He had black hair that formed tight ringlet curls around his head, a long face with a large nose, and intelligent brown eyes. He had a PhD in chemistry and founded and ran a small science toy company.
I was interested in his stories—he had traveled around the world as a boy because his father was a world-renowned Hungarian opera tenor, and he’d played clever pranks in school—but as I listened, I still noticed with condescension how unglamorous, how nerdy, he was compared with my father. He drove an old white VW Rabbit and sometimes pretended he had a car phone, mocking the Silicon Valley types who’d recently bought car phones the size of bricks, miming at stop signs as if he were receiving an important phone call.
He had two children: a younger son and a daughter around my age named Allegra, with whom I danced to Madonna’s “Lucky Star” at her house one afternoon when I still thought he and my mother were only friends.
He’d had an open marriage, but had fallen in love with my mother against the rules and had separated from his wife. I didn’t like the idea. I taunted my mother, but I couldn’t irritate her much when she was in love.
“He’s married,” I reminded her.
“Oh, honey,” she said, like I was a fool.
When I was with Ilan and my mother together, I felt the grumpy rage I’d felt when she started dating her last two boyfriends. “Are you all right, sweetie?” she asked. Being in love made her seem as if she was far above me, looking down, separate. She was unable to keep a slight smile off her lips.
With the others, I had still believed my mother and I were a team against them. With Ilan, I sensed she might let go of me, not him, if she had to choose, and I was going to make her choose. I hunkered down for a long campaign.
One weekend morning several months after they’d started dating, we walked to breakfast.
I complained but went along. We dashed across busy Alma Street to the curb on the other side, through a hole in the fence through the bushes and onto the elevated mound of white rocks where the train tracks ran. From there, it was a straight walk north for twenty minutes along the rocks and the tracks, balancing on one iron track or stepping between wood planks.
We watched for trains.
“Look,” Ilan said, as a train came toward us. He placed a penny on the rail before we ran to the side and the train thundered past. Afterward, the penny was hot and had become a shiny copper disc, an uneven oval. It was an object I would have liked to keep.
“Whatever,” I muttered when he showed me.
It took a lot of energy to despise Ilan and my mother continuously, the way I did for months. Around them I was lethargic, smirked, and was pointedly silent when either of them made a joke. When we had dinner with others, I noticed how Ilan would find a way to bend the conversation toward his father without quite mentioning him, so that someone else would become curious and ask, Who was your father? My cruelty and unhappiness around him felt like a fierce tamping down of myself. It was exhausting and hadn’t worked so far to break them up, although it had made them both cautious around me. If I broke out of character for a moment with one thread of happiness, I knew my mother would take it as permission. I refused to give her that. It was as if she’d forgotten what we went through during each breakup, and I hated her for how she was misty-eyed and foolish.
The restaurant, MacArthur Park, was in a converted barn and served a fancy buffet brunch with bowls of strawberries, bowls of fresh whipped cream, waffles and eggs in nickel domes, and fresh juice. Usually we went to simpler places.
That morning something changed as I stood at the buffet and looked back at my mother and Ilan, who were sitting at a round table facing me, smiling. Looking at them, past the piles of fruit and the billows of cream, I felt too weary, and too content, to stay enraged. And they looked like parents. I surrendered. I felt safe here under the vaulted ceiling, with the clinks of silver-plated serving implements. However awful I had been, they would take me even now, and I could let them if I wished to, and it wasn’t too late to have it—a family.
When I talked with him much later, when I was an adult, Ilan told me how he’d taken several walks with my father when they happened to see each other at the Rinconada house, encouraging him to spend more time with me, framing parenthood and time spent in terms of personal advantage—it’s for you, Steve, he’d said. Think of it that way. He’d noticed my father was opportunistic. He went for whatever was most appealing in the moment, ignoring me if someone else arrived. Ilan encouraged my father, praising him for even small gestures toward fatherhood. He praised him, for example, when my father took me for a skate. Ilan’s work, too, was entrepreneurial and consuming, but my mother said he had the ability to transition from work mode to family mode with ease and speed, so that when he was with us, or with me, having dinner with us as he did most nights before going back to the office, he was focused, not halfway listening, the way a lot of businessmen were.
It was Ilan who, after staying home several nights to help me with my math and science homework, sitting beside me on the couch, patient, even though he had planned to go back to work in the evening because his company was struggling, gave me the first taste of what it felt like to arrive prepared for class, to understand the lesson and have a homework sheet filled out right. After several nights of his help, I wanted to arrive prepared, and to feel the calm and get the attention that came with it, and so it would be Ilan, later, who was part of the reason I would start to do well in school.
That summer, Ilan’s daughter, Allegra, and I went to my father’s house in Woodside to go swimming, and afterward we explored the house. She found a room I’d never seen before near the front door, empty bookshelves covering the walls up to the ceiling, a couple of books and magazines here and there. In the middle of the room was a crude model of the property, with the land made of the crumbly green material used to hold stems in flower arrangements.
“Do you think he’s ever been in this room?” she asked.
“Probably not,” I said. We rummaged through the things, which I thought looked as though they might have been left by the people who’d lived here before.
High up on a shelf, I found several copies of a Playboy magazine.
“Look.”
We flipped through it sitting on the floor. That rumor about my father in Playboy might not have been true—but there, on the next page, was his face. A postage stamp–sized black-and-white photo above some text. He looked innocent in a white shirt and a bow tie. Fully dressed.
“I knew it!” I said. “I’ve heard about this.” I was so relieved he was not nude or leering, and I wanted Allegra to notice him.
I felt lucky to have a father like that. We turned the page. A naked woman was sprawled out across two pages, a brunette with big hair, bedroom eyes, red lipstick.
On one of our skating outings that year, my father and I stopped at a low building nestled in trees near downtown. We each had one mildly skinned knee from another fall.
“I know some people here,” he said. “It’s a design company.” We didn’t remove our skates; inside it was carpeted, so we could walk almost normally.
We went down the hallway and into a room with a large table lit up with fluorescent lights, with pages of white paper fanned out on top, messy.