Fathermucker (16 page)

This
is the traditional white American straight man!
This
is who the beer companies make their ads for.

“Well, it sounds like you found yourself a keeper.”

He's about to continue, but I cut him off. “Sorry, dude. I have to get my daughter.”

“No problem,” he says, punching me a bit too playfully on the upper arm, “Mr. Mom.”

W
HEN
I
GET BACK TO THE MINIVAN
, M
AUDE IS SCREAMING HER
head off. Her cries give way to gentle sobs as I extricate her from the five-point harness and carry her into the house.

“Are you hungry? Do you want lunch?”

“No!”

The grimace on her face is so over-the-top that I actually break character and laugh. “Okay, crabcake.”

“Lollipop,” she barks.

“What?”

“Lollipop! I want a lolly!”

This is where the political component of fatherhood comes into play, where I become Obama in the Situation Room, weighing the pros and cons of military response to this brazen act of defiance. Should I draw a line in the sand and take up arms against the Kandahar lollipop rebels, or simply cave to their modest demands, buying myself a few moments of peace? Key word in the decision-making process:
simply
. Like the American public with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't have the stomach for further acts of war. Sugar on a stick is a small price to pay for
Pax Lanskya
.

“If you sit quietly and watch something,” I tell her, “you can have a lolly.”

Yet another banner moment in my campaign for Father of the Year. Alert
Parenting
magazine while I clear a spot on my mantel for the bronze plaque.

I carry her downstairs, set her on the sofa.
Bob the Builder
, a show about a Playmobil-shaped carpenter who speaks in a vaguely marijuana-addled voice—not unlike a male version of Meg—comes on just as I flip on the TV. Twelve o'clock, on the nose. High noon. The theme song, call and response:

Bob the Builder, can we fix it?
Bob the Builder, yes we can!

The most successful political slogan since “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” purloined from one of the more irritating kids' shows of all time.
Yes we can!
When Obama contemplates the big decisions, does he then
sit back in his Thinking Chair and think . . . think . . . think
? Perhaps this is what he meant in his Inaugural when he said it was time to put away childish things.

“Lolly,” Maude reminds me, as if I could somehow forget the terms of our historic peace treaty.

“Relax, would you? I'll get it.”

I take the steps two at a time, find a vitamin C, health-food-store lollipop, unwrap it, and bring it back downstairs.

“I don't want that lolly,” Maude says. “I want a
blue
lolly.” A Dum-Dum. Can't blame her. The health-food lollipops
ahem
suck.

“We don't have any more blue lollies.”

She considers this. Now it's her turn to be Obama in the Sit Room.
Think . . . think . . . think.
She's about to whine again, but the prospect of the prize in hand is too tempting.
We can do . . . any-thing . . . that we wanna do.
Already she's more clever than the fabular dog staring at his reflection in the lake. She grabs the treat, inserts it in her mouth, and eases into the couch and the show.

I retreat upstairs on the double, lest she tack on an eleventh-hour amendment to the bill. She has a bad habit of deciding she wants something on a whim and then demanding it over and over, in increasingly loud and sharp tones, until said object is produced, or she is locked in her room.

It's noon, I've been up for almost seven hours, and all I've eaten is an Egg McMuffin and a few chocolate-chip cookies. Which explains the lightheadedness. The refrigerator offers few tantalizing options. Yogurt, leftover ravioli, Kraft singles, a few bottles of Magic Hat #9, a jar of pickles from the Rosendale Pickle Festival. The Pickle Festival was almost a year ago. Probably should throw those away, but that's a task for another day. Digging in the meat drawer, I unearth the last of the Polish ham I bought on Monday. Is it still good? What's the shelf life on deli meat? Five days is a while to be in the fridge, but then, processed cold cuts are chock-full of preservatives and salt. In theory, they should last forever. Nuclear holocaust might destroy all life on earth, but cockroaches and deli meat would endure. I sniff the plastic. Doesn't smell rank, although this is really Stacy's area of expertise. She's the Anton Fig of the house. I throw the remaining ham—four thin slices, no longer pink; almost Seussian in ham hue, when held to the windowpane light—between two pieces of half-stale whole-wheat bread, add a Kraft single and some (low-fat; it's not
all
bad) mayo, and bring my delectable
répas
to my desk.

In the unfinished part of the basement, by the boiler and the oil tank, Joe Palladino, fresh off his Felicia fellatio, bounds around with an extra hop in his step. A good blow job will do that. Ah, blow jobs. Ah, the warm, inviting mouth slurp-slurping my swelling—

Oral sex sort of falls by the wayside when you have kids. But then, so does sex-sex. You know how, in lieu of birth control that actually works, some couples employ the Rhythm Method? Stacy and I use the Ferber Method—or, more accurately, we have applied the concept of this rather ham-handed sleep-training technique to a different kind of bedroom. When you Ferberize a toddler, you put him in the crib and let him cry for, say, five minutes. Then you go back in and comfort him, before leaving him to cry again. The second time away, you wait ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty, and so on, until the toddler finally falls asleep on his own. Over time, and in theory, the toddler learns to fall asleep without the visit from Mom or Dad. With intercourse, it works the same way. You go a few days, then a week, then three weeks, then a month, then . . . you get the idea. The Ferber Method doesn't really help crying toddlers sleep through the night. It's even less effective weaning horny adults from their basic need of wet and wild whoopee.

Any new e-mails? Just a note from my sister detailing her Italian vacation and a reminder from Discover that my minimum payment is due. (Next week I'll have to look into the credit card choreography, see if another
pas de chat
in the
danse macabre
of the balance transfer is in order.)

