Fathermucker

by Greg Olear

  I know that further engagement will only get me in deeper trouble. He clearly hates my guts; I should just accept my ticket and the stinging humiliation that comes with it. Anal rape is worse when you resist, right? But I can’t stop myself. “Do you have kids? My son is four; my daughter is three. Eight minutes on the side of a road is an eternity, when you’re that little.” As I talk, my cell phone makes a bleeping noise, indicating a new message. I ignore it. “Can you please at least acknowledge them? I don’t want them to be afraid of police officers.”

  He stands there for a moment, perhaps searching his mind for some statute I’ve violated with this modest request, some arcane blue law he can book me with. Then, finding none, he leans in a bit, gives a two-fingered wave, and says, with all the warmth of one of those animatronic animals at Chuck E. Cheese, “Hi, children. You be good, now.”

  “Thank you, officer.”

  He knocks three times on the hood of the minivan, marches back to his Vic, and is gone, off to harass some other innocent driver, leaving me on the side of the road, exposed and upset and thoroughly ashamed.

  And I’m struck by a sudden thought: Is this how Roland felt when I pulled him away from his game at the pumpkin patch? Did he flip out because he felt I abused my power, punished and humiliated him when he’d done nothing wrong?

  My tears come quick and loud, in big wet sobs; the raw emotion built up during the course of the day, a liquid cancer that won’t come out of my body any other way. My reaction to Officer Stalin here is not all that dissimilar to Roland’s to me at the pumpkin patch.

  In the backseat, the kids have gone silent. They know something’s wrong. I can see the terror in their eyes. Maude has stopped sobbing, her sippy-cup mishap forgotten. Even Roland has picked up on the discomfiture. No one likes to see Daddy cry.

  “Sorry, guys,” I say, trying to stifle the sobs. “It’s okay. I’m okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Daddy,” Maude says, “was he bad?”

  “Yes, honey. He was bad.” I meet her concerned glance in the rearview, the caregiver look she generally reserves for her dollies and Steve the cat. “Not all policemen are bad, but he sure was.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy.”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  “I want to break him,” Roland says. “Stupid idiot cop.”

  “So do I.” I fire up the engine. “But you can’t break a police officer. You’ll go to jail.”

  Glancing at my phone on the passenger seat, I remember that someone left a message while I was talking to Officer Stalin. I check the call log: Stacy. Three out of five bars here, good enough reception to check the message:

  Hey, it’s me. Just calling to check in. I’m off to yet another meeting—fun fun fun. I can’t wait to come home, you have no idea. This has been a fucking nightmare. The work has totally sucked, we haven’t been able to leave the hotel even though we’re like so close to the beach it’s torture—why come to L.A. if we can’t go outside?—and then I don’t know if you remember my old boyfriend, Chad? He’s, like, stalking me. He called me yesterday, out of the blue, and asked me to dinner, and he won’t take no for an answer. He keeps calling the hotel and leaving these weird messages, and posting weird shit on my Facebook wall. Ever since he left Promises, he’s been a totally different person. He’s, like, all into Jesus now. It’s kind of creepy. Anyway, love you. Talk to you later. Bye.

  Again the Fish in the Pot in my head reminds me that Sharon may have bad information, that of course Stacy loves me, that of course she’s been true, that all the anxiety of this suck-ass two-star day has been much ado about nothing, a product of caught in a trap suspicious minds. No smoke, no fire.

  One thing for sure: we can safely cross Chad Donovan off the list of suspects.

  And yet the Headless Whoresman is only wounded, and will not die.

  INT. SQUAD CAR – NIGHT

  The car is parked on the side of Route 299 in New Paltz, hidden behind a billboard. A COP sits in the driver’s seat, presiding over a radar gun. A car zooms by doing sixty.

  COP

  Should I? Ah, fuck it.

  Instead, he plops a Munchkin into his mouth. Confectionary sugar winds up on his otherwise immaculate moustache. Another car speeds by. CLOSE SHOT of the radar gun: 69.

  COP

  Sixty-nine. Excellent.

  He turns on his takedown lights and peels out after the car, a silver Subaru Outback with an Obama/Biden sticker on the bumper.

