He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten to twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home, he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.

What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.

He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”

Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.

Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-­imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up.

Ash Wednesday, once, I went to church and stood in line. I looked around at the statues, plaques, and pillars, the stained-glass windows, and then I went to the altar rail and knelt. The priest approached and made his mark, a splotch of holy ash thumb-printed to my forehead. Dust thou art. I was not Catholic. My parents were not Catholic. I didn’t know what we were. We were Eat and Sleep. We were Take Daddy’s Suit to the Dry Cleaner.

When he left, I decided to embrace the idea of being abandoned, or semi-abandoned. My mother and I understood and trusted each other. We went to live in Queens, in a garden apartment that had no garden. This suited us both. I let the hair grow back on my aboriginal shaved head. We went for walks together. Who does this, mother and teen-age son, in the United States of America? She did not lecture me, or rarely did, on my swerves away from observable normality. We ate bland food and batted a tennis ball back and forth on a public court.

But the robed priest and the small grinding action of his thumb implanting the ash. And unto dust thou shalt return. I walked the streets looking for people who might look at me. I stood in front of store windows studying my reflection. I didn’t know what this was. Was it some freakified gesture of reverence? Was I playing a trick on Holy Mother Church? Or was I simply attempting to thrust myself into meaningful sight? I wanted the stain to last for days and weeks. When I got home, my mother leaned back away from me as if to gain perspective. It was the briefest of appraisals. I made it a point not to grin—I had a gravedigger’s grin. She said something about the boring state of Wednesdays throughout the world. A little ash, at minimum expense, and a Wednesday, here and there, she said, becomes something to remember.

Eventually, my father and I began to jostle our way through some of the tensions that had kept us at a distance, and I accepted certain arrangements he made concerning my education but went nowhere near the businesses he owned.

Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”

Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers.

I was afraid of other people’s houses. After school, sometimes a friend might talk me into going to his house or apartment to do our homework together. It was a shock, the way people lived, other people, those who weren’t me. I didn’t know how to respond to the clinging intimacy of it, kitchen slop, pan handles sticking out of the sink. Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman’s stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child’s slipper in the bathtub—it made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody’s socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who were these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there.

The smell of other people’s houses. There was the kid who posed for me in his mother’s hat and gloves, although it could have been worse. The kid who said that he and his sister had to take turns swabbing lotion on their father’s toenails to control some hideous creeping fungus. He thought this was funny. Why didn’t I laugh? He kept repeating the word “fungus” while we sat at the kitchen table to do our homework together. A half slice of withered toast slumped in a saucer still damp with spilled coffee. Sine cosine tangent. Fungus fungus fungus.