I Will Be Complete Read online

  She was alert to other people trying to control her. My father, for instance. He was hapless when it came to emotions—he said “I love you” because he knew he should, but it came out like the Pledge of Allegiance. He was stiffening more since things were getting difficult financially. He was traveling to Chicago, sometimes for months at a time, for our futures. And when he was back, he was frosty to her.

  The local consciousness-raising groups were appealing, but they were also angry, and close-minded. She tried to have a civil conversation with Judy Chicago, and came away feeling Chicago was just as bad as the society she was critiquing. What if she took another writing class? Volunteered at a women’s clinic? Made friends who weren’t so rich? What if I had a younger brother or sister?

  She would say this and then, wherever we were, look at me for an answer. It was like those moments where we shared our ESP. Only now it made me nervous. And then it hit me, I was the child in her novel. I knew more than she knew about what she should do. It made me feel an electric kind of horror, like dreams in which I was supposed to be flying an airplane.

  Once, fooling around with a cousin, I got my hand slammed in a car door. Within a minute it started to swell and by the time my mother had driven me to the emergency room, it looked like an apple was trying to force its way out of my palm. The technicians brought out an X-ray machine, which panicked me. “It won’t hurt,” they said, but that wasn’t what bothered me. The pain in my hand had shaken loose something primal. My life had already been asterisks and strange circumstances, and nothing about me was ordinary. I thought, “Don’t you know I’m in gifted school?” Looking inside my body had to be an awful idea. What terrible structures would they find in there?

  When the X-rays however showed the normal anatomy—granted, some of it smashed—I felt relief. There were bones in my hand. Just like what anyone else had. I was not special. Thank God. This set up a little island for me to visit when I felt circumstances had gotten too strange. The island where everything was normal. I would visit often as my mother realized what she wanted her life to be like.

  * * *

  —

  On a Sunday morning my parents told me they were separating, maybe they were divorcing, they weren’t sure, it was hard to know. They were going to play it by ear, my mother said. We were in the sunken conversation pit in the living room. Spread across the couch was the Sunday paper. I could see Prince Valiant’s primary colors and unwelcoming dense text. It felt unbalanced, like its weight would cause the page to fold over. I realized I was weeping and that embarrassed me, so I stopped.

  I have letters between my parents from that time. My father wrote that he couldn’t believe how maturely I was handling it. My mother replied they didn’t have a child, but a thirty-six-year-old midget. The idea was that I was so smart I had placed out of having the reactions a normal kid would. None of us believed that, but it was convenient. In a crisis, you need to say and hear optimistic things when there isn’t any real hope.

  I was a mouthy kid, not that pleasant, and I didn’t have many friends to talk to. There were many days where I would take the croquet set alone onto the field and play by myself in the afternoon breeze.

  But the threat of divorce was a leveling influence. Classmates were one by one having family meetings on Sunday mornings, being told they were still loved just as much by each parent separately, and that nothing was their fault. Mondays at school, one gifted child or another showed up red-eyed and in a wrinkled shirt, not wanting to talk about it, getting picked up at three o’clock by a parent with a youthful haircut in a new sports car, usually a tobacco-brown Mercedes.

  I witnessed these developments with a sense of awe and adventure, a line of children being forced to cross rope bridges. One weekend I stayed with Richard Lewis, whose father had the Newport Porsche dealership. They were living in the family beach house, along with a new coltish girlfriend who was some unknowable age older than us and younger than the dad. Richard’s mom had not worn bikini bottoms around the house, nor baked brownies that were explicitly not for us, nor had she made Richard’s father look so happy. I was ten years old, and my appreciation of the sights and sounds around me was starting to deepen, so the girlfriend’s presence was as magnificent to me as a mermaid’s.

  In the morning, Richard and I sat in his dinghy a hundred yards offshore, fishing with bait he’d bought with quarters from a trawler in the harbor. I saw his father’s girlfriend walking from the house and diving into the ocean, and even though I’d grown up near the beach, it was like I’d never seen a woman before. Divorce could be exciting. I didn’t say this to Richard, who regarded her with dull and disgusted eyes.

  Look what my dad wants, he muttered. No one can condemn an adult with so few words as a ten-year-old. I didn’t say much in return, maybe affirmed how much everything sucked—we were at the dawn of the age when everything sucked. But secretly I wondered if things could get interesting if you woke up each morning without knowing whom you might meet that day.

  * * *

  —

  My father started living in Chicago. My hair was becoming greasy and I was entering the age of clothes that didn’t look right on my body, and no matter how much I showered, I smelled like stale cereal.

  I stayed with Mom in Corona del Mar. She started dating. She brought a man to the house and I explained to myself she was allowed to do that. Still, when her date met me, he asked if I wanted to go hunting with him and I asked him if killing animals made him less insecure about his masculinity.

  See, he wasn’t nearly as magical to me as the mermaid had been. If Mom was allowed to date men, and they were allowed to talk to me, they should be at least as smart as I was. My mother was embarrassed but not the way I thought she should be—later that night I walked past her bedroom and saw her hugging him in the doorway. I stepped back, barefoot, telling myself dating was a normal, natural, and healthy thing for her even if she was doing it with an insecure idiot.

