I Stand Corrected Page 19

  Given the belief by the Chinese that their ancestors merge into the forces of the universe, given, as well, the more earth-bound issue of succession, particularly when it comes to family-owned businesses and newly built empires, and given China’s one-child policy—given all of these things, it is no surprise that in China the urge to have sons is now skewing the gender balance of the population.

  Increasingly and for the next twenty years, China will have more men than women of reproductive age. That has prompted the government to openly express concern about the consequences the gender imbalance will have on the nation’s social stability.

  Thousands of years before the ancient lessons of The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, Egyptians set forth The Instruction of Ptahhotep, a collection of maxims that sowed the seeds of Western ethical conduct.

  “How worthy it is when a son hearkens to his father … and how many misfortunes befall him who hearkens not!” cautions Ptahhotep.

  I cannot help wondering if what resides not far below the surface of his warning is the primal fear of fathers that their sons will surpass them. Though never a great fan of Freud, I have seen for myself how accurate is his timeline charting the early childhood development of boys.

  Gilliam went to sleep one night a four-year-old devoted to both of his parents and woke the next morning determined to eliminate his father in order to have his mother to himself. Before breakfast, he walked purposefully into the next room and glared at his competition stationed at a desk, drawing cartoons.

  His father looked up.

  “Well, hello, Gilly. Have you come to visit? How nice.”

  Gilliam’s intentions were expressed politely, but they were as deadly serious as a Russian oligarch.

  “You need to move out of our house,” he announced.

  Caught off guard, his father nonetheless managed to retain the convincing tone of adult authority.

  “This is my house as well,” he reminded his son.

  Gilliam considered the accuracy of his father’s statement. Unhappily, it was correct.

  “You wouldn’t have to go far,” Gilliam suggested.

  “Where would you have me go?” asked his father with amused curiosity.

  “What about the garage? That way you could visit,” Gilliam reasoned.

  In China, it could well be that the cultural factors of Confucianism would have made the kind of Oedipal exchange between Gilliam and his father unnecessary. Perhaps far more thought provoking is the ever-increasing number of young Chinese men. By 2020, China expects a surplus of thirty-five million of them. That number of males for whom there will be no available women in China exceeds the entire population of Canada. This will not happiness make.

  On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure what kind of happiness is actively encouraged in China, other than the kind that rewards achievement.

  Instilled in the Chinese by the Cultural Revolution was the belief that pursuing happiness at the expense of others ran contradictory to the moral principle of communism and therefore those who did so would never be happy. The idea of romantic love has been systematically dismissed by Chinese politics as both frivolous and selfish. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise. With so little reference made to romantic love, most likely Chinese people have been spared the anguish of its loss.

  East or West, we are never entirely honest when it comes to issues of love, and so it is doubtful I can be the reliable narrator of my own. I am, however, absolutely certain that I married W. for love.

  “For better or for worse” were words in a vow I took completely to heart. Fifteen years later, my heart remained devoted, but it was physically, emotionally, and financially impossible to continue life as it was. I hoped I could make W. understand this. Instead, he pivoted in an entirely different direction.

  Despite my profound dislocation, I was determined to create security for Gilliam. Security is home, I reasoned. I will make our home safe, I told myself. Safety, at least the reassuring illusion of it, is to be found in a household routine, and so Gilliam and I became an enterprise of sorts, with the shared responsibility of routine. Each morning after breakfast, I left for the office and Gilliam left for school. Each night during dinner, we compared our days and made plans for the next … each night, a plan for the following day … and the following, and the following … until, gradually, sadness lost its place and possibilities appeared in front of me. Isak Dinesen once said that sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story. I did that. I wrote a novel.

  My life was uncommonly full, as was Gilliam’s. But the unspoken circumstances that reduced us from a tight three-person family to only mother and son required of me a sustained effort to redirect our futures, both of which had been pushed off course. I decided we should travel.

  Regardless of where our journeys took us, I packed no more than could be carried on the plane. We were efficiency in motion, but the frantic hour before leaving was a showcase of my least attractive qualities. It took only a few trips for Gilliam to recognize my pretrip irrationality. He would station himself near the front door, away from the dangerous whirl of my helicopter blades.

  If a psychiatrist were to explain that my anxiety had nothing to do with getting to the airport on time, he would not be telling me anything I did not already know. I understood the reason behind my pretravel angst: I was responsible for Gilliam’s life, but no one was sheltering mine. That fear made its own place, filled with longing and self-pity. Guilt lived there too—guilt for feeling anything other than gratitude that my son and I were fortunate in our health, that we were buffered by my resourcefulness, and that we both lived advantaged lives.

  Determined not to allow my emotions to take the lead, I called on my organizational skills to hold them back. There were prerequisites to our trips. The flight was nonstop and overnight Thursday, placing us in the foreign city on Friday morning. By sleeping on the plane, we were able to stay in the local time zone for the two days we explored the city. We left on Sunday, the time difference returning us to New York before dinner. Slightly longer trips coincided with Gilliam’s French holidays, when off-season travel made it possible for me to afford more than our usual two-night stay.

