by David Hicks
Finally I got up off the basement floor, trudged upstairs, and told Rachel I was sorry, I was terribly sorry, but I couldn’t go on, I could no longer live this charade, I didn’t love her anymore, I felt ashamed and awful but I didn’t know what else to do. She heaved the coffee table at me: Get out of my house! So I spent the night at my sister’s. I was lying in the guest-room bed, miserable and guilt-ridden, when my mother, who lived next door to Annie, came into the room without knocking and told me how disappointed my father would be, may he rest in peace.
The next day, after Rachel called to tell me Nathan was confused and crying and I’d better be the one to explain it all to him, I picked up my son and drove him to the neighborhood pizzeria. Nathan hung his head as he came out of the house, kept his head down as he got into my car, and lowered it even further as we got out at the pizzeria and I guided him to a booth. In the corner was a kid around Nathan’s age playing a video game, firing a toy gun at men who popped up out of nowhere. In a split second the kid had to decide if it was a hero or villain, to hold fire or shoot.
Our pizza slices sat on paper plates before us.
“I’m not leaving you and Janey,” I told him. “I’m leaving Mom. Your mother.”
I checked my impulse to call the whole thing off, to tell him it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, I would be moving back in immediately. My wife was a fun-loving, attractive woman and I was an idiot for leaving her. So many people, millions and millions, including my parents, had learned to shelve that silly dream of happiness and true love and settle for a working, fraternal partnership with their spouses. Why couldn’t I?
I sought out Nathan’s eyes, hidden under the Mets cap I had given him for Christmas, but when he raised his head I looked away.
“You are, you are leaving me,” he said. He lowered his head again as his face clenched, his breath grating and catching in his throat. I reached out to keep his forehead from touching the pizza sauce. “I woke up and you were gone,” he said through his chokes. “Mom said you just left, you left us.”
I considered explaining everything to him: how his mother and I had been too young to marry, how it had been a mistake from the beginning, how we hadn’t yet learned to love ourselves, how we had fought all the time before he was born and afterwards repressed it all so that it came out in bitter parries and brutal asides delivered with sarcastic smiles. I considered telling him how important it was for him to love himself or at least know himself before committing to someone else. I considered advising him to be deeply in love, crazy in love, before he married. I considered apologizing for ruining his life; all the articles I’d been reading concluded that children of divorced households were far more likely than “normal” kids to become addicted to drugs, commit violent crimes, and grow into coldhearted atheists who hated their fathers.
Nathan lifted his head. “Why don’t you just come back?”
He thought the solution so simple, so obvious, that for a moment his eyes brimmed with certainty. But when they met mine they again collapsed, and his tears dropped onto the oil of his pizza, his shoulders convulsing. Nothing will ever be as hard as this, I wanted to tell him, but I knew that would be a lie, that in fact he was in for a lifetime of hardship and hurt and patricidal fantasies, and who could even predict whether or not whatever city he lived in would be obliterated by terrorists or completely underwater by the time he was my age. Instead I watched as he slipped away from me across the table, the space between us opening like a canyon, and I understood that nothing for him would be easy for a long time, and nothing I could say would help. All those months I had considered leaving, all the inner debates and bargaining, I had known it would destroy him, and that alone had kept me from acting on it. But I had never put a face to the destruction. Here it was, in front of me, and I had at the ready no offerings of solace, help, or hope.
*
As we neared the centerfield gate he took my hand, and when we finally entered the ballpark and heard the stadium usher say Stay on the warning track, this way please, I saw immediately how the Diamond Dash worked. The long line of kids and adults followed the warning track to the right-field corner, then turned along the foul line towards first base where the children made a sharp right and took off, dashing around the bases as parents and guardians continued to stroll towards home, shouting encouragement, until they met their little ones at the plate and ushered them out of the ball park. A dash around the diamond.
Nathan broke into a slow, almost stationary trot, as if he had to go to the bathroom.
*
One Saturday in June, five months after I left my wife, my son and I had sat together on the baseball field at Silver Lake Park. “Are they the same swans we saw last time?” he asked, pointing.
I looked over and nodded, thinking of Yeats’s swans, especially the fifty-ninth one, then noticed, at the far end of the lake, an SUV that looked like Rachel’s, fire-engine red. It rolled slowly on the shoulder before stopping under a tree. “They’re beautiful,” I said. “But territorial.” Nathan threw the baseball up in the air and caught it in his new glove, waiting for me to define territorial. His little fist clenched around the ball. I told him the swans decided a pond was theirs, and then dominated it. “They kill ducklings at night,” I said. “They drown them.” I started to demonstrate, as if forcing his little head under water, then stopped.
Nathan shuddered. “Why don’t the ducks just stick together and fight back?”
I watched the swans glide in unison, dipping their long necks toward each other—such grace, such enmity. “I guess they’re afraid to,” I said.
“Do you still not love Mom?” Nathan asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said, glancing across the lake at the car.
“Do you love someone else now?” He was still watching the swans.
