Pharmakon (49 page)

After a few days, my father mellowed on the subject of my disgrace. But not much. As he watched me send off my college applications, I heard him tell my mother, “Well, now that he’s blown his chances at Yale and the Ivies, he’ll have to start off where we did. Some second-rate state school.”

“It’s not the end of the world, Will.” My mother tried to give him a hug; he shrugged it off.

“No. There are worse things that could have happened to Zach . . . I guess.”

My father did not like to be ambushed by life. He had kept us from being done in by dented cans of tuna fish, drowned by hip boots. He had taught us how to perform tracheotomies and, in spite of his farm boy prudery, had made sure his daughters knew enough about birth control and the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases to get them through high school and college without getting knocked up—no small feat in those days. He had even protected us from Casper Gedsic. But the fact that he could not protect us from ourselves made him feel defeated and depressed.

I was not the only one who disappointed my father during the course of my last year at high school. For six months now, Fiona had come up with a good reason to refuse every invitation to come out to the country. At the age of twenty-seven, my oldest sister lived alone with paintings that could not find a gallery and a cat her last roommate had left behind along with a foldout bed when she had gotten married.

Shortly after my fall from grace, my father called Fiona and invited himself to dinner at her place. He wanted to see his daughter by himself. Fiona agreed, then promptly outflanked him by immediately calling my mother and insisting she and I come, too.

She lived seven floors up on the top floor of an old pickle warehouse on Spring Street that smelled of brine. There was no elevator. We arrived two hours early and climbed the stairs quickly; Fiona wasn’t ready. T-shirt, ripped shorts, dirty hair, and, even for a warehouse, it was a mess. Dad apologized for getting the time mixed up, but I could tell he had wanted to catch her off guard. If my father had wanted to catch her with a man, he was disappointed.

None of us had ever been to her loft, or any loft. It had fourteen-foot ceilings and a pull toilet and a bathtub that used to be a pickle barrel. A mattress on the floor at one end, a ratty old couch by the dirty windows at the other, it seemed like she was camping out rather than really living there. My father noted that any agile sex offender could climb up her fire escape, and my mother wished there were bars on her windows and worried aloud about who would hear her daughter if she called out for help. Fiona nailed her canvasses right to the walls, and there was paint splattered on everything, including Fiona.

When we arrived, Fiona was just about to go out and shop for our dinner. My father stayed behind while my mother and I descended the six flights we had just climbed and went out on the street to help her buy groceries. Fiona got everything you couldn’t get in the country and she knew my father liked: smoked white-fish from Canal Street and oxtail from a butcher on Mulberry, and she insisted on not letting my mother pay for anything, even though she was broke.

When we climbed back up the stairs with the bags, Fiona started to sing “Wimoweh.” Mom asked us what was so funny. It was good to see her until we walked in the door. Dad was standing in front of a large, unfinished canvas of a family bunched together, as if posed for a snapshot, and obliterated by an opaque patina of beeswax and brown pigment that was just the color of shit. My father was holding a paintbrush as long as a yardstick in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Fiona’s voice was as sad as it was angry.

“The eye wasn’t quite right.”

“My God, Will.” My mother wanted to say worse than that to him.

“Don’t ever touch one of my paintings again, please.” Fiona dropped the groceries on the counter and opened a bottle of wine.

My father held out his hands and gave me a “What? Me?” look. I was embarrassed for him and got on Fiona’s bicycle and rode to the other end of the loft.

“I was just trying to help.” He waited for Fiona to say something. When she didn’t, he pushed on. “Do you think you have something special to say as an artist?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, like Picasso or Matisse or Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg? They show you something you haven’t seen before.”

“You mean ‘original’?”

“Yes. Do you think you have something original to say?”

“Do you, father?”

My mother stopped washing the dishes. I pedaled back to watch.

“Yes, I think I’ve broken some ground.”

“But not like Freud or Jung or Skinner or Wilhelm Reich.”

“Reich believed in flying saucers.”

“Let’s stay on the subject.”

“You’re mad I touched your picture.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Well, I’m not mad that the father in all these pictures is me. I just thought I’d give one of them the right color eyes.” It was a decidedly awkward dinner.

When we climbed back down the stairs an hour and a half later and got into the Volvo, my father turned to my mother and said, “I just want what’s best for my children.”

Dad was still digesting the punch bowl and the Fiona dinner when a certified letter arrived from Lucy. She was twenty-five by then, in the start of her second year in Columbia’s PhD program in psychology. My father had had to pull strings with more than a few old colleagues to get her admitted. But once there, she had done him proud, dean’s list, in fact. It still amused Lucy to tell people she was adopted. And thrice engaged, she continued to go through men like toilet paper. And as of late, she had developed the habit of dyeing her hair a different color every other week. She looked best as a redhead.

