The Ask (5 page)

“What are you doing?” said the first girl.

“What do you mean?”

I scooted off the counter, stood before them.

“We asked you to put the knife back. Not steal it.”

“It’s my knife,” I said. “My father gave it to me. I just left it here when I moved out. By accident. But now I found it. I can’t believe I left it in the first place. I’m going to need some therapy to figure it all out.”

“That’s the lamest story I ever heard,” said the governor’s daughter.

“Totally,” said one of the others.

“Why should we believe you? Do you have proof?”

“Proof?”

“I don’t think he has proof.”

“It’s my knife,” I said. “My father won it in cathouse in El Paso.”

“A cathouse?” said the first girl, though we knew then to say woman, even if none of us were women or men.

“Is that the word he used?” said another. “Cathouse? Not rape factory? What a pig your father must be. Are you proud of him? Paying to rape underage women of color?”

“They have agency,” said the governor’s daughter to the first girl. “They are sex workers in a marginal economy and there is agency there. Though not much. Especially if they are underage.”

“Who said underage?” I said, tried to recruit Constance to my cause with a glance, but she glided behind the others. Somehow I couldn’t blame her.

“Okay, maybe they were eighteen,” said the governor’s daughter. “Who cares? It’s a bullshit story. It’s not your knife. And anyway, possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

I wondered when she had first heard that sacred charm. Had the governor cooed it into her newborn ear? I could not believe I was not believed. I wanted to laugh. I could just walk out with the knife, nobody would stop me, but still I would not be believed. I would be known as a thief.

I shook as I handed over my father’s knife. Such shame. The governor’s daughter, who cared so little for this object, would get to keep it. She was from the people who kept everything. I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time. I knew I deserved no pity, would get none from the people who kept everything. They only pitied the people with nothing at all. I also knew that because I was leaving without the knife, I did not deserve the knife. A part of me did not want to deserve it.

Brownsville or El Paso.

Wave or brandish.

So it was all very tricky, telling the truth. It wasn’t really about the truth. It was about being believed. It was about Purdy believing that he’d chosen right when he’d chosen me. It was bad form to hound him by telephone this soon after the email. I surfed art blogs for news of newer art blogs, food blogs for news of food. A new joint downtown seated eleven. The pork belly tart was divine. Reservations were impossible, and if you got one, it didn’t guarantee dinner for your party, just you.

I logged off, swung my knapsack to my shoulder. I’d had a hard time deciding whether to carry a knapsack, a messenger bag, a canvas book bag, or a briefcase. Each seemed to embody a particular kind of confusion and loss. But the knapsack did the least spinal damage. I’d also noticed more people on the street with those briefcases on wheels. Nothing depressed me more than these rigs, this luggage for people not going anywhere, having their holiday at work. Sometimes I imagined those squat cases full of bondage gear or hobby trains, some secret glee, but you could almost be certain they bulged with files.

“Tough hour?” said Horace, swiveled from his monitor.

“Just sort of setting up today. Need to pick up Bernie soon.”

“Right. Well, nice to have you back. On a probationary basis.”

“Thanks, Horace.”

Vargina popped her head up out of her command nook.

“Milo?”

“Hey,” I said.

“So, everything working here?”

“Think so, yeah.”

“You know, given the nature of your situation here, how it’s just this one project, please don’t feel you have to come in that often. We’re more interested in the outcome than the process.”

“Right,” I said. “But since, if this works out, I’ll be back here long-term, isn’t it better if I re-integrate now?”

There was a blankness, and within that blankness an odd flicker of what I took to be pity, in Vargina’s expression. The pity part, plus the idea that the tips of her nipples might be brushing the synthetic weave of the cube wall, put a thrum in me. Or it might have been my cell phone.

They held up the N train at Queensboro Plaza for a medical emergency, somebody maybe stroked out on the car’s sticky floor, mistaking for a celestial communiqué the guarantees of Upper Manhattan’s number one pimple doctor, or the public service announcement about condoms targeted at Spanish-speaking men who believed they were not gay. The victim’s eyes might even have alighted on the new Mediocre subway campaign:
Knowledge
and Discovery: A Better You. A Better World
, the words stenciled below a beautiful Polish exchange student in a lab coat. This could be what the admissions folks called a change-of-life oppor tunity. If Strokey lived he might quit his job, go back to school, become what he always wanted to be, namely, somebody stand  ing next to a beautiful Polish exchange student in a lab coat.

