Because Catherine had left so long ago, I had assumed that when my father and I entered his house with a pot of spaghetti one afternoon that the interior would have been redone with new décor and furniture. But I was wrong on many counts.
First, the doctor who was usually tan, tall, and gangly, due in part to his love of tennis, answered the door slouched in a tattered gray robe. He looked pasty, deprived of sunlight, and had a dark circles under his eyes, a double chin and a paunch. His hair was unkempt and he had a week of scraggly beard growth. The house was bare and over-heated to the point that it was difficult to breathe. The windows were closed and it was like a sauna inside. The walls were blank canvasses. The hard-wood floors were covered only with a few dust balls. That was about it. Only the kitchen had a card table and three fold-out chairs.
Moving like a ghost tethered to a ball and chain, Stark led us into the kitchen where we sat on the fold-out chairs. My father made small talk about fishing for crab at the Berkeley pier and my stupid idea of bypassing college and going right into the labor force as a garbage man and all the while Stark was plugging numbers into his calculator and mumbling the cost of what it would require to replace the furniture while shaking his head as if overwhelmed by the money he would need to spend.
My father said, “You’re loaded. You don’t need to worry about money, do you?”
Stark ignored my father and continued making calculations. He looked up and pointed at the dining room. “The dining table she took was worth over five thousand dollars. And that was ten years ago. Today it would cost twice that much.”
“Then replace it,” my father snapped. “Just fill up your house to your heart’s content and be done with it. It’s time to move on.”
Ignoring my father’s words, Stark said, “The sofa turned into a pull-out bed and was the most comfortable bed in the house. I’ll never find one like it.”
I noticed my father’s demeanor was changing. He was a lieutenant in the army well acclimated to barking orders and expecting quick results. A rigid scowl of impatience was spread across his face.
“If you continue going down this rabbit hole,” my father said, “you’re going to go down so deep no one—and I mean no one—is going to be able to pull you back up. Do you hear me?”
Stark didn’t appear to be listening. He was plugging in more numbers in his calculator while grumbling about a rare vase from Paris that his wife had taken with her. “Technically it was hers, but I had picked it out for our tenth wedding anniversary.”
In the mythical version of the story, the way I want to remember it, my father grabbed Stark by the lapels, shook him like a doll, and screamed "Wake up!" over and over.
But instead my father looked at me and said, “Let’s go, son. I’ve had enough.” My father grabbed me around my upper arm to the degree that it hurt and he steered me to the front door.
Following us, Stark seemed to emerge from his daze. He said, “Wait, we haven’t had lunch. Your spaghetti is still on the counter.”
With a look of disgust I’ll never forget, in one motion my father bared his teeth at Stark, opened the front door with his left hand and with his right hand he violently swatted in the direction of the forlorn doctor as if trying to kill a fly. His dramatic gesture was accompanied by a loud unintelligible yell of dismissal. I’ve never seen my father do this to anyone. It was like an official shunning of another human being.
I replay this scene over and over thirty-five years later, but it’s always in slow motion with spittle parachuting out of my father’s mouth and beads of sweat flying off his drenched hair.
When we returned to our house, my father said to me, “I know as your father I am supposed to love you unconditionally and for the most part I do, but if you ever succumb to helplessness and self-pity to the degree that you and I just witnessed, I will disown you, do you hear me? I’ll disown you because the disease that he has allowed to take over his life is the unforgivable sin. Do you understand?”
I didn’t totally understand at the time this “disease” my father was talking about. But I do now, the self-pitying python that strangles us and makes us squander the life that has been given us. I’ve struggled with this “disease” off and on over the years and I loathe myself when I see it baring its fangs. But I’ve also learned that the self-loathing from seeing my own self-pity and my own fixation on the past just feeds the disease, so I find that this “disease” can be rather tricky to deal with.
One thing for sure, I always make sure to fill my house
with tasteful, high-quality furnishings.
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