by Greg Olear
The goal of this early intervention is to prepare him for kindergarten. Enough prep, the thinking goes, and he won’t be as disruptive to his classmates, who will be learning their letters, numbers, and colors, knowledge Roland mastered years ago.
The 2012 edition of the DSM-V will eliminate the “Asperger’s” diagnosis, lumping it in under the more catholic heading “autistic spectrum disorder.”
The consensus among aspies is that this will only add to the confusion.
Although his “refrigerator mother” theory was debunked years ago, Bettelheim was right about one thing, as current studies clearly and repeatedly validate: Parents of autistic children are more likely to suffer from depression, from parental stress, from psychological stress.
Parents of autistic children are also more likely to split up.
The divorce rate for these parents is eighty percent, is what I hear.
Ernest, one of Cynthia Pardo and Peter Berliner’s three children, is autistic.
Stacy and I haven’t had sex in . . . how long has it been? A while. It’s been a while.
Shit.
Friday, 10:51 a.m.
GOOD LOVE IS HARD TO FIND.
“You Got Lucky” is on the radio as I start the car after our abrupt playdate exit. I’m not a big Tom Petty guy, but this song is innocuous enough, and anyway Maude’s stopped crying and has that distant look on her face like she’s about to fall asleep, so I don’t change it. Good love is hard to find. So say the Heartbreakers, who know.
I’m a good half-mile down Yankee Folly before I realize that the tune has a newfound and unwelcome significance. Check that: potential significance. If Sharon is right. If Stacy is—
In February, we’ll have been together ten years; Roland is almost five. His arrival into our world, and the subsequent migration of said world from the city to the marchlands to the north, marks a distinct midpoint of our union, a delineated shift from Act One to Act Two from the original blockbuster to the watered-down sequel.
The first half of our relationship was spent in New York and the various indulgent vacation spots—Napa, New Orleans, New Mexico, Nice—we periodically flew to from JFK. We both had jobs—not dream jobs, but real jobs, with salaries and benefits and personal days. We had free time, lots of free time, although it may not have felt that way back then, and the option to call in sick and sleep till noon if circumstances demanded it. One New Year’s Eve—the year after the bathetic Y2K ballyhoo, if memory serves, as it doesn’t as often as it once did—we got hammered at a friend’s party, literally dancing the night away, and didn’t get home till dawn. When we finally rolled out of bed on January first, it was three o’clock in the afternoon. The cats kept checking on us, rubbing whiskers on our cheeks to gauge for signs of life, puzzled looks on their feline faces, and we blissfully ignored them. Three in the afternoon!
Those first five years were our Gay Nineties; Roland’s birth, the Zimmermann Memo heralding a half-decade dug into the Great War foxhole of parenthood. No money, no travel for pleasure, no drinking to excess, no raucous parties, no sick days, no sleep-ins. No let-up. No relent. New Paltz is our Flanders, and our charge is to remain in the trenches and hold our ground until the Armistice Day that is . . . what? Kindergarten? College? Death?
You got lucky, babe.
Yes, Stacy is unhappy. Not depressed unhappy, worn down unhappy. But unhappy just the same. Unhappy enough to trade foxhole for rabbit hole and vanish into a wonderland of wanton wander-lust? I don’t believe so . . . she’s not the cheating kind, I’d like to think . . . but I don’t know. I mean, it’s possible. Certainly I’ve let her down enough these last five years.
She turned forty last month—the Big Four Oh, which is a bigger deal for women than it is for men, I’ve the hard way learned—and I totally botched the birthday. Not that I dropped the ball, as such—I organized a well-attended surprise breakfast and the obligatory spa mani-pedi, and we went out to dinner at Hokkaido, her favorite sushi restaurant—but something was missing from the festivities, and we both knew it. My birthday was just an item on your to-do list, she groused afterward. You didn’t really care about it at all. She wasn’t right about the second part, but she was bang-on about the first. I did care, of course I cared, but I didn’t have the resources—financial or emotional—to pull out all the stops. Had she turned forty after the kids were old enough to stay with her mother . . . after I’d gone back to work . . . after our credit card bills were not all on the brink of being maxed out . . . and not on a fucking Wednesday . . . I would have made the requisite fuss. But this year? I just didn’t have it in me. The timing was bad. Her milestone birthday was one of countless fatted calves we’ve sacrificed at the altar of parenthood. And Stacy’s fed up with it. She’s worn out, to the point where she’s starting to break. She’s unhappy.
