Fathermucker (33 page)

Her expression is difficult to read. Guilt? Surprise? Anger? I don't know. “Who told you that? Sharon, I suppose?”

“I'd rather not say.”

“You think, what? You think I'm
cheating
on you? Is that
really
what you think?”

“I didn't say that.”

“But Sharon did. That little whore.” She flings the magazine across the room and scowls at me. “What did she say?”

I stand there dumb, a moron. I don't want to talk about this, not now, not ever; it's clear from her reaction that she's
not
having an affair—with Soren Knudsen or anyone else. Her arms are still crossed, and now she's tapping her foot on the hardwood floor, which would be more effective if she weren't wearing her Sauconys.

“What did she
say
, Josh?”

So I lay out the evidence. The lunch at the Bonefish Grill, the conspiratorial meeting at the Grand Hotel, the glimpse of her leaving Soren's house one night two weeks ago.

“And from
that
she deduced that I was having an
affair
?”

“Well . . . ” It does seem sort of stupid, phrased this way. “Yes.”

“She's seen too many episodes of
Y&R.
That bitch. Why can't people in this fucking town mind their own fucking business?” She bends over to get the magazine off the floor, then barricades herself in the bathroom. Like Britney Spears did, but without the kids. She comes out a few minutes later, toilet flushing behind her. She glowers at me, her eyes seething, and without a word, marches down the hall toward the bedroom.

“Shhh. Quiet,” I tell her. “Maude's in there.”

But she's wearing the sneakers, and Maude can sleep through earthquakes once she's out. Stacy vanishes into the room, closing the door on me (and the cat, who has followed her every step of the way since she walked through the door; he prefers her). After a minute, Steve gets tired of waiting and slinks back to the couch.

Two minutes later—I watch the time pass on the microwave clock, every second like a fresh knife wound to my heavy heart: where is this going? What is she doing in there? Have I ruined everything? Can our marriage recover from this stupid, awful, hideous, two-star day?—the longest two minutes of my life, Stacy returns, carrying a shoebox. Without looking at me or speaking, she makes for the couch, sits, and motions for me to join her. I have no idea what to expect. What's in that box? Her diary? Divorce papers? Gwyneth Paltrow's severed head?

“I was saving this for your birthday,” she says. “
Some
of us know how to make those occasions special.” This is yet another dig on her craptastically bad fortieth, which she will be giving me shit about until the day I die, and possibly also during my funereal eulogy—but her voice is softer, more forgiving, so I relax ever so slightly. “But you might as well open it now.”

Inside the box is a stack of black-and-white five-by-seven photographs—gorgeous, artsy photographs of my gorgeous, artsy wife, wearing a variety of naughty undergarments (negligee, bra, garter belt, and in one shot, just her hands covering her pert breasts), in an array of sexy and seductive poses. It looks like the sort of photo shoot a celebrity who doesn't want to bare all would submit for
Playboy
.

“Holy fucking shit.”

It's hard to believe that the alluring model in these five-by-sevens is my wife, the same woman I've shared a bed with for ten years, the mother of my two high-maintenance children. We take for granted how attractive our wives are, I guess, or I do; sometimes it takes looking at her from a different lens to appreciate her beauty anew. She's prettier than Sharon Rothman, prettier than any of the other mommies in town, prettier—yes!—than Mary-Louise Parker. “These are . . . these are great.”

“Yeah?” Her eyes fall to the floor, hair falling in her face. Even now, after five days of work and a long flight, in her Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt and Guess jeans, she's still a hottie. “You like them?”

“Of course! I mean, look at you! You're so fucking
hot
.”

“Soren is very talented. And Meg was there when we did the shoot. Just so you know. She didn't meet us for lunch at Bonefish to discuss it, and she must have been in the bathroom when Sharon saw us at the Grand Hotel. That's when Soren showed us the prints.”

“Oh my God,” I say, hugging her as hard as I can, tears welling in my eyes. “I feel like such an idiot.”

She pats my head as I stifle my tears. “You've been alone with the kids all week. That would make anyone feel that way.”

“I never believed her . . . but Sharon, I mean, she was so
convinced
.”

“Did she put the moves on you?”

I don't answer, but my weep-wet eyes give me away.

“Oh my God! She put the moves on you! You didn't
fuck
her, did you?”

“No. No, of course not. I'd never do that.”

Which is the truth, right?

“Good.”

I could elaborate. Maybe I should. But, given that I answered Stacy's question to her satisfaction, I decide against rehashing the play-by-play of Sharon's almost-successful seduction attempt. I love my wife more now than I did when the day began, and when the opportunity presented itself, in all its garter-belted glory, in the end, I did not betray her. That should be enough.

