Rounding

By Andrew Jacono

He’s young in this picture. Clean-shaven. His chin jutting squarely, smoothly out under his mouth. His lower lip reflects the glare of the camera’s abusive flash, his cheeks are lean and V-shaped, and his nasolabial folds—that doctorly term for smile lines he uses with his surgical colleagues—curve in a perfect, rainbow-like arc toward the edges of his lips. He’s attractive, fitting well into the image of brash masculinity my mother illustrates whenever she recounts their meeting at a Long Island nightclub fifteen years before their divorce—he sidled up to her with a sweeping flourish and asked her to dance to the thumping overhead disco—but his eyes give him the mystical air of some ancient oracle. How blue and self-assured and perceptive they are, at once leering and gazing, how they line parallel to his hesitant porcelain grin. He doesn’t want to be there, at the Christmas party at my grandmother’s house, the home he tried to, and successfully did, escape in his twenties, but obligation has won him over. He’s holding one of the first iterations of the iPhone against him, as if to camouflage it in the black wool of his sweater, but it’s still visible, an escape lasso that he can use to avoid any conversation he doesn’t want to entertain. My younger sister, Arianna, who’s curled in his lap, her hair draped over the nook of his shoulder, feels like an afterthought; he takes up the whole of the picture’s space even though he comprises only a third of it.

I don’t remember him like this. He didn’t grow a beard until he was forty-one, but I imagine him sporting one, grooming it like an obedient pet, for the first fourteen years of my life. I see him staring down at me with those bristles, imagine the spit and swears and chortles spraying from a chapped mouth surrounded by partly-black, then half-black, then mostly-gray stalks. I see him with his newly-sunken eye sockets, that hollow, freckled, purple streak underlining his left eye and stretching to the dent in his nose that I accidently elbowed into him in a pool in the Bahamas when I was eleven and that he never fixed. I see his body rounder—his gut, his thighs, his calves with their branching spider veins—and find it difficult to believe that I used to find him so tall, muscular, and domineering.

But I usually see the rest of him as angular. His attitude and wit have always been as sharp as his ability to berate anyone he deems deserving—take the time when he, my sister, my younger brother Gavin, and I were at Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway and he called the mother in the family sitting behind us a raging bitch for intentionally crushing a candy wrapper in our ears as we noisily munched on our own Kit Kats—so I imagine my currently flabby, graying father treating others with youthful aggression despite the fact that, in the last five years, he’s become more jaded, exhausted, and indifferent than I’ve ever seen him, babbling about the doomed state of American politics, falling asleep on the couch at every juncture of post-work relaxation, and shying away from any conflict that might cost him time he could otherwise spend enjoying Michelin-starred restaurant food and sipping the finest Bordeaux and Super-Tuscans his favorite local wine shop can source.

Until six years ago, I could only remember seeing him cry twice. The first time was thirteen years ago, the day after he and my mother announced their separation. He brought me, Arianna, and Gavin to an IHOP fifteen minutes away from home, and the whole meal, if it could even be called that, we sobbed for the collective demise of our family. The second time was four years later, when he gave what would become the first of his annual Thanksgiving speeches. He stood at the head of the dinner table, glass of white wine raised high, and addressed why he was thankful for everyone present—each of us kids, and then his girlfriend of two years, Jesse, who, he quavered, made him “believe in love again.” His appearance had changed significantly between these two events—he’d lost twenty-five pounds, let his hair run into long, poufy curls, and grew out a neatly-trimmed beard—but the way he cried remained the same; so still was his face that, if you were to look anywhere but his eyes, you wouldn’t be able to discern any emotion, but look just above the crooked bridge of his nose and you’d see a pair of hooded peepers and eyebrows trembling so fitfully they might leap from his face and scuttle away.

Since then, his feelings have become somewhat more apparent. He gets misty-eyed during sad movies, especially ones that deal with family, and choked up during milestone events in our lives. During Thanksgiving this year, he burst into tears as he spoke about how much he missed Arianna, who attends college in Wisconsin, and with whom he can’t spend as much time as he did me with me, who studied at a Connecticut university just two hours from Manhattan. This outburst felt characteristic of an older and more reflective man who, at his core, only wants to be close to his children, for whom, owing to his demanding work schedule, he’s always had to fight to pass meaningful time with. His feelings, then, haven’t been so much more extreme as more visible. He’s aware that he’s getting older and weaker, and that his children are growing, loosening their dependent holds on him. My own reaction to this revelation has erred toward the surprised, having never seriously considered that, in my early twenties, I’d witness my father age, and that, with this aging, I’d come to recognize the rounding of his emotional edges in almost perfect tandem with the rounding of his physical ones.

