Fathermucker (2 page)

Only now can I turn my attention to the your-wife-is-having-an-affair business—which, right on cue, is starting to generate the obligatory wave of nausea—but Sharon isn't in the kitchen anymore. I go back into the living room; no sign of her there, either. But there is the sickening smell of shit (which doesn't help the nausea), and one fewer body in the bubble mosh-pit, so I put two and two together. Iris, not yet potty-trained, must have taken a monster dump.

I head to the foyer, and the stairs leading to the bedrooms on the upper level, where Sharon probably went, but before I can advance, the front door opens, and Meg comes in with the twins. Meg is my closest friend in New Paltz. I met her in the waiting room of the Barefoot Dance Center, where Roland and Maude take Creative Movement class with Beatrix and Brooke. The first day there, as we sat with nine other parents—eight mommies, two of whom were nursing infants, and a stray daddy with oniony body odor—all of us idly discussing the scintillating topic of how to introduce new foods to a child's palette, someone complained about her daughter's hyperactive gag reflex, and Meg quipped, “Beatrix is like that, too. She pukes at the drop of a hat. She's a bulimic's wet dream.” The others all looked at her like she'd just broken wind, eating disorders being beyond the pale as comic fodder, but I laughed, and I knew she wasn't like the other New Paltz moms, and that we would be friends. And so we are. Although at this point—mostly due to the tacit taboo against married men getting too chummy with married women; it wouldn't do for me to say,
Hey, Stacy, Meg and I are going out for a drink
, even though there would be nothing remotely untoward about us doing so—she's closer with my better half than she is with me. When she calls the house, if I happen to answer the phone, she asks,
Is your lovely wife there?

Meg adroitly doffs the twins' coats, adding them to the pile on the floor, and gives me a hug and a peck on the cheek. “Big fun,” she says, rolling her eyes, as Brooke (at least I think it's Brooke) makes for the seductive hoopla of the bubble mosh-pit. I can tell from the eye-roll Meg's pissed about something.

“You okay?”

“I'm married to a doucheface.”

Something I love about Meg is that she drops
bon mots
like
doucheface
while one of her impressionable daughters is clinging koala-like to her leg.

“Soren went out last night,” Meg tells me. Her voice is low, and she speaks slowly and not quite loud enough, like she's stoned to the gourds. Which she is often enough, although not as much as she'd like; she's lived here all her life, and, much to her annoyance, she still doesn't have a good pot hook-up. “With Peter Berliner, who
by
the way
still
hasn't realized that Cynthia's shacking up with Bruce Baldwin, even though, like, I'm pretty sure it was in the
paper
, so many people know about it.”

The realization that I might share common ground with Peter Berliner, the town cuckold—that my friends and neighbors might speak in hushed whispers about me, if they are not already doing so, while I pass them in the Stop & Shop, obliviously stocking my cart with YoBaby six-packs and organic Spinach Munchies—cranks the nausea up to eleven. It's all I can do not to hurl my Moka Java all over Meg's Uggs.

“We were
both
supposed to go,” she says, “but he was in charge of finding a sitter, so of course we couldn't get one, because he didn't call Abby till like
five
o'clock. Then he stays out till like two in the morning, and he comes home totally trashed, and he pukes all over the bathroom, and now the whole house smells like alcohol and vomit. It's dis
gust
ing.
He's
disgusting.”

She looks down and appears to notice, for the first time, the barnacle of Beatrix lodged on her left leg. “Come on, dude,” Meg says, more to herself than her daughter, giving the leg a shake. No dice. She turns back to me. “And then this morning, he's all whining about being hungover. Boo fucking hoo. He has to drive to Pawling today for some photo shoot. It's near Danbury, so I'm making him stop at Trader Joe's. The dick.” With a sudden kick she detaches Beatrix from her leg, gives her a little spank on the behind. “Go play now, Trixie. Leave Mommy alone.”

But Beatrix (so it
was
Brooke who already left!) just stands there. Twins—identical twins, at that—and they couldn't be more different. No two snowflakes and so forth. Parenthood would fill your heart with wonder if it weren't so fucking exhausting.