Unhappy enough to stray?
The weeks after her birthday were the frostiest in all the time we’ve been together. Unable to focus her anger on the actual source—the kids; or, rather, the at-times suffocating restrictions raising kids has imposed on us, as hands-on parents—she took it out on me. You know how a baseball team that can’t trade all its players instead fires the manager? I was Team Stacy’s Billy Martin. The question is, was I irredeemable enough to replace?
Maybe I deserved what I got. If not the ax, at least the hostility. Maybe Stacy’s lame fortieth birthday was a passive-aggressive way for me to lash out at her. Maybe she’s not the only one who’s angry. Maybe I’m just as unhappy as she is. This would be prime fodder for couples counseling, but we stopped going to Rob in July because her insurance doesn’t cover mental health, and we can’t cover the out-of-pocket expense.
Things reverted to normal by the end of September . . . but could that be because she found satisfaction elsewhere? No, no, that’s not right—she was miserable then, too. It was around the first of October, I think, when I came home from the dentist and found her in tears. My life is a steaming pile of shit, she told me, and I hate everything right now. I’ve spent the last two hours with Maude, giving her every single ounce of my soul and it’s still not enough. I’m tired, I’m getting sick, I have SO much work to do. Help.
Unhappy enough to stray.
Period, full stop.
This would be the part in the movie where the jilted husband flies to Los Angeles on the next available flight—a cute and kindly stewardess would help him bypass airport security—to have it out with the cheating wife. He’d interrupt the business meeting, he’d yell and scream and embarrass her, he’d call her a whore and throw water in her face. Then he’d fly off into the sunset with the cute stewardess. But I can’t imagine reacting that way. I’d rather crawl under the porch and await the coup de grâce, like a dying cat. The very idea of confrontation—and therefore confirmation—makes me ill. Hot bile churns in my gut, a toxic stew of hurt pride, sadness, humiliation, and dread that cannot be healthily expressed, but cannot be tamped down. Some of the coffee comes back up my throat, bitter and acidic—why did I drink so many cups!—but I’m able to roll down the window and spit, and thus avoid retching all over my jeans (although I leave a trail of brown caffeinated spew along the side of the minivan).
How will I react when I know for sure? Hard to say. But the Not Knowing is eating me up already. It’s a monster, an apparition in human form; faceless like my wife’s potential lover, but powerful, relentless; a ring wraith—or, perhaps, that legendary faceless Hudson Valley bugbear, the Headless Horseman (or if he is Stacy’s lover, the Headless Whoresman)—riding roughshod over the broken landscape of my mind, haunting me.
I should probably call her, check in, ask her even, although I’m the sort of guy who will go to great lengths to avoid confrontation, particularly confrontation whose outcome I won’t like no matter how the cookie crumbles, as this sort of half-baked Lorna Doone is sure to. I should call her, yes, but what would I say? Hi, honey, I know you can’t talk long, but I was wondering . . . um, are you perhaps cheating on me? I
f Sharon’s information is bad, and Stacy has been true, I look like a dickhead for not trusting her. And that’s the best-case scenario! No, I can’t bring it up. Not now. Not until I talk to Sharon, find out what she knows.
And the Headless Whoresman gallops on.
When I found you.
Ten days until Election Day, and political posters have popped up everywhere, like so many red-white-and-blue zits: defacing the lawns, street corners, highway overpasses, storefront windows (the “T” where Main Street intersects the Thruway exchange suggests one of those Midtown plywood walls where the POST NO BILLS directive has been ignored)—blue for Democrat, red for Republican, although Ulster County lists so far to the left that the latter tend to be coy about their party affiliation. One of my little driving games involves trying to forecast a winner based on the volume of signage. Gilpatric, it appears, will cakewalk to a seat on the state Supreme Court. I’ve yet to see a single sign for his opponent. I don’t even know who’s running against him. In the race for county clerk, on the other hand, Nina Postupack and Gilda Riccardi appear headed for a photo finish—the number of lawn signs suggests a dead heat. I wonder who they are, these hopeful and perhaps gullible municipal candidates, who permit their names to be printed on posters all over town. Ronk, Zatz. Deborah Schneer. Hansut, Maio. And my favorite pair of names, Bartels & Hayes. We thank you for your support. As an American, I’m supposed to take pride in this ardent display of civic duty. Democracy in action and yadda yadda yadda, the stuff of Alexis de Tocqueville’s wet dreams. But the signs tend to depress me, this morning especially. I feel bad for the losers, even the Republicans; their banners will remain on those lawns, street corners, overpasses, storefront windows, for days and sometimes weeks (and, in the case of my never-say-die McCain/Palin-supporting neighbor Bill, years) after Election Day, battered by the elements, faded like the glow of campaigning, like the hope of reform, torn from their metal frames, blowing in the wind like monogrammed flags of plastic surrender. What a humiliation it must be, losing an election. Public flogging. Tar and feather. I don’t know how you come back from that. Look at Al Gore, that poor sap, vanishing into a beard and twenty pounds of post-election padding. How did he recover from that mortifying “defeat” in 2000?
