I Will Do Better, page 8
Lily is withdrawing from the class, effective immediately.
Two of the three March sessions were canceled on short notice, so we’ve only had one class in March. You can send me a revised bill for that class. Otherwise we should be fine on the balance.
Thank you for all of your help. I am sure we will take more classes at Third Street. Ms. XXXX is a wonderful teacher and a lovely lady. In no way is our withdrawing a reflection of her as a teacher, or her skill, or personality. It is just too hard for me to get Lily to class and also to practice at home. It’s affecting our relationship in an adverse way and I think it’s better that I find some other activity for her right now.
Again, I believe her relationship with music will change as she gets older, and I am sure we will be around third street more.
Thank you once again for your time.
Charles Bock
Sent via telekinesis.
WINTER’S APEX: AFTERNOON sky the color of filthy snow, Lily off being educated about how many sides are in a square. I was at my writing space, not actually writing, not so much, basically distracting myself, enmeshed in the pleasures of Mark Yarm’s Everyone Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. I was right in the middle of a chapter, its subject the short-lived, influential Seattle band Mother Love Bone (members went on to be in Temple of the Dog and Soundgarden). Their lead singer, Andy Wood, had passed from a heroin overdose, just a few months before the band’s debut album was going to be released. The singer’s significant other—a woman named Xana La Fuente—was expounding upon her grief, as well as her subsequent run of sexual partners. La Fuente explained that sex was part of grief, as sex represented the urge to live.
I read that and had to put down the paperback, its truth resonating through me: the need to be touched, to be consoled and likewise soothe, to let loose in a manner that simultaneously brings pleasure and achieves release.
Diana had wanted me to wait a year before dating again. This made sense, in theory. But an abstinent year was a long haul in real time, especially considering my previous two and a half years, which, as you might guess, had been hugely sad and exhausting, and during which—for reasons that also are apparent—I hadn’t had any sex. Throw onto that another year, the time following Lily’s birth, including the final months of Diana’s pregnancy. (Yes, doulas contend that the late pregnancy can be a time when expectant mothers, jacked with hormones, are eager to get down; nonetheless, our home still had not been any kind of cornucopia of erotic offerings.)
I’d survived six months before taking off my wedding ring, replacing it by tattooing, onto my ring finger, the two symbols—an ohm sign and a heart—from the front of Diana’s final diary. Another month had passed before I ventured onto a website that not only rated, but provided contact info for sex workers. (Five hundred dollars a pop, the going rate, was both prohibitive and ridiculous.)
Diana and I had married before internet dating took off. Since then, I’d been like every other locked-down, married man on the spinning globe in that I’d followed the rise of this proverbial new Eden from the other side of the plexiglass window. My limited understanding remained that, in this new reality, women had grown empowered and now felt comfortable claiming their orgasms, often while taking selfies. Filthy texts and cock shots weren’t just expected, but required elements of courtship. It was every hetero man’s fantasy, the pornographic dream that had started as a pubescent and continued throughout adulthood. It might actually be possible to click, meet a girl, have sex, click again, and meet another girl—and that you might endlessly repeat this cycle.
Only we’d moved beyond the realm of fantasy.
Meanwhile, I was firmly in a time of life where you look in the mirror and see deterioration, where a man objectively wonders whether any more real live women will be willing to get naked for him—without a bouncer present—ever again.
I didn’t want a girlfriend; that was a no-brainer. I didn’t possess the time or mental energy to be seriously interested in anyone. Diana used to indulge all my idiotic rock preferences, my bizarre fandoms; she’d read countless drafts of my doorstop of a novel, showed concern for me if my face was too gaunt, when I was chained too long to my desk without deodorant. She also stepped up, when she had to, and challenged me about my antisocial inclinations, and just how we were supposed to make our way in the real world until the doorstop was finished. No problem getting one of her friends to find me work at a tabloid newspaper. At the end of the night we walked my dog together, watched rented movies on the couch, engaged in the deep conversational good shit that comes with true emotional intimacy. I couldn’t imagine the brick-by-brick reconstruction of all that. And as for introducing some imaginary girlfriend for Lily …
Real talk: I was nowhere near ready.
All of which is why, amid that winter’s festive cornucopia—snow angels with the depth of shallow graves, half-molten snowmen in heroin leans, make-believe friends playing dress-up, sung lyrics to musicals that did not exist—with my body basically rehabilitated and Lily sort of safely accounted for, I apologized to my deceased wife: so many things I wished were different. And in the middle of this random weekday afternoon, I typed out the registration info, thereby dipping my figurative toe into the pulsing, virtual cesspool known as AshleyMadison.com, a website whose members were married but were seeking sex outside that marriage. Yeah, Ashley Madison seemed tailor-made for me.
