Man in the Empty Boat Read online

  Eleven

  AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, I began to feel antsy. Raising a child is a creative act, yes, and being a parent is a role no one should disdain, but it’s a role that leaves you feeling both full and empty at the same time. All your instincts tell you that you ought to be gaining a sense of control as time passes, but in fact, you are steadily losing it. It’s like operating an avatar, only the avatar has a mind of its own and gets better every day at overriding your commands. Parenting books tell you that this is how it’s supposed to work, but the adjustment is stressful.

  This is when you start to feel like you wouldn’t mind returning to work or taking up a hobby or joining a book club. You want to do something that is all your own, something that your avatar can’t fiddle with.

  And you want little opportunities to let loose. I’m not talking about putting a lampshade on your head. I mean having an uninterrupted conversation with your spouse or watching a whole movie all the way through or writing for a whole morning. When you’re raising a child, you’re always having to keep one foot on the brake. Actually, you are the brake. Some people seem to think that a parent’s most important job is to love his or her child. That’s not really a parent’s job, any more than it is a wife’s job to love her husband or vice versa. You can’t roll up your sleeves and decide to love your child, but you can roll up your sleeves and decide to chop those green beans a little smaller so that Sweet Pea will stop throwing them across the room and start putting them in her mouth. Your job is to prevent unnecessary mishaps, deprivations, and hardships. Don’t do this, don’t do that, watch out for this, what on earth were you thinking, be careful for god’s sake, hold my hand, let go of my leg, slow down, hurry up, and yes, you do need to get these shots, hold still. It’s like being in stop-and-go traffic on a freeway that’s under permanent construction—sometimes you just want to sneak into the emergency lane, stomp on the gas pedal, and hold it there until your tank runs dry. The day I found myself coming home from Costco with a twelve-pack of spiral notebooks stashed under the mountain of Huggies, I knew it was time to start writing again.

  But not yet. We still had to move. We ended up buying a fixer that spring, a house that hadn’t been lived in for years. A water pipe had burst inside it, windows were broken, and the yard was a dirt nightmare with a cage for a guard dog rusting near the entrance. I’m not going to describe what the “fixing” process was like, except to say that it kept me too busy to write. When the last permit had been pulled, the last concrete pad had been poured, the last frame built, the last appliance delivered, the last toilet replaced, the last countertop fitted, and the last sheet of insulation unrolled—and after I’d moved all our belongings myself with a rental truck—then, at last, I started writing.

  With deeply mixed feelings, we hired someone to help watch Ava for a few hours a day. One day, when I was on my way out the door to go to the library, Ava grabbed my leg and pleaded with me not to go. “I don’t want to ever let you go away!” she wailed. I carried her into her room and read with her on my lap until she calmed down, and then she said, “It’s OK, you can go now.” I put her in her crib with her fluffy blanket and stepped out of her room, but I gave in to a foolish impulse to linger outside her door for a few moments to make sure she was OK. I couldn’t help myself; I even peeked back into her room. She was staring up at the sky through her window, and this is what I overhead her say aloud to herself: “You said you’d always be there for me. But you’re not.”

  It’s from The Lion King; it’s what Simba says when he realizes that his dead father isn’t looking out for him from his place among the stars after all. Children say the darndest things. I wanted to throw myself into the path of a train.

  I gave up on the idea of writing at the library and turned the bedroom next to Ava’s into my office. I began work on a novel set in thirteenth-century Asia, about a European captured by the Mongols during the height of their conquest period. Even with childcare help, I could only find time to write three days a week for two hours at a stretch, but that was better than nothing. One unexpected result of being so busy, faced with so many tasks that weren’t complicated at all but required my immediate and undivided attention, was that when I did sit down to write, I got to work right away. I didn’t waste any time procrastinating. I began to think that maybe, if I didn’t procrastinate at all, I could end up writing just as much as I did before having kids. Maybe I wouldn’t have to give up anything at all, the way my mother and so many of her friends had. I knew it was possible to write novels and host playdates at the same time, because I’d read in People magazine that J. K. Rowling had done it. Not only did she write the first Harry Potter book while she was a stay-at-home parent, she was a single mom when she did it. If she could write a book like that without the help of either a spouse or a babysitter, then I, with my terrific support team, had no excuse. I told my editor I would have the Mongol novel finished in two years.

