I am trying to know both things without using one to cancel out the other.
That’s the work, probably. That’s what it looks like, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in November, to be the person this happened to.
## What He Said at Christmas
I’ve been circling around this. Let me actually say it.
We were at Vanessa’s house, which is where Christmas had migrated once she and Theo had enough space to host it. It was a good Christmas as far as these things go — the food was good, Theo had gotten a new speaker system he was unreasonably proud of, Vanessa’s kids were at the age where they still found the tree legitimately exciting.
At some point in the evening, late, when the kids had gone to bed and the four of us were sitting around with drinks, my father said something. I don’t remember what prompted it. We might have been talking about something practical — about logistics, about who was responsible for what. And he said, in the mild, factual way that was his most dangerous register: “Well, Vanessa’s always been the one I could count on to handle things.”
He wasn’t saying I was unreliable. I don’t think he even thought of it as a comparison. He was saying something he believed to be simply true, which was that Vanessa was the one who handled things, in the sense of being physically present and operationally reliable.
What it did was confirm something I’d felt for years and told myself I was wrong to feel: that the way I’d chosen to be present — from a distance, on the phone, in the late-night conversations — was less real to him than the way Vanessa was present. That the currency of proximity was the one that registered most clearly. That what I’d been doing, all those years, didn’t quite count in the same way.