“One of them saw my copy of Madame Bovary, and assumed it was pornography, so he grabbed it. And so there they all were, peeking over each other’s shoulders to look at the girlie book, and maybe I was only projecting, but I thought one of them was pushing and shoving extra hard to convince his friends, and himself, that he actually wanted to be there, to see it. Can you imagine what it would be like to be different—I don’t even mean gay, I just mean sensitive or creative—and to be trapped into acting along with the pack? I hope that never happens to you.”
It sounded sincere. It sounded true. I’ve described Rick’s trip to Wales to friends over the years, and some of them wrinkle their brows and half-start in recognition, not at Rick’s feelings, but at the scene itself. It’s familiar, but no one can quite place it. I’m pretty sure he made it up as he went along. Or it was from a book I have yet to read.
When I walked around Westwood I thought of Rick’s Welsh pub night. That summer, men tended to wear distressed leather jackets, without the benefit of having ridden a motorcycle—just the pre-disastered shell, as if they’d once been dangerous and they were still carrying that on their shoulders.
Experience was a fashion statement. I realized that if you followed this line of thinking, eventually you would see men with eye patches they didn’t really need. Peg legs. There were definitely jeans with holes in them on both men and women, but they were cunningly placed. No one here had slid off a motorcycle during a barrel race circuit. You did nothing to earn that damage, I thought, but it does become you. How similar it was to the subtext of the punk look, really, where sixteen-eye combat boots and safety pins inserted through flesh were also meant to convey that you’d actually done something with your life? I am ready for action and ready for pain.
Speaking of that, I agreed, finally, to go to Rick’s.
“Are you excited, young man?” he asked, and I was aware he was teasing me.
“Why do you want me there?” I asked him this, but mostly as if he were a proxy for Melanie.
“For balance,” he said after a while.
“To balance out the guests—”
“No, silly, to throw you off yours.”
* * *
—
Mel would give me a ride.
She said, “You’ll have fun.”
“When am I coming back?”
“Whenever you want.”
Was she saying this as a friend? Did twenty-six-year-olds have friends? I began to add up the differences between what nineteen meant and twenty-six and I was embarrassed.
I visited every used bookstore under the somewhat gentle Santa Monica sun. I bought a few strange periodicals, literary journals, that were so intelligent I couldn’t even understand their names. Antaeus. Ploughshares. They were like speakeasies, and the code to get in was knowing why naming your magazine after a Greek wrestler made associative sense.
I understood some of the writing in them! This felt like a triumph, as it was the first time I’d read literary fiction without a classroom to explain it to me. I had been calling myself a writer since I was five years old, but you couldn’t just have the attitude of being a writer, carrying around a highly visible copy of Ploughshares like it was a beaten leather jacket. Or you ended up like Owen’s stepfather. Here was a formula: attitude minus work plus time equals bitterness.
I started writing a short story. It wasn’t good, but it was weird, at least, with dream logic that could have tricked people into believing I knew what I was doing, so I continued with it. Instead of telling myself I was a writer, I said, “I write, but I’d like to get paid for it,” which felt honest.
* * *
—
At work, I saw we had Water Music by T. C. Boyle, and when Mel saw me holding it, I said, casually, “I just read a short story of his in Antaeus,” and it felt perfectly natural.
She walked to the middle of the fiction section and returned with a small paperback pressed to her chest with palms crossed against it. “This is white magic. Anti-dough-head literature.” It was a novel called Easy Travel to Other Planets and it was based on the work of John C. Lilly, dolphin expert. It was Ted Mooney’s first novel and she said it was so cryptic and beautiful and funny it reminded her of how I probably wrote.
When I read it in my room at home, I thought, “I could write like this,” which actually meant, “I wish I’d written my short story this well,” and I understood why this book was so much better than my work. The author looked outside of himself. He knew things like emotions and how other people acted in ways I didn’t yet. I read it in an afternoon with jealousy, awe, and appreciation suspended over the thought that recurred like a quick heartbeat: Melanie thinks she knows how I write, which means she thinks about me.
THE CHILDREN’S SECTION
THE NEXT MORNING I was awakened by the sound of something sliding under my door. It was an article from The Wall Street Journal explaining how many first-time novelists never sold a second novel. My stepmother had clipped it for me.
I should explain this. The house I was in wasn’t my home, of course, but during high school and college I’d camped there during the vacations when I wasn’t visiting my mother in New York.
One morning when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen and on break from boarding school, I heard my stepmother on the phone to her parents. I wasn’t trying to creep around; the house was large and her voice carried across a few rooms. “Herb’s ex-wife is looking for money,” she was saying. “She’s scrounging like an alley cat, trying to sell us her old jewelry. We’re pretending we don’t have any money, and that we need to borrow it from you.” A pause. “Yeah, right, like when we put in the swimming pool.”
