Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (12 page)

Her response was kind but firm, “I don’t make love to my patients. And I don’t make love to boys.”

I was desperate and prideless. “Make me feel alive.”

She stared into my pleading eyes and smiled. “Silly boy, you are alive.” She combed my hair with her fingers in a way my mother never had.

When she left the room, I could still feel her fingers in my hair.

I was in the psych ward for five days. Since my parents were too devastated to come and visit me, my aunt volunteered to be their emissary. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to them?” She handed me a card with a therapist’s name on it and told me to be a good boy. She spoke to me in the same tone of voice that she used when she talked to her dog. In her defense, she loved her dog.

No one was more surprised than me when I found myself sitting across from David. The whole scene hangs like a still life in the back of my mind, forever in the present tense. David is sitting in a comfortable leather chair. I am sitting stiffly on a couch that is threatening to chew me up and spit me out. He is offering me a bottle of water. I shake my head no. My eyes search the room for an ashtray. David looks at the bandages on my wrists and smiles softly, “I’d have gone for a tattoo instead.”

I try not to smile. I want to joke back. But there is no joke inside me and I don’t say anything at all.

He is utterly comfortable in his own skin and there isn’t anything formal in the way he presents himself. “What would you like to talk about, Charlie?”

“Birds.”

“What is it about birds that you like?”

“They make sure their young can fly before they throw them out of the nest.”

He nods. I study his face and wonder where he learned to wear empathy as comfortably as my father wore his ties. “I take it you don’t like your parents.”

“It’s mutual.”

“Well, they’re paying for these sessions.”

“My mother’s paying for these sessions.”

“Does your mother work?”

“No. She’s above all that.”

“Then it’s your father’s money.”

“She has plenty of her own.” I am tapping my finger on my bottom lip. “Paying for these sessions? They have serious money. It’s like handing a panhandler a nickel.”

I see David nodding. “But it might mean they love you.”

“It might.”

He studies my face. “But you have other ideas about that.”

“I think paying for a therapist after—” I pause, displaying my wrists. “How would it look to let their son go without a therapist when he slits his wrists in their bedroom?”

“Their bedroom?” He doesn’t nod but his face says something—though I’m not sure what. “That’s an interesting choice.”

“I must have thought so at the time.”

“Must have?”

“I don’t really remember.”

“Any idea why you chose that particular site?”

“Is this the part where I get to really talk?”

“Something like that.”

“We were never allowed in their bedroom—not even when we were small.”

“We?”

“I had a brother.”

“Had?”

“We lost him.”

“Did he die?”

“No. We just lost him.”

“Just lost him?”

“My mom and dad are careless people. They misplaced him.”

He looks at me, wants me to say more.

So this is what I say: “He left. He never came back.”

I see that he is mentally placing a note in a file in his brain labeled Charlie. That much I can tell. “Do you want to talk about your brother?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk about your parents?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s who I want to talk about.”

He smiles at my sarcasm.

“I think your parents are trying to help you.”

“Sure they are. They’re going to pay for my sessions so they can pretend they’re teaching me how to fly.” I offer him a smirk. “You know, like the birds.”

“Yes. The birds. We’re back to that.”

“I told you that’s what I wanted to talk about.”

“Let’s talk about the nest you came from.”

“I hate my father.” The words come out without rage and without regret. It’s not difficult for me to tell David how I feel about my father.

David is studying my face. He repeats my words. “You hate your father.” It almost seems like he is staring at the letters that make up that word, examining the
h
, the
a
, the
t
and then the
e.
He is trying to understand what it means to hate your own father. “Is that really true, Charlie?”

“Yes, that’s really true.”

“You’ve thought about this?”

“I’m not sure that thinking is the right word.”

“Charlie? You’re sure?”

“Do I sound unsure?”

He looks at me with that puzzled look. I understand he wants me to explain. No longer wanting to have this particular conversation, I just look back at him. I want to get back to the subject of birds. Or Icarus, how he flew too close to the sun.

He looks right at me and says, “Hating your father is a lot of work.”

“Not really. He’s made it easy.”

“Is there any part of you that loves him?”

“No.”

“A lot of people think they hate their fathers.”

“When in fact we really love them? I think you should meet my father.” I took out my wallet and handed him his card.

He is gracious enough to take it even though I am behaving like a stupid, rebellious boy. I’m sure he is making a mental note of that too.

He stares at the card. “So you tried love?”

“He doesn’t know what to do with love.”

“Do
you
know what to do with love, Charlie?”

“Probably not.”

He smiles at me. “What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“Does your mother—does she know what to do with love?”

“She’s the same. The same but different.”

“Different?”

“My father controls by words and actions. My mother controls by withholding. They arrive at the same place.”

“Do you think they love each other?”

“I’m not about to walk into that desert.”

“Desert?”

“You can die of thirst in a desert. You know, like all those Mexicans. They’re trying to get somewhere and they’ll never get there alive.”

He has an interesting look on his face. “There are birds in the desert too, you know.”

I laugh at his joke, then get mad at myself for laughing. I don’t want to let him see that I get mad at myself so I keep talking. “I don’t know anything about what exists between my father and my mother. Anything I say is a lie or a theory. If my mother had a business card, I’d hand you one of hers too.”

