Grudgingly, we started talking numbers. Their first offers were criminally low. We had one big thing going for us: the pure luck of being at the start of the twenty-four-month lease. What this meant was that we could afford to play hardball, but we could not wait them out. Every month we lost on our lease made our buyout worth less to them.
By this time Amanda was the director of public programs at a bookstore in SoHo, staging readings, discussions, and other book-related events three or four nights a week, sometimes for crowds of hundreds. She took half days at work and we went apartment hunting, only to find that the market had changed radically in the past year. In 2012, $1,800 had been the top of our range. Now people laughed and hung up on me when I said that. We started naming it as our base.
It was a hot, miserable afternoon, Friday the tenth of May, and we had been out for hours looking at overpriced, awful apartments in neighborhoods we didn’t want to live in, driving around with a smarmy Hassidic guy probably five years younger than me, who kept pulling his hey-from-one-Jew-to-another-this-is-a-good-deal routine while in actual fact trying to screw us out of a bunch of application fees for places we would never live. I hated him. When it hit four o’clock he told us that he had to get home for Shabbos. Instead of taking us back to where he’d picked us up, which is standard for these things, he got in his car and sped off, leaving us stranded on Court Street in Carroll Gardens. We were hungry, tired, and upset. Amanda wanted to see if we could get hold of someone to take us out to see another place; I was ready to be done for the day. Or maybe it was vice versa; I don’t know. What I know is we were on the sidewalk arguing when a woman came tearing out of the storefront that we happened to be standing in front of. She was cursing a blue streak and running to her car to put money in the meter to avoid a ticket. She did not avoid the ticket, and a minute later walked back our way, holding it. “You guys look upset,” she said. “Do you need some water?”
She took us into what turned out to be a real-estate office. We drank the cold water she offered and told her our story.
We’d already been booted out of South Slope; even Fort Greene looked like a long shot. There was no going back to Bushwick. We were half-resigned to being pushed out past Bay Ridge, or maybe out of Brooklyn entirely. Carroll Gardens wasn’t even a pipe dream: It was a joke. But Nancy, that miracle-worker, said she had a few places to show us, close enough that we could go see them right now if we wanted to.
The Carroll Gardens apartment was maybe seven hundred square feet, though laid out in a floor-through style so that despite the extra square footage it felt smaller than the Park Slope apartment had. Still, it was perfect for us, and we set about scrambling to get out of our old lease and prepare to make the move.
On May 11, my sister told me that Dad had been in DC visiting her and that he’d gotten choked up when they said goodbye. That wasn’t anything special, to be honest. In the last few years he’d become a hair-trigger crier. But, she continued, he had made a point of telling her how proud he was of her and that no matter what happened she couldn’t let herself get distracted from achieving what she was working for. It was the “no matter what happens” part that bothered her, and this was why, when the Mother’s Day letter was accompanied by a list of passwords and account numbers, she took it—rightly—as a sign of intent, while I interpreted it as more of a “just in case” thing.
Amanda tells me that I was more aware at the time of what was going on than I’m giving myself credit for now. She says that she and I had a few conversations about it, and that while we weren’t sure of anything, she had gone so far as to alert her boss that there was a “family situation” and that she might have to travel on short notice. I believe her, but I can only tell this part of the story the way I remember it, the way I told it at the beginning of this book: silence, the throat packed with ice, late-spring sunlight in the home office that would soon no longer be ours. The hot phone in my hand. Me calling and him not answering and me not calling a second time.
We accepted the corporate landlord’s buyout offer, told the broker we were ready to sign the lease on the new place. I remember thinking, Well, at least there’ll be a little money in case Dad needs help. It was May 12, Mother’s Day, and he was trying to kill himself.
* * *
—
What happened in the days that followed? The answer, absurdly and perhaps inevitably, is not much. My aunts, cousins, sister, and I exchanged some phone calls and a lot of emails. We talked about ways we could take better care of Dad, keep a closer eye on things, and be in more regular contact with one another. Noble sentiments were expressed about how it was time for the family to start acting more like a family. For a while, his sisters were calling or emailing him every day, to offer emotional support and obtain proof of life. My sister and I did the same. He moved from the airport hotel back to the extended-stay, with Michael now footing the bill. We raised the prospect of Florida, but he wasn’t ready to think about that yet. We deferred to him. Things were getting back to normal. Or what passed for normal with Dad, which in some ways was the most absurd part of the whole episode: that his untenable, ridiculous living situation was now being thought of as some kind of workable status quo. Within a few weeks, the family email chain slowed to a trickle and then dried up entirely. Life went on.
