You Can Say You Knew Me When

by K.M. Soehnlein

Genres: LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Charming underachiever Jamie Garner is living a sexy slacker's life in San Francisco during the dot-com boom--avoiding his stalled career as a radio producer, barely holding on to his relationship, but surrounded by fun-loving friends. And then Jamie gets the call he's always dreaded: Teddy, the father who never accepted him, has died. It's time for the prodigal son to come home to the subdivisions and strip malls of suburban New Jersey to face the emotionally barren family he left behind years ago. Caught between the guilt he wants to shake and the grief he can't express, Jamie takes solace in a box of memorabilia he finds in the attic, marked "1960," the year his father spent in San Francisco but kept secret. Jamie is especially drawn to a moody, enigmatic photo of the stunning Dean Foster, his dad's closest friend, who headed west then mysteriously disappeared. Determined to unlock the mystery of his father, Jamie seeks out the artists and poets, the free spirits and wild men mentioned in Teddy's letters to Dean. It's a journey that takes him deep into the subcultures of San Francisco, from the bohemian heyday of the Beat Generation through the Internet mania of his contemporary world, even as it unleashes something primal, hungry, and slightly dangerous in Jamie. As his search for the elusive Dean Foster turns ever more obsessive, undermining his friendships, his income, and his fidelity to his partner, Jamie is forced to decide what he is willing to risk in the pursuit of the truth. "Engaging . . . the flow and intensity of the writing make it difficult to put Soehnlein's book down . . . With remarkably stylish and witty prose, Soehnlein keeps the reading convincing and compelling, displaying a knack for giving just enough detail to put the reader right in the scene."-- The San Francisco Chronicle

Release date: October 9, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 436

Sample

It had been five years since I’d visited Greenlawn, and as soon as I stepped off the bus from Newark Airport, it was clear the only thing that had changed was me.

Many of the same family-owned shops that had been here when I was a kid still stood: the pet store, the hardware store, the place selling musical instruments, the one that made custom-ordered curtains. There was even Georgie’s Sweet Shoppe, where I worked one summer during high school, mixing ice cream and chocolate in the basement, putting twenty pounds on my teenage frame. Each of these stores was housed in brick, all warm hues and weathered corners, so that the main street resembled a single, long storefront, sturdy and timeworn. In San Francisco, where I lived, brick was nearly nonexistent; brick walls collapse during earthquakes. The old brick warehouses that I biked past every day on my way to my boyfriend Woody’s apartment were all being retrofitted with massive steel beams in X formation along the weight-bearing walls. The effect was something like seeing a brace put on a leg before any bone has broken: The buildings were stronger, but you were newly aware of how vulnerable the original structure had been.

Growing up, I saw Greenlawn, New Jersey, as the epitome of American suffocation and conformity. Now here it stood, a pleasant little village preserved in amber. The brickface was part of this, and beyond that, the fact that there were almost no chain stores on the main street. I looked across the intersection to the town park, whose Veterans Memorial and white gazebo had seemed to my rebellious teenage self symbols of oppression, but which now simply seemed old-fashioned; not Amerikkka, but Americana.

My father loved living in Greenlawn. As I stood at the bus stop, waiting for my sister to arrive—luggage at my feet, a lit cigarette in my mouth—I repeated that sentiment in my head, a platitude at-the-ready for meeting and greeting relatives during his wake and funeral in the days to come. It’s good that he died here, in this place that he loved. This was bullshit, of course: He’d died too young, in the hospital, after a painful deterioration, and for those involved the whole thing was suffused with tragedy. That I wasn’t one of those involved was the reason I needed to rehearse platitudes at all. I needed something to say, a way to be and behave during this visit.

A screech of tires, a blur of silver in the winter air: a minivan arcing sharply through the street in front of me. For a split second I imagined it roaring over the yellow-striped curb and plowing into me—I saw the headline, ILLEGAL U-TURN ENDS IN DEATH—but instead it slid efficiently to the curb. At the wheel was my sister, Deirdre. The passenger window lowered halfway, and her voice carried over from the driver’s seat: “I know I’m late. Put your bags in the back.”

I took one last drag off my cigarette, glancing at the clock on the First Jersey Bank across the street. 10:05. “In my world, five minutes late is early,” I said.

I turned to lift my luggage into the back of the van. Staring across the backseat was a small boy bundled in winter clothes. My nephew, AJ. I hadn’t seen him since he was born, and what I caught in his wide brown eyes, gazing out from below a snowflake-patterned ski cap, was equal parts anticipation and suspicion. Distracted, in mid-swing, I banged my forehead on the edge of the roof, letting out a pained “Fuck!” I’m all too famous for this kind of klutzy move.