He smiles. A smiler. The thing about smilers is that they’re sincere. “So you just decided to hate him instead.”

“Yeah, one day I just decided. Sure.”

“I’m just trying to—”

“I know,” I say. I want a cigarette. “For the record, I don’t love my mother either. I just don’t hate her. I feel sorry for her.” I stare at my fingernails but decide against chewing on them. I smoke. I bite my nails. I chew on my knuckles. Yeah. He is waiting for an answer. “My father doesn’t deserve to be loved.”

“Don’t you think everyone deserves to be loved?”

“You mean like even Hitler had Eva Braun?” He doesn’t laugh at my joke. I tap my bottom lip with my finger again. “No,” I say. “Not everyone deserves to be loved.”

“What about you? Does Charlie deserve to be loved?”

“I have no fucking idea. And anyway, that’s not the way it works. People get killed who don’t deserve to be killed. Some people have more success than they deserve. I know about a holy man who got crucified. You get where I’m going here?”

“Yes, I get you. But we’re talking about love. We’re talking about you.”

“The guy who got crucified doesn’t count?”

“I want to talk about Charlie.”

“I thought you wanted to talk about
what I wanted to talk about
.”

He nods. I think he would make a very good poker player. He’s hard to read—except that I already decide that he’s a good man and he is incapable of hiding his kindness.

“My father’s insane,” I say. I really want to say that.

“Insane?”

“Emotionally insane.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it.”

“What else would you call someone who behaves like that? He threw my brother out of the house.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He never allowed us to mention his name again. He took all of his pictures and tossed them in the trash. He went through all of my mother’s albums. He even burned his birth certificate.
Even my pictures.
He walked into my room and searched it thoroughly in front of me. He took every picture of me and my brother and ripped them to shreds in front of me. I was ten.
Yes, I think my father is insane.”

“Well, maybe there are more appropriate ways of looking at your father’s—”

I didn’t let him finish his sentence. “I loved my brother. And he’s gone. He’s lost. He might be dead. He might be alive. I don’t know. But he’s gone.”

“And your father took him away from you.”

“You’re getting the picture.”

“Have you ever gone to look for your brother?”

“Where would I look?”

“Why do you think your father threw your brother out of the house?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have made something up about why.”

“My brother was eighteen years old. He was rebellious. He was alive. He liked to laugh. He reminded them that they were dead.”

“Them? Your mother and father?”

“Who else? They’ve never mentioned his name. Once, I asked about him. We were just finishing dinner and I said, ‘I miss Antonio.’ I said, ‘Is he ever coming back?’ My father slapped me so hard I went flying across the room. You know what my mother did? She stared at me. And then she walked out of the room.” I was trying not to chew on my knuckles. “When I was small, I used to go to my brother’s room when I had bad dreams and he would hold me.”

“So he was like a father?”

“No. He was like someone who loved me.”

I am remembering almost every detail of my first conversation with David as I stand in front of my father’s coffin at the cemetery. The priest’s final prayers of commendation provide the soundtrack as I play the scene over in my head.

2.

My father was killed in a car accident. He ran a red light—and took the other driver with him. A strange and ironic ending for such a careful and controlling man. Careful in the way he dressed. Careful in the way he spoke. Careful in the way he handled his personal finances. But careless in matters of the heart. He never succeeded in controlling his own cruelty. That was his drug of choice. That was his great addiction. When he saw an opportunity to be cruel,
he had to take it. He tried to cover it over with a veneer of grace and civility and that thing which he called “breeding.” But he didn’t quite carry it off.

The funeral mass at the cathedral was formal and disciplined. Which meant that no one shed a tear. I was half hoping that at least my mother would cry. I would have thought better of her if she had. After the final service at the cemetery, my mother had people over to the house where I was raised, the house where I had been something of an unwelcome visitor for the formative years of my life.

I don’t know why people like my parents have children. My father never held me as a boy. My mother’s touches were tentative.

There was no laughter in my house. Only my brother had known how to laugh.

After my suicide attempt, my father never spoke to me again. My mother, whose emotional disposition can best be described as austere, pretended it had been a mistake. That’s exactly how she put it. “You made a terrible mistake, Charlie.” Oddly, that was the kindest thing she’d every said to me. I think a part of my father was almost disappointed that I hadn’t succeeded. He could not have possibly been as disappointed as I was.

As I tried to adjust to having survived my suicide, I took a job as a bartender.

I promised David that I would not try to off myself again.

I found a place to live in Sunset Heights. My mother said that it was a predictable choice. She looked at me in that disdainful way she’d cultivated over the years. “Just the kind of neighborhood you’d choose. And will you be living next door to a prostitute?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Just make sure she’s really a woman before you sleep with her.”

That made me laugh. There were moments I thought my mother had potential.

My apartment was a dump. It was an old building with worn wood floors and high ceilings. I painted the walls white, re-sanded the floors and managed to get rid of the mice. I thought it was a good sign that I’d never seen a cockroach. I started going to school part-time and decided to major in art. I had my drawings and paintings all over the apartment. Not that I was all that impressed with my own work—but it was the only art I could afford. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about my own talent.