I was not the only one who disappointed my father during the course of my last year at high school. For six months now, Fiona had come up with a good reason to refuse every invitation to come out to the country. At the age of twenty-seven, my oldest sister lived alone with paintings that could not find a gallery and a cat her last roommate had left behind along with a foldout bed when she had gotten married.
Shortly after my fall from grace, my father called Fiona and invited himself to dinner at her place. He wanted to see his daughter by himself. Fiona agreed, then promptly outflanked him by immediately calling my mother and insisting she and I come, too.
She lived seven floors up on the top floor of an old pickle warehouse on Spring Street that smelled of brine. There was no elevator. We arrived two hours early and climbed the stairs quickly; Fiona wasn’t ready. T-shirt, ripped shorts, dirty hair, and, even for a warehouse, it was a mess. Dad apologized for getting the time mixed up, but I could tell he had wanted to catch her off guard. If my father had wanted to catch her with a man, he was disappointed.
None of us had ever been to her loft, or any loft. It had fourteen-foot ceilings and a pull toilet and a bathtub that used to be a pickle barrel. A mattress on the floor at one end, a ratty old couch by the dirty windows at the other, it seemed like she was camping out rather than really living there. My father noted that any agile sex offender could climb up her fire escape, and my mother wished there were bars on her windows and worried aloud about who would hear her daughter if she called out for help. Fiona nailed her canvasses right to the walls, and there was paint splattered on everything, including Fiona.
When we arrived, Fiona was just about to go out and shop for our dinner. My father stayed behind while my mother and I descended the six flights we had just climbed and went out on the street to help her buy groceries. Fiona got everything you couldn’t get in the country and she knew my father liked: smoked white-fish from Canal Street and oxtail from a butcher on Mulberry, and she insisted on not letting my mother pay for anything, even though she was broke.
When we climbed back up the stairs with the bags, Fiona started to sing “Wimoweh.” Mom asked us what was so funny. It was good to see her until we walked in the door. Dad was standing in front of a large, unfinished canvas of a family bunched together, as if posed for a snapshot, and obliterated by an opaque patina of beeswax and brown pigment that was just the color of shit. My father was holding a paintbrush as long as a yardstick in his hand.
“What are you doing?” Fiona’s voice was as sad as it was angry.
“The eye wasn’t quite right.”
“My God, Will.” My mother wanted to say worse than that to him.
“Don’t ever touch one of my paintings again, please.” Fiona dropped the groceries on the counter and opened a bottle of wine.
My father held out his hands and gave me a “What? Me?” look. I was embarrassed for him and got on Fiona’s bicycle and rode to the other end of the loft.
“I was just trying to help.” He waited for Fiona to say something. When she didn’t, he pushed on. “Do you think you have something special to say as an artist?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, like Picasso or Matisse or Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg? They show you something you haven’t seen before.”
“You mean ‘original’?”
“Yes. Do you think you have something original to say?”
“Do you, father?”
My mother stopped washing the dishes. I pedaled back to watch.
“Yes, I think I’ve broken some ground.”
“But not like Freud or Jung or Skinner or Wilhelm Reich.”
“Reich believed in flying saucers.”
“Let’s stay on the subject.”
“You’re mad I touched your picture.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Well, I’m not mad that the father in all these pictures is me. I just thought I’d give one of them the right color eyes.” It was a decidedly awkward dinner.
When we climbed back down the stairs an hour and a half later and got into the Volvo, my father turned to my mother and said, “I just want what’s best for my children.”
Dad was still digesting the punch bowl and the Fiona dinner when a certified letter arrived from Lucy. She was twenty-five by then, in the start of her second year in Columbia’s PhD program in psychology. My father had had to pull strings with more than a few old colleagues to get her admitted. But once there, she had done him proud, dean’s list, in fact. It still amused Lucy to tell people she was adopted. And thrice engaged, she continued to go through men like toilet paper. And as of late, she had developed the habit of dyeing her hair a different color every other week. She looked best as a redhead.
It was my father’s idea that she become a psychologist. Lucy wasn’t really interested in psychology, but she knew enough about psychology to realize that by staying in my father’s shadow, she avoided becoming a target for him. Her favorite part was arguing with Dad in shrink talk about the collateral damage his madness had inflicted on us as kids. Which, now that I think about it, drove my father crazy. But all in all, he was proud of her, proud that she was joining the guild of his dark art. He talked about the research they would one day conduct together, and genuinely thought she was on the road to his idea of happiness until he opened that certified letter.
He wouldn’t let me read it, but from the argument that erupted between him and my mother after she had read it, the salient points conveyed on that single sheet of onion skin were, not necessarily in this order: A) She loved them. B) She didn’t want to become a psychologist, because it was depressing. C) She had quit graduate school and was on her way to Morocco to work in an orphanage. D) She was sorry, “but I need to establish an emotional boundary between my life and yours.” My father read that part aloud. Twice.
The letter also included a check for $12,153, the amount my parents had spent on room and board and tuition for grad school.
A) through D) upset him on so many different levels, he chose to focus on the most superficial part of the kiss-off, the check. “She thinks sending me a check makes this all right?”
