BELOW THE WATERLINE

My Father only gave me one piece of advice: ‘Never break stride, always look important and don’t ask any stupid questions.’ Actually it sounds like three, but those were my instructions whenever I showed up somewhere uninvited, or felt totally out of place. This was one of those times.

      We never had a man to man, my father and I—it was always a board meeting. I was a shareholder, not a son. I was the carrier of the torch, the heir apparent, the propagator of the Wharton gene pool and whether he liked it or not I was his only hope—his only son and the only chance he had at leaving part of his brilliant, incomparable self to the world.

      I knocked on the door of his office.

      “Come in, Steven,” I heard from the other side. I took a deep breath and entered.

      He was a big man, my Father— distinguished-looking with salt and pepper hair and a thin mustache streaked with gray. He was handsome and charismatic and he knew it. He was speaking into the telephone, half-hidden behind a bank of computer monitors.

      “Shit, Morten, that just won’t do,” he barked into the receiver. “Now you get your ass back to Denver and straighten it out!”

      I took the chair directly across from him. He lowered his glasses and looked at me, covering the phone with his right hand. 

      “You run out of blades?” he asked me.

      I hadn’t shaved or taken the time to wash my face—it was all I could do just to make it across the lawn with the hangover I was nursing.

      “Please, Morten,” he said, back into the receiver. “For once don’t argue with me. Now, I have to go…Rip Van Winkle is here.”

      There was a short pause.

      “Never mind,” he said. “ I’ll talk to you later.” He put the phone down and glared at me.

“It’s two-o’clock in the afternoon, for Christsake. Now I know it’s not every day you graduate from college son, but the party is over. It’s time to get back to work.”

He shuffled a few papers around on his desk and capped his pen.

“So what are your plans?” he asked me.        

      “I don’t know,” I told him. “I thought I might take in a movie.”

      “The Fall, smart-ass…Harvard or Yale?”

      “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

      “You hadn’t really thought about it?” 

      “No,” I said. “I may take some time off …travel a bit.”

      He removed his glasses and leaned back in his chair and I could see that little vein in the side of his head popping out. He hated it when I made my own decisions.

      “Let me get this straight,” he said, trying to stay calm. “You’ve been accepted to two of the finest graduate programs in the country and you’re gonna traipse around Europe with a backpack?”

      “I was thinking maybe a warmer climate.”

      “How long are you going to chase that skirt around?” he asked me.

      “Have a little respect, Father,” I told him.

      “A little respect?” he snapped, slamming his fist down. He stood up and moved out from behind his desk. 

      “Now you listen to me! I worked my ass off to get you into Harvard…your grades were sub-par, your interview for shit. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around and watch you throw your life away.”

      “I’m hardly throwing...”

      “I gave you everything!” he screamed at me, moving closer. “Opportunities any child would dream of, and you sit there smug and defiant.”

      He was leaning over me now and I could feel his hot breath on m