by David Adjmi
A few days after the drunken phone call Dad called again, this time sober and cheerful. He sucked it up to apologize to Cookie, he said, and they were reconciled. My father credited me with saving their relationship, so now I was triangulated in it. He wanted me to meet Cookie. He invited me out to Jersey for a weekend to see the new house. He’d remodeled an old two-car garage that was “very high-line” and “very sharp” and “very much your type, Dave.” We could all have dinner together, he said, and in the morning he’d take me to get pancakes, some secret joint he knew about.
I’d never spent a weekend with my father. I’d never slept over at his house. It was exhausting having to perform for him even in small amounts—I couldn’t imagine how I would do it for an uninterrupted weekend. But maybe he’d changed. He apologized to Cookie at my urging. He’d never done anything like that before. Maybe he was beginning to soften. Maybe there was still a relationship we could cultivate, and some kind of healing could take place.
Healing had always seemed lowbrow to me, even lurid, but I needed a new approach to life. The first few months after graduation, things were shaky. I moved back home and temped intermittently. It was a rotten time. I thought becoming an intellectual would serve as a preparation for life, but as it turned out: no one gave a shit. At my temp jobs, I’d try to strike up conversations about Lacan’s Ecrits, but the other temps would just stare at me with deadened expressions. I was pretentious and it turned people off. Without a stage for my intellectual posturing, and the reassuringly measurable gradients of progress academia gave me, I became depressed and underconfident. I was presentable, mainly, but something was off. I was like a cake that looked sort of appetizing, but when you cut into it oozed uncooked vanilla gunk.
During my senior year of college I officially decided to become a playwright (after watching Six Degrees I started seeing plays all the time, it was a fait accompli) but when I tried writing my own plays they turned out wooden and impersonal. The plays mirrored back to me how fake and stunted I was. That was my impetus to change. I wanted to be a good writer, it was suddenly all I cared about—and I knew there was some buried part of me I had to confront.
I started seeing Boris Fischer, a psychoanalyst one of my professors recommended to me, which helped. In one of our earliest sessions I explained that when I was fourteen, my then-analyst said he could make me a functioning bisexual, that I could marry a woman and live a quote-unquote normal life. “Oh did he say that?” said Boris Fischer, not very cordial. “What was the name of the analyst?” At the very mention of Weinberger’s name I saw a slight twist in his expression. “Yes,” he replied, with sudden surgical coldness, “I know Dr. Weinberger. I’m familiar with his methods.” From the way he said methods I sensed some antipathy between them. I asked if he knew Weinberger personally. Fischer sighed languidly. “We cochair a school of psychoanalytic training together,” he said. I couldn’t imagine Boris Fischer and Weinberger in the same city, much less chairing a program together. They were so different. It was clear, for instance, that Boris Fischer believed gay men should not be made functioning bisexuals and that attempting this would only damage and warp them. Boris was progressive and humane—possibly a gay man himself.
Because of my therapy with him, I was able to heal, and because of the healing I was more open to having a boyfriend. I started dating someone named Kurt in the fall, and it quickly became serious.
The courtship was a blur. I went to a bar, got drunk, saw Kurt slumped by a wall, and made out with him. Back then, I had no criteria for relationships; I didn’t know who to like or reject. I experienced the whole bar scene as a kind of ambient mobile flux, and slept with mostly everyone—not because I wanted to, but out of some combination of pity and politeness and bad self-esteem. Many of these men seemed desperate (in a way that made me feel relatively adjusted, though I found only minimal compensation in that), but Kurt was able to project sanity, even in a rough outline. This made him stand out.
That night, he took me back to his apartment, a small one-bedroom on Avenue A he shared with a small, very officious dog named Rudy, and the following morning we went to a café across the street and ate croissants and played board games. By the end of Yahtzee there was the tacit understanding that we were already in a relationship. It was a little accelerated, but I didn’t know any better—and in my state of famished loneliness (because I was at the time) I believed it was what I needed.
