White Oleander - Janet Fitch [183]
To be my mother’s daughter again. I played with the idea like a child with a blanket, running it between my fingers. To be lost in the tide of her music again. It was an idea more seductive than any man. Was it really too late for childhood, to crawl back into the crucible, to dissolve into the fire, to rise without memory? The phoenix must burn... How would I dare? It had taken me this long to be free of her shadow, to breathe on my own, even if in this singed-hair space-heater Europe.
I lay in Paul’s arms, thinking how we’d gone up to Denmark last summer to find Klaus Anders. We located him in Copenhagen. He was living in a shabby flat with his children, it smelled of turpentine and stale milk. His wife was off working. It was three in the afternoon when we came calling, he had on a blue seersucker bathrobe covered with paint. There were two kids under five, my half sister and brother from his third or fourth marriage, on the couch watching TV. The girl had strawberry jam in her hair, the baby needed changing, and I saw the chain of disaster could move laterally as well as up and down.
He’d been painting, a biomorphic abstraction that looked like an old shoe with hair. He offered us Carlsbergs and asked about my mother. I drank and let Paul do most of the talking. My father. His handsome forehead, his Danish nose, just like mine. His voice lilting with its accent, humorous even when expressing re-gret. A man who never took anything seriously, least of all himself. He was pleased I was an artist, unsurprised my mother was in prison, sorry we’d never met. He wanted to make up for lost time, offered to let us stay, we could sleep on the couch, I could help out with the kids. He was sixty-one years old, and so ordinary.
I had felt like my mother, sitting in his living room, judging him and his sticky children and the TV that never turned off. The old futon-couch, scarred teak coffee table with rings. Canvases on the walls, encrustations like brain coral and colon cancer. We ate cheese and bread, the large jar of strawberry jam. I gave him the address of the comic book store, said I’d be in touch. It was the first time I’d ever wanted to move on, be the first person out of the room.
Afterward we went to a student bar near the university and I got thoroughly, sloppily drunk, and threw up in the alley. Paul got me on the last train back to Berlin.
Now I took Paul’s hand in the bed, his right in my left, laced my fingers through his, my hands large and pale as winter, my identity stitched in the whorls of their fingertips, Paul’s hands dark from graphite and fragrant with Drum and kebabs. Our palms were the same size but his fingers were two inches longer. His beautiful hands. I always thought if we ever had children, I hoped they’d have them.
“So what happened with the printer?” I asked.
“He wants cash,” Paul said. “Imagine.”
I turned our hands, so we could examine them from each side. His fingers practically touched my wrists. I traced along the sinews of his hand, thinking how in less than a day I could be back in the States. I could be like my mother, like Klaus. It was my legacy, wasn’t it, to shed lives like snakeskin, a new truth for each new page, a moral amnesiac?
But a disgrace. I’d rather starve. I knew how to do it, it wasn’t that hard.
I looked around our flat, the rain-ruined walls, the few bits of furniture, battered pressboard chest we found in an alley, the dusty velvet