“There's bubbles.”

“Bub-uhz?” Thus duped, Beatrix half-skips into the living room (one of her legs is slightly shorter than the other, giving her an odd gait).

“Well played,” I tell Meg.

“So what's the deal with
Rents?
”

“How did you know about that?”

“Facebook.”

“Oh. Right.” I'd updated my status in the early morning hours, before my coffee had kicked in, and Meg had
LIKED
it. (Soren's crack-of-dawn Facebook update—
CAN'T REMEMBER LAST NIGHT
—now makes perfect sense.) “No, it's not quite that exciting. They liked my pitch.”

“What was it?”

“You know how they do the Q&As? With celebrity parents? Well, I told them I could get Daryl ‘Duke' Reid.”

“He's that punk guy, right?” She says
punk
like Pat Robertson would say
gay
.

“Yeah. His daughter's, you know, in Roland's class at Thornwood.”

Remembering, she nods. “Does she get services, too?”

“I don't know. Probably not. I mean, not everyone there does. It's an integrated program.”

She contemplates this, moves on. “You think you can get him?”

“There's a field trip this afternoon. Pumpkin patch. He should be there. Hopefully. He usually comes to parent stuff.”

“That's awesome, Josh.”

At the moment, nothing feels particularly awesome, other than the weight of the world on my flimsy shoulders—figurative weight, as I'm able to shrug. “I guess.”

“You need me to watch Maude?”

“Vanessa's coming over.”

Meg, who used my babysitter once—
once
—laughs. “I repeat: you need me to watch Maude?”

On cue, Maude wanders into the foyer, a pissed-off look on her face, the fine white-blonde curls of her hair giving her head the aspect of a fluffy dandelion. “Daddy, I want to go home,” she says, in her patented half-whine.

“But Beatrix and Brooke just got here.”

“Because . . . because . . . ” Her face contorts into a mask of almost parodic pissed-off-ness. “I don't
like
Bee-uh-twix and Bwook.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I want to go home!” And then she commences the subverbal wailing. Which, come to think, pretty much sums up my own feelings right at the moment.

I know you're not supposed to let the kids boss you around and all that, but one of the lessons I've learned the hard way is if your child wants to end the playdate, what you need to do is end the fucking playdate.

“Okay, honey. Let's get your coat.”

“No! No coat!”

“We can't go without your coat on. It's chilly outside.”

“No coat! No! Nooooooooooooooooooo!”

And she has a full-fledged temper tantrum, right in the foyer. A little early for her sporadic nap, but she hasn't been sleeping well lately, and she's probably tired.

“Well,” says Meg, unfazed by my screaming banshee of a daughter, “have fun, kids. I better go pretend to be a good mother before one of the twins breathes on Haven funny and Gloria has a fucking cow.”

I scoop up Maude—thirty-two pounds of fist-flying fury—and throw her over my shoulder like a sack of wriggling and violent potatoes, trying to position her so her flailing feet don't knock off my glasses, or the row of framed photographs of Emma Holby in various stages of development hanging neatly and chronologically on the foyer wall. Then I bend my knees, lowering myself, and with my free hand, snatch up her coat.

And that's when Sharon appears at the top of the stairs, Iris in one hand, a tied-off plastic Shop & Shop bag in the other. Reusable bags are great for Mother Earth and all, but disposable plastic is not without its uses. “You going?”

“Looks like.”

“Shit. Sorry. I . . . ”

“It's okay.”

She extends her thumb and pinky, folding up the other fingers, and holds her hand to her ear—
I'll call you
—but the gesture looks ridiculous because there's a plastic bag dangling from her pinky with a poopy diaper inside it. Shouting goodbye and thank you to Jess and the others, I carry Maude, kicking and screaming and still coatless, into the minivan.

