My Father's Affairs
And how they screwed me up.
by David Amsden
August 2, 2006
I was having lunch with my father at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan chosen because it was cheap and I wasn't sure if my father could pay even his half, let alone treat me. I was twenty, a waiter wanting to be a writer; he was forty-three, a devious little boy trapped inside the slump-shouldered body of a middle-aged man. Two clichˇs, sharing a meal. Last time I knew my father, I was fourteen and he was working behind the register at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Rockville, Maryland, talking constantly about how the rotisserie oven was going to revolutionize the industry. I was a high school freshman, partial to Roy Rogers, so there was already some space between us. Then he met a woman who lived in Jersey, and, having little money, moved in with her a few weeks later. Finding women to live off had been a skill my father refined in the years after the divorce — every few months he'd have a new address, typically some good-humored, quietly insane divorcee's home. But living out of state, we quickly lost touch: nothing dramatic, just two boys too preoccupied with their own navels to make a phone call. At seventeen I moved to New York, which was when I heard he married the woman, and had another son, though not in that order.
Women love my father. He is one of those men: the sort you are not supposed to love, knowing you may regret it, but you go on loving anyway, love being a perennial nemesis of common sense. My mother left him because his drug habit put our family in over $50,000 of debt at a time when my parents' combined income was under $30,000, and yet twenty years later she still (reluctantly) gets a whimsical, sly dog grin when he comes up. It isn't that he has the a con-artist's calibrated, self-serving charm — no, his is the clumsy, endearing charm of a man who means to do the right thing but rarely does. Raised on a farm along the Maine-Canada border, he is especially lethal in metropolitan areas, his crooked smile and goofball jokes and quirky turns-of-phrase seen as exotically redneck. He can fix anything with his hands — a blender, a shelving unit, an antique muffler — a beautiful quality that, for some women, is sadly mistaken for stability. He saves stray animals and, I swear to you, can get birds to land on his pointer finger by calling out to them in the woods, though unfortunately this kind of sensitivity doesn't always translate over into his human relationships. As a father I can think of little he did that doesn't fall under the category of negligent parenting, and yet, because he is so likeable, all my memories of him are fond ones.
Here in the restaurant, however, something was off. Missing. The drink in his hand fit, true, but the defeated look on my father's face — brown eyes dimmed, lips frozen in a hard frown — was the sort of look I associate more with the type of dude who kills afternoons blowing disability checks at the OTB. My father's hair was stringy and gray, his charisma gone, his whole demeanor slack and dejected. He mentioned a 1973 MG convertible sitting on blocks in his garage ("Fixin' her for my dentist since I was a smidge short on the last bill") but even this, a subject he typically could talk about enthusiastically for hours, inspired only a few melancholic grunts. He seemed to be holding something back, something in, for so long that it had grown thorns, turned toxic. Because my father has always been less a parent than a template for how not to live a life, I wanted details, information, facts and figures I could store away for further inspection, to keep my own developing personality in line.
Problem was, I didn't know the man anymore. Wished I did, but didn't. Didn't know his address, didn't know what he did for a living, didn't know where to start. And so I resorted to that simple but loaded question so popular among strangers looking for something, anything to say to one another —
"How's life?"
"Ah . . . uh . . . all's fine," he said. And then, the way heroes of B-movies repeat certain lines to indicate both gravity and a darker subtext, he added: "All's fine, all's fine."
"Dad," I said, "what's going on?"
He smiled weakly, shook his head, sipped his drink. He shrugged. Then he uttered his wife's name, as if this meant anything to me.
"That's vague," I said.
"Marriage," my father replied, his tone a mix of irony and hyperbole, "it's a difficult thing, you know?"
