IF I COULD TOUCH YOU by Andrew D. Payton
The unusual call came in early spring. “I sad lately,” my father spoke into the empty space. It was late and I was living in another part of the country. His calling at all was unexpected; he hadn’t called without reason in all the years since I’d moved away, but the admission of weakness was even more surprising. Not that he is the hard and macho father of long and morose novels, but expression comes with such functional difficulty that he rarely attempts it. Savant-like in his government job as a computer programmer in D.C. but almost incapable of navigating his PC, he speaks and writes like an intermediate level English-language learner. My mother blames his speech impediments on undiagnosed ear infections in his early years, but other behaviors lead me to believe he lives somewhere on the low end of the autism spectrum. “My friend she sick,” he told me. I didn’t ask what friend, but assumed some lover from another age – one of the girlfriends before our mother about which my siblings and I speculate. Then we were silent and then we spoke of my life far away.
The next I learned anything of this friend, though I didn’t yet connect it to the call, was when my father started sharing pictures of a woman on Facebook. Image after image – she was a middle-aged black woman (my family is white and the only black people my parents had ever known were colleagues and the parents of my and my siblings’ friends, so I reasoned this wasn’t some forgotten relative or old friend) and her pictures were of backyard parties and graduations; they were pictures typical to most of the older generations on Facebook. She appeared a smiling, congenial woman who might have lived for her close and small family. Her name was Audrey. At first I imagined my father had confused ‘like’ and ‘share’, but then the pictures came with captions he had written. “Miss you always” and “Goodbye sweet woman” and “I see you in heaven.”
For the last few years my father had been spending more and more time online. At first he connected with aging cousins and old classmates. Then he played Farmville and watched episodes of The Andy Griffith Show or Magnum P.I. on YouTube, though to date he still hasn’t mastered the functions of full screen or pause, leaning in to see the screen within a screen and letting the video run while he fixes himself a snack. He bought himself a laptop and sat at the kitchen table in the hours between his office and sleep. He developed a tic wherein his head would jerk sporadically to the left whenever he concentrated on the screen. Later he discovered IMVU, an online metaverse of sexy 3D avatars. Standing behind him I studied his alter ego: a tall and thin man in a black tux and sunglasses with long salt-and-pepper hair. He took his avatar to night clubs, to house parties. He paid real money for fake shoes. He attended weddings and Catholic mass, though we’d always been a Protestant family. He slow-danced and grinded blondes in short skirts and drank whiskey, all while chicken-pecking his terse and often nonsensical chats to the droning beat of pop songs.
My siblings and I agreed it was strange. It was sad. We joked at his expense in sight of him, confident his failing hearing obscured our laughter. We mimicked his head twitch and his one-finger typing and our mother shook her head in frustration when she passed through the room. He never said anything in response to our indirect criticism, but he didn’t share the details of this online world with us either. He had lived a long and unaccomplished life, I told myself. His knees failed him, his back failed him, and there was a cancer in his prostrate. He was, I thought in the steady burn of my late twenties, slipping into a willful death. I said nothing to him. I forgot. I prepared to move again, this time even farther away and out of country.
Before leaving, on a final visit home, I learned from my brother that our father had seen a woman – twice, once in D.C. and once in New York. “What’d they do?” I asked my brother.
“He took the train to New York a few months ago. He was there for a few days.”
The prospect of our father having a physical affair confounded us more than his online life. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to be angry; our parents had been living without romance at least since our childhoods. Our father slept on the living room floor and our mother covered his side of the bed with cat toys and the unpaid bills of their great and mounting financial debt. Never had I found the two in conversation more in‑depth than the perfunctory exchanges necessitated by co‑managing a household. Once, years ago in our old neighborhood, a door-to‑door pastor asked them if they wanted to renew their vows, and I remember how strange it felt to see them facing one another, holding hands, speaking directly in kind, sober voices. “I do,” they said. You do? I thought. Almost like the dusty picture that sat on the mantel above the television – the one with the dress and the tuxedo; the smiles and the flowers; the two hands laced together and the wedding ring my father seldom wore.
