Fathermucker (10 page)

“Apparently,” Jess says, “there's this like big exhibit in the basement. These sort of big steel mazes?”

“Yeah,” I say, “they're really something.”

“Well, they were there on this like rainy day, and it wasn't crowded. So they went into one of these mazes, right, and they decide to,
you
know.”

The steel mazes comprise a permanent part of the collection, a Richard Serra installation of massive sheets of gray-brown steel, the kind used to make ships, twenty-some-odd feet high, heavy as fuck, arranged in spiral patterns. Roland was fascinated by them. You walk into the things—there are half a dozen of them, I think—and the effect is spooky and disorienting. Like getting lost in a steely corn maze. You don't see them; you
experience
them. The last thing that would be on the mind of any sane individual interacting with that installation is,
Wow, this would be a great place for some afternoon delight.
I mean, there's nothing remotely aphrodisiac about them. “They did it
in
the installation?”

“Um . . .
yeah
. And when they get it on, they don't go halfway, so Cynthia's skirt is all hiked up, and Bruce's pants are around his ankles, and she's loud, louder than she should be, and it echoes off the steel walls . . . and that's when the cops show up.”

“No shit!” Gloria says, and immediately covers her mouth and scans the room for Haven, lest his immaculate ears be adulterated by her potty mouth.

“Apparently there's a surveillance camera down there, so there's like a
tape
of this.”

“Is it on YouTube yet?”

“Wouldn't
that
be a fun link to discuss on Hudson Valley Parents,” says Gloria, and we all laugh. She can be very witty, Gloria, when she's not crimping her son's playdate style. “So what happened?”

“What happened is, museum security called the police, and the officer who responded, he trains with Bruce at the gym, so they got off . . . ”

“ . . . in more ways than one . . . ”

“ . . . with a warning. But, Jesus! That's only a misdemeanor, but it would have been in the police blotter if they got busted . . . ”

“Oh, they got busted, alright.”

“ . . . and Peter would . . . ”

“He'd find out.”

“ . . . find out. But isn't that
gross
? I mean, why would you
do
that?”

“Well,” Gloria says, batting her eyes as she always does when she's about to reveal information more personal than any of us wants to know, “sex in a public place can be
intensely
erotic.”

“This isn't on the
beach
or whatever.” Jess wrinkles her nose. “Or the Mile High Club. It's an
art
museum.
Kids
go there. It's like so disgusting. She's such a skanky skank. It makes my skin crawl.”

“She
is
kind of a succubus.”

“The only reason you'd have sex at Dia:Beacon,” I offer, “is because you want to get caught.”

“That's what
I
said,” Jess says. “She wants out of the marriage, but she doesn't want to be the one who leaves. She wants him to find out.”

“Unfortunately, he's oblivious.”

“Or in denial.”

“How do you know about this?” I ask.

“She told Mike DiLullo, who told Cathy, who told Ruth, who told me.”

“Jesus.”

“I know, right?”

“Poor Peter,” I say.

“And the kids,” says Gloria.

“All three of them,” adds Jess.

If there
were
a thread about Cynthia Pardo on the Hudson Valley Parents website, most of the comments would harp on the fact that Cynthia has three kids, and that her abundant offspring makes her indiscretion even more abominable. This is the tack most people take when the subject comes up. How could a mother of all those children—not to mention the doted-upon wife of Peter Berliner, a nice, non-abusive, faithful guy with a steady job and top-drawer fathering skills—stray so brazenly, so wantonly, so self-destructively? Sure, Gloria is not the paradigmatic wife, but next to Cynthia Pardo, she looks like Donna Reed. Donna Reed with genital piercings, but still.

“Seriously,” Jess says. “She skeeves me out.”

