Thy Neighbor Read online

  Choosing is a matter of dry judgment, even here, where we are looking at the shape and height of trees and wondering if they will look right in the corner of the room when the lights and ornaments are strung on them.

  My father has no aesthetic sense. No receptors for that. For him, beauty registers in straight lines, as order, a pleasing logic in the eye that can, for a moment, relax the grip of his mind on the absolute.

  To communicate, I must borrow his language, haul it up, copied and memorized for times like these, when the adjustment is so abrupt. I must narrow my eyes against the light, against the bliss of ambience and appetite, sharpen the focus and speak. Say something astute.

  He nods.

  “Hold it here, son,” he indicates, grasping the midpoint of the trunk where I can reach it, then kneeling to saw at the base.

  I watch him do this the way I watch him do everything, like a hospital machine with a pen attached, counting every beat and twitter and recording it. For what? For mimicry. For fascination. I note every dart of his eyes to his fingers, the eyes small and incongruously soft, date brown, the fingers huge, long and thick. Manipulative. Yes. Exactly that. The pull of hands to a task.

  My deepest love for him is in that space of intention where he exerts his will on the object and I can see his mind at work, uncluttered by fear or doubt. This is a man. This is a man I want to be. Knowing. Acting. Clear.

  I am bursting with silent admiration, bleeding it internally, my chest filled. I am helping to carry the tree, on its side, dragging in the snow on my end, the tip where the angel will go. I am feeling my arms heavy and my shoulders ache. I am watching my boots, which seem big to me, until I look forward at Dad’s—huge, punching graves in the snow. I step where he steps and my feet disappear in shadow.

  At this age, he is impatient with me, with the things I ask or the things I like and want to do, things he deems frivolous, unintelligent, like taking a ride in the horse-drawn cart filled with hay and other laughing children.

  Or this is often how it sounds to me when he replies, a curled lip under his answers. But there is also a firm pedagogy that expects me one day to catch up, say something interesting all on my own.

  So many of my memories of him are like this. Snippets. Bits of film clipped out and dominated by imagery and inference, my interpretations of what’s happened endlessly branching, like fingers scrabbling for a hold. My experience is dominated by this, my obsession with what was going on in his head, as if it could be read in waves on the air and shield me from his disapproval.

  What are you thinking? What do I need to know or presume to get safely through the next five minutes? The next hour? What angers you? I will avoid it. What annoys you? I will slide past. How do I make you proud? What do you think is important? I will be that, building the platform of myself out of all the things you admire in other people. Give me the example, and I will make it into something that you can love. More so, something that you can like, or that you can claim as your own without disappointment.

  But this business of pleasing is a delicate balance. Dodge and strive. A boy guided not, as he should be, by joy and private inclination, but by what he thinks will get a prize, or some credit from the man above. With fathers, it is every bit this simple, hackneyed, primitive, and stupid. Boys are like savages worshipping stones. “This is God,” they say, “this idol of a man. I will sacrifice anything to please him.”

  My need makes him sound mean, but he wasn’t. He was solid and blunt and armed with his education. That’s all. Honest to a fault. A man who had made his own way on his own terms, working as a waiter at country clubs to pay his way through college and law school, the first member of his family to educate himself past high school.

  As a young man just out of the army, he served veal scallops and single-malt scotch to the businessmen in their tailor-made double-breasted suits, and he swore that someday he would be one of them, a professional, a man of taste and reasonable wealth.

  He was much older than most fathers of kids my age, and nine years older than my mother. He was forty-one when I was born.

  Maybe that was part of the problem. The gap between us was just too big. The world he had known was nothing like my own. James Nicholas Walsh was a child of the Great Depression, and Nicky boy was coming of age with the Internet.

  Dad groomed his hair every morning with the five-inch black plastic comb that he carried behind his wallet in the left-hand breast pocket of his suits. He carried a clean handkerchief in the other breast pocket, and he put his change in the pocket within the pocket at his right hip. All of these things could be reliably found in their accustomed places, the change especially, which he did not remove each evening and which I pilfered once a week from his closet, feeling for the hanging weight in each jacket and sliding my fingers in neatly to filch the coins.

  The man was his image: a suit, carefully displayed. Hanging on a hanger or on his shoulders, it was much the same either way.

  I was the opposite.

  I grew my hair long like every rebellious twelve-year-old boy and took pride in my dishevelment. My looks were so foreign to men of my father’s world that one of them, when he met me at a party for the first time, said:

  “Your daughter would be quite pretty if she didn’t have such big feet.”

  Another family joke I never lived down.

  But who cared? I was an exercise in contrast by design.

  Well through my teens, I wore ripped jeans and cutoff T-shirts, especially in summer when I came home from boarding school for three months, randy with the cooped-up flak of the semester and determined to make the most of my freedoms.