AJ’s eyes widened.

“Pretend I didn’t say that.” I sent him a wink. As I circled back to the front seat, he twisted beneath his safety belt to keep a watch on me.

I hopped inside and leaned across a topography of gray leather to give my sister a greeting: a no-contact kiss near the side of her face and an awkward shoulder pat meant as a hug. She remained more or less motionless through this, her hands firmly on the steering wheel. “How was your flight?” she asked. Her face was thinner than I remembered, tight around the jaw. Or maybe it was the severe way she’d pulled back her hair into one of those clip-combs. When she pressed her burgundy-painted lips together, the effect was one of strain.

“The flight was fine,” I said. “No, actually, it was awful. I was in and out of sleep. I’m sort of stiff all over.”

“Can’t remember the last time I flew anywhere,” she said as she pulled the van into the street.

I was contemplating how much accusation I should insinuate from her tone—I haven’t flown anywhere because I’ve been here, taking care of our dying father—when AJ interrupted from the backseat.

“Was I ever on a plane, Mommy?” His voice was New Jersey through and through: evva onna plane.

“Ayj, you know you weren’t,” she replied. “Did you say hello to your uncle Jamie?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He said the F-word.”

Deirdre exhaled wearily. “Off to a great start.”

“It was self-defense!” I threw my arms apart, exaggerating a plea for mercy, trying to keep things light. “I was attacked by the rear end of this high-octane death machine.” I turned around and looked at AJ. “Come on, kid. Don’t give your mother any ammunition against me.”

Deirdre sighed again. “Just watch your mouth around him, Jamie.”

AJ had already grown since the Christmas photo Deirdre and her husband, Andy, had mailed me; dressed in a shirt and a tie and framed by an evergreen wreath, he’d seemed prim and well behaved. He looked more playful in person, rolling a multicolored rubber ball from hand to hand, but I guessed he was kept pretty tight under Deirdre’s thumb. “You can fly on a plane to California. That’s where I live,” I said to him.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed.”

“You can go when you’re ten,” Deirdre said.

“That’s two times my age,” AJ protested.

“He has Andy’s knack for numbers,” Deirdre whispered.

“Five years is a long time. We’ll work on her, AJ.” His eyes twinkled back—a lovely moment, a little reward for my efforts to befriend him, but one that evaporated quickly as Deirdre spoke again.

“You’re still smoking.”

“I’ve cut back quite a bit,” I said.

“Cut back isn’t the same as quit.” She sounded like a mother lecturing to a teenager—like our mother, who’d once caught us sneaking cigarettes in the attic. How old were we then? Mom died when I was seventeen and Dee was fifteen; this would have been a couple years before. I’d taken the heat that day, “confessing” that I’d pressured Dee, when in fact it had been little sister who wanted to get in on big brother’s bad habit. The whole episode had ended in some kind of punishment for me when Dad got home.

“Look, I’m a very civilized smoker,” I said. “I sit next to an open window when I smoke in my own apartment. I’m not some chimney you have to tolerate under your roof.”

“You’re not staying under my roof.”

“Where am I staying?” But I knew before I’d completed the question: at my father’s house. About a half mile ago we hadn’t turned right at the middle school, which would have taken us to where Deirdre, Andy, and AJ lived on the other side of Greenlawn. Instead we had continued straight on, toward the house where we grew up.

“I need you to keep an eye on Nana,” she said.

Our grandmother had been living with our father, her only son, for the past few years, taking care of him through his illness. I had no idea what state I’d find her in, what kind of help she needed. I tried to remember the last news I’d gotten about Nana, in one of Deirdre’s monthly phone calls. “How is she?”

“Well, she’s eighty-five years old, and she just watched her son die,” she said, turning the van into the driveway. “Think about it.”

A tightness took hold of my stomach, the awful feeling of returning to a place reverberating with old hostility. The yard looked barren. The spindly oak tree that had stood near the sidewalk was gone, opening up the view to the house—two stories and an attic covered in pale, sooty shingles. The place had always looked its best in the summer, surrounded by green grass, leafy oaks, flowering honeysuckle and azalea bushes. In the winter it resembled some kind of Gothic rooming house, all cold doorknobs and creaky floorboards, a block of grayish white not so different from the grayish white winter sky above it. I thought of what I’d find inside: canned beer in the fridge, a thermostat not turned up high enough, lights flipped off in every empty room. The thrifty way Teddy Garner kept house. Then I remembered what I wouldn’t find: Teddy—my father—at the center of it.

