He did not want to be our protector, but he dabbled in it. The more he approached and pulled away, the more I wanted him to spread a vast, fine net below us.
I don’t remember seeing Tina much during this time. It became harder for me to muster joy at the reunions, knowing that a crash would follow soon. I overheard my mother and Ilan talking about how NeXT wasn’t going well either, and I knew that if NeXT failed and he and Tina really broke up, he might collapse with grief. I was terrified for him.
“I wrote a song for Tina,” he said, one night when my mother had a date with Ilan and I went to stay with him at the Woodside house. “You wanna hear it?”
I sat on the couch to listen. He didn’t turn on the lights but there was some moonlight from the windows. I didn’t know he could play anything but “Heart and Soul.”
He sat down at the piano in the semidark, cavernous ballroom. I don’t remember much of the song anymore, his voice and his notes were very loud and clear and rang through the room. I couldn’t believe he could play so well, and sing so well. Afterward he wanted to know what I thought, and I had a hard time convincing him of the truth—he kept asking again and again—that it was beautiful, and sad. At some point he gave Tina a tape, but then he took the tape back.
When he and I were in the car together a week later, he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Any other guy would snatch her up in a second.”
It wasn’t just him but other adults, too, who sometimes treated me as if I were another adult, asking me for advice, telling me about their feelings and wishes, confiding in me about their relationships in ways they must have known I couldn’t understand. Their love lives, they called them. None was married yet; not my father, my mother, Mona, or Tina, and I was often the only other person around; it was natural that they sometimes talked to me. I listened and thought, if it were me, I’d live life better, avoid the mistakes, the drama. I listened closely and dispensed advice and figured I’d have an advantage when I was older myself.
“Maybe you should figure out if you like her,” I said to him.
A couple of weeks later Steve and Tina were back together and we three walked down University Avenue on Saturday afternoon, Tina and I flanking him, on the way to lunch at the Good Earth. Inside the door came a blast of air that smelled of the proprietary tea blend—cinnamon, cloves, orange, ginger. The tables, chairs, benches, and uniforms were all in dreary shades of brown to communicate heath food. A line of vinyl-upholstered chairs ran the length of the bar.
“Lis, you’re gonna remember this,” my father said loudly and with solemnity, as if I was the designated record-keeper. NeXT was fine, Tina was here, I was here. The sunlight was so bright it erased the spots it hit. He said this phrase a lot when he and Tina were back together, confusing his swell of emotion for mine. I wondered if I would.
These days I alternated between pitying him and being in his thrall. He was tiny and weak, then vast and impenetrable, big and out of scale. These two impressions flipped back and forth in me, not touching.
A homeless man walked toward us on the sidewalk. He had long segments of brown-gray hair falling against the sides of his face, but the top of his head was bald. A red T-shirt hugged a large, round gut. As he walked, his mouth gaped open and snapped shut, like a fish’s. He had only a few teeth left.
“That’s me in two years,” my father whispered to us.
He said this often, pointing to a variety of old men who lived in the town and sat on curbs with dirty hair and dirty, weather-beaten faces. Some looked like they were wearing diapers. He couldn’t look like these men in two years if he tried. It was as if his comparison was also to say, Look how far I am from him. Or: Not really.
Or else he said it to try to remind himself that he was no different from anyone else, no better.
“Yeah, right,” I said, to make him laugh.
My mother and I went for a few days to a place called Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist retreat with natural hot springs, where she would be what was called a guest student and do work during the day in exchange for a small, less luxurious cabin than the other guests stayed in. Our cabin was up a long series of small steps made of wooden blocks inserted into the hillside. When it rained one day, the dirt and wood on the path up to our cabin became slippery, and there was nothing to hold on to, and we scrambled up, complaining and laughing.
During the days, she swept and peeled vegetables in the kitchen while I roamed around, making friends, swimming, and making concoctions with the free coffee, ice, and milk in glass mugs at the beverage bar brought out in the afternoons. Around the pool’s concrete lip, thirsty bees alighted to drink the wet spots that formed when people got out, and I was careful not to step on them.
“Are you allergic?” a woman asked.
“It swells up and I can’t walk.”
“And where’s your mother?” she asked.
“She’s working.” I burned with the desire to let this woman know that I wasn’t just any girl staying in an inferior cabin far away but someone who mattered.
“And your father?”
“He’s not here. He’s—he—runs a company,” I said.
“What company does he run?” she asked.
“It’s called NeXT.”
She looked at me more carefully, studying my face, and I knew she’d understood that I wasn’t just a girl by the pool avoiding bees, I was a kind of princess in disguise. “I know who your father is,” she said. “But I heard his company failed.”
“When did you hear that?”
“I read it in the paper a couple days ago,” the woman said. “NeXT failed.”
We’d left him; he’d failed. He would perish.
He’d been talking about a NeXT presentation that was coming up in a month or so and how the “demo” wasn’t working. “If it doesn’t work, the presentation’s gonna tank,” he’d said.
“I have to go,” I said. We needed to get home right away. I had to convince my mother to take us; I had to convince her without letting her know that I’d told someone who my father was. If she knew I was advertising his name, she’d worry I’d endanger myself, worry while she worked.
I ran along the tree-shrouded dirt path to the place my mother said I should go, to the building that housed the kitchens.
“We need to leave,” I said when I found her. “I want to get home. I’m worried about Steve.”
“Why, honey?”
“I heard NeXT failed.”
“How did you hear that?”
“A woman said it was in the papers.”
“What woman?”
“A woman here.” I imagined him crumpled over, needing us as we blithely passed our days where he couldn’t reach us. We were all he had—I was all he had—and I’d left him. Remorse felt like suction in my stomach. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me how the conversation went.
“Let’s call him first,” she said.
A pay phone was attached to the wall of a building. She dug out a quarter and found his work number. I dialed, worried the line would be defunct, my heart in my throat.
He picked up.