Dirty Old Man
Steven Wineman
I
grew up loving my father and, a little desperately, wanting to be like
him.
When I was little I would sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch him shave. Then he would brush his hair, intent, efficient, parting it with one decisive stroke into a perfect straight line. To this day I think of my father when I brush my hair in the morning, trying and usually failing to do it as well as he did.
In his sixties and seventies he was almost picturesquely handsome, the distinguished older man. Trim, impeccably dressed, mustache neatly groomed, eyes alert, snow-white hair now brushed straight back. This despite half a century of alcohol abuse, which didn't seem to take the slightest toll on him physically, though in the end it may have helped to kill him. He died at 79 from a tumor that ballooned to the size of a soccer ball, so fast and so devastating that they were never even able to poke around to see what exactly was going on. After he died his doctor said it could have been his liver, spleen or kidney. I figured liver.
Picturesquely handsome. There was another word, I think a better one, but now it escapes me.
My first marriage was in the throes of breaking up as my father went into his rapid decline. I was staying somewhere temporary, scrambling to find an apartment in Ann Arbor. My daughter was six, a very tender age. I was going back every day to spend my usual times with her, giving her breakfast, putting her to bed, keeping her life's routines undisturbed by her parents' turmoil. I felt, with reason, it was the most important thing I could do. I was overwhelmed.
My father thought he was having a problem with his back. Even when he was hospitalized I couldn't take in the magnitude of what was happening; even when they found the mass. I finally made it to New York, to his bedside; it was late in the evening, he was asleep, running a fever. I sat with him for fifteen minutes. I planned to come back first thing in the morning, for rounds, to talk to his doctor. The next morning he was dead.
In my dream I'm sitting on the toilet and my father comes into the bathroom, wearing a white terrycloth robe. He didn't knock but I don't mind. I'm my adult self and he is old, white haired but in good shape. The bathroom is small and I assume he is going to get into the shower but instead he sits on the edge of the tub, inches away, and watches me as I finish shitting.
I'm grading papers, honestly a little bored with them, when Angela Hartman knocks on my open door. She waits in the doorway, smiling but something about her seems off. I wave her in and she drops herself, heavily I think, into the chair in front of my desk.
It's not a physical heaviness, something else. She's slim, athletic, dark hair tied in a ponytail that reaches half way down her back. Her face is plain but suddenly becomes animated, almost beautiful when she starts talking sociology.
“I'm disturbing you.”
“Not at all.” I wait, and when she doesn't say anything I ask, “Angie, is something the matter?”
She looks over my right shoulder. There is a small window behind me. The late afternoon sunlight is muted. The view is pleasant enough, a few trees and a campus lawn, but I'm not sure she is even aware of it. Then her eyes shift toward me and she says, simply, “Yes.”
I teach sociology at the University of Michigan. In 1972 I arrived here with a Ph.D. from Harvard. I published four books in eight years, the usual array of journal articles. I did a highly regarded study of inmate culture at Jackson State Prison. Made full professor at thirty-five. And then I settled into my niche. Once I didn't have to research and write, I pretty much didn't. I was thirty-eight when my daughter was born; forty-four when that marriage ended. An active parent all the way through high school. I remarried, and ten years later divorced again. I had a lot going on.
During my productive period I was considered one of the rising young stars of the department. Colleagues assumed...it doesn't really matter what they assumed. I like the teaching. I enjoy my doctoral students. I have no complaints about my professional life.
At the moment Angie is one of my sharpest students. She's just starting to work on her dissertation.
She looks to be around my daughter's age.
She comes to my office not infrequently and we delve into her topic, the social construction of gender. Her eyes light up when I say there is no such thing as race, or when we talk about objective inquiry being crap.
“Right,” she'll say, “as if you could factor out personal values.”
But today her eyes are not alight. She looks at me, then shifts away, caught in some kind of internal struggle, and finally comes back again.
“I'm pregnant,” she says.
Evidently congratulations are not in order. “You think this will interfere with your dissertation?”
“Not exactly,” she says with a little shake of her head.
Before I can respond she blurts out, “Look, Dr. Feinstein, is it okay for me to be talking to you about this? I mean this is personal. It doesn't really have anything to do with my work.”
“Of course it's fine.”
Her eyes well up. “Neil is having an affair.”
When I was little, well before my teens, I would ask my father for a sip of his beer, which he cheerfully gave me. He took me into bars, not all the time but not infrequently. He'd have a couple of beers, I'd have a coke. Some bars had a kind of shuffle board-bowling game, where you would slide a metal disk and depending on the spot you hit a certain number of pins would snap up. Sometimes he would play with me. I remember the bars being dimly lit and smelling of beer and smoke. There would be a thin scattering of men, drinking alone or in twos or threes, sitting at tables or on barstools. There would be a lot of empty tables. Occasionally there would be a woman with one of the men. The bartender would be a tough looking middle-aged guy in shirtsleeves who, more often than not, would work his face into a grin when he served my coke and say something like, “There you go, son.”
I don't ever remember my father getting drunk when it was just him and me in a bar. It was usually in the afternoon, when we'd go out and drive around with the radio on. The times I remember him drunk were in the evening, sitting on the couch in front of the TV downing one beer after another, sometimes with a shot of whiskey, until he'd slide onto his back and start snoring.
Or during parties that got louder as the evening went on, the joking more raucous, my mother's shrill laughter. Sometimes as they got sloshed the men would start arguing politics, about red baiting, crossing picket lines, race relations, the Bay of Pigs, or still disputing whether the Rosenbergs were spies a decade after their execution. From my room I could pick out my father's voice, could tell from the tone and volume and ragged edges to his argument how drunk he was.
Or the nights when he had been out drinking with his buddies, or with his students, and would stagger into the house.
When I was fifteen a friend of my parents died of cancer. Her name was Rebecca and she was forty-three. I knew her, but not well. I didn't go to the funeral, I wasn't expected to go. When my parents got home my father was shitface. He was crying, barely coherent. He sat with me on the stairs, put his arm around me, tears streaming, and he kept saying, “Rebecca was the golden girl. The candy girl.”
Angie has not told her husband that she is pregnant. She has not told her parents. She hasn't told her friends because she fears it will get back to Neil.
She comes to talk to me about it.
She found out about the affair when she saw him from across the street, walking with another woman. They were holding hands. Later she confronted him. He admitted everything.
They quarreled. She threatened to leave him. He said he would stop seeing the other woman. He cried. She believed him. They reconciled. They weren't trying to get pregnant after that, it just happened.
And Neil hasn't stopped seeing the other woman.
“How do you know?” I ask her.
“He tells me.”
“At least he's honest.”
“Right. So honest that he lied through his fucking teeth when he got me to stay with him.”
Her face is drawn, her body rigid with tension. She is trying not to cry. I ask if she has been sleeping; she says not much. Is she eating, taking care of herself? She says she tries. Is she nauseous? No, not yet anyway.
If she were my daughter, what would I say? What would I do? But she is not my daughter.
Between Angie and me there is the width of my desk, and another several inches from the desk to her chair. Despite this she feels very close. I have an urge to get up, bridge the physical distance, and hold her. She is so alone with this. I don't do it.
Instead I ask if she has a therapist. She shakes her head no. I say it might be a good idea. She needs support, I'm not a trained counselor. She says, in a small voice, that she'll think about it.
A few years after I came to Ann Arbor, my father was here visiting me. At one point he made a phone call, something about getting picked up at the airport when he flew back to New York.
After he got off the phone he sat down with me at the kitchen table and told me that he was having a relationship with the woman he'd just called.
“I thought you might find it strange, my calling Joanne. Richard,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I thought it would be better to tell you the truth.”
I hadn't found it strange, him arranging for Joanne to fetch him at the airport.
He went on, “And, as you know, your mother is in a relationship with Sam.”
I didn't know that my mother was in a relationship with Sam.
I did at least know who Joanne was. My father's secretary at Columbia, where he taught psychology. And I certainly knew who Sam was. He had been Rebecca's husband.
An old friend used to talk about his default parameter, by which he meant the place his thoughts went when there was nothing else to occupy them. He was single. It was usually some woman. Now I find myself thinking about Angie all the time.
This special role she has given me, this confidence, it's stirring me up.
These intimate moments with her. These needs I might rather leave alone.
I try to talk myself back into a comfort zone. You're a father figure, I say. That's a role you know how to manage. Or: You're her dissertation advisor, for christ sake. This is a professional relationship.
The problem is it doesn't feel like a professional relationship at the moment. The problem is I don't feel like a father figure. The problem is I enjoy the intimacy. Too much. The problem is, this is touching something that has been missing from my life for years.
* * *
Here are the reasons why I shouldn't even think about getting involved with Angie:
I'm more than twice her age.
She's young enough to be my daughter.
She might actually be younger than my daughter.
I don't want to make myself ridiculous.
I hardly have any libido left.
She's married.
She's pregnant.
I hardly know her.
I'm romanticizing her pain.
I'm her advisor, it would be an abuse of power.
She's in a highly vulnerable state.
I don't have the emotional skills to manage an intimate relationship.
It will end badly and we'll both get hurt.
I don't want to be like Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
I don't want to be like my father.
“I don't want to abort,” she says. “That much is clear.”
Her hair is loose today, flowing across her shoulders and down her back. It's the first time I've seen her not wearing it tied back. It's thick, wavy, very becoming. Really quite beautiful. You don't get any sense of this when she pulls it into that tight, drab ponytail.
“So you want to be a mom?”
“You know – actually I do.”
“You sound surprised.”
“It's just...that's not what I was thinking.”
“Your reason for not wanting an abortion?”
She gives a little shake of her head. Then she's quiet, pensive. I wait. I am content to feel her presence with me, here in my office. I breathe in and out.
She looks up and says, softly, “Abortion is complicated. Isn't it?”
“Yes, I know. So is having a baby.”
“There's so much he's already taken away from me.”
I ask if she means Neil. She nods.
I tell myself, at my age intimacy has nothing to do with sex. I'm not all that attracted to her physically. I'm attracted to her emotionally. I feel like a young man when I'm with her. It's connection I want, deep friendship.
Besides, I could satisfy her...in other ways.
I was back home for a short visit with my parents. It must have been in the early eighties because my father was still teaching. I was in the living room watching TV with my mother when the phone rang. She picked it up and there was a brief exchange. She said Jake was out. She said she'd give him the message. Nothing out of the ordinary.
After she hung up she looked at me and ran a hand through her hair. “Your father. She's his student. He's having an affair with her.” My mother was pretty sloshed, which was par for the course by that time in the evening. There was an edge and a pitch to her voice which, from almost 40 years of observation, I recognized as ironclad indicators of her alcohol consumption. She didn't exactly slur. She emoted. She flailed.
Sitting next to the phone that evening, she lifted her shoulders and let them drop in an exaggerated shrug. “Joanne doesn't know.”
It could have been a French melodrama, or a parody of one. The sixty-something husband cheating on his mistress. The drunk wife, who has her own longstanding lover, watching it unfold with a resigned sigh. The academic son, trained to analyze the sociology of marriage and infidelity.
The next day my father and I were in his car and I told him that I knew about the affair. I explained how I'd found out from Mom. I said I thought he should know that I knew. He nodded and said, evenly, “It's really more of a friendship by now. We're good friends.”
I took my father at face value. He wasn't denying the affair, just saying that it had morphed. He seemed to imply that they had stopped having sex. I didn't press him. He had no reason to lie about it. And I didn't really need to know the details.
I had actually met his student the year before. Her name was Rosie. It was at a demonstration in Washington, to do with Central America. She and her daughter had come down on the bus with my father and a bunch of other Columbia faculty and students. I had driven from Ann Arbor with some friends. Rosie looked to be about my age, with long frizzy brown hair, a pleasant smile, a gentle way with her daughter. I didn't think anything of her having some kind of connection with my father. He'd always been friendly with his students.
In the car with my father, neither of us mentioned Joanne.
Years later, after my father died, I called Rosie to let her know. I'd found her number in my father's Rolodex. She was shocked, of course. She cried a little, then pulled herself together. She thanked me. Then she said, “Your father was always very sensitive to Joanne's feelings.”
“Richard,” Angela says. “All I do is talk about myself.” Her hair is back in a ponytail. If I'm honest with myself, I'll admit I'm disappointed. “I'm not usually this self-centered.”
“You're in a crisis.”
“Tell me about you.”
I feel as if my life has become one long conversation with Angela, interrupted and resumed, interrupted and resumed. Now it is taking a new turn and I'm not sure what to say. I look at her, eyes alert, forcing some of her old animation back into her face. Something inside me is melting.
“You know all about me,” she says. “I don't know anything about you.”
“To the contrary. You know...”
“Yes, I know your books and your articles. I know you're a brilliant sociologist. I mean you as a person.”
“All right,” I say. “I'm divorced, as a person. I have a daughter.”
After my second divorce, I resigned from intimate relationships.
I had been in therapy for the better part of a decade. My wife and I had been in couples counseling, off and on, for the last five years. It was not for lack of trying that the marriage failed.
Then what? I was sixty-one years old. Two marriages had imploded. Before that was the usual detritus of relationships which, for varying reasons, had not lasted. Or were the reasons actually so varied?
What if the reason was, simply, me? Something fundamental about me that I could not fix, that could not reach a negotiated solution with any partner of my choosing.
At my father's funeral service, I spoke about unfinished business. Afterward a middle-aged woman came up and introduced herself as Maria something. She was blond, plain looking, a little overweight. She said she had been a student of my father's, had known him for 20 years. She said they had been close. After a brief pause, she said, “We were very close.”
If I ever wanted to talk, she said, she might be able to tell me things about my father that I didn't know, that I didn't understand. She thought this might help with my unfinished business. She handed me her card.
Then she looked at me and said with clear, firm conviction, “Your father was always very sensitive to Joanne's feelings.”
My head jerked down, as if I had been hit from behind. I mumbled something and walked away. I didn't want to be in the same galaxy as that woman.
There were a lot of people milling around, and I was the dead man's son. I needed to avoid them all. I walked decisively toward the men's room. I struggled, without success, to clutch at the veil that had been ripped from my eyes.
It was not just Joanne and Rosie my father had slept with, his mistress and a single indiscretion. How many others? How many nights when he was out late drinking had he been fucking some student? How many of them had he comforted with the utter fantasy that he was being sensitive to his mistress's feelings?
And then there was Rebecca, who he sobbed for. Who, in a drunken stupor, he called the candy girl. Obviously Rebecca. But it had never occurred to me, like so many other things about my father that would have been obvious to someone with even a shred of willingness to face the truth.
The woman's card was still in my hand. I looked at it. Maria something, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist. Individual, group, and family therapy. I shuddered at the thought of her being anyone's therapist. I ripped the card into tiny pieces and let them scatter like ashes on the men's room floor.
