We eat at Arnie’s Deli, a small restaurant on Broadway with a deliberate coffee shop feel. “How are you guys doing?” the waitress says, handing us our menus. She’s tall and slim, her hair, an unnatural platinum color, fed in a ponytail through the hole in the back of her baseball cap, and Norm is all over her in an instant, shamelessly looking her up and down with an appreciative grin.
“I’m just fine, Penny,” he says, reading her name tag. “Thanks for asking. And how are you?”
“I’m good,” she says with considerably less enthusiasm.
“You look beautiful this evening,” Norm says.
“Well, thank you. And what can I get you tonight?”
“What’s good?”
“I don’t know. What are you in the mood for?”
“Well, I usually get to know a woman better before I answer that, but since you asked . . .” He laughs loudly at his little joke, nudging my arm to get me in on it, smiling at the other diners, the inadvertent beneficiaries of his sharp wit.
“Norm,” I say quietly.
“Sorry,” he says, not taking his eyes off her. “My son doesn’t like to see his old man flirt.”
“And you do it so well,” Penny says. Oblivious to her sarcasm, Norm breaks into raucous laughter, as if she’s bantering with him.
“Well, no one ever died from being told they were beautiful, did they?”
“I’m dying,” I say, and Norm goes off again.
I catch Penny’s eye and I want to explain everything to her, how I haven’t seen him in years, how he coerced me into this, how sorry I am for the inconvenience. “We’ll need a few minutes,” I say ruefully.
“I’ll be right back, then,” she says with a grin, heading back to the counter, and I realize that I’ve overestimated her reaction to Norm.
“I’ll watch you go,” my father says, leaning out of his chair.
“You behave now, Norm,” she says, casting a playful glance back at him.
“This is behaving,” he calls after her, smiling around the diner at his unwitting audience, somehow seeing approval in their indifference. Then he casts one more longing look at Penny’s ass before sitting back in his chair. “Now, that will keep you warm at night,” he says appreciatively.
“Jesus, Norm,” I say.
“What?”
“It’s a shitty enough job without having to be hit on by dirty old men.”
“She didn’t seem to mind,” Norm says.
“She was being polite, because this is her place of work, and if she tells you to fuck off, she could lose a tip or her job.”
“And I think it’s a long night, and a tough job, and maybe a little flirting breaks up the monotony and makes her feel good about herself. Besides, I think she liked me.”
“What, you and her?” I say, inexplicably frustrated by his delusions. “Are you honestly telling me that you think you have a shot at getting a date with her?”
“Why not?” Norm says, perturbed. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You think a twenty-year-old girl like her lies in bed at night dreaming of the fat, bald sixty-year-old man who’s going to come into the restaurant and sweep her off her feet?”
The hurt in his eyes is instantaneous, the collapse of his smile, the sagging of his jowls, and I immediately regret the remark. “Listen, Norm, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, I live here, you know? I eat here all the time, and I was a little embarrassed.”
“I’m sorry I embarrassed you,” he says. “I’m an outgoing person. That’s just the way I am. When I see a beautiful woman, I let her know she’s beautiful. Once in a while, I’m lucky, and it leads somewhere. If not, I’ve at least paid her a compliment, brightened her day just a little bit. Either way, I’m not going to apologize for it.”
“No one’s asking you to,” I say quickly, noting the waitress’s approach and trying to end the conversation.
“You made up your minds yet?” she says.
“Is the minestrone soup any good?” Norm asks her.
“Sure is.”
“I’ll have that and the grilled cheese.”
I order a salad and grilled cheese. “We always had the same taste in foods,” Norm tells Penny with pride.
“So,” I say brightly once she’s gone. “What would you like to talk about?” I’m still feeling bad about shooting him down before, haunted by the acute sadness instantly readable behind his fallen smile. I realize that regardless of whether he truly believes in the appreciation of indifferent bystanders and the possibility of young waitresses, or it’s just an attitude he’s embraced as a survival mechanism, the behavior is symptomatic of a deeply ingrained loneliness that informs his every impulse.
“Just about you in general,” he says, sitting back in his chair. “How are things at the Spandler Corporation?”
“How do you know where I work?”
“I looked through your desk while I was waiting in your room.”
