And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (2 page)

2

Three Months Earlier

I
thought the mustache looked pretty good.

It wasn't Clark Gable in
Gone with the Wind;
it wasn't even Tom Selleck in
Magnum P.I.
But it was my first attempt at real facial hair and I was surprised by how well it was coming in, even if it was a little more dirty sand in color than what I had hoped. Plus, it was for a good cause. Every November, men around the world sign up for the “Movember” program to help raise money and awareness for prostate cancer research and prevention, and as the editor of an online magazine catering to the lifestyles of an older male demographic—men right around the age when they schedule their first prostate exam—I felt it was my duty to kick in. The way it works is that men grow a mustache and ask people to sponsor them. It's sort of like one of those charity walk-a-thons they have on junior high tracks where walkers get pledges of money based on their performance. A dollar a mile or two bucks an hour. Except there was no real measurement of length or endurance with Movember. You just signed up and, by doing so, you committed to the full thirty days of growing, pruning, and cultivating a mustache. Some of the men I knew who were participating were lucky. They were natural-born facial hair growers. Two days in, they looked like Burt Lancaster, suave and sexy as if stolen right from the pages of a late 1970s
GQ.

I thought mine looked all right, but my wife hated it. She didn't understand why I needed to grow facial hair in order to support prostate cancer.

“Can't you just give them some money?” she asked, and I told her that me having a mustache was like writing a check, except other people wrote them on my behalf and all I had to do was hold out until the end of the month. “Yeah, but what about the pictures? All the pictures we're going to have from when Molly was born and you're going to look like a porn star.”

She had a point. I suppose that if I was able to look at myself the way she saw me, my proud crumb duster would look like little more than a dusty accident, a spot missed on consecutive face washings. Without a hat on or my glasses, I looked like a hobo. With them, I looked like a chimney sweep. Either way, it probably wasn't the best image. I could imagine my newborn daughter, years from then, looking back through pictures from childhood and wondering if dear old dad had gone on some sort of strike around the time of her birth.

I went into my mustache experiment with a little trepidation and an open mind and was pleased to see that after just a couple of weeks, it covered my entire lip in one long strip. No bald spots, no patches of cat hair. Not full, not thick. But good enough for the time being, even though I knew it had to go eventually. Marriage is like that. Stay with the same person long enough, love them deeply enough, and you find even your simplest fantasies and indulgences become less important than the other person's fancies.

I checked it out in the rearview mirror of our minivan one last time as I pulled around from the long-term parking lot to the circular, covered drive. After a little more than two days in the hospital, Rebecca and our newborn angel, Molly, were coming home. I can't really explain my fascination with the mustache, particularly given its relative unimportance at this time in my life, but for some reason it felt novel and masculine in a way I have seldom ever felt. Just the night before as I was getting our sons, then six and three, ready for bed, our oldest, Jack, had asked me if I was going to be a cowboy. Not for Halloween, which had passed three weeks before, or for some exotic prank, but as a job. He wanted to know if I was going to leave my work as a writer and an editor to ride the open range. It was the first time I had ever felt like someone's hero and I had my mustache to thank for that. My plan was to keep it as long as possible, but shave before we had the first round of professional photos taken as a family.

Molly was a welcome addition to the family. My wife and I had held each other's hand tightly—uncomfortably—in the ob-gyn's office as the technician had sprayed her belly with warm, gelatinous goo and pushed the sonogram wand (a bit too forcefully if you ask me) into her stomach. The tech paused and asked if we wanted to know the sex of the baby and we shared a knowing and meaningful look for a split second before simultaneously saying yes. It wasn't that we would not have been happy with another boy. It wasn't that at all. We loved having boys.

