American Subversive (36 page)

Julie wasn't responsible for my parents' divorce (that title went to a “Porsche Girl” my father met at an auto-show advertising dinner while I was in college). No, she came several years and women later, after my father had squeezed everything he could from his extended midlife crisis and settled, creased and furrowed, into semiretirement outside Litchfield. It was during this period that I grew closest to him, the two of us stung by recent—repeated—failures (I'd just dropped out of NYU), but with all of life suddenly open to us. We saw each other every month, even took a road trip together. We were becoming friends.

Then Julie appeared. They met for the first time at a Midtown-hotel lounge where my father was entertaining a table of big-shot marketing people. Julie was their cocktail waitress, and somehow numbers were exchanged. She played it perfectly after that, stretched the chase out over several months so as to serve up her spicy past in digestible morsels. There were her children, for instance, two twin girls and a boy—ages six, six, and five—who lived with their father in Nassau County, begging the question—

Oh, there were so many questions it was hard to know where to begin.

As is a son's obligation, I'd rebelled against every stage of their courtship, from the sordid Phil Spector–ness of their initial meeting, through the dark days of the engagement, and on to the awkward wedding itself, which officially completed my father's reduction to cliché. He had doomed himself to play out the string with a washed-up stripper—because at some point, with her tits and attitude, Julie
must
have been a stripper—and that was just too much to bear. I refused to accept his new reality—or mine—and instead defaulted to a strategy of mordant disregard to get me through my Litchfield visits. This further distanced me from my father, of course, while exacerbating the significant tension and discord already present in the house. Still, I couldn't help myself. It was a rough situation. And I'd never been much of a bigger person.

Whether by accident or not, my father's birthday fell on one of the few weeks all year that Julie played host to her kids. Which is why he always begged me to come—even sprang for the rental car. And I couldn't blame him. They—Amber, Ashley, and their brother, Jordan (some real Asian-American names for you)—were miniature hooligans who pillaged with no fear of reprisal. Everyone ignored them, or tried to, except poor Loretta, the Honduran maid, whose job it was to keep them under control.

“She'd have better luck in the green-card lottery,” my father muttered, after one particularly difficult night a few years back.

The poor guy, turning sixty in a cyclone. But he would try to rally while I reverted to form, did what I always did: mock Julie's mindless small talk at dinner, and after she'd drunkenly gone to bed, slowly shake my head in disdain as my father sipped his scotch and kept the conversation away from anything personal or approaching important. Indeed, it was only out of some enduring filial respect that I hadn't yet asked the question that hovered over his house like an electric cloud—that being what the hell my father's thirty-four-year-old wife had done to lose custody of her three confused children. Because something pretty unbelievable must have happened.

Two cars—two
vehicles
—were parked in the driveway. The tiny Prius belonged to the long-suffering Loretta, keeper of secrets and nominal order. Beside the Prius sat another hybrid, this one brand-new and bright red, and it would have been exciting news, would have marked an evolution in family environmental thinking, if it weren't a massive Escalade, complete with step-up running boards and what looked like monster-truck tires. The thing was so wide the rearview mirrors had necks. I could only shake my head. That they'd gone to the trouble of buying the hybrid somehow made it worse.

I walked into the house and was immediately assaulted by the piercing screams of my young stepsiblings. They were in the den, jumping up and down on the couches while a TV gunfight droned on in the background. This is what a Yoko Ono karaoke party must sound like, I thought, as I turned and walked the other way. I found Loretta in the kitchen, watching a Spanish game show as she tended to a pot of
vegetables. She was momentarily startled, but recovered enough to say, “Hallo.”
“Hola,”
I responded, and from there we fumbled through each other's languages until I came to understand that my father and Julie were at the golf club.

“Practice,” Loretta said, making an odd attempt at a golf swing.

A shriek alit from the other room, so loud it echoed.

“
La casa mucho
noisy,” I said pathetically. “No wonder
señor et señorita
left.”

“Señor-a,”
Loretta said. “No
señorita.
” We grinned in some kind of collusion.

