I Will Be Complete Read online

  Heidi didn’t buy any of this. She and I had been arguing tentatively anyway, but my new clothes and haircut seemed to her like an assault on the relationship. Once she walked into my room with newly curled hair, and when I looked at it and said nothing, she burst into tears.

  Later she brought me a magazine folded back to show off the advertisement for an upcoming movie called Risky Business. It featured a handsome actor wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers like mine.

  “You kind of look like him,” she said.

  “Really? You think so?”

  She looked at me witheringly. “No.”

  A few days later, I wrote in my journal a comment about my heart (“black ice”), then Heidi’s name and the phrase “until one day you no longer see what you once saw.” Did I mean she didn’t see me? Or that I no longer saw what I’d seen in her? She had kissed someone else when she was home for vacation; I found out; it was a good excuse for me to be outraged and to look at her with detachment. We broke up.

  In May, it was time to go back to Los Angeles. I felt a little bit strong—my clothes a kind of armor, my detachment a minor superpower—but not strong enough. I was nervous about seeing my mother. If I was still the same on the inside—churning, awkward, looking for the approval of people I hadn’t even met yet—I had changed on the surface. Only the surface. I was all image and no substance. In other words, I was prepared for my hometown.

  MUSIC & HI-FI

  OWEN PICKED ME UP from the airport. We’d gone to high school together and he was thrashing against college in Berkeley just as I was Wesleyan, with uncertainty about whether he belonged. He’d discovered punk rock, so when I climbed in his car, he got to business, playing a tape of bands he’d seen live or heard on KALX, the student radio station that ran as if it were a pirate ship parked three point two miles off the coast.

  Owen was good at detailing the sociology of punk. The bands had names like the Meat Puppets, the Germs, the Circle Jerks, the Vandals, the Dead Milkmen. There was a thing called slam-dancing. I’d heard of this, but was scared to learn more.

  Owen explained. “You know those cartoons where the Tasmanian Devil spins around and it’s a whirlwind with thunder and stars and lightning coming out of it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what slam-dancing is like.”

  He liked punk because punk didn’t care what people thought. Punk didn’t brush its teeth and it drank beer for breakfast. It was incoherent and angry and uncompromising, excellent for a genuinely nice guy like Owen, who still lived with his mom. The lead singer of Flipper sang with his back to the audience. “Just total arrogance,” Owen said. Once, Fear had a string quartet open for them, to piss the audience off. The Pop-O-Pies were famous for sometimes playing only one song, a cover of “Truckin’ ” by the Grateful Dead, but then doing the song for forty-five minutes or until the crowd finally pulled them offstage.

  As he was talking, I decided to show off what I’d learned at Wesleyan. I put a tape I’d made into his deck. I turned it up.

  After about fifteen seconds, Owen said, “What the hell is this?”

  “Philip Glass.”

  “Who?”

  “Philip Glass.”

  His face puckered. “This is horrible.”

  “I’ll take it off.”

  “No, Glen. We’re going to listen to it.”

  It was minimalist piano from the afterworld, frosty and intellectual, probably the kind of music Bach would play after being dead for five hundred years. I reached to pop the cassette out, but Owen stopped me with a glare. He listened to confirm that I had intended to play this. “You like this? You actually like this? Is it that a girl likes this?”

  At the next stoplight he stared at me with such disappointment I finally took the tape out. It was obvious to Owen that Wesleyan had done a shitty job of educating me.

  On Wilshire, a few blocks from my father’s house, there was a billboard for a Spanish language station’s eleven o’clock news team. The weather girl had breast implants. The sportscaster had dyed blond hair. The seasoned, serious anchor had an obvious toupee. All of them had teeth like searchlights and though it was hard to tell from the ground, I’d swear the photo had been retouched so their eyes were blue. The slogan read: “Auténtica.” I can’t believe I was the only person in all of Los Angeles to note the irony of this, but now, in my new rush to keep my eyes open, it struck me as important. Was this me, in my new clothes and haircut? My Philip Glass music? Yes. I was auténtica.

  * * *

  —

  My father lived in a house that could have seemed affluent or just middle-class, depending on how sophisticated the eye evaluating it. After people have known me long enough to have heard stories about my dad, they are shocked when they meet him. In person he seems so nice. He’s curious, funny, gentle, and he loves to share what he knows. He wants to know if you know anything interesting, too, and he wants to hear your stories.

  His laugh is famous in family history. Once, he saw a performance of Beyond the Fringe off-Broadway, and he laughed so hard Peter Cook and Dudley Moore stopped the show and did their routines directly to him. His name was Herbert, and when bookstore clerks asked if he was “that” Herbert Gold, he always said yes, because in his mind, he was that Herbert Gold.

  He was the eldest and blackest sheep of a tight-knit family which he wanted to leave immediately. Grandpa Ben had met Grandma Frieda when he was sixteen and she was thirteen, and they dated for five years before they kissed for the first time on the Tunnel of Love ride at the White City amusement park. They were together for seventy-five years, solidly, and had three boys, all successful, many grandchildren, Frieda screaming at Ben every single day they were both alive.

