A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [91]
Sasha had commandeered two seats at a low table, a setup that made Ted feel like an ape, knees jammed under his chin. As she hoisted the umbrella drink to her lips, the purple light leached into slivers of pale scar tissue on the inside of her wrist. When she set down the drink, Ted took her arm in his hands and turned it over; Sasha allowed this until she saw what he was looking at, then yanked her arm away. “That’s from before,” she said. “In Los Angeles.”
“Let me see.”
She wouldn’t. And to his own surprise, Ted reached across the table and grasped her wrists in his hands, taking a certain angry pleasure in hurting his niece as he wrested them over by force. He noticed that her nails were red; she’d painted them this afternoon. Sasha relented, averting her eyes as he studied her forearms in the cold, weird light. They were scarred and scuffed like furniture.
“A lot are by accident,” Sasha said. “My balance was really off.”
“You’ve had a bad time.” He wanted her to admit it.
There was a silence. Finally Sasha said, “I kept thinking I saw my father. Isn’t that crazy?”
“I don’t know.”
“In China, Morocco. I’d look across a room—bam—I saw his hair. Or his legs, I still remember the exact shape of his legs. Or how he threw back his head when he laughed—remember, Uncle Teddy? How his laugh was kind of a yell?”
“I do, now that you say it.”
“I thought he might be following me,” Sasha said, “making sure I was okay. And then, when it seemed like he wasn’t, I got really scared.”
Ted let go of her arms, and she folded them in her lap. “I thought he could keep track of me because of my hair. But now it isn’t even red.”
“I recognized you.”
“True.” She leaned toward him, her pale face close to Ted’s, sharp with expectation. “Uncle Teddy,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
It was the question he’d been dreading, yet the answer slid from Ted like meat falling off a bone. “I’m here to look at art,” he said. “To look at art and think about art.”
There: a sudden, lifting sensation of peace. Relief. He hadn’t come for Sasha, it was true.
“Art?”
“That’s what I like to do,” he said, and smiled, remembering the Orpheus and Eurydice this afternoon. “That’s what I’m always trying to do. That’s what I care about.”
In Sasha’s face there was a slackening, as if some weight she’d been bracing herself against had been removed. “I thought you came to look for me,” she said.
Ted watched her from a distance. A peaceful distance.
Sasha lit one of her Marlboros. After two drags, she squashed it out. “Let’s dance,” she said, a heaviness about her as she rose from her seat. “Come on, Uncle Teddy,” taking his hand, herding him toward the dance floor, a liquid mass of bodies that provoked in Ted a frightened sensation of shyness. He hesitated, resisting, but Sasha hauled him in among the other dancers and instantly he felt buoyed, suspended. How long had it been since he’d danced in a nightclub? Fifteen years? More? Hesitantly, Ted began to move, feeling hulking, bearish in his professor’s tweed, moving his feet in some approximation of dance steps until he noticed that Sasha wasn’t moving at all. She stood still, watching him. And then she reached for him, encircled Ted with her long arms and clung to him so that he felt her modest bulk, the height and weight of this new Sasha, his grown-up niece who had once been so small, and the irrevocability of that transformation released in Ted a ragged sorrow, so his throat seized up and a painful tingling fizzed in his nostrils. He cleaved to Sasha. But she was gone, that little girl. Gone with the passionate boy who had loved her.
Finally she pulled away. “Wait here,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I’ll be right back.” Disoriented, Ted hovered among the dancing Italians until a mounting sense of awkwardness drove him from the floor. He lingered near it. Eventually, he circled the club. She’d mentioned having