 

For years everyone had referred to my father’s condition as Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t exactly that. He suffered from a particularly virulent form of what the doctors labeled nonspecific dementia, akin to Alzheimer’s but ultimately not diagnosable without a brain biopsy—something my father, with his fear and loathing of the medical establishment, did not allow. The label made no difference; the nerve connections corroding inside his brain, nonspecifically, from the time he was in his mid-fifties, made all the difference in the world. He was dead before he turned sixty.

I had ceased contact with my father five years earlier. Had cut him off. Deirdre periodically pressured me to come home. Her most recent plea came ten days before, when she warned me that this hospitalization would likely be his last. But he was brought in just before New Year’s, 2000, the turn of the millennium, a time when even the most rational people were spooked by dire apocalyptic scenarios: computer networks powering down, electricity fritzing off around the globe, passenger jets falling from the sky. No one was flying then. I’d personally stocked up on batteries, canned food and bottled water, just in case. It was a distracting time—neurosis on a mass scale. Y2K. A compelling reason to stay away.

But even if I had simply taken the first available flight to New Jersey, stood alongside my sister and brother-in-law, my grandmother and my aunt, claimed my belated membership in the vigilant inner circle, it wouldn’t have changed one basic fact: My father lacked the faculties to recognize me. The moment for restorative visitations had passed long ago. Woody had urged me to hurry back for my own sake, for a sense of closure, but I didn’t take much stock in this. “The case has been closed for years,” I told him. For five years, to be precise, since my father and I had our last argument—what I decided would be our final argument.

Deirdre’s call had come during an unlit early-morning hour while I was deep in sleep. “It’s over,” she said, sniffling through tears. “You didn’t get to say good-bye.” I couldn’t tell if she was angry or felt sorry for me.

I propped myself up, half awake, tented in blackness, fumbling for something to say. All the usual sentiments seemed wrong, inappropriate to our family’s situation, our strained relations. “What happens now?” I asked.

“There’s a lot to do,” she said. “I’m going to need your help.”

I found myself struggling to recall if I had any freelance work lined up for the next couple days; how difficult it would be to meet with Anton, my pot dealer, before I left San Francisco; which of my overburdened credit cards had room for a last-minute cross-country airfare. “I’ll probably need a little time to get myself together,” I told her.

“Sure, just take your time,” she said, sobs sucked up into steely sarcasm. “See if you can fit it into your schedule, you know, before he’s fucking buried.”

This caught me off guard. I can see now that it shouldn’t have; estranged or not, he was my father, this was his funeral. But on the spot, I thought, I hoped, that I could just show up at the last minute, shake a few hands, and move on—like any other far-off acquaintance. I was wrong.

 

When we were children, Deirdre and I used to push past our parents and race each other up the stairs of the apartment building in Manhattan where Nana lived. We’d find our grandmother standing ramrod straight in the doorway, wearing an apron over a fancy dress, a potholder in her hand. We’d throw ourselves at her, and she’d always say, in her heavy Irish brogue, “Smelled the cooking, did you?” as she shooed us inside to eat something hearty like baked ham and boiled potatoes. The ritual changed over time—we got older and less demonstrative, and Nana spent far fewer hours in the kitchen after her husband, who we called Papa, died—but I still thought of her that way. Welcoming.

There was no sight of her as I lugged my bags from the minivan into the house. Instead I found her sitting in the kitchen, her eyes fixed on a TV perched atop the refrigerator. I went to her side and wrapped my arms around her. Even in the old days, Nana had been more of a back-patter than a hugger; along with her stiff posture came a certain emotional rigidity. But this time, as I felt the nubs of her vertebrae and the hard lines of her shoulder blades, I got absolutely nothing in return.

I asked her how she was feeling. She shrugged, nothing more. As I slunk back toward the counter she said, “Make yourself a cup of tea, Jimmy.”

The name halted my steps. No one had called me Jimmy since high school, and I’d more or less forgotten that anyone ever had. Jamie was the name I’d given myself when I left home. (No one ever, ever, used the name on my birth certificate, James, though the stoners I hung out with in college liked to call me Rockford, after the TV detective played by the actor whose name I shared.) When members of my family used Jimmy, I felt them clinging to a me who no longer existed. To Nana I would always be the boy racing up four flights of stairs to greet her.

I was starting to take off my coat, thinking about a nap, when Deirdre called from across the room, “Don’t get too comfortable.”

She was scanning a clipboard and repeatedly clicking the end of a ballpoint pen, snap-snap, snap-snap, a tic that pressed whiteness into the tip of her thumb. I noticed her manicured fingernails, maroon like her lipstick. She used to bite her nails, right down to the skin. “Follow me,” she said, waving toward the stairs, whisking me into the centripetal force of her plans.

