CHAPTER

21

Rebecca’s father, seated at a table at the far end of the restaurant, saw us as soon as we came in, and he stood up and waved furiously. If he was dismayed that his daughter had brought a date, he showed no sign of it, and when we reached the table he commenced doing what fathers are supposed to do: state facts in a way that makes their children hate the facts, their fathers, and themselves.

“I see the birthday girl has brought a young man.”

“Venter Lowood, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ Politeness is creepy in your generation. Call me ‘Bob.’ What did you say your name was again?”

“Venter. My parents wanted me to have a name no one else had.”

He looked at his daughter. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with having a name that other people have either.”

I had not intended any comment on the history of the name “Rebecca Hart.” It wasn’t even true that my parents had wanted me to have a name that no one else had—this was just a breezy line I used to get out of talking about my name. I tried to think of a way to explain all this while Rebecca’s father explained that Rebecca’s mother was trying to find a parking space. Rebecca, not having registered any unintentional insult from me and already in chiding-daughter mode, said that it didn’t make any sense for them to have driven, since it would have been much more convenient for them to have taken Metro-North. It struck me as a major failure to learn that the first girl I had hooked up with lived in a town accessible by the rail system that fed commuters from suburban New York and Connecticut into the city and then spat them back out again; I had gone to college hoping for new experiences, but had formed my first real connection with someone who was, apparently, from the same place I was.

After saying that the train always made her mother sick, as Rebecca well knew, her father launched into a monologue about how lucky we were to be in college and how much he missed it. He was an ear, nose, and throat doctor, which, he told me, he considered a ludicrous specialty. It made sense in a way, of course—the medical profession had sound reasons for carving up specialties the way it did—but he said he couldn’t help feeling that he had been tossed the leftover parts of the body, the ones the other doctors weren’t interested in. He had really enjoyed reading Augustine in college, and in his dorm at night, he used to fantasize about becoming an Augustine scholar, even though there was never really a time when he was going to do anything other than go to medical school, and he was glad he had gone to medical school, since he had friends who were academics and they said it was a miserable life for all but a lucky few at the top. Anyway, he said, his point had nothing to do with wanting to be an Augustine scholar, it had to do with wanting to live the life of an undergraduate, and reading whatever you wanted to in a fun and superficial way, and making all sorts of plans that don’t really mean very much, and that both Rebecca and I should enjoy this time while we could, and we should remember that every moment we weren’t enjoying ourselves was basically a moment that we were adding to our own oblivion, and it would be pretty dumb to add any moments to our own oblivion, since our oblivion already extended into functional eternity in two directions.

Throughout this monologue, Rebecca tried to interrupt to get him to talk about something more interesting, but I appreciated the fact that I was not being called on to talk. Despite my extensive practice, I still wasn’t very good at making conversation with a father who would prefer that I was not there.

When Rebecca’s mother arrived, she took a deep, unhappy breath at seeing me, and then said she was delighted that I could join them for their private family dinner.

“It’s New York, Mom. There’s no such thing as a private family dinner.”

Her mother collapsed into her chair and took Rebecca’s comment as an invitation to complain about New York, particularly the parking. As we all shared some bruschetta, I noticed Rebecca’s mother glancing at me, waiting for the right opportunity to strike and say something nasty. I told myself I was imagining this, until the right opportunity struck and she said something nasty.

“So, Venter, I hope you’re ready to be portrayed unflatteringly in Rebecca’s first novel.”

“I’m not writing fiction anymore, Mom.”

“What? But that’s your dream.”

“Was my dream. And that’s all it was.”

“Is this because you’ve been distracted by your boyfriend? You should never let that happen.”

“I’m totally supportive of whatever Rebecca wants to do,” I said. I was generally supportive of anyone’s artistic inclinations, so I would almost certainly be supportive of Rebecca’s specific artistic inclinations were I ever called upon to do so.

“Young lovers are never going to listen to us, Melanie,” Rebecca’s father said. “Lecturing them will only make them want to rebel.”

“Oh yeah, everything I do is out of rebellion,” Rebecca said. “That’s why I’m dating Venter. Venter’s favorite food is bacon. Bacon-wrapped shrimp is pretty much the only thing he eats.”

“Rebecca likes to tease us,” her mother said. “It’s not as though we keep kosher. We’re secular.”

“Venter’s not just secular. He is a very bad Jew. He’s such a bad Jew he has a tattoo.”

This obvious baiting of her parents was getting tiresome.

“The salmon looks amazing!” I said, pointing to a nearby busboy and lamely trying to recover the moment.

“Is that true, Venter?” her father asked. “Do you have a tattoo?”

“Daddy doesn’t want Jews to have tattoos. He doesn’t like the rhyme.”

“It was a bad decision,” I said. “I should never have gotten it. It’s not worth alienating anyone over.”

“Oh, now I’m disappointed,” her father said. “You shouldn’t care what I think. I certainly didn’t care what Melanie’s mother thought. She didn’t approve of the fact that my father wasn’t Jewish, but I certainly didn’t apologize for my background, or for anything else I did. I’m not sure how I feel about my daughter dating someone who cares what I think.”

“Whoa, looks like the epiphany machine and my dad agree about you, Venter,” Rebecca said.

“Wait, what? You don’t have an epiphany tattoo, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You understand that Adam Lyons ruined our daughter’s life.”

“Ruined her life? She’s a freshman at Columbia.”

“Her entire life, she’s had to endure jokes about Rebecca the Heartless.”

“I recall a different term,” Rebecca said.

“So why did you name her Rebecca?” I asked.

“Rebecca is my grandmother’s name and Melanie’s grandmother’s name, so we had other associations with the name ‘Rebecca,’ if you can believe that.”

“I like my name!” Rebecca said. “Not that you’ve ever cared about that.”

“So what does your epiphany tattoo say?” her mother asked.

“I’d rather not discuss it.”

Both parents laughed at this. “He’d rather not discuss it,” her father said. “He gets it tattooed on his arm for the whole world to see, but he’d rather not discuss it.”

“Not the whole world,” I said. “Just people who see my arm.”

“People like my daughter.”

“People like me,” Rebecca said.

“So let us see it, too,” her father said.

“Let you see it?”

“I didn’t ask to see your dick. I asked to see your fucking forearm. If my daughter is dating a cult member, I’d at least like to see what the cult has told him.”

I stood and shoved up my sleeve for him to see.

“Happy now? Because, uncharacteristically, I don’t give a shit.”

Within seconds, I was out of the restaurant and half a block away, trying to imagine how I would tell this story to Leah and Ismail in a way that would make me sound as heroic as possible.

“I’m sorry I used you as a prop against my parents,” Rebecca called from a few steps back. “How about letting me make it up to you by letting you use me as a prop against these friends you’re obviously trying to avoid?”

I mumbled something about how I wasn’t trying to avoid them, but she hailed a cab and we were on our way.