  They tried to inculcate three things in my father: family, Judaism, and baseball, and he made sure he taught me nothing about any of them. As a teen he was mentored by a surveyor who taught him about science, and it turned out he loved science. It answered questions without getting hysterical or the answer being “because we’re your family.”

  At the University of Michigan he joined what he told me was the engineering fraternity, and his family told me was the Jewish fraternity. He was there for one reason only: to become their social chairman. My father’s party planning was limited to making sure the dances were held on the weekends that a girl named Alva could attend them. This courtship went throughout college, and was a success. Like many of his successes it was brief: he married her.

  As a child I sorted through the photos of my father’s life before me. I was deeply curious what his first wife looked like. Slides from vacations they took together, labeled in his engineer’s print, might say “Alva by the waterfall,” but someone had removed the transparency from the cardboard frame. Finally I found a small photograph from their wedding day, and my father looked the happiest I have seen him, and Alva’s entire form was cut out so that not a trace of her remained. He told me a jealous girlfriend did this, but the precision of the cut looked to my eye scientific.

  I asked him years later when he knew Alva was a mistake. “On my honeymoon,” he said. “I remember walking on that beach alone that night and looking up at the sky and asking myself what I’d done.”

  I’m glad I know this story. It illuminates for me what a young Herb must have looked like the first time he married a beautiful woman who turned out to be complicated.

  When he met my mother, he had a job that paid well, a Porsche, his sense of humor (now darker), and that attractive, cheerful amorality. Mom was beautiful and funny and could beat him at Scrabble, and there was that English accent that made people stare, and when they stared, they saw a handsome, loving couple that radiated success.

  A decade later, while that was falling apart, he was doing consulting work on the Board of Trade and the Commodities Exchange, contributing to computerizing their systems. It was supposed to be a brief
job, a few weeks here and there, but the weeks kept getting longer and he was gone for months at a time.

  He was desperate then. The first important event he missed, perhaps one of my birthdays, he sent me an envelope with a joke note inside: “Stop saying I never give you anything,” and with it a crisp ten dollar “HAWAII” note from World War II, for our collection. When I remember these gifts, and there were a few as several years went by, it’s as if my mother were standing nearby every time, eyebrow raised to see if I agreed that these were transparent bribes.

  They were. But there was something else going on. Dad’s letters to me got longer, and weirder, each one tallying how long he’d been awake before writing them. Twenty-two hours. Twenty-six hours. He was programming, his mind overrun with the thrill of Fortran and C, and I thought he was just having fun.

  Sometimes he would call the house at odd times, and if I answered, he would just say “thirty hours,” and tell me to tell Mom he’d said hi, and he was going to bed. Once, my mother answered instead, and they almost immediately got into a fight. He hung up. She looked at me, and said, “Your father wanted me to tell you he’s been up for fifty-six hours.”

  I thought this was boss, and I bragged about it at school, insisting it was boss even when Gary Abraham, whose father was a sports medicine doctor, said staying up that long was impossible. Which might be true except for how much speed my father was doing.

  It was 1974. My father had just had five million dollars slip away, and he lived in the remainder of that expensive, diminishing, impossible-to-maintain lifestyle. My mother tells me he became paranoid about IBM stealing his work, and there were rough phone calls where she talked him down.

  Many years later, his sister-in-law told me this story: his brother, who also worked on La Salle Street, was waiting for the train. He saw my father standing, reading a newspaper, at the same stop. This was a surprise to him. My father had been living in Chicago for two years without telling his family.

  My father disputes that story, but it’s a much stranger story to make up than to deny. I think it happened, but not because my father didn’t like his family. I see shame in his choice. He had gotten fired and had lost everything. The project he was working on now didn’t pay as promised. There were mysterious hierarchies among traders and also he fucked up trading at least once.

  His new wife’s money was wealth generations deep, a family portfolio of real estate money, shopping center developments, and skyscrapers built by industrialists on a scale my father could never compete with. It was intimidating money.

  After they moved back to California, he got up early every day, showered, dressed in a boxy suit, left for work at Atlantic Richfield, came home, put his briefcase down by the mail table, and listened to Ann tell him about the day she’d had. He made somewhat funny comments to her in return. They now had two little boys, Seth and Marc, who also had days my father listened to. He gave off two distinct impressions: one was that he was relieved to be working a job that ended at five p.m. The other was that he was insisting to an invisible witness that he was happy.

  He and Ann had landed not in the secluded estates area of Brentwood, but its more shapeless flatland cousin, where the streets were a mix of condominiums and ranch houses with lawns. The garage had a Volvo station wagon and a 1970s midline Mercedes. It was a corner lot with a big backyard with three-story palm trees and a nice-for-the-neighborhood, but not flashy, swimming pool. Two stories in a vague Spanish style, and every wall covered with artwork.

  He and Ann still collected the photorealism my father loved, but they’d expanded to the work of local artists whose careers were in the ascent. They commissioned portraits, so when guests sat in the living room, there was a life-sized watercolor of Herb and Ann sitting on a couch, him leaning forward, about to make a point he found important. It was clearly a commemoration of having arrived, and that’s what I think my father was saying to himself every day when the gears of the automatic garage door opened, and he drove into the garage, then opened the door to the kitchen, with a chirp of the alarm, and came into the house to be greeted by wife and children: I have arrived, I have arrived, because he wasn’t sure he had.

