1995–2006
1.
I Trust Myself to Do It Because I’m Strong
“The thing about Nancy was that it was hard to be with Nancy and have a job at the same time,” my father explained. He was walking with Rachel and me from his new apartment on Sullivan Street down hot little lanes that cut Greenwich Village into triangles, formed As and circles, anarchy signs. It was fifteen months after the Family Meeting of Separation and the Incident with the Cabin. Rachel and I hated the weekends we spent at his sparsely furnished condo in Wattsbury, but we loved weekends like these, weekends we camped in his tiny, entirely nonfurnished one-bedroom in Manhattan, in which white paint peeled from the heating pipe. There was a window that looked out on a brick wall five feet away—I could think of few things more exhilaratingly, masochistically urbane.
“I was consulting instead of holding down a steady gig, all to have a schedule free enough to see Nancy in Boston when I wasn’t with you guys in Wattsbury. What with child support, and the two apartments, I had to commit fully to my new life.”
“What does it mean to commit fully to your new life?” Rachel asked.
“As soon as you children split for college, I’m going to stay here in New York every weekend and write essays in the style of Montaigne. That’s what I’ll do when I’m finally unencumbered. I’ll write through the lens of my own experiences. I marched against McNamara when he came to speak at Harvard. I met Gorbachev. I knew Al Gore, before he was vice president.”
“So the book is, you’re Forrest Gump,” Rachel said.
“Dad,” I interjected, “did Nancy ever say anything about Khadijah, before you broke up? Like what she’s up to?”
“Thriving, she gave me to understand. Really taken to art history, apparently; a chip off the old block. Oh, and she’s going to spend next year in France. That’s Arty’s thing, he’s the one who pushed that, or so Nancy feels. If he can’t have her, neither can Nancy, it seems. Khadijah’s an only child, you know. They fight over her. Why don’t you write her a letter and ask her?”
What would I say? Don’t go to France? Consider ditching your mom and Cambridge for your dad and Wattsbury? But there was another reason why not: I wrote her letters constantly in my head. In these, I could tell her anything I wanted, speak with grace and candor. Whenever something momentous happened, I dashed off a mental note to Khadijah. I played guitar for three hours and listened to records for four hours today. I feel my destiny is to be a musician. Or I’m getting a C+ in math, so I’m not going to Harvard, but f*ck conformity, right? Or, I’m in a band, now, although we suck.
I was sixteen, wearing a T-shirt for my band that my father had designed. He had painted “The Rational Actors” in jagged red late-seventies punk rock letters on it, and given it to me as a surprise present. The singer and I had contemplated a series of deeply meaningful names: Exiled, Black Tambourine, Agatha’s Rainstorm. But the only name my father liked, the one he decided was our real name, was our lamest, proposed by the drummer as a half joke, never seriously considered.
“The Rational Actors is good because it tacitly admits who you are,” he’d said. “You’re creative, you’re a little rebellious, but at the same time you’re responsible, you’re paying attention in history class, you’re good.” I was the only member of the band who had the T-shirt; there was only one in existence. It was a bizarre, unforeseen token of paternal affection, but I took it. In spite of every baleful father-related event, in spite of my suspicion that the Rational Actors was an unsuitable name for any self-respecting institution, it was the first shirt I wore whenever I did a wash, even though I didn’t know the world would soon sprout nine hundred bands with AP-student names—the Decembrists, DeVotchKa, Les Sans Culottes, Franz Ferdinand. I didn’t know that studiousness, then a liability in rock and roll, would become an asset, a genre.
We were on our way to meet my father’s girlfriend of nearly a year, a native New Yorker. I knew that this New York girlfriend was a sign my father had established himself in the city, but I was confused about another thing.
“So do you have a job here now?” I asked.
“Here’s Allison,” he said. “With her new dog. Let’s all be endearing.” We knew from the way he said this that Allison was rich. He winked at us, and we became a team, the three of us, earning something together.
A woman closer to my age than his waved from the far side of the street, holding a leash. At the other end of it was a beatific little object, the business end of a toilet brush, snow white with pitch eyes. She stood with the puppy in front of a restaurant called Elephant & Castle, where we were going to eat our introductory lunch. She held the door open with her back, gripping the leash with one hand and shaking our hands with the other as we walked in.
