Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman

high round forehead, kinked hair drawn into a bun, bee-stung lips. My father told my mother she is only a few years younger than me, but I imagine her much younger, a teenager almost. I've managed to strip her of the ice skates, but the outfit remains, tarted up for purposes of fantasy, no pale pink bodysuit underneath to simulate flesh, but rather actual skin peeking through shredded spangled miniskirt and thong. When I imagine them together, my father and his Russian whore, what I see them doing is some kind of pornographic paired triple lutz. I suppose that if the girl's name had been Nadia or Olga, my fantasies would have involved back handsprings and the uneven parallel bars. The most pathetic thing about it all was that my father claimed Oksana loved him. He told my mother that this girl thought that he was special, that she didn't think of him as a client but rather as her lover, her boyfriend, the man she would marry if only she could. He told this to my mother as the sun rose on a crisp autumn day, the trees a riot of color, the air redolent with the coming winter. Then he went to work, and my mother called me. I took the bus from Port Authority and I was there in a little over an hour, so that I could hold her hair while she vomited. I helped her pack his bags, and I crossed my arms and stared her down when she tried to change her mind.
    â€œWe've been married for thirty years,” she said. She was standing in her bedroom holding a stack of wool sweaters in her hand. Her housedress was buttoned wrong, one end sticking up by her ear, and her small, narrow feet, blue-veined and pink-polished, were bare.
    â€œTwenty-nine,” I said.
    â€œAlmost thirty.”
    â€œAnd how much of that time was he cheating on you?”
    â€œI don't know.” She put the sweaters into a suitcase, layering tissue paper between them.
    I pulled the paper out, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the trash can. I pulled open my father's underwear drawer and, holding my breath, dumped the contents into a carryall.
    â€œHe says this Russian girl loves him.”
    â€œYeah, right,” I said. “And were there other Russian girls? Did they love him too?”
    I stood over my mother while she sent my father an e-mail telling him where his belongings would be, and then I drove the suitcases to a Ramada Inn on Route 17, not too far from his office. I took a room in his name, putting the charge on my mother's credit card and forging the signature I had perfected in high school. When I got back to the house she was standing in the front hall, still in her housedress.
    â€œI don't know if I can do this, Emilia,” she said.
    I stood in the doorway, the keys jingling in my hand. “I will never forgive you if you take him back, Mom.”
    My mother stared at me, her face spongy and pale. “Oh,” she said.
    She swayed on her feet and I saw that this was too much to bear. I saw, too, what she would never say: that no matter what I felt, no matter what I imagined, my father's betrayal had been of her, not of me.
    â€œI'm so sorry,” I said, and rushed across the room. I wrapped my arms around her and she sagged against me, soft and moist, as if desperation was leaking from her, dampening her skin and clothes. “I had no right to say that.” And I had no right, of course. But it is true that I never would have forgiven her, and she knew that as well as I did.
    Now, sitting in a Soho café across from Simon, I cannot get an image out of my head. It is of my father and a young Russian stripper. I see his naked back, skin loose and gray, pocked with brown birthmarks. I see her smooth and unlined face over his shoulder, bored and anxious as she watches the clock above the door; she will be punished if he takes too long. I know I have a very active and vivid imagination, torqued and twisted by too much television, a steady diet of gothic novels, and an Electra complex worthy of twenty years on