Golden Gate

They had been early for the movie, and so enjoying the soft air and the evening light they had decided to walk a few blocks up and down the hills. Dusk was coming on quickly, and with it a clamminess that slid under the bridge and unfurled itself upon the city. They had time to kill and no particular destination, but nevertheless Joe still walked as if driven by something, some insistent wind at his back. His father, meanwhile dawdled. Walking with his father was like taking a dog with Attention Deficit Disorder for a walk on the L.A. freeway. Joe would look behind him and see his father staring into a shop window, or shuffling slowly forward while craning his neck sideways at a passing point of interest. While Joe walked as if he was in possession of the city, behind him his father exhibited the vague uncertainty of a visitor, every now and then stopping in his tracks to peer at something quizzically—an old car, an architectural detail, a storefront sign. He seemed to scrutinize these things with the same interest and bewilderment that an early hominid might exhibit when faced with a television set. If Joe pointed something out he immediately regretted it, as his father would cast questioning glances up and down the street, like a blind man searching for the source of a noise. Joe, having moved on, would suddenly realize his father was not there and have to interrupt his forced march. Occasionally someone would say something to his father in passing, some street comment, in fast, idiomatic West-Coastese, or the babble of a crazy person—usually something better ignored or unheard. Joe wasn't always close enough to catch it, but he understood the tone. The comment would waft over his father, who smiled vaguely as if receiving a benediction from an angel.

It was difficult to walk slowly enough to stay abreast of him and Joe continually felt a nagging sense of guilt for letting this annoy him. This was not an entirely new development. For perhaps the past ten years or so Joe and his siblings, when together, had joked about the comic value of their parents, which derived from their seeming to become increasingly disconnected to what the younger generation considered reality, and this, in turn was related to them getting old. When away from home this tendency of their parents was always more apparent, because novelty of any kind loses its attraction as one ages and takes on the attributes of challenge.

But the changes in his father were more apparent to Joe when he hadn’t seen him for a while. encounters were rare, as they had been lately, and Joe did not like how they made him feel. Earlier that day Joe had noticed his father looking at the pavement and furrowing his brow as he walked, apparently measuring his footsteps, like a child avoiding the paving stones.

“Dad. What are you doing?” he had asked, his tone incredulous, impatient.

“I can't seem to keep up with you. Its real strange, I don't think your legs are longer than mine but you must somehow take bigger strides.” Joe shifted his weight between his feet, and mumbled something inaudible as if to hide the fact that he had noticed this too. Was it possible that his father had sensed his irritability? He was aware that he was on edge, was manic, even; he’d felt that way for several months now. Ever since the anti-depressants had kicked in Joe had been unusually energized—climbing mountains, swimming enormous lakes, kicking the living daylights out of dummies in the gym in Tae Kwon Do practice. God forbid he imbibe coffee. He resolved to make an extra effort to be relaxed, and take the rest of his father’s unexpected visit in his stride, whether it was longer or shorter than his father’s.

Before his father’s visit Joe had been discussing parents with a colleague. Something his colleague had said had stuck in Joe’s mind, the idea of a role reversal.

“Its like the Hopi Indian wheel of life,” said the colleague. “You get looked after and then, sooner than you know, its your turn, and you shoulder the burden of care.” For the first time ever Joe was experiencing what this would be like: his father was getting old. What would this mean for him? He wondered whether he was ready to help his father in the ways you have to help old people, and something made him bristle at the prospect. When his father had informed him that he was coming, several weeks before, he was overcome with an intense panic. He had always had the feeling that, in his own inscrutable way, his father was watching, taking notes, processing. He knew that no matter how relaxed, unconcerned and even unconnected his father seemed, there was always that edge, that paternal imperative, as Joe philosophically characterized it, which meant he was scrutinizing his son, his environment and his life.

