Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “Claire, my dad was far from per—”

  “What’s it been now, six years?”

  “Seven years in October.”

  “I miss him, Hank.”

  “Take a number.”

  “I sense a little resentment. You okay?”

  “My dad had his faults. Why can’t people just love him without fucking canonizing him? Did you know he was a draft dodger?”

  “What?”

  “Back in the late sixties, Dad got his draft notice for Vietnam right after he and Mom got engaged. He ended up failing his physical for the military.”

  “Flat feet?” Claire looks down at my feet, remembering my own personal deformity.

  “No, smart gal.” I roll my eyes. “A hernia.”

  “Easily fixable.”

  “Exactly! But guess what? The government can’t order you to have the surgery. Dad refused to get the operation until he was too old for the draft.”

  “So you have your dad’s weak groin to thank for being alive?”

  “I guess you could say that.” I laugh, but only a little. I’m struck by the role Dad’s balls have played in my life. A cough here, a snip there. Gaming the system. Learning how to be a man after someone has lost the instructions or else read them to you in fucking Spanish.

  “Speaking of fathers, congratulations. Sasha, right?”

  “That’s right,” I say. “Sasha Grace.”

  “Two years old?”

  “Just turned three.”

  “Any sisters or brothers planned?”

  “One or two more, depending on what Beth can handle. Sasha was a C-section.”

  “Ouch.”

  “And my wife might be the meanest pregnant woman on Earth.”

  “On behalf of all past, present, or future pregnant women, go suck a dick.”

  “I’m not kidding. Hitting, screaming, cursing—you name it. If my wife were a dude, I could’ve had her arrested.”

  “And yet you kept coming back for more.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love her, Claire.”

  “I can see that, Hank.” A wistful, almost envious look from the ever-guarded Claire Sullivan Hatcher. She runs her hands through my hair again. “You’re very sexy when you’re in love—have I ever told you that?”

  I smile at Claire. She positions herself closer to me, my knee now firmly between her legs. I place my hand on the small of her back, maybe even a little lower than that. Low enough to know she’s not wearing any panties. If her hemline were any higher, my knee would be buried in her bush right now. Tanned a soft gold and rock-hard, Claire’s calves flex with every step she makes.

  Claire and I have always had great chemistry. But in lieu of attempting anything that could be deemed a relationship—sexual, casual, or otherwise—we long ago settled into a flirty but harmless cat-and-mouse game.

  At least this is what I keep telling myself. What Claire and I engage in is definitely flirty, but hardly harmless. A failed relationship or lost love is a maypole of life, for a brief moment the absolute unyielding center of everything but in time dismissed as something not worth getting that excited about. Far harder to escape the semi-permanent shadows of an affair that never was.

  “Mind if we dance with yo’ dates?”

  The combination of the Animal House reference and Richard Marx giving way to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” snaps me back to reality.

  “What?” I say.

  Hatch and Beth stand in front of us on the dance floor. “May we cut in?” Hatch says.

  I step back, bow. “Be my guest.”

  Claire winks at me again. “Thanks for the dance, Hank.”

  Not only do I not wink back, I don’t even make eye contact. “You’re welcome.”

  Beth reclaims my empty hand. She straddles my leg, more obvious with her dry humping than Claire was, being my wife and all. “You two looked pretty cozy,” she says.

  “You know Claire is like a sister to me.”

  Beth shakes her head. “In West Virginia maybe.”

  “She’s your best friend.”

  “That’s never stopped her from hitting on my boyfriends—or my husband apparently.”

  “What do you want me to say, Beth?”

  “How about ‘I love you, honey’?”

  “I love y—”

  Beth puts her hand on my mouth. “It doesn’t count if I have to prompt you.”

  I take her hand away. “It seems like it doesn’t count regardless.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that maybe I’d enjoy dancing with Claire a little less if you showed more interest in me.”

  “More interest? We had sex last night.”

  “Yeah, for the first time in eight weeks.”

  “I’m sorry. Apparently you’ve been living in a cave for the last three years. Have you seen my stomach? Ever since the C-section, my abs look like a fat old person’s ass. I don’t feel pretty.”

  “But you are pretty. You’re fucking hot. We’ve had this conversation before. I’m a very vain guy. If you get ugly and fat, I’m divorcing you.”

  “You really know how to make a gal feel special, Hank.”

  “That’s what you don’t seem to get. You’re still in twice as good a shape as almost any twenty-eight-year-old woman I know, let alone tonight’s episode of The Bald and the Bloated.”

  “Except for Claire.”

  “Fuck Claire! She’s got her high school body because she’s never been pregnant, and she’s too self-absorbed to ever get pregnant.”

  Beth leans in, kisses me on the lips. “You really think that?”

  “Hell yes, I think that.” I lick my lips, tasting both Claire’s and Beth’s lipstick on my tongue. I’m pretty fucking turned on right now.

  “You’re just buttering me up.”

  “No I’m not,” I say. “The butter comes later tonight.”

  2000

  Chapter seventy-one

  Beth and I sit in Dr. Florio’s office. My wife flips through the March 2000 issue of Parents magazine. She’s uneasy, rifling through the pages without looking at them.

  I grab her hands, take the magazine away. “Will you just relax, honey?”

  She inhales deeply, turns and looks at me. “Bite me.”

  We’re here for the eighteen-week ultrasound. This time around we’re finding out the baby’s gender—that is, if my wife doesn’t have a heart attack in her OB’s waiting room.

  I left Jack at home with Sasha. Jack is staying with us for a few days. Mom is up in Indianapolis with Aunt Claudia getting all of Grandma Louise’s affairs in order.

  Grandma died last week. I tried to cry at the funeral and play the part of the heartbroken grandson, but it’s hard to get past the fact she was such a psychotic, racist bitch. Jeanine brought her fiancé, Marcus. They met in Portland when Jeanine was his physical therapist. Marcus is a professional basketball player for the Idaho Stampede of the Continental Basketball Association, and he’s black as coal. Grandma would have hated him, and I loved Jeanine for bringing him.

  There’s a lot riding on today’s OB visit. One girl and one boy is the master plan. This pregnancy has no other option but a boy. Our new gay neighbors, Oscar and Marshall, told us to load up on red meat and salty snacks and for me to pound a pot of coffee before sex to get the Y-chromosome sperms swimming faster. Beth’s thong-wearing aerobics instructor with the store-bought breasts—I think her name is Shena, but I might just have Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” in my head—told her to have “as much sex as humanly possible” because more boys are conceived during the honeymoon phase of a relationship. Needless to say, I’m a fan of Shena. Beth’s hairdresser, Jodi, told her to let me initiate sex and focus on
my pleasure because “if the man climaxes first, you almost always conceive a baby boy.” I like Jodi, too. Her hair is two-toned, blonde with dark roots. She has these wild sky-blue eyes that give her a hot, older-woman vibe, like Julie Christie in Afterglow. A lot of people say if they had a time machine, they’d go back two thousand years and meet Jesus Christ; personally, I’d just go back to 1965 and fuck Julie Christie. Jodi has been pumping out kids since her teens and sneaks out for a smoke every fifteen minutes. When she washes my hair, it feels so good I feel like I’m cheating on my wife.

  Putting aside our friends’ learned advice, and Beth’s father being a pediatrician and all, we’ve done our homework on this one. There are fifty-one boys born for every forty-nine girls, so we know math is on our side. We flirted with trying the Shettles Method, which mandates “deep, penetrative intercourse no more than twenty-four hours before ovulation and no more than twelve hours past ovulation.” The Chinese Conception Method showed some promise, right up until we realized all our dates were wrong because we were using the Gregorian calendar instead of the Chinese lunisolar calendar. Ultimately, we settled on the Whelan Method—i.e., having sex at the beginning of Beth’s cycle up until four-to-six days before ovulation. Whelan doesn’t specify the level of depth or penetration like Shettles does, so I improvised. (I’ve narrowed it down to somewhere between “fuck me harder” and “fuck, that hurts.”) All I know is the Whelan Method involves more sex than most any other approach, so I’m willing to make the sacrifice—you know, for the children.

  The door to the waiting room opens. A nearly attractive nurse with pinned-back hair and comfortable shoes holds a clipboard and smiles at us. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick?”

  Dr. Florio smiles at my wife, her hand on her belly. “How you feeling, kiddo?”

  “Not so good, to tell you the truth,” Beth says. “I’ve had a lot more nausea and a lot less sleep with this pregnancy.”

  “Interesting.” Dr. Florio squirts the ultrasound gel onto my wife’s bulging abdomen with her right hand, follows up with the transducer in her left hand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

  We eye the black and white sonogram. There’s only so much you can see four and a half months into a pregnancy, at least that’s what I remember with our daughter. With her translucent spine and huge head, Sasha looked more like a cross between a baby dinosaur and Patrick Ewing.

  “Whoa!” I say. “That popped up fast.”

  We see the back of our baby. It turns. We see a beating heart. “Hmmm…” Dr. Florio says.

  Beth turns to her. “What?”

  “Your husband was right. He did pop up fast.”

  “He popped up fast?” I say.

  Dr. Florio points to the baby’s now-obvious phallus. “Oh, he’s definitely a boy.”

  Beth raises her hand. I give her a high five. She notices Dr. Florio’s pensive look. “Is there something you’re not telling us, doctor?”

  “There’s a reason he popped up fast,” Dr. Florio says. “I’m going to turn the probe ninety degrees here and let you see for yourself.”

  “Holy shit,” Beth says.

  “What?” I say. “What am I looking at?”

  Dr. Florio adjusts the transducer. “You’re looking at two heartbeats, Hank.”

  “Come again?”

  Beth puts her hand over her face. “I’m pregnant with twins.”

  “That’s why you poked out so quick at eighteen weeks.”

  “And that’s why you’re sicker,” I add, “and not sleeping compared to when you were carrying Sasha.”

  “It certainly explains a lot,” Beth says. “I got the hormones of two boys raging inside me.”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Florio says.

  I shake my head. “Are you sure, Doc?”

  She points to the video monitor. “There are clearly two babies, kiddo. The second one is just lying across the bottom, hiding almost. And they both look to be boys.”

  “And this would explain the abnormalities in my AFP tests a couple weeks ago?” Beth asks.

  Dr. Florio nods. “It totally explains it.”

  I have no idea what the hell “AFP” means, but I give a confident, affirmative nod as if everything in the world now makes sense. I can barely get past page twenty of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. My interest always starts to lag in the middle of the Fibroids section, and I completely jump ship at Incompetent Cervix.

  My wife is crying.

  “Beth,” I say. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little scared is all.”

  “These two boys look perfectly healthy, kiddo.”

  “It’s not that, doctor,” Beth says. “It’s just that I’ve been reading up on vaginal births after a cesarean. I was really hoping with this pregnancy that I could at least try to—”

  “VBACs aren’t for everyone. They’re not for most people, quite frankly.”

  “I know that.”

  “Least of all gymnasts and their narrow pelvises.”

  “As you’ve told me before.”

  “Let’s just cross that bridge when we come to it.” I run my hands through Beth’s hair. Brushing her bangs back, I kiss her on the forehead. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”

  Chapter seventy-two

  “I hear congratulations are in order.”

  Lila Prestwich stands at the entrance to the College Avenue Press office. She’s wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless knit top that barely contains her always-ample bosom. Her hair is cropped just below her chin, her skin giving off the somewhat off-putting black currant scent of Ralph Lauren Safari perfume. A printed tote with a Strand Bookstore logo hangs over her right shoulder.

  I walk over to Lila. She gives me a casual hug. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough,” Lila says.

  “So you heard that phone call?”

  “Was that Beth?”

  “More like her evil doppelganger.”

  “Trouble in paradise?”

  “That’s an understatement. I once told someone that my wife might be the meanest pregnant woman on Earth. I take that back—she is the meanest pregnant woman on Earth.”

  “Sorry to hear about that. Still, congrats. Twin boys, huh?”

  “Who told you?”

  “Your boss.”

  “Fucking Rosner. When was that?”

  “It was when he was in New York last month. He came by my apartment and took me out to celebrate.”

  “Yeah, celebrate.”

  “College Avenue Press, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. That isn’t worth celebrating?”

  “It’s just ‘College Ave’ now, per an edict from some marketing department idiot who thinks branding means anything in publishing. They even got really cute and changed our logo to a navy blue rectangle with the word ‘COLLEGE’ in white caps.”

  “Like John Belushi’s sweatshirt in Animal House?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Very cute.”

  “Aaron took the money and ran. Meanwhile, I’m afforded a slightly bigger paycheck with a lot less editorial freedom. Forgive me if I don’t join in the merriment. But enough about me. To what do I owe this visit?”

  “Just flew in today. I wanted to stop in and say hello before I drove down to Empire Ridge.”

  “Well, hello.”

  Lila reaches out and gives me a much improved hug followed up with a kiss on the cheek. “Hello, Hank.”

  “Here, have a seat.” I smile, offering her a chair. “How’s New York treating you?”

  “Best city in the world.”

  I sit in the chair opposite her. “Still working for that literary agency?”

  “Not anymore. I took a job with Little, Brown and Company just last month. I’m their new director of foreign rights.”

  �
��Nice.”

  “It sounds nicer than it pays.”

  “And who’s the lucky guy in your life these days?”

  “Chris.”

  “Next time I’m in New York you should introduce me to him.”

  “I’ll introduce you to her if you’d like.”

  “Come again?”

  “Hank…” Lila says, patting my hand. “I’m a single Mormon woman pushing thirty. You figure it out.”

  “I guess I just never figured you for a—”

  “Lesbian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Chris is the hardcore lesbian. I’m still solidly in the bisexual camp. We’re living together in one of her father’s brownstone rentals on the Upper Westside. She’s the lead singer of an all-girl band called Femshack.”

  “How very New York of you.”

  Lila nods, raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, Dad is really pleased.”

  “How is Papa Prestwich doing these days?”

  “You’d know better than me, Hank.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Actually, I do know better. Mom and Gillman Prestwich have been dating for six weeks. After Mom’s rogues’ gallery of suitors, I figure a guy who doesn’t drink, doesn’t swear, and goes to church too much is probably a safe option.

  “They’re so cute together, Hank.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Now, I’m assuming you didn’t come here just to chat about the Odd Couple and tell me you’ve started playing for the other team.”

  “Astute observation as always.” Lila reaches down into her shoulder bag, pulls out a manuscript. She hands me the tightly bound pages. The first page is blank. The second page has a W.B. Yeats quote from the poem “The Second Coming” that says,

  The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  “What is this?” I say.

  “It’s my book.”