by Greg Olear
“Great.”
We stand there for a moment in silence. Joe likes to talk, and his line of work doesn’t allow for many opportunities to chew the fat. He notices the sleeping Maude in the carseat.
“Wow,” he says. “She’s getting big.”
“Yeah.”
“How old is she now?”
“Three.” I’m about to add, “and a few months,” but Joe doesn’t really care, so I withhold that detail.
“Wow.” He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and grins. “So, just you and the kid on a Friday afternoon. A little Mr. Mom duty today, huh?”
In the five years that we’ve been here, Joe Palladino has been to the house more than a dozen times, to do battle paladin-style with wasps, carpenter ants, and, on one occasion, a plague-sized swarm of ladybugs that turned our front porch into a Hitchcock set. On every visit, without fail, he makes a reference to that ridiculous and dated Michael Keaton picture—his subtle way of asserting a claim to alpha male-hood. Because, you see, it’s much more manly to cavort with insects than spend time with your daughter. But I indulge him. I laugh at his sorry excuse for a joke. It’s either that or knock the fucking toothpick down his throat.
“Yeah, I’d like to have kids someday,” Joe tells me, as if this sentiment is one that no one else has ever before considered. “Have to find the right gal first.”
I twirl my keychain around my index finger, hoping he takes the hint. “You’d be a wonderful father,” I tell him, and Stacy would be proud of the acting it takes to sell the sincerity of the line. I move toward the front door.
“Well,” he says, “you would know, right?” He follows me, peacocking his chest. Joe is the sort of guy who feels the need to constantly project his manhood, especially around an obvious inferior like me. Usually I find his compulsion toward machismo amusing. But today I’m in no mood. He derides my fatherly duties, the implication being that I’m less of a man than he is, because his line of work is predicated on my primal fears . . . but it’s more than that: he owns his own business, draws an income, makes a decent living—and I don’t. No matter how certain I am that stay-at-home fatherhood will benefit my children more than a few extra dollars in the bank, no matter how evolved and twenty-first-century my thinking, the fact remains that masculinity—and by extension virility—is inextricably linked to money. We men are supposed to bring home the bacon. Whether this role is innate or learned, nature or nurture, Stanislavski or Stella Adler, we’ve been playing it for millennia. A few piddly decades of Women’s Studies programs, of CEOs in skirts, of Sandra Day O’Connor and Sally Ride and Sarah Palin, can’t undo a million years of rigid, inveterate gender dynamics. Money begets power, power begets sex appeal. No one wants to fuck Mr. Mom—not even Mrs. Mom. And yet, taken in strict biological terms, what is more manly than procreation? Animals fight to the death for the right to sire brood, to continue their bloodline. I have kids; Joe Palladino has bugs. Scoreboard, Joe. Scoreboard.
“So I’ll let you in,” I say, “and then I have to, you know, take care of my daughter.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” Joe scratches his scruff as he watches me fumble with the lock. “So I went on a date last night that was kind of promising.”
I don’t say anything.
“Match.com,” he continues. “Slim pickings up here, but she seems pretty cool.”
“Good for you.”
“I’m not one of those guys who operate well in bars, you know? I’m not down with that scene. I mean, I have a beer here and there, but I’d rather do other things. Hiking, climbing, fly-fishing. We went to a bar for the date, though. A wine bar, actually. New place. 36 Main? Down by Snugs? Her idea. She seemed to know the bartenders really well. I think it’s where she, like, hangs out.”
Finally the lock gives, and I push the door open. As soon as it does, Steve bounds out, dashing through my legs and down the steps.
“He’s not doing his job,” Joe quips, watching my cat vanish into the woods across the street. He’s a barrel of laughs, this guy. A date with him sounds like a fucking Sartre play; of course the girl met him at a bar; she’d have to ply herself with cosmopolitans to get through it. “He’s gotta earn his keep.”
“You know where the basement is, right?”
But the Comic Sans paladin won’t take the hint. “She’s pretty hot, though. You know, for an older chick. Great legs. I’m kind of a leg man. Not bad upstairs, either. She knows her way around a cocktail dress, that’s for sure. And she puts out. On the first date! Not all the way—she probably would have, but you know, I didn’t want to push it. Maybe I should have. I don’t know. She gives great head, though”—his voice gets softer, like a stage actor’s sotto voce, even though there’s no one within five hundred yards of where we’re standing other than a napping three-year-old—“and dude, she swallows.”