A few years back, on one of those rare occasions when Stacy and I went out with a group of people—and one of the not-rare occasions when we were in the middle of a bad patch—a bunch of us went to Eighties Night at Cabaloosa, and as we formed a crude circle, I found myself dancing next to Cynthia (Peter, it should be noted, wasn't there; he's kind of antisocial and doesn't get out much, unless bowling is involved). As I watched her shake it to Cyndi Lauper, I remember thinking,
This is someone you could have an affair with. She has three kids. She'd never break up her marriage, so you wouldn't break up yours. Discreet encounters in far-flung motel rooms. The occasional clandestine rendezvous at the house, when Stacy's out of town. We'd use the futon in the basement. Look at her move. You
know
she's good in bed. She probably hasn't had a good fuck in almost a decade. And when's the last time someone's face was buried in her thighs?
Looking back at that night at the dance club, I see that Cynthia was putting out a distress call, and I merely picked up on it. She wanted out, period. She was a princess locked in a tower, and it didn't really matter who came to the rescue: me, Bruce Baldwin, Prince Charming, Shrek; it was all the same to her. If I had pursued her that night, or soon thereafter, I might be the one schtupping her in art museums, the trending topic on the mental Twitter feed of moms all across town. Whenever her name comes up, then, I breathe a sigh of relief. Her name, like some secret incantation, makes me swell with contentment at my own marriage, and renews, in some hard-to-define way, my own wedding vows.

“Oh, totally,” says Gloria, with a sanctimonious nod of her head.

“I'm going to check on the kids.” I mosey down the hall, peek into the spare bedroom—Maude and Emma are playing with dolls, while Haven is jumping up and down on the bed, a dangerous and reckless act whose discovery would give Gloria a conniption—and then head to the bathroom.

What gets me about the Cynthia Pardo business is that I
like
Cynthia Pardo. Not in a sexual way—that urge in the dance club proved fleeting—but as a friend. I haven't hung out with her as much, but I enjoy her company more than Jess's or Gloria's. I like her . . . but I don't understand her. There are better ways to extricate yourself from a dead marriage, ways that don't involve crimes and misdemeanors, ways that aren't as humiliating for her husband, the poor sap, who, whatever his flaws may be, doesn't deserve to be treated like this.

As I shake off the last of my coffee-fueled piss—one of the greatest challenges of stay-at-home fatherhood, for me, is coordinating my bathroom breaks; I have the bladder of a nine-months-pregnant woman—I happen to glance out the window just in time to see a shiny black BMW X-5 pull into the shiny black driveway. In West Hollywood, where my wife is now holed up, every third car is a BMW; not so in New Paltz, where Subarus, Honda CR-Vs, or pick-up trucks dominate the roads. A BMW here is like a Bentley in L.A. Who belongs to the Beamer? Ruth isn't coming, and Meg drives a beat-up Jetta.

I wash my hands for longer than necessary, holding them under the hot water as long as I can stand it, letting the heat radiate through my body. The face in the mirror—Jess was right—looks tired. The gray at the temples has begun to migrate in all directions, like the mint plants in our backyard. Gentrification of gray. Conquest of age. Bags under my eyes, hidden by the rim of my glasses, but Jeff Van Gundyan in their depth and darkness. The only hint of youth in the entire expanse of weary visage, the last vestige of my teenage self, is the dime-sized zit forming painfully above my left eyebrow.

I'm mildly and not unpleasantly surprised to find Sharon Rothman in the great room when I return, an oversized water bottle in one hand, her daughter's hand in the other. The playdate roster, like a basketball team, has nine members, five of whom (Jess, Gloria, Meg, Ruth Terry, and me) are starters, with the other four substituting every so often (and some of the fringe players, it must be said, are not crazy about a father encroaching on their mommy time; the inverse of pro athletes made uneasy by female reporters in the locker room). But Sharon is not one of the regulars; this is the first time she's come to one of these things, or the first time
I've
seen her at a playdate, anyway. In my limited dealings with her—at a birthday party at Meg's, at Hasbrouck Park, at the healthfood store—she strikes me as more East Village than New Paltz, and although she's quiet, she's fun to talk to, if only because I'm not yet bored of her. She's intriguing, her sad eyes bespeaking unknowable depth. And I have this strange feeling that I already know her, although I can't for the life of me figure out how.