We didn’t imagine – my brother and I – that our father was capable of a purely sexual affair. If anything, he had made a friend, his first in many years. We were happy for him in a way, sneaking away to see this New York woman. We imagined him with this stranger hand-in‑hand in Battery Park. We speculated about what she might see in him: was she kind about his strange manner of speaking, in a way our mother had never been? did she mind his non-sequiturs and the moans he made while walking? had she seen his explosive anger, heard the under-the-breath curses he showered on himself every morning as he made his way through a 40‑year-old routine? was she patient with him? did she touch him, this so rarely touched man?
Still I thought him strange and lonely. Every night he hunched at his computer, ignoring the living humans at his side for this digital world. On the morning I left for Slovakia for a yearlong position teaching English, I woke to find him at his computer and I watched as he watched his avatar slow dance with the avatar of a woman in Australia. “Are you horny?” the woman in a red dress asked.
“What that mean?” my father asked me.
“Who is that?” I asked in disgust.
“She in the game,” he said.
He drove me to Dulles International.
“Okay,” he sighed. He popped the trunk.
“I love you,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. We hugged in a manner neither intimate nor awkward – it was merely our bodies against each other for a moment, embracing as if by chance, as if we used some form beyond touch and word to communicate and neither of us bothered to wake that distant function. We spoke again a month later, when I organized a Skype call with my mother a few days after his birthday. They sat on the living room couch. He was only half in‑frame. I learned nothing of the progress of his cancer or the slow deterioration of his body.
Then, in April of the following year, I met Paulina. She was a university student in the small town of Cotija de la Paz, Mexico. She sketched landscapes and learned about wild medicinals, she had a big Catholic family, and she laughed with her whole body and swam and biked and ran in the evenings. The first time we spoke she pretended to poke me in the neck and she saluted me a goodbye. When I closed the Skype window I felt an enormous silence in my kitchen. Outside the Slovak spring was cold and rainy and the communist-era blocks of flats stood inert and heavy against the dark sky. She had sat in a room full of light in the Mexican afternoon. The curtains behind her had billowed with a wind I couldn’t feel.
We met casually enough, on a website designed for language exchange partners. I’d just gone through a break‑up, not as catastrophic and existential as one two years prior, but disorienting nonetheless; and so, I wasn’t searching for love but just a native Spanish speaker. When we spoke we shifted between our languages, taking turns as student and then as coach. When the conversation was in Spanish, she held the power to laugh at my mistakes and tell complicated stories and ask involved questions; and when we switched to English, I did the same. We talked about our travels and our ideal futures – we both wanted houses at the edge of things, we both wanted gardens and families, we both wanted to see more of the world, and we both loved to read, to hike, to understand and explore. At first we arranged weekly video chats, with the expressed purpose of improving speaking abilities, and then we friended each other across platforms to text and share music and pictures until we were speaking an hour or two every day. I knew her schedule – I set a clock on my phone to Mexican time – and I would leave bars and parties to see if I could catch her when she got off work. Hours passed as I drained the battery on my phone.
We talked about religion and painful break‑ups. We talked about our fear of being alone and about how beautiful it was to walk quietly through the forest. Sometimes we miscommunicated and I misread her Spanish and she my English, but as the weeks moved forward I learned her language and I memorized the verbs and constructions and expressions she depended on most. In our video chats, when we forgot that our initial purpose was language learning, we spoke in a Spanglish hybrid – the conversation moving fluidly and as needed, our only goal to understand and to be understood.
I sent her my poems and short stories and she showed me her drawings and the stationary she designed. In a few months’ time we were dreaming of each other, we were describing our embraces, speaking of places in the world we might meet, ways we might shape a future together. Still I had never seen her – still I didn’t know what she smelled like or how it might feel to have her in my arms, but I daydreamed the hugs and the closeness, and as I traveled through Europe I pictured her at my side in every city – on the beaches near Lisbon, over the bridges of Budapest, and in the lively squares of Krakow. She sent me pictures of the green paths by her house, the view of town from her roof, the morning skies and selfies with her nieces and nephews.
