The super’s wife sat down next to B on H’s bed and patted his hand.
–You be all light, she said.
VIII. OBLIGATIONS
An unpostmarked letter arrives for B—it has been folded over and jammed into his mail slot—which opens with the sentence, –As of this moment, you are no longer my son. The letter is unsigned but the handwriting is unmistakably that of the man who is in a position to issue such a renunciation.
What has he done now, what can he possibly have done, to provoke the old man to this extreme?
Two days before, he had taken his aged parents with a realtor friend to look at some co-ops with the idea of having them move from their four story brownstone to a place that didn’t require climbing stairs. His father had seemed offended that none of the apartments he was shown was as grand as the house he was apparently being asked to give up, but he was on his best behavior with the realtor, who was an attractive young woman, and she told B afterward that his father was one of the most charming older men she’d ever met.
For his part, B said next to nothing during the tour. He knew from a lifetime of failed attempts to urge his father to anything was to invite resistance. His mother, who had lost all immediate memory, had become no more than a bystander to the decisions made concerning her. Her constant question, asked the moment she forgot she had been already answered, was —What do I do now? To which his father would answer sententiously, –Whatever it is, darling, it doesn’t matter because you’re already doing it.
When they were tired of walking through other people’s rooms, he drove his parents home and he parted with his father, or so it seemed, on friendly terms.
Shortly after the vexing letter arrives, B phones the woman he’s been seeing off and on to report his grievance in a slightly amused, studiedly casual way. She isn’t home and doesn’t answer at work so he goes through his address book looking for some other low-maintenance sympathetic listener.
His father’s letter is like having a curse on his head and until it is removed, his only concern is easing the trauma. His day is filled with negligible incident: he takes an extended morning walk, has a prelunch beer, reads student work, adds a few sentences to a story he has been working on, holds unscheduled office hours at the college. Still the only thing on his mind is his father’s renunciation and he rehearses the opening sentence to himself as if it weren’t already etched indelibly in memory. When a colleague from the college calls on a professional matter, he finds himself telling her of his father’s angry letter.
–How awful for you, she says, and then proceeds to tell him of the tyrannies of her own parents, her mother forcing her to eat for breakfast whatever she left over from dinner the night before.
–Why aren’t our parents as smart as we are, he says.
His sharing of his father’s letter with this stranger eases his burden only for the duration of the call. They talk of meeting some evening for dinner to continue their newfound intimacy. He promises that whatever food she leaves over will go back to the kitchen and disappear from her life forever.
B returns to a psychotherapist who had pronounced him graduated from what had been a five year analysis six months ago. The therapist, Henrietta Doan, seems disappointed by what is obviously a regression in his behavior as if her judgment in releasing him were at fault. His father, she reminds him, feels disempowered and that makes him want to strike out at those he feels are usurping his prerogatives.
B understands and yet only up to a point, comes away from his therapy unimproved. Though the sun is out, a dark cloud hangs over his head, trailing him like an aura of the defeated. He keeps the letter a secret for the most part, embarrassed by the madness of his father’s gesture. Sometimes he breaks up laughing at his private melodrama. No one can possibly know how wronged I’ve been, he tells himself.
–I love and admire my father, B announces to his therapist, though I can’t stand being around him more than forty minutes at a time. Does that make any sense?
–It sounds to me as if you hate him, she says.
He insists that she has misunderstood his remark. He searches his memory for episodes that illustrate his point, the occasions, for example, his father took him as a child on excursions to art galleries, which were one of his favorite things to do. He recalls a time they went together to a show of some prized new painter and his father made a point of explaining to B what was wrong with the work, his voice carrying, though the artist and dealer were in a huddle on the other side of the room.
–Look at this, he remembers his father declaiming as if he were lecturing to a classroom of the deaf, the man has no sense of color, the man can’t draw a line.
–Dad, the mortified 11-year-old B whispered, the painter can hear you.
–Let him hear me, his father roared. Someone ought to tell him he can’t paint.
That isn’t the example he means to give. One anecdotal memory leads to another similar memory and B feeds on each for awhile only to distrust their unrelenting one-sidedness. Why can’t he dredge up scenes of his father as the generous or affectionate person he sometimes was?
When he first started to write, his father had been encouraging, even admiring. Sometimes he let slip a negative comment after the fact of his initial praise, catching B off his guard. His father approved or mostly approved of the various women B had married. On at least two occasions, he seemed to prefer the woman B had married to B himself.
When a neighbor told the 12-year-old B that he had a walk just like his father, B had taken pleasure in the comparison. He used to baby sit for this neighbor’s children and play pool on their table. The memory is strong, though he distrusts it. Now as he gets older it worries him that he is becoming the same irascible curmudgeon his father has almost always been.
