My Father More or Less Read online

  In his most recent phone call, he said he had been thinking of shaving his beard, not to be surprised if he were beardless when I saw him.

  “How will I recognize you?” I asked, only parly in jest.

  “I will be the only one there who can claim to be your father.”

  I see it this way. Or this is one of the ways I see it. I am the man’s enemy and he knows it. He has made me his enemy and is aware that he has and so he must resent and fear my presence. If that’s the case, and it’s the only case I have, why did he invite me to London? Certainly not for the reason he offers—to get to know me better, to make up for past failures—which he would mock as clichés if I offered them to him. I acknowledge that he may feel some guilt over the way he’s treated me in the past, but I doubt that that’s the main reason for his invitation. There’s evidence for a completely different interpretation of his motives. The natural hostility of sons and fathers is the central theme of his novels, a friend of my mother’s once told me, thinking the idea would amuse me. Let’s take the argument where it goes, okay? It’s dangerous not to know where your enemy is at all times. So he brings me to London to have me where he can see me, to have me in his sights. What follows? He converts me if he can to his view of things, tries to pacify my resentment. And if he can’t—the reasoning seems extreme, is meant to be extreme—he gets me out of his way. The idea seems inhuman, perhaps crazy, and I neither believe it nor disbelieve it. I see it merely as one possibility on a spectrum of possibilities.

  I am susceptible to motion sickness, have always been, my mother says, and on long car trips usually have to ask the driver to stop and let me out. When the sickness doesn’t come its absence is itself cause for wonder. An hour and fifty-five minutes have passed on this flight and I’ve had a beer, dozed, read a half-page of my father’s first or second novel, and I’m still all right. Queasiness, or maybe only expectation of, rises and subsides. I open the book in my lap at random and read whatever the eye chances to record.

  On the other side of the closed window, in the dusty courtyard where rough gravel gathers into heaps, the truck has its hood turned toward the house. There were a few people around as there always were, no matter the hour, at the gate along which the road, connecting with the Skyline Highway, ran. I understood the signification of their continued presence, like mysterious plants that spring out of the soil, though found it without weight or interest, a familiar and ominous landscape belonging to itself.

  Someone said (I forgot where I read it) that my father writes mystery stories in which there are neither corpses nor murderers, in which almost everything is suggested and almost nothing happens. I quote this judgment sometimes as if it were my own discovery. Whether accurate or not, it has the ring of profundity. Mostly I think it’s a lot of shit what people say about books, just words to fill the empty spaces. I’m pretty good at shooting a certain kind of literary shit myself before a friendly audience, though with teachers and fathers I can barely put together a complete sentence. I signal to a stewardess as she goes up the aisle, holding up the Coors can to indicate I’d like another. “Someone will be taking your lunch order in a few minutes,” she says, moving away, called invisibly to some other business. I read somewhere (or am I making that up too?) that stewardesses have sex all the time on the ground because it reminds them of being in the air.

  I don’t recall my father talking to me about his own work, though he had opinions about almost everything else. I don’t know why it was so, but we tended to avoid the subject of books altogether. Sometimes as a joke I would say to him, “Write any good books lately?” I don’t remember what he answered; he may not have said anything at all. Our main topics of conversation were movies and sports (baseball and basketball mostly ) and how I was doing in school. He was full of theories about winning and losing that always seemed to me beside the point. “If they weren’t committed to losing,” he’d say about some team we supported, “they’d find some way to win.” “Doesn’t everyone want to win?” I’d ask. “It’s dangerous to get what you want,” my father would say. “You don’t understand that, do you?” I’d nod as though I understood, but then a little later the question would come out, “What happens to you if you get what you want?” Then he would explain or he wouldn’t, and it would make no difference which, his explanation beyond my reach, that it was death-bent to challenge the gods. (Could the gods field an entire team? I used to wonder). The teams that didn’t want to win—they were always somehow ours—lacked character, he would say. The teams my father supported were underdogs of degraded character, frightened to the point of ineptitude at the distant prospect of victory. I didn’t always enjoy going to games with him. When his team was losing he could be embarassing to be around, complaining about the referees in a self-pitying voice that made me want to pretend I didn’t know him. “It’s just a game,” I would say, giving him back his own wisdom of an earlier day. “They’re calling them all against us,” he’d say. “They won’t give us a break.” He would calm down for moments but the slightest turn against his interests would set him off again. It was like being with a madman. Then there were times he held me responsible for his teams’ failures as if I had some magic I was refusing to employ on his behalf. I took it to heart, began to root secretly against his teams, wanted to see them fail because of his stake in their success. If I couldn’t will them to victory, I could at least take pleasure in their defeat. My own theory: a man committed to losers got what he deserved.

  It is not one time but several times coming together as one. Not memories but invention, as he would say, given the shape and condition of recollection. I know it is my father before I am fully awake. His heavy walk rings the floors. My mother asks him to leave in a soft reasonable voice, says she doesn’t want the children’s sleep disturbed. He says—I am pressed agaist the closed door of my room—that he has as much right to be in the house as she. He won’t stay long, he says in a wheedling voice, he just wants to see his kids for a few minutes. Be a sport, Magda.

