He looks right at me and says, “Hating your father is a lot of work.”
“Not really. He’s made it easy.”
“Is there any part of you that loves him?”
“No.”
“A lot of people think they hate their fathers.”
“When in fact we really love them? I think you should meet my father.” I took out my wallet and handed him his card.
He is gracious enough to take it even though I am behaving like a stupid, rebellious boy. I’m sure he is making a mental note of that too.
He stares at the card. “So you tried love?”
“He doesn’t know what to do with love.”
“Do you know what to do with love, Charlie?”
“Probably not.”
He smiles at me. “What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“Does your mother—does she know what to do with love?”
“She’s the same. The same but different.”
“Different?”
“My father controls by words and actions. My mother controls by withholding. They arrive at the same place.”
“Do you think they love each other?”
“I’m not about to walk into that desert.”
“Desert?”
“You can die of thirst in a desert. You know, like all those Mexicans. They’re trying to get somewhere and they’ll never get there alive.”
He has an interesting look on his face. “There are birds in the desert too, you know.”
I laugh at his joke, then get mad at myself for laughing. I don’t want to let him see that I get mad at myself so I keep talking. “I don’t know anything about what exists between my father and my mother. Anything I say is a lie or a theory. If my mother had a business card, I’d hand you one of hers too.”
He smiles. A smiler. The thing about smilers is that they’re sincere. “So you just decided to hate him instead.”
“Yeah, one day I just decided. Sure.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“I know,” I say. I want a cigarette. “For the record, I don’t love my mother either. I just don’t hate her. I feel sorry for her.” I stare at my fingernails but decide against chewing on them. I smoke. I bite my nails. I chew on my knuckles. Yeah. He is waiting for an answer. “My father doesn’t deserve to be loved.”
“Don’t you think everyone deserves to be loved?”
“You mean like even Hitler had Eva Braun?” He doesn’t laugh at my joke. I tap my bottom lip with my finger again. “No,” I say. “Not everyone deserves to be loved.”
“What about you? Does Charlie deserve to be loved?”
“I have no fucking idea. And anyway, that’s not the way it works. People get killed who don’t deserve to be killed. Some people have more success than they deserve. I know about a holy man who got crucified. You get where I’m going here?”
“Yes, I get you. But we’re talking about love. We’re talking about you.”
“The guy who got crucified doesn’t count?”
“I want to talk about Charlie.”
“I thought you wanted to talk about what I wanted to talk about.”
He nods. I think he would make a very good poker player. He’s hard to read—except that I already decide that he’s a good man and he is incapable of hiding his kindness.
“My father’s insane,” I say. I really want to say that.
“Insane?”
“Emotionally insane.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“What else would you call someone who behaves like that? He threw my brother out of the house.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He never allowed us to mention his name again. He took all of his pictures and tossed them in the trash. He went through all of my mother’s albums. He even burned his birth certificate. Even my pictures. He walked into my room and searched it thoroughly in front of me. He took every picture of me and my brother and ripped them to shreds in front of me. I was ten. Yes, I think my father is insane.”
“Well, maybe there are more appropriate ways of looking at your father’s—”
I didn’t let him finish his sentence. “I loved my brother. And he’s gone. He’s lost. He might be dead. He might be alive. I don’t know. But he’s gone.”
“And your father took him away from you.”
“You’re getting the picture.”
“Have you ever gone to look for your brother?”
“Where would I look?”
“Why do you think your father threw your brother out of the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have made something up about why.”
“My brother was eighteen years old. He was rebellious. He was alive. He liked to laugh. He reminded them that they were dead.”
“Them? Your mother and father?”
“Who else? They’ve never mentioned his name. Once, I asked about him. We were just finishing dinner and I said, ‘I miss Antonio.’ I said, ‘Is he ever coming back?’ My father slapped me so hard I went flying across the room. You know what my mother did? She stared at me. And then she walked out of the room.” I was trying not to chew on my knuckles. “When I was small, I used to go to my brother’s room when I had bad dreams and he would hold me.”
“So he was like a father?”
“No. He was like someone who loved me.”
I am remembering almost every detail of my first conversation with David as I stand in front of my father’s coffin at the cemetery. The priest’s final prayers of commendation provide the soundtrack as I play the scene over in my head.
2.
My father was killed in a car accident. He ran a red light—and took the other driver with him. A strange and ironic ending for such a careful and controlling man. Careful in the way he dressed. Careful in the way he spoke. Careful in the way he handled his personal finances. But careless in matters of the heart. He never succeeded in controlling his own cruelty. That was his drug of choice. That was his great addiction. When he saw an opportunity to be cruel, he had to take it. He tried to cover it over with a veneer of grace and civility and that thing which he called “breeding.” But he didn’t quite carry it off.