“I went to see a therapist.” Angela's face is flat, I can't read it. “At the Health Center.”
“Good. I'm glad.”
“A woman. A clinical social worker.”
“I think it's good that you're seeing a woman. I mean as opposed to a man. Under the circumstances.”
“I thought so too.”
“How did it go?”
“I told her I feel physically assaulted by what Neil is doing. And she said to me, 'What meaning do you make of that?'”
I feel this in my stomach. Now I'm reading Angela's face, too clearly. “Oh shit,” I say.
“Yeah. Shit.”
“I'm so sorry, Angela.”
She nods, does not speak.
“I feel responsible for this.”
Her eyes flash. “Why?”
“I encouraged you to see a therapist.”
“It's not your fault.”
“You're not going back?”
“No.”
She is quiet again, her gaze off somewhere. Then she comes back, and her face softens. “Thanks for caring, Richard. It means a lot to me.”
Anomie, the state of normlessness, was a concept popularized by the great Emile Durkheim. Kissing cousin of Marx's alienation.
But not the same. I have knowingly lived with various kinds of alienation for most of my life – from others, from nature, from myself. It's endemic to advanced industrial society. You may be lucky enough to escape alienation in some compartments of your life: a good job; true connection with a partner (as long as that lasts); a good relationship with your child. But in my view, in our society, no one lives a fully connected life.
Yet I have believed in the capacity, in my capacity, to live with integrity. Which can only happen with values, surely implying norms, however defined. I went through two awful marriages and I never had an affair. I came out the other end of my first divorce and I remained a primary parent to my daughter. I treat my students with respect, which matters to me, and I hope to them, despite and because of the power imbalance in our positions. These things are possible. They have been my lived reality.
I have never had an improper personal relationship with a student. Until now. And now?
A week passes, two weeks. Three. She still has not told Neil.
How much longer until she starts showing? A month? Six weeks? The point is this can't go on. I think she might as well tell him now. This stuck place she is in, this indecision, is just prolonging her misery.
I hear those words in my head, so trite they must be beneath my dignity even to think them. I do know it is not that simple. But for Angela it really does come down to something like that, doesn't it? Something has to give.
I think this but I don't say it to her. I listen, I commiserate. I tell myself it is not my place to give advice. That makes good sense to me, but of course I also have an ulterior motive. How to tell where the one stops and the other begins?
When I am not with Angela, during the interruptions in our long conversation, I find myself more and more unhappy.
My obsession with her is reason enough for unhappiness, this yearning for something I know is impossible. The attraction is a portal to the banal things a person my age, any age, would rather not face – emptiness, aching, loss.
Four years since my last divorce. Before that, a half dozen years of being wretchedly connected to my second wife. That nicely sums up my last decade. The truth is I'm a lonely old man.
All right, I tell myself, let's do an accounting. What's on the other side of the ledger? I've been a pretty good parent. I have a reasonably close relationship with my daughter, at a distance of two thousand plus miles. That counts for something – for a lot. We talk on the phone every week or two. She calls me, and her mother, when she needs support. She comes home for Thanksgiving. In the summer I take the train out to Oregon to spend a week, if that works for her.
It's the best thing I've ever done, my parenting. It's sweet, and it's deep, and it's intimate in its own way. But it has nothing to do with what I feel for Angela, with what I yearn for and don't have in my life. It exists on a different plane. Parenting is not, has never been about meeting my primary needs: to be held, to be embraced and cherished for who I am, to be put first as much and with the same intensity as I put the other person first. My daughter came first, always. And when she was ready, I knew how to let go.
I find myself wishing I had met Angela, her equivalent, thirty years ago. Then I have to admit that I did. Thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago. Fifteen years ago, my second wife. Women who were every bit as interesting as Angela, every bit as smart and engaging, who had stories that gripped me and that, more often than not, circled around a core of pain that latched onto my own and pulled me in. I tick off the names, the faces, the way each relationship fell apart.
I settle, not on either of my ex-wives with all their baggage (to say nothing of mine), but on Andrea Katz, my lover during graduate school. She had one of the most fluent minds I've ever known. I loved talking sociology with her, or politics, or really anything. The sex was good, comfortable, easy. She was pleasant looking though not the least bit beautiful, on the heavy side, and I honestly didn't care. We got along incredibly well. I was in my mid-twenties and she was the first woman I had ever felt completely at home with. I told friends my life had become placid. The truth is I loved her, though, amazingly, I don't think I ever told her.
After two years of being really happy with Andrea, I fell in love with someone else. A woman who was not at all intellectual; who was, yes, physically very beautiful; who was deeply wounded; who evoked a depth of passion I didn't know I had in me. There was a lot of melodrama, naturally. Both relationships went to hell. A year later I moved to Ann Arbor.
Now it's forty years later, and wandering through these empty spaces, I miss Andrea. Passion ends up being so much smoke, though of course in the moment no one feels that way. I tell myself that of all my efforts at intimacy, all the failures, she is the one I could have spent my life with. But that obviously isn't true. I made my choices. If I had been capable of being her life partner, I would still be with her. Wouldn't I? I'd have had to be a different person.
Angela asks if I'd like to have dinner with her. It is late afternoon, our usual time. But this is new.
I say yes.
Of course I say yes. When I am with her - I'm alive. I feel our connection, palpably, a physical presence in my body and, I believe, in hers. No, not necessarily sexual. But surely not just an idea. All the things I understand when I am not with her, my analysis of what this really means, my repetitive lecture to myself about why this is impossible – it drifts away like smoke, and I am, simply, with her.
We walk quietly across the campus. It's early April, the air is crisp, there is a chatter of birds. The usual array of students pass by us; occasionally, someone older. There is nothing out of the ordinary about an aging professor strolling here with a graduate student near the end of the day. We might have just finished a dissertation meeting. We might be heading toward our respective homes. Once we leave the campus green and walk down State Street, we could be father and daughter.
We choose a Thai restaurant. Angela says she has been here and the food is good. The place is mostly empty. We are seated, study our menus. She recommends one of the curries and I order it.
We talk about ordinary things, the impending end of semester; my summer plans. Angie asks why I take the train to Oregon rather than fly. Because of the carbon footprint, I tell her. Besides, crossing the West by train is breathtaking; the immense spaces, the passes through the mountains. We talk about the West, where she has been, and when, and with whom. Other places of staggering beauty each of us has known. I am careful not to ask about her plans for the summer, for obvious reasons.
The food comes. We comment on how good it is. We eat quietly. She looks at me from across the table and her eyes are soft, despite the circles beneath them, the lines of tension across her forehead, which I think will not quickly fade. She smiles, a little, and then returns to her meal. Her hair is down. There are fifty things I could say, and I don't.
Finally she tells me, “I've decided. I'm going to talk to Neil.”
“Yes?”
“I'm going to tell him.”
“That's good,” I say. “I've been thinking you should.”
“I can't keep it from him much longer.”
“Exactly.”
It's better she came to this on her own. That of course is what one part of me thinks. The Advisor part, the appropriate older adult. The part of me that is not descending into a state of anomie. But what do I feel? Jesus, Richard.
“What are you hoping will happen?” I am trying to sound calm and measured and – what? Paternal? All right, supportive.
“I don't even know. I have to see how he reacts.”
I nod. She does not say anything else.
