"I have to say if this is an act, it's a good one." He actually looks distraught, which is kind of rare for my father.
"I'm sorry," he says, shaking his head. "I don't know how this could have happened. I really thought it was there."
"What are you doing? Stealing artifacts anyway, rare books. What do you know about rare books?"
"A lot," he says, "it's a good business. I'm aging out of being a hit man. I don't know if you know this, but it's safer. Paintings, art, forgeries even, and rare books. There's a lot of money to be made there and I have made a good amount."
"What are you talking about?"
"How do you think I’ve supported myself for the last couple of years? You can't be a hit man on your own. It's too dangerous. It's too much work to plan out the entire thing, as you know, and execute it perfectly. Not if you want to do it safely, not if you want to never get caught. And so I figured the best way to never get caught is to retire from that part of my job. So that's what I did."
I shake my head, not wanting to believe him, but he's right of course. He has been living pretty well and yet it's unclear how he's been making a living.
"Tell me everything," I say, pouring myself a glass of scotch and sitting down across from him.
10
Dante
My father and I haven't talked, just the two of us, in a very long time. There’re so many things that have always been left unsaid between us that he's a stranger to me. He lives in a world far removed from the one that I inhabit, not just because of the wealth and privilege that I grew up with and that he had always wanted, and something that I secretly think he holds against me and Lincoln and our mom. But it's more than that. He's a writer and he's supposed to be able to express himself, to tell, to bleed onto the page. And to tell the world exactly what he's thinking.
But he's an enigma. He prides himself on being the kind of writer who doesn't appeal to so-called melodramatic readers or what he refers to readers, mainly women who enjoy literature that have feelings and conversations about emotions and relationships. There's a kind of toxic masculinity that's tied up in all of that, where he lives in this world that's supposed to be somehow above all that.
But in reality, emotions and relationships, that's what life is really all about. We go through it, pursuing these other things. We put ourselves out in the world and we pretend like something else matters. But in truth, it is our family, or lack thereof, it is our friends or lack thereof, it is our partner and children. That's who our lives are defined by.
It's not that my father's life is any different, of course. He is the person that he is today because of the family or lack thereof that he grew up with. He likes to think of himself as this macho person, even though he's a writer. He likes to think that he's somehow above emotions as if to experience emotions and to let them rush through you and then learn something from them makes you weak. It doesn't.
If anything, this world gives you strength. It is to know thyself and to embrace how you feel and to not let that define you. You don't want to be like one of those people who ping-pong around in life, making decisions, living according to somebody else's terms and conditions. All because you don't actually know who you are or what you want, what makes you tick, or what you crave and what you need in this world.
Despite being a writer my father’s interior life has always been a mystery to me. He talks about nothing in particular, and he shares very little. I read his works and it's just one plot point after another. There’re glimpses of who these characters are and their interior lives.
But those are mere glimpses. He doesn't say anything direct, leaving the reader wondering in awe of the mystery that is him. The truth is that I haven't been wondering. The truth is that I've put him entirely out of my mind. He never cared to share anything real with me. Just tips and little pieces of information that I was supposed to somehow piece together into something that makes sense. Well, I don't care about that.
He's not going to be a mystery to solve, because I have my own life to lead. Lincoln, on the other hand, has always found him to be so much more fascinating than he probably ever was or should have been. He was drawn to him. He wanted to figure out how Dad works, why he does certain things, why he lies for instance, why he promises to be somewhere and then doesn't show up.
This was a common trope in my life growing up. He would announce that he was taking me out for my birthday to go horseback riding. We would make plans and then he'd have something come up at work or anything else, whatever.
Maybe he just didn't feel like it. Maybe he went on a bender the night before and forgot. But in any case, I didn't matter enough in his life for him to show up. So why the fuck would I care about him now?
Lincoln didn't always have that view of the world. He thought that there was some big underlying mystery explanation. Yeah, he had a fucked up childhood, okay.
He never came to terms with it, but isn't it time for him to do the work now as an adult? Isn't it time for him to address why he can't do a simple thing, like say, I'm sorry, ever, or I love you or express any real emotion whatsoever? If that's so hard, then how do you expect me to react to you?
I sit across from him, not so much angry, but feeling used. We broke into the house. We tried to find this elusive folio. I did him another favor. And though it didn't exactly blow up in my face. Something else happened. It wasn't there.
"What now?” I ask Dad whose hand trembles as he reaches for his scotch.
"I don't know, son."
I clench my jaw when he uses that word. I guess it's biologically accurate, but I don't feel like he’s earned the right to refer to me that way.
“I'm not sure where to go from here,” I say, shaking my head. "Why wasn't it there?"
“I guess he must've moved it, but I had the cameras there for a week and nothing was disturbed. They were just moving other stuff out of the house. I don't know how I could have missed this.”
I hate the way that we're going in circles and want to put it back on track. "Tell me about the rare books," I urge him. "How long have you been doing that?"
“Like I said, the last couple of years I just had to do something for income. I went to a fair, met a few people, and then I found out about the black market. People will pay a lot for ancient artifacts. Book publishing has only been around since the Gutenberg press in the 1600s.”
"What makes the book rare?" I ask.
“Popularity after publication and the scant number of copies. That's why titles that are very popular and are still in print tend to not be worth anything besides the regular retail price. But when it comes to books that are now revered as classics, like The Great Gatsby for instance, they are valuable because they didn't have a very big print run initially. The publisher didn't think that it would be very popular. The publisher didn't print enough copies, but it ended up being a book that's revered to be a classic.”
"And this folio?” I ask.
“Shakespeare’s first folio is a collection of thirty-six plays, published right after his death and it’s one of only five complete copies that are held privately. It’s handprinted, written on vellum.”