Assisted Loving (3 page)

Are we going to be working this same material until he dies? If he goes from loving to furious around me from time to time, it's only because he doesn't know how else to respond to my nagging and cynicism.

We drive to the train station, passing the endless athletic fields of my youth. By the age of ten, I wanted my father to be like the other jock fathers in our community. He was great at singing in the car, teaching me jokes, and helping me make funny home movies. But I could see he was as uncomfortable as I was with a football or basketball. It took some effort to keep from being bullied in gym class. Well, like father, like son. He liked Ping-Pong. He liked tennis. Wimp sports.

When I was twelve, I was on the court with him at our beach club for a father-and-son end-of-summer tourna
ment. It was a sticky night, and the bay smelled of seaweed. The lights were on, glaring white mercury beams overhead that might have been towering over a prison. My tennis whites were my uniform. I felt totally trapped. I wanted to be home watching the new fall sitcoms. It was, after all, the debut season of
The Partridge Family
. We weren't going to win this match. Why did I have to bother going through such motions? I moped around the court, rolling my eyes. My father had an oddly good game based on annoyingly high lobs, drop shots, and dinks. Sometimes he'd even switch hands when he played, totally confounding opponents as he sent balls sailing slowly past them. He was always an encouraging and gentle partner. “Move up! Bend your knees! Watch your alley! That a boy!” He meant well. But his unsolicited coaching drove me crazy. I kept double-faulting.

“Throw the ball higher,” he said, with increasing intensity.

“Get back up to the net, Dad,” I snapped.

He would not. He needed to stand on the baseline and give me pointers. Our opponents were waiting, and so was the crowd of people watching us from lawn chairs.

“Leave me alone, and just play,” I said in a voice wavering between boy and man.

“I will when you stop double-faulting. Give me a nice high toss on your serve.”

I did and served better. We won a point. At the next, we found ourselves together at the back of the court, an awkward place. A ball came right to my backhand.

“Got it!” I called.

He poached it right out from under me and lobbed it too shallow. Faster than you could say “bonk,” an over
head smash humiliated both of us. Why didn't he let me take that shot? The next thing I did—and I still see this in slow motion—was rear back and, with my well-honed backhand after years of lessons, nail him hard with my racket right in the center of his right arm.

“Oh!” the crowd gasped.

“Ow!” Dad cried. He dropped his racket and went hopping around the court like a turkey full of buckshot. More gasps from the onlookers. “Oh my goodness,” said Selma Weinstein as she stood up from her beach chair in shock. Mary De Luca put out her Kent in her ashtray and called out, “Joe, are you all right?”

He gestured at her with his hand, as if to say, Get away! I'm fine.

Sadly, I can't even remember feeling concern for him. Just embarrassment at his reaction, not my behavior. I had not hit him that hard. And it was with a wooden racket, after all, not one of the new metal ones coming into vogue at the time. Why couldn't he just smack me back in retaliation and tell me we were going home? Maybe if he'd been a tougher guy, I wouldn't have taken such advantage of his gentleness.

 

“So then, nothing else to report?” Dad is asking at the traffic light near the station. Breakfast is already repeating on me with the unpleasantness of childhood memories.

“No interesting trips planned? Anything new with your social life?”

“Social life, Dad? What does that mean?”

“I don't know. Romance, the usual.”

“Um, no, but thank you for asking”

“Okay, fair enough,” he says as we roll into the station. My train is already on the track. How many times have we barely made it to a train because he is so habitually late? How many times has he kept me waiting here when I'd arrive from the city? Is this why I'm always so late myself? I see him and am terrified he's the man I will become. And because I'm good at blaming, I resent him for the bad habits he's passed on to me.

“My train's already up on the track,” I say, interrupting the plans he's trying to make for next weekend. “I've got to go, Dad. Talk to you later.” I grab my bag and jump out of his car, slam the door, and run for the train, suddenly feeling alive again to the possibilities of my city life far from this stifling suburbia.

“See you, Dad!” I run and make the train as the warning bell rings and the doors close. From my window I watch his car leaving the parking lot and making a left turn toward the home where he now suddenly lives alone.

It is only as the train picks up speed that I realize I didn't thank him for breakfast or extend a hand to him to say good-bye.

