“It matters,” she said.
I thought maybe she didn’t know. I experimented with the idea as I walked around. He doesn’t love me and that’s why he’s like this.
The plain truth.
Kevin and Dorothy paid my tuition for my final year.
My mother said she had tried to sell her new house to pay for it, but there wasn’t much time, and she couldn’t find a buyer. She also said she had a vision of an enormous, brilliant gold angel towering behind the neighbors. It was impossible, I knew, but the image made the gift easier to receive, if I could imagine the money came from an angel and not just from them, whom I worried I could never repay. The gift was unfathomably big.
At times, I wished that these stable, responsible neighbors were my family instead, and if I yearned to be good enough for a family like this, they might have liked being an example to me, and delighted in how I saw them heroically. They were often cracking jokes and giving me ideas about how people lived, and how families interacted, and how I shouldn’t interrupt, and what questions were rude, and how to defend myself with my words, and how to think about the people who fawned on my father and stepmother and did not notice or care about me. I flipped back and forth between wanting to be exactly like them and wanting to be myself, with them as my doting parents. For a while, perhaps, all of us were caught up in the wish that we could be a family.
My mother called a friend to ask him what he thought would come of all this.
He said, “Lisa’s going to find out she can’t replace her parents, and Kevin and Dorothy are going to learn they can’t buy a daughter.”
I had already committed to study abroad at King’s College in London for my final year of college, and Kevin and Dorothy insisted that I go.
That year, near my dorm, the London Eye was lifted from the surface of the water.
Toward the end of my year abroad, I dated an English lawyer with a high-standing blond ruffle of hair.
“You should invite your father to your graduation,” he said.
“No way,” I said. I told him everything my father had done wrong.
“But he’s your father,” he said. He kept pressing, saying that it didn’t matter what one’s father had done; he was still one’s father, that fathers had done worse things and still should be invited to momentous events, and if I didn’t invite him, I’d regret it later when it was too late to fix. I was ambivalent, but in the end I sent my father and Laurene two tickets and a note.
Kevin and Dorothy, whom I invited and who planned to come, were deeply hurt that I’d invited my father, after all they had done for me when he had not, and decided not to come.
My mother was worried she wouldn’t be able to afford the trip, but at the last minute she got a consulting job with Hewlett-Packard, bought a flight, reserved a hotel room, and bought a stunning black cotton dress that was ruched up at the bottom like a parachute.
Later, when my father talked about that day, he said, several times, “Your mother was so graceful.” He did not know what I knew—that she’d carefully rationed her words to him, giving him a maximum of twenty-five. To him she spoke deliberately and carefully, to protect this economy.
My father and Laurene had slipped through the river gate of Winthrop House to watch me walk down the line and receive my diploma. When I came to join my mother, I found them standing beside her. “I don’t believe in genetics,” my father blurted out after we’d exchanged hellos. He sometimes made pronouncements like this. At other times he had talked about how powerful genes were. I didn’t know how to respond.
“What are you going to do next? Do you have a job?” he asked.
I was almost too embarrassed to say, because I knew he didn’t respect banking, or what he called “the straight and narrow,” and neither did I, and I withered under my imagination of his judgment.
“Tell him,” my mother nudged me, and I mumbled it. I would be starting work as an analyst at a bank in London. It was the wrong kind of job for an English major, and I felt foolish to have joined the normal hubbub of the world, and for being one of the people my father sometimes mocked, but Schroder Salomon Smith Barney would get me a visa so that I could live and work in London. I would be able to support myself.
After graduation, I would see my father once a year, if that. My younger sister, Eve, was born when I was away at college, but in a few magazines I came across in the following years and on his bio on his company website, he said he had three children, not four. Sometimes, he would be wonderful, but then he would say something unkind, so that I found myself guarded around him, happy to stay away.
A few weeks after graduation, my mother asked Kevin and Dorothy to provide a sheet with a detailed accounting of everything they’d spent on me, including the flights, books, vacations, and clothing for school. She sent this piece of paper to my father and, shortly after, he paid them back.
When I was twenty-seven, no longer at the bank but working at a graphic design company in London, my father invited me to join a yacht trip that he, Laurene, my siblings, and the babysitter were taking in the Mediterranean. He invited me for a weekend, but then implored me to stay for a few more days when the weekend was up. After those days were up, he asked me to stay longer again, until I had stayed as long as I could, for more than two weeks. Off the coast of the South of France my father said we were going to make a stop in the Alpes-Maritimes to meet a friend for lunch. He wouldn’t say who the friend was. We took a boat to the dock, where a van picked us up and took us to a lunch at a villa in Èze.
It turned out to be Bono’s villa. He met us out front wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and the same sunglasses I’d seen him wearing in pictures and on album covers. He seemed plain, and he was kind, without the awkward distance usually affected by famous people.
He gave us an exuberant tour of his house, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was his. The windows faced the Mediterranean, and the rooms were cluttered with children’s things. In an empty, light-filled octagonal room, he said, Gandhi once slept.
We had lunch on a large covered balcony overlooking the sea. I sat a few seats away from my father, who sat beside Bono at the head of the table. Waiters delivered food.
Bono asked my father about the beginning of Apple. Did the team feel alive, did they sense it was something big and they were going to change the world? My father said it did feel that way as they were making the Macintosh, and Bono said it was that way for him and the band too, and wasn’t it incredible that people in such disparate fields could have the same experience? Then Bono asked, “So was the Lisa computer named after her?”
There was a pause. I braced myself—prepared for his answer.
My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. “Yeah, it was,” he said.
I sat up in my chair.
“I thought so,” Bono said.
“Yup,” my father said.
I studied my father’s face. What had changed? Why had he admitted it now, after all these years? Of course it was named after me, I thought then. His lie seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled my chest up.
“That’s the first time he’s said yes,” I told Bono. “Thank you for asking.” It was as if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets.