My dad’s confession didn’t frighten me. It had always been his ability to detach that had worried me, so hearing him admit to an overabundance of feeling was a relief. And hearing him talk about how he’d longed for a mother and father when he’d been in foster care, how Betty had never really talked to him about anything, only tried to control him, drew a line between the lack of parenting my dad had received and the lack of parenting he’d given me. He suddenly didn’t seem so powerful, just a taller little boy who had many of the same longings I did.
When we arrived in Northampton, we went directly to the apartment complex. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks depressing.”
It didn’t look any worse to me than so many worn-down and weathered brick buildings all across the region. And given how hard I worked to barely pay my own rent, a part of me bristled when my dad complained about his government subsidies. The idea of having someone pay for my lodging and food was my idea of heaven, while my dad called himself a nonunion philosopher and was known to spend three hours meditating, four hours walking, and the rest of the day watching Fellini and reading Freud. But again, I didn’t think to recall my mother’s advice about needy men, or how she’d come to give it to me. My blind spot regarding my dad and the patterns he’d created in my romantic relationships with men were so inherent to who I was at that moment in my life, it was difficult for me to see them play themselves out.
I didn’t say anything, and we drove into the downtown area and parked. Walking the upscale streets, my dad flinched a little at the windows we passed; the other residents reflected back at us in the glass of the fancy stores.
“I don’t know,” he said.
We went into a used bookstore, but even this wasn’t enough to make him feel as if he’d found his spot. Now I was worried. It was one thing to turn his nose up in theory. I got it. I did. I had left rural Maine not only because I’d been hungry for a big life, but also because I’d grown tired of being viewed as a freak. But the boardinghouse was going to be sold, and if he didn’t find an alternative, he would be out on the streets. My dad had prepared himself for this eventuality by spending several nights in homeless shelters, and he said he’d been fine, but it wasn’t something I wanted to think about. He was almost sixty years old. Boston had brutal winters. Even if the citizens of Northampton weren’t quite ready for him, it was surely better than homelessness. But I knew it wasn’t my decision to make. And so, I just hoped he would choose a new home.
Like my dad, I was struggling to figure out where I was meant to be. I’d nearly moved to New York City the year before, only staying in Boston to write a weekly music column. But now, so much of what I’d loved about my life in Boston was gone. When I’d first moved there, it had been the big city of my childhood dreams, and I’d loved exploring its streets and writing about its happenings. But after six years, I felt as if I’d walked down every street, and I wanted the kind of life that could stay big even as it became more stable. It felt as if everyone had moved on but me. Something had to change.
The Boston Globe began searching for a new staff music writer. Although I’d started out in journalism as a trade, I’d become passionate about my music writing. Not to mention the fact that Bono was expecting me to call him any day.
I spoke with my editor about my interest in the job and went through the application process. I tried not to get ahead of myself, but given the constant state of financial worry in which I’d been living for the past four years, it was hard not to think about how great life would be if the job were mine.
One night I saw a fellow freelancer who’d always been like a big brother, and he asked how I felt about the Globe’s choice for its new music writer. They’d hired someone else and never called to let me know. Just like that, I was done with journalism. I was done with Boston.
When my lease ran out that April, I moved in with friends in Jamaica Plain, cutting my rent in half and giving me the freedom to leave the city whenever the time was right. And then, a woman ran a red light and hit me, totaling my grandmother’s car. I was stuck in all new ways, and I felt it keenly. I gave up my columns and regular contributions to the paper, though it was hard to relinquish control. I considered it a privilege to write about bands I loved and help bring them to the attention of a larger audience, and it thrilled me to see my byline in the paper I’d grown up reading. But as with a love affair that has run its course, I had to move on; I had gladly chosen the poverty of the freelance life for the privilege of being mentored by the talented editors at the Globe, but in the end, I’d been just another freelancer to them. I had to leave. I had to find my place.
Claire had moved out to LA, and I stayed with her and her boyfriend for a week, excited to find myself reunited with a city I had come to love. She was the best kind of hostess, planning outings and carefully curating the books in the guest room. But I wanted more than the slice of LA she told me to want, including Judah, whom I’d maintained a flirtation with on and off over the years, and the other musicians I knew out there. I felt restricted. Claire felt underappreciated. We still had the intense relationship we’d had at sixteen, but it now felt uncomfortable in our adult lives.
That spring, Scott came through on tour again. When he got in touch to give me a heads up, I felt that familiar uptick of excitement. Even four years after our breakup, I was eager for the oasis of sex and love and comfort he offered. But when I arrived at the venue a little early so we could have dinner, he had a surprise for me.
“I have to tell you something,” he said. “My girlfriend is on tour with me.”
I was shocked. He and his girlfriend had broken up instead of getting engaged. Who was this new girl who wasn’t me? Even if I knew in my heart I couldn’t really move back to Portland for him, it didn’t mean my heart was any less his.
“How did you not tell me this?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you still want to have dinner?”