  You don’t want them to see you like this, she says.

  Like what? I wonder and open the door to see for myself.

  Is this your idea of seeing the kids? she asks. He has her backed against a wall, his arms out.

  She slips out from under his arms. I think you should leave, she says. Goodbye.

  He has his arms around her. Let’s go into your room, he says, kissing her, my mother drawing back her head.

  The children will wake up, she says. I want you to leave.

  They are out of view when I hear her say in a loud whisper, I don’t want to, don’t you understand.

  They go into her bedroom and close the door.

  The man next to me is asleep, his mouth open, a faint sound coming from him, an industrial hum. I get up to go to the bathroom, slide by two sets of knees. The plane lurches slightly. A child lets out a heartbreaking cry. In the bathroom cubicle, after peeing, I stand slumped over the bowl, waiting out a bout of nausea. When it passes—it is as if it never quite arrives—I have the illusion that I glimpse my father’s face in the mirror. Actually there’s hardly a resemblance between us, except perhaps at the mouth, in the thin red line of the lips. On the face in the mirror, sweat sprouts like a rash. I am allergic to small enclosures, to other people’s reflections staring back at me. I wash my face and hands, comb my hair, flush the toilet, the poisonous liquid raining thirty thousand feet into the ocean.

  I have this idea off and on that my life is a movie or made up of pieces of old movies. A girl about my own age stops me as I step out of the bathroom, says amazing as it may sound her travelling companion, a lady named Mrs. Karp, had gone up front about twenty minutes ago to get a magazine and hasn’t returned. She has searched the entire plane and there is no sign of her friend. I don’t know what to believe, suspect the girl is on something, but her story as she tells it is full of convincing detail. When I get back to my seat I begin to wonder if there isn’t, as she suspects, some kind of conspi
racy aboard this plane. She sits, empty seat next to her, with her hands over her face.

  It often strikes me that almost everything we take for granted is something of a fraud. I’m not dogmatic about my conclusions. One thing is true for me at one moment and another, maybe the opposite, is true the next. We are suspended in the air, going nowhere; the plane is going on course at the speed represented by the pilot. The girl in the Grateful Dead sweatshirt has lost her friend on the plane; there is no friend and never was. My father wants to see me and my father wants to get rid of me. I am making this trip to see my father; I am making this trip to see what my father wants.

  Once the connections break, it is hard to put things together again.

  I feel at times like an old man, older than my father, as if I had already lived through my future on some secret wave length. My mother likes to say that her friends think of me as an adult, forget when talking to me that I’m her little boy. Someone had to take his place, I suppose, and after the first few years there was no one else. It’s like it’s so far back I can’t remember having been a child. I mean, I don’t know if I even had a childhood. I just turned eighteen and I haven’t the faintest idea what it was like to be twelve.

  My mother won’t say anything directly, but I know she feels he’s ruined her life. I’ve never gotten anything from him either, not anything I’ve ever wanted. For some reason this complaint always fits itself into the same words as if it existed independent of any specific reality. When I think of him I say to myself: I’ve never gotten anything from my father. It’s always the same words, the feeling stuck in the same flag of language. I’ve never got anything real from him. All the time I’ve spent with him has been wasted time. I don’t expect anything from him; I don’t really want anything from him. All of this, which I know to be true, rings false. Language, which is his weapon, has put me in a false position. Who’s to blame for that? Sometimes I think I could kill him for putting me in the wrong.

  My father wears on this occasion a three piece tobacco-brown corduroy suit with the texture of velvet. He is two years late for our appointment. We go to a restaurant called Toros, which is a hangout for writers and literary groupies. My father is fussed over by the proprietor, a hard-bitten type who professes to admire everyone’s work, and we are conducted to our table like visiting dignitaries.

  “How’s school?” my father asks.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “As a matter of fact I’ve stopped going.”

  He nods, refuses to comment, purses his lips in disapproval.

  “Do you know who that is?” he asks, pointing to a red-faced man in a belted leather jacket at a table perhaps ten feet from ours. The man, being pointed at, looks up, nods to my father, says something amusing to his companion.

  “Do you see that man?” my father asks, his harsh whisper too loud not to be overheard. He mentions a name vaguely known to the general public, a figure of minor celebrity. “He was functionally illiterate until he was twenty-five. The man couldn’t write a business letter, could barely spell his own name. He was working in the garment district in New York as an assistant buyer and he had a nervous breakdown. He began writing as a form of therapy. His wife, Minerva, who was a high school English teacher, edited his manuscript into recognizable English, taught him the rules of English syntax.”

  “Dad, he can hear you,” I say, speaking behind my hand.

