Through the Children's Gate (37 page)

You might expect an Updikean theater of adultery, of flirtation and seduction and sexual conquest and betrayal, to be going on at the same time within that same living room. The small subcircles of trust ought to become sexualized. But—and, twenty-five years married, I may well be missing something here, but I don't think I am—this doesn't seem to be going on. I am stirred by some of the women players—that excitement with which women play all games, once their tentativeness passes, without the tedious knowingness that men insist on introducing—and, who knows, there may be hidden threads, a pattern in the tablecloth visible only when you hold it to the light, that I am too dull to spot. But it seems to me that the eroticism of Mafia, like the apparent eroticism of the actual Mafia as we see it in the movies and read about it in the tabloids, lies in the renewal of sex among the already connected. The hit man's interest in his own wife is, they say, reawakened by the hit.
You're a liar, and I know it, but I'll sleep with you anyway
is, after all, the most intimate thing we can say to each other. It keeps the game—many games—going.

T
he screens have a hold on the children, but the cards hold them even closer. We live in New York, we tell other people timidly, for the cultural advantages, and for Luke, the major cultural advantage is Alex's MVP, a grungy sports memorabilia and card store on Eighty-ninth Street and Second Avenue. It sits in a basement crowded with old
cards and comic books, and Luke's chief desire is to go there and buy more cards.

We found it first when we were bumming around one day. I was showing him the old neighborhood where Martha and I first lived, for three years, in our basement room on Eighty-seventh Street. It really was a neighborhood once, with a bad bakery, and German restaurants lining Eighty-sixth Street. On a memorable snowy night in the early eighties, I got my first job and we went out to celebrate at Kleine Konditorei, goose and duck with German sauces. All of that is gone now, wiped right off the map, not a sign anywhere of the kind of neighborhood it was just a quarter century ago.

Luke is indifferent to this, for obvious reasons—no child wants to hear his parents’ mythology; his parents are already sufficiently mythological, evil emperor and good captive princess—and, trying to find something that he would like, I vaguely recalled a vintage comicbook store in the neighborhood. I said, “I think there's a cool card store around here somewhere.”

“On Second Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street,” a man going by announced helpfully. I stared at him in gratitude.

It was there, and Luke loved it. Small and grungy, with spiritualized sawdust on the floor. The smeared glass cases were crowded with dusty memorabilia at New York prices: a bat signed by Derek Jeter, a World Series program from 1932, a whole world of memories, some of them, a few of them, mine.

Luke wanted baseball cards. It is only a year now since I broke the news to him, finally and definitively, that the Rookie, the three-year-old fast balling pitcher of the bedtime story of his Paris years, was a fiction. He nodded cheerfully—a Santa moment—and then Martha made me abandon another fiction we had launched before, about the king of Central Park. At Alex's, he began instead to collect Major League Baseball Showdown packs, the new craze in the civilization of nine-year-olds. You collect baseball cards, new ones, showing players from across the decades, and then play a complicated dice-throwing game. (We actually had to send to Washington State for a peculiar twenty-sided die.) Each player pits his lineup against the others, and they follow the rules marked on the back of the cards, which span the
decades: Whitey Ford can get out Johnny Damon; Barry Bonds can slug some off Walter Johnson. I love this game because it is, though part of their life now, still historical—it centers and decenters all at once, and for the price of a pack of baseball cards.

The other day we wandered over to Alex's—Olivia on her scooter; Luke has now “outgrown” his—and Luke bought a pack. He asked Olivia to kiss the pack for luck, and then he opened it.

He paused. “Dad, this is the kind of thing that only happens to me in my dreams,” he said seriously, and he showed me what, or rather whom, he had in the pack: Willie McCovey, the great San Francisco Giants first baseman of the sixties. Apparently, McCovey, more than even better-known players, is hugely valuable within the game.

