Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [25]
At the end of my first term at Oxford, my father came to visit. I had not told him I was gay, nor that I was in love with Brian. I had only said I was having a quarter-life crisis, that I didn’t know what I wanted to be. But he heard the grief in my voice.
We met for dinner near his hotel. His eyes flickered over me as he administered his parental CAT scan. Although he said nothing, I could see he was shocked by my thin, unshaven self. He himself was perfectly groomed in his button-down shirt and wool blazer. Over dinner, we tried ordinary conversation, discussing my friends, my studies, and my horror of English food. He laughed too hard at my one attempt at humor: why is the English countryside so beautiful?—they haven’t found a way to boil it yet. Then he asked me up to his room.
He did not begin immediately—the contraption by his bed distracted him. Like Kipling’s mongoose, his motto is Run and find out. He examined it.
“What is this object?”
“That’s a trousers press.”
“They have them in hotels here?”
“Yes.”
“They press trousers?”
“No, Papa, they send faxes.”
“I see.” He grinned. Then, more gently.
“It is not the courses, is it?”
“No.” I was beyond lying—if he had asked the question point-blank, I might have been able to answer it. But I could not volunteer the words. He eased himself onto a high-backed chair and turned to me as I slumped on the luridly damasked comforter. He waited. He has this teacher’s gift, the ability to find the edge of a student’s capacity, and to wait there for him to leap.
I had always been able to leap for him. From the days when he would open his arms to me in the swimming pool to the days when he told me I could go to Exeter, or Harvard, or Oxford, I had trusted him, and leapt. If he could come to America at eighteen and become a professor, then I could do anything in my own country, the language that was my own. But where was I now? I could not sit still to read a paragraph, I could barely force myself to eat. I sat before him stripped of my carapace of accomplishment, the turtle unturtled.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” I finally said. “I can’t do anything. I’ve failed. I have nothing.” Then I paused. Could I say it? I could not. Something dull spoke instead: “I am nothing.”
I felt him before I heard him. It was not his usual brisk embrace, but as if, in the warm parentheses of his arms, he had made me part of him.
He said: “You are my son.”
And I began to sob. Perhaps this is the worst any closet does to us—it prevents us from hearing the words “I love you.” These were words my parents said to me, and I trusted the love, but not the “you.” The real me was hidden, so the “you” they loved was some other, better son. But when my father claimed me—This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine—I began to suspect that no matter what I was, he would be next to me, the silent economist stroking my hair. My sobs dislodged something inside me, and I began to understand love is a narrative permission, that stories can be told within its bounds. But that night, the only sound I made was animal. And still he held me.
Three weeks later, I came home for Christmas. My mother met me at Logan Airport, a hummingbird of love and anxiety. I was still at the slow-moving end of the animal spectrum. She didn’t make me talk. “Don’t think so hard,” she said in Japanese. “Life is not that simple.” I loved her for this. It struck me that many parents would tell their children not to think because life wasn’t that complicated.
The next evening, I spent hours staring out the window of my parents’ apartment on the Charles River. While I saw my own reflection in the glass without flinching, I also noticed how spectral it seemed—I could see through