It would have been an average father-daughter spring break in Paris if not for that courtyard party we attended 13 years ago. The first time I saw Audrey there, I thought she was sexy. Turns out, my father did too. That night, somewhere amid the clinking silverware and Charles Aznavour playlists, our futures were being quietly rewritten.
Audrey, in her mid-30s, was the epitome of grace and artistic flair, an award-winning production designer for the opera, and the definition of French-Vietnamese beauty. Her hair was held up by two red chopsticks, and the rest of her was fitted in an orange satin dress. This was her normal attire.
Then there was me, mid-20s, jeggings, who thought day-drinking at the Louvre was peak culture. Yet somehow, over clams au beurre and enough chardonnay to drown a fish, we hit it off.
Under the stars, we shared her pack of Benson & Hedges — along with an actual dinner plate, to make more elbow room at the table. She is always the woman everyone in the room is looking at, I thought, including me.
A year later, outside of a Starbucks on Queens Boulevard in New York City, when my father told me he was having an affair with a woman he met in Paris, my first thought was, “Oh, I know just the one.”
Audrey had been promoted from the chic French friend to the other woman. My second thought was more of a realization: My father said he was “in love,” and for the first time in my know-it-all life, I realized I had no idea what that meant.
In the tapestry of my fragile self-image, I fancied myself as a champion of love. I prided myself on open-mindedness. At the time, I was grappling with the complexities of my first lesbian relationship. I was living with my girlfriend and simultaneously watching the landscape of love unfold, revealing its obstacle course of triumphs and tribulations.
When I met Audrey, she struck me as a role model. She was a bit older than me, talented and fearlessly herself. Recklessly herself, even. A force of nature with unwavering confidence, my idealized notion of womanhood. In the labyrinth of my own journey navigating femininity, sexuality and autonomy, she was a north star. Until I learned she was sleeping with my married father.
Before long, in the name of love, my father left a 30-year marriage, and my 14-year-old brother became the man of the house as my mother struggled to take care of her own dying, live-in mother and geriatric collie.
Before Audrey could move to New York, life took another turn. My father moved into my college studio apartment, that my now ex-girlfriend and I had abandoned, and in a twist of fate, had to undergo a major open-heart surgery.
With Audrey still overseas, I became the woman who helped him through his next chapter. I joked that he only made me his health care proxy because everyone else in the family wanted him dead. Things were broken. Our home was broken. My mother’s heart was broken.
I blamed Audrey. Maybe she didn’t know how bad things were. How could she? She wasn’t there. Maybe I just needed to explain things. Good communication can right all wrongs, right?
I pulled out my laptop, cracked my knuckles and wrote Audrey the most scathing email I could muster, a dramatic soliloquy of anger and threats. Subject line: “Just So You Know.”
And I wanted her to know. Along with a medley of profanities and childish one-liners, I wrote, “Here, we are real, you are not. You want his life? You want to deal with me? I don’t think so.” I closed with: “Take care. Leave us alone.”
I was sure that would be the end of her. I would take care of my father, and his heart, in all respects. We would forgive and forget. My father and I didn’t hold each other hostage to our sloppiest mistakes. He didn’t judge the men or women I brought home, or me when I needed an abortion. He was a shoulder to cry on, an alibi for a drunken night out, a best friend when I had none. He assured me that love is complex and follows its own logic.
So, apparently, did Audrey. My email did nothing. Rather than leave our life, she moved into it.
My father and Audrey filled their new home in Chinatown with antiques, tropical house plants and silk lanterns. They called each other “Madame” and “Monsieur” and had matching floral kimono bathrobes. Then they got married. Their happiness was undeniable, cute. And my father had never seemed more alive.
I was in a new and loving relationship, too, and expecting my first child. I was learning to accept love in all its forms. But I still couldn’t accept Audrey. Sure, Audrey and I found our détente. For 10 years, we were like two cooks trying to share a kitchen without making eye contact.
There was a recognition of each other’s complexities and strengths. But this wasn’t the budding of a great friendship. She was too young to be my stepmother yet too married to my father to be my friend. But things were OK — until something we couldn’t control threatened to take him away from us both.
When I Googled the hard-to-pronounce medical jargon from my father’s biopsy results, it said he had five years to live. Likely less. My father has never been a healthy guy, but this was different. He was dying.
The proposed way forward seemed as brutal as the disease: a forequarter amputation of his right arm, shoulder, shoulder blade and a pair of ribs. This “solution” felt both medieval and deeply personal, and it wasn’t even guaranteed to work. Suddenly, Audrey and I were both clinging to a man we couldn’t imagine a life without.
On Nov. 10, an unseasonably warm day in New York with pink skies, Audrey and I waited 11 hours for my father to wake up missing a quarter of his body. After seeing him, I cried. Audrey hugged me — no, held me — like never before. Like we now had something that only the two of us would ever understand. Part of me still hated her, but in those hours, she was all I had.
My father moved into Memorial Sloan Kettering, and basically so did we, learning to adjust oxygen, stop IVs from beeping and deal with phantom limb pain. Somewhere in the time it took for the hospital’s holiday décor to morph from turkeys to tinsel, the relationship between me and Audrey changed.
Our routine became punctuated by whiskey sours at a dimly lit bar three blocks from the hospital where we became regulars, not just to the bartenders but to each other. We were scared, sad and overwhelmed. It was a lonely place to be.
Correction: It would have been a lonely place to be, except we were together.
I thought back to my email to her, telling her to leave us alone. I felt fortunate not to be alone.
One midnight, after a long day at the hospital, Audrey and I sat laughing about something under strings of hanging lights on her makeshift terrace. After finishing our second bottle of wine, we said good night. I cozied up on the pullout couch with my daily lobotomy of “Gilmore Girls” reruns. Audrey floated into her bedroom and closed the door.
A second later, my phone pinged. A text from her read: “Love you.” Red heart emoji.
“Oh yes, I love you too,” I replied. “Very much.”
A few days later, we sat at our bar, which smelled of candied fruit and Clorox, or maybe we did. Between comfortable silences and slow sips, we planned. Who would go to the hospital tomorrow morning? Who would go tomorrow night? Who would call the caseworker? Who would call the billing department? I chewed my last cherry.
“Did the results come back?” I asked.
“No, not yet,” Audrey said. “They should be back in a week or two.”
I wanted to ask what we would do if they came back positive, if the amputation didn’t solve the problem. But fear of manifesting a fate stopped me. Instead, I said, “What will you both do after all this?”
“After this, we’d like to move to Paris. Find a small apartment there, and live.”
I swallowed hard. I was always so scared of her taking him away from me, but I found myself hoping they would get to go.
And maybe they will. In July, my father, with Audrey, drove my car all the way across the country with one arm. Then he went off to a yoga retreat in Jamaica.
This is a man who lives.
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