Lila opens the door, walks into the apartment. I follow her inside, shut the door behind us.
“Wuuna sleep inna yuroom or inna mine?” Lila says.
“In my room or yours?”
“Yeah, zwut I said.”
As is customary with my constantly raging libido, my penis does a half-salute inside my pants as if to say, Can we, pleeeeease?
“My room is fine,” I say.
“Zoot yerzelf,” Lila says. She walks up to me, kisses me full on the lips, with tongue. She stumbles back. “Mmm, you taste good.”
“You’re not so bad either,” I say.
Lila pats me on the chest. “Can I tell yuz one thing?”
“Sure, Lila.”
“You do whateverz you thinks is best for Jack. Yours hiz dad. Gillman isn’t.”
I grab Lila by the hand, pull her into me. We kiss. I feel her pelvis lean into mine. My road to redemption deserves at least one tap on the snooze bar, doesn’t it? Just as I start to slide my hands down the small of Lila’s back, she appears.
“What are you doing, Daddy?”
Lila doesn’t see her. Only I can see her. She’s a figment of my imagination, but in every way that counts, she’s very real. She is my six-year-old daughter, Sasha.
When I was a teenager, my father and I had precious few man-to-man conversations. But the one I remember most was the lecture on fidelity. I was twenty years old and had just screwed up my fourth relationship in as many months.
“How do you do it?” I remember saying to him.
“Do what?”
“Stay with one woman…forever.”
“Masturbation and patience,” Dad said. “But mostly masturbation.”
His candor surprised me. Genuine off-color humor from John Fitzpatrick? I didn’t know whether to congratulate him or run screaming to Mom. “Uh, yeah…” I said, still off balance. “I think I got a pretty good handle on the masturbation, Dad.”
Dad grinned. “Truthfully, Hank?”
“No, just make something up. Yes, truthfully.”
“Jeanine helps me.”
“Come again?”
“Your sister.”
“Yeah, I know her name.”
“Whenever I’m in a potentially compromising position, I picture myself with the compromising woman, and then I picture my daughter watching everything I’m doing. It’s like a built-in monogamy kill switch.”
And so, here I stand, on the verge of quasi-incestuous Armenian Mormon sex, when my daughter Sasha appears.
I unhinge my lips from Lila’s face. “Good night,” I say abruptly.
“What’s wrong, Hank?”
“Nothing,” I say, giving Sasha a quick smile. She smiles back.
“Sure about that?”
I reach into my pocket, pull out my cell phone. “You were right, Lila. I should call my wife.”
Chapter eighty-three
I open the front door, walk into the house without knocking. Gillman and my mother are in the family room watching television.
“Hey, son,” Mom says. “Back already? I thought you wanted to stick around and spy on Jack a little bit.”
“It’s an eighth-grade dance, Mom. He made me drop him off a block away from school. I’ll live if I miss creeping on a bunch of thirteen year olds.” I slap the application to Empire Ridge Preparatory Academy on the coffee table in front of Gillman and my mother. “Now, do either of you mind explaining this?”
“That’s a Prep application,” Gillman says.
“No shit,” I say.
“Hank, a little respect for your father, please.”
“Gillman’s not my fucking father. He’s barely a father to his own daughter.”
Gillman stands up. I move toward him until we’re standing face-to-face. He’s my exact height but outweighs me by a good seventy pounds. For a guy who abstains from alcohol and caffeine, you think he’d exhibit a modicum of temperance with sweets and fried food.
“Debbie,” Gillman says, turning away from me. “I don’t have to stay here and take this in my own house.”
“Running away already?” I say. “Come on now, Gillman, I know you want this fight. I can see it in your eyes and that donut-stuffed face. You’re ready to go all Mountain Meadows Massacre on me, aren’t you?”
“Hank!” Mom shouts.
“It’s okay, Debbie.” Gillman waves my mother off. “I got this.”
“Sure you do,” I say.
“Why would you think I’d run away, Hank?”
“Everyone runs away.”
“Open your eyes, son.”
“Don’t call me—”
“Spare me the martyr routine,” Gillman says. “Look around you. I’m the only one who hasn’t run away. Your sister moved to Portland the day she graduated college. We’re lucky to get a Christmas card from her. You’re in and out of Jack’s life when the mood suits you, teaching him how to masturbate and French kiss but not teaching him the difference between right and wrong or what it means to be a Christian. Meanwhile, your marriage is falling apart and you spend months at a time in New York away from your family just so you can flirt with my daughter.”
“Excuse me?” Mom says.
“That’s an oversimplification of things,” I say. “And you know it.”
“What exactly am I ‘oversimplifying’?”
“First off, let’s just leave Lila out of this. She confides in me more than she’ll ever confide in you, and that’s your problem, not mine. As for Jack, if I didn’t have that talk with him, no one would. The kid was scared shitless. He was turning into an emotionally and socially dysfunctional freak. He was turning into you, Gillman.”
“Give me a break, Hank.”
“If you could only see yourself in social situations, Gillman.”
“I am plenty social.”