  COP

  Another proud supporter of the Muslim socialist. No way I let this guy off.

  The Subaru pulls over; the cop pulls behind it.

  EXT. SIDE OF ROUTE 299 – MOMENTS LATER

  The COP saunters over to the driver’s-side window, where STACY fidgets.

  STACY

  Good evening, Officer.

  COP

  You in a hurry, ma’am? Because I clocked you at sixty-nine.

  STACY

  No. No hurry. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.

  COP

  Not a good idea to not pay attention when you’re behind the wheel, ma’am.

  STACY

  No, it’s not. You’re right, Officer.

  COP

  Have you been drinking, ma’am?

  STACY

  I had a beer.

  COP

  A beer?

  STACY

  Two beers. Maybe three. But, you know, over the course of several hours.

  COP

  Get out of the vehicle, please.

  STACY

  Yes, Officer.

  She does. She’s dressed to kill. The cop ogles her admiringly. His eyes stop at the wedding band on her left hand.

  COP

  Where’s your husband?

  STACY

  Home. Home with the kids.

  COP

  I see. Maybe you’re in a hurry to get back to him?

  STACY

  Not particularly.

  COP

  Trouble at home?

  STACY

  I wouldn’t call it trouble.

  COP

  What would you call it?

  STACY

  Boredom. No, that’s too strong. Ennui? I don’t know. We’re in a rut, Officer. We’re just in a rut.

  COP

  I might be able to help with that.

  STACY

  Really.

  COP

  Do you like a man in uniform?

  STACY

  As long as handcuffs come standard issue.

  COP

  You’re a nasty one, huh?

  STACY

  Guilty as charged. Was I really speeding?

  COP

  You were.

  STACY

  Am I really under the influence?

  COP

  I’d hate to have to find out.

  STACY

  Is this the part where I offer to do something for you in exchange for you forgetting all about this?

  COP

  I don’t know if I can completely forget about it. I might want to take you to dinner.

  STACY

  Yeah?

  COP

  Sure. We should probably get out of New Paltz, though, go out in Fishkill. That’s where I live.

  STACY

  Then you can take me back to your place.

  COP

  If all goes well.

  STACY

  I have a feeling it will. I’ve always had a thing for cops.

  COP

  Yeah?

  STACY

  I have a recurring fantasy about fucking a cop. In uniform. In the back of his squad car. Or maybe sprawled on the hood. But I guess you’re on duty.

  COP

  I am. But it’s Tuesday. It’s a slow night.

  Grinning, the cop reaches into his belt, pulls out his handcuffs. We hear them CLICK open. Then we . . .

  FADE OUT

  CRYING AND DRIVING PROVED DIFFICULT, SO I SWUNG BY PHILLIES Bridge Farm, our CSA,
not far from where I was pulled over, to gather my composure. (CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, but people up here use the abbreviation as a synonym for farm. When you join a CSA—and everybody in New Paltz does, just as every student wizard joins one of the Houses at Hogwarts—you come to the farm once a week to collect your share of fresh organic produce, a sizeable percentage of which you wind up throwing away six days later because you don’t know how to cook it and it goes brown and limp in your refrigerator.)

  Harvest Days, when the unpaved parking lot fills up with the Subarus of CSAers picking up the week’s take, are Thursday and Saturday; on Friday afternoon, then, the farm is empty, just a handful of crunchy college-kids-on-leave watering the rows of sunflowers. Roland and Maude are playing in a sandbox, not as elaborate as the one at Hasbrouck, but elaborate enough for my purposes. They’re playing happily, interacting well, enjoying each other’s company, as they often do in the late afternoon.

  It really turned out to be a gorgeous day. The sky is big and blue, the sun low over the farmhouse, bathing with light the red and orange and yellow of the autumnal trees. To the west, the mighty Shawangunk Ridge—a layer-cake of glacier-hewn bedrock, ugly and beautiful all at once, on which is perched, improbably, a manmade hard-on of stone: Skytop Tower, part of the famed Mohonk Mountain House resort complex—presides over the valley. SAVE THE RIDGE. Bucolic splendor, the lure of upstate New York. A lovely tableau, a picture postcard (literally, as Skytop Tower is our Liberty Bell, our Mount Rushmore, adorning our GREETINGS FROM NEW PALTZ, N.Y. postcards). So much beauty to behold, don’t know why there’s no clouds up in the sky and it could not be more antithetical to my stormy weather state of mind keeps rainin’ all the time.

