15   12 July 90   Today’s postcard from D must surely be the last. It was from Frankfurt, and that is from where he is flying back to New York, on this very day. Britain was fun. Betty repeated, in reverse, the trick that she and Daniel played when we were in France in 86. That was when they persisted in speaking English with each other (and me) so that they would be taken for anglophones and then surprise the French by speaking perfect French. This time she spoke nothing but French with me (which of late she has been doing anyway, probably influenced by Gérard) and surprised the Brits by speaking perfect English with them. At first she spoke with the Princess Di accent that she had learned in 81 but she soon reverted to North American, except that whenever she was taken for an American she was indignant. Each time she said emphatically “I am Canadian” and repeated it in French “Je suis Canadienne.” To be frank, my journal, I have mixed feelings about hearing nothing but French at home. And now there will be even more French in my private life. Yes, my journal, I am coming to it. On the flight coming back from London I met Bob. (Just as I met Wayne back in 81, except that W was a flight attendant – the first male one that I encountered – and not a passenger.) He was already sitting in the window seat of our row when we boarded. Normally I like to sit in the aisle seat but this time Betty made me sit in the middle seat, next to him. She must have sensed something. When I sat down he smiled and said hello, in English but with a definite French accent. I said hello back and he said, “I am Bob.” I said, “mais vous êtes Français” and he laughed, especially because I (“une jeune Québécoise comme toi,” he said, he spotted my accent immediately) had used vous with someone of her age. Speaking (or rather writing) of Québécoise, Betty has been hinting that when she finishes Sec V at NAA she will go to a French cégep. Gérard? Back to Bob His name is Robert Cloutier, he is 36, single, is an actuary at Banque Nationale Assurances, studied at Laval and lives in Lachine. When he first said it I thought he meant that he lived in China, and we had a good laugh. He explained that the name of the town does in fact come from “la Chine” because its founder, Sieur de La Salle, tried to find a route to China. It felt strange that in my 20+ years in Montréal I had never been to Lachine, probably no more than 12 km away from St-Laurent. Well, my journal, I have been there now, and it is lovely. I also asked him what he had been doing in England. Changing planes, he said. He had been in Marseille, visiting family, and the connection via London is better than via Paris. After 20 years, Bob is my first French Canadian lover since Jean-Marc. I have not spoken French with a man since Miki. But Miki’s French was learned in school and was of the literary, poetic type. He didn’t know much of the sexual argot until I taught him, and he didn’t particularly enjoy using it.He preferred to quote Verlaine. Aime-moi, car sans toi, rien ne suis, rien ne puis. Et surtout ne parlons pas littérature. Ah, Miki, Miki, Miki, tu me manques. But with Bob we speak Québécois, like with Jean-Marc. It’s like reliving my teens. My wild, wild teens. I remember what Tina said when she started dating Louis. There is frank sex talk, and there is francophone sex talk. What to do when G calls? Tell him the truth, of course. Centro Hispano   Daniel had a portside window seat on his flight back to New York, and the sun was on him throughout the endless morning. His seatmate, a South Asian man who was coming from Singapore, slept throughout the flight. And so, except when reading the day’s Frankfurter Allgemeine and the month’s Priority magazine or occasionally glancing at the Bollywood movie that was shown on the screen (but with his headphones tuned to the classical-music channel), he spent his time thinking. His thoughts were mostly about Brigitte. She had become such a large presence in his life, like another mother, that he felt that he needed a word to designate her relationship to him. She was not his stepmother, since she was married to his father before, not after, his relationship with his mother. He thought of calling her his foremother, mon avant-mère, but he quickly remembered that what the English word means is a female ancestor, the equivalent of forefather. The French term has no such secondary meaning, and he decided that this was what he would use for Brigitte, at least when talking to himself, and possibly to Betty. They did, after all, call their mother maman and refer to their father as papa when speaking with her or with each other, even in English. Brigitte’s reference to the friendliness of the meeting in January of 1971, it seemed to Daniel, had a double meaning. The obvious one was that they had no disagreement concerning the divorce. The divorce, at that time, could not yet have been motivated by Miki’s impending fatherhood – since he didn’t know about it yet – but by the fact that the marriage, as he had known it, had ended. But Daniel was convinced that Miki still loved Brigitte – how could he not have loved that extraordinary woman who had been so much to him? – and that he showed his love sexually, now that they were on a more equal footing: during the months of their separation he had slept at least with Nili and with Mireille, and possibly – nay, probably – with other women as well. And so the cloud of one-sided fidelity was no longer hanging over him. There was also the nagging thought that in some strange ways he knew Brigitte better than his own mother, who had always showed herself quite reserved when talking about herself. He