Cocaine's Son_ A Memoir Part 3

"Okay," she said with a devilish chuckle. I liked this newfound boldness that my untested drug supply had provided me, and she did, too.

If Jana thought we were headed home to smoke pot and look at pictures of her recent trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I made it clear this wasn't my intent. From my dining table, I retrieved my wad of foil, where it still sat next to the napkin holder. "Look what I just bought," I said to Jana as I unwrapped the foil and displayed its chunky, chalky contents.

"Oh my G.o.d," she said with sly surprise, and as decorously as one would b.u.t.ter a dinner roll, she produced a nail file from her purse and began shaving away at the crystals, creating little piles of powder that she gathered into lines with another American Express Gold Card. With a snort, the first line disappeared up her nose, and then a second, and a third, and then finally, she let me try a couple, too.

This time it worked. The effect was unlike anything I had experienced in any previous state of consciousness: I did not feel dizzy, dazed, or distant; I was not hallucinating or mixing up my senses. I felt like I had been plugged in to myself and, in doing so, had tapped in to an aquifer of adrenaline and testosterone that was laying dormant for over a decade, acc.u.mulated through a lifetime's aversion to organized athletics, gym workouts, or any activity more strenuous than videogames. I was happy and proud to be me, infinitely confident and unafraid of anything, and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with more energy than I knew what to do with. But I knew exactly where I wanted to put it.

Jana was lying on my couch, looking back at me through needful, half-open eyes, and suddenly, her body started looking like an elaborate instrument panel that I had rarely gotten my hands on but which I knew exactly how to use. I started peeling off her clothes as if they were made from tissue paper, latching on to an ample breast with one hand while pawing at her pubic mound with the other, all the while in utter disbelief that she was actually allowing me to do this to her she was actually allowing me to do this to her. As I immersed my face between her legs, her tiny moans and gasps gave way to a soft, uncertain entreaty to stop. Whether or not I wanted to heed it, she abruptly sat up and ran into my bathroom, where she began throwing up.

Within a few minutes, Jana returned to the room, unashamed. "See what happens when you get me too excited?" she said before climbing into my bed and pa.s.sing out. She had taken off her remaining clothes and was dressed in one of my old college T-s.h.i.+rts, which barely came down to her waist. At its hemline, a few small hairs poked out from underneath, a teasing reminder of the anatomical bits that had been both my inspiration and my undoing on this night.

We woke up late the next morning, groggy and sick, and traded shy, embarra.s.sed laughs as we pa.s.sed each other going to and from the bathroom. I saw Jana with decreasing frequency over the months and years that followed, and we never spoke of this incident even once.

Here is how a house of cards begins to collapse. You build its foundation on a layer of unstable ground and add each tentative tier with a meticulous process of indifference and neglect, observing in disconnected fascination as each wobbly story is a.s.sembled atop a previous one, well beyond the point where your empirical understanding tells you that the fragile structure should be able to support itself. Then, with an inevitable tug, it starts to buckle and heave, and you watch with a mixture of defeat and amazement as it goes down and the familiar pieces you used to construct it come hurling back at you, as the whole enterprise spreads wider and sinks lower without ever finding a boundary or a bottom.

Months had pa.s.sed since my meaningless rescue of my father from his self-imposed flophouse exile, the memory of the event added to our backlog of personal tragedy to be discussed and reexamined as soon as we found a mutually convenient time, which would be never. I had a new magazine job, an editor's t.i.tle and my own private office, and a hip new East Village apartment, where I was relaxing one night only to have my modest tranquillity interrupted by another phone call at another odd hour. Proving that I had learned absolutely nothing from the previous episode, I answered it.

"I need to talk to you about something," my father told me, and right away I knew I was in trouble. I ran through the mental checklist that I had honed over the years, prepared for scenarios like these when he should call me out of the blue, designed to determine whether I was talking to someone who is sober or high: is his speech slurred or stuttering? Is his train of thought circuitous or disconnected, or does he drop out of the conversation for long periods of time? Does he only want to talk about his s.e.x life? He pa.s.sed all of these tests and yet something still seemed off, as if he were talking to me through a paper cup. Out of a kind of fatalistic curiosity, I allowed him to continue.

