“What’s the highest annual income you’ve made so far?” he continued, unimpressed.
The question took me aback. No one had asked me that so far. I tried to think fast; numbers flashed in my head.
“I made upward of seventy-thousand dollars selling real estate in a lousy market,” I said nervously, exaggerating the figure.
His eyes twinkled with amusement. “You understand that’s peanuts around here, don’t you?” He wasn’t asking, rather stating a fact in a derisive fashion, as if he were mocking me.
Is he poking fun at me? I wondered. Nobody had spoken about money or salary yet, though I really wished they had. I was in such financial distress; my trepidation went up a notch.
“I suppose it is!” I retorted. “I’m actually glad to hear that. I’m certainly ready to make much more money than I have so far.”
I looked him right in the eyes, willing myself into sounding determined and supremely confident. He finally smiled and, leaning forward, extended his hand.
“I like you,” he said. “Welcome to Merrill Lynch.”
On March 7, 1994, I started my training as a rookie Merrill Lynch financial consultant.
Despite the manager’s assertion, my compensation that first year was barely enough to cover the most essential bills. I had nowhere to turn and was terrified at the thought of losing my new employment. At long last, after seven more agonizing months examining every conceivable option, doubt and guilt-ridden, I decided to seek protection under the law and allow myself and my family a so-called “fresh start.” Out of desperation and the necessity to face the dismal facts, I filed for bankruptcy on October 7, 1994. On February 23, 1995, I was released from all dischargeable debts under Chapter 7. My debts were wiped clean, but I had also lost my apartments.
Had it not been for the kindness of a stranger, the co-op sponsor, who, when told of my predicament, offered to let me continue to live in my home and pay only the monthly maintenance charges until I could get back on my feet, Sophia and I would have been homeless. It had taken me fifteen years to build a spotless credit history with not a single late payment or returned check. It took less than a year to shatter that perfect record.
On a few occasions, throughout my financial ordeal, I tried to appeal to my in-laws for help, but they turned me down flat every time. I’d had the brilliant idea to write a letter to them in which I laid down all my grievances and their son’s responsibility in the breakup of our marriage. My mother-in-law’s first response was to disbelieve every word of it.
Evidently Robbie had denied all wrong-doing or transgression, and it was obvious that his word had more weight than mine. After this fruitless attempt at requesting financial assistance from them, I tried to appeal to their grand-parental sentiments by asking that they and Robbie keep in touch with Sophia.
In a long letter, Charm had replied that, as a child, she herself had been abandoned by her biological father. She’d gone on explaining that, far from being hurt by her father’s absence, she’d found great happiness with her step-father. She had then advised me that I ought to look for the same solution for my kid’s well-being, and concluded that I should stop trying to contact them or her son altogether.
I was dismayed by her callousness. I had always held her in the highest esteem and viewed her as a compassionate woman. Her heartless reply was utterly unexpected. I understood that her empathy with her son had blind-sided her and that she was angry at me for the pain he suffered, but to reject her innocent grand-child out of their lives and offer such an insensitive answer inflicted a blow to my psyche that I could never forget.
24
Endings & Understandings
“I want my Daddy. I want my Daddy,” whined Sophia over and over.
It was not the first time she had cried for her dad. Sometimes it was unpredictable, although often it followed his phone calls. I cuddled her as best I could, bewildered by her heartbreak but powerless to relieve it and full of hate toward its source.
“I’m sorry, honey, Daddy is far away. He’s not well. He can’t be here now. You know he loves you very much.”
What was I supposed to tell her? How much could a four-year-old understand? How could I explain that I had no idea why her father had decided to stay in Costa Rica instead of returning to her side?
In the weeks that followed his exile, every time he called and asked for her she ended up distraught or tearful. Despite my reluctance, one day, I picked up the second phone and listened in on their conversation.
“I miss you so much, baby, and I want to be with you very much, but I can’t right now,” he wept.
“But why, Daddy?” she insisted. “Why? Why?”
“I just can’t right now, baby. But I love you and I miss you.”
His voice broke, and I could hear him sob.
I listened in disbelief. There was a grown man talking to a tiny girl and not for a moment did he show restraint or understand the implications of his indecent show of self-pity. What did he think she could make out of that? I’d heard enough. I hung up and went to her.
She was sitting on the sofa in front of the television set, ready to watch her favorite program on that cloudy Saturday morning when the phone had rung.
“Say goodbye to Daddy, honey,” I said with a kiss on her head.
“Bye, Daddy,” she said in a little voice, handing me the cordless phone.
“Hi, Robbie?” I said. “Hold on a minute, will you? I need to talk with you.”
I covered the receiver and looked at Sophia. “You want to watch Barney?” I asked.
She nodded and put her left thumb in her mouth. I turned the TV on, gave her “Papette” to hold on for comfort, and went into the bedroom. She watched me walk away before turning to the screen with a deep sigh while kneading her blanket.
“Robbie? What do you think you’re doing exactly?” I asked in dismay.
“What do you mean?” he retorted on the defensive.
“I mean, here you are, once again, crying on the phone with your child who is already traumatized by your absence. How do you imagine your infantile display affects her?” I struggled to keep my voice down.
