I don’t recommend it.
My mother was not aware that my father had leukemia. She asked repeatedly where he was, why he was gone, when he was coming back. She went to the hospital to visit him once or maybe twice. My sister and I walked her across Central Park one day in her wheelchair, stopping at the cart by the Great Lawn for the hot dogs slathered with mustard she loved so much, her appetite never at a loss. The park, once the epicenter of my life, seemed closed off to all but a handful of people. They made no eye contact with us, as if they knew. We circled the Metropolitan Museum and passed the Guggenheim, fixtures of my New York life that no longer held meaning. We arrived at the entrance of Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue, crammed and crazy in the shuffle of people who had no idea where to go because nothing was clearly marked.
We went up the elevator and awkwardly jammed the wheelchair into his room. She recognized him but was puzzled and gave him no encouragement or sympathy. My father became increasingly angry. He had his laptop computer in front of him and was trying to get a program to work and complained that the “fucking thing is broken.” He wanted all of us to leave. We became a Diane Arbus photograph at that moment, a freakish fractured family that would never heal.
He came back from the hospital about three weeks later. The chemotherapy seemed to work for a while. His white cell count went down. He joked when he saw the oncologist for the weekly blood check. He never felt self-pity. Instead he felt defiance and said he never thought about the disease. He got tired of the endless restrictions—no booze, no high-calorie food, no this, no that.
He and I were out together one day, when we went into a Starbucks on the West Side so I could get a cup of coffee. He peered into the pastry case at all those cakes lacquered with frosting. “Fuck it,” he said. He bought a piece. We sat at a table, and he ate with rapaciousness. He never looked at me, and we never spoke. His eyes darted back and forth, yearning and terrified instead of satisfied, like a terminally ill little boy knowing it was only a matter of time.
IV
My mother still lived in their apartment after he died. She still sometimes called to him. She sometimes said she had just seen him in the living room.
Her diagnosis had still not been pinned down—aspects of Parkinsonism, aspects of Alzheimer’s, aspects of low blood pressure that caused her fainting, the suspicion of depression. She was on twenty different pills. My sister and I took her to a neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian in November of 2001, a month after my father’s death. He believed she might have hydrocephalus, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the brain. A shunt was inserted to relieve the pressure.
In early March of 2002 she was rehospitalized after fainting and having difficulty regaining consciousness. She was placed in a single room with a view of the Hudson River. She loved New York. At her peak she had sopped up all of it—plays, musicals, ballet, museum openings, the opera where she occasionally had to wake my father because his snoring was disturbing the other patrons. I believe the view brought her a certain serenity, that the connection to New York would always be there with the Hudson in front of her. She watched the little cities of the ships move up the river. She could see the George Washington Bridge. The on-call neurologist came in one day to test her aptitude. “What is your name?” he asked her.
She paused. She stared out the window into the brittle light of early March when winter is no longer winter and spring isn’t yet spring. It was somewhere around her seventy-fifth birthday.
“Eleanor Lebenthal Bissinger.”
She said it like a five-year-old standing up in class for the first time, trumpeting to the world that she had arrived. It was the last thing I remember her saying. The shunt had become infected. In trying to get rid of the infection, her kidneys started to fail.
Four months and ten days after my father died so did my mother, quietly and without complaint. I felt relieved. I felt lucky. I no longer had to bear witness to a mind that had vanished. That was the good part, I suppose. The bad part is that you never get over your parents dying back to back, critically sick at the very same time. You feel exhausted, cheated, angry, pulled in every direction because of their simultaneous needs but never knowing quite where to go. Parents die, but they should never die like this, the father livid at the world, the mother permanently sealed in her own world. You also know your children, no matter how much they loved their grandparents, will never fully overcome the scars. I worried particularly about Zach. He had lost great-grandparents, but he never shed a tear, his only curiosity to see what they looked like in an open coffin. This was different. I did not know how he would react. If he’d react at all.
Zach held special territory in my father’s heart. The place where they worshiped each other the most was Nantucket. In one of the first steppingstones of self-assertion, Zach visited alone one summer when he was fifteen or sixteen. Since Zach was not easy to entertain, my father was apprehensive. But he compensated for it. Zach could gladly eat salmon every day of his life so my father wrote up a menu for the entire week and came up with four different ways to prepare salmon—grilled, poached, sautéed, stuffed with crabmeat. He put in vegetables to act like he was doing the right thing. Dessert was always crammed with chocolate.
Every morning at eight, they got in the car together and drove side by side to the Downyflake. My father, after much inner debate over calories and cholesterol, ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and hash browns and toast and then complained about it the rest of the day. Zach had a muffin. Then they went to the car wash only a few hundred yards away and got my father’s car washed. Afterward they went to the entrance and watched other cars get washed until Zach said he’d seen enough. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. It was their version of fishing in the pond.