would have liked to hear her reaction to Nili’s report that Miki had not been in love with her, but he knew better than to ask; he would have received a noncommittal reply. He would have liked to know some details about her loss of virginity at the age of fifteen in Québec – for example, who the guy was – but she didn’t offer any, and he didn’t want to pry. Brigitte showed no such reserve, and he was sure that if any unanswered questions came into his mind, all he had to do was write them to her. His reflections were briefly interrupted when lunch was served. The stewardess asked him what he wanted to drink, and, without any thought, he answered “beer, please.” Daniel realized that in the course of his German wanderings beer drinking had become a habit, with two potentially problematic consequences. One of the consequences, of which he had been gradually becoming aware over the last week or two, was that his pants were feeling ever tighter on him. Here he was, not quite nineteen, with an incipient beer belly! He recognized that during his freshman year he had severely neglected physical exercise, and he resolved that he would do something about as soon as possible. Come the fall semester he would start going to the gym – he needed to fulfill the physical education requirement anyway – and he would look for an intramural soccer team to join. Meanwhile he would take advantage of his apartment’s closeness to Central Park and go running there, or possibly bicycling: he would buy himself a bicycle and use it not only for exercise but as transportation for his two-mile commute to the Columbia campus. The other problem was that, if he were to continue to indulge his newfound taste for beer, the absurd drinking-age laws of the United States would be an obstacle. Not only would he not be able to order a glass of beer legally in a bar or restaurant, but he could not even buy any in a store in order to drink it at home. He had no older friends or relations in New York who could do it for him. On second thought, he did have one older friend: Gen McGrath. But, other than sending her a Christmas card from Montreal, he had not called her since the time he went to bed with Audrey, and he would not be comfortable doing so by this time. On third thought, there was Mireille’s friend Sam, but Daniel had never contacted him – nor had she ever suggested that he do so – and it would seem crass to do it now. Then he remembered Eddie the super. He hardly ever saw him without a bottle of beer in his left hand. He was sure that he could be persuaded, when he restocked his supply, to get a few additional six-packs for him. He might also ask him to get him a few bottles of wine, in case he had any dinner guests over. The passing thought of Gen led him to consider the satisfaction of his sexual needs, of which he was reminded every time one of the lovely Singapore Girls walked by, her colorful sarong kebaya draping her slender body. And then Cici, Cynthia Carmona, came into his mind. Would he have a chance with her? She had encouraged him to call her, but to what purpose? He now thought that, being under drinking age, he might be too young for her, though she was probably no more than a year, at most two, older than he. Strangely, the thought of being too young had not occurred to him when he was with women who were older by a decade, like Gen and Angie. But unlike them, the beautiful Cici undoubtedly had her pick of men, and someone more mature might be more to her liking. But of course he would call her, and let chance take its course. About an hour before the scheduled landing the captain announced, with a Scottish-sounding accent, that it was raining in New York, with the temperature at seventeen degrees centigrade. The announcement was for Daniel like a sudden crossing of an invisible boundary: he suddenly felt himself in and of New York, a New Yorker. He was impatient to be greeted by a rainy New York spring, to go for a walk in his new neighborhood – he didn’t know yet what to call it, except that was a part of the Upper West Side – to see its sights, smell its smells… He got home in time for lunch, which he had at a Chinese restaurant he had not previously tried, and went back home to take a nap. After he woke up and stretched his limbs he called Cici. The outgoing message on her answering machine was alternately in Spanish and English. The English text consisted of “Hi, this is Cici, AKA Cynthia Carmona,” “I’ll be away till the second part of August,” “Call me then” and “Have a great summer!” There was no opportunity for leaving a message. Kitty-corner from the Cuban-Chinese restaurant, where he went to have dinner, he noticed a low-rise office building with many signs on its windows. One of the signs read Centro Hispano de Manhattan / Clases de Inglés / Spanish classes and listed a phone number. After a good night’s sleep in his own bed, he called the Centro and asked about Spanish classes. The woman at the other end told him that he was in luck: a beginning class would start the following Monday and continue Mondays and Thursdays, from seven o’clock to eight-thirty, for six weeks. If he was interested he could come to their place at a quarter to seven, with a check for two hundred dollars, in order to register. After unpacking, he spent most of the weekend looking through the photo album Brigitte had given him and browsing through Miki’s articles. Having heard examples of his humor made him appreciate the covert irony in much of his writing, something that even a competent reader of German might miss. He was aware that reading his writings was having an emotional impact on him, but it was not clear yet what that