I hesitated. There was a new Student Life director at my university, with recklessly curly hair. After meeting her in the fall, I had thought about her every day. In mid-December we had met for lunch, I told her of my situation, and we spoke of the possibility of dating once I left my marriage. She was smart, energetic, and had a great, throaty laugh. “It would be exciting to date the famous Professor Hawkins,” she said. “The students adore you.” When I drove her back to campus I held her arm as she started to leave, pulled her to me, and gave her a long, desperate kiss. But a few weeks later, when I did leave my marriage, she refused to answer my calls or emails. And when I went to her office to find out what had happened, she shook her head sadly and closed the door on me. For a while I kept up hope—maybe she simply didn’t trust that I had left my wife for good—but the next time I saw her on campus she had a glittering diamond on her finger.
Then, in early February, I had tried to contact someone I had met in graduate school, a woman with enormous black eyes that had haunted me off and on for the past seven years. But while I learned from a web search that she had graduated NYU with her masters in Comparative Literature, she seemed to have disappeared afterwards—or more likely got married and changed her name.
“No,” I told Nathan.
He was shifting his weight, standing on the dusty path between first and second base, pounding the glove with his little fist. I was squatting on the infield grass, a few feet away.
“Mom still loves you,” he said, “even though you left.” He kicked the bat with his foot. “So now you must love her again if you don’t love anyone else. You have to love someone.”
I tore up some grass, fisted it in my hand. Your mom doesn’t really love me; she loves the idea of me. “I love you,” I said. “And Crazy Janey, of course.” When I had picked up Nathan I had seen my baby daughter in the back yard, in the turtle sandbox. (“Leave her,” Rachel had said. “Nathan’s the one who needs you. She’s fine.”) Janey, I thought, would never remember anything from the two years I had spent with her in the house. No memories of her father rocking her in the blue chai
r, feeding her pureed apricots with her Ariel spoon, singing “Good night, it’s all right, Jane” before bed. Would it be easier for her, then, than it would be for Nathan? Or would she be even angrier at me when she came of age?
Nathan shook off his glove, picked up his new bat, and tried to toss the ball in the air and hit it, but again and again he swung and missed. After the fifth try, he flung the bat away. “I hate this!” he said, his face reddening. “It’s too heavy.”
I could see that the bat, which I had also given him for Christmas, was too heavy, and that his shoulders were in discord with the rest of his body, but that soon, in a few years perhaps, he would be strong enough to rip line drives with a smooth, level stroke. But who would teach him how to swing, how to shift his weight from back leg to front, how to follow the ball with his eyes right into the catcher’s mitt?
Nathan crumpled to the ground and began flinging pebbles in my direction, though not far enough to reach me.
“I was lying on the floor every night,” I said quietly, “crying. After I read to you and rubbed your back. After you fell asleep. After Mom and Janey fell asleep.” I began to curl my face into my armpit, mimicking how I must have appeared on the family-room floor, but then stopped. No child wants to picture his father like that.
Nathan straightened his shoulders. “If you come back I’ll be good all the time and you won’t be sad anymore. And if you do get sad you can come in bed with me like you used to and I’ll rub your back now.”
I shook my head, looking at the torn grass in my hand. I could, I thought. I could go back. I had been making it work, hadn’t I? Fake it ’til you make it, my mother had once told me, when I confessed to her I was unhappy in my marriage. How do you think your father and I made it as far as we did? Before the son of a bitch up and died on me.
“Mom says you’re going to hell,” Nathan said.
A cyclist rode past us then, down a dirt path that led into the woods. Nathan and I had ventured that way many times, but I still didn’t know where the path ended. Once he found a butterfly on the ground there, its wing bent, and thought that by picking it up and holding it, he could save it. I had to tell him that if you hold something too tightly, you could kill it.
“This is not your fault,” I told Nathan, “and it’s not your mother’s fault.” I stood up and brushed off my shorts. “This is my fault.”
*
On the right-field wall of Shea Stadium were the jersey numbers and names of the most famous Mets: Casey Stengel, Gil Hodges, Tom Seaver. Men of strength, confidence, humor, and grace. When I bent to scoop up some gravely clay from the track, Nathan yanked on my shirt so we wouldn’t lose our place. I started to tell him about the stadium, which would soon be torn down—I had been to over a hundred games here—but he furrowed his brow. “Why did that man call it a warning track?” he asked, but I was thinking of my father, of a time he had taken me here, and I heard Nathan’s question in some arid distance, as if he had asked it in his thin voice through a tin can on a string from his room in our former house in White Plains and it had somehow carried all the way to the other tin can here in Queens.
*
When he was four, Nathan and I sat on the living-room couch as I prepared for the class I was teaching that night. He was reading a pop-up ABC book featuring a variety of animals and insects, and Rachel was in the family room blasting an old Pat Benatar CD while vacuuming the carpet. We had just found out she was pregnant again, and I was feeling like a prisoner whose sentence had arbitrarily been extended.
