Seven Types of Ambiguity

  The journal, Dad’s journal, was on my desk, naked on my desk, near the card and the flowers. I never left it there. I kept it in the top drawer of my desk. I religiously returned it there every time after reading it. He’d found it. He must have gotten bored while waiting for me, found it, started reading it, and then, realizing what it was, taken it away. He must have taken it home, read it and left it on my desk when he returned it. Now he knows everything, or thinks he does.

  14. The first thing you notice is the size of the man, his frame. He’s a big man. Sam is tall but his father is wider, broader. He was sitting at his desk under a blinking strip light in the showroom where “Moon River” in Muzak form was leaking out of tiny strategically placed speakers. Perhaps on hearing it, one was meant to think of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I don’t know why they played it. There had to be a story behind the casting of George Peppard opposite Audrey Hepburn. So miscast, like Joe Geraghty. You look at Joe and it’s not true to say you can’t see any of him in Sam but, as his father, he’s so miscast. He should have been Sam’s uncle. I wanted to see him before he saw me. Even sitting down, I could see how big he was.

  I knew where he worked because Sam had told me one day as we drove past it together on our way somewhere. “My father works there,” he’d said matter-of-factly, pointing across me toward the passenger window out on to the Nepean Highway. I looked and read, LAFFENDEN’S NEW AND USED CARS. It’s where Reg Hunt used to be when I was growing up. Do you remember that stretch? “A mile of cars,” it used to say. He might have already told me that his father sold cars, but I hadn’t remembered.

  You could be wondering why, in looking for Sam, I chose to try Joe Geraghty first, I mean ahead of you and Anna, especially given that Sam had at times been almost estranged from him. The prospect of meeting him was far less intimidating for me than the prospect of meeting Anna and, especially, meeting you. Sam’s father had had nothing to do with my father and so, unlike you two, was connected to me only through Sam. It was a connection less weighty in significance for me. And, anyway, Sam had more than once said that he would like to try to get to know his father better, or words to that effect. I thought he’d be even more motivated now, after reading my father’s journal.

  He would now know that he’d been fed a lie about the circumstances of his parents’ breakup. He would know that, contrary to what he’d been led to believe, his mother hadn’t really left his father for her university sweetheart. She’d been seeing someone else. It was only when this someone else didn’t come through that she decided to cast her vote against Sam’s dad and in favor of the man whose unhealthy obsession with her had upset the applecart in the first place. Sam had grown up not knowing that his father was, in a sense, taking the rap for you. Joe had always been cast as the gross, bad, insensitive husband, the professional fornicator. It occurred to me that after reading the real story, Sam might have been moved to contact his father. When I still hadn’t heard from Sam at one in the morning I resolved to stop by Laffenden’s New and Used Cars the next day to see if anyone there knew where he was. It’s impossible to get to sleep until your mind settles on a plan of some sort, no matter how desperate it is. You know the way it works. You know the drill.

  After you notice the man’s size, you notice the way he looks at you. Well, you do if you’re a young woman. The spider and the fly come to mind. He approached me with a smile. I was nervous, less nervous than if it had been you, but, nonetheless, nervous. He wouldn’t have known. As far as he was concerned, I was there to look at the cars. But I knew. What I didn’t know was how to start talking to this man, a stranger, about his son and about his divorce ten or twelve years earlier, in a car showroom. So I turned away to bury my gaze through a driver’s window deep into a cloth interior—taupe, they probably called it. Then I smelled him: aftershave, a cloud of aftershave in a scent with just a hint of man. The cloud was about to burst.

  “Beauty recognizes beauty,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I think, and I hope you’ll forgive me for telling you what I think, but I think that a young woman should drive a car that makes her feel beautiful and a beautiful car can do that. It will do that. I’m Joe. You are?”

  “I’m . . . Rachael.” He took my hand, shook it, holding on for too long.

  “That’s a beautiful name. Almost biblical. Rachael, what are you driving now? No, on second thought, let me guess—”

  “No, please don’t . . . don’t guess.”

  “You’re a young woman. You needn’t be ashamed of your car. You have to work your way up to your ‘dream’ car. I had a car once, Rachael . . . Well, no, that was my dream car. I don’t know much about art, but she had curves straight out of the Bauhaus school. They used to say it would offend the eye to change one thing about her. And performance! She could perform. Really. From zero to a hundred in six point four seconds. Even I’m not that fast. You know what I’m saying? But she was a roadster, the Audi TT Roadster. It had a top speed of two hundred forty-three kilometers per hour. She purred. But my point here, Rachael . . . my point . . . my point is that she wasn’t my first car by any means. Just my dream car. So whatever you’re driving now, and it doesn’t matter, you’ve got to be allowed to dream. Now, I saw you looking at this one here, and if this helps you dream . . . Shall we? I’m not really supposed to . . . We could . . . Oh hell! Who would even know? Would you like to try her on the road, just for a little while?”

