Fathermucker (26 page)

(My net worth, needless to say, is less than zero. Red-inked ledgers, spreadsheets with five-digit numbers in parentheses, credit scores lower than what I got on my SAT verbal. When I finally do address the Chase Visa bill looming on the front seat, perhaps after a few Rolling Rocks, it will inform me that if I continue making the minimum monthly payment, I will pay off the balance in a mere ninety-eight years. Untenable debt, the bane of my generation. Just in time for the trough of Social Security to run dry. A nation in default. We are so fucked. Barring some unexpected windfall, next month, maybe the month after, I will have to undergo the profound humiliation of beseeching my mother for financial aid. Fatherhood is one long slog to Canossa.)

Never mind that the former Linda Silverman didn't even follow her own advice.
My
father wasn't Jewish—people assume Lansky is a Jewish surname, because of the notorious Jewish underworld kingpin, but it's actually Slovak in origin; Meyer Lansky's real last name was Suchowljanski—and owned, as I mentioned, an auto body shop, at which his role was more than administrative; working with your hands is hardly the stuff of the Jewish-American dream. And while he wasn't a staunch Catholic, he insisted I learn about the church; I was the only kid I knew who went to both Hebrew School
and
C.C.D. (Mom rectified that deviation from her faith with her second marriage—he goes by Frank, but the name on my stepfather's driver's license is Israel Frankel.)

Why did she have to call today, of all days? The very lilt to her voice puts me on the defensive, destroys my confidence, undermines my sense of well-being. She makes me feel like I'm eight years old, a child. Not that she intends to do this. Not consciously. She means well, my mother; she worries about me something awful, and why would she fret so if she didn't care deeply? And I know she's proud of me; I know she brags about me to her friends at temple. If
Babylon Is Fallen
ever made it to the local cineplex, they'd never hear the end of it. But for all her love, for all her pride, for all her worry, she doesn't trust me. She doesn't. You can tell by the tone of her voice, she's waiting for the other shoe to drop. She's Chicken Little. Every misstep is a crisis, every wrong turn a sign of the Apocalypse.

Roland and Maude are now throwing sand at each other. “Stop it! Guys! Stop throwing sand! Come on, now.”

I am seized with a feeling I've had throughout my life in times of turmoil, a powerful urge to confide in someone, to seek counsel, coupled with the realization that, with Stacy unavailable (and even my wife, far and away my closest friend, has her limits in this regard), I have no one to fill that role. A chronic loneliness. Part of the male condition.

I settle upon my sister, who usually answers her phone no matter what, but I hang up when I remember she's in Pisa at the moment, on a deferred honeymoon with her new husband, filling her Facebook feed with photos of the Leaning Tower.

I can't call Meg; wasp.

I can't call any of my guy friends out of the blue, my drinking buddies from the city, my old chums from college, and cry into the phone. Guys don't do telephone, and we certainly don't cry into our Nokias.

I don't have Sharon's number, and I can't call Meg right now to get it.

I scroll down the
CONTACTS
list on my phone. Most of the numbers belong to pediatricians and schools and take-out restaurants and landscapers and snow removal companies and car services. I used to have more friends. I don't know what happened.

With no one else to turn to, I decide on Rob, our therapist. Maybe we can set up a time to talk this evening or something. The number usually goes right to voicemail, so I'm surprised when a live human being—a woman with a thick Irish brogue—picks up. When I ask to speak to Rob, I'm told that this is his answering service. (She has a brogue, then, because she lives in Ireland; outsourcing is the new black.)

“I didn't know he had an answering service.”

“Dr. Puglisi is attending a mental health conference in Los Angeles this week, but he is checking his messages. Can I have your name, please?”

The phone cuts out just then—shaky reception at Phillies Bridge Farm—which is just as well, because there's no reason to keep talking.

I have all the information I need.

Rob's been in Los Angeles all week.

Stacy's been in Los Angeles all week.

Rob and Stacy have been in Los Angeles all week.

Well now.

I had not considered Rob Puglisi as a suspect. I don't think of him as a real person—or to be more accurate, as a viable candidate for intercourse of any kind outside the hallowed walls of his Balinese-decorated office—because I have too much respect for the work. But why
not
Rob Puglisi? He's older, yes, but he's a handsome dude—tall, with fashionable glasses and a carefully trimmed beard, always dressed in tweed coats of the kind worn by members of the British royal family. He sort of looks like Phil Jackson, but if the Lakers coach were reincarnated as a professor of nineteenth-century British literature. He has a deep, hypnotic speaking voice—he does hypnotherapy, of course he has a hypnotic voice!—that with the slightest modulation could come off as intensely seductive. He's smart, he's enlightened, he's funny . . . and he always
did
seem to take Stacy's side.

Furthermore, from a purely logistical standpoint, he's a therapist; his job involves the keeping of secrets. He knows how to keep his mouth shut. If your intention is to have a discreet affair—one that doesn't ruin your marriage—this is vital. Your lover, after all, is your partner in crime. You don't want the guy you robbed the bank with flashing money all over town, and you don't want your Monica Lewinsky blabbering to every Tom, Dick, and Linda Tripp in town.