Kurt was in his early thirties, recently out of the closet, and in the process of a very amicable divorce from a woman who lived in a place called the Thousand Islands up near Canada. He was over six feet, lantern-jawed with symmetrical features. His outfits were all variations of one outfit: a fitted T-shirt, jeans, black Chelsea boots, and a bandanna (de rigueur for a period in the nineties, like goatees, and he sported one of those too). He was blandly stylish—which is not to say he was a schlub; he worked in fashion. He was an art director for a high-end clothing label; he directed commercials for them—I’d even seen a couple. They played before coming attractions at the movies: people in beachcombers drinking wine coolers; people laughing and wearing linen. I thought it was so impressive to know someone who made commercials. It felt important.
We started going out with a bunch of his friends from work a few times a week. I rarely went on one-on-one dates with him, which I initially found odd, but eventually determined was probably fine—that most gay men of a certain social status and economic bracket probably did that. We rented cars and drove to parties in Queens, in Long Island—parties in people’s basements, parties in suburban houses, parties we were far too old to attend, where models hung around and ate nachos, where there were beer bongs and table tennis. Who are these people, I wondered. Why are we driving to Queens? But I dared not ask, and frankly I was just grateful to be part of a couple. To feel I belonged, even in some nominal way, to something.
At the parties Kurt ignored me—which, again, seemed normal. He’d go off and talk to male models who were famous at the time and I’d wait patiently for him, usually somewhere close to the door where it would be easy for him to find me. I was eager to prove my worth as a boyfriend, be supportive, not someone who would hamstring his social needs. After the parties, Kurt would compliment me in the car while the friends cooed and giggled and mocked us playfully from the back seat. He’d say things like You were so great! I never knew what I’d done that was so great but I was ecstatic to be complimented. Maybe he saw my stillness and quiet as a sort of profound homage. Once, after complimenting me, he put his hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze. Now the bonds that unite us are sanctified, I thought, and I felt a deep warm joy spreading through my insides, a feeling of completeness I had never known.
With my new boyfriend and new prestigious analyst and my new playwriting ambitions I felt suddenly ascended into some new stratum, now part of the world instead of jutting against it with my usual hard perpendicular angle. I’d moved through successive vessels for growth and self-expansion.
I started to think the trip to see my father would be a natural extension of all that—like going to a healing spring, or soaking in a mineral bath and absorbing some elemental nourishment from the very pit of the earth. I didn’t have to erase my family to become myself—in fact, I’d likely done some sort of violence to myself in the attempts to block them from my life. I wanted to be a writer, so I had to confront the truth about my life—a truth I couldn’t extract from plays or films or books. I had to go to the source of my problems. If the past had a hidden structure, I was ready to unearth that structure, to bring what was hidden to light.
I drove out to Cookie’s condo in Long Branch on a Saturday evening. Cookie was jittery, she was clearly nervous to meet me. She kept apologizing and flittering, preempting my judgments with her own burbling self-reprovals: her house wasn’t nice enough, she looked terrible, she hated her outfit. She wrung her hands together anxiously, smiling precariously as though she were falling off a cliff and didn’t want to trouble an
yone by screaming for help. She kept offering me tea and food as her eyes darted all over the place. My father chuckled with amusement at Cookie’s routine. He seemed to interpret her bird-fluttering hysteria as a watermark of some kind of female genuineness—apparently it was entertaining for him to see grown women perched on a ledge of psychic terror for no real reason. Maybe he enjoyed the expansive ease he felt being a protector when the stakes were low to nonexistent.
