Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  Henry would laugh if he hadn’t first been exposed to each of these “spontaneous” outbursts via an embarrassing string of e-mails, messages bearing subject headings such as “A Meat-eater’s Manifesto” to “Man Rules for Meat” (number three: “Gristle is our friend”).

  He would laugh if it weren’t for his own sad contribution to the spectacle: Kobe beef hot dogs.

  Besides Henry there are five of them gathered in the bluing twilight, all fathers at least eight years older than Henry. They all live within a half-mile of Gerard’s house, and all except for the Osborne brothers, who grew up in the first iteration of this subdivision, have landed here through the randomness of corporate migration.

  Gerard is working three separate cooking stations: a coal-filled Weber kettle for the indirect heat purists, a massive stainless-steel Weber gas cooker for bulk, and a smoker that for the past sixteen hours has been working its magic on Gerard’s self-proclaimed (yet never before attempted) world-famous brisket. There’s a red plastic tub filled with an eclectic variety of international beers—Belgian ale, India pale ale, German Hefeweizen, Slovakian pilsner, and, in a nod to Gerard’s less exotic college years in upstate New York, Genesee Cream Ale. Henry randomly selects a bottle of Blue Point Toasted Lager (Long Island), which, as he fumbles with the opener, Gerard is quick to point out recently won a gold medal in Munich. Henry hears himself saying “Wow!” even though, except on nights like this, he doesn’t drink, especially beer, and he could give a shit about Munich or lager or medals. But after his first sip he has to admit that while nothing about this beer tastes particularly toasted or medal-worthy, it is good. He says as much to the group, because saying no to beer on manly Meat Night or poker night is much more of a lightning rod for sarcasm than nursing one or two until it’s time to go home.

  He takes another swig, laterals his bag of exotic hot dogs over to Gerard, and begins shaking hands with his geographically mandated friends. Forty-something WASP Gerard; the forty-something Irish American brothers Osborne, John and Eric; forty-two-year-old Chinese American Victor Chan, who has a yet-to-be-explained purple and black shiner around his left eye; and forty-one-year-old African American Marcus LeBlanc.

  They’re all employed in some form of corporate middle management. Financial services. New media. Apps. Digital widgets. They’re all wearing cargo shorts with cell phones clipped on the waistband, sport sandals, and colored cotton T-shirts stamped with the logos of places and things that might be cool if any of them actually existed. Freddie’s Bait and Tackle. Death Valley Road Rally. Chattanooga Charlie’s Chile Sauce.

  They’ve been gathering like this, once a month or so, since they recruited Henry two years ago. Not only for Meat Night, but for everything from Lawn Jarts and horseshoes to bocce and Wiffle ball. Last fall they even had a brief beer pong season, which concluded on an ugly note, with that night’s champion and subsequent former group member Louis Bell getting a DUI from a state trooper on Route 9.

  The games themselves don’t matter. What supposedly matters is the ritual of talking them up for days and sometimes weeks prior to the event. At first Henry wasn’t interested in any of it. The drinking, the “I’m a Jarts God!” e-mail shit, and especially the company of men much older than he.

  At first he went out of politeness and because Rachel encouraged him. She said it would be good for him. Then later, during her obsession with getting pregnant, her obsession with staying pregnant, and her prolonged depression after she lost the baby, he found himself wanting to go, looking forward to it. Anything to get out of the house.

  But now he’s unsure of where he’d rather not be: in his giant empty home with Rachel, ignoring each other or, worse, talking about his vasectomy; or here, feigning camaraderie in the universal epicenter of displaced manliness.

  Before settling down, he announces to the others that he has to take a piss. That’s what you do on Meat Night, you announce it— I’m pissing in your house whether you like it or not, perhaps with the seat down—because excusing oneself is a sign of weakness, is for pussies. He stops in the kitchen to look at the corkboard near the phone. Besides the preponderance of takeout menus, which reinforce his theory that Gerard’s wife and kids may be “vacationing” in Long Beach Island longer than Gerard wants to admit, there are two calendars, both turned to the month of June, even though it is now mid-August.

