Fathermucker

by Greg Olear

  Sharon hasn’t updated her status in almost a month (but I notice that she’s untagged the photo from this morning, the one of her with the big hair).

  Sharon Rothman is in a Sylvia Plath sort of mood.

  September 30 at 1:16am

  Sharon Rothman is sunshine & lollipops.

  September 21 at 10:54am

  Sharon Rothman Iris got a new haircut . . . she’s so Louise Brooks.

  September 19 at 3:14pm

  Not much to go on there. Same profile picture she’s had for ages, the shot of her and the infant Iris at the beach. Cape Cod, I think. Wellfleet. She’s wearing a straw hat and those giant Nicole Richie sunglasses; you can barely see her face. She could be anyone. Iris, similarly bundled to ward off the sun’s nefarious rays, could likewise be any baby, could be a doll for all we know. It’s as anonymous a profile picture as you can have without opting for the generic blue silhouette.

  Her info page is just as sanitized:

  About me

  Sex: Female

  Birthday: November 2

  Relationship status: Married

  Interested in: Men, women

  Networks: Poughkeepsie

  Work & Education

  Vassar College, 1997

  Poughkeepsie, New York

  Scarsdale High School, 1993

  Scarsdale, New York

  Quotations

  “Is there no way out of the mind?” —Sylvia Plath

  No photos. No further information, not even a short “likes” list of foreign films or indie bands or thick novels translated from the Russian.

  A blank slate. A placeholder page. An ID card purchased in Times Square for ten bucks.

  Call her—that’s the next move. So I look at our phone list, which Stacy has typed up neatly and magneted to the fridge, but Sharon’s number isn’t on it. Nor is it contained in the CONTACT INFORMATION on her Facebook page.

  So much for that idea.

  I click PROFILE and, once there, the link to Stacy’s page.

  Stacy Ferguson Lansky Scones here not so bad.

  4 hours ago

  Scones not so bad? Come on, now, people! Is that really the status update of an unfaithful wife?

  I’m about to laugh the whole thing off—until I check her Wall.

  Chad Donovan Don’t be koi.

  15 minutes ago

  Chad Donovan? She didn’t mention anything about seeing Chad Donovan. And what is the meaning of that cryptic wall post?

  And then it hits me. The rumored affair. The weeklong “business trip.” Los Angeles. Chad Donovan, her first love; Chad Donovan of the killer backhand and the washboard abs . . .

  “Daddy,” says Maude in her half-whine, plodding into the office, “I want to watch music.”

  “Not now.” The Pax Lanskya sure didn’t last long. “Where’s your lolly?”

  “I ate it.”

  “What about Bob the Builder?”

  “I want to watch music,” she says, more sharply.

  What she means is, she wants to sit in my lap and watch videos on YouTube. This is one of the few ways I can get her to sit still. Sometimes she even falls asleep doing this, if she’s tired enough—although the early car nap probably blew any chance of that happening now. Fuck it. I’d rather watch music videos than, say, Little Bill.

  “What do you want to watch?”

  “Ummm . . . Mickey Winehouse.”

  That Maude’s managed to conflate two personalities as antithetical as Amy Winehouse and Mickey Mouse never fails to amuse me. Even now, under duress, I can’t help but smile. I scoop up my daughter, nestle her in her usual spot on my right leg. She melds her small but powerful body into mine—at moments like this, her tough-guy exterior is revealed as façade—and settles in. With a few short clicks of the mouse—that word again!—I navigate from Chad Donovan’s territorial pissing on Stacy’s Facebook page to the FAVORITES tab on YouTube, a motley hodgepodge of the Monkees, the Velvet Underground, Celtic Woman, Mad Donna, and braying toddlers singing the ABC song, and on comes the troubled Brit with the soulful pipes, the equine face, the ugly tattoos, and the alluringly deep and deeply alluring cleavage.

  Chad Fucking Donovan?

  I say no no no . . .

  There is a way out of your mind, Sylvia. Stick your head in the oven.