  I lay down with microwaved pizza in the recreation room, which was as far away as possible from my mother’s bedroom. KTTV was showing a marathon of Japanese monster movies like War of the Gargantuas, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, Mothra. In one of these was a scene in which a secret agent’s boat capsizes in a storm. The next morning he washes up on a lonely beach, almost dead. And yet he’s perfectly manicured, suit dry, hair combed so well that scientists could calibrate their instruments by the line of his part.

  On the floor, I pretended I’d washed up like driftwood, pummeled by the storm, skin a contour map of bruises and scrapes. I was about to be patched up for one final mission. I didn’t imagine what that mission was—just that it was final. I imagined the agony and exhaustion of being rehabilitated. There would be such terrible setbacks on my final mission. Almost extinguished but not quite. It felt good.

  * * *

  —

  There was a cliché about divorcées, and my mother embraced it, telling friends she was “finding herself,” even as she made fun of the phrase. She wanted to move us from the plush cocoon into a real neighborhood. That might mean Seattle or Portland or New York. She was in touch with her sisters—maybe we would all live together somewhere. San Francisco? She was investigating it, so she put me on a plane to see my father in Chicago.

  When Dad picked me up at the airport, I saw his hair was longer. He had new designer glasses. He was wearing a Steve McQueen–style turtleneck, apparel that was young and in fashion. There was a woman with him.

  “This is Ann,” he said.

  She nodded. I nodded back as if this were normal, meeting my father with an unannounced woman.

  We walked down the concourse, toward Baggage Claim. I was hyperaware of Ann, looking for clues. I wasn’t sure why he had come to the airport with her, nor why she was still with us. My father spoke again. “I met her at the commissary at the Board of Trade. She was trying to change a two dollar bill.
” A long pause. “Into a three dollar bill.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, to acknowledge that a joke had been told.

  My father was forty-four years old. Ann was twenty-seven. We drove in what I remember as a Sunday-heft-of-cathedral-tunes-like silence to a downtown high-rise, McClurg Court. I didn’t know what we were doing there. Was I staying there? Was Dad? Where did Ann live?

  Recently, I asked my father about his stiffness when it came to difficult moments. He told me he’d concluded he was bad at explaining awkward things and much better at just presenting them without comment. Which is why he stopped explaining things. This apparently worked better for him than it did for anyone related to him.

  It turned out my father lived with Ann in her apartment. It was ultramodern and efficient in the way young, single, well-off professionals lived. I thought, “My father has the right to start his life over.”

  White walls, one bedroom, a kitchenette, a living room with a fold-out couch. He did not give me a house tour. It was neither warm nor cold, but airless. The windows didn’t open. There was wall-to-wall carpeting. I sensed the dull pulse of the building’s climate control, which managed to ride tensely between sound and sensation.

  My father and I still had the same sense of humor, but that was now like a valve that had rusted shut. If I happened to laugh at something, he looked at Ann to say with his eyes, “See, this isn’t so bad.” What I know now is that my father was trying to prove to himself that he wasn’t feeling guilty, and that made things uncomfortable, the way it always does when you tell yourself that you aren’t feeling what you’re feeling.

  He made lists of things to do. There were foreign movies to see. We would visit museums. We would visit the Sara Lee factory. And then we did that. When there was nothing left to do, the three of us played gin rummy. Ann made butterscotch brownies, and then made them again, because we ate through the first batch in the place of conversation.

  I can’t imagine what Ann thought as she opened up her one-bedroom to a ten-year-old who was paying attention to every movement she made. I doubt my father had prepared her for my arrival any more than he had prepared me. I couldn’t have told you a single personality trait of hers. She was, I now understand, nervous and far too young to know what she was doing. She read for hours at a time, mainstream fiction from the library, and she and my father did the New York Times crossword puzzle together on the couch, quietly, and I wondered sometimes if the silent occupation was a way to not volunteer anything I might use against her.

  At night I lay awake on the fold-out couch in the living room. There was a clock on a bookshelf. It was silver metal, a three-dimensional, cylindrical T, like the tip of a periscope. Its round plastic face was marked with crosshairs around which a black pupil revolved, once per minute. As it moved, the face changed colors. I watched it for hours.

  We saw every movie in town, from The Phantom of Liberty to And Now My Love. It was a season for difficult movies, so we saw Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and something with Liv Ullman that was so slow it had the rare effect of making me wish I were back in the apartment.

  I wanted brownies in the afternoon, but I felt I couldn’t have one until my father did. Happily, every afternoon, and every day a little earlier than the last, my dad cut himself a brownie. I would follow. He would eat it, not looking at me. I would stare out the window. And so the week passed.

  The truth was—and I can’t blame her for this—Ann didn’t want me around. This is why my dad felt guilty. It was nothing personal, just atavism, a lioness defending against the litter of a previous mate. I was certainly not charming, or plucky enough in any way I can remember.

