Fathermucker (14 page)

As an anthem for the stay-at-home dad, you could do worse.

S
TACY IS THE MARKETING MANAGER FOR ONE OF
IBM'
S SOFTWARE
products. I should probably know which product it is, since my wife is in charge of its promotion, and my ignorance of such a basic piece of information does not speak well of her faculties in that regard, but the name keeps changing, and the departments keep shifting, and there are so many mergers and acquisitions and staff reductions that it's difficult for me to keep track. In my defense, she rarely talks about work. Big Blue has been good to her, she likes what she does well enough, and she's made some decent friends in the office, but it's hardly her life's calling.

She's uncomfortable with “marketing manager” as her primary social identity; when conversationally challenged guests ask her at parties what she does for work—the grown-up equivalent of
What's your major
—she visibly deflates. Sure, she can explain that she's a classically trained actress who works at IBM to make ends meet, but is that really what the partygoer is after? And why should she, or anyone else, have to justify her existence because some schmuck has no imagination, no gift for gab?

We were watching this Bill Hicks video last year, and the late comic greets the audience with, “Does anybody here work in marketing?” and to the sources of the scattered applause in the live audience, he deadpans, “Please kill yourself now.” I don't think I've ever seen Stacy laugh like that. She howled so hard she wept. I mean, she
crossed over
. Tears were streaming down her face, her cheeks glistening with the changing colors of the TV lights.

During the Oscars, when Hilary Swank and Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet snivel and gasp for composure and neglect to thank their husbands, an awkward silence passes between Stacy and me. Although the subject is never broached—hence the pause—we both know damn well that Stacy belongs in that city, at that auditorium, on that stage, buckling under the bald statue's shiny encumbrance, resplendent in a designer gown that would charm the editors of
Us Weekly
, basking in earnest applause and the warm glow of affection from her peers, her esteemed colleagues in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and not in an upstate outpost with two needy preschoolers, an unemployed husband (stay-at-home moms are
homemakers
; stay-at-home dads are
lollygaggers
), a salaried position at International Business Machines, and nary a role in a community theater production to her credit in the seven years since she last graced the stage, in a lamentable off-Broadway production of
Taming of the Shrew
. Catering, auditioning, catering, auditioning, cateringauditioningcatering-auditioning—the acting cycle was killing her, the IBM gig fell into her lap, she jumped and never looked back. That's the party line, anyway, but what is left unspoken . . .

Reese Witherspoon
, she'll snipe during the Oscar telecast,
has an enormous chin
. That's as close as she comes to giving voice to her justified bitterness (unless someone mistakes her for Mary-Louise Parker, that is; but that's a whole other ball of Madame Toussaud's wax), but it's there. It's there. How could it not be?

The actor's road makes for difficult hoeing because acting is such a dependent art form. Actors need directors, they need writers, they need make-up artists and costumers and set and lighting designers, they need performance spaces, they need box offices and ticket sellers, they need audiences. What do I require? A laptop and Final Draft. If my script becomes a movie
if my bill becomes a law
, of course, many more dashes of spice will be added to the cinematic Bloody Mary before it is served with the requisite celery garnish to the moviegoing public. By then, though, the heavy lifting is done. The money is in the bank.
Babylon Is Fallen
, original screenplay by Josh Lansky. Optioned by the Freeland Group for three-quarters of a million dollars, which sounds like a lot of clams until you realize that you only get the whole pot if they
opt
to make the picture. Hence
option
. Like a non-guaranteed contract in the NFL. Sounds great on paper, but the real number is ten percent of the option. Seventy-five grand up front
money from the sky, manna from heaven
less the agent's cut and the tax hit, and what you're left with is just enough scratch to put a down payment on a house upstate, pay the movers, and buy some furniture. Then you're up here, and back to Square One. You've moved Square One ninety miles up the river, basically. Meanwhile the script gathers dust in some Hollywood vault, like an ancient relic, the Maltese Falcon, the Shroud of Turin . . . no, it's not as special as all that . . . like one more ducat on the corpulent dragon's swollen horde. Six years and counting in that gilded tomb, and I don't think it will ever see the (green) light of day. Optioned? Rendered unto Caesar. I've written two more scripts since then—
Quid Pro Quo
, a thriller about a crooked employment agency, and
Coronation
, a rom-com about three disparate candidates running for the office of county coroner—but the last two years have yielded nothing but the insipid vampire project, which I didn't even bother finishing. Writer's block seems to be a by-product of fatherhood.