“you’re a bitch,” he replied in disgust. “I’m just being honest. I can’t pretend everything is okay when it’s not. I can’t talk with her without thinking of you, and I’m hurting. You don’t understand…”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” I snapped. “I do get that you’re in pain. We all are. But Sophie is a baby, and hearing you weep breaks her little heart and makes her cry, too. You do that every time you call. It’s incomprehensible. She doesn’t know why you’re not here. She thinks she’s somehow responsible for that. She often calls her uncles ‘Daddy’ and asks for you all the time. You’re inflicting immeasurable damage on her. How can you not see that?” I choked on my last words.
“I’m not there because you kicked me out, Wafa. You think it’s easy, don’t you? You have no idea what I’m going through, how much I miss her—”
“Then get back over here and be there for her,” I interrupted. “I wanted you out of my life, not hers. You’ve been away for almost six months now. Why are you still acting like a helpless victim? How long does it have to take you to separate our situation from the fact that you are a father and have responsibilities towards your child? She has nothing to do with us. She is not me. You must think about her, and her well-being, alone. Is she not your highest priority?”
“I can’t do that yet. I have no money, and I’ve been sick. I need to take care of myself. I can get treated here,” he said.
“Then you better get well fast,” I snarled. “You can find a job and live nearby. You can be with her as much as you want. We can work out flexible custody terms. Listen, she needs you, period.”
I paused, besieged by memories of my absent father and the pain that had caused me. My child had to be spared similar torment. But there was another pressing matter.
“By the way, I need you to sign the divo
rce petition. We both have to put this mess behind,” I ventured, aware of the thorniness of the subject.
“You wrote all that shit about me in the complaint. I can’t agree to that,” he said sullenly.
“I had to give a cause for wanting to divorce immediately. ‘Extreme cruelty’ is a common ground for expeditious action. Besides, it’s all true, and why should it matter to you, anyway? It’s not costing you a penny! Just sign it, and let’s put an end to this.” God, he really tested my patience.
My anger simmered at the surface. I was certain his reluctance to sign the petition had more to do with innate procrastination than with a valid sentiment of offended honor.
I had him served when he was still in New Jersey, but he had ignored it altogether. I had sent him at least two more petitions to Costa Rica, which he’d dodged yet again. I had no clue what else I could be doing to get him to sign the documents and return them. My lawyer was pretty inept, and I couldn’t afford someone more competent.
There was no financial dispute because there were no assets to speak of, only piles of debt, which I wasn’t even asking him to help with. There was no request for alimony or child support, and I had agreed to joint custody. I knew he was still unemployed, broke, and living with his parents. I just wished him completely out of my life. Divorce was the only way out, and a quick signature should have been easy. Apparently not!
My only expectation was that he stayed in touch with Sophia, though even that was a challenge. His egotistical and cavalier attitude toward his daughter was a source of greater distress than I had imagined. As much as I had been missing him and yearned for his presence for months, I’d come to see him as a fiend.
Love is a treacherous mirage, appearing like an oasis in the wasteland of our desire and neediness, only to metamorphose into loathing once our expectations are trampled.
That turned out to be our final conversation. He stopped calling, writing, or otherwise communicating with his daughter—not even on her birthday or Christmas did he feel he needed to express his attachment. He just let it go, let her go, as he did me, as if we were one and the same. What did fatherhood mean to him? Did he imagine that relinquishing his responsibility to her freed him from me? For the life of me, I could not comprehend why, as intelligent as I knew him to be, he was still incapable of separating his feelings for me from his love for her. For that very reason, I never trashed him in front of Sophia.
Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I had deeply resented my mother’s horrid portrayal and savage criticism of my father—no matter how true or well-founded. It was, hence, paramount in my mind never to speak ill of Robbie to my daughter. Quite the contrary—I described him in the best light possible. Ironically, it was his behavior over the years that revealed his true character to her, making her despise him for a long time.
In the end, he never signed any of the divorce petitions I sent him and never filed his own. We were at a standstill. As a last resort, on September 29, 1995, I entered a request to be granted a divorce by default. To do that, I had to publicly publish the complaint in newspapers in both New Jersey and Costa Rica, wait thirty days, and then be granted a hearing. On November 28, 1995, three years after our initial separation, a final judgment of divorce was issued.
“My parents were insulted to have their name in the Costa Rican paper associated with your appalling petition,” he afterwards had the nerve to complain—as if he had left me any other option.
What exactly had he expected me to do? If my petition was so offensive, how was his child abandonment to be qualified? Where were his and his parents’ sense of honor then? Furthermore, had he really wished for the whole matter to remain private, why hadn’t he signed and returned any of the complaints that were sent to him on multiple occasions for three long years? My questions had remained unanswered.
Most outrageous yet was his request for a copy of my final judgment of divorce, a couple of years later, when he was ready to marry a Costa Rican woman he had impregnated. Even more egregious was his phone request for a loan to divorce the same woman years later, and obtain legal custody of his then two young children. All those years, I agonized watching Sophia aching from his absence, and as much as I felt bad for him, my reason would just not let me show him any sympathy. I ignored all his appeals for help, and he had the common sense not to insist.
