Meeting Elise

SHE'S COMING TODAY. It's 11:40 a.m. and I can feel my ass again. I get into a kneeling position in the bathtub then slowly stand up, one trembly, lard-like leg at a time. Water runs down my chest, over my creased stomach, coalesces on my creased balls. With my right hand I reach down and squeeze them, sponge-like, until what remains in my fist is a shriveled sac of skin. My ass is burning. My head was doing okay for a while there. I flick the soggy cigarette in my other hand into the bathwater, grab the tube of lidocaine and smear some of that sweet stuff onto my rosebud.

You're a dirty old man, Olivia used to say, speaking generally, smiling that toothy, canine-sharp smile she reserved for me. It made me horny and she knew it. We used to spend half our time here, sitting in this long, deep tub, spying on the street below. She liked to watch strangers. I liked watching her. I almost demolished this apartment so we could both get our perve on. It took a binder full of expert appraisals and zoning permits before I was allowed to knock out the wall, put in a steel frame and glass-brick the whole thing back up.

It gets me a bit loose-headed, all this reminiscing. I climb out of the bathtub and take off my sunglasses. It's not so bright outside, not today. Some days it gets so I can barely even see the street, its lines and depths – cars, buildings, people – everything looks so bleached out. But not today. I light up another cigarette, avoid the mirror, ignore a wolf whistle from outside and half lope, for the dozenth time that morning, to my computer screen. I quickly scroll down through her website bio: Elise Kozlov, cello prodigy, noted for her precocious facility of technique, her inventive fingering for passagework, her grace of phrasing, etc., etc. There's a mention of me too: Henry Luff, "well-regarded neo-figurative painter" – as well as her mother, credited as "raising" her in Russia. Selected by Elena Dernova for the St. Petersburg conservatory at age five; member of Anatoly Nikitin's celebrated Cello Ensemble at age twelve; world's youngest owner of a Guadagnini. Then there it is: the solitary statement that popped up only a few days ago: "Delighted to announce her engagement to Jason Sharps."

I leave off, walk into my walk-in wardrobe. It hurts less when I take small, shuffling steps. Get your clothes on and get working. Olivia liked to say that too. But the thought of picking up a paintbrush right now makes me jittery. The order of the day, then:

First, get dressed. Something swanky for the concert, a penguin suit, probably. It's Carnegie Hall. No counting on time to go home to change after our late lunch. I run my fingers along the plastic-wrapped shoulders of my tuxedo rack: full dress, half-tailcoat, black tie, white tie ... finally I pick out a classic number and truss myself up. There I am in the mirror. Craggy, sure – heavy in the lips and nose – but not altogether undistinguished.

Just as I'm leaving I feel the compulsion-one last time-to see what she looks like. The computer blinks the photo on. Long black hair; impatient, deep-set eyes. She's mine in the strictest, most accidental sense. She's beautiful. She looks nothing like me.

***

I'M TAKING MY CLOTHES OFF AGAIN. This time for my gastroenterologist, Eric Hingess, whose patient list includes the likes of Ed Koch and Art Garfunkel – and who charges accordingly. I was lucky to get this appointment just before the long weekend.

"I may as well admit it," I tell him. "I'm nervous as hell."

"It's a natural response." He leans back in his chair, wearing a suit that looks stitched together from carpet samples, watching me as I try to undo my bow tie. Rabbit chasing the fox. Oddly, Hingess seems more nervous than me, sniffing and jerking his eyebrows like a conductor rehearsing a piece in his head.

"This is a big day for me."

"Here," he says, handing me a pill and a plastic cup. After a moment he sighs: "Valium. To relax you."

I swallow the pill. "Yeah, I'm meeting my daughter today. First time in seventeen years."

"Goodness," he says absently. "How old is she?"

"Eighteen."

The metal disk of his stethoscope against my chest is as cold as an ice cube and I imagine it melting, trickling down onto my gut, Olivia's squinting eyes above it and her tongue retracing its route. I follow the lines her tongue chooses. I shiver. The doctor's saying something.

"Your trousers too," he's saying. His eyebrows contort operat-ically. Then he sneezes. Two, three times: wet, clotty sneezes. "I'm sorry," he says. "What were you saying?"

"Hold on," I tell him. "I thought we went through all this last time." I try to stare him down. The effort is fruitless, though, in light of my last visit: me passing him stool samples, him digging around inside my asshole with his lubed, latexed, incredibly knuckled finger. It felt like he was feeding a knotted rope into my gut.

He's still watching me. I take off my patent leather shoes, unwrap my satin cummerbund, slide down my black pleated trousers and roll miserably onto the examination table. He doesn't even show the token modesty to look away. Instead, he starts talking. He talks about fecal occults and flexible sigmoids and adeno-something polyps and asks me if I've read the pamphlet he gave me.

"Yeah," I lie. "But I thought I just had piles."

"Hemorrhoids, yes. They certainly cause some blood in the stool. Today we're testing farther up."

