father
April 27, 2012
Father.
If you could choose to be in your father’s arms, held as a small child would be, or in a lover’s embrace, which would you choose?
Thirty years of being disappointed by men taught me that I still suffered for want of a father’s love. And so I chose him from the ones I knew, he had been a father four times. I had decided I didn’t want a sexual relationship, that would not be fatherly, I thought. I want a father’s love.
He had heard of my clinic and called to discuss his problem. I was interested only in his medical condition, lower back pain, and the lifestyle of social work and fatherhood that had caused it. But my voice, he said, my laugh had interrupted the solitary rhythm of his single man’s life. He liked that, he said. His curiosity about my personal life troubled me at first, for what did it have to do with my expertise as a doctor?
It had been a few weeks after his first call when he asked me to leave my California home to see him, to bring my mobile energy clinic to his home in Michigan. I agreed to make my first long-distance house call. I was to stay for two weeks of the summer, when my teaching work was over for the year.
I teach him meditation in the mornings, and check his chakras throughout the day, uncluttering and deprogramming them when necessary. I learn that mostly he had loved too much, had agreed to put his sons and caseload before his own health since the age of twenty-five. Had mothered as well as fathered thousands of children for nineteen consecutive years. His kidneys had carried too much and were now too heavy to bear. He had not worked for three years because of the discomfort in his lower back, treated with ultrasound waves and other modalities that only covered up the symptoms of the injury. I am to repair this damage inflicted upon his bones and organs in the fourteen days I spend here.
When we are not shopping for medicinal foods and cooking, when we we are not meditating or talking over tea and chocolate, when we are not walking alongside the small river that winds through his backyard, he fathers me. Cradles me like a child, his arms dark and muscular. I am muscular, too, but his athletic build is almost frightening, the strength of a bare-handed murderer feminizing my frame by contrast. His gentle, irrepressible masculinity, the flexibility of his temperament, a man’s protection of a woman. Gifts my father never gave me. I had told him I liked younger men, men who had not yet expended all their energies on failed marriages, childrearing, and other traumas. But I wanted the love of a father and I would accept it of him, if he had it to give, I said.
In the evenings after dinner, once the dishes are washed and the kitchen swept of crumbs, he approaches me in silence. Gathers me up and takes me to his bed, cradling me against the mound of pillows at one end. I lean against his chest and talk, otherwise motionless, listening to his responses, his low laughter.
On the fifth day of my visit to his home on the East Coast, after a few minutes on the bed I embrace him back, the scent of his male skin making me forget my resolve to love him as a daughter. And isn’t a daughter’s love for her father sexual, too? Tangled by my own heartstrings to the generosity of his affections, months of telephone calls full of undelivered caresses. To be claimed. Now.
I embrace him back, kiss his throat, my hands rubbing his chest and shoulders and stomach, the terrifying muscles pulsating with his breathing. Feel the deadliness of his abdomen — this man who could overtake me effortlessly handles me almost too gently. He presses his hands to my body, too, first tenderly sliding against my clothing and skin, then squeezing, massaging deep into me. Possessing. I can smell his desire because it is my desire, too — penetrates me even before I reach down to feel his readiness.
It is as if I am awakening from a long dream, one whose shards of nightmare have exhausted me during sleep. I curl the length of my body against him, exhaling against his cheek. Translating my signals, he makes a quick movement to place me on top of him, his gaze locking mine in place. Feeling his hardness beneath me, my lips release a sound like I am trapped. He rolls me beneath him, crushing my body against the firm bed, and I am somewhere between my body and my mind, sensation and analysis, someplace between my desire to be daughter and my need to be woman.
© 2012 Tahminah Zaman
