Fathermucker

by Greg Olear

  Finally, Sharon breaks the silence. “I understand wanting to have sex with other people. I don’t even think it’s that big of a deal, as long as it’s done openly and honestly—and as long as you don’t fall in love.”

  My (admittedly impaired) sense is that she’s speaking from experience.

  “Well, apparently my wife has fallen in love with Soren Knudsen.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. It could cut the other way. It could wind up making her love you more.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  “Think about it. The unknown commodity, the forbidden fruit, the greener grass on the other side: all of it serves to inflame desire. You’re attracted to someone, you sleep with them, you get it out of your system. It’s never as good as what you imagine it will be. Not that you should run around shagging anything that moves, like that Felicia Feeney. But there’s so little in this world that’s emotionally and physically satisfying in the way that sex is. Why deny yourself the pleasure?”

  “Well, how about because you swore not to?”

  “Wedding vows,” she says, “seem a bit outmoded to me. A bit patriarchal.”

  “That’s the Vassar talking.”

  “Or the wine.”

  We honor its mention with another gulp.

  “You want a more pragmatic reason?” I tell her. “Fine. Here are three: disease, pregnancy, not embarrassing your kids. I can’t even imagine what Cynthia’s son, the oldest one . . . ”

  “Konrad.”

  “ . . . has to deal with at school. What’s he in, fourth grade? I mean, the whole fucking town knows; you think the kids at school don’t? And kids are merciless. It’s a trade-off, like you said. I don’t hook up with whoever my heart desires, but, on the other hand, I don’t have herpes.”

  “I’m not saying you should knock up big-mouthed syphilitics.” She’s looking directly at me, her face a few inches from mine. Her eyes, which despite their beauty have, until this moment, communicated nothing but ennui—Sharon has the comportment of an amnesiac, like she’s on a desperate quest for something but has forgotten what it is she’s looking for—glow with a passion I did not know she possessed. “Stacy sleeping with Soren, that’s not cheating on you. What’s cheating on you is not telling you about it. That’s what fidelity means. Fidelity means no secrets.”

  The shiraz might have something to do with it—it’s certainly advocating on her behalf—but I find myself being wooed by her I’m always true to you darling in my fashion cold logic. New Paltz is a liberal town; why should I raise an eyebrow when that liberalism extends to the yes I’m always true to you darling in my way bedroom?

  Whatever the movies have us believe, love and lust are not indivisible. Yet we insist that to secure the former, we must temper the latter—a futile attempt to impose order on the chaos of nature. Is this hubris? Naïveté? Or rank stupidity? Sharon has a point, I’ll grant her that; sexual monogamy, like the wedding vows that proclaim it, seems dreadfully old-fashioned, if not outright retrograde. Consider: when Maude borrows one of Roland’s floor-plan books—which she does only to get his attention and approval, but that’s another story—and he goes apeshit, yelling, But it’s mine! It’s mine, Maude! I calm him down and try and explain that possessions are better when shared. What I do all day long, as a father of two, is try and instill in my children the virtues of sharing. Sharing, it can be said, is the very backbone of civilization. If we don’t share, as a society, we perish. It takes a certain level of maturity to understand this. And yet, when it comes to sex—and only when it comes to sex—sharing is forbidden. There’s a disconnect there, seems to me. My getting indignant with Stacy for sleeping with another guy is no different, fundamentally, than Roland fuming at Maude for daring to leaf through one of his floor-plan books. Initiating divorce proceedings because of infidelity, to extend the metaphor, is a miffed child taking his ball and going home. Going home alone. Going home alone rather than do what the civilized world, in virtually every other arena save the marital bedroom, celebrates and venerates: share.

  Share, sharing, Sharon . . .

  Maybe the divorce rate wouldn’t be so high if our expectations weren’t so unrealistic. Open marriages don’t work, they say; maybe they don’t work because they are the exception and not the rule. Certainly Gloria and Dennis Hynek seem quite happy. Maybe an open marriage is something we evolve to. In five hundred years, human beings might look at rigid sexual partnerships with the same mixture of horror and surprise that we now view chastity belts.

