Stories for Boys: A Memoir (16 page)

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Authors: Gregory Martin

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir
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Christine took lots of photos, because it was Evan’s birthday, and maybe because she knew how much my father’s visit mattered to me, and to him. My father in his sweatpants and Coca-cola t-shirt and uncombed thinning hair helping Evan open his presents at 6:30 in the morning. My father on his knees on the floor helping Evan put together one of his new Lego sets. Evan sitting in my father’s lap as my father reads Evan one of his new books. My father, later, at Evan’s birthday party, off to the side, as Evan plays with his friends from the neighborhood and from preschool. My father standing in our unremodeled kitchen eating pizza with the parents of Evan’s friends. In these pictures, my father appears content, happy, at ease.
My father kept speaking in the first person plural.
I was walking through kitchen, and I heard him say to my neighbor Andrew, “ We took one of those cruises to Alaska one summer.” I kept going. That trip he took with my mom to Alaska was more than ten years ago. Another time, on my way back through the kitchen, my father was talking to Tom now. Tom and Amy had just remodeled their kitchen. It was mostly their fault that we had to remodel ours now. My father said to Tom, “We’ ve lived in so many places. I don’t know how many houses we’ ve remodeled. It seems like a dozen.” I stopped and looked at him. He said, “Hey, Son. I don’t know how many rooms we painted white over the years.”
I didn’t say anything.
Then he said to Tom, “Greg’s mother didn’t like purple rooms or blue rooms or whatever kind of color people think of to paint a room.”
I nodded. This was true enough. I took scissors from the drawer. I needed to go hang the piñata.
Twenty minutes later I went out to the backyard and my father was talking to Gerhardt, Isaac’s dad. They were both looking up at Evan and Isaac in the treehouse. Isaac had yet to go down the dangerous yellow slide. Isaac’s arm was still in its cast. Gerhardt appeared unconcerned. He was giving my father his attention. My father said, “That’s what everyone told us, but we did it anyway.”
I didn’t know what they were talking about. The danger of treehouses? The danger of having children who will someday judge your every stray word?
There was that “we” again. I wanted to sidle up to my father and say, as blithely as possible, “Dad. They know. They know you’re divorced. They know you’re gay. They know you attempted suicide. I was gone last summer for two-and-a-half weeks. They know the whole goddamn thing. There is no more
we
.” But I didn’t. It helped that there were too many people around – children and adults – who were having fun. I didn’t demand that my father refrain from any implication that he was still a mar - ried man, that he had any ongoing relationship with my mother. I wanted to say these things, but instead, I walked away.
I found Christine in the living room. She was adjudicating a dispute over Nerf swords between three of Evan’s friends. There were only two swords. Turns would have to be taken.
I interrupted. “ My father keeps saying,
we
, as in ‘We loved it when the neighborhood kids came over to play in the treehouse.’”
Christine said, “If you want one of these swords, you’ll have to wait your turn.”
I didn’t laugh or smile. I didn’t even say, “Can’t I just take one? I’m bigger.” That’s only what occurs to me to say now. Then, I didn’t say anything. I was too focused on making myself crazy over the word
we
.
My father laughed and smiled. Over the three hours of the party, he worked the different rooms of the house – kitchen, dining room, living room. He mingled in the front yard and on the back patio. My father had been so alone for almost a year, and it was clear that he simply enjoyed being in the company of people who had only goodwill in their hearts toward him, who never once betrayed to him their knowledge of the tragic turns his life had taken, who laughed and smiled when he laughed and smiled, who clapped him on the shoulder and listened to him talk about the treehouse he’d built all those years ago, who listened to his ideas for our kitchen remodel, who listened to him make all kinds of references to the ordinary happy life he and his wife had shared and, by the sound of it, still shared. Not one of them put him on the spot or called him out. No one said, “Where is she? Where’s Evan’s grandma? Could she not make it for some reason?” Not one of them came up to me later and said, “It was like your father was talking in his sleep, and I didn’t want to wake him.”
It is so much easier in retrospect to see that afternoon with charity – charity towards my father, and towards my own difficulty. What was my father supposed to say? “Hey, it’s really good to talk to you, because I’ve been really lonely since I attempted suicide! Because, you know what? I got divorced after that, because I’m gay! Oh, and by the way, my father molested me for over ten years of my childhood!” Wouldn’t that have been a lot like what I was doing to some of these very same people at the park only months before, assaulting them with my unfiltered, raw emotion?
Was my father lying to himself and, however casually, to people he’d just met who had no stake in his description of his life? I don’t know. I don’t think so. And I don’t really care. Not now. What was he supposed to do – deny all those years of happiness with my mother? His understanding of those years had not changed. It was only her understanding, and my understanding, that had changed. He had known all along. Was he now not supposed to even mention my mother? What were the rules? Who established them? Wasn’t it true that his use of the first person plural was a combination of lifelong habit and more poignantly his longing, still and always, for my mother? Why couldn’t I hear this in every word he was saying?
It should have been no surprise to me that my father would not burden anyone with his problems. It would have been absolutely inappropriate and self-absorbed for him to make the parents of Evan’s friends uncomfortable with his story, with
total honesty
, whatever that means.
 