  I met my friends out back of a neighbor’s vacated house most evenings to smoke pot and drink beer and make out with girls in the grass. The cops busted us there one night, having received a report of a possible burglary, and hauled us down to the station for questioning. We’d all been savvy enough to toss our drugs before being tackled by the overzealous third-string SWAT team they sent in, so they couldn’t keep us in custody for more than a few hours.

  But they did call Dad to have him pick me up at the station, and that was worse than a night in jail. We drove home in a silence that was like a death happening.

  When we finally had it out in the kitchen, Dad worked himself into such a fury that he tore the ratty T-shirt off my back. Right off, like wrapping paper. Lifted me clear out of my chair by it, and it gave at the shoulders and pits where I’d trimmed it to show off my pecs.

  It was the maddest I’d ever seen him, and the whole time he was ripping into me—chair scraping, cotton shredding—he still managed to sound like an old English barrister taking the wrongdoer down a peg by terms of a gentleman’s code.

  That was his most effective punishment. Banishment from his good graces. Being thought unworthy, found wanting at the far end of his withering rebuke. He crushed me with slurs I didn’t even understand.

  Standing there half clothed and sweating out the booze, I was hardly in a position to refute his parting shot.

  “You look, you smell like exactly what you are. Uncouth.”

  I slouched around him like Caliban for weeks after that—this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine—doing chores and strewing around copies of Rousseau and Gibbon and even my Signet Classic of The Tempest from school, all as a kind of wearying jest, but really just a dash to redeem myself in his eyes, if only by the badge of summer reading.

  Dad was such an intellectual climber (and through him, so was, so am I) that this Great Books ploy often worked to set things right again between us, or at least give us something to talk about.

  He had the autodidact’s tic of deep-set insecurity incurable. He was always a sucker for the Western canon, or what a man of good breeding would supposedly just have lying around on his bedside table or on the back of the toilet.

  Fuck m
e, but I loved the old bastard for his love of learning, even if it was put on. How else? I learned quick enough (or is it quickly?) that learning is putting on, or taking on and then keeping for the times when you find yourself alone in your haunted prison, reciting poetry for comfort.

  He gave me that, the valuation of knowledge for its own sake. I stole a line for every mood to shore me up against the philistine inside me who wanted nothing more than just to be in his own gruff body, hanging from tree limbs and raking his toes in the dirt, running wild all day long on a cocktail of breakfast and testosterone.

  That was natural me, and that me took some breaking in the earliest years. But acclimatize the bear to the circus, and he will dance, eventually.

  At first I hated to read, when I was a young boy and Dad and Mom made me do it for an hour each day. Hated it. But then, over time, I came to really love it—slowly, in and after college, when I first learned to savor the pleasure of an idea, rolling it around in my brain, feeling for the first time that you could actually get high, really pleasurably high on thinking.

  But by then, of course, it was too late. The best of me, done for him and courtesy of him, was all dressed up with no place to go. No place to go but a funeral. Oh, well. At least he saw me graduate. At least I made it partway to what he wanted for me.

  That was Dad’s greatest gift. He had worked his way into an education. Earned it for himself. But it was given to me as my birthright from day one, not just in the schooling he paid for but in extras as well. By mandate, he gave me the leisure time and space to learn if I wanted to, and I took it. I came home from school every summer, and Dad said, “Study or get a job.”

  And so, while my friends made cinnamon rolls all day at the mall or mowed lawns for spending money, I chose to study. I took summer school courses, or read on my own from a list that Mom, Dad, or a teacher had given me. I sat by the pool, the pretend gentleman amateur, working on my tan and turning the pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, getting maybe every tenth word but feeling really deep all the same for even trying to roll my boulder of a brain up that hill, and then watching it roll back down again.

  Mom assigned me most of the literature, Dad the history, philosophy, and poli sci. True to form, he was big on dates and facts and memorization, she on nuance. All the art genes came from her. She could teach you to feel a sonnet down to the roots of your teeth by way of your broken heart, whereas Dad went at your grammar, hammer and tongs.

  “Today, you lay the book on the table and you lie on the couch. Yesterday, you laid the book on the table and you lay on the couch.”

  Right. Got it. First and last lesson learned. A book on the table and a body on the couch. Right here. In this room. Did I say that before? It—the crime—happened here, in Dad’s study, which is now mine.

  Study.

  Study well, boy, and learn.

  And with that, the memories snap shut. The pictures cease.

  I am in the present again, circled back and caught blank.

  Today, which is still so much of yesterday, I lie on the couch beside Monica and I lay what I can of my past out in front of her, telling her all of these things about my parents, my father especially, because she listens, and because lately she asks. It is her asking that helps me to remember, and her listening that helps me to withstand the memory.

  Just barely.

  “Tell me about your Dad,” she says, whispering, close. And she does it in such a smooth, unassuming way that I am able somehow to answer, even though the same question from anyone else would be grounds for dismissal on the spot.

