Daddy Dearest

Chapter Thirteen

Melody

I blew him a kiss.

Jesus, why didn't I just offer him a blowjay along with the tea? I really hope I didn't come off thirsty as hell or some creepy Lolita, desperate for a Daddy figure. Ugh, I'm such a dope. I don't even know how I managed to issue that invitation. "Oh please, notice me, sensei!" Pathetic.

I was sure he was going to say no. After I asked him in, he looked like he was going to have a heart attack. I know that's why he practically tore off the car door in his haste to get away from me. He probably ran all of the worst case scenarios in his head, all of them ending with Mrs. D taking the kids and leaving him. On top of getting fired and never finding a teaching job ever again. Poor guy.

I watched him through the windshield with his back against the hood of the car and his tall, lean figure silhouetted in the pale moonlight and thought about the Man on the Moon. He was an important figure from my childhood, even though he's just some guy from a story that Nancy made up to soothe a lonely motherless child who couldn't sleep at night. She used to tell me that I didn't have to fear having nightmares because my mom and the Man on the Moon would watch over me while I slept.

I imagined that my mom was the princess in the story and the sorcerer managed to get her to the moon, after all. Every night for a year, I would ask the man to please send my mother back, even for just a little bit, because my dad and I really missed her and things around the house were super sad all the time. The man never gave my mom back, though, so I stopped talking to him. Because seriously? Screw that guy.

I don't know when it was that I started conflating Mr. D with the Man on the Moon. Probably around the time I realized that his novel "All Things Fade and Disappear" was about my mother. The dedication was in Welsh, which Mr. Davenport's grandmother spoke, and as far as I could make out, it says, "My lost flower, will you be waiting on the mountain?" I've never asked Mrs. D just in case it's a sore subject with her because the book is obviously about my mom. I can't figure out the reference to the mountain, though. I've often wondered if it refers to my mom's favorite novel "Soul Mountain" by the Chinese writer named Gao Xingjian. I read it when I was ten. I encountered some racy parts, which I skipped because I was sure God was looking over my shoulder the whole time.

"Soul Mountain" is about a man who tries to escape his humdrum life by going out to nature and seeking the legendary "Lingshan" (which means "Soul Mountain"). He eschews the very idea of a regular life. He doesn't want to settle for a dull job, a dull wife, dull kids, and a dull house, eventually leading to a dull death. He aims for solitude, but during his travel, he also meets up with another wanderer just referred to as "She," an emotionally troubled woman with her own set of problems. The two of them bond, get intimate with each other, and "She" forces the traveler to look within himself and tell his own story. One day, "She" disappears and the traveler is left to wonder whether she was a real or a hallucination stemming from his self-imposed isolation.

Mr. D's novel echoes the same themes of a person's need for solitude, recreating oneself after devastation, finding one's own stories, and realizing that a person needs other people to live.

I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Mr. Davenport to have been in love with my mother while she was married to my father, his best friend. He must have believed he was being a traitor to my dad just for feeling the way he did. I love Mr. D's depiction of my mom. Sometimes I think my memories and impression of Meredith Z. Plum were shaped by B.C. Davenport.