Well, no, I didn't. My parents, it seems my father had forgotten, divorced when I was too young to have any memory of them as a married couple. And probably thanks in part to the man sitting across from me, I had developed — how shall we say? — some issues with the opposite sex. Since moving to New York, I had not been in a single relationship, opting instead to hone a peculiar, G-rated fetish that I merely confused with having relationships: inviting women into my apartment, asking them to strip and walk across the living room in their underwear — slowly, no, even slower — and then asking them to leave without ever actually touching me. I did this, I'm sure, to convince myself that proximity to intimacy is the same as intimacy experienced, the same way my father has spent a lifetime thinking that being loved by many women for the wrong reasons is the same as loving a few for the right ones. Sex had become, for me, an act of desperation and manipulation, too psychologically filthy to be enjoyed physically, a view that was hard to reconcile with the fact that I was a post-adolescent boy who thought of almost nothing but sex. The girls in my apartment . . . I took comfort in them because they supplied the illusion that all was well, all was well: a post-coital state without actual coitus, which I told myself was a sensible and healthy and rewarding way to live.
"You're going to have to be more specific," I said to my father. "Marriage is a difficult thing how?"
"Oh," he muttered, "just your usual snags and glitches . . . "
I noticed his nostrils flare in the same way that (according to my mother) mine do when I'm trying to hide something that, in truth, I want revealed. And suddenly, strangely, in that instant I did understand what he was trying to tell me: marriage is a difficult thing, yes, especially if you are having sex with someone who is not your wife. I don't know how I knew. I just did. Aside from waiting tables, I was also working days as a reporter for the gossip column at New York magazine, a job that had fostered a good deal of dread and self-loathing, but also helped me fine-tune the dubious talent of asking near-strangers uncomfortable, personal questions, many of which dealt with infidelity. I have asked a famous chef about why he doesn't pay child support. I have asked Alicia Silverstone about her preferred sexual positions. And now I was asking my father, the ultimate near-stranger, about the woman he is fucking.
"Ha!" he blurted, not for second denying it. "How the hell'd you know?"
Instead of being ashamed, he smiled that crooked smile, thrilled to have someone to confess his secrets to. A brother — a son — in arms! He sighed, he slapped the tabletop. He ordered another round, and, once it arrived, went into detail. First he told me her name. And that they met at the deli where he works. And that (my father never being a man of couth) she was toned and olive-skinned and heroically flexible, a veritable contortionist in bed! Also that she was only twenty, my age, which was momentarily unsettling, though only momentarily, given that only a masochist would attempt to view my father as a legitimate adult. Finally (here after his third of fourth drink) he told me that she trimmed her pubic hair into a neat little thatch of clipped brown hair, which, Jeez, was so much more manageable than women his age! Have you, he asked giddily, experienced this? Wait, what — really? It's common with girls your age? He shook his head wistfully and finished his drink.
Listening, I offered only the professional interviewer's objective nods. I wish I could tell you that I felt terrible for his wife, or that I looked at the man seated across from me and saw a study in moral corruption. But I had only met his wife one or two times, enough to determine that (a) I had nothing to say to her because (b) she fit the classic Dad Girlfriend Mode of being openly hostile and emotionally unstable. He never meant to marry her, it was obvious, but she got pregnant and, well, at times situations between people are far more crude and hopeless than my liberal education taught me to believe. From the moment I learned that my father had not only gotten hitched, but had accidentally become a father again, I felt no anger, no envy, but only the sort of shoulder-shrugging sympathy one feels for a hapless friend who has vague, admirable goals that he tends to destroy the possibility of achieving. He was a grown man, he had brought this life on himself — yes, I understood. But it was also the sort of life no one in their right mind wanted to live, and now, barely into his forties, he had to go on living it.
"David," he was now saying, his face crinkling back into its previous state of blanched despondency, "let me tell you something. I know I haven't exactly been around or what have you. But listen to this. Never get old. And never get married."