“She
does
that, you know.”

“Does what?”

“Hits on married guys.”

“Really.”

“She modeled for Soren a few months ago, and at the end of the session, she basically offered to blow him.”

“I didn't know that.”

“She and David have an
arrangement
, is what she told him. Please. She's a fucking homewrecker. Like Angelina Jolie. They have the same puffy lips.”

The idea that anyone would select my home as wreck-worthy seems ludicrous—I feel like the least sexy man this side of Barack Obama—and I tell her so.

“Are you kidding? You're
totally
cute. You are. You're, like, a total FILF.”

I laugh. “You're biased.”

“Just a little.”

I hug her again, as tight as I can, trying to merge our bodies into one. I'm a
Titanic
survivor kissing dry land. A clumsy metaphor, I realize, comparing my wife to dirt, but that's how I feel—like I've been saved. “I really missed you. I can't tell you how glad I am that you're home.”

“Me, too.”

“These pictures are great. Really. This is, like, the best birthday present of all time ever.”

She looks down at her fingers, plays with her wedding band. “We're in sort of a rut, you know? I thought this might, you know, be the spark we needed.”

We embrace again, and I kiss her deeply, desperately, as if trying to make up for lost time. And then I'm making out with my wife on the same sofa, in front of the same platter of cheese, where I (briefly, but still) made out with Sharon less than two hours earlier.

“I love you,” I tell her between kisses. “I love you so much.”

She gets this sly grin on her face—a grin I know well from the early days of our marriage, but haven't much seen of late. “You wanna?”

“Of course.”

“Shit. Maude's in our bed.”

“Damn it.”

“We could just do it here.”

“On the couch? It's like we're in junior high.”

“We could go upstairs, to Maude's room.” We both reject the proposal silently, independently, and simultaneously. “Yeah, bad idea.”

“I'm actually really exhausted.”

“Me too.”

“Tomorrow,” she says. “Date night. And by ‘date night,' I mean ‘whoopee night.' ”

“About Vanessa . . . ”

“Screw Vanessa. I planned this already. I got one of Meg's sitters. Abby. If she can handle the twins, she can handle Roland and Maude. She's coming at six.”

“Yeah? You planned it?”

“I figured we could use a night out.”

“Where should we go? The Would? Global Palate?”

Her eyes twinkle with mischief. “I was thinking we'd do something different. Something naughty. Mix it up. Check into a motel, under an assumed name. Pretend we're having an affair.”

“Cynthia Pardo and Bruce Baldwin did it at Dia:Beacon. We could always go there.”

“They did
what
?”

“See, you go away for five days, you miss stuff.” I hold her close, kiss her forehead. “There's that motel in Balmsville, near the strip club. That might make for a good hideaway. We could go get lap dances first.”

“Sold.” She kisses me hard on the lips, a final stamp of approval and possession and commitment. “And for the record . . . I would
never
cheat on you, you
stupe
.”

Stupe. Roland's word. “Me, neither.” I now know this to be true.

We sit for a while on the couch, as we've sat so many times before, holding hands, quiet and content.

“Wait,” Stacy says, “they did it at Dia:Beacon?”

“Yeah. The cops came and everything. But that's not even the half of it. Cynthia's
pregnant
.”

“What?” Stacy shakes her head. “This place,” she says. “The more you dig . . . ”

“ . . . the more you find.”

And the word
find
triggers the iPod in my brain. As I wash my face and brush my teeth and take one final leak, and as we crawl into bed, Stacy and I forming parentheses around the asterisk of the slumbering Maude, I can't get the song out of my head, the chorus playing on a loop, over and over and over, until I finally fade into sleep:

Good love is hard to find.

Saturday, 5:03 a.m.

I
WAKE UP.
N
OT FROM A CHILD'S CRY, OR A KICK FROM THE SLEEPING
and flailing Maude, or a nightmare, or a pressing and urgent need to void my bladder (although I do have to pee, I always have to pee), or the invasive scratching of rodents trapped in the walls. I wake up because my body has decided that now—5:03, the same time Roland roused me yesterday; precision of the internal clock—is the time to wake up.

Stacy faces the wall, a jumbled mess of arms and legs, snoring loudly, chainsaw snoring: the blessed soundtrack of home. Maude occupies the center of the bed, limbs splayed out like she's being drawn and quartered. Roland is asleep, too; in the monitors, nothing but the whir of the twin noise machines. Peace, quiet. My loved ones, my family, tucked safely into bed. There is something deeply satisfying, something almost magical, about watching over your sleeping wife and children. I'm fulfilling an ancient paternal role, one that
hasn't
changed with the times: Father as Protector.