The urge to knock the toothpick down his throat returns. In addition to being contemptibly crude—be grateful you found someone to take you in her mouth, you scumbag, and keep yours shut!—the spit-or-swallow dialectic has always struck me as ridiculous. How could any man, in the throes of hummer-fueled climax, so much as ponder the final resting place of his manufactured goods, let alone genuinely care?
“She’s divorced, is the only problem. Not that it’s a problem, really. I mean, I don’t care. We all make mistakes, right? The guy lives in New Paltz”—he pronounces it Nu Paul’s, like the natives do—“though, so it could be a bit awkward. He’s an artist or something. One of his murals was hanging over the bar, she said. Bunch of squiggly lines, looked like to me. Modern art, you know. I don’t get it. Was pretty funny, though. ‘I can’t get away from the guy,’ is what she said.”
Felicia Feeney. Paul Feeney’s lush of an ex-wife. As many notches as Paul has on that legendary bedpost of his—Gloria is not his only lover—Felicia has even more. It’s like they broke up and now try to out-slut each other. Like rival siblings, vying for the bigger pile of toys, the more voluminous Christmas-morning haul. Which is curious because the Feeneys, alone among adults in our extended social circle, don’t have kids. Paul shoots blanks, is the word on the street. An impotent Don Juan; oh, the irony. I decide not to relay any of this information to the gallant beneficiary of Felicia’s swallowing, who, if the rumors are true, may have to contend with bugs of a different kind in a few days.
This is the traditional white American straight man! This is who the beer companies make their ads for.
“Well, it sounds like you found yourself a keeper.”
He’s about to continue, but I cut him off. “Sorry, dude. I have to get my daughter.”
“No problem,” he says, punching me a bit too playfully on the upper arm, “Mr. Mom.”
WHEN I GET BACK TO THE MINIVAN, MAUDE IS SCREAMING HER head off. Her cries give way to gentle sobs as I extricate her from the five-point harness and carry her into the house.
“Are you hungry? Do you want lunch?”
“No!”
The grimace on her face is so over-the-top that I actually break character and laugh. “Okay, crabcake.”
“Lollipop,” she barks.
“What?”
“Lollipop! I want a lolly!”
This is where the political component of fatherhood comes into play, where I become Obama in the Situation Room, weighing the pros and cons of military response to this brazen act of defiance. Should I draw a line in the sand and take up arms against the Kandahar lollipop rebels, or simply cave to their modest demands, buying myself a few moments of peace? Key word in the decision-making process: simply. Like the American public with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t have the stomach for further acts of war. Sugar on a stick is a small price to pay for Pax Lanskya.
“If you sit quietly and watch something,” I tell her, “you can have a lolly.”
Yet another banner moment in my campaign for Father of the Year. Alert Parenting magazine while I clear a spot on my mantel for the bronze plaque.
I carry h
er downstairs, set her on the sofa. Bob the Builder, a show about a Playmobil-shaped carpenter who speaks in a vaguely marijuana-addled voice—not unlike a male version of Meg—comes on just as I flip on the TV. Twelve o’clock, on the nose. High noon. The theme song, call and response:
Bob the Builder, can we fix it?
Bob the Builder, yes we can!
The most successful political slogan since “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” purloined from one of the more irritating kids’ shows of all time. Yes we can! When Obama contemplates the big decisions, does he then sit back in his Thinking Chair and think . . . think . . . think? Perhaps this is what he meant in his Inaugural when he said it was time to put away childish things.
“Lolly,” Maude reminds me, as if I could somehow forget the terms of our historic peace treaty.
“Relax, would you? I’ll get it.”
I take the steps two at a time, find a vitamin C, health-food-store lollipop, unwrap it, and bring it back downstairs.
“I don’t want that lolly,” Maude says. “I want a blue lolly.” A Dum-Dum. Can’t blame her. The health-food lollipops ahem suck.
“We don’t have any more blue lollies.”