  Varied and vivid and surprising, our trips offered as many reasons for taking them as there were places to go. Sufis and Agatha Christie were two good reasons for Istanbul. The Goya exhibit at the Prado lured us to Madrid. A loaned apartment on the Île Saint-Louis made Paris possible. Mozart’s Magic Flute was the excuse for Vienna. Pompeian frescoes and the Cappella Sansevero’s Veiled Christ waited for us in Naples.

  Three holidays anchored us to the same places with our offbeat version of an extended family: the Fourth of July was in Capri with the same set of friends from L.A.; Thanksgiving had a counterintuitive place in London with Gilliam’s English godmother and her family; Christmas Eve dinner was celebrated with a boisterous group of New Yorkers. Our birthdays—two days apart in August—were spent in foreign cities we’d not yet visited.

  Gilliam’s life took shape in cities: L.A. was where he grew out of his infancy; Paris claimed some part of his childhood; New York—a city of sharp corners and brute force—seemed an appropriate backdrop for the assertive male pride of his adolescence.

  Raising a son on my own confirmed what I long ago suspected: men and women are not set apart by biology; they are biology. The dissolution of my marriage left me with full-time parental responsibilities for Gilliam, and I carried the financial obligations of that unforgiving fact. Gilliam respected my role in our household, and I appreciated his. That was before, at the age of fourteen, he mutated into something unrecognizable.

  Surliness appeared for the first time and fed defiance; defiance egged on provocation, until life with my son became like handling nitroglycerin. Expecting anything from Gilliam on the weekends became his equivalent of a miscarriage of justice. At first, I was furious at what I believed to be his indolence, but then I became worried when he slept for long stretches.

&nbs
p; “Does he nod off in the middle of activities?” asked our doctor after I insisted Gilliam must be suffering from narcolepsy.

  “There are no activities on the weekend—unless you consider eating to be one,” I told him. “The boy eats constantly when he’s not sleeping. I don’t understand that either because he’s so thin. Could he have picked up a tapeworm on one of our trips?”

  Ignoring my question, the doctor asked one of his own. “What about school, does he fall asleep in class?”

  “No. He’s fine in school. It’s the weekends that are lost.”

  “It’s not lost time if it’s spent sleeping,” the doctor pointed out.

  “Of course you’re right,” I said, not because I agreed but because I wanted to sound supportive.

  “The thing is, no matter how much sleep Gilliam has, he’s exhausted. Do you think he has caught one of those sleeping diseases you get from parasitically infected third-world water?” I asked.

  “Your son doesn’t have a tapeworm or a sleeping disease,” said the doctor.

  “Then what does he have?”

  “He doesn’t ‘have’ anything. The boy is growing.”

  I would not argue with that point. Gilliam’s height had increased five inches that year alone.

  “All right,” I told the doctor. “I’ll let the boy grow.”

  And so Gilliam’s weekends remained forty-eight-hour rotations of sleeping, eating, lounging, and standing—mutely and without purpose—in front of the open refrigerator. The few times he was actually in motion, his behavior was recklessly driven by his glands.

  “Any suggestion of mine is a detonation device,” I complained to Annie.

  “Testosterone,” was all she said.

  I waited for more.

  “It’s been shown that the increase of testosterone causes certain species to patrol larger areas so they can pick more fights,” explained Annie.

  Actually, that sounded familiar. When he wasn’t manufacturing a crisis, Gilliam would search me out, reach into the inner chamber of his psyche, and select a poison dart tipped with the most hurtful thing to say. So precise was the boy’s cunning bull’s-eye aim that it took a single accusation to hit the very core of my defenselessly open maternal heart.

  Gilliam’s increasingly provocative attitude was not unlike that of his favorite childhood character, the atrociously behaved Monkey King.

  DESPITE THE IMPORTANCE of deference in Chinese culture, one of the most enduring Chinese literary characters is Sun Wukong, also known as Monkey King, whose egotistical and prankish misbehavior was put to paper by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth-century epic novel Journey to the West.

  It begins, logically enough, with the beginning of time.

  Born from a stone is a monkey with supernatural powers but very little sense of propriety. His acts of destruction and disrespect against, among others, the Ocean Dragons and the God of Death came to the attention of the august Ruler of the Universe, the Jade Emperor. A diplomat first and foremost, the Jade Emperor invited Monkey King to heaven and—believing it would placate him—bestowed on him the double-barreled title of Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. But the incorrigible Monkey King went on a spree of mythically proportioned bad behavior. He gate-crashed a party meant for the officials of heaven, where he ate all of the prized Longevity Pills, stuffed his face with Peaches of Immortality, and—before fleeing heaven in a single bound—taunted the Jade Emperor with an obscene gesture recognized by mortals and gods alike.

  When the Jade Emperor sent his Heavenly Army after Monkey King, it was defeated by his wickedly clever tricks and overwhelming powers. Realizing that any attempt to subdue Monkey King by force would prove fruitless, Buddha made a wager with him. If Monkey King could jump off the palm of Buddha’s hand, Buddha would demote Jade Emperor and Heaven would fall under Monkey King’s jurisdiction. If, however, Monkey King was unable to leap the distance, an apology would be expected and a severe and long penance would be due. Knowing himself to be capable of leaping thousands of miles at a time, Monkey King quickly agreed to the bargain.

