Chapter 4 #2
“You need that passion to have a worthwhile life. Don’t ever lose that, or let anyone talk you out of it.
Fight for it if you have to. This is your life and no one else’s.
Don’t let anyone spoil it for you, or stop you.
That’s what my father tried to do. He tried to shame me out of my dreams. I didn’t let him, and it cost me his respect and my relationship with him.
But I don’t regret it even today. I won’t ever do that to you.
The price is too high, and no one wins. I lost a father and he lost a son that way.
I won’t let that happen to us. So go for it, if building gardens is your passion and what turns you on.
That’s a hell of a lot more noble than what I did—I turned delivering condoms and mattresses to my classmates into a major career.
What you want to do is beautiful and could last for centuries.
How could I say no to that?” Liam looked ecstatic when his father said it, and deeply touched.
As independent as he was, his father’s approval was important to him, and he knew he wouldn’t get it from his mother, who had no artistic or creative interest, and no ability to use her creativity except for money and deals.
She was a genius with that, but gardens would be totally beyond her, and Charlie knew it too.
Liam wouldn’t get the blessing he wanted from her, but what his father had just said to him was enough.
Charlie had just given him wings to fly.
It was what Charlie had always hoped to get from his father, and never did.
He had only gotten his anger, disapproval, and harsh criticism.
Liam deserved better than that, and so had Charlie at his age.
He had had to fly against his father’s wishes and take to the skies alone.
And even if earthbound himself, and limited in his knowledge of Liam’s chosen field, he wanted to give Liam a good send-off and wish him well.
—
The two men grew closer than they’d ever been in the time they spent together at the house in East Hampton.
The pain in Liam’s ankle was easing, and he had gotten adept with the crutches.
The only help Charlie provided was hanging out in the bathroom when Liam took a shower to make sure he didn’t fall, hopping on one leg with a plastic garbage bag protecting the injured one.
Other than that, Liam managed fine, and peaceful nights, sleep, and the sea air did them both good.
They cooked lobster together and made sumptuous dinners, and Charlie introduced Liam to some excellent wines.
They were two men who loved and respected each other.
One couldn’t ask more than that from father or son, and they both flourished in the warmth they shared as they bonded.
Liam had spoken to his mother, and was planning to spend a few days with her on his way home.
She had a house full of guests in Aspen, all stars of the venture capital world like her.
It was all she knew and they were the only kind of people she wanted to be with.
It struck Charlie sometimes that in her own way, she was as limited as her banker father had been.
They both had a specific relationship to money, and couldn’t see any other way of life as acceptable or of interest. It surprised Charlie because she could be very creative with some of her deals and how to make them work, but it extended no further than the boundaries she established, which were rigid and inflexible.
Even the startups Charlie had successfully established were too far outside the traditional box for her.
She didn’t get it, and she had dismissed Charlie as a suitable partner because of it.
He doubted that she would be any more indulgent with their son.
He suspected that Faye would override Liam’s wishes and insist on law school or business school as she always did.
Liam feared it too. He was planning to go forward anyway, but he was hoping for both his parents’ approval, out of respect for them.
Charlie thought it was more than they deserved, since they had served their own interests for so long.
Charlie was determined to honor Liam’s wishes, but knowing Faye, he doubted that she would agree.
It was her way or the highway. Charlie wanted to apply a lighter hand and had offered his support.
He had made the suggestion that Liam defer Yale for a year, rather than withdraw completely, in case he discovered that landscape architecture was less exciting than he thought.
He advised him to keep his options open rather than close any doors, which Liam thought was wise, and agreed to do.
He was grateful for his father’s advice.
Aside from their serious talks, they had fun together.
They couldn’t pursue the sports they enjoyed, like tennis or biking or long walks on the beach, but they took drives in the area, cooked together, and went out for good meals.
They played video games and Charlie was a grossly incompetent adversary, much to Liam’s delight, and Liam told him about some of the girls he had dated recently, none of them serious.
They spoke openly on many subjects, which led Liam to venture onto a topic he had always wondered about and they had never discussed.
It was an unspoken taboo. It came up one night, as they lay on the deck outside the living room, gazing at the stars.
“What went wrong with you and Mom? How did you end up so far apart?” Liam dared to ask him, and Charlie hesitated before he answered, pondering the reasons himself, while Liam worried he had gone too far and offended him, and had risked their recent closeness with the question.
“I’m not sure there is a simple answer to that,” Charlie finally said, glancing at Liam and then back up at the sky.
There was a falling star at that exact moment, as there often was in the summer when he was there.
He loved watching them as they free-fell through the heavens and disappeared.
“My personal opinion is that marriage is a crapshoot at best. Whatever age you marry, twenty, thirty, forty, you don’t know who you’re going to be a decade later, or who your partner will be, what you’ll want, if you’ll still want the same things or something completely different.
People don’t grow in the same way, like plants, I guess.
If you’re lucky, you grow in the same direction as life bends you.
If not, you end up going in opposite directions, and can’t even see each other anymore.
“For sure, we were too young. I don’t think either of us was thinking about marriage.
We were both under a lot of pressure at Harvard, and trying to excel.
We were both driven about our studies, and I think your mother went through some kind of rebellious stage.
When I met her she was thirty-one, I was five years younger, and maybe turning thirty made her a little crazy for a minute.
She had purple hair, and wore the shortest skirts I’d ever seen.
She could drink any guy under the table, and still ace her exams thenext day, while I had to struggle for good grades.
I thought she was the coolest girl I had ever met, and the smartest. I loved how smart she was, and she was fun to be with.
We went to Vegas on a lark. I won five thousand dollars playing craps, while she kept explaining the odds to me.
She was good at that too. And I don’t even remember how we wound up at the Elvis Chapel, but we did.
She was holding a bouquet of fake flowers, I was wearing a white rhinestone-studded Elvis cape—and I only remember that because we have a picture of it—and the next morning, I had the worst hangover of my life and a fake gold ring on my finger, and we were really married.
We went to an oxygen bar for our hangovers and real life set in.
The obvious moral of the story is that you don’t marry someone you barely know when you’re drunk off your ass.
We talked about getting it annulled, and not even telling anyone we’d done it.
But we were young and smart, we liked each other and had fun together, and by the time we landed in Boston, we decided to give it a shot, and exit quietly if it didn’t work.
We said a year. We told our parents, which was a mistake, and they went nuts.
We should have kept it to ourselves. It was bumpy while she finished law school and I got my MBA in the next few months.
We were both beginning to think it wasn’t going to work, but we wanted to give it a fair chance after we graduated, and six months after my moment of glory in the Elvis cape, she found out she was pregnant, and we both decided to take it seriously.
There was no way back at that point. Abortion and divorce were out of the question for both of us.
So we were stuck, and you were the only sweet spot in the story.