There is a wound that so many men suffer. Women, too, but so many men. This wound—let me tell you what this wound is. This wound is the Absent Father Wound. The dad who wasn’t there when you were a kid. Maybe he wasn’t physically there, or maybe he was there but he wasn’t. He was absent. And he inflicted on you an Absent Father Wound.
Dad is destiny! Mark it down. Who determines whether you’re going to be happy? Dad. Who determines whether you’re going to be successful? Dad. Who determines whether you’re going to be responsible and courageous and provide for your wife and children? Dad. Love him or loathe him, Dad is destiny.
Colossians, chapter 3, verse 21: “Fathers, do not provoke or irritate or fret your children. Do not be hard on them or harass them, lest they become discouraged and sullen and morose and feel inferior or frustrated. Do not break their spirit.”
A father can break his son’s spirit. The son might not even know it’s happening. The wound might remain hidden for many years. But you grow up and you discover you’re wary of love, wary of relationships, and you don’t know why. You don’t know why you’re unhappy in your marriage. Or you’re not married and you don’t know why you can’t find a wife, that one woman in all the universe who completes you and is your soul mate. You have an Absent Father Wound. And there’s pain. And confusion. And anger. And you don’t know what to do with those feelings. You don’t know how to heal that wound.
So what do you do? You turn to alcohol. Drugs. You turn to sexual immorality and perversion. Because why? Because you’re trying to dull the pain of this wound at the heart of your very being. You’re the kid who tore his patellar tendon, and you never went to the doctor to get it fixed.
Or you went to the doctor, and he told you to get surgery, and instead you flew off to South Carolina.
And you’ve been walking backwards since that day.
I was in Sadie’s garage now, the engine off, reclining in the driver’s seat, on the verge of sleep. John, chapter five, tells an interesting story. I think you’ll find it very interesting. Jesus was wandering around the desert, when one day he ran into a man who was crippled. Crippled for thirty-eight years, is what John tells us. Thirty-eight years is a long time. And Jesus asked him a very simple question—a very simple question, but not the one you might expect. Do you know what he asked him? I’ll tell you. He asked him, “Do you want to get well?” Do you want to get well? That’s a pretty good question. Do you want. To get well.
Do you?
Hey there, Wounded Warrior, I’ve got a question for you: Do you want to get well?
I did. I wanted to get well. I had started feeling unwell only in the past half hour or so, but now I felt overwhelmed by a mix of extreme fatigue and shame. I was ashamed because my plan had been stupid and self-serving, because I had sort of blacked out in a crowd of strangers, because I’d told that guy to go fuck himself, because I was a terrible dancer and underdressed and old and I’d tried to kiss Jess—Jess who was seven years younger than me and recovering from a bad relationship—and also because I had gone on and on about my abandoned novel, and because I wasn’t religious or a war hero or a Wounded Warrior. I didn’t have an Absent Father Wound, and yet I still suffered from insecurity, inadequacy, and confusion. Who to blame? As I shuffled upstairs and fell into bed, I resolved to call my parents more often, taking comfort in the resolution, doubting I would keep it.
* * *
—
I felt vague pride that I made it three days before concluding that Maria would never respond to my invitation. On the fourth day I read through our emails, the whole stack, searching for something solid and unequivocal, peering behind and between our words, tapping the sentences for cracks or dead spots. “I’m very excited about our correspondence!” she’d written. I doubted I’d find a definitive sign of her love, but I thought I might find one of my delusion. In the end my investigation clarified nothing. If it was easy to convince myself Maria hadn’t been so much as flirting (she was restless and bored and estranged from her housemates, our emails provided nothing more than comfort and release, so we happened to like some of the same books—who cared?), it was almost as easy to convince myself she wanted to spend her life with me. “For me, just leaving off with a book is as painful as—I don’t know, seriously a missed romantic opportunity.” We’d mentioned so often how much we loved our correspondence; wasn’t that a small step from loving each other? You could fall asleep in one state and wake up in the next. Roll over in the middle of the night without knowing it. Or you could pretend none of it ever happened, we never met, never reunited, never went out for sushi or shared a bed, you never sent me John Berryman’s biography of Stephen Crane.
I drafted two emails to Maria. In the first, I apologized for my previous email, which I’d written in a moment when I wasn’t quite myself, and asked if she’d consider renewing our correspondence on the terms we’d established over the previous weeks: as co-enthusiasts and collaborators, as confidants and friends. In the second, I doubled down on my declaration, refusing to apologize or take it back, challenging Maria in no uncertain terms to admit that she, too, was falling in love, and re-extending my invitation to Des Moines, where we could start a life together. Both emails languished in my “Drafts” folder, where they remain to this day. The truth was I didn’t know if what bound me to Maria could accurately be characterized as “love.” Either we loved each other or we didn’t, but somehow I lacked access to the salient information. Maybe it was blocked by fear or confusion. Maybe Ashwini stood in its way. The best I could do under the circumstances, it seemed, was to remain open to both possibilities, to wait, to see if Maria would respond.