Luke had a good sense of McCovey's “icons,” his particular status within the game, but only the most shadowy idea of who McCovey actually was, obviously, and I took delight in telling him the little I could remember, pretending that that little was more than it was. He listened seriously, with a real edge of respect for a past that reaches into the present: Who Willie McCovey was matters for who Willie McCovey is, for what he is worth in the game.

Then an odd thing happened. Every day Luke would come home from school with a kind of offer sheet for his McCovey card. “Dad, what if I traded McCovey for Bob Gibson?” he would ask over dinner, his face betraying only the slightest sign of deliberate taunting, of complicity in teasing Dad. “You'd be crazy,” I would say flatly. The next night: “Dad—Daniel offered me Whitey Ford for him.” I tried to distinguish between my own knowledge of the relative value of these ballplayers and their represented value on the face of the cards. I tried to be sage. But I didn't want him to trade the McCovey card. Every morning I would drop him off at school and cry out inwardly:
Don't trade the McCovey card!

I don't know why it mattered to me. “You're going to be trading steak for hamburger!” I would warn him when he came home with a particularly lowball offer. But the truth was that, so far as I could see, some of the offers—Gibson for Willie, Ford for Willie—were pretty decent. I could sense that the card was burning a hole in his pocket—that possessing it was, perversely, urging him to surrender it, transform
it, abandon it. It was, I suppose, a dream come true, and the only thing to do with a dream come true is give it up, so another dream can take its place. (Proust got a whole book out of this idea.)

Why did it matter to
me,
though? After all, one card or another … it's his game, I told myself relentlessly. It was, I came at last to understand, because the serendipity of the purchase of the card at Alex's was a marker in our own relationship, our own friendship, beginning to change, properly, with the passing years. We had bought it together, and I wanted it for us. If it became currency in his game of peer-group rivals—which is what it ought to be—then it was no longer a significant object in our history of father-son pleasures. This had occurred to him, too, or at least been sensed by him, driving him in just the opposite direction.

I came home from the office one day, and he was waiting for me by the door, a guilty smile on his face. “Dad, I traded the McCovey card today,” he said, smiling but firm.

“What did you get for it?” I asked weakly, sadly.

He showed me: Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra, and a throw-in member of the 1959 White Sox, Luis Aparicio. It was a pretty good haul of old ballplayers, I had to admit. Well, each man kills the thing he loves, and each nine-year-old has to trade his McCovey card. The cards are a way out into the adult world of exchange and judgment, of deceit and enterprise; they are there, above all, to be traded. Once the card is put in circulation, it is no longer his—but it is no longer mine, either. Parenting, however hard we discipline our hearts to make our children independent, involves an assertion of ownership; baseball cards, like money and desire, are a medium of exchange.

W
hen we had another no-screen sleepover the other weekend, I walked into Luke's room and was annoyed to find the boys huddled over the computer. “It's okay, Dad,” Luke said with winning innocence. “We're writing a screenplay.”

They were, too—a story called “The New Finding,” a sequel to
The Lord of the Rings.
They let me read a few pages. It was pretty clever, a transposition of Tolkien into Manhattan.

And what could we say? That they alone could not enter into the great gamble, the permanent game, of screenplay writing, into which all their parents would sooner or later plunge, as Mexican peasants plunge into the lottery, knowing the odds but dreaming of the jackpot? How could we forbid them that?

Considering the maze of screens and cards and pages, I ended up at last with a bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion: It is not that we want them free of screens, really. It is that we want them to be screen producers rather than screen consumers. We say that we don't want them enslaved to screens, but what we really want is for them to enslave other people to them. We want them to be Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg—feudal screen lords rather than mere screen peasants, screen serfs. We do not mind if they play games, so long as they grow up to write the software. We will leave them alone for a weekend to write their screenplay, even if they have to huddle over a screen to do it.