“I think it’s Lucy’s way of trying to take responsibility for her actions.” My mother’s lips trembled as she handed the letter back to my father. Her eyes watered up, but no tears fell.
“Dropping out of the graduate school I had to beg to get her into in the first place is responsible? And running away to an African orphanage is taking responsibility? She should have at least had the decency, the backbone, to tell this to my face. Putting it in a letter is cowardly.”
“Will, she said she was sorry. She knew you’d try to talk her out of it, and you would have.”
“You think this is a good idea?”
“No, but she’s twenty-five years old. And what we think doesn’t really matter.”
“And what’s this horseshit about emotional boundaries?”
“I can suspect what she might be referring to.” My mother glanced in my direction. Whatever she thought Lucy meant, she didn’t want it discussed in front of me. “But since I didn’t write the goddamn letter, I suggest you ask your daughter that question yourself.”
“I would, but as you seemed to have failed to notice, she was careful not to include her phone number or the name of this orphanage. Did you notice the return address on the envelope is the American Express office, Tangier?”
My mother gave in to her tears. “I should have known she was up to something when she asked me to mail her her bathing suit.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was just a bathing suit!”
“She’s going to wear a bikini at the orphanage?” At first, it was a relief to have their disappointment directed at someone other than me. The check fell out of the envelope.
“Where do you think she got the twelve thousand bucks?”
“Please stay out of this, Zach.”
“Her brother’s r
aised a valid question. How does a girl who’s trained for absolutely nothing, whose only previous job experience was being a camp counselor, get someone to give her twelve thousand dollars?” I didn’t like where my father’s paranoia was taking him.
Gray squawked on the sill. My father slammed the window, just missing the old parrot’s claws. “She always wanted to marry an African prince. Remember the Christmas she insisted we get her a black doll?” My father was showing his own colors as he free-associated a pattern to Lucy’s betrayal.
“Dad, you can’t honestly think Lucy’s getting money for sleeping with a black prince?” In truth, I thought it was kind of a cool idea.
“Anything is possible. She got the money from somebody. Her marketable skills are limited. She’s pretty, agreeable, not too particular . . .”
My mother slammed down her coffee cup so hard against the table it shattered. “I won’t stand for you talking about your own daughter that way!”
“When a daughter of mine carries on like she’s a cross between Baby Jesus Christ, Marilyn Monroe, and Job, what am I damn well supposed to think?” I didn’t like the way he said it. It made me wonder what he said about me behind my back.
“I think it’s great she’s going to work in an orphanage.”
“Sadly, Zach, that doesn’t surprise me.”
The next body blow to my father’s fantasy of his family was delivered by Willy. He, like Lucy, chose not to deliver it in person. He didn’t even hand in his resignation in writing. He called and talked to my mother, and asked her to relay the bad news to Dad. Willy had decided to give up premed at Princeton to study art history. What’s more, he was going to spend the next semester studying art in Florence.
My mother didn’t think she’d heard him correctly, and made him repeat it. I was listening in on the other line. “I thought you wanted to be a neurologist.”
“It doesn’t suit my sensibilities any longer.” His voice had gotten Masterpiece Theatre-ish since he went to Princeton. “My aesthetics have changed.”
“Willy, there’s nothing wrong with art history, but you don’t even like museums.” That’s what I was thinking.
“I do now.”
“But it’s such a drastic change.”
“I’ve been thinking of making a run in this direction for a while.” Still the long-distance runner.
“I’m not sure your father will pay for Florence.” My mother said it like the city was a girl.
“He doesn’t have to. Professor de la Rosa has fixed it for me to get a fellowship.”
“Who’s this professor de la what’s-it?”
“Visiting lecturer. He’s a curator at the Tate. He says I have a great eye.”
“You’re going to have to tell your father this yourself.” My mother handed the phone to Dad.
My father listened patiently as Willy laid out his plan. He did not interrupt. He listened carefully, then inquired politely, “Are you finished?”
“It’s not the word I’d use for it.”
“Willy, being your father, I’ve known you for a long time, and I’m for you in the long and the short run. And I think you will regret this decision.”
“I think you think you know me.”
As my father hung up the phone, my mother said, “At least he’s not dropping out of Princeton.”
“You’re right, Nora, it could get worse.” My father went to the liquor cabinet, and with careful deliberation, mixed himself a Manhattan with a fresh slice of orange. He waited until his cocktail was finished to explode. “Christ almighty! Companies pay me tens of thousands of dollars to tell them what to do. Governments hire me to think about their goddamn problems. You’d think one of my children would listen to me when I give them advice.”
“I listen to you, Dad.”
“You try.”
In the weeks that followed, every day began and ended with a Sock Moment. Sometimes my father would become becalmed in the middle of the day. My mother would leave him at their desk to Xerox something or make a cup of tea and come back and find him holding the glass paperweight with the giant antidepressant entombed within its sharp-edged clarity. He’d stare down at it with a grimace, as if it were a splinter that he could not see well enough to remove from his flesh. She would pull him back from wherever it was he’d drifted with the weight of her hand on his shoulder and the gentle reminder, “We still have work to do.”