 

The first task was to haul our father’s mattress off his bed. One, two, three, lift: The waft of urine, infection and medicinal powder, faint but unmistakable, spiraled into the air between us, and I felt bile bubble up from my travel-addled guts. “This is nothing,” Deirdre said, seeing the expression on my face. “You should have been here two weeks ago.”

Or two months ago, I imagined her thinking. Or two years. “I’m about five seconds away from puking up airplane food,” I said.

“One thing I’ve learned—you can get used to anything.” On her face I could see the toll of getting used to this: worry lines around her mouth and eyes, a tendony tightness to her neck. She was younger than me—she wasn’t yet thirty—but she’d started to look like my older sister.

We lugged the mattress, which was bowed at the center and blotchy with stains, out into the damp January air and wedged it into her minivan. It came to rest on top of the seat backs. “It’s kind of like a loft bed,” I wisecracked. “You might want to use it as a guest room.”

“Great, now I know where we can put you,” she said dryly. She was dangling the car keys in the air between us. “You remember how to get to the dump?”

“You’re kidding, right?” She was not kidding. “Isn’t there some service that can take this away?”

“Yeah, it’s called Big Brother’s Moving Company.” She pressed the keys into my palm.

“Don’t I have a say in this?”

“Not really.” Then, softening just a touch: “Please, Jamie. It’s your turn.”

Years ago I’d been part of the group that cleared out my friend Paul’s apartment after he died from AIDS, and his mattress was the very first thing we got rid of. Deirdre had put off this wretched task for two days, or three, whatever it had been, even with Nana living here and Andy around to lend muscle power. Why? Because it was my turn, my punishment? I knew how easy it was to slip into an argument with her; I wondered if she’d actually welcome it.

But I’d sworn to myself I’d get through this visit without incident. I took my place behind the wheel.

Coping with the smell was easy enough—I opened the windows, gladly enduring the cold air; I lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the dashboard—but the specter of my father wasting away on the mattress now bobbling behind my head was another matter entirely. He’d been a sturdy, almost stocky man—five feet eleven inches, nearly two hundred pounds—but illness would have shrunken him. Again I thought of Paul on the eve of his death, the skin-and-bones appearance; his shallow, dry breathing; the medicated glaze of his eyes as he held on longer than any of us thought he would, longer than we’d hoped was possible. My brain morphed them together, the friend I loved and the father I did not, until a sickly vision floated up behind me—the slate blue of my father’s eyes bulging out from a skeletal face, his cracked lips rasping out one of his characteristic truisms: Responsibility breeds respect. Respect comes from responsibility. Show me one, Jimmy, and I’ll show you the other. Even in death, a lecture.

My foot fell heavier on the gas, and I sped along the residential streets, gunning through a yellow light, honking at a slow-moving subcompact. I flipped the radio to an all-talk station and tried to lose myself in the angry pitch of political debate. Caller and host were arguing about whether or not Al Gore should distance himself from Bill Clinton in order to win the presidency. I joined in: Yes, distance yourself. Don’t get dragged down by the last guy’s mistakes. Be your own person!

At the dump I was the third minivan queued up. I killed the engine and watched one, then another, middle-aged woman extract a withered Christmas tree from her vehicle’s rear door, drag it across the frozen ground and, with a scattering of dead needles, heave the barky skeleton into an enormous gray compactor. It was all rather efficient, a timeworn January ritual at which I was some kind of interloper. When my turn came, I felt like the punch line to a comedy sketch: soccer mom, Christmas tree; soccer mom, Christmas tree; gay guy, dirty mattress.

I held my breath as I catapulted his death-bedding into the compactor’s jaws, grunting “Rest in peace” as it slipped from my sight. I was answered by an uprising of dust that hovered high above before disseminating on the wind, carrying toward me a last gasp of pine.

 

I wanted so badly to sleep, but when I got back to the house I was conscripted into other projects. First, the arranging, and frequent rearranging, of living room/dining room/family room furniture according to Deirdre’s orders, in anticipation of the visitors who would stop by after the wake the next night. Given the number of cobweb-caked folding chairs we dragged up from the basement and wiped clean, it seemed that she was expecting half of Greenlawn. Then we took the van to Big Savers, one of those enormous concrete warehouses where everything is sold extra-extra-jumbo size, a place so antithetical to the town’s Mom-and-Pop main street that it wiped away all my quaint illusions of Greenlawn. Here were the locals en masse—teenage employees speeding by on forklifts, overweight retirees in motorized wheelchairs, four-year-olds scurrying among the free samples as one mother after another shouted “Jacob, put that down” and “Emily, I said no.” I was glad we’d left AJ behind with Nana.

