Trying to get from Ecksville to Rimpleton to visit my fucking dad and step-mother. [Trying in the sense of trying to make future arrangements to do so. (These bracketed notes are all after-the-fact, for clarity.)] She’s a dried up old bitch who I wish I had the guts to call on her shit. We were sitting in a restaurant this past week (they had come up to visit) and we were talking about Persis and Burt and I coming down to visit them some time in July, and my Dad offered (at our prompting) to watch Burt for us while we went to see a play (Rimpleton is, as you may know, home to the State Theater Convocation), and Babs clamped down on that idea like a steel trap, and even when my dad insisted that he would be okay (he wasn’t insisting with any backbone; it was like he was a whimpering child and she was his mom telling him know (I meant to write no, but for whatever reason, that homophone came out, and under the terms of my editing standards, I must leave it)), she kept saying, “Not this first time, Teddy,” and it was damn fucking clear that she meant it, even though she was (and he was cooperating) keeping up appearances of being civil. They say they never fight, but looking at that interchange it’s impossible for me to imagine how that’s possible. What, does he just give up everything he wants because she says no?

That’s what I’m afraid of with Persis…but I can’t let go of the Dad and Babs thing yet, because I’ve just come off of Amtrak’s and Greyhound’s website, trying to find ways of getting down there that don’t involve driving with Burt in the car for two and a half hours, which is a major undertaking at this point.

I hate that fucking bitch. You know, sometimes, she surprises me -- I have said in the past that she never ceases to surprise me, but know…I meant to write now…I see that that surprise is the same kind of surprise I experienced when I went to the abstinence conference last Fall (did I tell you about that? [(Sexual) Abstinence Education Conference for script research.]) where I was blindsided by the humanity and goodnaturedness of these people whose point of view I despise on paper. In fact, of course she surprises me in that sense; why should I be insensitive to the human side of her? But the fact is that she runs this life, this tight ship, she runs my dad, and I oscillate between thinking that the reason he lets her is because at heart, he really doesn’t want the things that I imagine she is preventing him from having [e.g., time with his kids, grandkids, etc.] badly enough to protest and thinking that he’s just spineless. Why don’t I write them an honest email that blows apart the fiction that I’m maintaining by not telling them what I think of them? Being civil is such a constraint on honesty. I guess that’s what it’s supposed to be.

So on the other hand, they come up, supposedly to spend time with Burt, whom they haven’t seen in six months since they went off to their pied-a-terre in Paraiso (and screw you for ever having lived there) and we meet them for lunch and they come back to our house and Burt starts doing his thing, crawling around and exploring the house, and they just sit out on the fucking patio playing with the cat. I mean, what do they expect, that Burt is going to put on his Sunday best and come outside and sit and chat with them? My dad gradually relaxed and became more expressive over the course of the twenty-four hours, at the end of which he finally had the initiative to come out and offer to watch Burt [That is, during this proposed future occasion of our visit to Rimpleton.], when Babs clamps down on him. Why does it take so fucking long for my blood to come to a boil about this? Why don’t I jump in and say, “Shut up you desiccated old hag (you know, (I think I’ve told you) my dad once shared with me that he and Babs don’t have sex very much; again, the Persis comparison comes up), why don’t you let him do what he wants?”

I should dictate terms. I should stop letting them tell us the terms under which we are going to see them and say that I can’t afford to be that flexible anymore; that it’s time they start molding their schedule around us.

What really makes me burn is that, at dinner on Tuesday night (they were here Tues. lunch through Wed. breakfast) Babs lets out that (and my dad wasn’t listening at the time; I don’t know what he would have done if he had heard this, probably nothing) my dad doesn’t think he’s going to live very much longer. (!!!) This doesn’t surprise me. I have wondered the same thing for the same reasons: his genetics. His mom died when he was sixteen, and his dad died when he (my dad) was in his thirties so that must have made my granddad mid to late sixties probably, which my dad is dawning on. So he’s trying to take care of himself, exercising every day. Meanwhile, every time he goes on a cruise (which he does one to two times a year) he goes on this…he sends me all this information about how to get ahold of him and where his will is and all that. My grandfather died while on a cruise through the Panama Canal…which incidentally is where my dad’s last cruise was, when I noted that his anxiety was especially high. Grandpa Bobo died at the Coco Solo hospital. I remember that factoid; the rest – or most of it – is a blur.

My dad, if confronted with any of the evidence of his subconscious working [i.e. anxiety around cruises, and esp. ones through the Panama Canal.], seems neither fazed by it nor acknowledging of it; as if he acknowledges the school of thought that says there is any such thing [That is, such thing as a subconscious.] but privately believes that he is not possessed of one and feels no conflict about this. He denies any of it so coolly that I almost believe him; it is one of the things that routinely shakes my private assessment of his inner workings: how reliably and ably he seems unimpressed or –affected by those ideas.