I returned to D.C. midsummer without a plan. My year in Slovakia was over and for the first time since leaving for college – eleven years before – all my things were gathered into one house. I had no dorm room, no apartment states away, no girlfriend’s parent’s garage, just the house of my late youth. I spent the first few days cleaning – pitching old t‑shirts and drafts from grad school papers, stacking the bookshelf two rows deep, organizing hiking boots and camping gear, finding corners of the house for my bicycles and kayak, pots and pans, and sorting through and preserving the currencies and identification cards I’d collected as a student and driver and employee and library patron of so many scattered worlds.
For the years I’d been away, my father had used my old room as his base. He traveled light in his own home, however, and had migrated with only an alarm clock, a few books, one drawer of clothing, and an assortment of combs and pocket change. These he collected with an apology at my arrival as he resumed his stay on the living room floor. A few days into my cleaning I discovered a notebook. It was spiral-bound, cheap, and worn. On the cover my sister had written her name in black marker and the first three pages appeared to be notes from a lesson on U.S. women’s history. Further in were my own scribblings: among them an angry poem to an ex‑lover and a series of observations written in an unsteady hand that I had clearly made while drunk or stoned or hallucinating in some form, probably on a weekend home in my college years. After more blank pages came my father’s handwriting, which every member of the family recognizes immediately. He writes in a combination of capital and lower case letters, his spelling is atrocious, and he pushes his pen hard to the paper, leaving dark ink spots and a brittle and warped finished page.
The first few entries were prayers. In them he asks the Lord for strength and for blessings, for patience and guidance. To anyone who grew up in the drone of Sunday mornings at a Methodist Church they will not seem profound, merely reorganized and regurgitated. Then a series of short messages begin between “D” and “A,” which I knew immediately, though my siblings and I all have names that start with A and my parents and all my aunts and uncles have names that start with D, that this was a correspondence between my father and Audrey, the dead woman whose pictures he had shared on Facebook more than a year before. Each letter is dated and time stamped, and as I read I began to understand that they were transcriptions from online messages, maybe from e‑mail or Facebook, ones he had probably deleted in an effort to hide his emotional affair.
When the transcriptions begin, Audrey is already sick.
“I hope you be better,” he says.
“I am here in the hospital and I am thinking of you every day,” Audrey tells him. “My boys came home to see me but I am thinking of you and your sweet voice.”
“I remember your hand,” he says. “It is so soft to hold and your face is beautiful and you are my sweet baby honey.”
Sometimes Audrey responds to my father’s messages within minutes. Other times she takes days. The transcriptions go on for pages and pages. They share dreams and events from their days, but mostly they speak of longing for each other.
“I am so worried,” he says. “I know you are sick and I pray every day God keep you here on earth.”
“I am so tired,” she says. “It is difficult to remember the days, and sometimes I can’t remember how much time has passed between doctor visits and phone calls from my boys. But I always wake up thinking of you. I remember when you came to see me in New York. Just to walk with you and see your beautiful smile. To touch your hand. You are my love and soon I will be in heaven and I will wait for you there.”
“Today I write you a song,” he responds. “And now I sing it for you:
This is Audrey’s last message to my father: “If I could touch you, oh if I could touch you.”
My father went to the funeral. My mother told me this when it happened, at how outraged she was that her husband had disappeared to attend the passing of a stranger. Her interpretation of the event seems to end at anger; in speaking about it since she expresses neither suspicion of infidelity nor compassion for his loss. At the time I had considered it such a peculiar and lonesome thing to do, I too offered little sympathy. It was in New Jersey and he took a few days off work. He drove there alone and rented a hotel. I imagine he was some strange white man in the corner among a small black family, a man no one recognized by face or name. The woman in the casket – Audrey – a woman I will never meet but that will almost certainly be the last love of my father’s life. As her sons and grandchildren, her siblings and daughters-in‑law, her coworkers shuffled in to pay respects, I wonder how much they felt they understood about the interior life of this woman. Did they know that on her death bed, she felt so alive and moved by love – not just for them, for the life she had spent years building – but for a man who was by all accounts a stranger, cities away, a man she had met only twice, a man with whom she had shared only two long afternoons and hours and hours of screen time?
