by Greg Olear
I move away from her and to the trunk, where I collect her bags. With a night of sleep—or at least a shower—separating me from the Sharon imbroglio, I could better disguise my culpability. As it is, there’s not enough time. I feel like the guilt is a second head that’s sprouted on the back of my existing one, like Voldemort in the first Harry Potter movie. How can she not notice something so obvious? There’s a fucking head on the back of my head!
“You’re acting funny,” she tells me. “Have you been drinking?”
“I had a few beers. To relax.”
“You don’t seem relaxed.”
“I’m just surprised to see you. And I’m really tired. It’s been a long day.” I’m walking toward the house now, carrying the bags, and thus able to avoid direct eye contact.
“So why aren’t you in bed?” She’s half a step behind me. Literally and figuratively. “Why are you outside?”
“Maude had a nightmare.” This is the truth, but it sounds like I’m improvising an elaborate ruse, like Jon Lovitz on that old SNL sketch. No way she’ll buy this, even though it’s true she reads my she reads my yes she can read my lame poker face. “She’s in our bed, and I wanted to give her time to conk out. So I figured, it’s a clear night, why not come look at the stars.” We step through the door. Steve, happy to see her, arches his back; Stacy leans down and pats him. “It’s hard to spot those constellations. I suck at it.”
“You should try it without the lights on.” She kills the driveway flood lamps.
This is a decent set-up line for a bawdy rejoinder, but I’m not feeling it. The clever part of my brain—if, in fact, there exists a segment of my gray matter that can generate something approaching cleverness—is in panic mode, trying to cover my bloody tracks.
I let the bags drop on the floor. Stacy immediately notices the magazine on the coffee table. “Ooh. Is that the new one?”
If I can make it to the morning without her giving me the third degree, I’ll be in the clear. I still have to confront her about Soren, tell her what I was told and who told me, but that will be a difficult conversation, and I don’t have the energy for it right now. All I want to do is pass out on the bed with my wife and daughter. Get to bed, and we’ll live happily ever after.
“Yeah. With Josh and Stacy on the cover.”
Will she notice the remains of the cheese and crackers on the coffee table—the smoking gun of near-adultery—as she takes the Us Weekly? Nope. She grabs the magazine and heads to the bathroom. I move to clean up the mess, but before I can get to it, she returns, the rolled-up mag in her fist.
“Was someone here?”
I try and make my voice as nonchalant as possible, which does not work well. She’s a much better actor than I am. “Yeah. Sharon Rothman stopped by.”
Four quick words, a magic spell. The floodgate damming All Hell bursts, and just like that, the Pandemonian contents break loose.
“Really.”
“She was on her way to Poughkeepsie. To a gallery opening. So she stopped by.”
“She stopped by.”
“For a drink. She brought a bottle of wine, so we had some. Some wine.”
“In addition to the beer you drank to relax.”
“What’s that?”
“You said you had a few beers, to relax.”
“Oh, right. Yes. In addition to a few beers.”
“That explains why your breath smells like a garbage dump.” Stacy’s face contorts as she processes this information. Then she crosses her arms over the CARNEGIE on her college sweatshirt—her attack pose. “I don’t know if I like the idea of you entertaining other women in my house when I’m not here,” she says finally, indignity and accusation creeping into her voice.
Stacy and I rarely fight. Not that we don’t ever have cause for quarrel; it’s just that I will go to great lengths to avoid outright conflict, because I suck so royally at one-on-one, out-in-the-open debate. My arguments, however well-thought-out before the clash, and however correct, degrade to emotional grunts the minute I’m attacked. In short, I avoid rows with Stacy because Stacy always wins. Always. She’s Jerry to my Tom. I find it easier to acquiesce surrender surrender but don’t give yourself away than to take up arms. The Neville Chamberlain route, peace at all costs.
Yet tonight, I have no choice. I’ve already ceded the Sudetenland, and now the tanks have rolled into Poland. I have to fight. I have no choice. The very future of our marriage depends on it. I can’t just laugh this off (although I probably should). I have to have out with it, all of it; to defend myself, and by extension my marriage, or die trying. “Well,” I counter, “I don’t know if I like the idea of you meeting Soren Knudsen for lunch and not telling me.”