My mother’s relationship with Zach was well-meaning but taut and tense. She could never quite accept his condition. She took him to see The King and I on Broadway when he was nine or ten. Zach constantly shook his box of candy because he couldn’t sit still. She became livid and she slapped him. When I asked her about it, she was convinced he had done it on purpose. A pattern developed. Zach saw an opening for attention, positive or negative, much like he did with Gerry when they were younger. He’d pull on the brown fedora she wore. “Goddamn it!” she’d say, her pursed lips like the slit of a knife. He’d take her pocketbook. She’d chase after him. I found him in the yard of the Nantucket house once, terrified and breathing heavily. I took Zach’s side and lectured her on the fact that he was different and she had to accept it. But she wasn’t buying.
Yet it was Zach who gave the most touching eulogy at her funeral. He insisted on speaking. He wrote the words out himself. His voice was clear and his words direct. Everyone there was familiar with his condition and probably did not think he was capable of speaking in front of an audience with any poise. I didn’t think he could either. But he did, in unfiltered words straight from the heart.
“I love you, Ellie,” he said at the end. “I shall miss you very much.”
V
At 2:19 P.M. we pass the Continental Divide. We have driven 2,942 miles. At 2:56 P.M. we cross the border into Arizona. We have driven 2,991 miles. We have decided not to go to the Grand Canyon. I feel ambivalence but Zach feels none. He looks quite relieved.
Dark clouds hover over the mountains like vultures, turning them black. Then straws of white light poke through the clouds like secret stairways. Sections of the mountains heat with an amber glow, then turn black again as the cloud vultures return.
The car drives itself as if speeding toward one of those straws of light, lifted up by it, my son and I soaring. Then the clouds turn dark again and press as if they might crush us.
14. Hollywood Blue
I
WE END UP DRIVING over six hundred miles today. I am snappish. Zach as usual remains steady in the face of my flash thunderstorms. He has never talked back to me; I used to think it was always out of fear, and sometimes it is when I am purposely trying to scare him out of those behavio
rs that could become destructive. But his even temper is more than that; confrontation is simply not part of his nature, except when he threatens to kill his teacher. The right hemisphere of the brain, in addition to gripping onto concrete facts and experiences with crampons of steel, also seems to create imperviousness to others’ wig-outs. He doesn’t get rattled, life too short to waste his energy on such angst. I still have no real idea of what he sees of the world when he looks out the window, but it is never ugliness or cynicism or degradation. I like to think it is salmon.
Zach and I barely glimpse downtown Phoenix, which is fine because I have seen it before, tall buildings plunked and packed into a moonscape. We stick to our route through the labyrinthine interstates, as close to a futuristic version of the Jetsons as you can get where all human impulse is missing and commercial impulse overloads the most materialistic soul. Billboards skirt Interstate 10 for Whataburger, Bowdry RV Center, Gila River Casino. We pass a mall whose name I can’t read. It doesn’t matter. The same repeat offenders—Home Depot, Bed Bath & Beyond, PetSmart, Sam’s Club, Verizon Wireless, Ross, Best Buy.
I am also cranky because it has been the longest day of driving of the trip. Plus Zach must be famished.
—Are you hungry?
—Not yet.
—Okay.
—Let’s eat in Phoenix.
He wants to eat in the downtown of Phoenix rather than somewhere out here along its version of the Outback. Not going to happen.
—There is no Phoenix.
—Well I think Phoenix is a city right?
—It’s not a city. It sprawls all over the fucking place. I’ve just driven six hundred miles, and I’m not driving twenty more to get into Phoenix.
—Maybe just eat at the hotel it will be nice to get out of the car won’t it you’ll be happy for me?
—I’ll be happy for me.
I need directions to the hotel, and I’m trying to read the AAA guide while driving. The print is small; the pages are thin. I turn too many at a time. I can’t read without taking off my glasses. When I take off my glasses the road becomes blurry. Phoenix, we have a problem.
I hand the book to Zach and tell him where to look. He seems confused. It is taking forever.
—Are you looking at the right page?
—I am looking at the right page.
—No, you’re not. We’re going to miss the fucking exit.
—It says 139 1–10 51st Avenue see we’re right.
We check into the hotel. We eat dinner. Zach takes out his map and studies it and announces the best route to Las Vegas, up Interstate 10 and then over to 95. He hungers for Gerry again and calls him in the middle of dinner.
—Now wait did you have tennis tonight how are you going to get to the airport you just gonna take one plane so Thursday you have to work right so what time do you usually start school every day how do you get to school where do you take the subway from?
He hands the phone to me.
—Hey, Dad. How has Zach been?
—He’s been great. How’s it going?
—There’s a lot of work. Plus student teaching.
—You sound tired.
—I am tired.
—I’ll let you go sleep.
—I’ll see you in two days.
Zach eats voraciously, as usual. I have to tell him, as usual, to slow down between bites and use his knife and fork and cut the meat into small pieces. The cutting is hard for him, despite the endless physical therapy he had when he was young and had to learn and relearn the simplest actions, build a tower of ten blocks, cut a three-inch circle, maintain balance on a green ball to improve equilibrium, do five sit-ups.
—Sorry Dad.
—It’s not going away.
—I’m sorry.
—You don’t have to be sorry. Just relax.
After each bite he takes the napkin from his lap and wipes his face. He glances at me to make sure he is performing correctly, as if he is peeking nervously from behind a curtain. I avert my eyes from him. I am sorry. I change the subject to another snippet of Zach, This Is Your Life! With your special guest host, your father.
—Do you know why I let you go to Haddonfield when you were thirteen?
—Why?
—Your mom loved you. I thought it would be a really nice town for you, which it has been.
I cannot bear to finish. All I think about are the possessions that I took from his room after he was gone, so little that all of it could fit inside a single cardboard box—a wooden plane we once painted together in wobbly colors of red and green and yellow with his initials, ZB, on it, a snowball of Batman sent by a film director looking to dump unsold promotional items, an old-fashioned toy featuring baseball players in white uniforms with curlicue mustaches, the stack of photo albums he left behind because he was moving on and never was burdened by sentimentality. Was it all that he needed while he lived with me? Or was it all that I thought he needed? I had tried to engage him in other activities . . . did I really?
The only sound as we eat is the dull scrape of cheap silverware on cheaper plates. We drove too far today. We are tired and we are hot. We were in the car for fourteen hours. We go upstairs to our rooms. Zach says he wants to use the pool. I ask if he wants me to go too. I say it out of love. I want to be with him.
—No if that’s okay it’s good for me to do things myself.
After he leaves, I go downstairs and spy on him through a glass window. The pool is empty. The light from the overhead bulbs is in mourning. A few plastic lounge chairs are sprinkled about like forgotten mannequins. I watch Zach in the Jacuzzi with his arms stretched back against the plastic sides, the soft, pale bloom of his belly. I can tell he is talking to himself. He seems so alone in that fraying light. I also know after three thousand miles that he feels no isolation as long as the water bubbles up and swirls through him in the elixir of his own definition of freedom. He has himself, and as I have discovered time and time again, he relies on himself. There are only so many prescribed facts of what is your birthday and where do you work and where do you live and how do you get to work that can fit into a lifetime.
I go back to my room. I insert the plastic room key and hear the little click. I think of him propped like a pillow against the back of the Jacuzzi with those outstretched hands, conducting his own verbal symphony in total contentment. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, be sad or proud. I am all those things.
II
—Where are we going today?
—Vegas.
—So tell me why you need to shave?
—So I look good?
—You don’t want to look scraggly. They won’t like us as much there. I’m gonna shave too.
I make sure the water is hot in the sink. I tell him to take off his watch, which he wears religiously with the stringy Velcro strap since knowing the exact time is almost as important as knowing somebody’s birthday. He dips his hands to cup the water so he can splash it on his face and soften the beard. It is an uneasy physical action. I take his fingers and gently iron out the stiffness. I help him pat off the excess water and apply the shaving cream. He lays it on in mountains, and I take his hand and help him make a circling motion to rub it in. I know he is twenty-four, and part of me says Why am I doing this? But the intimacy I feel with him is like the spontaneous kiss of a little boy, because he is forever my little boy.
I take the razor and apply short but firm strokes because of the recalcitrance of his beard. I do his neck. He laughs because it tickles, another vestige of eternal boydom. I refill the sink with water so he can get rid of the excess shaving cream. It is once again difficult for him, his hands unwieldy. I take a towel and gently remove the remaining shaving cream from his sideburns and the groove under his nose. I help him apply a thick and even layer of after-shave unlike the globs he usually applies. I admire my barberesque handiwork. I admire him.
—Dad’s shaving you because it’s party time!
—Yeah.
We get
on the road. I focus on Las Vegas as much as I can, but I feel Los Angeles looming. It was the scene of my greatest personal and professional failure. While the gloom and doom have since receded, I still ponder what happened. I avoided dwelling on it during the trip, but now we are only a few hundred miles away.
I moved there in 2000 as a co-producer for the ABC television show NYPD Blue. I had written only one script in my life when the call came from legendary producer Steven Bochco. He had read it, liked it, and nearly two years later contacted me like a scene out of that old television show The Millionaire. I was beyond flattered. Bochco had invented the modern television drama with Hill Street Blues. He continued with LA Law and NYPD Blue. He had more impact on television as we know it than anyone else in the modern history of the industry. He thought I could make the transition from journalist and nonfiction author to television writer. So did I.
After I wrote a shitty script in my first assignment, I knew Bochco had given up on me, a lark that had become a loser. He was quite nice about it: he took me and another writer who had equally bombed to lunch at the commissary on the Fox lot. The food was wretched, the hamburgers so stuffed with extraneous accouterments that it was a game of hide-and-seek just to find the overly seasoned meat. Bochco assured us we’d get the hang of it. He just had a heart and was letting us down gently into the forgotten.
Roiling through me in the minivan is how I had left my children behind in Philadelphia. I cried on the flight to LA, knowing I had made a terrible mistake but still forging ahead. I told the woman next to me that I was going to Hollywood without them. I looked for solace from her but she rightly gave me none. She was literally the only one who disapproved of my decision; everyone else, whether family or friend or foe, applauded the careerism of my move because of the perceived glamour and the money I would be making. Hollywood is still always Hollywood.
Father's Day Page 19