I’ve undergone a pretty radical transformation since my younger days. One kind of fun has replaced another. Where before I had taken pleasure in my own well-being, I now take much greater pleasure in the well-being of Timmy and Tad.
As one conspicuous example, the boys are now going through a zealous costume phase, and Meredith and I have spent the bulk of our vacation chasing after Batman and Spider-Man and assorted creatures from outer space. Yesterday, the kids went bodysurfing in their costumes—Timmy was Superman, Tad was a bunny—and more than a few bewildered stares came their way as they emerged from the Atlantic like the survivors of some comic-book shipwreck. They dine at Nobu in their costumes, go down water slides in their costumes, climb rock walls in their costumes, stroll through the casino in their costumes, and high-five puzzled lifeguards in their costumes. The boys are no longer content with store-bought outfits; Meredith devoted the first day of our vacation to manufacturing a pair of unicorn horns, using rolled-up socks, coffee filters, and plenty of ingenuity. Though it’s embarrassing to admit, I’ve sometimes joined the boys in their costumed reveries, patrolling the Bahamian shoreline in my homemade Hulk getup.
What fascinates me, in part, about this costume obsession is the uncompromising earnestness with which Timmy and Tad engage in the fantasies of make-believe. For them, make-believe is the real world, and the real world is make-believe. In one way or another, and to one degree or another, this is how I’ve led a great deal of my own life for the past sixty-some years. I’ve dressed up in an Armani suit and pretended I belonged among the rich and famous; I’ve dressed up in white linens for a cameo role in a movie called The Notebook, pretending I was at ease in the presence of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams; I’ve dressed up in a helmet and rucksack and pretended I was a competent soldier; I’ve dressed up in a magician’s top hat and pretended I was making miracles happen; I’ve dressed up in blue jeans and a baseball cap and pretended I was a happy guy.
Two afternoons ago, after I’d lost a hundred bucks at the blackjack table, we took a cab into Nassau, where we spent a few minutes visiting the piece of ground on which the Royal Victoria Hotel had once delivered to my father the only untarnished joy he had ever mentioned in my presence. Meredith snapped a couple of photographs. Timmy and Tad stood nearby, a little impatient, flapping their Batman capes at passing pedestrians. For me, those few minutes were important. I was hoping for … Who knows? Nothing revelatory, nothing startling, but maybe some whisper out of history, maybe a tree my father might have climbed, maybe a flowered path down which he might have embarked on a midnight stroll in the company of a highball and a pretty young woman. But time had done its work. Almost all had been obliterated. A small commemorative plaque, mounted on a concrete block along a sidewalk, informed passersby that here had once stood the Royal Victoria, except here was no longer here, and the name Bill O’Brien did not appear on the plaque, and after all these years, a kind of shabby, ill-tended dreariness had replaced romantic summer nights and popping champagne corks and tuxedos and fourteen-piece orchestras playing music that could be flirted to and snuggled to and danced to. All that was now a parking lot. The hotel permanently closed its doors in 1971, stood vacant for a time, and was destroyed by fire in the mid-1990s. As with a broken toy, something sad and depressing had subverted not only the Royal Victoria, but also my father’s expectations about what the world would offer to him in the years ahead—a glamorous lifelong cocktail party that over time turned very ugly. The fantasy became asphalt. My dad ended up hiding vodka bottles in the basement of a small, unstylish house in southern Minnesota.
Now, feeling a pinch in my eyes, I ran a hand across the surface of the Royal Victoria’s dismal little plaque. Nothing much happened except the fantasy that something had happened.
After a time, Timmy approached me in his Batman costume.
He took my hand. He asked why I was crying. I told him I was not crying—I was remembering.
“It looks like crying,” Timmy said.
“I suppose it does,” I said, “but you look like Batman.”
“So what?”
“Well, maybe—” I stopped, composed myself, and lifted the mask from Timmy’s face. “Maybe someday you won’t be Batman anymore. Maybe someday you won’t be a superhero.”
“No way,” Timmy said. “That can’t happen.”
“No?”
“Never,” he said. “Not to me.”
Back in second grade—or was it third?—Timmy misspelled the word “utter,” replacing the t’s with d’s, an error to which his teacher responded with the suggestion that spelling matters. “But they sound the same,” Timmy told her. “How could anybody except a cow tell the difference?”
Two mornings ago, I came across Tad peeing into a wastebasket. Not only a wastebasket, but a wire mesh wastebasket. And not only a wire mesh wastebasket, but a wire mesh wastebasket situated on a bathroom floor that had been very recently recarpeted.
Tad had been potty-trained; he knew better.
I spoke to the boy sharply—earnestly, you might say. Tad froze. His angle of attack became indecisive. His bull’s-eye was no longer the wastebasket, and certainly not the toilet, but instead a point midway between the two. I was furious, as I had every right to be. Scarcely a month earlier, I had selected this new carpet for its lush pile, its regal shade of maroon. (“You’ll be sorry,” Meredith had said.)
Once Tad finished his business, I told the boy to drop to his knees and begin blotting up the mess with wads of toilet paper.
“Why,” I asked, “did you do this?”
I asked heatedly—many times—but my son did not look up at me and did not speak. He was frightened, no doubt, by my tone of voice and by a couple of inappropriate words I summoned. Eventually, just as Tad began to cry, Meredith stepped into the bathroom. She gave me a stern, get-out-of-here wag of the head, bent down to console our son, and took over the cleanup operation. I retreated to my office, where for some time I sat muttering to myself.
Maybe a half hour later, Tad came toddling into my office. The boy’s lower lip was trembling. He looked at me with a combination of remorse, fear, and ferocious concentration.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, “but I have two heads.”
“What?” I said.
“Two heads,” said Tad.
“What?” I said.
“You
