"You made breakfast." "You always do that in these situations?" "Actually this doesn't happen that often." " You seem happy." " Are you fishing?" "Don't analyze me, Paul." "Yeah, you're right." "I'm happy." "Me too." "I thought I'd feel guilty." "But you don't?" "It's strange." "I haven't been with or even looked at another man for 15 years." "But we..." "I don't know, it just completely seemed comfortable." "Comfortable?" "Like an old shoe." "Like a perfect fit." "Like a parallel universe." "I even thought that if Marc found out, he'd understand." " Do you think he would?" " Nope." "No." "I know he wouldn't." "It would be nice if he would, but no." "But this isn't about him." "This is about before him." "You mean you think I should be grandfathered in?" "Excuse me." "It's my daughter." "I should get dressed." "I have a train to catch." "Hello?" "Hi, Rosie." "No, it's not a bad time." "Can you hold on for a second?" "Do you have to go now?" "I thought we might take the train down together." "No, I mean..." "What if somebody sees us on the train together?" "No, I didn't give uncle Patrick my Brooklyn number because..." "You're right, you're right." "I should have." "No, I haven't seen grandpa this month, Rosie." "Look, if it were a real emergency, the nursing home would contact me." "Because I'm the emergency contact, that's why, Rosie." "I know you love your grandfather." "And..." "She hung up." "Subtitles:" "I'm sorry, I've gotta run." "Marc is in the car." "Are you all right?" "Did something happen?" "No, I'm fine." "Are you okay?" " I'm all right." " How's your dad?" "He's great." "So I'll call you later on then." "I gotta go." "Yes, come in." "It's good to see you." "Are you okay?" "That's just what Tammy asked me." "Do I seem..." " You seem nervous, yes." " I'm not." "My father's sick." "Okay, that's not true." "He's past sick." "He's got late-stage Parkinson's." " I'm so sorry." " That's so easy to say, isn't it?" "It may be easy to say, it's very hard to hear." "Forget it." "Thank you." "I'm sorry I snapped." " When was the last time you saw him?" " Does it matter when I saw him?" "I try to talk to him, but he's..." "He's not there." "Or maybe he is and he's just choosing to..." "To hide." "Remind me again where he lives." "He's been in the same nursing home for the last 2 years." "It's called Valley Haven, but it's not in a valley and it's not a haven." "It's filled with dead men walking" " and pissed off nurses." " Is he in pain?" "He's in pain, I'm in pain, the whole fucking world's in pain." "Lucky for him I'm there to pay the bill." "Long as I do, he gets to take his nap twice a day." "How did we get on to this?" "Jesus." "Are you surprised to find yourself talking about what a burden he is?" "You know what I think?" "I think he mishandled his finances deliberately so that I'd have to take care of him." " He threw himself at my mercy." " He's been sick for a long time." "Why is he at the front of your mind today?" "I don't know." "I talked to my brother Patrick." "He said my father seemed a little bit..." "off somehow." "Like Patrick would know what that was." "Your brother's visited him?" "He goes over there and he eats his dinner, according to the nurses." "Can't you tell them not to let him in at mealtimes?" "I don't really care who eats his dinner." "I just..." "What were you going to say?" "I was going to say I'm just waiting for the man to die." "You asked." "It's very hard to have someone sick and dependent on you." "It drains all your reservoirs." "It makes you very very tired." "I mean, it's not like he was this great father who got Parkinson's and disappeared." "He was never present in my life." "Somebody could always eat his dinner for all he cared." "He ate at the hospital, he said." "My mother stopped setting a place for him at the table when I was six years old." "Did she stop doing other things for him?" "I'm sure there were, but the man wasn't there." "You keep calling him "the man."" " Does that have any meaning for you?" " What, like..." "Like he was supposed to be "the man" of the house only I had to do that job for him?" "Is that what it means?" "I asked Tammy about him." "You know what she said?" "You spoke to Tammy about your father?" "She said that the first time that she saw him, she thought he looked just like "the man" was supposed to look." " So "the man" came from Tammy?" " Her father died that year." "I don't know, maybe she was fantasizing about my father." "Actually, I'm sure she was." "She wanted to live in my apartment and I wanted to live in hers." "Anyway, Tammy and I, we..." "We went out for coffee and I did what we talked about last week." "I asked her what she remembered about that Christmas Eve, the night that my mother tried to..." "Tried to kill herself." "Anyway, it turns out that Tammy remembers, but in a really crazy way." "A lot of it was what I remembered, that my mother was at home, she was asleep," "I was at Tammy's, we ate the cookies, we were singing." "And then Tammy and I went... to her room to talk, but after a few minutes I jumped off the bed and ran down the hall to check on my mother." "That