  Sexuality, perhaps, is best thought of as a carnal Hasbrouck Park, a playground of delights at which Stacy and I have ridden the seesaw of monogamy for the last decade. Maybe what I need to do is let her down gently from the seesaw and indulge her desire to take a turn on the swing set, rather than let her fall to the stony ground a marriage on the rocks by maliciously jumping off myself. Maybe our marriage will improve, maybe we’ll get out of this rut, if we evolve from seesawers to ahem swingers.

  “Your teeth are purple,” I tell share sharing Sharon.

  Her hand finds my knee. “So are yours.”

  Without moving her hand, she leans over and plants one on my lips.

  I could not be more shocked at this turn of events. I’d be less surprised if Steve emerged from the bedroom on his hind legs and began to recite the Hamlet soliloquy. But then, I’ve always been slow on the uptake.

  “Sorry,” she says, her lips centimeters from mine.

  If I were in my right mind I’d push her off, make her leave, but I’m drunk and confused and devastated, and I’m also suddenly and excruciatingly horny—When was the last time Stacy and I had sex? Has the entire month of October been one long dry spell?—so I’m all too happy to respond in kind.

  IN JUNE OF 1999, STACY WAS DATING A GUY NAMED GREGG, WHO was also an actor—a pretentious jackass who liked to expound upon the craft, as if he were being interviewed by James Lipton, even when discussing a suburban dinner theater performance of Bye Bye Birdie. Gregg’s friend Lee used to date Roberto, a playwright friend of mine from college. Broke his heart, actually, and was the subject of at least one bitter one-act. One silver lining of the doomed Roberto-Lee union is that Gregg wound up acting in some of Roberto’s plays, which is how Roberto met Stacy, and cast her as the lead in The Line Waver, Roberto’s one-act (not the bitter one), which was performed at the Bond Street Theatre for two weekends that summer. She was tremendous in that, just tremendous, although the script was unworthy of her talents, as even Roberto would admit, if he still took my calls (he’s since gone Hollywood, writing teleplays for second-tier HBO shows).

  That’s how Stacy and I met. I saw her in the play—even though she was in her late twenties, she played a character who would now be called a cougar, and played it with aplomb—and I sort of developed a crush on her, as I sometimes do when I see a play and the leading lady blows the roof off the place. At the after-party at 2A, a bar located at go figure Avenue A and East Second Street, I found myself sitting next to her on one of the cushy vinyl couches on the upstairs level. She was drinking a vodka tonic, extra lime. Her hair was pulled back, so I could see the contour of her shoulder blades, and every last detail of her (very pretty; actressy pretty; Mary-Louise Parker pretty) face. She was sitting maybe a bit too close on account of the busted springs in the couch and the three vodka tonics she’d already consumed, a fact she mentioned six or seven times, and Gregg was on his soapbox, pontificating to Frank and a few of his gay playwright friends on the genius of Pinter. Pinter, whom I despise. Gregg was wearing a flouncy white shirt two removes from the one Seinfeld famously ridiculed, unlaced almost to the navel, like a romance-novel hero, his long wavy hair smacking of Fabio. He looked like a Calvin Klein Jesus. During our conversation, Stacy mentioned that Gregg only wore Tom’s of Maine deodorant, which explained why I could smell his rank reek from clear across the room. (Living in New Paltz, I’ve since come to appreciate the Tom’s of Maine fragrance.)

  We had a great t
alk. We talked about how Shakespeare was overrated, and how film and stage acting differ, and how her favorite actress of all time was Eva Marie Saint, who was so fantastic in On the Waterfront and North by Northwest. And then for whatever reason the subject of The Big Lebowski came up, and we wound up throwing quotes at each other for the rest of the night. We should have coffee sometime, she said. I replied, “The Dude abides.”