It's not that I don't find Stacy sexy—she remains as alluring as the first time I saw her, in a play in the East Village ten years ago—or that I don't want to screw more often, or that we both don't really dig it when we do. Parenthood saps your energy, and sex—not just sex; lust itself, the primal urge of all creation—requires energy to sustain. Shit, even
God
had to rest after six days of intense creativity. Look, it takes an hour and a half to put the kids to bed every night. An hour and a half! Woody Allen movies aren't that long. Ninety fucking minutes. Every. Fucking. Night. If we devoted half the time we spend reading aloud the work of Dr. Seuss and Kevin Henkes and Ian Falconer, and singing bedtime songs in the rocking chair, and washing hands and faces, and brushing teeth, and preparing sippy cups, and going downstairs, and coming back upstairs because the sheets aren't tucked properly or the noise machine stopped or the ceiling fan cast spooky shadows . . . if Stacy and I devoted just half that time to foreplay, to pleasuring each other with Caligulan abandon, we would be the most sated couple in upstate New York. We would be the Ice-T and Coco of New Paltz. But we don't
turn on
each other; we turn on nightlights and noise machines.

The ham, while not spoiled, is stringy and flavorless.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I choke it down with a big swallow of not-cold-enough Diet Coke.

Furthermore, there's something antithetical to the copulatory act in the drone of the noise machines, the framed photos of the kids on the dresser, the stray Legos in every conceivable nook in the house.
There must be thousands of Legos under our baseboards alone; how many must there be in the world? More than there are grains of sand? More than there are stars in the sky?
Less of a headache to repress the carnal yearnings, to tamp out the need for intimate sexual contact, to whack off every few days with the same utilitarian detachment with which I mow the lawn, to empty my reserves as stolidly as I empty the dishwasher, than to—

Not that I'm complaining.
A time to reap, a time to sow.
That's just how it is at this stage of the game.
A time to cast away stones.
Stacy and I thoroughly enjoyed our period of unbridled, impromptu, kink-infused sex. We experimented with cock rings and French ticklers, handcuffs and nipple clamps, role play and
Kama Sutra
poses, porno films and costumes, tantra and
soixante-neuf.
We really went to town. But that was then. We're in a different phase now.
A time to gather stones together.
And this phase, like its steamier, wrapped-in-a-brown-paper-bag-after-its-purchase-at-a-store-on-Eighth-Avenue predecessor, won't last forever.

But if Sharon's right,
turn turn turn
Stacy has already turned the page.

For a moment, I'd forgotten. But no, the Headless Whoresman has not given up the chase. His sudden ghostly appearance makes the ham taste like it has, in fact, gone bad. A metaphor for my marriage?

If
Sharon's right
, my inner Fish in the Pot reminds me.
If
.

S
HARON
R
OTHMAN
. A
N ODD MESSENGER, TO BE SURE
. J
OAN-OF-ARC
odd. Out of the mouths of babes.

Of the half-dozen mothers in our loose little clique, Sharon is the most mysterious. She moved here last January, when the hyperactive Iris outgrew the family's two-bedroom in Park Slope. But to date, none of our sources of parental gossip—Meg, Jess, Gloria, Ruth Terry—have gotten close enough to Sharon to figure out what the deal is with her and Old Man River, as Stacy calls him. The grapevine has yet to bear fruit. We don't know that much about her. Which makes it even stranger that she would be the bearer of such bad news. Because when you get right down to it, it's an enormous responsibility to reveal someone else's infidelity. Heck, it's an enormous responsibility to know in the first place. Or it should be.

Time to put on my Philip Marlowe hat—a fedora, I suppose—and do a little gumshoeing. Choking down the rest of the ham sandwich, I open Facebook. At the top of the news feed is this:

A by-product of our gadget-mad age: users have developed distinctive Facebook styles. Gloria's updates, for example, almost always concern the quotidian, which she tries to spin in the shiniest, happiest way possible. Her house could be burning down and she'd talk about
the pristine beauty of the lapping orange flames
. She's also fond of sharing YouTube links, which I am not fond of following.

Jess Holby only talks about her kids. Her profile picture is of her daughter, Maddie (note: I hate when people do this). She also posts a photo album every other day—a good three quarters of my photo tags are from her. But her husband never writes about his kids, or his wife, or his job at the Culinary Institute. Chris is all about promoting his band, String Cheese. They're playing at Market Market. At the Rosendale Rec Center. At Snug's. At the Muddy Cup.

Catherine DiLullo's news feed doubles as a Google alert for midwifery.

Mike DiLullo is all about the perniciousness of vaccines, high-fructose corn syrup, and Fox News.

Peter Berliner inserts lyrics from classic rock songs and old movies.

Cynthia Pardo isn't on Facebook. Neither is Bruce Baldwin. Although both could wind up going viral any day now.

Meg's updates are snarky. Soren doesn't update often; only when he's drunk, usually.

Stacy posts about food.

As for me, I tend not to divulge day-to-day news—does anyone really care if I'm heading to Meadow Hill Farms this afternoon, or eating a spoiled ham sandwich for lunch, or on Day Five of my ordeal?—and I almost never post links. I only update if I have something important to share, or come up with a plum witticism worth repeating. Which is to say, I post rarely. Twice a week or so.

Sharon hasn't updated her status in almost a month (but I notice that she's untagged the photo from this morning, the one of her with the big hair).

Not much to go on there. Same profile picture she's had for ages, the shot of her and the infant Iris at the beach. Cape Cod, I think. Wellfleet. She's wearing a straw hat and those giant Nicole Richie sunglasses; you can barely see her face. She could be anyone. Iris, similarly bundled to ward off the sun's nefarious rays, could likewise be any baby, could be a doll for all we know. It's as anonymous a profile picture as you can have without opting for the generic blue silhouette.

Her info page is just as sanitized: