The next day, Andrew went to meet with the fire crew with whom he’d be working as a medic while he waited for school to start next fall.

I decided to spend the day luxuriating in everything that Chateau Marmont had to offer. I ordered room service breakfast, followed by a day at the pool.

Lounging poolside, with occasional dips in the water, I tried to keep my eyes casually peeled for famous movie starts. But it was late on a Wednesday morning, and famous movie stars probably had other things to do at that time, like get chemical peels or Botox or, you know, act.

I had to laugh when an attendant brought me a cordless phone, as if I was a Hollywood mogul. For a second I worried that it was Susan, or Helen calling about Susan, but then I realized that would have come through on my cell. Who knew I was staying here who’d want to call me?

“Nick, it’s Karen. Andrew’s mother.”

“Yeah, hi. How are you?”

“Can I impose on you to join me for lunch?”

“Sure, where?”

“Look to your left.”

I turned to see her sitting at a table for two, under a giant white umbrella. She waved at me.

“You weren’t going to take no for an answer, I guess.”

“I was not. I ordered you the thyme-roasted chicken. And a Marmont Mule. I won’t take no for an answer on that, either.”

I put my shirt back on, slipped into my flip-flops, and joined her. She looked as elegant as she had the night before, although today’s outfit was a pair of cream slacks, a plain white blouse and a preppy cream sweater thrown over her shoulders.

“I wanted to thank you,” she said as she sipped her cocktail. My Marmont Mule turned out to be a concoction of ginger-infused vodka, with soda and lime. What the hell, I wasn’t driving anywhere, and I didn’t feel like I had to be fully alert and ready for battle with her, as I’d had to be last night with Andrew’s father.

“Thank me for what?”

She raised an eyebrow. “You really do need the list, don’t you? You’re too modest, Nick.”

“I suppose so.”

“Hmm. Okay.” She lifted her slim, elegant hand, her gold bracelets sliding down her forearm. “Number one. You are Andrew’s only friend, lover, co-worker, or anything else for that matter who has put my husband at a loss for words.”

I laughed. “I’ve seen worse.”

She smiled. “Charles is…” She sighed. “His own father was very hard on him. He drove him into medicine, ruthlessly. Charles wanted to be an artist. A sculptor.”

I blinked. “But Andrew said his grandfather told him…”

“He told Andrew to be who he wanted to be, to do what he was happy doing. Yes. Because he saw the mistake, too late, that he’d made with my husband. His only son. Charles is a very good physician, in his way. No bedside manner, but, he applied himself to learning medicine with all the fervor he’d applied to art. And, as he says sometimes when he’s had enough to drink, he’s still sculpting, only now he works on real bodies and not marble.”

I was silent, digesting this. The Great Man wasn’t the great monster he’d seemed.

“He felt he had to do with his son, what his father had done with him. Force him into ‘the right thing,’ away from anything else that might come to nothing.”

“Like life as an artist.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And…” I guessed. “The war between your husband and his father never ended, either, did it? That’s why Andrew’s grandfather left him everything. Or part of why.”

“Yes. But he also knew that Charles had plenty of money by then. He didn’t need a house by the sea and a few million more dollars. If Andrew ever really had a home growing up, it was that house at Sea Ranch.”

She polished off the remaining half of her drink in one motion. “And it’s my fault. I should have stood up for Andrew more. I was always taking Charles’s side, when I had time to take any side at all. I let myself become one of them, you know, those competitive mothers who meet for cocktails and… Well, that’s another form of class warfare, dear. Seeing who can one up who, by means of whose children are doing what. If your son gets into Deerfield, mine has to get into Groton. If your son is on the lacrosse team, mine has to be the captain.”

She laughed, the drink loosening her up. She signaled for another.

“Andrew was always a rebellious child. It wouldn’t have mattered, really, if in his heart he’d wanted the same thing his father wanted for him. He had to not want it, just because if he did, his father would win.”

“Win the battle for control.”

Karen nodded. “I know he loved medicine from an early age. He really did. But his father, making plans for him, ‘of course you shall do this and that and go here and be that.’ He couldn’t help it.”

She laughed. “Here’s a funny story. They used to argue about discipline. When Andrew would get in trouble at school, for instance, and his father would put him on restriction. He never laid a hand on him, but instead he took away his social life, his phone, for whatever number of days Charles arbitrarily decided was an appropriate sentence. And what Andrew hated most was how his father would rationalize it, deliver some long pompous speech about the whys and wherefores of what his misbehavior represented about his character.

“We had subscriptions to all sorts of magazines. Including Psychology Today. And Andrew was reading it, cover to cover, even as a little boy. And one day, when his father started in on his ‘why you’re on restriction’ speech, Andrew delivered a counter argument, based on what he’d read about ‘control issues’ and ‘overreaction’ and all these other concepts from the magazine.

“So his father…. Took the magazine away from him. Forbid him from reading it anymore.”

“Wow.”

She nodded. “Yes. And he wasn’t the kind of father who’d ever forbid any kind of learning. But… he did it in this case, because that’s where they were. In this war for control of… I don’t even know what. Everything, nothing.”

I had nothing to say to that. But I could see now, why Andrew was so meticulous, so methodical on the van. It all had to be just right, because who knew when his father would materialize behind him, find the one thing that was missing from the van’s drug box, see the wear and tear on a set of restraints, and get him for it, score a victory in the war.

She sipped her second drink. “My point is, you’re good for him. You’re strong. But you’re also kind. And when you see him being, well, an asshole, I wanted you to know where a lot of that comes from. And when the two of you fight, and you will, just remember that it’s not always you he’s fighting.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

She smiled. “Oh look, the chicken is here. You’re going to love it.”