Joe had not seen his father since informing him almost five months before that he and Gabriella were filing for divorce. They had been separated for a few months before this, but this legal activity brought with it an acrid taste of finality. It was an admission that whatever probationary quality the separation had, it was now over, and it had failed to bring about significant change. Now the next step was inevitable—"Irretrievable Breakdown" was how the legal papers referred to it. While the language unsettled him, sounded like a crisis situation in the Oval Office, it was true enough: whatever had been lost would not be found again.

Gabriella had also been unsettled. Two months afterwards, at a party in Oakland, she had overdosed on tranquilizers. Sitting in her hospital room several days later, she told him how she had felt like a satellite which had lost its orbit and gone careening off in a random direction, no attachments, nothing. It was strangely exhilarating. When she told him this he had looked down at his scuffed shoes and realized how ineffectual he was, how powerless to prevent harm to others. Her confiding in him at this point wasn’t really confiding, either, because the tone of their conversation had changed forever, it had lost all spontaneity. They talked to each other like one person in a rising hot air balloon talking to someone on the ground. Not shouting or rushed, but calmly, the words carried off by the breeze.

Joe’s father knew how they had been everything to each other for nearly six years. What he didn’t know was the way in which the fabric of their relationship had slowly begun to rend, exposing a gaping wound which neither of them knew how to heal. He hadn’t seen this, and Joe hadn’t wanted him to. Nor did he know that they had tried to have a child. After a year or so of attempting to conceive, Gabriella had become pregnant. She had a miscarriage in her third month; “Like a fish” she had said of the event, “that you think you have caught and then it slips through your hands, and goes back to the sea.” That child was a mirage representing the vain hope of their success, for by then it was too late. Joe remembered the dream she had one night while they were staying with friends north of the city. In the morning they drank strong black coffee in delicate white cups, the only ones they could find in the sparse kitchen looking over the hillside onto the buoyant Pacific. In her dream she said there had been two children: a little girl who was like her—noisy, effervescent and endlessly chatty. Then there was a little boy with dark hair who took after Joe: quiet, meditative, and watchful. Now it seemed to Joe that they had failed at something natural and easy, turned their backs on it and walked into the alone.

Without having to actually say so, it was clear to Joe that his father had consciously decided to spend some time with him, in his own businessman’s way allocating “resources” where he felt they were most needed. This gesture of his father's was so silent that Joe found himself caught between anger at his father's inability to be straightforward about emotional needs, and an immense gratefulness at his tact (whether intentional or not). He sensed that while not necessarily frank about it, his father knew something, in his silent way of knowing, about the nature of this pain and the human needs that cause it. But beyond this was a feeling that the father expected to find the son battered and bruised. This subtle drawing of attention to Joe's emotional state unnerved him. He wasn't sure he really wanted to play victim to his father's offer of emotional support. Usually, when he went home to Tucson, the rest of his family would be there, creating distractions from each other, like the members of two football teams marking each other, canceling out the attention directed toward the center. But now here he was, alone with his father, face to face, the noise of his brothers and sisters silenced. With family it is all too easy to blend into group anonymity, surrender to the communal myth, lay down the self on the altar of togetherness.

Opposite a store-front with flashing red pink and yellow lights, Joe made to cross the road and head up the hill. His father stopped momentarily and looked up at the neon sign promising “Live Girls,” then came to stand with Joe on the curbside. Joe didn't want to express much interest in this phenomenon with his father, who was smiling: “Live Girls,” he said. “As opposed to dead ones, do you think?” His interest was merely semantic, Joe observed with something like relief—divorced from the reality of the topless bar. He crossed the road, and standing on the opposite curb now, looking back at the figure of his father, Joe caught his eye and grimaced, feeling like a traitor. His father smiled absently, looking left and right, waiting for a break in the roaring line of cars, and his smile transformed itself into a grimace as he walked stiffly out into the road. The air was full of dust particles, of gathering darkness. He turned away, not wanting to look at the older man.

They reached the top of the hill, and in between them and the murky swell of the bay were the flitting, haphazard lights of the town.

