Family

Pretty much all we do anymore is argue. I’ve gotten quite good at it. I know which jabs to rebut and which to ignore and when to press on and when to hold back. I can make any and all of them feel skittish and defensive and defeated with one withering comeback or even one silent look, and so the apartment is pretty much all the time just a simmering pot of resentment and fear and conflict. I’m on top all the time, though. They know to keep their distance from me unless they want to get embarrassed.

What we were arguing about the other night is she thought I was cheating on her. Cheating on her! Can you imagine? A ridiculous proposition, and I told her as much. I told her I barely had the sex drive to keep me interested in one woman, let alone two or more. She didn’t like that very much.

I wouldn’t cheat on her though, even if I were more sexually inclined. I feel a tenderness towards her, the kind of tenderness you feel towards things you totally dominate. Pity mixed with--something. Pity mixed with more pity, but a different kind of pity. Pity, mostly.

The son was in the other room clacking away at his keyboard. Computer keyboard. I bought him a computer--my one indulgence--with the idea being that it would keep him out of our hair most of the time, and it worked. I don’t like the kid hanging around, truth be told. With his awkward limbs and his dull skin like a greasy paper plate and his awful voice. Voices, I should say. You hear him one day and it’s as deep as mine, the next he’s squeaking like a kitten. Annoying. Pick a voice and go with it. I don’t think it’s ever affected. There’s something wrong with his vocal chords, I’m sure of it, cancer maybe. Could it be? As plausible as any other explanation. Anyway, he sulks around the room and sulks at the corner of the couch and just darkens the whole damn room, truth be told. He has either an overbite or an underbite. I can’t tell which because he never opens his mouth, but I know it’s one of them because of the weird ways his lip juts out. He grows his hair too long so you can’t see his face, hardly, which is fine by me if his hair didn’t look so ridiculous and he kept better care of it. As it is it’s constantly in tangles, hanging over his eyes.

I was never like him when I was in my youth. Well, I like to think I am still in my youth, but we were all younger once upon a time, were we not? I was confident, even when I was his age. Oh, I thought I had it all figured out, and though I was wrong about most things, I was not so awfully wrong that I am embarrassed to think back on it today, where when the son is old and bald I’m sure he’ll be just mortified by how he acts today. And he’ll look back on his old dad with a new understanding, of what he had to put up with.

“What’s he writing in there?” she asked. “Hopefully a suicide note,” I responded. She gasped. I was taken aback. It was just some thing I said. Hadn’t put an atom of thought into it beforehand--it just came out.

“How could you say a thing like that about your own son?” she asked, in a whispered hiss. She was feigning outrage, to score points against me, I could tell. I frowned, for it was careless of me to have opened this door. Normally I am much more careful.

“It’s just a joke,” I hissed back. “You need to learn how to take a joke. That’s his,” pointing back at the boy’s room, “problem, doesn’t know how to take a joke. He gets that from you. That’s why he comes shuffling home from school mumbling to himself about how people made fun of him, because he doesn’t know how to take it.” I can take a ribbing, always could. That’s part of childhood, is learning how to take a ribbing so it doesn’t affect you anymore. Those of us masters learn how to get inside the ribbing and find what really cuts, so that we can do damage to others while sustaining no damage ourselves. Have I mixed my metaphors? Never mind.

“He comes home from school depressed because he’s not motivated by you.”

“And he is motivated by you?”

“I’ve done everything I can,” she said. The truth, perhaps, I would have no way of knowing. I responded with a snort--skeptical, but sufficiently vague, to guard myself.

“You need to be the one to motivate him,” she said. “He respects you.” Respects! What a fool. What kind of boy respects his father? A weak one. A boy must always be watching his father, watching him become old and slow, waiting for the moment he can destroy and overtake him. That’s how it was with me and my old man. He showed me the ropes, the old fool, at the family business, until I pushed him out the door and into a retirement home. Never knew what hit him. Oh, I won’t pretend I don’t feel some affection for the old man now and then, but what should I have done? Let him hang on past his prime and take nothing for myself? End up old and wasted like him before my own time, before I even had a chance to make something for myself? No, that wouldn’t happen to me. I would never let it.