Still, why stop the whole train just so paramedics could board the car and pull some poor slob back from the white light? We couldn’t waste time like this. Not for an individual life. We were losing our superpower superpowers. Would they stop this train in China?

I got off and waved down a livery cab, rode out to my Astoria Boulevard stop, took the shortcut through a playground beneath the tracks. The playground was empty except for a burly man coaxing his daughter down a slide. The sight of them startled me. He looked like a man I’d known on my block, a man who was dead now but who in life boasted the same huge shoulders
and shaggy dreadlocks. But really this man looked very different, his skin much lighter, and he wore jeans and construction boots powdered with drywall dust. The man I remembered favored tatty T-shirts and checkered chef pants. Whenever I thought of him I thought of those pants.

Often, out with Bernie in the stroller, I’d pass his house. His two young kids, a boy and a girl, would putter around a dirty plastic playhouse, the man on his stoop, smoking, reading the paper. I’d wave, dad to dad. Sometimes we would talk, the weather, the fish at the Greek place up the street, the dilapida  tion of the swings at the river park.

I liked talking to this man who could somehow pull off the role of loving and attentive parent with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He was a throwback papa, reminiscent of another time, another texture, his affection gruff, or else a bit reined in, but all the more palpable, that full-hearted but fatalistic love from before people used “parent” as a verb, when you might sit on the stoop and watch your children play in your barren rented yard and believe that life could work out. It was horseshit, of course, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.

Yet we were also, the both of us in our way, the new dads. This fellow was the real McCoy, a stay-at-home hero, but at least I was a quality-of-lifer, a knock-off-at-fiver, who would rush back for hours of child care if Maura needed to finish a project or just needed free time, a pedicure, a treadmill run. Often enough this man and I both put our kids to bed, our wives still at work, doing the work of their type in this era, the conferencing, the teleconferencing, the brainstorming, the liaisoning. Sometimes the work of their type meant drinks at the bar with other men and women. Sometimes they just needed to get away from us. Enjoy yourself, we said. Heaven knows you deserve it. We meant this and did not resent them for being better than us. New dads still respected what was best in the old ones, but had maybe
abandoned the fear, the silence, or else the gabby cruelty of our fathers, grandfathers.

This is how I liked to think of us, anyway, me and this large man with his good laugh and the Marlboro Light in his teeth or between his stubby fingers, which he’d hold with such care away from his daughter’s braids when she charged over to collapse in his lap and file howling grievance against her brother’s style of playhouse play.

I even imagined a life for this guy, figured him for a chef, because of the checkered pants, home until he could find another high-end organic gig or else raise the cash for his own place, living off scant savings and his wife’s administrative job. Then one afternoon, sitting in the playground I crossed now, while Bernie napped in his stroller, I noticed an item in the paper about an entire family wiped out by a beverage truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and studying the article and the photograph of my neighbor there beneath photographs (and diagram) of the wreck, I saw I had not been far off.

James “Jimmy” Easter had been a chef in the East Village. Probably knew his way around a pork belly tart. His wife was in sales, medical supplies. Jimmy Easter, there was the name, Jimmy Easter, the missing piece that should have connected it all, me out with the stroller, always the lighter-framed of our two Mac-larens, not because it weighed less but because it was cleaner and there was something unmanly about pushing the filthier stroller, with its crumbed seams and yogurt-smeared handles and pockets stuffed with rotten apple cores (not that I ever cleaned the thing), and the friendly neighbor with his cigarette and his children and their mud-crusted playhouse. Except the name connected nothing. Easter was too much. It crowded out what mattered.

There was also the question of the car, the compact Korean-made tomb of the Easters. Had I ever seen it? Probably parked out back. Maybe Jimmy paid his landlord for a space. A monthly strain, this extra. And Jimmy with his cigarettes, even after the
mayor jacked the tax, Jimmy still with his cigarettes and the smoke he tried to wave away. What kind of father would smoke around his children, or smoke at all? Not the kind of father the mayor would consider a father. Nobody committed to effective parenting. Did Jimmy have life insurance? Would his death from lung cancer at least pay out?

But these questions, these accusations in the form of questions, they really stopped being pertinent one blue afternoon in October in a southbound lane on the BQE. The semi took care of these questions, or really issues, let’s call them issues, much as many of us not my mother claim to despise the word. It took care of the unemployment issue, the parking space issue, the smoking issue, and it took care of James “Jimmy” and Barbara Easter’s issue, Devin and Charlene. The truck, the sleep-starved Croat at the wheel of it, took care of everything. Jimmy Easter might just as well have taught his children how to blow smoke rings, or steal cigarettes. Jimmy Easter was off the hook. He would never go down in history, or case history, as a shitty father.