Objectively, I told myself, little had changed: Maria hadn’t been there before, and she wasn’t there now. I was alone. The largely abstract nature of our relationship made it easy to imagine it wasn’t real, and I stuffed the stack of printed-out emails in a box in the basement with Sadie’s son’s old school assignments, along with the small library I’d amassed since arriving, which seemed part and parcel of our correspondence.
A new beginning. Thrown back into solitude and silence, I recommitted myself to ambivalence, anonymity, and openness to whatever might come. I was re-resetting my life. I went back to sitting, back to staring. And I felt…I felt fine, for a nonentity. Wind chimes chimed at the limit of hearing. Falling snow reveals the secret form of wind. The shadows of the mullions wavered if you watched them, but the windows never moved: they framed bare branches which framed the sky which framed the soft winter world which framed me. My mother emailed: When would Ashwini visit? Would I mind if she and Dad came down when she did (not for the whole time, of course:))? How was the old street, the old city? Was I bored yet? “Sadie said the two of you had a nice time together.” She did? Dress socks worn too long with slippers become reptilian second skins. House sparrows spoke to each other somewhere close. My arm fell asleep then off in my mind. Laura had a new boyfriend.
“I do not.”
“You do the things boyfriends and girlfriends do with each other.”
“I didn’t know there was a checklist.”
“There is. Walk, watch things, eat, kiss. Those are the four things boyfriends and girlfriends do.” I was pleased with the elegance of the formulation.
“Dan is not my boyfriend. I think I’d know.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Sometimes you don’t know. Sometimes it happens when you aren’t looking, and then bam! Marriage, children, death.”
“Right. Hopefully in that order, I guess.”
“It’s like that Talking Heads song…how does it go?”
“ ‘Burnin’ down the house’?”
“Exactly. Apt, isn’t it?”
“Very. Dan is not my boyfriend.”
Laura had met her boyfriend on Match.com. Apparently she’d been a member for two years but Dan was the first guy she’d gone on a date
with. She’d rarely even visited the website, she said, so anxious was she about her photo, her profile, whether she’d chosen the most important qualities and accomplishments and enthusiasms to highlight. Plus she’d have to read through a million notes of interest from men who couldn’t punctuate or spell. Among the many things she’d noted in her profile were that she liked to play tennis and didn’t smoke, and for some reason the Match.com algorithm had determined that these were her two most essential characteristics: every man who contacted her put strange emphasis on the fact that he was a nonsmoking tennis player. “But in their profile photos they’re wearing, like, Vikings jerseys or they have their hair slicked back or whatever. I mean, I shouldn’t—I’m sure they’re really nice guys. I’m sure I could, like, get a drink with them and it’d be fine.” In any case she had no problem meeting men in real life, went on occasional dates without the help of the Internet, and had been with a handful of serious boyfriends in the years since we’d broken up. She believed, it seemed to me as we spoke, what all sensible romantics believed: that dating sites destroy the adventure of love by minimizing its elements of contingency and risk. She’d joined Match.com to appease her mother, and because she was curious, she said. “You should do it.”
I wasn’t sure if she was serious. “I’m okay, thanks.”
“No, I mean it. When’s the last time you went out with another person?”
I told Laura about my outings with Jess, feeling they stood in for my emails with Maria, which I hadn’t mentioned to Laura or anyone else. They felt too personal, too dangerous, too dear. I didn’t tell Laura about the quasi-blackout, nor the failed kiss attempt, nor that I’d resolved not to see Jess again, not that Jess would want to see me.
“Match dot-com could help you find women your own age,” Laura said.
“Love knows no bounds.”
“I disagree. Love knows bounds.”
“No bounds.”
“Some. One or two bounds, at least.”
“Will Dan be your date at your sister’s wedding?” The wedding was taking place in about a month and a half, in Grinnell, an hour from Des Moines. (Iowa was the only state in the Midwest in which her sister could marry legally.)
She did the laugh I love that’s basically her saying, “Ha,” then said she didn’t plan on bringing a date.
“Why not?”
“Because if I brought a date I’d pretty much be telling my mother this was the man I planned to marry.”
“You don’t plan to marry Dan?”
“I met him three weeks ago.”
“It’s about time, then. You and your sister could do a dual wedding. Two birds.”
“He doesn’t read. He’s not a reader.”
“What about speech? Can he talk? Does he know the alphabet?”
“He seems to. Could be faking, though.”
“Bipedal?”
“Most of the time.”
“Whoa. Let’s not go there. Does he make you laugh?”
“We’ve gotten drunk every time we’ve been together. You know what happens when I’m drunk.”
She can’t stop laughing. “Is he comely?” I don’t remember when or how that became one of our words.
“Very. In a cyclist, skinny-frame, thick-thighs kind of way.”
“Thick thighs, knows the alphabet, gets you drunk enough to laugh—marry this man, I say!”
She said she’d think about it.