“No, I’m talking when you have to get down and dirty with the unwashed Gentiles. Seeing you with your fellow Mormons at a Catholic wedding reception is priceless. You guys all huddle together around one table with this panicked, bug-eyed look as if you’re witnessing an orgy.”
“To be fair, if it’s anything to do with you Catholics, I usually am witnessing an orgy.”
“‘You Catholics,’ huh? Oh good, let’s go there next. Let’s talk about you teaching Jack what it means to be a Christian.”
“What about it?”
“You fucking suck at it.”
“Hank!” Mom shouts again.
“Debbie, I said I got this.” Again Gillman waves her off. “Okay, Hank. Take your best shot.”
“You don’t want my best shot.”
“Try me.”
“Okay, Gill-man. First off, the next time you have a spare moment, open a fucking dictionary. Stop calling non-Mormons ‘Gentiles’. A ‘Gentile’ is a non-Jew. Mormons are just as much Gentiles as Catholics, you idiot. And I realize the Catholic Church is far from perfect, but an apostasy? My ass, you intellectually dishonest and morally hypocritical prick. Let’s not forget for the first thousand years of Christianity my imperfect church was a goddamn one-man show. If not for that millennium of kicking ass and taking names, there wouldn’t even be a Christianity for your church or anyone else’s church to break away from. Hell, I got T-shirts older than your religion. Suck on that fucking revelation, Joseph Smith.”
I’m short of breath. Face red. Pulse racing. Perspiration drenching my shirt. But I’ve won. I know it. I can see it in Gillman’s eyes. I can taste it in the sweat dripping down into my mouth like liquid vindication.
Mom abruptly stands up and leaves the room. Strangely, Gillman hasn’t budged.
“Have you said all you wanted to say, Hank?”
I wipe my brow with the sleeve of my shirt. “I guess so.”
“Are you familiar with the term putati
ve father?”
“Should I be?”
“If I were in your shoes, yes.” Gillman nods. “A putative father is defined as the presumed father of an illegitimate child.”
Gillman knows I’m Jack’s father? Well, fuck. I guess the joke is on me, eh, Joseph Smith?
“When did Mom tell you?”
“The first night we went out on a date, and I didn’t run away.”
Fortunately, Mom’s complete inability to engage in subterfuge has lessened the blunt force trauma of this revelation. There are only so many ways you can bring characters into the story, make them interesting and necessary to the narrative arc, and then find plausible ways to drop the big reveal on them. Quite frankly, I’m a little disappointed here. Mom telling Gillman over a basket of breadsticks at a shitty Italian restaurant is rather pedestrian.
“Well, go on,” I say.
“You sure you want to hear this?” Gillman asks.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that it doesn’t matter what I want.”
“A putative father registry is a state-level legal requirement for all non-married males to document through a notary public with the state each female with whom they engage in heterosexual sexual intercourse in order to retain parental rights to any child they may father.”
Gillman has practiced this speech. His words sound like they’re being recited more than said.
“The putative father registry is intended to provide legal recognition to the non-married putative father of a child, provided he registers within a limited timeframe, usually any time prior to the birth or from one to thirty-one days after a birth.”
“But all bets are off,” I say. “If I never even knew he was my—”
“I’m not finished, Hank.” Gillman’s eyes roll up into his head and then back, as if he’s scrolling down the page to the last sentence. “Lack of knowledge of the pregnancy or birth is not a legally acceptable reason for failure to file.”
I bite my lip in disbelief. Gillman has won, big time. He’s called my bluff. I won’t say anything to Jack, at least not yet, and Gillman knows that. I’ve been Jack’s age. The kid is an emotional and hormonal powder keg, and I refuse to be the one to light the trail of gunpowder.
“So that’s it?” I say.
“Hank, I’m—”
“You’re pulling the rug out from under me?”
“I don’t want to shut you out of Jack’s life.”
“Then don’t!”
“Answer me this,” Gillman says. “When’s the last time your mother had a drink? When’s the last time she took a sleeping pill? Where is Jack graduating in his class?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your mother hasn’t had a sip of alcohol or so much as one narcotic in almost three years. Jack is graduating first in his class. First! Do you know how proud that makes me feel? I messed up with Lila. I know that, and I hope she can learn to forgive me. But with Jack, I have a chance to make things right. He and your mother are the lights of my life. I know I come across to you as old-fashioned and weird, but I’m a good man. I don’t want to change your mother or your brother.”
“Jack is not my brother, Gillman. He’s my son.”
“I know he is, and I can’t begin to fathom what you’ve gone through. All I’m asking is for a little more time. You and I are never going to be father and son, and I think we’re both fine with that. But I’m not going anywhere, and I hope for Jack’s sake you don’t go anywhere either. Just let me be his father for a little while longer. I promise you there will come a time when I won’t stand in the way.”
Conveniently, Mom pokes her head around the corner and walks into the room. She and Gillman sit back down on the couch. I pick up the Empire Ridge Preparatory Academy application off the coffee table.
“Is he going to have friends there?” I ask, looking at just my mother.
“Yes, baby. Tons of friends. Almost half his eighth-grade class is going to Prep.”