"I want to talk to you about your aunt Arline," he said, referring to his older sister. "She was up here to visit your mother and me a few days ago in the mountains. I don't know what kind of life she has down there in the city. I think she should move up here. I think it would be good for her."

"Dad," I asked, "what does this have to do with me?"

"I need you to explain to her that she should do this," he said. "I want you to convince her that this is the right thing for her to do."

Had I applied some of the more rigorous and obscure criteria on my father-testing checklist-does he want to discuss an intensely personal situation involving his family? is he asking for help that he seems to think only I can provide? does he sound utterly convinced of his own unflinching standards of right and wrong?-I might have arrived at the red-flag moment that signaled to me: Do not talk to this person unless you seek a frustrating, humiliating, ego-crus.h.i.+ng conversation Do not talk to this person unless you seek a frustrating, humiliating, ego-crus.h.i.+ng conversation. But the signs were so numerous and imprecise that half of them could still apply to my father when he was completely clean. Some days I felt like salvaging him from the messes he had created, and some days I wanted to leave him behind in the hourly motels of his own invention, and on this occasion I decided to rebel.

"I don't see why I should get involved in this," I said. "This is between you and your sister. I'm not going to do it."

With preternatural calm, my father replied, "Then you are a coward, and you are a failure."

It should be self-evident that hearing one's own father refer to oneself as a coward and a failure would be completely devastating to anyone, and yet I still feel I should explain why I found the remarks so unsettling: not because I feared he truly meant what he said. What frightened me most were the retaliatory acts I had often cycled through and savored in my mind, that I was free to perpetrate on him.

I had not only contemplated but fantasized about what my life would be like if I were to cut him off entirely. It was the same punishment he had threatened me with, turned on its head-I had nothing tangible that he wanted or that I could withhold from him, only unquantifiable commodities like love, contact, and compa.s.sion. My campaign would cost me nothing to perpetrate, but it would devastate him fully. I would be giving up nothing more than a sometime sounding board, a guy I could occasionally count on to hear out my plans for the future and then tell me all the ways they could possibly go wrong. He would be left to perpetually apologize to the rest of our family for my absence at gatherings and Thanksgiving dinners, to explain to his friends that he could not update them on my life because he did not know what I was doing, and to wonder, above all, how it was that he squandered the trust of this person who was once completely devoted to him-the boy of a thousand nicknames who used to believe that there was no rock so heavy that he could not lift it, no highway motorists so fast he could not outrace them, and no c.o.c.ksucking traffic jam so f.u.c.king impenetrable and G.o.dd.a.m.n demonstrative of the f.u.c.king worthlessness of New York City that he could not curse it into a state of powerlessness.

There was no formal declaration of hostilities, only an abrupt cessation of concordance that took him several weeks to notice. First I had to explain my actions to his proxies. My mother called and, after an exchange of ba.n.a.lities, asked if there was any reason why I hadn't spoken to my father in all this time.

"Mom," I said, "didn't he tell you that the last time we talked, he called me a coward and a failure? I don't know what he was on, but I'm sure he was taking something or doing something. I don't know if I'll ever talk to him again."

Her voice turned cold with recognition. "I can understand why you might feel that way," she said, and I'm sure she could.

I next practiced the argument with my sister, who was deep in her studies at medical school. Some elements of the story had trickled down to her, but not the whole thing. "What's going on, David?" she wanted to know, as if I were withholding the details of some fatal accident from her.

"I don't know if I can be a part of this family anymore," I told her in my most self-aggrandizing tone. "I'll always be there for you if you ever need money," which was the one a.s.set I inevitably equated with independence and self-reliance. "I'll be there for whatever you need from me. I think from now on we'll have to learn to take care of each other and look out for ourselves." Whatever I said and however I said it must have been pretty convincing, because she started to cry.

These practice confrontations were not enough preparation for facing down the man himself. He caught me off-guard with another of his sudden phone calls, this time when I was at work.

He had the opportunity to say only one thing to me, but it was enough. "David," he said, and I could just about hear the tears welling in his eyes, "are you going to stop loving me?"

In my private office, I could have closed the door behind me and said whatever I wanted without fear of being overheard. But I didn't say anything in reply. I simply hung up the phone. In the moment it felt courageous. And when I look back on the course of my life-not just the times when I could have supported my father but elected not to, out of spite or anger or confusion, but all the sins I've been responsible for, all the stains that will never be fully cleansed from my soul, all the acts of deceit and larceny, guile and ruthlessness, I've committed in my own self-interest that I dare not ever confess-I think it may have been the cruelest and most terrible thing I've ever done.

Chapter 5

I was talking to my mother in a stolen moment when I could be certain she wouldn't try to pa.s.s the phone to my father or allow him to listen in on the conversation when she made the suggestion. "I think you and your father should go into therapy," she said.

Setting aside the accusatory, slightly satisfied way she said this, something about her advice sounded right to me. For all the times I had tried to make my father understand that the past didn't matter-that previous disputes between us were no reason to conclude the bond between us was broken beyond repair, and previous reconciliations no reason to a.s.sume that it would always remain intact-now was my chance to show him that I meant what I said, or that I meant what I always intended to say anyway.

We didn't have to be one of those parent-child pairings who spent their adult lives wondering what happened happened to their dynamic without realizing that it was always, perpetually to their dynamic without realizing that it was always, perpetually happening happening-whatever it was that we once had, we could always get it back, and we could always create it anew. We didn't have to treat our relations.h.i.+p so delicately, as if it were some exotic electronic device with a baffling array of b.u.t.tons, any of which threatened self-destruction if you pressed the wrong one. We had to experiment with using this device, and any time we could not figure out how it was supposed to operate, all we had to do was unplug it and plug it back in again. And we could do it over and over, as many times as we needed to, until we got it working the way it was meant to.

"Yes," I said to my mother. "Yes, I will. Yes. Can you arrange this for us?"

As soon as I agreed to do it, I became extremely frightened about the process I had just consented to. The harder I tried to avoid cliche in my life, the more inevitably I ended up fulfilling it. Now here I was, perpetuating the tradition of being so impotently unable to solve my own problems that I had to turn to a total stranger for help, doled out in one-hour increments. And once I had been in therapy, I could no longer say that I'd never been in therapy; my personal belief that I was the sanest member of my family would be that much harder to hang on to.

By agreeing to partic.i.p.ate in therapy with my father, I was basically admitting that I was just as messed up as he was. This guy This guy, I always knew, needed therapy. But me, too? Really? For all the things I had ever done to excess, at least I had the good sense to do them in private, in a way that didn't interfere with anybody else's life. But once I was poked, prodded, and picked apart in that therapist's office, what horrible and long-denied truths about myself would emerge after the superficial layer of infallibility was peeled off of me? What if, for all the suffering I blamed him for inflicting on me, I had perpetrated as much pain on him?

The psychiatrist's office was in a big midtown skysc.r.a.per of steel and gla.s.s, and his waiting room was all right angles and oak finishes. I arrived there well before my father, and if I thought I was nervous, he looked positively panic-stricken. He rarely came to New York anymore, having moved his fur business nearer to his summer home in Monticello a few years earlier, and in that time he appeared to have forgotten how to live among civilized society. He showed up in a T-s.h.i.+rt, sweatpants, and a windbreaker, probably the first things he'd grabbed when he woke up that morning, or maybe the same clothes he'd worn to bed the previous night. His hair was ghost-white and mangy, and he was unshaved, and every part of him twitched and tingled at its highest state of alertness, like he was about to be interrogated by the police for a crime he knew he'd committed. When he saw me already waiting, he spoke my name and reached out to embrace me or shake my hand, but I rebuffed him.

The psychiatrist was a thin man in a suit, with a full chestnut beard and a gentle but clinical demeanor, and he consistently misp.r.o.nounced my father's name.

"Mr. Itz-off," he began, "do you want to tell me why the two of you are here today?"

"Well," my father said, turning to me, "maybe you want to-?"

I recounted the story of his confrontational phone call, the insults leveled at me, and the mystery of what substance or substances had elicited them from him. "Do you know," I said, "that he still hasn't apologized to me for this? And I still don't even know what he was on at the time."

"Is this true, Mr. Itz-off?" the doctor asked. "Did you say this to him? Were you high at the time?"