I should be exhausted—I only slept for five fitful, wine-drenched hours—but I'm not. On the contrary, I feel as alert and refreshed as I've felt in ages; I feel alive, inspired, even powerful. They were an efficient five hours, I guess, a productive half-day at the office. There certainly was a lot of paperwork to process. Oddly, of all that went down yesterday—the anxiety of the alleged affair, Stacy's return and my titillating birthday present; the run-in with the law; the babysitter stand-off; Roland's pumpkin patch meltdown and the subsequent breaking of bread with Daryl and Zara Reid; Cynthia Pardo and Bruce Baldwin, Cynthia Pardo and Peter Berliner; and, yes, the delicious caress of Sharon's fingers on a part of my body that no one has touched in ten years except my wife and the urologist who performed my vasectomy—what I wake up thinking about is something relatively minor. I'm rehashing the remark made by Joe Palladino, my goateed exterminator, he of the mouse bait and the blind-date blow job:

Just you and the kid on a Friday afternoon. A little Mr. Mom duty today, huh?

It's time for an update, it occurs to me, a
Mr. Mom
for the new millennium: a groundbreaking film about a dad who
isn't
a cipher, who isn't thrust haplessly into the primary-caregiver role, but who courts it, and who excels at it. Brad Pitt could star—heck, if the tabloid photo spreads of him hauling Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Vivienne, and Knox from Lake Como to Los Angeles are to be believed, he won't even have to act. Maybe it's time for Hollywood to catch up. Maybe I should stop writing derivative vampire thrillers and bang out a screenplay about my own absurd life. Maybe then my agent would respond to my e-mails. Maybe he'd do even more. Maybe—

A little Mr. Mom duty today, huh?

See, the days of
Mr. Mom
are over, no matter what my benighted exterminator might think. The paradigms have altered. The gender roles have blurred. The distinction between Mother and Father is all mucked up. And that, more than anything, is why Joe's comment sticks in my craw. For hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of years, in almost every culture that is or was, women have cared for the children, and men have not. Right here, right now, we are experiencing a cataclysm of domesticity, a tectonic shift in how things are and how they will be going forward—and there is nothing,
nothing
in the language that adequately reflects this sea change.
Mr. Mom
affixes a masculine title to a feminine noun—arguably the
most
feminine noun going.
Mr. Mom
is defined by its antithesis, by what it's not, by how it's unusual, extraordinary, queer, risible, ridiculous, possibly malefic. Compare:
undocumented, illegal, illegitimate, Antichrist
. What we need is a new term for what we are. A word that is
positive
, something we stay-at-home dads, we SAHDs, we Y-chromosomed co-parents
Co-parents! As if fathers actually participating in raising their kids has to be specified! As if doing so is encroaching on the mother's side of the parental line of scrimmage!
we evolutionary Mr. Moms, can be proud of. A word like . . . like . . .

A clatter from the living room disturbs this train of thought: Steve playing with a catnip toy? Somehow I know better. With my heart in my throat, I creep down the hall to investigate.

One of the mice has at last found its way beyond the wall. Steve—who perhaps heard Joe Palladino's lecture this afternoon; perhaps one of an exterminator's functions is to light a fire under his housecat ally, to play Knute Rockne to the resident four-pawed mouse-killer—has discharged his feline duty, and has the li'l varmint trapped under the sofa; the same sofa where Sharon and I partook of our wine and cheese. Was it the smell of cheese that drew the brazen mouse from beyond the wall? Do mice
really
like cheese?

For all the times I've read, heard, or used the hackneyed phrase “cat and mouse,” I've never actually beheld a real cat toying with a real mouse. I always assumed that the cat, with its superior cunning and quickness, would pursue the mouse relentlessly
with paws but without pause
until the disgusting little poop machine was dead. But it's not really like that. The chase comes in stops and starts, like the action in a football game. Cat pounces upon mouse, catches him, then releases him, as a fly fisherman and his prize trout. Mouse retreats, but knows better than to attempt a full-fledged escape. Both creatures wait without moving for many minutes. Then, without warning, the cat strikes. He bats the mouse around with his paws, like a one-named Brazilian midfielder dribbling a soccer ball, and for a few moments, both animals are a blur. Then Steve pins him by the tail—predator and prey are in the middle of the floor now, nowhere for the little fucker to hide—and I get a good look at the cause of my nightly autumnal terror. The mouse—who must know his days of haunting my interior walls are over—breathes furiously, the whole of his body expanding contracting expandingcontracting, like a tiny billows, his flaxseed-sized heart pounding furiously in his tiny ribcage. And as I watch him anticipate the end—an end Steve, master of suspense that he is, a feline Hitchcock, seems determined to prolong—I actually feel pity for the poor thing. The mouse, he's like me—more like me than the cat, certainly. He's small, this mouse: insignificant, vulnerable, afraid, in over his head; and though his desires may be great, his needs are modest. And here he is, pursued without relent down dark hallways by a fierce creature of the night, a sharp-fanged monster, an embodier of unquenchable cruelty, as we are in our dreams.

