Chapter 8

March 1999

I sat in my car on the campus of the University of Florida with my last exchange with Maren ringing in my ears.

“You take care, kiddo.” I chucked her under the chin and she laughed.

We stood next to my car. I opened my door and climbed in.

“You know, I’m thinking, maybe I should change my major.”

I looked up at her. She smiled.

“I’m thinking English.”

I nodded. “We don’t need too many doctors in the family anyway.”

I watched her walk back toward her dorm. So there was that. I felt satisfied that I had accomplished at least one positive thing in the past two days. Now I drove away, uncertain of where I would go next.

There was a gnawing feeling at the back of my head. I drove a few miles away from campus before I realized what it was. Guilt. This was nothing new for me. It seemed like I’d been feeling guilty about one thing or another since the day my mother died. Maybe before. But the time before my mother died, when my family was predictable, imperfect but intact, had become a haze of unreliable memories. In five years, I could no longer remember the contours of my mother’s face without staring at a photo. And each time I stared at the photos, I saw Maren in my mother instead of the other way around. My sister was flesh and blood, living, needed, trying. My mother was gone.

Why was I guilty? My mother died before I had a chance to tell her that it was okay that she wasn’t home a lot, that she put her career before my desire for a more traditional mother. I never had the chance to stop the bickering, to tell her that I loved her flawed, lovely ways. I was seventeen when she died, and at seventeen I didn’t know how to apologize. I didn’t know that she could be taken from me without notice. I didn’t know how fleeting love truly was. Angela had taught me that.

Why was I guilty? Because while I was busy hating my father after we moved to North Carolina to live with him, my sister found her first love, a love that was muddy gray and destined for failure. I was all she had, and I failed to protect her and instead had worried most about how much I hated our father.

Why was I guilty? Because I left school without letting anyone know. Because I left my father passed out in a hotel room. Because of Angela. Because I promised her I would be strong, and, in the end, I was too weak to do the right thing.

Angela wouldn’t speak to me. Chris was gone. And the thing Maren had asked of me before I left was simple.

“Go back and talk to him. Just try. He’s our father, and hating him doesn’t change that,” she said.

I had refused to do it so many times before, but there was something different about the way she asked, as if she was trying to show me something I couldn’t see on my own. I didn’t know if my sister was right. Was there a chance of a relationship between me and Calvin?

His next book signing was in Jacksonville. I headed east.

There wasn’t much to see on the seventy-mile trip from Gainesville to Jacksonville. The weather was balmy, so I kept the windows open. Stray papers blew around the car and some out onto the highway, but I didn’t care. They weren’t my papers anyway, since I kept my car in pristine condition. Perhaps they were Maren’s, or Calvin’s. There weren’t any particular sights, but the smells were unfamiliar. At one point, I passed by a burning field, and in the distance I could see the orange light of flames. There was the fragrance of yeast as I drove past a bread warehouse. It reminded me of childhood trips to Milwaukee, driving past Pabst and feeling nearly choked by the smell of hops. And, as I grew closer to Jacksonville, I could taste the salt in the air. The coppery smell of the beach was unmistakable, although I was still miles from the water.

The perfumes kept me company as I considered what to say to my father. How could I make him see how much his indifference hurt me, hurt Maren? Before our mother died, we hadn’t seen Calvin in years. Why didn’t he care enough to see us before our lives were ripped apart? I wasn’t sure I could find the words to explain how angry I had been at seventeen, even before I lived with Calvin. How would I explain the way I avoided him after I went to college, even though we lived just miles apart? How could I explain why, this week, after more than four years, I came to him?

Part of the problem was that I didn’t have the answers. I just knew that I had to say something. It occurred to me, as I chewed through another tasteless rest stop meal, that my life depended on it. If I didn’t talk to Calvin now, at least try, I feared that I might spend the rest of my life in this bubble, detached and alone. If I didn’t settle things with Calvin, I would lose myself for good.

* * *

I was struck most by the sound of Calvin’s voice. It was deep and smooth, confident. The words, as he spoke them, felt like velvet. Even though I had never read more than the inside jacket of his novel, the words were familiar, like old friends I didn’t even know I was missing. I focused not on what he was saying, but each word. It was the only way I could listen.

