The Rules of Attraction

SEAN The last time I saw my father had been in March when I met him in New York for a long weekend to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. I remember the entire trip quite clearly which surprises me considering how drunk I was most of the time. I remember the look of the morning at an airport in New Hampshire, playing gin with some guy from Dartmouth, a rude stewardess. There was a meal at The Four Seasons, there was the afternoon we lost the limousine, the hours spent shopping at Barney’s, then Gucci. There was my father, already noticeably dying: his face yellowish, his fingers as thin as cigarettes, eyes that were wide and always staring at me, almost in disbelief. I would stare back, finding it impossible to imagine someone that thin. But he acted as if this wasn’t happening to him. He still held a certain degree of normalcy about him. He didn’t appear scared, and for someone apparently quite ill had enormous amounts of stamina. We still saw a couple of lame musicals on Broadway, and we still had drinks in the bar at The Carlyle, and we still would go to P.J. Clarke’s, where I played songs on the jukebox I knew he’d like though I don’t remember why exactly this rush of generosity occurred, what brought it on.

It was also a weekend when two women in their mid-twenties tried unsuccessfully to pick up on my father and I. They were both drunk and due to the cold weather I had sobered up from whatever drinking binge I had been on, and my father had stopped drinking completely, and we lied to them. We told them we were oil barons from Texas and that I attended Harvard and came to Manhattan on weekends. They left whatever bar we had been at with us and we piled into the limousine which took us to a party someone my father knew at Trump Tower was having where we lost them. What was strange about that situation was not the pick-up itself, for my father had always been quite adept at casually picking up women. It was that my father, who would normally have flirted with these two, didn’t this last March. Not in the bar, not in the limousine, not at the party on Fifth Avenue we lost them at.

My father also couldn’t eat. So there were meals left wasted at Le Cirque, and Elaine’s and The Russian Tea Room; drinks ordered and left untouched at 21 and the Oak Room Bar; neither of us talking, mutually relieved if the bar or restaurant we were at was particularly noisy. There was a dour lunch at Mortimer’s with friends of his from Washington. A somber birthday dinner at Lutece with a girl I’d met at The Blue and Gold, Patrick and his girlfriend, Evelyn, who was a junior executive at American Express, and my father. This was two months after he had mother committed to Sandstone and the thing I most remember about that birthday was the fact that no one mentioned it. No one ever mentioned it except for Patrick, who, in confidence to me, whispered, “It was about time.” Patrick gave me a tie that night.

We went back to my father’s place at The Carlyle after the gloomy birthday dinner. He went to sleep, giving me a disapproving look as I sat with the girl on the couch in the living room, watching videos. The girl and I had sex later that night on the floor of the living room. I woke up sometime early that morning hearing moans coming from the bedroom. A light was on, there were voices. It started snowing that night, just before dawn. I left the next day.

On the plane heading for New York and later in my father’s place at The Carlyle, unpacking, pacing, drinking from a bottle of J.D., the stereo on, I think of the reasons why I came to New York and can only come up with one. I didn’t come to see my father die. And I didn’t come to argue with my brother. And I didn’t come because I wanted to skip classes at school. And I didn’t come to visit my mother. I came to New York because I owe Rupert Guest six hundred dollars and I don’t want to deal with it.