  The hint of red under the new Us Weekly reminds me that I forgot to open the Netflix. Carefully tearing the reusable envelope—how many did I destroy before figuring out the clever trick?—I withdraw the smooth white sleeve. It is not I Love You, Man, but Stacy’s uninspired selection, He’s Just Not That Into You. This means I will be channel surfing later; if I watch He’s Just Not That Into You tonight, by myself, I might as well donate my balls to someone who can actually use them.

  Shaky reception here, but I’m able to get through. The plan is to catch Stacy before her meeting, but the call goes straight to voicemail. I leave a perfunctory message, kids are fine, miss you, love you, can’t wait to see you. Then I check the home voicemail, an oh-so-convenient process that entails dialing (but not really dialing; no one dials anymore) a mere twenty numbers, plus the obligatory pound key, and then waiting for the automatronic woman the auto-matron?, whose changelessly cheerful tone of voice is the telephonic equivalent of the old biddy doing forty-five on the Thruway, delivering her news with all the urgency of a corpulent carrier pigeon. Get to the point!

  You have . . . one . . . new message.

  A message, a message! Knots in my stomach, bad ham doing its dread work. Sharon, the dreaded follow-up call, a nuptial oncologist phoning with the biopsy results of the invisible cancer in my marriage? Stacy, with benign news about her scones, her chopped salads, with what she ate for lunch with who ate her for lunch?

  New voice messages. Playing . . . new voice messages. Call answering message from . . .

  I click the number key, bypassing the chipper auto-matron, and skip right to the message:

  “Jawsh,” comes the familiar voice, as lugubrious as the auto-matron is sunny. “Haven’t heard from you all week. Just wanted to see how you were holding up. Call me when you get a chance, okay? Um . . . okay, bye.”

  I’ve always been close to my mother, but lately, I find her difficult to talk to. She doesn’t understand, and therefore doesn’t approve of, my lifestyle. She can’t wrap her brain around the fact that not everyone of consequence has a job in the legal or medical professions. I should have a law degree by now, I should be a partner. I should be married to a nice Jewish girl who stays at home and cares for the children, who balances the checkbook and manages the dry cleaning. I should be a success, not in the bullshit screenwriterly way, but using the traditional yardstick of such things, net worth.

  (My net worth, needless to say, is less than zero. Red-inked ledgers, spreadsheets with five-digit numbers in parentheses, credit scores lower than what I got on my SAT verbal. When I finally do address the Chase Visa bill looming on the front seat, perhaps after a few Rolling Rocks, it will inform me that if I continue making the minimum monthly payment, I will pay off the balance in a mere ninety-eight years. Untenable debt, the bane of my generation. Just in time for the trough of Social Security to run dry. A nation in default. We are so fucked. Barring some unexpected windfall, next month, maybe the month after, I will have to undergo the profound humiliation of beseeching my mother for financial aid. Fatherhood is one long slog to Canossa.)

  Never mind that the former Linda Silverman didn’t even follow her own advice. My father wasn’t Jewish—people assume Lansky is a Jewish surname, because of the notorious Jewish underworld kingpin, but it’s actually Slovak in origin; Meyer Lansky’s real last name was Suchowljanski—and owned, as I mentioned, an auto body shop, at which his role was more than administrative; working with your hands is hardly the stuff of the Jewish-American dream. And while he wasn’t a staunch Catholic, he insisted I learn about the church; I was the only kid I knew who went to both Hebrew School and C.C.D. (Mom rectified that deviation from her faith with her second marriage—he goes by Frank, but the name on my stepfather’s driver’s license is Israel Frankel.)