“Jesus,” I say angrily. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”
“It looks like an impressive place. What do you do there?”
“I don’t want to talk about work.”
“So tell me about Hope.”
“I don’t want to talk about her either.”
“Do you still think about writing screenplays?”
“Nah. That was never a serious thing.”
Norm nods sadly. “Zack,” he says. “A man’s two great loves should be his woman and his work. You seem unwilling to talk about either one. Now, if I were a long-lost son whose no-good father showed up, I’d want him to see how well I’d made it without him. I’d take great pleasure in letting him know that I’d made a success out of my life, that I was doing well at work and I was in love with a great woman. It would be the most natural impulse in the world. And yet I can’t get you to discuss either one with me. Why do you think that is?”
“You haven’t given a shit about me for all these years,” I say, my voice coming out louder than I’d intended, and I’m vaguely aware of the other diners pausing in their conversations and looking our way. “Don’t you think it’s a bit presumptuous to show up and think I’ll share any details of my life with you? You’re not a part of it, Norm. It’s none of your fucking business, that’s all. A man’s two great loves should be his woman and his work? That’s great, Norm, really brilliant. You cheated on your woman more times than I probably know, and unless things have changed dramatically in the last few years, you haven’t ever held down a job for more than a year or two in your entire life. Maybe somewhere in there, one of your great loves should have been your children, don’t you think? It would have been much harder to lose us, but I guess you managed to pull that one off too.”
Norm stares straight at me, willfully absorbing my tirade, his face reddening from the effort of it. Then he nods, frowning slightly. “Everything you say is true,” he says. “I’m not going to deny any of it. It’s no great secret that I’ve made a colossal mess of my life. But just because all of that’s true, it doesn’t change my instincts that you are under a tremendous strain, and that all is not right with you. I’m worried about you, Zack.”
“That’s just self-serving bullshit,” I practically scream at him. “You’re worried because you want to be worried, because you want to feel like the father you never were.”
“Nevertheless, I am.”
“Well, there’s no need. Believe me, I’m fine. Just fine, thank you very much.”
Norm takes a sip from his water glass and flashes a small, wry grin. “You sound fine,” he says.
Before I can respond, the waitress arrives, gingerly setting down Norm’s soup and my salad with the posture of someone inching her head out of a hiding spot, ready to retreat in an instant. “Okay,” she says nervously. “Let’s all try to calm down a little. Family’s family, right?”
“Penny,” Norm says to her. “I want to apologize to you if any of the remarks I made earlier offended you. That was certainly not my intention.”
“Don’t be silly, Norm,” she says, rubbing his shoulder. “You’re a sweetheart.”
We eat in an uncomfortable silence, the only sounds coming from Norm as he aggressively slurps his soup. After a while he looks up at me between mouthfuls. “How’s Pete doing?”
“He’s great.”
“I send him a birthday card every year,” Norm says.
“Well, that changes everything, then, doesn’t it,” I say.
Norm puts down his spoon and looks at me. His forehead is dappled with beads of sweat, either from the soup or from the strenuousness of making conversation with his bitter fuck of a firstborn son. “This isn’t going very well,” he says to me.
“No shit,” I say wearily.
He wipes his sweating pate with a napkin, and then wipes his lips with the same one, and I wonder if he can taste his own sweat. “Listen,” he says. “I am working under the assumption that there must be something we can talk about in a civilized manner for as long as it takes to eat a grilled cheese sandwich, something that won’t get you angry. I’ve struck out so far, so why don’t you give it a shot?”
I look at my father wiping his soup bowl clean in circular strokes with his onion roll before taking a messy bite out of the roll. I hate that he’s right, that after all these years, he’s just stepped back in and called it so accurately. How can someone so obtuse be so sharp? It’s nothing more than a coincidence, my personal dramas coinciding with his delusion that he can still lay claim to the instincts of a true father. I’m loath to make it so easy for him, to concede that his blind shots have nonetheless hit their mark. There are crumbs on his shirt as well as a soup stain or two just above the upper swell of his belly. The limp dust-colored strands of his hair are askew from leaning over his bowl, and when he grabs another roll, I can see that his fingernails are jagged and bitten. Just like mine.
“I might have cancer,” I say.
