVE IN THE MOMENT
, and though I don't have any problem making a deeper trek into this happy hell without my Dante of an underground guide, in my beanie and befuddled frown I don't fit.

That I don't care is no big issue. Or no new issue. It could be just simple indignance, sure, but I'm cool with my same old story against these synthetic shoppers.

No. A bigger issue is three people I can see from fifty yards, sitting on a bench outside an eating establishment. Five feet from them, two men are playing stand-up chess on a giant board with dwarf-sized pieces. As I tentatively approach, they're being summoned into the restaurant: little Toby in the arms of my sister, Tali; McLaughlin trailing his wife a dutiful step behind. I catch them at the door and say, “Can we make it a party of four?”

All three turn around with no visible signs of excitement, not even from the kid. McLaughlin, however, grabs me by the shoulder and starts to pull me into the restaurant like a North African peddler strong-arming a mark into a desert tent of stolen goods.

“Well,” says my sister. “Come on in, Paul.”

As if this restaurant were her house.

N
O ONE SAYS
a word as we take our seats, not even the kid, and as the menus come, and Tali passes them to us one by one, I look around at the restaurant instead. It's called The Left Bank. Of the Seine. There are French flags and French ribbons pinned to potted plants and the stiff collars of servers. Across the backside of the bar are multiple framed renditions of the Eiffel Tower. Above the bottles of spirits: a tributary black-and-white of a young mustached cocksure Hemingway at Montparnasse. So far the Impressionists have been ignored in the establishment, though I've yet to see the restroom. I'm sure I'll urinate in front of a framed
Water Lilies
over the foldout bidet. There's a terrace outside where I bet I'll find a miniature version of Notre Dame cathedral. Like, for instance, in the center of a penny fountain.

Who said high art can't be transported in hidden drywall to a strip mall near you?

And, of course, the enduring television has found its way into the Chef Boyardee Franco-American picture, in this case six of them, crisscrossing over the bar at different angles. On their faces a show called
Adulterers
, hosted by a primadonna named Johnny Gecko. He's
wearing those black-rimmed glasses, the kind you see now on dispossessed species like poets and mimes, jet black hair chemically pulled away from his forehead, and a mouse, that smudge of hair under the lower lip. And he's sporting a black turtleneck, tight around the windpipe, cutting off oxygen to the brain.

So my options are to admire the little Eiffel Towers sprouting around, zone off into the world of adultery, join my hosts and stare down at the silverware, or head to the exit.

Tali says, “Daddy Kolu called while you've been gone.”

I look to the door, inhale deeply, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Right now I'm supposed to say,
And how is he?
but I don't. Daddy Kolu is a guy named Dimitri Taliafero.
Kolu
means three in Samoan. But Dimitri has no Samoan blood. He's Russian-Italian. Married my mother in 1992, her third vow for life. So Tali calls Dimitri Daddy Kolu in the same way she numbers in Samoan the other five men whom she claims as her fathers.

I say, “While I've been gone? Where have I been?”

“You tell me, Paul.”

“Well,” I say, “I haven't been spending time with Dimitri. Can tell you that much.”

Tali says to McLaughlin, “Paulie didn't like to talk to his fathers.”

Nearly twenty years later, it still sounds wrong. And this with the numbers having grown significantly: Mom is now on number six, a stout little Costa Rican named Culito, a retired dot-commer who hit it big in the mid-'90s. My mother left my father, or my father pushed my mother out; but however you look at it, we were your typical broken American family.

I'd like to clarify some things to Tali right now. That I don't, frankly, care. And I, personally, ain't broken. Or wounded. Or suicidal. I'm just nil. I was disappointed for some time, I suppose, but I got used to it. One less institution to believe in. By my early teens, I was
functional in the flux of my mother's remarriages. It was like changing the stage props for the next band.