"I don't know," my father answered, which surprised me more than if he'd admitted it or denied it outright. "I suppose it's possible. I'm sure if that's how he remembers it, then it probably happened."

"Probably?" I said, incredulous. "Do you see," I said to the therapist, "how he's already trying to absolve himself of responsibility for his own actions?"

"I'm not saying it didn't happen," my father continued. "I just can't imagine what I might have been on. That's not how I talk when I'm high. If I said it, I didn't mean it."

"I'm not so sure," I said. "Usually, the things you say when you're high, you mean them as intensely as possible." I started to cry. The therapist silently extended a box of tissues in my direction.

Seated in his chair, my father clutched at the zipper of his windbreaker like it was a rosary and attempted to change the subject. "Do you know what a willful child he can be?" he said, extending at me a finger that he had been gnas.h.i.+ng on moments earlier. "Do you know that three years ago, I moved my business up to the mountains? Three years ago, and in all that time, he he hasn't visited my new offices." hasn't visited my new offices."

"Dad," I said, "what does that have to do with anything anything?"

"Is that right?" the doctor asked me, trying for the moment to placate my father. "Have you never been to his new offices?"

"It's true," I said. "His offices always make me really uncomfortable."

"And why do you think that might be?" the doctor asked.

"Because," I said, "they are always run-down and ugly. They always smell terrible. And they have always been places where he goes to get high." I started to cry again.

My father gave me a dismissive wave of his hand. His breathing was heavy, and he was constantly crossing and uncrossing his legs. I had reached a conclusion that had been building up in my mind like a bomb, and I decided to detonate it.

"You know what?" I said. "I think you might be high right now."

My father leaped to his feet with such force that it rattled the diplomas and citations on the therapist's walls and shook the trophies in his display cabinets. "It's not true," my father insisted. "I am not."

"Calm down, Mr. Itz-off, calm down," the doctor said, but his repeated urgings made my father angrier still.

"I'm not not gonna calm down," he said. "I'm not. I'm not gonna be accused of being high when I'm not." gonna calm down," he said. "I'm not. I'm not gonna be accused of being high when I'm not."

"I have to say," the doctor said, "your behavior has been very erratic from the start of this meeting. I would like to recommend that you take a drug test."

"Fine," my father said, rolling up his sleeves. "Let's settle this. We'll see who's right. Give me a cup and I'll take it into the bathroom."

"Not now, Mr. Itz-off," the doctor said. "After the meeting."

"No," he demanded. "I want to take care of this now. You don't have a cup? Fine. I'll go p.i.s.s in my hands." He held out his palms as if begging for charity.

Thus our first joint therapy session came to a close. After writing the doctor a check for his four-hundred-dollar fee, my father approached me outside his office doors. "I'd like to talk to you alone," he said. "I'd like to settle this, you know, between ourselves."

"No," I told him. "I don't want you riding down with me. I don't want you following me. You wait for me to leave, and then you take your own elevator."

A few days later, I learned from my sister that on his drive home from this appointment, my father got into a car accident. He walked away uninjured, but his SUV was totaled. It was agreed that we would not see this same doctor again.

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After further research, my mother came back to me with a new suggestion. On the advice of my aunt, the same one whose unwillingness to relocate herself to the Catskills had inadvertently triggered the fight, she had located an inst.i.tute on the Upper East Side that specialized in therapy for families dealing with substance-abuse problems. She made an appointment for me and my father there, and I found myself blithely looking forward to this visit as if the previous attempt at psychotherapy had never occurred. But I was bothered by a couple of inscrutable omens that preceded it.

First, after having recommended this new inst.i.tute for me and my father, my aunt abruptly reversed course and sought desperately to talk us out of going there. Her argument hinged on the fact that the facility charged only seventy-five dollars for each session. How good a job could its staff members do, she said, if they got paid so little? Wouldn't we be better off, and get higher-quality attention, if we went somewhere more expensive?

