Fathermucker (13 page)

When we get these reports, Stacy cries at the dining room table. She stops eating. Her left eye starts to twitch, her face breaks out in acne.

Eventually she stops reading them.

It is 2004. Amy and Gareth Nelson found an advocacy group called Aspies for Freedom. Its aims are: to erase the “disability” stigma affixed to people on the autistic spectrum, to have them recognized as a minority status group, and to eradicate the notion that autism is a disease that must be cured.

Within three years, the group accumulates twenty thousand members.

Among the treatments and techniques used by the teachers at Thornwood to help Roland: physical therapy (for gross motor development), occupational therapy (for fine motor development), speech therapy (for what's called
pragmatics
; knowing what to say at appropriate times, how not to interrupt, how to feign empathy, and so on), music therapy (stimulates the right half of the brain), counseling (oh to be a fly on the wall; I'm pretty sure he just talks about states and lamps the whole time), brushing protocol (in which they brush his arms, legs, and back with a soft brush for two minutes every hour, to balance his tactile stimuli), hippotherapy (where he rides a bus to a nearby horse farm and then rides an old nag named Pal), wearing a weighted vest (an L.L. Bean fisherman's vest, cute as can be, that weighs about five pounds), and good, old-fashioned removing him from the classroom when he gets out of hand. The last technique—call it what it is: a Time Out—is the only thing that reliably works.

The goal of this early intervention is to prepare him for kindergarten. Enough prep, the thinking goes, and he won't be as disruptive to his classmates, who will be learning their letters, numbers, and colors, knowledge Roland mastered years ago.

The 2012 edition of the DSM-V will eliminate the “Asperger's” diagnosis, lumping it in under the more catholic heading “autistic spectrum disorder.”

The consensus among aspies is that this will only add to the confusion.

Although his “refrigerator mother” theory was debunked years ago, Bettelheim was right about one thing, as current studies clearly and repeatedly validate: Parents of autistic children are more likely to suffer from depression, from parental stress, from psychological stress.

Parents of autistic children are also more likely to split up.

The divorce rate for these parents is eighty percent, is what I hear.

Ernest, one of Cynthia Pardo and Peter Berliner's three children, is autistic.

Stacy and I haven't had sex in . . . how long has it been? A while. It's been a while.

Shit.

Friday, 10:51 a.m.

G
OOD LOVE IS HARD TO FIND
.

“You Got Lucky” is on the radio as I start the car after our abrupt playdate exit. I'm not a big Tom Petty guy, but this song is innocuous enough, and anyway Maude's stopped crying and has that distant look on her face like she's about to fall asleep, so I don't change it. Good love
is
hard to find. So say the Heartbreakers, who know.

I'm a good half-mile down Yankee Folly before I realize that the tune has a newfound and unwelcome significance. Check that:
potential
significance. If Sharon is right. If Stacy is—

In February, we'll have been together ten years; Roland is almost five. His arrival into our world, and the subsequent migration of said world from the city to the marchlands to the north, marks a distinct midpoint of our union, a delineated shift from Act One to Act Two
from the original blockbuster to the watered-down sequel
.

The first half of our relationship was spent in New York and the various indulgent vacation spots—Napa, New Orleans, New Mexico, Nice—we periodically flew to from JFK. We both had jobs—not dream jobs, but real jobs, with salaries and benefits and personal days. We had free time, lots of free time, although it may not have felt that way back then, and the option to call in sick and sleep till noon if circumstances demanded it. One New Year's Eve—the year after the bathetic Y2K ballyhoo, if memory serves, as it doesn't as often as it once did—we got hammered at a friend's party, literally dancing the night away, and didn't get home till dawn. When we finally rolled out of bed on January first, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. The cats kept checking on us, rubbing whiskers on our cheeks to gauge for signs of life, puzzled looks on their feline faces, and we blissfully ignored them. Three in the afternoon!

Those first five years were our Gay Nineties; Roland's birth, the Zimmermann Memo heralding a half-decade dug into the Great War foxhole of parenthood. No money, no travel for pleasure, no drinking to excess, no raucous parties, no sick days, no sleep-ins. No let-up. No relent. New Paltz is our Flanders, and our charge is to remain in the trenches and hold our ground until the Armistice Day that is . . . what? Kindergarten? College? Death?

You got lucky, babe.

Yes, Stacy is unhappy. Not
depressed
unhappy,
worn down
unhappy. But unhappy just the same. Unhappy enough to trade foxhole for rabbit hole and vanish into a wonderland of wanton wander-lust? I don't believe so . . . she's not the cheating kind, I'd like to think . . . but I don't know. I mean, it's possible. Certainly I've let her down enough these last five years.

She turned forty last month—the Big Four Oh, which is a bigger deal for women than it is for men, I've the hard way learned—and I totally botched the birthday. Not that I dropped the ball, as such—I organized a well-attended surprise breakfast and the obligatory spa mani-pedi, and we went out to dinner at Hokkaido, her favorite sushi restaurant—but something was missing from the festivities, and we both knew it.
My birthday was just an item on your to-do list
, she groused afterward.
You didn't really care about it at all.
She wasn't right about the second part, but she was bang-on about the first. I did care, of course I cared, but I didn't have the resources—financial or emotional—to pull out all the stops. Had she turned forty after the kids were old enough to stay with her mother . . . after I'd gone back to work . . . after our credit card bills were not all on the brink of being maxed out . . . and not on a fucking
Wednesday
. . . I would have made the requisite fuss. But this year? I just didn't have it in me. The timing was bad. Her milestone birthday was one of countless fatted calves we've sacrificed at the altar of parenthood. And Stacy's fed up with it. She's worn out, to the point where she's starting to break. She's
unhappy
.

Unhappy enough to stray?

The weeks after her birthday were the frostiest in all the time we've been together. Unable to focus her anger on the actual source—the kids; or, rather, the at-times suffocating restrictions raising kids has imposed on us, as hands-on parents—she took it out on me. You know how a baseball team that can't trade all its players instead fires the manager? I was Team Stacy's Billy Martin. The question is, was I irredeemable enough to replace?

Maybe I deserved what I got. If not the ax, at least the hostility. Maybe Stacy's lame fortieth birthday was a passive-aggressive way for me to lash out at her. Maybe she's not the only one who's angry. Maybe I'm just as unhappy as she is. This would be prime fodder for couples counseling, but we stopped going to Rob in July because her insurance doesn't cover mental health, and we can't cover the out-of-pocket expense.

Things reverted to normal by the end of September . . . but could that be because she found satisfaction elsewhere? No, no, that's not right—she was miserable then, too. It was around the first of October, I think, when I came home from the dentist and found her in tears.
My life is a steaming pile of shit
, she told me,
and I hate everything right now. I've spent the last two hours with Maude, giving her every single ounce of my soul and it's still not enough. I'm tired, I'm getting sick, I have SO much work to do. Help.

Unhappy enough to stray.

Period, full stop.

This would be the part in the movie where the jilted husband flies to Los Angeles on the next available flight—a cute and kindly stewardess would help him bypass airport security—to have it out with the cheating wife. He'd interrupt the business meeting, he'd yell and scream and embarrass her, he'd call her a whore and throw water in her face. Then he'd fly off into the sunset with the cute stewardess. But I can't imagine reacting that way. I'd rather crawl under the porch and await the
coup de grâce
, like a dying cat. The very idea of confrontation—and therefore confirmation—makes me ill. Hot bile churns in my gut, a toxic stew of hurt pride, sadness, humiliation, and dread that cannot be healthily expressed, but cannot be tamped down. Some of the coffee comes back up my throat, bitter and acidic—why did I drink so many cups!—but I'm able to roll down the window and spit, and thus avoid retching all over my jeans (although I leave a trail of brown caffeinated spew along the side of the minivan).

How will I react when I know for sure? Hard to say. But the Not Knowing is eating me up already. It's a monster, an apparition in human form; faceless like my wife's potential lover, but powerful, relentless; a ring wraith—or, perhaps, that legendary faceless Hudson Valley bugbear, the Headless Horseman (or if he
is
Stacy's lover, the Headless
Whores
man)—riding roughshod over the broken landscape of my mind, haunting me.

I should probably call her, check in, ask her even, although I'm the sort of guy who will go to great lengths to avoid confrontation, particularly confrontation whose outcome I won't like no matter how the cookie crumbles, as this sort of half-baked Lorna Doone is sure to. I should call her, yes, but what would I say?
Hi, honey, I know you can't talk long, but I was wondering . . . um, are you perhaps cheating on me?
If Sharon's information is bad, and Stacy has been true, I look like a dickhead for not trusting her. And that's the
best
-case scenario! No, I can't bring it up. Not now. Not until I talk to Sharon, find out what she knows.

And the Headless Whoresman gallops on.

When I found you.