I straggled alongside Deirdre, who commandeered a shopping cart so large an average supermarket cart could have fit inside it. She loaded it up with restaurant-size packs of paper products, cases of carbonated soda, loaves of bread the sizes of roasting pans, boxes of shrink-wrapped guacamole, gallon jars of salsa and all manner of mass-produced snacks, each labeled to sound upscale: Mesquite Chips, Fancy Cookies, Four Cheese Tuscan Pizza.

“Could we maybe buy something besides junk food?” I finally asked, watching another chunky ten-year-old gobble up samples of Turkey Jerky.

“It’s just for people to nibble. Nana’s making a roast.” She handed me a laundry-detergent-size box of Gourmet Party Mix.

“Do you even know what’s in this?”

“AJ loves it. You gonna tell me how to feed my son?”

I put on a Big Savers mom-voice and wagged my finger: “Deirdre, I said no.”

She paused a moment. Was I joking? Was this worth a fight? “Some fruit would be good,” she said finally, returning the offending snack food to the mile-high shelves.

 

The quiet of the house started to spook me. I had moved my bags into a small room at the end of the upstairs hall that had once been where our mother sewed the clothes Dee and I wore as kids. I pictured Mom staring out the window into the backyard—the weedy lawn, overgrown bushes and tall evergreens—guiding inexpensive poly-cotton fabrics under the needle as she hummed one of the German songs of her childhood. Her Singer sewing machine, with its varnished wood table and brown-plastic foot pedal, was long gone, probably donated to the Salvation Army after her death.

My mother’s death had been the inverse of my father’s: quick, shocking, unbearable. She’d gone into the hospital suffering sudden, debilitating chest pain and died a day later, after twelve hours on the operating table. The postmortem diagnosis blamed a defective heart valve that had gotten infected, flooding her bloodstream with toxic microorganisms. My father spent the rest of his life suing the hospital and various members of its staff for malpractice. He became a self-taught medical expert, obsessed with figuring out what had gone wrong in surgery, sure that this could have, should have, been averted, and it had made him as crazy as any single-minded crusader.

I was seventeen when she died, a junior in high school, already a troublemaker—chain-smoking, breaking curfew, drinking until I puked. Mom’s death turned me into a sort of runaway, hopping between overnights with friends, piling up unexplained absences, infuriating my father. I could no longer stand to be in this house, which was, back then, so clearly hers. Not only had she been home more than the rest of us—she worked part-time as a lab technician in the same hospital where she died—but she kept our family in equilibrium, mediating arguments, offering compromises. I’d been identified as the problem child a decade earlier, a smarty-pants always talking back, and at the same time a confrontation avoider, a late sleeper, a dawdler. My mother had patience for my restlessness. One day you’ll outgrow this, she’d say, her English so perfect it revealed no trace of her German upbringing. My father was the pessimist. A wiseass never wins. We were two stubborn red-haired males, always at odds—though before my mother died we at least had someone to run interference for us.

This was the most I’d thought about her in years.

This sewing room was now a guest room, big enough for only an end table, a twin bed and an enormous wicker planter sporting a dusty bouquet of fake peacock feathers. The wallpaper had a leafy green, vaguely jungly pattern; the bedspread, in contrast, was midnight blue and swirled with stars and galaxies—the same one beneath which I’d agitated as a teenager. The mattress might have been my teenage mattress, too. It was so broken-in I couldn’t get comfortable.

Nearly thirty hours had passed since Deirdre’s call cut off my last deep sleep, but I was wide awake. Is there anything more enervating, short of chronic physical pain, than not being able to sleep when you’re clearly exhausted? I tried reading the book I’d packed and watched pages turn while words went unabsorbed. I opened up the notebook I carry around as a journal, wrote down some thoughts about brick storefronts, dirty mattresses and the dystopia of Big Savers, but then gave up when I tried to put into words what I might be feeling about the reason I had come here. It was too soon; I was too freshly in it. I tried jacking off but couldn’t shake the vehemently nonsexual cloak of death hovering in the air, not to mention the image of my grandmother in the next room. The muffled bass tone of her TV rumbled through the wall.

Finally, I got up and phoned Woody at work.

“I’m missing you, Wormy,” I told him. “This is pretty hard.”

“Must be hard for you there. Is everyone really sad?”

“Not so much sad as—I don’t know—tense. Nana’s avoiding me. Deirdre’s bossing me around.”

“What about you, Germy?” (That’s right, Wormy and Germy, the private us.)

“Painfully tired. I can’t sleep, I’m so traumatized by the sound of Deirdre’s cracking whip. You’d be proud of me, though. I haven’t started any fights.”