  We never did meet for coffee, but on New Year’s Eve—the Y2K New Year’s Eve, when the new millennium did not begin and the world did not end—I went to a party at Roberto’s apartment, a massive industrial-chic Williamsburg loft. New Year’s Eve, like Valentine’s Day, is a holiday that tortures the unattached, and if I lived somewhere other than New York, where the Times Square craziness is impossible to ignore (not the case in New Paltz, one of the myriad benefits of living here), I might have stayed home watching Charlie Chaplin movies and gone to bed before midnight. Instead, I went to Roberto’s. At two o’clock in the morning, I found myself on the fire escape with Stacy. She and Gregg had just gotten into a horrible row—the coup de grâce, she feared, of their star-crossed love—and she was lamenting the end of yet another relationship, the hopelessness of being single at her advanced age (she was twenty-nine at the time; I was twenty-six). We stayed up all night, shooting the shit, and we had breakfast at Dark Odessa, and after the sun came up on the new year, I walked her back to her apartment. We kissed on her stoop, one of those magical Princess Bride kisses. It took a few weeks of stops and starts—Gregg wound up apologizing, and the rumors of the demise of their relationship were exaggerated—but by Valentine’s Day, we were a couple, and have been ever since.

  Another thing that happened at Roberto’s party on December 31, 1999: when the ball dropped, and we all reveled in our miraculous deliverance from surefire destruction, I wound up making out with a woman I didn’t know—she sort of looked like the Mystery Woman from my (prophetic?) dream, in fact—who just happened to be a) alone, b) in need of a make-out partner, and c) standing next to me at the stroke of midnight. I don’t even know what her name was; I never asked, and by the time I found Stacy on the fire escape, I no longer cared.

  I mention this because it’s been nine years, nine months, and twenty-two days since I swapped spit with someone other than my wife (I’m not including Roland, who occasionally slips me the tongue when he kisses me goodnight). That’s a significant period of time. When Sharon kisses me now, almost a decade later, her tongue lapping against mine like a cat a Cat with a Tat! greedily drinking up a saucer of milk, I feel like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree after they string the lights on it and plug it in. See? All it needed was a little love. I crackle with energy. I am the body electric. All the day’s conflicting emotions, good, bad, and ugly, they all find release in that high-voltage kiss.

  My left hand slides behind her neck, my right finds the small of her back. I pull her close to me, her breasts rubbing hard against my chest. I know this is morally gray territory—Stacy cheating on me does not give me carte blanche to cheat on her; two wrongs don’t make a right—but the fact that I’m committing my own act of transgression, that I’m being naughty, only adds to the intensity of my primal hunger. My cock is a murder weapon, and then something went BUMP! hard as a bludgeon.

  I break off the kiss for a moment, just long enough to pull off my flannel shirt (my chill, my nausea, any sign of illness, are long gone). Sharon does the same with her sweater. Now she’s in her bra, and her breasts, bubbling out of the top of that black lace brassiere like giant champagne bubbles . . . I can’t even tell you. Big, round, firm as a Sealy Posturepedic. Stacy has great breasts, too, but Sharon’s are . . . well, they’re not Stacy’s, and that makes them, at the moment, preferable. A bird in the hand. I want to squeeze them, I want to manhandle them, I want to tear them apart like overripe melons, but I restrain myself. I’m gentle. I caress, I explore. I trace little circles over her nipple with my index finger; Sharon moans; she likes that. I know it is wet.

  “Oh my God,” she mutters. “Oh my God.”

  The next thing I know, her brazen hand dives into my sweatpants—which, while a Fashion Police violation worthy of the back page of Us Weekly, do make for easier access than button-fly jeans; today, function trumps form, no matter what the Fug Girls say—and . . .

  “Why, we can have lots

  Of good fun with this trick—

  A game that I call

  UP-UP-UP with your dick!”

  . . . then it’s my turn to take the Lord’s name in vain.

  The first person to touch my penis in a sexual way—I’m giving Rabbi Weiss, the mohel who did my briss, the benefit of the doubt here, although he did wind up being arrested on child molestation charges not long after the ceremony; contrary to popular belief, Catholics don’t have a monopoly on perverted holy men—was Sarah Hoyle, back in seventh grade. I don’t know that anything can quite equal the thrill of that initial touch, but this comes close; and Sharon’s practiced fingers, unlike Sarah’s, know exactly what scales to play.

  When was the last time my cock was handled by someone other than me or my wife? The temptation is to romanticize one’s oat-sowing bachelorhood, but New York, for all its eight million inhabitants, is a lonely town, or was for me. Before Stacy, there was a long period of no sex, few dates, and countless hours surfing Internet porn; the young Warren Beatty I was not. I’ve been with Stacy since I was twenty-six; for the entirety of the two-thousands. My last hand-job occurred when I was probably twenty-four, and it was almost certainly a drunken encounter. So yes, the novelty of Sharon’s deft fingertips on my leaden cock is something of a revelation.

