迷失的自我 英文版｜第1章A

ON A VERY COLD DAY during my sophomore year of college, when I was living just an hour away from home in a dorm, my father returned from a two-day seminar on financial planning to find what he initially thought was a stranger asleep in his bed. Even after he turned on the overhead light, he didn’t recognize the bearded face of the man sleeping openmouthed on one of the firm, supportive pillows he always missed so much while away. In those first confusing moments, my father later told me, he simply didn’t comprehend the situation. He would soon forgive himself this slowness—his experience as a trial lawyer had taught him that people often cannot comprehend the unexpected; the human brain can fail to register what seems impossible. “Blinded by naiveté” was how he explained it to me, in one of his more vulnerable—or perhaps more calculating—moments. Even after he turned on the light, he said, it took him several seconds to recognize the blond hair and pleasant face of one of the men who had worked on our roof the previous summer. Naiveté aside, I’m surprised he recognized the man at all. My father worked long hours, and so the repair of the roof, like everything that had to do with the house, had fallen to my mother’s domain.

The roofer’s tanned shoulders were visible over the top of the duvet. He did not wake when my father turned on the overhead light. Bowzer, our dog, was curled up at the foot of the bed, his silver chin resting on a lump that appeared to be the man’s right foot. When my father kicked the bed, the roofer turned and sighed, resting one pale arm over his eyes. He seemed to be groping for something—or someone—with his other hand, but still my father allegedly remained clueless. Our house was on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Kansas City that is known for its safety, excellent public schools, and complete lack of public transportation; still, my father said that for far too long, he truly perceived the man as some kind of confused, unshaven transient who had broken in to take a mid-morning nap.

“I was exhausted,” he explained to me later. “Okay? Veronica? You understand? I’d been on a plane all day. All I wanted was to come home, change clothes—maybe even, God forbid, have someone make dinner for me—and I walk into that.”

He said the situation only started to make sense after he spotted the note. It was creased in half so it sat like a little tent on top of the roofer’s work boots, which were on the floor next to the bed, wool socks still nestled inside. Before my father even picked up the note, he recognized the lined yellow paper, a pad of which my mother kept in the drawer of her bedside table for copying down interesting passages in books, and gift ideas from the catalogues that she also read while in bed.

“O CLOUD-PALE eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes…” You look so beautiful asleep I can’t bring myself to wake you. But make sure you are gone by three. (And take this note with you!) I will call you. And I promise you, all day long, I will think about being brave.

The note was not signed, but my father of course recognized my mother’s handwriting, the careful cursive, the neat and even loops. He looked at her bedside table. There was the Philip Roth book she’d been reading before he left. Stri Vectin hand cream. A tube of the raspberry lip balm she had, for years—and in his opinion, very irritatingly—woken to put on in the middle of the night. His brain was able to register what was clear, but he was so surprised, he said, that his legs literally gave way, and he had to sit on the edge of the bed. Because of my father’s occasional back problems, my parents slept on an expensive mattress, the kind made out of the material that has something to do with astronauts—and apparently, it really could withstand the weight of a grown man sitting on the edge of it without disturbing a sleeping man, or even an elderly dog, lying in the middle. So my father had several seconds to look at the roofer’s slackened face, and to notice—to his even further surprise—just how young the interloper was. When I first heard the story from my bewildered and disgusted older sister, the roofer was reported to be about thirty years old. That may have been an exaggeration—to this day, my mother maintains he was closer to forty.

But we can all agree that my father—once he collected his wits—responded to the crisis with characteristic forethought and logic. I wouldn’t put all of this on his training as a lawyer. He is a huge fan of true crime—in his spare time, what little there is of it, he watches cop and private detective shows, Unsolved Mysteries, etc. He dropped the note where he’d found it, stood up, and took a large step away from the bed. His phone had a camera on it. He took it out of his pocket and took a picture of the sleeping man. He found the man’s flannel shirt lying on the floor, and he used it—as he had seen so many television detectives use latex gloves—to pick up my mother’s note. He slipped both articles behind her big oak dresser for safekeeping, and then crept over to his dresser, where he kept the small handgun he had purchased three years earlier after a house several streets away was burglarized—though it was a much nicer house, and the owners had been away at the time, skiing in Aspen.

“He bought that gun so he could tell everyone he bought it,” my mother had said. “He bought it to make me insane.”

And truly, on the snowy afternoon that the discovery of the sleeping roofer gave my father some reason to finally load the gun, he didn’t load it. He wasn’t looking for vengeance, he told me, just the upper hand.