“Oh, hey, Sharon. I didn't know you were coming.”

“Good morning, Josh.”

We don't know each other that well, so we do an awkward dance, neither of us sure if we should shake hands, embrace, kiss the other's cheek, or all three, and we wind up going full-on awkward and kissing half on the lips. And me with my coffee breath. Should have brought the Altoids from the minivan.

“What are you drinking? Margarita?”

“I wish. It's a protein shake.”

“She's doing Isagenix, too,” Gloria informs me.

“Too bad,” I tell her. “The cookies are really good.”

“These shakes, I gotta say, they're not that bad,” Gloria says.

“I wish I could have cookies,” Sharon says. “Sugar gives me a migraine. It's a curse.”

Sharon taught at the Montessori school until the big scandal—a sex offender was discovered to be living in a house adjacent to the school grounds; it subsequently came out that the school not only knew about this and didn't disclose it, but said sex offender was one of the school's initial investors—when all of the teachers quit en masse. I'm not sure what she's up to these days—last I heard she was training to be a yoga instructor . . . or was it an astrologer? Maybe both. “I'm still finding myself,” she told Stacy one time. From the looks of the BMW, it doesn't appear she's in a hurry to locate her self, or a gainful job.

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

The kids run in from the other room to greet Sharon's dumpling-shaped daughter, Iris. They don't say hello, as such, just jump around happily as the dynamics shift. Gloria takes a seat on the ottoman near the fireplace. “Look what I found,” she says. “Bubbles!”

Maude, Emma, Haven, and Iris jump up and down even more furiously, bouncing to the fireplace and the bubbles like so many hopped-up kangaroos.

I find my Mickey Mouse mug and notice, to my dismay, that it's empty.

“I'm going to get a refill. Anybody want some coffee?”

“I'll go with you,” Sharon says.

“Help yourself,” says Jess. “There's light cream in the fridge.”

“How decadent.”

“I know how to live.”

Sharon and I move through the archway into the kitchen.

“Are the shakes really tasty, or is Gloria just saying that?”

“They're supposed to be chocolate flavored,” Sharon says, “but they actually taste like carob. I really hate carob.”

“The cubic zirconium of dessert flavors,” I say, and she laughs, although it's not a particularly good joke. “So how are you doing? How's David?”

“He's fine. He's been really busy at work.”

“Yeah, Stacy has, too.”

“Is she having fun in L.A.?”

I'm a bit surprised that she knows my wife's whereabouts, but then, it's not exactly a state secret, as it's been all over Facebook.

“I think she's too busy to have much fun. She said she'd rather have gone to Dallas. The conference rooms are the same everywhere, but Dallas at least is a much shorter flight.”

“Where'd she fly out of? Albany?”

“Newark.”

“That's far.”

“Yeah.”

Sharon pours coffee into the same oversized Disney mug that I have, only with Minnie Mouse instead of Mickey. “I went to town this morning. I swear. Have you used the muni lot since they put in the meter machine?”

“No.”

“It used to be so easy to park,” she says. “Now, it's this big hassle. The lot used to be full, and now it's practically empty. People are afraid of the meter machine. They'd rather not use it.”

“Yeah, it's been a
great
way to increase revenue. Another genius decision by the mayor.”

“I know, right?”

“Woodstock has a free muni lot. Rhinebeck has a free muni lot. Poughkeepsie has free muni lots. And New Paltz doesn't? What sense does
that
make? They basically removed an entire parking lot. How does that not hurt local businesses?”

“Exactly.”

“What'd you do in town?”

“Yoga.”

“How's that going? You're training to be an instructor, right?”

“I was. I quit. It wasn't right for me. I don't know.”

Sharon sips her coffee and moves aside—our forearms glance as we switch positions—and I begin to refill my cup. The clock on the coffee pot, I notice, reads 10:39. Not even eleven yet. A whole lot of day left.
Miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I—

“I don't know how to tell you this,” Sharon says, her eyes wide with concern, “so I'm just going to tell you.”

Part II