impact might be. Time will tell, he told himself. Sunday morning he called his mother. She was happy to hear from him, but her response to his account of his trip was guarded. He wondered if in some way she felt in competition with Brigitte. That was another thing, Daniel thought, that time would clear up. Betty, on the other hand, listened to his narrative enthusiastically, thrilled to hear more information about the unknown man whom she had finally, after receiving her share of the inheritance, accepted as her father. One mark of her enthusiasm was every so often veering unconsciously into French. When he commented on it she giggled, and when he asked her how things were going with Gérard she said “Très bien.” Monday evening, after a pasta dinner he had made for himself, he went to the Centro Hispano. The classroom had seats for about twenty, but only eight students were gathered there, taking turns registering at what was probably the teacher’s desk, where a brown-haired woman wearing a tee-shirt, jeans and sneakers was handling the registration. When everybody had registered and no more prospective students were arriving, she got up, announced with a slight Hispanic accent that the teacher would be coming in a few minutes, and left the classroom. The teacher did, in fact, come into the classroom ten minutes later. She was the same woman, but now wearing a sleeveless red dress and high-heeled shoes. “Buenas tardes,” she said breezily as she swept in front of the blackboard. “Buenas tardes,” a few of the students answered. “Yo soy la profesora. Ustedes son los alumnos. Buenas tardes, alumnos.” “Buenas tardes, profesora,” all the alumnos said in unison. “Yo me llamo,” she began as she wrote her name on the blackboard, “Carmela de la Peña. Mi nombre es Carmela. Mi apellido es De la Peña,” she said as she wrote nombre and apellido above her first and last names, respectively. “Y usted, ¿como se llama?” she asked the woman seated next to Daniel. “Yo me llamo María Chesny,” the woman said. “¿Cuál es su nombre?” The woman seemed a little confused by the question. “Diga, mi nombre es María,” the teacher said. “Mi nombre es María.” “¿Y cuál es su apellido?” “Mi apellido es Chesny.” “Muy bien,” the teacher said. She went on to Daniel next, and then to all the other students until they all knew one another’s first and last names. At some distance above her name she then wrote Alfredo and Dolores and drew slanting downward lines that met just above the de of her name. Above Alfredo and Dolores she then wrote padre and madre. She drew another pair of lines from her parents’ names to an empty space to the right of her name, where she wrote José. “Alfredo de la Peña es mi padre. Dolores Montes es mi madre. Yo soy la hija de Alfredo y Dolores. José es el hijo de Alfredo y Dolores. José es mi hermano. Yo soy la hermana de José – yo soy su hermana. Yo no tengo hijos, pero mi hermano José tiene hijos pequeños,” she concluded with a gesture showing the small size of her brother’s children. She then asked her students to tell her whether they had siblings or children. With that exercise over, she drew a horizontal line to the left of her name, Rodolfo to the left of the line, and a heart above it. “Rodolfo es mi novio. Yo soy la novia de Rodolfo.” She did not ask the class, however, whether anyone had a novio or novia. Instead she started talking about what she and her novio like to do. “A mí me gusta cantar canciones y tocar la guitarra. Yo canto y toco. A Rodolfo le gusta jugar fútbol. El juega fútbol en el Parque Central.” The next round of responses by the class gave me a chance Daniel tell that he also liked to play the guitar, pero no toco, and to play soccer, pero no juego. The class laughed. The teaching format never changed: Carmela spoke nothing but Spanish, explaining the meaning with gestures and illustrations, and the students were expected to answer her questions in full sentences. Before long they engaged in dialogues with fellow students. As the first class ended he found himself walking out alongside his neighbor. “Is your name really Maria?” he asked her. “No,” she said, “it’s plain old Mary.” “You’re neither plain nor old,” he said, making her laugh. They left the building together and, by happenstance, both turned left. “I could use a beer,” she said as they passed a bar. “Would you like join me?” “I’d love to, but I’m afraid I’m under age.” “Oh, that’s right,” she said, remembering the class giving their ages with the help of a number chart that the teacher had hung over the blackboard (Mary had given hers as twenty-nine). “But I’ve got beer at home,” he said, “and I live two minutes away.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, okay,” she said. As they walked into his apartment she said, “This reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment.” “Whose?” “Jerry Seinfeld? He’s this comedian with his own show that was running back in June.” “I was away for most of June.” “Well, it’s supposed to be repeated in the fall, on NBC. Don’t miss it. Anyway, Jerry has this apartment that’s super-neat and he always has women coming up.” “You’re the first woman coming up here. I moved in on the first of June, but then I went traveling and I just got back four days ago.” Daniel wondered if she would ask him where he had gone traveling, but she didn’t. He opened a bottle of beer and poured its contents, in equal halves, into two glasses. He quickly realized that Mary needed more than six ounces of beer, and his next pour was decidedly unequal. One thing quickly led to another. At ten o’clock she announced that she needed to get home and dressed in a seeming hurry. He asked her if she