Whereas me, I still had a decent shot.

Nearly every day now I passed the man’s house, that yard. The playhouse was gone, but there were still some ancient cigarette butts wedged between the sidewalk and the first flagstone of the walkway, and often as I passed I whispered, “Jimmy Easter, Jimmy Easter, Jimmy Easter,” until the name conjured nothing, failed to spook. But then I would very nearly see the boy and the girl in their sweatshirts, climbing through the grimed window of the playhouse, and I would feel a jangled shiver, like shaves of ice in the blood, which was maybe just my nerves trying to shield me, to throw up some farce of hauntedness, of spirits lingering, to save me from the brute fact of their oblivion.

Late, I sprinted through drab, tidy streets toward Christine’s. Her brick two-family was an exact replica of every other house around here, including mine. Much as I feared the advent of the me’s, architecture alone was against it. There weren’t enough lofts or factory floors. Kids needed big, decrepit spaces for their parties and orgies and suicidal Sunday afternoons. The buildings in these precincts had been designed for only one thing: to house, and disguise, the fester of families.

When I reached Christine’s I was sweating, heaving. I could have used a nice vomit. I should join a gym, I thought. But then I’d just vomit in it.

Christine’s brother sat in a canvas chair in the driveway. Nick had the build and the hair of a picture-book giant, a merry bipolar glint in his eye. He worked occasional construction jobs and sometimes held down the day-care fort while Christine cruised the borough in her minivan.

Nick nodded, waved. The pink plastic rifle in his lap had leaked, wetted his tracksuit pants. Frantic children danced around him, screamed, struck Nick with lengths of garden hose. Nick raised his rifle, launched dark ropes of liquid at the more brazen tykes.

“Gun me!” said one kid.

“I’m poopy man!” called another.

Bernie appeared to be absent from this frolic.

“Milo,” said Nick. “How you doing?”

“Good,” I said, ducked a late burst of crimson spray. “Just here for Bernie.”

“No, I know,” said Nick.

“Have you seen him?”

“What?” said Nick. “Yeah, sure. But first, I was just thinking. How would you like to make some money?”

Nick lowered his rifle, looked over at the boys still cowering from his fusillade.

“Go play with those wood scraps near the garage,” he called.

“Sure, I’d love to make some money,” I said. “Money is one of my favorite things to make. But I should really find Bernie right now.”

“Yeah, no, go ahead, guy. Just that I got this deck job at the end of the week and my assistant crapped out on me. I need a helper.”

“Deck job?”

“I build decks. Like off the back of a house?”

“Got it.”

“Interested?”

“Ah, maybe,” I said. “I’m pretty busy. Can I let you know? I’ll let you know.”

There was a whiff of the volatile about this man that always put me in modes of appeasement, of friendly deferral.

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Let me know.”

“I will, I promise. I’ll let you know.”

“Good. It’s a deal.”

“What’s a deal?”

“You letting me know.”

“Yes, that’s a deal. Have you seen my kid?”

Nick tilted his head, a new shine in his eyes.

“Your kid? Is it one of these little homos?”

He swiveled in his chair, opened up once more on the boys where they crouched near the ruins of a doghouse.

“Soup’s on, motherlovers!”

What he shot at them, I realized now, was some variant of Vitamin Drink. The children squealed and dove into the splintered wood.

“No, not one of these particular little homos,” I said, jogged past Nick and climbed the side staircase.

The house was low-ceilinged and dark and as I crept through the kitchen I could almost have been some Hollywood SEAL with a pistol in my hand, an avuncular sergeant in my earbud. I could almost have been any one of the righteous manhunters I’d portrayed in cramped hallways since boyhood, but I was not, felt the dull sear of that notness now.

More howls broke through the roar of a television as I turned into a carpeted parlor, slunk past a flimsy rack of cut-glass bowls, china dolls, and other sad lady collectibles, toward the light of a dusty bay window.

I knew this room from past pickups and now I felt an odd flutter in my gut. Bernie could be facedown in the shag, choking on a cherry sucker from that quartz dish on Christine’s coffee table. No longer the high-tech avenger, I’d end up a different character in the same Hollywood movie, the stunned father with his kid’s limp corpse in his arms, the collateral damage cutaway.