Then, on some sleepless night, I happened to turn on the television in time to see a cable doc.u.mentary about this same inst.i.tute. Three couples had agreed to be videotaped during their therapy sessions and in follow-up interviews: a boyfriend and girlfriend, a husband and wife, and a mother and daughter. One by one their relations.h.i.+ps unraveled: the boyfriend and girlfriend were both cheerful, severe alcoholics, missing work and losing jobs to go on benders for days at a time; by the end of the show, they had broken up without diminis.h.i.+ng their addictions in the slightest. The mother was no longer on speaking terms with her daughter at the doc.u.mentary's end and did not even know where she was currently living. I didn't stick around long enough to find out what happened to the husband and wife. I remained resolute in my belief that my father and I would somehow beat the odds. I just had to remember not to let anyone film our sessions.

Encouragement was coming from other places as well. A few months before, I had created a page for myself on Friendster, a website where people were invited to set up profiles for themselves, fill them with photographs and lists of their favorite books and movies, and see how many other people's profiles they could connect themselves to. Then I abandoned the project, having concluded that online social networking was a pa.s.sing fad. But even when left unattended and ignored, this little Web page was doing more for my dating life than I ever could. One day, through absolutely no effort on my part, I received an email message from a young woman who said she had read something I had written and enjoyed it so much that she had sought me out and discovered we had a friend of a friend of a friend in common and, by the way, would I want to meet her for a drink some night? She probably felt as excited and frightened and ridiculous writing that note as I did reading it.

But I could see from the photograph on her page-as easily as she could see from the one on mine, in which I wore a T-s.h.i.+rt with the slogan TIJUANA: CITY OF TOMORROW TIJUANA: CITY OF TOMORROW-that this person posed no obvious threat. She had adorned her profile with her actor's head shots: two professional black-and-white pictures, one Smiling, in which she wore a big white sweater and looked like a model in an I-learned-to-live-with-herpes advertis.e.m.e.nt; one Serious, in which she wore a black tank top and showed a lot of skin. She had short blond hair and intense eyes that felt like they were looking directly at me from my computer screen, and I was very, very curious.

Our first date did not promise much; we met at a bar, and she said she was glad I wasn't as short as I'd described myself. We drank and talked, and I walked her home at the end of the night, expecting so little that I did not even react when she leaned in and kissed me good night.

We agreed to see each other a second time, and this meeting was very different. It had an energy to it, one I could sense right away when I met up with her at a Ukrainian diner in my East Village neighborhood. I told her how clearly I could see her in the light of the restaurant and how pretty she was that night, and she said, "Oh," and shyly smiled. Her name was Amy, and she was the first woman I had ever known who did not become angry or suspicious when I told her she looked good. She must have been nervous, because she ordered a plate of French toast and a gla.s.s of bourbon for dinner. We ate and drank and talked, and walked around the neighborhood and kissed. And at the end of the night, she clearly wanted me to invite her up to my apartment, but I told her no, not yet.

"I want to be the kind of person you deserve," I told her. I wasn't sure why I said it, except it sounded good-like the sort of thing you say to someone who needs further convincing to sleep with you, not to someone you're trying to talk out of the proposition.

So Amy put her arms around me and clutched me to her so tightly that I could feel her leather jacket crush and crumple itself upon my body. It was the action of someone who badly needed to be held and who knew how badly I wanted to hold her. There would be plenty of weeks and months to come for our resistances to wear down and our false fronts to erode, and for all the terrible and embarra.s.sing truths about ourselves that we hid from each other in these earliest encounters to make themselves known. But for now, and for everything awful and unwanted that we knew about ourselves, what we represented to each other was possibility-a window, however small, in which we might be able to make just one other person see us as the people we'd always wanted to be seen as, the people we always believed we could be.

If you could be a new person to someone who never knew you, could you be that same new person to someone who had known you for your entire life?

The first session with the new therapist was scheduled on a Sat.u.r.day morning, in an inconspicuous brownstone I had pa.s.sed many times on my wanderings in the East Seventies, near a subway station I frequently used and a deli where I often stopped for sandwiches, never knowing of the harrowing, heart-wrenching drama that was going on right next door while I waited for my Reubens and potato salads. Past its front door and beyond a security desk, a ground-floor living room was furnished mostly with diversions for children: tiny plastic chairs, half-filled-in coloring books, mismatched toys, and sullen stuffed animals. I was alone, so I worked on a crossword puzzle until my father arrived, and together we rode up to the townhouse's top floor in an elevator so cramped that we could not fit together in the car without my father's belly pressing up against me.