would like him to walk her out, but she declined the offer. For the next six weeks Mary came to his apartment after every class, for an hour or so, except for one time, an exception that he ascribed to her period. They did not talk much. He learned nothing about her that she had not already announced in the course of the class exercises: her name, her age, her being de Pensilvania (after Carmela told the class that she was de Colombia and Daniel announced that he was de Canadá), not having children and working in a bank. Their farewell after the last class felt no different from the others, except that it was earlier than usual – at twenty past nine – because the class had ended early, and there was no See you in class, only Good night. They never exchanged phone numbers, and he had no expectation of ever seeing her again. In the meantime he wasted no time in putting his Spanish to use as he was acquiring it, using it as best he could – usually provoking smiles that he interpreted as friendly, or at least indulgent – in neighborhood stores and restaurants. In his walks, jogs and bike rides through Central Park he occasionally came across a pickup soccer game, and if one of the teams seemed undermanned and was mainly Hispanic, he would ask ¿Puedo jugar con ustedes? and get a hearty ¡Si, cómo no! in return. He had also learned enough to figure out that what had sounded as kewapo from Cici’s friend Letty was actually ¡Qué guapo! and meant that she found him good-looking. As soon as Mary left for the last time he dialed Cici’s number. Again he got her answering machine. The outgoing message was now in Spanglish: “Hola, soy Cici. This is Cynthia Carmona. Leave me a message después del tono.” He clicked the phone off before the beep in order to compose the message that he would leave in Spanish. When he called again, after the beep he said, “Hola, Cici, soy Daniel Wilner. Quisiera hablar con usted. Llámeme por favor.” And he left her his number before concluding with “Ciao,” which he had heard Hispanics use with one another. She called him back the next morning, as he was preparing breakfast for himself. “Hey, Daniel,” she exclaimed, “it’s Cici! So you’ve learned some Spanish! ¡Chévere!” “My class just ended last night, but I didn’t learn the word you just said.” “It means ‘fantastic.’ But what’s this usted business? It’s like Sie in German. People our age don’t say usted to each other, except when they’re from Colombia or maybe Costa Rica!” “Oops,” he said. “Our teacher was from Colombia. What do people say?” “Usually tú, except that some people, like Argentines and Salvadorans, say vos.” “This is great, Cici, a free Spanish lesson before breakfast!” “Oooh, breakfast! I haven’t had mine either. I just got back a couple of days ago, and I’m not quite on a regular schedule yet. By the way, I just got your postcard from Berlin. Vielen Dank! I got the first one before I left. Anyway, you wanna meet somewhere for breakfast?” “I’m just making some eggs and stuff, and I could easily make it for two. Would you like to come over?” “Sure. Where do you live?” It was only after giving her his address and hanging up that Daniel realized how bold he had been. To invite a woman that he barely knew to his apartment felt quite natural, but he had not expected it to be so easy with a girl as beautiful as Cici. And it was not so easy after all. They had a friendly breakfast encounter in which they told each other many things about ourselves – she told him, among other things, that her major, like Karen’s, was psychology and that she had taken German in order to read Freud and Jung in the original – and they said good-bye with a handshake, in the course of which she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. More meetings and more self-revelations followed in the succeeding days. She told him about her complicated family life: her father was a businessman in the garment trade, buying wholesale in New York and selling retail in a chain of stores that he co-owned with his brothers in Puerto Rico, and in so doing he had raised two parallel families. One was in New York, with his Nuyorican legal wife and their children, Hector and Cynthia. The other was in San Juan, with a younger common-law wife and four other kids. But when the manufacture of clothes in Manhattan declined, he found it cheaper to import them directly from China and bypass New York, so that he stopped going there. Eventually Cici’s mother moved to Florida, where she had relatives, and Cici usually split her vacations between her parents’ residences. A week and a half later, after classes had begun and they saw each other on campus, she told him that she was in the final throes of an extended breakup with her old boyfriend, who was – as Daniel thought he might be – almost thirty and pressuring her for a serious relationship, for which she was not ready. After another two weeks they arranged to meet for dinner at the Cuban-Chinese restaurant to celebrate his nineteenth birthday (she, Daniel had learned, was a month shy of her twentieth), but had agreed beforehand that it was not to be a date. He was there before her, sitting at a table. When she came in she greeted him with a radiant smile and as he stood up put a gift-wrapped package into his hands, saying, “Happy birthday!” He unwrapped the present and it turned out to be a box of dates from Florida. “You wanna date?” she asked. He answered her with a kiss, which she accepted warmly. The meeting turned into their first date.   