38
Legoland
“You know why I’m late?” John says as soon as I open the door to the waiting room. It’s fifteen minutes past the hour, and I’d assumed he wasn’t coming. A month went by before he responded to my message after his no-show—he’d unexpectedly resurfaced and asked to come in. But maybe, I thought before he arrived, he got cold feet. Indeed, on the walk down the hallway, John goes on to say that after he pulled into the building’s parking lot, he sat in his car, debating whether to come upstairs. The attendant asked for his keys, but John said he needed a minute, so the attendant told him to pull over toward the exit, and by the time John decided to stay, the attendant informed him that the lot was full. John had to find a spot on the street and sprint the two blocks to my building.
“Can’t a person have a minute to sit in his own car and collect his thoughts?” John asks.
As we enter my office, I think about how beleaguered he tends to feel. Today he looks ragged, exhausted. So much for his sleep medication.
John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there’s no food today.
“Okay, you win,” he begins with a sigh.
“Win what?” I ask.
“The pleasure of my company,” he deadpans.
I raise my eyebrows.
“The explanation to the mystery,” he continues. “I’m going to tell you the story. So, lucky you—you win.”
“I didn’t know we were competing,” I say. “But I’m glad you’re here.”
“Oh, for Chrissake,” he says. “Let’s not analyze everything, okay? Let’s just do this, because if we don’t start now, I’m two seconds away from leaving.”
He rolls over to face the back of the couch, and then, very quietly, says to the fabric, “So, uh, we were going on a family trip to Legoland.”
According to John, he and Margo were driving down the California coast with the kids to Legoland, a theme park in Carlsbad, for a long weekend away when they had a disagreement. It had been their policy never to argue in front of the children, and up to that point, they’d both kept their promise.
At the time, John was in charge of his first television show, which meant that he was on call day and night in order to get each week’s episode out. Margo also felt overwhelmed, taking care of two young kids and trying to keep up with her graphic-design clients, but while John got to interact with adults all day, Margo was either “in Mommy-land,” as she put it, or working at her home computer.
Margo looked forward to seeing John at the end of the day, but at dinner he would answer calls while she gave him what he termed the death stare. When things got so busy that John couldn’t make it home for dinner, Margo would ask him to turn off his cell at bedtime so that they could catch up and relax together without interruption. But John insisted that he couldn’t be unreachable.
“I didn’t work this hard all these years only to get this opportunity and see my show fail,” he told her. And, indeed, it was off to a rocky start. The ratings were disappointing, but critics raved about the show, so the network agreed to give it more time to find an audience. The reprieve was a short one, though; if the ratings didn’t improve quickly, the show would be canceled. John doubled his efforts and made some changes (including “firing some idiots”), and the show took off.
The network had a hit on its hands. And John had a very angry wife on his.
With the show’s success, John got even busier. Did he remember that he had a wife? Margo asked him. What about his kids, who, when Margo called out, “Daddy’s here!” ran to the computer instead of the front door because they were so used to talking to Daddy on a screen? The younger one had even begun calling the computer Daddy. Yes, Margo conceded, John spent time with them on weekends, playing with them in the park for hours, taking them on outings, and horsing around with them at home. But even then, the ringing phone never left his side.
John didn’t understand why Margo was making such a big deal out of this. When he became a father, he was surprised at how intense and immediate the bond was. His connection with his babies felt so powerful—fierce, even. It reminded him of the love he’d had as a boy for his mother before she died. It was a kind of love he didn’t even experience with Margo, though he loved her deeply, despite their disagreements. The first time he’d seen her, she was standing across the room at a party, laughing at something some doofus had said. Even from afar, John could see that it was the laugh of somebody being polite but thinking, What an idiot.
John was smitten. He walked over to Margo, made her laugh for real, and married her a year later.
Still, the way he loved his wife was different from the way he loved his kids. If his love for his wife was romantic and warm, his love for his kids was like a volcano. When he read Where the Wild Things Are to them, and they asked why the Wild Things wanted to eat the kid, he knew exactly why. “Because of how much they love him!” he said, pretending to swallow them as they giggled so hard they could barely breathe. He understood that devouring love.
So what if he took calls when he was with his kids? He spent time with them, they adored him, and it was his professional success, after all, that provided them with the kind of financial security that he wished he’d had growing up as the son of two teachers. Yes, John was under a lot of pressure at work, but he loved creating characters and making up entire worlds as a writer—the very craft that his father had always aspired to. Whether by luck or talent or a combination, John had achieved both his and his father’s dreams. And he couldn’t be two places at once. The cell phone, he told Margo, was a gift.
“A gift?” Margo had said.
Yes, replied John. A gift. It allowed him to be at work and at home at the same time.
Margo thought that was precisely the problem. I don’t want you to be at work and at home at the same time. We aren’t your coworkers. We’re your family. Margo didn’t want to be midsentence or mid-kiss or mid-whatever with John, only to be interrupted by Dave or Jack or Tommy from the show. I didn’t invite them into our home at nine p.m., she said.
The night before the trip to Legoland, Margo asked John if he would please stay off the phone during their vacation. It was family time away, and it was just three days.
“Unless someone’s dying,” Margo had pleaded—which John took to mean Unless there’s an emergency—“please don’t pick up the phone on this trip.”
To avoid another fight, John agreed.
The kids couldn’t wait to go to Legoland—they’d been talking about it for weeks. On the drive down, they wriggled in their seats, asking every few minutes, “How much longer?” and “Are we almost there?”
The family had decided to take the scenic route along the beach instead of the freeway, and John and Margo distracted the kids by having them count the boats in the ocean and play a game in which they’d make up silly songs together, each person adding a lyric more hilarious than the last until they were all cracking up.