RETURNING FROM A trip to the bathroom; discreetly flipping away from my writing program’s window; switching tabs and logging back in—for a discovery. A response. Electricity shot through me. Someone was interested, and not just any someone. Late twenties, looked like. Winking profile, flirtatious. I sent what I hoped was a well-crafted greeting, one that conveyed proper enthusiasm, hopefully even a spark of cleverness: “Okay. Your photos just blew my mind straight through my brain.” Within ten minutes I got an answer: “{/:” and followed up, volleyed, worked my way into: Maybe she wanted to chat? “URCute” was her response. “I’m def interested. Only thing. I’ve had problems w/ stalkers. AshMad won’t do anything. For my safety, could you just register at this site.” She included a link, apologized for the small sign-up fee. I stopped corresponding, kept getting follow-ups, “UR so sexy. Just register alreddy so we can have fun.” At which point I realized: I was not chatting with a person but some kind of bot.
Reader, even this felt like progress—maybe not success, not a date, but something happening, or almost happening. Fact is, the greater majority of my attempts had been going straight into the ether, had been ignored, or had been brutally shot down—by fucking adulterers, of all people. One time I got catfished and eventually discovered I was dealing with an online prostitute, a woman who was obviously insane, on meth, and out of my price range. This still didn’t stop me: I was a starving man in a dumpster, and though I didn’t make an appointment with the overpriced catfish, I nonetheless kept on dumpster diving, adjusting my profile in between tough paragraphs at my writing space, sending texts while watching the kid attempt backbends in her courtyard.
An aging party girl kept posting shots of empty Hamptons beaches. She was couch surfing through the offseason; we had a few great chats; I thought I had a shot. In certain terms, she let me know she was looking to land a hedge fund hubby. An executive at a catering service had no problem meeting for afternoon tea. We made out around the corner from her subway stop, but she was not looking to ruin her Upper West Side family, certainly not to risk a fling. (There was no second meeting.) I had lunch with a lovely sad Yemeni woman, in her mid-thirties, whose high-powered husband was never around. During our conversation, I reached beneath the table, touched her stockinged knee, and pressed. The flash that took her, that connected us, was tangible, her desire suddenly electric. She was exotic, a platinum blonde, dark skinned. She wore a prim white jacket. Her face was just as it had been five seconds earlier; at the same time, it was transformed, near tears, simultaneously frightened and so erotic as to be paralyzing. We still had our orders coming. Neither of us knew what was next. We kept chatting. By the time our meal ended, it was clear the moment had passed, her desires were going to stay bottled—at least, with me.
A nice woman was stuck on Long Island, trapped in an open marriage. She’d rather have been locked down and happy, and she was pissed at Hubby, looking for retribution. We exchanged a few emails, ended up walking along the High Line. Oblivious to the chilled afternoon, I asked if she wanted ice cream. (A go-to move. One of my friend’s teen years had been spent pulling tourists in a rickshaw around the beaches of Oahu, Hawaii. Afterward, he’d tell the single women he knew where to get the best ice cream on the island.) Ice cream was innocent, reaching back into childhood. Ice cream also was creamy, melting on the tongue.
I bought this lovely unhappy woman a cup of chocolate mint and talked her into going to the last hourly hotel in Chelsea. Our kisses were heated. My first time having sex since my marriage. Every second felt foreign, wrong, and at the same time sacred. Afterwards, she sent an affectionate email. I replied with warmth. That was the only time we met.
LOOKING BACK, I see that I worked hard to listen to Dr. Melfi’s assurance: “You cannot ruin this child.” I tried to take value in her words, to will her truth into action, in one breath fretting, cursing, clenching my fists until my knuckles were white; in the next, believing in Lily’s strength, unclenching, breathing, letting our lives just move forward without eruption, with something that might have resembled faith.
Daddy wiped under his daughter’s fingernails to get out all of the watercolor paint. When Lily turned without a second thought, Daddy watched her trot away, toward new fun. Daddy picked up the glass of dirty water, wiped paint off the table surface.
Daddy stood outside the woman’s bathroom at the puppet show, apologized to a woman who was on her way in. “Could you do me a favor? Just check on my daughter. Her name is Lily.”
“No, Daddy cannot come and help play with your dollies right now,” I said. “He has to keep lying on the couch to keep it from flying up to the ceiling.”
Lily, delighted: “Daddy, the couch does not fly.”
