Jonathan Tropper Read online

  “Come and meet my parents,” she said to me a few months later.

  Her parents lived a few blocks over from her apartment on the Upper East Side. When I arrived, the uniformed doorman informed me that I was expected. “What floor?” I said.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Fifteen what?”

  He just smiled and pointed toward the elevator. “Just fifteen.”

  The elevator opened into a private vestibule with only one door, at which Hope was waiting, looking radiant in a white cashmere sweater and black stretch pants and boots. She led me into a gargantuan anteroom with a marble floor and a large diamond-shaped skylight cut into the high ceiling. There were doors at various intervals, leading deeper into the apartment, and at the far end of the room was a grand staircase that went up to the second floor. I’d heard about apartments like this, had seen them in movies, but I never really believed real people actually lived in them. “Nice place,” I said.

  “Don’t let it freak you out,” she said apologetically.

  I shook my head. “It’s beautiful.”

  Hope’s father, Jack Seacord, had inherited his father’s medical supply company and grown it into a publicly traded, multinational conglomerate, of which he was still majority owner and CEO. He was a large, athletic man in his late fifties whose small, commanding features were jammed between the jutting slabs of his prominent forehead and chin. His smile was plastic, like a politician’s, and he had a quick, efficient manner about him, shaking my hand and sizing me up in the same instant. His lone displays of affection were reserved for Hope and seemed just a tad abnormal to me, his kisses landing squarely on her mouth, his hand resting casually on her backside, fingers stroking absently as he held her next to him.

  Hope’s mother, Vivian, was a stunning woman, a long-limbed brunette with a gleaming, Botox-smooth porcelain complexion, a pixie haircut, and a languid, feline expression, a cat in sultry repose. In her prime, she’d actually been a rated tennis player. Now she sat on the boards of various museums and philanthropic foundations, and had this whole down-to-earth vibe that usually seemed so contrived in obscenely wealthy women, but seemed completely genuine in her case.

  He was unimpressed. She thought I was hilarious, and told me so repeatedly, her loud laughs reverberating off the ceilings. Neither thought I was good enough for Hope, but naturally they were too polite to say so. It was evident in the way Jack nodded seriously as I explained what I did for the Spandler Corporation, his seeming lack of condescension simply a highly stylized version of it. “I know the company,” he said. “Great little outfit.” Vivian found me to be refreshingly grounded, which was fine for passing the time, but in no way made me a suitable mate for Hope. Hope’s only sibling, an older sister named Claire, was a militant lesbian living in LA, which Vivian mentioned with contrived pride at every possible opportunity, the word “lesbian” rolling off her lips with a practiced flourish. Claire’s outing had left Hope as the sole remaining member of the Seacord progeny to bear the burden of her parents’ dreams of succession, and that was a pretty tall order for a middleman to fill. So the dinner was a friendly affair, warm even, but there was a general undercurrent of shoulders being shrugged in the manner of the underwhelmed.

  After dinner, Hope and I cuddled on a couch in one of the many densely decorated dens scattered throughout the labyrinthine halls of the massive apartment. “So,” she said, curling up into me. “What do you think?”

  “They seemed great.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, hitting my chest lightly. “They were awful. But they mean well.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s okay, Zack. I’m not blind.”

  “No. I meant the part about them meaning well. I didn’t get that at all.”

  She giggled and kissed me.

  “Your father seemed disappointed.”

  “He’s just very protective.”

  That’s because he’s maybe a little too into you. “Yeah,” I said. “I got that.”

  “Lucky for you, they don’t get a vote.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “They won’t cut you off, or something?”

  Hope laughed. “It doesn’t work that way. Besides, as the straight daughter, the world is pretty much my oyster. I’ve got some leeway.”

  “So I guess I’ve got that going for me.”

  “You’ve got me going for you.”

  She kissed me and I kissed her and soon we were making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers. “Let’s go to my room,” she whispered.

  “Are you serious? Your parents are sitting in the living room.”

  “I know,” she said, tongue in my ear, hand in my pants. “Hurry.”

  Chapter 16

  I stagger into the brownstone at around seven, to find Jed sprawled in his usual position on the couch, shoveling Cap’n Crunch into his mouth and watching Entertainment Tonight. Living with Jed is like having a puppy. No matter what time of day or night you come home, he’ll be there to greet you. “Hey, man,” he says with his mouth full, taking in my haggard appearance. “What happened to you?”

  “I had a tube shoved up my dick,” I say, plopping down next to him.

  “A cystoscopy,” he says knowledgeably.

  “You’ve had one?”

  “Hell no. But I watched one on the Learning Channel.” Jed has become quite well-rounded since he took up television full-time. “Why’d you have it?”

  “Blood in my urine.”

  “Hematuria,” he says, nodding.

  “Very impressive,” I say.

  “If it’s out there”—he indicates the television and then points to his head—“it’s in here.”

  “Well, do you think you can pry yourself away long enough to get me some Tylenol?”