I could ask her to my place. This would be the moment. There may not be another one. Ask her to my place for what? As what? As a friend. Isn't that possible? Isn't that what we have become over this last bittersweet month? Does she have the slightest idea how bittersweet for me? Does she consider what my feelings must be for her? What this must be like for a man who is sixty-five and has gone through two divorces and has a grown daughter her age? Or does she just take my support for granted as – I don't know, going with the older man territory? The doctoral advisor territory? Some perception of Richard as a selflessly good guy? Or just a good guy with appropriate boundaries.
But what makes a friendship inappropriate? A simple connection between two human beings?
A simple connection. Whatever else this is, it is surely not simple. Not for me.
The moment passes. I let it go. I breathe, and let it out, and feel tears rising, and fight them off.
Maybe she senses something, maybe my breath came out as an audible sigh, or maybe she is moved by something else entirely. Regardless: she deliberately puts down her fork and covers the top of my hand with hers. “Richard,” she says. “Thank you so so much for everything you've done for me. I don't know how I could possibly have gotten through this without you.”
This is the first time we have touched. You'd think it would be electric – but it is not. It is only the contact of skin on skin, not really that much different than a handshake, except that my palm is down on the table, and I know very well there is a different social significance to a woman's hand covering a man's in this way. I know it, but I don't feel it. She squeezes, once, and lets go. I look up and see she is crying.
The next day is Friday and Angie does not come to my office. Unusual, but not extraordinary. Then the weekend, when we never see each other. On Monday she again does not come. By now I know. Tuesday confirms it.
I am glad for her. This has to be what she wanted, not to be a single parent. Who would?
Near the end of April, it is late afternoon when a man appears in the doorway of my office. I don't know him. He is a thin middle-aged guy with short salt-and-pepper hair and a beard, mostly white, trimmed so close it's hardly more than stubble. His eyes are alert and seem tense. He is smiling with half of his face. The door is open but he knocks anyway.
“Come in,” I say, curious.
He takes a few short steps and plants himself about half way between the door and my desk, a little to my left. “Dr. Feinstein?”
“Yes. Richard Feinstein.”
“Neil Jacobs. I'm with the English department.”
Neil. Angie never told me he is on the faculty. As if that matters. But it does to him, apparently. He presents himself to me as a colleague. What am I to him? Why the hell is he here? Everything about him seems off key – the knock on the open door, where he is standing, the way he holds his body, the stubbly beard, the cockeyed grin, the intensity of his eyes, the timbre of his voice.
I realize he has been talking, only because he just stopped. I have no idea what he said. “Have a seat.” I gesture toward the chair in front of my desk. Angela's chair. “Please.”
“Nah. I don't, ya know, want to take up your time. I just came to, ya know, thank you, Dr. Feinstein. Richard. For everything you did. Ya know, for Angie, all the support. I don't, ya know, know what she'd of done without you.”
I nod. I try to smile. I should say something gracious but can't manage to. This man teaches English?
He looks at his feet. Then he raises his head. He gives a little cough. “It's, ya know, not even that. Look, Richard. You saved my goddamn marriage. I don't know how to thank you.”
“Really, Neil, I...”
“Nah, you don't have to say it. I know what you're thinking. This guy's an asshole. He doesn't deserve Angie. And you're right, I am an asshole. I don't deserve her. But, ya know, I'm gonna be a dad. At my age, for Christ's sake. Listen, Richard, I've started seeing a therapist. I'm gonna change this time. I'm gonna turn this thing around.”
I nod again. I don't bother trying to find something to say. This man did not come here to listen to me. I am grateful he did not sit down.
He extends his hand. He doesn't move. He is too far away for me to reach from where I sit. He wants me to come to him. I can hardly refuse the proffered handshake. It is a social norm.
With considerable effort I lift myself out of my chair. I walk up to him. He envelopes my hand with both of his and pumps vigorously, looking me in the eye. Then he lets go. But before I can step back he slides his arms around my shoulders and captures me in a hug.
I dream that my father is teaching his class. The lecture hall is packed.
There is a podium but my father doesn't use it. Instead he places himself in front of the podium, closer to his students. He paces, he gestures as he speaks. His face is animated. His hair is snow white, but he is not impaired by age. His voice is strong. He is impeccably dressed, as always, in a dark gray wool pinstripe suit, the pants crisply pressed, a blue Oxford shirt, and a black silk tie with a Windsor knot.
“Semantic psychopathology,” my father says. “The sickness of words. Or you could say, corn without fear. Why did the chicken cross the road? To make a fast buck buck buck buck.”
The class roars.
He pauses for the laughter to subside. Then he waits a little longer, not because he is unsure of what comes next, but for dramatic effect. You can see this in his face, the self-assurance, the lingering grin, the twinkle in his eyes. The seasoned lecturer.
“My son Richard,” he says, “would scoff at the idea of sick words. To him, the question of meaning is always sociological first, psychological only secondary to social meaning. Which is what you would expect from a brilliant sociologist.”
I'm sitting in the middle of the hall, one face out of hundreds. Does he know I'm here? It seems beside the point for reasons I cannot discern. On my left there is a young woman with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Her face is familiar but I don't know why. I lean toward her and whisper, “It's about social norms. The sickness or wellness of language is socially constructed.”
She nods.
“Consider a woman who takes off her dress,” I go on. “All she has on is a skimpy bikini. If she's at work, she gets in a lot of trouble. If she's at a party, people gasp, get excited or say she's being provocative. If she's at the beach, or even in a public park, it's normal behavior.”
I expect the young woman to object that this is behavior, not words. I'm ready with my rejoinder. Instead she says, “But isn't that obvious? What makes it brilliant? And what about drinking beer during a lecture?”
I look up and my father is holding a beer bottle in his right hand. With his left hand he makes a sweeping gesture. He takes a long swig of the beer, smacks his lips, lets out a satisfied “Ah,” and chugs some more. He puts the empty bottle down and picks up another. He twists off the cap and drinks. Now there is a shot glass in his left hand. He downs the shot. He paces, weaving in front of the podium, not quite staggering.
No one seems upset by his behavior. Not even the woman next to me, who must have brought up my father's drinking as a rhetorical point.
“Can sick words be the product of a healthy mind?” my father asks. “Or, conversely, can healthy words be the product of a sick mind? Or is there a consonance, a wholeness of mind and language? A synthesis of psychology and sociology?”
Now the blond woman leans toward me, her shoulder brushes mine and she whispers, “Dr. Feinstein was always very sensitive to Angela's feelings.” She hands me a card.
Martina Navraswaboda-Jacobson, Ph.D.
Sports Psychologist
All Contact Sports, Individual and Group
Video Games
Finger Lickin' Good
From my seat in the middle of the lecture hall I see my father, unsteady on his feet, an elegant, inebriated older man, raising the beer bottle to his lips. Now, from a far corner of the hall, I see the side of his face, the hollow spot on his cheek, a tiny curve to his nose. Now, from front row center, a few feet away, I can see his old acne scars, the neat trim of his mustache.
Finally my father notices me. His eyes go wide, he beams. “Richard,” he says. He puts the bottle down. He extends his hand.
I am standing next to him. I can smell the beer on his breath, the hint of whiskey. I shake his hand. His grip is firm, warm.
He lets my hand go. Then he kneels like a camel. My mother used to say, “Jake has camel kidneys.” But this is not about holding his urine. I know why he is kneeling, without him having to say it.
It seems the most natural thing in the world, to climb up onto my father's shoulders. Here I am, my legs dangling over his chest and down to his waist. I rest my hands on his head. I am mussing his picturesque white hair, but he doesn't seem to mind. He rises, steadily, effortlessly, and hoists me up into the air.
