Assisted Loving (11 page)

“In your dreams, buster.”

“What about a coffee shop then?”

“Are you kidding me? If you want to meet her so badly, you go. Squeeze your own melons! Kick your own tires! Besides, I still think you should hold off until you get to see if you can make a go of it with Florence. You two are still writing letters, right?”

“Yes. But, Bobby, please. Do your old man a favor. I'm lonely. I want a date this weekend. You can think about it tonight, and let me know your decision tomorrow.”

I don't want to think about it. I don't want to think about him either. I want to think about my own aspirations and frustrations. I want to finish my column and talk to friends whose stunning accomplishments will make me anxious about my lack of them. I want to live in a parent-free zone this week. Still, I can't get this Kitty Levin out of my head. I keep imagining what would happen if I actually did meet her Thursday morning:

My computer beeps. An e-mail rouses me from my daydream.

But I can't shake the image of this woman's desperation from my head.

And then I have to wonder if I'm almost as desperate myself.

I never do go meet her. But my father keeps her in a file getting thicker by the day.

I
n August, I have to be in Dartmouth for a staged reading of a doomed musical I'm writing. It's a long drive that I don't want to take on my own. I'd like to spend a couple days out of the city before getting to work up there, but staying in an inn alone isn't so appealing. For years I've been able to convince myself that traveling solo is good for the spirit and means you don't have to compromise. Now I'm tiring of it. Sure, you can bring a book to read at dinner. But you also have to be prepared to hear the sound of people getting it on in the next room. Maybe Dad and I could drive up together, I think.

What could go wrong? It takes all of a moment to project the possibilities.

He could dislike the place I book because it's old. He could throw his back out as he did on Nantucket one year,
ending up in the local clinic. A toothache is another possibility. That took down a family vacation to the Caribbean one winter. Or it could just rain, leaving us in a room together all weekend with nothing but TV to fill the time.

My track record for traveling with my dad isn't exactly perfect. One summer after college, when I was a charming combination of arrogant and broke, he and Mom picked me up in front of a pizzeria in New Hampshire. I had just hitchhiked down from a summer with an earthy Marxist theater company in Vermont. We rode in his battleship-size Lincoln Continental. I was righteous and anticorporate. The first George Bush was in office at the time. And the word was there'd be a war for oil. So as the family gas-guzzler crossed New England, and he checked us into Ramada Inns and Marriotts along the way, we fought about the Middle East and the administration's AIDS policies. After three days we were two hissing cockroaches.

I was supposed to be reading the map while he drove.

“I told you to turn there, Dad!”

“I know you did. I heard you.”

“I've got the map. You don't trust me?”

“Look, don't make a federal case out of this. My hunch is you're wrong.”

“Well, my hunch, Dad, is you're an idiot.”

Even as I said it, I was sorry. He grabbed the map from out of my hands, swerved the car into the right lane, and ended up freaking out an elderly couple passing in a convertible. Their horn blared in anger. I felt like grabbing him by the throat. Why? Because his politics were mainstream? Because he preferred Marriotts to old country inns? I'd been exposed to so much in my first years in
college—Eurotrash, Roxy Music, sushi, limousine Leninism, and drugs that only the privileged could afford. People liked me. They liked my Bermuda shorts and old-school eyeglasses. They liked my humor and creative outbursts—writing poems on the sides of supermarket walls in the middle of the night, making experimental videos and performance art that only children who were raised to feel special could make. Many of my friends had their parents come to campus for visits. I didn't encourage mine as much as I should have. I was a little embarrassed. And now, at the end of a summer of political art–making, I had to tolerate the limited consciousness of this Republican who sired me. He was as angry as I've ever seen him. My mother was cowering in the back, listening to every word.

“I'm sick of your attitude. Why don't you go to hell?”

“I'm sick of you, Dad, and your stupid oversize car.”

My mother was the one who loved that Lincoln. She was still healthy in those years, but she had varicose veins, so she liked to keep her legs elevated in the backseat. That car was so big she could stretch out like a sedan queen. I thought it was the height of vulgarity to have such a big car (this was before SUVs). Every time Dad tried to park it—or, as I used to say, dock it—I was mortified. I was downwardly aspirational back then, into the importance of living simply (but attractively, of course). And I tyrannized my parents with my inflexible taste, railing like a prophet against their music, shoes, and shampoo. This car was almost as bad as driving a Winnebago, I thought.