Her expression is difficult to read. Guilt? Surprise? Anger? I don’t know. “Who told you that? Sharon, I suppose?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You think, what? You think I’m cheating on you? Is that really what you think?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But Sharon did. That little whore.” She flings the magazine across the room and scowls at me. “What did she say?”
I stand there dumb, a moron. I don’t want to talk about this, not now, not ever; it’s clear from her reaction that she’s not having an affair—with Soren Knudsen or anyone else. Her arms are still crossed, and now she’s tapping her foot on the hardwood floor, which would be more effective if she weren’t wearing her Sauconys.
“What did she say, Josh?”
So I lay out the evidence. The lunch at the Bonefish Grill, the conspiratorial meeting at the Grand Hotel, the glimpse of her leaving Soren’s house one night two weeks ago.
“And from that she deduced that I was having an affair?”
“Well . . . ” It does seem sort of stupid, phrased this way. “Yes.”
“She’s seen too many episodes of Y&R. That bitch. Why can’t people in this fucking town mind their own fucking business?” She bends over to get the magazine off the floor, then barricades herself in the bathroom. Like Britney Spears did, but without the kids. She comes out a few minutes later, toilet flushing behind her. She glowers at me, her eyes seething, and without a word, marches down the hall toward the bedroom.
“Shhh. Quiet,” I tell her. “Maude’s in there.”
But she’s wearing the sneakers, and Maude can sleep through earthquakes once she’s out. Stacy vanishes into the room, closing the door on me (and the cat, who has followed her every step of the way since she walked through the door; he prefers her). After a minute, Steve gets tired of waiting and slinks back to the couch.
Two minutes later—I watch the time pass on the microwave clock, every second like a fresh knife wound to my heavy heart: where is this going? What is she doing in there? Have I ruined everything? Can our marriage recover from this stupid, awful, hideous, two-star day?—the longest two minutes of my life, Stacy returns, carrying a shoebox. Without looking at me or speaking, she makes for the couch, sits, and motions for me to join her. I have no idea what to expect. What’s in that box? Her diary? Divorce papers? Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head?
“I was saving this for your birthday,” she says. “Some of us know how to make those occasions special.” This is yet another dig on her craptastically bad fortieth, which she will be giving me shit about until the day I die, and possibly also during my funereal eulogy—but her voice is softer, more forgiving, so I relax ever so slightly. “But you might as well open it now.”
Inside the box is a stack of black-and-white five-by-seven photographs—gorgeous, artsy photographs of my gorgeous, artsy wife, wearing a variety of naughty undergarments (negligee, bra, garter belt, and in one shot, just her hands covering her pert breasts), in an array of sexy and seductive poses. It looks like the sort of photo shoot a celebrity who doesn’t want to bare all would submit for Playboy.
“Holy fucking shit.”
It’s hard to believe that the alluring model in these five-by-sevens is my wife, the sa
me woman I’ve shared a bed with for ten years, the mother of my two high-maintenance children. We take for granted how attractive our wives are, I guess, or I do; sometimes it takes looking at her from a different lens to appreciate her beauty anew. She’s prettier than Sharon Rothman, prettier than any of the other mommies in town, prettier—yes!—than Mary-Louise Parker. “These are . . . these are great.”
“Yeah?” Her eyes fall to the floor, hair falling in her face. Even now, after five days of work and a long flight, in her Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt and Guess jeans, she’s still a hottie. “You like them?”
“Of course! I mean, look at you! You’re so fucking hot.”
“Soren is very talented. And Meg was there when we did the shoot. Just so you know. She didn’t meet us for lunch at Bonefish to discuss it, and she must have been in the bathroom when Sharon saw us at the Grand Hotel. That’s when Soren showed us the prints.”
“Oh my God,” I say, hugging her as hard as I can, tears welling in my eyes. “I feel like such an idiot.”
She pats my head as I stifle my tears. “You’ve been alone with the kids all week. That would make anyone feel that way.”
“I never believed her . . . but Sharon, I mean, she was so convinced.”
“Did she put the moves on you?”
I don’t answer, but my weep-wet eyes give me away.
“Oh my God! She put the moves on you! You didn’t fuck her, did you?”
Then Stacy came back.
On an earlier flight.
Should I tell her
The things that went on here tonight?
“No. No, of course not. I’d never do that.”
Which is the truth, right?
“Good.”
Should I tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD I do?
Well . . .
What would you do
If your wife asked YOU?
I could elaborate. Maybe I should. But, given that I answered Stacy’s question to her satisfaction, I decide against rehashing the play-by-play of Sharon’s almost-successful seduction attempt. I love my wife more now than I did when the day began, and when the opportunity presented itself, in all its garter-belted glory, in the end, I did not betray her. That should be enough.
“She does that, you know.”
“Does what?”
“Hits on married guys.”
“Really.”
“She modeled for Soren a few months ago, and at the end of the session, she basically offered to blow him.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She and David have an arrangement, is what she told him. Please. She’s a fucking homewrecker. Like Angelina Jolie. They have the same puffy lips.”
The idea that anyone would select my home as wreck-worthy seems ludicrous—I feel like the least sexy man this side of Barack Obama—and I tell her so.
“Are you kidding? You’re totally cute. You are. You’re, like, a total FILF.”
I laugh. “You’re biased.”
“Just a little.”
I hug her again, as tight as I can, trying to merge our bodies into one. I’m a Titanic survivor kissing dry land. A clumsy metaphor, I realize, comparing my wife to dirt, but that’s how I feel—like I’ve been saved. “I really missed you. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re home.”
“Me, too.”
“These pictures are great. Really. This is, like, the best birthday present of all time ever.”
She looks down at her fingers, plays with her wedding band. “We’re in sort of a rut, you know? I thought this might, you know, be the spark we needed.”
We embrace again, and I kiss her deeply, desperately, as if trying to make up for lost time. And then I’m making out with my wife on the same sofa, in front of the same platter of cheese, where I (briefly, but still) made out with Sharon less than two hours earlier.
“I love you,” I tell her between kisses. “I love you so much.”
She gets this sly grin on her face—a grin I know well from the early days of our marriage, but haven’t much seen of late. “You wanna?”
“Of course.”
“Shit. Maude’s in our bed.”
“Damn it.”
“We could just do it here.”
“On the couch? It’s like we’re in junior high.”
“We could go upstairs, to Maude’s room.” We both reject the proposal silently, independently, and simultaneously. “Yeah, bad idea.”
“I’m actually really exhausted.”
“Me too.”
“Tomorrow,” she says. “Date night. And by ‘date night,’ I mean ‘whoopee night.’ ”
“About Vanessa . . . ”
“Screw Vanessa. I planned this already. I got one of Meg’s sitters. Abby. If she can handle the twins, she can handle Roland and Maude. She’s coming at six.”
“Yeah? You planned it?”
“I figured we could use a night out.”
“Where should we go? The Would? Global Palate?”
Her eyes twinkle with mischief. “I was thinking we’d do something different. Something naughty. Mix it up. Check into a motel, under an assumed name. Pretend we’re having an affair.”
“Cynthia Pardo and Bruce Baldwin did it at Dia:Beacon. We could always go there.”
“They did what?”
“See, you go away for five days, you miss stuff.” I hold her close, kiss her forehead. “There’s that motel in Balmsville, near the strip club. That might make for a good hideaway. We could go get lap dances first.”
“Sold.” She kisses me hard on the lips, a final stamp of approval and possession and commitment. “And for the record . . . I would never cheat on you, you stupe.”
Stupe. Roland’s word. “Me, neither.” I now know this to be true.
We sit for a while on the couch, as we’ve sat so many times before, holding hands, quiet and content.
“Wait,” Stacy says, “they did it at Dia:Beacon?”
“Yeah. The cops came and everything. But that’s not even the half of it. Cynthia’s pregnant.”
“What?” Stacy shakes her head. “This place,” she says. “The more you dig . . . ”
“ . . . the more you find.”
