Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father Read online

  Left to myself in the evenings after work, I walked from Boulevard Filles du Calvaire into the neighboring Marais district until sundown. Before heading out, I’d make myself a simple dinner. Other nights, when I wanted to treat myself, I’d buy a falafel on the Rue des Rosiers, which I’d slowly eat on the winding walk home, peering through the windows of small boutiques full of beautiful clothing I couldn’t afford. The waning light, a gold wash on the walls of the vieux quartier, lingered until eight or nine o’clock, as I meandered through little streets with names like Rue des Mauvais-Garçons (Street of the Bad Boys), appropriate given the neighborhood’s recent transformation from a Jewish neighborhood into a fashionable gay enclave. As I neared the Boulevard Filles du Calvaire, the area restaurants would start to come alive—the warm evening air filling with murmured conversation and the music of glasses and tables being set for dinner. The streets were thick with these narrow restaurants, along with bars and nightclubs, what the French call boîtes, boxes.

  I often felt as if I lived in a boîte, this little room on the third floor where I would sit by myself reading or writing letters to my father. It was a square space, with uneven slat-wood floors and room enough only for two wardrobes, two beds, and a desk. The bathroom was down the hall and shared with all of the other girls on the floor. Every night, I waited in line, holding a toothbrush and a cup in my hand. Returning to my room, I spied cockroaches creeping along the edges of the walls.

  For three weeks that summer, my high school friend Camille, who was staying with her French father, was my companion and guide. She invited me to a traditional French lunch at her grandmother’s and introduced me to kir, a cocktail of white wine and sweet cassis. Drinking these with her on the terrace of a Latin Quarter bar, I felt sophisticated and French. But after she returned to her mother’s in California, I was on my own again.

  Then one weekend, my roommate left for three days without mentioning anything to me. I looked for her out the window and listened for her laugh in the hallway. I checked with the front desk each night to see if they’d received any news of her. When she finally returned, I told her how worried I’d been but she only laughed. “I’m a grown woman, une femme,” she told me.

  I knew then I was not a woman, just a fille.

  EVERY SUNDAY at four o’clock, I went to the cabine téléphonique, a hexagon of folding glass doors in front of the Foyer. I entered and closed the door, shutting out the sound of busy street traffic, and collect-called my grandparents in Kewanee, where it was ten in the morning. Talking to my grandparents in English, if only for five minutes, was like taking a breath of fresh air after being locked in a windowless room.

  There was no problem with my French. Three years out of the bilingual school, I was surprised by how easily and completely it returned. With my pale skin and dark hair I could even pass for a local. One evening, riding home from work at rush hour, the car suddenly filled with a rowdy crowd of American tourists and a man standing beside me murmured in my ear, “It’s like we’re the only French left!” I smiled at him sheepishly, hoping not to reveal my true identity.

  Dad couldn’t afford collect calls from France any more than he could afford to call me in New York, so when I finished talking to Munca and Grumpa, I returned to my room and sat down and wrote to him about my adventures.

  June 14 1989

  Dear Daddy,

  You’re the best letter writer I know. Almost every week I get a letter. I must say, some of your first few made me cry. So much love was expressed in your words, genuine love. I’m bound closer to you than any one else in the world yet you’re so far away. It sounds as if you’ve been lonely lately. It must be hard having me away for so long. At least I can hear the details of your life by letter. Now you can hear mine:

  . . . Five days a week, I spend 9 hours at a little law office called Cleary Gottlieb. Inside that little office I run around, drink liters of water, and talk about Jazz with the American in the photocopy room.

  After work, at about 7:30, I eat dinner and take a walk into the Marais. Tonight I walked to the Place des Vosges, the oldest square in Paris, also in the Marais. It was very relaxing sitting on a park bench in the Jardin Louis XIII. I watched a young couple nuzzle and coo, a little girl chasing pigeons, and an old woman with a vivid, pensive face.

