by Lucas Mann
“Okay, fine, okay,” my father says.
Outside, the old ladies have grabbed paddleboards and are kicking themselves through the pool. They sound like a dishwasher. Josh goes back to his routine. My father goes back to watching, but now he is unsettled. He looks at Josh’s fists balled, knucklebones ready to poke out of his skin, supporting fifty pounds of metal in each hand. He wonders how many hours a day Josh spends in here, alone, straining. He remembers strain on Josh’s face from a decade ago, the throbbing frustration as he tried to explain what he was feeling, what he saw and why it frightened him. It has always hurt my father to see his son strain.
Josh begins to walk toward him, dumbbells still in his hands. He walks until they’re only two feet apart, and the dumbbells swing a little in the space between them. My father feels his body tense. He tries to force a chuckle out.
“Muscle beach over here,” he says.
“How big you think I can get?” Josh asks.
Was that rhetorical?
“You look great,” my father says. And then, “You know, you always did. Look great, I mean. And now, perfect.”
He gives a thumbs-up, which hangs benign between their chests.
Josh takes a step closer, and my father’s thumb touches the valley between muscles.
Josh’s face is running. There’s orangey makeup from his hairline to his chin, like a plastic mold, and now, as he sweats, seams are beginning to form. Beads run down his forehead, around his nose, along his cheeks, and they’re like zippers opening, revealing actual skin beneath.
My father likes reasons. Everything he has ever done has been for a reason. Everything everybody does should be in service of an end. So how can he not wonder what his son’s performance of self is for? Why lift weights to admire the final product alone? Why wear makeup for a workout in front of your dad, just to sweat it off and reapply before bed, leaving smudged, eyeless prints of your face on your pillowcases? Why pump yourself up for a choreographed face-off with a father who never hit you, who wouldn’t even know how to do that?
My father sees Josh as a boy again, his glimpses. He remembers standing in the bedroom doorway, paralyzed, watching Beth on her knees yelling, Tell me what you want.
He was a literature scholar, or trying to be, when Josh was born. He quit that and took a mailroom job because there are basic responsibilities in a productive life that go unspoken. He came home from work and read next to the crib while Josh slept. He was going to someday write a dissertation on Melville because he liked that Melville was a city clerk and a genius.
He’s thinking of a line from Moby-Dick now: It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
That’s a cruel thing to think when watching his son.
“You look great,” my father says again. “Great.”
Outside, the old ladies hoist themselves from the pool and shuffle to the elevator. Josh breaks whatever stare-down has been happening and moves to put the dumbbells away. Then he begins a set of crunches, face disappearing between his knees, reappearing, disappearing again until he’s a blur.
—
There’s a beautiful Puerto Rican girl who loves him for a while. The first time my father sees them together, it’s his proudest parental moment since he watched Josh play the timpani in a high school orchestra concert. He had been so on beat then. There was the beat, and there was Josh, right on it. Steady, which is always a nice word to think.
This Puerto Rican girl is more of a guitar solo. My father can’t remember her name, but names don’t seem so important, because she’s standing there, hoisted up on thin heels, and Josh is asking her to pirouette. She’s doing it for him. She’s not happy about it, but she’s not unhappy. She is smiling, at least, a wry smile. The heels make her leg muscles tighten, and my father watches the tightening.
She’s really hot. Objectively. And charming, at ease with herself in any conversation, the kind of person everyone wants to know. And she’s leaning her weight on Josh, certain that he won’t let her fall. And he doesn’t. And Puerto Rican girls have options, mind you, options like big Puerto Rican men who know how to fight and fix engines. And still she chose Josh, she is here smiling next to him. My father can’t believe he’s thinking this way.
The girl is saying, “It is so nice to meet you. I’ve been so curious.”
Josh is smiling broadly, and he appears happy without any complication. My father wishes he could freeze the easy quiet on his son’s face. He wants to take them out while it’s like this.
He announces that it’s dinnertime and puts his hands on the middle of each of their backs, steers them to the door. They have sushi at a fancy place on University and the girl says, “No, this is too much,” when she sees the menu, but my father puts his hand on hers from across the table and says, “I want to,” the words intoxicating as he speaks them.
They stay for hours. Instincts never before triggered rise up in my father, and he tells stories about Josh’s cheeks as a baby, and that one time in right field in Little League, and the poem he wrote in middle school, and watching him play the timpani in the orchestra. My father and Josh laugh at the same moments in the stories, and then the girl sees them laugh so she laughs, too, and my father points at her, says to Josh, “A sense of humor. Very nice, very nice.”
They drink sake and her face gets flushed. Josh puts the back of his hand on her cheek and she closes her eyes. My father looks out the window and sees the sidewalk crowded, sees passing faces glancing in at him, on the inside, with his son and a girl whose name he can’t remember but whose eyes are closed because she’s in love. On the street after dinner, everyone is drunk and they hug in a pack of three, elbows like the points of a star.
She disappears quickly and Josh never says why. He never mentions that she existed, and so my father begins to doubt every part of his sushi dinner memory. Josh brings more women to his apartment, every month or so it feels like. He displays each one so that my father may see them. But that feeling from the first time is gone.