I look over at Toby to try and defy our family history and get the conversation focused on what matters. He's so tame and lifeless that I reach out for his wrist, feel for the pulse and, relieved by the traceable rush of the kid's blood, say, “Does my nephew talk?”

“To people he likes,” she says.

I almost say,
I have never heard him say a word to his mother, sister of mine
, but somehow it would be like adding to why the kid doesn't talk.

“And who are you to ask that, Paul? You never said a word to our fathers.”

“I used to talk with them, Tali.”

“But you didn't like talking with them.”

“That's not true. I used to rap it up with them about everything. Like with anybody I meet. I was cool with each one. They were okay guys.”

“They were your fathers.”

“Nah. We're split there, Tali. I mean, I think it's better to say that they were my mother's humpers. Or, I guess in number four's case—”

“His name is Spinos.”

“Spinos. With the gargantuan peni—” I catch myself: little eunuch Toby needn't hear about Spinos's King Kong dong. Toby'll have enough problems learning how to put his first sentence together before hitting his teens. “That's right. Old Spinos. Cool guy. Loved to whip up a Greek salad in the summertime. 'Member he used to watch
Golden Girls
with Mom and read Alice Walker novels to her in bed? And he loved to pick out Mom's wardrobe at the mall. 'Member that time we caught him running around in mother's dress downtown? Anyway—.”

“He loved our mother.”

“I don't think we're in disagreement there.”

“But you talk about them, Paul, as if they didn't love you.”

“I don't talk about them. I don't really think about them, though I wish them well—as I do anyone. Even old Spinos. Hell, I hope he's kicking it in the Castro doing his thing.”

“But I know what you think of them, Paul. You can't fool me. You feel like they had no right to care about you.”

“No, I don't think so. No. If they felt it, more power to them, wherever they are. But I guess I'm sorry, too. Because I didn't feel it back. I think I just cut out the cancer before it could really hurt me. And since I made that sacrifice, no one could ever tell me that I didn't love Dad.”

“Are you saying
I
didn't love Dad?”

“No, not at all. I'm just saying I didn't love your dads.”

“Daddy Kolu paid for your tuition, Paulie, at St. Cajetan. Then later, Daddy Fa paid for the University of Alviso, which you quit five classes short of a degree.”

“God. I almost forgot I was that close. How funny.”

“Funny? It's tragic. All that money down the drain. All those years. Daddy Fa went to all your home football games. And he drove out to Utah once to watch you play.”

“That was nice of him. Surely, I thanked him. Even now, I'm sure of it.”

“Your problem goes back to your childhood, Paul.”

Oh, God. Here we go. Spare me the new-age psycho babble, please. I'm trying not to argue, debate, bite back. Just trying to make me clear for once to you
.

“When you couldn't find it in your heart to come home from the library or the mountains or the ocean and tell them where you'd been. At the Fathers' barbecue your senior year at St. Cajetan, you took some homeless guy you'd picked up on the street!”

“Not true. I picked him up in McDonald's. I told him to wash up if he wanted some real food.”

“Whatever, Paulie.”

“My teammates got a big kick out of that.” I nod at McLaughlin. He doesn't nod back. “That guy loved the meat loaf and mashed potatoes that their spoiled asses hated. He got drunk on the wine and started calling me figlio mio. Then he was bragging to everyone that his son was going to be a cadet at West Point. He was great. I went back and looked for him later but never found him.”

“Just like you, isn't it? You did more for a stranger than your own fathers.”

“That's not true,” I say. “I relinquished my Oedipal right to claim my mother. That was my gift. Believe me, I know I was a hindrance to them. Each one came into that house with the same look. They knew I was a threat to their territory. But I removed myself. That was my gift straight through childhood to our mother—who, by the way, wanted exactly that: no Sophoclean bullshit. That kind of old-world story she was getting rid of with Dad. He took all the honor and patriarchy of his heart with him when he went back to Samoa. So I tried to stay away amap and let them live their lives with my mother freely.”