“Jesus. Its so steep,” said Joe with awe. “You could almost jump off and land in the bay from here.” He turned to look at his father from the side to gauge his reaction, wanting him to feel the size and beauty of the spectacle.

“Quite something ain't it, Dad?” His father nodded, eyes absorbing the information, and there was unmistakably a sense of peace about him, an appreciation of this great city and its majesty.

When they turned to go back down, Joe noticed a sign on the side of the road, lit up in orange neon: “Miss Priscilla, Palm Reader, Psychic.” He nudged his father in the ribs, grinning at him: “How about it Dad, a quick palm reading before the movie?” His father, while not exactly experimental, was usually pleased to accommodate his son. And this was something on the order of a fairground attraction, something that fathers and sons could experience together. They stepped down into the small room that occupied about half of what appeared to be a basement apartment. The space was about fifteen by twelve, with a simple desk at one end, partnered by a chair opposite, plain and wooden. On the desk were some pamphlets produced cheaply, and a card-holder displaying Miss Priscilla's open-palm logo cards.

As soon as they entered the room, a short dark-faced man around sixty came out of an adjacent room and asked them, more with his body than his speech, what they wanted.

“We would like a palm reading,” Joe said. “You do palm readings, don't you?” As he said this a small shabbily dressed woman of about the same age pushed her way past the man into the room, clearly taking charge.

“Come on in, sit down. D'you want the full reading or the short one?” she asked with a heavy Spanish accent. Joe caught a glimpse of the room in back from where the two people had emerged; it was dimly lit and had cushions on the floor, in the corner was some sort of an altar with candles burning on it. These people clearly hadn't been expecting much business this evening. The man disappeared back into the dark room and drew a curtain across the doorway. They followed Priscilla to the desk and she squeezed herself behind it. Joe noticed she was wearing furry slippers. She reminded him of the old Indian women who hung out at the diners and dime stores around Tucson where he had grown up—grandmothers, loitering around the family business.

Joe sat in what he assumed to be the “hot chair” while his father positioned himself to the side of the desk in another.

“How much is the short one?” he asked.

“Ten dollars.” She didn't smile much, but she had a reasonably kind face. It was well wrinkled and had a gray pallor to it, unhealthy, even. She was dressed very cheaply, in nylon clothes, and smelled of smoke. Joe's father was quiet and sat in his chair smiling and looking at Miss Priscilla attentively, his thinning brown hair mildly tousled by the wind, his tie lose around his neck, his business brogues clean. Between them was the swirling vortex of time, space and difference, unbridgeable.

“I think we'll go for that, then. Dad, what do you think?” His father looked at him, still smiling.

“Yeah, uh huh that's fine,” he nodded, and returned his gaze to the palm-reader.

“First of all,” she began in a grave and business-like tone, “you must know that all what I tell you here is general. I can't tell you any specifics. I can't tell you any major event like when you die, how many kids you gonna have, nothing like that. What I see here is what I sense from round your aura. I see things around you and I see things in your palm. Sometimes it takes a second visit to find out what's going on. You have any questions?” She sounded to Joe like a policeman reading someone their rights. He was looking at her with what he feared was an ironic smirk.

“How do I know you're not gonna make it all up?” She looked at him without smiling.

“You'll know.”

His father was still smiling his benign smile. Joe looked at him and realized that this smile, with which he was so familiar, was a kind of mask.

“So you go first?” She asked. Joe looked at his father and shrugged.

“Sure.” She looked at Joe's father and then at him.

“Is it O.K. he be here? You must know I might tell you some personal thing?”

“Oh no,” Joe was quick to reply, grinning, still not acceding to the possibility that anything she had to say would be in any way resonant. “He's my father.”

She smiled for the first time. “That's what I mean.”

Joe's father's face as he looked at it was still inscrutable, chuckling. For all of his bravado, Joe experienced a gentle swell of disquiet and berated himself silently for being taken in by the woman's cheesy theatrics. Extending his right hand, palm upward on the desk, Joe looked at Miss Priscilla's weathered face and thought about how she fit the stereotype of a witch, psychic, medium.

