My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “So does that mean I can stay?”

  I shook my head no. He nodded slowly like he didn’t like it but was prepared to accept it. “I understand,” he said, rising to his feet, his chin up in an imitation of dignity. “I’ll pick up a Voice tomorrow,” he said, and ducked out under the shade.

  IN the morning I walked down to D’Amico. The two old Italian guys were sitting at a table in the back, reminiscing about how cheap haircuts used to be. “Now they don’t even give you a shave,” said one of them. “You gotta pay extra. It used to be a service culture.”

  “It’s a different world we live in,” said the other.

  A few tables away a nerdy Jewish guy was reading The New Yorker and he eyed me as I came in. Powell was at the table next to his, his head slightly obscured by the paper. I walked right up to him and leaned over the top. His eyes moved up to mine and he gave me the kind of slick smile he gave all the ass kissers at the cast party. It was like he didn’t know me.

  “Good morning,” he said formally. There was a cold blackness behind his eyes.

  I went up to the counter, ordered a bagel, fixed myself a cup of coffee, and sat down opposite him. “I’m sorry we got interrupted,” I said. “But believe me, it was worse for me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “What’s with you?”

  “What did I just say?”

  He lifted his newspaper and read silently, like I wasn’t there. I nibbled my bagel and watched him and after a few minutes the silence got so deafening I opened my trap. “Are you still working on Who Killed My Wife?”

  He threw the paper down and glared. “Why?”

  “You haven’t mentioned it in a while, so I was wondering if, you know, you were only working on The Brother-in-Law, or—”

  “I’m working on the new one.”

  “Because you have a deadline or because you’re blocked on the other one?”

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “I guess you are.”

  “I didn’t say I was blocked!”

  I felt totally panicked, like he was going to throw something at me, or punch me in the mouth. So I did the thing I always do when I get scared: kept talking. “Well, look on the bright side,” I said. “The less money you make the less you’ll have to give to your ex.”

  “Why are you bringing up money?” he roared.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You act like you’re so sensitive all a the time, like I should tread lightly with you, but you’re the insensitive one. Your behavior is boorish.”

  His eyes were angry and insane. I had seen this side of him before and I always felt like I just had to switch him around, calm him down enough so that he’d act normal. But Powell wasn’t normal. It was the best part of him and the worst. He was who he was and more than fifty percent of the time he was a jerk.

  “You know what?” I said. “You can be a real asshole sometimes.”

  “What did you say?” he hissed, leaning in, as though daring me to dig myself in deeper.

  “You pass yourself off as so enlightened but you’re just a grump. You’re obnoxious and moody and you expect everyone around you to just suck it up and be grateful to be around such a genius. You’re totally full of yourself. And mean. And old.”

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me!”

  “Sure I do! I just never said any of this before because I knew you’d act like even more of an asshole.”

  “I act this way because you have no grace! I always have to put you back in line because you’re always doing the wrong thing.”

  “If you hate me so much then how come you keep asking to see me?”

  “That’s a very good question.” He stared sullenly at the wall as the Italian guys behind us got quiet. They probably lived for drama like this.

  “I don’t understand how you have any friends when you’re this obnoxious,” I said.

  “You have no right trying to make me feel guilty when you’re the one violating my boundaries.”

  “I’m not violating your boundaries,” I said. “I’m telling you what I think. And even if I don’t say the exact right thing all the time I’m a human being. You make me feel like I have to follow some script with you, some perfect script. It’s like I can’t ever be honest or myself. You just want an audience telling you how great you are every second of the day. And you are great. You’re funny and smart and endlessly entertaining. But I don’t want to be a clapping seal all the time. It’s not that it’s hard to appreciate you. It just gets…really boring.”

  “You’re vile!” he said. “You know what the problem with your family is? Nobody taught you any manners!”

  With this foul scowl on his face, his eyebrows twisted around, the saliva glistening at the sides of his mouth, his hair matted and unkempt, he didn’t look so dashing or brilliant anymore. He just looked ugly and angry.

  Powell was the wrong kind of sadist. It wasn’t the tying-me-up part I hated. It was this, the snarls and the temper. It wasn’t fun. I wanted the good stuff without any of the bad but he had told me who he was all along and it was my fault for never listening. The whole point of having someone was to feel better around him than you did with everyone else but when I was with Powell I always felt worse.

  I stood up and stared down at his thinning hair. I didn’t want to say good-bye. I wanted him to love me, to be sweet. I wanted him to apologize for being mean and irritable, for blaming me when my dad had walked in, for being sporadic with his affection and cruel when I didn’t kiss his ass. But Powell was like Popeye and if nobody else had been able to change him I wouldn’t be able to. This knowledge hit me in the stomach like failure and instead of hating him I felt the tragedy of it not having worked.

  “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” I said.

  “That’s fine by me.” He turned his body away toward the wall and flipped a page of the paper with a loud rustling noise. I walked out past the coffee barrels. Through the window I could still see him, frowning, bent down intently. From far away he looked like a crazy man.