But Bernie had not choked on a sucker. Bernie was not dead in the shag. Bernie was chewing another boy’s penis. The boy screamed as my son gnawed denim. Hunched before the giant TV, where a prelapsarian New York Yankees highlight reel looped swank Jeterian feats, the boys, in their backlit shadow-play agon, jerked like Mrs. Cooley’s beloved Balinese puppets.

“Daddy!” shouted Bernie, lifted his head from the drool-dark pants of his prey.

“Hey, little man,” I said. “Ready to go home?”

Bernie hopped up, did his funny lope across the room.

“Say goodbye to Aiden,” I said, recognized the other boy now, the rabbit-eyed only of another Christine regular, a single mom who sold cell phone plans from a storefront on Ditmars Avenue.

“Bye,” said Bernie.

“Bye,” called Aiden, perhaps distracted by the swell of martial melodies surging from the plasma. Blue Angels navy fighters streaked over old Yankee Stadium, the bond forged between two of the best-funded teams of their time.

I lifted Bernie into the crook of my arm, passed back through the kitchen, snatched our canvas supply bag, stepped out the door.

The children shivered in the grass, their hair and skin faintly iridescent. No longer the lawn chair hunter, Nick had taken a knee, a precarious pose for a man his size. He leaned on the rifle stock, the bright barrel wedged in his mouth. He bucked his head away, mimed the rifle’s recoil in slow motion, let the weapon clatter to the asphalt.

“Just like that,” he told the children.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“I’m telling the kids a story about my brother.”

“Do you think it’s appropriate?”

“What does that mean? Appropriate? Is that a fancy word for having no balls?”

“No, it just means—”

“I know what it means.”

“Okay, Nick, I’m sorry if I—”

“Don’t worry about it. You were not wrong to wonder. Why is he showing kids how to eat a bullet, right? But this is not what it looks like.”

“It’s not?”

“Not completely.”

“Oh.”

“And our deal still stands.”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “Come on, Bernie. See you kids later.”

“Bye!”

Nick turned back to his rapt flock.

“See, my brother wanted to plaster the wall with his brains, but the round went through his cheek. Right here, see? Took out a wad of cheek meat, but he survived. After that he started going to this megachurch in Connecticut. We don’t talk much.” I hoisted Bernie to my shoulders, carried him across the street.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, Bern.”

“Is Nick bad?”

“No, I don’t think he’s bad.”

“Is he sad?”

“Maybe he’s a little sad.”

“Is he angry?”

“He might be a little angry.”

“I bit Aiden’s winky and mashed his face.”

“Yeah, Bern, I saw. Why do you think you did that?”

“I wanted to.”

“Why do you think you wanted to?”

“I didn’t want him to have his train.”

“Was it his train?”

“Yeah.”

“‘Did he share it with you?”

“Yes.”

“So, what was the problem?”

“He had it.”

“Okay, Bern. Maybe you should have been happy he was sharing it with you, though. That was nice, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So, do you think it was right to bite and mash?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to.”

“You baffle me, Bern.”

“What’s baffle? Like waffle?”

“It sounds a little like ‘waffle,’ doesn’t it? You’ve got a good ear. But baffle means I don’t know why you bit and mashed Aiden.”

“I told you why.”

“I know, you wanted to.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“What’s depressive?”

“Who called you depressive? Nick?”

“Nobody.”

“Bernie, tell me. Who called you depressive? One of the older boys?”

These poor kids, they gleaned these terms at random, overheard them from afternoon TV, dinner chat. Or else the language of pathology was affixed to them by some shrink Mengele eager to stuff them with Ritalin and Zoloft.

“Who said you were depressive, Bernie?”

“Nobody, Daddy.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re the depressive, Daddy. Mommy said. On the phone with Paul.”

“Who’s Paul?”

“Paul from work. He’s an artist.”

Paul did design for Maura’s firm. Some animation websites also featured his cartoons. I’d met him in midtown once, when I picked up Maura for her birthday dinner. He seemed pleasant, if not a little bland, a tan, lanky guy who wore expensive vintage clothing. I’d kept waiting for Maura to tell me he was gay—she’d declared herself a devoted fag hag when we started dating, said it might even interfere with her quest for heterosexual companionship—but she’d never said anything about Paul’s preference. I knew better than to ask.

“Right,” I said. “Paul from work.”

“Paul is going to make me a whole little movie of superheroes. On his computer. That’s what Mommy said. Are you a pansy, Daddy?”

“Wait,” I said. “Did Mommy say ‘depressive,’ or ‘pansy’?”

“What’s a pansy?”

“It’s a flower, Bernie.”

“I love flowers. I pick them for Mommy but she gets mad because other people need to enjoy them.”