The funeral mass at the cathedral was formal and disciplined. Which meant that no one shed a tear. I was half hoping that at least my mother would cry. I would have thought better of her if she had. After the final service at the cemetery, my mother had people over to the house where I was raised, the house where I had been something of an unwelcome visitor for the formative years of my life.
I don’t know why people like my parents have children. My father never held me as a boy. My mother’s touches were tentative.
There was no laughter in my house. Only my brother had known how to laugh.
After my suicide attempt, my father never spoke to me again. My mother, whose emotional disposition can best be described as austere, pretended it had been a mistake. That’s exactly how she put it. “You made a terrible mistake, Charlie.” Oddly, that was the kindest thing she’d every said to me. I think a part of my father was almost disappointed that I hadn’t succeeded. He could not have possibly been as disappointed as I was.
As I tried to adjust to having survived my suicide, I took a job as a bartender.
I promised David that I would not try to off myself again.
I found a place to live in Sunset Heights. My mother said that it was a predictable choice. She looked at me in that disdainful way she’d cultivated over the years. “Just the kind of neighborhood you’d choose. And will you be living next door to a prostitute?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Just make sure she’s really a woman before you sleep with her.”
That made me laugh. There were moments I thought my mother had potential.
My apartment was a dump. It was an old building with worn wood floors and high ceilings. I painted the walls white, re-sanded
the floors and managed to get rid of the mice. I thought it was a good sign that I’d never seen a cockroach. I started going to school part-time and decided to major in art. I had my drawings and paintings all over the apartment. Not that I was all that impressed with my own work—but it was the only art I could afford. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about my own talent.
I had a few sketches of some girls I’d slept with. I liked studying them. Not that I went out with many girls—a few—and they always liked me more than I liked them. I don’t think I could bring myself to respect someone who actually liked me. But there was one girl—her name was Ileana. She was graceful and elegant and easy to be with. She was from Juárez and spoke perfect English. She was rich and articulate in two languages. She’d studied at a boarding school in England. And she was beautiful. I always thought she was sleeping with me to get back at her parents.
She left me. Of course she did. She said she couldn’t stand being around me anymore.
I asked her if she hated me.
“Oh, Charlie,” she said. “Sweet, sweet, Charlie. It’s so unnecessary to hate a man who hates himself as much as you do. I just can’t be around to watch you anymore.” And then she did something I didn’t expect. She cried.
I knew there was nothing I could say to make her stay. No one had ever taught me how to love. And perhaps, in that department, I was uneducable.
I missed Ileana at first, but I had always been more in love with being alone than being in the presence of other people—even beautiful and intelligent women. I thought of her as I looked around at all the people at my father’s funeral. I don’t know why I expected to see her there. I kept searching all the faces. It dawned on me that the only people who were in attendance were relatives and the men and women who worked for my father in his bank. Imagine owning a bank. Imagine owning several. They had praise for my father, those people. One of the men, Mr. Gonzalez, who served as a pallbearer, told me my father was a fine and ethical man who would be deeply missed. I wanted to ask him who my father was. But the question was insipid and banal. If my father had wanted me to know who he was, he’d have let me know.
It occurred to me that my father’s life had meant nothing—not even to him. Maybe there’s tragedy in that—though I doubt it. Tragedy has a profound emotional quality. Certainly my father’s life lacked that. He was one of millions of men who lived, made lots of money, and died. He lived his life with certainty, which meant he didn’t give a damn about people like me—or most of the occupants of the earth for that matter.
My father’s two brothers were there. And my mother’s three sisters. I was surprised that most of my cousins were also present. They couldn’t have had more than a few ounces of affection for an uncle who was by turns emotionally aloof, intellectually superior, and obscenely rich.
My cousins—every one of them—were impeccably dressed, self-possessed, good-looking people who knew how to behave themselves in public. They were in love with their own class and their own sense of entitlement. Not that I knew anything about them. And not that I felt anything when I found myself staring into their lovely faces. They had fine features, that was true enough. So did I for that matter. And what of it? It’s always been interesting to me how we mistake good genes for virtue.
Marta, my cousin who was not much older than me, attempted to have a conversation. “I’m sorry about your dad.”
She was being nice and I should have at least returned the favor. But of course I didn’t. “He was a prick,” I said.
She didn’t seem surprised by what I said.
“Still, he was your father.”
“Yes,” I said. “He was my father.” I looked at her. She was very beautiful. And I wondered if there was anything that mattered underneath all the beauty. “Do you love your father?”
She smiled. “Of course I do.”
“Is he kind to you?”
“Kindness has nothing to do with love,” she said.
Then it was my turn to smile.
