My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  He didn’t say anything. He just got a face of pure rage and walked away from the table. My mother offered to take me instead, and wait around until the event was over. When we got home and my mother put the key in the door it turned back. I thought it was a ghost. She turned again and it turned back. She realized, before I did, what was happening. “Richard!” she said, pounding on the door. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “She’s not coming in until she learns to stop being a spoiled brat!” he said.

  “Come on,” my mom said wearily. “It’s late. Just let us in.” Again she tried the lock and again he turned it back.

  “I’m not kidding!” he shouted. “No one’s coming in!” This went on for about five minutes and then my mom took me by the hand and walked me across the street to Nina and Larry’s.

  She explained to Nina what was going on, in hushed urgent tones, and then told me she’d come and get me. I sat at Nina’s kitchen table and began to cry at the shame of it, at the shame of being child to someone insane. “It’s so embarrassing,” I said.

  “All parents go a little crazy sometimes,” she said, squeezing my hand, but I didn’t believe her.

  A little while later my mom came over and picked me up. She made a comment to Nina like it was a big joke when we all knew it wasn’t, and then we walked over. The house was quiet and he wasn’t in sight and when I went downstairs the bedroom door was closed. I went into my bedroom and lay down on the bed. My mom came in and I asked what he was so upset about. She said, “He was hurt by what you said about his clothes. You know how he gets.”

  “What should I do?” I said. “Does he want me to say I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t think he’s in the mood right now,” she said. “But if you wanted to write something down you could.”

  And so I wrote a long letter of apology about how spoiled and awful I was and how sorry I was for hurting him and how I’d never do it again. I slipped it under the door and in the morning he came in and said, “I overreacted,” got all choked up, and walked out. We never spoke about it again and from time to time when I would remind my mother of the story she’d swear it never happened.

  AS soon as I got home from Raoul’s I went to the bookshelf and pulled out Powell: Six Screenplays. If I could just find one tiny piece of evidence in one of his movies that he and Rachel Block were meant to be together, then I could present it to him like evidence and he’d have no choice but to take me back. I knew I could make him happy. All I had to do was make him agree.

  I opened to Knock for Greenberg, the one about the ailing landlord who got nursed back to health by his home health care worker. The climactic scene was the one right before Rosanna Arquette and Ron Silver made love for the first time.

  GREENBERG

  (waving Constanza away)

  I can get into bed fine on my own. Go home to your husband.

  CONSTANZA

  I live with my mother. Lemme help you with that shirt.

  He eyes her hungrily as she approaches. She opens his first button, then his second, and runs her finger over the scar from his heart surgery.

  CONSTANZA

  Does it hurt when I do this?

  GREENBERG

  (without irony)

  I can barely feel it.

  CONSTANZA

  (massaging more intently)

  What about now, Mr. Greenberg?

  As Constanza strokes Greenberg’s chest, he opens himself to the possibility of love. This feeling hits him like a lightning bolt and he reexperiences the pain of being alone for so long. He sobs hysterically, like a woman on the rag, but then locates the man in him. He seizes her and kisses her with enormous power and an erection that could tear the roof off a building.

  CONSTANZA

  I been waiting for this moment my whole life. You got the biggest heart of all the guys I’ve known, and trust me, I known a lotta guys. What I’m trying to say is, you kiss good, Mr. Greenberg.

  GREENBERG

  Call me Izzy.

  I wiped the tears from my eyes. Powell was a romantic; I knew it from his words. He didn’t really want to cut me off. He’d just done it because he was afraid. All he needed was for me to be tender, the way Constanza had been to Izzy Greenberg, and then he’d soften up and tell me what a huge mistake he’d made.

  His phone rang three times and the machine picked up. “The chill of fall is upon us, easing summer into the far reaches of our memory, forcing us to look toward the inevitable onslaught of the winter holidays with a mix of optimism and dread.”

  I cleared my throat. “Hank? You there?”