Her eyes were as dark and friendly as the mop’s, and she was almost a foot shorter than my father, five-four to his six-two. She was the same height as Khadijah, and had the same color eyes, and this made me both envious of my father and disinclined to hate him. I could tell Allison’s body was meant to be zaftig, maternal, but she had enslaved it to what must have been a Khadijahan will, exercised herself thin. We ate blood sausage, and when she tore it diagonally with her knife, so did we, and when she then established a pattern of devouring these bites completely before she issued some satisfied commentary, like pretty intensely good, Rachel and I did that too. This was our way of showing that we wanted to continue to share with her, to be a pack of canines gorging on the same kill. Because the Elephant & Castle, as an English restaurant, allowed small dogs, the recent acquisition, whose name was Miles, stared plaintively from beneath the table, joining his solicitude with ours, begging for scraps, but subtly, lying still, only showing his desire to partake with his ears and his eyes.
Allison was earning something too. She asked me careful, indepth questions about the Rational Actors, with the attentive, empathetic, respectful expression of an MTV News reporter. How did I play guitar and sing at the same time? It seemed totally inconceivable, to Allison, that anyone could do that and remember the words and keep in sync with a band. I waited for my father to note that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, some people had managed this feat on a number of well-documented occasions, but instead he looked at her as she interviewed me with a lost, dreamy expression on his face, his arm slung around her. When I explained that keeping all the chords in your head wasn’t that hard because there usually weren’t many of them, and Allison said, “Well, I find it really goddamn impressive,” he nodded in agreement.
Allison turned her light upon Rachel. What was The Devil’s Arithmetic about? Was it true that she had already read two non-young-adult AIDS memoirs, for a history paper that had received a special Diversity Award from the principal, and the paper had been reprinted in an alternative weekly in Northampton? Was it true that two different boys had asked to have coffee with her, and one of them had asked her out to a marionette production of Phaedra?
We basked in Allison’s attention, Rachel and I, surprised that someone so pretty and sophisticated, someone who had obviously been a superpopular girl in high school just twelve years ago, seemed obsessed with us. And we basked in the presence of our father. I still despised him, in theory, but he was the one who provided access to New York City, the one who could reach into the crowds of Manhattan and draw out an Allison. And I still loved him. I loved the way his mouth twisted to one side and his eyes darted from table to table, exchanging glances with waitresses. I loved how he dabbed his beard with his napkin vigorously when he was enjoying himself. A new economy had developed, in the year since the separation was declared: My mother was abundant, my father was rare. He was a newly scarce commodity and his value was up. I schemed after his attention. I flirted with him.
“You were a good girl when you were a teenager, weren’t you?” my father asked Allison. “Like Rachel? You must have been, to get into Brown.”
“I was a good girl like Rachel until I was Josh’s age,” Allison said. “Then I was bad, for about a year.”
“Why did you start being bad?” Rachel asked her.
“Bad school, out in Pueblo, Colorado. I lived there with my mom, who had just gotten, she thought, enlightened. My dad was here, far away, had a new wife who didn’t like me. I didn’t see him. He had lost track of me, so I f*cked up until he started paying attention. I skipped school and smoked cigarettes under the bleachers and cried on the phone a couple times, and finally they sent me to live with him in New York senior year. Which was a major improvement over my mom’s condo, let me tell you.” She stared at the wall. She was with people who weren’t in the room.
So: Allison was a child who knew what it was to court an elusive Dad. Emerging from the fugue state in which she’d delivered the speech, Allison looked at me and Rachel to see if she had weirded us out. I wanted to show her that I liked her story, so I nodded and said, “F*ck yeah,” which baffled everyone into silence.
“This is good,” said my father. “This is a good place to bring a dog and kids.”
? ? ?
