As for boyfriends, lovers? I’ve had a few, some more serious than others, but I’ve never really wanted to go down that whole marriage and kids route that so many women seem to think is inevitable, and that’s been fine. Fine.
But my dad? My daddy? The man who gave me twenty dollars to invest when I was seven? Who sat with me poring over the business section of the New York Times, who told me about getting in on Microsoft before it went big – never mind that he didn’t, he just thought about it.
My dad was so proud of me. He didn’t like me going into venture capital, true; he felt it was too risky. He played it safe, lived a middle-class life out in Newtown, Connecticut, and retired at sixty-five. But he was proud of me, even with the risks. When I found that first tech investment that went big, six years ago – All Natural, a company that sourced organic products from different stores to present the whole healthy living/wellness package to subscribers – he pumped his fist in the air and said, ‘Gracie, you did it. You damn well did it!’
My dad was everything to me: mother, father, family. When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was seven, he stepped right up. He came to my ballet recitals; he made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner; he sat with me at bedtime. He bought me pads for my first period and stammered through a talk about birth control right before I went to college. He took me out for my first legal drink on my twenty-first birthday; we shared a very good bottle of wine. He can’t be gone.
But he is.
The lump of tears and grief is growing, taking me over like the cancer that ate away at my father’s insides. Kidney, diagnosis to death took six weeks. Six weeks. Barely enough time to understand what was happening, never mind accept it. The impossibility of it is like slamming into a brick wall, leaving me not just breathless, but reeling.
Slowly, I walk from the window to the enormous kitchen I barely use, all marble counters and stainless steel appliances – a cliché, I know, the professional woman who doesn’t even make use of the apartment she paid a fortune for, and certainly not the kitchen. You think I want to spend hours making some gourmet meal I’m going to eat alone in front of the TV?
The enormous sub-zero fridge holds very little – milk, some nice Brie that’s probably gone bad, and the bottle of wine I opened last night and that is already half-empty. I pour myself a fishbowl-sized glass and for good measure I take another bottle from the wine rack and stick it in the fridge. I’m going to need a lot of alcohol to get through tonight. To get through the rest of my life.
I wriggle out of my pantyhose and black crêpe dress, leaving them crumpled on the floor of my bedroom before I slip into yoga pants and a t-shirt and curl up on my king-sized bed, cradling my wine.
I feel so lonely. It eats at me, like some physical attack from an invisible monster. I want to claw at my own skin, pull my hair, scream, anything to alleviate this moment. To change it. Instead I drink more wine.
It slips down nicely, and soon the glass is empty. I’ve only nibbled a couple of soggy sandwiches all day, and so I have a nice buzz going on as I walk back to the kitchen and pour a second glass. I think about turning on some music – I paid a fortune for a voice-activated system – but I’m afraid music, any music, will tip me over the emotional edge. I’m not ready to cry. Not yet, and maybe not ever. I don’t know if I’d ever be able to come back from that.
So I drink and I watch darkness settle on the park and the lights of cabs stream by. The apartment is so quiet. I liked that about it, when I toured the place four years ago, after I got the big bonus that provided me with the deposit. I liked that I couldn’t hear anything – not neighbors, not traffic, not the creak of the elevator or the blare of a car horn. But right now I feel like I’m in an isolation chamber. I am in one.
The second glass of wine goes down easier than the first, even though my empty stomach is starting to churn. Blearily, the world going fuzzy, I reach for my phone and start scrolling through contacts. I’m not so drunk that I don’t realize this is a bad idea, but I need to talk to someone. I feel like if I don’t, I might explode – or die.
I call Joanne, my friend from business school, first. She works in Chicago now, managing a hedge fund, and I haven’t seen her in over a year. Her phone flips over to voicemail and I open my mouth to leave a message, except no words come out. What can I say that would make sense? I haven’t talked to her in months. She doesn’t even know my dad was sick. I swipe to disconnect the phone and toss it on the bed. I drink more wine.
I’m not sure what time it is, but it feels late. After a little while, I’m not sure how long, I pick up my phone again. I swipe through my contacts and then, sober enough to know I’m being stupid, I press call on a certain number.
Ben answers after a couple of rings, sounding uncertain. ‘Grace?’
‘You still have me in your contacts.’ I let out a hiccuppy laugh and then close my eyes. What am I doing? This is so not me, I do not make drunken phone calls. I don’t even get drunk. And yet here I am.
‘Yes, I do.’ A pause and I can hear him moving, maybe getting up from a chair or a bed. Was he with someone? Does it matter? ‘Grace, are you… are you all right? Because you sound…’
‘My father died.’ The words are stark and abrupt. ‘His funeral was today.’
A pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben says quietly, and I know he means it. Ben is the closest thing I have to a great, lost love, and the funny or maybe the sad thing is, we only dated for a little more than a year. We met years ago at a party thrown by one of my MBA colleagues, and we just clicked. He was as ambitious as I was, but also funny and fairly laid-back. I had fun with him, and the thought of forever flitted through my mind.
‘Thanks,’ I say, and I sniff. My eyes are closed and my stomach and head are both spinning. ‘Sorry, I know I shouldn’t have called.’ We broke up five years ago, when Ben, a corporate lawyer, got headhunted to San Francisco.
We had an awkward, stilted conversation about keeping it going long distance, and Ben suggested, rather hesitantly, that I consider moving to San Francisco. I remember looking at him in disbelief; I couldn’t leave my job, or my father. I did fly out once, about three months after he moved. We had a nice if awkward dinner, and then a discussion about how we might as well break up because our relationship was clearly not going to last an East Coast/West Coast divide.
‘It’s okay,’ Ben says after a moment. ‘I know you were close to him.’
‘Do you?’ I sound almost childishly eager. Does he have some story, some recollection that I’ve forgotten? He feels like a link to my father, a precious thread I want to unravel and see where it leads.
‘You met him for brunch just about every weekend,’ Ben remarks dryly. ‘Not many thirty-five-year-olds have that kind of relationship with their dad.’
‘No.’ I loved those brunches. Father-daughter time, an institution he insisted upon every Saturday morning since my mother died when I was fourteen. Our last one was seven weeks ago, before all this happened. I’ve gone over every second of that brunch, trying to remember if I missed some clue. My father had white chocolate waffles, but he left a lot on his plate, saying they were too rich.
We had the New York Times spread out on the table, as we often did, and as we sipped coffee and nibbled toast we’d read out bits to each other, commenting on various news stories or investment snippets like an old married couple. If I’d known that was the last time we’d do that… what would I have done differently? I torment myself with that question, with remembering how I checked my watch at the end, how I turned down a third cup of coffee because I had some errands to run. Errands.
I do remember how he talked about my mother; how he said he missed her but he was glad he’d been able to be both mom and dad to me. I didn’t pay much attention; my
dad liked to get sentimental sometimes. Later, I tried to remember every word. I even wrote it down, a transcript that was half remembered, half wishful thinking.
Sometimes I wish we’d been able to give you a sibling. He’d definitely said that, and I’d simply shrugged, because what else could I do? Now I wonder how much easier this grief would be if someone else were bearing it with me. If there was anyone, absolutely anyone, to put their arms around me and say they understood; that they were sad too, as sad as I am. Because I know no one is.