We walked around the corner to the Middle East and there she was: his new girlfriend. She was a European rocker he had met on tour, with platinum blond hair. She wasn’t smiling. Neither was I. The three of us awkwardly got through dinner. When she left to set up the merch booth for the show, I sat in stunned silence across from Scott, unable to say anything, unable to get up and cleave us apart. Even this small moment alone together tugged at me. I drank whiskey steadily all night. The band was sweaty and wild, and I sang along, even though I wanted to run away. Before I knew it, the night was over. Scott and I stood at the center of the rapidly emptying club.
“What are you doing now?” Scott asked me.
“Going home,” I said, grateful it was almost over, as much as that hurt.
“I could go with you,” he said.
“There’s not enough room for both of you,” I said.
“I could come and hang out,” he said.
The possibility of ending the night alone with him was such a relief after the painful surprise of his new girlfriend’s presence. I leaned toward him a little. It struck me how impossibly awful that would be, to abandon this poor woman who had flown from Europe to sell T-shirts in grungy clubs just to be with Scott. I started to cry.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “What the fuck do you want? Tell me. Please. Because I don’t understand anymore.”
“Sarah,” Scott said.
My name in his mouth was still so precious. I cried harder, fought temptation.
“I have to go,” I said.
He hugged me, so I was crying in his arms, and it felt so safe, but then I got it that this really was the last time, and I cried harder still. “Good-bye, Scott,” I said.
As soon as I got out to my friend’s car, I let go completely. It hurt as if we were breaking up for the first time. There hadn’t been a time in the past ten years that Scott and I had seen each other without going to bed together. But that hadn’t happened tonight, and wasn’t going to happen, not ever again. It really felt like everything I most loved
was gone. I had no idea what to do next.
I received my insurance settlement from the car accident and bought a very used Honda. With a reliable car at the ready, I acknowledged a dream that had been rising in my heart for nearly three years now: Los Angeles. I was smitten with her.
The thought of my new life made me ecstatic. There was just one problem: my dad. I was nervous about telling him, as if he might see my departure as a betrayal. And I was afraid that without me there to drive him to Section 8 properties and make sure he didn’t give up on the paperwork, he’d end up homeless. Still, I broke the news.
“Los Angeles,” he said. “Far out. How are you going to get there?”
“I’m going to drive.”
“Yeah? I used to love to drive.”
“I know you did, Dad.”
“Well, I fully support you getting everything you want,” he said.
It was a double-edged blessing. I was grateful for his support, but as usual, his neutrality made me feel like he had all of the power. I secretly longed for him to be a little more broken up about my departure.
I went up to Maine to store a few belongings at Mom’s house and say good-bye. Some things hadn’t changed: I was eager to go, but the morning I was supposed to leave, I stood just inside the doorway, hugging Mom and crying. She and Craig had created a beautiful sanctuary, and I always hated to go away, but I knew I couldn’t stay.
chapter fifteen
DON’T EVER DATE HANDSOME MEN
As usual money was an immediate and constant worry in Los Angeles, but money had always been a worry, so I made do. My friend Rebecca had taken me in, giving me a room in the house she’d just bought and charging me very little rent, in part because I was helping with her dog, and in part because she believed in my writing and became my patron of the arts. I woke up, diligently worked on a short story or journalism pitch, went running, and then the whole afternoon yawned in front of me until Rebecca got home from work and we cooked dinner together, or I went out with one of my few friends.
There was one person who was home during the day and had no job or other obligations to distract him from my need for reassurance: my dad. There was just one problem. He didn’t have a phone. There was a phone in the boardinghouse, but it was down the hall from his room. So my dad and I began scheduling calls in advance, either by letter or at the end of a conversation. At our agreed-upon time, he would call me from one of the pay phones he had scoped out around Boston. He bought those inexpensive phone cards favored by immigrants, so we could literally talk for hours, and we did. In my loneliness, I was more candid with my father than I’d ever been. I spoke of my past affairs, describing the men I’d fallen for, and how none of them had fallen for me the way I wanted.
“You should never date handsome men because they don’t have to develop any other aspect of their personality, and so they don’t.”
I laughed, even while protesting, but I knew he had a point. As he did when I told him most of the men I’d been involved with of late had also been involved with cocaine.
“You should never try to compete with cocaine, Sarah,” my dad said. “It’s designed to be the best feeling in the world. And you can never win.”
I knew his words were accurate. But it wasn’t in my nature to let go. And, at least in the case of my father, my stubbornness had paid off. If I had given up on him, he and I never would have reconciled. Because I hadn’t stopped believing, we had a relationship.
My dad applied himself to my love life with the same intensity and thoroughness with which he approached his own quest for enlightenment, and even more than that, with a renewed acknowledgment of his part in my personal issues.
“I broke you, Sarah,” he said to me again. “It’s up to me to fix you.”
Part of me believed it to be true. I had tried to fix myself with perfectionism, and writing, and running, and booze, and other men, and none of it had worked. Much of what he said about our dynamic made sense, but his requests to “run” my past lives or redo our childhood interactions made me nervous.