After lunch, my father said that it was time for me and Rachel to meet Allison’s “family”—he raised his eyebrows as he said the word, to suggest it didn’t quite apply. This was the Muellers: Allison’s father, Bruce; his second wife, Laura; and their two children. We were going to visit them on their island. My sister and I rode in the backseat of Allison’s black Saab east through Brooklyn, Long Island bound. Allison was the driver; my father was the talker. He waved at the public housing projects, explained the mind-set of the social engineers who created them. In the beige-yellow industrial palimpsest of outer Queens, he pionted his thumb to the south and reminded Allison that her father, Bruce, had once owned a textile factory “out there on Mount Purgatory.” At the mention of her father’s name, Allison became focused on the gearshift.
She flew the Saab through openings in traffic I couldn’t see, and soon we found ourselves on a tine of the North Fork. We coasted at twenty miles per hour down suburban avenues where the air was scoured cleaned by the ocean; Miles was permitted to thrust his upper body through the window, his tongue absorbing information. We stopped at a place where the side streets curled into a semicircle of grass and kelp-covered rock, and the sun fell on scale-shaped waves: Long Island Sound.
Allison punched a code into a chrome keyboard embedded in the stone. A square of solid rock revealed itself as a garage door, and she parked the car in a fluorescent cave. She muttered into a phone attached to an interior wall, and servants came out in a boat to conduct us across the water.
Things! Objects were shocking me with their capacity for meaning. In my mind, I spoke to Khadijah, and I explained to her what I was seeing. We were reunited, somehow; she had come back to Wattsbury for her senior year, I was telling her about rich people. They hide, I said to her, and they hide the signs of who they are. They keep cars behind rocks by the seashore. They go to islands nobody can find. That’s why you never see them.
“Look at this,” my father said to me conspiratorially, on the boat, as Allison murmured to somebody on her cell phone. (An exotic accessory—I had never known anyone who had one.) “Bruce, he’s probably worth about what, fifty million? But he’s bought an island and bleached an old Tudor house.” He gestured toward a blinding colossus that tottered on a green tumescence, our destination. “Not what I would do with my money, I’ll tell you that much.” So my father was nervous too. More than nervous; his eyes were actually frightened.
At some point on the drive to Long Island, my father had begun to address Miles as “son.” “Careful now, Son,” he said as we brushed against the dock. But Miles bounded off the boat as soon as the servants unfroze themselves from their nautical postures and tied the ropes. From a distance, we saw the island dogs gallop up to meet us.
“See, that’s Brenda and Gopher,” said Allison to Miles, pointing to the dogs. “New friends, big guy.”
On the grass, Miles and the island dogs circled each other strategically, Brenda old and spry, Gopher bounding and inelegant. The islanders were both mutts, part standard poodle, part miscellany. Brenda’s underbite reminded me of a terrier, and Gopher had the grimace of an angry thirteen-year-old boy.
Miles fishtailed between his hosts and finally splayed on the grass before Brenda. Gopher sauntered up behind Miles, planted one paw on his side, and humped the air above him with martial determination.
“I don’t like this,” mused my father, watching the dogs, stroking his beard. “Gopher’s already exploiting Miles’s innocence,” he said, descending on the dogs as Miles rolled away. “Gopher’s like the old convict checking on the new guy in prison. He says, ‘You’re cute, c’mere.’”
Allison stared at my father neutrally for a moment, and then the man who must have been her own father appeared, dark haired, stocky, stubble cheeked, loose armed, loping down the impeccably contoured landscape in stained khaki shorts and a black Miles Davis T-shirt. My father boomed out his name—Bruce!—sidestepping to swipe Gopher away from Miles with one hand as he presented the other to Gopher’s owner.
There was still a coat of orange on the waves when Bruce’s second wife, Laura, the age of Allison plus the age of Rachel, excused herself from our five-way game of catch. (We threw an Aerobie, a red, soft-edged torus not unlike a giant, flattened cock ring.) She returned thirty seconds later to beckon us inside with both her slender arms. A former teacher of special-needs children (it was in this profession that she had discovered how easy an Aerobie was to catch) her movements were lumbering and joyful, the movements of one accustomed to chasing and gathering up. Her hair, a mix of blond and gray, fell between her shoulders; her face was scrunched and kind; her smock a diaphanous tribute to the Russian villagers of Fiddler on the Roof; her butt, in her crimson, one-piece bathing suit, jutting and hard like the golden rocks. She led us to the kitchen, which at first looked ordinary. Only string beans and scalloped potatoes somehow hissed on two skillets, and firm flanks of white fish somehow steamed on a metal sheet. The servants had vanished after they had finished their work, so that it was as if we had cooked for ourselves and suffered a loss of memory. Ordinary: We piled our plates with food and took them to a table on a screened-in porch. Ordinary: We praised the meal as if one of our party had prepared it. Our performance was spontaneous, heartfelt, if unnatural; it had the feeling of the first practice of a rock band.