Lily shouting out Muppet gibberish with me, rolling balls of cookie dough for the oven pan. Here she was, standing on my feet at the edge of our little kitchen, the two of us contradicting each other over whose turn it was to lick the remains of the frosting mix from off the bowl. (I will spare you any suspense: it was always her turn.)
Then she was in our bathroom, finishing on the potty, and was playing, unspooling the toilet paper roll, and somehow locked herself in, and I had to put my shoulder through the flimsy door, and Lily screamed and cried. Who wouldn’t?
We were in the West Village playground, near my sister’s apartment. Lily had her legs hooked on the bottom rung of some protective fence bars; she was hanging on to the top bars, and for no discernible reason decided to let go. I was sitting, like, six inches away on a bench, and actually saw this happen, her actions making no sense to me, disagreeing with all logic, I even had enough time to think, What are you— Then her head plummeted, and the rest of her body followed along, swinging as if on a hinge, the back of her skull banging against the pavement, its impact sickening. In the emergency room specifically for children, we were put through to an exam room, and as we waited for a doctor, gradually Lily’s howls petered out into whimpers, and her whimpers ebbed and then picked back up, a bit, and she swung a little bit around on the doctor’s chair, and I helped her climb up onto the exam table, and she crinkled the thin paper, and since the room was legit frigid, I found a blanket, and she wrapped herself like a little burrito. When I was done with my half-hearted attempt to eat her face, I took out whatever coins I had, explaining the value of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. An hour or so like that, minimum progress on the money front, but wasn’t that part of it, the point of these waiting rooms—especially when it’s not a life-or-death situation— the boredom, taking the edge off, seeping away at her fear? And when it came time for her sutures, Lily followed my instructions, shut her eyes, reached for the safety of my hand, gave a big, hard squeeze.
But we also had my longtime friend Terri Jay Cello dropping in, purchasing not one but two full-length puffy winter coats for Lily! We had another buddy, Kashmir, hauling his kids to our house and forcing them to act out scenes from The Sound of Music with her! That well-meaning married couple from my writing space who started popping in for Saturday night visits, doing a kind of soft rehearsal for their own attempts at parenting, whisking Lily off to a coffee shop for burgers and board games and ice cream! Another guy I’d traded sarcasms with on a long-ago part-time job welcomed us into his home for dinner! Still another writer, cleaning her closet, sent packages of clothes her daughter had outgrown! What basically amounted to reinforcements, thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for these good people, and more than I can list here: they kept me from blowing my brains out, seriously they did. And, reader, it is no exaggeration to say, I resented every single one of those motherfuckers.
A YOUNGISH BARISTA met me at some other ice cream parlor in the West Village. Underneath slovenly clothes she hid the promise of legendary breasts. She had been a chess prodigy, competitive into her teen years, but still wasn’t recovered from flaming out, and was on so much depression medication that she could not come. I took this explanation as a challenge, and tried to conquer science by lifting her atop a chest of drawers. The wooden fixture banged repeatedly against the walls of our cheap art hotel; afterward, she asked if we could start having lunches. Eat good food. Maybe talk before our trysts.
That was it for her.
SEX WAS A significant part of what these women were searching for. I see this now. I also understand they had not been receiving emotional intimacy from their husbands, no exciting sparks from the people in their lives, no needed embraces from the outside world. Ashley Madison promised they could be wanted, mooned over, valued as womanly, sexual beings without throwing away the lives they’d built. And they also got to embark on something new, which is always a thrill—to define (or redefine) themselves for someone new, to flirt, be worthwhile in new eyes, explore new attractions: they got a secret.
Granted, recognizing all this, especially in retrospect, is not quantum physics. Still, when it was happening, if you’d read those previous sentences to me, I would have nodded, Right. Then, boom, emotional intimacy would have been one more tool, something I had to provide, promise, or feign. “The secret of success is sincerity,” goes the famed quote attributed to forgotten playwright Jean Giraudoux. “Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
A close friend once confided that, during stretches of life where she was having sex, she walked differently than if she wasn’t. Her statement acknowledges the innate. You just feel better when you’re getting off, when you’re getting someone else off.
As for responsibility for fostering those emotional attachments? Owning up to any expectations I’d nurtured? I didn’t have the emotional space. Lily dominated my radar screen.
That is what I told myself.
AS IF ON cue:
“I want to grind,” she said.
“You can’t grind,” I answered.
“But I want to grind.”