Ten days until Election Day, and political posters have popped up everywhere, like so many red-white-and-blue zits: defacing the lawns, street corners, highway overpasses, storefront windows (the “T” where Main Street intersects the Thruway exchange suggests one of those Midtown plywood walls where the
POST NO BILLS
directive has been ignored)—blue for Democrat, red for Republican, although Ulster County lists so far to the left that the latter tend to be coy about their party affiliation. One of my little driving games involves trying to forecast a winner based on the volume of signage. Gilpatric, it appears, will cakewalk to a seat on the state Supreme Court. I've yet to see a single sign for his opponent. I don't even know who's running against him. In the race for county clerk, on the other hand, Nina Postupack and Gilda Riccardi appear headed for a photo finish—the number of lawn signs suggests a dead heat. I wonder who they are, these hopeful and perhaps gullible municipal candidates, who permit their names to be printed on posters all over town. Ronk, Zatz. Deborah Schneer. Hansut, Maio. And my favorite pair of names, Bartels & Hayes.
We thank you for your support
. As an American, I'm supposed to take pride in this ardent display of civic duty. Democracy in action and yadda yadda yadda, the stuff of Alexis de Tocqueville's wet dreams. But the signs tend to depress me, this morning especially. I feel bad for the losers, even the Republicans; their banners will remain on those lawns, street corners, overpasses, storefront windows, for days and sometimes weeks (and, in the case of my never-say-die McCain/Palin-supporting neighbor Bill, years) after Election Day, battered by the elements, faded like the glow of campaigning, like the hope of reform, torn from their metal frames, blowing in the wind like monogrammed flags of plastic surrender. What a humiliation it must be, losing an election. Public flogging. Tar and feather. I don't know how you come back from that. Look at Al Gore, that poor sap, vanishing into a beard and twenty pounds of post-election padding. How did he recover from that mortifying “defeat” in 2000?

Well, it probably helped that Sharon Rothman didn't tell him at a playdate that she thought Tipper was having an affair.

O
N THAT FATEFUL
T
UESDAY EIGHT YEARS AGO, AFTER THE FIRST
plane hit the World Trade Center, we gathered in an office to watch history unfold on TV. One plane, one black hole, one tall tower. An accident—this is what everyone thought. Some dimwitted pilot had managed to fly his Cessna smack dab into
the largest building in North America
. What a dope! But when the second plane hit, we knew at once, all of us knew, that this was not the case. We knew it was
intentional
, an act of terror, an act of war. The newscasters knew it, too. Immediately, we were informed of commercial planes unaccounted for, lost in the wild blue yonder. There were six of them, like bullets in a chamber, heading toward other targets: the White House, the Capitol, the Sears Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, LAX, the Empire State Building. And although I was stunned that this had happened, some small part of me—God, it pains me to admit this—
wanted
those six planes to hit those targets, just to see
what would happen
. I wanted to witness the apocalypse. I wanted to watch the world end, and with a bang, not a wimper. That base and shameful inkling proved short-lived; I came to my shell-shocked senses well before the first tower collapsed. But I cannot deny the frisson of thrill I felt that day, standing in that office, listening to the newscast, as I contemplated the coordinated destruction of Life as We Know It.

If I'm honest with myself, I recognize that the part of me that
isn't
devastated, that
isn't
overcome with anxiety and dread, feels the same way now. My marriage, my family, my entire life could tumble like those skyscrapers, leaving a gaping, smouldering, noxious hole where something tall and proud once stood. Those are the stakes—nothing less. And yet some small and obviously deranged part of me craves this outcome.

Why do I want to witness my own destruction?

As my son well knows, not to mention every producer in Hollywood, it's fun to watch shit blow up.

My throat is burning and I swallow hard, sending the Moka Java sluicing back from whence it came.
Easy, Josh.
We don't know anything yet. Don't freak out.
The best recourse is to approach this as a mystery, I tell myself, like an episode of
Law & Order
, or a game of Clue, or an Agatha Christie novel.
Ten Little Huguenots
.

Okay, then.

For the sake of argument, let's accept Sharon's premise that Stacy is cheating on me. That begs three more questions: when, for how long, and with whom? We don't exactly have surplus hours to while away, not with two high-maintenance preschoolers, not with Maude's obstinacy and Roland's special needs; how exactly did she manage to sneak in an affair? Is this a long-term sort of infidelity, one of those
Same Time, Next Year
situations, or a relatively recent infatuation? And who the fuck is the Other Guy? Stacy rarely goes to the city, so it would have to be someone up here. Someone local. But who? A colleague at IBM, maybe? A trainer at the gym, like Cynthia Pardo's paramour, Bruce Baldwin? One of the other daddies? Chris Holby? Dennis Hynek? David Rothman? Soren?

My mind is blank. There are no usual suspects to round up. It really is an Agatha Christie book:
everyone's a suspect
.

I check the rearview—Maude is passed out, her head dangling off to the side like a broken bobblehead doll. On the radio, Tom Petty gives way to a guitar riff as familiar as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and then the swaggering vocals kick in:

I can't get no . . . sat-is-fac-tion

My finger wavers toward the preset, but the familiarity of the song soothes my upset stomach, and I've always liked the line about not smoking the same cigarettes as me—it reminds me of my father, who loved the Stones, who would blast
Exile on Main Street
at the body shop
Is this a sign? Is he watching over me right now?
—and instead of turning it off, I find myself turning it up.