  “Have no fear!” says the Cat.

  “I will not let it fall.

  I will get you more hard

  As I cradle your balls.”

  The little guy is not in game shape; shit; this will be over too soon.

  I take the time-honored advice and THINK ABOUT BASEBALL. The umbrella term “baseball” somehow finds human form in the person of retired Baltimore Oriole shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., holder of the record for consecutive games played. Which calls to mind my own streak: the not-quite-ten years I’ve been exclusive to Stacy. Do I want it to end? Do I want a black mark on my perfect record? Then again, records only matter if you care, right? In the grand scheme of things, let’s be honest, what difference does it make that Cal Ripken gutted out more ballgames than anyone else? He was paid millions and millions of dollars to play a kid’s game; so what? Ripken reminds me of another bald-domed icon, John McCain, choosing to rot in that terrible Viet Cong prison, to subject his broken body to unspeakable tortures, instead of hopping the next flight home, as he easily could have, as the fortunate son of a senator. He stayed in ’Nam for honor, because it was the right thing to do. But was it? Would anyone really have faulted him for bailing (anyone but his father, that is, which is probably why he remained; but that’s fodder for his Rob Puglisi)? I wonder if McCain would make the same choice, if he could do it all over. Would he trade in his medals and his presidential run and his honor for fully functional arms and a face that isn’t scarred? Was his heroic sacrifice—words we heard again and again on last year’s campaign trail, words we dared not question—worth it? When he is not calling for the deployment of still more troops to the euphemistic battlefield of Harm’s Way, or the repeal of gay rights legislation, or the “reform” desperately needed in Warshington, does the Gentleman from Arizona, in moments of quiet reflection, lament not checking out of the Hanoi Hilton early? Does he curse his obdurate pride, or is he at peace with the choice? Probably he is ambivalent. Probably it depends on the day. How will I reflect upon this tryst with Sharon ten, twenty years from now? Will I regret doing it? Will I regret not doing it? Why are these decisions never easy?

  My Fish says, “No! No!

  Make that Cat go away!

  Tell that Cat with the Tat

  You do NOT want to play.

  She should not be here.

 
She should not be about.

  She should not be here,

  Not when Stacy is out!”

  My lips have worked their dilatory way south, and I’m now nibbling on her neck, sucking on the supple skin, working my tongue around and around. She tastes as good as she looks. Her head is flung back, warm wet breath on my earlobe, and she’s moaning, “You’re so hard . . . you’re so hard for me . . . you’re so fucking hard,” as she plies her prestidigitational magic, and all that’s preventing me from shooting all over her dainty fingers, from oozing spent desire onto her multi-carat marquise-cut wedding ring, is the erection-killing image of the distended pink face of Senator John McCain.

  But how quickly the close-up of McCain on the TV screen of my mind pans to his comely running mate—who would be gazing at Russia from the portico of the gubernatorial mansion in Anchorage still if he’d gone with Romney—and while I abhor her politics and her opportunism and her choice of baby names, I must concede that the image of Sarah Palin’s hot-librarian glasses, her attractively bitchy face, her long slender legs, combined with the smooth rhythm Sharon’s fingers have now found on the instrument of my longing, is insufficient to ward off a potential sticky mess in my sweatpants. Only a matter of time.

  Sharon, sensing this, releases me. She pulls away, stands up, turns around—affording me a lovely view of the tattoo on her lower back; the same place Vanessa has hers, but unlike Vanessa’s deformed butterfly, Sharon’s intricate red-and-black scorpion inspires drool—unzips her skirt, and lets it slide to the floor.

  The stockings don’t come all the way over her panties, but stop at mid-thigh, and are held in place by a garter belt. A garter belt? She was wearing a fucking garter belt to a gallery opening? This has now become a scene from a porno I decided not to watch on Cablevision.

  And then she stands up.

  And then—oo la la!

  The Cat with the Tat

  Doffs her blouse. And her bra,