  J. K. Rowling is a statistical anomaly. Either that or she is not a real person at all. I think she’s a literary hoax, the invention of a group of English professors at Cambridge who played Dungeons & Dragons together for thirty years and finally said, “Let’s write a book that every kid on earth will want to read!” “Brilliant! And let’s say it was written by a single mom; then parents will buy it too!”

  My deadline came and went. Life had other plans for the author of Harry Potter and the Mongol Hordes.

  “Ava needs a sibling,” Jessica said to me one day, and I knew better than to argue. Our second daughter was born nine months later, and my domestic duties increased. But I kept writing, and after three years I had a draft of the novel finished. I thought it was brilliant, but alas, no one else did. The main character, both my editor and agent agreed, lacked something. What he lacked, apparently, was character. Lots of things happened to him: He participated in great battles, he watched as cities burned and nations fell, and he even got to have sex, which was new for me. (For some reason, my fictional characters never seem to get laid.) In spite of all that, Catalano del Saggio remained a cipher. Who is this man, and why should we care about him? This was the question that my team put to me, and when I found that my best answer was that he was somebody who wanted to get back to Europe, I knew that I had to start over again.

  I decided that while the first draft had plenty of man vs. nature conflict in it, and even more of the man vs. man variety, what it lacked was a good dose of man vs. himself, which just happens to be the kind of conflict I know the most about. Catalano del Saggio needed to feel that something within him was either missing or broken. His sufferings as a captive of the Mongols, I decided, would force him to look inward and resolve this problem. I found an upstairs storage room at Ava’s preschool, where I set myself up with a chair and a computer table and worked every morning while either Jessica or our sitter watched baby Esme. Earplugs kept the lyrics of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “I’m a Little Teapot” from distracting me.

  For this draft, I made Catalano del Saggio a young Franciscan monk who is captured by the Mongols in 1241 as they storm through present-day Bosnia. After a grueling forced march across Eurasia, he is assigned the task of translating the Bible for his masters. (Nestorian Christianity was a popular religion among members of Genghis Khan’s family, but no translation of the Bible existed in the Mongol language at that time.) Del Saggio’s faith in an omnipotent, loving God is strong, but the horrors he witnesses as he travels with the Mongol army plant the seeds of doubt in his mind. He is tested further when he falls in love with a fellow prisoner, a Chinese woman forced to become the concubine of a Mongol prince. When the evil prince is banished by a rival within the Mongol royal family, del Saggio breaks his vow of celibacy to live with the Chinese woman and help her care for her infant son. In the end, the Mongols accuse del Saggio of treason, bind him to a crucifix on the plains of Dzungaria, and leave him for dead. His suffering causes him to lose hope; his faith in a personal God vanishes like a mirage. When all seems los
t, he has a spiritual awakening and finds inner peace. Then the Mongols change their minds and cut him down.

  I was a little concerned when I printed this draft and it turned out to be only one hundred pages long. I widened the margins and used a bigger font and managed to get the number of pages up to 130, but to no avail—my support network gave it the thumbs-down again. The characters were insufficiently developed, they said. The novel read like an outline that went on too long rather than a story that ended too quickly.

  At that point, I’d already spent four years trying to develop Catalano del Saggio’s character, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do with him. Make him a French Crusader? An English traitor? A medieval bodybuilder? In the meantime, Ava was finishing second grade and baby Esme was preparing to enter kindergarten. Perhaps, I began to think, the problem with my novel couldn’t be solved by tinkering with the details. Medieval Europe had never captured my imagination, whereas medieval Asia certainly had. Why, I wondered, had I chosen to stick an Italian into a story that was so clearly Chinese, both geographically and philosophically?