* * *
—
We moved on June first, the busiest moving day in New York City, and in 2013 one of the hottest days of the year. We couldn’t find movers at any price, couldn’t even rent a U-Haul until the night before, when I used an old trick that Dad had taught me: Call ten minutes before closing and see who’d canceled. He got us a cabin in Yosemite National Park once using this trick, the night before we left Florida for a family vacation when I was nine years old.
Amanda and I rallied a dozen of our friends to help us, working in teams at each apartment. I drove the truck. Now we had a living room that accommodated our still-expanding library, nearly floor-to-ceiling windows in the bedroom, and so much storage that we took the doors off one of the living-room closets and had Amanda’s sister (an architect and furniture artisan) install a bar. We moved into that apartment just before I turned thirty-one and I told anyone who’d listen that I expected to turn forty, maybe fifty, still living there.
But life, as usual, had other plans. Amanda had outgrown her job, and after nearly a year of looking in the city had not found anything that made sense as a next move. She decided to apply to be the new manager of a book festival in—of all places—Portland, Oregon. It seemed like a long shot, but one worth taking. I had fond memories of Portland, both from living there in ’05 and from visiting friends and giving readings at Powell’s when my books came out. I myself had applied for a job at Portland State University earlier that year.
After she was offered the job and accepted it, things began to happen very quickly. I proposed to her over Thanksgiving. This had been on my mind for a while already, and we had talked in general terms about marriage, but the big move and the looming separation while I finished my school year in New York gave me a sense of urgency. We spent Christmas with her parents in Florida and New Year’s Eve at home with friends. We flew to Portland on New Year’s Day, 2015. I spent two weeks helping her get settled, then came back to New York alone. In addition to my teaching work, we also wanted to hang on to the apartment until she made sure that this new job, this new city, was a keeper. If she wanted to bail, we wanted there to be somewhere for her to come back to. I won’t say that I was hoping for this to happen, but I wouldn’t have been sorry if it had. Columbia and Pratt had both invited me back for the upcoming school year, and I put off giving them notice for as long as I could.
Those last months in New York were the coldest, loneliest winter I’ve ever known. I was working on a novel that was going nowhere, drinking too much and too often, endlessly bemoaning the imminent loss of our apartment, my teaching gigs, our friends—our l
ife. I would go visit Amanda in Portland and find myself unable to remember all the reasons we’d had for wanting to be there. She would want to explore neighborhoods and I’d drag my feet, thinking all the while of my father, how when he visited Nashville and my mother first tried to show him the house she wanted to buy, he said he didn’t want to see it. I worried I was making the same mistakes that he had made, even as I could now see more clearly how and why he had made them. I had crying jags, which had never happened to me before. Amanda wasn’t sure I was really going to make the move.
For whatever it’s worth, I never considered not joining her, or breaking our engagement, but I can see why she wondered if I would.
Eventually, I told the schools that I was leaving. We started telling people that the apartment would soon be available, and our friends Julie and Gabe ended up taking it. They’re a few years younger than us, and it was perfect for them, for what they needed at that time. Movers came on the first of May and because the semester wasn’t quite over yet, I moved into a friend’s spare room. A week later, I was gone too.
* * *
—
May 12, 2015, was the second anniversary of my father’s suicide attempt: unacknowledged, as you might expect. May 15 was his sixty-third birthday. Birthdays were always a hard time of year for Dad. They were also a hard time to be around Dad, because he took the occasion to obsessively rehash his failures—real and imagined—especially the money he had never made, and all of the things he would have done with that money if he had not not made it. The parents of most of the kids I’d grown up with were buying their vacation homes and midlife-crisis Jaguars. Dad didn’t crave any of that stuff, though he sometimes accused Mom of having craved it, which I understood to mean that he was sorry he hadn’t been able to give it to her.
I called him, of course; a phone call like any other, like the ones we always had: Kill a couple of hours, try to talk about happy things. Amanda and I had sent him a Target gift card, because he wouldn’t accept cash from us and there was no present we could have sent him that would have made him happy, but if we sent him a gift card he’d see that the money was already spent and so grudgingly go to the store and use it on clothes, food, medicine—whatever he needed—rather than let it go to waste.
* * *
—
I had a hard time adjusting to Portland. I missed New York: our friends, our apartments, our lives. I didn’t like owning a washing machine or driving a car. I felt isolated, physically and emotionally; both stranded and adrift. I was hardly writing, and what I was producing was no good. I didn’t know when I would have a job again or what that job would be. Here we were: new city, new marriage, new everything, and all I felt was that I was failing, had perhaps already failed.
A lot of people put a lot of energy into making me feel welcome, but it was like they were all shouting and waving through smoked glass. Because I’d never experienced depression before, I didn’t know what it would look or feel like, apart from what I’d read about it. Here’s William Styron, from Darkness Visible, which I’d read shortly after my father’s suicide attempt, to try to glean some insight into things that he might have experienced but couldn’t or wouldn’t say himself.