She considers this. Now it’s her turn to be Obama in the Sit Room. Think . . . think . . . think. She’s about to whine again, but the prospect of the prize in hand is too tempting. We can do . . . any-thing . . . that we wanna do. Already she’s more clever than the fabular dog staring at his reflection in the lake. She grabs the treat, inserts it in her mouth, and eases into the couch and the show.
I retreat upstairs on the double, lest she tack on an eleventh-hour amendment to the bill. She has a bad habit of deciding she wants something on a whim and then demanding it over and over, in increasingly loud and sharp tones, until said object is produced, or she is locked in her room.
It’s noon, I’ve been up for almost seven hours, and all I’ve eaten is an Egg McMuffin and a few chocolate-chip cookies. Which explains the lightheadedness. The refrigerator offers few tantalizing options. Yogurt, leftover ravioli, Kraft singles, a few bottles of Magic Hat #9, a jar of pickles from the Rosendale Pickle Festival. The Pickle Festival was almost a year ago. Probably should throw those away, but that’s a task for another day. Digging in the meat drawer, I unearth the last of the Polish ham I bought on Monday. Is it still good? What’s the shelf life on deli meat? Five days is a while to be in the fridge, but then, processed cold cuts are chock-full of preservatives and salt. In theory, they should last forever. Nuclear holocaust might destroy all life on earth, but cockroaches and deli meat would endure. I sniff the plastic. Doesn’t smell rank, although this is really Stacy’s area of expertise. She’s the Anton Fig of the house. I throw the remaining ham—four thin slices, no longer pink; almost Seussian in ham hue, when held to the windowpane light—between two pieces of half-stale whole-wheat bread, add a Kraft single and some (low-fat; it’s not all bad) mayo, and bring my delectable répas to my desk.
In the unfinished part of the basement, by the boiler and the oil tank, Joe Palladino, fresh off his Felicia fellatio, bounds around with an extra hop in his step. A good blow job will do that. Ah, blow jobs. Ah, the warm, inviting mouth slurp-slurping my swelling—
Oral sex sort of falls by the wayside when you have kids. But then, so does sex-sex. You know how, in lieu of birth control that actually works, some couples employ the Rhythm Method? Stacy and I use the Ferber Method—or, more accurately, we have applied the concept of this rather ham-handed sleep-training technique to a different kind of bedroom. When you Ferberize a toddler, you put him in the crib and let him cry for, say, five minutes. Then you go back in and comfort him, before leaving him to cry again. The second time away, you wait ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty, and so on, until the toddler finally falls asleep on his own. Over time, and in theory, the toddler learns to fall asleep without the visit from Mom or Dad. With intercourse, it works the same way. You go a few days, then a week, then three weeks, then a month, then . . . you get the idea. The Ferber Method doesn’t really help crying toddlers sleep through the night. It’s even less effective weaning horny adults from their basic need of wet and wild whoopee.
Any new e-mails? Just a note from my sister detailing her Italian vacation and a reminder from Discover that my minimum payment is due. (Next week I’ll have to look into the credit card choreography, see if another pas de chat in the danse macabre of the balance transfer is in order.)
It’s not that I don’t find Stacy sexy—she remains as alluring as the first time I saw her, in a play in the East Village ten years ago—or that I don’t want to screw more often, or that we both don’t really dig it when we do. Parenthood saps your energy, and sex—not just sex; lust itself, the primal urge of all creation—requires energy to sustain. Shit, even God had to rest after six days of intense creativity. Look, it takes an hour and a half to put the kids to bed every night. An hour and a half! Woody Allen movies aren’t that long. Ninety fucking minutes. Every. Fucking. Night. If we devoted half the time we spend reading aloud the work of Dr. Seuss and Kevin Henkes and Ian Falconer, and singing bedtime songs in the rocking chair, and washing hands and faces, and brushing teeth, and preparing sippy cups, and going downstairs, and coming back upstairs because the sheets aren’t tucked properly or the noise machine stopped or the ceiling fan cast spooky shadows . . . if Stacy and I devoted just half that time to foreplay, to pleasuring each other with Caligulan abandon, we would be the most sated couple in upstate New York. We would be the Ice-T and Coco of New Paltz. But we don’t turn on each other; we turn on nightlights and noise machines.
The ham, while not spoiled, is stringy and flavorless. I do not like them, Sam-I-am. I choke it down with a big swallow of not-cold-enough Diet Coke.