  “Doesn’t matter. He knows what I’m saying is true. After he made a lot of money—on his third book if I remember—he left Minerva and the kids for a seventeen year old girl. The girl was at most a year older than his oldest daughter whose name unless I’m mistaken was Loretta. The man hasn’t written a creditable book since then because he has no one to rewrite them for him. Critics take the cramp in his syntax for evidence of a deepening of purpose. The truth is, he’s unable to write a lucid sentence.”

  The object of my father’s cruel description is talking in an equally loud whisper about my father. I hear the name Lukas Terman rise and fall in the buzz of the room.

  A couple come to the table to greet my father. “I want you to meet my son, Tom,” he says.

  “Your father’s the best writer in this room,” the man says.

  “Is that right?”

  “He’s also the sexiest man in the room,” the woman says, kissing my father on the cheek.

  “That’s the nicest compliment of all,” he says.

  When the couple move off to their own table, I ask my father if they are writers too.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he says in his loud whisper. “Talented beginners. The girl has a telling way with a phrase but doesn’t know when enough is enough. The man can speak in tongues but hasn’t yet found his own voice…. Tell me why you aren’t going to school.”

  “I don’t know why,” I say.

  The answer seems to close the subject for the moment. His attention moves elsewhere. He gives me a brief biography of a bearded man standing with his back to us at the bar.

  “Do you know everyone in the room?” I ask.

  The waiter comes over and my father asks him what’s good. “Everything,” the waiter says, winking at me.

  “As I don’t have to tell you, everything also means nothing.” says my father. “Isn’t that so?”

  “In this restaurant, everything means everything. What do you want me to tell you? You want me to tell you bluefish, I’ll tell you bluefish.”

  “Is it fresh?”

  “Like my daughter’s tongue,” he says.

  They joke back and forth like characters in a play or a movie made out of a play. I have the idea that there are cameras filming them, that hidden microphones record their conversation.

  When the waiter finally goes off with our order, my father asks me what I think of him.

  “He’s not very fast,” I say. “He talks too much.”

  “What I’m asking is if you recognize him,” my father says. “He looks familiar, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Where would I have seen him?”

  “He’s a comedian. He used to do commercials on television.”

  I’m willing to believe his other stories—it’s like not bothering not to believe them—but not this one. “I’ve never seen him on television,” I say.

  “He used to be on all the time,” says my father. “You couldn’t turn on the set without catching him doing something. He was a man of a thousand faces and two thousand voices. He was a brilliant comic, too brilliant for his own good. Viewers tended to remember his persona and not the product he was selling. The agency that was using him let him go—there was some scandal in the background as well. When they tried to hire him back he refused their offer. He would not be bought off by any amount of money. Besides, he liked being a waiter at Toros, liked the idea of having a secret, of being other than he seemed.”

  “Well,” I say, skeptical to the last, “maybe when he was working as a comedian he was realy a waiter in disguise.”

  No one is what he seems. Everyone in the restaurant, guest or employee, has an astonishing private history, which my father reveals to me in his blaring whisper.

  Lunch is being served. Though I think of passing it up this trip, the stewardess vetoes my decision by letting down my little table and serving me.

  For the last year or so I’ve been incredibly impassive, sitting still for whatever comes by, unable to put one foot in front of another without being told I had no other choice. Lunch sits in front of me on a plastic tray and I pick at it—not the swiss steak but the potato puff and the salad—trying to determine whether I’m really hungry or only filling time. The man next to me lights up a cigarette to accompany his second cup of coffee. A woman of about my mother’s age turns around to tell him that there is no smoking allowed in this section. My neighbor takes two more drags before snuffing out the cigarette.

  “Thank you,” the woman says with heavy sarcasm. “It only took you four hours to get the message.”

  “Wha
t message is that, lady?” he asks, winking at me. “If my smoking bothered you, why didn’t you say something before?”

  The woman, who is English, offers him the back of her head, says nothing that we can hear. An unintelligible whine of complaint hangs in the air. She turns once again and says, “The rules are made for some, I dare say, and not for others.”

  “What is she talking about?” he says to me. “We’ve been in the air close to five hours and I’ve smoked two cigarettes, really half of two cigarettes. Does that make me a public nuisance?”

  He can’t let go. Even after he opens his attaché case to get at some business documents he’s already read three or four times he continues to justify himself. I turn my face to the window, make no response. “Am I being unreasonable?” he asks me.

  “Everything’s unreasonable,” I say.

  Do I surprise him? He accepts the remark not as intended, but as a gesture of empathy, the men against the woman, the Americans against the English. “You most of all,” I could have added, though stopped short of saying what I meant.

  When the trays are cleared away, the panel in front of our section lifts up to reveal a screen. We are requested to draw the shades over the windows and to put out the pintpoints of light overhead. I seem to be the only one in my immediate area without headphones, had probably been sleeping when the stewardess offered them for sale.

  I watch the movie without sound a while, which has its own interest. It concerns a retired rodeo star who is reduced to making drunken public appearances on behalf of an unlikely breakfast cereal. After a scene with in which the cowboy, too drunk to go throuh his paces, watches an impersonator perform in his place, I close my eyes, let them close. The movie washes over me.