Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  He imagined his plane touching down at LAX. He imagined himself walking into a bar and talking to young women. Just to talk! To have someone smile. To carry on a conversation that wasn’t about kids. When they found out he was pitching a Jed Finger movie, they would think he was a big deal. At Princeton, he hadn’t been good at talking to girls, not in the beginning. He was on partial scholarship, but all his friends were rich. A group of kids would go off to Killington for the weekend, and he couldn’t join because he had no skis and couldn’t afford the lift fees. Sometimes someone would offer to pay for him, and he’d say no.

  Halfway through his freshman year, he had gotten one girl to sleep with him, and she was fat and unattractive. She had accosted him in his hallway, drunk. Desperate to lose his virginity, he did it with her, her scrunchy on the door a signal to his roommate not to come in. They were together a few more times, and he made her promise not to tell anyone. She hadn’t, though he didn’t like the intense way she smiled at him when he saw her around campus.

  One afternoon on winter vacation, when everyone else was gone and Gottlieb was working his cafeteria job, he was sitting in the library flipping through magazines. In New York, he spotted an ad: SPERM DONORS WANTED. He was curious about it and called the number. It was a cryobank in Manhattan. The woman on the phone explained it to him: You went in for a workup, and if everything was okay, you could do it twice a week for seventy-five bucks a pop. There was a private room with “material,” she said.

  He tore out the page. That night, alone in his dorm room, he thought about his friends off skiing. He thought about his depressing work-study job slicing bologna. He thought about his awful nickname, Gottlieb, and the looks on the faces of the blond jocks as they said it.

  A few days later, he took a bus into the city and signed up at Eastern Cryobank in a bland office building near NYU Medical Center. His first time in the donation room, there were no videos, and the only magazines were of black women. He spent a few minutes trying to guess whether other donors pilfered a once-more-racially-diverse stash, or whether some donor with a black fetish had brought his own stash and left it behind, seeing it as an act of onanistic altruism.

  It took him a long time with the magazines—it just wasn’t his thing—but eventually, he filled a cup. After that day he went in twice a week for the next three years, bringing his own porn. He found another sperm bank and hit that one, too, without telling them he was already signed up at a different one; he would alternate the days. He told no one where he was going. His friends suspected he had a secret girlfriend. He kept his cafeteria job because it was work-study and he had to, but he used his donation money for extras, everything he couldn’t afford before. He bought nice clothes and a weight set. He found a salon on Madison Avenue and got expensive haircuts. Girls started paying more attention to him.

  At a party back at school after a haircut, he had seen a perky brunette with bangs and a Big Star T-shirt, which you didn’t see a lot of at Princeton. He opened her beer bottle and asked her name. She glanced up, surprised, and then sized him up, seeming to calculate that if he was that confident, he probably had a reason to be. She took him back to her room. Your life could change when your attitude did.

  As he drove into Provincetown, he imagined ordering four whiskeys in a row on the plane. Not changing diapers for a week. Sleeping late when he didn’t have meetings. Surfing. Driving nowhere. Hanging out with Jed Finger. For a legitimate reason. Staying in the Sunset Tower, a hotel he had read about in The New York Times. The article said their restaurant, the Tower Bar, was the new center for dealmaking in L.A. He loved L.A. and always had—the weather, the pace, the meals, and the valets. In Brooklyn he’d gone to pot, but in L.A. he was a comer.

  Marco

  Baby Jason was crying in his bouncy chair, and Enrique had just pooped on the floor of the cottage. If Todd had been there, he would have spanked him. The men had been fighting about it lately, the benefits of corporal punishment. Todd thought it was the only way to keep kids in line; he said if it was occasional, it served its purpose. Marco thought it was wrong to hit children. It reminded him of his father.

  But he could do what he wanted with Enrique. Todd wasn’t there. He had left for a contracting job in Greenport, Long Island, where he had been commuting frequently for work lately. It was a big house and there were last-minute problems; Todd’s gay subcontractor, Frankie, had called Todd’s cell when they were on their way to the adoption agency. Todd said he had to go. He would stay in some hip hotel while he worked.