A week later he started playing intramural soccer. Just before the beginning of classes he had received an invitation to join the Canadian Culture Club, just as he had at the beginning of his freshman year, when he ignored it, Canadian culture being at the time the farthest thing from his mind. But this time, as he read the letter, he noticed that the Club had entries in various intramural sports leagues, including soccer. He decided that he would represent his Home and Native Land, Terre de mes aïeux, as a member of Team Canada on the soccer pitch. Since all of his teammates were English, Daniel made a point of identifying himself, to their surprise (and in some cases disbelief), as a French Québécois. After another week Germany was officially reunified. The event was duly noted both in the advanced German class and the European history class that he was taking. Remembering the hopes for German unity that his father had expressed in his writings, Daniel celebrated it privately with Cici with a dinner at a German restaurant in Yorkville. She was no longer taking German – she had fulfilled her language requirement with the second-year course – but they made a point of speaking it during that date, and he was surprised by how well she remembered it five months after the class.   Cici and Daniel’s relationship all through that semester was literally one of dating. On occasion they would meet casually – for lunch, coffee or a short walk – on or near the campus on weekdays, but their evening and weekend encounters were invariably prearranged. One would ask the other if he or she were free, and the answer would either “Yes” or “I’ve got to study.” The latter was their accepted formula for declining a date, since they both took their academic studies seriously, even if the real reason for declining was something else, such as Cici’s period, or Daniel being caught up in reading one of Michael Wilner’s essays (which he had been doing, at the rate of about one a week, since the beginning of the semester), or even having a beer with his clubmates. The dates invariably ended at Daniel’s place, since he was the only one of the two who lived alone. Cici lived, cost-free, in the apartment where she had grown up – still in her mother’s name and rent-controlled – with two roommates, whose payments covered the already low rent, the utilities, and any incidental expenses. The building was under the threat – or promise – of gentrification, just as Daniel’s had been, but Cici didn’t care. She had already decided that after graduation she would move to Florida, to be near her mother and nearer to her father, and to study clinical psychology at one of the universities there. And because both of them understood that the relationship would not last, at the utmost, past her graduation, they, and Cici in particular, worked at keeping any excessive emotional attachment at bay. There was only a vague promise of a resumption the following semester, after their respective winter vacations: hers in Florida and Puerto Rico, his in Montreal. “Back to our roots,” Cici remarked.   By the time he was settled in his seat on the Adirondack, his copy of In meiner Zeit in his lap, he had read about a dozen of the articles. He now began the introductory article to the series Eine angelsächsische Reise (mit etwas Spanisch und Französisch) that was published in 1962. In the second paragraph of the article, he learned that the trip (with Brigitte, as Daniel knew) that led to the series was Miki’s second one to North America. The first had been eight years earlier, to visit his uncle Leon, and on that occasion Miki, nineteen years old just as his son was now, had taken this very train (or its predecessor on the New York Central), but in the opposite direction: from Montreal to New York. The knowledge filled Daniel with wonderment. As he looked out the window at the multihued bustle of the platform of Grand Central – knowing that it was probably his last chance to see it, since a few months hence Amtrak would begin using Penn Station instead – he tried to imagine what Miki might have seen when he arrived there, thirty-six years before. By now Daniel had acquired a sense of the workings of his father’s mind, and could even identify with some of them. For example, there was Michael Wilner’s insistence on being simultaneously (and paradoxically) a Polish Jew – and proud of it – and a German, or at least a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany; he had even coined, in his very first article, a term – Germanian in English and Deutschländer in German – for someone who was a citizen of Germany but not necessarily an ethnic German. Daniel could, in a similar vein, envision himself as remaining proudly a French Canadian even if he were eventually to become a United States citizen. A Unitedstatesian? In Spanish, he had learned from Carmela de la Peña, one could say estadounidense. But there was a difference. For Daniel, having the dual identity of French Canadian and American would not present a paradox, he thought as the train began to move amid muffled announcements over the station’s loudspeakers, any more than it did for Cici to be Hispanic and Puerto Rican and American, or for the millions of other Americans who proudly proclaimed their ethnicity. Michael Wilner’s writing, on the other hand, vibrated like a taut string under the tension between his two identities, as a German and as a Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust (though this was a word whose use he disparaged, as he had written in the article Wörter um Eichmann, around the time of the Jerusalem trial). Getting to know my father won’t be a simple matter, Daniel concluded as he began reading the account of the riot in London’s East End in which a mostly Jewish crowd attacked the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.