It’s never a white girl. And that’s fine, it’s whatever, but now it’s only Indian women with names that Josh can perfectly pronounce, that my father doesn’t even attempt to repeat. Josh speaks enough Hindi to impress them, which used to also impress my father but now makes him confused and uneasy. The women speak English with accents. Sometimes they speak so quietly that Josh repeats everything they say to make sure it’s heard. Then they go silent and sit at the edge of the couch while he talks.
The things that he says.
She’s quiet, but you’d be surprised. Tell him, babe, don’t be shy. Tell him what you do for me.
My father asks him to stop, but he says it low, drained of conviction, and he is ignored.
They sit for too long. Sometimes the girls try to tell my father, It’s so nice to meet you. I really care about your son. Then my father tries to smile and thank them. One time, the girl gets up to go to the bathroom. When she leaves the room, Josh leans forward at my father and says, “Isn’t it great?”
“What?” my father says.
“These girls,” Josh says. “You know I can say anything to them. You see that?”
“That is not—” my father begins, stops, begins again. “That is not nice.”
There is no weaker thing he could have said. Josh chuckles to himself. My father wants to tell him that he didn’t raise him to be like this, but he’s not sure if that’s true and he doesn’t want to risk hearing Josh call bullshit.
The toilet flushes and my father snaps back in his seat. He puts his hands on his lap as though he has been caught complicit. Josh laughs again.
The girl is smoothing her skirt as she returns. She smiles.
“Thank you,” she says. “But I’ve got to go now. I’m supposed to meet my sister uptown.”
“Stay for a while,” Josh says. “Stay for me.”
She sits down next to him and says only for a minute. Josh wraps his arm around her nec
k and pulls her close to him. She smiles at that. She nestles into his chest. His biceps tightens as he runs his fingers through the black hair that hides her face. He’s flexing. My father tries to see how much she seems to like the way Josh touches. He tries to focus only on that.
—
A year later, Josh is still flexing but this time father and son are alone. My father’s fingers are on Josh’s skin, tracing the raised outline of his new Iron Cross tattoo.
“Is it supposed to be bumpy?” he says. “Are you sure it’s not infected?”
“It’s not infected.”
There isn’t much else to say. They’re in Josh’s apartment that he still doesn’t pay rent on because he doesn’t have a job. He’s a musician who doesn’t perform, a writer who doesn’t finish, the owner of a business that doesn’t turn a profit, and yet he has found enough money to pay for what looks to be a very professionally done tattoo, and who knows how much extra tattoo artists charge for Holocaust symbols.
“It’s a mark of strength,” Josh says.
This is a test. You don’t have to be Freud to realize that a Jewish son showing his father a Nazi tattoo is looking for a reaction.
“Did it hurt?” my father asks, so as not to ask anything else.
“Yeah,” Josh says. “Especially when they filled it in. To get all that black filled in, it’s like they’re running a knife back and forth on your skin in the same spot.”
The snake, that fucking snake, slithers by my father’s ankle, and he makes a sound like a man on a ledge in a cartoon, waving his arms to not fall. Josh grins and the snake slithers on.
“The idea is that you control the pain,” Josh says. “You say, I am in control of this pain.”
My father breathes deeply and forces his breath not to quiver because quivering is something Josh would very much want in this moment.
He says, “I guess it doesn’t make sense to me. That’s all. You’re Jewish. I have your Bar Mitzvah picture up at home. You’re playing the drums.”
That last sentence hangs in the air between them, and my father wants, he thinks, only acknowledgment from his son—I remember what you’re talking about, and yes, that version of me did exist. Josh doesn’t say anything, so my father loses control and snarls, “Say something, please.”
Josh sighs and takes on a bored teacher’s voice. He says, “But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Ayn Rand.”
“You’re quoting Ayn Rand to me?”
“It is so fucking typical that you would say it like that. You are so fucking afraid of my self-reliance because that would be such a threat to the Jew landlord.”
My father feels his torso snap back, exactly what he hadn’t wanted to have happen. Because, again, what does Jewish anti-Semitism want more than to shock somebody? And my father is not shocked. That’s the point. All this posturing is annoying, fine, it’s upsetting, but it’s not like his delicate sensibilities have been offended or anything.
“You depend on other people’s need,” Josh finishes. “That’s all I’m saying.”
My father really wishes he could go to Melville here: It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. It’s the kind of retort that people remember on the way out of a room or later, falling asleep, and he has it now, ready to say, and it would be so mean and so true. But that’s the problem with a son: You make him see that he is pathetic, and then what? He is your pathetic creation and the whole conversation becomes about blame.
And then there’s the nasty reality that my father wouldn’t mind at all if Josh succeeded at imitation. This apartment is an attempt at imitation—Live in it; pretend that it’s yours. Even with the tattoo, my father is reaching for some sense of normalcy in his mind. Josh placed it high on his arm, not on his hand or neck, so it can be covered up for any job interview or family function. He is clinging to that tiniest compromise.
