Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [67]
“Are you planning to settle scores in the buff?” Ready whenever you are, Mr. Hawk.
Romeo Hawk costumed himself leisurely. Cream-colored silk shirt with French cuffs, vanilla double-breasted suit, pink silk jacquard tie, blue sapphire cuff links and tie pin. Snakeskin boots with narrow toes and stacked heels. A man who has spent time in Asian prisons values style. He was Valentino and Nureyev and Adonis.
He said, admiring himself in the hotel’s flattering mirror, “You find me irresistible?” He had his back to me. “Every woman does.”
“You’re not my type,” I snapped. I hoped I meant it.
“I don’t have to be.” He grinned. “I’m your father. I didn’t come empty-handed, daughter.”
He didn’t contain his excitement; he didn’t even try to. I braced for his gift—a burst of Saturday night special?—as he ran to the closet. He chucked the satchel-sized pocketbook and a flea market hatbox to the closet floor, then came to me holding out the carry-on I’d shifted on the shelf so I could ease down the traveling kettle. A green vinyl carry-on. The leather-panted Eurasian in the allnight diner where I hadn’t paid for my Pepsi. No convergence is coincidental.
He read my mind. “The first time was accidental.” He unzipped the carry-on. Cheap metal zippers need a lot of curses and tugs. “The rest perspiration.” He dangled the carry-on just out of my reach. It looked light, hanging limp from his flat, wide hands. Karate-hardened hands. Flash hands. Killer hands. “The only gift you’ll ever want, daughter.”
I tore the carry-on out of those cruel hands and upended it on the rug. Five passports, that’s all that fell out of the cheap vinyl bag. Five to be exact. Five passports issued to five separate names, but each carrying a photo of Jess’s guileless face. I studied those thick, embossed and stamp-smudged official pages like a palmist reading life-routes and loveroutes.
Jess, too, was a ghost. She had inhabited five other bodies than the one I knew.
Bio-Mom’d paid her footloose way through hot, smoky Asia dealing in passports as well as dope. That, too, made sense.
The woman Fred Pointer had dug up as my biological mother and whom he had courted as Jess DuPree, successful Bay Area businesswoman, was also Jeanne Jellineau, b. 2/5/38, a citizen of France, the holder of a valid passport issued to her by the French embassy in Ankara. And she was Sigrid Schlant, a West German, b. 8/8/42, with a replacement passport issued her in Bangkok, where the original had been stolen. Also, Veronica Alexandra Taylor; born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 6/7/44; Magda Lukacs, born on 3/9/43 in a German camp for displaced persons; and Margaret Rose Smith, a British citizen, born on 1/29/41 in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
“You want to take the first shot, daughter, it’s yours. We’re on the same side.”
“ ‘Zero at the bone.’ Dad?”
A vain man, he preened in front of the full-length mirror. “Whaa?”
“I’m on nobody’s side.”
Romeo slicked down a stray strand of his hair. He liked what he saw in the mirror. “Same as being on everybody’s side.” He shoved the mirrored closet door shut. “Don’t elevate yourself to something you are not.”
Like god or demon? Like a snake-thing? I took a swing at his face. He bounced back, grinning. “Dad forgives. Hello, daughter! Jolly good!”
Larry’s old I MY ARSENAL sign was stolen off his apartment door soon after he vanished. I suspect Emad, but have no proof. The sign he painted especially for me I keep hanging above my futon. It reads: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO LIBERACE: TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING IS SIMPLY WONDERFUL. Larry communes with me through the sign. The things you can see and touch aren’t the things you should dread, he still mentors me. In that zombie hour of each night when I am not sure if I am dead or simply asleep, Larry and Liberace merge, sequined and giggling. Fear of the invisible is a good thing because