Friday, 3:33 a.m. (seven hours earlier)

I
WAKE UP FEELING RESTED AND THEREFORE HAPPY—WHICH IS
what happens when you awaken under your own power, to the rhythm of your own biological clock, taking the requisite time to ease from the nebulous realm of the subconscious into the real world
tiptoeing your sweet-ass way into a frigid lake
, rather than being yanked from your dream
pushed unsuspectingly into that same cold water
by the sudden and piercing cry of a child, and having to abruptly shift from navigating the soft, cloudy corridors of dreamscape to the sharp, unforgiving corridors of a darkened house
one minute out cold, the next splashing around for dear life
—but the blissful feeling fades when I become aware of the scratching.

Two baby monitors transmitting the dulcet din of dueling noise machines—white noise in Roland's room, steam train in Maude's—plus the metallic clang and watery rumble of the baseboard heater, but all my ears register is the scratching. The foreign sound, the intruder's noise.

October, and the mice have returned.

Damn it all.

We've lived here four full years now, so I'm familiar with the seasonal changes to the house. I know there are mice in the walls. I know they can't get out. I know that if they ever do get out, Steve will kill them. Look, there he is at the closet door, waiting in that infinitely patient,
Manchurian Candidate
way that cats do, for the damn thing to stop scratching and show his conical face. But the mouse—or the mice; they travel in packs, the fuckers, like gypsies—won't come out. He'll scratch, and he'll bang around, and he'll race up and down the gap in the floorboards, but he won't come out. He can't come out. He's trapped in there. He'll die in there—they always do—he'll die of hunger, of thirst, of feasting on the poison I dumped in the abyss beneath the vanity in the upstairs bathroom, and then his rotting corpse, his tiny decomposing mouse cadaver, will stink up our bedroom for the next two weeks. An awful smell, the pungent reek of death, but there is something about it that I sort of like (as the aroma of my own flatulence is vaguely intoxicating), because the smell of dead mouse means, at last, that the mouse is dead.

I am terrified of mice. I hate them. Everything about them. But especially I hate the noise. The scratching, the banging in the walls. Like fingernails on a chalkboard, but much, much worse. Whoever came up with the
quiet-as-a-mouse
simile was also probably the astute author of
slept like a baby
. Mice are fucking
loud
, you dipshit, and while we're at it, babies wake up all night long. As I well know.

When I first heard them in the walls, for a good month I was paralyzed with fear, like something out of Poe. I slept with the light on whenever Stacy was away. I made sure Steve was nearby, preferably curled up at my feet, for protection. On more than one occasion I actually did whisky shots to calm my nerves (not recommended: instant headache, and I had to get up three times during the night to pee).

Over the years, I've become more inured to the mouse problem. The scratching is more expected, and therefore not as debilitating. My musophobia has gone from a ten to maybe an eight-point-five. I can function now, when I hear them. But it's difficult, almost impossible, for me to relax. Because as soon as I hear a noise, any noise not immediately identifiable, even if it isn't mouse-generated, even if it's the heater and I
know
it's the heater, I start, every fiber of my body standing at attention. And should the source of the noise be confirmed as rodentine, heaven forbid, this triggers the burglar alarm in my soul. Adrenaline surges through me, the fight-or-flight enzyme or whatever it is, and, although I'm vaguely hard of hearing most of the time—to the degree that Stacy gets annoyed with me almost every day because I can't hear her from down the hall when she asks me to take out the garbage, check on Maude, feed the cat—I'm suddenly a sophisticated sonar device. The navy could install me on a submarine. And I lie there, on Def-Con One, unable to stop myself, and I listen. And when you're on guard like that, good luck sleeping.

Yes, I know. Mice are harmless. Mice are cute. Mice are mammals, like us. They care for their young and blah blah blah. This is presumably why children's literature is populated by—we might even say
infested with
—so many mice. Mickey, Minnie, Mighty, Maisy, Jerry, Wemberly Worried, Stuart Little. Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock. Goodnight little house, and goodnight mouse. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Leaving crumbs much too small for the other Whos' mouses. Would you eat them in a house? Would you eat them with a mouse? No fucking way, Seuss—and what kind of doctor are you, tormenting me like that?