  STACY IS A SERIAL MONOGAMIST. WITH PRECIOUS FEW INTERREGNUMS, she’s had one consort or another seated at the throne next to hers since she started “going out” with Dave the Rock Star her sophomore year of high school. Dave the Guido followed Dave the Rock Star, only to be usurped by Michael-Don’t-Call-Me-Mike, who took her to her senior prom even though he’d already graduated. When she got to college—the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama; nothing to sneeze at—Michael-Don’t-Call-Me-Mike was replaced by Jason the Mason, a sculptor and her deflowerer, who was in turn dumped for the aforementioned Chad Donovan, a varsity tennis player with a suntan and a six-pack gut who looked, in photos from that era posted to Facebook in which she’s tagged, like Sookie’s brother Jason on True Blood. Hot, in other words. Although he was fifth in an uninterrupted series, Chad was Stacy’s first true love. They had one of those college relationships where they sleep in the same bed every night, where they behave like an old married couple and finish each other’s sentences, where circles of friends orbit around their starry coupling.

  Chad was at Tepper, the business school, and although he had no interest in or aptitude for acting, he grew up in Brentwood, and had industry connections. For spring break her junior year, he brought her to Los Angeles to meet his parents, although the Donovans are cut from the Less Than Zero cloth, so they weren’t around much. Chad knew somebody who knew somebody, and on a lark, Stacy went to an audition for a pilot—a sitcom based on the movie The Goonies (unsurprisingly, it never aired). She didn’t get the part, which was just as well, but she managed to impress an influential casting director who is, in the field, well known, but whose name always escapes me. You can probably find it on the bowels of IMDB.

  A few weeks after she returned to Pittsburgh, this casting director wanted to bring her back to audition for a part in a film he was working on. He couldn’t promise her the leading role that he envisioned for her, You’d be perfect for it; perfect, but he had the juice to get her at least a supporting part. Or so he claimed. Casting directors make such promises. The catch was, she had to leave for California immediately. Like, the next plane out. She was in the middle of the spring semester, and leaving would have meant withdrawing from a full slate of classes, surrendering unrefundable tuition, and jeopardizing her future in the Drama School, with only the promise of a small role in a film. There were other mitigating factors as well: her father, with whom she was quite close, suffered a brain aneurysm the day she got back to campus after spring break in L.A., and two days after that news broke, Chad very classily broke up with her—the only time in her history of dating that she’d been given the heave-ho (she started seeing Jeremy, one of the few straight guys in the drama program, eleven days later). After hemming and hawing for a day or so, she opted to stay at school. She’d already made the contact with the casting director, she figured; she could get a small role in a film after she graduated.

  Her calculations were off. Miffed, the casting director declared her persona non grata—apparently he’d already greased the wheels with the producers, gushing about her, and by bailing she’d made him look foolish—and blacklisted her. And that’s how the part of Ruth in Fried Green Tomatoes went to Mary-Louise Parker and not Stacy Ferguson (or Stacey Ferguson, as her film credit would have read, her birth name having already been claimed at SAG by the erstwhile child actress who now goes by Fergie and fronts the Black Eyed Peas).

  The decision still haunts her. It was the chance of a lifetime, she’s told me, on more than one occasion, usually after a few drinks, and I blew it. I fucking blew it. I talk her off the ledge, explain that it was an assessment of risk and reward, like all big choices in life, and the reward—a smal
l chance of a big role in a medium-sized movie—was by no means assured. The likelihood is that she would have gotten a bit part, maybe one without dialogue, and left with a few more relationships and some points toward her Guild card. Would that have been worth wasted semester of school that put her degree in jeopardy? Would that have been worth being in Hollywood the night her dad died, instead of by his side? No and no, I tell her. And even if she’d won the part, and been Taft-Hartleyed by the Guild, and turned in a bravura performance—which she would have, if given the chance; that much was certain—that would not have come with guarantees either.

  I think she made the right call. Unhappy enough to stray. But I’m not the one who has to live with it.

  EXT. MULHOLLAND DRIVE, LOS ANGELES – NIGHT

  Top down, a red Porsche 911 is parked on the side of the road, affording a dazzling view of the lights of Los Angeles. In the driver’s seat sits CHAD DONOVAN. A form-fitting V-neck T-shirt highlights his buff physique. His powerful right arm rests on the back of the passenger seat, in which sits a rightly impressed STACY. “L.A. Woman” plays on the radio.