In desperation B composes the following letter:
Dear Dad,
I hesitate to call you Dad since you have disclaimed me as a son, but I’m writing to you to clear up what seems a misunderstanding between us. In taking you and mom to look at co-ops, which you seemed interested in pursuing, I was not trying to push you out of your place, if that’s what you think but to help you make your life more comfortable. If you don’t want to move, I’m willing to let the matter drop, though you’ve been complaining incessantly about how difficult the stairs have been for you and mother. Perhaps you have some other imagined grievance against me and it has nothing to do with my taking you to look at apartments. I care for you and want you to be happy so I hope we can resolve this apparent crisis and return to our usual low level manageable tension. Otherwise, the hell with you.
B lets the unfinished letter sit on his desk three days before destroying it. An array of scenarios concerning his father passes through his mind unencouraged.
A week or so later, his father calls to ask why he hasn’t heard from B.
–Come over, his father barks at him. I need to talk to you right away.
–Dad, he says, you said you didn’t want to see me again.
His remark ushers in thirty seconds of dead phone time.
–When did I say that? his father asks. Who told you I said I didn’t want to see you. Didn’t I just this moment invite you to come over?
B sees no point in resurrecting the past particularly since his father seems to have forgotten the letter. –I’ll come by tomorrow at two o’clock, he says.
–This can’t wait, his father says. Son, oblige me and come over now. This concerns you. This is something that has to be discussed right away. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.
–I have to be at the college in an hour, B says. It is his standard evasion these days and it evokes a heavy sigh from his father.
–I’ll expect you tomorrow if it has to be tomorrow, his father says, and hangs up.
The curse on his head lifted, it is as if it has never been there or has always been there, one or the other. He feels both elated and unrelieved. B senses that the more he accedes to his father’s whimsica
l demands, the more contempt he earns. Yet he sympathizes with the grimness of his father’s situation. The old man is stuck in this huge house—he has mostly stopped painting in the last year—with nothing to do but worry about his health, which is amazingly good, and wait for his death.
B shakes off his sense of grievance and phones his father.
–Who is this? his father asks after hearing B’s distinctive voice.
–Dad, B says, I can come by tomorrow between 12 and one and take you for a haircut.
–You knew I needed a haircut, his father says. That’s wonderful.
–I thought it was about time, B says.
A moment of throat clearing follows. –Isn’t that curious? his father says. Just last night I dreamed you called to apologize. Isn’t that something? How could I have possibly known that you’d call?
–So I’ll see you tomorrow, B says.
–In the dream you came over right away and didn’t keep me waiting, his father says.
In his role of grudging caretaker, B drives to the Heights to visit his father, lucking into a parking spot two blocks away. As he gets out of the car, he hears his name in the air. It is the woman in his department, the one he exchanged confidences with on the phone about a week ago.
–What are you doing in my neighborhood? she asks after they have awkwardly shaken hands. She has been carrying groceries and has to shift them from her right arm to her left.
B concedes that he is visiting his parents who live a few blocks from where they stand.
–I thought your father had excommunicated you, she says. Isn’t that what you told me?
B walks her to her door, which is in a mostly opposite direction from the one in which he is going, relishing the delay.
–Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee? she asks.
B glances at her—he has not really noticed her before—and registers that she is prematurely gray, is overweight, and has what might be described as a dowdy post-hippie style. She is wearing a colorful peasanty, tent-like dress that calls attention to her heaviness rather than disguises it. She has an angular, intelligent, sympathetic, not unattractive face.
–My father is expecting me, B says, which is his indirect way of accepting her invitation.
He ends up having a glass of white wine instead of coffee and the woman—Tamara—tells him an intimate story about a man she had been dating who had told her he loved her and then a week later said he thought it was best if they ended things before they went too far. She had been hurt and mystified by the man’s behavior and she asks B if as a man he can explain to her what was going on from the man’s point of view.
Of course B has no idea why this man he doesn’t know has behaved as he had, though that doesn’t stop him from marketing an opinion. –It sounds to me as if he got frightened that things were moving too quickly, he says.
–We had been dating for two years, Tamara says. That was the first time he ever told me he loved me.
He may have been seeing someone else, B thinks, and told her he loved her out of guilt and because there was no longer so much at stake. –A lot of men are afraid of intimacy, B says as if his making the comment excludes him from the universal judgment.
–He’s been married before, she says, and has a 10-year-old son. He’s a very loving father. I thought you might understand him because you’ve been through similar experiences. Have you ever broken off a relationship abruptly like that?
B had a tendency when he wanted to get out of a relationship to behave carelessly and objectionably until the woman broke it off. At that point, he usually felt mistreated and regretful and then tried to salvage matters that were beyond salvation.
–Do you know if he’s seeing someone else now? B asks.
A comic strip light bulb comes on over Tamara’s head.
–A few days before he ended it, he said he thought it would be a good idea if we allowed ourselves to see other people. I said I didn’t know what to make of such a suggestion.