  They picked up Jason and spent a few hours in Park Slope together, and then Todd took off for Greenport on the train. Marco drove both kids back to Wellfleet that night in the rental car, stopping continually to feed the baby.

  He should have stayed in Brooklyn. It was about eleven in the morning, and it was raining. After a brief trip to the South Wellfleet muffin shop, Marco had taken the boys back to the cottage. He had let Enrique watch TV for an hour and went into his bedroom to rest, leaving the baby in the bouncy chair. When he went in to check on them, he saw Enrique squatting next to the baby, a pile of shit next to him.

  “Why did you do that?” Marco had yelled. “Poop goes in the toilet.”

  “It goes on the floor!” Enrique shouted back demonically.

  Marco fetched paper towels. “Let’s clean this up together,” he said, remembering something he’d read in Dr. Spock.

  “No! You clean it up!”

  Marco scooped up the poop and sprayed the floor with Fantastik. “Go wipe yourself,” he said. Enrique went to the bathroom and came back. Jason wailed in the bouncy chair. Marco tried to burp him, thinking maybe he’d had too much formula, but the wailing continued. He cried if he was hungry, he cried if he was full. The crying was high-pitched, ear-splitting, and injured. If there were such a thing as baby Ambien, Marco would have dosed him. Rebecca had told him to drive to Orleans and buy something at CVS called Gripe Water, an over-the-counter colic remedy. When he looked it up on his phone, he found that it contained 3.6 percent alcohol and decided against it. Now he was reconsidering.

  The cottage phone rang over baby Jason’s screams. “How are they?” Todd asked.

  Marco put the phone up to Jason’s mouth so Todd could hear the screaming. “I think he has reflux. Maybe we should put him on Zantac.”

  “Zantac? He’s three months old!”

  “Lots of babies take it.”

  “My son is not going on Zantac. We’ll ride it out.”

  “I’ll ride it out, you mean.”

  Enrique upped the volume on the TV. He was in the armchair, watching one of those cartoons in which the children on the screen yell questions to the children at home and the children at home yell the answers back to the screen. “Is Enrique watching TV?” Todd asked. He was vehemently anti-television.

  “It’s the only way I can get him not to kill his brother.”

  “Put him on.”

  Marco handed Enrique the phone. He could hear Todd talking sternly to Enrique, but the boy’s face was dull. When Daddy wasn’t in the room, he didn’t wield the same power. Marco took the phone back. “I guess he doesn’t want to talk,” he said.

  “Ugh, it was such a disaster when I got here,” said Todd, “but we finally got things under control.” He never felt the need to be asked how he was doing. “You’re not going to believe this. Frankie and I are doing the bathroom and he’s getting these texts like every few seconds. Finally I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ He tells me he has a date for eleven o’clock with a black karate instructor who’s eight-by-six. He met him on Grindr.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An iPhone app for gay guys. You put your profile up, and the app tells you how far away different guys are, up to five hundred feet. He showed me on his phone. We found a guy a mile away. His profile was ‘Greenport: The North Fuck.’ Frankie says it’s changed his life. He can have sex in any city within ten minutes.”

  “He could have done that bef
ore.”

  “Not within ten minutes to five hundred feet.”

  There was something manic in Todd’s tone. Jason had started crying again, so Marco put his finger in the baby’s mouth. The baby spat it out and cried harder. “I gotta go,” Marco told Todd, and hung up.

  Marco missed his other Jason. It wasn’t only the sex, though the sex was endless, energetic, and romantic, everything it had ceased to be with Todd. Jason was soulful and romantic and bright, and in his bedroom in that old Carroll Gardens house, they made love and then they talked and made love more. Marco told him of his childhood in Miami. His older cousin Julia, who he secretly wanted to fuck. His mother forcing him to go to Catholic Sunday school. The Sigma Chi hazing at Duke. The first girl he kissed.

  But it was hard to lie to Todd, and he was nervous that the school would find out. Jason swore he would never tell, but he was a kid, and kids talked. The guilt got to Marco. He and Todd had been together so long, and he didn’t like lying. You had to split yourself in two to do it. When Marco had told Todd about the affair he’d hit the roof, but during the near fistfight that ensued, Marco saw the triumph in Todd’s eyes. The affair had allowed him to formalize what he already had informally: the emotional upper hand.

  Marco ended it soon after. Jason graduated and went off to Reed College. He said he loved Marco and always would. Marco and Todd went to couples therapy. Marco didn’t put up a fight when Todd said he wanted to adopt a child. Morham, a third-tier school that was considered the last-ditch hope of rich parents whose children were too dumb for Dalton or Riverdale, granted Marco his request when he asked for a one-year child-care leave to take care of Enrique, knowing it wouldn’t look PC to say no to a gay Latino father. The faculty was about 10 percent minority, and Marco was the only Latino there who didn’t teach Spanish.

  Enrique came in June, one month old. School had ended and the first few weeks Marco and Todd did all the baby care together. But then Todd went back to contracting, and Marco was on his own. He had been surprised by how easily he took to fatherhood. With his calm demeanor and his soft voice (Rebecca always called him a low-talker), he turned out to be a natural caregiver—taking Enrique jogging in the park, soothing him to sleep at night, bouncing him to Dan Zanes and Journey. He felt himself expand as he took responsibility for this tiny flailing thing.

  He got frequent validation from other mothers, who would go on about how attentive Marco was to the baby, then ask about his wife. “I’m gay,” Marco answered, and they would blush, simultaneously embarrassed and disappointed that they could not tout him to their own husbands as an example of a responsible (straight) father.

  When Enrique was almost one, Marco took him to the Third Street Playground in Prospect Park. He was holding the baby’s hand, guiding him around the low slide, when a mother of a toddler approached and smiled. “Is he cruising yet?” she asked. Marco had been taken aback. How had she known he was gay? Why was she making a tasteless joke, implying that Enrique would turn out gay, too?

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “Cruising. When they walk holding on to things? Ella’s just started. Isn’t it adorable?”

  He had enjoyed the moments like that, the funny ones. But much of early parenthood had been isolating. With his affair over and a baby to take care of all the time, he lost a part of himself. There were moments when he felt like he was imprisoned in Motherland. The land of child rearing, and nurturing, and nonstop care.

  Because he was on duty all day, he did whatever he could to release his tension at night. He started on mixed drinks around six, reasoning that when Todd came home, it didn’t matter. He chewed gum to hide the extent of it and used Visine. When Todd’s jobs allowed him to be home at a reasonable hour, Marco made any excuse he could to go drinking. He went to literary readings and killed the wine. He went for dinner with a friend, and it turned into drinks afterward, and he stumbled home at four in the morning, knowing the baby woke at six but not caring. If Todd knew how drunk Marco was, he pretended not to.

  When Enrique was a few months old, Marco went bar-hopping on the Lower East Side with a bunch of writer friends he had met at a colony in the Hudson Valley before he became a schoolteacher. In the morning he awakened to the sound of Enrique crying. Todd was at work. Marco was so hungover that he had to crawl into the bedroom to get him. When he got there, Enrique was lying in a pool of his own wet shit; the diaper hadn’t been put on properly, and it had seeped out onto his leg and all over the sheet. Marco called Todd and said, “I think I have a problem.”

  Todd had been sympathetic then, helping Marco find the detox program, accompanying him to meetings. Now he was a stranger. He didn’t seem to care what Marco was going through, alone with the two kids in a homophobic town and no laundry machine in the rental. The Todd of a decade ago had been beautiful, carefree, and ambitious. He loved sex and smiled all the time. He took pride in his body. What had happened? These days when Todd didn’t want to do something Marco wanted him to do, Todd would say, “I’m not your trophy wife!” Marco would answer, “Not anymore.”

  They had met at the Madison, an upscale restaurant/bar in Midtown frequented by Upper East Side dowagers and Eurotrash. Marco was not yet thirty, working as a bartender and writing poetry. Todd was on a job nearby and came in for a Grey Goose and tonic. Marco was living in Hell’s Kitchen with his boyfriend, a buff Italian-American unemployed actor with a small dick. Todd flirted hard and after Marco shut down the bar they did it in the stockroom. The sex was frenzied and hot and he loved how young-looking Todd was, even though they were just a few years apart. He moved into Todd’s Chelsea apartment a month later.

