Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (35 page)

It was strange to see my father so invigorated. No sooner were the rooms cleared than carpenters, painters, and contractors arrived, clomping through the apartment in coveralls and ponytails, filling it with industriousness and the distinctly oniony smell of male perspiration. Under my father’s direction, the renovations then proceeded as frantically as time-elapse photography set to the
William Tell
Overture.

Soon, every evening began to feel like Christmas morning; my parents and I hurried home from work eager to discover the latest surprise: six sleek leather chairs tucked around a new dining table. A hand-embroidered carpet unfurled on the living room floor. The beauty went beyond anything we had ever imagined for ourselves. It was hard to believe, frankly, that so much material good fortune could be visited upon us—and that my father, of all people, had instigated it. Why, when it was all done, my mother and I dared to whisper, our apartment might look like something out of
Architectural Digest.

Yet the less our home looked like a storage facility, the more alien we felt in it. We moved around the new rooms stiffly, gingerly, like guests in a furniture museum.

“Don’t sit on the sofa!” we shrieked when one of us entered the living room with a glass of Diet Pepsi. “You’ll spill!”

“We’ll get more comfortable with this in time,” my father said with newfound authority. “It’ll be better once the wall unit arrives.”

For the
piÈce de rÉsistance,
he’d ordered a custom-made wall unit for the living room. To hear him go on about it, however, it was not merely a wall unit that was going to arrive, but a wall unit messiah.

“Wait till you see it,” he said excitedly. “It’s a brand-new design by the same company that builds wall units for the royal family of Denmark.”

For as long as I had known him, my father had had almost zero interest in material goods. Any gadget harder to operate than a bottle opener was a source of anxiety for him. Designer suits, athletic shoes—my father could barely pronounce the names, let alone appreciate their status. Whenever we asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he shrugged. “Jeez. I don’t know. Maybe a new pair of sweat socks?”

This custom-made wall unit was the first item I’d ever seen him get visibly emotional about.

While I struggled to present myself as someone who cared, he described in painstaking detail how it was made of a rich mahogany veneer, making it easy to clean! Bolted directly into the wall, there’d be no warping or wobbling! “It’s indestructible. You can store anvils in it,” he said excitedly, as if this were something we were actually contemplating doing.

For weeks, our apartment lay in wait, the renovations complete except for one naked, gaping space in the living room and a mountain of boxes, ready to be emptied.
Once the wall unit arrived,
our father insisted rÉpeatedly, our apartment would be
clear for the first time in decades.

The day of the delivery, he was so excited, he stayed home from work. “When you get back this evening, it’ll be like you’re in a brand-new apartment,” he said gleefully.

“For starters, it’ll be quiet,” said my mother, rolling her eyes. “No more listening to your father obsessing about the goddamn wall unit.”

That night, the apartment was, in fact, quiet. As my father had promised, when I arrived home from work, there were no more cartons barricading the hallways, no more stepladders and paint cans lying about. All traces of renovation had vanished.

“Hello?” I said plaintively.

I hung up my coat and headed into the living room. My father sat on our newly upholstered couch. My mother was over by the window, staring blankly out at the city.

“So. Did the wall unit come?” I asked. But before they could answer, I saw it for myself. It was impossible not to. Extending from the floor to ceiling, it took up the entire eastern wall of the apartment.

Gargantuan and liver-colored, it looked not so much like a piece of furniture as a gigantic control panel, an enormous monolith riddled with brass industrial hinges and knobs. The retractable “cabinets” were more like hatches and vaults, and the dark shutters looked impenetrable, giving it a foreboding, sinister quality. The unit was so massive, it overpowered everything else in the living room. It gave you the distinct feeling it would slam down on top of you at any minute and crush you. It was hideous: the Death Star of furniture.

My father leapt up. “Well,” he said, forcing a smile. “What do you think?”

I studied it for a moment.

“Is it really bolted to the wall?” I said.

My mother gave a little cry of despair.

“I could kill Gene,” she said, nearly in tears. “And I could kill you, David. It didn’t look like this in the catalogue at all.”

“Look, Ellen. I told you,” my father said desperately. “It has lights.” Turning to me, he fairly pleaded, “I told her, it looks better with the lights.”