We were welcomed into a small private room smelling of fresh paint by our new therapist, a woman-by my father's demands, as he refused to see another male therapist after our previous meeting-who introduced herself as Rebecca but whom my father addressed as Becky. She was an Asian woman of roughly my height, slight and unimposing, with a short haircut. She was young, no older than thirty, and had a master's in social work and was working toward a doctorate, a degree that would presumably be awarded to her upon her successfully reconciling me and my father.

Her first words to us were tentative but well rehea.r.s.ed. "What we do here is a kind of modified version of couples' therapy," she said in a soft but formal voice that betrayed the slightest of accents. "Now, maybe you do not think of yourself as a couple, but in a way, you are. It's true, a lot of the people we see here, they are married or dating. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. They chose to be together, and they can choose to break apart if they want.

"You are family. You did not choose to be together. You cannot choose to break apart. But you did choose to be here today. That tells me that you value each other, that you value your relations.h.i.+p. That you want to work on it together to make it better.

"A lot of relations.h.i.+p problems," she continued, "are communication problems. So that is what we're going to focus on in here, communication. We're going to work on active listening, which unfortunately sounds like what a lot of people think of when they think about therapy. You say to someone, 'I hear you when you say...this.' Or 'When you say that, it makes me feel...this.' It can be weird to get used to. But sometimes when things haven't been working for a long time, we convince ourselves that they are working anyway. And then we don't know where they first went wrong. So we must start from the beginning, from the simplest, most basic steps, and build up from there. You are a father, and you are a grown son, and maybe you do not want to think about starting something new, starting all over again. But you have to start from the same beginnings in order to end up in the same place."

There were two additional conditions that Rebecca revealed to us about her therapy sessions. First, she said she wanted us to write up a contract that would spell out all the goals we wanted to achieve during our time with her, so we could track our progress and determine when our therapy was complete. I liked her optimism-she seemed to believe the process could actually conclude well, without one of us quitting or dying. But this condition made my father exceedingly nervous, even after she told him he would not have to supply his suggested language for the contract until next week.

"I think I'm gonna need my wife's help with this one," he told her with a nervous chuckle. "I haven't written a complete sentence since grade school. They would ask me to write what I did on my summer vacation-I would turn the paper in blank."

Second, Rebecca explained that all of our sessions would be videotaped, so that each week she could share these tapes with a panel of trained psychologists who were instructing her-a kind of therapy for the therapist, to remind us what tender and inexperienced hands we had trusted to tend to our mutual mental health. It was a direct violation of the one rule I had established for myself a few days earlier: do not not let someone videotape your therapy sessions. And yet I allowed it to pa.s.s without the least bit of protest, because a person of authority had suggested it, and because I was too busy silently studying the other details of the room: the plastic dinosaur toys on the bookshelf, the halogen lamp that leaned a few degrees away from perfect verticality. let someone videotape your therapy sessions. And yet I allowed it to pa.s.s without the least bit of protest, because a person of authority had suggested it, and because I was too busy silently studying the other details of the room: the plastic dinosaur toys on the bookshelf, the halogen lamp that leaned a few degrees away from perfect verticality.

At Rebecca's request, I once again performed my recitation of the recent events that had landed us here: the original phone call from my father (injurious), his frame of mind and the substances he may have been on (mysterious), the aftermath (apocalyptic). By now I had my presentation of the story down cold, knowing exactly what to emphasize in order to elicit maximum sympathy from my audience.

"Why do you think this bothered you so much?" Rebecca asked me as the camera continued to roll.

"I've just never heard him talk like this to me before," I said. "Either he didn't mean any of it, which would be pretty bad, or he did, which would be worse. I don't know what to root for here."

I expected her to say that I was right and he was wrong and be done with it, but she wouldn't give me such easy satisfaction. "David," she asked, "what does your father usually talk about when he gets high?"

Now, that was an interesting question, one that I couldn't recall anyone asking me before. But I didn't have to think long about my answer.