A lot can be said about his upbringing, though little of it good. I didn’t know many of its disturbing details until I interviewed him for a creative piece I wrote about his life during my sophomore year of college. He was born into a poverty-stricken Ronkonkoma family in 1970. His father was an abusive telephone lineman whose kidney disease medication caused serious bouts of steroid psychosis, and his mother was a hyper-faithful born-again Christian who, rather than provide him medicine when he was sick, babbled over him in incomprehensible tongues. He got into his share of trouble growing up—started drinking at twelve, having sex at thirteen, and engaging in dangerous stunts, like setting fire to gasoline and riding his bike through the flames à la Evel Knievel—but vowed to rise above his lot by becoming a doctor. After years of tireless study and graduating salutatorian of his college class, he not only did just that, but became one of the preeminent facial plastic and reconstructive surgeons in the world.

To say this has all influenced his behavior would be an understatement. As he had to make enough money to prevent his wife and children from falling into the traps of suffering and destitution he once endured, he performed countless rhinoplasties and facelifts from four o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night, sacrificing, until my mother filed for divorce, hours and days and weeks of time he could have otherwise spent with his family. I don’t have many memories of him before the age of nine, save a few negative ones in which he either bent me over and spanked my bare ass or, upon returning home from his office, trudged upstairs, a pale, self-flagellating ghoul, and locked himself in his bedroom to type out business reports.

The difference between the him of over a decade ago and the him of now doesn’t lie in his working less—in fact, he works more—but in his taking advantage of weekends to say and do everything that needs to be said and done: movies, Broadway musicals, family dinners, shopping sprees, and on holidays, day-long festivities ending in meals prepared by the whole family. He works as hard at making up for lost time as he does on faces in the operating room, and always to excess, spending thousands of dollars on gifts and intercontinental travel with me, my siblings, and his fiancée in hopes of satisfying desires we aren’t even aware of having. The same goes for his mother and sister, for whom he regularly wires money for mortgages, credit card debt, and all sorts of life expenses, from the purchase of groceries to the repair of my grandmother’s constantly caving roof.

The drawbacks of such an excessive lifestyle have always lain in its intentions; if he can just purchase things as proof of his love, he won’t have to endure the difficulties of showing it in more overt ways. But for this, I don’t blame him. It’s not like he grew up with healthy examples of what love and affection comprise. Still, I’ve always wished he could understand that those who surround him don’t need such resplendent demonstrations to understand that he holds a deep fondness for them.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking truth is that he’s self-aware. In a few recent, rambling nighttime drives through Manhattan, he’s admitted to having an inconsolable fear of poverty, of intimacy, and of being alone. But other than a stint with a therapist during the brutal three-year-long divorce proceedings, I don’t think he’s done much to address these issues. And I fear that he’ll never try again.

In the last year, Arianna has vocalized a creeping unease of hers: that he’s not happy, and that he never will be, even though he constantly gloats about having everything he could ever want and being surrounded by people who cherish him. Like any child who’s reluctant to acknowledge the discontent of their own parent, I doubted her at first, affirmed that he was obviously happy, because how could someone with as much as him not be? But the more I’ve considered, the more unsure I’ve become. He may claim to be perfectly satisfied that he’s reached a point in his career where he can afford to outright buy a seven-million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side, but is that all his life amounts to? Perhaps I’m worried because he’s lacked so much in areas that I couldn’t imagine lacking in myself. Call me solipsistic for projecting onto him what I’m terrified of being deficient in, but isn’t basic emotional literacy a universal human need? Why has it taken him forty-nine years of living, and twenty-two years of parenting, to more dependably show that he’s capable of achieving profound feeling?

One of my fondest memories of him took place six years ago. After reading Michael Crichton’s Travels, which featured a chapter on the author’s ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro, I had the powerful urge to attempt the same. I asked my father if he’d like to accompany me. No sooner had he said yes than he shelled out a few thousand dollars on plane tickets and climbing gear. Following a few months of training—going on long runs together, walking for hours with heavy packs, and lifting weights side-by-side at the gym—we flew to Tanzania. The climb lasted seven days and was consistently cruel, seven- and eight-hour periods of lumbering punctuated by only a few hours of fitful sleep come night, and my father and I quickly realized how in-over-our-heads we were, gasping for air and taking breaks every few minutes until our bodies filled so completely with pain that we stopped noticing it.