  Nothing. He was probably screening but I’d already said his name so he knew who I was; I couldn’t just hang up. “I just—wanted to say I’m sorry. I was definitely overcritical with you about the pitch. It’s my family. They’re driving me crazy.” I hated my tone, the need in it. I should have practiced what I was going to say, written some talking points.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry you’re having such a tough time with your ex-wife. I just wanted you to know you can call me. I mean, we don’t have to stop being friends.”

  What was I saying? We were never friends. We’d had sex on the first date. This was revisionist history, the kind that made a person come off as completely deranged. I had to hang up before it got worse. “So do you want to have coffee tomorrow? I was thinking I’d go over around nine. Anyway, give me a call.”

  I hung up and hung my head. I was the dumb-dumb of dumb-dumbs, the imbecile of imbeciles. I’d called to smooth everything over and wound up asking him out. I didn’t sound like a sweet Puerto Rican nurse. I sounded like an insane neurotic Jew. Maybe right at this very moment he had another girl over, this mysterious Jennifer, and they were laughing their asses off at the deranged groupie filling up his digital tape. I shoved the book back on the shelf and pushed it as far back as I could so I wouldn’t be tempted to open it again.

  EVERY morning for the next week or so I went past D’Amico, looked for Powell, and walked out when I didn’t see him. I went back to drinking my coffee by the park even though it was turning colder and I had to sit outside at the table, holding my newspaper down with two gloved hands.

  Liz’s apartment that week was eerily quiet, even though the supermarket giveaways never returned. I told myself the silence meant they’d stopped, that Rosh Hashanah had miraculously given them a conscience, and the next day they’d ended it. Unfortunately, as with all pipe dreams, it was only a matter of time before the ugly truth came out.

  One night on my way home with some takeout from my favorite restaurant, the Fountain Café on Atlantic, I saw Liz coming out of our building. She was wearing a black form-fitting blazer with high black boots and a miniskirt. I ducked around Boerum and waited till she crossed.

  When she was halfway down Pacific, I followed, keeping my eyes on her round perfect ass like it was a compass. She walked down Pacific to Hoyt past the community garden, which in a lifetime growing up in Cobble Hill I had never seen open. At Atlantic Avenue she turned right toward the Williamsburg Savings Bank. As we kept walking the neighborhood started to get blacker; the antique shops and women’s clothing stores, high-end furniture places and galleries started to shift into seedy bodegas and charity clothing shops.

  We passed the strip of antique stores, the flower place with my absolute favorite name, Flowas, the chic women’s clothing shop that sold overpriced T-shirts. Halfway between Nevins and Third she opened a door and disappeared. I ducked into an entryway so she wouldn’t see me as she turned, then waited to see where she had gone.

  It was a seedy bar I’d never gone to before, with a sign that said “Studio Tavern,” which sounded to me like a compromise after an argument over the name. There were neon beer lights in the window, with Christmas lights around the perimeter. If I hadn’t been so concerned about finding out whether he was in there I would have paused for a moment to appreciate the grungy beauty. I squatted down and duckwalked over to the window, my nose just barely above the
ledge. There weren’t many customers, just a few Hispanic men in their sixties sitting together by the window.

  My dad was on a barstool, and his arms were wrapped around Liz’s skinny waist. Her hands were tight around his neck and he was scooted forward so his groin was pressed right against hers. They were kissing, his mouth opening and closing rhythmically like Maggie Simpson sucking her pacifier. When Liz pulled away she put her thumb on his mouth to wipe off the lipstick.

  He patted the stool next to her and she sat down and crossed her legs toward his. He grabbed the seat part of her stool and dragged it closer to him. I could hear the scraping noise of the chair all the way through the window like a horrifying broadcast of his love.

  He gestured to the bartender, a stout Spanish woman, who smiled cordially and went to mix their drinks. She must have had May-Decembers come in here all the time, to escape their wives. It was a Hernando’s Hideaway right in the middle of Boerum Hill.