With traffic passing on either side of us, Dad and I were yelling, blood boiling.

“You're completely out of line, Bobby!”

“You're the one who's out of line! I don't need this! I don't need you!” I made him pull over, got out of the car, put my mother in the passenger seat, and sat in the back, the petulant child. I remained silent all the way to Westchester, where I boarded a commuter train to Manhattan without saying good-bye.

I didn't speak to him for months. I can't say I didn't feel an ache about being so cold and impenetrable. But nonengagement seemed the best solution back then. Now I wince at the off-putting cocktail of my pretentiousness and immaturity. My parents didn't deserve that from me. Never. All they wanted was for me to be happy.

“Sorry, Mom, I just don't have anything to say to him,” I'd tell her when she called to try to mend things between my father and me.

“Sure you do,” she told me. “You have no idea how much you have in common.”

What we had in common was her, the last person in the world I wanted to hurt. And it pained her deeply to be in the middle of our fights. She took our feelings so seriously. Can a son just decide not to talk to his father? What does that do to a family?

“Maybe after a year, I'll feel better,” I told her. “For now I need a break.”

Bobby,” she said. “I wish the two of you would grow up and accept each other.”

At the time I couldn't imagine it. But maybe today, twenty years later, when we're driving north through New England once again, we'll have our bonding-buddy road trip. And maybe it will bring us to a scenic vista of reconciliation. He's in the passenger seat of my old Saab.
I'm the driver in charge, not him—that's a first. I like the feeling of control it brings me. His brown vinyl suitcase is in the back, bottle of Snapple in his hand. I hope it doesn't end up all over my car. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I pop in a tape I've carefully selected. He tries to like it, and almost does. But then he wants me to put on a baseball game. I refuse. He wants the air conditioner on high, and I tell him I can't stand the cold. Does he have to take every call on his phone? I don't want to listen to his banal conversations. All this, and we haven't even gotten out of Connecticut.

While merging from the Merritt Parkway to Route 95, I get an idea that might save this trip. It's based out of need as much as desperation. I pull out my pocket notebook and a pen, and hand them to him. Then I grab a folder with a file of song lyrics that need a lot of work before my first rehearsal Monday.

“Can I run them past you and see what you think?” I ask.

“Sure, I'd be delighted,” he says.

Indeed, this is what he lives for. Solicited advice. It's rare I ask him anything, especially when it comes to writing. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have plenty to tell me. I sing him one of my songs from memory. He studies the lyrics on the page. “First off, what you've written is way too long,” he tells me.

I begin to argue, then realize maybe he's right.

“Second, I can't really tell what this song is about.”

“What do you mean?”

He answers astutely. Then, to my delight, a real collaboration begins. He starts jotting down ideas. Morris and Hammerstein? No. But we get so into it that we lose
track of everything but the work. The miles and hours fall away as new lyrics, better than what I had before, come together. He sings them to me, and I tweak them. Before we know it we're pulling into our inn. It's a lovely old clapboard place.

“Isn't that nice,” says the assistant manger, “father and son!”

“And he writes for travel magazines, so you might be in luck,” Dad chirps back.

The room, while clean and charming, doesn't have views because he insisted I book ground floor so he wouldn't have to climb any stairs. It also doesn't have the elaborate cable TV choices he requires. But it has something very important to me—a living room with a pullout couch. I cannot face the idea of sleeping right next to him. I don't trust he won't snore all night. I don't trust that I won't snore either. And there's this squeamishness I feel around him when I see him with his shirt off in the bathroom. Is that what I'm going to look like in thirty-five years? Waking up right next to him in the morning would be too intimate. So we share a space, but with extra space between us.

On Sunday, Aunt Sylvia drives over from Rutland, Vermont. (She still drives at eighty-five, but only during the day.) We go to lunch at a classy restaurant by a waterfall. She's telling us about her trip to Italy with her fifty-six-year-old bachelor son.

“We spent a few days in Positano,” she says. “Our hotel had a view of the Mediterranean. We had perfect weather.”

“Your trips always sound marvelous,” Dad says.