H
oliday time is always a good run for me, party-wise. Without the pressing concerns of getting home for Christmas stocked with presents, I'm free to flit from one overreaching event to the next. And when you traffic in my socially superficial style world, the invitations keep coming. Staff party for the posh travel magazine where I'm a contributing editor. Annual blowout in Soho given by the hipster president of a big publicity agency. I am booked every night in the middle of December, showing up in the red plaid Christmas pants that I hope people know I'm wearing with irony. Other nights it's all about the black velvet jacket that reeks of all the sophistication my upbringing lacked. Usually, I arrive alone at parties, with nobody on my arm. And that's okay because I'll know all kinds of people once inside. These
are my party friends—journalists, stylists, publicists (but no socialists) with whom I'm intimate at the least-intimate occasions—the hot dressers and hot nobodies, like me, who are best friends for a few hours once a year.

“Bob, that last column was a riot!”

“Bob, you're so fabulous, why don't you have someone?”

I rarely answer. It's Christmas Eve now, and I'm with my pal Marisa's family in New Jersey. Marisa is a bling-dressing, high-stepping cartoonist whose vixens have blown-out hair and blown-up breasts. We're taking a cigarette break outside in the misty December air. My problem with Marisa these days is how preoccupied she is with her new love, Silvano, the owner of an important Italian restaurant. It's been hard adjusting to her recent infatuation. Just last fall, when she was complaining about how he flirts too much with the beautiful women who accost him in his restaurant, I told her to let him go.

“Love is as overrated as Tuscany,” I said. “And so is marriage.”

“You're just jealous I have a boyfriend, Bob,” she snapped.

“Well, don't be looking for an engagement ring is all I'm saying. And for God's sake, don't be giving up your apartment just because you're shacking up with him.”

“I can't believe you're so cynical about love,” she said.

I can't either. But since then, her relationship has solidified, and I have learned to curb my cynicism, even though I still mock her for being at his beck and call. She's happy—she's found someone who makes her laugh all the time. And deep down I know she's right—I am jealous.

Marisa's parents are pleasant people with a modern 1970s ranch. They are as proud of her as my father is of me. Her art is all over their walls. But she doesn't seem embarrassed by that. In fact, she seems completely at ease in her childhood home. Her sister is here with her husband and child. It doesn't bother me to be the lone single person at the table. And I'm not at all surprised when, after dinner, Marisa announces that she and Silvano are getting engaged. Like everyone else at the table, I make a big noise of congratulations. Raising a glass, I say, “I couldn't be happier for you, babe.” But driving home alone past the competitive Christmas lights of the deep Jersey suburbs, I let out a sigh. “Well, so much for her,” I mutter. One more friend lost to love and marriage. I've been watching my friends march off into the battlefields of love for years now, and I'm always on the sidelines, waving good-bye.

When I get back to the penthouse of my brother and family, where I usually stay alone for the holidays so I can pretend to be wealthy, the phone rings. My brother is calling from Palm Beach. Every year, he makes it a point to drop in with his family and play the good son, before heading farther south to the Caribbean, where the weather is much better. He's staying at The Breakers this year. Florida has been cold and rainy. But he is enduring it so Grandpa Joe can see his grandchildren. I know my father appreciates their visit. But this year he hasn't been around to dote much.

“He blew us off for brunch today,” my brother's telling me. “Can you believe that?”

“What was his excuse?”

“Who knows? I bet it was a bridge game.”

I laugh. “He ditched you for bridge?”

“Yup. We use up half our Christmas vacation to be with him in fucking Florida, where it's cold and rainy, and he'd rather play bridge than see us. He's too busy running around to spend time with his own grandchildren.”

I'm thinking that would be fine with me. How much of the old man does he want to see anyway? How much driving around in his car seeing the nonsights? But my brother doesn't think that way. To him, it isn't about what fun he can have with my father. It's about the appropriate face time a family should have together—obligation and respect. He's in Florida, thinking that this would be the year to huddle together, think about Mom, mourn, and heal. But Dad plays ditchy-do.

“Are you going to tell him you're disappointed?” I ask.

“What good would that do,” he says. “If he doesn't want to talk about Mom, it's his problem.”

“Well, it's nice you're down there,” I say. “You're doing the right thing.”

“Yeah,” he says, “but I can't wait to get out of here tomorrow.”

