I Will Be Complete Read online

  The three of us stared at it. It was bigger than we were. My father said it was a Fabergé, or a contemporary studio’s work. We called it the Fabergé chess set. We never used it. It was too precious to do anything with except admire it. We brought friends over so we could all admire it.

  We lived in a house with such fine things around us. Let me show you this, my father might say, opening up a curio cabinet, a bottle of brandy, a jewelry box. Note the maker’s mark. He had a tiny Lucite cube in which a miniature of the Certron prospectus floated, the idea being that all this—the house, the lifestyle, the future—came from what I did here.

  Imagine it’s 1969 and we’re in a five-thousand-square-foot ranch house, a freshly remodeled rectangle around a courtyard of fuchsias that attracted, to Leo’s delight, hummingbirds. We had a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi. Floodlights outside, track lighting inside to show off the nail sculptures and Chinese scrollwork and the contemporary pop art and op art. The designer kitchen, with appliances in avocado green and an Amana Radarange microwave that cooked with science. The living room conversation pit with hidden television cabinet, executed by contractors who’d worked on the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. The darkroom where my father developed and printed the color photographs he took on weekends at the local salt marshes and Japanese tea gardens.

  In the recreation room is the Derby Day pinball machine rescued from a penny arcade. And the Hammond “Follow the Piper” organ with twenty-two synthesized instruments, including the twin mallet marimba, on which I would play for our guests all eight verses of “In the Year 2525” without encouragement. And here is a gift from cousin Howard, who worked at Mattel: a wildebeest head mounted like a trophy. When you pull the nylon string coming out of its neck, a tiny mechanical voice box implant within is activated and the same voice as the Ken doll murmurs risqué phrases. In sixty-nine do unto others as they do unto you. Pull that string again, buster, and we’re engaged.

  And this is my bedroom, with Danish modern furniture and a collage of black light posters and psychedelic wall paints my mother had assembled during brave trips to the head shops on Balboa Island, where there were actual hippies. One whole wall was a Dennison’s Chili billboard, studded with visual puns like Op Art bull’s-eyes. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda rode their motorcycles with a trail of balloons behind them that my mother had inserted herself. The walls told a story that leapt from place to place and hewed to its own magical logic.

  Now look from the window down the hillside, past a thicket of ice plant, to see our vacant lot, the last one in the neighborhood, our investment, planed flat, with a lawn whose surface bears the architecturally perfect diagonal lines of a rider-mower that every week managed to avoid my hand-painted wooden croquet equipment.

  At the other end of the house, my father’s office is all about the future. This tall plastic podium, sterile as an X-ray technician’s station, is a computer terminal. You ease the phone receiver into a soft headphone-like umbilicus and a gigantic mainframe computer downtown, a DEC-10, whistles and shrieks information stored on rolls of yellow punch tape that makes confetti in a clear plastic box jumpy with static electricity. My father works here so much, so late into the night, the maid refers to the computer as his mistress.

  Linger at a side table in the dining room. My father gives a tilt of the head. “Here’s our chess set. It’s a Fabergé,” and then on to the artwork.

  Here’s the mock-up of a submarine the L.A. Fine Arts Squad floated in Newport Harbor. Here’s a Frank Stella lithograph we picked up at the Jack Glenn Gallery. No, we didn’t buy any of the Peter Max paintings; they were too popular, and clearly overpriced. My father would say something like that, or I would, which either drew laughter or confused stares.

  I couldn’t tell you what our guests thought. I had a tin ear for response. I did not know how to impress anyone. Sometimes, if Leo walked by, I would pick him up and announce he was a rare seal point Siamese and he had a very unusual voice.

  Mostly I was excited because of the surprise at the end of the tour. Standing barefoot in the shag wool conversation pit, I would give visitors a presentation about our coin collection.