“That’s right. Mommy’s right.”

“You’re a nice pansy, Daddy.”

“Thank you, Bernie.”

“You’re welcome.”

Most nights after dinner Bernie and I retired to his room to play guys. We’d each grip one of his grotesquely proportioned action mutants, bash them together, growl.

“I will defeat you and meal you, Wolfsquid, Scourge of Decency,” I might say.

But now Bernie appeared at the threshold of a new phase. The last time I had offered up my services, he shrugged.

“I just want to go to my room and unwind,” he said.

Later I went in to tell him a story. He’d become critical of the saccharine bent of my bedtime sagas.

“Don’t forget the evil,” he said now.

I worked up some woods for him, some trolls, some berry-picking children. I put the evil in there. Finally a hippo ex machina rescued the children from the castle of the Lanky Animator.

Soon Bernie was asleep, or down, in the parlance of our suffering set.

We cooked pork chops from the corner butcher. Maura patted the meat with a Cajun rub. I made the salad, stirred in the vinaigrette. This was our time. The sacred hour of our sacred institution.
I sipped some sour Malbec Maura had brought home from an office party and decided not to prod about Paul, instead told Maura about Nick’s offer, if only for the chance to launch some jokes at the giant’s expense, get my girl to cackle again.

“Maybe you should do it,” said Maura.

“Are you serious?”

“Well, this Purdy thing can’t take up all of your time. Seems like you’re just waiting around for the next meeting.”

“He’s been out of town.”

“Okay, so, maybe you can try doing the deck. You might enjoy the exercise.”

“If I can handle it. Could kill me.”

“If Nick can do it, you can do it. That guy’s not exactly fit.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, and maybe meant it. A day in the sun, some hard-earned under-the-table cash, it sounded promising. I’d once been a painter, after all, a fellow who worked with his hands. Now I could be a carpenter, like Jesus. I felt flushed with the idea of Jesus, the Jewish craftsman Jesus, and also the shit wine.

“To decks,” I said, raised my glass. “Decks are America. The hidden platform where the patriarchy is reasserted.”

“What are you talking about?” said Maura, who knew what I was talking about, had dabbled with perhaps a bit more coherence in the same college theory I had, but probably wanted me to focus on how I salted the salad.

“I’m talking about our homeland, honey,” I said, poured more wine, gulped it, flusher now, warm with that feeling of wanting a feeling that maybe had already fled. Where had the feeling gone? It wasn’t in the wine. It wasn’t in the pork chops Maura tonged from the broiler.

“America,” I said, “that run-down demented old pimp. Can’t keep his bitches in line. No juice. He’s lost his diamond fangs, drinks Tango from a paper bag. A gummy coot in the pool hall. The wolves, those juveniles, they taunt him.”

“Gummy coot?”

“Whatever,” I said. “You get the point.”

“Not really,” says Maura. “It’s retarded.”

“Retarded ha-ha or retarded peculiar?”

“Wait. Be quiet.”

We froze, listened for sounds from Bernie’s room.

“I thought I heard him,” said Maura. “Sometimes I’ll be at work, in a meeting or something, and I’ll think I hear him crying. It’s weird. He’s been sleeping through the night for a year but I still … Anyway, what were you saying? America is an alcoholic pimp?”

“You used to love my raps. My riffs. I thought that’s why you married me.”

Had she caught the edge of true panic beneath the joke panic? Did she know it was Horace’s riff? You really had to hustle to recruit the right people to prop up your delusions, but the moment somebody broke ranks, or just broke for a protein shake, the whole deal teetered.

“I know it wasn’t my soap opera looks,” I said. “I thought you loved the way my mind worked. Its strange loops. My sense of humor.”

“Shhh,” said Maura. “Shut the fuck up.”

We froze again, listened for moans, the beginnings of wails. It wasn’t so onerous these days, but some moments still brought us back to Bernie’s infant months, both of us on tiptoes, petrified we’d wake the baby, lose those seventeen minutes of email catch-up we believed our sacrifice had earned us. We were like the Frank family in their Dutch attic, but with email.

“Okay,” said Maura, signaled the all clear. “So, what were we saying? Soap operas?”

“Yeah,” I sulked. “Soap operas.”

“Don’t be such a queen,” said Maura.

“Save that terminology for your gay lovers,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean your lovers that are also gay.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem.”

“Is there something you want to say to me?”

Why was I such a diseased fuck? It had to be society’s fault. I loved people, all people, except for the ones with money and free time.