Frustrating as he can be at times, with the expectations he has for impeccable behavior from all of our family, Jeff is a good man. And I miss him now. I miss his good-natured wife, Janet, and the children, too. It's so quiet in this apartment without all of them. I'm used to being here when my cerebral niece and rollicking nephew are all over me. I'm used to being the crazy bachelor uncle who blows in to entertain the family with irreverent commentary, and makes every birthday party into a Vegas floor show. Just as my brother and his wife depend on me to spice up the conversation and get them reservations at
tricky restaurants, their children depend on me to be the naughty entertaining uncle. And I depend on them for the intimacy that comes when you read children stories at night, hold their hands while crossing the street, sit them on your lap and make funny noises into their ears. They are as much my children as I'm ever likely to have in life. I live for their giggles. But right now I have this elegant penthouse that's usually so full of their laughter all to myself. All my friends are out of town somewhere fabulous. My father is having fun in Florida. Me? I'm here feeling like the tired and lonely old man he's supposed to be. The Empire State Building is lit up red and green. The stars are out over the city. Silent night. Silent week. And that's okay. I'd rather be alone than tangled up with someone who isn't just right for me. New Year's Eve is coming. I don't have a date. Nothing new. It's fine. Alone is fine.

P
alm Beach International Airport is clean, manageable, and suburban, just the way my father likes his life. It's January now, four months after my mother has died, and with the lonely holidays behind me, I'm making one of my winter visitations when airfare is cheap. It's a strange feeling, knowing my mother won't be at the airport to meet me. Sometimes I miss her. Most of the time, now, I am relieved not to have to worry about her failing health. It surprises me how often she is out of my mind completely.

With carry-on bag on my shoulder, I emerge from the jetway, passing the usual herd of white hairs. Ladies in sequin sweatshirts. Men in windbreakers and baseball caps. All in every shade of pastel imaginable. It's a flock of snowbirds thick as pigeons. They are all waiting for
their children, grandchildren, anyone young to get off the plane from New York. These migratory retirees—white and middle class—number nearly a million in Florida. They are aggressive about their pursuit of the good life, and proud to show their kids the orange tree in the backyard, the alligator in the lake by the golf course, and to gift them with the warmth of the sun. As they greet their cherished visitors at the airport, they beam with pride. Yet there's desperation in their eyes, I think. Is it reasonable to expect so much pleasure from your children? Is it reasonable to expect anything but the same old patterns of behavior from parents?

I step out onto the sidewalk and here's something new: the front of Dad's car is falling off. Half of the fender is mashed in and hanging off like it's just had a stroke or been stricken with Bell's palsy. The left side is steaming and hissing in the airport parking lot like a collapsed soufflé. I was planning on saving money on a rental by using his car while down here. I always stay with him because hotels are very expensive. The whole point was to get in some face time with both him and the sun without paying for much except airfare. The freelancer son takes a holiday. Now I won't have any wheels to use to escape him. I tell myself to stay pleasant, avoid confrontation.

“What happened, Dad?”

“I hit the median.”

“Why?”

“I wasn't paying attention, that's all.”

“Don't tell me you were talking on your cell phone.”

“I was calling to check your flight status.”

“Or were you answering a call from any one of your
friends? I told you to stop answering that phone when you're driving. You're going to have your license revoked. Imagine not having a car around here! What would you do, Dad?”

“Please, Bobby, don't start nagging at me. You just got here.”

This is not good, not the plan at all, to start off so poorly. We've had so many awful fights down here in the past. Always about control. We both have very firm ideas of how things should be done. Where to eat and what time, for instance. The volume of the TV in the living room. Sliding doors to the balcony opened or closed? How strong should the coffee be? Important things, the stuff of life. Once, when my mother was still alive, Dad and I fought so hard about something so minute it seems absurd to describe it (the proper exit from a mall, okay?), and I actually threw his backseat car door open on Federal Highway—this was around midnight—and told him to pull over so I could get out and walk to a hotel. He told me he was sorry I had come to visit. I told him to fuck himself, all this unfolding right in front of my mother, who never swore and hated seeing her “boys” fight. Big drama over nothing. But uncontrollable as the weather.

