Not long after the Lotus vanished from the driveway, he took me to a barbecue at a colleague's beach club in Newport Beach. I was flattered. He rarely spent time with me one-on-one, too busy living out his fantasy to take much notice of me. What I wanted more than anything was for this dashing figure to tell me I was part of that fantasy—that he cared about me, in some precious way, as much as his cars. I knew he was capable of such adoration, because he mooned over my older brother, whose dark handsomeness and hard-drinking exploits were far more interesting to him than my good grades and admiration. He'd talk about how, twice in two years, my brother had crashed the Alfa Romeo he'd bought him, and my father couldn't help beaming with pride. I would have done just about anything to make his face look like that.

At the beach club, my father circled the parking lot a couple of times in the car he drove most often, a Porsche 928. I don't know why he wanted to impress the guests so badly, but I suspect it had something to do with the vision of Californian life arrayed so platonically before us: the mothers in bikinis, the thwock of Smashballs, the smell of sun lotion mid with the briny breeze from the ocean, whose gentle waves seemed to frost the sand like a cake. Boys in Jams and rope bracelets slurped Cokes or played volleyball or skimboarded across the wash with sunglasses on. These of course were the effortlessly tan Californian kids I so admired and feared, the ones who knew how to surf and skateboard and had managed to lose their virginities at preposterously young ages, generally to their older sisters' friends. They said "gnarly" with a straight face and spoke in a diabetic drawl that made each word seem like a message washed up on the beach. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get tan, and though I burned my face and arms every summer to a freckled variant of brown, my legs were hopelessly immune to the sun's rays. Somehow my father's legs were even whiter. In shorts he looked like a half-finished page in a coloring book. I'm guessing they were his secret shame, proof of the midwestern German heritage he longed to escape.

That afternoon he was wearing tennis shorts. As we were waiting for hamburgers from the grill, I overheard the host tell him he needed to get some color on his legs.

"No thanks," my dad said, grinning. "I try to keep them as far from colored as possible."

The man smiled but took a step backward, busying himself with the spatula. I had never heard my father say the word colored before; for some reason, the racism shocked me less than the antiquated weirdness of the term. But what really startled me was my dad's face, which, as we stood there waiting for our host to look up from the grill, turned pink as a grapefruit. The more the man ignored us, the pinker it became. When he finally served us our burgers, my dad mumbled out a thank you, avoiding his eyes.

Later, we sat in the sand as the other kids my age played a game of beach volleyball. My father must have seen an opening of some kind, because to my great embarrassment he stood up between matches and asked if I could join in. I tried to refuse, but there was no way to do so with­out seeming like even more of a loser. I was a decent athlete—I'd played lacrosse and hockey in Baltimore—but did not understand the most basic mechanics involved in keeping a ball up in the air with my forearms. While the other kids set and dug and belly flopped for shots, I stood in the corner of the court, praying that the ball would miraculously avoid my jurisdiction. Finally someone spiked the ball right at me, and I did something tragic. I caught it. I glanced at my father, still clutching the thing to my stomach. His eyes were squinched up, fid somewhere near my feet, as if he couldn't stand to look me in the face. It took me a second to realize he was staring at my legs.