I called my father a couple of times, but he didn’t pick up the phone or return my calls. My mother suggested I could ‘drop by’ his house, on the other side of town. I said I was still feeling ill and that I didn’t want to walk over for nothing, since he wasn’t answering his phone. In response she just said: he’s your father. It was like some kind of mantric prayer with her. I let the issue go. He wasn’t in touch.
My mother hated the way I talked about my father, like he was just another normal person rather than my distinguished personal benefactor, or a minor celebrity. This irritation was directed toward me, but it was also a symptom of her disappointment that my father had failed to earn the respect she wanted me to give him. I knew she’d had to sleep with her purse tucked inside her pillowcase when they were married. I’d found her crying the time he fell asleep on the stairs in his underwear. I saw him lying there, gigantic and pink, his head cradled in one of his arms. He was snoring like it was the best sleep of his life. She couldn’t understand that I didn’t love him. You must love him, she told me when I was sixteen. He’s your father.
Who says I have to love him? I said.
Well, I want to believe you’re the kind of person who loves her own parents.
Believe what you want.
I believe I raised you to be kind to others, she said. That’s what I believe.
Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.
I found a video of the documentary that Bobbi had mentioned in France, a 1992 TV production called Kid Genius! Nick wasn’t the primary kid genius on the programme, there were six featured children, each with different areas of interest. I skipped until I found some footage of Nick looking at books, while a voiceover explained that at the age of only ten, ‘Nicholas’ had read several significant works of ancient philosophy and written essays on metaphysics. As a child Nick was very thin like a stick insect. The first shot showed a gigantic family home in Dalkey, with two imposing cars parked outside. Later in the show Nick appeared with a blue backdrop behind him and a female interviewer asked him questions about Platonic idealism, which he answered competently, without seeming haughty. At one point the interviewer asked: What makes you love the ancient world so much? And Nick cast his eyes around nervously like he was looking for his parents. Well, I don’t love it, he said. I just study it. You don’t see yourself as a budding philosopher king? the interviewer said humorously. No, Nick said very seriously. He tugged on the sleeve of his blazer. He was still looking around like he expected someone to appear and help him. That would be my worst nightmare, he said. The interviewer laughed, and Nick relaxed visibly. Women laughing always relaxed him, I thought.
A few days after the hospital I called Bobbi to ask if we were still friends. I could feel my voice getting stupid when I asked her, though I was trying to make it sound like a joke. I thought you were going to call me the other night, she said. I was in hospital, I told her. My tongue felt huge and traitorous in my mouth.
What do you mean? she said.
I explained what had happened.
They thought you were miscarrying a pregnancy, she said. That’s kind of intense, isn’t it?
Is it? I don’t know, I didn’t know what to feel about it.
She sighed audibly into the receiver. I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing. I had never been pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them. In the past Bobbi had been receptive to my analyses of my own misery, but this time I couldn’t trust myself to deliver the argument without weeping into the phone.
I’m sorry that you feel like I lied to you about Nick, I said.