But Gabe softened. Smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “The whole family was close but I was the only one who wanted to go to job sites with him. I could spend all day there, breathing in the sawdust, listening to his team hammer and cuss. Watching them watch my dad. He was great at his job—everyone admired him.”
“You loved your dad,” I said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Gabe said.
The general assumption was that there was something dark and sordid about Gabe’s relationship with his father. That Gabe’s reluctance to talk about him was covering something up.
He leaned back into the couch, his feet up on the coffee table.
“What do you know?” he asked. “About him?”
I repeated everything I’d heard—just the facts—the kind of things that might be listed on his Wikipedia page.
“You weren’t…estranged?” I asked.
I thought about my tape recorder in the other room. But I knew that Gabe wasn’t telling me this because of the article.
“No,” he said. “He died when I was ten and he was my hero—cheesy as that sounds—and to an extent, he still is. Losing him was the worst moment of my life.”
He rubbed a hand over his face.
“My dad was thirty when he had me,” he said. “My age.”
I sensed that I was just supposed to listen.
“You’ve written a lot of articles on celebrities,” Gabe said.
It wasn’t a question so I didn’t bother answering. Also, “a lot” was relative.
“I’ve read plenty of articles on celebrities. I know how it works when you have a story like this. It becomes part of the narrative, part of your DNA as an actor. As a public figure. My dad…” Gabe paused, hand swiping over his face again.
Every time he did that he seemed a little older, a little more tired.
“I’ve never liked talking about it—talking about him. When he died, people would ask about him, about how I was doing, and it always made me uncomfortable. Almost like there was this weird performative aspect to it.”
He shook his head. “I know it doesn’t really make sense, but it always made it hard to talk about him. That hasn’t changed just because people want to know about my personal life. My dad is more than just a single line in my bio,” Gabe said. “He’s more than my tragic backstory. Can you understand that?”
I did. And I knew exactly what he was saying, because my own writerly, reporting brain was already building that narrative: Gabe Parker: Haunted by Beloved Father’s Loss
Gabe Parker: Becoming the Man His Father Never Got to See Gabe Parker: What Loss Gave Me
“My father—his memory—is private,” Gabe said. “I understand that part of my job is sharing myself with the public. Sharing stories and intimacies of my life. But I can’t do that with my dad.”
He shrugged.
“I know it’s ridiculous—I know that refusing to talk about him has made him into a source of interest—but some things aren’t for my fans.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” I said.
I knew that if I included this in my article, it would be a huge boon for me. It would get me attention. It would get me work.
Because I would have gotten the story that no one else had.
Gabe studied my face with an intensity that made me want to curl back into myself like a startled pill bug, but I forced myself to stay still. I waited for him to ask if I was going to write about this.
Instead, he redirected the conversation back to a safer topic. Almost as if he didn’t want to know the answer.
“How’d you get into Star Trek?” Gabe asked. “Your family?”
I shook my head. “My first semester of grad school was rough,” I said. “I moved to Iowa without knowing anyone, and had a hard time making friends. I’d get DVDs from Netflix and watch them alone in my room.”
Gabe looked thoughtful. “I can’t imagine it,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I was very awkward.”
“I can imagine that,” he said.
I made a face of mock outrage and he laughed.
“I guess I just thought that you’d be the same kind of awkward as the other grad students,” he said. “All of you in sweaters with elbow patches, smoking pipes and debating the actual intention of the guy who wrote Lolita.”
“Nabokov,” I said.
Gabe gave me a knowing little smile and I realized I’d walked right into that one. Again.
“There were no pipes,” I said.
“No?”
“Okay, maybe one or two,” I admitted. “And a few sweaters with elbow patches—but I didn’t have either.”
“You and the Novelist aren’t cut from the same cloth?” Gabe asked.
His tone was sardonic.
“Jeremy,” I said. “And no.”
“Hmm,” Gabe said.
I could hear the judgment in that one simple sound.
“He’s a good writer,” I said.
“Hmm,” Gabe said again.
Better than me, I thought. After all, Jeremy had an agent and a book deal. I was hustling to write puff pieces.
Gabe’s attention had shifted back to the TV.
“This,” he said.
He was watching a very young, extremely beautiful Famke Janssen explain to Patrick Stewart that she had been raised and bred to please her future partner. That she took pleasure from being what someone else wanted her to be.
“They are fulfilled by what I give to others,” she said, in response to Picard asking about her wishes. Her needs.
“What about when there are no others. When you’re alone?” he asked.
“I’m incomplete,” she said.
I looked at Gabe. He kept his focus on the TV, the bright glow of it making him seem both younger and older at the same time—the light sinking into the lines around his eyes, while blurring other parts of him.
“This?” I asked.
“This is how it feels,” he said. “Being an actor.”
I didn’t say anything.
“When I’m in front of the camera,” he said, “I know who I am.”
“And when the camera’s gone?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Pathetic, isn’t it?” he asked. “That I’m more comfortable playing pretend than being myself.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s pathetic.”