Road to Paradise Read Free Page B

don’t know won’t understand, but people who know raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh, Larchmont . Wow.” It is for them I say I live near Mamaroneck. Nobody ever raises their eyebrows at that. It’s suburban-sounding, not French-sounding, unpretentious, not posh—all the things you can’t say about Larchmont, a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, old-world European city in the middle of parochial, provincial suburban America. The streets are winding and canopied, the houses Tudor, compact and esoteric, with square rooms, hardwood floors and tiny kitchens, a town where the Christmas lights get strung up for December down Main Street and twinkle merrily in the snow. Many houses are for rent, and there is one particular furnished Tudor, off Bridge Street, on a cul- de- sac (even that’s French) where Emma and I live in three small rooms above the garage that stands on a driveway overhung by enormous trees that drip sap in thespring and fall, staining my running shoes. We live there for free, but the way washing machines and vacuum cleaners live for free. In exchange for our rooms, we maintain the house. Mostly Emma does this. I help out on the weekends.

    I live with Emma. Her last name is Blair. And mine is Sloane. These things I know.
    Now for all the things I don’t know. I don’t know who Emma is, why I live with her or who she is to me. When I was a child, I used to call her Aunt Emma, but then I grew up. Always, since then, she has been just Emma.
    I also know this. And I only found out because Gina’s friend, the ridiculous and bug-eyed Agnes Tuscadero, eavesdropped on her parents’ very private kitchen conversation late one night a few years ago. Apparently my father, Jed Sloane, while married to my mother, took up with a woman who they think was named Emma, who might or might not have been my mother’s sister/aunt/best friend. So the reason I don’t have a mother is because of Emma. My mother split, leaving me with Dad and his new mistress/lover/fling. Agnes’s parents gossiped and Agnes told Gina who told me that my mother left a letter saying, I know all you ever wanted was your smokes and your drinks and your whore. Well now you can have them. My life and everything in it was a complete waste of time . My mother wrote that, I presume, sometime before she left me.
    I don’t know where this letter is, and believe me, that’s not for the lack of looking. Every crevice of every drawer in our two rooms and a living room, I have scraped through, searching for it, wanting to see her handwriting, and her name. Haven’t found it—yet.
    Now, I don’t know what my mother looked like, but I know what Emma looks like, and I find it surprising, to put it euphemistically, that any man would leave home for a woman like Emma, who, with her thick ankles, square low-heeled shoes, gray stiff helmet of hair, and matronly dresses, couldn’t engender passionin a rutting stud dog, much less a male human being. She simply seems too Puritan for love of any kind.
    What’s interesting, in a purely academic way, of course, is that my father also left. I assume it was soon after my mother, because I don’t remember him. What’s odd is I do remember her, like a pale ghost with warm arms. He left and then died somewhere on the road. That’s all Emma told me, wanted to tell me; that’s all I asked, wanted to ask.
    Agnes told Gina who told me he did not leave a letter. Jed Sloane left, died, and left me with “the whore.”
    And she raised me.

    Who was my father?
    Who was my mother?
    And if Emma is no good, and my father left her, why am I still with her?
    More important, why is she still with me?
    Does she feel guilt over me? Do I ask this of her when we’re cleaning the bathrooms of the French U.N. diplomats?
    Emma, my father left; why did you stay?
    My mother left; why did you stay?
    Can you answer me as we wax the floors and cut up onions?
    If they all went away, walked away, why didn’t you walk away?
    I could not fathom