He spoke about her in the third person: Cookie is excellent at sudoku. Cookie likes all that stuff you like, Dave. Cookie seemed relieved not to have to come up with topics on her own. When my father switched subjects to nutrition she pivoted with free-floating ease. “I only eat healthy,” she vaunted. “I try to get your father to take spirulina. It’s very good for you, spirulina.” As she went on about herbs and macronutrients and detoxifying properties, she relaxed a little bit. The sun-scorched lines in her face softened. She started speaking openly about my father’s controlling personality. In an attempt to chart new territory with him, I made a couple of jokes about my dad—who smiled slightly, to show his openness and good humor. I spoke in long paragraphs about humility and compromise, and became a sort of impromptu marriage counselor, which gave me a sense of purpose: I was the parent and they were kids needing advice.
That night we ate dinner at my father’s favorite kosher Italian restaurant. He was only eating kosher now—somehow it went with the tracksuits and baseball cap. Cookie hated kosher food but she brought her spirulina supplements. My father wolfed his two doughy lobes of manicotti teeming with kosher cheese, and downed that with cupfuls of kosher wine. Cookie fluttered and shook and said endearing things. There were spontaneous ruptures of confidence and ease (my father kept asking if I had a girlfriend, even though I’d come out to him four or five times* by that point and had no intention of introducing him to Kurt), but then they faded and we laughed again. There was a spirit of goodwill. We had the sort of good-natured camaraderie strangers have with one another.
After dinner we dropped Cookie off, and my father drove us to the carriage house. Once she was gone, he seemed switched off. I was used to his loud exertions, his strained efforts and whipped-up blandishments, but once we crossed the threshold of the carriage house, it was like I ceased to exist. He didn’t show me the house. He didn’t say where the bathroom was. Maybe in his aggravated state of manliness he assumed I would trounce around, pee wherever, sleep on a rumpled pile of laundry. I was hurt. It was late, yes, but he wasn’t merely sleepy, it was a kind of arrogance. And I didn’t see what was so “high-line” and fantastic about this redecorated house of his. It felt strangely bare and shrunken; the furniture was tacky and ugly. He’d put in new wood floors, but the wood seemed splintered in parts and unevenly graded, and the glaze over it was thick and goopy. I changed into a pair of sweatpants and sat for a bit in the kitchen, thinking my father might come back and say good night to me. When he didn’t, I went up the small spiral staircase. I found him in a darkened room, lying in bed and watching The Tonight Show.
From a distance, he looked imperious, with his head resting on a stack of white pillows, his bathrobe gigantic and flowing like a judicial robe. But when I got a better look at him, my father seemed ragged and old. He seemed drugged watching television. His baseball hat was off and I could see the outline of his skull. I could see the shadow in his open mouth. The remote drooped in his hand. His expression was slack and empty. His feet were relaxed into a default V shape, the big toes jutting with bunions.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pretended to watch television with him. I wanted to feel the filial comfort and ease sons have with fathers, but I hadn’t sat in a bed with my father since I was six years old. I felt like a stranger, and he was treating me like one—but then, out of nowhere, I felt suddenly determined to have an intimate relationship with him.
“So I’m in analysis,” I told him, as if continuing something I’d said earlier.
“Huh?”
“I’m in analysis,” I repeated—even though he was the one paying for it.
“How’s that goin, honey?”
“Well,” I said, my voice trembling, “I’m having some issues with abandonment.”
I felt myself slipping off the bed slightly as if it were an inclined plane. My father didn’t move a muscle—he didn’t look at me, didn’t flinch. I felt an impulse to leave the room, but I knew I would never again have this opportunity to confront him, that I would never find the courage. Exerting my every last ounce of trembling will, I began to prod and push him—gently, so as not to frighten him—to make him explain his actions to me, actions for which he’d never been asked to account, for which I deserved an explanation: Why did he leave without telling me, forcing me to guess at his whereabouts? Why did he cut off contact for five years before insisting on those awkward punishing dinners at the Genovese House where I was forced to sit like a ventriloquist’s dummy and pick at caprese salads while he got drunk?
As I disgorged the contents of my tortured history with him, Dad didn’t interrupt or try to answer; he just stared straight ahead with his same blank expression. Shadows from the television flickered over his face in the darkness, so it appeared to change shape. “She wanted me out of the house,” he muttered eventually.