Regardless, I wanted to leave the room and score some points of my own, so I waved her off and headed off for the boy’s room. He was reclined on his bed, on his stomach, feet up in the air kicking back and forth like a schoolgirl’s. He had moved his desk right up to the edge of the bed so that he could operate his computer from the comfort of the reclined position. The keyboard was pulled onto the comforter; the rest of the machine remained on the desk. It was an old, heavy, ugly model; I had found it on the side of the road, though it was not trash, because I saw the guy put it there and talked to him about it and he agreed to let me take it away, since it was going to be garbage anyway. The boy is fine with it, so fine.

“Wha’cha writing there?” Aiming for a tone of fatherly conviviality; missing the mark wildly, I’m afraid.

“Poetry,” he said. “I like to get my feelings down in poetry.”

Christ.

“Private stuff, I guess.” I was just praying that he wouldn't let me read it.

“Actually, I could use a second opinion,” he said. “From someone I trust.” What a load; he was playing the game too, I was sure of it. And trust--he trusted me to do what? To lie and say it was the sign of budding genius? To sugarcoat my criticism, so as to preserve his delicate little feelings? To give him the unvarnished truth and rip him to shreds?

The poem was a mess, naturally. Unoriginal, awkwardly phrased. No sense of rhythm, nor rhyme. It was about his need to "stand out" amongst the "faceless crowd" (Christ), something like that. I skimmed it briefly. I advised him to pay more attention to structure then tried to delicately change the subject.

“Is this poem for school?” I asked.

“No,” he pouted. Unattractive boy when he pouted, like a fish. “Mr. Bevelacqua represses me.” No kidding. And who could blame the man? I certainly wouldn’t want drivel like this piling up on my desk, seeping into my weekends and (God forbid) summers.

“From what I hear you’re having trouble in school,” I said gently. It was enough to make me retch; I’m surprised I held it in. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t like the people there,” was his pathetic excuse. Had he not learned sublimation yet? Redirecting loneliness and rage into productive pursuits such as academics? 14 years old and he still had no clue how it was done in the adult world. I’d love to mope around all day writing dreadful poetry but I have a family to feed.

“No matter where you go, you’ll find people you don’t like,” I said. Mostly true. Some of us are lucky to have good friends at work, to relieve the abject drudgery of home life.

“I guess.” He paused. “I guess I have a lot of complicated feelings, you know? And it seems like no one at school understands that.” He looked up at me. Wuh oh. Time to get out of there.

“Well why don’t you just try a little harder, OK?” I said, patting him on the rear. A mistake--past a certain age, childhood rings like a tuning fork with overwrought Freudian sexual tension. Unconscionable, what that Freud did to parenting. The son took the pat OK--a little too OK, is what I was worried about. At least act embarrassed, squirm a little bit, for my sake. Though “squirm” is just an awful word there--it’s a minefield, the whole subject.

Back in the hallway, I closed the door to his room. I had earned a shower. Yes, a shower on a Saturday afternoon--4ish--is my one vice. Drying yourself off and slipping into your pajamas all clean and new---it’s the tops. On the way to the tub, I almost stepped on the dog. Out of food? No; he would have yelped and panted and let me to the bowl. In need of a walk? His leash was by the front door; he is trained to bring it over when he needs to go outside. So what then? “What?” I said. The dog just looked up. I gave him a little kick with my foot, and he let himself be nudged but kept looking up. A little harder; no change. "What, then? Out with it!" I shouted. And I shouted again, much louder, but the dog just kept looking up, so I shouted louder, mouth foaming, in a frenzy, and I looked up and the boy and the wife were there, giving me exactly the same look.