session, at the end of the year, I told her about a dream I’d had the night before: I was sitting on a cliff, looking out over the vast ocean, where my father was sitting at his desk under a cone of light. The desk was like a raft, and the whole work raft was drifting out to sea as he concentrated on the screen.
“He’ll go away,” she said, a sad note in her voice, “and then maybe someday he’ll realize that he did the same thing to you that was done to him.” I was surprised that she could make such a quick summary, and I assumed something so quick and short must be wrong. But later, when I thought about it, it seemed true. I thought of my family as unique, but it must not have been, and I was surprised that it could be so obvious.
This was around the time my father had started working at Apple again. I read about it in the papers, and before I left to study abroad in London during my senior year, the first advertisements of the colorful new iMacs appeared, shrink-wrapped around the buses in Harvard Yard.
Over the next summer, I stayed in Cambridge to work at the Harvard travel-guide company, Let’s Go, as an assistant editor for the Southeast Asia guidebook. Halfway through the summer I received a notice from Harvard in the mail saying that my tuition for the following year hadn’t been paid.
After I moved out on the night of the circus two years before, my father had stopped paying for other expenditures besides tuition—flights to and from college, books, and spending money. I’d been paying for these with money from work and help from Kevin and Dorothy.
The next day, I wound my way down a dark basement corridor for a meeting with a Harvard financial aid officer. The man sat at a desk facing the door. Behind him, in the corner of the room, a ceiling tile was missing and piece of insulation had started to come loose.
I explained that my father had decided not to pay my tuition, even though he could afford to do so.
“You’ll have to drop out until the age of majority,” he said.
“What’s the age of majority?” I asked, hoping it was twenty-one.
“Twenty-five,” he said. I deflated.
In college, I had two jobs, one as an ESL teacher and one in the University Development Office, where the word “development” meant raising money for the college through fundraisers and advertising.
I had assumed the financial aid office would look something like the development office—money in, money out. In fact, this office, and this man, seemed beleaguered, as if to communicate that Harvard didn’t have the money one might think it had. I was furious at this man for his no-nonsense talk; there must be a way to make it work. Surely Harvard would want to help me, to keep me, I thought, when, in fact, it was this man’s job to inform me that it did not.
“Harvard financial aid is need-based,” he said. My father’s status rendered me ineligible for any aid.
“So I just have to drop out? There’s nothing Harvard will do to help me stay?”
“That’s correct,” he said. “Absolutely nothing.”
When he came to Boston for business, Kevin took me for dinner. I liked these dinners because they made college less lonely, and made me feel like other people who sometimes went to dinner with their fathers, even if he wasn’t my father. Sometimes he seemed competitive with my father—”He might have nice cars,” Kevin said, at dinner, “but he doesn’t really know how to drive.” Good driving, as Kevin defined it, involved making the passenger comfortable, unaware of the speed and acceleration of the car. If this was true, my father did not have that skill; his driving was like a wire in my stomach. He fishtailed through curves. Before my father’s success at Pixar and his new job at Apple, Kevin talked about my father’s poor business acumen, how NeXT was doing poorly, worse than other people might know, which you could tell because he had stopped buying things, Kevin said. I listened and nodded. But my father had rarely bought much, compared with other rich people, and none of these attributes made me care about him less, or diminished his importance to me. He could have been the worst executive and the worst driver in the world.
“He doesn’t love you,” Kevin said to me. “Love is what you do.”
“Maybe you’re