The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes Read Free Book Online Page B

that feels familiar, untouchable, unchanged. I am glad to be returned to something that predates me. The bathhouse is divided into ladies’ and men’s; everyone there is a million years old, dating directly back to George Washington. I imagine it is like a Swedish sanitarium; there is something deeply medicinal about it—we have come for a cure.
    Soaking in the holy antique waters is cleansing—lying on the slab of a table while an old woman kneads my flesh is equal to the moment I am in. It is the perfect escape.
    We have our treatments and then we go to the old hotel for club sandwiches and head home.
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    On the phone, Norman tells me he has something for me, something he wants to give me; first he tells me he will send it to me and then he says he will wait and give it to me in person. I am thinking it is a family heirloom, something of his, of his mother’s, something that came on the Arc or the Dove, something that the Nazi brought back, something that his father gave his mother, something that he wanted to give Ellen. Whatever it is, he never gives it to me, he never mentions it again.
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    Over the next few months, we meet several more times. We meet in hotels. We meet at Holiday Inns, Marriotts, Comfort Inns, Renaissance Quarters, in the odd spaces that are between spaces, the there that is never there.
    We meet in the lobby, awkwardly kiss hello, and then move to the glass atrium, or the inner courtyard, or the café, looking up at a surround of numbered doors, housekeeping carts making their rounds. We come from the outside and are plunged into a temperature-controlled environment where the potted plants are watered automatically, where they are rotated seasonally like crops, where everything is suspended in time—hermetically sealed.
    Ever since Norman’s comment about my clothing, I worry about what I am wearing, how I look. I continually feel that I am being evaluated. I want his approval. There is something about him that I like—the bigness of him; he is grandiose, larger than life. Sometimes it scares me; sometimes it lures me into another world, a world of men.
    There is something sleazy about it, meeting in the middle of the afternoon in these middle-of-the-road hotels. Does he think that these are safe places where no one will see us? Does he have something in mind? It is never clear to me why we are meeting in them.
    â€œYou don’t know what it does to me to look at you,” he says.
    He doesn’t mean, The resemblance is amazing, or, I’m so proud of what you’ve done with your life.
    â€œYou don’t know what it does to me to look at you.” He says it in a strange way. He is looking at me and seeing someone else.
    He never does anything to push it further but I am always thinking that he will. I imagine him saying, I’ve got a room, I want to see you naked. I imagine undressing as part of the procedure of proving who I am, part of the degradation.
    I imagine him fucking me.
    I imagine being Ellen and him fucking her thirty-one years ago.
    I imagine something profoundly sad.
    It is the strangest set of imaginings and I can tell he has them too.
    I have read about this; it is not unusual for the primal experiences of parent and child to morph—the intensity, the intimacy of the sensations is often expressed in adults as sexual attraction. But while the attraction may be common, almost expected, obviously it cannot be explored.
    He makes no mention of the blood test—the results can take eight to twelve weeks. He makes no mention of telling his other children about me. Instead he tells me about how fond he is of his grandchildren. He tells me how close he was to his grandmother. And again he tells me how Coach always used to tell him to stay in the game—never get out of the game.
    He asks me if I’ve spoken with her.
    â€œYes,” I say. “Have you?”
    He nods, yes.
    â€œShe wants to visit me,” I tell