Since he avoided the spotlight, his jokes weren’t stagy; he didn’t seek the coda of a laugh. He preferred to wield irony — an irony that could be devastating when he was talking about things that really mattered to him — and, even more frequently when among friends, he resorted to self-mockery, as when he affected the voice of a child to make his demands for love or to respond to those made of him.
I think that what he was hiding was a pronounced, paralyzing sense of pride. Many of his character traits embarrassed him, beginning with sentimentalism, and he put all his energy into hiding them, keeping them safe from prying eyes. That was why he avoided conversations that were too emotionally charged: he feared that his true self would surface, that a tear would escape him or one remark would lead to another until he ended up saying something he didn’t want to say. In fact, what embarrassed him most, and what his overdeveloped sense of pride was at most pains to conceal, was that he saw himself as weak. Sentimentalism was something he considered to be part of that weakness, along with other things I can only guess at. The central one: his lack of assurance in facing the practical questions of life, of which I — as his son — was a constant reminder.
For years I accused him of being an egoist, and he was. But it wasn’t the egoism of someone who loves only himself, who doesn’t care what happens to anyone else; it was the egoism of someone who does care, even too much, but who has a hard time stepping up if his life will be affected.
Did our similarities get in the way of our relationship? I’m not even sure they’re real and not a pretense that I clung to in times when nothing else seemed to unite us.
Resemblances: inherited and learned. I’ve written about them before. In my second novel I loaned my narrator my perplexity about why we’re stuck with certain traits — attitudes and mannerisms especially — that seem too random to be genetic and too trivial to be learned.
Most of the odd resemblances I cited as examples in my novel were really my father’s and mine. I don’t include them here, because they’ve already been recorded, and when stripped of the mask of fiction, almost all of them embarrass me. I purposely chose them with a parodic slant because that’s what the tone of the novel demanded.
Of course, they aren’t the only traits we shared. Beyond those I’ve used in fiction and beyond our increasing physical resemblance, there are others. Learned and inherited. Both of us melancholy, both quick-tempered, both timid, both insecure, both sentimental, both skeptics, both pessimists, both solitary, both allergic to social climbers and posers, both sober, both slightly exhibitionistic, both stoic, both dreamers, both affectionate, both masculine, both heterosexual, both secretly feminine, both vulnerable, both compassionate, both obsessive, both split, both quiet, both hobbled and thrown off-balance by an excessive awareness of our own limitations.
That’s part of what I inherited from him. The strange thing is that I could hardly have received it by contagion, having spent so little time living with him. Did it come to me in my genes, or did life mold us similarly even though our circumstances were different? He, a motherless child with older sisters, and I, an only child of separated parents; he, a creature of privilege until suddenly he wasn’t, and I, spoiled and pampered until I was made a skeptic by the fragility of the good life my mother and I shared and by the times we plummeted into the void, as well as by my dissatisfaction with him. Maybe that’s it: different circumstances with comparable effects. Or it might be that the resemblance isn’t so great, as I’ve said. That it’s nothing but an old formula for strengthening the bonds between us, recovered now through the subterfuges of mourning. As if I were trying to eliminate our differences in order to hold on to him, to make the line “Your father lives in you now”—which brought me unexpected consolation and that I could even feel physically — come true.
I don’t think that’s it. I think we are alike, even though there’s no way that all the traits we share could have been handed down to me directly from him; similarly, it wasn’t rejection of him that caused me to be inspired by the ways in which we were different, the things that set us apart: he more of a hedonist, more open-minded, more curious, more voracious, more virile; I more malleable, more chameleonic, warier, stronger, more capable, more independent. Less wounded.
It’s no accident that I’ve written “less wounded.” For years I wouldn’t admit it; for years, when I had him permanently in the dock, I tried to undermine any justification that might excuse his behavior. If he was wounded, I was more wounded; if his life had been hard, mine was harder; if he had something to complain about, I had more to complain about. He might have been mistreated by life, I thought, but he had mistreated me. Now I realize that this way of thinking itself proved that I’d had an advantage over him. I had him to rebel against, to build myself up against.
Competing with him, thinking that I was better than he was, gave me the impetus that so many times I would otherwise have lacked. Pitting myself against him and drawing strength from my rage, I gathered weapons to survive in the world. Pitting myself against him and drawing strength from my rage, I came up with plots for my stories; pitting myself against him, it’s even likely that I became a writer. After all, wasn’t the hatching of my dream and the switch to my mother’s world a consequence of my prolonged rebellion against having to give up the best playroom I ever had: his painter’s studio?
But that’s not all I got from him. What I got also includes what I really did learn.
Of what we shared, it’s hard to say which things — on his side — were a deliberate search for common ground, and which — on mine — were an attempt to emulate him.
For an endless period — almost my entire adult life — he exasperated me. He exasperated me more than anyone ever has. He exasperated me so much that for long periods I didn’t want to see him; just hearing his voice on the phone put me in a bad mood. I was outraged by his resignation, his conformism, the secrets he kept from me. I was outraged by his aloofness, his slipperiness, the way he ignored my arguments. I was outraged by his lack of understanding. I was outraged by his sense of superiority, his social clumsiness, his self-absorption. I was outraged by how fat he was, by the way he dressed, by his increasingly bourgeois life. I was outraged that in order to further refine his irritating stoicism, he had abandoned parts of himself that seemed more attractive to me than what he let me see in that endless stage of our life. It’s fair to say that I despised him. So great was my anger at times.
And yet practically all the faults I accused him of were faults of omission. His guilt lay not in what he did, but in what he failed to do, and especially what he failed to do for me. But even there I didn’t consider him to be completely guilty. His sin was having surrendered, having succumbed. The true guilty party, I concluded, was the friend he met in Brazil. His suffering was proof of it. If he had been the one driving it all, he wouldn’t have felt so bad. But he did. He blamed me, I suppose, for being immature, willful, demanding, but I always believed that when he turned out the lights at night, at the mercy of the radio playing in the background, he forgave me and understood me.