His lips parted, he sighed and tilted his head to one side; then he straightened up again, took off his wire-rimmed glasses, held them delicately in one hand, and with his other, covered his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “Marcè,” he said. And then he turned and walked off, shortsighted, to wrap things up with some promoters, and when he reached them, he put his glasses back on and was smiling once more.

My father’s negative reactions come in three types.

The first is simple: he’ll raise his voice, saying something like, “Oh, sure,” then stop participating in the conversation.

The second is stronger: when something awful happens to his children, he stops speaking to us. When my fiancée left me, he didn’t speak to me for three months. Then, just like that, we were talking again, and he gave me some good advice about getting over her, but he didn’t apologize for disappearing. At home, we knew he was “so gentle he couldn’t bear to see us suffer,” but when he was ready, he’d come around and be available to us. He advised me not to attempt to get back together with that woman—she’d just leave me again.

The third type is the most subtle, and the most difficult to try to get down in writing: he becomes invisible.

Like when I resigned. He didn’t stop talking to me. But he didn’t talk to me.

He avoided me the entire time I was out of work. I’d go see my nephews fairly often, and he’d say hello from his easy chair, smile timidly, but avoid my eyes. I know he must have been ashamed that he couldn’t seem to speak with me. I felt I’d done the natural thing, in a city and time when being unemployed or underemployed was becoming the norm, especially in those social classes where, between the scarcity and difficulty of work and then the abundance of one’s family resources, the pursuit of a career had become an increasingly precarious notion. For my father, who reached adulthood in the sixties, this was blasphemy, though maybe, in his way, he did realize that the two of us were condemned to different moral paradigms.

(I remember one summer, during one of those times he wasn’t speaking to me—that must have been ten years ago—I was shut up in a public library working on some galleys, and I left for lunch, it was July, and I caught sight of him, maybe twenty meters away. He was in the middle of the street, standing on the traffic island, talking with two guys my age. All three of them were wearing jackets and ties, my father in a beige suit. It was ninety-five degrees out, and I had on sweats, a white T-shirt, and sunglasses. I didn’t know he went to that neighborhood. He’d left a restaurant with those two kids, who were talking to him like they were friends and constantly touching his arm.)