Jack had been a surprise of sorts. We had been married just over a year. I was working as a newspaper reporter in a small once-great industrial city between Cincinnati and Dayton, covering local politics and writing the occasional humor column that was greeted with tepid reader response. My wife had been a first-grade teacher and after four years away for college and nearly two away following our wedding, we were trying to decide if the right thing to do was to move back to Cleveland where both our families lived and would, presumably, protect us from the strange anxiety of being a young couple facing the world all alone. We went out for dinner at a fancy restaurant we drove past in the three-block area our suburban community passed off as a downtown, talking over a bottle of wine and steaks. We came to the conclusion that five years was the key. We'd work a little while longer in southwest Ohio, then move home to Cleveland, where we would live near our parents—themselves separated by less than two miles as Rebecca and I were high school sweethearts. I would try to get a job working for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
or apply to law school, and she would work in our old school district. At the end of five years, when we were in our late twenties and had, presumably, been to Europe and the Caribbean and purchased a house, we would start a family of our own.

That was on a Friday night. Tuesday, I got home late from work to find Rebecca pacing around the drive that circled our apartment complex, talking nervously on the phone to a friend from work and smiling timidly when I pulled up near her.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, how was your city council meeting?” She was giggling like a girl who had just caught a glance of a teen idol buying milk at a convenience store.

“Fine,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, why?” She paused. “Just go home, we'll talk then.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Nuh-thing.”

“It's something,” I said, and suddenly a thought came to me as clear and unexpected as a bolt of lightning out of a cloudless sky. “Beck, are you pregnant?”

Nothing. She smiled, beamed really, and asked if I was okay. That night we talked for hours, about the future, about the news, about our now irrelevant five-year plan that had held for just over seventy-two hours. The next summer, Jack was born.

We settled into the life of young parents as best as we could. We never had any money—journalists are, in fact, the only people who marry teachers for the money—and were the first among our friends to have children by a long shot. My budding journalistic career took a sideways detour when we realized that we didn't have enough to make minimum payments on our burgeoning credit card debt and pay for a babysitter. And we couldn't afford for my wife, then making nearly twice my salary, to stay home. So I had to leave newspapers to take a job doing public relations for the city I had been covering. Not exactly my finest ethical hour, but I had presented my conundrum clearly to my editors and tried to find an alternate solution—including moving to the night shift to stay home with Jack during the day. We couldn't find one, so I took a job I had been offered several times by the city manager, who I got along with very well and who, by personality and profession, didn't like dealing directly with the press.

I wasn't in the job long when I began pining for journalism. A dull ache to write stories—about people, profiles, mostly—set in like an ulcer, and I tried to find magazine writing opportunities. Finding none, I borrowed some money from my dad and started my own. So in addition to my forty-five-minute commute each way and the hectic life of young parents trying to care for a child without the benefit of close friends or family, I found myself working as the editor, publisher, sales manager, photographer, and lead writer of a small bimonthly magazine. I produced three or four issues before a friend of a friend introduced me to a man who owned an advertising agency. He offered me more money and even expressed some interest in helping build the magazine. I took the job and, almost immediately, regretted having done so.

The magazine was never brought up and the slightly larger paycheck was often delayed in arriving. Once, I was told to hurry up and cash my check before others that had been sent out went through. Turns out the company, which was small, was writing checks it could not cover. I didn't get an opportunity to do a whole lot of writing at the agency, unless you count writing banal, mindless, screaming television and radio ads for a chain of discount carpet stores to be writing. I certainly didn't. I had made up my mind to quit, my magazine long gone and Dad's investment wasted, when my wife nudged me one morning from a sunny sleep with some news. She told Jack first and wanted him to tell me, but he was not yet three years old and, while gifted from a verbal intelligence standpoint, perhaps too young.

She was pregnant. Again.

I greeted the news with genuine excitement, even if I knew that it would kill any hopes I had of leaving my dungeonlike work in pursuit of something better. It would turn out that, four months before Dylan was born, the decision would be made for me when my boss, with whom I always had a good personal relationship even if there was no business chemistry, called me into his office and rather unceremoniously let me go. I called my wife to tell her I had been fired, and we both settled in to the tingling numbness of shock that often follows a car accident. You are happy to be alive, but beyond that not much makes sense.

