by Noah Hawley
“Not so rough,” she says absently. “I told them. My Sally has delicate skin.”
Tracey leans over.
“Maybe this was a mistake,” she says quietly to David, referring to the whole karate experience. She has never liked the idea of violence, and ever since he started taking karate, Christopher has been wandering the house punching things. They have dents in their Sheetrock and fist-shaped smudges on all the appliances. Tracey has, on several occasions, had to stop her son from demonstrating throw holds on his sister.
“It’s for defending yourself only,” she told him. “That was the point. Not to turn your body into a weapon.”
Christopher liked this, the idea of his body as a lethal force. When his father came home that night, Chris jumped out from behind the coat rack, adopting one of his lethal karate stances.
“Ha!” he yelled.
“Ha, yourself,” David said, throwing his jacket over the boy’s head.
The instructor lines the kids up. He bows to them and they respond, their little heads almost touching the floor. They look like hand puppets next to the big man. He turns to the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. For the next half hour you will see a different side of your children. Discipline and honor, these are the facets we focus on here. We try to instill a sense of mindfulness and fair play. These are lessons I had to learn the hard way after many years of drinking and petty crime. But then, thanks to my sensei, I cleaned my act up, and now I do fight choreography for several fabulous Hollywood films.”
Listening to him, David thinks they should have done more research before enrolling Chris in this particular dojo. The younger kids, six, seven, eight, pair off and start sparring. They jump around on little legs, throwing their limbs about in exaggerated movements. It looks a lot like play-fighting, like the regular household spit-punching that goes on every day. We’re paying fifty bucks a week for this? thinks David. But then the little kids sit down and it’s time for the older ones to show their stuff. Chris walks out to the center of the floor. He turns and bows to his opponent, a hulking ten-year-old boy who looks like he was recruited from the Russian preteen weight-lifting team. David feels that familiar worry settle into his stomach. He wants to run out onto the mat and punch the kid in the face, protect his son at all costs.
Chris adopts a stance, elbows bent, knees. David can see the concentration on his face. He wishes he could lock his son up in the basement, keep him from harm for the rest of his life. Instead he is about to witness a juvenile reenactment of a Mike Tyson blowout. His hands are fists, the nails digging into the palms of his hands. He is a man who has taken out over two million dollars in combined insurance policies. The big kid lunges forward, and David rises involuntarily out of his seat, but just as the kid’s arm thrusts forward, Chris steps aside and chops the bigger kid across the back.
“Point,” yells the instructor, and David feels that bottom-of-the-ninth-inning thrill. What a warrior his son is, and by association, what a warrior his father must be. He looks over at Tracey, grinning, but she doesn’t share his zeal. Her face is still tight with worry. He smiles at her to let her know everything is okay, puts his hand on her leg.
“There’s almost no gravity on the moon,” says Chloe. “If they were fighting on the moon, one of them could just fly right off.”
David musses her hair. In two hours his mother and brother will descend on his house, bringing with them all kinds of emotional chaos, like a visit from the loony bin. But right now the five of them are a family, coherent, intact. Right now they are insulated, self-sustaining, robust. This will change the minute his mother arrives, dropping her casual cruelties, sitting with her liquor, watching the children play with pained skepticism on her face. Don’t they have anything interesting to say? she will ask. Which one is Sam? David has made sure there is plenty of wine in the house. The kids have cleaned their rooms. They have prepared as if for a natural disaster, laying in water and batteries. The cars have plenty of gas, and for some reason, Tracey bought six cans of mixed nuts. David’s cell phone vibrates in his pocket. He takes it out. The caller ID says J (for Joy). He slips his phone back into his pocket.
“Who was that?” his wife wants to know.
“Just checking the time,” he tells her.
The match ends with Christopher easily besting the bigger, slower kid. His usual plodding deliberateness has been replaced by concise grace. He steps and turns, throwing crisp kicks and chops. No energy is wasted. David feels hustled, as if his son has been setting him up all this time, playing a role, the flat-footed, monosyllabic shlub. The other kids take their turn dancing around on the gray mats, boys and girls. Then the instructor herds his students into a circle. He pulls out a stack of wooden boards. As one, the parents lean forward in their seats. The boards look substantial, impervious, and the children’s hands are so small, so fragile. Some mothers glance out through the plate-glass window to see if an ambulance is standing by. One isn’t.
“Can I ask Christopher Henry to come up?” says the instructor. Chris jumps to his feet. Tracey reaches over and grabs David’s hand.
“How can this work?” she says. “He’s ten years old. He’s basically punching a tree.”
David doesn’t respond. He watches his son step up to the instructor. Two big kids are holding the board between them.
“Okay, Chris,” says the instructor. “Remember what we practiced. Close your eyes. See the board break.”
Chris steps up to the board. He does a few choreographed arm maneuvers, then reaches out and touches the board with his outstretched fingers, his palm flat, thumb tight against his index finger knuckle.