“Amap?” asks McLaughlin.

“As much as possible,” says Tali, and reclaiming her theme, her childhood, her life, says, looking at her husband, “You didn't want to listen to them.”

“That's not true,” I say. “Whenever I was there, I listened a lot.”

“So you did nothing wrong to them?”

“Oh, no. I'm sure I did plenty wrong.”

McLaughlin's nodding encouragingly, hoping we can wrap things up and remove the tension.
Just get it over with and be wrong
, he wants to say. I want to say back to him,
This is only one half the problem, bro-in-law. There's still the other parent in the equation, living halfway across the world, from whom you take your discolored self-definition
.

“One thing I've never done is complain,” I continue. “How could I? It was the kids whose folks
stayed
married who were the oddities. We were just like everyone else, with half-siblings they'd never met, weekend visits from a parent, eight last names. There were plenty of other little dreams to latch onto back then. I had a nomination to West Point for chrissake.”

“And what about Dad?”

“You mean Daddy Tasi?”

“You know who I mean, Paul.”

“Well, what about him?”

“Do you talk to him?”

“No. I prefer to write. Send him a letter once a month or so.”

“I bet you make up stories about yourself.”

“Of course I do. That's my gift to him. Dad knows, for instance, that I'm a churchgoing man, strong in my devotion to a virginal girl whom I'll only marry once the families have aligned. People respect me, sometimes envy my strength as a Tusifale. I am indebted to my brothers and sisters in American blood for life.”

“So you lie.”

“I write the opposite of what's going down in my life.”

“You lie.”

“I'm doing it for him.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I am. I don't care what people think about me.”

“Well, I guess
that's
true, anyway.”

“I just don't want Dad to ever think I'm so screwed up he has to return to a country he loathes to save me.”

“And Mom?”

“We don't talk.”

“Do you want to change that?”

“Change what? That's what she wants: me out of her business. I'm cool with it. I ain't complaining.”

“You think you're so noble, Paul.”

“Not at all. Not even close. But I can read the signs. I know what people want. And when they can take it without barking or biting back, I give it to them. You know that. I knew years before they signed the divorce papers that our parents were finished.”

“You're selfish, Paul. You think you're over that time in your life, so you leave them by the wayside.”

“Okay,” I say. “Without arguing who left whom by the wayside, what do you want to talk about, sister? How we were caught in a crosscurrent of cultural miscommunication? The recent trend toward kid leashes? Hummers?”

“Paulie, I can't stand talking to you sometimes.”

“Well, I don't mind sitting in silence.”

I try to be cooperative, look up at the nearest television of the sixteen total, and read the words being transcribed across the bottom of the screen. Our conversation about Tali's fathers has bypassed all the frills of preamble and ushered us right into the meaty part of this show. We're observing in gray-and-white infrared what looks to be some kind of country-western nightclub. A big cowboy with a gallon hat, a T-shirt crawling out his overalls, is twirling and tossing a tiny cowgirl. He has his chin down in the two-step, serious, and she has her head up, laughing. Suddenly, the screen starts shaking up and down and then there is a rapid shaking zoom because the cameras are live and approaching the bar very fast. Big brothas in tight black shirts are sprinting ahead and fanning out along the street, and all along the bottom of the screen run the words of Gecko: “There they are. Block 'em in at the exit.”

The crew of cameras reaches the bar and some girl points with her bottle of Bud Light, “It's
Adulterers
!” A sleeveless doorman commands, “You can't come in here,” as the cameras whip by his crossing-guard palms and surround the two dancers. They're shocked and the cowboy responds. Open-hand slaps the main camera and for a
few seconds I'm looking at the blackness of the ground. Suddenly another camera shows a different angle of the cowboy, carrying the girl underneath the crook of his arm like a rolled Persian rug. The man she's allegedly betrayed stays on the heels of the black-shirted Gecko, who's hard on the cowboy's heels.