“That’s good, I guess.” I hand her the application. “I know you don’t need my permission or anything, but I think he’ll be okay there.”
My stepfather grabs me by the crook of my arm. “We don’t need your permission, Hank, but we want it.”
A smile tries to fight its way through my straight-lipped visage, but it’s not going to fucking happen. I jerk my elbow free of Gillman’s fat, clammy hands. “Don’t get to thinking we’re picking out china patterns anytime soon, asshole.”
Chapter eighty-four
I pull into the driveway in my blue Subaru Outback. The odometer is at 175,000 miles. The engine rattles as I turn off the car, reminding me I’m about five thousand miles overdue for an oil change. Beth sits barefoot and tanned on the front porch steps, just back from a girls’ weekend in Las Vegas with Claire, Lila, and Chris. She’s wearing a white tank top and her favorite old pair of cutoff jeans, a glass of red wine in her left hand and her right hand cocked just enough to suggest it might have been holding a cigarette only a split-second ago.
I step out of the car, Sasha trailing behind me. She slams her car door. Dad hated when we slammed our car doors. “Those doors are on loan from the dealership,” he’d shout at us. “There’s no need to slam them into next Tuesday.”
“How were the kids?” Beth asks in between sips of wine.
“Fantastic,” I say.
“I hate my brothers!” Sasha screams as she marches toward the house. She is her mother’s six-year-old clone, right down to her blond hair, her high cheekbones, her obstinacy, and even the way she struts, her left foot extending farther out than her right.
“Fantastic, huh?” Beth finishes off her wine, sets the glass on the porch, stands up, and makes her way toward the car.
“We had a bit of an incident.” I point to the two sleeping balls of fat known to the outside world as Johnny and Burke. “The boys kind of barfed on their big sister.”
We named the boys after their grandfathers, the “Burke” name almost an inside joke in honor of the Cisco Shin-kicking Affair of 1995. They are identical twins, their only distinguishing features being their moles: Johnny has a single mole centered on his forehead, while Burke’s two moles appear like a vampire bite on the right side of his neck.
Beth recovered nicely after her second C-section in four years. I would like to credit my bedside manner for her recovery, but as I haven’t been in her life or in her bed for the last six months, I’m indebted more so to the post-cesarean umbilical hernia that forced the insurance company to cover the entire cost of Beth’s tummy tuck. She lost her tattoo along with a few inches of loose skin. She even lost her navel. The fake navel looks real enough, and I’ve caught Beth enough times staring at her bare stomach in the mirror to know she’s pretty pleased with the results. The surgeon also gave her a breast lift at a reduced rate. Even though we’re separated, Beth has caught me staring at her cleavage enough times to know I’m pretty pleased with the results.
“Both of them barfed on her?” Beth says.
“She wanted to take them on the merry-go-round. I advised against it, but you know Sasha when she gets an idea in her head. I sat the boys on each side of her and made sure to not spin them too fast, but it didn’t take much for them to start spewing.”
“Is it bad that I’m picturing our daughter covered in her brothers’ vomit and wanting to laugh out loud?”
“Go for it,” I say. “I sure as hell did when it happened.”
Beth walks into the study just off the front hallway. She places Johnny in one of the two cribs pushed up against the hardwood bookcases. She tucks Johnny in, points to the other crib. “You can just put Burke in here for now.”
I lay Burke in his bed, swaddling him in a similar fashion to his brother. My eyes dart from one corner of the study to the other. A diaper pail vies for space with a fax machine. A changing pad sprawls over the antique
mahogany desk I bought at an estate sale. My first-edition library of Fitzgeralds, Steinbecks, Hemingways, and Faulkners share space with Dr. Marc Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, Rachel Simmons’s Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World, Dr. Dan Kindlon’s and Dr. Michael Thompson’s Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, Dr. William Pollack’s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys: Why Boys are Different—and How to Help Them Become Happy and Well-Balanced Men.
“I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“I thought you might,” Beth says.
I grab the paperback copy of Real Boys off the shelf, cracking the spine. I read aloud the first few lines of the introduction: “‘Boys today are in serious trouble, including many who seem “normal” and to be doing just fine. Confused by society’s mixed messages about what’s expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel a sadness and connection they cannot even name.’”
“Agree or disagree with the premise, Hank?”
I close the book, return it to the shelf. “Yeah, I’ll buy that.”
“Technically, you did buy that.”
Beth reaches over, squeezes my elbow. I don’t smile.
“Too soon for child support jokes?” she asks.
“Yeah…” I say. “Probably.”
“Would you like to stay for dinner?”
She has asked me over for dinner at least once a week since I closed my satellite office in New York and started working full time again out of College Ave’s Indianapolis headquarters. I’ve been promoted to publisher. Last month, Aaron Rosner’s father helped him secure a seat on the board of directors at Domino’s Pizza in Ann Arbor. Aaron always hated Indiana anyway. “Too many goddamn Gentiles,” he said, using the word “Gentiles” in its proper context. I’ve been sleeping on a cot in the copy room. My clothes smell perpetually of warm paper and ink.
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