“He could have just asked him to leave,” my mother pointed out later. “Mr. Drama. You know what? He probably could have just cleared his throat.”

But my father did use the gun, the tip of the barrel, to nudge the roofer awake. “Get the hell out of my house,” he said, very calmly, or at least that’s how he told us he said it, with all the quiet bravado of someone who has watched several Clint Eastwood movies in the course of his life. My father does have a trial lawyer’s flair for drama—he tells stories well, and he has a good memory for dialogue. But neither my sister nor I was ever completely convinced that his actual delivery was so tranquil—our father is a very excitable person. He screams when he loses his car keys. He wails when he stubs his toe. In any case, the roofer woke up quickly and found whatever my father said, however he said it, sufficiently clear, and the gun sufficiently motivating. He raised his palms in surrender. He asked permission to stand. To my father’s surprise, the roofer was wearing jeans, his leather belt still buckled. And he wasn’t that physically impressive, now that he was standing up. He was several inches shorter than my father, and though his arms were broad and muscular, he was a little soft in the middle. “Cloud-pale eyelids?” my father asked me later. “Cloud-pale eyelids?”

The roofer, his eyelids now invisible above his wide-awake eyes, asked permission to put on his boots, almost every word, according to my father, followed by an “uhhh” or a “duhhhh” that strongly hinted he was not just temporarily terrified, but also permanently stupid. Of course, my father’s impersonation may not have been accurate or fair. Long after the roofer—his name, I later learned, was Greg Liddiard—returned to Alaska to marry his pregnant girlfriend, and my mother had little reason to defend him, she told my older sister and me that there were many different kinds of intelligence and stupidity, and that Greg Liddiard—her former boyfriend, poetry pal, whatever he was—hardly had the market cornered on any of them.

My father, by his own admission, felt pretty stupid himself. He wanted both me and Elise to understand he’d been blindsided. You think you know a person, he said. You think you have a good idea of what’s going on in your own home. Once he understood the real story, he said, he was all done playing the dupe. Less than two minutes after Greg Liddiard ran shirtless out the door and down our long, icy driveway to his van, which was still parked in the curb of the cul-de-sac, my father used his cell phone to call my mother on hers.

“She must have seen the number,” he told me, still incredulous. “Okay? Veronica? She must have known it was me.” He clearly remembered that my mother’s hello did not sound particularly guarded, not particularly friendly or unfriendly. She did not sound like a liar, a betrayer, a thief of his life energy, of his very life. She sounded, he said, matter-of-fact.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re home?” There was activity in the background, people shouting. At first, he pictured her subbing at the elementary school or the junior high, answering her cell phone in front of a room of bored or hostile young suburbanites as they misbehaved and switched identities and asked when their real teacher would come back. But it was Saturday. My mother was working her volunteer shift at the food pantry for the homeless shelter. How altruistic! He imagined her stacking cans of soup, wearing an apron, a self-righteous expression, and also her wedding ring.

“Yes,” he said. “I am home, Natalie. And I think you better come home, too. In fact, you better come home right away.”

She must have picked up on his tone. He said she was silent for a long stretch. Even with the background noise, he could hear her breathing on the other end.

“Yes,” she said finally. “We need to talk.”

He laughed. He actually laughed. He was nervous, he said, freaked out, standing in their bedroom, looking in the mirror at his own middle-aged face and realizing just how much was about to change. My parents had been married for twenty-six years. My mother was a junior in college when they met, my father in his second year of law school. Their union had survived early parenthood, a flooded basement, and the deaths of both of their parents. They had been allies against my sister’s first boyfriend, Kyle, who had been nice enough at first, but who threatened to set himself on fire in our driveway after my sister broke up with him. My parents were married when Reagan was president, when the first Bush was president, when Clinton was president, and then the second Bush as well. They had planned vacations, funerals, and my sister’s wedding, together.

“Oh my dear,” he said, almost tenderly, his voice wistful, or at least it was each of the several times he told this story to me. “Oh Natalie,” he said to my wayward mother. “I’m afraid you have no idea.”