I sat in the back of a sizeable crowd, all of us in folding chairs in the B. Dalton in the Regency Square Mall. It struck me that I was spending a lot of time in malls since I’d left Durham. Florida was filled with “villes” and massive shopping centers. As I drove into the sprawling city, I wondered why the western suburbs existed. Who would live in Florida and not demand to be close to the water? Without the ocean, Florida was common, nothing special at all.

I had arrived just as he was shuffling through the book, finding his place. Calvin was absorbed in his own impending performance and so he didn’t notice when I took a seat and moved it directly behind a wide woman sitting in the back row. I didn’t need to see him. I didn’t want him to see me. Not yet.

I couldn’t tell whether the book was good or not. I didn’t want to think about it. I still felt as if he’d stolen from me by deciding to tell his story, which was also my story. But I was also sorry that I couldn’t stop running away whenever my father slighted me. He’d been doing it my entire life. During the drive from Gainesville to Jacksonville, I decided that I would not run from him anymore. I was a man. I had to face Calvin.

His voice stopped. There was a moment before the applause erupted. I looked around at smiling faces. The crowd had enjoyed the words, what they meant. They had probably been listening. I slouched down in my seat, shielded by milling customers and a short line of people waiting to have their copies of Save Me signed. Soon, the crowd dispersed and Calvin looked up. Our eyes met. His face showed no reaction at first, but I thought I saw his jaw tighten. I stood and approached his table.

“So maybe we should talk.” I kept looking in his eyes for some sign, of what, I don’t know.

He looked down at the book he still held in his hand and nodded.

“Maybe we should. But Ellison, you have to promise me that you’re going to stay and actually talk. You can’t leave every time someone says something you don’t like.”

But you can pass out, or pretend to be asleep, when you son asks you a hard question? You can write about your family secrets without even a courtesy heads-up? You can be a shitty father and seemingly not care?

I thought these things, but I didn’t say them. I was a man. He was never going to be anything other than himself. I could spend the rest of my life fighting that, or I could face it. Like a man.

“I came back, didn’t I? I didn’t have to, but I did.” If I wasn’t allowed to act like a child, he wasn’t allowed to treat me like one. “So maybe we should talk.”

He nodded. “You hungry?”

We walked out of the store and toward the rental car Calvin had obtained in Atlanta. That guilt crept up the back of my neck, but I brushed it away. I couldn’t let guilt get in the way. I’d made a list in my head of the things I wanted to tell him. I wouldn’t be able to speak my mind if I was worried about feeling guilty. I was wrong to leave him in Atlanta. He was wrong, too, in a lot of ways that were worse than leaving someone in a hotel room. So now what?

“How about seafood? Somewhere on the water?”

I shrugged. “Sounds good.”

Calvin didn’t miss a turn on the way to the restaurant. I was called One Ocean Way. I presumed it was the address. We were sitting and Calvin had ordered a bottle of wine before it occurred to me that he must have been here before. He glanced at the menu before putting it aside to sample the pinot grigio. I felt subdued by the muted crowd surrounding us, by the heavy white tablecloths, by the prices of the entrees. I felt like it was the first time I’d ever been to a nice restaurant, though my mother took me to many, mostly against my will. The menu was a long rectangle weighing heavy in my palms. I chose scallops when the waiter asked, and I ordered a beer to get up my nerve. I told myself I would say everything I had to say to Calvin. I told myself to be calm. Be clear. Be honest. Be a man.

Instead, I downed two more beers before the food arrived, and Calvin matched me, finishing his bottle of white wine. He ordered another bottle, and by halfway through the meal, we were drunk and laughing. Calvin told me the story of how he met my mother the first time. I’d heard it before. Mom used to tell it to me, to remind me that I was born from love, even though that love didn’t last. But I liked hearing him tell it. I liked that he told it exactly the same this time as he had the first time I heard him tell it, when we’d first moved to Durham. That time, Maren was with us and I watched her relish the story, yearning to get closer to our mother in any way she could. That time, I didn’t want to hear it because it just reminded me that my mother was gone. This time, it reminded me that my mother would always be here with me.