  My father and I went to so many auctions at Bowers and Ruddy the auctioneer would wink at me when Dad let me raise the paddle. We had a 1794 variant cent and an 1808 described as unique in Sheldon’s Penny Whimsy. “Thomas Jefferson himself might have carried these pennies in his pocket.” I presented the half-cents, the two-cent pieces, the three-cent pieces, the proof Barber dime, the doomed twenty-cent pieces. In 1916 the Standing Liberty quarter (and here, an aside on the importance of Art Nouveau) was bare-breasted, and in 1917 America demanded a breastplate. We hadn’t even gotten to the gold pieces yet.

  I read Yeoman’s Red Book by flashlight, memorizing coinage runs, mint marks, Colonial patterns, the relative values of double die errors. I was so overwhelmed by the love of knowledge I wanted to crawl inside the coins and live their histories with them. My father’s version of a fishing trip was to bring me rolls of nickels from the bank for investigation, seeding one with an AU-55 three-legged buffalo, whose discovery made me jump off my bed in shock. The story of catching that particular trout became part of my presentation.

  Now I can hear my voice becoming shrill as the sun goes down and the moon comes up. I see, superimposed over my features, a cloth monkey with a key in his back, banging cymbals together until there are nothing but cheese rinds and empty Chablis bottles and the final spark and thud coming from the fireplace as the last of the logs is consumed. Our visitors watch with embarrassment a child juggling plates, counting out how much of his time playing with tiny metal cars has been appropriated by pursuing the love of his parents. The end of the tour isn’t the coins, but me—I am the big finish, the most curious gem in the collection. I tell my history stories, I actually bow for applause at the end. My father approves, my mother begins to get a migraine, I’m just a kid, I don’t understand cause and effect.

  * * *

  —

  I’m sad to end that house tour. We were there so briefly. When it was already too late, my mother didn’t know. She said, “When your father cashes his Certron stock in, he can retire.” She said, “When my therapy is finished, I’ll have more time to work on my novel.” Something about how well she enunciated made me pay attention. None of that “when” was going to happen. It turned out we didn’t have money, just Certron stock.

  One day, Herb Alpert would be driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in his convertible, listening to a Certron tape. It would break. He would put another tape in, and it would break, too. He would pull out of my father’s company and the stock—the basis of our fortune—would plummet. Certron would blame my father publicly for the problems, and fire him, and no audio firm in the country would hire him.

  I’ve mentioned that my mother was prepared for loss. My father was not. He didn’t know how to fail. He didn’t know he could fail. That wasn’t part of his family story. Nor could he cope with how readily my mother would say it was okay that he’d lost. For her, that acknowledgment was a kindness, a pushing back of a chair at a certain sad feast familiar to her, and for him it was betrayal.

  What happened to my father after that is something I can explain. What happened to my mother is different. She wanted to be a writer, and all the novel fragments and memoir fragments she showed me in the years since were kaleidoscopic attempts to explain what she saw. They are heavy with momentum, yet somehow lack direction. It’s as if she is simultaneously defending herself from an invisible judge, and yet also daring herself to make certain assertions that she can’t quite spell out, hoping someone will read between the lines and understand her.

  She was going to lose everything, slowly, beginning with the material things she cared little about. Then she was going to lose her sense that anywhere in the world was safe.

  Ultimately she, my father, and I rescued ourselves, but we di
d it at a cost, and we did it separately. I don’t think anyone would call what we managed a success.

  * * *

  —

  Before all that unraveled, my mother called her family one night. It couldn’t have been her only phone call home, but it was a production, as my father would say. Mom made the call at midnight our time, eight in the morning there. Many of her siblings didn’t have phones and I imagined them all packed into a single room somewhere in a damp flat in Uxbridge to hear the voice from California. Since my mother had trouble hearing and she worried she would miss something important, my father set up a reel-to-reel tape to record the conversation on both ends.