When I was little I would sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch him shave. Then he would brush his hair, intent, efficient, parting it with one decisive stroke into a perfect straight line. To this day I think of my father when I brush my hair in the morning, trying and usually failing to do it as well as he did.
In his sixties and seventies he was almost picturesquely handsome, the distinguished older man. Trim, impeccably dressed, mustache neatly groomed, eyes alert, snow-white hair now brushed straight back. This despite half a century of alcohol abuse, which didn't seem to take the slightest toll on him physically, though in the end it may have helped to kill him. He died at 79 from a tumor that ballooned to the size of a soccer ball, so fast and so devastating that they were never even able to poke around to see what exactly was going on. After he died his doctor said it could have been his liver, spleen or kidney. I figured liver.
Picturesquely handsome. There was another word, I think a better one, but now it escapes me.
My first marriage was in the throes of breaking up as my father went into his rapid decline. I was staying somewhere temporary, scrambling to find an apartment in Ann Arbor. My daughter was six, a very tender age. I was going back every day to spend my usual times with her, giving her breakfast, putting her to bed, keeping her life's routines undisturbed by her parents' turmoil. I felt, with reason, it was the most important thing I could do. I was overwhelmed.
My father thought he was having a problem with his back. Even when he was hospitalized I couldn't take in the magnitude of what was happening; even when they found the mass. I finally made it to New York, to his bedside; it was late in the evening, he was asleep, running a fever. I sat with him for fifteen minutes. I planned to come back first thing in the morning, for rounds, to talk to his doctor. The next morning he was dead.
In my dream I'm sitting on the toilet and my father comes into the bathroom, wearing a white terrycloth robe. He didn't knock but I don't mind. I'm my adult self and he is old, white haired but in good shape. The bathroom is small and I assume he is going to get into the shower but instead he sits on the edge of the tub, inches away, and watches me as I finish shitting.
I'm grading papers, honestly a little bored with them, when Angela Hartman knocks on my open door. She waits in the doorway, smiling but something about her seems off. I wave her in and she drops herself, heavily I think, into the chair in front of my desk.
It's not a physical heaviness, something else. She's slim, athletic, dark hair tied in a ponytail that reaches half way down her back. Her face is plain but suddenly becomes animated, almost beautiful when she starts talking sociology.
“I'm disturbing you.”
“Not at all.” I wait, and when she doesn't say anything I ask, “Angie, is something the matter?”
She looks over my right shoulder. There is a small window behind me. The late afternoon sunlight is muted. The view is pleasant enough, a few trees and a campus lawn, but I'm not sure she is even aware of it. Then her eyes shift toward me and she says, simply, “Yes.”
I teach sociology at the University of Michigan. In 1972 I arrived here with a Ph.D. from Harvard. I published four books in eight years, the usual array of journal articles. I did a highly regarded study of inmate culture at Jackson State Prison. Made full professor at thirty-five. And then I settled into my niche. Once I didn't have to research and write, I pretty much didn't. I was thirty-eight when my daughter was born; forty-four when that marriage ended. An active parent all the way through high school. I remarried, and ten years later divorced again. I had a lot going on.
During my productive period I was considered one of the rising young stars of the department. Colleagues assumed...it doesn't really matter what they assumed. I like the teaching. I enjoy my doctoral students. I have no complaints about my professional life.
At the moment Angie is one of my sharpest students. She's just starting to work on her dissertation.
She looks to be around my daughter's age.
She comes to my office not infrequently and we delve into her topic, the social construction of gender. Her eyes light up when I say there is no such thing as race, or when we talk about objective inquiry being crap.
“Right,” she'll say, “as if you could factor out personal values.”
But today her eyes are not alight. She looks at me, then shifts away, caught in some kind of internal struggle, and finally comes back again.
“I'm pregnant,” she says.
Evidently congratulations are not in order. “You think this will interfere with your dissertation?”
“Not exactly,” she says with a little shake of her head.
Before I can respond she blurts out, “Look, Dr. Feinstein, is it okay for me to be talking to you about this? I mean this is personal. It doesn't really have anything to do with my work.”
“Of course it's fine.”
Her eyes well up. “Neil is having an affair.”
When I was little, well before my teens, I would ask my father for a sip of his beer, which he cheerfully gave me. He took me into bars, not all the time but not infrequently. He'd have a couple of beers, I'd have a coke. Some bars had a kind of shuffle board-bowling game, where you would slide a metal disk and depending on the spot you hit a certain number of pins would snap up. Sometimes he would play with me. I remember the bars being dimly lit and smelling of beer and smoke. There would be a thin scattering of men, drinking alone or in twos or threes, sitting at tables or on barstools. There would be a lot of empty tables. Occasionally there would be a woman with one of the men. The bartender would be a tough looking middle-aged guy in shirtsleeves who, more often than not, would work his face into a grin when he served my coke and say something like, “There you go, son.”
I don't ever remember my father getting drunk when it was just him and me in a bar. It was usually in the afternoon, when we'd go out and drive around with the radio on. The times I remember him drunk were in the evening, sitting on the couch in front of the TV downing one beer after another, sometimes with a shot of whiskey, until he'd slide onto his back and start snoring.
Or during parties that got louder as the evening went on, the joking more raucous, my mother's shrill laughter. Sometimes as they got sloshed the men would start arguing politics, about red baiting, crossing picket lines, race relations, the Bay of Pigs, or still disputing whether the Rosenbergs were spies a decade after their execution. From my room I could pick out my father's voice, could tell from the tone and volume and ragged edges to his argument how drunk he was.
Or the nights when he had been out drinking with his buddies, or with his students, and would stagger into the house.
When I was fifteen a friend of my parents died of cancer. Her name was Rebecca and she was forty-three. I knew her, but not well. I didn't go to the funeral, I wasn't expected to go. When my parents got home my father was shitface. He was crying, barely coherent. He sat with me on the stairs, put his arm around me, tears streaming, and he kept saying, “Rebecca was the golden girl. The candy girl.”
Angie has not told her husband that she is pregnant. She has not told her parents. She hasn't told her friends because she fears it will get back to Neil.
She comes to talk to me about it.
She found out about the affair when she saw him from across the street, walking with another woman. They were holding hands. Later she confronted him. He admitted everything.
They quarreled. She threatened to leave him. He said he would stop seeing the other woman. He cried. She believed him. They reconciled. They weren't trying to get pregnant after that, it just happened.
And Neil hasn't stopped seeing the other woman.
“How do you know?” I ask her.
“He tells me.”
“At least he's honest.”
“Right. So honest that he lied through his fucking teeth when he got me to stay with him.”
Her face is drawn, her body rigid with tension. She is trying not to cry. I ask if she has been sleeping; she says not much. Is she eating, taking care of herself? She says she tries. Is she nauseous? No, not yet anyway.
If she were my daughter, what would I say? What would I do? But she is not my daughter.
Between Angie and me there is the width of my desk, and another several inches from the desk to her chair. Despite this she feels very close. I have an urge to get up, bridge the physical distance, and hold her. She is so alone with this. I don't do it.
Instead I ask if she has a therapist. She shakes her head no. I say it might be a good idea. She needs support, I'm not a trained counselor. She says, in a small voice, that she'll think about it.
A few years after I came to Ann Arbor, my father was here visiting me. At one point he made a phone call, something about getting picked up at the airport when he flew back to New York.
After he got off the phone he sat down with me at the kitchen table and told me that he was having a relationship with the woman he'd just called.