"Usually, he wants to talk about his s.e.xual anxieties," I said. "How much fear he had about s.e.x when he was growing up and how he never wanted me to go through the same thing. How he didn't want me to be afraid of s.e.x and how, when I was younger, he even offered to hire a prost.i.tute for me if I wanted."

Hearing this, my father began to choke up. Having been made to listen to my remembrances of the terror, unease, and confusion that he had instilled in me at a tender age, he now was crying tears of joy. After all these years he had been struggling to make himself understood, using drugs to give himself the courage to do so, it turned out that not everyone was dismissing his tirades as the rantings of a lunatic. There had been someone listening all along, trying to connect the dots as best he could, from the time he was a little boy to the day he sat down, as a man, with his father in a series of therapists' offices.

"It's true, it's true," my father said, weeping.

Not knowing our backstory beyond what I had already told her, Rebecca was confused by my father's reaction. "Why does this make you cry, Mr. Iss-i-koff?" she asked. I a.s.sumed that over time she would learn to p.r.o.nounce our name correctly.

"Well," he said, "it probably has something to do with David." He handled the last word gently, as if placing it on a pillow. From the delicate, reverential way he intoned the name, I knew he wasn't talking about me.

My father rarely talked about his brother, David, anymore. If the name came up in conversation, it was usually by accident; it was a side street he traveled only on unintended meanderings, one where he immediately reversed course and sped away whenever he found himself on it. The few family photographs in which I had seen David, looking young and vital with a dirty-blond pompadour and the slightest of overbites, like a Jewish John F. Kennedy, had been hung in my grandparents' apartment but never in my parents' home. The only relics of his that I had, pa.s.sed on to me after my grandmother's death, were a couple of Edward Hopperesque paintings of deserted storefronts and seascapes, signed with the diminutive "Davi." Whatever else my father possessed or knew about David, he rarely ever shared it for fear that what was left was so fragile it would dissolve in the sunlight.

"He was only eighteen when he was in the accident," my father said to Rebecca. "He'd never really lived away from me or away from our parents. I don't know what he'd experienced. I don't think he ever even had a girlfriend."

None of this meant, however, that my father had stopped thinking about David or stopped loving him. Indeed, he loved him so much that he named his first son after him, and he fought for that name, even after his sister had given it to her son, and after that son was discovered to be autistic, and after the rest of his family had concluded that it was a cursed name and should be left alone. He loved David so much that he perhaps believed at times that his son really was his lost brother brought back to life, with all the same needs, desires, and anxieties that my father had been unable to help him fulfill, from when they shared a bedroom every night until the day my father went off to college.

"Dad," I asked him, "are you afraid because you think David died a virgin?"

"Yes," he answered with sudden and unexpected relief. "Yes."

Rebecca must have been pretty satisfied with her work, because the two men who, an hour ago, had entered her room, with its toy dinosaurs, its video camera, and its slanted halogen lamp, on the verge of outright hostility were embracing for the first time in many months. Our new clarity had cost us all of seventy-five dollars, which my father paid for with a business check he had safely stowed in the front pocket of his flannel s.h.i.+rt like a good-luck charm. And did I mention this was only our first session?

My father was in such a positive mood afterward that he drove me home, and his exuberance was making him antsy. At every turn and traffic light, he asked me for directions through the city where he had lived for fifty years, from the recently expired parking meter on the Upper East Side where he had left his car to the Ukrainian diner in the East Village where we stopped to eat lunch, the same setting where Amy had ordered her bourbon-and-French-toast dinner on our victorious second date. No one had instructed my father and me to spend any additional time together outside our therapy sessions, but it seemed like a natural way to keep alive our forward momentum, a onetime act that could easily become a regular tradition if we applied a minimal amount of effort. I ordered the first of what would be, over the next several weeks, many roast-beef club sandwiches on white toast with Russian dressing on the side, while my father ordered scrambled eggs, soft, and a cup of coffee with half-and-half and Sweet 'N Low, then a second cup the same way, to be brought out when the meal arrived. He spoke so rapidly that not even a waiter with a perfect grasp of English and a pencil and pad in his hand-a luxury we did not enjoy that morning-could have kept pace with him. He made his demands with such specificity that I feared our fragile harmony would be ruined if the order wasn't fulfilled to his exact liking.