  He was always organizing things for her like that. I recently found a chart he’d made, and from its details I’d date it to when he was courting her. It’s a precisely rendered map of my mother’s family for three generations. I can imagine my father drawing it, and showing it to her and saying, “See, it’s not so terrible. It’s not so mysterious.” And her giving him that smile that understood how kind life was, sometimes.

  That was what marrying my father had meant. He had promised her that by living in the sort of world that had him in it, things would make sense for her. Of course, his chart couldn’t encompass all the emotions in the single blueprint-like line that linked, for instance, my grandfather George and his wife, Elsie. There were no dotted lines for abandonment. There weren’t lines leading to suicide. The link between one box and another didn’t indicate a union made in joy versus one made under the obliteration of hope. There were no diagrams that explained how people felt, and, as was his tendency, my father stumbled, all knees and elbows, when it came to the complexities of the heart.

  His chart also turned out to be wrong. My father didn’t know about the secret lovers or the bigamous husbands. He didn’t know about my mother’s missing twin. For instance.

  On her side of that transatlantic phone call, her voice was slow, each phrase separated by unnatural space so she would be heard. Gradually, something else happened, something bizarre that made my skin ripple with goose bumps. As she spoke, years peeled away and she sounded much younger. Thousands of miles vanished, and she was sucked back into that room of family, where her accent returned. She sounded like a teenage girl, and she sounded helpless. Her siblings were Rosemary, Anna, Elizabeth, Ursula, Georgina, and Jonathan, and my cousins were Angela, Maria, Gary, Jimmy, Simon, Isabelle, Amanda, Christina, Peter, Paul, John, Debbie, Nicola, and Marc. I name them here not in the spirit of my dad’s chart, but the opposite. Naming them doesn’t begin to bring them under control any more than naming the elements of the northern lights allows you to guide them.

  * * *

  —

  After my mother hung up, the American had shed from her, and she was weeping. Something in the call had wrecked her. She left, and closed the door to the bedroom, and a migraine began. I wouldn’t see her for days.

  My father wanted to understand. But his mind organized the more difficult emotions as if they were equations in chemistry or geology, fields to which he’d never been that attuned. Before the phone call to England, what he had been the most proud of recording had been the Bob & Ray comedy show. He never really stood a chance. Whatever my father brought my mother was not going to rescue her.

  Three little dots in that huge house that night: my mother in her bed, my father in his office, and me in my room. I was talking to myself, of course, as there was so much to say.

  I gave up on trying to sleep. I walked quietly in my cotton pajamas the full range of the house, giving myself the tour. I mouthed the words without speaking so I wouldn’t wake my parents. In the dark, I noted the Fred Eversley Lucite sculpture, and explained to no one how it was placed so that the setting sun would illuminate its many colors.

  I was aiming at one piece of art that carried its own gravity. It wasn’t part of the tour. It was hidden from easy view. I stopped just outside their bedroom. I pressed myself into a small alcove. On the wall above me was the painting, a portrait. The spotlight shined on my grandfather George.

  It was unlike anything else in the house. It was hardly art as I understood it. Its background browns were oppressive, Teutonic murk meant to be folds of drapery, so dense with shadow George could have posed by gaslight. He might have been any age from twenty to forty. He wore a dark suit and a red tie. He held a cigarette loosely, as if it were natural to his class, a riding crop.

  He had been the most handsome man in Germany. He was the firstborn, he spoke seven languages, he died terribly at forty-three. Since George had died so young, he would never be a success or a failure. He would always stare out at you with potential. His gaze knew everything about you, it held out a little hope, it evaluated, sympathized, and found you wanting.

  When you moved, the light played over the canvas, showing restoration marks. My mother told me she’d had it repaired because it had been torn. Much later, I learned the truth, that someone had stabbed the portrait right through George’s face.