  Inside Liz was lighting a cigarette for my dad. The bar was so remote they could ignore the ban. “I thought you quit,” I said. My dad’s head spun around like Linda Blair’s as I walked up and stubbed his cigarette out in the tray. It was one thing for her to be fucking him, another for her to be killing him.

  His face turned so white the red spots of his razor burn stood out like zits. I really hoped he didn’t keel over onto the floor. He had such high cholesterol he was on Lipitor. The last thing I needed was a dead adulterer on my hands.

  He stared at me terrified, his mouth hanging slightly open like Neil Roth’s, and said softly, “How?”

  “She saw us in the park,” Liz said.

  “And you didn’t tell me?” he said angrily.

  “I didn’t feel you needed to carry any more guilt around than you were already carrying.”

  The bartender brought their drinks and set them down. “Grey Goose grapefruit and an extra-dry Grey Goose martini,” she said as Liz shelled out some dough.

  “You’re drinking Grey Goose?” I said. “And smoking? Are you in the cast of Swingers?”

  “It’s the smoothest vodka,” he wailed. “And I only smoke when I drink.” He sounded like some bimbiotic fuckslut who carried a pack of Parliament Ultra Lights in her party purse.

  “Why are you doing this?” He didn’t say anything for about a minute and then he started to sob—full, open-throated, and gobble-like, his head bobbing up and down.

  He’d always had a problem with tears. When I was ten he took my best friend from Packer, Ruthie Levinson-Rudowsky, and me to see Splash at Cobble Hill Cinemas. At the end when Daryl Hannah leaves Tom Hanks to go back into the ocean where she really belongs I heard this quiet rhythmic noise right by me. “Is your dad crying?” Ruthie said, as I nodded mortified.

  “I’m so sorry,” he choked into his sleeve. “I hope someday you can forgive me.”

  “I don’t want to forgive you. I want you to end it.”

  “I didn’t want you to find out! That very first night I said to Elizabeth, ‘Please do not tell Rachel.’ I didn’t want my problems to become yours.” The snot was streaming down his face. When he had his beard it used to trickle into his mustache and harden there but now his shelf was gone. Liz grabbed a bev nap and passed it to him. “I know this must be rather unpleasant for you,” he went on. “I can’t think of many moments in my own life that have been more unpleasant for me.”

  “Hey,” said Liz, swatting him in the arm. I stifled a giggle. Blocks: One. Blockwreckers: Zip.

  “I know you must be questioning a lot of things right now,” he said. “You’re probably thinking I’m a terrible husband.”

  “Check,” I said.

  “That I’m a bad father.”

  “Check!”

  “And you’re probably right. I’m not on the most stable ground right now or I wouldn’t be doing something like this in the first place.”

  “Hey,” Liz said. Maybe I didn’t have to say a thing. Maybe my dad’s big mouth would do the work for me.

  “Not because of you,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “You’re wonderful. You’re beautiful.” I’d never understood Catherine Zeta-Jones’s appeal to Michael Douglas but now I saw their relationship in a new light. How could I sway him when all we shared was history? Liz was like Scientology in a slip. I wanted to believe my bond with him was stronger, but she had an ace in the hole in her hole.

  She nuzzled his nose and said, “You’re the wonderful one.”

  I made a vomit noise in my throat. “Bitch,” Liz murmured over his shoulder.

  “Do you really want to get into a ‘Who’s the bigger bitch’ contest with me?” I said, “’cause I think we both know who would win.” I had to admit I was shocked at how fearless I sounded. I had the kind of crazed adrenaline high that makes you run extra fast when you’re being chased in the woods by a bear that smelled your period.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, turning to face the Evil One, “but my dad’s breaking up with you. He thinks you were a great lay while it lasted but now he’s gotten a grip and reevaluated his priorities.” I grabbed his arm and started to pull him out of the seat. Maybe the tough-love thing would work. Once he came back to our family, I could start a wilderness camp for parents who’d screwed their families over: Outward Scoundrel.

