Beautiful Boy (10 page)

She began her interviews with two- to seventeen-year-olds whose parents had divorced in the early 1970s. She found that the children were having a difficult time coping with the breakups, but she assumed that the strains would be short-lived. She met these children for a second interview more than a year later. Not only had they not recovered, but they were doing worse.

Wallerstein followed the children every few years for the next twenty-five years. In her series of books, she reports her findings—that more than one-third of these kids experienced moderate to severe depression and a significant number were troubled and underachieving. Many struggled to establish and maintain relationships.

No one wanted to hear the message, and the messenger was attacked. Feminists said that Wallerstein was part of the backlash against women, in effect telling them to go back home, stay married, and take care of their children. Her work was appropriated by various special interest groups, including the conservative new right, who used it to "prove" their arguments about traditional family values—and to attack single parents and nontraditional families. Men's rights groups praised her for emphasizing the importance of fathers in children's lives and attacked her when she said that some forms of joint custody seemed to be harming children. But her work reverberated throughout the country, influencing courts, legislatures, therapists, and parents. Her books were bestsellers, and they are still used as a bible by many judges and therapists. Some judges assign Wallerstein's books to divorcing parents.

I meet Dr. Wallerstein at her wood-shingle house in Belvedere, overlooking the bay and Sam's Grill on the Tiburon waterfront. She is diminutive with silver hair, gentle crystal-blue eyes, precisely dressed. When I ask her about joint custody, particularly long-distance joint custody like Nic's, she tells me that she has observed young boys and girls who, upon returning from one home to the
other, wander from object to object—table to bed to sofa—touching them to affirm that they are still there. The absent parent may well seem even more elusive than the furniture. As children grow older, though they no longer require tactile proof, they may incorporate a sense that both of their homes are illusory and impermanent. Also, while young children may suffer when joint custody keeps them apart from a parent for too long, frequent transitions, especially when parents live far apart, may harm older ones. Dr. Wallerstein explains, "Going back and forth made it impossible for children to enjoy activities with other children ... Teenagers complained bitterly about having to spend their summers with parents instead of with friends." She concludes: "You'd like to think that these kids could simply integrate their lives between their two homes, have two sets of peers, and easily adjust to being with each parent, but most children do not have the flexibility. They begin to feel as if it's a flaw in their character when it is simply impossible for many people to conduct parallel lives."

For many families, summer vacation is a respite from the stresses of the school year, devoted to time together. I just want to get through it as fast as possible. Nic and I speak regularly on the telephone. He tells me about the movies he sees, the ball games he plays, a bully on a playground, a new friend, the books he reads. It is quieter when he is in LA, but even the fun of the new baby is tempered by a low-grade melancholia. We never get used to him being gone.

We make the best of the times we have with him. He comes up for two weeks and we cram in as much surfing, swimming, kayaking, and other fun as possible. We go to San Francisco to hang out with our friends. In the evenings, Nic plays with the little kids or we talk. His reenactments of movies have long been regular evening entertainment. Nic's impressions are precise. De Niro: "You talkin' to me?" Not only the line, but the entire
Taxi Driver
scene. And Tom Cruise—"Show me the money"—and Mr. T—"I pity da fool..." He does Jack Nicholson in
The Shining,
"He-e-e-e-re's Johnny," and, impeccably, Dustin Hoffman's
Rain Man.
And Schwarzenegger: "Hasta la vista, baby"; "Chill out, dickwad"; "I'll be back"; "Come with me if you want to live." Possibly his best is
Clint Eastwood: "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

We also visit Nic in Los Angeles on our predetermined weekends, picking him up and driving north to Santa Barbara or south to San Diego. Once we rent bicycles on Coronado Island and, on an orange full-moon night, walk the broad beach, where we are startled by the spectacle of tens of thousands of shimmering grunion, brought onto the sand by a wave and left behind for their transfixing mating ritual. The female fish wriggle into the sand, depositing their eggs. The males wrap their eellike bodies around them, fertilizing them. Within a half-hour, the rising waves sweep the fish back into the sea. It seems as if they have never been there, as if we'd imagined them.

After these weekends, we drop him back at his mother and stepfather's house in Pacific Palisades, hug him, and he vanishes.