Rachel and I were seated kitty-corner at the far end of the table from Bruce and Laura. Our vantage was ideal for watching the theater of the dogs. Miles mopped at Gopher’s legs with his head; Gopher leapt over Miles and whirled to charge Brenda, who tried to capture Miles’s attention by running around him in a circle.
“Do you think I should go out and guard Miles?” I whispered to Rachel. “Dad has to stay at the table and be social.”
Rachel assessed the dogs. Her face was diagnostic and calm the way it’d been a year ago, when she’d looked at our parents arranged in the stations of a family meeting and said divorce. There was an instinct for nature in her, a certainty. “Neither of those dogs,” she whispered, “wants to do to Miles what Dad thinks they want to do.”
Laura tinked her fork against her glass of water and said ahem. “Hear ye hear ye,” she said. “The Annual Mueller Swim Race to the Shore commences tomorrow morning at nine o’clock sharp. Raise your hand if you’re in.”
Everyone except Rachel and me raised their hands.
“You’re too young, Rachel,” said Laura. “It’s almost a mile. But why not you, Josh?” I knew, from experience with teachers, how relentless this kind of grown-up concern for my emotional development could be. I was being Challenged to step outside my Safety Zone.
“Oh no,” I said, “I’m no swimmer.”
“I bet you’re pretty strong,” said Laura, kindly and absurdly. “You impressed us all with that Aerobie out there.”
Allison laid down her knife. “No one cares, Josh. If you don’t feel like it, you don’t need to do it.”
I blushed. I had brought these two women into conflict simply by provoking incompatible forms of generosity. Allison, I thought, wants to be a mother.
After dinner, Laura brought in bowls and a pan of warm apple cobbler that must have materialized in the kitchen. She placed a hand on my father’s shoulder and tucked an envelope beneath his cobbler bowl.
“Ooh, a present! Open it!” I cried, shocking everyone with my sudden volume and enthusiasm. I hoped that this was the kind of spiritedly ironical tone rich people found endearing and natural.
My father’s eyebrows jumped. “All right, since my teenager is so breathlessly invested.” He pushed open a hole with his thumb and teased out the contents.
For a moment, every face at the table went blank—everyone had seen that one of the pieces of paper in my father’s hand was a check.
My father’s face was full of death. “Thank you very much, Bruce,” he got out. “Incredibly generous.” He began to hum, staring into space. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it was wide-ranging, fast, meandering.
Bruce stirred crust and ice cream with his fork. “It’s my pleasure.”
“Starting a business, or a nonprofit, sorry, you need a little help in the beginning, Linus, that’s all,” said Laura, nurturing, hungry to show herself a nurturer—a teacher.
Then there was an eruption of barking, a three-way debate. My father stopped humming and looked out the enormous windows, transfixed. I tried to parse what he was looking at. Paws and tails entangled, dancing, the hard wind off the sound combing the lawn.
“Excuse me,” said my father, folding the check and putting it in his pocket. “I’ll be only a moment.” He dropped his napkin on his chair, slid open a glass door, and slipped outside. We watched as he made his way to Miles and Gopher.
We heard him shouting: “No, Gopher, no.”
We watched through the glass as he threw his body between the two dogs, issuing prohibitions. “Stay away from Miles,” he grunted to Gopher. “Don’t even come close. That’s my son there, buddy.”
“I just don’t think,” said Laura, finally, to the table, “that Gopher would do something like that. Linus keeps bringing it up. I mean the idea he would rape another dog. A male dog raping another male dog.”
Bruce wiped his mouth with his napkin and stretched in his chair. He glanced at the torn envelope beside my father’s cobbler bowl. His mouth bent upward, perhaps to form a discreet smile. Who could tell? It might have been a suppressed belch.