  A COUPLE days later I got a call from my mom asking me to come over. She wouldn’t say why and when I got there she and my dad were sitting at the kitchen table laughing. “Hel-lo,” she said as I came through the door.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is everything OK?”

  “We’re doing just fine,” she said, tossing her head back to him. “Right, Richard?”

  “I’d say more than fine.” They were acting like it was Rosh Hashanah dinner all over again.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “This is really weird.”

  “Mom and I had a talk and figured out a lot of things.” He patted one of the kitchen chairs and I sat down reluctantly. I didn’t know if they were going to say they’d gotten back together and I didn’t know if I wanted them to. “For starters,” my dad said, setting his plate down on the table, “I’m going to be living here again.”

  “You guys made up?”

  “Are you crazy?” my mom said. “I found a rental on the Upper West Side and Dad’s going to stay here. I want to be closer to Symphony Space and this place is too big and empty for me anyway. I was willing to give it up but Dad said he could handle it.”

  “The rent’s less than yours, Rachel, and I’ve got the whole place.”

  “But what about Koffee Klatsch?” I asked my mom.

  “What do you care?”

  “It’s important to the neighborhood!”

  She shook her head like I wasn’t making any sense and said, “Nina’s going to take over. She has a bigger living room anyway.”

  My mom seemed far away then, like a stranger, like someone I didn’t know. Her face was pink and she looked so optimistic, like she’d just graduated high school and was moving into her very own apartment.

  “So what do you think?” my dad said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.r />
  “It was strange for me too at first,” he said, “but then I accepted the fact that Mom doesn’t want me back and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You’re making it sound like this is my fault,” she said, “when you’re the one who brought it on. I didn’t cheat. Who’s the one who displayed such a total lack of self-control he felt the need to take off with the Jewish Happy Hooker?”

  “I’m not saying I didn’t make a mistake, I just—”

  “You can’t even be accountable now, even after all this, even after I agreed to give up the place for you? That is so like you.”

  “Maybe if you’d showed a little more awareness during the past year of what I was going through—”

  “Oh, so it’s back to the cause-and-effect,” she said. “I am trying really hard to move through my acute stage into the integration but you—”

  “What?” he snarled.

  “I can’t believe you blame me. Even now you can’t even look at the mirror and see what you did. You’re just going to keep denying, denying, denying, because even to this day you cannot be accountable for your own actions!”

  As they kept going back and forth I stood up quietly, went into the living room, and lay on my stomach on the couch. A little while later they must have realized I was gone because they shut up and came over. And then my mom was lifting my head up and sliding under me so my head was resting on her lap, and my dad was sitting on the other end of the couch and squeezing the arch of my foot.

  I remembered when I was little and I used to crawl into their bed on weekend mornings and wake them up and tell them I wanted to make a peanut butter sandwich. They were the bread and I was the peanut butter and I would squeeze in between them and tell them to crush me, and it was that feeling of being suffocated in the best way, smothered by love.

  I knew then what scared me so much. I hadn’t wanted to admit it because it was too unsettling and weird, but for the past few years I had been dating my parents. I chose to move back into the neighborhood not because of the hipsters but because of them. They were my steadies, the ones I could count on, and as much as I griped about the dinners and obligations, I craved their company like it was a drug. Now that their marriage was over I was afraid that as they disintegrated I would too. I’d just wander around like a soldier whose arm’s been shot off but doesn’t know it.

  My mom brushed her hand across my forehead. “Aren’t you glad to have him get out of your apartment? Now you can have some privacy with Hank.” I started bawling. “What is it?”

  “It’s over,” I said. I had told my dad I ended it but when he pressed for details I hadn’t given any.

  “That’s terrible,” she said. “I thought the two of you had something really special. What were the issues? When did this happen?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to go into it, Sue,” my dad said. The only time my dad was willing to give me an ounce of space was to get one over on my mom.

  She leaned forward and said, “You can tell me all about it when you come to visit in a few weeks.”

  “Why’s she going to talk about it with you when she won’t talk about it with me?”

  “Stop playing the victim,” she said.

  I looked from one to the other, the steeliness in their gazes, and I could see that they were no longer a couple. There was a formality in the way that they looked at each other, even under the fighting, that reminded me of a customer and a bank teller. The glaze of love was gone.

  I couldn’t fix them, I’d never be Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap. The most boring, static, dorky, public radio–ified boomer couple in the hood was no longer a couple. And whether it had happened because of his affair, or just because, I probably wouldn’t know in my lifetime.

  They were two entities now and I would have to come at them in a new way. I felt the terror of this and at the same time the possibility. I’d spent years feeling frustrated that I couldn’t tell one of them anything without having them pass it on to the other and now it seemed maybe I could. Maybe they had to separate in order for me to separate.

  MY mom had me over for dinner at her new place soon after she moved in. She cooked salmon and pilaf and I brought over a bottle of white wine. It was small but charming, in a prewar building with a rickety elevator and that uniquely New York blend of dust and noodles that so many Upper West Side buildings have. She seemed mellow in a way she hadn’t in all the time I had known her, like a woman who’d been single for twenty-five years instead of just two months.