My little girl, my Lilisita Mon Amita, positioned against the corner of the small white table that acted as her desk, was thrusting without compunction or self-consciousness. Two feet away, her godmother stared, slack-jawed. Over to take Lily out for dinner, Susannah had been chitchatting with me about how much she didn’t enjoy a particular consulting job. Eyes then went wide, the conversation stopping.
A child’s sexuality is a delicate subject, obviously. But wasn’t it supposed to be her teen years that this minefield would detonate, exploding upon both Lily and me?
To have this now? Really?
Susannah mumbled something. I started punching at my phone. Parenting sites agreed: grinding was appropriate for a girl that age.
“Go in the bedroom if you need to.”
Lily dutifully dismounted, scampered off.
I looked at Susannah, shrugged. What am I supposed to do?
I WAS SUPPOSED to apply enough attention, insight, and precision to my edits of fifteen homework essays that my intermediate fiction students would be able to unlock the myriad nuclear truths that lay inside those dormant passages. I was supposed to be firm with the pesky creditor and convey that what they had labeled a generous offer—me paying thirty cents on the dollar—was mistaken, as my name, in fact, had not been on Diana’s grad school health insurance policy, meaning I was not legally responsible for the expenses on the bills they kept hounding me about, so they could go inhale a big bag of walrus asshole. I was supposed to get stamps, send out checks, keep good shit like electricity from being disconnected. I was supposed to return a weird query about teaching a graduate-level workshop online. Make up a blurb for a book I gave up on around chapter three. I was supposed to get to the Fourteenth Street Trader Joe’s for groceries during that twenty-three-minute sweet spot that exists right after the senior citizens have done their weekly shopping but before the college kids have woken up and figured out they need supplies for their weekend. Handle paperwork for Lily’s pre-K field trip on the Staten Island Ferry. Send an email to my therapist with my insurer’s out-of-network code for psychological services. I was supposed to finally check in on my parents and then call my sister back to let her know I’d done as much. Scale to level four of Laundry Mountain. Lily was at Third Street, so the onus was on me.
Whatever else I was supposed to be doing, it was also unavoidably true: if I wasn’t heading toward the page count that got me the next installment of my advance, then I was moving us toward bankruptcy, toward homelessness. It weighed on me. Even meeting friends for lunch felt sketchy.
Unless, of course, it was Terri Jay Cello.
We’d met at an arts colony—I’d been working on my first book, she’d taken a leave from her office gig to finish an orchestral composition—and through this past, Jesus, this past decade, her benevolence toward me had been, by any rational account, astonishing. It had started with her illegally subletting that Gramercy apartment to me after she’d married and moved to Brooklyn. When the management company discovered our deception and started eviction procedures, Terri Jay convinced them to transfer the lease (telling me, before we all met to sign contracts, “Don’t speak”). If this wasn’t enough, after I’d finished a final draft of my book, Terri Jay snuck me into her place of employment after business hours and we used their printers, Xeroxed the manuscript, and sent the copies off to agents. She was one of the people who helped organize a fundraiser that absorbed Diana’s medical costs, was bedside with Diana during those last days. Basically, Terri Jay Cello was my guardian angel, one of the few people I felt safe with, to whom I could confide without reservation.
Two of the three March sessions were canceled on short notice, so we’ve only had one class in March. You can send me a revised bill for that class. Otherwise we should be fine on the balance.
Thank you for all of your help. I am sure we will take more classes at Third Street. Ms. XXXX is a wonderful teacher and a lovely lady. In no way is our withdrawing a reflection of her as a teacher, or her skill, or personality. It is just too hard for me to get Lily to class and also to practice at home. It’s affecting our relationship in an adverse way and I think it’s better that I find some other activity for her right now.
Again, I believe her relationship with music will change as she gets older, and I am sure we will be around third street more.
Thank you once again for your time.
Charles Bock
Sent via telekinesis.
WINTER’S APEX: AFTERNOON sky the color of filthy snow, Lily off being educated about how many sides are in a square. I was at my writing space, not actually writing, not so much, basically distracting myself, enmeshed in the pleasures of Mark Yarm’s Everyone Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. I was right in the middle of a chapter, its subject the short-lived, influential Seattle band Mother Love Bone (members went on to be in Temple of the Dog and Soundgarden). Their lead singer, Andy Wood, had passed from a heroin overdose, just a few months before the band’s debut album was going to be released. The singer’s significant other—a woman named Xana La Fuente—was expounding upon her grief, as well as her subsequent run of sexual partners. La Fuente explained that sex was part of grief, as sex represented the urge to live.
I read that and had to put down the paperback, its truth resonating through me: the need to be touched, to be consoled and likewise soothe, to let loose in a manner that simultaneously brings pleasure and achieves release.