This assumes, of course, that Stacy is only scratching an itch and doesn't intend to leave me outright.

I tuck my phone back into my jeans, watch the kids laughingly throw sand—I've given up trying to stop them—and try to focus on that, to lose myself in their simple joy, to feel grateful for all that I have, to not feel sorry for myself.

I'm three deep breaths into the meditation when Roland and Maude simultaneously hit each other in the eye with sand, and it's time to go.

EXT. LAKE MINNEWASKA, NEW PALTZ, N.Y. – DAY

The pristinely set lake, surrounded by mountains of white stone and pine trees, twinkles in the sunlight. STACY sits on one of the rocks, looking down at the water, alone in her thoughts. She's wearing workout clothes, but she still looks hot. She gets up to continue her hike, and who should she bump into, coming in the opposite direction, than her former therapist, ROB PUGLISI.

T
HE WALLS AT
P
ASQUALE'S ARE WHITE BRICK, WITH PLENTY OF
plate-glass windows overlooking the Stop & Shop (correction: the
Super
Stop & Shop; in addition to providing the freshest produce and meats, it wears a cape and fights crime) on 299, and roomy booths of green vinyl, and a mural of the Amalfi seascape on the wall by the restrooms, and a little statue of a big-mustached pizza guy, the
paesan
stereotype, that greets you as you enter, and red-green-and-white paper placemats with a clumsy drawing of the Italian boot, with the caption
BEAUTIFUL ITALY
in English, but the major cities written in Italian: Roma, Firenze, Venezia, Napoli.

Two booths away, a troika of Goth-arrayed SUNY coeds, none of them particularly cute, has gathered for pizza. As I gorge on meatballs, I eavesdrop on their conversation, which, far as I can tell, involves Eighties Night at Cabaloosa.

“ . . . and it's like, they play, you know, oldies. Like, you know, Madonna, and Prince, and Culture Club.”

“Culture Club?”

“You don't know Culture Club?”

“Never heard of them.”

“Boy George?”

“Um, no?”

“Don't they sing that song? The
comma-comma-comma-comma-comma come-ee-lee-un . . .
”

“I think so?”

“I have, like, no
idea
what you guys are talking about?”

“It's kind of a dumb song.”

“Ya think?”

“I have
never
heard that before in my
life
. You guys are like total dorks.”

She's maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, hip enough to dress Goth, smart enough to be in college . . . and she's never heard of “Karma Chameleon”? Never heard of Boy George, who's only the Lady Gaga of 1982?

Shit, I'm getting old. Not
getting
.
Am
.

“What's this?” I ask Roland, showing him the placemat.

“Italy,” he says.

“Aunt Laura is there right now.” I pronounce it the Jersey way, like the insect; Stacy says
ont
; the kids usually hold with me. “Did you know that?”

“She's in Pisa. She saw the Leaning Tower.”

“Right.”

“Wait,” Maude says. “Because . . . because . . . where is Aunt Laura?”

“In Italy. With Uncle Michael.”

“In Italy, you stupe,” Roland says, smacking her.

“Hey! Enough of that!”

I take another big gulp of my beer. You don't think about having a draft beer at a pizza place, or at least I don't, but the Bud at Pasquale's is crisp, cool, and refreshing—just like they say it is in the commercials. The Clydesdales would be proud.

“There's only one interstate highway in Nebraska,” says Roland, the Crown Prince of the Non Sequitur. “Interstate 80.”

When I get home, I'll verify this, but I don't have much doubt that he's right.

Roland is polishing off the last of his ravioli. Maude is gnawing on breadsticks, pausing between bites to re-insert her pacifier. They haven't been
not
naughty—we can't go to a restaurant without them moving seats three times, or peeling the wrappers off the crayons, or getting fingerprints all over the windows, or fucking around with the blinds, or lying down on the bench, or crawling underneath the table to get from one side of the booth to the other (as it now stands, Maude is next to me, and Roland is by himself across from us), or bursting into song—but the naughtiness is at an acceptable level. There is less misbehavior than I was expecting. It's almost like they both recognized, on some level, that their old man'd had it—the last day of a long tour of duty in Parenting Afghanistan—that another outburst would put me over the edge, and I'd wind up in the back of a squad car, an ambulance, or a hearse, and they'd have no one on hand to ply them with ice cream when they got home, or cue up their favorite shows.

“Do you like your bread, Maude?”

“I like it, Daddy,” she says. “I
very
like it. It's
so
delicious.”

“Good.”

Idly, I take out my phone to check the time—4:47—and am about to try Stacy again when I hear a tiny voice call out, “Roland! Hey, Roland!”

The next thing I know, Zara Reid, in the same blue-on-blue dress she wore to the farm, slides beside Roland at the big booth, and a heavy hand rests on my shoulder.

“Hey, man,” comes a deep voice. And then Daryl “Duke” Reid, still wearing his blue Dickies uniform and his ski cap, still impossibly big, pulls up a chair and plops down at the head of the table. “Mind if we join you for a minute?”