  The first calendar is for Gerard’s soon-to-be fourth grader, Gerard Jr., and every day is meticulously inked in, from morning until bedtime, with appointments for everything from soccer practices to karate and alto saxophone lessons to three-times-a-week SAT prep tutoring with a woman who, Gerard has told Henry, virtually guarantees that Gerard Jr. will be accepted into an Ivy League school if he sticks to their long-term, increasingly expensive plan. The second calendar is for Gerard’s other son, Phillip, who is in preschool. There are no written words on it, only hand-drawn smiles for the days on which young Phillip hasn’t bitten anyone. Of June’s thirty days, there are only three smiles.

  Back on the patio, while the meats sizzle and sputter on clean-brushed, recently oiled grates, Henry takes the only remaining seat at the glass-topped patio table, in between the Osborne brothers. The seat is empty for a reason. The brothers are notorious for their passionate discussions, with one taking the opposing view of everything the other believes in, from sports to how to light coals to, of course, politics. Henry’s never seen it, but several times the Osbornes’ arguments have escalated to the physical, the most famous of which was a 2004 St. Patrick’s Day dance that left the basement of the Catholic church in ruins and Eric cupping his hands over his bleeding, shattered septum.

  Henry’s not even sure which one is Eric and which is John. He’s known them long enough that he should (it’s not as if they’re twins), but to ask for clarification this late in the game would be counterproductive. They give him the slightest of nods before resuming their debate on immigration. One wants to close the borders and build an electrified wall and the other, he wants to . . . Henry stops listening. Lately he’s been doing this a lot. As soon as someone starts in on health care or taxes, playgroups or some neighborhood committee, he glazes over, shuts down. Same goes for stories about Face-book or Twitter or the social network du jour. Sports too, especially golf. And office crap. Lately, even the parts that involve him. Sometimes he daydreams and others, such as now, he wonders how he ever got himself living this doomed existence, at his age.

  ~ * ~

  Rachel became convinced that their troubles were some kind of sign, that their having children just wasn’t meant to be. As soon as he agreed to at least consider having a vasectomy, she threw herself into the research. She downloaded articles and printed diagrams for him that were intended to allay his fears about loss of libido and the pain of recovery. What he was most concerned about, beyond the mental state of his wife, was having someone take a scalpel to his testicles, and no chart or penis-friendly phrasing could make it go away.

  Whenever he tried to tell Rachel that perhaps they should wait just a little longer, because one day they might want to try to have a child again, she told him that she couldn’t handle the emotions of expectation and loss, that if it happened again it would break her completely. Whenever he mentioned therapy or counseling, she responded with anger, accusations, and prolonged periods of silence. Pushing harder, he thought, would be the end for them. So, while not assenting, he let her run with it, with the hope that things would change, she’d get better, or at least find a replacement obsession.

  But she didn’t. Soon Rachel knew enough about the vicissitudes of vasectomies to do a dissertation for the New England Journal of Medicine.

  ~ * ~

  Henry accepts another beer. “A Slovakian—not Czech, there’s a huge difference—pilsner,” Gerard explains. One of the Osbornes, deep into a criticism of the latest government bailout, stops pointing his index finger at his brother long enough to say, “That’s what we want to see, Junior. Pounding some fine eastern Eur
opean swill. We’ll make a man out of you yet.”

  Henry raises the bottle in a toast. They have taken to calling him Junior, or Kid, or H. After two years he is still the plebe, the pledging frat boy. He has remained the disciple and they the wise elders, the savvy veterans of the mysteries of suburbia, marriage, fatherhood, and the sub-prime lending fiasco. They played every aspect of their hazing, mentoring roles to perfection, he thought, except the part about the actual dispensing of wisdom, the leading by example, or the solving of even the smallest problem.

  LeBlanc asks Victor Chan for more details about his swollen and blackened left eye. “Happened at Kenny’s T-ball game.” Chan looks away from LeBlanc, hoping that this is description enough.