According to a therapist whom I was talking to at a bar down here, children do tend to get into conflicts while visiting their snowbird parents in Florida. It's a combination of factors. Personal space issues for one, agendas for another. The kids want to get to the beach. The parents, who never set foot on a beach, want them home early so they can take them to early-bird dinner specials. They want to advise their children on how to raise children.
Their children want them to butt out. They want to buy their grandchildren ice-cream cones, a deadly idea in an era of parents obsessed with childhood obesity. Control, control, control. Other than incest and alcohol, is there anything more disruptive to family dynamics? One friend of my parents, a perfectly nice, laid-back woman, had a daughter-in-law who didn't like to see her having a couple of cocktails before dinner. So the daughter-in-law stopped bringing the grandchildren to visit. It was devastating and punitive. “She was drinking,” my mother explained at the time, “because her daughter-in-law was making her so anxious.”

Florida, in other words, can be a multigenerational mosh pit.

So why would anything go according to my carefully laid plans on this trip?

“We can still drive this,” Dad says as we pull out of the parking lot. “No problem.”

We approach the airport spur, with the front of his car rattling and smoking. Soon a distinct odor of burning—Toyota Teriyaki—permeates the air. People are driving past, giving us looks. My mood has gone murderous. The car seems to be getting worse by the minute. The temperature gauge is rising to high. I can't take my eyes off it.

“Dad, we aren't going to make it to your apartment,” I say. “It's ten miles away.”

“Oh, yes, we are,” he says. “I can call Triple A from there.”

“The engine's overheating. It's about to catch fire. Pull over.”

“Not necessary. This is my car. I know what I'm doing.”

“Are you crazy? Pull over right now or you'll end up getting us killed.”

We are in the middle of the little city of Palm Beach now, the billion-dollar sandbar I find so appealing. I love that he has made his winter habitat on the edge of such elegance. But I hate that his middle-brow silver sedan is now smoking and making a total spectacle of us at a red light on South County Road, within sight of two upscale restaurants and The Breakers hotel. A headband-wearing blonde in the palest blue cocktail dress crosses with her white poodle in front of us. She gives us a look that is both concerned and condescending.

“There's a service station right here, Dad. You have to pull in.”

“I'll do what I want. Don't tell me what to do.”

“I will tell you what to do since you have no idea what you're doing.”

Mad as it is, I grab the wheel and steer it to the right. He's about to fight me when his cell phone starts ringing, or perhaps I should say singing. His natural tendency to answer a call in any situation takes over. He grabs his phone from his shirt pocket, letting me guide the car in as he applies the brakes and turns off the burning engine.

An attendant comes and looks at the broiling, hissing mess, shaking his head. “What happened?” he asks.

I just shrug and point to Dad, on the phone.

“Hello, Edie,” he's cooing. “Marvelous to hear your voice! What a thrill!”

Edie?

Later, over dinner (next to the service station) at Chuck and Harold's, one of the more pleasant restaurants on our regular list, he explains: “Edie lives down the road. I met
her at a bridge game last year, and we played well together. She's a terrific partner, and very pleasant to be with. A real friendship developed. Strictly platonic.”

“I certainly hope so,” I say evenly. “Mom was still alive last year.”

“But she wasn't able to get out much,” he says.

I order another martini. What is going on here exactly?

An hour later, Dad's car is declared out of commission. So a taxi takes us back to his apartment. It's on Ocean Boulevard in a white wedding cake of a building called The President, sitting between the intercoastal waterway and the ocean. The owner, Dad's landlord, has decorated it in a tasteful array of whites. The water view is very pleasant. Aunt Sylvia lives upstairs. She dresses like everyone else in this building, treating life as an occasion to look your best—women in pumps, men in sports jackets for brunch. Here life is not about sweatshirts and sneakers, and I like that. My mother never did. And my father's essentially oblivious. He dresses how he wants.

The last time I was here my mother was still hanging on after five years of struggle. I can still see her everywhere in this apartment. There are even some leftover cans of Ensure, her dietary supplement, in the cupboard. Here's the balcony where she used to hobble out in her housedress to watch me play tennis down below with Dad's friends. Here's the door that knocked her down in a fierce wind and ended up leaving her covered in bruises. She was so helpless. It was hard, watching her in her hopelessness. It was even harder seeing her thin, bruised arms and neck because she dressed in the most unflattering T-shirts. One day I convinced her to come
downstairs to be with me on the dock. She sat in silence, her skeletal face sharp as a hatchet.

This was not the mother I knew, the one who was so easy to amuse.

