Look Closer(33)

I heard a sound. My first reaction, he was in pain. My first mental image, he was moving something heavy. He was moving furniture and hurt himself, something like that. A heart attack, maybe.

Sometimes I chide myself in hindsight for my naivete. But then—maybe it was okay that a teenage boy didn’t immediately leap to the worst conclusions about his father.

I moved slowly toward the door, carefully along the carpet, as the moaning and the grunting continued, then a thumping noise, and a woman’s breathless voice.

We didn’t have locks on the office doors. I remember my father saying that was a kind of statement, some bullshit about an open-door, egalitarian philosophy around the office.

I wish the door had been locked. I wish I hadn’t opened it.

I wish I didn’t have to listen to him grovel and apologize and try to justify to me why he was fucking around on my mother, who was probably being fed her dinner, spoon to mouth, at that moment by our in-home nurse, Edie.

That was the moment. It got worse, after the money was gone, and we could no longer afford Edie, and Mom was headed for a nursing home at the age of forty-nine. But right there in the law firm, on the seventeenth floor of the Chicago Title & Trust Building, with my father chasing after me down the hall as he pulled up his trousers, trying to block me from the elevator while shoving his shirt inside his pants, begging me to listen to reason, not to go home and do something everyone would regret—that was the moment, for me, when everything changed.

I wish I didn’t let him convince me not to say anything to my mother.

I wish I didn’t let him make me a coconspirator in his crime.

Because he didn’t stop. Oh, no, even after I found out, he kept on. He didn’t tell me, but I caught him again. A few months later, just before Thanksgiving, stepping out onto the back patio for some fresh air, I found an empty bottle of champagne and two glasses tucked in the corner of the porch.

Two glasses, not one, even though my mother could no longer drink alcohol. He wasn’t just cheating on my mother; his lady friend was sneaking over to the house at night after my mother was asleep, and I was working late at the school.

A stupid bottle of champagne, two red-tinted plastic champagne flutes you’d buy at a convenience store. Those things told me that my father wasn’t just a weak man who succumbed to a moment of temptation—he was a liar. He was a cheat. His carnal needs were more important than his commitment to my mother, to our family.

I didn’t throw them away. I started to. I tossed the bottle of champagne and glasses into an empty garbage bag but, instead of heading to the garbage bin, I took it to my room and placed it inside my closet. I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to look at it every day to remind myself what and who my father was.

The day I found that bottle, the day I realized my father was never going to stop cheating—that was the day that Ted Dobias died.

The night he was found with a knife in his stomach, floating in his pool, was just the moment he stopped breathing.





27

Monday, September 12, 2022

You knew something was wrong tonight. I’d tried to play it off. I greeted you the same way I always did, clutching you in my arms, kissing you in that way we kiss, lifting you off your feet.

But afterward, you could tell. You prodded me. And I’ve made this vow, Lauren, as I’ve said before on these pages, that I will not lie to you, I will not hide from you. So I told you.

“My father cheated on my mother,” I told you. “It destroyed her.”

That surprised you. You knew my father for a short time as your boss, not your immediate supervisor but the big boss, the name on the door, and you probably thought he was a nice enough guy. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought he was an asshole. Either way, you didn’t know him know him.

Apparently, I didn’t, either. I thought I did. I wasn’t as close to him as I was to Mom. But I thought I knew him. I didn’t see until later how insecure he was, because he was in the same profession generally speaking as my mother, but she was smarter, she was better at it, she was more successful.

She taught constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, the University of Chicago. And Dad was a scrapping, lowbrow attorney taking slip-and-falls and DUIs, whatever he could grab.

What he didn’t understand was that Mom didn’t care about that. She didn’t measure people that way. But Dad did. Probably a male thing.

Then Dad hit it big. When that kid he grew up with in Edison Park was working on a construction site, and the boom of a rig he was operating contacted a live overhead electrical power line, sending deadly streaks of electricity through his body and leaving him horribly scarred and disfigured, Dad got the case. A thirty-million-dollar settlement, a third for the Law Offices of Theodore Dobias, meaning nearly ten million in Dad’s pocket.

I thought that would validate him, make him feel like he was in the big leagues now, the equal or roughly the equal to Mom.

But apparently, he needed more. Now he was Mr. Big-Time, a big-shot lawyer with expensive suits and steak dinners and a Porsche, and he had to have a piece of arm candy on his side, too.

I confronted him, more than once, but Dad didn’t stop. He was in love, he said. And there were things that a young man like me might not be able to appreciate, which was code for, he still wanted to get his rocks off and it was hard with a woman bound to a wheelchair. Yeah, I was eighteen, not eight. I knew what he meant. But there were some other things that a boy like me could appreciate, like committing yourself to someone forever, even through something as tragic as her stroke, ESPECIALLY through something as tragic as her stroke.