  Over dinner I told her a little about what had happened with Powell and when I finished I said, “I know it sounds stupid, but I still miss him. Even though I know he was crazy and wrong for me.”

  “Why would you want to be with someone who didn’t want you?” she said.

  “A million reasons,” I said.

  “But that should be prerequisite.” She frowned tightly. “It makes me worried when I hear you say you could love someone who didn’t love you back.”

  “Hello?” I said. “It’s called being in your twenties?”

  “I know,” she said. “It just makes me feel like I should have been clearer with you when you were younger, told you not to go for a guy who wouldn’t give you the time of day, not to go for jerks.”

  “He was a jerk in some ways but not in others.”

  “That’s the very worst kind.”

  We ate in silence for a little and it had that same awkward feeling it often did, where we had to struggle to find things to talk about. “So do you have a boyfriend?” I asked. She blushed. “Oh my God. You act fast.”

  “I wouldn’t call him a boyfriend,” she said, “but yes, I am seeing someone.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Yeah? And what’s his name?”

  “Stan.” This could not be good. Stan was not a name pulsing with sexuality and promise. Stan was the name of Dorothy’s ex on The Golden Girls.

  “Where’d you meet?”

  “At a Wednesday-night dancing group I go to at Metropolitan Duane. He came up to me and said, ‘Is your name Sue?’ Turned out we were in the same folk dancing group at NYU when I was a student. He remembered me. He said I hadn’t changed a bit.” I swallowed. The guy sounded way too oily. “He’s divorced with two sons. We’ve gone out twice and so far we seem to be enjoying each other. We’re taking it very slowly.”

  I couldn’t say I was overjoyed that she’d gotten back in the saddle almost as quickly as Liz had, but I wasn’t as angry as I expected to be either. It just seemed like yet another aspect of her life that I didn’t completely understand, but wasn’t prepared to give her a hard time about. “I’m—really happy for you, Mom.”

  “You know,” she said, setting her napkin down next to her plate, “one of his sons is your age. He went to Oberlin and works at a dotcom. Stan and I were thinking maybe the four of us could get together some night next—”

  “Mom. That is sick.”

  “It’s not a setup! I just thought the two of you might—” I shot her a look. “All right,” she said. “Why don’t you think about it?”

  I poured myself some more wine and as I did she said, “I want you to know that I don’t blame you.”

  “You don’t?” I said.

  “It took me a lot of processing with Dr. Fern, that’s the woman I’ve been seeing, Nina recommended her, she’s feminist and wears the most beautiful caftans, but I don’t think it’s your fault. I wanted to believe it was your fault, for introducing the girl to Dad, because I wasn’t ready to look at what Dad—did, but I have a more evolved understanding of events. And then when Dad moved in with you I felt like I was going to lose not only him but you. But now I see that…” Her voice trailed off.

  “You what?”

  “That hasn’t happened.” She made a noise, and covered her face, and I could tell she was crying a little. It was such a strange, cockamamie world. My mother was crying and my dad was living on his own. But I knew
better than to humiliate her about it. I started clearing the plates and asked what she had for dessert.

  THE day my dad moved out was bright and sunny. He insisted on renting a U-Haul van since he had passed his driving test, and we loaded his boxes into the back. I asked him four times if he was certain he was comfortable driving a van and he said he’d called Mr. Goddard and gotten a few pointers so I shouldn’t worry.

  There were only two near accidents along the way—a bicyclist zoomed around us as we were about to turn onto Warren, and a kid ran in halfway down the street to get a ball—but no one was killed. By the time we had pulled up at the house it felt like we’d gone three hundred miles instead of six blocks.

  We found a parking spot around the corner and unloaded the stuff together. The house was stark and empty; she’d left a lot of the furniture like the etageres, the TV, and TV stand but removed personal stuff like her photos.

  When we were finished hauling the boxes in we sat on the stoop and watched the people bustling by, women shopping and kids on little scooters and wheelbarrows and tricycles. I could smell a fire burning in somebody’s house and I found myself comforted by the smell instead of disgusted. Cobble Hill makes the most sense in the fall; the houses look more right and the air feels crisp but not too cold.

  “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said, “and I haven’t known how.”

  “You’re dating T. Russell in Apartment Fifteen?”

  “These past few months I’ve been thinking about how much trouble I have in conventional job situations and how I’ve always wanted to work in a Jewish environment. So…” He winced and wrung his hands. “I want to run it by you but I’m afraid you might discourage me and I just don’t know if—”

  “Just tell me!”

  “I was thinking of everything I’ve been through, and how I’d do things differently the next time, and how much more I understand about choices, and consequences, and what it means to live a meaningful life, and I thought, What kind of person gets to help people figure out all that stuff? Because I think it’s something I could be good at. Or at least better at than I was before. And it hit me. Maybe I could be a rabbi.”