Hurrying over to the wall unit, he pushed a button on the side and small halogen bulbs embedded in the top shelves came on weakly, illuminating the uppermost cubbies like a row of shadow boxes. “See?” he said. In a court of law, he would have been accused of leading the witness. He twisted the dimmer on “high.”

It was a little better, but not much.

I walked over and examined the wall unit. It was made of a sort of plastic laminate, a glossy fake wood oddly reminiscent of the halcyon furnishing at Hojo’s. There was no painting it, no bleaching it, and, I saw quickly, no removing it. It was bolted to the wall, all right—an exterior wall—which meant my parents would probably have to knock down the entire building if they ever wanted to get rid of it. It was a monstrosity, a titanic eyesore, and they were stuck with it.

For a moment, we all stood there, marinating in misery. “Maybe you just need to remove some of the cabinet doors,” I suggested. “You know, lighten it up. Make it more homey.”

“Yes. Of course,” my father said, seized with relief. “Remove some of the doors.”

Immediately, the three of us got very busy with screwdrivers, removing the cabinet doors, then stocking the exposed shelves with my mother’s prettiest art books and handicrafts. She positioned a couple of philodendrons in each corner so they cascaded down greenly.

“Well,” she said uncertainly. “That’s a little better. I guess.”

“Oh, it’s a lot better,” my father insisted. “See, how much nicer that is? I think this will work out well, actually. I think this looks pretty good.”

I didn’t know who he thought he was kidding. Our efforts were the aesthetic equivalent of pinning a corsage on a robot. Yet as I watched him struggle to make the best of it, I found myself rooting for him, hoping that he would succeed in taming the oppressive wall unit—or at least in convincing my mother that he had not, in fact, made some colossal mistake.

By dinnertime, we were utterly fatigued from the physical labor and forced optimism of it all. Too tired to cook, we went to our local Chinese restaurant and pushed shreds of shrimp lo mein around on our plates while studiously avoiding any mention of the wall unit. When we came home, I noticed, none of us made a beeline for the living room.

“Look, I think we just need to sleep on it,” my father said finally. “When we wake up in the morning, it may look like a whole new piece of furniture.”

“Well,” my mother said dubiously. “I suppose.”

“You know, sometimes these things just take getting used to,” I prompted, eager to help. “We’ve been living amid drop cloths and boxes for so long, naturally it’s going to take us a while to adjust to
real
furniture.”

“Oh, that’s such an excellent point.” My father looked at my mother encouragingly. “Isn’t that an excellent point? It’ll just take us a while to
adjust.
In a few days, you’ll see. We’ll probably love it. In a few days, we probably won’t even notice it’s there.” Then he smiled. “I mean, people, it’s just a goddamn piece of furniture. It’s not death and it’s not cancer, right?” He laughed. “I mean, let’s keep some perspective here. It’s only a wall unit.”

“That’s right,” my mother said mirthlessly. “It is only a wall unit, David.”

Later that night, however, I found I couldn’t sleep. Beyond my window, the city glittered, then grew steadily darker as lights in other buildings snapped off, like eyes shutting, like faces turning away. When the numbers on my clock radio flipped over into the single digits, I finally surrendered, got up, and headed into the kitchen for a snack. The tiny halogen bulbs on the wall unit were still on, glinting bleakly in the darkness. I almost didn’t notice my father, sitting alone on the couch, staring up at the wall unit. He seemed unaware of my presence, or, indeed, of anything around him. All the florid optimism had been drained from his face; alone in the shadows, he looked worried, utterly bereft, more defeated than ever.

“Dad,” I whispered, “it’s only a wall unit.”

Startled, his head jerked in my direction. “I know, sweetie,” he whispered sadly after a moment. “It’s just furniture.”

But any stranger with an IQ higher than room temperature would’ve known that it was not “just furniture” at all. One look at my father, and they would’ve known instantly that as he stared at the wall unit, he was seeing a void that he believed would become the rest of his life. His frenzied redecorating hadn’t been a quest for more closet space, but a desperate, naive attempt to resuscitate his own life, to renovate his marriage, to stave off some gangrenous rot. No doubt, with that damn wall unit, he’d hoped to contain my mother, to confine her volubility, to shut away years of tension behind a sleek mahogany veneer. He had tried his best, but his efforts had only resulted in this: a more permanent hideousness, bolted to his wall. Now, he was exhausted. He was out of ideas.

