He never told us, not one of us, what he’d done. He never gave any of us an opportunity to understand him.
Even before the accident, our father had been a practiced dissembler, routinely allowing significant falsehoods—such as the fact that he was engaged to, or even in love with, Mandy Bernstein—to go unchallenged. Before he killed her the main reason for this was that he did not want to hurt Mandy’s feelings; after he’d killed her it was to try not to compound the pain of her family. Also, it was far easier to simply agree when people made certain assumptions, and everybody made the same assumptions, for good reason; Mandy had not only been devoted to him but had been willing (indeed, happy!) to have sex with him in his college dorm room (this was the early ’70s, after all, when a lot of nice girls wouldn’t do that). And actually, it wasn’t at all impossible that the two of them would have stayed together, married, and made a wonderful go of things. Why not? You only had to look around to see men who’d settled for far less than Mandy Bernstein! But in love, as he himself and at least some of his own children would later experience that—no. The truth was, he had never felt such a thing, and half disbelieved anyone who claimed to have done so.
Anyway, dissembling wasn’t the same as lying, especially when its purpose was to spare the feelings of the bereaved, of which there were so many, including, as it happened, Johanna Hirsch. Our mother was careful never to ask Salo about Mandy, and she obviously believed that his heart (his heart!) could never be entirely hers anyway since it must always belong, in some part, to that poor, lost girl. Also, Salo gradually decided, even a lie wasn’t an egregious lie when you simply lacked the mechanics for a certain thing (say, doing four-figure sums in your head, or performing a long jump of over ten feet, or feeling a deep connection to another human being). There were many such mechanisms our father lacked, a few of which he regretted far more than an ability to really love the woman he had supposedly intended to marry (or indeed the one he actually did marry). He lacked any musicality, for example; that was a disappointment. He lacked a kind of easy friendliness he could see in other people. Finally, and especially after the accident, he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air. On it swirled around him as he struggled to right himself, and sometimes fought a powerful urge for it to simply stop. That was the biggest deficit of all. That impacted everything.
Salo’s pathetic physical wounds resolved so quickly they were embarrassing. Within weeks he was back in his dormitory, back in his lectures and seminars, though he avoided the people he’d known. He limped through his classes and passed them without much effort (or much distinction), and that summer flew to Europe on his own and meandered. To the strangers he fell in with (as one does, on trains or at museums), he gave only basic information: New Yorker, Cornellian, future banker, and did not volunteer the harm that was now at the center of his existence. He wasn’t in despair; he was just tumbling, perpetually tumbling, relentlessly at the mercy of that terrible weightlessness and the betrayal of gravity. No one could conceivably understand that, so what could be the point of telling them?
He began his trip in Rome and drifted north through Milan, Geneva, Paris. He didn’t mind being alone, though it was clear that the packs of young people, hitching or traveling by the new Student Rail Pass, were a little mystified by him. A tourist their own age and obviously affluent—he slept in hotels, not hostels—traveling alone? But of course he wasn’t always alone. He was fine with meeting the people he met. He was content to buy them meals—he could afford it; why not?—or a ticket to some tourist site that could not be missed. And if they were heading somewhere next that sounded no worse than anywhere else, he often went with them, because there was no place in particular he wanted to be, so what did it matter where he was? When the world is tipping beneath you and you are tumbling even when you are sitting, even when you are sleeping (especially when you are sleeping), any place is the same as any other place.
All this, like every other private thing, he would tell only one person, who would one day tell us.
In Bruges he tried cannabis for the first time, even a little bit hopeful that it would help, but it didn’t. In Amsterdam he met an art student in a café, and he had dinner with her and even went to bed with her in a flat she shared with a sculptor and a state-registered heroin addict, both amiable guys. Her name was Margot and there was an art exhibition in Krefeld, in Germany, that she wanted to see, so Salo folded his long legs into her brown Peugeot and drove east with her. When he showed his American passport at the border the guard looked sharply at him and held that look, and abruptly the hairs on Salo’s arms stood up. It hadn’t occurred to him that it wouldn’t be innocuous, this trip. This crossing. The car was waved forward, and Margot drove on. It was his first time in Germany.
Krefeld was not so far from the border. Margot was talking about the man whose work she wanted to see, who had once painted soup cans and bananas but was now making movies of people staring or sleeping. She seemed surprised that our father had never heard of the artist, but he told her about the sort of paintings he’d grown up with on the walls of his family’s New York apartment, the low-country landscapes and portraits of jolly women and smug, prosperous men. He did not tell her that some of those paintings had been donated to his university the very month he’d applied for admission; possibly he’d understood how crass, how outlandishly American such a gesture would have appeared to her. Instead, he turned to watch the country—this dreaded country—run past, and marveled at how ordinary it seemed: grocery stores, car lots, playing fields with soccer games in progress and parents watching on the sidelines. He thought about these same towns and fields and roads at the time of Joseph Oppenheimer, our mythic ancestor, and at the time of Goebbels’s Jud Süss. He thought about why anyone would paint a banana, and what you’d have to paint it with to make sure the paint didn’t peel off, and he wondered why a film of somebody sleeping was art. He didn’t think it was worth asking Margot about either of these things.