One time Stacy and I were driving up near Woodstock—this was before we moved upstate—and we came around a bend to find a deer on the highway. I was behind the wheel, doing sixty-five at least, and the deer was directly in our path. Cucumber-cool, John Wayne in a showdown, I looked that deer straight in the eye and said
Don't you move now
, and I swerved around him, and we were all fine. Me, Stacy, the deer. All safe. But Stacy was in the passenger seat screaming. Two hours later, she was still freaked about the near miss. My pulse didn't even quicken. I don't know why or how, but I
knew
I wasn't going to hit the deer. I wasn't afraid at all, not even a little bit, and I probably should have been. My theory is that people who have extreme phobias, like me, they take all the excess fear they repress from instances when they should be scared, and they transfer all of it onto the object of the fear. So I wasn't scared about almost dying in a car crash, just like I wasn't scared on the streets of lower Manhattan on 9/11, or on the plane to Paris when lightning struck the wing and even the flight attendant puked. All of the residual fear that a normal person would experience at those perfectly appropriate moments, all of that, for me, is thrust on the miniscule shoulders of the
Mus musculus—
the tiny, harmless rodent who wants nothing more than a few crumbs of bread and a warm place to make a nest for its young. The brown mouse, my green Kryptonite.

Mice brought Stacy and me together. Sort of.

After years of secondary-citizen status in Hoboken, I was finally living in Manhattan, in my own shithole studio on Twenty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, right above two bodegas. (If I got home late enough, I could see the end-of-shift hookers buying bagels at the corner deli—Twenty-eighth and Lex was, unbeknownst to me, a prime spot for streetwalking.) My apartment, as it turned out, was a fucking mouse BQE, a West Side Highway of little furry critters. I didn't know this consciously, not at first, but I
knew
. Mice scurried about my subconscious, squeaked into my dreams. My dormant musophobia, which I'd acquired as a child, went into overdrive. But I never heard them, never found droppings, nothing. Then one night I came home late—it was almost two—and saw a couple of them flitting around my floor lamp. And I flipped out. Panic attack, or close to. I almost passed out. I wouldn't have fled the apartment faster if there'd been a dead body in the room, leaking blood all over the area rug. I hopped in a cab, went to Stacy's place in the East Village, rang her buzzer, and pleaded with her to let me spend the night. I was crazed. I must have sounded like a lunatic. We were dating, by then we had even dropped the L-bomb, but this was still early enough in the relationship that it could have deep-sixed the whole thing. Who wants a partner who's
that
afraid of a measly mouse? She let me in, God bless her, and I climbed into her queen-sized bed, flanked by her two cats—Steve and the dearly departed Joni—and I've been there ever since. The turning point in our relationship, really. Because of a mouse.

When I confessed my musophobia to Rob, our erstwhile therapist, he suggested that the next time I hear mice in the walls, I imagine myself in their shoes. If, you know, they were wearing shoes. I've tried that. The mouse I imagine is wearing a leather jacket and a fedora and carries a whip, like Indiana Jones. He's navigating the warren of passageways in the bedroom wall, trying to find his way out. Rounding a corner, he finds an enormous chamber, like one of the anterooms in the bowels of the Great Pyramid. And in this chamber is a towering pile of mouse skeletons. All of his predecessors, their decomposed arms still scratching futilely to freedom, still searching for the elusive way out, for the Ark of the Covenant that is the portal to the bedroom proper. And that mouse knows his time is up. He knows he's a goner.

So here I am, exactly three thirty-three in the morning, the dark night of the soul and all, lying on my back, covers wrapped around me like Kevlar, listening to the mice scratch, and Steve the cat scratch back, and I'm trying to focus on the lead rodent dressed like Harrison Ford, which should be a comical enough image to soothe most people, but no, I'm a wreck.

I hate being awake in the middle of the night when the kids are asleep. I hate being awake in the middle of the night
period
, but when I'm not up to fulfill fatherly duties, that
really
drives me bonkers. It's like I haven't had sex in months, and then suddenly I'm in bed with a naked and nymphomaniacal Kardashian sister (preferably Kim, but any of them would do; even Khloé, although she sort of looks like a guy in drag), but I've just whacked off, so I can't get it up. The opportunity is blown—and nothing else.

