The Old Man in the Club

by Curtis Bunn

  That was among the last extensive conversations he’d had with his children. Daniel insisted he and Danielle limit their contact with him. Danielle did not want to go along with her brother, but she did because she sensed the pain her mom suffered. She felt it would be a betrayal of Lucy, the victim in the marriage, to maintain close contact with Elliott, the destroyer of the marriage.

  At their high school graduation, the kids were cordial to their father but not warm. He was proud and he was hurt. “Lucy, this is killing me,” he said.

  Daniel heard him and told his sister. “He’s over there begging Mom to forgive him, talking about ‘This is killing me.’ ”

  “Maybe it really is killing him, Daniel,” Danielle said. “You know he loves her. You know he loves us.”

  “If he loved us, he wouldn’t have had an affair and they wouldn’t be divorced,” Daniel said. “Look, it’s graduation. I don’t want to talk about this.”

  That summer, before going to Michigan State, Elliott asked to take out Lucy and their kids. They agreed, mostly because Lucy insisted. At Paschal’s Restaurant on Northside Drive, they ordered soul food and talked about each other’s lives.

  “So, Michigan State, huh?” Elliott said. “The Spartans. Great basketball program. I’m really glad you all are staying together in college.”

  “Yeah, me, too, Daddy,” Danielle said. “Daniel gets on my last nerves sometimes, but I’m not ready to separate from him yet.”

  “Well, your mother and I started saving for your education when you were born,” Elliott said. “Since you all earned scholarships that’s taking care of tuition, I’m going to take care of room and board. And you can use that money we saved for your incidentals: fun, food, clothes, whatever you want.”

  “Don’t do us any favors,” Daniel said.

  “What’s your problem, son?” Elliott said.

  “Daddy, don’t listen to him,” Danielle said. “I love the idea. Thank you. Thank you both.”

  “It was your father’s idea and it’s a good one,” Lucy said. “We’re so proud of you both.”

  “Don’t try to make him look good, Mom,” Daniel said.

  “Daniel—” Elliott started.

  “Wait,” Lucy jumped in. “Daniel, I want you to stop being so angry. We’re sitting here having dinner as a family. There is no need for you to be rude to your father. Why would you do that?”

  She did Daniel as she had many times before done Elliott: She made him think.

  After a long pause, Daniel said, “I don’t know. It just feels right.”

  “That’s a child’s answer,” Lucy said. “You’re a young man; a smart young man at that. Unless you can express yourself better than that, I say you let go of your hostility and enjoy this family time. You two are going to college in two weeks. I’m sad to see you go. But I’m glad to see you go. It’s your time to grow up.”

  “I miss you all, and you haven’t even gone yet,” Elliott said. “I know it was a busy summer, but I really wish we had seen each other more.”

  Everyone braced for Daniel to fire off an angry response. Instead, he said, “Dad, thank you for the room and board.”

  It was the first comment to Elliott that was not angry in the year-and-a-half since the divorce. “Sure, son,” Elliott said.

  “You don’t plan on coming to visit us at school, do you?” Daniel asked.

  “Actually, I do,” he answered.

  “Well, I’m sure I’ll be busy when you come,” Daniel snapped.

  “Well, you can hang out with me, Daddy,” Danielle said.

  “No, he can’t; you’ll be with me,” Daniel said.

  “Listen here, Daniel, enough is enough,” Lucy said. “Let me tell you what happened.”

  “No, you’re not,” Elliott jumped in.

  “Look,” Daniel said. “He doesn’t want us to know what he did.”

  “I told you before,” Elliott said, looking around to make sure no other patrons were listening to their conversation, “this was none of your business. Lucy, we agreed that we would deal with this ourselves. The children should not be in the middle of it.”

  “You act like we’re kids or something,” Daniel said. “Shoot, we know the truth anyway.”

  “We’re going to continue our meal talking about pleasant stuff, if that’s okay with you, Daniel,” Elliott said. “If it’s not, then too bad.”

  Danielle snickered. “That’s funny to you?” Daniel asked.

  “This is your last warning,” Lucy said. “You hear me, Daniel?”

  “I hear you, Mom,” he said, staring at his father.

  There was no more drama the rest of the meal, but the animosity Daniel—and to a lesser degree, Danielle—felt grew over time. Elliott went on with his life, occasionally speaking to his daughter, who did not relay to her brother that she was in touch with their dad.

  It ate at him that his relationship with his children was less than great. It was important to him. Elliott had a close relationship with his father. But the toll of his arrest and conviction wore heavily on Walter Thomas, and his health faded slowly and then rapidly while his son was incarcerated.

  By the time Elliott was released, his father was a fraction of the active, jovial man he had been. Depression led to physical breakdowns that doomed him, no matter how many letters Elliott sent him from prison insisting that everything would be all right.

  His dad’s death was a landmark event in his life. It not only riddled him with guilt because he believed his father would have been fine if he did not get convicted, but it also reinforced the idea that life was short and to live each day as if it were your last.

  “Obviously, there is truth to that,” his therapist said to him the week before he saw his kids at Vanquish. “But could it be that you’re using that as an excuse to live this lifestyle of a younger man?”

  “Maybe I am,” Elliott conceded. “I don’t know. I just know it feels like the thing for me to do right now. Maybe it will help me relate better to my kids and can help me rebuild our relationship.”

  “What I can say for sure is that you’re not going to rebuild the relationship hoping to rebuild it,” Dr. Nottingham said. “Nothing happens without action. So, the question becomes: What are you going to do?”

  Elliott was stumped. “You’re always asking me questions,” he said. “I come here for answers.”

  “I just gave you an answer,” she said. “Do something. If it were me, I would call my kids together and tell them what they want to hear.”

  “And what’s that?” Elliott said.

  “Do I really need to tell you that?”

  “There you go again with the questions,” he responded.

  Dr. Nottingham looked at him.

  Finally, Elliott said, “There are a lot of things I want to say to them. But then my son gets so angry and disrespectful.”

  “He’s only angry because he loves you,” she said.

  “What?” Elliott asked.

  “He cannot express his love because he’s angry. But through his anger he’s expressing his love,” she said. “He could not be so mad at you if he didn’t care about you as he does.”

  “His sister is mad at me, too, but she’s very respectful and available to me,” Elliott said.

  “Your daughter is spoiled and the female extension of you,” Dr. Nottingham said. “The doting father to a daughter is almost more valuable than anything she could ever receive. At the same time, her brother is her twin and that connection is usually unbreakable. It’s natural for her to go with him, even if her heart is telling her something else.

  “For Daniel, his mother is the symbol of life for him, and the older he gets, the more responsibility to protect and defend her he takes on, especially after a divorce. He feels like he’s protecting and defending her by being angry with you.”

  Elliott left his session convinced he would have to take the lead to end the contentious relationship with his children. He thought he would invite them over for d
inner and have a heart-to-heart. But before he made the call, he ran into them at the lounge while with their college friend, Tamara.

  He went on that night and the next to have nice times with Tamara, but he was saddled with the thought of what his kids thought of him. He did not feel like meeting Henry for lunch or doing much of anything—sudden fatigue he attributed to post-cancer trials. But it really was mental. He was drained from his lack of a relationship with Daniel and Danielle, and Friday night’s encounter only magnified the rift.

  Worse, he was embarrassed. It was one thing to philander with women less than half his age. It was another that his kids knew it—and were college classmates of Tamara. Caught up in the moment, he pushed aside the awkwardness of the situation. With quiet time to think about it, he was panicked.

  He sat on his balcony sipping on an Arnold Palmer and lamented his plight. This was far from the relationship he expected to have with his children. He called Lucy, who lived in Southwest Atlanta, to see if she could offer advice. He had spoken to her on this subject many times over the years.

  “I don’t know if you have a different solution now,” he said, “but I just want this to get better.”

  “Well, Elliott, from what I was told yesterday, it got worse,” Lucy said. “Daniel called.”

  He knew his son had told his mother that Elliott was with Tamara. Elliott felt weak.

  “Is it true, Elliott?” Lucy asked. “You’re dating one of their friends? No, don’t answer. I already know. I have heard things from some of your so-called friends over the last year or so about you hanging out at nightclubs, like you’re twenty-five or something. So this only makes sense. And it’s disgusting.”

  “Lucy, I didn’t call you to make you upset,” he started.

  “You can do whatever you want to do,” she snapped. “Just keep my kids out of it.”

  “Oh, now they’re your kids?” Elliott said. “All I have ever done since this marriage fell apart was protect them. And you know that.”

  “I didn’t ask you to try to protect them,” Lucy said. “I have said all along to tell them the truth about why we got divorced. They deserve that. It’s been you that has insisted they don’t know.”

  “That’s not why I called you,” he said. “I called to see if you had any idea how I could make some headway with our kids.”

  “Don’t date their friends,” Lucy said. “That’s one way.”

  Understanding she would provide little help, Elliott said, “Okay, thanks. Take care,” and hung up.

  He had learned how to deal with anger over the years, which was hard to do coming out of prison when he should not have been there. He developed his own method, which required him sitting back with his eyes closed and praying. He thanked God for protecting him and sparing him and asked for patience.

  After that call with Lucy, he put down his drink. He leaned back in the chair, clasped his hands together on his lap and closed his eyes.

  “God, bring calm over me now,” he prayed. “Protect me from myself, from my past, from my flaws. Deliver me to a place of peace. Quiet the noise in me. Settle my emotions…”

  He remained in that posture for several minutes. It was only broken by his need to go to the bathroom. But he had unburdened himself. Praying always worked for him. He stopped praying for what he called “big things” after he was freed from prison. “God has done more than enough for me,” he told Danette. “I used up my ‘big things,’ and that’s all right. It would seem selfish to ask for big things after he protected me in that place and got me out.”

  He quickly learned that the “little things” are needed more often than the “big things,” and so calling on God was a frequent thing. This prayer made him feel more at ease, more focused.

  He was eager to get to Dr. Nottingham for some advice on how to proceed. He had an appointment in two days, Tuesday, so after he had some time to mull it all over, Elliott decided to go with his original plan: To have them over for dinner before they went back to college to let them know how important it was to be a family and for them to communicate better and more frequently.