I couldn't wait around at the house, not with
Romper Room
in full swing, so I set off across town to find them. My father had joined the Torrington Country Club before Julie appeared on the scene, so the membership—a genteel roster of aging blue bloods—had no choice but to tolerate her plunging dinner dresses, skintight tennis whites, and thong bikinis at the children's pool (I hadn't seen her golf outfit yet). The wives wouldn't speak to her, of course, and the husbands weren't allowed to, but Julie didn't give a shit. She thought the place was hilarious. It's the one thing I liked about her.

I parked in the members lot and walked past the clubhouse to the driving range. I spotted Julie right away, at the far end of a row of comically clothed bodies hacking at stationary golf balls. She was wearing a sleeveless white top and a blue daisy-print miniskirt that barely reached her thighs. A matching choker added just the right touch of S&M to the proceedings, while allowing for an unobstructed view of her wondrous breasts. I stopped a moment to take in the scene, its lavish, unadulterated spectacle. Julie was taking a lesson from the head pro, who was down on one knee, like an on-deck hitter, patiently placing balls on tees, while my stepmother, still fit as a showgirl, stood up tall, spread her legs past shoulder-width, and took abbreviated swipes at the earth with some kind of high iron. In the four swings I witnessed, she made contact—with the golf ball—exactly half the time. The problem was simple to diagnose: her assets were a liability. She couldn't swing her arms without her tits getting in the way. Not that anyone cared. This performance had nothing to do with sport, and everything to do with a thirty-four-year-old seductress stuck in the middle of nowhere with a sixty-year-old retiree. It was only a matter
of time—weeks by the look of it—before a dock boy or yoga instructor or this golf pro here began complicating matters—if it wasn't already happening.

And my father? you might ask. He was a few spots down, hitting wedge shots at a crooked flag a hundred yards away. Could he be that oblivious? Or did he truly not care about the swirl of activity surrounding his wife? Christ, maybe he actually enjoyed it, in some perverse Hugh Hefner–ish way. I don't know. It was hard enough to view from a distance, this tragic final act of an American life, without delving under the sheets for the particulars. The total detachment. The absence of self-awareness. Or was it
too much
self-awareness? Had my father won or given up?

Bill Cole stayed poised over the ball as I approached him, but he must have sensed I was there, for his awkward swing produced a hand-rattling shank that sliced off toward the trees at all deliberate speed. He grimaced and looked up.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“
Aidan
. How are you? So sorry we weren't home.”

“Don't worry about it.” We shook hands and sort of patted each other on the back at the same time. A hybrid hug, I thought.

“It's just that Julie had a lesson scheduled—”

“I see that.”

“—and we were getting in Loretta's way. She's cooking dinner for us. Did you see the kids?” Something weird was happening. Two trickles of sweat had escaped from under his cap and were now wandering down past his ear. Except they were . . .
black
. Was his cap dirty or something? “Here, come say hello to your stepmother.”

“I don't want to interrupt.”

“No, no.”

We made our way down the firing line. In front of us, Julie swung and missed and giggled; the pro chuckled along with her, but stood up abruptly when he saw us. Julie turned around, and what Touché once described as “the greatest fake smile in the stepmother business” now spread across her face. She held her arms out, shirt stretched taut, and I stepped up to her. Her breasts felt like water balloons that could only give so much before bursting, which is not to say I didn't test them. Indeed, we held on a beat too long, the moment heightened by sweat
and perfume and the audience that was watching. She knew what she was doing. She knew that if I saw her in some Brooklyn bar (or, more likely, a Vegas lounge), I, like any man, would have been all over her. And who knows what she would have done then. We let go, and I backed away.

A few minutes later, her lesson came to a merciful end, and the four of us paraded toward the pro shop. Flustered after our encounter, I had somehow picked up Julie's golf bag and was now carrying it like a caddy, while the pro spoke—apparently seriously—about Julie's swing-plane.

One night, I thought. Just one night.