T
he New York Mafia season passed with the coming of summer, when the players scattered, and then re-formed with the autumn. The game went on, but we noticed that the circle of players had altered slightly; there were certain couples whom we decided not to ask back to play with us—they were too loud, or too dull, or too unskilled—and then we noticed that certain other people, with whom we had played in the spring, were no longer playing—at least they must have given up the game, since we were not invited to their houses to play. Funny, that they lost interest …

And then it dawned on us: The game of Mafia we play at night is a ruse, a red herring, the game that conceals the real game. The real game of Mafia is the game of who asks whom back to play the game again. The apparent game of playacting and pretend death is just a subsystem, orbiting within the larger game not of pretend death but of brutally real social inclusion and exclusion. Over the Chinese takeout, murderous social judgments are being made: They're no fun, they're too giddy, they're too flat, they're too shrill. Silently, in the middle of the night in our Sicilian village—the real Sicilian village of New York, where the work of conspiracy is accomplished by cell-phone calls and
e-mails—someone is being murdered and dropped right out of the game, the social circle, while others are being left to live. The real killers are an amorphous and self-appointed but fatal small inner circle within the larger innocent circle of players. A Mafia! One morning you wake up dead, though you don't know it until weeks go by and you realize that you have not been invited to the next game. You thought they were your friends, but they now turn out to be, well, Mafia. We are complicit in these murders, of course, as we, too, include and exclude, reinforcing our own circle. There is not one true Mafia, we realize, but several, Five Families, each whacking members of the other ones. The real “night” is the week's interval between games; the real murders the dropping off of friends; and the real God—well, there is no God, really.

On Thanksgiving, after the meal, with many friends we played Mafia because the children wanted us to; they are envious of our game-playing evenings out, the only thing we do without them. But the game feels rote in the absence of near-strangers with whom we can bond and break. That new game had decentered us as we want the old games to decenter the children; it left us reeling, just a little, with a usefully punctured ego. To have been killed, and by those people, too—to have been judged, so unfairly, as dull as all those others who deserved it! But then we have killed, we know, and just as cruelly, those friends on whom our social disdain has somehow landed, who could not have known that we would never ask them back. We were at the center, and now we are not. We have turned on our friends, and our friends have turned on us. We
are
a Mafia, after all, and more murderous than we pretend.

W
hen our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so many larger elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock's
Vertigo
—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

To begin with, Bluie, as his name suggests, was not actually a goldfish. He was a betta, a goldfish-size fish that the people in pet stores encourage you to buy in place of the tetchy and sickly true Asian goldfish. The betta is a handsome fish, with long, sweeping fins. It can be red or black or violet or blue, and it is, at least according to the pet-store people, the Vietcong of pet fish, evolved in rugged isolation in the rice-paddy puddles of Indochina and just about impossible to kill off. The only drawback is that male bettas fight with one another and have to be kept apart. It is not surprising these days to see a pair of them on a child's dresser in Manhattan, held in separate containers, in a kind of glass-bowl parody of the co-op apartment building that surrounds them, each fish furiously pacing its cubic foot of space and waiting for the other to turn up the stereo.

And then, in a deeper, damper sense, Bluie was not really a fish at all. He was, like so many New York fish and mice and turtles, a placeholder for other animals that the children would have preferred to have as pets, but which allergies and age and sheer self-preservation have kept their parents from buying. Olivia and her ten-year-old brother, Luke, desperately want a dog, and at Christmas Olivia
brought the class hamster, Hamu, home from her preschool as an experiment in pet-keeping. Hamu stayed with us for a mostly happy, if sometimes jittery, holiday week, and we reluctantly agreed to add a hamster to the family.

We went to the second floor of PETCO, the mallish store on East Eighty-sixth Street, where all the rodents are kept together—rats and mice and guinea pigs and hamsters and gerbils. Looking at them, Martha had a foreboding sense of what Darwin must have felt, looking at the Galápagos finches: that these things were not nearly so distinct as they had been trying to make you believe. A hamster and a guinea pig and a gerbil are all rats, and the differences, tails and no tails, cute noses and not, are really bells and whistles, niche-marketing gimmicks. Having spent twenty-five years of her New York life struggling to keep rodents out, Martha couldn't see spending time and money to bring one in.