I stayed at the reception until the end. Sometimes I had good manners too. Only my mother’s sisters remained after all the guests had left. I tried to be civil. I kissed them all on the cheek as I saw myself out. One of my aunts followed me out to my car. “You’ll leave your mother alone?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’ve always disappointed her.”
“I wonder which one of us is more disappointed.”
I could see she wanted to slap me. I could see her trying to control herself. I looked into my aunt’s hazel eyes. “Tell my mother I never want to see her again.”
“Be a man and tell her yourself.”
I grabbed my aunt’s arm and dragged her back into the house. I let her go when I was standing in front of my mother who was sipping on a glass of scotch.
I looked at my aunt. Then looked at my mother. “I never want to see you again.” I took the drink out of her hand and downed it. “And that’s the last thing I’ll ever take from you.”
I worked that night. The bar was busy. I made nearly two hundred dollars in tips. The money I made was all mine.
3.
The next afternoon, I was in David’s comfortable office. “When they were lowering my father into the ground, I was thinking of the first time I came to your office.”
David didn’t say anything. He wanted me to keep talking. I didn’t know what to say next so I didn’t say anything at all. We sat there for a long time. He wasn’t going to give in this time. He was going to make me talk.
“They sent me to the best schools,” I said. “I behaved for a long time. I was the best student. I had the best grades.”
“What was your favorite subject?”
“English and history.”
“English and history? That’s interesting.”
“I loved reading books.”
“You have a favorite author?”
“Dickens.”
David smiled. “Hmm. Why Dickens?”
“He didn’t like rich people.”
David nodded. “I always thought he had a romantic view of the poor.”
“Yes,” I said. “I liked that about him.”
David smiled. “So you liked books. Tell me about your friends about school.”
“I didn’t have any friends.”
“None?”
“None.”
“Why is that, Charlie?”
“I didn’t want any.”
“Why?”
“I never knew what to say.”
“Really? You seem comfortable enough with words.”
“I have a formal and aesthetic relationship to words.”
David was smiling. Absolutely, he was a smiler. I wanted to tell him that he was very beautiful—but I didn’t.
He looked at me. “What are you thinking?”
I just shrugged.
“Tell me, Charlie, why were you thinking of me at your father’s funeral?”
I looked at him and told myself I wasn’t going to cry. But that’s exactly what was happening. There was something caught in my throat and I couldn’t talk and I knew my lips were trembling. And there I was sobbing. But it was worse than that because I wasn’t just sobbing, I was howling. I kept hitting my own chest as if I was trying to tell my heart not to do what it was doing, to stop hurting me, my heart, and I found myself kneeling on the floor and howling and I didn’t even know why and I could hear the moaning in the room and I knew it was me who was moaning and I couldn’t stop and I hated myself more than I had ever hated myself.
I don’t know how long I was there on the floor, sobbing and moaning and howling. But then I felt David’s hand pulling me up.
“Charlie?”
I found myself staring into his eyes as we stood there.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I sat there for a while until I felt calmer. “David,” I whispered, “maybe I was thinking of you because I love you. And I never loved him. I didn’t love my father and I love you. Not him.”
&
nbsp; David seemed so calm. “And do you hate yourself for loving me and not him?”
“I’m not supposed to love you. I’m supposed to love my father.”
“You don’t have to love him, Charlie.”
I sat down on the couch and took a breath. I hid my face. I just sat there.
“Look at me, Charlie.”
He was sitting in his chair.
He was smiling at me.
I wanted to talk. But I didn’t know what to say. I shrugged and looked into his kind face. “It’s so sad, isn’t it, David? Not to love your father. And to love a man who isn’t your father, a man who gets paid to listen to you. It’s so sad.”
“I know it’s sad, Charlie.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I kept staring at the floor.
“Look at me,” he said.
So I looked at him.
“Do you know what transference is?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know what that is.”
I couldn’t stop the tears. I looked away. I couldn’t stand his eyes. I had never known what to do in the face of kindness.
He just looked at me and I knew what he was thinking.
“There’s no one in the world left to love me,” I said.
“Never believe that, Charlie,” he said.
“It’s true.”
“Charlie, do you know what countertransference is?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What you feel for me is transference. What I feel for you is countertransference. We can work with that, don’t you think?”
4.
A month after my father died, I got a phone call on my cell from David. “Your mother called me today, Charlie.”
“If it’s about your fees, I can pay.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not what this is about.”
“But I’m going to start paying for my own sessions. I just want you to know.”
“Yes,” he said, “we can talk about that when you come in on Tuesday. Is that okay?”
“Yes, that’s good.”
“Charlie, your mother said that you need to get in touch with your father’s attorney. She gave me his number.”