There was, however, a bright spot in the midst of those sad circumstances—it came from his mother, who, despite her prior insensitive statement, had in fact maintained a rapport with Sophia, writing her every birthday and Christmas and sending her a check on each occasion. Had she not been there, I am convinced Robbie would have vanished without a trace from his daughter’s life.
As I finished writing those words, I was struck by a flash of awareness. I stopped and mulled over the tone of my narrative. The voice was all one-sided, stubbornly smug, and sanctimonious. If I felt that way then and, for years afterward, wallowed in self-righteousness, I was no longer that person, I realized.
“It’s like I still want to have the last word!” I said out loud, the sound of my voice breaking the silence.
The sun had sunk behind the horizon, leaving a red-orange smudge in the dimming sky. I stared back at my computer screen. Is it possible for me to ponder over those times and reassess my life with Robbie objectively, without prevarication or bitterness? I never had the opportunity to hear his side. I never cared to find out. My pain had sealed me off from him, and I’d had no desire to be compassionate.
I closed my eyes and revisited our relationship in my mind, trying in earnest to stay detached.
When Robbie first admitted his pot problem and expressed his desire to free himself of his dependency, he’d also described the goodness toward which he’d aspired, and I’d believed I had found my prince. I was going to help him heal, be his savior, change him for the better-just as he had thought he found his “beau-ideal,” as he put it, his Greek goddess, in me. We’d each childishly clung to those imaginary deities out of selfish need and in total obliviousness to the real other.
Behind my lover’s beautiful physique, intellect, and sensitive soul, had lurked an anxious and depressed young man, who self-medicated with marijuana, masturbation, and pornography. My disappointment had been so immense, I’d kept obsessing over his problems-in denial of my own. I had thought myself in control and dealt with my own anxiety by taking charge, with regular physical exertion, running, and gym workouts, never once indulging in drugs or alcohol excess, all of which enabled me to claim the moral high ground. I do recall him pointing to just that, prompting a swift refutation from me.
“You and I are the same,” he’d once said, stretching full length on the couch in front of TV on one of his days off. “Behind your self-righteousness and poise, you too are doubt-ridden and afraid. We simply deal with it in different ways, which does not mean you’re better than me.”
I’d been getting ready to go to the gym and had asked him to watch Sophie; he’d said no, arguing that he needed to relax and advising that I take her upstairs to Mom while I was gone. I was infuriated by both his statement and his refusal to take care of the baby in my absence.
“How is getting high and habitually dallying in front of the TV the same as going to the gym and working out?”
Thinking back, the idea had hit a nerve and lingered in my head. Indeed, I’d often mentioned it to friends and relatives in expectation of reinforcing my view of him, which they invariably did.
The thought had, however, finally seeped through my psyche and was staring squarely at me. I could see now what he meant and how true it had been.
There was no question he had been guilty of some creepy and brutish things over the years. But I couldn’t be absolved of all blame in our demise. For one thing, I was so insanely insecure about money that it had become second nature to confront him with images of imminent Armageddon. Time and again I had disparaged his natural generosity and desire to please, going so far once as to yell at him for
bringing me flowers for no reason other than to celebrate me. In his hand, the bouquet had looked like a posy of overdue bills. Forever since, I have felt like an ogre for that unremitting tyranny.
I should have known the first time I had caught Robbie smoking pot in hiding, that there was something fundamentally wrong, deeply dysfunctional, between us. He, on the other hand, who had lived for my approval, was just as oblivious. I had become his father figure under his very eyes. Pleasing me was his raison d’être, and he submitted to it, albeit rebelling and striking back every so often. Like a disobedient teen, he had wanted to avoid criticism, while I’d behaved like a nagging parent, reprimanding and judging his every act. I’d put him down, made him feel worthless, incapable of achievement. The longer he put off his college graduation and career goals, for instance, the more my reaction contributed to further stunt his dreams. Was I solely responsible for his failure to succeed? No, but my displeasure had contributed to it.
Change, for most of us, is inherently difficult. But it is next to impossible when we live with people who don’t believe in us and wear their discontent on their sleeves. Instinctively, I had also emulated my mother in her criticism of my father, who had not been strong, or ambitious, or a good provider. In my eyes, Robbie too had fallen short on every count.
To make matters worse, we had both been opinionated and aggressive in our beliefs and conversation, always locked in a bitter power struggle and resorting to vicious arguments about everything, from political issues to household chores, to Robbie’s on-again off-again drug use. Physical violence and verbal cruelty had infected our encounters and worn us out. We’d each had to have the last word. Neither would give in, as if our lives depended on it. Disagreements turned to accusations and slights. Quickly we’d learned which buttons to push and, when words failed, I had hurled insults and he had thrown physical blows.
In the end, our early infatuation had quickly been deflated by reality. We were no angels, just earthlings struggling with our inadequacies. Because we only saw what we wanted to see in each other, we had no recognition of our failings, no clear-eyed acceptance of our shortcomings, the inevitable other side of our all-too-human selves. When we grasped the illusory nature of our expectations, the ground shifted under us and we came face to face with our frailty.
THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO Page 22