“I was young, you know, and I felt cooped up back in Durham. It was the same people doing the same thing all the time, and I felt that if I didn’t get out, I’d end up just like everyone else. So I took a bus to Chicago. I’d never been there, but I’d heard there were a lot of black writers there and I figured I could learn something. Most people were running off to New York back then, but I don’t know, something about Chicago called me.”

He paused to gesture to the waiter for another bottle of wine that we didn’t need. I was already feeling woozy. I ate my food without tasting it, hoping it would absorb some of the alcohol. Hoping that this time, it might taste like something instead of nothing.

“So I got there, and it was late summer, so the weather was still nice. But as soon as I stepped off the bus, I noticed there were police cars everywhere and news cameras filming. There had been a murder near the station, and it was big news.

“Well, I’d never seen anything like this back in Durham, so I hung around the edges of the scene, watching the cameramen squat to get just the right angle, listening to the police bark orders at each other. And then I noticed a pretty girl who was holding a pad and pen and pushing her way through the throngs of people to talk to the main cop. She was so petite and beautiful. I couldn’t believe the way she forced the cop to talk to her as she scribbled on her pad.

“Something clicked inside me, and I suddenly had to know this lovely, tough, determined woman. So I sneaked underneath the police tape, went up to her and asked her out,” Calvin finished, staring off into the air over my head as if he could see that Chicago street corner. I wanted to turn and look too, but I knew she wasn’t there.

“It was love at first sight.”

Five years ago, I’d found that notion corny and trite. I told him so then, but he told me I’d change my mind one day.

I pushed my plate away and accepted the full glass my father offered me. I gulped down half of it before I realized that the last time he told me that story, we’d also been drinking. Why was it that we could only talk when we were drinking?

I told him about Angela, about how we met, about how we became friends while she dated Jason. I told him that nothing ever happened between us. A lie. I told him I now believed in love at first sight. That was true.

Calvin grinned at me. “So you believe me now. That’s how it was with your mother and me. Right from the start. And no matter what happened later, we always had that.”

His face got serious. “Does Angela love you?”

I shrugged, wanting to change the subject. “It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past.”

He shook his head. “If she loved you, you’ll always have that.”

I started to believe him. I wanted to believe him. I was going to ask him more, get him to convince me that things might work out after all with me and Angela, even though she hadn’t spoken to me for months, even though she promised never to speak to me again. Even though she had never said “I love you.” But Calvin called for the check, and the mood was broken.

* * *

I don’t know how we made it back to the hotel. I don’t remember getting a room or taking off my shoes. The last thoughts I had were thoughts of long ago, when things were not difficult between me and my father. When I was still eight years old, during the time before he went away. I let the tenderness wash over me. I was almost asleep before I remembered that there had never been a time when things weren’t difficult between us.

* * *

Calvin on fear:

One of my biggest regrets is that I let fear dictate too many of my choices as a young man, and, unfortunately, as a mature adult as well. If I had to give one reason why my marriage failed and my family fell apart, it is fear. Don’t misunderstand me: there are always many reasons why a relationship doesn’t work, and it’s never the fault of just one person. But all the reasons why Vanessa and I couldn’t be together were rooted in fear.

After Ellison and Maren were born, things changed between us. We were no longer a couple, but a group of four, and Vanessa and I had barely learned how to be together before we started having babies. She was different; a mother first and a wife second, I thought, and that felt like a betrayal. I was afraid of not coming first in her life. I didn’t believe our love would survive it. So I made the possibility of failure a certainty by having affairs with women in such a blatant way that Vanessa couldn’t ignore them even if she tried.

I was punishing her for putting my needs below those of the children. I was proving to Vanessa, and myself, that I was still desirable, that there were women who would put me first, even if my wife no longer wanted to. I made sure that I was not the victim in the eventual demise of our life together.

None of the affairs were long-term. None of them were with women particularly beautiful or irresistible. It wasn’t really about sex. I was just afraid to try to make things right, because if I failed, it meant that something was wrong with me.

—From Save Me: A Memoir by Calvin Emory