What remains most amazing to me is that the potency of love can be so great as to stir a heart nearing its end; and that though reality can be such an impossible thing to bridge, we persist with hope and longing, even for things invisible.
I find work in my city. Nothing that pays enough to get me out of my parents’ house, but work enough to keep me from descending into debt. Paulina spends her days working in her mother’s fabric shop and studying for her classes. Now we have been speaking every day for six months and we have made tentative plans to meet in the winter. She will fly to Tijuana and I will fly to San Diego and I will cross the border to her. But the tickets are expensive for both of us. I look at tickets to Guadalajara, to Mexico City, but still they are expensive and the risk is terrifying. I tell myself to be more critical of this love. I tell myself that to quit my job, no matter how unsatisfying, and to quit my city and to chase an encounter with a woman I’ve never met is foolishness, is irresponsible, is a surefire path to emotional and financial poverty. But still we talk; every day we talk.
She tells me she has applied for a visa to the U.S. every year but it never comes up. We dream of a life together in Canada – her in graduate school, me teaching – but we are unsure of how this would work, if it would work. I joke about a green card marriage – the meaning is blurred in translation. The truth is that we don’t know if we will ever meet.
“I was thinking,” she texts in Spanish, “who would tell you if I die?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I would probably learn from Facebook.”
“If you die,” she says, “I wouldn’t be able to visit. I wouldn’t even be able to get the visa.”
“Why are you thinking of death?”
“I don’t want to die before seeing you.”
“I don’t even know how tall you are,” I say.
“I’m 157 centimeters,” she says.
“I’m 183 centimeters,” I respond. Google tells me she is almost a foot shorter than me. “You wouldn’t even reach my chin,” I write.
“Jajajajajaja,” she says, and then she sends an emoji with one eye closed and a bright pink tongue sticking out. I send her an emoji blowing a kiss and a heart. She responds with a blushing emoji.
I look up from the phone and I am sitting at my desk at work, smiling to myself. Soon I will eat lunch alone at my office desk. I will stand in front of students and teach them about researching for argumentative papers, about evaluating source material, and about the importance of writing bibliographies. They will watch me stand in the fluorescent light sweating rings into my armpits and then I will walk across campus to the parking lot and I will drive home, listening to the news of the world and its wars, and then I will cook myself dinner, pick up where I left off in a novel, and I will go to sleep and I will wake up alone and my family and my friends will know that I pass these days alone. But there, on the dresser, my phone is blinking a steady blue light.
“Buenos días Mr Andrew!!!!” Paulina has written. “I hope you have the best day!!!”
In the kitchen my father reads the paper and I crack eggs into a pan. I have seen this image hundreds of times in my life, maybe thousands. He shuffles the broad sheets. The coffee gurgles. He wears his black dress slacks and a white t‑shirt which soon he will cover with one of his many button-down shirts and a tie. I have never spoken to him about Audrey and I never will. I don’t know how to explain that I understand, that I won’t be upset about his loving another woman, that I found his private thoughts and I let myself invade.
I go over and put my hand on his back and stroke his shoulders. He radiates warmth, as he must have just come from the shower. Beneath this exterior is a rich and complicated man, an emotional man in a landscape of loss and hope; and somehow, I don’t know if he can sense it, but it is as if we are touching for the first time – we can offer each other no direction, but there is a deep forgiveness and compassion that passes both ways. “You’re a good boy,” he says, reaching over his shoulder to grab my hand.
Andrew D. Payton’s nonfiction has appeared in Bayou, South Dakota Review, South Loop Review, and The Rumpus.