A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (22 page)

I had left my mother’s psychiatrist’s house and was now truly on my own. After paying my security deposit along with first and last months’ rent, I had seven dollars to last me the week. I was home now.

The trouble was, I couldn’t afford food. At the restaurant, we were allowed only one small meal from a limited menu. But at seventeen, I was constantly hungry. It seemed to me I hadn’t felt full since I was twelve, before my parents split apart. Even my teeth were chipped and cracked. I wasn’t getting enough nutrition to build a whole, complete human body, so my system did the best it could. Teeth, bones, skin—these, on me, were improvised.

Shortly after moving in, I realized I had to call my father and ask him to bring me some food. My brother, I knew, wouldn’t do it. He was unreliable and I could never get him to agree to anything. My mother was too crazy to call. That left my father. I paced my apartment and tried to think of what I would say. 
Dad? It’s me. I have my own apartment now, but I’m out of money
. No, that would only generate a lecture about fiscal responsibility. I thought I could just tell him, 
I’m out of food,
 and leave it at that. The more I thought about it, the more that seemed to be the thing to say. But could we have a normal conversation? Could I call him and ask him for food and would he bring it? Could anything be that simple?

At last, I picked up my telephone and dialed his number. While the phone rang, I steadied my breathing and cleared my throat. When he answered, I said simply, “Can you bring me some food? Just to last until I get my next paycheck, in four or five days.”

There was silence on the line. He was considering my request. Because he hadn’t refused automatically, I felt buoyed. I didn’t dare breathe. I could allow nothing to spoil the moment, ruin the outcome. I stared up at the plaster peeling away from the light fixture mounted in the center of the ceiling and said a superstitious prayer, 
Please say yes, please just say
 yes. I weighed only 120 pounds, the thinnest I had been since reaching my adult height of six one.

My fingernails were soft.

Oh, please say yes, you old bastard.

I could almost taste the peanut butter. What would I make first? A ham sandwich? Or maybe, I could boil water and make pasta, right on my own stove. With tomato sauce and garlic bread and . . .

“All right,” he said finally. Two words and I would eat. I was so flooded with gratitude that I couldn’t speak. I coughed to clear my throat. “Thanks,” I said, simply. “This is going to help a lot. And I promise I won’t call you all the time and ask for food. It’s just hard right now, until I can find a second job or arrange for some more hours at work. He said he might be able to do it,” I added, referring to my boss, who had blithely replied that he might be able to “scrounge up a few extra hours a week” for me. Even just ten extra dollars a week would make a huge difference.

My father didn’t want to hear my gratitude. “Okay, son. That’s all right, that’s fine now. I have to go. But I’ll bring you some food.”

I hung up and looked around at the apartment. How would it appear to his eyes? I saw the dingy, yellowed walls, the filthy, nearly opaque window. The floorboards could use a refinishing but there was nothing to be done about that. I had a broom and I used it to sweep up any dust and fallen paint chips that had gathered. I did not have a dustpan, so I swept the debris onto an envelope and dropped it into the trash. I made my bed. And there wasn’t much else I could do. I wished I had some flowers or a plant. I wished I had some curtains.

I sat at the chair in front of my typewriter, but I was too anxious to sit still. So I paced some more.

Three hours later, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, my father handed me a surprisingly small bag, which I brought into my kitchen, set on top of the stove, and began to unpack.

“Well, so,” my father said, scanning the surroundings. “Your first apartment, how about that,” he chuckled. “Yes sir, your very first apartment. Well, that’s very exciting.”

I stood motionless, looking at the contents of the bag, which I had now placed on the counter before me.

  A half-size loaf of Wonder Bread with a red sticker on the wrapper that read, day old ½ price.

One package of Oscar Mayer bologna containing five slices.

One can of orange-flavored Hi-C fruit punch with a dent on the side so large that the can was, mathematically, no longer a cylinder.

And that was it.

My heart was pounding in my chest and my eyes stung with tears but I refused to cry in front of him. I would not do that. I said instead, “Thanks for bringing these things,” and I smiled.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re going to do if you can’t afford food. You better not lose this job of yours. I don’t—” He stopped speaking and gave up, so discouraged by my pitiful life. He shook his head in disappointment. And at last, he looked me in the eyes. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to pour gas on him and light a match. I said, “I’ll see you later, then.”

He left. I listened to his footfalls on the steps, slow, somber, pained.

I watched from my window as he opened the door, climbed behind the wheel, and drove away in his blue Oldsmobile.

My hatred, the boiling oil rage I felt, had a color: white.

There is anger so powerful that the fist 
must
 go through the wall. It is not humanly possible to contain or manage this kind of anger.

Yet there is a kind of anger that goes beyond even this. Where you are lifted so high by your fury that for an instant you hover, suspended; the fist does 
not
 go through the wall. You hold your breath and wait, you hang, you float. This is where I found myself and I 
laughed
.

And I continued to laugh.

Standing near my window overlooking the street, I doubled over, my abdominal muscles contracted in hilarity.

Newton’s Third Law engaged. Newton’s 
Third Law states: Forces always occur in pairs. If object
 A 
exerts a force
 F 
on object
 B, 
then object
 B 
exerts an equal and opposite force
 –F
on object A.
 Phrased another way: 
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction
.

Tears nearly blinded me, liquefying the world outside my window. My cheeks were wet, my nose was running. I was gasping for air, laughter now exploding out of me.

It wasn’t food my father brought me.

It was rocket fuel.

I was going to make something of myself. Something 
big
.

My laughter was merely the eruption that occurs directly after ignition, as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen are converted into directed kinetic energy.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Blast off
.