On the fifth day, we woke at midnight after three hours of difficult high-altitude rest and dressed in layers of sweaters and fleeces and coats to combat the far-below-freezing temperatures we would encounter as we rose. Our headlights boring through the mountainous darkness, we began our precipitous seven-hour slog that would have us stumbling and falling and crying out to God for mercy. But there was something comforting about being there with him, seeing those layers of grizzled indifference and stubborn toughness peel away to leave behind a grunting, gasping middle-aged man who, despite his money and vain efforts to convince himself otherwise, was mortal.

By the time we reached the top, so spent that we all but crawled the final few meters, the day had just broken. The sun crept pink and orange like a heavenly specter over the horizon, and far below swirled thousands of clouds that covered the African savannahs like the fabric of a massive safety blanket. I stepped to the edge of the summit plateau for a better view of the blue, sparkling glaciers shielding the mountain’s flanks, and a few moments later my father swiveled me around, pulled me into a tremulous hug, and began to sob. He told me that he loved me. That I could do anything. Weeping with him, I didn’t have to say anything for him to know that I loved him, too. That I always would.

While it would be easy to say that this is my favorite of our moments together because of its almost symbolic clarity—a father and son duo climbing a mountain, the former imparting on the latter a pearl of well-meaning wisdom about life, success, and a fulfilling future—it’s more likely that I hold it so close because it’s the only time he’s ever put on display his inner world in such a raw, unfiltered way. I’d never before seen him cry like that, his body curling under the weight of his sobs and his breaths breaking into moans that rocked my shoulders. This tells me that he’s capable of visceral feeling, and likely explains why, since then, I’ve convinced him to accompany me on six other alpine excursions, during which I actively hope for instances where we can be so close that the sweaty skin of our faces makes a peeling sound as we pull away from one another.

But no other journey has recaptured the magic of that first summit breach. He hasn’t cried at the top of another mountain, and neither have I; he’s gotten better at concealing the physical agonies of each ascent, and so have I. Sadistic to say, but I hope that someday I’ll see him break down again—maybe if we climb Mount Everest, which we’ve discussed in passing for the last five years. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s filled in the crack on the spiritual dam that let slip that rare reaction. Maybe I should just be grateful that it happened. That I can reflect on that moment, however brief, for the rest of my life.

I’ve come to look almost identical to him when he was younger. I have the same bony facial structure, the same tight, muscular frame, the same chiclet-like teeth he had before he fitted them with veneers. We’re the same height—five-foot-eight, five-foot-nine on a good day—and about the same weight. Like him at twenty-two, I can only grow a soul patch, but I can expect, by twenty-seven, to sport what I might consider a full beard. We have the same raunchy sense of humor, the same mumbling tone of voice, and the same half-shuffling gait with its loose side-to-side wobble. It’s no wonder people sometimes confuse me for him, and that he jokes I’m a product of his mitosis.

But our personalities might as well be literary foils. Whereas I’m forgiving and indecisive, he’s vindictive and self-assured; whereas I’m impulsive and scatterbrained, he’s steadfast and methodical; whereas I’m optimistic and bleedingly empathetic, he’s fatalistic and ambivalent, unperturbed by grand gestures of immorality, so convinced he is that the world is as dark and evil a place as Tolkien’s Mordor. But most importantly, whereas I find it intuitive to communicate feeling, sometimes spouting the minutiae of my anxieties to people I’ve just met, he’s so concerned with guarding his vulnerabilities as to appear as though he has none. As though every pointed critique of his surgical results doesn’t bother him, as though every word of acidic vitriol my short-tempered pubescent brother launches at him doesn’t wound his pride, as though every moment he’s alone doesn’t make him fear that he will be forever.

Sometimes, I wish that I didn’t so visibly resemble him. That way, his friends and colleagues wouldn’t repeatedly ask if I’m planning to follow in his medical footsteps or expect me to respond to their racist and homophobic remarks with as many careless guffaws as he’d surely belt out. And that way, however much it pains me to admit, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about becoming like him. Not that existing as him would be unbearable. But it’s taken me years to realize that it’s okay to be emotionally round. And to accept that it’s what I should have been taught much earlier in my life.

The more I stare at that old picture, the more I think about how he’ll continue to change. Maybe next, his jowls will droop, and then the tip of his nose will sag, and then every hair on his body will, if they don’t fall out first, grow stiff and thin and white. Maybe his beefy arms will continue to loosen up and fatten, or his face will accumulate extra chins, or his gut will protrude a few inches further out over his belt. I wonder what he’ll look like at sixty, seventy, eighty years old. If his emotions will match the roundness his body might accumulate.

But I suppose that, for now, I can only hope I won’t let him keep rounding alone.

END

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