  Back then they loved their freedom. They would go to bars and take home young guys. They drank, slept late, fucked all the time. In 1993 they got married in a commitment ceremony at Po led by a Universalist Life Church friend, a chorus dancer who was gaining a reputation for gay ceremonies. They rented out the whole restaurant and invited friends, including the handsome Mexican guys Todd always hired as his workers. From then on they referred to each other as “husband” and registered as domestic partners with the city. Now that the city clerk was offering actual ceremonies, they had talked about doing it again but they decided there was no point in a new ceremony unless the state someday legalized gay marriage.

  Marco looked out the window of the cottage. It was still raining, relentless. Carrying the baby, he opened the screen door to the porch, thinking the rain might calm him. The sky was gray and ominous, the rain coming down in sheets. Jason cried louder. Marco understood why some mothers shook their babies to death.

  He came inside and laid Jason on the green futon next to the TV, thinking that he might fall asleep if he were lying down. The cottage appeared not to have been updated since the seventies. It had knotty pine walls, an orange vinyl armchair. The fridge was small and didn’t keep food cold, and the mattresses were encased in plastic so no one would pee on them.

  He went into his bedroom and put a pillow over his head. What might have happened to Jason if they said no? He would have wound up in foster care, grown up to be a rapist or murderer.

  The crying stopped. The only thing more harrowing than a steady stream of infant wails was sudden silence.

  He dashed in. Enrique was hovering over his brother by the couch, wearing a sick smile. Jason was still, his eyes wide and terrified. “What did you do?” Marco said.

  The boy said nothing. Marco saw that Jason’s mouth was closed. He flipped him over on the couch. A nickel dropped out.

  “Did you put this in his mouth?”

  Enrique grinned mischievously. He was a bad seed, a demon! Marco felt an instinct to hit him, to whale on him the way his own father had on him and his brothers. “Go to your room!” Enrique smiled and didn’t move. Marco carried him in and threw him hard on the bottom bunk. “You stay there,” he said, “and don’t come out until I say so.” From the living room came a thunk and a cry.

  He found Jason on the floor. He had rolle
d off the futon. Marco never should have left him there without a pillow. He wouldn’t have left Enrique without a pillow when he was an infant. Rebecca had been right. Marco picked up Jason, turned off the TV. Enrique came speeding out.

  “Go back in your room!” Marco shouted. Enrique ignored him, turned on the television. Marco was too tired to protest.

  He took Jason into the bedroom and lay on the bed, Jason next to him, screaming and flailing away. Maybe he could leave the kids alone for a few minutes, just to walk up the road in the rain. If he did that, he might relax and clear his head. But he couldn’t leave Jason with Enrique. The baby on his shoulder, he went to the kitchen and put water on the stove for formula. Maybe the warmth would calm him.

  He opened the cabinet to take out the formula and saw a bottle of Grey Goose, left over from Todd’s vodka tonics. Marco’s drink was Absolut, straight up, by the bottle. That was what he drank with Jason.

  The morning he had called Todd and said he had a problem, he realized of course that the problem wasn’t new. At Duke he hung out with frat boys and did kegs, in denial about his sexuality, wanting to fit in and loving the numb sensation that beer brought on. There was a girl on his hallway, daughter of a famous Republican senator. All the guys had been into her but Marco. One night she knocked on his door when his roommate was out. Flattered, he invited her in, offering her a bottle of champagne from the dorm fridge. “I really like you,” she said, “but I don’t drink and if you open that bottle, I’m leaving.” He opened the bottle and she left.

  After college, having come out, going on dates and getting laid, he went through periods of drinking heavily—beer and Absolut shots—and then he met Todd. They drank together, but Marco never felt he was out of control; he was a heavy drinker but not an alcoholic, an alcoholic couldn’t hold down a job, couldn’t get up in the morning, and he could. But after he met Jason, the drinking escalated; he drank with Jason in the bedroom, and he drank at home so as not to feel guilty.