  Why did she have to call today, of all days? The very lilt to her voice puts me on the defensive, destroys my confidence, undermines my sense of well-being. She makes me feel like I’m eight years old, a child. Not that she intends to do this. Not consciously. She means well, my mother; she worries about me something awful, and why would she fret so if she didn’t care deeply? And I know she’s proud of me; I know she brags about me to her friends at temple. If Babylon Is Fallen ever made it to the local cineplex, they’d never hear the end of it. But for all her love, for all her pride, for all her worry, she doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t. You can tell by the tone of her voice, she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. She’s Chicken Little. Every misstep is a crisis, every wrong turn a sign of the Apocalypse.

  Roland and Maude are now throwing sand at each other. “Stop it! Guys! Stop throwing sand! Come on, now.”

  I am seized with a feeling I’ve had throughout my life in times of turmoil, a powerful urge to confide in someone, to seek counsel, coupled with the realization that, with Stacy unavailable (and even my wife, far and away my closest friend, has her limits in this regard), I have no one to fill that role. A chronic loneliness. Part of the male condition.

  I settle upon my sister, who usually answers her phone no matter what, but I hang up when I remember she’s in Pisa at the moment, on a deferred honeymoon with her new husband, filling her Facebook feed with photos of the Leaning Tower.

  I can’t call Meg; wasp.

  I can’t call any of my guy friends out of the blue, my drinking buddies from the city, my old chums from college, and cry into the phone. Guys don’t do telephone, and we certainly don’t cry into our Nokias.

  I don’t have Sharon’s number, and I can’t call Meg right now to get it.

  I scroll down the CONTACTS list on my phone. Most of the numbers belong to pediatricians and schools and take-out restaurants and landscapers and snow removal companies and car services. I used to have more friends. I don’t know what happened.

  With no one else to turn to, I decide on Rob, our therapist. Maybe we can set up a time to talk this evening or something. The number usually goes right to voicemail, so I’m surprised when a live human being—a woman with a thick Irish brogue—picks up. When I ask to speak to Rob, I’m told that this is his answering service. (She has a brogue, then, because she lives in Ireland; outsourcing is the new black.)

  “I didn’t know he had an answering service.”

  “Dr. Puglisi
is attending a mental health conference in Los Angeles this week, but he is checking his messages. Can I have your name, please?”

  The phone cuts out just then—shaky reception at Phillies Bridge Farm—which is just as well, because there’s no reason to keep talking.

  I have all the information I need.

  Rob’s been in Los Angeles all week.

  Stacy’s been in Los Angeles all week.

  Rob and Stacy have been in Los Angeles all week.

  Well now.

  I had not considered Rob Puglisi as a suspect. I don’t think of him as a real person—or to be more accurate, as a viable candidate for intercourse of any kind outside the hallowed walls of his Balinese-decorated office—because I have too much respect for the work. But why not Rob Puglisi? He’s older, yes, but he’s a handsome dude—tall, with fashionable glasses and a carefully trimmed beard, always dressed in tweed coats of the kind worn by members of the British royal family. He sort of looks like Phil Jackson, but if the Lakers coach were reincarnated as a professor of nineteenth-century British literature. He has a deep, hypnotic speaking voice—he does hypnotherapy, of course he has a hypnotic voice!—that with the slightest modulation could come off as intensely seductive. He’s smart, he’s enlightened, he’s funny . . . and he always did seem to take Stacy’s side.

  Furthermore, from a purely logistical standpoint, he’s a therapist; his job involves the keeping of secrets. He knows how to keep his mouth shut. If your intention is to have a discreet affair—one that doesn’t ruin your marriage—this is vital. Your lover, after all, is your partner in crime. You don’t want the guy you robbed the bank with flashing money all over town, and you don’t want your Monica Lewinsky blabbering to every Tom, Dick, and Linda Tripp in town.

  This assumes, of course, that Stacy is only scratching an itch and doesn’t intend to leave me outright.

  I tuck my phone back into my jeans, watch the kids laughingly throw sand—I’ve given up trying to stop them—and try to focus on that, to lose myself in their simple joy, to feel grateful for all that I have, to not feel sorry for myself.

  I’m three deep breaths into the meditation when Roland and Maude simultaneously hit each other in the eye with sand, and it’s time to go.