After the mixed bag of tribulations his children had hit him with, my father was on his guard. My grandmother Ida said that bad news comes in threes. Dad knew better. He was on the lookout now. He didn’t say it out loud, but I could tell he thought it was his fault we had strayed from the trajectory he had plotted for our lives. He had become complacent, self-satisfied, bourgeois in his gentrified barn. Worse, middle-aged—that is, if he were going to live to be a hundred and six.
At the age of fifty-three, my father bought a slim volume titled Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness and a set of barbells. Dad began to do push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts, and curls while he dictated breathlessly to my mother about the latest final solution for troublesome thought: Zimelidine, the first of the fabled SSRIs to hit your local drugstore. If you’d taken it, you might know it as Normud, later banned due to side effects that included Guillain-Barré syndrome, exanthema, arthralgias, and, according to some, suicidal ideation.
Lazlo had been in Europe most of that fall. He no longer dealt in garbage. He bought and sold companies. “Garbage that doesn’t know it’s garbage” was how he put it. My father called him about Lucy. Lazlo got somebody who worked in Tangier to check on her. She was indeed working at an orphanage.
My mother placed a call to Lazlo as well. Not about Lucy; she was worried about my father. When Lazlo heard about the barbells, he called me. “How mad is he?” Lazlo was in Zurich.
“He’s pretty pissed off.”
“No, I mean, how nuts is he?”
When I told Lazlo about how my father was convinced that Lucy was being kept by an African prince, Lazlo exhaled a laugh. He always laughed at sad stories.
Lazlo invited himself for Thanksgiving that year. It was his way of checking up on my father. He arrived early in the day, long before the bird had gone into the oven. It had been cold the week before, the ground frozen solid, the river laced with ice, but overnight a warm air mass mugged New Jersey. The mercury was in the sixties. Steam rose up off the frozen fields as Lazlo pulled into our drive, top down, in a brand-new fire-engine red 4.5-liter six-passenger Mercedes-Benz convertible.
My mother wasn’t amused when my father called out, “Lazlo, in my next life, I want to be you!” Lazlo, now forty-eight, a bald spot, a shag, and a Fu Manchu mustache, had a twenty-four-year-old blonde cuddled up next to him, who wore a tube top, cowboy boots, and a fringed leather jacket.
When Lazlo announced in a stage whisper, “I think she’s too old for me,” my mother laughed, mostly because my father thought it was funny, and it had been a month since she’d seen him smile.
The blonde’s name was Ula. And Lazlo swore she had an MBA, even though they had met while she was a first-class stewardess for Scandinavian Airlines. She looked at my mother, my father, me, and the barn, pronounced us all, “Fantástico” in a Swedish accent.
I thought my father was just pretending to like the red Mercedes so as not to make my mother jealous of Ula. But when Lazlo and his Swedish babe went inside, Dad stayed out on the lawn, staring at Lazlo’s red lacquered ride. After a while, he opened the door and sat on the cream hide and gripped the wooden steering wheel, and smiled at himself in the rearview mirror.
Fifteen minutes later my father was still sitting in the Mercedes, going nowhere. Lazlo went out to check on him. I followed.
“I’ve always wondered how the world looks from a car like this.”
“If you weren’t such a cheap bastard, you’d buy yourself one.” Lazlo put a finger to his nose and gave himself a blast of Dristan in each nostril.
&n
bsp; “Even if I could feel comfortable wasting this kind of money on a car that becomes secondhand as soon as you pay for it, I’m too old to pull it off.”
Lazlo tossed him the keys. “Take it for a spin.”
My father shook his head no.
“He’s scared he’d like it.”
“Come on, Zach.” In that moment, my father had not just forgotten about the punch bowl, he had forgotten I was his son. Stepping on the accelerator, popping the car into low, he fishtailed onto the lawn. When he saw the double Ss he’d just gouged in the sod he put down last summer, he laughed.
We stayed on the back roads. My father asked me to find a station. We tuned in on Pink Floyd. Dad seemed to like “Dark Side of the Moon.” The sun was in his eyes. He reached into the glove compartment, found a pair of shades in Lazlo’s hat. He put on Lazlo’s dark glasses and beret. He looked like a white Miles Davis. All the while, the speedometer was creeping up on him. The Mercedes was a red tank. We were doing sixty down gravel roads, cutting corners with a drift. Then we turned onto the interstate. Pedal to the metal, our differences blurred.
We were doing a hundred and thirty-three miles an hour when we heard the siren. A cop car pulled us over. My father smiled as he handed over his driver’s license.
When the cop asked for the registration, and I couldn’t find it, my father laughed.
The cop looked at him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
My father still had on Lazlo’s dark glasses. “I’m a doctor returning a patient to the mental hospital.”
The cop eyeballed me. “What’s wrong with the kid?”
“Nothing. I’m the patient.”
My father seemed disappointed that the cop let him go with a warning. We laughed as we turned back toward home. As we headed up our road, my father announced, “I’ll never have a car like this.”
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