“I thought you might find it strange, my calling Joanne. Richard,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I thought it would be better to tell you the truth.”
I hadn't found it strange, him arranging for Joanne to fetch him at the airport.
He went on, “And, as you know, your mother is in a relationship with Sam.”
I didn't know that my mother was in a relationship with Sam.
I did at least know who Joanne was. My father's secretary at Columbia, where he taught psychology. And I certainly knew who Sam was. He had been Rebecca's husband.
An old friend used to talk about his default parameter, by which he meant the place his thoughts went when there was nothing else to occupy them. He was single. It was usually some woman. Now I find myself thinking about Angie all the time.
This special role she has given me, this confidence, it's stirring me up.
These intimate moments with her. These needs I might rather leave alone.
I try to talk myself back into a comfort zone. You're a father figure, I say. That's a role you know how to manage. Or: You're her dissertation advisor, for christ sake. This is a professional relationship.
The problem is it doesn't feel like a professional relationship at the moment. The problem is I don't feel like a father figure. The problem is I enjoy the intimacy. Too much. The problem is, this is touching something that has been missing from my life for years.
* * *
Here are the reasons why I shouldn't even think about getting involved with Angie:
I'm more than twice her age.
She's young enough to be my daughter.
She might actually be younger than my daughter.
I don't want to make myself ridiculous.
I hardly have any libido left.
She's married.
She's pregnant.
I hardly know her.
I'm romanticizing her pain.
I'm her advisor, it would be an abuse of power.
She's in a highly vulnerable state.
I don't have the emotional skills to manage an intimate relationship.
It will end badly and we'll both get hurt.
I don't want to be like Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
I don't want to be like my father.
“I don't want to abort,” she says. “That much is clear.”
Her hair is loose today, flowing across her shoulders and down her back. It's the first time I've seen her not wearing it tied back. It's thick, wavy, very becoming. Really quite beautiful. You don't get any sense of this when she pulls it into that tight, drab ponytail.
“So you want to be a mom?”
“You know – actually I do.”
“You sound surprised.”
“It's just...that's not what I was thinking.”
“Your reason for not wanting an abortion?”
She gives a little shake of her head. Then she's quiet, pensive. I wait. I am content to feel her presence with me, here in my office. I breathe in and out.
She looks up and says, softly, “Abortion is complicated. Isn't it?”
“Yes, I know. So is having a baby.”
“There's so much he's already taken away from me.”
I ask if she means Neil. She nods.
I tell myself, at my age intimacy has nothing to do with sex. I'm not all that attracted to her physically. I'm attracted to her emotionally. I feel like a young man when I'm with her. It's connection I want, deep friendship.
Besides, I could satisfy her...in other ways.
I was back home for a short visit with my parents. It must have been in the early eighties because my father was still teaching. I was in the living room watching TV with my mother when the phone rang. She picked it up and there was a brief exchange. She said Jake was out. She said she'd give him the message. Nothing out of the ordinary.
After she hung up she looked at me and ran a hand through her hair. “Your father. She's his student. He's having an affair with her.” My mother was pretty sloshed, which was par for the course by that time in the evening. There was an edge and a pitch to her voice which, from almost 40 years of observation, I recognized as ironclad indicators of her alcohol consumption. She didn't exactly slur. She emoted. She flailed.
Sitting next to the phone that evening, she lifted her shoulders and let them drop in an exaggerated shrug. “Joanne doesn't know.”
It could have been a French melodrama, or a parody of one. The sixty-something husband cheating on his mistress. The drunk wife, who has her own longstanding lover, watching it unfold with a resigned sigh. The academic son, trained to analyze the sociology of marriage and infidelity.
The next day my father and I were in his car and I told him that I knew about the affair. I explained how I'd found out from Mom. I said I thought he should know that I knew. He nodded and said, evenly, “It's really more of a friendship by now. We're good friends.”
I took my father at face value. He wasn't denying the affair, just saying that it had morphed. He seemed to imply that they had stopped having sex. I didn't press him. He had no reason to lie about it. And I didn't really need to know the details.
I had actually met his student the year before. Her name was Rosie. It was at a demonstration in Washington, to do with Central America. She and her daughter had come down on the bus with my father and a bunch of other Columbia faculty and students. I had driven from Ann Arbor with some friends. Rosie looked to be about my age, with long frizzy brown hair, a pleasant smile, a gentle way with her daughter. I didn't think anything of her having some kind of connection with my father. He'd always been friendly with his students.
In the car with my father, neither of us mentioned Joanne.
Years later, after my father died, I called Rosie to let her know. I'd found her number in my father's Rolodex. She was shocked, of course. She cried a little, then pulled herself together. She thanked me. Then she said, “Your father was always very sensitive to Joanne's feelings.”
“Richard,” Angela says. “All I do is talk about myself.” Her hair is back in a ponytail. If I'm honest with myself, I'll admit I'm disappointed. “I'm not usually this self-centered.”
“You're in a crisis.”
“Tell me about you.”
I feel as if my life has become one long conversation with Angela, interrupted and resumed, interrupted and resumed. Now it is taking a new turn and I'm not sure what to say. I look at her, eyes alert, forcing some of her old animation back into her face. Something inside me is melting.
“You know all about me,” she says. “I don't know anything about you.”
“To the contrary. You know...”
“Yes, I know your books and your articles. I know you're a brilliant sociologist. I mean you as a person.”
“All right,” I say. “I'm divorced, as a person. I have a daughter.”
After my second divorce, I resigned from intimate relationships.
I had been in therapy for the better part of a decade. My wife and I had been in couples counseling, off and on, for the last five years. It was not for lack of trying that the marriage failed.
Then what? I was sixty-one years old. Two marriages had imploded. Before that was the usual detritus of relationships which, for varying reasons, had not lasted. Or were the reasons actually so varied?
What if the reason was, simply, me? Something fundamental about me that I could not fix, that could not reach a negotiated solution with any partner of my choosing.
At my father's funeral service, I spoke about unfinished business. Afterward a middle-aged woman came up and introduced herself as Maria something. She was blond, plain looking, a little overweight. She said she had been a student of my father's, had known him for 20 years. She said they had been close. After a brief pause, she said, “We were very close.”
If I ever wanted to talk, she said, she might be able to tell me things about my father that I didn't know, that I didn't understand. She thought this might help with my unfinished business. She handed me her card.
Then she looked at me and said with clear, firm conviction, “Your father was always very sensitive to Joanne's feelings.”
My head jerked down, as if I had been hit from behind. I mumbled something and walked away. I didn't want to be in the same galaxy as that woman.
There were a lot of people milling around, and I was the dead man's son. I needed to avoid them all. I walked decisively toward the men's room. I struggled, without success, to clutch at the veil that had been ripped from my eyes.
It was not just Joanne and Rosie my father had slept with, his mistress and a single indiscretion. How many others? How many nights when he was out late drinking had he been fucking some student? How many of them had he comforted with the utter fantasy that he was being sensitive to his mistress's feelings?
And then there was Rebecca, who he sobbed for. Who, in a drunken stupor, he called the candy girl. Obviously Rebecca. But it had never occurred to me, like so many other things about my father that would have been obvious to someone with even a shred of willingness to face the truth.
The woman's card was still in my hand. I looked at it. Maria something, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist. Individual, group, and family therapy. I shuddered at the thought of her being anyone's therapist. I ripped the card into tiny pieces and let them scatter like ashes on the men's room floor.
