Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “I like the Grateful Dead.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “What’s the third reason?”

  “They don’t rock.”

  “Don’t rock?” Jack says. “Have you even listened to them?”

  “I’ve listened plenty, and I can’t envision going to a Dave show and banging my head, pumping my fist, or feeling my heart about to explode out of my chest.”

  “That’s your main criteria for music? Whether or not it makes you violent and gives you a heart attack?”

  “When I want to rock, I want to rock, not do the stoner shuffle to safe, uninteresting folk music.”

  “I wouldn’t call Carter Beauford safe or uninteresting.”

  “He’s Dave’s drummer, right?”

  Jack nods. “And probably rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest living percussionist.”

  I shake my head in a dissenting motion. “I’m never leaving you alone with our sister again.”

  “Name someone better.”

  “He’s practically in our own backyard. Does the name Kenny Aronoff ring a bell?”

  “Should it?”

  “He’s John Mellencamp’s drummer.”

  “Is it possible for you to have a musical discussion without referencing Mellencamp?”

  “Okay then, what about Neil Pert?”

  “Neil who?”

  “Dear Lord, I have failed you as a big brother.”

  “Relax, Hank.” A car honks as it passes by us. Jack waves. “I know who Neil Pert is. I just don’t think he’s as good a drummer as Carter Beauford.”

  “Neil Pert could eat a bowl of drumsticks and crap a better solo than Carter Beauford.”

  Jack laughs at me. I laugh right back at him to spite myself. I’ll never be a Dave Matthews fan, but if the guy can deliver me more of these moments with Jack, I might just jump on that Phish-wannabe frat-rock bandwagon. Talking about music is something I always wanted to do with Dad, but by the time I had formed an opinion one way or the other, he was gone forever. I think Dad would have been on Jack’s side in this argument, but I don’t tell him that. Blues harps, fiddles, a full horn section: that was John Fitzpatrick’s kind of music.

  Thank you, Dave Matthews. If somewhere in between smoking dragons with your girlfriend, getting stung by bumblebees, and wearing pineapple grass bracelets, you can make the world smile, who am I to disparage a twelve-year-old’s cassette bootlegs?

  Chapter seventy-nine

  With my late nights working at College Ave and Mom being an absentee parent to Jack in the midst of her newly wedded bliss, I feel like I’m neglecting my wife and children.

  Well, I know I’m neglecting my wife.

  Beth and I are struggling. It started after the twins were born. At first, I chalked it up to the same thing she went through with Sasha: another bout of post-partum depression. We talked through it, or pretended like we did, for about a year. Raising a toddler and two infants was a convenient distraction. I stopped counting the weeks and months that would go by without having sex with her. Beth stopped asking how my day was. The idea of even striking up a conversation intimidated me. I felt like a stranger in my own house.

  Nothing prepares you for this in a marriage. For the doldrums. For those moments when your sails stall and the ship flounders. A part of you wants to look to the horizon, hoping for that wind that will carry you home or at least to kinder shores. But a part of you also just wants to jump off the boat.

  “Hello again, Vanessa.”

  She bows her head. “Good morning, Hank.”

  Beth and I sit on the couch across from the old woman. Her name is Vanessa Sheed. She’s our couples therapist. In her fifties, soft in the middle, and pear-shaped, with auburn hair sprinkled with strands of gray and an authoritative, borderline-sneering Margaret Thatcher countenance. Beth, of course, corrected me this morning, saying the woman “isn’t so much old as she is just older than us” and that my choice of adjectives is “further indication of your emotional immaturity.”

  Whatever. If I’m a kid masquerading as an adult, then Beth is counting the days until she can apply for an AARP card. The disapproving sneers. The constant rejections of her “sex ogre” of a husband. The lamentations about how she’s lost her womanhood to motherhood. Beth didn’t lose anything; she gave it away enthusiastically.

  We agreed I should see Vanessa for a couple sessions on my own prior to meeting in a group setting. And by “we” I mean Beth ordered me to do it. All things considered, our conversations have gone pretty well. I started opening up. I uncorked a bottle of resentment about my sainted father. I talked about Jack in the context of being my son and not my brother. I wrote a letter to my dead godfather asking him why he felt compelled to massage my balls and stick his finger up my butthole. Great stuff all around. Turns out this last bit about my butthole was a repressed memory that my therapy only now brought to light. I can’t say I’m particularly grateful or that I’ve become a better person for now having a conscious memory of my godfather knuckle-deep in my anus, but I leave that to the professionals to decide.

  Barring the anus revelation, a part of me almost thinks the worst is behind us and that we might be turning things around. There’s no way we’re going to throw all this away, are we? Life with Sasha and the twins is pretty close to perfect. Beth and I even had sex twice recently, in one week! At one point, I almost went forty-eight hours without masturbating to Internet porn. My streak came to a crashing halt when the new neighbors moved in. The wife, this full-breasted half-Vietnamese woman named Lang who works in the healthcare industry, had me searching on the Internet for a few hours, dick in hand, for Busty Asian Nurses. There’s a revelation for you, Vanessa: I didn’t even know I was into Asians.