Speaking of whacking off and a naked and nymphomaniacal Kardashian sister . . . my wife is in L.A. I have the bedroom to myself. I'm free to make like Bloom at Sandymount Strand. Should I take the situation in hand and fight fear with lust? I don't often have the opportunity to rub one out right before bed, like I did every day of my life between age twelve, when that seminal gift of the gods was bequeathed to me, and the day I moved in with Stacy fifteen years later. Sweet release might calm my nerves . . . but no, I'm not feeling it. There are two essential ingredients for a climactic climax: 1) a backlog of shall-we-say raw material, and 2) an inspirational scenario to fuel the
come on baby light my fire
imagination. I beat off six hours ago, so my reserves are depleted. But even that was a chore—my imagination and last week's
Us Weekly
(thanks for the memories, Heidi Montag) only go so far. There is nothing happening to feed that part of me, nothing at all. I'm a summer house that's been shut down for the winter. I'm a fallow field. I'm dull roots and dried tubers.

Meanwhile the mice keep scratching.

S
TACY HAS VIVID DREAMS ALMOST EVERY NIGHT, THE SORT OF
crazy, densely packed-with-detail dreams on which Jungian disciples—like Rob—could write full dissertations. Every morning (as I'm pouring my second cup of coffee, but before the caffeine from the first has completely kicked in) she tells me, “Oh my God, I had the
craziest
dream last night.” And every morning she's right, because each succeeding dream is, in fact, far loopier than its predecessor. As if the inner director of her subconscious—a cross between Fellini and David Lynch, but under the influence of some CIA lab–concocted hallucinogen—were constantly trying to one-up herself.

If her dreams are
8½
and
Wild At Heart
on industrial-grade acid, mine are unedited raw footage of a
C-SPAN
feed from the Senate floor on a slow day. They could not be more dull. The palette is all earth tones: browns, grays, faded blues; the color scheme of a Banana Republic catalog from the late eighties. I'm usually a) wandering lost around some Manhattan-that-isn't-really-Manhattan, trying to meet friends who never appear, b) in the HR-office-that-isn't-really-the-HR-office of News Corp., my old place of employ, where I have not set foot in almost five years, fretting about a job posting that I've done incorrectly, or c) stepping away from whatever lame-ass dream-action might be happening in order to find the men's room and relieve the Johnstown Dam–like pressure in my bladder, only to find new ways to have this mission thwarted (urinal is too small, bathroom is locked, stage fright brought on by professional wrestler standing next to me impedes flow, etc.). Most of the time I don't remember my dreams at all, and when I do, they're not worth remembering.

But check this:

I'm in a living room—it's supposed to be the green room on some talk show,
Colbert
I think, or maybe
Letterman
. . . I'm the guest,
Babylon Is Fallen
has been made and is a surprise hit, I'm a Golden Globe screenwriting nominee, maybe even an Oscar contender, I'm vaguely famous, way more desirable than in real life; it's the (ha ha) Dream Me—but it's actually the den at Meg and Soren's house. There are two couches, not matching, at a ninety-degree angle, one on each wall. I'm sitting by myself on the longer couch, all the way to the right, in the corner of the room. On the other couch are a few people, girls I think, whom I can't identify. Maybe they're the
Suicide Girl
–pictorial SUNY coeds, all piercings and tats, who work the counter at the Convenient Deli. I'm not sure. But they all rise as this stunner makes a grand entrance. The newcomer has long blonde hair, straight with bangs, like Jenny Lewis, or Feist, or perhaps Janel Moloney from
The West Wing
, but she's not someone I recognize. I can't really see her face. She sits down next to me in such a way that her skirt—a short skirt, off-white—hikes up, and I can see her white silk panties and her white silk stockings, and the thin white line of the garter running down six inches of bare white leg. I reach out and touch what I see, and I can feel everything—the smooth, almost-cold silk, the heat radiating from her leg, the little ridge where the strap bisects the warm peach-pink flesh. She lifts herself up slightly, so my palm can further slide beneath her ass, and lets out a soft moan. I lean closer to her, my eyes not straying from that glorious patch of leg.