  “What,” shouts Gerard, “did you get clipped with a line drive by a toddler on steroids?”

  “Or did one of the parents clock you?” Henry offers with a laugh.

  Chan turns and stares at Henry. “Well, actually, yes,” he says, as if Henry is the one who did the sucker punching.

  “What happened, V-Chan?” asks Marcus. “This is T-ball, correct?”

  “Yeah. There was this little kid, this little prick, actually, who started mouthing off to the first baseman, a nice kid twice the size of the other kid. The first baseman didn’t do anything, except catch the throw that sealed the other kid’s fate. I thought they were playing, but the little brat began throwing punches. Soon the big kid had him on the ground. I ran over and started pulling them apart and the next thing I know this other father, the little kid’s father, grabs my shoulder, spins me around, and clocks me.”

  Gerard approaches from the grills, brandishing tongs and a long grease-slick fork from which dangles a piece of charred grizzle. “Holy shit, Victor, what’d you do?”

  “What I did is fall down, Gerard. You think I know kung fu or something just because I’m Chinese?”

  “You didn’t hit him?” Gerard is shocked. “I would’ve—”

  “I would’ve sued him,” says Osborne the First.

  “Further destroying our overly litigious society,” counters Osborne the Second.

  “I did nothing. It wasn’t even my son in the fight. My son, who, by the way, won’t even talk to me because I walked away.”

  “You have to redeem yourself,” Gerard insists. “You must bust that dude right in the nose, Victor Chan, for your dignity, your son’s future, and the integrity of our national pastime.”

  “Did he at least apologize?” Henry asks. “Have you seen him since?”

  “No. We have a game tomorrow. I feel sick just thinking about it.”

  They grimace as one as the testosterone is sucked out of their manspace. No one speaks for a while. Clearly this tale of passive nonviolence at, of all things, a sporting event has been a level-one Meat Night buzz kill.

  “Well,” Gerard finally declares. “That’s just weak, V-Chan. Effin’ pathetic.”

  Victor doesn’t respond as Gerard heads back inside. A few moments later Green Day’s “American Idiot” comes through the exterior wall-mounted speakers. Marcus LeBlanc starts jerking his head to the music. The Osborne brothers finger-jab to the beat. Henry is fairly sure that none of them know what’s playing, what it’s saying. What’s important to them is that even though it was released more than six years ago, it sounds younger than they are and that, at least among themselves, they are getting away with co-opting it.

  Gerard reappears and turns to Henry. “Too loud?” he asks, but what he means is, “Too much of a reach?”

  Henry shakes his head and gives Gerard two rocking thumbs up. Meanwhile, Victor Chan seems to have collected himself after his tale of T-ball terror and is proudly removing the contents of the traveling martini kit he received for his fortieth birthday. Not especially macho, Henry thinks, as Victor reassembles, then begins to measure and pour and shake. But there is hard liquor involved, in this case a Polish vodka distilled from a particular type of wheat or something (Henry lost interest after the words distilled from), and it does provide the others with the opportunity to point out Chan’s numerous tactical errors. Henry takes a long drink of a beer (English Porter) that he doesn’t remember opening and closes his eyes.

  “That rude son of a bitch.”

  Henry opens his eyes. It’s Victor Chan. “Who?”

  “Gerard. The man’s man. If you only knew.”

  Henry knows he’s supposed to follow up Chan’s tease, but he doesn’t. Doesn’t care.

  ~ * ~

  The Permanent Snip

  Rachel wasn’t the only one doing research.

  He told her about the man who’d gotten one, yet his wife got pregnant anyway a month later. Then he told her about the guy at work whose wife had him get one even though she’d secretly had her tubes tied after a C-section. When the man found out, after it was too late, his wife said she didn’t want him to go running off and having kids with some bimbo and watering down her children’s estate. “But can’t I still get it reversed?” the soon-to-be-cuckolded man had asked her. “Nope,” his wife said. “Yours is irreversible. We got you the permanent snip.”

  At the end of the story, Henry asked Rachel, “Do you want mine to be permanent?”

  “No,” she said. “I just want it to work.”

  ~ * ~

  Six weeks after the procedure date he’s still haunted by dreams of phallic mutilation, is still reminded of it in the quotidian images of his daily routines. So it’s understandable that watching Gerard take a Ginsu knife to a heat-plumped kielbasa and his own sizzling Kobe beef dog is something his eyes cannot abide. Instead he looks away, drinks his martini, and manages to listen to the Osbornes argue long enough to discern that they’ve changed their topic from the auto industry bailout to waterboarding.

  Soon after Victor gets up to make another batch of sub-par martinis, Marcus pulls a chair alongside Henry. Marcus is drinking seltzer. He says it is because he is on antibiotics for Lyme disease, but they all know it’s because Marcus is on antidepressants. Marcus’s wife, who is white, had told the other men’s wives, including Rachel, after their firefighter’s workout class that Marcus is depressed over his diminished blackness in white suburbia. But Henry and the men at the round table of meat know that the real cause of Marcus’s depression is that his wife has been cheating on him with a man who has significantly more ghetto in him than Marcus. They know because Marcus confessed to them two months ago, after being over-served on small-batch bourbon and Raw Bar Night.

  Marcus tried to win her back. He gave up golf, khakis, and, for a while, the Protestant church. He tried cooking soul food, watching BET and Samuel L. Jackson films, and listening to old-school hip-hop. He tried to alter his diction and even attempted to cultivate a genuine resentment of the Man. But none of it worked, he told them, because he was the Man. Born and raised in white suburbia. Soccer coach. Churchgoer. Occasional cardigan-wearer. What he realized, or what couples counseling helped him realize, just before his wife abandoned him and his two daughters and moved in with a man in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn for five weeks, is that she had a thing for dangerous black men and Marcus, in retrospect, was way too white.

  The Brooklyn experiment was a failure, and they are currently living under the same roof, trying to make a go of it for the sake, they say, of the children.

  “Mister Tuhoe.”

  “Monsieur LeBlanc.” Henry smiles. He likes Marcus LeBlanc. On occasion they’ve actually had some decent conversations.

  “How goes it at work?”

  But apparently not today. And yet, though he hates talking about work while he’s away from work—primarily because talking about what he does for a living (which in itself is a depressingly accurate phrase) angers, humiliates, and frustrates him—here he is finishing up Polish specialty wheat martini number two and beginning to tell Marcus LeBlanc about his day.

  About how goes it. How went it. About working hard or hardly working. About everything.

  At first he doesn’t notice, but soon he s
ees that they’ve all stopped what they were doing—Gerard (cooking), the Osbornes (ranting: presidential citizenship), Victor Chan (fretting)—and, smelling the blood of genuine emotion, the scent of angst other than their own, have gathered closer to revel in his tale. He tells them about the morning gravestones, the fainting woman, and Giffler’s ambiguous ultimatum. He tells them about Norman from the gym, the lurker in the locker room, and Warren’s Bangalorian reverse-outsourcing ambitions. He even tells them about Meredith, though he refuses to reveal her name, real or porno.

  Midtale, Victor refills Henry’s martini glass and Gerard gets him another beer (Hefeweisen, Germany). Moving back and forth through time, pausing for dramatic effect, and occasionally standing to pantomime an event, Henry tells them that after two miserable entry-level jobs in sales he fell into a job at his current company. And though it was better than sales, he never did like it. He tells them that he probably would have left the job long ago if he had had the slightest clue about what he’d like to do, about what gives him satisfaction or pleasure. He tells them that he’s probably being transferred, or expatrio-sourced, the name he invents on the spot, to what he’s being told is a customer-service satellite for the newly acquired Water Division, even though he has little call-center knowledge and none of the bottled water industry, and that he’ll probably have to travel quite a bit, probably to a third-world-type place—India, China, South America—and that it troubles him deeply, because, as they know, he hates flying and has a bit of a germ phobia.