I told him I wished he was here with me. This was sidestepping the truth: I hadn’t invited him to come along. There was no way to pull him from his fifty-hour-a-week dot-com job, went the official reasoning for his absence, but the fact was, I just couldn’t cope with a boyfriend in the midst of the family reunion. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me: While my father was alive, my boyfriends weren’t welcome.

On my last trip back, a couple months after AJ was born, I’d been hopeful. AJ’s birth was a big deal, something to pull us, once and for all, out of the gloom of Mom’s death. Change was in the air, and spirits were high. Dad organized a big summer party, inviting friends from all corners of the past along with the whole extended family. Deirdre and Andy had married quickly, and quietly, after she got pregnant, but they’d been dating for years, and everyone was ready to celebrate. This would be the wedding reception my father had been deprived of.

The sun blazed strong that day, the humid air thick with barbecue smoke, cut grass and honeysuckle, the yard trampled with the carefree steps of guests getting drunk. Deirdre wore the tired-but-smiling face of the new mother; Andy was fast growing into the part of proud papa, boasting that AJ’s big hands were a sign he would play for the New York Mets some day. Dad had lorded over the grill all afternoon, a whiz with spatula and tongs, his voice booming greetings across the yard, his new apron announcing him as the WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA.

That night, I cornered him in his bedroom for a talk that I’d nervously rehearsed ahead of time. I told him that I had wanted to bring David—the guy I was seeing back then—to the picnic, but that I hadn’t because I didn’t think Dad would approve. My father, without hesitation, said, “You were correct.” The conviction of his voice, its done-deal tone, squeezed the air out of me. “I thought you’d changed,” I said, and he replied, “As always, I prefer that you keep your private life private.” To which I said, “Then I prefer to not come home anymore.”

That’s the headline-news version. The actual conversation was lengthy and insulting and loud. I called him a bigot in a dozen different ways. He took great issue with my timing: I was stealing Deirdre’s spotlight; I was ruining a joyful occasion. “You’re looking for attention,” he told me in his calm, clenched voice. “You’ve always craved attention.” I tried to notch it down, to take the anger out of my voice, to sound as rational as he did, but I wasn’t able: It hurt. It hurt because we’d been through this before, when I was a teenager and he’d first discovered my sexuality; after I got out of college, finally able to admit to myself what I was; when I decided to move to San Francisco, hoping he’d understand; and then long-distance, over the phone, in smaller doses. I’d been “coming out” to him for most of my adult life.

That night I told him he wouldn’t hear from me until he’d changed his mind. What I actually said was “Until you stop being so fucking closed minded.”

All this came roaring back to me after I got off the phone with Woody. I was sitting in a nook in the upstairs hallway, in an armchair next to a small wooden table—the “telephone table” we called it, a name that had always sounded sophisticated to me, something out of a Rosalind Russell movie. I glanced toward my father’s bedroom. An eerie, vertical slice of darkness floated between the half-open door and the frame, beyond which I could see our penultimate argument in pantomime: me, pacing uneasily, wearing shorts made from cut-off Army fatigues, a sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with a random high-school sports logo (WOLVERINE WRESTLING), silver rings on my fingers, silver hoops in my ears, a fresh tattoo inked around my bicep, the whole look an ironic pastiche of the very masculinity that he embodied. I must have appeared so adolescent to him. Clownish. Gay. Sitting tensed on the bed, he was intimidating and solid: freshly showered, his clean white T-shirt snug across his barrel chest, his freckled and furry arms, his clenched fists. I saw each contour so clearly. He was dead, but his presence was stronger than it had been for years.

I walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open, flicked on the light. Medical supplies—pill bottles and swabs and a thermometer—cluttered the dresser. The bed frame, devoid of its mattress, sat empty in the center of the room, a fuzzy coating of dust on the brown rug beneath. In a span of five years, my father had been transformed from that imperturbable figure arguing rationally from the foot of his bed to an emaciated shell withering away under the covers. Perhaps he was already heading into dementia the night we’d fought—plaque forming along his nerves, the viral conspiracy to bring down his brain fomenting deep within.

A couple of months after that, he called me in San Francisco to chat. Literally, just to chat. For small talk. When I brought up the subject, he seemed perplexed, as if things between us hadn’t gotten so heated. “I consider that matter settled,” he said, as if reviewing a policy dispute with a co-worker. It was all I needed to end contact, once and for all.

But now I wondered, when he’d made that call, had he literally forgotten the previous argument? Was he, in general, beginning to forget? It was only six or eight months later that Deirdre first started reporting Dad’s strange behavior—how he’d begun repeating himself, misplacing things, losing his sense of direction and time.