  The way it was happening I wasn’t going to get a word in, not about his son, not about anything. Suddenly I was in the driver’s seat of a car whose make I hadn’t even registered, not saying a word, with him and his aftershave beside me. He spoke only to offer directions. He had me turn right from the Nepean Highway onto North Road and then to the end where he suggested I try the turning circle in the parking lot at the beach. When I pulled to a stop he looked at me, and that’s when I got really nervous. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind.

  “Rachael,” he started.

  “Joe,” I interrupted. “I’m Sam’s girlfriend.”

  “Sam . . . My son?”

  “Yep.”

  “Jeez . . . he never . . . well, son of a gun! Where’s he been hiding you?”

  “Well, it’s funny you should mention hiding.”

  Someone out there is going to buy herself a brand-new car with a taupe cloth interior and the reverberations of a conversation held in a parking lot overlooking an overcast sea, a conversation wherein a salesman was dumbstruck for much of the time as a version of his life was played back to him by a much younger woman he’d never before met. A man who is easily comical is easily tragic. Joe Geraghty listened to me as I explained, first, who I was: the younger daughter of his ex-wife’s husband’s deceased psychiatrist. When he had absorbed that, he heard how I’d met his son at university, and how, after reading my father’s journal, I came to know more about Sam’s parents, and particularly his stepfather, than Sam ever would. And when Joe realized, not without some shock, just how much I knew, he asked me, almost fearfully, “What do you want?”

  It was as though he was frightened that I might want to blackmail him or else use that part of his life against him in some way. Perhaps it was because it had already been used against him. Were not those no-longer-recent transactions of the market and the heart, over which he’d had about as much control as over the weather, still being used to keep the second bedroom in every apartment he moved into gapingly empty? And there’s no amount of aftershave can fill a room that has no people in it.

  I told him I had come to see if he could help me. I wanted to find Sam. I explained about the fight we’d had, how we’d made up by correspondence and how then, when I’d been at a loss to explain why I wasn’t hearing from him, I’d discovered my father’s journal out of place.

  “So, he’s read the journal. So what? What’s it got to do with me? Your father couldn’t have written anything about me. He didn’t even know me. I was the fucking victim in that circus. I??
?ll never understand Anna. Never did. And Simon Heywood . . . I don’t know . . . I really don’t know. The fucking lunatic reads poetry, and everyone thinks he’s Christmas. Sam does. Sam thinks he’s Jesus on a stick. He fucking kidnapped him! Okay, so he pulled him out of a swimming pool when he was little. Anyone would’ve done that. What kind of a monster would he have been if he hadn’t? When I had money, Anna . . .

  “I’ve got to get the car back on the floor. Rachael, you seem to know so much. I don’t know why you thought you’d find him with me.”

  “Because he’s going to see things differently now, the past and . . . I know he’s going to want . . . He’d already talked about wanting to spend more time with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “He really said that?”

  I drove us back to the car dealership. He asked for my number and he told me he would call me if he heard from Sam, on the condition that I call him when I found him.

  “Maybe we could . . . I mean the three of us, when you’ve patched things up, maybe we could all grab a bite together or something.”

  “That would be nice, Mr. Geraghty.”

  “Joe.”

  “That would be nice, Joe, assuming Sam still wants to have anything to do with me. Maybe you could put in a good word?”

  He nodded and I began to walk away when, after a few steps, I heard him say quietly, “Sorry for your loss.”

  “So you don’t think I’ve got much chance then?” I turned and asked.

  “No, it’s not . . . I meant . . . your father.”

  I had made it all the way back to my car when I realized there was something I’d never understood from reading the journal and listening to Sam. Why hadn’t Joe told him the truth? Why, sooner or later, amid the alcohol-fueled rants against the faithless Anna, why had he never told Sam that Anna had been seeing someone other than you, and that you really had kidnapped Sam? I went back to the yard to ask him but he was busy with a customer, a woman.

  “Are you kidding?” he said to the woman. “Too masculine! This is the exact model my wife drives. My hand to God. I never see her; she’s always out in this car. Rachael, long time no see. This is my daughter-in-law. Be with you in a moment, honey.”

  The woman gestured that she would make way for me to talk privately with him, but I said I would wait.

  “My daughter-in-law, God bless her, she’s a university student. She’s got all the time in the world.”

  I walked around the floor refusing all the entreaties of the sales personnel. Eventually, after the woman had left with a fistful of brochures, I got to ask him. He thought for a moment and sighed. “Right from the time he was a kid . . . I don’t know, it’s . . . It’s just one of those things. Sam always seemed to . . . to really like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Simon. It’s like they just clicked and I . . . What was I going to say? You love your son. You want him to be happy. What was I going to say?”

  He said this without looking at me. He couldn’t look at me.

  “Rachael, honey, we’ve . . . we’ve got a sales meeting,” he said looking at his watch. “You call me. I’ll be waiting.”

  15. The last time I saw my father it was late at night. My sister and I were staying over at his place. It was a Sunday night, and our mother was to come the next morning and take us to school. He would sometimes need to get to work earlier than we had to be at school. Some patients could only see him before they started work. My mother said that it was interesting that he had these early-morning patients on the mornings after his daughters had stayed the night with him. The comment was probably just one of her scattershot attacks on him, not said with much thought given to us, but it made me wonder why he didn’t want to take us to school. I don’t know whether he really had a patient the next morning on that occasion or not. I’m sure he would have had them once, but by that time his practice was in poor health.