It was my father’s idea that she become a psychologist. Lucy wasn’t really interested in psychology, but she knew enough about psychology to realize that by staying in my father’s shadow, she avoided becoming a target for him. Her favorite part was arguing with Dad in shrink talk about the collateral damage his madness had inflicted on us as kids. Which, now that I think about it, drove my father crazy. But all in all, he was proud of her, proud that she was joining the guild of his dark art. He talked about the research they would one day conduct together, and genuinely thought she was on the road to his idea of happiness until he opened that certified letter.

He wouldn’t let me read it, but from the argument that erupted between him and my mother after she had read it, the salient points conveyed on that single sheet of onion skin were, not necessarily in this order: A) She loved them. B) She didn’t want to become a psychologist, because it was depressing. C) She had quit graduate school and was on her way to Morocco to work in an orphanage. D) She was sorry, “but I need to establish an emotional boundary between my life and yours.” My father read that part aloud. Twice.

The letter also included a check for $12,153, the amount my parents had spent on room and board and tuition for grad school.

A) through D) upset him on so many different levels, he chose to focus on the most superficial part of the kiss-off, the check. “She thinks sending me a check makes this all right?”

“I think it’s Lucy’s way of trying to take responsibility for her actions.” My mother’s lips trembled as she handed the letter back to my father. Her eyes watered up, but no tears fell.

“Dropping out of the graduate school I had to beg to get her into in the first place is responsible? And running away to an African orphanage is taking responsibility? She should have at least had the decency, the backbone, to tell this to my face. Putting it in a letter is cowardly.”

“Will, she said she was sorry. She knew you’d try to talk her out of it, and you would have.”

“You think this is a good idea?”

“No, but she’s twenty-five years old. And what we think doesn’t really matter.”

“And what’s this horseshit about emotional boundaries?”

“I can suspect what she might be referring to.” My mother glanced in my direction. Whatever she thought Lucy meant, she didn’t want it discussed in front of me. “But since I didn’t write the goddamn letter, I suggest you ask your daughter that question yourself.”

“I would, but as you seemed to have failed to notice, she was careful not to include her phone number or the name of this orphanage. Did you notice the return address on the envelope is the American Express office, Tangier?”

My mother gave in to her tears. “I should have known she was up to something when she asked me to mail her her bathing suit.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was just a bathing suit!”

“She’s going to wear a bikini at the orphanage?” At first, it was a relief to have their disappointment directed at someone other than me. The check fell out of the envelope.

“Where do you think she got the twelve thousand bucks?”

“Please stay out of this, Zach.”

“Her brother’s raised a valid question. How does a girl who’s trained for absolutely nothing, whose only previous job experience was being a camp counselor, get someone to give her twelve thousand dollars?” I didn’t like where my father’s paranoia was taking him.

Gray squawked on the sill. My father slammed the window, just missing the old parrot’s claws. “She always wanted to marry an African prince. Remember the Christmas she insisted we get her a black doll?” My father was showing his own colors as he free-associated a pattern to Lucy’s betrayal.

“Dad, you can’t honestly think Lucy’s getting money for sleeping with a black prince?” In truth, I thought it was kind of a cool idea.

“Anything is possible. She got the money from somebody. Her marketable skills are limited. She’s pretty, agreeable, not too particular . . .”

My mother slammed down her coffee cup so hard against the table it shattered. “I won’t stand for you talking about your own daughter that way!”

“When a daughter of mine carries on like she’s a cross between Baby Jesus Christ, Marilyn Monroe, and Job, what am I damn well supposed to think?” I didn’t like the way he said it. It made me wonder what he said about me behind my back.

“I think it’s great she’s going to work in an orphanage.”

“Sadly, Zach, that doesn’t surprise me.”

The next body blow to my father’s fantasy of his family was delivered by Willy. He, like Lucy, chose not to deliver it in person. He didn’t even hand in his resignation in writing. He called and talked to my mother, and asked her to relay the bad news to Dad. Willy had decided to give up premed at Princeton to study art history. What’s more, he was going to spend the next semester studying art in Florence.

My mother didn’t think she’d heard him correctly, and made him repeat it. I was listening in on the other line. “I thought you wanted to be a neurologist.”

“It doesn’t suit my sensibilities any longer.” His voice had gotten
Masterpiece Theatre
-ish since he went to Princeton. “My aesthetics have changed.”

“Willy, there’s nothing wrong with art history, but you don’t even like museums.” That’s what I was thinking.

“I do now.”

“But it’s such a drastic change.”

“I’ve been thinking of making a run in this direction for a while.” Still the long-distance runner.

“I’m not sure your father will pay for Florence.” My mother said it like the city was a girl.