  When I came back that summer, my father spent evenings in his study, reading The Wall Street Journal, listening to classical music on his excellent KEF 105 speakers. The music was for him what punk was for Owen, a badge of belonging. In my father’s case, the resonance of Tchaikovsky wasn’t its emotional engagement, but a man like himself, in a house like his, listened to classical music.

  The music didn’t really do its job, I think. He bought more albums and he improved his stereo, but nothing could change his nagging feeling that an amoral person who didn’t want to be where he’d arrived, again, could cheerfully insulate himself from discomfort with money.

  ARCHITECTURE & HOME IMPROVEMENT

  IN SUMMER 1983, when I came home from Wesleyan, my father and Ann were interested in moving. There was a house in Bel Air, recently built, that was an architectural wonder, “a showpiece,” as my father said. The current house wasn’t a showpiece.

  I told him he just wanted a place to say, “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair,” and he said, “Probably.”

  They were negotiating with the current owners. He told me I should see the place. I wanted to go, but I had to go to my mother’s in Long Beach first. She had said she had a good eight or ten hours of office work for me, which meant forty or fifty dollars to start my summer out. Since I didn’t drive yet, I would take the bus there. When I came back, Dad would pick me up and show me the house he was interested in. And then, he reminded me, it was time to look for a summer job.

  * * *

  —

  When she was still in New York, my mother had started a business. If you were an entrepreneur and needed someone with typing or other office skills, and if you weren’t yet in the phase of your business where you had an office, you could call my mother. She was an excellent typist. She knew many professional résumé formats. She had a “can-do” attitude, and she was unafraid to work long into the night if necessary. She leased copiers, and had sign-making equipment. Sometimes she had an assistant, sometimes I worked there on school breaks. But it was on the second floor of a building in Midtown. No one knew she was there, and if they did, no one would hike up a flight of stairs to get copies made unless her prices were good, and they weren’t.

  When she relocated to California, she brought her business with her, but she’d had to get work like the office jobs she’d complained to Jen about. It wasn’t clear to me if the office work she’d asked me to do was for her own company, for someone else, or maybe in pursuit of a new career in sales. When I took the bus from my father’s to Long Beach, I was unsettled. I wanted whatever she was working on to be successful, so I could prove my father wrong.

  When I got off the bus, Mom immediately took me to a bookstore to buy me a couple of books. Unlike my father, Mom wasn’t that concerned with me getting a job. She worried that I’d have enough time to write a novel. When I was in high school, she’d bought me a copy of The World According to Garp, describing it as “about a mother and son who write,” a way no one else has ever described it, but the way I’ve thought about it since.

  At her apartment, we ordered Chinese food, she asked me again about my writing, and volunteered that when she got settled she would have so many more stories for Money Matters. So many people had such crazy ideas of what they could get away with when you were an individual proprietor, and a woman, not that she was calling foul on all men. And then it was like she woke up to actually seeing me for a moment: did I realize how much with my new haircut and clothes I looked like my grandfather now?

  She was right. Now that I was clean-shaven and my hair looked like it had been razored by Leni Riefenstahl’s stylist, my face had the angular shape that supported his intense stare.

  But something else was up. Everyt
hing my mother owned seemed to be in a box or on a counter. I had the sense that if I opened the kitchen cabinets, they would be empty.

  She had a typewriter set up for me. “You can write if you want,” she said, because she had some paperwork to do. I didn’t feel like writing, but I had the sense that it would soothe her to hear her son typing. The phone rang and she ignored it. I tried not to look at the phone. Instead, I typed, “When a phone rings, you have two choices. Answer it. Or let it ring.” My mother made a different choice: she unplugged the answering machine, wrapped up the cord, and then put it into a box.

  She put me in charge of packing. There were files that had to be boxed carefully. When everything was stacked and labeled, it was time to take the cartons out to the car. Mom was leaving her apartment and moving to San Diego. So it wasn’t really office work, but she was going to pay me to help her move.

  When the apartment was empty and the car full, the last thing to go in was the typewriter. It was an old top-of-the-line IBM Selectric whose font bobbins had fascinated me as a kid, and as my mother was typing now I thought of the film ribbon that passed before the hammering letters. If you stretched it out in front of a light, you could see all the characters making up all the office needs, résumés, and business letters that my mother had typed out. And as you unspooled them you could take yourself back into the past, where her business started, and then you could read forward into what it had become.

  Now she was typing this, to her landlord, “Making the best of a poor situation, I am returning the key. As you and I both know, I would be unable to—” and then I stopped reading.

  The door to her apartment was closed and we were on the outside. The note went into an envelope with the key, then went through the mail slot, and she closed the door. I had never seen someone skip rent before. We were both pretending I hadn’t seen it now. I felt frosted over, and supremely careful, as if by breathing too hard I would accidentally ask a question.