He sounds wistful. Her son, my cousin Steve, takes
Aunt Sylvia on a big trip every year. I can't imagine that with my father. But then, my cousin is a devoted son, the type who calls constantly. And he and his mother are so aligned in taste and temperament that they are well-suited travelers. He selects destinations and hotels. Aunt Sylvia goes along happily. My father would never do that. He has his own ideas.

Under big birch trees shimmering in the summer sunlight, I sit across the table, drinking white wine and listening to brother and sister catch up. With my mother out of the picture, I can't help but notice what a pair of bookends they are. They have the same fine white hair and good olive skin. They are similarly shaped and sit back in their chairs the same way. Yes, their dispositions are different. He's relaxed, and she's tightly wound. He's Linus, she's Lucy. But despite their differences, they are extremely close. Well, they were orphans together. Big sister comforted little brother. She was there to mother him, throw him birthday parties, help with homework, and shop for clothes during his tender adolescence. He didn't have a father of his own to talk to about dating.

“And he was pretty shy as a teenager,” she tells me. “Once when our grandmother arranged a date for him for a high school dance, your father said he had no desire to take the girl. It sounded so funny. Our grandmother told him desire had nothing to do with it.”

I like hearing her talk about Dad's first years of dating. Maybe it will shed light on the romantic renaissance fair he's putting me through right now. Aunt Sylvia says that in his twenties, when he dated attractive women whom his friends also liked, my father just handed them over to them.

“He's always trying to make people happy,” she says.

“Always?” I ask.

“Unless it gets in the way of his own fun, of course,” she says, as she turns to Dad. “Remember that night in Palm Beach last winter when you stood me up, Joe?”

“All too well,” he replies.

“What happened?” I ask.

“I had everything set out on the table for dinner, and he just never showed up,” she says while Dad finishes her salmon. “I got worried and called the doorman and had people looking for him all over the building. I thought he had a stroke or something.”

But then she looked outside and saw his car wasn't in the parking lot.

“I knew what happened. Edie had called him at the last minute, and your father just forgot about me,” she says, as she gives him a nudge. “He'd done it to me once before with her. She called, and he vanished when we had plans. Imagine!”

“Love is a funny thing.” Dad sighs as he chews his salad. “Also sadly fleeting.”

“I think the whole thing is just ridiculous at your age,” she clucks.

“So you never dated anyone after Uncle Dan passed away?” I ask her.

“Only once and I almost died. A man from my condo asked me to a concert at Tanglewood. I knew he was fond of me, but I didn't want any romantic involvement.”

“Aunt Sylvia! Really! Was he cute?”

“Cute? Who's cute at eighty-five? He was a bright, well-dressed man, that's all.”

“So did you go on the date?”

“I couldn't believe I said yes. But then, the night before, I got into a panic. I couldn't sleep. I had to take pills. I don't know why I didn't cancel.”

“But you went? So what happened? Anything?”

“Not a thing. An hour before he was to pick me up I got a call. He'd had a minor heart attack that morning.”

“Oh, my goodness,” I say.

“And I hate to say it, but I was relieved,” she says.

She shakes her head disapprovingly, then laughs at herself. Dad laughs, too.

I watch them across the table on a perfect Vermont afternoon, handsome senior citizens, both alone in the world now, with the loves of their lives gone. We are three single people, living on our own, sleeping in beds alone. Are we in the same boat? Not exactly. After all, they both have children who care about them. They have memories of raising families and happy marriages. They know what loving deeply means.

Meanwhile, I have Dad. We sit under the awning on the flagstone patio of the inn later, looking out at the mountains of central Vermont and working on my lyrics. Never mind that none of them will end up getting used in my show. Just for this moment we are happy with what we are doing. We find rhymes for this word, metaphors for that one. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed him as much as right now. With fingers that look like mine, he scribbles in a terrible scrawl that could be my own. We work into the late afternoon and beyond. Words fly down onto the page, then get crossed out, reworked. We recite. Rewrite. Argue, and then, deliciously, come to agree.

Hours pass. I look up from my lyrics and see, above
his head, fireflies. Beyond them, the sun is setting and the first star is rising over the farthest mountain ridge. Out on the pond across the road, a couple of unchecked bullfrogs compete with our singing.

It is a perfect and long-overdue moment.