was where your memory went blank." "What about hers?" "She says that I came right back and that I was really upset." "That my mother was sick and my father was with her, waiting for an ambulance." "By the time Tammy and I went back, my father had already gone to the hospital with my mother, so Tammy's mother brought us to the hospital." "So, that night it turns out your father was actually with her." "That night he actually was the man." "I guess." " You don't believe Tammy's version?" " No, I believe it." "Why would Tammy lie?" "It just doesn't add up." "Right, because if your father had already left home, how could he know that your mother was going to commit suicide?" "But... that was also kinda strange." "Tammy said that he was always calling her mother to check on us." "Well, of course he was." "It must have been a fucking lot easier than coming over and seeing for himself." "Okay, but he did come over that night." "So, yeah, he called the ambulance, so what?" "He happened to drop in one night when..." "Maybe he came over to see his boys and his wife because it was Christmas eve." "What difference does it make if he was there one fucking night?" "What about all the other nights?" "The nights when he was off with his girlfriend, when I was at home, guarding my mother?" "All those other nights, where was your brother?" "He's older than you." "Yeah, he played..." "He played sports." " What kind of sports?" " Baseball." " Did you ever see him play?" " No, I didn't." "Can you see me trying to drag this lonely, crying woman out to a ballpark?" "So your father was at work, your brother was at sports and you were on duty." "After my father left, Patrick didn't even... sleep at home very much." " Where did he go?" " I don't know." "Friends, I supposed." " Do you remember any of their names?" " Where are you going with this?" "I'm wondering if your brother was actually home." "Could you have air-brushed him out too?" "You think that they were both there under the tree wrapping gifts?" "Our memories can be very unreliable." "We like to think of them as indelible records of our past, but every time we pull out a scene, we fiddle with it a little bit before we put it back in." "If we hate our husband now, we re-remember the wedding as less joyous, or we say, "He was never the right one for me anyway."" "We're constantly altering our memories so the past won't conflict with the present." "My memory is fucked." "So what was my childhood really like, Gina?" "No, please," "I'm not questioning your feelings about your childhood." "They're absolutely accurate." "I'm just wondering on this, you know, particular night that maybe some of the facts aren't what you think they are." "Gina, I'm familiar with the whole notion of a screen memory, yeah." "Okay, of course you are." "So then, you know your Christmas eve memory tells us about that whole period of your childhood, not just one night." "You were overwhelmed." "You felt that you were the only one who knew how much trouble she was in." "My father knew, he just didn't give a shit." "Are you sure about that?" "If he cared, he would have put her in an institution." "He'd have gotten her help, which he finally had to do but not before I spent every day of high school having no idea of what I was going to face when I came home." "Would all the knives be sticking out of the wall, the bathtub be overflowing?" "Would she have an electrical cord around her neck?" "Or would she suddenly decide to take it upon herself to clean and paint the hall closets?" "Why do you think he didn't institutionalize her sooner?" "I don't know, maybe he needed somebody to take care of the kids." "Or maybe he didn't want to take your mom away from you." "Or you away from her." "How about he and my brother ignored her, until she finally had to try to kill herself to get them to come home?" "You know, Paul, one of the... confusing things about emotional injury in families is that it can feel so unfair, it can feel so random." "It's like an automobile accident:" "everybody's in the car, but you're the only one who went through the windshield." "Well, actually it was my mother who went through the windshield." "And you tried to grab her, but, Paul..." "Could you look at me?" "You were in the backseat." "All you could do was watch." "And my brother walks away without a scratch." " I don't know what he suffered." " My father was in the driver's seat, struggling to keep our little family from crashing." "Is that what you're saying?" "Yes, I suppose that's what he thought he was doing." "Is that what you're trying to do now with your family?" "You know, coming down to see the kids every weekend, calling them every day?" "He was nothing like me and I am nothing like him." "Paul, you're working very hard to keep from taking in any good information about him." "Tell me why the hell I would do that?" "I mean, if he was half-decent, I would like to know it." "He never did one fucking thing to help." "But Tammy just told you a good thing he did:" "checking up on you from down the hall." "What does Tammy know?" "He was probably flirting with her anyway." "Your