And here we are. Back at Square One—or Square One-A, I suppose. In bluer-than-blue New Paltz, New York, home of Mohonk Mountain House, historic Huguenot Street, and more massage therapists, per capita, than anyplace else on the planet.

Maude is snoring, her breaths almost in time to the steady snare drum. I'm on North Putt now, driving past Woodland Pond, the massive assisted living place that opened six weeks ago. During the past year, every senior citizen in town has put a house up for sale, it seems, glutting the market with excess inventory just in time for property values to plummet by twenty percent. Shitty timing, really. Two years ago, their Village shoeboxes were worth almost four hundred large. No more. A sucky time to retire: shrunken 401(k)s, shriveled pensions, hollowed husks of real estate paydays. The poor fuckers. But then, I'd have more sympathy for them if they didn't keep voting down the school budget.

When we moved here, we were city transplants, with a colicky baby and two cats. I left my benefits job at News Corp., and after a few harried months of maternity leave, Stacy returned to work at IBM, this time in the Poughkeepsie office. Slowly but surely, we accumulated a circle of friends, all of them the parents of similarly aged children, most befriended by Stacy during her second pregnancy and leave of absence. That's who we see socially: Stacy's mommy friends and their (generally blah) husbands. Which puts me in the somewhat ghostly position of being one remove from the action. I know all of the Divine Secrets of the Ma-Ma Sisterhood—the salacious details of Gloria's adventures in polyamory, of Ruth Terry's bisexual forays, of Meg's habit of swapping nude photos with well-hung black guys via a secret Hotmail account—but all of this dirt comes from Stacy.
This place
, she'll say as she slings the gossip.
The more you dig, the more you find
. I don't know if Gloria or Ruth Terry or even Meg knows how much I'm privy to, so I don't bring any of it up. I play dumb. I'm already at a distance, as the only guy in the group, and this illicit harboring of secrets forces me to be even more aloof.

Five years upstate, and I'm a stranger here. I may as well be walking the streets of Skopje or Baku or Košice, lost and alone
he doesn't speak the language he holds no currency
, an expat, an exile, a man without a country. This is my own fault, I realize. The energy needed to cultivate new friendships, to get to know people, to establish an identity apart from sad-sack SAHD, is beyond what I'm able to muster. As with the planning of Stacy's bathetic birthday, I just don't have it in me. I'm too fucking
tired
, too beaten down. When the phone rings, it's almost always for Stacy, and when it's for me, it's either my mother or my sister. Pathetic.

Not that I can complain. I signed up for this, when I agreed—heck, when I
lobbied
—for us to leave New York, to quit my suck-ass job (which in retrospect seems not so suck-ass), to abandon my friends, to decamp even farther away from my family, from my comfort zone. My exile is self-imposed, and necessary. And yet I miss my old life. I miss my friends. I miss my sister. I even miss my mom. They all think,
He's busy; I don't want to bother him; he'll invite us for a visit when he wants to see us.
Not so! What I want is for
them
to take the initiative, to call me up and say, “Josh, I need to see you, I'm coming up, and I won't take no for an answer.” I want someone else to take the lead, because I don't have the giddy-up to do it myself. But no one does. Instead, my friends pull away. The relationships fester—it depresses me, when I think about it, so I try not to—leaving me alone
he is a foreign man
, a stranger in a strange land. I observe, I take note, but I do not engage. Easier that way.