Well, it probably helped that Sharon Rothman didn’t tell him at a playdate that she thought Tipper was having an affair.
ON THAT FATEFUL TUESDAY EIGHT YEARS AGO, AFTER THE FIRST plane hit the World Trade Center, we gathered in an office to watch history unfold on TV. One plane, one black hole, one tall tower. An accident—this is what everyone thought. Some dimwitted pilot had managed to fly his Cessna smack dab into the largest building in North America. What a dope! But when the second plane hit, we knew at once, all of us knew, that this was not the case. We knew it was intentional, an act of terror, an act of war. The newscasters knew it, too. Immediately, we were informed of commercial planes unaccounted for, lost in the wild blue yonder. There were six of them, like bullets in a chamber, heading toward other targets: the White House, the Capitol, the Sears Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, LAX, the Empire State Building. And although I was stunned that this had happened, some small part of me—God, it pains me to admit this—wanted those six planes to hit those targets, just to see what would happen. I wanted to witness the apocalypse. I wanted to watch the world end, and with a bang, not a wimper. That base and shameful inkling proved short-lived; I came to my shell-shocked senses well before the first tower collapsed. But I cannot deny the frisson of thrill I felt that day, standing in that office, listening to the newscast, as I contemplated the coordinated destruction of Life as We Know It.
If I’m honest with myself, I recognize that the part of me that isn’t devastated, that isn’t overcome with anxiety and dread, feels the same way now. My marriage, my family, my entire life could tumble like those skyscrapers, leaving a gaping, smouldering, noxious hole where something tall and proud once stood. Those are the stakes—nothing less. And yet some small and obviously deranged part of me craves this outcome.
Why do I want to witness my own destruction?
As my son well knows, not to mention every producer in Hollywood, it’s fun to watch shit blow up.
My throat is burning and I swallow hard, sending the Moka Java sluicing back from whence it came. Easy, Josh. We don’t know anything yet. Don’t freak out. The best recourse is to approach this as a mystery, I tell myself, like an episode of Law & Order, or a game of Clue, or an Agatha Christie novel. Ten Little Huguenots.
Okay, then.
For the sake of argument, let’s accept Sharon’s premise that Stacy is cheating on me. That begs three more questions: when, for how long, and with whom? We don’t exactly have surplus hours to while away, not with two high-maintenance preschoolers, not with Maude’s obstinacy and Roland’s special needs; how exactly did she manage to sneak in an affair? Is this a long-term sort of infidelity, one of those Same Time, Next Year situations, or a relatively recent infatuation? And who the fuck is the Other Guy? Stacy rarely goes to the city, so it would have to be someone up here. Someone local. But who? A colleague at IBM, maybe? A trainer at the gym, like Cynthia Pardo’s paramour, Bruce Baldwin? One of the other daddies? Chris Holby? Dennis Hynek? David Rothman? Soren?
My mind is blank. There are no usual suspects to round up. It really is an Agatha Christie book: everyone’s a suspect.
I check the rearview—Maude is passed out, her head dangling off to the side like a broken bobblehead doll. On the radio, Tom Petty gives way to a guitar riff as familiar as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and then the swaggering vocals kick in:
I can’t get no . . . sat-is-fac-tion
My finger wavers toward the preset, but the familiarity of the song soothes my upset stomach, and I’ve always liked the line about not smoking the same cigarettes as me—it reminds me of my father, who loved the Stones, who would blast Exile on Main Street at the body shop Is this a sign? Is he watching over me right now?—and instead of turning it off, I find myself turning it up.
As an anthem for the stay-at-home dad, you could do worse.