I followed my father's vintage MG along Route 4 toward Woodbridge Lake. The air was dry and cool with the wind, and I realized I'd gone almost two hours without thinking, without obsessing, about Paige. Which is exactly what I started to do. But then we stopped at an intersection and something in the lead car caught my eye; the top was down and my father had taken his cap off, and his hair was . . .
darker
. That's what it was! The bastard was
dyeing
it.

A frazzled-looking Loretta was waiting for us when we turned into the driveway. She began speaking rapidly in Spanish, which no one understood, but the gist of it was that Ashley or Amber (did Loretta get them confused as well? Did
Julie
?) had got loose in my father's study and knocked one of his prized advertising awards off the shelf.

“A CLIO?” my father asked, before realizing Loretta (and Julie, for that matter) would have no idea what he was talking about.

“Is broken,” Loretta said.

My father brushed past her into the house. The kids were nowhere to be heard.

“Want a drink?” Julie asked. “I'll make a pitcher of margaritas before I shower.”

“You've got him drinking margaritas?” I asked.

“I meant for you and me. He's strictly whisky or wine.”

“Whisky
and
wine.”

She managed a watery smile. She was tossing me a lifeline, not jumping in my boat.

“Fuck!”
my father shouted, from somewhere above us.
“The god- damn kids, Julie!”
Julie ignored him, but I ventured upstairs to observe the damage and found him squinting up at an empty space amid a row of awards on the top shelf of his bookcase. He had a gold statuette in one hand, its detached base in the other. “How the hell did they get up there?” he asked, genuinely flummoxed.

I took the black base from him and read the engraving aloud: “Absolut Vodka, U.S. Print, Winner, 1986.”

“How about that?” he said, calming down. “It was a big deal back in the day.”

“I'm sure.”

“Speaking of, how's your mother?”

The question caught me off guard. “Good,” I said. “Peaceful.”

“Lucky her. She still with that artist guy?”

“I guess, yeah. But he has his own place.”

“Well, tell her to marry him so the goddamn gravy train can come to an end. I've got enough expenses around here without shelling out for her every month.”

With that, he set the broken CLIO on his desk and we went downstairs. We were well into cocktail hour now, and I watched as my father measured out a few fingers of Maker's Mark while Julie poured the margaritas. It was the most focused I'd seen them. Somewhere in the house, a child yelled. My father shook his head. Julie looked at him and shook hers. Drink in hand, I escaped outside.

The view across the lake was spectacular. Out in the middle, a lone water-skier cut smoothly across the surface. A fisherman trolled quietly in a nearby cove. And a pair of loons—were they loons?—bobbed up and down a few yards from our dock. Nature rolled endlessly out in every direction, and yet it seemed somehow manageable, containable, as if physical splendor might still be enough to counteract man's many evils. I tried to tune out the rush and swirl of events. The kids arguing in the house behind me. My father shouting for his wife. And Derrick, whom I'd never gotten around to calling back. To say nothing of Cressida. The late-day sun was warm on my face and the margarita was strong and cold; New York seemed like another planet, orbiting, perhaps, but a long way off. Only Paige stayed with me.

What I thought about then was the Fishers Island photograph she'd
posed for with Brendan. And how completely dissimilar that Paige had seemed from the outlaw version currently occupying my apartment. Had she changed so much? Or was she both of those people (or neither of them)? Appearances: I'd spent my working life judging them, and the rest of the time keeping them up. What good had come of my efforts? For me? For anyone else? Tonight, I decided, I'd bite my tongue. Refrain from piling on. My father and Julie were somehow getting by, and maybe, for them, that was enough. Who was I to say it wasn't?

The big birthday dinner consisted of watery leek soup followed by tasteless pasta drowned in vegetables. Julie had turned a classic meat-and-potatoes man into some kind of organic nibbler. And still my father hadn't lost much weight. I tasted the soup, then put my spoon down and caught his eye. He shrugged. The kids, who started at the table with us, soon escaped to the counter stools and settled in to watch
Scarface
on the kitchen television. No one said anything about it until Pacino unleashed a particularly famous volley of oaths that caused my father to arch his eyebrows in the direction of his wife.