  “No need,” Jed says, reaching into a crack of the sofa and feeling around. His hand emerges a moment later, clutching a bottle of Aleve. “Sometimes I get headaches from watching,” he says in response to my incredulous look.

  I down three pills with one of the many half-finished Coke cans that litter the coffee table.

  “So, what’s the verdict?” Jed says.

  “They found a spot,” I say.

  Jed actually looks away from the television for a minute. “Oh, shit,” he says worriedly.

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  He nods. “Probably. They do a biopsy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So when do you find out for sure?”

  “Friday.”

  “What’s today?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “That sucks, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sit together in glum silence, watching Mary Hart feverishly discuss the latest celebrity pregnancy. I’m thinking that Mary ought to cut down a bit on the caffeine before taping. She’s looking more and more like a Saturday Night Live sketch of herself.

  “Oh, hey,” Jed says after a few minutes. “Your dad’s here.”

  “What?”

  “He’s in your room.”

  I look at Jed. “What’s he doing there?”

  Jed shrugs. “He was tired. Said he wanted to lie down.”

  “So you just let him go up into my room?”

  “What’s he going to do, rob you?”

  I pull myself off the couch. “I can’t believe you let him upstairs.”

  “That’s right, Zack,” Jed says, getting annoyed. “I had the gall to let an older man rest in his son’s room.”

  “Don’t get all righteous with me, Jed. You have no idea what he’s like. What he did to us.”

  Jed nods. “You’re right. Sorry. I didn’t mean to come off like that.” He looks up at me. “I can barely remember my dad, Zack. He died when I was seven. But I still miss having one, you know? Those years when my company took off, you know, when I was so successful, I always missed having a father to be proud of me. It made the whole thing feel, I don’t know, hollow. And after Rael died
, you know . . .”

  “I know,” I say softly.

  “I mean, I’ll get it together,” he says, looking back at the television. “I’m not going to watch television forever. But I sometimes wish I had a father, you know? Someone to just look to in all of this, to tell me to get off my ass. To set me straight, I guess.”

  “Mine is not really the kind of father who sets people straight,” I say.

  “So he’s a fuckup,” Jed says with a shrug. “What are we? The point is, he’s still here and you’re still here, and as we both know, that’s an equation that can change pretty quickly.” This is far and away the closest Jed’s ever come to discussing Rael’s death.

  “Jed,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is the first meaningful conversation we’ve had in over a year.”

  “You see, he’s already having a positive effect,” he says with a smirk, but his eyes dance purposefully away from mine, back to the television, and the moment is lost.

  My room is engulfed in the twin odors of aftershave and flatulence, a noxious combination that actually stops me in my tracks for a minute. Norm is sitting at my desk, shoes off, belt undone, his belly bumping up against the desk like a docked dirigible. He’s bent over a large, warped journal with frayed edges, scribbling copiously and humming atonally to himself. I watch him for a moment as he sits there unaware of me, trying to discern some hidden truth in his posture, trying to connect this bloated man with the version that was frozen in my head when I was twelve years old, trying to justify the intense longing and sadness I’ve always felt with respect to him. It’s not happening, so I clear my throat. “Zack!” he says, closing the journal and spinning around on his chair. “Hello, son.”

  “Jesus,” I say, stepping into the room and opening the window. “How can you stand to be around yourself?”

  He smiles good-naturedly. “An unfortunate side effect of my Frappuccino habit.”

  “What are you doing here, Norm?”

  “Oh,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind. I just figured I’d get some work done while I waited for you.”

  “For all you knew, I wasn’t even coming home tonight.”

  My father flashes a simultaneously sad and defiant smile. “After all these years, do you think a few more hours are really going to make a difference to me?”

  I don’t want to sit down, because that will somehow ratify his presence here, but a sitting position seems to be the only thing that soothes the fire burning in my crotch, so I sit down on the bed. “So, what’s up?” I say.

  Norm stands, pulling up his pants, and starts tucking in his checkered button-down shirt. “I’m hungry,” he says. “Let’s go get some dinner. My treat.”

  “No, thanks,” I say. “I just want to go to bed.”

  “Come on, Zack, it’s just dinner. It’s no big deal.”

  “Yes,” I say hotly, and you don’t think of your voice as coming from your groin, but when I raise it, I feel a sharp bolt of pain there. “It is a big deal. It’s a huge fucking deal. Because we don’t do that. Ever. We aren’t that father and son. We never have been. And you can’t just materialize, showing up at Matt’s gig, sitting in my room, at my desk, like it’s our fucking routine or something, as if you’ve been around for the last fifteen years, as if you gave a damn about us before today—” And then I have to stop, because goddamn if my voice isn’t breaking and I can feel the tears threatening, and I cannot, under any circumstances, give him that, because he’ll be fucking dancing in the streets over his breakthrough, will be celebrating the connection he thinks he’s made, will be so impressed with himself, thinking that he was right to come back and knew just what to do to reach out to me. I’ve had a shitty day, I’m on edge for a thousand different reasons, and the last thing I want to do is inadvertently validate this absurd notion he’s always subscribed to that a few grand gestures will accomplish what should take years of building or rebuilding.

