I Stand Corrected (26 page)

And so Gilliam’s weekends remained forty-eight-hour rotations of sleeping, eating, lounging, and standing—mutely and without purpose—in front of the open refrigerator. The few times he was actually in motion, his behavior was recklessly driven by his glands.

“Any suggestion of mine is a detonation device,” I complained to Annie.

“Testosterone,” was all she said.

I waited for more.

“It’s been shown that the increase of testosterone causes certain species to patrol larger areas so they can pick more fights,” explained Annie.

Actually, that sounded familiar. When he wasn’t manufacturing a crisis, Gilliam would search me out, reach into the inner chamber of his psyche, and select a poison dart tipped with the most hurtful thing to say. So precise was the boy’s
cunning bull’s-eye aim that it took a single accusation to hit the very core of my defenselessly open maternal heart.

Gilliam’s increasingly provocative attitude was not unlike that of his favorite childhood character, the atrociously behaved Monkey King.

DESPITE THE IMPORTANCE of deference in Chinese culture, one of the most enduring Chinese literary characters is Sun Wukong, also known as Monkey King, whose egotistical and prankish misbehavior was put to paper by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth-century epic novel
Journey to the West
.

It begins, logically enough, with the beginning of time.

Born from a stone is a monkey with supernatural powers but very little sense of propriety. His acts of destruction and disrespect against, among others, the Ocean Dragons and the God of Death came to the attention of the august Ruler of the Universe, the Jade Emperor. A diplomat first and foremost, the Jade Emperor invited Monkey King to heaven and—believing it would placate him—bestowed on him the double-barreled title of Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. But the incorrigible Monkey King went on a spree of mythically proportioned bad behavior. He gate-crashed a party meant for the officials of heaven, where he ate all of the prized Longevity Pills, stuffed his face with Peaches of Immortality, and—before fleeing heaven in a single bound—taunted the Jade Emperor with an obscene gesture recognized by mortals and gods alike.

When the Jade Emperor sent his Heavenly Army after Monkey King, it was defeated by his wickedly clever tricks and overwhelming powers. Realizing that any attempt to subdue Monkey King by force would prove fruitless, Buddha made a wager with him. If Monkey King could jump off the palm of Buddha’s hand, Buddha would demote Jade Emperor and Heaven would fall under Monkey King’s jurisdiction. If, however, Monkey King was unable to leap the distance, an apology would be expected and a severe and long penance would be
due. Knowing himself to be capable of leaping thousands of miles at a time, Monkey King quickly agreed to the bargain.

Buddha stretched out his hand.

Monkey King’s jump landed him thousands of miles away in a desolate plain with five great columns reaching to the sky.
These must be the Five Pillars of Wisdom at the end of the Universe
, he thought. And in a vulgar display of territorial imperative, Monkey King urinated against the nearest pillar before leaping back into Buddha’s palm to claim his right to Heaven.

Raising a sublime eyebrow, Buddha informed an astonished Monkey King that although the leap could indeed be measured in thousands of miles, Monkey King had not in fact left Buddha’s palm. Worse news was that the pillars were Buddha’s fingers, one of which had been defiled. Monkey King was banished by Buddha, who trapped him under a mountain until Monkey King agreed to make peace with the universe.

CLOSER TO HOME, reason and determination—two attributes that served me in my professional life—worked against me with my son.
Either I come up with a plan
, I told myself,
or one of us will end up killing the other
.

What saved us both was not so much a plan but a different approach: I let go of control. Despite his taciturn determination to operate in perversely oppositional terms, Gilliam acknowledged my gesture. The boy-man told me he loved me dearly. He told me he admired me greatly. He told me he was incredibly thankful for me. He told me he intended to go to Japan and learn the language.

At the time, my son was seventeen. The rarefied life we shared had come to its rightful end.

THERE WERE TWO things to be done before Gilliam left for Japan.

The first—my idea, not his—was a serious discussion about
the differences between Asian and Western attitudes toward intimate relationships. I felt it my obligation as a stand-in father to have this conversation with Gilliam before he left. By no means was I comfortable with the subject. I am a fairly private person and, admittedly, old-fashioned in my views. The last and only time I had spoken to my son about sex was when he was five and he insisted I explain human reproduction.

“So, tell me,” Candida asked at the time, “how do you discuss sex with a five-year-old?”

“The books I’ve read suggest I tell him in words he can understand.”

“You’ll never get anywhere that way,” she said. “Try finding one of those intrauterine films. It’s the perfect solution. The entire subject of sex has been scientifically dry-cleaned, and there’s no need to say anything. You just watch the film with him.”

The following week, Gilliam sat on the couch expectantly facing the television while I pushed the
PLAY
button. On the screen appeared sperm as seen through an electron microscope, a thousand times their actual size.

I addressed the obvious first. “Of course they’re infinitely smaller,” I said as my son and I watched a menacing number of diabolically large sperm swarm before our eyes.

“There’re so many,” was Gilliam’s initial reaction.

“That’s right,” I said, trying to keep to the script. “And do you see that they are all moving in one direction?”

“No …”

He was right again. It was bedlam. Bumper-car-size sperm were darting erratically from side to side, careening into one another before finally finding their collective sense of direction. The longer Gilliam watched them struggle upstream, the more worried he became. When the one sperm had reached the single egg, he asked me to stop the tape.

“But, sweetie, the film isn’t finished yet,” I said.

