Pharmakon (50 page)

“He doesn’t have to. Professor de la Rosa has fixed it for me to get a fellowship.”

“Who’s this professor de la what’s-it?”

“Visiting lecturer. He’s a curator at the Tate. He says I have a great eye.”

“You’re going to have to tell your father this yourself.” My mother handed the phone to Dad.

My father listened patiently as Willy laid out his plan. He did not interrupt. He listened carefully, then inquired politely, “Are you finished?”

“It’s not the word I’d use for it.”

“Willy, being your father, I’ve known you for a long time, and I’m for you in the long and the short run. And I think you will regret this decision.”

“I think you think you know me.”

As my father hung up the phone, my mother said, “At least he’s not dropping out of Princeton.”

“You’re right, Nora, it could get worse.” My father went to the liquor cabinet, and with careful deliberation, mixed himself a Manhattan with a fresh slice of orange. He waited until his cocktail was finished to explode. “Christ almighty! Companies pay me tens of thousands of dollars to tell them what to do. Governments hire me to think about their goddamn problems. You’d think one of my children would listen to me when I give them advice.”

“I listen to you, Dad.”

“You try.”

In the weeks that followed, every day began and ended with a Sock Moment. Sometimes my father would become becalmed in the middle of the day. My mother would leave him at their desk to Xerox something or make a cup of tea and come back and find him holding the glass paperweight with the giant antidepressant entombed within its sharp-edged clarity. He’d stare down at it with a grimace, as if it were a splinter that he could not see well enough to remove from his flesh. She would pull him back from wherever it was he’d drifted with the weight of her hand on his shoulder and the gentle reminder, “We still have work to do.”

After the mixed bag of tribulations his children had hit him with, my father was on his guard. My grandmother Ida said that bad news comes in threes. Dad knew better. He was on the lookout now. He didn’t say it out loud, but I could tell he thought it was his fault we had strayed from the trajectory he had plotted for our lives. He had become complacent, self-satisfied, bourgeois in his gentrified barn. Worse, middle-aged—that is, if he were going to live to be a hundred and six.

At the age of fifty-three, my father bought a slim volume titled
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness
and a set of barbells. Dad began to do push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts, and curls while he dictated breathlessly to my mother about the latest final solution for troublesome thought: Zimelidine, the first of the fabled SSRIs to hit your local drugstore. If you’d taken it, you might know it as Normud, later banned due to side effects that included Guillain-Barré syndrome, exanthema, arthralgias, and, according to some, suicidal ideation.

Lazlo had been in Europe most of that fall. He no longer dealt in garbage. He bought and sold companies. “Garbage that doesn’t know it’s garbage” was how he put it. My father called him about Lucy. Lazlo got somebody who worked in Tangier to check on her. She was indeed working at an orphanage.

My mother placed a call to Lazlo as well. Not about Lucy; she was worried about my father. When Lazlo heard about the barbells, he called me. “How mad is he?” Lazlo was in Zurich.

“He’s pretty pissed off.”

“No, I mean, how nuts is he?”

When I told Lazlo about how my father was convinced that Lucy was being kept by an African prince, Lazlo exhaled a laugh. He always laughed at sad stories.

Lazlo invited himself for Thanksgiving that year. It was his way of checking up on my father. He arrived early in the day, long before the bird had gone into the oven. It had been cold the week before, the ground frozen solid, the river laced with ice, but overnight a warm air mass mugged New Jersey. The mercury was in the sixties. Steam rose up off the frozen fields as Lazlo pulled into our drive, top down, in a brand-new fire-engine red 4.5-liter six-passenger Mercedes-Benz convertible.

My mother wasn’t amused when my father called out, “Lazlo, in my next life, I want to be you!” Lazlo, now forty-eight, a bald spot, a shag, and a Fu Manchu mustache, had a twenty-four-year-old blonde cuddled up next to him, who wore a tube top, cowboy boots, and a fringed leather jacket.

When Lazlo announced in a stage whisper, “I think she’s too old for me,” my mother laughed, mostly because my father thought it was funny, and it had been a month since she’d seen him smile.

The blonde’s name was Ula. And Lazlo swore she had an MBA, even though they had met while she was a first-class stewardess for Scandinavian Airlines. She looked at my mother, my father, me, and the barn, pronounced us all, “Fantástico” in a Swedish accent.

I thought my father was just pretending to like the red Mercedes so as not to make my mother jealous of Ula. But when Lazlo and his Swedish babe went inside, Dad stayed out on the lawn, staring at Lazlo’s red lacquered ride. After a while, he opened the door and sat on the cream hide and gripped the wooden steering wheel, and smiled at himself in the rearview mirror.

Fifteen minutes later my father was still sitting in the Mercedes, going nowhere. Lazlo went out to check on him. I followed.

“I’ve always wondered how the world looks from a car like this.”

“If you weren’t such a cheap bastard, you’d buy yourself one.” Lazlo put a finger to his nose and gave himself a blast of Dristan in each nostril.

“Even if I could feel comfortable wasting this kind of money on a car that becomes secondhand as soon as you pay for it, I’m too old to pull it off.”

Lazlo tossed him the keys. “Take it for a spin.”

My father shook his head no.

“He’s scared he’d like it.”

“Come on, Zach.” In that moment, my father had not just forgotten about the punch bowl, he had forgotten I was his son. Stepping on the accelerator, popping the car into low, he fishtailed onto the lawn. When he saw the double Ss he’d just gouged in the sod he put down last summer, he laughed.