  My parents’ end would be awful, but nothing to have shocked George. It was not like the nature of fate had changed since slapping him down. It’s just that it was happening so far away from him, in such a sunny place, to people with such good humor about life, that it seemed unlikely. But it turns out that no matter what you free yourself from—your family, your past, your disasters, your belief in God—you aren’t really that free. George would have known that. I used to imagine his hand reaching out of the painting to offer the cigarette, a comfort and a way of passing the baton. Here, old chap, he would say. I know what you escaped. So sorry it came back.

  333 EAST ONTARIO STREET

  APT. 2206

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  60611

  TOWARD THE END, when I was nine, my mother ordered my father a 3.5-inch telescope so he could see the Comet Kohoutek. Kohoutek, which appeared every 150,000 years, was theorized to be the largest comet Earth had ever seen. Its tail would take up a quarter of the nighttime sky.

  Every night for a week, my father unbuckled the leather case of his new Questar and took me onto the deck that wrapped around our house so we could prepare our observations. With the December winds whipping up our hillside, and the lights of Newport Harbor making a modest interruption of our sightings, we started with the naked eye. My father told me that the only way to see the faintest stars was to avert your eyes from them. It had something to do with how visual purple worked with the eye’s rods and cones, but the important thing was to just notice how it worked. Look north, look south, just look a few degrees away, and the dimmest, farthest, quietest objects in the sky revealed themselves.

  “Look at the Big Dipper,” he said. “There are seven stars, but you can only see the seventh if you aren’t looking straight at it.” He was right.

  The telescope was polished aluminum. I made sure I didn’t let my finger near the lens, which I respected as my father had rhapsodized over the necessity of retaining its perfect smudgeless clarity. I loved what he knew and the care he took. He never talked down to me. I tried to honor that. We had an instrument worthy of viewing the nighttime sky in this era that we were lucky to live in. Time magazine had put Kohoutek, “the comet of the century,” on its cover that week. It was larger than Halley’s Comet. It weighed a trillion tons. Planetariums were sponsoring parties. 747s would streak across the skies, festive with guests making champagne toasts alongside the comet at apogee.

  But Kohoutek turned out to be a smudge. Even with our telescope, Kohoutek was a fleck you could brush out of the night without feeling a loss.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said the first evening. This wasn’t him accepting responsibility so much as his acknowledgment that sometimes what you were promised ended up disappointing you.

  And I was disappointed. But nonetheless, the skies gave you what they gave you. My parents’ marriage was suffering then, and my dad and I spent more time in o
ur heavy coats outside, together, than we would have otherwise, as this was a chance not to return inside the house. While the comet was with us, he and I looked through the telescope, averting our eyes and hoping that playing with the focus knobs would let us see things more clearly. Sometimes one or the other of us would say, “Yeah, this is pretty crummy.” And then the comet was gone.

  It turns out the most obscure things in your life are invisible when you try to look at them directly. For instance, the end of the marriage. I tend to look away.

  * * *

  —

  My mother was writing a new novel then. It was narrated by a woman married to a character named Ron, who was distant and controlling. They’d become rich recently and it was ruining their marriage. The narrator was frightened by the child she and Ron had. The child was supernaturally intelligent and foresaw the problems in their marriage before they did. She showed it to me to see what I thought.

  I wondered if, when it was published, people would—because people weren’t clever—think it was about her and Dad. She would have to let them know it was just fiction.

  It’s probably as hard to describe any parent as it is to catch your own profile in a mirror. In my mother’s case it’s even more complicated. She had been born Cockney, within the sound of Bow Bells, but she wasn’t a Cockney, she hastened to add. “I had to take care of the boardinghouse when I was seven because Mummy…” Her mother drank. Her mother drank because she was schizophrenic. My mother had an older sister, Rosemary, but the truth was, I was old enough to know now, Rosemary was a half-sister. There had been an Italian man, a semi-Mafioso, before her father. In fact, her father and mother hadn’t been married when my mother was conceived, so she felt terribly guilty, as if it were her fault that two people so ill-matched were forced together. She felt guilty until the day her father died, and then she felt so much worse.