  She gets away with it, as with so much else, and I let her, because she is my executioner, chosen especially for this. Standing on the scaffold—for what crime? the crime of omission, I think—I give her the token ring or piece of gold or silver. I put it in her palm and say, “I forgive you,” and then she chops off my head.

  Except that my head is still like that boulder I read about. Rolling down. I’ve always got to pick it up again.

  “Tell me about your Dad,” she says, and smiles gently.

  “I hated him and I wanted to be him,” I say. “Pretty tired stuff.”

  “Maybe, but tell me anyway.”

  “What do you want to know that I haven’t told you already?”

  “I don’t know. Something surprising. Something that no one else knows.”

  She is sitting up now on her elbow looking down at me intently.

  “You’re no different than anyone else, you know,” I say a little angrily. “Everyone wants to know why he did it.”

  “But I don’t mean that. I mean the opposite.”

  “The opposite of what?”

  “Of the devil.”

  “He wasn’t the devil. That’s my whole point.”

  “I know, but you haven’t said that.”

  “That’s all I’ve been trying to say.”

  “Yes, but you keep circling back to the same place.”

  “What do you mean? What place?”

  “I don’t know. Hardness, I guess. His demands. His expectations. Your differences.”

  “Well, that’s the way I remember it.”

  “That’s the way you let yourself remember it. But there’s more.”

  “Oh, really? And what makes you so sure about that?”

  “Because if there weren’t, you’d stop trying. Case closed. But you keep going back because there’s something else still there and you need it?”

  “So now you’re a shrink. Is that it?”

  “Don’t make this about me.”

  “Don’t make it about me, you poser.”

  “Poser? I’ve never said I was anything other than what I am. You’re the one who’s posing. You can’t even be honest with yourself. You don’t know how.”

  She flops down on her back and sighs loudly.

  We lie in silence like this for a while, both staring up at the ceiling, both hurt, but both working inside ourselves, waiting for the conflict to ease. We can’t part this way and we know it. We’re both too desperate and, despite whatever I say, we are both way too much in need of the therapy we came for.

  After a long time, she says:

  “I’m sorry.”

  She waits longer, then tries again for a way back in.

  “He had soft eyes, you said.”

  To this I manage a strangled:

  “Yes.”

  We are in the most fragile place we ever go to now. One false word and the quiet will flail beyond salvaging.

  “There,” she says. Carefully, leadingly, placing her finger above the wound, but not touching it.

  Still more silence. Then, finally, I say:

  “Raspberries.”

  I almost want to laugh at this, and if I weren’t so fucking maimed and terrified, I probably would.

  But she gives no sign of anything. She just waits.

  Clever girl.

  “He loved raspberries.”

  She nods very, very slowly, but says nothing.

  So I go on.

  “I remember being very young. We were sitting on the couch side by side watching TV one night after dinner, and we were eating bowls of raspberries with grenadine.”

  I stop again. I’m going to make her sit for this. See if she can improv and get it right. Squeeze out the confession.

  But she’s better at this than I am. Not even challenged.

  She’s so still. Electrically still, like a sound that’s too low or too high for me to hear but that registers anyway, somewhere, on my skin or on hers, or between, and she knows she can linger, balanced palpably this way, encouraging, for as long as it will take.

  And that’s the right word.

  Encourage, to make brave.

  Why is this little, little th
ing so hard to say? So hard to remember?

  We were eating raspberries. So what?

  She’ll be disappointed when I finish. There’s nothing there. But it’s all I can think of.

  It’s what she wants, so I’ll give it to her.

  “We were eating and watching the TV, and then I happened to look down at what was on my spoon, and I saw a small white worm curled inside one of the berries, wriggling.”

  I hang on this, still hoping she’ll trip, say the wrong thing or interrupt, and then I won’t have to go on with the rest. But she doesn’t. She waits.

  “I hated insects then,” I say, feeling it now, coming strong, the picture running on its own. “I still do. I couldn’t believe that there was one in my food, and alive, too. I felt sick at the thought that I’d already eaten one.”

  Monica smiles uncomfortably, her face squirming with the ick of it.

  “I thought, how many worms had I already eaten in all the time I’d been eating fruit? It was horrible. I was probably six or something at the time, the age when discoveries like that are catastrophic.”

  Monica nods vigorously.

  “Around that same age, I once found a spider on my pillow, and for years after that—really, years—I wore socks and a tracksuit to bed every night, my logic being that how could you ever know what was crawling over you while you slept? I’d lie there all night sweating my balls off, but I couldn’t bear to sleep uncovered. That’s how bad it was.”

  I’m rolling it out now, blabbing, as if we’d never argued, and there’s no stopping me.

  “Anyway, I looked up at Dad, probably with those saucer eyes that kids get after they’ve just bumped their head on the coffee table but before the pain has gotten through—you know, like they’re looking at the parent to see if they should freak out—and I said, ‘Dad, there’s a worm in one of my berries.’”