  I ended up where I probably should have begun: in Lin’an, the capital of Song dynasty China, on the eve of the Mongol invasion in 1276. For my third draft, I chose for a main character Yin Lu, a young Confucian scholar whose father was one of the most prominent officials serving in the imperial court. Yin Lu wants to live up to his father’s example of attempting to restore harmony to the world through the practice of virtue, self-discipline, and enlightened scholarship, but three obstacles stand in his way: (1) He stutters, which makes him seem indecisive; (2) He falls in love with an inappropriate woman; and (3) The Mongols have declared war on China and threatened to turn the whole country into a wasteland if the Song emperor won’t surrender.

  Here was a story I could sink my teeth into: how the experience of war turned a troubled idealist into a contented fatalist—a Confucian into a Taoist, in other words. I wrote it in a year, sent the manuscript in, and waited for the congratulatory call from New York. I got a discouraging letter instead. That’s when my rabbit-whiskers began to tremble.

  And that’s when Jessica looked at me from across the dinner table one night, with the girls sitting on either side of her, and said, “We need a dog.”

  Twelve

  I’M NOT TERRIBLY ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT pets but my wife is. In 1989, the year that we were married, Jessica said she wanted to buy a saltwater fish tank. By then, I’d already agreed to two cats (Fog and Smog, the ones I kept off my lap with the tinfoil skirt), so I figured, Fine, bring on the fish, maybe the smell of the ocean will cancel out the smell of the kitty litter. “But it’s your tank,” I said to her. “You have to clean it.”

  She got a fifty-gallon tank—it was about four feet across and two feet high—and stocked it with a few anemones and a pair of clownfish. This was before Finding Nemo came out, so I’d never seen a clownfish before she brought these two home. An interesting fact about clownfish, which was not mentioned in Finding Nemo, is that they are transsexuals. They are all born male, and then the largest and most dominant member of the colony becomes female. When she dies, the next male in line swaps gender and takes her place. One of our clowns was a bit larger than the other, so I assumed he was a she.

  They are beautiful creatures, I’ll admit that, but for me, there’s not much else you can do with a fish but stare at it. The novelty wore off after a few months. Meanwhile, the Plexiglas walls became clouded with mineral deposits. Jessica did clean the tank following the terms of our agreement, but not as often as the guy at the pet store had recommended. The anemones eventually gave way to a forest of invasive green algae, and the gravel teemed with brightly colored microscopic organisms. A plaque at the base of our aquarium identifying the featured animals might have read, “Clownfish, Snails, Scum.”

  Jessica fed them live bloodworms every other day. Live bloodworms, which must be stored in the refrigerator, produce an astonishing volume of waste matter that fouls the water of whatever container you hold them in and smells awful. And a lot of them die before they reach the fish tank, adding to the odor problem. Whenever we left home to travel, we had to arrange for someone to come to the house every other day to feed the worms to the fish and add water to the tank. When we’d had the clownfish for ten years, I asked Jessica if we could give them away and retire the tank, but she wouldn’t hear of it. When Jessica gets a pet, she never gives up on it. Ever.

  The first of the clownfish—the male, I think—passed away after we’d had him for nineteen years. I assumed that Jessica would want to buy another one to keep the survivor company, but to my surprise she announced that when the second clownfish died, we could drain the tank and move it into the garage. We had children by then—we didn’t need fish anymore.

  A year later, we found the second transsexual floating upside down in the algae, and it was all I could do to keep from pumping my fist in the air and shouting “Huzzah!” But four days later, the aquarium lights were still on and the filters were still running. Was Jessica observing a mourning period? Or had she changed her mind about retiring the tank? As casually as I could, I asked her if she needed any help draining the water out of it.