She was talking to her mother. I walked up behind her. I tapped her on the shoulder. Ann’s face didn’t change expression as quickly as mine did—it didn’t change now, but she was silent and glancing away from me as she added up what I’d heard.
“Tell me when I can come back inside the house,” I said. I went out the front door and sat on the stoop. It was a sunny morning in West Los Angeles. Mostly it was just pops, clicks, whistles, and shards of glass going through my mind. “Who says ‘scrounge,’ anyway,” I thought. Also: I liked cats. So fuck Ann. Also, waiting out there, I had to admit I understood why she and my father were lying to my mom. I didn’t know what else you could do with her.
Ann appeared on the porch. She said she was off the phone. So I went back in. I don’t recall any discussion of what I’d heard, which would mean both that I didn’t confront her and that she didn’t apologize. It’s likely she did and I didn’t want to remember it.
So that’s how it stood between us. I understood that to her, I was, among whatever else I might be, the residue of that poisonous person who had to be kept at a distance. Further, she thought at the time that she and my father were both on the same side. But she was young and my father was an unusual case.
When she slipped the newspaper clipping under my door, she was being helpful. She knew my mom wanted to be a writer, and I think Ann thought she was giving me data that might send me in a more promising direction.
She lacked malice, but she had an awkward, brilliant efficiency that skipped over social graces. Whenever Owen rang the doorbell, Ann would acknowledge him, then come find me and tell me he was outside so I could open the door myself. Owen, whose upbringing had been as weird as mine, didn’t notice things like that, but I’d specifically noticed that at other people’s houses, they tended to let you in when you came over.
My room was upstairs. It had a fold-out couch for a bed, and it had a demoralizingly thin mattress that pressed against a cruel set of metal support bars, so I slept on the floor. I had a couple of shelves of books and comic books, and an electric typewriter on the desk. There was a deck outside my window that overlooked the palm trees and the swimming pool in the backyard. I rarely used the latter because looking a
t it, I still thought, “Oh, you lied to my mom about that, too.”
Just because they might be right didn’t mean they could get me to stop being loyal to her.
That oversimplifies things. It’s not like I accepted my mom’s worldview anymore. A couple years after my moment with Ann, Mom asked me to do something for her. I was living with her in New York and working at her office. She wanted me to call my father to tell him I needed him to come up with the money for college. The original bonds supposed to pay for it had probably gone up Trevor’s nose. Or maybe they’d gone to help float Anton—my mother’s explanations had so many hairpin turns I couldn’t follow them. I had a net of loans, grants, and a work-study job, but there was still money owed before I could start at Wesleyan. She told me Dad had been playing games with her, being cryptic about whether he and Ann actually had money or had to borrow it from her mother. She felt I would have a better chance at getting him to commit to paying for school.
She sat me down at her desk in her office, the one on the second floor in Midtown Manhattan. I had her close the door for privacy, and I made the phone call to my father’s office in Los Angeles as directed. I’d never told my mother about the conversation I’d overheard of Ann’s. Nor had I told my father.
I was more nervous talking to him than I normally was, but only in part because of what I was supposed to be asking. I started as she had asked (“Mom wants to know if you…”) and he cut me off. He said I would be taken care of. He said nothing further.
At the time, my father was in management at Atlantic Richfield. He was in the brown suit phase of his career, where his sense of humor had been submerged, and our talks on the phone were always awkward, like I was the loose beatnik progeny he wasn’t sure of.
He continued: I shouldn’t worry. I would never be out on the street, but I shouldn’t get into details with him, because there were things I didn’t really need to know about, regardless of what my mother was insisting.
I said that this phone call was hard for me because I didn’t trust him. I said I also didn’t trust Mom. I said that they were playing games about money and I didn’t understand it, and that I just wanted everyone to be honest. He pointed out that I’d once had a college education fund.
“But Mom made up for that,” I explained. “Remember, she got me a scholarship at Thacher to balance that out.”
“No she didn’t.”
Finally, something I was sure of. My father’s anger at my mom had clouded his memory. “She did. I filled out the paperwork. I saw the scholarship grant. I was on scholarship at Thacher,” I said.
There was a long pause. “What are you talking about?” I explained it again, and my father said, “I wrote a check to your mother every semester for the full tuition at Thacher.” Then he said, “I suppose that went to her boyfriend, too.”
There was more in this vein. My father started telling me things I hadn’t known about how Peter Charming had negotiated the part of the settlement that set aside property to be used for my education. What he was saying wasn’t exactly accurate, but it was a fuller accounting than I’d had. My mother had left out many details. My father was adding them, not carefully, but coldly and with a bit of knife-twisting, the way you do when something has been on your mind every day for a decade.
I was only seventeen, but something had been on my mind, too. I said, “Do you know this? A couple of years ago, I walked in on Ann telling her mother that you and she were going to lie to my mother about having money. She said my mom was scrounging around like an alley cat. She knows I heard it.”