This was an odd moment, for a million reasons, but namely because it was the first time my father offered me advice that I immediately took to heart. In recent months, my "relationships" had started to take a turn for the worse. Frowning and putting back on their clothes, the girls in my living room would tell me that I was opaque, selfish, indicative of a generational fear of intimacy, or simply in need of therapy. Worn down by hearing these (mainly true) armchair analyses of my personality, I had, in the irrational and melodramatic way of the young, recently sworn off the whole idea of love. I did not have a problem, no! It was these poor narrow-minded girls who wanted to be smothered with affection and drowned in dependency who had the problems! Monogamy, marriage, actual sex as opposed to "sex"...pffff! These were blind unions destined to shatter or, worse, were held flimsily together only by mutual fear of them shattering!
There was only problem with this worldview: I struggled not to think of it as total bullshit. Furthermore, it wasn't at all conducive to the real life I secretly wanted to live: a life in which sex wasn't queasily linked to nonsensical psychodrama, but was merely two bodies, some sweat, some kissing, some bare skin, an orgasm or two, perhaps a jealous neighbor listening through the wall, and maybe, who knows, the chance of something like love if you did it enough times and had stuff to talk about afterwards. With my theoretical view of love and sex at odds with my actual hopes, I went to pains to reinforce the former while obliterating the latter. Woody Allen movies, for instance, became a popular pastime. Same with John Updike novels. And now, here in the restaurant, I had the best cultural reference of all: my father, a real live human being whose life would be so much easier if only he heeded to his own dictum. And never get married. I took this to heart, and in doing so I did something I had always promised myself I would never do. Because it was convenient, I used my father's mistakes to reinforce my own.
"Shit," my father was saying, suddenly, looking at his watch and shaking his head. "I'm supposed to pick up my son at daycare, totally slipped my mind..."
When the check came, he offered to pay it, though it turned out he didn't have quite enough cash on him, so I pitched in ten bucks. I thanked him for the advice, walked him to his car, and two years passed without us speaking. Not for any reason. Just both of us busy, him with his beleaguered marriage and pliable girlfriend, me with writing terrible short stories and further insulating myself from women. Then one day my father called me, and we drove up to Maine to see his parents, a ride during which he seemed even more broken than in the restaurant. It turned out he was having more affairs now--there were three simultaneously for a few months — and though he was briefly comforted to confess, he never quite reverted back to the charming guy I knew as a kid.
Again I pressed for details, and learned that his wife had discovered his indiscretions by carefully studying the phone bills. As a result, his household was no longer the cold war of a stagnant marriage, but a full-on combat zone. They fought daily, terrible, cartoonish fights. On one occasion his wife ran naked into the street, on another my father, the animal lover, relieved his tension by taking the dog for walk — her dog, from before they met! — and shooting it dead with his shotgun. "Hated that dog," he told me in the car. "Got back and told her, sorry, he ran away." Most recently the police were called, and my father asked if he could sleep in the cell at the station. "Best rest I've had in years," he said, which would have been funny if only it weren't true.
"You know," I said, "maybe you should consider getting divorced."
"I know," he said. "But the kid. I couldn't do it to the kid."
"Look at me," I said. "I'm fine. More or less."
My father was silent. The same way I preferred not to think of him as my parent, he preferred to forget I was his son.
"Dad," I said, legitimately concerned, "what the fuck are you going to do?"
He had no answer, of course he didn't. He was tired. He would apologize, swear he wouldn't repeat the same mistakes, and then repeat the same mistakes. Put another way: he would do nothing. As we rode on in silence an epiphany started to form in my mind — more of a self-scolding, actually, than a realization: You have been taking advice from this man? He is sweet, yes. And means well, true. And, okay, is responsible for your existence on the planet, which is no small thing. But, really, what the fuck have you been thinking? After the trip it was another four years until we spoke again. This time I didn't bother asking him about his marriage, or about his life at all. I had learned and, besides, I was too thrilled to introduce him to my girlfriend.
"It's been almost three years," I said. "Can you believe it?" n°
©2006 David Amsden and hooksexup.com