  “You’re right,” Norm says, standing awkwardly in front of the bed, nervously patting down the anorexic strands of his hair. “It is a big deal, and I in no way meant to minimize your feelings. I apologize.”

  “Forget about it,” I say, feeling nonplussed by my reaction and annoyed with his recovery speak.

  “Zack,” Norm says. “I’ve always prided myself on my ability to read people, and I’m going to tell you what I’m reading in you.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Obviously, there’s a lot of hostility toward me.”

  “Wow. They should give you a talk show.”

  “I said it was obvious,” he says. “But there’s more. I’ve been disliked before—”

  “Say it isn’t so.”

  “—So I have a pretty good idea of what it feels like. But I am suggesting that what I’m getting from you is very scattered and unfocused. It’s as if you’re too distracted to hate me properly. I mean, look at Matt,” he says admiringly. “Now, that boy can hate.”

  “You’re criticizing the manner in which I dislike you?”

  “No, I’m analyzing it. And what I come up with is that while you certainly do have your issues with me, as well you should, they’re not foremost on your mind. You were drunk at Matt’s show last night, not fun drunk, but desperately drunk, if you take my meaning. You looked to me like a man with way too much on his mind.” He smiles at me. “You were always a worrier, even as a kid. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, you would always ask me for a flashlight. You were five years old and you were worried about blackouts. Do you remember that?”

  “No,” I lie.

  “Well, anyway. It just seems to me that on the list of things that are troubling you, I’m nowhere near the top right now. I don’t know if it’s work, or your engagement, or what, but I just know this: it’s not me.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” I say. “You’re still way up there.”

  Norm lets out a bone-weary sigh and picks up his notebook, carefully organizing some of the tattered pages sticking out at various angles. “What is that, anyway?” I ask him.

  “I’m writing my memoirs,” he says without the faintest whiff of self-consciousness, and something about it just makes me laugh out loud. “What?” he says defensively.

  “Your memoirs,” I say, unable to hold back a laugh.

  “That’s right,” he says defensively. “And I’ll have you know that I’ve already shown them to a friend or two in the publishing game, and they’re very interested.”

  “No doubt.” I’m still smiling, and I can see it’s aggravating him.

  “Look,” he says, annoyed. “Are we going to eat, or what?”

  And maybe it’s the insanity of the last twelve hours, maybe it’s my current worries about my own mortality, maybe it’s because I’m scared and I want a father, any father, or maybe it’s just because this is the first time I can recall laughing in recent memory, but suddenly, I have no resistance left in me. “Fine,” I say. “Let’s go eat.”

  “Hallelujah,” Norm says.

  Chapter 17

  We eat at Arnie’s Deli, a small restaurant on Broadway with a deliberate coffee shop feel. “How are you guys doing?” the waitress says, handing us our menus. She’s tall and slim, her hair, an unnatural platinum color, fed in a ponytail through the hole in the back of her baseball cap, and Norm is all over her in an instant, shamelessly looking her up and down with an appreciative grin.

  “I’m just fine, Penny,” he says, reading her name tag. “Thanks for asking. And how are you?”

  “I’m good,” she says with considerably less enthusiasm.

  “You look beautiful this evening,” Norm says.

  “Well, thank you. And what can I get you tonight?”

  “What’s good?”

  “I don’t know. What are you in the mood for?”

  “Well, I usually get to know a woman better before I answer that, but since you asked . . .” He laughs loudly at his little joke, nudging my arm to get me in on it, smiling
at the other diners, the inadvertent beneficiaries of his sharp wit.

  “Norm,” I say quietly.

  “Sorry,” he says, not taking his eyes off her. “My son doesn’t like to see his old man flirt.”

  “And you do it so well,” Penny says. Oblivious to her sarcasm, Norm breaks into raucous laughter, as if she’s bantering with him.

  “Well, no one ever died from being told they were beautiful, did they?”

  “I’m dying,” I say, and Norm goes off again.

  I catch Penny’s eye and I want to explain everything to her, how I haven’t seen him in years, how he coerced me into this, how sorry I am for the inconvenience. “We’ll need a few minutes,” I say ruefully.

  “I’ll be right back, then,” she says with a grin, heading back to the counter, and I realize that I’ve overestimated her reaction to Norm.

  “I’ll watch you go,” my father says, leaning out of his chair.

  “You behave now, Norm,” she says, casting a playful glance back at him.

  “This is behaving,” he calls after her, smiling around the diner at his unwitting audience, somehow seeing approval in their indifference. Then he casts one more longing look at Penny’s ass before sitting back in his chair. “Now, that will keep you warm at night,” he says appreciatively.

  “Jesus, Norm,” I say.