“A year ago I was divorced. I divorced on the advice of my father who said, Well, shit, get a divorce if that’s the situation. We were sitting in a room in a hotel off L.A. International. We were on the seventh floor and I was bitterly complaining. My capacity for unhappiness was overwhelming. The misery of my complaints provoked my father. Divorce her, he repeated. I didn’t have the money and told him so. He said he would pay for it. I sat there nodding my head. I wanted to punish my wife and divorce and abandonment seemed just. No doubt my old man knew what to do. I knew I didn’t. He said to write him the amount I would need and he would wire it to me but under no circumstance was I to give my wife any of it. I agreed not to. Then he said a man was supposed to forgive the dead, wasn’t he, that in time my wife would become as if dead to me and he hoped I could forgive her, he hoped that for me more than anything. I said I hoped so too, and he said it again, that I should forgive her, that it was the most important thing of all. If I didn’t, he said, she would never go away, she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t. I looked up at him. There were tears in his eyes. Up here, he said. He was tapping the side of his head. I mean up here. Tears came to my eyes. Dad, I said. You have to, he said, you can’t let them get the best of you, you can’t let them do it . . .”