EIGHTEEN

THE WAY I woke from sleep, suddenly, thickly, my dream was still stuck to me. Like a dry tongue, pasted to the roof of a mouth. I was thirty but felt fifty. Even with the blinds closed, as they always were, sunlight bled through the slats and washed the contents of my tiny Manhattan studio apartment. The protective, concealing layer of darkness had been peeled away by the sun and everything looked raw, exposed, like the skin that is revealed when a scab is pulled away. Hundreds of magazines, crumpled and stepped on, pasted to the floor through years of trampling, along with mounds of clothes on the sofa, half-empty Chinese food containers, Evian bottles stuffed with cigarette butts, and empty green Tsingtao beer bottles, many filled with urine. There was a path through the debris from the front door to my desk; from the desk to the bed; from the bed to the bathroom. At night when I drank, the room melted away, became a kind of nest. But in the daylight the room was madness and as I looked around at where I lived, I wondered if what I saw around me was a reflection, the externalization, of what was in my head.

I’d had another one of the dreams.

My left shoulder was numb and I couldn’t feel my fingers—I hadn’t changed position once all night. I sat up in bed, fully drained, as exhausted as if I’d been running. The sheet and comforter were twisted together into a sort of rope and my legs were intertwined with it. I’d never changed these sheets and had wet the bed again. I knew that by evening, they would be dry once again, but I could not stand to sit in the wet, terrible bed.

I swung my legs over the side and sat, feeling dizzy.

In this dream, I don’t know how I killed the person, but I was keeping their body beneath the floorboards. I was living in a different apartment, an old room with wide wood floorboards. I’d peeled up two of the boards and rested the body inside. What was so terrible was that in the dream I was aware that I had been having reccurring dreams where I killed people and had to dispose of the bodies, but this time, I’d really done it. In the dream, I’d woken up hungover and seen the pried-open floorboards. I’d approached the body and felt squeamish, repulsed. I’d wrapped the body in plastic wrap and tape and then a sheet. So in the dream, I was aware that I was having these dreams, and this made it especially real.

I walked from the bed and went into the bathroom. My urine was deep, deep yellow and as I pissed, I tried to aim the stream at the crusty, beige film of scum that encircled the inside of the bowl, to clean it. I’d never scrubbed the toilet.

The dreams were upsetting me. More and more, I was having the same dream. The circumstances were always different but in each, I killed somebody and then had to hide the body or find a way to get rid of it. When I woke up from one of these dreams, I was flooded with relief. I thanked God it was just a dream.

I was concerned, though I mentioned it to no one.

I climbed into the shower and as the hot water sprayed me, I felt the relief of distance from the dream. It was no longer clinging to me, the details so vivid and true. It was beginning to curl up and whither; soon it would evaporate away entirely.

But even then, I would still be left with my problem.

I dried myself by using my hand as a squeegee, sliding it quickly down my arm, legs, chest. I walked through to the main room of the apartment and picked through my laundry bag, the paper receipt still pinned to the side, to search for clean clothes. Jeans, a vintage T-shirt from a tackle shop in New Orleans, clean white socks.

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and left the apartment. Outside, I hailed a taxi and went to my office uptown.

I WAS AN associate creative director at an ad agency in Manhattan. At the office, I was funny and people seemed to like me. I’d worked with the same art director for many years and we traveled together from agency to agency as a creative team, so she assumed she knew me well. A few times a day I would go into the men’s room, close myself inside a stall, sit on the toilet, and block my ears with my hands. I would stay that way for a few minutes, trying to calm myself. I had the feeling that my home life, my real life, my dirty life, was leaking out, showing through. I had the feeling that people at the office could see something rotten and disturbing and insane poking through me.

It was essential that my work life remain good and clean and separate from the life that happened after work. Never would it occur to me to make a friend at the office.

I had a few suits, which I wore when it was important to wear a suit. But mostly, I wore jeans and T-shirts.

I worked out six days a week and was proud of my body. It was, for me, another point of difference between me and my father. It was important that I have as many of these as possible.

I dated. But nothing ever became serious because at a certain point, you have to invite the other person over to your apartment and I could never do this.

I had a few male friends, all of whom I’d dated in the past, and I kept them separate from one another. None of my friends had ever met.

I made very good money and spent all of it, every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck and after working in advertising since the age of nineteen, had saved around two hundred dollars.

My goal each day was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.

I used to go out to bars. I used to go to clubs. Now, I drank alone. Once drunk, I might wander the streets and look for drugs. Or go to a bar and talk to a stranger.

I was two people. The sane, funny, advertising me. And the other me, that came out at night. It was a constant struggle to manage the two. And lately, I was becoming very worried about this other person. It appeared that he was growing larger. The daytime me was shrinking. I was leaving the office earlier and earlier each day. It was only a matter of time before I quit entirely and went freelance.

Then, I would be accountable to no one.

This other side of me, this whole other person, even ate foods I didn’t like. Sometimes, I woke up to find an opened tin of smoked oysters on the bed. Once, I woke up in a different town. I was on the floor, beside a sofa. On one end of the sofa, a man who was unfamiliar, on the other a woman I’d never seen. I had no idea where I was or how long it would take me to get back to Manhattan.

But I did get back to Manhattan and went to work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As if I’d stayed home the night before and read a novel.

Nobody who knew me, or saw me on the street, would ever guess that I lived the way I did. That I had to keep my apartment air-conditioned year-round to control the odor. That my apartment wasn’t merely filthy but diseased.

I had concerns that something might be wrong with me. That the dreams might be a part of me trying to come out. I was afraid I might be a serial killer.

And I was afraid that I was exactly like my father.

He, too, showed the world one face but wore an entirely different one in private. And was I missing empathy? I thought this might be so.

It wasn’t that I had fantasies of killing people. But I was having dreams about it. And I had to admit, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Perhaps the dreams 
were
 fantasies, expressing themselves when I was out of the way.