  Buddha stretched out his hand.

  Monkey King’s jump landed him thousands of miles away in a desolate plain with five great columns reaching to the sky. These must be the Five Pillars of Wisdom at the end of the Universe, he thought. And in a vulgar display of territorial imperative, Monkey King urinated against the nearest pillar before leaping back into Buddha’s palm to claim his right to Heaven.

  Raising a sublime eyebrow, Buddha informed an astonished Monkey King that although the leap could indeed be measured in thousands of miles, Monkey King had not in fact left Buddha’s palm. Worse news was that the pillars were Buddha’s fingers, one of which had been defiled. Monkey King was banished by Buddha, who trapped him under a mountain until Monkey King agreed to make peace with the universe.

  CLOSER TO HOME, reason and determination—two attributes that served me in my professional life—worked against me with my son. Either I come up with a plan, I told myself, or one of us will end up killing the other.

  What saved us both was not so much a plan but a different approach: I let go of control. Despite his taciturn determination to operate in perversely oppositional terms, Gilliam acknowledged my gesture. The boy-man told me he loved me dearly. He told me he admired me greatly. He told me he was incredibly thankful for me. He told me he intended to go to Japan and learn the language.

  At the time, my son was seventeen. The rarefied life we shared had come to its rightful end.

  THERE WERE TWO things to be done before Gilliam left for Japan.

  The first—my idea, not his—was a serious discussion about the differences between Asian and Western attitudes toward intimate relationships. I felt it my obligation as a stand-in father to have this conversation with Gilliam before he left. By no means was I comfortable with the subject. I am a fairly private person and, admittedly, old-fashioned in my views. The last and only time I had spoken to my son about sex was when he was five and he insisted I explain human reproduction.

  “So, tell me,” Candida asked at the time, “how do you discuss sex with a five-year-old?”

  “The books I’ve read suggest I tell him in words he can understand.”

  “You’ll never get anywhere that way,” she said. “Try finding one of those intrauterine films. It’s the perfect solution. The entire subject of sex has been scientifically dry-cleaned, and there’s no need to say anything. You just watch the film with him.”

  The following week, Gilliam sat on the couch expectantly facing the television while I pushed the PLAY button. On the screen appeared sperm as seen through an electron microscope, a thousand times their actual size.

  I addressed the obvious first. “Of course they’re infinitely smaller,” I said as my son and I watched a menacing number of diabolically large sperm swarm before our eyes.

  “There’re so many,” was Gilliam’s initial reaction.

  “That’s right,” I said, trying to keep to the script. “And do you see that they are all moving in one direction?”

  “No …”

  He was right again. It was bedlam. Bumper-car-size sperm were darting erratically from side to side, careening into one another before finally finding their collective sense of direction. The longer Gilliam watched them struggle upstream, the more worried he became. When the one sperm had reached the single egg, he asked me to stop the tape.

  “But, sweetie, the film isn’t finished yet,” I said.

  “Can you rewind it? I want to see the beginning. I don’t care about who gets there first. I want to see what happens to the others.”

  Gilliam’s intense focus was on the journey of the sperm, not their destination. He insisted we watch the first few minutes of the film over again several times. We never got to the fertilized egg.

  “The rest of the sperm are absorbed into the mother’s bloodstream,” I explained when he asked what became of them.

  I knew that hundreds of redundant sperm had a far les
s dignified ending but decided to recast it in an optimistic cycle-of-life message.

  “You mean they die,” said Gilliam.

  “No, they become something else.”

  “So what is it that they become?” asked my son, clearly onto me.

  “Well, they … I think they …,” I stuttered.

  Gilliam put an end to my instructional failure. “The truth is they die,” he said matter-of-factly. “They die for one life to be possible.”

  Unable as I was then to deal with the boy’s metaphorical take on the subject, how was I now to address the more subtle issue of what I considered his obligations as a young man when it came to young women in Asia, a place where—once intimacy takes place—the cultural expectations are decidedly different?

  “You can’t afford to get this wrong,” warned Jonathan. “You’ll ruin it for him for the rest of his life.”

  “Ruin what?” I asked.

  “Everything,” he told me.

  It was then that I decided I would write a letter to Gilliam instead and surreptitiously pack it with the belongings he would take to Japan.

  Fortunately, the second obligation requiring my attention before Gilliam left home was an easier proposition.

  PART TWELVE

  A Series of Departures

  Enjoy yourself—it’s later than you think.

  —Chinese proverb

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  It was the last year of my almost ten-year tenure at Hearst. The phone call came to my office.

  “It’s me,” he said without announcing himself.

  “Greg?”

  He lowered his voice so it was barely audible.

  “Have I missed the Turtle Release?”

  “No. You haven’t missed it.”

  “Thank God I have something to look forward to.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here.”