  STACY

  It’s beautiful.

  CHAD

  I know, right? Never gets old.

  STACY

  I’m really glad you called. It’s been so great to reconnect. And I’ve always wanted to go to Koi.

  CHAD

  You’ve got to do Koi when you’re in L.A. Especially when you’ve never been.

  He moves his arm a bit; now he’s touching her back.

  CHAD

  You look great, you know? Really. No way would I have thought you had two kids.

  STACY

  You’re just saying that.

  CHAD

  I’m not even joking. You look hotter now than you did in college. And you were pretty fucking hot in college.

  STACY

  Now you’re being ridiculous.

  CHAD

  (unridiculously)

  No. I’m not.

  Pause as they take in the view. She’s looking at the lights, but his eyes are trained on her.

  CHAD

  You know, I never should have broken up with you. Biggest regret of my life. I was young, I was stupid. Man, I wish I could take that back.

  STACY

  Well, what’s done is done. It was a long time ago.

  CHAD

  Is it? I never stopped loving you, you know. Look at me, Stace.

  She looks at him.

  CHAD

  I never stopped loving you.

  STACY

  I know. Me neither.

  CHAD

  What are we going to do about it?

  STACY

  I have some ideas.

  He pulls her close; they kiss passionately.

  CHAD

  I love you.

  STACY

  I love you, too.

  We pan back, and Stacy disappears below the dashboard. We hear the CLANK of a belt. On the radio, the song has slowed down; Jim Morrison is singing “Mr. Mo-jo Ri-sin.”

  STACY

  (off-camera)

  Holy shit. I forgot how big it is.

  Chad cranes back his head, lets out a loud moan, and we . . .

  FADE OUT

  SEX WITH BABYSITTERS: THE TRIED-AND-TRUE MALE FANTASY. AN unlikely, if not outright unattainable, brass ring. Like scoring with a bethonged bartender at Coyote Ugly, or a miniskirted hair stylist at a swanky salon. Mostly it’s movie stars who boink babysitters. Or so Us Weekly would have us believe, as every issue, it seems, breaks yet another babysitter sex scandal. Although they usually put a favorable spin on it and call them nannies. Because fucking a nanny sounds less sleazy. More upscale. That’s something millionaire playboys do. Jude Law fucked his nanny, after breaking up with his movie-star mistress. Ethan Hawke fucked his nanny, and then married her, after divorcing his movie-star wife. (They’re still together, Hawke and the nanny. We saw them once, up in Woodstock. They looked really happy.)

  If Jude Law and Ethan Hawke met our babysitter, however, Sienna Miller and Uma Thurman would seem as attractive to them as they do to the rest of the red-blooded, straight American male population. Although Vanessa is not uncute per se, there is something off, very much so, about the sum of the parts. She has a tattoo on her lower back—an ostensibly sexy “tramp stamp”—but it’s of a butterfly, and so poorly rendered it looks like something one of Roland’s classmates might draw up in Magic Marker. Her low-rise jeans—also ostensibly sexy, especially when paired with the peek-a-boo tat—reveal her ass crack in a way that is less Keeping Up with the Kardashians and more I’m here to snake your clogged drain. And her eyes, while deep and blue, stare so vacantly, she may as well be Bambi gazing into the angry headlights of an oncoming tractor-trailer. In short, Vanessa, although old for a college student at twenty-six, is such a child that the very idea of banging her is simply unimaginable, quite like the notion of shagging a unicorn, or a My Pretty Pony.

  Vanessa is a senior at SUNY New Paltz. She’s been a senior for a few years now. She keeps switching majors. First it was psychology, then sociology, then English, then back to psychology. Now she’s majoring in ceramics What does one do with a major in ceramics? Work at Pottery Barn?, which involved taking a slew of fine arts prerequisites, ceramics not having much overlap with other fields of study.

  I made a joke once about kilns. Vanessa stared at me blankly. She appeared not to know what a kiln was.

  Back in June, I asked Vanessa if she’d seen Star Trek—this was after she’d professed her love for the TV show, so asking about the new movie version was ahem logical—and she said, with total candor, “No. I only see movies at drive-ins.”

