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I watched Clara and Sara from a distance. They were at the opposite end of the parking lot, engaged in a prolonged mother-daughter embrace.
I was envious. Despite all their bickering and banter, they were obviously very close; whatever had transpired between them in the station was already forgotten. Conversely, the last time my father and I had “bantered” was never, and our “hugs” were the forced embraces that concluded the father-son dinners planned out for us a month in advance by his secretary. And forgiveness? There was no such thing. When I made a mistake, he never let me forget it.
And I knew I was going to be hearing about this latest mistake for many years to come. I looked down at the text that had come through while Clara and I were still in lockup.
Call me as soon as you get this, Dummy.
Dummy. Dad had come up with a variety of pet names for me over the years. When I was a little boy, it was “Dunderhead.”You can’t score a goal if you don’t kick the ball, Dunderhead.In my adolescent years, I was upgraded to “Einstein.”The milk goes in the refrigerator, not the pantry, Einstein.By the time I was seventeen, I was beginning to suspect he’d snuck out in the middle of the night and had my name legally changed to Jesus H. Christ.Jesus H. Christ, do I even want to know how you managed to have an accident in the car wash?
By college, he’d grown tired of having to come up with a new synonym for stupid every year, so he downgraded me to plain old “Dummy.” It had been my nickname ever since.
Just as I was about to call him and let him have at me, my phone rang. I let it ring five times before I finally picked up.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, not looking forward to our oncoming conversation.
He didn’t waste a minute. “Remember that time at the country club banquet when Peter Middlebury said,If you could take a bath with a celebrity, living or dead, who would you choose, and you said,The living one?”
God, not this again. “I was sixteen years old, Dad,” I said, rubbing my temples. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that I thought you could never, ever out-stupid that one. But congratulations. You finally did it.”
“Whatever Walsh told the lawyers, it wasn’t true.”
“Explain this to me, Dummy. You can afford to have sex in the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton.Whilethe President and First Lady politely wait in the hallway for you to finish. So why a hand job in a ditch on the side of the road? Do you have some kind of kinky public sex fantasy? Because if you do, trust me, I get it—”
“I wasn’t getting a hand job in a ditch!” I said. “We were in a car and we weren’t even—”
“What kind?” Dad interrupted.
“What kind of what?”
“Car.”
“Why does it matter?”
“It’s a car and you’re a man. It matters.”
I steeled myself. “A Hyundai Santa Fe.”
“Oh my God!” he cried out. In my mind, I pictured him clutching his heart. “It just keeps getting worse. Why would you do this to me, son? Isn’t it bad enough that you drive around town in a used Toyota? Do you really have to disgrace the family name by getting a hand job in a Hyundai when the whole world knows you can afford to get a blowjob in a Rolls-Royce? If you really hate me that much, why don’t you just suck someone’s tits in a Kia and kill me already?”
“Believe it or not, Dad, I don’t actually want to be known to the whole world as ‘Ian Dunning, who can afford to get a blowjob in a Rolls-Royce.’”
“Is it worse than ‘Ian Dunning, who can afford to rent a two-dollar whore’? Because that’s what the whole world is calling you now.”
“She’s not a whore! Stop calling her that!”
“Sorry,” he said. “Whatever they call themselves these days. A sex engineer.”
“She’s a PhD candidate at Columbia. And she happens to be extremely intelligent.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
“No shit?” Dad finally said, sounding impressed. “Is she good-looking?”
“Yeah, Dad, she’s gorgeous,” I said. “Big boobs, blond hair and blue eyes. She’s everything a loving father could want for his son.”
“You say that sarcastically, but you might actually be onto something for once in your life. Educated wives are all the rage these days. Bill Beckett’s wife from last year had her master’s from Yale, and Larry Wentworth once had one who taught at NYU.”