  “Come on, Dad,” I said. “It could be so easy. Think about it. You could pretend she’s just a car wreck you were passing in the road. You’ve seen the devastation, the flattened near-dead corpse. Now it’s time to keep driving.”

  “Rachel,” my dad said. “Don’t talk about Elizabeth that way.”

  “Elizabeth?” I spun around to her in shock. “Who are you—Sybil?”

  “I don’t get it,” said Liz.

  “You see, Dad?” I cried. “Mom would have gotten that. She didn’t. You might think lack of generational connection is a small thing but it’s not. This girl has never seen Bonanza and she doesn’t think of Opie when she goes to a Ron Howard movie. Think how close you feel to Mom when she hums the theme to The Dick Van Dyke Show. You could never have those moments with Liz.”

  “We have other moments,” she sniffed.

  This wasn’t working at all. If I couldn’t turn him against her maybe I stood a chance of turning her against him. “He’s just using you, Liz! Don’t you get it? He doesn’t respect you.” She looked a little pale. Then again she might not have eaten since ten in the morning.

  “Nice try,” she said. “But I know Richard cares about me. Just because your relationship is all about sex doesn’t mean ours is.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “My relationship isn’t all about sex!”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “It’s more…mentor-mentee.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Liz sarcastically. “Right.”

  “You don’t know anything about it!”

  “She has a point,” my dad chipped in. “I don’t think you should be telling us what to do when you’re involved with an older man yourself.”

  “It’s not the same! He’s not married!”

  “But obviously you understand the appeal of a May-December affair,” my dad said. “If you’re going to take issue with me, I think you’re going to have to look in your own backyard first.”

  “My backyard is spic-and-span!” I hollered. “You want to know why? Because he dumped me.”

  My father got a look of intense concern and put his arm around my shoulder. “Oh, honey,” he said pityingly. “I’m so sorry. Why’d he do it?”

  “He thinks we’re incompatible!”

  “How could he not see how special you are?” It was a pretty good question.

  Then Liz’s face softened too. She squeezed my hand and said, “You must be in a lot of pain.”

  I shook both of them off. “Look, this isn’t about me and Hank anyway! It’s about you and Mom. Don’t you care about her at all?”

  For the first time I saw a glimmer of chagrin on his face. “Rachel,�
�� he said, “what’s going on between Mom and me is complicated. There’s—there’s stuff you don’t know.”

  “Like what? You seemed pretty cozy on Rosh.”

  I looked at Liz for some sign of hurt but instead she said, “It doesn’t bother me that they still sleep together. He cares deeply about both of us.” It was my worst nightmare; my dad had laid two women in the space of one day.

  “Dad, don’t you have any taste? This girl is evil. ‘Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.’ Psalm One, OK? That means it’s the most basic one.” They were gaping at me with white eyes but I didn’t care. “She’s a waste of airspace, which she must herself be aware of, since she does her damnedest to occupy as little of it as possible. She has major body issues, she’s probably carrying more than one STD, and she’s going to leave you for someone working-class. It’s like a parade in her apartment, one after the other after the other!” I spun around to face her. “Didn’t you tell me a couple months ago that you almost slept with the refrigerator man? Or was he the plumber? You’re the cunt that ate Cobble Hill!”

  It got very quiet in the bar. My cheeks were hot and the room was very small. “You’re the cunt,” Liz said.

  “Stop using that word,” he said to both of us. Then he turned to me and said, “You can be angry at me, but please try to temper your rage at your friend. I’m the one to blame here.”

  “Friend? Oh my God! I think she relinquished the friend privilege as soon as she let you in her apartment.”

  His eyebrows were meeting at the center of his forehead like Woody Allen’s. He looked like a poor shmo who’s just pulled his two buddies apart in a bar brawl. He took a sip of his martini, then set it down and said, “Elizabeth, do you think you could give the two of us a minute?”