So, are you going to meet your dad again? How could I possibly drop it so lightly? There was absolutely nothing I could say that would even begin to address all the thoughts that were running around in circles in my head.
To escape the oppressive silence, I retreated to my studio. But every time I sat down to draw, all I could think about was the gallery closing. If someone had asked me to name the five most important things in my life, I doubt I ever would have thought to name the gallery. But now that I knew it would shortly be gone, I felt the loss acutely.
And then, of course, there was the slight matter of me being pregnant.
I almost wanted to laugh at how absurd it was, to be dealing with all of this at once. I knew that “when it rained, it poured,” but really? This? This was a monsoon.
Of course at times I scolded myself for being melodramatic. Two of the major life-changing events I was dealing with were positive things - weren’t they? We were starting a family, and reconnecting with one that Daniel thought he’d lost. The closing of one small art gallery hardly compared to that. So why was my stomach in knots?
Well, I supposed that might be the pregnancy talking.
Really, though, for all intents and purposes, I didn’t feel like a mom-to-be. Other than forgoing my glasses of wine in the evening, I hadn’t changed a single thing. I knew I’d have to make some pretty big adjustments before long, but at the moment it sort of felt like some strange hypothetical game. Or that health class assignment in high school where you have to carry around a bag of flour for a week and pretend it’s a baby.
I knew it was real, and I knew it was serious. But I suppose my brain was trying to take things one small, manageable bite at a time. And considering I hadn’t even seriously though about having a family until the charity dinner, I thought I was handling it pretty well.
Daniel was, to my immense relief, not becoming ridiculously clingy or over-protective as time passed. Not that I thought he would, exactly. But it was still nice to know I could continue living my life without him hovering.
Finally, one morning, I took my opportunity to begin an actual conversation.
“How are you feeling?” he said, the same as every morning these days.
“Fine,” I said. “How about you?”
He eyed me over the rim of his coffee mug. “…fine?” he replied, not sounding terribly convincing.
“Really?” was my only response.
He sighed, setting down his mug. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going to see him again.”
“It wasn’t…” I knew I had to approach this carefully. “It wasn’t…terrible, was it?”
“It wasn’t terrible,” Daniel agreed. “Certainly. He could have been outright hostile. Instead, he was just condescending as usual.”
“Well,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. He was right. Walter gave me the distinct impression of looking down his nose at us.
“He thinks it’s all right for him to be patronizing, because he’s my father.” Daniel’s mouth twisted into a sort of bitter half-smile. “Do you know, one time when I told him to stop patronizing me, he proceeded to give me a lesson about the root of the word? Yes - I know it literally means ‘to act like a father,’ but that isn’t an excuse for treating adults like children who don’t know any better. He just thinks it is. And nobody’s ever going to convince him otherwise, so it’s not even worth trying.”
I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. “I’m sorry,” I said, as Daniel looked at me askance. “I just, I can’t imagine anything more patronizing than someone explaining the definition of the word ‘patronizing’ to someone who just accused them of being exactly that. It’s like he somehow made the concept of patronizing crawl up its own ass.”
“Yes,” said Daniel, letting himself laugh a little bit. “Yes - that’s exactly it. That’s my father in a nutshell.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “Well, you know, I think…” I didn’t know what I thought, actually.
“I have to go to work.” Daniel cut me off mid-thought, snatching his keys off of the coat rack and heading for the door. “By all means, if you come up with a way to make him less insufferable, let me know.”
***
“Didn’t you tell them you’d have the biography done by the end of the year?” I said one evening, over dinner.
I could tell by the expression on his face that he’d completely forgotten. “Yes,” he said, evenly. “Yes, I did.”
“I think maybe we should get back to work,” I said. “We can skip over all the childhood stuff for now, if you’d rather not talk about it.”
Daniel took in a sharp breath through his nose. This, I knew, was always a prelude to something important. “I was actually thinking,” he said, “maybe it would be useful to talk to my father for the book.”
I looked at him skeptically.
“Don’t you think so?” he said, mildly, as if the last conversation we’d had about it hadn’t ended the way it did. I’d been left with the distinct impression he’d rather jam a pencil in his eye than talk to his dad again.
“I guess, sure,” I said. “If you…I mean, if that’s what you really want.”
“You certainly don’t have to,” he said.
I shifted in my seat. “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I like that idea, actually.”
He smiled. “If he gets insufferable, don’t hesitate to tell him to f**k off.”
“I’m definitely not going to do that,” I replied. “But it’s nice to know I have your blessing.”
***
“I don’t know how much I’ll be able to help you,” Walter was saying, as he sat down on the sofa. “But I guess I’m honored.”
I smiled, opening my notebook. “I just thought it might be interesting to get a different perspective on Daniel,” I said. “Especially his formative years.”
Walter shrugged. “He was a pretty normal kid.”
I surveyed the man in front of me. It was absolutely eerie to look at him; like a strange vision of an alternate future, where Daniel suddenly decided to start talking like a normal person instead of someone giving a dissertation.
“Normal,” I said. “How do you define normal exactly?”
Walter shrugged again. I had a feeling that a pattern was developing. “You know, just, more or less what you expect a kid to be. He wasn’t as, uh…he wasn’t as driven as his sister.” He looked slightly…not uncomfortable, exactly, but something. I couldn’t quite identify it.
“Normal,” I repeated.
“Sure,” said Walter. “Normal. I know he doesn’t really think of himself that way. And I guess he did get less normal as he got older. I just mean there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about him, at least not then.”
“Was there ever?” I twirled the pen around in my fingers. “Was there ever a moment when it hit you, ‘there’s something special about this kid?’”
Walter smiled, hesitantly. “It’s going to reflect pretty badly on me if I say no, isn’t it?”
I met his eyes. “Just be honest, Walter.”
“Being perfectly honest?” He uncrossed and re-crossed his legs in the other direction. “No. I mean, everybody hopes - you know. Everybody wants their kid to be something special. But honestly, I had no idea. Even when he was in college, and he started trying to explain all those gizmos and gadgets to me. Everything he was working on that eventually turned into such a big deal. It all sounded like total bullshit to me. Excuse me.” He paused, seeming to suddenly remember where he was.
I waved my hand dismissively.
“I still don’t really get it. My fear for him, always, which I think he took as some kind of…I don’t know, resentment, was that the bottom would fall out. All these new systems and machines, they don’t make any sense to me and it never did. That really irritated him. He wanted me to just go along with it, I guess, but how could I? I didn’t understand it.”
He was looking at me like he wanted an actual answer.
“I don’t know.” I swallowed, thickly, suddenly feeling very nervous. If I said anything to Walter that Daniel didn’t like, I could potentially make their relationship even worse than it already was. Which would be quite an accomplishment.
“Well, what was I supposed to do?” Walter demanded, with a slightly raised voice. “I’m not a geek like him.” Suddenly, he switched gears and stared at me. “Don’t you write that,” he snapped, pointing at my notepad. “Don’t you tell him I said that.”
I didn’t answer. “I think maybe, at a certain point, he just wanted you to accept that he knew what he was doing, even if you didn’t understand it. He wanted you to trust him.” I took a deep breath. “To respect him, really.”
Walter gave me a look that I’d seen on my own father’s face one too many times. “Respect him? He’s my son.”
“Not everyone feels that way,” I said, amazed at my ability to stay calm. “This is pretty far off-track of what I’m trying to accomplish here, but if you want my advice, you could try apologizing to him for the ways that he feels you undermined him.”
“Apologize.” Walter’s forehead creased. “I don’t owe him any apologies. I always did the best I could for him.”
“All right,” I said. “Forget I mentioned it.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, Madeline, but I’ve known this boy for longer than you’ve been alive. I can figure out how to deal with him on my own.”
“This boy,” I repeated, softly.
“Don’t read into that,” he commanded.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sorry at all. “You just seemed confused about the way he feels. I was trying to give you some helpful information.”
“He’s confused about the way he feels,” Walter shot back. “He doesn’t want to think of himself as ‘normal’ because that’s the kiss of death, as far as he’s concerned. But he can’t brag either. He can’t go around saying he’s better than everyone, because he knows that’s how you get cut down. So he does this instead. He calls himself strange or awkward or eccentric or whatever, and it’s this coded language for I’m better than you but I’m going to say it, I’m going to make you say it. It always bugged the hell out of me when he was a kid, and it only got worse when he was a teenager. By the time he went off to college, honestly, it was a relief to get away from that.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m sure he felt the same way about me.”
“Sounds like a personality clash,” I said.
“He was just disrespectful,” Walter replied, disdainfully. “Personality clash, my ass.”