“You know, Mom, we all feel bad that you're so unwell,” I told her. “But it's a sin to despair. Did you know that? I looked that up and found it in the Bible.”

“I look terrible,” she said. “My spleen is so enlarged I look pregnant.”

“But what is the point of being so down? You're not in pain, are you?”

It wasn't a fair question. Why should she cheer up at sixty-eight years old, with mortality hanging over her, years before it was due? She shook her head, thought for a moment. The wind whipped her thinning hair and slacks on the reeds that were her legs. Her neck was like a stalk sticking out of her T-shirt. Why couldn't she dress up a little?

“Well, how about this? I won't complain if you won't criticize,” she said.

“Okay, but I just have to tell you one thing, Mom.”

“What, dear?”

“You could use some new shirts.”

“Oh no, honey. Please don't start nagging about my clothes. I know I'm not stylish enough for you. I never have been. Why can't you accept that?”

In a way she was right. A mother isn't someone you can decorate according to taste, like an apartment. On the other hand, she is with you for life, isn't she?

“It's not about fashion, Mom,” I persisted. “When you get older, you can't wear T-shirts and sweatshirts like that. It isn't flattering, especially when your frame is so
thin. You need shirts with collars, sleeves, and structure. It will make you feel better about yourself, I promise. And what's with the hairnets? Aren't those for bed?”

“My hair has gotten so thin,” she said as she touched it, yellow and wispy as sea grass blowing in the warm, salty wind. “When I step outside, it always gets messed.”

“So let's see if we can get you some hats, okay? Please?”

“Bobby, what's the point?”

“Why not? What else do we have to do? It'll be my treat.”

“Oh, all right. If you insist,” she said as she stood up. “Take me to Macy's!”

So I did. In slow motion, we traversed a busy mall in Boynton Beach. And in the women's department, with salesclerks looking at me suspiciously, as if I were a bossy stylist from hell, I found the half-sleeve blouses I imagined for her and bought them in several colors. Then she tried on hats that looked ridiculous. But she ended up laughing at her reflection in the mirror for the first time in years. And when we got back to the apartment, she tried everything on with the kind of energy I didn't know she had anymore. For a woman who always said that clothes didn't matter to her, those new blouses were making her feel better than all the pills in her medicine cabinet.

“Thank you, my little personal shopper,” she said.

I can still feel the touch of her lips on my forehead.

It's morning in the apartment now, and I'm about to make Dad some French toast using Mom's old recipe.

“So, Dad, Edie, huh?” I'm asking as I break eggs.

“Yes, and she's great.”

“I was just thinking, is it a little early to be running around with another woman? I mean, it's just a few months since Mom died.”

“It's not that serious,” Dad says. “Edie's not available all that often anyway. But when she is, we have fun. She's the nicest woman I've met down here. Just a gem.”

As I shake my head in mild disdain (
Kids these days!
) his phone rings. It's Edie. Thirty years fall off his face. His eyes get big as Alka-Seltzer tablets.

“Edie! I thought you were busy! No, I have no plans. I'd love to!”

The next thing I know, the French toast is languishing upstairs and I'm standing in his parking lot watching him get into Edie's silver Lexus for a bridge game in Delray Beach, thirty miles away. She rolls down her window to look me over. She is silver-haired, carefully tanned, lipsticked, and wearing what looks like a Rolex on her wrist. Not pretty, but nicely put together. “You have such a handsome son,” she purrs. “And Joey, he looks just like you!” Then she blows me a kiss, rolls up her window, and drives him away. I watch her make a fast hard right turn onto Ocean Boulevard. Then I stand immobilized, eating their dust, a little in shock. For a moment there's no traffic and I hear the ocean. I hear gulls calling out, too, in mocking tones. Are they laughing at me? I came all the way down here to visit my dad, and he just ditched me for an air-kissing seductress in a luxury sedan? Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to have the day to myself. But I also have—as I stand in the sun in front of his building—an entirely unexpected feeling of emptiness.

I call my brother in New York, with the news flash.

“There's a woman named Edie in the picture,” I say.

“You're kidding.”

“That explains why he didn't have time for you when you were down here.”

“Who is she?”

“All I know is she drives a silver Lexus that matches her hair. Three and a half months after Mom died, and Dad appears to be dating. Is this appropriate?”

“I don't know,” Jeff says. “But since when has Dad been appropriate?”