He stops talking to sneeze again. I turn away from him, wince as he grazes the hard lump outside my rosebud, then a sharper pain, then a real humdinger:

Elise – my daughter, my baby girl – just a bloody, scraggly mess between my wife's harness-hung legs. Hideous under the man-made lights. Then a lump of flesh, stewing in sickness, pulling every possible contagion out of the air and into her body. The pain burns. Weeks and months she lay, first in the incubator, then the cot, under the watchful eyes of her mother. Her mother, who watched me as closely as her. Elise inherited her seriousness. Even before she could speak she'd look at me, unblinking, bringing me down to an accusable level, her eyes deep with understanding. I hadn't wanted her and she knew it. My lower body floods with water. It feels warm and wrong. Something's yanked out of me and my eyes tear up.

We're done, I realize. From the pain, my ass must look like black pudding. I start pulling up my underwear when I hear Hingess's voice, "Hold on there." I look over my shoulder. He's wheeling something toward me-a laptop-attached to about ten feet of evil-looking black rubber hosing.

"That was just the enema," he says, "to prep you. This is the sigmoidoscope." "You're not going to-"

"Only two feet of it."

"I want a smoke," I say. My face is salty, sopping with sweat.

I eye the hosing. Easily as thick as my thumb – probably thicker.

He frowns. Then he purses his lips and says, "All right. It'll help you breathe."

It hurts too much to sit up so, slouched on my side, I fumble in the bunched pant pockets around my ankles for a cigarette. I light it.

"Will you mind if I ask someone to assist?"

"What?" "A medical student. I want to demonstrate the procedure."

And then she's there, white-smocked, clipboard in hand, hair tied back in a bun. From sideways she's hot in a birdlike way, and I wonder refiexively if the doctor here has slipped it to her. She studies me with a detachment that verges on impudence. No way she's just some schmuck med student. It's Park Avenue- someone must have called in a favor. She acts like she sees this every day: a sweat-drenched man, naked save for his white wing-tip formal shirt, blood leaking from his ass, lying in a fetal position, shakily smoking a cigarette. Her coolness feels familiar to me.

The two of them start doctor-talking. I'm ordered to shift onto my left side. Someone lifts my right buttock, then from the locus of my rosebud the cold-hot pain flares again through the grid of my body. I can't breathe. It's okay, the doctor says. Slowly, breathe slowly through my mouth. Then he talks to Birdgirl, quick-fire, every word punctuated by a twist in my guts. The hosing goes in so deep it feels like part of it might snap off, stay trapped in there. My wobbling fingers drop the cigarette. I arch my head to look at the laptop screen, for some sign that it's worth it, that it'll be over soon, but all I see are smudges of gray and white. Large, hob-knuckled fingers pointing to them.

Then silence. The doctor and his sidekick are studying something on the screen. They mutter, speaking in Latin and percent ages. I rest my eyes. On the website photo she's got her mother's mouth. It doesn't smile.

"It's a big deal," Birdgirl says in a casual voice. When I turn to look I see it's Olivia; she's running her hands in small circles on her white smock, shaking her head at my thickness. "Of course it's a big deal. The Mayakovsky String Quartet. Carnegie Hall. Eighteen years old."

"She's getting married," I say. "To her manager."

"It's a big deal. It's serious."

"He's English."

"It's serious."

I agree with her – I'm nodding full of agreement when a putrid smell jogs me awake. Old anchovies and drain-clogged vegetables. The doctor, an inch from my face. My eyes heave into focus.

"Henry. You all right?"

Without asking permission I pull up my crinkled pants, cram my shirt into them and haul myself upright with only a slight moan. My feet dangle, toes stretched down, trying to hook my shoes. She doesn't usually come so close, so clear. The doctor confers with Birdgirl in a low tone. Then he turns to me.

"You have a number of adenomatous polyps in your colon."

"It's not your fault, Doc," I joke automatically. I grope again for my shoes.

"Most polyps are benign and the sigmoidoscope can remove them. However, the size and number of adenomatous polyps I have observed means we will have to carry out further tests."

"It's serious," Birdgirl murmurs. The doctor glances at her and she frowns, blushing.

At this point I catch on. They're not talking about my hemorrhoids. I zip up my pants.

"Tests? For what?"

He shows me pictures he's saved on the laptop. The polyps, he explains, are superfluous bits of tissue, generally shaped like mushrooms. There, he points, and there. I study the grainy images, trying, pretending to see. Then I see: the colony of little mushrooms in my colon. He's only inspected one third of it. He will perform biopsies through a colonoscope, he tells me, during a full colonie examination. He has awful breath. He will use a scythe-like wire to harvest my mushrooms, but there is a chance that malignant cells have already metastasized into my bloodstream or lymph system. I'm having trouble getting past the mushrooms. Birdgirl looks down, nods thoughtfully.

"Give it to me straight," I say.

Hingess is one of the most expensive gastro men in town and this is why I pay him: for his straight-shooting, no-holds-barred, expert opinion: "You will very likely develop colorectal cancer," he says, "if you haven't done so already."