  The last time I saw my father, it was late at night. I don’t know what time it was but it was very late, not just late for little girls but late for everyone. My sister was asleep in our room, and I got up to get a glass of water. He was sitting in the living room in the dark wearing his pajamas and bathrobe. I could just discern his outline. I went up to him and sat on his knee.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said quietly.

  “Hi,” he said. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was just thinking. I sat there for a while, neither of us saying anything. Then I got up off his knee and went to get my glass of water from the kitchen. I looked at him sitting there on my way back to bed, and I fell asleep. Maybe you could tell me about the last time you saw him.

  I was always going to contact you sooner or later. Sam has made it urgent, and the urgency has made me crazy. I’ve been to your house. I’ve sat outside and I’ve waited for the smallest sign of him. I have to tell him, or someone has to, if he won’t talk to me, that it wasn’t what I think he thought it was. My initial interest in him, our relationship—it has nothing to do with you and my father. It may not make any difference to what happens to us, but it matters to me that I tell him I wasn’t using him to get closer to my father. It’s him I want to be close to. I should have told him sooner about our connection but once I hadn’t told him at the outset, there was never a time when it didn’t seem far too late, and, paradoxically, when it didn’t seem there was always still time. Until now, that is, when it really is too late. The losses that are your own fault are the ones that hurt the most and the longest.

  When I couldn’t find him through his father, the two of you seemed the obvious choice. Actually you were always the obvious choice. But his car wasn’t outside your place that night, and when I looked there first thing the next morning and it still wasn’t there, I thought again of going to the police and reporting him missing. I was about to leave when the front door opened and I saw you, the remarkable Simon I had heard and read so much about. You walked out to the mailbox and got the paper.

  I watched you walk back inside and waited for you to close the door behind you. When the door didn’t close I thought of getting out of my car and walking in. I was going to, when you came out again carrying a large box and got into the car in the driveway. It can’t have been more than seven-thirty in the morning. It occurred to me that the box contained food or groceries or whatever for Sam. He wasn’t staying with you, but you knew where he was. You were taking it to him. All I had to do was follow you in the car. I would meet you and at the same time try to explain myself to Sam. You might need to explain a few things yourself. He’s just found out that you’d kidnapped him.

  You drove away from the direction of his place and I followed never more than two cars behind you, confident that my expectations were about to be confirmed. You stopped outside a little terrace house opposite a park. From my car I could hear you crunching the pebbles in the path as you walked to the front door. You hadn’t seen me.

  I’m always on the lookout for small stones. At first Sam thought this very strange and even gently mocked me for it. He said that I probably wanted them to throw at the windows of the old Radley house. Remember Boo Radley? Sam took to calling me Scout for a while there and asking me, “Didn’t anyone ever teach you never to harm no mockingbird?” But when I told him the reason for the small stones he stopped calling me Scout and took instead to bringing me stones in little bags, a few times anyway. He’d come over with them. After a while, he wouldn’t even mention them. I’d find a bag with a few stones a day or so later.

  My father is buried in the Jewish section of the Springvale Cemetery, the only place on earth where it is always raining. Jews don’t bring flowers to a grave. They bring stones. Who knew? I didn’t start visiting him there till I could drive. Sam would offer to come with me. I always declined. He asked if it was because he wasn’t Jewish, and I told him that was ridiculous. I’m only half Jewish myself and, since it’s not on my mother’s side, many would say I’m not Jewish at all. Even my father, who had Jews on
both sides, was never at all religious, as far as I know.

  I don’t think he could read Hebrew, and maybe he couldn’t, but there were some Hebrew letters in one of his journal entries toward the end. It’s all Greek to me but I showed them to someone who could read Hebrew. The man wasn’t certain but it seemed, he said, that my father had written “as if” in not very confident Hebrew. When I asked him its significance, he couldn’t tell me. It so intrigued me that my father would write anything in Hebrew, let alone something as cryptic as this, that I couldn’t just let it go and I finally got the closest thing to an answer that I am likely to get. There is an ancient Jewish tradition that holds that if someone saves the life of a single human being, it is “as if” he has saved the whole world. My father had written this in his journal in the period after Mitch’s suicide attempt, in what might have been an argument he was having with himself. I try hard not to overinterpret every random thought he ever jotted down all those years ago. But this one, in Hebrew, could not have been random.

  Let’s take it at its worst and say that he should have seen Mitch’s suicide attempt coming. He dropped the ball. But he saved him anyway, even if only by chance. And didn’t he save you? If you were as he described in his journal, in saving you hadn’t he saved what he thought was best in man? So he lost his battle against the local introduction of U.S.-style managed care. But he did save someone who is crazy enough to go on fighting the good fight and passionate enough to breathe some of his fervor into the next generation. Or did the negative side of the ledger drag along the ground when he took a trial balance? Health care, his failing practice, his failed marriage, the end of his relationship with Gina, and then his near failure of Mitch—these were things you could touch, as well as feel.