Summer is over. Finally. Karen, Daisy, Jasper, and I go to the airport. We wait at the gate for the joint-custody shuttle to arrive. A long line of commuters and families pass by and then, trailing them, come the unaccompanied minors, wearing pink paper badges with their names written in Magic Marker. The littler children also have pilot's wings pinned to the lapels of their jackets. And there is Nic. He has a short haircut and a new light-blue button-down cardigan that he wears open over a T-shirt. We take turns hugging. "Everything." Then we claim his suitcase filled with his summer things.

As we drive home to Inverness, Nic tells us about his seatmate on this flight. "So she pulls out these red earmuff-style headphones," he says of a woman who had zeroed in on him when she realized he was alone. "And she flips on a Walkman and starts rocking and moving her head, her eyes closed, mouthing the lyrics, singing them in this warbling voice: 'Ooooo, baby. I lo-v-v-v-e you my rock and my redeemer ... Ooooo, baby, it's you, my Lord, you send me, it's you-u-u who sends me.' "

Nic surveys his audience—us. "When she gets to the place on the tape she's looking for, she pulls off the headphones and puts them on me," he says. " 'Listen,' she says to me. 'You gotta hear this.' She just puts them on me and cranks up the volume all the
way. Doesn't ask if I want to hear or anything. The song goes: 'I rock to Jesus. Whoa-o-o. Jesus rocks me. Yeah. Jesus—you blow my mind.' Practically blows my head off it's so loud, but I'm smiling pleasantly and I take off the headphones and hand them to her and tell her what a good song it is, and she says, now sort of steely, 'No, the next one is best,' and she jams them back on me and now I'm listening to a ... it's a rap song: 'Oh the devil wants to tempt me, yo, and I ain't gonna listen, no...' and I'm still smiling and nodding and finally I take off the headphones and hand them back to her. She says, 'The tape's for you, son,' and she takes it out of the player. 'No, thank you, it's very kind of you,' but her eyes are scary now, so I say, 'Well, if you're sure you can spare it, I'd love the tape, thank you.' "

Nic produces the tape from his pants pocket. "Wanna listen?"

We play it as we drive on. Nic holds Jasper's hands in his, moving them to the beat and singing along with the "woo woo" chorus.

The noise level at our house has escalated. What with three children and Nic's assorted friends and numerous amplified and percussion instruments and the two dogs, our house is a cacophony of singing, wailing, barking, laughing, yelping, Raffi, pounding, screeching, Axl Rose, thumping, crashing, and howling. My agent one day is speaking to a friend of mine. She says, "I don't know if he lives in a daycare center or a dog kennel."

We need a new car. With our horde of beasts and children, the obvious way to go is a minivan. We visit car dealers and test drive some. I compare minivans, examining their safety features. We are not fooled by the Honda Odyssey ads about it being a minivan for people who hate minivans, but we buy one. As a feeble gasp of dissent, we add surf racks on top.

There are far more beautiful and less trampled beaches along this coastline than Bolinas, which throughout summer is overrun by dogs and teenagers. However, on the day before Nic's freshman orientation, we take to the beach on a dazzlingly bright afternoon. Karen, Jasper, and Daisy are on the sand, where Jasper ties Daisy up in seaweed, and together the little kids stack shells and eat sand and roll in the waves at the edge of the lagoon. Brutus and Moon
dog run amok with a motley pack of local dogs. Brutus at one point steals a picnicker's baguette.

Nic and I paddle out into the lineup of surfers, where we sit up on our surfboards. Waiting for a set of waves, Nic tells me more about his summer of baseball and movies, plus an update about the bully who taunted him at a local park and then chased him home on his bike. When we begin discussing the following day's freshman orientation, he admits that he is nervous about high school, but says he is excited, too.

The best set of the day comes rolling in and we catch one more wave apiece and ride in to the beach, where Nic joins Jasper in building a sand-and-driftwood Hobbit Shire decorated with kelp and seashells.

As they work, Jasper asks Nic, "What's LA like?"

"It's a big city, but I stay in a nice town on the edge," he says. "There are parks and beaches. It's kind of like here, but no you. I miss you when I'm there."