  But on that one afternoon next to the window, a white sheet of paper, a letter unfinished, lay on top of my desk. I was now looking out the window trying to think of how to answer my father’s last letter:

  22 June 89

  Cher Alysia,

  I got a horrid sunburn last weekend & now have had a horrid chest cough. Been tired a lot too (but have had trouble sleeping). My latest t-cell count is 71 (down from 360 three months ago.) It’s probably time I get on some AIDS treatment – if I can get on some program when I don’t have to pay (because things cost a fortune and I don’t have insurance) but the medical bureaucracy is such a maze and experts have so many contradicting opinions and I have been too tired and have no time. But I’ll see about it soon.

  Been working hard on my job, on 2 books (proofing them, etc.) and my essay on homophobia came out and a lot of people liked it. You probably will be more interested in my writing sometime in the future after I’m gone than you are now.

  Hearing about your days & your visit to the Place Des Vosges made me feel I was right there with you. You have a writer’s knack for noticing all the fresh, precise details. Rewriting this Atlanta novel is fun in that way – remembering what your mom was like – little details of what she did when she was agitated – and others we knew then too. Not much about you in it @ present (you were 1–2 then) I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that. But if I live awhile, there may be an Alysia book coming.

  love,

  Dad

  Looking out the window, I felt myself tumbling. This loneliness in Paris, the loneliness of my room where the African girl never sleeps. There’s a greater loneliness out there, much worse than this loneliness. There’ll be a time when Dad won’t answer my letters. When I won’t be able to phone him collect or not collect. When he won’t complain and comfort and encourage me. This letter that speaks of T-cells speaks of this time.

  “My latest t-cell count is 71 (down from 360 three months ago.)”

  The white blood cells that fight off infection are called T-cells. As AIDS progresses it kills these cells, attacking the body’s ability to protect itself from any illness. I know this now, but at eighteen I only vaguely did. Sitting in my room, I looked at this part of Dad’s letter over and over again, like someone who couldn’t read. Then this unfathomable idea started to rise in my consciousness. Now a bone-hard realization, I felt it lift from the bottom of my belly, up under my spine—a large bubble of hard, cool air pushing up and through me, threatening to huff and puff until it blew my house down. Collapsed on the floor, I was suddenly sobbing and breathing so hard and so fast that I was no longer the verb’s subject but its object. (Not Alysia taking a breath but a breath taking Alysia.) I continued like this for a long time, rocking back and forth, trying to swallow my sobs, until I was too tired to cry anymore, and I just sat in my empty room, dazed and thirsty.

  I stood up, returned to my spot by the window, and looked for the passersby and their big canvas bags of laundry. I needed these signs of the everyday to bring me back to the present.

  So on this afternoon sitting by the window, I wrote him a letter finally admitting to and explaining my sadness, begging him to “be careful,” and signing it “your melancholy daughter.” Two weeks later his reply arrived:

  26 July 89

  Dear Alysia,

  Don’t be melancholy (unless you enjoy it, hee, hee). I’ve been feeling very healthy lately. In fact, when I went to oral medicines this week, the nurse said my gums look better than they had in four months and was so excited she took two photos of them. I’m feeling more vigorous and energetic again too.

  I don’t do drugs (not even smoke pot) and drink only occasionally
(an occasional glass of wine if company comes to dinner). I’ve even been feeling sexy again. And got laid twice in 2 days (almost a miracle – the second time w/ a very nice person I met at the Anarchists Conference.) This did wonders for my mood.

  I don’t “have” AIDS yet and am supposed to get on drugs that will fight the advance of the virus soon. Realistically I could stay fairly healthy for another five to ten years – or one or two. I just don’t know. It’s harder to fight off any illness as one gets older. I know people who have died of cancer or heart attacks younger than me. Death simply gives meaning to life (sets the boundaries of life), and one might as well complain about birth as death because birth is where the suffering begins.

  So please don’t get so upset you hyperventilate my dear. No need for that. But I want to be honest with you about how things are & not “in denial” ignoring reality and pretending things are always perfect if they’re not.

  My hope is that by doing this that we’ll love and appreciate each other more the next few years & not waste the time we have to communicate or share our growth, hopes and aspirations.

  Wish you’d call collect so I could talk to you but I guess I can wait till you return to the US.