Our lease was coming to an end and, without me gainfully employed, we could not afford nor did we want to renew. As luck would have it, a family of one of Rebecca's students was being sent overseas for six months and was looking for someone to house-sit their beautiful suburban home. So that's what we did. Most of our things went into a storage locker and we spent a long summer and fall sleeping in someone else's bed, using their kitchen, and mowing their lawn. I stayed home with Jack while Rebecca finished up the school year and looked for jobs online while he was napping. I gained twenty pounds from depressive eating and felt less prepared to be a patriarch than I ever had. Dylan was due two weeks before the family was set to arrive back in the States and, a few weeks out I still hadn't found a job.

I wanted to work in journalism, but that felt hopeless. Editors in the area were wary of my intentions given the circumstances of my departure from the newspaper. And, even if I did somehow manage to get a job, it would not pay enough to cover the bills and child care. I had a month left of unemployment benefits when I got an e-mail from the boss who had fired me saying that a man he knew was looking for a magazine editor. I will always have Sam Wilder to thank for giving me my big break by hiring me to be the managing editor of a chain of regional home-and-garden magazines he had founded.

Dylan was born the week I began working again, and in the mad rush of the next three weeks, we managed to find a three-bedroom condo, move our things, and arrange for child care. It was frantic and stressful, and I had an awful feeling of ill-preparedness and unworthiness hanging about me for months. Most of this had to do with Dad. Never once had he uttered a judgmental word in my time of unemployment. Never had he scolded or admonished me for not living up to my end of the familial bargain. Quite the opposite, actually. He had been very supportive. Still, I had a hard time looking him in the eye. He's one of those guys who always had a job, who always supported his family. He'd never, as far as I knew, been fired from anything and, after leaving the army, I'm pretty sure he had spent his entire adult life living in homes of his own.

By the time Molly came down the chute, I had left the magazine on my own good terms, done some stay-at-home freelance work and taken a position at the web magazine, which offered a generous enough salary for my dear enduring wife to stay home with the kids. We weren't well-off, but we were making it work. And the birth of my daughter signified the first time Rebecca and I had brought life into the world in something resembling stability.

The moment the sonogram tech confirmed that the baby growing inside my wife was indeed a girl, my eyes welled up—part pride, part relief, part the oh-shit feeling that I imagine washes over every man when he learns he will someday be responsible for instilling fear into would-be teenage suitors. And I began looking forward to meeting her, holding her in my arms, and lavishing her with affection and praise more with each passing day.

S
he was bundled tight against the chill November air, a square inch of skin exposed from beneath her blankets, and I carried her up the steps to our second-floor living space gently. The boys had been making faces and talking to their new little sister in the cloyingly cooey voice children use to talk to newborns and puppies on the entire ride home from the hospital—twenty-five minutes made much longer by lack of sleep and an overabundance of cuteness. Stepping into our home, a small second-story condo we'd been renting for three years with an eye on buying a place of our own for all but three days of that time, I felt, well, strange. My heart began pounding, my eyes dimmed. I had a hard time breathing. I was panicky, anxious as if I had just been told I was late for a college exam for which I had not studied.

“Molly's home!” the boys yelled.

“Mommy's home!” Dylan added.

I turned and looked at my wife. I learned from Jack and had it reinforced with Dylan and Molly how cruel childbirth is to a woman physically. Yet, she looked beautiful. I handed Molly to her, and they went to the back bedroom for a feeding and diaper change. The boys followed and I had a long moment alone in our living room/kitchen area. I felt somehow incomplete and jittery. I felt empty and lost and stood in the kitchen with my coat and shoes on, holding Rebecca's overnight bag, Molly's diaper bag, and two books the boys had been thumbing through in the car. It was like the opening scene of
American Beauty
where Kevin Spacey is going mindlessly through the minutiae of his day, pouring coffee, staring blankly out the window. And for a long moment, I found myself staring at a glass of water I had left on the counter absentmindedly before leaving to pick up my wife and daughter. I took three deep breaths to calm my nerves and was snapped from my stare by Dylan, who was pulling on my pant leg, wanting to take me into Molly's room and show me his little sister.