  But Ann loved him. He was in love with her, and I can see why. They had a kind of level-headedness together that he couldn’t have found with my mother. Beyond the art and movies and books, they had every section of the Wall Street Journal in common. They discussed capital the way other couples might discuss baseball, with the same passion and knowledge and humor and faith that it made the world a better place. Also, Ann was rich. That was a new kind of added value for my dad. It must have been very different than being with my mother, who so feared being rich.

  I linger here because I need to explain what was going to happen. When I was in my thirties and my father in his sixties, he said with the same voice that he had used to explain George Carlin routines to me, “I sold you out.”

  He added that he wasn’t sorry. He said it was just one choice among many he’d made. “I’m amoral,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve done.” He said, “It was too bad you got caught in the middle.”

  I can’t say that my father’s late-life dabbling in explaining himself felt any better than him acting and having me guess why he’d done things. I want to credit him for taking some responsibility, but I also have to call bullshit. My father wanted to be amoral the same way I would like to be the Hulk. Cheerful amorality was his unattainable superpower.

  He loved Ann. And he loved me. And he loved being rich. And those things couldn’t work together. He already wanted to marry her. A shadow would skim across a conversation, a comment about my future, a glance from Ann, and his face would show a pang of that thing he said he no longer felt: guilt.

  * * *

  —

  When I returned to Corona del Mar, my mother picked me up impatiently—she had a story. She’d arrived in San Francisco and within minutes of sitting at the Mark Hopkins bar, met a man with the most unlikely name. Peter Charming. Of the Rhode Island Charmings. He had shown her his American Express card to prove it. “He had the most ridiculous pickup line,” she laughed. “ ‘May I buy you a balloon and take you to Paris?’ ”

  She had stayed in San Francisco instead of visiting Portland and Seattle. She said Peter had a Victorian mansion and drove the car Steve McQueen did in Bullitt. This was a step up over my dad wearing a sweater like McQueen did. Peter didn’t just have the type of car, he had the actual car used in the movie. He played chess, and he had a café circle of interesting friends. Peter wanted to meet me.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I was ready for a new boyfriend.

  He was a friend, but relationships were more organic and loose than how society defined them traditionally, she said. People didn’t really belong to each other, she said, which was news to me. Just a week in San Francisco had alerted her to how our culture put a lot of pressure to fit us into molds we didn’t naturally fit into, like “boyfriend,” or “wife.” By nature, she explained, we were actually much more complex than that.

  It sounded like a paragraph of an article someone had given her that she strongly agreed with. It also sounded so sophisticated I felt the urge to already know all of this.

  Besides, my mother continued, Peter had a girlfriend who lived with him, Sue, and my mother liked her. “He can be aggravating and irresponsible. And funny. He’s like a big kid.”

  Still, I was pretty sure I could destroy him, if we met. I said he sounded more fun than Ann had been.

  “Who’s Ann?” my mother asked.

  * * *

  —

  My mother had me write letters to Peter Charming saying I was going to beat him at chess. “Go ahead and taunt him,” she said. “I’d like to see what he’s going to really do.”

  My role was apparently gatekeeper now, something combining son and disapproving, pipe-smoking father. I was fine with this. Sometimes Mom dictated specific insults.

  “Tell him he lacks dignity,” she said. “Tell him he’s immature.”

  As I wrote him, I thought, “Peter, you can’t court me. I will impress you and I will make you want to impress me. And then I’m going to sink your ass at chess.”

  I should mention I wasn’t actually good at chess. My mother assumed I was. So I assumed it, too.

  On Halloween 1974, Peter visited our house in Corona del Mar. Afte
r thinking about it for a while I decided to greet him wearing a rubber Creature from the Black Lagoon mask and offering him a glass of Chablis.

  He said to my mom, “You didn’t lie—you don’t have a kid, you have a thirty-six-year-old midget.”

  He didn’t ask me about school or whether I liked Disneyland. Instead, he put me to work uncorking the next bottle of Chablis. As his arm moved over mine, I was awestruck by a heavy square of gold on his wrist that flashed under the candlelight. His watch! He wore a Pulsar, a digital watch. I’d heard about digital watches. They were supposed to cost two thousand dollars. When he tapped a button on the side, the time appeared in ruby digits that illuminated the hints of mind-boggling Jack Kirby–like circuitry behind them.

  He was a clotheshorse, which meant expensive bell-bottom jeans faded perfectly to a sky blue, a huge brass belt buckle, Pierre Cardin patterned polyester shirt with two buttons undone, and a collar the size of a paper airplane. He smelled of just enough cologne, was fastidious about his fingernails, and wore a tiny Star of David on a chain around his neck. He had a money clip but no wallet. He wore a tight afro that he attended to with a cake cutter that jutted up from his rear pocket.

  I thought he was a lawyer, or he let me think that. He didn’t mention what he did or how he’d come to have a mansion in Pacific Heights. He told me obvious lies, knowing I knew he was bullshitting me: he was a spy; he knew Groucho Marx; he was a grand master chess champion.

  “You are not a grand master.”

  “You’re right. When you’re right, you’re right. But I’m still going to beat you, kid. And after I beat you, you’ll wish I was a grand master, because at least then you’d have an excuse for losing.” He’d outthought me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Now, where’s the cheese and crackers?”