I'm a painter. A good one, by most accounts. I look for the angles, the things that lend complexion, the joke in things. My doctor's mouth smells like a fish has flipped inside and died. I'm sweating in my penguin suit, my asshole burning from all the wrong-way traffic. There's a girl in the room who I'd jump if I could stand up, but even if I did – get this – her face wouldn't budge from the same mix of tenderness and pity holding it together now.

I'm looking, waiting, but I can't find it. It doesn't exist. There is no joke.

***

IT WAS JACOB APELMAN'S DOING that I met Olivia eighteen years ago, when I was unhappily married to a terminally passive-aggressive wife, father to a chronically ailing baby daughter, and caretaker of a career that made my domestic life seem idyllic. I'd been with him a few years – he wasn't yet the hotshot he is now, of course – and maybe I wasn't his most gracious artist. In any case, when a life-study model canceled at the last minute, Apelman kept mum (he said later he was afraid I'd take it personally) and found a girl to replace her. He didn't tell me she was seventeen years old, had never modeled before, had been plucked like an apple from Washington Square.

The girl had a boyish haircut and a botany textbook. Immediately she took charge. Without a word, she let her clothes fall to the floor and stepped out of them, as though from a pool of water. My studio – the top floor of an old box factory in Gowanus – faced westward, and as the day wrung itself into evening the sunlight streaked across the river and through my tall, rust-flecked windows, stenciling light and shadows across the room. A chintzy coral effect. The girl ignored the chair, sat on the cement, naked, on a reef of light. She sat so her knees touched, her feet splayed apart to create a triangle of dark space. I was taken aback by the perfect fluke of the composition. Then, cool as you like, she picked up her book and said: I'm ready.

For years after that day, I'd continue to be amazed by the ability of her body to hold light. Even at the end – when she was flat and wooden under the hospice sheets. I'd watch her endlessly: following her body across each foot and nook of my studio; outside, walking through Central Park, lying down, the sun caught in her skin – or in bathtubs, watching how the water refracted the light on her face. I'd paint. It felt like cheating. Even after she moved in-after my wife and daughter left – she posed for me almost daily. Then, when she was tired of being watched, she'd lick a fingertip as though to turn a page but the finger would drop below her book and dangle over her groin. This didn't mean anything special, of course. If she smiled, though – not any old stretch but a smile broad enough to reveal her chipped canines – that was it, my cue, the first infallible move in our formula of sex. Always enough – there and then – to make me happy.

***

OLD APELMAN BEAMS WHEN HE SEES ME. "The big day!" he cries out, before marching across the polished floorboards of his gallery dodging sculptures made of wire and rubber bands, to give me a hug. Apelman's a sucker for all that man-to-man contact stuff. Right now, though, I'm a convert. I can't get enough: I'm nestling my chin against his beard when he shoves me away, pats me hard on the back a couple of times and says, "You smell like the main floor at Bloomingdale's."

It's true-I smell good. Mixed with sweat, the half ounce of French cologne I splashed on this morning seems to have brought forth a chemical pungency.

"And hey, buddy, did I see you power walking just now?"

I realize, after a while, he's talking about my squirmy, gimpish gait. A new aerobic regime, I tell him. We joke around about black-tie marathons and cardiac arrests – who'll finish first – but my heart's not in it. My mind's jammed. I know why I'm here – I'm ripe for Apelman's pep – and honestly, I'm trying to follow him as he jabbers away, but in my head I'm still inside her matchbox apartment, sharing a bathtub so small we both sit chin to knee; I'm watching her eat, sloppily lips smeared with mango juice, sweet with the nectar of plums. I never thought it would be me: the painter who falls for his nude model. I love that, she says. What? When you look at me too long. Then she smiles. I drag her toward me, fend her off. Through it all, she loves hitting me. Her lips turn martial. Afterward we fall apart, marks on our bodies, smelling of fruit and mineral spirits, soap and charcoal. You're a dirty old man, she says, giving me her best dirty young girl look, steering my cigaretted hand to her lips. I leave, each time, with new bruises.

No, I think to myself, no, get with it. Stay with the program.

"How's business?" I ask.

Apelman 's looking at me funny. I take another drag. Maybe he'd been hot for her. Maybe not. He'd never married. After a prolonged period of sulking and half-veiled threats on my part, they'd both denied it.

"Better," Apelman says slowly, "if my biggest name would give me something to sell."

"Freud's up to eight months now. Per painting."

"He's a perfectionist."

"I'm a perfectionist."

"Well," he says, "that explains why you've got nothing to give me."

We both grin. We're a regular riot together.

"Listen," I say. Then I stop – I realize I've got no idea what to tell him. "Actually. I've been meaning to talk – "

He motions me toward the back office. "Hey," he says, "forget it, buddy. That's not why I asked you here." He rests his hand on my tux shoulder. "Take all the time," he says.

But I know what he's thinking. I glance at the walls as I dodder behind him: splashes of chalky-colored oilsticks on linen and vinyl, photogravures and woodcut prints – all pulled off with the impatient skill and insolence of youth. They're good. Clamoring at his door. He always had a good eye, Apelman. He's thinking of my last exhibition – when was it?-more than a year ago now: those obsessive portraits of Olivia, black-layered and liquid, how I'd worried the same lines – trying to keep in the light – before it was shut off for good. The tube running out of her mouth, two plastic offshoots from her nose and the bright green wires that led to the bright blue box pumping breath in and out of her. Disney colors.