"I miss you, too," says Jasper, and then he asks, "Why doesn't your mom move here and we can all live in the same house and you would never have to go away?"

"Nice idea," Nic says, "but somehow I can't see it."

On the way home from Bolinas, we talk more about the ceaseless back and forth between here and LA. Nic complains about it. Though he would never want to choose between his parents, neither would he choose joint custody. This is my conclusion about it: yes, it has contributed to his character. He is a remarkable child, more responsible, sensitive, worldly, introspective, and sagacious than he might have been otherwise. But the toll has been such that, given the geographic and emotional chasms that came with our divorce—that probably come with almost every divorce—at the least Nic should not have been forced to do the traveling. We should have. Though the visits would be far more inconvenient, I am convinced that Nic's childhood would be easier for him. Instead, he is left with a meager consolation prize for all his commuting between parents: he has more frequent-flier miles than most adults.

Is high school better?" a girl asks her older brother in I Todd Solondz's
Welcome to the Dollhouse.

"Well," he answers, "they call you names but not as much to your face."

I hated high school, a Darwinian laboratory of cliques and random acts of cruelty and violence. My grades were unaccountably decent and I didn't get into any trouble, but other than one writing course, school was a waste of time. I learned nothing, and no one noticed. But Nic's high school has more in common with a small liberal arts college. It has vibrant programs in the arts, science, mathematics, English, foreign language, journalism, and so on, as well as courses in justice in America, Langston Hughes, and religion and politics, all taught by devoted teachers. The tuition is expensive. Vicki and I strain to pay it. We rationalize that nothing is more important than our child's education. Even so, I sometimes wonder how much it will matter. Kids in my hometown went to private schools. From the stories that have filtered back, they didn't fare any better or worse than those of us at my public school. Maybe we delude ourselves that we can purchase a better, at least easier, life for our children.

Nic's school is located on the 115-year-old campus of a former military academy. The classrooms are open and airy. There is an outdoor pool and green playing fields and impressive science labs, art studios, and a theater. Within the first month, Nic is playing on
the freshman basketball team and has gotten a role in a play. We meet Nic's new friends on campus and at a Friday evening get-together at our house. They seem like good kids, busy with student council, local politics, sports, painting, acting, writing plays, and performing jazz and classical music. Nic adores his teachers. It is an auspicious beginning.

Nic continues to devour movies, an obsession ever since he could push play on a VCR. As a young child, he once asked me if FBI meant Disney, because he associated the stern antipiracy warnings at the start of home videos with the promise of adventure, romance, drama, and comedy. Along with
Pink Panther, Thin Man,
and Monty Python movies, he is now obsessed, thanks to Karen, with Godard, Bergman, and Kurosawa.

After school and before movies, and between sports and plays and hanging out with his friends, Nic makes time for Daisy and Jasper. Daisy was just getting the hang of English but for some reason switched to animal languages—she oinks, brays, and meows. She and Jasper, whom we call Boppy after Hale-Bopp, the comet that is buzzing around Earth—a mop of brown hair over serene, wise eyes—are enamored of their big brother, and Nic seems to adore them back.

The school year sails along smoothly. Nic does his homework swiftly and conscientiously. Karen quizzes him on the week's French vocabulary. I help him proofread his writing assignments. The notes from Nic's teachers in his report cards are glowing.

Then, on an afternoon in May, Nic, Jasper, and Daisy are in the yard with Karen. The telephone rings. It is the freshman dean, who tells me that Karen and I have to come in for a meeting to discuss Nic's suspension for buying marijuana on campus.

"His
what?
"

"You mean you don't know?"

Nic had not told us.

Even after discovering the marijuana two years ago, I am stunned. "I'm sorry, but this must be some sort of a mistake."

It's no mistake.

My rationalizing begins immediately. He is experimenting
again, I think, and many kids experiment. I tell myself that Nic isn't a typical druggie, not like the boys who hang out on the main street of town, unsupervised, cigarette-smoking, aimless, or the teenage son of an acquaintance back east who, high on heroin, was in a car wreck. I recently heard about a girl Nic's age who is in a psychiatric hospital after she slit her wrists. She was on heroin, too. Nic is not like those children. Nic is open and loving and diligent.