As the sun set on Thanksgiving afternoon at my parents’ place upstate, I leaned my shoulders against the mantle of the fireplace and arched my back over the metal grate. I looked across the room at my mother cooking in the kitchen. I watched Oliver and his cousin run around a corner, their socks slipping on the floor. My father sat down in a chair in the living room. My back hot from the fire, I moved to a chair near him.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Good!” he said. “Have you read this?” He held up the book he was reading, Chroma by Derek Jarman.
“I gave that to you, remember?” I said. “It’s one of my favorite books.”
“Oh! I have a lot of thoughts about it!” he said.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you working on your opus?”
“No,” he said. “I got to eighteen thousand words. But I can’t fabricate a persona. I had one: the dying man. Now with the new diagnosis I don’t. So I stopped.”
He looked so pleased to have beaten death. Only he hadn’t necessarily. I’d been in that doctor’s office. The doctor didn’t say he was cured, only that the immunotherapy had shrunk his tumors by half and that many outcomes were now possible. As a “long-term responder” to the treatment, my father was now in “a new bin of uncertainty”—in contrast, I supposed, to the old bin of certain imminent death, which wound up not being so certain after all.
My father looked proud of his inability to fabricate a persona, the same way he seemed pleased he could never keep a journal because, he said, he didn’t know who he was writing to.
I always kept a diary. I knew who I was writing to: Diary. I apologized to Diary when I didn’t write enough. I asked Diary if Diary could believe that at a sixth-grade party none other than George Mitchell had asked me to dance. Then again, I will personify anything that stays still long enough. I apologize to a table if I bump into it.
My father was full of excitement that he and my mother would be flying in a couple of days to Madrid to look at Diego Velázquez paintings at the Prado. Steve Martin was taking them. My father was sharing one of his favorite observations about the magic of private air travel, which he’d experienced just once before, also with Steve Martin. He began to say something I’d heard him say at least a dozen times: “It’s like being poured from one champagne glass into another.”
Oliver, who’d sat down near us a few minutes earlier, got up in the middle of this recitation and headed to the kitchen to see what my mother was up to.
“Hey!” my father said to him. “I’m talking!”
“He’s heard it before,” I said.
During dinner, my father left the dinner table to go to his office to smoke. About fifteen minutes later he returned, seeming cheerful. “Steve emailed. He asked me if he could record me when we’re in Spain.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“My first reaction was no, but then I thought, Why not? I said yes.”
When I’d asked if I could record his Frick tour, he’d told me that his tours were a “you had to be there kind of thing.” I knew it wouldn’t be the last time my father showed a preference for his friends, nor the last time I would feel hurt by it. It was our routine. I saw that clearly as he sat smiling by the firelight, excited about his trip. I could get mad every time or I could try to stop being so surprised.
When they returned from Spain, my father sent as much as he’d gotten done of his memoir to his editor at the New Yorker. She cut the twenty-three-thousand-word document down to a nine-thousand-word essay the online editors titled “The Art of Dying.” It included stories from his life and his thoughts on death: “I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish, letting people natter sagely, ‘He smoked, you know.’ But at seventy-seven I’m into the actuarial zone of fatal this, that, and the other thing: the winners’ circle.”
The essay, published in the issue dated two days before Christmas, was brave and beautiful, a tour de force of an apologia. I noticed that his editor had given it a shape. And to this final reckoning with life, she’d suggested he add more about his family. Didn’t he have a grandson? I searched the original twenty-three-thousand-word version of his story, the one he’d turned in, for the names Oliver, Neal, and Blake. None appeared.
The final version included a new story about the ballgame we attended. It mentioned that Oliver had caught a T-shirt from the T-shirt cannon. A paragraph about me made it into the final, too. My father took what I’d told him that day in the apartment—that I always felt he never found me interesting—and used it in his story:
My daughter Ada has told me that she spent years in her childhood trying to interest me. I hadn’t noticed. She was sixteen when I got sober. She said, “Let’s see if I get this straight. NOW you want to be my Dad?” It took a lot of time and change and is still underway. I don’t know if it’s a consolation prize for Ada, or what it is, that she turned out to be fantastically interesting.
He also said in the story something I’d always felt but never heard him articulate: “I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.”
My inbox immediately began filling up with emails congratulating me on having such a terrific father. One editor told me she envied my having a parent who in the face of death had found such a “genius peace.” Several fellow writers wrote me long emails about how much they admired my father’s brilliant style—how, again, he was AMAZING, and THE BEST. The article was about his impending death, but most of these emails offered me not condolences but praise.
A bookstore owner I knew wrote and said he was thrilled by a rumor he’d heard about my father writing a book about Frank O’Hara. He said there was no better person for the job. (The source of the rumor: a recent New York Times profile of me in which I’d mentioned that I was planning to do something with the tapes I’d found.)
I was at the supermarket with Neal and Oliver when I felt my phone vibrate. I looked down and saw an email from a woman I’d interviewed for my Gen X book. The email was full of lavish praise for my father’s essay, and it ended with an unironic “What a dad!”
My heart rate sped up. I had trouble catching my breath. I left Neal and Oliver to check out while I went outside and gulped parking-lot air. I looked at my arms to make sure I wasn’t actually disappearing, turning translucent, like ghosts in movies.
The following week, as Jason and I sat in an off-Broadway theater waiting for a play to start, I told him that the emails about my fantastic genius father were starting to drive me crazy.
“No!” Jason said. “This is seriously great! It’s like on Law and Order. You can talk about anything you want from your childhood now because he opened the door, your honor! My evidence is now admissible!”
My friend Asia said I should write a rebuttal to the essay, like Liz Phair’s song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. She said there was a long-overdue conversation that should happen between men of his generation and their daughters. She said it should include the line “I’m good at things, too, you know.”
I thought of the scene in which the new wife in Rebecca finally asserts herself with the housekeeper and says, “I am Mrs. de Winter now.”
But I didn’t feel so self-possessed. I’d worked hard to become my own person, even changed my name. But now, weeks before the publication of what people kept saying would be my “breakthrough” book, I was back to being nothing more than a great man’s daughter.
And I was tired.
In the span of six months, Neal’s father had died unexpectedly of a stroke, my father had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, my childhood home had been destroyed in a fire, and my grandmother had gone into hospice. I felt hexed. I thought of how Maureen had implied that I had so much going for me and that if I pursued the Frank O’Hara book, bad things would happen. I wondered if this was what she’d meant.
At my regular poker game, my friend Matthew delivered his usual patter as he dealt a hand of seven-card stud high-low: “Looks like Dan’s going low with a seventy-five … Abbott, two queens, high … Ada …” Looking at the garbage sitting in front of me, he said, “Ada’s going another way.” That became my euphemism for 2019: another way. As the terrible year came to an end I thought, Well, at least 2020 is bound to be better.