  “We can’t do that yet,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because there are still snails in it.”

  For a moment, I thought she was kidding, but then I saw that she wasn’t, and I got annoyed. I think it’s endearing that Jessica rescues slugs from the sidewalk, and I can handle the fact that she won’t let me kill wasps when they drink out of our swimming pool, but this was going too far. I was not going to hire a sitter to feed the snails.

  Anticipating my objections, Jessica said, “I’ll find someone who wants them when I have time. Right now, I don’t have time.”

  I couldn’t argue with the not-having-time part; with my career in a tailspin, she was supporting all four of us by herself. Finding adoptive homes for her snails was the least I could do, so I got proactive. I found a Vietnamese-owned aquarium supply shop that agreed to take them. I fished the trio of snails out of the tank, put them into a container, and made my way to the shop. When I showed them to the proprietor, he frowned. “Where snails?” he asked.

  “Right there,” I said, but I felt myself blush. Compared to the healthy-looking animals in the tanks around me, my snails looked awful. Their shells were covered with so much algae and sea-hair that you couldn’t tell they were snails at all. I reached in and tugged at them to show they were clinging to the bottom of the Tupperware container. Dead snails can’t do that, I pointed out. I handed it over, and when he asked if I wanted the container back, I said no. I was afraid that if I said yes, he might hand it to me with the snails still in it.

  When I got home it was late afternoon. I made cocktails for Jessica and me and announced that I’d found a home for all three of our snails.

  “Three?” she said, looking confused at first and then slightly suspicious. “There were four snails in there.”

  I made a second trip to the aquarium store the next day.

  What can we learn from the clownfish/snail incident? Mainly, I think, that my kids got better DNA from their mother than from me. Let’s run a comparison:

  My wife’s circle of empathy is so wide that it includes even snails—an admirable trait; I think of snails as plants with shells.

  She gets what she wants—an enviable trait; I wave the white flag and then negotiate terms—an inferior strategy.

  She earns more than I do—an unsettling trait; I claim that it doesn’t bother me at all, but my nose grows and other parts of me shrink every time I say it.

  And finally, she has ballast. No one needs to tell her what to do with snails or how to vote or the right way to make a film or raise children; she figures these things out on her own without a whole lot of fuss or indecision. Something keeps her on an even keel no matter how rough the seas get, and she has total confidence in her internal navigation system. She has faith to burn, in
other words, although if you ask her what she believes in, she’ll probably tell you that she doesn’t know and doesn’t even think about it.

  This, if you ask me, is the trait that separates those fortunate souls who lead charmed, purpose-driven lives from those of us—like me—who are screwed.

  When Jessica said that the girls needed a dog, I breathed deeply and counted to ten before responding. This was one battle that I did not want to lose. As a compromise, I suggested that we invest in a realistic, battery-operated dog puppet. That’s how we’d handled the horse question, and it worked beautifully. You’d never know that the pony in Ava’s room isn’t real, and no one’s been talking about stables or riding lessons since. But no, Jessica insisted, it wouldn’t do for our kids to have a dog puppet when all their friends have real dogs. And believe me, every family in our neighborhood has a dog. I know this because every one of them barks at me when I take my walk. And there are few sounds on earth I hate more than the sound of a barking dog.

  I don’t have anything against dogs as animals. Like bears and dolphins and sea snakes, they are perfectly fine creatures. They are children of the universe, as the author of the “Desiderata” might say; they have a right to be here. It’s dogs as family pets that get on my nerves. Dogs require a lot of attention, and if they don’t get it—and let’s face it, most of them don’t—they become nuisances. I’m talking about the barkers, the roamers, the garbage can tippers, the carpet soakers, the sidewalk crappers, the car chasers, the jumpers, the diggers, the droolers, the crotch-seeking missiles. I’m talking about the Average American Suburban Family Dog—the AASFaD, for short.