Silence.
“Dad?”
Silence again. I knew he understood exactly what I meant. He hadn’t expected this story, and he couldn’t contradict it. I was the kid he’d had with a woman he had to protect himself from, and I’d managed to find a new way to remind him of that.
“Dad?”
My father at his desk at Atlantic Richfield, in ARCO Towers, in downtown Los Angeles, many floors above the ground, views for miles, holding the phone away from his mouth. “Oh, Glen David,” he whispered. Then he hung up.
I didn’t know what happened. I waited on the phone, thinking there was no way he’d hung up. Finally, that strange, urgent sound of the long-distance company telling me to replace the receiver and try again.
I called back. My father has a steady phone voice. He had answered the phone exactly the same way every time I had called him, since I was perhaps three or four years old, when my mother, even then, had put me on the phone: “Herb Gold.” I had always felt, in just the two syllables of his name, his affirmation that he belonged at that desk and could answer any question thoughtfully.
The receiver picked up. I waited for “Herb Gold.” Nothing.
“Dad?”
He hung up again.
I held the phone. I put it down. I stared at the office door.
Eventually, there was a knock. My mother came in. “Did you get the money?” she asked.
* * *
—
Two summers later, when I was nineteen, whenever returning to Wesleyan came up, my father and I were both not thinking about that phone call, the way you don’t think of any chronic condition, and neither of us talked about it. So there was that tension. There were others, too.
My half-brothers: Seth was six and Marc, whose life was a living hell, was three. Seth had come out of the womb at a dead run, talking, crying, asking questions, breaking shit, talking more, figuring out he was the smartest person in any given room, and making demands on his mother’s loyalties like he was an Eastern Bloc dictator. His nickname among my father’s side of the family was “the Prince,” and for a kid to have earned that distinction over me was a significant achievement.
Marc, on the other hand, was an orchid of a kid. He was quiet for long periods of time, and unlike Seth, who loved to dance to whatever punk songs I put on the stereo, Marc liked to sit on the couch perfectly still, listening to Mozart and gazing into the middle distance like an infant Henry James. He was just as smart as Seth, which only made his life worse, because he could anticipate exactly whatever awful thing Seth was planning on doing to him next, but because he was only three years old he was unable to prevent it.
Once, I was in the kitchen with Marc, when Seth came in because he had a question to ask me. “Glen,” he said, punching Marc in the face, “is Owen ever coming back to visit?”
Marc at that moment was glowing with his first, and thus purest, expression of disbelief that the world could possibly be that unfair. He threw his head back and wailed. Seth looked at him not with disdain but real confusion. Punching Marc in the face was so normal for him he didn’t realize he’d done it.
But there was no punishment for that, nor anything else he did. Seth could do anything he wanted. If his feet had been able to reach the pedals, he would have driven the family Volvo to the market to pick up smokes. For about twenty-two hours a day, he bossed Ann around.
But then my father would come home. It wasn’t that Seth trod lightly then—he behaved exactly as he would otherwise—he just knew he had a tougher opponent.
My father was unscalable and monument-like. In part that was because he had to be the voice of Moses when he was at home. There was always a list of promises and treaties Seth had negotiated with Ann that my father was learning of the moment he arrived. Once, before he’d even put his brief down, my father was greeted by Seth twisting his arm.
“Seth, if you do that, I’ll do it back to you.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’re going to lose,” my father said.
“No I’m not.”
There had at one point been countdowns, but there weren’t countdowns anymore. Nor were there second warnings. My father took Seth’s arm and began to twist. Seth laughed. But it became a strangled laugh. And my father didn’t stop. Seth let go of my dad,
and tried to push him away, but of course, he was six and my father was fifty-two and probably weighed two hundred twenty pounds. As I recall it, my dad just kept sorting through the mail with one hand, using the other to bend Seth’s wrist back until he was yelling.
“You giving up yet?” my dad asked.
“No!”
“What, does it hurt? You do this sort of stuff to your mother and your brother all day long and now someone stands up to you and you’re about to cry?”
“I’m not going to cry,” Seth said.
Part of me was horrified Dad was being so cruel and the other part, the stepbrother part, was perfectly fine with the little brat getting the snot whipped out of him.
“I’m going to kill you, Daddy!” Seth screamed. “Let go!” My father released his arm.
“There was a boy in Montana who killed his father,” Dad said. “It was in the newspaper.”
“How did he kill his father?”
“With a shotgun.”
“I’m going to get a shotgun and kill you, Daddy.”
“You’ll go to jail.”
“Good.” Seth’s eyes flashed. He went over to the newspaper and started rummaging through it.
“What are you looking for?” Dad asked.
“I want to know about the boy who killed his father.”
“What about him?”
“I want to write him a fan letter.”
I Will Be Complete Page 26