The Reunion

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/magazine/the-reunion.html

Version 0 of 1.

The longest walk I ever took in New York City was on a winter’s afternoon in December, five miles along Ocean Parkway with my father. This was 30 years ago, and we were, I suppose, trying to jump-start something, namely, a relationship. We were also trying to avoid any mention of what had been, until then, my father’s almost complete absence from my life, beginning when I was 9 months old. Now I was 18, and my father, newly arrived in Brooklyn, by way of Iran, was living in an apartment in Kensington with his bride, who was 20 years his junior, which is to say 20 years my mother’s junior.

I had come from Pittsburgh to visit him for the week, an extraordinary amount of time given our collective history, and we spent it engaged mostly in classic father-son activities: watching movies and playing backgammon. For obvious reasons, I had always regarded him as distant and therefore severe, but in the flesh he was easygoing and generous. He joked, he cooked, he counseled. During an excursion to the American Museum of Natural History, my father pointed to a stuffed hippopotamus and said, “Look, a hypotenuse,” which sent me into hysterics. So smitten was I that I later told my mother, “If you hadn’t married him, I would have.”

It had been my father’s idea to go for a walk, or, more to the point, it had been his doctor’s idea, given how sedentary and overweight my father was. I was at an age when walking was not exercise but a form of tedium, and I was from a city where almost no one walked, except the poor. He was insistent that we not use the walk as an opportunity to stroll, but instead, as he had been advised, that we move at a pace swift enough to keep the heart rate elevated. To remind us of his commitment to this ideal my father would occasionally swing his arms back and forth as if he were skiing through the cold air, and this gesture was perhaps the sole thing about him that embarrassed me.

That you could actually walk to the ocean in New York City was mind-boggling, let alone that you could do so in a straight line, without ever passing through an unpopulated expanse of land. Furthermore, there was something whimsical in the fact that someone had named the avenues after letters, and that my father and I were, in essence, slowly ascending the alphabet together, starting at C. At one point, he paused to chastise a man who had let his dog run off its leash, but otherwise the walk was without conflict. Halfway through, we stopped somewhere in Midwood or Sheepshead Bay, at an Iranian restaurant, where my father, who was already on a first-name basis with the owner, demonstrated how quickly he had acclimated to the city, while I reflected on how little I knew of my Middle Eastern roots, including the cuisine. I was treated to an inordinately salty drink made primarily from yogurt, and then we continued on. M, N, O.

As lovely as the walk was, I had an inkling that it was also somehow profoundly off-kilter. It was a walk not between father and son, but between friendly acquaintances. My father was performing the role of a charming man, and I was performing the role of a boy on his best behavior, lest his father’s charm have limits. After all, someone who has disappeared from your life once can disappear twice. There are some confusing photographs that document our day, in which my father and I are sitting on boulders at our final destination on Brighton Beach, three hours after our walk began, my arm draped over his shoulder in a shocking display of familiarity that I can’t quite reconcile today.

It must have been right after those photographs of my father and me were taken that I made the mistake of alluding to the fragile nature of our relationship by saying, “I’d like to see you again.” And then adding, “That is, if you’ll have me.” I was trying to be polite, maybe even winsome, but my father heard it for what it was: an insecure son imploring his father. The bald truth of the statement must have hit too close to home, because he responded with irritation and displeasure, the first sign that there were things that lurked beneath the charmed surface. “Don’t you say that!” he bellowed. “Don’t you ever say that!” Shortly thereafter, we caught the subway home.