“Because I wasn’t there for you when you were a little girl, you think you’re undeserving,” he said. “But we can fix it. We can go back and start again. You can be the child again. You can say anything to me. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, there’s nothing that will upset me or make me go away again.”
I heard him. I was grateful. But his offer also made me deeply uncomfortable. He might as well have told me it was okay for me to suddenly be fluent in French. Sure, it was a nice idea, but if I’d never been taught, there was no way I could feel comfortable speaking it to someone else. I couldn’t say that to my dad, though. And so I said, “Thank you.”
Going into the holidays, I was invited to a party at Lucinda Williams’s record label by a friend who knew Lucinda was the inspiration for the heroine of my first novel. By the end of the night, Lu and I were drinking wine together, bonding over the important topics of the universe—poetry, men, our fathers, and shoes.
The next night I had dinner with Claire and tried to rally through my hangover to enjoy our conversation. Things had been strained ever since my last visit. It was wonderful to have an old friend in a new city, especially one who was also driven to succeed as a writer, but I felt wary around her; it was like she always wanted me to be someone else. After dinner, she urged me to have another glass of wine. I demurred.
“You’ll get drunk with Lucinda Williams, but you won’t get drunk with me?”
I stared at her, surprised by her genuine anger. I ordered another glass of wine. And then went to another bar for more drinks, even though I was worried about driving home. By the time I made it to my car, I was tipsy and glad to be free of her. We met for dinner and drinks once more, but it was clear that something was seriously wrong, and neither of us had the energy to find out what. I didn’t want that seemingly constant level of intensity—fighting, reconciling only after long, difficult conversations—for me, or for her. I realized I’d rather love her from afar than resent her and fear her as a friend. We never spoke again.
I was getting some regular work for the Los Angeles Times, but they had recently declared bankruptcy and cut their freelance rate—already not a lot—by fifteen percent. The downsizing of the newspaper meant fewer pages, which meant fewer assignments to go around, which meant less money. I started tutoring kids for the SAT, but that still wasn’t enough to live on, and so I started working for a catering company.
It was hard not to feel that I’d taken a step back. In the five years since grad school, I’d managed to support myself with my writing, and here I was wearing a black tie and searching out straws for rich socialites so they wouldn’t muss their lipstick while sipping overoaked chardonnay. And, still, I wasn’t making enough money to survive.
I’d always assumed I would eventually sell a book, which would be the foundation for my financial life as a writer. It seemed clear, though, that my first novel was never going to find a home without major revisions, and that meant supporting myself long enough to complete them. So I hobbled along.
One day, a manila envelope came for me in the mail. I still received quite a few press CDs, so this was nothing unusual. But when I opened it, I found it was a book: I Deserve Love: You deserve love and sexual pleasure—and you can get exactly what you want! by Sondra Ray. I laughed, wondering which of my friends had sent it to me as a prank, but I read through the hundreds of sex-positive affirmations inside.
“Did you get the book I sent you?” my dad asked during our next call.
Of course it had been my dad. How had I not realized it immediately?
“Oh, that was you,” I said. “Yeah, thanks.”
“I did all of the affirmations before I sent it to you. It’s really good. I really recommend that you pick a few of the affirmations and write them out.”
“Okay,” I said, trying not to think too hard about my dad writing out the affirmations, such as “When I put my penis in a woman’s vagina . . .”
“And have you given any more thought to having me run you?” he asked. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but I think it would be really good for you.”
I paused for a long moment, looking out the window at the overexposed sunshine on the palm trees and stucco houses, willing myself to find enough nerve to push back, even a little bit. He was speaking of “running” my past lives as a way to identify traumas that were creating problems in my current life. I knew it was something my dad, and even my mom, had done in the seventies, and my dad still believed in it deeply.
“I’m not sure, Dad, let me think about it,” I said.
“Okay, well, we wouldn’t do it until you’re home at Christmas anyhow,” he said.
It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate my dad’s desire to help me. All I had ever wanted, after all, was his time and attention. But I knew enough about therapy to understand that one of its central tenets was the need for an impartial healer. On my good days, I feared my dad was so interested in my progress that it would be impossible for him to actually help me. On my dark days, I was struck by the fact that my father, who had spent his life searching for a mother, had found himself with two daughters and had decided he was the only person who could heal them. Deep down, I feared he wanted to keep me broken so I would never outgrow my need for his help.
My father was constantly hungry for an ever-expanding list of books, from the new age healers of his day, such as Sondra Ray and Louise Hay, to On the Road, which he decided to reread, and works by Freud, whom he read in his entirety, and movies, from the pulp directors he adored, including John Carpenter and Dario Argento, to the greats he had introduced me to, particularly Bergman and Fellini, whose creative process fascinated him. He was forever on the lookout for treasures at his favorite thrift stores around Boston, and he happily told me about finding his coveted items for two or three dollars, as well as surprise treasures he had only bought because of their price or cover.
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