And what a spectacle!
The more you dig, the more you find.
Enough drama for a reality show:
The Real Housewives of Ulster County.
The relationships overlap and blur together like a Seussian fever dream, an X-rated
One Fish Two Fish,
until a grand design can be read into the nonsense.
From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.
Begin with Bruce Baldwin, the muscle-bound personal trainer at Ignite Fitness, and his affair with Cynthia Pardo. This is not a quiet, discreet, Don Draperian sort of arrangement; everyone in New Paltz knows about it, because Cynthia Pardo has a big mouth (“She could deep-throat Seattle Slew,” as Meg so colorfully put it),
one fish two fish red fish blue . . . Bruce Baldwin
and because, as the Dia:Beacon incident demonstrated, they have eschewed lovemaking in the relative privacy of motel rooms on 9W for boisterous romps in public places within biking distance of their houses—
we see them come we see them go
the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, the old stone houses, the hiking paths at Lake Minnewaska, unlocked bathrooms at various watering holes. Plus, everyone knows who Cynthia Pardo is, even if they don't know her; as a broker with Coldwell Banker
Oh! What a house!
, her comely visage smiles at you from
FOR SALE
signs on every third yard in town. She sold us our house, in fact, although we didn't meet her socially until later. Cynthia is married (for the time being) to Peter Berliner, a manager at Ulster Savings and, as I said, a nice guy, if something of a schlemiel
a Wump with just one hump
. They have three kids—a son in fourth grade; a daughter in second; and a five-year-old, Ernest, a high-functioning autistic who, like Roland, gets services at Thornwood. Peter Berliner is an avid bowler
I like to bowl how I like to bowl
. His top score is 285. He's a fixture at HoeBowl in Kingston, a legend of the local leagues. Meg's husband, Soren, also bowls, not avidly, but enough to have formed a friendship of convenience (that is, another guy with whom to have the odd beer and take in the occasional movie; what in Hollywood is called a
bromance
) with Berliner, who happens to live on Cherry Hill Road, a few houses down from Meg and Soren. Meg and Cynthia are BFFs—or were, until the latter's affair with Bruce
and some are very very bad
, a New Paltz native and Meg's date to a senior prom from hell (she thought about pressing charges; things got that ugly)—put a strain on the relationship. I struck up a friendship with Meg, as mentioned, in the waiting room of the Barefoot Dance Center, where I enrolled the kids at the suggestion of Gloria Hynek, whom we met through Catherine DiLullo, our doula for Maude. Cathy's husband
we like our
Mike has a thriving acupuncture practice (New Paltz is renowned for its healing arts). We saw a lot of Mike and Cathy when we first moved here, but they sort of fell off the grid when they adopted two children from Ethiopia to complement the two they'd already adopted from China. Mike DiLullo is part of an informal clique that meets for drinks every week or two (usually at the Gilded Otter, a brew pub), a group that also includes Jen Hemsworth, who left her husband and her two young children
I do not like this bed at all
to live with her lover, also named Jen, a nineteen-year-old student at Bard College; Paul Feeney, a goateed graphic artist whose “art” hangs in coffee houses, and whose slatternly ex-wife Felicia hangs in wine bars, all over the Hudson Valley; Ruth Terry, who had an affair with her au pair (an
au fair
?) Gretchen, a twenty-year-old from Austria with enormous boobs, only to send the poor girl packing when it ended in tears
all I like to do is hop from girl to bop to girl to bop
, which didn't stop her from putting the moves on the next one, who was flat-chested and from Colombia; and the ubiquitous Cynthia Pardo
not one of them is like another
. Meg used to hang out with the group, too, until Cynthia started up with Bruce, precipitating their falling out. Gloria, like Meg and Ruth and Jen Hemsworth and more married mothers than you can shake a stick at, also splashes around in the same-sex kiddie pool
hop hop hop,
although she primarily schtoops guys (including Paul Feeney
jump on the hump of the Wump of Gump
, one of her regulars) with the full consent of her husband and Haven's father, Dennis, an attorney at a Poughkeepsie law firm. Dennis doesn't care, though; it turns him on to see other men and women have at his wife
at our house we play out back
—some dudes are into that, apparently; it's kind of a thing—sometimes, he even finds lovers for her. Gloria spends a few nights a week at Paul Feeney's house, although they tell Haven she's away on business (even though she doesn't have a job), because they want to keep their son's home life as normal as possible—an uphill battle, given Gloria's inability to keep anything secret: the nature of her
if you never did you should
genital piercings, the battery-powered accoutrements of her
these things are fun
and fun is good
experimentation-crazed sex life, the cock-size of her numerous paramours
I wish I had eleven too
and whether or not they are “cut.” In addition to practicing law and complacent cuckoldry, Dennis (seven meaty inches; mushroom head) plays bass in a (beyond lousy; off-the-charts bad) cover band called String Cheese; Paul Feeney is the drummer (which must get awkward, I'd imagine), but the band's front man and driving force
my Ying can sing like anything
, Chris, is Jess Holby's husband. Chris teaches at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, but his wife does the cooking at home
and I get fish right on my dish
. The Holbys have not, to the best of my knowledge, cheated on each other, although in this place, nothing would surprise me
and some are slow
. Dennis and Chris know each other through their wives, who were freshman-year roommates at Skidmore College. The String Cheese keyboard player—an important member, as their repertoire is heavy on pre–
Glass Houses
Billy Joel
we are not too bad you know
—Ken, is a science teacher at Rondout Valley High, whose own marriage ended a few years back when he was caught in the marital bed
I will sleep with my pet Zeep
with his personal trainer at Ignite Fitness, none other than—ta da!—Bruce Baldwin. And thus the circle of incestuous sex fiends comes full circle.