  Much love,

  Your loving Dad

  By the time Dad had written me this letter, he’d already spent many days and months considering his end. He later told me that when he first learned he was HIV-positive, he panicked. Pacing through the apartment, he kept asking himself, “What about Alysia? What about Alysia?” He focused on his breath and, counting his exhalations, told himself, “It’s okay to feel scared.” Then he remembered Issan, the abbot at his Zendo. When Issan had tested positive for HIV, he said, “It’s not AIDS that’s fatal: if you have AIDS you’re alive.” Dad studied the graceful way Issan accepted his infection and decided to follow his path.

  At one of Issan’s dharma talks he famously pronounced, “AIDS is the teacher.” The talk inspired members of the Hartford Street Zen Center to volunteer. Dad still sat with J. D. Kobezak every Friday at the Maitri Hospice, but now that he was HIV-positive he looked to that experience as a guide. In the epilogue to View Askew he wrote:

  Because I’m antibody positive, I know I may be in J. D.’s position myself some day – still alive but fading with little control of body or mind. We all die differently just as we all live differently. I don’t know what it will be like for me but I’m no longer afraid.

  My father may have been “no longer afraid,” but I was. He could write about staying healthy for “five to ten years” or for “one to two,” but I couldn’t think about numbers. The implications of Dad’s letter were too painful for me to keep in my head for any length of time. Sitting in my room in Paris, I folded his letter back inside its envelope and closed it in a drawer.

  Thousands of miles from Dad, my own life continued. The next morning I woke up and took the Métro to the Champs-Elysées, walked to the offices of Cleary Gottlieb, and spent the day filing legal briefs for bespectacled young lawyers, chatting up my French officemates and drinking liter bottles of water. That weekend I went on a picnic with the French girls to the Bois du Boulogne and walked with them through the woods, all of us getting drenched in a sudden summer rain.

  I RECENTLY DISCOVERED that this letter Dad sent to me in Paris isn’t the first in which he mentions being HIV-positive. On March 23, nearly three months before I left for Europe, he wrote, “Got results from my blood test. My t-cell count is 363. That’s below average – which is 450–1500. So I’m getting physical & evaluation @ UC AIDS Clinic. Maybe they can put me on some experimental drugs before I get sick.” But I have no memory of reading this letter, or even reacting to it, while in New York.

  Which is why I focus on that day at the window. It was the first time I remember thinking of Dad with AIDS.

  I never understood why it was so hard to recall Dad as HIV-positive before Paris. Then, carefully sifting through Dad’s journals, I found a copy of a letter he wrote to Dede Donovan that same summer of 1989:

  Alysia knows I have some health problems but I haven’t wanted to alarm her about their seriousness. But one reason I’ve wanted her to learn to fend for herself more is that it’s not unlikely that she’ll be without her remaining parent in 2–3 years, if not before. I haven’t told her grandparents about this either.

  Dad was indeed careful not to alarm me about the seriousness of his health. In the letters he wrote to me while I was at university, news on the progress of his infection was always couched between news of the banal—updates on plans for his fall tour promoting his novel, Holy Terror, and his book of essays, View Askew, troubles with the chatty roommate sleeping in my old room (“He has talk-arreah!”), and his many unrequited crushes: “What I mostly am, my dear, is celibate. It seems too much bother to get these boys in bed. But I do love them.”

  Unconsciously I took my father’s lead. If Dad didn’t want to give me reason to worry about the status of his health, I didn’t look for it. Why should I cooperate with the possibility of this loss, with the dissolution of my world? Besides, there was still so much life to live.

  IN FRANCE later that summer, I learned to ride a bicycle for the first time. The headmistress at the Foyer had organized a weekend trip to the countryside, driving the rowdy Filles du Calvaire in a rented bus to a dormitory on the Brittany coast. The trip cost us each thirty francs, then the equivalent of six dollars. On the five-hour drive from Paris, the girls in the back of the bus sang along to French pop songs playing loudly on a cheap transistor radio.