“You are the man, you like to be in control. You have a lot of ambition and you like to know where you are going. But I see a darkness around you. You have a dark aura. Maybe you not well, your energy is low, maybe you not well, inside. I see you father, he worry about you.”

She turned to Joe's father. “You don' have to worry about him. He be alright, in the end. You just gotta let him be, let him go.”

Joe grinned conspiratorially at his father who laughed off the advice gently as if saying, “the last thing I do is worry about him.” She went on, rapid fire this time.

“But you lost your way somewhere. I see you looking for something. You need to fill a hole, something that is missing in you. I see you have suffered much already. You have been hurt, and you are slow to recover..?”

“Fuck you,” Joe surprised himself thinking. “It’s just a game, a charade.” She looked impassively into Joe’s eyes. In between she mostly shut her eyes. It struck him that she didn't appear to be looking at the hand at all. When she looked in his face he felt obliged to offer some sort of response to her visions, as if she was asking for verification, as if the process was one of teasing out the true feelings, together, one leading the other. He raised his eyebrows and nodded occasionally, and maintained a steady grin that became increasingly uncomfortable, as if a bag was hanging around his jaw.

“You have deep feelings and a sensitive spirit, and this spirit is easily wounded. You need to find a way out of this darkness, it is like you are swimming in a black ocean and cannot see the shore.” Joe thought of the vermillion swell of the bay and beyond it the frightening, humorless Pacific. She was looking at him now in a manner that was almost imploring, asking him if this was so. He didn't know what she expected from him; he shifted his weight on the chair, looking out of the basement window at the sidewalk and dusk.

The face of his father was illuminated by a desk lamp that gave off a dimmed greenish glow. It made him look older, emphasized the baggy sacks under his eyes.

“You don't know what you want out of life and this is making you unable to do anything satisfying. I see that you are about to make a big change in your life, or you have already made it and this is causing you pain, you don’t know if its right or not." Joe’s head was growing heavier with the weight of her voice, spinning out her list of observations, like an indictment.

“Someone is following you. Do you know that?” This was news to Joe, and took him by surprise, seemed a little specific, and a little too bizarre; he had an image of a shadow, an energy, some unspecific, amorphous thing lingering around street corners, hanging out by garbage cans. A man in a panama hat, perhaps, or a cartoon dog with a rain-coat and a cigarette. Maybe she threw this in to spice things up a little, to titillate tourists, to make them feel alive, exotic adventurous.

“I can't think of anyone who would be following me!” He laughed and looked at his father. But his smile seemed different now, sympathetic.

“You got any enemies? ‘Cos there is someone who follows you or who wants something from you.” Joe protested that this was highly unlikely, he didn't lead such a secretive, dangerous life, this sort of thing didn't happen to him. As she went on his mind led itself to Gabriella in her rising balloon; who was following who?

When she stopped and turned to his father, Joe stood up and sat heavily on the other side of the room. He suddenly felt a strong urge to leave the dark little basement. But he didn't move. Instead he sat in the semi-darkness and listened to her use the same introduction again with his father, allowing his grin to occupy the space between him and Priscilla.

“Because you're the man you need to be in control...you have had a long and full life and have experienced much pain and suffering. But you have been successful in your business and you have still some successes ahead of you.” She spoke without expression, blurting out assertions and observations with apparent lack of interest. Joe thought of the whole process as a kind of prostitution: she engages with you intimately, but simultaneously keeps a professional distance; you pay your money, and leave the little room while she welcomes another stranger into the close confines of her insight.