Somehow, in discussing the potential of death, I end up talking about my life, and within forty minutes or so, I’ve pretty much told him everything, about work, Hope, Tamara. And there they are, my deepest fears and secrets, spoken aloud, laid out before the least likely person to whom I’d ever imagined spilling my conflicted guts. The only part I leave out is my aborted infidelity last night at the WENUS gig. If Norm wants to feel kinship with me over grilled cheese, that’s fine, but I will not let him have that in common with me. He listens attentively, his brow furrowed, chiming in only to offer some predictably worthless advice about my situation at work. When I’m done, we order some coffee and sip at it quietly for a while. “It’s probably nothing,” he finally says.
“Probably,” I say.
“Listen, Zack,” Norm says, putting down his mug with an air of finality. “I know I’m the last person you want to be hearing any advice from.”
“Somehow,” I say, “I suspect you’re not going to let a minor detail like that stop you.”
“I gotta be me,” he says with a smile. I notice for the first time that he has Matt’s smile, and maybe mine, for all I know. “I’m going to admit something to you that I never usually admit, even to myself. Letting my marriage to your mother fall apart was the biggest damn mistake I ever made in my life. I’m sixty years old now and I’ve got a boatload of mistakes to show for it, but they can all be traced back to that one, ultimate mistake. That’s what sent my life down the course it took, and every bad thing that happened to me afterward was a consequence of that one mistake. I know you think you’re in a bad place right now, but I would give anything to be standing in your shoes at this moment. Because you’re still in the before. There are decisions to be made, but you haven’t made them yet. You have an opportunity—one I blew—to do everything in your power to look into yourself, I mean, really look into your heart, and make the right one. You should embrace where you are now, see it for the blessing that it is. I’ve been in my after for almost twenty years, and I have to tell you, it has not been a picnic. I often think back to the times right before I destroyed my marriage, and I wish someone like me had shown up and pointed out to me that I was in my before. Maybe I would have pushed myself more, to understand myself and figure out what was really in my heart.”
He sits back in his chair, somewhat breathless from the speech he’s just given.
“Norm,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he says, beaming.
Before we leave the restaurant, Norm heads to the back to personally hand Penny her tip, clasping her hand in both of his. He whispers something to her, and, unbelievably, she leans forward and gives him a quick peck on his cheek, casting a meaningful look in my direction. In that instant I’m able to see him through her eyes, his handsome smile, his kind expression, and I realize that I’ve sold him a bit short. “Don’t forget,” he calls loudly to her as we head for the door. “Fat people try harder!” He pats his gut as his bellowing laugh rattles the windows.
We step wordlessly out onto Broadway, into a gusty autumn night. The days have been getting shorter for a while now, but the early onset of night is still unsettling to me. I just want everything to slow the hell down for a minute. Some kids in a tricked-out Hummer nod in time to the rap song playing through their speakers at full blast, and Norm briefly breaks into a little dance, shuffling his legs and snapping. His face is flushed from walking, and his hair is instantly blown wild by the wind and now sticks out in stiff, haphazard angles behind each ear. He walks the sidewalk like a dervish, openly ogling the women, nodding at strangers, and greeting doormen like he owns the block. When I was a kid, it really felt like he did, and now I wonder if he was the popular character I’ve remembered, or if he was as much of an oblivious ass then as he is now, and I was just unqualified to recognize it. I’m still reeling from our conversation. Opening up like that had not been on my agenda, and it’s left me feeling vaguely disappointed. I always dreamed, or planned really, that he’d come back, broke and contrite, to find me having succeeded in all that he failed in. I’d be wealthy from my various entrepreneurial enterprises, happily married to a beautiful woman, and maybe even a young father in my own right. Despite my anger, I’d be forgiving, would write him a substantial check to help him out and savor the expression on his face when he saw the amount. And now he’s finally arrived, as if on cue, and all I’ve done is show him what a mess I am. I don’t know how he got me to talk, but no matter, the dream is dead. And as I watch him in my periphery, huffing proudly along the sidewalk like he’s leading a marching band, no doubt thrilled that he’s managed to pierce my defenses, I can feel the powerful resentment reasserting itself, filling me like mercury, and if he looks at me right now, if he dares shine the light of that shit-eating grin into the shadows of my cave, I know I’ll cheerfully strangle him.