26 #2
She leaned back and caught his eyes. “This trust exercise goes both ways.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Jules opened a bottle of water and waited for him to start.
“My dad worked the same job for thirty years. Every night he’d come home, lock himself in his study, and work on a novel.
When I was ten or so, he got an agent. This was a big deal. We went out to dinner to celebrate. Dad ordered dessert. I couldn’t
remember the last time he’d done that. He wasn’t a big spender. Either the agent was a con man or the manuscript didn’t sell.
I couldn’t tell you either way. He never spoke of it again.”
Jules felt for his dad. For every aspiring writer there were ten vultures ready to profit off their dreams.
“My dad grew up in Queens,” he said. “He attended junior college and got a job at a law firm, managing accounts. It’s as dull
as it sounds. But it paid well. Mom quit her job when I was born. They bought a house and saved up to send me to college.
I’m an only child. My parents tried to have more kids but couldn’t. Everything they had was for me. As it turned out, I didn’t
need anything from them. I got a free ride to an Ivy League school.
You got a grant just for breathing. That’s how he put it.
I had to be the only kid in America to earn a scholarship and feel like crap about it.
After graduation, I moved to the city. That was a slight, too.
I had a rent-stabilized apartment and low but steady income.
To hear him tell it, I was lazy and coasting through life.
Suddenly, writing wasn’t a real job. It didn’t require forty-hour weeks that stretched to sixty, climbing a ladder, kissing ass, and whatever else office culture requires of you.
Never mind that he’d tried to get published for years.
If you think he wouldn’t have quit his job, you’re mistaken.
I let him talk shit because I knew where it was coming from—a deep-seated sense of failure.
I felt like a failure, too. No matter what I accomplished, my parents frowned upon it, disapproved. ” He paused. “Bored yet?”
“No! Go on.”
“With time I started to see them differently. One day I confided to a friend, a guy in the neighborhood. I’d come home for
the holidays. We were hanging out, smoking. He kept saying how lucky I was to have gotten a scholarship. He was paying back
loans and angry about it. Without his father’s help, he would’ve gone under. I told him about my parents’ attitude about the
scholarships, and he wasn’t having it. He said no matter what he did, no matter how small the accomplishment, his grandmother
would cook a feast, and the family would gather for a Sunday dinner to celebrate. That was how it was meant to be, he insisted.
That was the first realization that my upbringing was dysfunctional, and my parents were blind to it. What I’m trying to describe
is a form of emotional abuse. It prevailed through my childhood but failed once I made it clear I wouldn’t stand for it anymore.”
Jules helped herself to key lime pie. “You were their only child,” she said. “A brilliant one, too. Maybe I’m overstepping,
but they should’ve cherished that.”
“My parents were preoccupied with their hang-ups and burdened with my father’s perceived failures.
He says he wanted to write, but I’m not sure that’s true.
A writer is the person who’ll risk missing a flight to get a cherished computer back, who reads voraciously, who keeps at it and never gives up.
Want to know what I think? My dad liked his job just fine.
He was good at it. Respected. But he wanted fame, adulation, and awards.
Earlier in the week, when I’d told them about the Thirty Under Thirty honor, they’d laughed it off, called it bogus.
You can imagine what happened when I showed up at the house with my shiny plaque, drunk, not giving a fuck whose feelings I hurt.
I confronted them and didn’t hold back. My father the abuser and my mother the enabler.
But when I look back at that night, I don’t forgive myself.
It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t cut out to be parents.
They’d started a family because every married couple had children at the time.
They didn’t know what to do with me. Soon I became the chair in the corner of the bedroom, something they could use to dump their emotional laundry. ”
Jules heart raced as she hastened to rewire everything she’d assumed about Leo and configure a new prototype.
“So no one loved you?” It was all she could think to ask to complete the picture. She had gone through a lot, but she’d been
loved, wanted, and cherished.
“My grandparents adored me, but they lived far away.”
“Want to know what I think?” she asked. “You were too good to be true. Beautiful and smart. They didn’t know what to do with
you. Probably hoped for a less gifted child, someone they could make feel small so they could feel big. That could never be
you.”
“Your relationship with your mother must have been beautiful,” he said, softly.
“It was, but my grandparents cut me off and I never met my father or his family. My mother had to wear many hats. It must
have drained her.”
“I can guess what went wrong with your father,” Leo said. “What was the issue with your grandparents?”
“I was the personification of my mother’s wickedness. She’d left home, abandoned her faith, had premarital sex—girl gone wild!”
She told him about her grandfather, a retired pastor, who by all accounts was a rigid man.
He cut ties with Ruby when she moved to the big city, fully expecting her to return within a year, after living among swine, begging for forgiveness.
When she got pregnant before the year was up, it was all the proof he needed that she was beyond saving.
“They wanted to control her,” he said, grim.
“Mom was a free spirit. They were fools to even try.”
“Like mother, like daughter.”
“I hope so.”
Leo slipped off his glasses and tossed them onto the rug. “That was cathartic! And not a drop of liquor, too. That’s a first
for me.”
It made Jules unreasonably happy that she’d had a hand in that. “We’re not done,” she announced. “Next step we strip naked
and hold each other all night.”
“A bit unorthodox, but I like it.”
“I bet you do.”
A while later, she stood to leave. “Thanks for dinner and everything.”
A shadow passed over his regular features. “Do you have to go? It’s not that late.”
“Sorry. I have my reasons.”
“I’m sure they’re good ones,” he said wryly.
“I just need—”
“Space,” he said. “Got it.”
Her stomach tightened. She hadn’t expected him to “get it,” nor had she wanted him to, she realized.
“Good night, July.”
“Good night,” she said. Though the night wasn’t over for her, not even close.