And the word find triggers the iPod in my brain. As I wash my face and brush my teeth and take one final leak, and as we crawl into bed, Stacy and I forming parentheses around the asterisk of the slumbering Maude, I can’t get the song out of my head, the chorus playing on a loop, over and over and over, until I finally fade into sleep:
Good love is hard to find.
Saturday, 5:03 a.m.
I WAKE UP. NOT FROM A CHILD’S CRY, OR A KICK FROM THE SLEEPING and flailing Maude, or a nightmare, or a pressing and urgent need to void my bladder (although I do have to pee, I always have to pee), or the invasive scratching of rodents trapped in the walls. I wake up because my body has decided that now—5:03, the same time Roland roused me yesterday; precision of the internal clock—is the time to wake up.
Stacy faces the wall, a jumbled mess of arms and legs, snoring loudly, chainsaw snoring: the blessed soundtrack of home. Maude occupies the center of the bed, limbs splayed out like she’s being drawn and quartered. Roland is asleep, too; in the monitors, nothing but the whir of the twin noise machines. Peace, quiet. My loved ones, my family, tucked safely into bed. There is something deeply satisfying, something almost magical, about watching over your sleeping wife and children. I’m fulfilling an ancient paternal role, one that hasn’t changed with the times: Father as Protector.
I should be exhausted—I only slept for five fitful, wine-drenched hours—but I’m not. On the contrary, I feel as alert and refreshed as I’ve felt in ages; I feel alive, inspired, even powerful. They were an efficient five hours, I guess, a productive half-day at the office. There certainly was a lot of paperwork to process. Oddly, of all that went down yesterday—the anxiety of the alleged affair, Stacy’s return and my titillating birthday present; the run-in with the la
w; the babysitter stand-off; Roland’s pumpkin patch meltdown and the subsequent breaking of bread with Daryl and Zara Reid; Cynthia Pardo and Bruce Baldwin, Cynthia Pardo and Peter Berliner; and, yes, the delicious caress of Sharon’s fingers on a part of my body that no one has touched in ten years except my wife and the urologist who performed my vasectomy—what I wake up thinking about is something relatively minor. I’m rehashing the remark made by Joe Palladino, my goateed exterminator, he of the mouse bait and the blind-date blow job:
Just you and the kid on a Friday afternoon. A little Mr. Mom duty today, huh?
It’s time for an update, it occurs to me, a Mr. Mom for the new millennium: a groundbreaking film about a dad who isn’t a cipher, who isn’t thrust haplessly into the primary-caregiver role, but who courts it, and who excels at it. Brad Pitt could star—heck, if the tabloid photo spreads of him hauling Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Vivienne, and Knox from Lake Como to Los Angeles are to be believed, he won’t even have to act. Maybe it’s time for Hollywood to catch up. Maybe I should stop writing derivative vampire thrillers and bang out a screenplay about my own absurd life. Maybe then my agent would respond to my e-mails. Maybe he’d do even more. Maybe—
A little Mr. Mom duty today, huh?
See, the days of Mr. Mom are over, no matter what my benighted exterminator might think. The paradigms have altered. The gender roles have blurred. The distinction between Mother and Father is all mucked up. And that, more than anything, is why Joe’s comment sticks in my craw. For hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of years, in almost every culture that is or was, women have cared for the children, and men have not. Right here, right now, we are experiencing a cataclysm of domesticity, a tectonic shift in how things are and how they will be going forward—and there is nothing, nothing in the language that adequately reflects this sea change. Mr. Mom affixes a masculine title to a feminine noun—arguably the most feminine noun going. Mr. Mom is defined by its antithesis, by what it’s not, by how it’s unusual, extraordinary, queer, risible, ridiculous, possibly malefic. Compare: undocumented, illegal, illegitimate, Antichrist. What we need is a new term for what we are. A word that is positive, something we stay-at-home dads, we SAHDs, we Y-chromosomed co-parents Co-parents! As if fathers actually participating in raising their kids has to be specified! As if doing so is encroaching on the mother’s side of the parental line of scrimmage! we evolutionary Mr. Moms, can be proud of. A word like . . . like . . .