* * *
—
I picked Sadie up from Des Moines International, and after her nap we set off walking on the same route we’d walked before, two weeks earlier, though this time it was slightly warmer, the clouds thin, the light both brighter and softer. In the woods by the river she pointed out invasives—garlic mustard, black locust, tree of heaven—and a little farther on we stopped to look for eagles, once again unsuccessfully. I hadn’t walked this path since the afternoon before the concert, and everything was different now. Emptied of anticipations, I no longer occupied the center of the world. The scenery was pretty or not pretty in turn, but it was no longer mine. It was only scenery.
As we walked through marshland filled with dead reeds and foxtails that reflected silver-gold in the sun, Sadie, interrupting the thread of our conversation, asked if everything was okay.
“Excuse me?”
“You seem a little down.”
I feigned surprise at her show of concern but actually I was grateful: I’d been hoping, almost expecting, I realized now, she’d give me a chance to open up to her. Instead of talking about Maria, though, whom I’d been unable to banish from my thoughts, or about Jess and our ill-fated night, I found myself talking about Ashwini. I told her about our sort-of-breakup and then, prompted by Sadie’s questions, went back to the beginning. I talked about how for a long time I’d been too afraid of Ashwini to speak to her. Whenever I saw her at friends’ apartments she’d come across as cynical, knowing, a little mean. I didn’t want to be the object of her judgment. I worried that if she got to know me, sooner or later she’d sort me into a category of young New York writer to be mocked and dismissed (which I’m sure, I told Sadie, says a lot about my state of mind at the time).
Finally, though, we found ourselves sitting next to each other on a couch at a phone bank for Obama. After we’d done enough winning hearts and minds of voters in battleground states, we got to talking. At first she didn’t deviate from my conception of her. She talked about how she expected Obama to win and for his presidency to be a disappointment, a slightly more palatable continuation of Bush-era policies and political realities. Nothing would fundamentally change, she said. In some ways, things would probably get worse. (Not that she had to worry too much about it: she could move back to Canada whenever she wanted.) But then something happened that changed her for me. The host of the gathering had made apple pie, and when Ashwini took a bite her face transformed completely. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone experience pleasure so fully, I told Sadie. She gave a little moan and after she’d finished chewing raved about the pie to our friend, gesticulating wildly. It was the first time I’d seen her excited—and she was more than excited, she was passionately absorbed—and the contrast between this side of her and the side of her I’d seen until that moment drew me in, made me want to get to know her.
After we started dating, I told Sadie, I saw this side of her all the time. Almost anything could bring it out, it seemed—a song, a person, a quality of light, a subway line, a smell, a commercial. I loved these moments when she lost herself in a sensation or enthusiasm. But I also grew to love the other side of her, the serious, critical side. She seemed unhappy but she also made it seem like unhappiness was the only sane response to the world, and anyway if life contained these, what, treasures, wasn’t that enough?
“Why wasn’t it?” Sadie asked.
“I’m getting there.”
“I’m listening.”
For a year or so things were great, I said. We moved in together after a few months of dating. During the day she walked dogs for money; most evenings I waited tables. When we were both home we often worked at our respective novels at tiny desks in opposite corners of our tiny bedroom. I’d never dated a writer before and it felt exciting, romantic. We were a literary couple. More than one friend told me it never worked out for writers to be in a relationship, and I took special pride—we both did—in proving those people wrong. That summer my novel was accepted to be published, and Ashwini won a big story prize, and we felt like we were on our way to something.
Then, the following spring—last May—my novel was published and Ashwini got a prestigious teaching job in Halifax. It would begin that fall. In retrospect, I told Sadie, that was when things started to sour. Ashwini asked me if I wanted to come with her to Halifax, and at first I hesitated, I had it in my mind that I should stay in the U.S. in the months following the release of m
y novel. Then the response to my novel seemed over, and I said I would follow her, but now she seemed hesitant, what would I do for work, what would I do when the six months I was allowed to be in Canada expired? Eventually we agreed we’d try to make it work.
“That’s never a good sign—when you’re ‘trying to make it work.’ ”
“No. That’s when you know it won’t work, isn’t it.”
I summarized our time in Halifax in much the same way I had to Laura on the phone a couple of months earlier: Ashwini’s withdrawal from me, her frustration, culminating in the thrown chair, the broken lamp; arguments that lasted deep into the night and left me with no energy to write. One night, exhausted and only half serious, I tried out the idea that maybe we should just be friends. “As if we’d be friends if we weren’t dating,” Ashwini said, and in the moment I thought she was right, we wouldn’t be.
“How so?”
“We were different people. We didn’t like the same things. I remember one night, we were walking around her campus and I was telling her about a walk I’d taken that morning. It was in this beautiful park at the tip of a peninsula—I actually fantasized about proposing to her there—and I remember wanting to tell her about some little thing I’d noticed, I don’t remember what, and she said, ‘The difference between you and me is that I like walking on busy streets and you like walking in parks.’ She said it sort of playfully, flirtatiously even, but I think that’s when I knew it was over, you know? And it wasn’t even true! I do like walking in parks, yes, but I also like walking on busy streets!”
“What about totally empty streets? With your mom’s friend?”
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