Her reports continued, always worsening, and Deirdre began urging me to come home. She had always been like our mother in her willingness to compromise for him, to build a game plan around his inflexibility. “You’re his son,” she would inevitably say. But I couldn’t come home. I wouldn’t. I had stopped caring, had stopped making myself crazy because my father disapproved of me, and this stopping had unburdened me. Case closed.

Long before my father died, I’d made peace—not with him, but with our estrangement.

 

And yet.

Nana woke me the next morning with a hand on my shoulder, an urgent whisper in my ear. “Up, Jimmy, up!”

The sky was still dim outside the window. Nana had a sympathetic, silvery glow about her. “Mass is at eight. You’ll take me, then?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven. But the driveway’s covered in snow. It could use a good shovel.”

“Okay,” I groaned. “Will you make me coffee?”

“Of course,” she said. “A fair trade.”

Maybe not so fair—Nana’s coffee was percolator-burnt, the charcoal taste lingering on my tongue. She really was slipping; I couldn’t remember Nana cooking anything that wasn’t just right. The night before, she’d microwaved a lasagna and a freezer-pack of vegetables, all of it bland, and during the meal she’d hardly spoken. When Andy tried to draw her into the conversation by asking about her girlhood in Ireland, she responded tersely, with a gaze in my direction, “We didn’t have much, but we took care of each other.”

She was born Margaret Carey and had come to the United States as the bride of John Garner, a boy from a neighboring West Irish farm; they’d always been Nana and Papa to me. They raised my dad and his sister, my aunt Katie, in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, back then still an immigrant ghetto on Manhattan’s West Side. A few years after Papa died, Nana took a lump sum from her landlord, who was condo-converting the building, and moved to a nondescript garden apartment in Hackensack to be near her children. Three years ago, she moved again, to Greenlawn, taking charge of my father’s care. The side-by-side bedrooms that were once Deirdre’s and mine were transformed for her into a floral-print-covered sleeping area and a tchotchke-filled TV room. She’d always seemed strong enough to survive anything—her husband had died, then my mother, then Uncle Angelo, who was Aunt Katie’s husband—but perhaps this, the death of her only son, Edward, was just one blow too many.

She was already dressed for church, sitting in the kitchen, once again glued to the TV, watching one of those courtroom entertainment shows. A female judge narrowed a hawkish brow and wagged her finger. “Sir, sir, just a minute, sir. This is my court. You speak when I tell you to.”

Out the window, day was breaking, revealing the shocking brilliance of icy tree branches and white rooftops. “I haven’t woken up to snow since forever,” I said. “I forgot how beautiful it is.”

“The roads will be slippery,” she said. “Your father keeps the shovel in the garage.”

Father had a dull magnetic force to it, drawing her gaze from the TV and mine from the window. Between us vibrated some combination of bond and rift; the thing that tied us to each other was also the place where we were worlds apart. In the bitter gloom on Nana’s face I glimpsed her years as Dad’s caretaker—feeding and washing and changing him like he was an infant again. I was reminded of gay guys I’d seen survive their lovers or their best friends; death offered no real relief, no catharsis, just the cold reality of inevitable demise. Nana bore the same kind of battle fatigue.

I felt my face getting hot. “This must be hard for you,” I offered.

Something sharp flickered across her face, but all she said was, “He’s no longer suffering, thank God.”

Years ago, I had talked to Nana about the tension between my father and me, about the reasons behind it, about who I was. We were at her apartment in Hackensack, and she’d cooked me lunch and made a rhubarb pie for dessert. I remember the queasiness I felt as I ate, preparing to break a silence, unsure of what to expect. When the moment came, she listened without interrupting, and then told me, “You’ll always be my grandson.” At the time this had seemed like a great generosity, but when I asked her to talk to Dad on my behalf, she replied, “When Edward had words with his father, I kept out of it. I’ll stay out of this one, too.” I had tried not to hold this against her. She was old, even Old World; I could hardly expect her to wave my flags. But why wouldn’t she cut me any slack now? Was it so hard for her to understand my reasons for staying away? Was I really so unforgivable?

Outside, the air was so crisp my cheeks felt slapped. I used a shovel that had been in our family for as long as I could remember, its handle worn smooth, its blade gouged in two places. Each push left behind snaky parallel trails of powder on the black driveway, a sight that had the force of déjà vu: the teenage me clearing this same path with this same faulty shovel, my father examining the work and scolding me for not scooping it all up: Everything you leave behind will be ice by tonight.

I drove Nana to St. Bartholomew’s in Dad’s boxy Chrysler K-Car. Before she got out, she asked, “Will you come to mass, then?”

“I don’t go to church, Nana.”

“This is a time for prayer.”

“Say one for me while you’re at it.”