  “Hank,” Vanessa says. “Would you agree with your wife’s assessment?”

  “What?”

  “My assessment of you,” Beth says. “Do you agree with it?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug my shoulders. “What’s this about anyway? I thought we’ve been in a good place lately, even in the bedroom. Haven’t we?”

  Beth shakes her head. “He wasn’t listening, not that I’m surprised.”

  “Please, Beth,” Vanessa says, holding her hand up.

  “Hank, your wife thinks you’re in a state of arrested development. That the sexual abuse you suffered as a child was compounded by the sudden death of your father and essentially froze you, emotionally and psychologically, at twenty-one years old.”

  I turn to my wife. “So that’s it? We’ve circled all the way back to that?”

  “Our problems aren’t going to be solved simply by rolling around in the sheets a couple times.”

  “Did I say they were solved?”

  Vanessa raises her hand to interrupt. “So you don’t agree with your wife, Hank?”

  “That’s just it,” I say. “A part of me agrees with her implicitly. My childhood, my boyhood, that brief period of my life in which I had a father, is a moment frozen in time for me. A part of me will always want to stay in that moment. But that doesn’t mean I’m not working to be a better person, a better father…”

  “A better husband?” Beth says.

  “Of course, a better husband.” I bite my bottom lip, my finger raised to my wife’s face, almost touching her nose. “You didn’t let me finish, and that’s my problem with you, Beth.”

  “Let’s assume a less aggressive posture, Hank,” Vanessa says. “But I like where this is going. Keep talking to Beth, not me.”

  “Yeah, Hank, talk to me.” She reaches for my hand as I lower it. I pull my hand away.

  “My problem with you is that you don’t want to fix things. You seem to take some sort of perverse pleasure in exposing my faults. I’ve never seen someone try so hard to dislike another person. You are the one person who laughs least at my jokes.”

&nb
sp; “That’s because I’ve heard all of them.”

  “No, it’s because you don’t want to give me a break. Anything that might possibly fragment your view of me as a completely flawed human gets cast aside. I know I’m not the world’s best listener. I know I’m not good with money and I don’t think about the future enough. And I know I publish books instead of saving sick kids.”

  “Saving sick kids?” Beth says. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not your fucking father, and you resent me because of it.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it? You’re here today to fix me, not us and certainly not you. You don’t want me to be the man of the house, you want me to be your idea of a man. Your idea of a man balances the checkbook, watches the stock ticker all day, alphabetizes his family videos, and knows his children’s vaccination schedules by heart.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I guess. But your idea of a man has also spent the better part of the last thirty years as a glorified roommate to his spouse. Your idea of a man hasn’t kissed his wife in public since Jimmy Carter was president.”

  “You’ve made your point, Hank,” Vanessa says.

  “Your idea of a man doesn’t even hold his wife’s hand, never mind have sex with her.”

  “I said that’s enough.”

  “Don’t worry, Vanessa.” My wife reaches over and touches the therapist’s knee. “I can handle this.”

  “Then handle it,” I say.

  “Do you like your life?” Beth asks me.

  “What?”

  “It’s a simple question. Do you like your life?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so? Let’s see. You have your perfect little family. You have a job you love. Meanwhile, I’m the one taking care of the kids. I’m the one who, on top of being a mom and a good housewife, goes to work in the evenings to take shit from entitled teenage gymnasts who reek of smelly feet and dirty tampons. Your life has turned out exactly the way you wanted it to turn out. And I’m just a stay-at-home mom with a worthless nursing degree and no marketable skills.”

  “You’re being a little hard on yourself, Beth.”

  “Am I?”

  “If you want to do more with your life, then do it. But don’t sit here and act like I’m the bad guy or try to tell me that your parents raised you right.”

  “Better Stan or Joan than Debbie.”

  “Nice misdirection.”

  “How so?”

  “My mom lost her reason for being a good partner to someone nine years ago when her husband got stabbed in the liver by a truck. What are your parents’ excuses?”

  “At some point you’re going to have to start realizing there’s an expiration date on grief.”

  “And at some point you’re going to have to start fucking me more than once every three months.”

  “Okay, you two,” Vanessa says, standing. She extends her arms between us, like a referee. “This session is no longer productive.”

  Beth sits in the car, still crying. I approach the driver’s side door. Inhale. Exhale. I open the door, slide behind the wheel. I shut the door, forcing a half smile.

  “That was productive, all things considered,” I say. “Looks like we might have a few more of those in store for us. Thank God for Random House medical benefits.”

  “Hank…” Beth says.

  “Unlimited ten-dollar co-pays for therapy. I confirmed our appointment for next month.”

  “Hank…” she repeats through a veil of mascara and tears. “I want a trial separation.”

  My wife’s request is hardly shocking. She’s played this card close to a dozen times in our seven years of marriage. My standard response is to grovel, say something about how “we need to think about the kids first,” then spend the next thirty to ninety days working our relationship back to a semi-tolerable equilibrium. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  I turn the key in the ignition.