“I went to see a therapist.” Angela's face is flat, I can't read it. “At the Health Center.”
“Good. I'm glad.”
“A woman. A clinical social worker.”
“I think it's good that you're seeing a woman. I mean as opposed to a man. Under the circumstances.”
“I thought so too.”
“How did it go?”
“I told her I feel physically assaulted by what Neil is doing. And she said to me, 'What meaning do you make of that?'”
I feel this in my stomach. Now I'm reading Angela's face, too clearly. “Oh shit,” I say.
“Yeah. Shit.”
“I'm so sorry, Angela.”
She nods, does not speak.
“I feel responsible for this.”
Her eyes flash. “Why?”
“I encouraged you to see a therapist.”
“It's not your fault.”
“You're not going back?”
“No.”
She is quiet again, her gaze off somewhere. Then she comes back, and her face softens. “Thanks for caring, Richard. It means a lot to me.”
Anomie, the state of normlessness, was a concept popularized by the great Emile Durkheim. Kissing cousin of Marx's alienation.
But not the same. I have knowingly lived with various kinds of alienation for most of my life – from others, from nature, from myself. It's endemic to advanced industrial society. You may be lucky enough to escape alienation in some compartments of your life: a good job; true connection with a partner (as long as that lasts); a good relationship with your child. But in my view, in our society, no one lives a fully connected life.
Yet I have believed in the capacity, in my capacity, to live with integrity. Which can only happen with values, surely implying norms, however defined. I went through two awful marriages and I never had an affair. I came out the other end of my first divorce and I remained a primary parent to my daughter. I treat my students with respect, which matters to me, and I hope to them, despite and because of the power imbalance in our positions. These things are possible. They have been my lived reality.
I have never had an improper personal relationship with a student. Until now. And now?
A week passes, two weeks. Three. She still has not told Neil.
How much longer until she starts showing? A month? Six weeks? The point is this can't go on. I think she might as well tell him now. This stuck place she is in, this indecision, is just prolonging her misery.
I hear those words in my head, so trite they must be beneath my dignity even to think them. I do know it is not that simple. But for Angela it really does come down to something like that, doesn't it? Something has to give.
I think this but I don't say it to her. I listen, I commiserate. I tell myself it is not my place to give advice. That makes good sense to me, but of course I also have an ulterior motive. How to tell where the one stops and the other begins?
When I am not with Angela, during the interruptions in our long conversation, I find myself more and more unhappy.
My obsession with her is reason enough for unhappiness, this yearning for something I know is impossible. The attraction is a portal to the banal things a person my age, any age, would rather not face – emptiness, aching, loss.
Four years since my last divorce. Before that, a half dozen years of being wretchedly connected to my second wife. That nicely sums up my last decade. The truth is I'm a lonely old man.
All right, I tell myself, let's do an accounting. What's on the other side of the ledger? I've been a pretty good parent. I have a reasonably close relationship with my daughter, at a distance of two thousand plus miles. That counts for something – for a lot. We talk on the phone every week or two. She calls me, and her mother, when she needs support. She comes home for Thanksgiving. In the summer I take the train out to Oregon to spend a week, if that works for her.
It's the best thing I've ever done, my parenting. It's sweet, and it's deep, and it's intimate in its own way. But it has nothing to do with what I feel for Angela, with what I yearn for and don't have in my life. It exists on a different plane. Parenting is not, has never been about meeting my primary needs: to be held, to be embraced and cherished for who I am, to be put first as much and with the same intensity as I put the other person first. My daughter came first, always. And when she was ready, I knew how to let go.
I find myself wishing I had met Angela, her equivalent, thirty years ago. Then I have to admit that I did. Thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago. Fifteen years ago, my second wife. Women who were every bit as interesting as Angela, every bit as smart and engaging, who had stories that gripped me and that, more often than not, circled around a core of pain that latched onto my own and pulled me in. I tick off the names, the faces, the way each relationship fell apart.
I settle, not on either of my ex-wives with all their baggage (to say nothing of mine), but on Andrea Katz, my lover during graduate school. She had one of the most fluent minds I've ever known. I loved talking sociology with her, or politics, or really anything. The sex was good, comfortable, easy. She was pleasant looking though not the least bit beautiful, on the heavy side, and I honestly didn't care. We got along incredibly well. I was in my mid-twenties and she was the first woman I had ever felt completely at home with. I told friends my life had become placid. The truth is I loved her, though, amazingly, I don't think I ever told her.
After two years of being really happy with Andrea, I fell in love with someone else. A woman who was not at all intellectual; who was, yes, physically very beautiful; who was deeply wounded; who evoked a depth of passion I didn't know I had in me. There was a lot of melodrama, naturally. Both relationships went to hell. A year later I moved to Ann Arbor.
Now it's forty years later, and wandering through these empty spaces, I miss Andrea. Passion ends up being so much smoke, though of course in the moment no one feels that way. I tell myself that of all my efforts at intimacy, all the failures, she is the one I could have spent my life with. But that obviously isn't true. I made my choices. If I had been capable of being her life partner, I would still be with her. Wouldn't I? I'd have had to be a different person.
Angela asks if I'd like to have dinner with her. It is late afternoon, our usual time. But this is new.
I say yes.
Of course I say yes. When I am with her - I'm alive. I feel our connection, palpably, a physical presence in my body and, I believe, in hers. No, not necessarily sexual. But surely not just an idea. All the things I understand when I am not with her, my analysis of what this really means, my repetitive lecture to myself about why this is impossible – it drifts away like smoke, and I am, simply, with her.
We walk quietly across the campus. It's early April, the air is crisp, there is a chatter of birds. The usual array of students pass by us; occasionally, someone older. There is nothing out of the ordinary about an aging professor strolling here with a graduate student near the end of the day. We might have just finished a dissertation meeting. We might be heading toward our respective homes. Once we leave the campus green and walk down State Street, we could be father and daughter.
We choose a Thai restaurant. Angela says she has been here and the food is good. The place is mostly empty. We are seated, study our menus. She recommends one of the curries and I order it.
We talk about ordinary things, the impending end of semester; my summer plans. Angie asks why I take the train to Oregon rather than fly. Because of the carbon footprint, I tell her. Besides, crossing the West by train is breathtaking; the immense spaces, the passes through the mountains. We talk about the West, where she has been, and when, and with whom. Other places of staggering beauty each of us has known. I am careful not to ask about her plans for the summer, for obvious reasons.
The food comes. We comment on how good it is. We eat quietly. She looks at me from across the table and her eyes are soft, despite the circles beneath them, the lines of tension across her forehead, which I think will not quickly fade. She smiles, a little, and then returns to her meal. Her hair is down. There are fifty things I could say, and I don't.
Finally she tells me, “I've decided. I'm going to talk to Neil.”
“Yes?”
“I'm going to tell him.”
“That's good,” I say. “I've been thinking you should.”
“I can't keep it from him much longer.”
“Exactly.”
It's better she came to this on her own. That of course is what one part of me thinks. The Advisor part, the appropriate older adult. The part of me that is not descending into a state of anomie. But what do I feel? Jesus, Richard.
“What are you hoping will happen?” I am trying to sound calm and measured and – what? Paternal? All right, supportive.
“I don't even know. I have to see how he reacts.”
I nod. She does not say anything else.