STACY IS THE MARKETING MANAGER FOR ONE OF IBM’S SOFTWARE products. I should probably know which product it is, since my wife is in charge of its promotion, and my ignorance of such a basic piece of information does not speak well of her faculties in that regard, but the name keeps changing, and the departments keep shifting, and there are so many mergers and acquisitions and staff reductions that it’s difficult for me to keep track. In my defense, she rarely talks about work. Big Blue has been good to her, she likes what she does well enough, and she’s made some decent friends in the office, but it’s hardly her life’s calling.
She’s uncomfortable with “marketing manager” as her primary social identity; when conversationally challenged guests ask her at parties what she does for work—the grown-up equivalent of What’s your major—she visibly deflates. Sure, she can explain that she’s a classically trained actress who works at IBM to make ends meet, but is that really what the partygoer is after? And why should she, or anyone else, have to justify her existence because some schmuck has no imagination, no gift for gab?
We were watching this Bill Hicks video last year, and the late comic greets the audience with, “Does anybody here work in marketing?” and to the sources of the scattered applause in the live audience, he deadpans, “Please kill yourself now.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen Stacy laugh like that. She howled so hard she wept. I mean, she crossed over. Tears were streaming down her face, her cheeks glistening with the changing colors of the TV lights.
During the Oscars, when Hilary Swank and Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet snivel and gasp for composure and neglect to thank their husbands, an awkward silence passes between Stacy and me. Although the subject is never broached—hence the pause—we both know damn well that Stacy belongs in that city, at that auditorium, on that stage, buckling under the bald statue’s shiny encumbrance, resplendent in a designer gown that would char
m the editors of Us Weekly, basking in earnest applause and the warm glow of affection from her peers, her esteemed colleagues in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and not in an upstate outpost with two needy preschoolers, an unemployed husband (stay-at-home moms are homemakers; stay-at-home dads are lollygaggers), a salaried position at International Business Machines, and nary a role in a community theater production to her credit in the seven years since she last graced the stage, in a lamentable off-Broadway production of Taming of the Shrew. Catering, auditioning, catering, auditioning, cateringauditioningcatering-auditioning—the acting cycle was killing her, the IBM gig fell into her lap, she jumped and never looked back. That’s the party line, anyway, but what is left unspoken . . .
Reese Witherspoon, she’ll snipe during the Oscar telecast, has an enormous chin. That’s as close as she comes to giving voice to her justified bitterness (unless someone mistakes her for Mary-Louise Parker, that is; but that’s a whole other ball of Madame Toussaud’s wax), but it’s there. It’s there. How could it not be?
The actor’s road makes for difficult hoeing because acting is such a dependent art form. Actors need directors, they need writers, they need make-up artists and costumers and set and lighting designers, they need performance spaces, they need box offices and ticket sellers, they need audiences. What do I require? A laptop and Final Draft. If my script becomes a movie if my bill becomes a law, of course, many more dashes of spice will be added to the cinematic Bloody Mary before it is served with the requisite celery garnish to the moviegoing public. By then, though, the heavy lifting is done. The money is in the bank. Babylon Is Fallen, original screenplay by Josh Lansky. Optioned by the Freeland Group for three-quarters of a million dollars, which sounds like a lot of clams until you realize that you only get the whole pot if they opt to make the picture. Hence option. Like a non-guaranteed contract in the NFL. Sounds great on paper, but the real number is ten percent of the option. Seventy-five grand up front money from the sky, manna from heaven less the agent’s cut and the tax hit, and what you’re left with is just enough scratch to put a down payment on a house upstate, pay the movers, and buy some furniture. Then you’re up here, and back to Square One. You’ve moved Square One ninety miles up the river, basically. Meanwhile the script gathers dust in some Hollywood vault, like an ancient relic, the Maltese Falcon, the Shroud of Turin . . . no, it’s not as special as all that . . . like one more ducat on the corpulent dragon’s swollen horde. Six years and counting in that gilded tomb, and I don’t think it will ever see the (green) light of day. Optioned? Rendered unto Caesar. I’ve written two more scripts since then—Quid Pro Quo, a thriller about a crooked employment agency, and Coronation, a rom-com about three disparate candidates running for the office of county coroner—but the last two years have yielded nothing but the insipid vampire project, which I didn’t even bother finishing. Writer’s block seems to be a by-product of fatherhood.