“Dad’s drinking was the catalyst that led to the divorce,” said Bobby. “And Charlie’s problems may have surfaced during a fragile time in their marriage, you know?—which only caused Dad to drink more.”
“There’s a myth in my family that Charlie’s alcoholism and drug addiction caused the breakup of my parents’ marriage,” I said.
“Charlie is a junkie, an alcoholic,” said Whitney. “He’s stolen from his family, he’s lied, he’s cheated, he’s shat all over them. It’s broken their hearts.”
“Dad blames me for the divorce,” said Charlie. “But that’s a bunch of bullshit. It was his drinking.”
“Each of my children has been deeply affected by Charlie’s problems,” said my mother, “but in different ways. My ex-husband’s been the most affected, to the point where—to the point where he can hardly talk about it.” She went on to say that my father had been ineffective at his job at the brewery, and that her sons were “procrastinators.”
“But I see myself in my daughter. She is striving to achieve, as I am in my own life. I think if I had those years of mother ing to do over again it would turn out just the same. I’d like to have control over my children’s poor decisions, but I find I don’t.”
As I sat in the darkened editing room, something unexpected happened, something for which I was not prepared: I had my first conscious glimpse of just how profoundly screwed up we were, how detached, inhuman, even. Each of us discussed Charlie as if he were nothing more than a character in a novel we’d recently read. We had learned well the art of detachment, my siblings and I, from our parents and perhaps theirs before them. I had been skating along the surface of the pain for years, pretending to look deeper, outwardly dismissing my parents’ version of reality, even rebelling against it, all the while inwardly accepting it as fact.
Our family was like one of those hand-painted road signs that point in a multitude of directions at once: laziness and bad genes were the problem, according to my mother; according to my father and Whitney, Charlie himself was the problem; Charlie would have it that our father alone was the problem; while, according to Bobby and me, an unfortunate alchemy of both Charlie’s and our father’s problems was to blame.
The cognitive dissonance between my parents’ versions of the story and ours simply could not be reconciled. I had written a paper to be presented on a panel at the gallery discussing my piece in purely conceptual terms, yet now I was unearthing a truth that could not be bound by any intellectual discussion. Looking at the piece as an outsider, I liked the tension of the raw emotional material pressing up against the cool, minimalist look I’d chosen—those six rectangular screens displaying enormous talking mouths—but these had nothing to do with me, with what went on inside of me when I myself watched the tapes: the horror, the shock of recognition. The emotional foundation I’d imagined was there, I realized, had been cobbled together out of repression and denial. Time was passing, things were falling apart, and we seemed unable to catch ourselves.
Switching off the light in the editing suite, I pulled the door shut. When I came outside into the warm dusk, the sculpture students were piling debris into the parking lot Dumpsters. Clouds of white dust rose up into the air every time they hurled something in, and I had the sudden impression that art was nothing more than a gratuitous accumulation of clutter that would someday have to be thrown away. The sight of discarded ceramic heads, welded metal shapes, and cracked wooden pedestals heaped into the trash was demoralizing, and I briefly wondered if my work, too, would amount to this sort of “nothing,” the image of my father’s stacks of photographs flickering through my mind.
I walked down the hill on Chestnut to Columbus and up toward City Lights Bookstore. The street hummed with life, people sitting at outdoor tables, crowded Italian cafés. I crossed the street to Caffe Roma, taking the last table outside.