“Can you rewind it? I want to see the beginning. I don’t care about who gets there first. I want to see what happens to the others.”

Gilliam’s intense focus was on the journey of the sperm,
not their destination. He insisted we watch the first few minutes of the film over again several times. We never got to the fertilized egg.

“The rest of the sperm are absorbed into the mother’s bloodstream,” I explained when he asked what became of them.

I knew that hundreds of redundant sperm had a far less dignified ending but decided to recast it in an optimistic cycle-of-life message.

“You mean they die,” said Gilliam.

“No, they become something else.”

“So what is it that they become?” asked my son, clearly onto me.

“Well, they … I think they …,” I stuttered.

Gilliam put an end to my instructional failure. “The truth is they die,” he said matter-of-factly. “They die for one life to be possible.”

Unable as I was then to deal with the boy’s metaphorical take on the subject, how was I now to address the more subtle issue of what I considered his obligations as a young man when it came to young women in Asia, a place where—once intimacy takes place—the cultural expectations are decidedly different?

“You can’t afford to get this wrong,” warned Jonathan. “You’ll ruin it for him for the rest of his life.”

“Ruin what?” I asked.

“Everything,” he told me.

It was then that I decided I would write a letter to Gilliam instead and surreptitiously pack it with the belongings he would take to Japan.

Fortunately, the second obligation requiring my attention before Gilliam left home was an easier proposition.

PART TWELVE
A Series of Departures

Enjoy yourself—it’s later than you think.
—
Chinese proverb

I
t was the last year of my almost ten-year tenure at Hearst. The phone call came to my office.

“It’s me,” he said without announcing himself.

“Greg?”

He lowered his voice so it was barely audible.

“Have I missed the Turtle Release?”

“No. You haven’t missed it.”

“Thank God I have
something
to look forward to.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m here.”

“As in New York here?”

“Lon …”

“Did you say London?”

“That’s right,
goddamn it
, London,” he complained. The unseen but damnable “it” hammered his impatience into a thin wedge of anger.

“I assume whatever’s going on isn’t going very well,” I said.

His response was garbled.

“It sounds like you’re talking through a wet towel,” I told him. “I can barely hear you.”

“I’m talking as loud as I can under the circumstances.”

“Are you okay?”

“As a matter of fact, I am
not
okay. What I am is stuck in
the middle of a negotiation taking longer than anyone bloody well expected.”

“You haven’t missed it,” I repeated.

“Have the invitations gone out?” he asked.

“No.”

“So I assume the shipment isn’t in.”

“Not yet.”

“Do you think they’ll show up by the end of the month?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re coming from some godforsaken part of Asia.”

“I thought they arrived the same time every year,” he persisted.

“Yes … usually when the weather turns warm.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“It was warm when I left New York a few weeks ago.”

“Not any longer,” I pointed out. “It’s cold now.”

“Goddamn it,”
was his refrain.

“Greg, listen, I can’t do anything about the weather or the shipment.”

“I realize that,” he said in a slightly more conciliatory tone. “I want to be there.… I plan to be there.…”

“If it’s any help, we’ve always done it on a Tuesday or Wednesday,” I offered.

“I remember … in the middle of the week, when fewer people are around … after hours.”

The man on the phone was a friend and the president of a large publicly traded company. When our conversation took place, big business was at low tide ethically. Even under the best of circumstances, our cryptic exchange would have made us sound guilty of something: references to “shipment” and “after hours” suggested an illegal transaction; the item in question was arriving from Asia, adding a sinisterly global reach. If investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission questioned us, we’d have to admit the facts: the Turtle Release was an annual event, the date of which was impossible
to schedule in advance. It took place in public spaces, but was shrouded by ceremonial secrecy.

Two months before Gilliam left for Japan, Greg received what he was waiting for.

A Chinatown is a micrometropolis that operates with an enduring distrust of the outside world, no matter which international city acts as its backdrop. The Chinese make a single-ingredient bouillabaisse from turtles, believing they impart longevity. It was customary—or so we concluded from years of personal experience—that red-eared sliders were shipped seasonally from Asia. That particular year in New York, the turtles arrived the last week of March. Though fishmongers in New York’s Chinatown are easily found, turtles are not. Down a narrow side lane … in an open-air fish stand … under a large tray of eels … there they were: turtles stacked in a deep wooden barrel.

Handicapped by my tendency to anthropomorphize, I was hopelessly emotional when it came to the actual selection; Gilliam decided which one of the turtles to rescue. Instructing me to stand a respectable distance away, he made his choice with unsparing objectivity.

Because it was impossible to know the precise date the turtles would arrive in Chinatown, there was, inevitably, a period of waiting between the time the rescue occurred and the time the release took place. After taxiing uptown with the chosen turtle, we hosed it off in Gilliam’s bathtub. During a week of
sanctioned luxury, the turtle lounged in its tub, dined on strawberries, and wandered among the claw-feet of the nineteenth-century furniture in our living room.

Turtle Releases in New York were traditionally scheduled on weekday evenings, when there were fewer people in Central Park, for truth be told, we were breaking the law—or, at the very least, ignoring the warning posted in front of the pond. Given our need to accomplish the actual release as quickly as possible, its celebration occurred at a reception beforehand. Among those marking the occasion were actors, authors, and musicians. Seduced by an available audience, encouraged by the champagne, they recited verse, played ditties on the piano, and offered toasts before we set off for the park.