“Your wife is a good woman, but she doesn't always satisfy you.” She looked at Joe's father with almost a mischievous stare, then continued, as if she was unwrapping a gift. “You had an affair some time ago, you got hurt and promised yourself never to do it again.” Joe raised his eyebrows at his father who chortled, brushing it off, exhaling through pursed lips. It occurred to Joe that she was pulling stereotypes out of a hat. A young man with his father, under thirty-five, bound to be going through some kind of a hard time, with jobs or love life, or any number of things. As for his father, what were the statistics of sixty-year old men who had had affairs in the past? She was hedging her bets.

Miss Priscilla paused and looked at Joe as if to confirm that he was hearing this. “You did have another affair, though, with a friend of the family who was close, for a long time. This ended with much heartbreak. It caused both of you much pain and it was difficult for the two of you to go on seeing each other. You are with your wife now but things are not so good. You are having a problem with sex, yes? She looked up at him, one sexagenarian to another, as he laughed it off, again, apparently stoically unmoved by any of these revelations. She grinned again, and it seemed as if there was an understanding between the two of them, equals in some way, initiates in the world of psychic secrets. Joe wondered momentarily whether his father's inscrutability was protecting him from a rough time, or whether Priscilla was as absurd as she appeared.

It didn't really matter whether or not she had made these details about his father up; for Joe, her comments gently pried open up a hive of possibilities. He had suspected his father of having an affair when he was very young, seven or eight, even. There was a close friend of the family's with which he had always sensed his father was unusually intimate. He had experienced the same suspicion about his mother too. He didn't know whether his parents were still having sex, and if so, how it was. In fact he didn't want to think much about it at all. Looking at his father now he felt a deepening sadness for him. It was very unlikely that either of his parents had sexual experience with more than one or two people in their lives. His parents seemed to love each other, but he knew that it could not have been the most compatible of unions.

“You have been very successful in your business life, but I think that you wanted more from life,” Priscilla continued. “It did not lead you where you expected it to. You are now making an important deal and you must watch out. There is danger ahead, someone is looking to trick you. Be careful who you rely on for friends.” Joe's father nodded sagely, then looked at Joe, passed air through his lips making a hissing sound, and raised both eyebrows, almost as if mimicking fear at the words of the old woman. Joe could see that the street outside was dark, occasional footfalls of passers-by reverberated in the subterranean room. He had a picture of himself and his father seated in this basement on top of the hill with their wizened fortune-teller leaning across the table conspiratorially.

She leant back abruptly and announced the end of the session.

“I want you to come back in a few days,” she said, looking at Joe. “Maybe next week. We need some more work; I see there is something happening with you that maybe you need help with.” She looked almost maternally at Joe, as he stood to pay her and make his escape. He fumbled in his pockets, assuring her that he would return, wanting to tell her that she wasn't a psychiatrist and that she hadn't told him anything about his future, which was, after all the point. He didn't have any money on him, so he asked his father for the ten dollars. Characteristically, he only had a supply of twenties, one of which Joe took and offered to Priscilla.

“I don't have change,” she said. Joe was somewhat taken aback.

“What, you don't have any money here?” He said. She shrugged and said something about never keeping money in the shop. Joe was increasingly anxious to leave her shop and regain the fresh air of the street out side. He couldn't help suspecting that the old gypsy was taking them for a ride, assuming they would just give her the twenty, casually tipping her one hundred percent.

“I'll run out and get some change,” Joe said and headed for the door.

Outside in the dark the street looked empty. It was not a busy neighborhood but there was a promising light a few hundred yards down the road. It was a liquor store, Joe observed, as he came closer, and on reaching the door saw that it was closed. On the other side of the road was a laundromat. He ran across the road, wiping a light sheen of sweat off his forehead and saw that it too was shut. He was determined not to let Priscilla pull off such a scam. He wondered momentarily what she and his father were talking about, and noticed that he was unusually agitated. It wasn't just Priscilla's monetary shenanigans, it was her unfair revelations, his father's affair, his dark cloud, and the knowledge that it would, any moment, be he and his father alone again, face to face with this knowledge, these possibilities, this newly-opened realm of truth hitherto delicately covered by the silt of twenty-five years of details.