–That means he was already seeing someone else, B says, glancing surreptitiously at his watch.
–Does it? What a creep. We had always been so honest with each other, we really had. It’s hard for me to accept his being so twofaced.
–Look, B says, as much as I’d rather talk to you, I’d better go and see my father. I’ll stop by afterward if you want to continue this. She makes no attempt to hide her disappointment in him.
–You don’t have to, she says. I’m sorry if I bored you with my problems.
–My father gets impatient, B says, which leads to rage. He may renounce me again and refuse to see me.
–I don’t think so, she says. I suspect after all that waiting, he’ll be extra-glad to see you. Would you like to come back?
–I’ll come back, he says.
It is a promise he regrets making as soon as he is out the door.
She is right of course. His father seems more than usually pleased to see him, offers to give B the dark green cashmere jacket he is wearing that B has offhandedly admired. There is no important news his father has to impart, there never is, beyond some new ideas his father has about painting that B has heard more than once before.
His father mentions that he had picked up B’s first novel and then couldn’t put it down and had read more than half of it in three hours and that it was so much more “luminous” than he remembered. B knows better than to allow himself to be pleased, though some small taste of gratification filters through his guard. Then he goes upstairs with his father to his studio for a showing of new work. His father shows B some paintings he has shown B on his last visit plus some old work plus one new painting he hasn’t seen.
–I can still do it, he says, can’t I?
His mother who has been silent up until then laughs at his father’s remark.
–Don’t boast, Hudson, she whispers.
B is obligingly impressed as always, acknowledges that his 89-year-old father is as good a painter as ever, makes some willfully perceptive comments about the painting on display.
–You’re my best critic, his father says. When you look at my paintings I see them anew through your eyes. His father’s unrelenting compliments begin to make B tense. He is struck by the dangerous fragility of the moment and feels an urgency about getting away before his father’s sweet humor disintegrates into something else.
He announces he has to be at the college to meet a class, collects his jacket, kisses his mother good-bye.
–Where are you always running off to? his father says as B approaches him. I need you around to confirm my existence. They embrace awkwardly, his father sitting in a high-back chair, B leaning over him, the muscles in his back in tortured opposition.
–I hope your children are more dutiful than mine, his father calls after B as he scoots down the stairs.
It is only after he has driven almost halfway home that B remembers his promise to Tamara to resume his visit. Since he doesn’t particularly want to go back—he had no friendships with women that didn’t evolve or devolve into sex—the promise hangs on him like an obligation. He notices a public phone on the next street and parks the car and walks over, thinking merely to be honest, not knowing how else to proceed.
He has to call Information to get her number but once inside the booth, her last name, which he knows perfectly well, evades memory. It is something with a G or a K, two or three syllables, a European name. There is nothing to do but go home (he has no impetus to go back) and call Tamara from there.
When he gets home there is a message on the answering machine from his father. –You forgot to take the jacket, his father says stiffly in a hoarse voice. It takes B a moment or two to figure out what jacket his father is referring to.
B is lying down, exhausted from what has been one of the most gratifying visits with his father in a long time when he remembers that he has forgotten to call Tamara Gielson. He is planning his excuses, investing them with worked-up conviction when he dozes off.
/> He seems to dream the call, but in the dream which is unusually lucid he gets his father on the line, having somehow dialed the wrong number.
–When are you coming over? his father asks. I have some things to tell you.
–Could you do me a favor? B asks. Could you go over to 126 Pineapple Street—he isn’t even sure it is the right address—and tell this woman, Tamara, that my promise to return had completely slipped my mind?
–I need you to take me for a haircut, tomorrow, his father says. Maybe some time next week we could visit your friend together.
B entertains the idea of visiting Tamara with his father, but the timing is inappropriate. How could he wait a week to explain his failure to keep an appointment? The damage to his credibility by that time would be irrevocable. He suffers the demise of his word. The word. All words.
After he escapes his parents’ house, B heads back to Tamara’s garden apartment to resume his visit. It is dark out, though barely four o’clock, the streets deserted, the wind gusting, leaves float by like swarms of insects. Several minutes pass and B patiently rings the bell a second time. He looks for a card in his wallet on which to leave a note.
Finally the door opens. Tamara is wearing a dusty white terry cloth bathrobe revealing a purple slip or nightgown perhaps underneath. –You caught me napping, she says. Could you take a walk around the block and come back?
–I probably should go on home, B says. I could use a nap myself. I just wanted to let you know I hadn’t forgotten my promise.
–You might as well come in and take your nap here, she says.
I won’t disturb you and when you wake we can continue our talk. As soon as he steps in and she closes the door behind him, she throws herself against him and they kiss open-mouthed. What’s going on? He can hardly believe how excited he is by the press of her body against his, though he has not thought of her, not for a minute, not ever, in sexual terms before.
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