We stayed on the back roads. My father asked me to find a station. We tuned in on Pink Floyd. Dad seemed to like “Dark Side of the Moon.” The sun was in his eyes. He reached into the glove compartment, found a pair of shades in Lazlo’s hat. He put on Lazlo’s dark glasses and beret. He looked like a white Miles Davis. All the while, the speedometer was creeping up on him. The Mercedes was a red tank. We were doing sixty down gravel roads, cutting corners with a drift. Then we turned onto the interstate. Pedal to the metal, our differences blurred.

We were doing a hundred and thirty-three miles an hour when we heard the siren. A cop car pulled us over. My father smiled as he handed over his driver’s license.

When the cop asked for the registration, and I couldn’t find it, my father laughed.

The cop looked at him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

My father still had on Lazlo’s dark glasses. “I’m a doctor returning a patient to the mental hospital.”

The cop eyeballed me. “What’s wrong with the kid?”

“Nothing. I’m the patient.”

My father seemed disappointed that the cop let him go with a warning. We laughed as we turned back toward home. As we headed up our road, my father announced, “I’ll never have a car like this.”

“Someday, I’ll get you one, Dad.”

“From you, I’d accept it.”

Thanksgiving dinner was at 6:30. Willy was in Florence, Lucy orphaning in Morocco. Not knowing Lazlo was bringing Ula, and to make the table seem less empty, my father had invited a German ethnobotanist and a French chemist who worked for a drug company. He’d met both of them the week before at a symposium.

My mother warmed toward Ula when the ex-stew changed out of her tube top and put on an ankle-length peasant dress that revealed nothing but a desire to please. And when Ula volunteered to mash the potatoes and make the gravy, my mother decided she rather liked the bombshell. The two of them made jokes about Lazlo’s nose hairs and his Hugh Hefner–esque bachelor pad, and they laughed together about men’s snoring. All of which gave me an unexpected glimmer of what my mother must have been like before she was my mom, or anyone’s mom. It was a glimpse of her, not unlike the one the ride in that red Mercedes had afforded me of my father—I was happy they were not always the people they’d had to become.

My mother and Ula uncorked a bottle of white wine and were smoking Ula’s cigarettes. By now Ula was doing all the cooking and my mother was sitting on the counter having a good time.

“How did you get your man?” Ula’s accent was singsong.

“Organic chemistry. He asked to borrow my Bunsen burner.” My mother said it like the punch line to a dirty joke. Ula laughed, likewise.

“Hot stuff.”

“Yes, he was . . . still is.”

My father was in the hayloft that had been turned into a living room with an eighteen-foot ceiling. Logs crackled in the fireplace they had made of river rock picked out by hand.

My father was having a good time, enjoying listening to the French drughouse guy telling the ethnobotanist how brilliant Dad was. “You know, Will was the first to see the potential of the inhibitors in the reuptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin.”

Usually, I tuned out when my father and his friends talked shop. But after the ride in the Mercedes, and being startled by the way my father had talked to the cop, and surprised by how my mom talked about sex with Ula like part of her was still a twenty-four-year-old babe, it occurred to me that I was missing something.

And so I listened as my father shrugged off the compliment. “Back in the sixties I was intrigued by diphenhydramine, and even before that with the synthesis of the first SSRI, zimelidine, from chlorpheniramine, also an antihistamine, but then and now the side effects worry me.”

The French chemist tried to include me in the conversation. “Your father always worries about the side effects.”

“Not that they listened to me.”

The German was listening carefully. “Professor Friedrich, have you ever worked with natural drugs?”

“No,” my mother answered for him.

The German looked confused. “But I was led to believe you worked with Dr. Winton.”

“How did you come to hear that?”

“A professor of mine, Dr. Honner, had a correspondence many years ago with Dr. Winton that led him to understand that the two of you had worked together on a psychoactive plant native to . . . where was it?”

“Cool. Dad, why didn’t you ever tell me about that?”

“Dr. Winton and I were colleagues at Yale, but I wasn’t aware of any correspondence. You’ll have to ask your professor about that.”

“Unfortunately, my professor is no longer with us.” There was a look of relief on my father’s face. “Perhaps you know how I can get in touch with Dr. Winton?”

My father shook his head no. The conversation moved on like nothing had ever happened. I had to say something. “She was murdered.”

High beams arced across the lawn and into the window. Fiona had driven out from New York with “a friend,” i.e., a boyfriend. It had been years since Fiona had brought a boy home, and after the dinner in her loft, I was surprised to hear she was coming.

When I think back on it, I can see that Fiona kept men at arm’s length for the same reason Lucy toyed with them. The smothering intimacy of my parents’ union scared them. Back then I simply thought Fiona wasn’t that into sex. I wasn’t entirely wrong.

We were all in the living room looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows as Fiona and her new friend pulled up. They parked directly beneath us. The garden lights illuminated them. We all kibitzed as Fiona’s “new friend” (that’s what my mother called him) got out of his white BMW. He wore a houndstooth tweed suit, a mauve shirt, and a floppy bow tie. He looked to be thirty or thirty-one. “
Ja,
cute, but not my type,” was what Ula had to say.

“What do Americans have against American cars?” was the German ethnobotanist’s take.

The French chemist poured himself another glass of wine. “What is the name of your daughter’s fiancé?”

My mother corrected him. “He’s not her fiancé.”

“Not yet, at least.” My father watched the new friend pull a bouquet of flowers and a small gift-wrapped square out of the backseat.