"How are your eyes?" Apelman asks.

I blink, looking for a place to throw my cigarette butt. A few months ago, my eyes joined in on my body's general strike. Some condition that made them more sensitive to light. An ironic incapacity. Everywhere I looked, everything looked brighter – then dimmer in a bright way through my sunglasses – like the color was drained out, like I was seeing everything at twilight. Anyway, my ophthalmologist, Andrew Werner, ran some tests and found nothing physically wrong.

"It comes and goes," I say.

"We're getting old." He peers quickly through the glass partition into the gallery. A young couple is walking in. "So, have you talked to Elise?"

"Not since last week."

"Where are you taking her?"

"Picholine. Her fiancé too."

"The manager?" "Yeah." I snort." The Leech."

The young couple drag their feet as they move, heads swaying and slanting, through the gallery. Grad students, probably. As they get close to the back office, I see them glance in, eyeballing my outfit. The girl starts whispering to the boy behind a magazine. I stare back and they scurry out. The boy tries to affect a relaxed amble but he's irrelevant; there's something about that girl – I watch as she darts across the street – how, past all the glass-fronted galleries, the low brick chop shops and warehouses, she walks without moving her hips, how the cute little beret holds down her hair against the Hudson wind ...

"Still got it," Apelman chuckles. Then, "Hey, buddy – hey, you okay?"

I shrug. He reaches into his coat pocket, leans across the office desk and hands me a white, ironed handkerchief. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to blow my nose into it. For a moment I want to tell him about the diagnosis. I can't. It's clogged there somewhere, blocked by a little mushroom in my throat, maybe more than one, maybe deeper.

"It's a big deal," he says gently. "You're meeting your daughter for the first time in-for the first time, really."

I nod.

"She's an adult now," he goes on. "She's making her own decisions. A new life. And she's decided she wants you to be part of it."

It's pathetic how okay this guy can make me feel. With his smooth talking and chic Chelsea gallery I don't get how he's managed to stay unhitched.

"Henry, I'm going to tell you something." He sets his mouth in a tight line in the middle of his beard. I know this look. I'm about to be advised. And what's more – I want it. I crave it. "I know you've been having a hard time of it," he says. "I know you miss Olivia. I miss her too. You're angry." Only Apelman could pull this off, this primped wording, this deadpan goodness. He goes on in this vein – nothing I haven't heard before – his eyes so earnest he looks like a cross between a TV evangelist and a cow. He only wants what's best for me, he says, and in that precise moment I realize it's true. He's the only one. At last he stops, breathes, waits for me to catch up to him, then says, "Just don't let your anger get away from you. You know how you are. And another thing: Elise is not her mother. Remember that."

Her mother. I realize I'm wincing. It's the one thing I could hold against him and he knows it. All those years he stayed in touch with my ex-wife – the witch – after she kidnapped Elise, exiled her to Russia – all that time I was cut off from my own daughter until it was too late, then much too late. The poisoning complete. He didn't deny it. He'd as much as admitted that my letters wouldn't get through. Nothing in, nothing out. In seventeen years I'd heard from them precisely three times. The first time, four years in, when her mother hit me up for $520,000.

"It's a Guadagnini," Apelman had explained. "Made in 1752, by an Italian master."

"Half a million bucks? For a cello?"

"Nothing like this has come on the market for years. Helen's right. It's a good deal."

"She's five years old, for God's sake!"

"And already accepted, personally, by Elena Dernova – "

No one even told me," I broke in, "that she was learning the cello."

Apelman waited for me to calm down. Then he told me I was right: she was too young yet, her body too small. But I could afford it, he said. He kept his tone careful, urgent. It was in my hands, he said, to have it ready for her – for when she was ready. He'd given me the same look then as he's giving me now. Almost under his breath, he added, "You should hear her play."

So it came to pass that Apelman, consummate networker, faithful go-betweener, brokered the international deal to buy my little girl a cello half again as tall as her and fifty times as old. Nine years of nothing later, I received a handwritten invitation to attend her debut in Russia. She was playing the Rococo Variations with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. A big deal (only fourteen years old!). The invitation came in the post-not through Apelman. No return address. At the top of the page, in her neat teenage cursive, she'd written "Father." Both Apelman and Olivia urged me to go – I booked my tickets – then at the last minute Apelman, gray-faced, handed me another letter. From the witch: "Under no circumstances ..." etc., etc. She would cancel the concert if it came to it. She'd somehow spooked out the whole scheme. I canceled my tickets.

"That means laying off the Leech," Apelman says, permitting himself a smile. He leans forward and punches me on the shoulder. It's like I'm one of those enormous bell carillons and the single clapper of his fist sets off a whole chorus of emotional peals and chimes within me. He might be everyone's friend, Apelman, but he's my only friend. He looks me in the eye. Then he says what I've been thinking ever since I picked up the phone and heard her voice a week ago – no – honestly – ever since I saw her last, blanket-wrapped and pillow-sized and hot with fever on my apartment stoop – "Family is family. You might only have one shot at it."