Furthermore, there’s something antithetical to the copulatory act in the drone of the noise machines, the framed photos of the kids on the dresser, the stray Legos in every conceivable nook in the house. There must be thousands of Legos under our baseboards alone; how many must there be in the world? More than there are grains of sand? More than there are stars in the sky? Less of a headache to repress the carnal yearnings, to tamp out the need for intimate sexual contact, to whack off every few days with the same utilitarian detachment with which I mow the lawn, to empty my reserves as stolidly as I empty the dishwasher, than to—
Not that I’m complaining. A time to reap, a time to sow. That’s just how it is at this stage of the game. A time to cast away stones. Stacy and I thoroughly enjoyed our period of unbridled, impromptu, kink-infused sex. We experimented with cock rings and French ticklers, handcuffs and nipple clamps, role play and Kama Sutra poses, porno films and costumes, tantra and soixante-neuf. We really went to town. But that was then. We’re in a different phase now. A time to gather stones together. And this phase, like its steamier, wrapped-in-a-brown-paper-bag-after-its-purchase-at-a-store-on-Eighth-Avenue predecessor, won’t last forever.
But if Sharon’s right, turn turn turn Stacy has already turned the page.
For a moment, I’d forgotten. But no, the Headless Whoresman has not given up the chase. His sudden ghostly appearance makes the ham taste like it has, in fact, gone bad. A metaphor for my marriage?
If Sharon’s right, my inner Fish in the Pot reminds me. If.
SHARON ROTHMAN. AN ODD MESSENGER, TO BE SURE. JOAN-OF-ARC odd. Out of the mouths of babes.
Of the half-dozen mothers in our loose little clique, Sharon is the most mysterious. She moved here last January, when the hyperactive Iris outgrew the family’s two-bedroom in Park Slope. But to date, none of our sources of parental gossip—Meg, Jess, Gloria, Ruth Terry—have gotten close enough to Sharon to figure out what the deal is with her and Old Man River, as Stacy calls him. The grapevine has yet to bear fruit. We don’t know that much about her. Which makes it even stranger that she would be the bearer of such bad news. Because when you get right down to it, it’s an enormous responsibility to reveal someone else’s infidelity. Heck, it’s an enormous
responsibility to know in the first place. Or it should be.
Time to put on my Philip Marlowe hat—a fedora, I suppose—and do a little gumshoeing. Choking down the rest of the ham sandwich, I open Facebook. At the top of the news feed is this:
Gloria Gallagher Hynek and Haven had a great playdate with Jess, Josh, Sharon, Meg, Emma, Maude, Iris, Beatrix and Brooke. So wonderful to spend time with good friends!
A by-product of our gadget-mad age: users have developed distinctive Facebook styles. Gloria’s updates, for example, almost always concern the quotidian, which she tries to spin in the shiniest, happiest way possible. Her house could be burning down and she’d talk about the pristine beauty of the lapping orange flames. She’s also fond of sharing YouTube links, which I am not fond of following.
Jess Holby only talks about her kids. Her profile picture is of her daughter, Maddie (note: I hate when people do this). She also posts a photo album every other day—a good three quarters of my photo tags are from her. But her husband never writes about his kids, or his wife, or his job at the Culinary Institute. Chris is all about promoting his band, String Cheese. They’re playing at Market Market. At the Rosendale Rec Center. At Snug’s. At the Muddy Cup.
Catherine DiLullo’s news feed doubles as a Google alert for midwifery.
Mike DiLullo is all about the perniciousness of vaccines, high-fructose corn syrup, and Fox News.
Peter Berliner inserts lyrics from classic rock songs and old movies.
Cynthia Pardo isn’t on Facebook. Neither is Bruce Baldwin. Although both could wind up going viral any day now.
Meg’s updates are snarky. Soren doesn’t update often; only when he’s drunk, usually.
Stacy posts about food.
As for me, I tend not to divulge day-to-day news—does anyone really care if I’m heading to Meadow Hill Farms this afternoon, or eating a spoiled ham sandwich for lunch, or on Day Five of my ordeal?—and I almost never post links. I only update if I have something important to share, or come up with a plum witticism worth repeating. Which is to say, I post rarely. Twice a week or so.