After yesterday's encounter with the Headless Whoresman, after those twenty-four hours of torture, the red-alert threat of the destruction of my marriage and my entire way of life never more real, this puny, terrified ball of fur seems not so scary.

Crossing the living room, I open the front door, admitting the night's chill. “Over here, mouse,” I tell him, as if he knows what this means. “Here.”

Then I walk casually toward the chase scene, the set piece from a Mickey and Minnie horror film, and scoop up the cat.

“Go, mouse. Go!”

I give him a little kick. He scurries for the door, slowly at first, as if expecting to be stopped, as if this is merely an elaboration on the same old game, a hazard on this mini-golf course of rodentine death; as if he has already succumbed to his fate and doesn't trust his two-footed savior. Once it dawns on his stupid vermin brain that he's in the clear, he picks up speed. He zigzags to the wall, creeps along the baseboard, and runs out the door. Steve, flailing in my arms, can only watch as his prize bursts free into the night. He lets out a long howl of displeasure
What the fuck are you doing, Josh?
and not wanting to disturb the kids, I throw him, too, into the dark and chilly night, bolting the door behind him.

No sign of a hangover, a hangover I surely deserve, as I make my way into the bathroom and take a long, satisfying leak. Fergie and Josh Duhamel, the allegations of his dalliance with
THE STRIPPER
still hanging over their collective and Photoshopped-together head, eye me uneasily from the magazine cover on the floor. I've had it with
Us Weekly
, with Heidi Montag and that asshole Spencer Pratt, with Rihanna and that asshole Chris Brown, with Bristol Palin and that asshole Levi Johnston, with Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Simpson and that asshole John Mayer (
do we detect a pattern here?
). I'm tired of affairs with strippers and nannies and cocktail waitresses, of leaked sex tapes and risqué phone messages, of Hollywood marriages that implode in a matter of weeks. Just because they pump gas and doff their Manolo Blahniks for airport security and buy paper towels in Target does not mean that stars are
anything
like us.

Oops! I've been a mite careless with my piss stream; a few drops of urine have found their way onto the luminous faces of the celebrity Josh and Stacy. So sad, too bad. After the requisite shake—this time I aim for Duhamel's smug, five-o'clock-shadowed mug—I roll up the magazine and toss it in the trash.

A little Mr. Mom duty today, huh?

Joe Palladino, of all people—the most artless Philistine in the Hudson Valley—has sparked something in me, the dormant creative force, the slumbering King of Wands. If not the mice, who remain, Paladin Pest Control has managed to exterminate my writer's block. After filling the coffeemaker with cold water and Kenyan Gold, I wake up my laptop, open a
NEW PROJECT
in Final Draft (When was the last time I even clicked on the app icon? A good year ago, I think, last fall, the wretched attempt to craft the vampire script), and begin typing:

1. EXT. JESS'S HOUSE – DAY

A McMansion, not quite as gaudy as the others. Several cars in the driveway, including a dark blue Honda Odyssey. In the yard off to the side, an enormous swing-and-slide set, unused.

2. INT. JESS'S KITCHEN – DAY

STEVE, 36, handsome but tired, pours himself a fresh cup of coffee. We hear happy SQUEALS of small children from off camera. SHARON, 32 and pretty, enters, mug at the ready. As he tops her off, she looks at him with grave concern.

At the first whiff of brewed coffee, that incense of the Muses, it hits me: the word! The Mr. Mom upgrade! The updated term for what I am, what all we stay-at-home dads are. I open the “title page” in Final Draft, type out the twelve letters. Then I go pour my coffee. I reclaim my seat, and I sip the Kenyan Gold, and I admire the word I've written on the screen . . . but only for a minute. Roland's awake now—I can hear the clatter of Thomas tracks tumbling over—and he's calling for me, and loudly (loud is his only volume). Time to deploy. Leaving my laptop open on the title page, I turn off the baby monitor, so he doesn't wake the mother-and-daughter sleeping beauties, and I march up the stairs, mug in hand, to report for duty.

Such is the life of the fathermucker.