***

A MESS. I'M A MESS. Things are a little off upstairs, I know that. That was always a lark to Olivia-now she is the lark. Banging around in my belfry. My ass is back to its old pyrotechnic tricks. On top of that, I'm sore all over. It's all the reflection. Seeing Apelman hasn't helped. The past's a cold body of water for me and nowadays my bones ache after even a quick dip.

He's right, though. I'm sitting in the private wine room at Picholine trying to pull myself together. My daughter hasn't arrived. Our table's the only one there – I called in a favor. The sound of the restaurant wafts through the hallway – low voices, laughs, the tinkling of glasses – the place, recently renovated, seems a lot cheerier than I remember. An odious young man is attending me. He's got so much gel in his slicked hair it pulls his face back tight. Traversing the harried catwalk of the front room I noticed him eyeballing my outfit; I'm at one of the most overpriced joints in town and still this kid-waiter makes me feel overdressed.

For starters, I order the crab salad with the grapefruit gelée, the spiced squab pastrami and the sea-urchin panna cotta. Then I remember Apelman's advice. The Leech might take offense if I don't wait – Brits being sensitive about things like that. How sensitive are they, though, to punctuality? I bark at the waiter and cancel the order. He smiles as though I've just made his day. For a second I'm worried his face might crack.

Half an hour later, I tell him to check the restaurant, both rooms.

"Under what name?"

"Kozlov," I tell him. Her mother's maiden name. When he comes back I tell him, "Or Sharps. Jason Sharps."

I hear a rowdy burst of laughter from the main room. When Gel-head trots in again, I tell him I've changed my mind. I'll order a bottle of red wine. I'm in a wine room, for God's sake! As I drink the room shrinks around me. It feels damp now, and smells – it smells like the inside of a janitor's closet. It smells of sickness, of dripping fluids, of saturated tissues. Forty minutes late. Fifty.

My body feels alien to me. I don't know it at all, I want nothing to do with it, I disown it. There's something inside me and it's dying – not me. So this is how it feels. Betrayed by your own body. I'd thought she lived most of her life on the surface of her skin but she'd found a way to get beneath, my Olivia. She'd discovered the flesh was hollow. I flew into a jealous rage. She left me. I begged her to come back. Who picks up a smack habit in their thirties? I thought. After fifteen, sixteen years together- wanting for nothing. Well, wanting for something, obviously. She blamed her body and so did I. She quit time and time again and then, at last, the time came when she didn't need to quit anymore.

More than an hour late. I signal for a second bottle. I know Gel-head's smirking behind his mask. I want to smash it in. I've been getting like this lately: irate at people I don't know.

"Would you like to reorder any appetizers, sir?"

No, he's a good kid. Just doing his job. I shake my head, lean over to squeeze his arm – give him some man-to-man contact – but he skips back, bumping against the wire mesh screen of a bookcase-like cabinet. The dust-rimmed clinking of a hundred bottles fills the room. He freezes, gapes at me – untrained to deal with the moment – then scuttles out.

Don't get me wrong, I like kids – Olivia was thirty years younger than me. I even wanted to have some with her. The problem is there are just too many of them. You can't throw a brick on this island without concussing one. I wish I had more restraint. But I can't help but hate how they look at me, how they don't look at me, I hate their interchangeable bodies, their mass-rehearsed attitudes, their cars that look like boxes, like baseball caps, like artificial enlargements, their loud advertising, their beeps and clicks and trings, I hate how they speak words as though they're chewing them, how they assume the business of the world revolves around them – how they're right-and how everywhere this cult of youth, this pedamorphic dumbing-down, has whored beauty-duped, drugged, damaged, pixelated it and everywhere turned it to plastic.

I'm almost done with my second bottle. All this alcohol will do wonders for my piles. Ninety minutes. Gel-head comes back in and delightedly hands me a cordless phone.

"Henry?"

As with her call last week, I feel as though I've stumbled upon the middle of something. Her voice is slow, sleepy, warm with music. Nothing like her mother's. I'm surprised, anew, by its power over me.

"We're really sorry. We've been trying you at home all afternoon." I'm untrained to deal with this; I say nothing. After a long pause she says:

"We're sorry. We can't make it to lunch. We hope you haven't been waiting." "I've been waiting ninety minutes."

The line goes muffled and the sotto voce whispering starts. In the background I can hear the vague strains of a string instrument warming up.

"I'm really sorry. It's just, with the concert – "

More hushed coaching. I look around, as though to ground myself outside her voice. Candles have been cleverly hidden in secret niches and the room glows and twinkles the colors of wine: ruby, amethyst, burgundy, bronze . ..

"We thought maybe it's best to leave this to another time."

"You don't want me to come?"

"Henry."

She can't hang up. I can't let her. I look around. How did I end up in this flinking dungeon?

"I don't mind paying. If it's money – "

"The show's sold out," she says quickly.

"Just a drink, then. I'm close by."