My father sees himself in a moment long buried. He’s in the apartment in Sheepshead Bay, holding Josh while he cries and shakes. Josh is looking past him at something that isn’t there. My father is saying, You are my son, Joshua. This is your home. We are in Brooklyn. I am your father and I love you. He is squeezing Josh, trying to make sure every part of his son’s body feels him so that he knows he’s anchored to something. Usually my father tries to blink away memories like this, all that vulnerability. But the moments existed, and he wants to be back in them now. He wishes he could still fit his arms easily around his son’s torso, wonders what he looks like as he finally falls asleep.
I see you, he thinks. I have always seen you.
You have nightmares when you are awake, little boy.
You are smart and scared. You have big, soft eyes that ask for help when you don’t want them to.
My father says none of these things, and Josh walks over to the sink. He pours himself some water, chugs it, says that most people don’t realize how crucial hydration is to a fully functioning body. Then he says, “Tell me another group throughout history that knew what they wanted and went after it like these guys.” He touches the tattoo. “Seriously, tell me.”
The snake moves along the counter behind him, making a sound like a whisper. Josh keeps fast-talking about discipline and purity, how if you put the politics aside, what’s wrong with the idea of purity as a goal?
My father doesn’t want to argue. He opts for humor instead.
“Jesus Christ, it’s going to be awkward at Passover this year,” he says.
Josh laughs and that makes my father laugh because Josh sounds the way he has always sounded laughing and my father never thinks about how much he loves that sound until he hears it. They are comfortable with laughter. They both understand it and let it linger, a truce.
—
They don’t speak for a long time. Or, if they do, none of the speaking made it to my father’s memory, which has streamlined, looking for major plot points and at least semi-plausible symbolism. Their relationship picks up again when Beth calls.
My father answers and she says, “Your son just came home. He was in rehab at Beth Israel. Did you know?”
She says it without any emotion; she’s just reporting the latest. My father answers, “Oh,” and then says, “I’ll come over,” to which Beth does not protest, so he goes to get his jacket.
He walks to the F-train at West Fourth and plans emotions to express, but he doesn’t feel any of those emotions. He walks downstairs to the tracks. He remembers riding the subway with Josh and holding his hand. He remembers the acute awareness of how close the third rail was, remembers putting his body in between his son and the danger. He remembers Josh at his legs watching strangers pass in train cars, watching his own face reflected and blurred in each window.
At the end of the platform, a withered man, chalky pale with matted white hair running from his chest up his neck to his face, plays Neil Young on an acoustic guitar. It’s “The Needle and the Damage Done.” He sings that line about junkies being like setting suns and his voice catches. My father thinks that this must be a hallucination. He puts five dollars in the man’s coffee cup and the man is real. The man looks up and says thank you with the flat tone of someone who is always thanking and never has cause to be thanked. He closes his eyes and sings on.
Josh is on the balcony at Beth’s apartment, looking out at the East River.
My father takes a breath like he’s about to go underwater, then walks up and puts his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Why’d you do that?” he says.
Josh looks up. He snarls. His face is feral.
“I’m a bad guy, Dad,” he says.
What does that kind of shit even mean?
“You want to be a junkie for your life?” my father says.
The correct answer is no. Josh says nothing. My father begins to say something nagging, but Josh interrupts him.
“I want to be a th
ief,” he says. “I want to be a criminal.”
They watch the river together. A ferry full of tourists ambles through the water. My father sees a flashbulb go off.
There is no more beautiful place in the world than New York from a distance, when you can’t make out any people and when you can’t hear any noise, but there it is, rising out of the water, stacks of gold light outlined by dusk. Everything else is disappointment.
“What?” Josh says, chiding.
“Nothing.”
“I’m a bad guy,” he says again.
When he first bought this place, my father would bring Josh out on the balcony. Josh would look down and get scared, and my father would tell him don’t look down, look out. They would watch the skyline and try to imagine everything they couldn’t see: Who lives there? Who is standing on that roof right now? What are they doing?
My father isn’t sure if this is a memory or a wish.
He wants to ask his son for a lot of details, but he doesn’t ask anything.
“You’re not bad,” he says, and Josh sneers.
They are telling two different stories about two different men and maybe neither one exists, but they don’t care. This is the conversation that will happen too often from now on. Once you have this conversation, it feels like the only conversation to have.
I am bad.
No, you’re not. You’re good, I swear, I see it.
Until those are the only two options.
My father leaves.
He retraces his steps to the subway, rides back to Manhattan. A homeless couple sits across from him and they slump into each other. He breathes through his mouth and doesn’t look at them. He has always been quick to look away. Smells make him retch easily. If alone, he has to sleep with all the lights on.
When he was a boy, his mother wouldn’t let him in the house while she cleaned. She tied string around a paper bag holding his lunch and dangled it down for him. He smiles at that memory, the routine. He whistles to himself, wet and tuneless. That’s what he does when there is something he’d rather not say or see. He never noticed it until Josh began making fun of him on a beach, one summer. He started whistling in the middle of conversations and everyone would laugh. Then, for years, Josh would say something ridiculous and my father would ask, What? Or, Why? And Josh would say, “I’m just trying to make you whistle.”