I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. This leads me to touch again on the elusive nature of such distress. That the word “indescribable” should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
The title, Darkness Visible, is from Paradise Lost. It is Milton’s description of Hell:
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
Styron’s account rings true to me, in kind if not degree. I spent a lot of time wrapped in what felt like a blanket of gray noise, which made it difficult to navigate basic emotional exchanges, or to communicate what I was feeling to the people around me, or even to myself. I was for the first time experiencing some version of what my father had been struggling with for years by now: dislocation, unemployment, dimming prospects, a sense (right or wrong) of profound worthlessness. I feared I was becoming more and more like him, even as I was coming to understand what he had gone through, and was still going through, more deeply than I had before.
I felt, and to some extent still feel, deep shame about my failure to understand him sooner or better or more fully than I was able to. All you had to do was listen to me. I sometimes think that even though we were never estranged from each other, and even though there was never a time that I would have characterized our relationship as anything other than close and loving, there is no disputing the fact that after the letter I wrote to him in 2007, probably because of it, that relationship began to fracture.
I was disappointed in his decision to stay in Tennessee after the divorce, and frustrated by his refusal or inability to find a job. By this point he hadn’t worked in nearly ten years. I don’t know what he might have done, since he didn’t have a brokerage license anymore and was starting to get sicker—the Parkinson’s appearing as little more than a nervous tic, but no longer something you had to look for in order to notice. It was impossible to distinguish between the real limits on his options and his tendency toward self-destruction (if that’s not saying the same thing twice). To avoid the tense and complicated dance of dividing my time between him and Mom on visits to Nashville, I stopped going there. My sister was out of school by then: She worked in South Florida for a year, then moved to DC for law school. Mom came to New York a few times a year, for business as well as to visit. I invited Dad to visit (he wouldn’t come) and told myself I’d visit him when he moved back to Florida, which I was still trying to convince myself might happen sooner rather than later. Instead, he hung onto the house as long as he could and then dug in his heels at the extended-stay hotel. Years went by without us seeing each other.
There was one visit to Nashville in 2011, a three-day weekend where we rendezvoused with Amanda’s parents and sister. We got everyone together on Friday for lunch and a trip to the art museum. On Saturday, he and I went to dinner with Amanda’s family. He was affable, maybe a little quiet. I could tell he was trying to be on his best behavior, and also that he was having trouble maintaining a veneer of normalcy—holding his utensils was a struggle, but my offer to cut up his food for him was dismissed. At that point it had probably been years since he’d been to a nice restaurant or socialized with new people. By the end of the night I could tell how worn out he was.
On Sunday, we spent the morning just with Mom before flying back to New York. A few days later, he wrote me a long angry letter in which he argued that it had been wrong to divide up the time so evenly, since Mom saw me so much more often than he did (he was probably right about that) and went on to accuse me of having “taken her side” in the divorce and, more generally, of having chosen her over him. The latter charges were well over the line and I let him know it. After that, whenever he tried to raise the subject of the divorce, I tended to shut the conversation down, which I think is why he began to feel that he couldn’t fully rely on or trust me, though judging from his letter it’s arguable that he had already been feeling that way for some time.
> It is likely that our fractured relationship, and my failure to recognize that fracture as such, left him feeling more isolated and like he had failed as a father, and so became a compounding element of his despair, a contributing factor to his decision to end his life.
And yet my writer-self knows better than to trust such tidy framing. In insisting on the primacy of these grave filial failures (whether real or imagined) and in choosing my own action as the inciting incident, I place myself at the center of my father’s story. I displace my mother, my sister, his family, his history: I displace him. Of course we’re talking about a person who had no sense of primacy in his own life, who did not believe himself entitled to be the center of anyone’s attention, which is why he rarely ever claimed it except by accident—when repressed ego would mutiny into id-driven rage. At some level, then, by shifting the focus from him to myself, I’m only doing what he would have done, though I’m not sure that makes it justifiable.
But I had troubles of my own, and Dad had obligations—to me as his son, to our relationship as a relationship, to himself as a man—that he failed to fulfill. Moreover, it is too easy (I mean in a narrative sense) to fault myself for failing to become his caregiver at a time before I was financially or emotionally capable of providing any degree of care. If all the same things that happened to him while my sister and I were in our twenties had happened ten years later—that is, now—we would have reacted much faster and had far more resources on which to draw. But if we’re going to play that game then we can say that if all the same things had happened ten years earlier, during our childhoods, who knows how badly it might have fucked us up and where we’d be—or who we’d be—today?
Riding with the Ghost Page 8