My father comes fifteen minutes early. I arrive forty minutes late. He says he doesn’t mind waiting. He always has something to read. I can see him sitting quietly behind the large window inside the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby, seemingly unaware of the crowd of tourists milling around the gift shop and the information desk. I rush out of the taxicab with my five-year-old son, Alex. It’s raining. I’ll blame the rain, I think.
We’re barely in time for a late lunch. We wait in line at the cafeteria and decide to share the same tray. My father likes the chili here; I order some, too; Alex doesn’t know what he wants, so we pick up a fruit platter and a handful of bread sticks. We argue over who is to pay. My father relents and offers to find a table while I wait in the cashier’s line. He reminds me not to forget his coffee. I nod and watch his small figure dart into the dining hall. He stops, scans the crowd once more, then scurries toward an empty table by the window at the far corner and proceeds to lay our raincoats down on the chairs.
He is pleased with himself. Our corner overlooks the gleaming wet patio, which on rainy days always reminds me of Alexandria. The storm patters on the large glass pane. It feels snug inside I look at him again and know he has thought of Alexandria, too.
And as I watch him slowly scoop up the first spoonful of chili, followed by a piece of bread, which he always butters with the scrupulous devotion of men who know the good things in life, I catch a fugitive look on his face that seems to ask, “What’s the matter, why aren’t you eating?” I shrug, as if alleging a stray thought. I look down at my food and look up again, realizing that I, too, am happy today—happy to be with him, to see him with my son, to know, as I catch him avoiding my eyes, that what matters to me now is not his love but his willingness to be loved, to come because I called.
We’re interrupted by the apparition of two women advancing slowly to a table nearby. He stares at them. “I like to come here …” he begins. I am reminded of how thoroughly and desperately he likes women! “There are days when every woman is beautiful,” he says, as though speaking of fruits that ripen everywhere on the same day. I know he wants to talk about women. As always, I steer the conversation away and ask about my mother instead. “What’s there to say?” he replies. “Your mother …”
I am about to deflect this as well, when it dawns on me that perhaps our improvised lunch is nothing more than an uncomfortably staged affair between a father eager to say a few things to his son and a son who doesn’t want to regret one day having failed to let him say them.
I take a first, shy, tentative step and ask, “Why did you ever marry her?”
“Whoever remembers?” he replies. Why did he have children? “Because I had to.”
But who ordered you? “No one,” he says, “it was just to make her happy.”
He looks around again. “All I wanted was to read books,” he adds. “On the second night of our honeymoon, while she slept, I opened the balcony door, and staring at the beachfront facing our hotel, I knew it was wrong. I wanted to study Greek, I wanted to write and travel and be free to love as I pleased. I wanted to leave our bedroom and go downstairs and keep walking past the empty garden and go away, but I didn’t dare.” Silence. “I forced myself to love her,” he says. “Then one day it was over. Or at least someone else made me see it was over.”
There is a strained pause in our conversation.
“Who?” I ask.
“You know who,” he says without hesitating, almost grateful I had made it easy for him.
He calls her That one. I say nothing and, instead, play the open-minded, freethinking grown-up who knows how to listen to such tales.
“She still calls me.”
This I can’t believe. More than thirty years later?
“In the middle of the night, when it’s daylight over there, she calls.”
“And what does Mother say?”
He shrugs.
I can just see him tiptoeing into the living room at three in the morning, tying his bathrobe, whispering in the dark to a woman halfway across the world and at the other end of time, who is probably irritated he’s mumbling and can’t speak any louder on the phone.
“She has a grown-up daughter. She misses me, she says. She thinks I’m still forty-five; I tell her I’m almost twice that. She doesn’t understand, she wants to come, she wants a picture of me”
He stares at me, as if to ask, Can you figure women out?
And suddenly I find myself saying something that is more shocking to me than news of the woman’s existence.
“Instead of pictures, why don’t you just go back for a few weeks. I’ll take care of the rest.” By the rest I mean my mother.
“But I’ve grown old, I’m a grandfather.” He turns to my son. “Besides, she says she’s fat now.”
“Just go,” I say, mocking his feigned reluctance.
My father sits quietly. There is no more coffee in his cup; he says he will get some for me as well.
“Everyone is allowed five good years in their life. I’ve had my five. Everyone meets a dangerous woman in his life. I’ve met mine.”
“Go to Egypt,” I interrupt without even looking at him.
“I need more coffee,” he says, standing up. “Anyway, first find me a decent picture and then we’ll see.” He throws a hand in the air to mean he doesn’t care, that he’s far too old for this, that the whole idea is one big nuisance.
The dining room is almost empty now, and as I watch him head for the coffee machine and disappear into the serving area, I am thinking of the years ahead when I’ll come here alone, or with my son, and remember this one day when we sat together as if posing for a mental photograph, thinking of Alexandria, listening to this cheerless tale of two lovers cast adrift in time. We’ll sit at this very table and wait for him, and think he’s only gone for coffee and is coming back shortly, carrying two fresh cups and dessert on a tray as he did that day when he returned to the table and asked almost casually: “By the way, do you happen to have a picture of me? I mean, a good one?”