Watching him, David thinks of his son praying, down on his knees every night before bed, hands clasped together before his face. David remembers the first time he saw Chris do it. He was stunned. Where had his son gotten it from? They weren’t religious in his house. Nobody ever said grace. They said bless you if you sneezed, but they didn’t mean it. And yet here was their son, down on his knees, praying. For what? To whom? David assumed it was the Christian God, but it could just as easily have been Allah, Vishnu, L. Ron Hubbard. What do you do in that situation? Had they taught him prayer in school? Taught him to believe in Jesus, to ask God for forgiveness, love? David and Tracey stood in the doorway looking at each other, their mouths agape. It was cute and disturbing at the same time. This was one of those moments when you wish your kids came with a manual. How do you question a ten-year-old’s faith? When your kids believe in God and you don’t, it makes you strangers. But then faith is the issue here, isn’t it? A ten-year-old boy staring down a solid piece of wood. The whole key, David thinks as he watches his son prepare to do battle, is believing you can do it. He himself is not a man of significant faith, even in other people. He is always sort of surprised when things work out, when he closes a deal or the kids get good grades. To him, the world is a place of unanswered prayers and dumb luck. And yet there are heroes in the world, men who believe, who triumph over inestimable odds time and time again. There are soldiers who rely on their training to save them, snake handlers who’ve never been bitten. For these people failure is not an option. It doesn’t even enter their minds. David wonders what it would be like to be so confident. He is a man with two wives, and yet he still can’t believe he got one woman to marry him, can’t believe he has produced four amazing children, despite the inarguable proof.
And then there is his mother, who doesn’t even believe enough to do ordinary things: leave the house, stop drinking. She is the opposite of an achiever. She can’t even work up the strength for failure.
Chris takes a step back, bows. The board hovers there in front of him. Tracey squeezes David’s hand harder. David pictures himself carrying his son to the car, rushing him to the emergency room. He pictures the mangled fingers, the broken bones, then he puts these thoughts out of his mind. In that moment he is convinced that not only must Chris believe for this to work, for the board to break, but
his father must believe as well. David believes that it is essential he see the board breaking in his mind, or else it won’t. His son pulls back his arm, takes a deep breath. In the gallery everyone holds their breath. David visualizes his son punching, the board breaking. He wills it to happen. Then, in one sharp motion, Chris shoots his hand forward, shouting Hai!, and snaps the board in two. It breaks with a great, wooden crack. In the gallery everyone applauds. No one can believe it. David feels his heart surge and threaten to explode. Chris runs around the mat, a huge grin on his face. And then Chloe is off her chair and running over to her big brother. She throws her arms around him, and they jump up and down together, lost in filial bliss. And watching them, David finally understands the meaning of family. It comes to him like a great stone tablet handed down from above. Family is everyone you can’t live without.
David calls Joy from his car on the way home. He is alone. Chris wanted to ride with his dad in the Mercedes, but David said he had business calls to make, and so the three kids piled into the Land Rover with Tracey.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s me.”
“Me who?” says Joy, though she knows exactly who he is.
“Me the Jolly Green Giant.”
“Oh, that me.”
Her voice is warm and thrilling. The sound of bacon frying in a pan. The sound of porn on TV.
“Sorry I missed your call,” he says. “I was in a meeting.”
“You missed one hell of an orgasm,” she says. “I could have used your help.”
David spends three days a week in New York, usually Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Tracey thinks it’s for business. That he is filling in as a New York sales rep until the company hires a replacement. Joy thinks he’s in L.A. four days a week for the same reason. It is simpler, he has found, if all your lies match up. If they correspond. As a result he spends a lot of time on the phone managing relationships. With Tracey it is more about logistics, helping her figure out schedules and traffic routes: how to get the kids to the doctor and still get home in time for dinner. With Joy, who is twenty-eight, there are other, more sensual duties required. They have been married almost a year now, have known each other only sixteen months. It is still the honeymoon phase, unlike with Tracey, whom he has known since 1991.
“Well,” he says, “now I’m definitely sorry I missed your call.”
“Sam wants to say hi,” she says. “Say hi to Daddy, Sam.”
She holds the phone to his son’s ear and David can hear gentle babbling over the line. He has a hard time distinguishing the two babies in his mind, Sam from Sam. Both were born last summer. Both have brown hair and beaming brown eyes. Listening to his son Sam2 giggle, he feels like a criminal. Am I crazy? How long can I really get away with this?
“A-boo-boo-boo,” he says into the phone. “A-da-da-da.”
“Sexy,” says Joy. “I like it when you baby-talk.”
David believes but cannot prove that any minute now his life is going to fall apart. That everyone he loves will leave him. The feeling makes him desperate. It makes him miss people, even when they’re in the same room with him.
He met Joy in October. He was on a business trip to New York and a client wanted to go clubbing, so David’s New York associate hired one of those party services (a thing David had never heard of), where, for a fee, a few drab businessmen can be escorted to the hippest clubs by a beautiful woman, floating past the velvet rope like celebrities. All the arrangements are made in advance. Inside, they are taken to the best tables, where they order the most expensive drinks. In this way, money can make anyone feel like a star.
“An escort,” his associate said.
“Like a hooker?” David wanted to know.