  Lather, rinse, repeat? Not today. Maybe not ever again. I just don’t have anything left for her, for us.

  “A trial separation, huh?”

  Beth nods.

  I put the car into drive. “Fine by me.”

  Chapter eighty

  From: Fitzpatrick, Hank [mailto:hfitzpatrick@collegeavepress.com]

  Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 11:26 AM

  To: Prestwich, Delilah [mailto:di_prestwich@yahoo.com]

  Subject: Advance Praise for SPERM BANK MESSIAH

  Dear Lila,

  They love you! The last review is my personal favorite. Hank

  P.S. Until my situation with Beth gets settled, I’m working mostly in New York at my satellite office in the Bertelsmann Building. An author friend is letting me crash at his place in Hell’s Kitchen for free. I’ll be here for the rest of the week. Come by for lunch?

  “A sardonic yet endearing confection of Ian Frazier humor, Paul Theroux travelogue, and Karen Armstrong theological progressivism.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Think Monty Python’s Life of Brian by way of Doctor Who, its unbridled self-awareness, mordancy, and aleatoric narrative arc derailed only by the occasional and unfortunate homage to Anita Diamant’s Red Tent.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Thank God for Lila Prestwich! Other critics might take a few potshots at her almost consciously derivative protagonist, but I have to think Dickens and John Irving would get a kick out of the baton being passed from Oliver to Garp to a time-traveling born-again crack whore. Sperm Bank Messiah is crass, vulgar, and inappropriate. Needless to say, I loved it. Recommended for all serious fiction collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “With American fiction heading into an inevitable post-9/11 morass, Lila Prestwich reminds us of what the world used to be like, vacillating between willful enervation and ambivalent immurement. She dares to be contumelious, her ribald yet perspicuous prose challenging the reader on every page.”

  —The New York Times

  “Modernism and its wicked doppelganger secularism have reached their zenith with Sperm Bank Messiah. Soon-to-be excommunicated Latter-Day Saint turned homosexual activist Lila Prestwich piggybacks on the mainstream media’s virulent hatred of all things Christian and masculine and gives us perhaps the most willfully offensive and wicked tome in the history of English (and I use this term loosely) literature.”

  —Salt Lake Tribune

  Chapter eighty-one

  From: Fitzpatrick, Hank [mailto:hfitzpatrick@collegeavepress.com]

  Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 8:14 AM

  To: Prestwich, Delilah [mailto:di_prestwich@yahoo.com]

  Subject: Young Lions Fiction Award Nominees Announced

  Dear Lila,

  What did I tell you about kissing New York’s ass? Hank

  P.S. Dinner tonight?

  Young Lions Fiction Award Nominees Announced

  Posted Monday, Apr 29, 2002

  The New York Public Library announced six nominees for its second annual Young Lions Fiction Award [YLFA], which recognizes the work of authors aged thirty-five or younger.

  Nominated for the YLFA top six are: The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski (Putnam), The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall (Norton), John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday), Esther Stories by Peter Orner (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin), Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman (Dial Press/Random House), and Sperm Bank Messiah by Lila Prestwich (College Ave/Random House).

  The ceremony will be held May 11 in the Celeste Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library. The winner will receive a $10,000 award.

  “[YLFA] is run by avid readers and formidable writers who believe in, and are committed to, the cultural necessity of the written word,” Mark Danielewski, l
ast year’s winner for the novel House of Leaves, said in a statement. “It’s essential for writers in the early part of their publishing lives to have opportunities for support and ratification.”

  YLFA stemmed from the Young Lions group, a membership organization for library supporters in their twenties and thirties. The nominees for YLFA were selected by a Reading Committee of Young Lions members, writers, and librarians, including Rodney Phillips, director of the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

  Chapter eighty-two

  The bad news is that Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days won the Young Lions Fiction Award. The good news is, on the heels of Lila’s nomination, Michael Pietsch, publisher and executive vice president of Little, Brown and Company, outbid Random House’s own paperback imprint, Vintage, for the trade paper rights to Sperm Bank Messiah, singlehandedly putting College Ave in the black for the rest of the year. Mr. Pietsch heard I was in town visiting Lila and asked that we both attend the party he was hosting for Alice Sebold, one of Little Brown’s new authors. The party is being held at Flûte, a champagne bar on West 54th Street.

  Lila and I emerge from the bowels of the subway. She had wanted to take a taxi from her apartment, where I’ve been crashing off and on since Beth kicked me out of the house. I wanted to take the 1 train, seeing as it dumps you at 50th and Broadway, all of a five-minute walk from the bar. In a rare fit of acquiescence, Lila agreed to take the train.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I say.

  Lila smiles. She straightens her cocktail dress, a black sleeveless number with a plunging neckline that dares me to stare at her cleavage. As usual, the sight of me walking down the street with her on my arm provokes multiple How the fuck did he land her? sideways glances.

  “Loosen up, Hank.”

  “Easy for you to say. These are your co-workers.”