  Another time, she was staying at the house while the kids were asleep. She planned to cook mac and cheese for dinner. She asked us if we had, and if she might borrow, a pan, water, and salt. The way she phrased it, she seemed pleasantly surprised that her request could be accommodated.

  If that is not enough of an indictment, neither Maude nor Roland particularly care for Vanessa—a big red flag for a babysitter. But she’s cheap, and she’s reliable insofar as she shows up when she’s supposed to most of the time, and unlike the dour young lesbian couple we used briefly last year who spoke condescendingly about “wanting to work for a family that shares our values,” while grimacing at our television set and boxes of non-organic cereal—Maude still recalls, with horror, her two miserable afternoons with Dark-Haired Amy—Vanessa is not judgey. Plus, we don’t really use babysitters very often. (This irked Vanessa when she applied for the job, as she’d demanded twenty hours a week of steady work, as if babysitting were the same thing as working the cash register at the Kingston Plaza Fashion Bug.)

  “I have to ask you something?” Vanessa’s standing at the door, but lacks the initiative to open it. Her shorts are Richard Simmons–short—again, that should be sexy, but the sight of her beefy, overexposed thighs makes my skin crawl.

  “Shoot.”

  “I started a new hobby,” and her voice changes, as if the next word is from a dead language, an arcane reference a provincial rube like me couldn’t possibly be hip to. “Smoking?”

  “Smoking? Like, as in cigarettes?”

  “Yes,” and she’s surprised that I’m down with such subversive activities. I open the screen door to let her in.

  “Okay . . . ”

  “And I’m sort of into it now, and I’m wondering if it’s okay to take like a smoke break while I’m here? I’ll go outside, of course.”

  “Of course.” I really need to find another babysitter. “But you’re only here for a few hours. You don’t think you could, you know, maybe wait until I get back?”

  “I’ve developed a habit,” she says, shrugging. Now that she’s standing next to me, I can smell the reek of cheap cigs on her clothes and frizzy dirty-blond hair. Sometimes cigarette smoke can be a pleasant, aphrodisiac scent. Not with her. My stomach lurches, the bad ham drowning in a sea of hot bile and Diet Coke.
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  “Well,” and I can see I’ll have to punt on this afternoon, and post an ad at SUNY for a new babysitter ASAP, “you have to do what you have to do. Just don’t do it in front of Maude.”

  “Thanks.”

  Clomp-clomp-clomp on the basement stairs—footsteps too heavy to belong to a barefoot three-year-old; Maude has returned to the basement and the Noggin programming; I can hear Moose and Zee, the cartoon station hosts who kill time normally reserved for commercials, singing about an aversion to candy corn—and Joe Palladino powers into the living room. “All set,” he says. “Give it a day or three, and those critters are toast.”

  “Thanks.”

  Noticing Vanessa, Joe flashes his most winsome smile, which involves a lot of yellow. “Hiya, honey.” Honey? And he wonders why he has to resort to Match.com in a town where the single-male-to-single-female ratio is so staggeringly in his favor. “Who’s this?” he asks me.

  “Vanessa, Joe Palladino. Our exterminator.”

  “Paladin Pest Control.” He fishes around in his shirt pocket, produces a crinkled business card, hands it to her. “Call me if you’re ever in need of my services.” He gives the last word an emphasis that’s a bit too creepy for my taste, but I’m pretty sure the erotic subtext goes right over Vanessa’s big-permed head.

  “Thanks,” she says. “I sure will.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” he says to me, but his wide arm gesture takes in the babysitter, too.

  “Good luck with Felicia,” I tell him. “She sounds like a keeper.”

  He’s halfway down the front stairs before he realizes he never told me her name. I watch him stop in his tracks, consider backtracking to ask me about it, decide against it, and head back to his ORD.

  The appearance of Joe Palladino has apparently sparked something in Vanessa’s dim memory. “I was watching a show on cable television?” she says, “with my roommate? I can’t remember the name of it. It’s about this woman, this mother? And she lives in this great big house somewhere in like California I think? And she like deals in marijuana? Because her husband is dead, and she doesn’t have a job? The guy, the big goofy guy from Saturday Night Live, you know, Hans and Franz? He’s in it, too.”