So I have three choices: I can lie and say I never had children. Untrue, twisted, and a week later, the woman on the other side of the table is going to pick up my books in my home or her bookstore and see a dedication and/or that photograph and say, “What the fuck, over?!”
I can reply, “I have a daughter, but we’re not close right now.” And she will ask, because of who I am and what I do and the kind of person I date, “You don’t really seem like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be close to his own child. What’s up with that?” And then she will draw the story out of me piece by piece, question after question. (As you may understand, I’ve been through this hundreds of times.) Or I can just cough up the whole bloody thing on my own, knowing it’s coming out no matter what anyway.
This has had the kind of effect on my romantic and friendship lives you might expect. Two stories, out of hundreds I could share:
Spring 2008, a few years after Sofi did what she did. Boulder, mid-day, I’m walking downtown on Pine Street from my home just east of downtown proper to have lunch with someone. A beautifully landscaped and gardened front yard appears on my left as I’m walking, behind a white picket fence, and it’s so exceptionally gorgeous I pause to gander.
After a beat, a lissome red-headed woman, maybe 40, the gardener herself, stands up amid the splendor, noticing me and causing me to realize she’s there. I admire her handiwork, a flirtation ignites immediately and accelerates symphonically and mutually for a few minutes. I realize I’m about to be late for my lunch appointment, and I give her my card without the slightest doubt she will be in touch shortly and we will live happily ever after. (I have short term memory loss about the Sofi story in moments like this.)
Two or three hours later, I get back to my desk, and there’s an email waiting: “Oh, Brian Walker — I’ve heard of you.” I sigh, write back, “Do tell.” Most people wouldn’t say another word, but she’s a marriage and family counselor and does me the kindness of relating her experience. She tells me that about six months prior, she’d walked into a secondhand bookstore, Red Letter Books, that existed for decades on Pearl Street downtown. She was with friends, a couple, and they were looking for something, she was not.
Waiting for them, she fell into conversation with the man who owned the bookstore, and within 90 seconds, she told me, unbidden by anything at all — her friends were not searching for one of my books, say — he began telling her a florid story about the supposed enlightened prince of Boulder, Brian Walker, who wrote these beautiful spiritual books but turned out to be fucking his own daughter.
I did not know or ever meet this fellow. He did not know me. It should not have to be typed, but there was never, ever a scintilla of truth to what he so enthusiastically shared as gospel. Let me put it in writing for eternity: if there was ever anything even vaguely sexual about my relationship with my child for so much as an instant, may my bones be ground by Satan himself until the end of time and beyond. If there is no Satan and I am not to have an eternal set of bones which could be ground were anything about that rumor even remotely true, may God Herself reconfigure the universe and time to create Satan, my eternal bones, and a horrifying array of grinding instruments. This will not occur because no such thing ever occurred. (Sofia did tell me, on the day she came to my home for the last time in forever, that her mother and Tess had made every effort to get her to suggest such a thing to Judge Sandstead. She described her refusal as instantaneous and absolute.)
That was my last interaction with the red-headed gardener. I never know whether I’ve said goodbye to yet another prospective romance or friend because the person imagines I must’ve done something terrible, men and the times being what they are — I would certainly have to consider that in any story of this nature told to me, and perhaps lean in the direction of suspicion, men and the times being what they are — or they are just creeped out, as any sensible person is, about any hint of a conversation about things as awful as people molesting their own children. They may believe my account, given Valerie’s lurid background and my general comportment and some other things, but they just want to be far, far away from what they’ve heard. They don’t want to contemplate it ever again. And they go. Virtually everyone.
In the gardener’s case, I had the sense that she understood I hadn’t done what was rumored on every block in Boulder for years. It seemed more like she understood, because of her profession, that I was likely going to be a wreck for a very long time or forever and not a great candidate for her next or last love. In any case, we said goodbye and that was that.
The second story: Spring, 2013. I’m living in Laguna Beach, in a beautiful second story apartment by the ocean with a spacious balcony on the street side. I’m sitting out there in the sun one day with my computer in my lap when a Mini Cooper pulls up and parks on our side of the street, below my balcony, across the lawn. Visible to me in the driver’s seat, sun upon them through the open window, are a long and lean and tanned set of legs. Responding to my biological imperative, I hurl the laptop aside, descend the stairs, go abreast the Mini and initiate some inane conversation through the window about how the driver, who is as lovely as her legs in every way, likes the car (sorry, best I could do in the moment).
We like each other, have dinner the next night, fall quickly into bed, experience tremendous delight on that and every other front, become a daily item. Long, long afternoons here, with the sound and scent of sea caressing us as we caressed one another:
About three weeks later, without a word, she disappears. No email, no text, no phone, not one word. Just gone, ghosted, done and dusted. She was divorced, the single mom of a 13 year old daughter. I’d never met her kid, all our dates began and ended at my house, but by this time I knew the drill.
We never communicated again until a few years ago, when she wrote me an email, apologizing profusely and confirming my understanding. She said the Sofi story just sat on her mind, and she reacted, anxious about the daughter I’d never laid eyes on. I know it was a lie, she wrote, I’m so sorry I let that get to me, I’m so sorry I sailed on the very nice things happening between us, you were so smart and funny and kind and ever so tender and generous in bed, please forgive me for hurting you as I did and for doing it for so awful a reason.
Thank you for those experiences, daughter I saved from a half dozen of Valerie’s firm appointments to abort you, and for all the others. Some day, if you like, and you have a couple of uninterrupted years to listen to them, I’ll tell you them all.
I have learned to live as a largely solitary individual. My parents never wavered. My immaculate dog Sasha was true.
For years, they were more or less my only real friends on Earth. A very few people stayed in touch, mostly at a quiet remove. Today some who were close to me in the years before Sofia went out for breakfast one day and never returned are back in my life, to a degree. But mine is not now, and never has been for eleven and a half years, a remotely normal life. My daughter understands every bit of this.