So here’s Babs saying that my dad thinks he is going to die soon. And of course you will want to know how I reacted. Desperation: this sense that I want to take advantage of the time that I have, this fear that something will be left unsaid. And…hard to own up to…relief. The money that I’ll get. Not billions, but at least half a mil, I think, based on the insurance policy that my sister and I will share the proceeds of upon his death. And not having to deal with this meshugas about Babs. I have this fantasy of honoring my dad’s memory by treating her well after he is gone, but I wonder whether I really will. I like to think that I will, but I probably will succumb to the human pettiness that I would rather pretend I am not subject to…like my dad and his nonexistent subconscious. (I’ve been going back and adding, subtracting words here of there for clarity or emphasis. Like ‘nonexistent’ in the last sentence. Added after the period. Sorry. I’m bad.)

And I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad’s choices in the light of my feelings about Persis. I really am afraid that I will never feel sexy again. I will never feel naked and unadulterated sexual desire for anyone, and I will never have the good fortune to feel that someone feels that about me. And I will never be blessed to have a wife whom I respect and value like some of the women that I have known, whom I value like I value my closest friends. Granted, there are ways that Persis serves me which, to acknowledge them fully (which I do on occasion to her) would be to acknowledge my own deep flawedness; whereas, my best friends make me feel like I’m perfect even in my imperfections. Persis completes me in certain meaningful ways. But the problem is that I don’t think she duplicates me in other important…or any important ways. What I mean is that…like the sex thing. I feel like, given a partner who is in touch with themselves and at ease about expressing sexual desire, I’m a really good lover (my mother, believe it or not, once said that about me, that I’d be an excellent lover – an out of the ordinary thing to admit perhaps, but when she said it, it was in the context of acknowledging, I don’t know, an attunedness to sensual stimuli that is an important quality in a lover. Don’t know if this is clear. What I’m trying to…no, shouldn’t veer off of that so quickly. But these qualities that my mom was, I think, identifying in me, in the same way she would say that I’d make, perhaps, a good lawyer, with an appreciative and admiring and definitely parental (I’m trying to say that I don’t remember feeling like she was saying anything inappropriate when she said this; it struck me as something that a parent might say to a child, and that, most importantly, that I agreed with, for the same reasons as she had for saying it in the first place), and that these qualities are what Persis herself lacks and what makes our sexual relationship so old-open-fizzy-water…flat. So she doesn’t duplicate those things. Or my sense of humor. We don’t really laugh about the same things in the way that I do with my close friends. We laugh about things. But not in the way that I do with my…here’s that word again…mother. Persis jokes acidly that maybe I should have married her. And the truth is I wish I had, though not her specifically, but someone exactly like my mother, who just wasn’t my mother. Who was my age and attractive…not that my mother isn’t. I recently looked at pictures of her when she first married my dad and when I was first born. And I swear to God…I never realized that my mom was as hot as she was when she was my age until I got to that age. Strange how that works.

So I’m afraid that my relationship with Persis is like my dad’s relationship with Babs. That I’m in it simply because I’m too spineless to get out of it, and that maybe I deserve it because I’m so spineless. That anyone who, seeing frankly all the warning signs and limitations of such a relationship, would go ahead into it, deserves what he gets. And then I try and justify it by saying that I can’t imagine not having had Burt, but certainly that’s as self-fulfilling as an argument gets. So… I wonder if my dad is in this stricture of a relationship because he feels like he deserves it for leaving his family.

What’s so weird about that is that I can’t match the boldness of that move [i.e., my dad leaving his family.] (and I mean bold in a morally neutral sense; I can think of it both as positively bold (leaving a relationship in which one has the insight to see he is never going to be happy although it may be very painful to do so and may cause pain to others, but what example is he setting for his children if he doesn’t?) and close-mindedly stupid (someone as seemingly unaware of his own subconscious as my dad is, and as I suspect he has always been, though I fantasize about him not being so in the moment he left his family, cannot have decided on divorce and leaving his family from a particularly thoughtful position, especially when the reason that I’ve been told was that he was critically wounded by the fact that my mom had had an affair.))

I can’t decide who my dad is, who I want him to be. If he’s the bold guy who acts with insight to achieve a greater happiness though it leave destruction in its wake, why can’t I do the same? And if he’s the same guy he is today I can only conclude that he left us and my mom because he was too numbskulled psychologically to explore a more complex and certainly reflexively painful (that line about Persis and my own imperfections? Apparently, the affair was instantiated by a lot that my dad was and wasn’t doing that he would not own up to or explore…though of course that’s my mom talking, so she has her bias, no doubt) truth that might yet keep his family together.

Then I look at all this Christian nonsense out in the world today and wonder if a family is really worth saving. Sometimes I want to destroy mine if only to deal a blow to this idea of the blissful Biblical family. I hate being a member of this demographic. I never intended to be a part of it, nor wanted to; the young suburban straight-laced family, I mean, not the Christian part.
So who is my dad? Can I discover by asking him? I’m afraid of what he’d say. I’m afraid that this frustratingly complex, gemini man I’m imagining him to maybe be will be dissolved by the simplicity of his denial of any subconscious motives and that I will be left with what he says as the truth. I don’t know if I like who he is. Maybe that is what I am saying. I love him, and I enjoy him a lot a lot of the time. But when the truth comes out about who he is… I would much rather imagine him as this dark complex figure…much the way I would like to imagine myself…as opposed to the simple nuclear father that I am becoming. Thank you, that’s it…can I have a different life, please?