  When we arrived at the dormitory in Brittany it was already dark, but I noticed next to the front door, under a bare bulb buzzing with moths, seven pink single-speed bicycles leaning against the wall outside our rooms. Over dinner the next night, the Norman girl with the sharp nose suggested that we go for a ride before bed. I sheepishly confessed that I didn’t know how to ride a bike, a fact I’d somehow managed to hide from my friends for most of my life.

  “Then you’ll learn,” she said in French, her thin lips curling into a smile. “I’ll teach you.”

  She took me out that evening on an abandoned road near the rooming house. As we started along the wooded path, the dorm shrinking behind us, I wanted to tell her that I’d changed my mind, that I’d rather go to the beach, watch TV, do anything else. But though my French was good I didn’t feel competent enough, or intimate enough with this new friend, to jettison our plan without seeming rude. Instead, ten minutes later, this twenty-two-year-old girl wearing pearl earrings and a conservative navy sweater with tiny white buttons, this girl whom I’d known only two months, dug her neat canvas sneakers into the dirt and patiently held my bicycle steady as I tried again and again to pedal forward without falling over. This girl, whose name I can’t even remember, worked so hard to keep me aloft on that rusted pink bike that her cheeks flushed and a thin moustache of perspiration appeared above her mouth, which was drawn tight with concentration. I felt heavy and stupid on the bike and was grateful that no one was around to see us. I was thinking of how to rescue us both from what was clearly a futile pursuit when suddenly I was moving forward on my own. I felt like I was flying.

  The sun was low on the horizon as I pedaled back and forth down that patch of dusty dirt road, gaining speed as I gained confidence. I bicycled into a nearby clearing, passing fields of grass in which I could see small farmhouses and rolled bales of hay painted golden pink by the evening sun. It was just like the Monet paintings I’d studied in my freshman year and I had to laugh at this almost prepackaged postcard moment. The fresh evening wind blew into my face and I couldn’t stop smiling. Pedaling in large swooping circles, I accepted the wind as a reward for my perseverance. Behind me, the Norman girl was laughing and clapping.

  I later wrote Dad about that day. I wrote him about the Norman girl (my heroine! my Joan of Arc!), who’d later take me to meet her family in Rouen, including her welcoming father, still grateful to those Americans who stormed the beaches of N
ormandy in World War II. I wrote about how I’d never felt as good as I had in that moment, riding a bicycle in the countryside of Brittany, the westernmost province in the western arm of France, which stretches into the Atlantic as if trying to reach the distant United States.

  17.

  I RETURNED TO NEW YORK in the fall of 1989. I continued traveling to the Weiksners’ Upper East Side townhouse every week, clinging to it as a familiar base. One cold Monday evening that October, I was typing a paper in their upstairs office (formerly my bedroom) when their fourteen-year-old-son Nicky burst into my room. He’d been in their library watching game three of the World Series on TV. It was a match between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants, the so-called BART game, named after the subway that connected the two cities.

  “Alysiaaa!” he called as he thundered up the stairs. “There’s been an earthquake in San Francisco! The Golden Gate Bridge collapsed!”

  I immediately telephoned my father, who informed me that it was the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate, and that only a portion of the upper freeway had collapsed, crushing two vehicles beneath. In our dining room the mantelshelf had cracked and fallen, destroying two blue marble goblets handmade by a friend.

  As a San Francisco native, the fear of “the big one” had always been a part of my identity; it pained me to not be there. Although the quake’s epicenter was in the hills of Loma Prieta Santa Cruz, eighty miles north of the city, to miss the Bay Area’s worst earthquake since 1906 fractured my foundation, my sense of self. I felt as if a part of me, the San Francisco me, was somehow slipping away.

  Though he didn’t say so, Dad’s journals reveal that the Loma Prieta earthquake made him feel disconnected also, but differently:

  I was on Haight Street bus and didn’t feel it. Saw a couple broken windows & a toppled chimney & folks outside talking excitedly but I went to Flore for coffee & then sat zazen. Only afterwards did I begin to understand the magnitude of the event: walking home in total darkness & seeing my bookcase toppled, 2 windows broken. Didn’t want to be alone & walked around the city looking for open bars. In a way I felt friendless during this time.