“I just realized,” I said, “I’m about the same age Tony was when he started to build The Breakers.”
“It’s ‘Tony’ now, is it?”
“At his specific request.”
“Call-me-Tony did start with a preexisting construction business and a few million dollars cash, though, right?”
I sighed theatrically. Healthy skepticism on your wife’s part is appropriate, however. As focus groups go, they don’t come much more focused than the woman who stands to lose whatever you lose.
“True,” I said. “Plus, he had a wife with drive and determination and a good honest faith in her man. But, you know, what I lack just makes me stronger.”
She grinned and flipped me the bird, just in time to be witnessed by the waitress as she returned.
“I’m so sorry,” the girl said. “I do hate it when I interrupt a special private moment.”
“Nah, business as usual,” I said. “You know any nice women, give them my number.”
We all laughed, Steph made a concerted start on the complex confection on the big square plate she’d been brought—Steph doesn’t screw around when it comes to dessert consumption: she’s all about shock and awe—and as the waitress walked away, she glanced back and looked right at me. Which was nice. It always is.
But being in love with your wife is nicer.
Steph drove us home over the bridge across the bay and out the south side of Sarasota to Longacres. Longacres is a gated community of thirty artfully mismatched minivillas around a small private marina to which our house does not have direct access—as we don’t care enough about boats to have made the dockage price hike worthwhile. The houses are dotted along a meandering drive, and though you never feel hemmed in, you have the comfort of neighbors, of seeming like you’re living somewhere in particular. Those neighbors are all people like us. Most had a child or two already, however. We do not. This had started to become a topic of discussion, a recurring item cropping up, low down on the agenda, but no longer just Any Other Business.
It had not come up tonight, thankfully. I want a family—of course. I want to make sure I’ve got my goals on a roll, however, before a row of gynecological forces majeures start directing the run of play.
I went and sat out by the pool. Steph disappeared indoors, leaving me time to think back over the day and be pleased with progress. Your life is your real job—and you’re being lazy and dumb if you don’t make the best of it. One of the reasons I believe this, I guess, is my dad. Don’t get me wrong, he was a decent guy. He was patient and generous, not overly bad-tempered, and could make you laugh when he had the time and inclination. He sold paint for a living—the kind you use to decorate your house. He kept up with the fashionable colors and finishes and accessories and tools. He was cheerful and friendly and he’d help carry your goods out to the car if you were old or female or simply looked as if you could do with a hand, and if it turned out you’d bought too much paint he’d cheerfully take back the excess and try to sell it to someone else. He did this for thirty years and then one day went out back to get something for a lady who wanted to finish the basement of the house she’d just bought—and he bent down to pick up a pair of gallon cans of brilliant white, and never came back up.
He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, seven years ago, and though people in town were content to say it was the way he would have wanted it—right there in his store, in the act of being helpful—my mother privately expressed the view that my father would have preferred it to have happened many years later, possibly in Aruba. She was joking, in the way you do around a death, and I knew by then that Aruba wouldn’t have been where he’d chosen. When I was a kid I’d started to notice that in my dad’s den (and dotted around other bookshelves, in low-prestige spots) were a lot of books on French history and culture, all of them ten or fifteen years out of date; annotated grammars and vocab books, too, with studious jottings in pencil, in a version of my father’s handwriting that looked exotic to me—a tighter, earlier style than I was accustomed to seeing in shopping lists or reminder notes on the fridge. I don’t think I ever heard my father say a single word in French, but when I looked at those grammar books for the last time—when I was at the house in the week after he died, helping my mother make sense of what was left behind—I realized they were pretty advanced, and that the marginal notes said this was not a guy who’d just been looking at the pictures.
I’d asked my mother about all this one day, way back when I was around thirteen. She shrugged, said my father had been on long family vacations to France as a child and liked the idea of spending more time there. I took from this observation, and the offhand manner in which it had been delivered, that moving to France had been a dream of my father’s back in the pre-Bill era of the planet. Something he’d thought about, talked about, probably kind of bored her with over the years . . . before the ship of his dreams ran aground on the sandbank of lack of dedication, becalmed by a slowness to act.
In the aftermath of his death, reconsidering him with the vicious perspective that comes when someone has committed their last actions and has nothing else to say—I realized that my assessment had been correct, but only up to a point. Half-correct, but also half-wrong and naive and cruel—in the heartless way children often measure the worth of the adults they are here to supersede.
There are men who would have made their dream happen without reference to how inconvenient it was to others. Patriarchs who would have put their foot down, made their love a hostage, and turned their family’s lives into a living hell until they got what they goddamned wanted. My father was not that guy, and as the years went on, I came to realize how it had more likely been. That the money was never there. That my mother would have gotten herself involved in events around town, part-time jobs, school jamborees—never mission-critical, but enough to stay the hand and compromise the ambition of a man who loved her, and valued the things she did, and wanted her to be happy. That there was a kid in the house who had friends and a community nearby: and there’s always some marker, some birthday or test or rite of passage that seems essential to pass on home soil, some relative who might not last the year. Something to clip the wings.
But there was also the fact that my dad was fundamentally an abstract noun, and not a verb: a feeling word, not a doing word. It was sad he didn’t get what he’d wanted, but it was not Mom’s fault or mine or the world’s. He was a nice guy and I’m sure he had nice dreams, but we’re only asleep half the day, and dreaming is therefore only half the job. Nobody gets points for living in a conditional tense.
Dad lost his cherished future by himself, dropped the ball one night in his sleep, and probably didn’t even realize it until it was too late. Maybe he never realized it. It could be that on the day he bent to pick up those two big old cans of paint, part of his mind was still noodling around the perfect little French fishing village, and how to convince his wife that now—finally, the kid having left home—was the time to make the move.
But I doubt it. Dreams are immortal, fickle, self-possessed: the cats of the subconscious. Once it becomes clear that you’re not going to step up to their demands, they desert you and go rub up against someone else.