From this point on, the story gets even more slippery. Though unsolicited, my mother and father have each given me a different account of the Day of the Sleeping Roofer, and what happened after she came home. My father said he confronted her with the note, the shirt. My mother said he didn’t need to. He said she sat down at the dining room table, still wearing her long wool coat. She did not appear exactly devastated. If anything, he said, she seemed disoriented, her big eyes staring at the striped wallpaper and crown molding that she herself had picked out and nailed on, as if she’d never seen them before. My father repeatedly emphasized that she looked a little demented—her hat crooked over her curly hair, her cheeks bright red from the cold. He said she didn’t have anything to say for herself. He said he watched her stare at the wallpaper for a while, her runny nose unwiped, and then he went upstairs to get his travel bag, which was, conveniently, still packed, ready to go. He carried it back downstairs, past my catatonic mother, and out the side door to the garage, his heart, he said, a brick in his chest.

He’d only driven to the end of the block when it occurred to him that he had not done anything wrong. He still wanted to take a shower, and he didn’t want to take it in a hotel. He wanted to take a shower in the house that he had worked over sixty hours a week for over twenty years to pay for. So he drove back to the house and yelled this at my mother, his breath turned to vapor in the open doorway to the garage.

My mother agreed, according to my father. Or at least she understood he was right. She left for a hotel. She took only a suitcase the first time she left. Five minutes later, she came back for Bowzer, and all of Bowzer’s medicine, worried, she said, because my father was unfamiliar with the dog’s complicated care routine. My father admits she was contrite and dignified in both of her exits. Of course, he added, with no real malice, she could afford to be contrite at that point. She still had her credit cards.

The next afternoon, forty-two miles away, I went on my second date with Tim Culpepper. We went sledding on dinner trays I stole from the dining hall, and then spent an hour making out in his car, the heaters on high, Nick Drake on the little stereo. After he dropped me off, I was still so happy, and smiling so much, that people next to me on the elevator looked uncomfortable. When I got to my room, my phone rang. I had to tuck the cold dinner trays under one arm to get my phone out of my coat pocket. It was my sister calling from San Diego to tell me about the Sleeping Roofer. I stood still in my doorway, the light of the hallway bright, my room still dark, the phone pressed against my ear. My mittens were wet from the snow.

“Are you still there?” she asked. “Veronica? Did you hear me? Mom and Dad are getting divorced.”

The dinner trays fell on the toe of my boot, and then clattered on the linoleum floor. I said, “What? No they aren’t.” I had just talked to my mother the week before. She’d been worried about my scratchy throat, my sniffy nose. It was just a cold, but she’d wanted me to go to the doctor. She didn’t think I was getting enough sleep.

“I just got off the phone with Dad,” Elise said. “He’s already talked to his lawyer.”

It was a typical Elise response: irrefutable, no way out. I did not argue again. But when she told me about the Sleeping Roofer, I silently shook my head, not believing her at all. I could not reconcile the idea of it with all I knew of my mother. She was not a careless person. She smiled a lot, but not just at men. She smiled at old ladies. She smiled at squirrels. She was not a seductive flirt. Our neighbor, Mr. Shunke, would whistle at her when she was out gardening, but she would only roll her eyes. She wore comfortable shoes. She read magazines that had mostly recipes. And more importantly, she had been my mother. I had grown up with her kindness, taking it for granted, using it up.

“I have to go,” Elise said. She wasn’t crying, but her voice was quiet. “Charlie’s home, and we have dinner plans with someone at my firm. I’ll call you later.”

I was still holding the phone, staring at it, when Tim Culpepper knocked on my door. I’d left my hat in his car. He held it out to me, looking uncertain and very tall. I said, “My parents are getting a divorce.”

He came in and sat next to me on my bed, and spent much of the rest of the evening listening to me say, in so many different ways, that I was just really, really surprised, that I had not seen this coming at all. He said, “I don’t know what to say.” But he kept sitting there. I told him I was sorry for crying in front of him when he hardly even knew me. He said, “Oh come on, if I had a dollar for every girl who pulled this…” But he looked at my eyes and didn’t make any more jokes.

I didn’t want to call either my mother or my father. I didn’t want to hear them say it, and I didn’t know what I would say. Tim nodded. He didn’t say he had to go. I told him, again, how surprised I was. My family had just spent Christmas together. Elise and Charlie had come in from California. They stayed in her old room, and I stayed in mine, and on the afternoon of Christmas Day, we’d walked over to old Mr. Wansing’s for the neighborhood pie party just like we had on every Christmas Day of my life. Everything seemed normal. My mother got my father a recording device that looked like a pen, something he could use at work. My father got her a juice machine. They’d sat next to each other on the couch in bathrobes and watched as we opened our presents from them. In my memory, they both looked happy.