  Elliott knew he could handle that part of an evening with his children. But as soon as one of them asked, “Are you dating Tamara?” the potential for reconciliation would evaporate like rain under an incendiary sun.

  He had to prepare an answer that was not a lie, but one that also did not portray him as an old man hanging out in clubs seeking young women. He was good with words and had a good mind—he read more than two hundred books while in prison. He called his boy, Henry, who deceived the mother of his young son for years before finally telling her the truth of his multiple affairs, which ended their relationship.

  “You have experience with crisis management and deception—I’m sorry, I can’t think of another word right now,” Elliott said. “How do I bring my kids back into my life without getting into dating younger women? Is that even possible?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy,” Henry said. “I was the guy, remember, who came clean, who aired all my laundry to get that burden off of me. It cost me my marriage, but that’s what I needed to stop feeling like a hypocrite—and to do right by my wife.”

  “Well, I just thought that because you deceived her for so long you could help me with that,” Elliott said. He knew it sounded crazy seconds after he said it.

  “Let me back up,” he said, trying to clean it up. “I need you to help me figure out the best way to get my relationship with my kids back on course.”

  “You don’t want to hear this, but the best bet probably is to tell them what they want to know—the truth about why you got divorced,” Henry said. “You said that’s what your son continues to harp on. Maybe if you came clean, they would accept things and move on.”

  “That might be the answer,” Elliott said, “or it might cause more problems. They might start asking for specifics and that opens up more wounds.”

  “Your kids are twenty; they aren’t eight,” Henry said. “At some point you have to trust that they will deal with stuff as adults. Maybe they’ll say, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ hug you and move on. Think about me being up front with you and how you received that.”

  Henry gave Elliott something to consider. He had given up on worrying after his long prison stint and instead focused on the beauty of life, the beauty of freedom. But he worried about his kids and his relationship with them. The longer the rift went on, the wider the gap would grow.

  Elliott called his daughter. She was upset with him, but she also held a soft spot for her daddy. She could be the key in a reconciliation. But she did not answer her phone, so he left a message:

  “Danielle, sweetheart, it’s your dad. Please call me as soon as you get this message. It’s important.”

  A few minutes later, he received a text message from his son, Daniel. It read: “Do us a favor and leave us alone.”

  Elliott’s heart sunk. But then he got angry. He called Daniel. “Let me tell you something, boy, I don’t care how angry you think you are at me, that’d better be the last time you get out of line with me.”

  “I wasn’t out of line,” Daniel said. “I was just saying what we want.”

  “I didn’t text you; I called your sister,” Elliott said. “If you want to be that way, then be that way. But don’t corrupt your sister. She can think for herself.”

  “You broke up our family,” Daniel said. “She knows that much and she’s not happy about it.”

  “So you’re her spokesperson now?” Elliott said. “Son, there’s no way you can go on with all this anger in your heart. It’s not healthy and it’s not right. I love our family more than you can know—”

  “So why did you mess it up by cheating?” Daniel asked.

  “There’s so much I want to say right now, but it is all beside the real point,” Elliott said. “Here’s the real point: I love you. I raised you and we were close. To be as we are now does not make sense. You know my story. You know what I overcame. Life is short. Do y
ou want to spend it mad at your father?”

  “You’re giving me answers, Dad, but they aren’t the answers we need,” Daniel said.

  “I want to see you two before you go back to school,” Elliott said. “We have to talk.”

  “We’ll see,” Daniel said.

  “No, you won’t see,” Elliott said. “It’s happening. And I will let you know when. The kid gloves are off. I’ve tried to ease my way around this with you. No more. I’m the father and I don’t care how old you are, you do what I say.”

  “That sounds good in theory,” Daniel responded. “But you can’t make me do anything anymore. The day you walked out of our house was the day you ended that privilege.”

  “I didn’t stop being your father, so it didn’t end and it will never end,” Elliott said. “You talk this trash, but you’re certainly taking my money for room and board and my money that’s in your pockets. So, I don’t want to hear you talking like you’re this grown, independent person because if I pulled the plug on your housing and money, what would you do then?”

  Daniel didn’t respond.

  “See you and Danielle at my house this Saturday at eight o’clock,” Elliott said. “Come hungry because I’m cooking.”

  Then he hung up the phone and smiled to himself.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Watching People, Being Watched

  Elliott regained his energy over the course of a few days and was excited about going out to Del Frisco’s Grill in Buckhead for drinks on Thursday. He’d learned through the many e-mail promotions he subscribed to that there would be an event there featuring one of the Real Housewives of Atlanta.

  He found the show to be silly and mind-numbing, but he knew the event would attract a crowd. He counted that he had been dealing consistently with four women and sleeping with two (Tamara and a thirty-two-year-old named Rita) but decided he had room for more. He always sought more.

  Elliott called one of his peers, fifty-eight-year-old Vincent, a mechanic originally from outside of Birmingham, to join him at the event. “Man, I told you I’m not messing with those young girls,” he said. “All they looking for is someone to buy them dinner and drinks. I ain’t got it like that.”