"Henry, I'm not sure I'm ready." I recognize the tone instantly. It belongs to the witch. I know I should stop but I can't.

"Tomorrow. There's a place in the EastVillage. No, the WestVillage. We'll have breakfast."

I hear activity on the far end of the phone line, then a muted thud, then an English-accented voice:

"Elise doesn't want to talk to you right now."

"Fuck you," I say playfully.

"Well, that's that," he says.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm a bit emotional."

"There's no need for that language."

He's right, I think. The Leech is right. I try to remember what Apelman told me.

"Family is family."

This shuts him up. So I say it again. It doesn't come out quite right the second time.

"You're drunk," he says.

"Hey, genius. Genius – can you put my daughter back on?"

"You're in no state to talk with her." There's a scuffing sound, which I recognize as the universal prelude to hanging up.

"Hey!" Clear air. I frantically search for something to say. "I've got cancer. Tell her that. Press release for you, Mr. Manager: C-A-N-C-E-R. Of the ass. Got that?" "I've had about enough – "

"Hey! Wait!" I'm screwing this up but I know there's something I can say, something perfect, something that will smooth over the past, pucker open the future. What would Apelman say? It's always been like this. It's always been me who's had to ask forgiveness.

"I'm hanging up."

"And a lot of money," I blurt out. "You know that, right, Leechy? Half a million bucks for a cello, right? There's plenty more where that came from. I bet you'd like to manage that, wouldn't you, once I'm gone? Leechy boy? Hey?"

He hangs up.

***

I WISH I HAD MORE RESTRAINT. I wish they'd taught it at school, or even before that, when I was still learning things. I shouldn't have quaffed those two 1989 Bordeaux. Let myself attempt full sentences on the phone afterward. At the least, I should've restrained myself from waiting so patiently, so long, for the two of them. Mostly, I wish I had the restraint to stop myself from doing what I'm about to do.

I throw a wad of cash on the table – Gel-head's lucky day – then go back and count it, peel back a few notes. No sense in losing one's head. Hobble through the twisty, curiously grungy hallway, through the mauve-colored, chandeliered restaurant, dodging cheese carts and briefcases, then outside. The sky's overcast. I opt for walking, give myself time to sober up. Cool down. I limp through the southern chunk of Central Park, a tuxedoed booze-breathed cripple among the mass of tourists, families and couples. Children look at me strangely. Everyone else looks away. It's crowded as hell. Then I remember – Columbus Day weekend.

I'm not sure I'm ready. What did she mean? Ready for what? To see me? Or for the concert? I shouldn't have pestered her hours before her big performance. But did that mean she'd be ready after the concert, though? Maybe she meant she wasn't ready for marriage to the Leech. A coded message. I shamble under the elms, past the hackberries and maples, lindens and ashes, deep in thought. When we came here Olivia had always insisted on teaching me the names of things. By the pond a group of amateur photographers click away at the asters. I decide to go the long way, double back later. I shuffle painfully through the crowd. Then, at the line of horse-drawn carriages, I stop, my body burning, let myself think it. She wasn't ready to see me at all. Maybe she 'd never be ready.

I don't realize until I'm a little ways down Fifth. It's the height of fall. I turn around. Central Park is in bloom, spastic with color – red, orange, green, yellow, purple, brown, gold. The asters have broken out into their annual parade of white, lavender, red, and pink. My head knows this but my eyes missed it – my poor eyes didn't see it.

I hang my head, trudge west along Fifty-seventh. Finally I get to Carnegie Hall. Focus, I tell myself. I convince the man at the box office that I'm Elise Kozlov's father. This makes me feel grubby and proud at once. Of course it's important, I tell him. He tells me where they're rehearsing, doing sound checks or something. I follow the sound to the parquet entrance of the main auditorium, push the door open and see her immediately, the black-gray smudge of four smudges on the distant stage, the one with the instrument between her legs. The one made small by her instrument. I move closer. She's just a girl in a dress that barely covers her knees. She looks like the girl in the website photo. Her face under the heavy lighting so young, yet so stern. Even the way she holds the cello is stern. I see it all clearly now.

And she's beautiful without me. I hate the young for that too. That they're assured in their beauty, in the way that only animals are assured – unmussed by the thought of death.

At the end of the piece she looks up and sees me. I'm in the half dark nearly a hundred yards away but she looks straight at me. No startlement, no gasp, no hand-to-mouth dramatics. It's me who's too stunned to do anything. Looking directly at me, she says something – her lips move – and I try desperately to decipher her words, to puzzle out a fitting response. By that point a young man in jeans and a black T-shirt glides out of the wings and down the aisle. Without touching me once, he escorts me outside the auditorium.

"Are you Sharps?"

He shakes his head. Then he looks up at me curiously. "Hey, sir, are you all right?" "Tell her I want to see her. Just for a second."

"Sorry?"

"Elise. Tell Elise – her father's here to see her." Her lips in my head, the lines of them, merging into one another. Her eyes.

"Tell her ... he says he's sorry."