Anyone else would’ve known instinctively that, as my father gazed despairingly into the shelving, he was seeing not a piece of furniture at all, but his own, awaiting coffin.

Anyone but me would’ve known that, at that very moment, he was planning to leave.

Divorce, we’d once thought smugly, was for other, less intelligent families. The fact that we had remained “intact”—while all around us, our neighbors were divorcing—had always been an enormous source of pride to my family. Occasionally, my mother would come home from the grocery store and announce, “I just heard that Ben and Rosalynn Schneiderman are splitting.” Hearing this, our faces would break into the same triumphant look that children got whenever they snagged a seat during musical chairs. Just like these children, my family and I secretly believed that we remained in the game not because of timing or luck, but because of our own inherent cleverness.

Sure, our mother was often seething. Sure, our father wandered around like a zombie. But at the end of each day, we ate dinner together. We had our Sunday brunch rituals, our driving to the beach rituals, our Christmas morning rituals—and none of them ever involved the words “custody,” “visitation,” or “stepparent.”

When our parents began divorcing, John and I found ourselves jettisoned from one demographic pile into another. Suddenly, in our twenties, we became the children of divorce, part of the other 50 percent. In a matter of weeks, our father had moved out, then moved again, then hired Gene the Decorator once more—this time to help him furnish his new bachelor pad on East 12th Street.

“Most men leave their wives for another woman. Our dad left Mom for another wall unit. Do you suppose we should feel lucky?” my brother said.

By waiting until we were grown, our parents had spared us a serial nightmare: the custody battles, the court appearances, the anxiety over whether child support and alimony would ever arrive, the possible parental vanishing acts. By waiting, our parents spared us the torture of thinking that we ourselves were to blame for the divorce. They’d spared us all traumas but one: the fact that our family had been smashed apart like a pumpkin.

Within weeks of my father’s exodus, our family circle had expanded. In addition to the four of us, there were soon our shadows, four alter egos in the form of four therapists, earnest men and women with leather-upholstered furniture and white noise machines whirring away in their fern-filled foyers. In our readiness to seek professional help, we became possibly the first family to
double
in size in the wake of a separation; it was as if our parents had initiated an act of mitosis.

It was every bit as ludicrous as it sounds. Soon I was having phone conversations like this:

Me:
Hi, Dad. Listen. I’m calling because I’m upset about something, and when I talked it over with my therapist, she said I should talk to you about it directly.

Dad:
Oh. She did? Well, listen, sweetie. Right now’s not a good time. I’m actually late for my therapy appointment.

Me:
So let me get this straight. You’d rather go to your therapist to talk about our problems than talk to me about them directly?

Dad:
Hm. I guess I would. But that’s an interesting observation. I’ll be sure to bring it up in therapy.

Overnight, we’d become clichÉs, a stupid caricature of New York neurotics flailing around, and I hated us for it. Once, I had worried that my family’s eccentricities made us a bunch of freaks. Now, I saw that we were no different from anybody else, and this was at least as depressing. All the standard pettiness, wretchedness, and temporary psychosis that plagued every other divorcing family in America plagued us, too.

My father, for his part, behaved like a man who had just emerged from a coma. Having spent decades catatonic on the sofa, he suddenly erupted with personality, becoming a great fount of needs, opinions, appetites, and the highly irritating desire to express himself almost constantly.

“You know what I realized today when I was at Gristede’s?” he said as I wandered dumbstruck through his trendy new downtown apartment, examining his love seat with its Aztec designs, his modular glass coffee table, his wicker basket filled with dried seed pods from Pier One Imports:
Was this stuff really my father’s?
His black, lacquered bureau was neatly stacked with ticket stubs from Lincoln Center. There was a coaster from Caramba’s! where I often went with Joshua for obliterating margaritas. Since when did my father like Yo-Yo Ma? Since when did he drink tequila?