Whatever he says, sometimes a grunt or clearing of the throat, produces laughter. “Your father is a very funny man,” the woman says to me. “Are you also a funny man?”
“I’m funnier,” I say. “I have to be because no one laughs.”
My questioner laughs, goes back to look for my father to repeat this remark to him. When she finds him, when she is able to dislodge his attention from elsewhere, when she repeats my remark with slight variation, my father looks puzzled then laughs extravagantly. The picture that remains is of my father and the woman laughing together with exaggerated amusement.
And there’s the other side of that face: suspicious, vulnerable, stern, glowering. He would fly off the handle, as my mother called it, at invisible provocations. “I won’t put up with that kind of behavior any more,” he would shout. “Do you hear me, Tom?” How could I not hear him? And sometimes after one of these rages he would apologize, saying that he loved me and wanted me to forgive him, tears on his face. Kate used to forgive him (I think she was afraid not to), but I refused him that satisfaction. I put my hands over my ears when he apologized, pretended not to be able to hear him. When he left home the second time, never to return, I could take some of the responsibility for his departure.
The third face, which comes in several variations, is the face of the visiting father. It sometimes comes with full beard, sometimes artistically unshaven. Sometimes the eyes seemed so far back in the skull that I had the impression that the sockets were unfilled, that the eyes had retreated beyond return. I remember thinking that the eyes had turned around to get a view of the other side. I think of the beard as a kind of mask, and the third face, the several third faces of my father, as the old man’s disguise. The beard changes shape, is pointed, is rounded, covers the entire face, covers only part of it, goes to seed like an untended garden. It is as if he were trying to hit on the most impenetrable disguise. If you can’t pin him down, can’t say exactly how he looks, he is safe from your knowledge.
In his most recent phone call, he said he had been thinking of shaving his beard, not to be surprised if he were beardless when I saw him.
“How will I recognize you?” I asked, only parly in jest.
“I will be the only one there who can claim to be your father.”
I see it this way. Or this is one of the ways I see it. I am the man’s enemy and he knows it. He has made me his enemy and is aware that he has and so he must resent and fear my presence. If that’s the case, and it’s the only case I have, why did he invite me to London? Certainly not for the reason he offers — to get to know me better, to make up for past failures — which he would mock as clichés if I offered them to him. I acknowledge that he may feel some guilt over the way he’s treated me in the past, but I doubt that that’s the main reason for his invitation. There’s evidence for a completely different interpretation of his motives. The natural hostility of sons and fathers is the central theme of his novels, a friend of my mother’s once told me, thinking the idea would amuse me. Let’s take the argument where it goes, okay? It’s dangerous not to know where your enemy is at all times. So he brings me to London to have me where he can see me, to have me in his sights. What follows? He converts me if he can to his view of things, tries to pacify my resentment. And if he can’t — the reasoning seems extreme, is meant to be extreme — he gets me out of his way. The idea seems inhuman, perhaps crazy, and I neither believe it nor disbelieve it. I see it merely as one possibility on a spectrum of possibilities.
I am susceptible to motion sickness, have always been, my mother says, and on long car trips usually have to ask the driver to stop and let me out. When the sickness doesn’t come its absence is itself cause for wonder. An hour and fifty-five minutes have passed on this flight and I’ve had a beer, dozed, read a half-page of my father’s first or second novel, and I’m still all right. Queasiness, or maybe only expectation of, rises and subsides. I open the book in my lap at random and read whatever the eye chances to record.
On the other side of the closed window, in the dusty courtyard where rough gravel gathers into heaps, the truck has its hood turned toward the house. There were a few people around as there always were, no matter the hour, at the gate along which the road, connecting with the Skyline Highway, ran. I understood the signification of their continued presence, like mysterious plants that spring out of the soil, though found it without weight or interest, a familiar and ominous landscape belonging to itself.
Someone said (I forgot where I read it) that my father writes mystery stories in which there are neither corpses nor murderers, in which almost everything is suggested and almost nothing happens. I quote this judgment sometimes as if it were my own discovery. Whether accurate or not, it has the ring of profundity. Mostly I think it’s a lot of shit what people say about books, just words to fill the empty spaces. I’m pretty good at shooting a certain kind of literary shit myself before a friendly audience, though with teachers and fathers I can barely put together a complete sentence. I signal to a stewardess as she goes up the aisle, holding up the Coors can to indicate I’d like another. “Someone will be taking your lunch order in a few minutes,” she says, moving away, called invisibly to some other business. I read somewhere (or am I making that up too?) that stewardesses have sex all the time on the ground because it reminds them of being in the air.
I don’t recall my father talking to me about his own work, though he had opinions about almost everything else. I don’t know why it was so, but we tended to avoid the subject of books altogether. Sometimes as a joke I would say to him, “Write any good books lately?” I don’t remember what he answered; he may not have said anything at all. Our main topics of conversation were movies and sports (baseball and basketball mostly) and how I was doing in school. He was full of theories about winning and losing that always seemed to me beside the point. “If they weren’t committed to losing,” he’d say about some team we supported, “they’d find some way to win.” “Doesn’t everyone want to win?” I’d ask. “It’s dangerous to get what you want,” my father would say. “You don’t understand that, do you?” I’d nod as though I understood, but then a little later the question would come out, “What happens to you if you get what you want?” Then he would explain or he wouldn’t, and it would make no difference which, his explanation beyond my reach, that it was death-bent to challenge the gods. (Could the gods field an entire team? I used to wonder). The teams that didn’t want to win — they were always somehow ours — lacked character, he would say. The teams my father supported were underdogs of degraded character, frightened to the point of ineptitude at the distant prospect of victory. I didn’t always enjoy going to games with him. When his team was losing he could be embarassing to be around, complaining about the referees in a self-pitying voice that made me want to pretend I didn’t know him. “It’s just a game,” I would say, giving him back his own wisdom of an earlier day. “They’re calling them all against us,” he’d say. “They won’t give us a break.” He would calm down for moments but the slightest turn against his interests would set him off again. It was like being with a madman. Then there were times he held me responsible for his teams’ failures as if I had some magic I was refusing to employ on his behalf. I took it to heart, began to root secretly against his teams, wanted to see them fail because of his stake in their success. If I couldn’t will them to victory, I could at least take pleasure in their defeat. My own theory: a man committed to losers got what he deserved.