"Wait here." As soon as he leaves, I slip back into the auditorium. Stand in the shadows. Then I see them onstage. The Leech attaching himself. He's a gangly, womanly-shouldered redhead. She's kissing him, her face upturned. I resent the grace of it, and the want. She's on tiptoes and both her arms are lifted up to his ears. He doesn't stoop at all to meet her lips. I feel my stomach in my throat, breath hot and thick through my nostrils. Apelman's voice in my head like an advertising jingle. I creak the heavy door open and slink back outside.

Minutes later the door opens again and Black T-shirt hands me a note. His face is insouciant now, verging on rude. By this time I don't care. My heart is hopping. I was wrong. I remembered – she looked straight at me. She wants to see me, she knows it's inevitable. I wait until he's gone before I unfold the note:

Henry,

I don't want to see you. Please meet Jason backstage after the concert (show this note) to discuss a payment plan for the Guadagnini.

***

FIRST, DRAW A BATH. Outside, light thinning into the color of piss. Everything looks like the color of piss. Peel off my jacket, shirt, pants, throw them into a corner where they squat, stiffened from starch and sweat, malevolent. Lidocaine my bloated, inflamed rosebud. Lower it – aaaaarggh – into the steaming hot bath. Then something I haven't done for almost a year: try to sketch. My fingers jiggling. I keep them out of the water, clinching a stick of charcoal, meek above the wet-splotched pad.

Apelman doesn't know I haven't done this at all since Olivia died. Sketched or painted. He doesn't know, either, that I've been seeing her everywhere. Today, though, I saw my daughter. And she saw me. Maybe for the last time. Why am I drawing? Apelman would love the idea: painter turns to art to redeem suffering. Sometimes, if the hand moves, the mind can rest. But not this time. I'm drawing to grab hold of her. If the hurt's all I have left of her, I want to keep it, keep it alive – hurting – because right now I think I need everything I have.

It was her handwriting. Unchanged in four years. She called me by my name.

It starts drizzling outside. The room darkens. Water condenses and runs down the full length of the windows, spills over the curved limestone caps. There's an exhaustion in the quality of the light. On the street, leaves catch moisture, gleam like the scales of dead fish. The gutters go black and wet.

A dot. Another dot. A line between them. I remember the last face I drew. Believe it or not, she, Olivia, was the only one. My single dalliance – through five years of matrimonial, blue-balled freeze-out. She was my risk. When my wife found out about her and blew the country, dangling our daughter from her broom, Olivia told me, "You've made your choice. Don't keep on choosing. Not every day you're with me."

Young women fuck like they're running out of time. It's like they know something. When her time ran out, I sat there, weeks, sketching her. Wondering if she could hear me, sense me, through her coma; if, when she slept, she completed a thought with each breath. An old man and a beautiful, serious young girl. I wondered how long she'd known about the diagnosis. I wondered whether – if I'd known – it would have made a difference. But all I had known was her perfect hunger, the painful playing out of her imperfect satisfaction.

At the hospice, I frightened away her visitors: mostly young people holding tight-bunched, crinkle-wrapped flowers, fuzzy toys, heart-shaped balloons. They came with nothing to say, stretching their lips as though smiling to me. They leaned over her machine-lived body with their face piercings and earplugs and iPods and cell phones and I wanted to rip all their things off, throw them away, and show them – show them – if they wanted so badly to plug the sockets of their bodies-what it was to be fixed upon that bed.

Only Apelman stayed, sitting by me as they pumped cocktail after cocktail into her polluted veins, her self-savaging body, watching me as I watched her ...

The drizzle turns to rain. Outside the glass wall, the last of the color is sucked out of the air. The streets are filthy with debris and the wind picks up papers, plastic wrappers, dead leaves – tosses them on its invisible surf. Holding my hands up, I immerse my head in the bathwater. Suddenly the plumbing of the whole building comes alive, like the massive groaning of the earth itself. I can hear the rain drumming on every exposed surface. Olivia taught me that trick.

I sit up, look out through the glass. I like the rain, how it makes monochrome of things. Even its own noise. People pass by, faces darkened under black umbrellas. Feet mutely slapping shallow puddles. Some caught unprepared: rushing arms crossed, heads bowed, as though shouldering their way out of an emergency room. Others slow down, look up, faces spotted with raindrops, mouths agape, pretending they're actually enjoying it. Chumps.

The drawing takes shape. She's looking at me and her mouth is open. Her hair so dark it looks wet. My wife's sitting on a suitcase crying. They'll be staying, she says, at her friend's place in Bushwick. In her carriage, Elise is asleep, features clouding in dream. She lets out a slight gargle as I pick her up. "Don't," my wife says through her sniffling, "she's sick." I put her back down and tuck her in. It's a relief; she's the only thing that can make my hands feel graceless. Now I see the perfect little beads of sweat on her forehead. Her body giving off warmth like a hot-water bottle. I think about kissing her but don't want to scratch her awake with my whiskers. To the dramatic sounds of my wife's surfacing, strangled sobs, I duck my head and go upstairs. Leaving them on the front stoop. Not knowing that the taxi that comes will take them not to a friend's place in Bushwick but to JFK. Not knowing that it will smuggle my daughter seventeen years away from me. But all that night – night after night – my dreams are filled with the image of her doll-small body on the stoop, burning, fevered with her father's sin.