But she wasn’t a hooker. She was a sweet, slightly off-kilter blonde from the Midwest. They met in Tribeca. Having grown up in New York, the city always had two identities to David. There were the neighborhoods he frequented as a kid, and the places he knew only as an adult. Tribeca was one of the latter, a foreign grid of late-blooming hipness. He always felt out of place below Canal Street. He preferred the multi-angle spread of the West Village, the glaring confusion of Midtown.
There were three of them at the bar, David, his associate Monty, and the client, a mid-level purchasing executive at a large Midwestern hospital chain. Monty was a slightly cross-eyed but otherwise extremely handsome sales rep from Vermont. He had a fiancée who taught nursery school and could, apparently, “suck the change out of a parking meter,” a skill David suggested could come in handy if they ever found themselves broke and living in her car. The client, Douglas, was a little man with a big belly and a penchant for brown. The three sat drinking rye shots and beer and talking sports, the international language of business. The client showed them pictures of his kids, three fat babies, their hair plastered down. They lived in a suburb in Oklahoma. He said he was excited to see New York, the nightlife.
“It’s funny,” he said. “You spend nine months trying to get out of a pussy, and the rest of your life trying to get back in.”
David chuckled along with Monty. He had never been comfortable with this variation of business talk, the way men invariably spiraled down into conversations about tits and ass.
“David here has a great wife and two kids,” Monty said.
“Fucking terrific,” said the client. “But tonight we’re all single. Am I right, or am I right?”
David started to say something, but Monty threw him a look, meaning, This is an important sale for us. Don’t fuck it up. So David nodded and threw back his rye.
“Single as they come,” he said.
“Which means,” said the client, “the wedding rings come off.”
He lifted his chubby left hand and tugged at the thin gold band until it yielded, slipping it onto his keychain and putting it in his pocket.
“Now you,” he said.
David nodded. He thought about something his wife once said: There is nothing more pathetic than a married man hitting on chicks. And yet the cold, hard reality was that he was in the running for a major promotion at work, head of West Coast sales, and he needed this sale to firm up his chances. He hadn’t taken off his ring since the day he got married. It had itched him for weeks after he first put it on, his finger feeling swollen, sweaty, but he had doggedly resisted the urge to pull it off, and then, over time, he had gotten used to it, stopped noticing it, even as he played with it absently, turning it on his finger whenever he talked. What would it feel like to be without it, to be naked again?
The client watched him expectantly.
“No attachments,” said David, and slipped his ring off. He took out his wallet, slipped his ring inside. This was the moment Joy walked in, twenty-six and gorgeous. Every head in the place turned, men and women. She had that kind of energy, those kinds of pheromones, like phosphorescent lichen lighting up an undersea cave.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “I believe I’m your date for the night. I hope you had plenty of caffeine this afternoon. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
It was pathetic really, the way they fell all over themselves to get her a stool, to tell her their names and ask where she was from. They were three men, the youngest in his mid-thirties, and she was the promise of a new beginning. A woman who still remembered what it was like to be a girl, to be the lustful center of a high-school boy’s infatuation. She greeted them each with a warm smile and a kiss on the cheek, and the smell of her, her intoxicating nearness, made them giddy.
“I’m Joy,” she said, and if ever there had been a more perfect name, David had never heard it. “And before we start I just want to make one thing clear. There is no way that I am going home with any of you tonight. I am here to make sure you have a fabulous time, that you get into the most exclusive clubs. I will even help you meet the girl of your dreams, but I will not be the girl of your dreams. Are we clear?”
They nodded. The bartender came over and she ordered a club soda, pulled out her itinerary.
; “Okay. It’s seven o’clock. We’ll hit Feral first, get a drink. It’s an after-work spot in SoHo, very hip, then we’ll head down to Rivington and hit a couple of speakeasies. After that it’s time to get serious. I hope you boys brought your dancing shoes.”
David sipped his beer. The whole thing felt ridiculous. In his mind, you either were hip or you weren’t, and no amount of money—especially if the whole hedonistic adventure was being billed as a business expense—was going to change that. For a moment he wished he were at home, curled up on the sofa while Tracey put the kids to bed. He missed the sound of their little voices, the smell of dinner in the air, that late-night calm after the little ones were asleep, after Tracey was in bed, when the house was dormant, like a deep breath before a sigh. He missed the comfort, the security. He didn’t like being on his own, the threat of all that empty time.
“Before we go,” he said, “I just need to make a phone call.”
He left them at the bar and went outside to call Tracey. It was almost Halloween, and this year she had decided she was going to make costumes for the kids.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“I’m up to my ears in felt,” she said.
“It’s not too late to buy,” he said. “I can pick up a Spider-Man costume on the way home tomorrow.”
“No,” she said. “I started this. I’m going to finish it. What are you up to?”
“Drinks with the client,” he told her. “I promised him a fun night in New York.”
“Well, don’t have too much fun. Not without me.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll hate every minute of it.”
As he said this, Joy came out of the bar and took a pack of cigarettes from her purse.
“I gotta go,” he told his wife. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He hung up. Joy lit her cigarette.
“Girlfriend?” she said.
“My brother,” he told her, lying without thinking. “Another broken heart. I swear, he’s got the worst taste in women.”