IT IS A Cooney- Martin birthday boy tradition to have one of those inflatable jumping castles in the front yard. This time, it was a Scooby-Doo jumping castle. I can’t remember taking my shoes off, crawling inside, and jumping around wildly, causing pandemonium and screaming, though that is something I’m fond of doing. I can’t remember if my father got in the jumping castle and jumped around, though that is the kind of thing he would do, also.
I think back to my father’s first visit to my home after his suicide attempt and revelation, and a part of me wants to say that nothing really happened. The boys didn’t once ask their Grandpa about his divorce from Granny. They did not ask him why? Was it because this no longer occurred to them to ask? Or could they sense, as if it were a scent in the air, that this was not a subject he wanted to talk about? Not once did I talk with my father about what his life was like as a divorced, gay man. I didn’t ask him about his trip to Long Beach, Washington, to the gay-friendly campground that was not a typical RV park. I didn’t ask if he was still seeing the man he’d written about in his email. Throughout his visit, I was frustrated with myself for what I took to be my lack of courage, for my failure to engage my father at a deeper level, but now I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate myself for just letting my father be.
It was not an uneventful visit. It’s not true that nothing happened. My sons spent four happy days with their grandpa. My father spent four happy days with his grandsons, with me, and with Christine, who was unfailingly kind, warm, interested in whatever it was my father wanted to talk about – the layout of his condo, an elderly patient who was too far gone for my father to help, the nerve pain running down his leg, and the medicine he took which gave him constipation. Sometimes I listened, and sometimes I busied myself in other parts of the house. Long before my father’s unspeakable revelation, I had lost patience with his penchant for talking about dietary fiber and the consistency of his bowel movements. We played Scrabble. We played Go Fish. We went out to breakfast and dinner. We went bowling, with rails along the gutters, and Evan shoved his six-pound ball with two hands down the lane, and we all watched it roll ever-so-slowly toward the pins.
I was neither happy nor sort-of-happy. But I welcomed my father into my home, and I did not fuck things up. I wanted to – for four days, the desire to fuck things up was like a slow leak hissing out my pores. I wanted to shout, over and over,
It should not be like this! Mom should be here! I hate
– But I did not. I did not even sigh or scowl. My bitterness lost.
I drove my father to the airport. I got out and pulled his bag from the back and set it on the curb and we gave each other a hug, and I said, “I ’m really glad you came.”
“I am, too,” he said. “I want to come again in June, for Oliver’s birthday.”
“Definitely,” I said, and watched him roll his bag through the sliding doors and disappear.
As I drove home, it came to me that my father could not give me what I really wanted, which was to restore to me my previous understanding of our relationship. In the old understanding, it never mattered to me how existentially forthcoming he was. I just liked being around him. I liked the sound of his laugh – a booming, spontaneous laugh that sometimes caught me off guard. Very few people I have known are as companionable.
Compliments, praise – they come easy for him. There was, and is, nothing begrudging about him. My father was always saying things like, “That’s just great” and “You know, I think you’re right about that” and “I hadn’t thought of it that way before.” He made people feel smart, funny, valued. He made me feel that way.
I can see now that, for me, the drama of my father’s visit was interior, marked by my struggle to discern what silences were acceptable, by my recognition of my ongoing unhappiness with the way things were, by the absence of melodrama, by the effort of will to allow my father to spend time with us without the threat of constant reckoning, by the desire to not inflict more damage, to not make things worse, to not pile hurt onto hurt like wood on a pyre.
Pop-Up Tent Trailer
 
MY FATHER VISITED AGAIN, IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE, FOR Oliver’s eighth birthday. He drove down from Spokane with his pop-up tent trailer hitched to the ball mount of his SUV. The day after Oliver’s party, we all went camping in the Pecos Wilderness, to one of my favorite spots on the planet – a high alpine meadow above 9,000 feet along the Santa Barbara River. My father, the boys, and I put up the pop-up tent trailer, while Christine watched from a camper chair, unmesmerized by our manly competence. We went for a hike. Rocky won the award for happiest mammal. We gathered firewood and made a fire. We roasted marshmallows and made s’mores. We all slept in the pop-up tent trailer, which the boys thought was far better than sleeping in a tent, and this has ever since prejudiced their experience of camping with their minimalist father.
I did not fuck this visit up, either.
The Way We Were
 
EVAN IS WANDERING THE HOUSE IN A FUNK. HE’S NOT himself. He’s not running from the front door to the hallway and back, gesturing, talking to himself, narrating, singing, daydreaming in motion.
Evan comes into the kitchen and stands there looking lost.
Christine says, “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Evan sighs. “I miss our old refrigerator.”
“I know,” Christine says. “Change is really hard. You wish that things could have stayed the same, don’t you?”
“I never asked for this
new, fancy
refrigerator. I liked our old one better.”

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