I try to capture her eyes on the page. In my head – my mind's eye-they're stern, accusing. But then it was either-or, either-or, and knowing what I knew, feeling what I felt, how could she have expected me to choose differently? How much does a moment carry? Across a gap of seventeen years, now she shows me shame again? Blood made hard and broken to bits. On the stage, her eyes were so clear and deep and large and true. The light from them-if she had turned them fully on me-could have made even a dirty old man like me look new again.

I throw down the pad and charcoal, stand up, clean as a corpse. Olivia always got a kick out of that, standing naked in full view of passersby on the street. Apelman's right. Family is family. I look at the floor, at the drawing, her gray-sketched face made bleary by spots of bathwater. As I climb out of the bath I feel warmth dribbling down my legs. I look down and see it – for the first time – blood – in the water: suspended, its pink wisps shifting like the petals of a flower.

Here's what I'll do: Look at myself in the mirror. My face stark white, a shock of bone and skin and hair. My teeth yellow, carious. The valves of my body corroded. Get your clothes on and get working. The order of the day: Get dressed – she's coming today.

Something swanky, maybe the white-tie suit. The satin peak lapel, besom pockets, with the white piqué vest. I pad my underwear with Kleenex to catch the blood. Outside, it's still raining – I skate the sidewalk, finding my way by the light of office buildings. The streets vacant, dark as a lung. When the wind is up it sounds like the trees talk to each other above the noise of a crowd.

I'm late. The performance has already started. In fact, it's almost over. The ticket clerk repeats this before he trots out his supervisor. I tell them who I am. There's a buzzing in my head – the sound of a fluorescent tube – as we argue, and then, finally, I have it in my hands – my ticket.

Side balcony. The signs leading up and up. The carpet is red-plaided and oil-darkened and feels like freshly mown grass – each step sinking in a bit. My footsteps leave damp craters. Music, all the while, audible from behind the neoclassically reliefed walls, floating to me as though from a distant boat. The stairs get steeper. I imagine I can hear it, her centuries-old cello. By the time I reach the top my legs feel weak, hollowed out, flush with hot bathwater and whiskey. My cummerbund is up underneath my nipples, my collar like wet cardboard, every seam in my shirt stamping itself into my skin. Sweat spurting out of every furrow.

"Sir," the gilt-brocaded usher begins, but I stare him down. I recover my breath. Then, slowly, I lean open the heavy door. The sound sudden, heart-flooding. She's onstage, the four of them forming an almost closed circle: playing as though only to each other.

The people in my row half rise, half brace, anything to avoid touching me as I sidle to my seat. My ass smarts when I sit down. There's a buttress blocking half of my face. I imagine the Leech in the front row, the hatchet silhouette of his head, his gangly legs all stretched out. It doesn't matter, though – I can still hear her, the sound of her cello, full, sonorous, rising through my body and slowly transmuting the pain into warmth, the carry of it through the auditorium, and it's as though my body is without substance and I'm dissolving into the sound she scratches out of her contraption of wood and steel and hair. The concert hall the space inside my skull.

Rain and sweat puddle the floor at my feet. It's getting hot. The music goes on in its slow, gorgeous, devastating burn. When I lean over for a better view my neighbor recoils, initiating a long sequence of public sighing. Now I see her, my Elise. Her head remains still: her bowing neat, precise. Her hair gleams burn-white and black under the spotlight – she's floating out there on a skiff of light – my daughter, my baby girl. A severe beauty all the way through her. My heart hitches underneath its tight cummerbund. I see her. She has everything she needs. She has wrung all my weaknesses out of her strong, straight body.

Get up. I get up. Light in myself, brittle – unable to hear, hold, any more – I breast, woozily, the row of half-risen knees. On the hallway stairs the applause starts up. It sounds like rain. Then, amazingly, there are shouts, stamping feet. I leave the building and go outside-into the brindled rain, the rain become iridescent – into the steel-lamp night. Above the world's dead weight. It's raining outside. I catch my breath and watch as the crowd comes out. She's coming out. She'll be out any second now.

Then I see her – in the walk of a young boy, in the languor of a twenty-year-old – uncommon economy for someone so young – no, there – at fifty, on a billboard, heartbreakingly beautiful and advertising the power of business solutions. Eyes gray, smile gas-blue. A deeper run of colors in her cheekbones. No, no-the darkness, through rain, is deceptive. The crowd empties out of the theater like a last exhalation. I count her as she passes.

It's raining. There she is. Stooped and somehow swanlike, waiting under the corner streetlight. The light drawn into her skin, soaking it, making it refulgent in the black mine of city. A serious young girl. Wind splaying her dark hair. No, I never had a shot-not really. Move, out of breath, toward that shore of light. Catch her and she'll smile, teeth showing-draw it for me-this matter of memory, word by word. Dirty old man. Wait up, Olivia, I'm coming. I see you now! Are you ready? Wait up for me!