“But you didn’t speak to me for five years.”
“I told you,” he wheezed, “your mother wouldn’t let me.”
“What do you mean ‘wouldn’t let you’?”
“She wanted me out of the house. I didn’t want to go—she pushed me out.”
“But she would have let you speak to me.”
“You don’t understand—”
“You were legally entitled to see me. You could have told me you were leaving—you could have written me letters, you could have made a phone call—”
“I couldn’t,” he eked out.
“What does that mean?”
He said I couldn’t again, still holding his parallel gaze. My father was completely ill equipped for this conversation. I was violating some wordless contract we’d made, some story about life we tacitly agreed upon, one that made him blameless, a savior. I was asking for a substantial rewrite to the script of our relationship and he wasn’t interested in the revision.
“Honey, I’m very tired,” he said, as if to settle the matter.
I bade my father good night, then crept down the spiral staircase. I tried to get comfortable on the leather sofa. There was a sheet, a thin quilt with blue diamonds, and a single pillow. It was not a great sleeping situation. The small of my back kept collapsing in the wide depressions between sofa cushions. No matter which way I turned, my shoulder was up near my chin and it was making my neck hurt. I lay there for a while, sleepless. The ground floor was laid out like a studio apartment, and from the sofa I had a view of the kitchen and the front door. The house had an eerie depopulated emptiness. The darkened room was overcast with shadows, the spiny outlines of trees. I berated myself for visiting him. I felt conned into it—yes, I’d gone of my own volition but I felt I’d been tricked. I’d always said no to him, and I was right to say no all those times, and now I felt I’d broken some kind of chastity. I foolishly thought I could undo the black spell—the way I had that one time when I was fourteen, after one of our dinners at the Genovese House, when I tried (as I did from time to time) to rescue my father from his own spiritual deadness.
Back then I was able, if he was sufficiently loosened up from the Prune Juice, to open a little spiritual aperture and connect with him. It was tricky, like threading a fine needle, but sometimes I could do it. And on that one night, between the liquor and deep conversation, my father had gotten particularly raw and sad. I could see he felt some relief sharing this sadness, this secret part of himself, with another person, someone who could empathize, who wouldn’t reject him for his weakness. After dinner he drove me home. He pulled his car into the driveway and we sat for a moment in the parked car. It was raining, and I could hear the squeak of t
he wipers as they washed thick cataracts of rain from the windshield. I turned to look at him and his eyes were watery. Each lid was rimmed with a shimmering wet tear that gleamed like the droplets of rain banging down on the windshield. “See that?” he said. He pointed to the wipers. “That’s what I do every day of my life. I don’t know how else to live.” I was intensely moved by my father’s admission—not exactly a revelation, I knew how he lived—but it was still the deepest, truest thing he’d ever said to me. In that moment he was sad but he was alive, and his aliveness resuscitated something in me. My mother was so calcified by cynicism, she never believed he could change, but I could see the change in him. The black spell was finally broken.
But when I saw him days later my father seemed more deadened, more false than ever. He came to pick up some bill or mortgage papers, and loped around the house with his hunched shoulders, pillaging the refrigerator for Entenmann’s cake. I kept waiting and hoping for some signal from him, some secret acknowledgment that his life had undergone a giant shift in the car that night, the way mine had, but he barely noticed me. When he finally did, there was a blank look in his eyes. The blankness felt deliberate, like he was marking a boundary in chalk, like he was saying Don’t go near me, don’t even think it. It was another broken promise—and not even a promise he made to me, but a promise that we would be there for each other, which was all I wanted.
I got to sleep eventually that night. Early the next morning I awoke to the sound of a click, followed by the infinitesimal turn of a tiny metal gear. When I opened my eyes there he was, hunched in his baseball cap and sporty cotton jacket, carefully opening the front door. His feet were planted unsteadily and he had a sickly, persecuted expression on his face.