dad was flirting with Tammy?" "He's a fucking doctor." "They're all flirts." "The whole time I was growing up, he was always..." " He was always what?" " You know..." "Well, it's just a memory of mine, excuse me, so it can't be trusted." "Are you afraid to say it?" "He was always..." " With other women." " How do you know this?" "Okay, I'll tell you how I know." "I was 10 years old." "My mother was yelling at him because he was... screwing this nurse and she wanted him to look at the effect that it was having on me so she pushed me at him, hard, and I hit a table and I split my forehead wide open: he sewed me up." "So you're right." "He wasn't completely useless." "Are you happy now?" "These fights about other women, they went on for a long time." "Oh, early and often." "I thought that the fights began after your father left her." "It seems that they were having trouble before he left her, before she got sick." "Maybe his fucking around made her sick." " His fucking around made her sick?" " That's what I said." "Christ!" "You know what?" "No wonder my patients complain about this." "Would you stop repeating what I'm saying?" "Just say something else." "I know it's irritating, but I just want to make sure that I understand." " Fine." " So you believe that your father's infidelity caused... drove my mother crazy, yes." "When your mother was finally admitted, wasn't she diagnosed with bipolar disorder?" "In your experience, can bipolar disorder be caused by the infidelity of a spouse?" "No, Gina, bipolar disorder is not caused by events in a patient's life." "Events can make you feel bipolar." "No, I know that much." "That's how I felt last year when Kate was... with her lover." "But no, infidelity can't make you bipolar." "You either are bipolar or you're not." "But... if your wife... was bipolar, it... could make you want to have an affair." "Yeah, it could." "Especially if you were a doctor and your wife's mental illness made you feel inadequate, helpless, incapable of helping the person that you were closest to." "And since he couldn't heal her, he left her for another woman." "And he left her with me." "Do you think I'm a therapist today because I feel guilty about my inability to heal my mother?" "No, I don't." "Good." "I think you felt your mother's illness deeply." "And I think even as a child, you had an empathic response to suffering." "But you were too young and so you went to school." "You worked, you studied, you thought." "And now when people come to you, you can help them." "But you're not a therapist because you think you failed your mother." "You were a boy, Paul." "You were in the backseat." "You tried to grab her, but she was already gone." "So I have this patient Oliver." "He's a kid who's trying to survive his parents' divorce." "And it's taking everything I have not to invite him to come live with me." "I know what he needs and I want to give it to him." "It's the same with April and her cancer." "I just want to stop them all going through the windshield." "Does Oliver remind you of you?" "Yeah, neither of us..." "Neither of us knows how to be around our fathers." "I mean, I have an idea, but it's the same idea I've had since I was Oliver's age." "I think of my father and he's still screwing his girlfriend and I'm still scared to death that my mother's going to die." "Only she's already dead." "And he's almost dead." "And I'm about to become the orphan I've always felt" "I was for 40 years." "I know you're going to do well by Oliver." "There's always hope." "Maybe the boy that you really wanna be good to is yourself." "Take me out to a ballgame." "Something like that." "Maybe what I ought to do first is..." "Be a good son to my father." " What would that entail?" " I Don't know, just go see the man." "See how off he really is, maybe." "Read him the sports page." "Why haven't you been to see him this time?" "Because I'm busy..." "I'm seeing the kids and I've got patients." "Actually the truth is I don't want to go." "He stinks and he looks like hell." "I'll probably look..." "Look bad too when I'm about to die." "I wonder if my kids will come and see me when I'm where he is." "What if they feel about me the way I feel about him?" "What do they feel about you?" "I don't know." "They're so mad it's hard to tell how they feel." "They're mad at you, Paul?" "That's what they feel?" "And what if I'm just like him?" "I mean, did they feel that they had to compete with my patients for my attention?" "Have I too left my young son home alone with his mother?" "What do the kids understand about why you and Kate are divorcing?" "Kate and I set them down and said the divorce had nothing to do with them." "It was about a sentence longer than what my mother said to me, which was," ""your father's moving out."" "I'm sure they don't understand it any more than I did." "I think I have to talk to them, you know, really talk to them." "And I should..." "I should talk to my father too." "You know, just... talk to him." "So," "I've got my homework to do." "And next week we'll talk about Tammy." " What do you mean talk about Tammy?" " Goodbye, Paul."