“Well, then,” she sighed, lifting herself from the car.

I drove through the slushy streets of Greenlawn, to the Athenaeum, the Greek diner where I’d spent a lot of time as a teenager. I took a seat at the counter, read the New York Times and slowly came to life over bottomless cups of strong coffee and single-serving boxes of cornflakes. Amid the red vinyl booths and faux-marble tabletops, a memory ignited from fifteen years earlier: sitting here, across from Eric Sanchez, deliberately pressing our knees together under the table, while around us our friends complained about how life majorly sucked, how totally stupid teachers and parents were, how so fucking boring it all was. Eric and I passed a cigarette back and forth, his dark bangs rising upward with the force of each exhale, our eyes stealing time with one another’s, sending wordless messages.

I returned to find Nana already waiting for me on the sidewalk, complaining about the cold. She presented me with a list of places she needed to go: a rotation of doctors, then the pharmacy, then Coiffures by Diane, where she had a standing appointment with Diane Jernigan, the older sister of a girl I went to high school with. Nana was very proud about her hair, still thick and full, and though she rarely left the house for anyone to see it, she kept it dyed a deep brown, like stout, like wet earth. It took years off her looks.

“Jimmy Garner!” Diane exclaimed when she saw me. Through Nana, Diane already knew about my father, and her sympathy commingled with reports of other dead parents, dead siblings, dead spouses, the accumulated losses of our high school peers as we left our youth behind. While Diane went to work on Nana, I listened to updates on people I hadn’t thought about in years, their marriages and divorces, the births of children, descriptions of the houses they’d bought. A remarkable number of my former classmates still lived in the area, their lives still knowable, without the mystery of departure. I thought of Deirdre among them, caught in this grind, an item of gossip for the Dianes of the world.

“Do you know what happened to Eric Sanchez?” I asked.

Diane paused above Nana’s dye-slick head. “Barbara’s brother?” she asked. “The one who went into the Navy?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”

“I think he’s married and living in Maryland or something.”

“Really? Married?”

“Barbara was living in Paramus for a while, but she moved a few years ago…”

As Diane continued on, I tried to imagine Eric at thirty-three, a husband, probably a father. The head of a household. Eric, who taught me how to kiss—slowly, with anticipation, with all the right pauses—in the backseat of Barbara’s Galaxie 500. Eric, who told me he loved me so fucking much a week before high school graduation, punching his fist into a wall until the skin broke, until I pulled him by the wrist into an embrace, promising him, You know I totally feel the same, asking him, How can I prove it to you (as he had to me, in blood)? Eric, who whispered, If we love each other we should try more stuff. Eric, whose swollen cock was in my mouth at the moment my father, home early from work for some unremembered, fateful reason, entered my bedroom to find me on my knees, in the midst of worship, surrender, proving it—the kind of moment, explosive and unequivocal, that separates everything into before and after.

It went like this: My father’s eyes sweeping from me on the floor, wiping my mouth, to Eric, yanking up his jeans, the clasp of his belt rattling as he turned his face away. My father shouting “What the hell are you doing?” though I could see he knew exactly what this was. I tried to throw it back at him: why did he push the door open, why didn’t he knock? “No way,” he bellowed. “No, no, no, no way,” negation repeated like a chant, disapproval and denial in equal measure. No way could this have happened, no way would it happen again, no way is my son this kind of boy. Eric was banned from our house—the official punishment—but worse than this was the scornful silence that descended like a sudden downpour.

“I love him,” I said.

“There’s no way you can,” said my father.

We didn’t talk it out; there was no way we could, or so it seemed to me.

I managed to see Eric a few more times that summer before I went to college and he to the Navy—furtive, tongue-tied encounters at the edge of group activities. Each locked gaze was more wrenching than the last, until we learned to avoid each other’s eyes, to fake indifference, as was needed, to get away from each other and the mess we’d created. At some point, Deirdre asked me, “How come you aren’t hanging out with Eric?” and what I told her was, “We were getting on each other’s nerves.”

My father never saw me the same again. Before, I’d been a problem child—one to boss around, bargain with, try to fix. After, I ceased to be a child at all. Just a problem—permanent, irreparable. Before, I’d thought it possible to fall in love with a boy. After, I lived with the knowledge that genuine love didn’t spark revulsion in others. My first month in college, I got myself a girlfriend.

“Jimmy?” Diane was waiting for an answer. “What about you?”

“Sorry—what?”

“Girlfriend? Someone special?”

I looked at Nana, who sat stiffly under Diane’s kneading hands. My relationship with Woody wasn’t a secret from her; still, it wasn’t something she probably cared to see dropped into the boiling vat of Diane’s gossip-stew. . . .