Nathan was inventing a narrative to go with the pictures, occasionally identifying a letter. “B,” he called out over the noise, “Butterfly. Butterflies are pretty. They fly with their pretty wings and drink from the pretty flowers.” He flipped the page.
I put my finger to my lips as I went back over the page I was trying to read. I was completely unprepared for class; I hadn’t even re-read the novel I was teaching, to say nothing of how I was going to fill three hours of class time talking about it. “Go in your room if you want to read out loud,” I said.
The music pounded. The vacuum whined. Maybe I would put the students into small groups, give them themes to discuss.
“C. Crocodile. Butterflies like to visit their friend Mister Crocodile.” Another turn of another page.
“Nathan, please. Daddy’s trying to work.” I held the book closer to my face.
Love is a battlefield.
“D,” he said next. “Doggie. Daddy Doggie.” He was still looking at the crocodile; he hadn’t turned the page. “Daddy Doggie is cranky today.” He raised his voice to be heard over the music, craning his neck so his lips came close to my ear. “HE CAN’T EVEN SEE THE PRETTY COL—”
I snapped my book shut and clamped my hand over Nathan’s mouth, forcing his head against the back of the couch. His eyes widened. He couldn’t breathe.
“Will you be quiet,” I hissed.
*
“It’s so the outfielders know the wall is coming,” I said. I told him they feel the track under their feet and that’s how they know they might crash into the fence. I was ready to add that I myself had been an outfielder, and that whenever I raced back for a long fly ball I’d feel the crunch one two and brace for the fence, and that once, at a field where there was no warning track, I had sprinted back and collided into the fence, hurting my shoulder and missing the ball—And so sometimes, you see, there is no warning—but Nathan was looking up now and wondering about something else, like how the stadium lights had come on even though the game was over and the sky wasn’t dark yet, so I didn’t tell him any of those things.
As we reached the right-field corner and turned toward home, I strayed from the track to step on the outfield grass, to feel it under my feet. When I was Nathan’s age, my father had taken me to Fan Appreciation Day, and while I don’t remember anything about either game of the doubleheader, I do remember that between games, clutching the wooden stake of the poster I had made, I had walked across this same outfield with hundreds of other fans. I had first been ushered to the end of a long line outside the stadium that led to the same centerfield gates Nathan and I had just walked through, and we had split into two parades, one streaming towards first base, the other towards third. For days I had dreamed of feeling the grass beneath my feet, of seeing my heroes leaning over the dugout rail, appreciating my poster. But once on the field, I found myself frantically searching for my father. He had walked me to the outfield gates, but now where would he be? Still back behind the outfield wall? Up there in our seats, in a section I couldn’t possibly locate? Out in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette? As I approached the infield I gripped my poster with both hands, searching the stadium for his maroon windbreaker. By the time I reached third base, I had dropped the poster and was running towards the exit behind home plate, and when I found my father there—standing at a reasonable distance from the rest of the parents, a snuffed-out cigarette at his feet—I clasped my arms around him, breathing in his musky smell.
“What the hell?” he said.
*
A few months after I left my sister’s house, Nathan and I had sat on my bed in my tiny apartment in West Harrison on the second floor of a cottage, formerly the horse groomer’s quarters, in the back yard of a small estate. A divorced woman in her sixties lived by herself in the main house. As soon as the weather had begun to warm I saw her outside every day, wearing a floppy hat, digging in the big garden beds out back, humming to herself. She was lean and fit, with gray-blonde hair. In mid-May she had given me some fresh lettuce, and a week later she left a bag of seed packets by my door with a note: I could start my own garden if I wanted to, in the little plot alongside the cottage.
The kids and I spent the day outside, planting together. Before picking them up I had aerated the soil and added some compost, and once they were with me, I scooped out holes with a spade as Nathan dropped in seeds, all the while ke
eping an eye on Janey to make sure she didn’t eat the dirt. Now inside and freshly bathed, Janey sat on the floor in her happy-face pajamas watching a Winnie the Pooh video while Nathan showed me some drawings he had made in his first-grade class. In one of them, stick figures in red crayon stood side-by-side on orange construction paper. There was a mommy, with a thick smile and a tuft of red hair; a daddy, tall and skinny, with brown hair and a moustache; a chubby baby in a bright blue stroller; and a slight little boy. But between the boy and the daddy was a strange man with a thick and hideous grin. The tallest member of this crayon portrait, he was clearly not a member of the family. And although the stranger was smiling, his head was on fire. An orange blaze raged up from inside his skull, the top of which had apparently been blown off.
“Who’s that?” I said.
Nathan looked puzzled. “That’s a man with his head on fire,” he said.
I looked at the other drawings: a cow with green stripes, a boy with hands so fat they blotted out the scenery. I thought, maybe sometimes a man with his head on fire is just a man with his head on fire. But then I remembered: on our way out of the pizzeria, he had kicked the soda machine as hard as he could.
“Are you angry?” I asked. “That I left? That would be totally normal, you know.” My god, of course he’s angry. He’ll be angry with me until the day he dies.