I could ask her to my place. This would be the moment. There may not be another one. Ask her to my place for what? As what? As a friend. Isn't that possible? Isn't that what we have become over this last bittersweet month? Does she have the slightest idea how bittersweet for me? Does she consider what my feelings must be for her? What this must be like for a man who is sixty-five and has gone through two divorces and has a grown daughter her age? Or does she just take my support for granted as – I don't know, going with the older man territory? The doctoral advisor territory? Some perception of Richard as a selflessly good guy? Or just a good guy with appropriate boundaries.
But what makes a friendship inappropriate? A simple connection between two human beings?
A simple connection. Whatever else this is, it is surely not simple. Not for me.
The moment passes. I let it go. I breathe, and let it out, and feel tears rising, and fight them off.
Maybe she senses something, maybe my breath came out as an audible sigh, or maybe she is moved by something else entirely. Regardless: she deliberately puts down her fork and covers the top of my hand with hers. “Richard,” she says. “Thank you so so much for everything you've done for me. I don't know how I could possibly have gotten through this without you.”
This is the first time we have touched. You'd think it would be electric – but it is not. It is only the contact of skin on skin, not really that much different than a handshake, except that my palm is down on the table, and I know very well there is a different social significance to a woman's hand covering a man's in this way. I know it, but I don't feel it. She squeezes, once, and lets go. I look up and see she is crying.
The next day is Friday and Angie does not come to my office. Unusual, but not extraordinary. Then the weekend, when we never see each other. On Monday she again does not come. By now I know. Tuesday confirms it.
I am glad for her. This has to be what she wanted, not to be a single parent. Who would?
Near the end of April, it is late afternoon when a man appears in the doorway of my office. I don't know him. He is a thin middle-aged guy with short salt-and-pepper hair and a beard, mostly white, trimmed so close it's hardly more than stubble. His eyes are alert and seem tense. He is smiling with half of his face. The door is open but he knocks anyway.
“Come in,” I say, curious.
He takes a few short steps and plants himself about half way between the door and my desk, a little to my left. “Dr. Feinstein?”
“Yes. Richard Feinstein.”
“Neil Jacobs. I'm with the English department.”
Neil. Angie never told me he is on the faculty. As if that matters. But it does to him, apparently. He presents himself to me as a colleague. What am I to him? Why the hell is he here? Everything about him seems off key – the knock on the open door, where he is standing, the way he holds his body, the stubbly beard, the cockeyed grin, the intensity of his eyes, the timbre of his voice.
I realize he has been talking, only because he just stopped. I have no idea what he said. “Have a seat.” I gesture toward the chair in front of my desk. Angela's chair. “Please.”
“Nah. I don't, ya know, want to take up your time. I just came to, ya know, thank you, Dr. Feinstein. Richard. For everything you did. Ya know, for Angie, all the support. I don't, ya know, know what she'd of done without you.”
I nod. I try to smile. I should say something gracious but can't manage to. This man teaches English?
He looks at his feet. Then he raises his head. He gives a little cough. “It's, ya know, not even that. Look, Richard. You saved my goddamn marriage. I don't know how to thank you.”
“Really, Neil, I...”
“Nah, you don't have to say it. I know what you're thinking. This guy's an asshole. He doesn't deserve Angie. And you're right, I am an asshole. I don't deserve her. But, ya know, I'm gonna be a dad. At my age, for Christ's sake. Listen, Richard, I've started seeing a therapist. I'm gonna change this time. I'm gonna turn this thing around.”
I nod again. I don't bother trying to find something to say. This man did not come here to listen to me. I am grateful he did not sit down.
He extends his hand. He doesn't move. He is too far away for me to reach from where I sit. He wants me to come to him. I can hardly refuse the proffered handshake. It is a social norm.
With considerable effort I lift myself out of my chair. I walk up to him. He envelopes my hand with both of his and pumps vigorously, looking me in the eye. Then he lets go. But before I can step back he slides his arms around my shoulders and captures me in a hug.
I dream that my father is teaching his class. The lecture hall is packed.
There is a podium but my father doesn't use it. Instead he places himself in front of the podium, closer to his students. He paces, he gestures as he speaks. His face is animated. His hair is snow white, but he is not impaired by age. His voice is strong. He is impeccably dressed, as always, in a dark gray wool pinstripe suit, the pants crisply pressed, a blue Oxford shirt, and a black silk tie with a Windsor knot.
“Semantic psychopathology,” my father says. “The sickness of words. Or you could say, corn without fear. Why did the chicken cross the road? To make a fast buck buck buck buck.”
The class roars.
He pauses for the laughter to subside. Then he waits a little longer, not because he is unsure of what comes next, but for dramatic effect. You can see this in his face, the self-assurance, the lingering grin, the twinkle in his eyes. The seasoned lecturer.
“My son Richard,” he says, “would scoff at the idea of sick words. To him, the question of meaning is always sociological first, psychological only secondary to social meaning. Which is what you would expect from a brilliant sociologist.”
I'm sitting in the middle of the hall, one face out of hundreds. Does he know I'm here? It seems beside the point for reasons I cannot discern. On my left there is a young woman with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Her face is familiar but I don't know why. I lean toward her and whisper, “It's about social norms. The sickness or wellness of language is socially constructed.”
She nods.
“Consider a woman who takes off her dress,” I go on. “All she has on is a skimpy bikini. If she's at work, she gets in a lot of trouble. If she's at a party, people gasp, get excited or say she's being provocative. If she's at the beach, or even in a public park, it's normal behavior.”
I expect the young woman to object that this is behavior, not words. I'm ready with my rejoinder. Instead she says, “But isn't that obvious? What makes it brilliant? And what about drinking beer during a lecture?”
I look up and my father is holding a beer bottle in his right hand. With his left hand he makes a sweeping gesture. He takes a long swig of the beer, smacks his lips, lets out a satisfied “Ah,” and chugs some more. He puts the empty bottle down and picks up another. He twists off the cap and drinks. Now there is a shot glass in his left hand. He downs the shot. He paces, weaving in front of the podium, not quite staggering.
No one seems upset by his behavior. Not even the woman next to me, who must have brought up my father's drinking as a rhetorical point.
“Can sick words be the product of a healthy mind?” my father asks. “Or, conversely, can healthy words be the product of a sick mind? Or is there a consonance, a wholeness of mind and language? A synthesis of psychology and sociology?”
Now the blond woman leans toward me, her shoulder brushes mine and she whispers, “Dr. Feinstein was always very sensitive to Angela's feelings.” She hands me a card.
Martina Navraswaboda-Jacobson, Ph.D.
Sports Psychologist
All Contact Sports, Individual and Group
Video Games
Finger Lickin' Good
From my seat in the middle of the lecture hall I see my father, unsteady on his feet, an elegant, inebriated older man, raising the beer bottle to his lips. Now, from a far corner of the hall, I see the side of his face, the hollow spot on his cheek, a tiny curve to his nose. Now, from front row center, a few feet away, I can see his old acne scars, the neat trim of his mustache.
Finally my father notices me. His eyes go wide, he beams. “Richard,” he says. He puts the bottle down. He extends his hand.
I am standing next to him. I can smell the beer on his breath, the hint of whiskey. I shake his hand. His grip is firm, warm.
He lets my hand go. Then he kneels like a camel. My mother used to say, “Jake has camel kidneys.” But this is not about holding his urine. I know why he is kneeling, without him having to say it.
It seems the most natural thing in the world, to climb up onto my father's shoulders. Here I am, my legs dangling over his chest and down to his waist. I rest my hands on his head. I am mussing his picturesque white hair, but he doesn't seem to mind. He rises, steadily, effortlessly, and hoists me up into the air.