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Authors: Anna Quindlen
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couch. “God, Beth,” I heard, even through the closed door. “Jesus Christ, Beth.” Beth was the name of a fierce feminist American history professor who was visiting from Rutgers. This is so banal, I thought to myself, using one of my father’s favorite words, so banal, people do this all the time. Carefully and quietly I took a sheet of stationery from the desk of the department secretary and wrote “Your wife wants you.” But I stood there and listened for a long time before I slid it under the door. Even now, all these years later, it gives me a sick feeling to think of it.
I don’t know whether my father knew I knew. Our relationship underwent a change after that. I was less supplicant, more judge, and I was a person who, when called upon to judge, always judged harshly. A girl once dropped out of our creative writing seminar at Harvard because we had to read aloud and then talk about one another’s work, and after four sessions she could not bear, she told the instructor, to hear what I would do to her stories, based on what I had done to others. I was unrepentant when the instructor told me this. “That’s her problem, isn’t it?” I said.
I judged my father just that harshly, or maybe more so because I’d imagined he had adjudged me wanting for so long and in somany ways. But nothing seemed to have changed between my parents, then or ever. And it was much later that I made the connection between what had happened and my enduring love affair with Jonathan, in which I wanted and hated him in relatively equal parts. When we went back to Cambridge after that Christmas vacation, Jonathan was amazed to discover the things I had now decided to do when we were in bed together. And not just in bed—I once slid my hand into his lap and inside his fly during an art history lecture, an explication of the Arnolfini wedding portrait, those two whey-faced people in elaborate robes preparing for a tedious eternity together. It is amazing to me now how far I was willing to go to mimic my father. It would make an interesting case for any psychiatrist.
We never spoke of what had happened, my father and I. The closest we ever got was when I came home six months later for summer vacation. I told my father of an encounter I had had with a professor in the Harvard graduate English department, who was also a novelist of some note, after I sent him some stories of mine. He had not liked the stories, I could tell by his careful and rather empty comments, although he had told me he had never seen brown eyes quite as dark as mine—“really, truly black!” he fake-marveled. I knew after only a year at school that this was clumsy code for “Be friendly and I’ll take you to dinner and to bed.”
I told my father of how, looking at my name at the top of each page, he had said, “There was a George Gulden in my grad school group. He was a smart guy but kind of a pain in the ass. He just dropped off the face of the earth after he got his degree.”
We both knew what that remark was code for, my father and I, as we sat eating vegetable lasagna and Caesar salad, but he did not flinch and I told the story casually. My mother turned away, turned to the stove, and Jeff and Brian gaped. My father smiled thinly and said, “He’s a very poor writer, and he was a very poor doctoral candidate. Did he like your stories?”
I didn’t answer, and my father smiled again, knowing what that was code for. I remembered I had answered the writer in mymind, had imagined saying, with hauteur, turning away his offer of another beer, “He’s my father. And you’re an asshole.” I imagined myself stalking out and leaving my manuscript on the table. Instead I had ducked my head and said nothing, took my stories and walked home in a driving rain, so that the manila envelope was the consistency of cereal by the time I got inside my dorm room. Jon was waiting on the bed in his underwear, reading a biography of Jefferson. “Did you sleep with
I don’t know whether my father knew I knew. Our relationship underwent a change after that. I was less supplicant, more judge, and I was a person who, when called upon to judge, always judged harshly. A girl once dropped out of our creative writing seminar at Harvard because we had to read aloud and then talk about one another’s work, and after four sessions she could not bear, she told the instructor, to hear what I would do to her stories, based on what I had done to others. I was unrepentant when the instructor told me this. “That’s her problem, isn’t it?” I said.
I judged my father just that harshly, or maybe more so because I’d imagined he had adjudged me wanting for so long and in somany ways. But nothing seemed to have changed between my parents, then or ever. And it was much later that I made the connection between what had happened and my enduring love affair with Jonathan, in which I wanted and hated him in relatively equal parts. When we went back to Cambridge after that Christmas vacation, Jonathan was amazed to discover the things I had now decided to do when we were in bed together. And not just in bed—I once slid my hand into his lap and inside his fly during an art history lecture, an explication of the Arnolfini wedding portrait, those two whey-faced people in elaborate robes preparing for a tedious eternity together. It is amazing to me now how far I was willing to go to mimic my father. It would make an interesting case for any psychiatrist.
We never spoke of what had happened, my father and I. The closest we ever got was when I came home six months later for summer vacation. I told my father of an encounter I had had with a professor in the Harvard graduate English department, who was also a novelist of some note, after I sent him some stories of mine. He had not liked the stories, I could tell by his careful and rather empty comments, although he had told me he had never seen brown eyes quite as dark as mine—“really, truly black!” he fake-marveled. I knew after only a year at school that this was clumsy code for “Be friendly and I’ll take you to dinner and to bed.”
I told my father of how, looking at my name at the top of each page, he had said, “There was a George Gulden in my grad school group. He was a smart guy but kind of a pain in the ass. He just dropped off the face of the earth after he got his degree.”
We both knew what that remark was code for, my father and I, as we sat eating vegetable lasagna and Caesar salad, but he did not flinch and I told the story casually. My mother turned away, turned to the stove, and Jeff and Brian gaped. My father smiled thinly and said, “He’s a very poor writer, and he was a very poor doctoral candidate. Did he like your stories?”
I didn’t answer, and my father smiled again, knowing what that was code for. I remembered I had answered the writer in mymind, had imagined saying, with hauteur, turning away his offer of another beer, “He’s my father. And you’re an asshole.” I imagined myself stalking out and leaving my manuscript on the table. Instead I had ducked my head and said nothing, took my stories and walked home in a driving rain, so that the manila envelope was the consistency of cereal by the time I got inside my dorm room. Jon was waiting on the bed in his underwear, reading a biography of Jefferson. “Did you sleep with
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