Diana had wanted me to wait a year before dating again. This made sense, in theory. But an abstinent year was a long haul in real time, especially considering my previous two and a half years, which, as you might guess, had been hugely sad and exhausting, and during which—for reasons that also are apparent—I hadn’t had any sex. Throw onto that another year, the time following Lily’s birth, including the final months of Diana’s pregnancy. (Yes, doulas contend that the late pregnancy can be a time when expectant mothers, jacked with hormones, are eager to get down; nonetheless, our home still had not been any kind of cornucopia of erotic offerings.)
I’d survived six months before taking off my wedding ring, replacing it by tattooing, onto my ring finger, the two symbols—an ohm sign and a heart—from the front of Diana’s final diary. Another month had passed before I ventured onto a website that not only rated, but provided contact info for sex workers. (Five hundred dollars a pop, the going rate, was both prohibitive and ridiculous.)
Diana and I had married before internet dating took off. Since then, I’d been like every other locked-down, married man on the spinning globe in that I’d followed the rise of this proverbial new Eden from the other side of the plexiglass window. My limited understanding remained that, in this new reality, women had grown empowered and now felt comfortable claiming their orgasms, often while taking selfies. Filthy texts and cock shots weren’t just expected, but required elements of courtship. It was every hetero man’s fantasy, the pornographic dream that had started as a pubescent and continued throughout adulthood. It might actually be possible to click, meet a girl, have sex, click again, and meet another girl—and that you might endlessly repeat this cycle.
Only we’d moved beyond the realm of fantasy.
Meanwhile, I was firmly in a time of life where you look in the mirror and see deterioration, where a man objectively wonders whether any more real live women will be willing to get naked for him—without a bouncer present—ever again.
I didn’t want a girlfriend; that was a no-brainer. I didn’t possess the time or mental energy to be seriously interested in anyone. Diana used to indulge all my idiotic rock preferences, my bizarre fandoms; she’d read countless drafts of my doorstop of a novel, showed concern for me if my face was too gaunt, when I was chained too long to my desk without deodorant. She also stepped up, when she had to, and challenged me about my antisocial inclinations, and just how we were supposed to make our way in the real world until the doorstop was finished. No problem getting one of her friends to find me work at a tabloid newspaper. At the end of the night we walked my dog together, watched rented movies on the couch, engaged in the deep conversational good shit that comes with true emotional intimacy. I couldn’t imagine the brick-by-brick reconstruction of all that. And as for introducing some imaginary girlfriend for Lily …
Real talk: I was nowhere near ready.
All of which is why, amid that winter’s festive cornucopia—snow angels with the depth of shallow graves, half-molten snowmen in heroin leans, make-believe friends playing dress-up, sung lyrics to musicals that did not exist—with my body basically rehabilitated and Lily sort of safely accounted for, I apologized to my deceased wife: so many things I wished were different. And in the middle of this random weekday afternoon, I typed out the registration info, thereby dipping my figurative toe into the pulsing, virtual cesspool known as AshleyMadison.com, a website whose members were married but were seeking sex outside that marriage. Yeah, Ashley Madison seemed tailor-made for me.
RETURNING FROM A trip to the bathroom; discreetly flipping away from my writing program’s window; switching tabs and logging back in—for a discovery. A response. Electricity shot through me. Someone was interested, and not just any someone. Late twenties, looked like. Winking profile, flirtatious. I sent what I hoped was a well-crafted greeting, one that conveyed proper enthusiasm, hopefully even a spark of cleverness: “Okay. Your photos just blew my mind straight through my brain.” Within ten minutes I got an answer: “{/:” and followed up, volleyed, worked my way into: Maybe she wanted to chat? “URCute” was her response. “I’m def interested. Only thing. I’ve had problems w/ stalkers. AshMad won’t do anything. For my safety, could you just register at this site.” She included a link, apologized for the small sign-up fee. I stopped corresponding, kept getting follow-ups, “UR so sexy. Just register alreddy so we can have fun.” At which point I realized: I was not chatting with a person but some kind of bot.
Reader, even this felt like progress—maybe not success, not a date, but something happening, or almost happening. Fact is, the greater majority of my attempts had been going straight into the ether, had been ignored, or had been brutally shot down—by fucking adulterers, of all people. One time I got catfished and eventually discovered I was dealing with an online prostitute, a woman who was obviously insane, on meth, and out of my price range. This still didn’t stop me: I was a starving man in a dumpster, and though I didn’t make an appointment with the overpriced catfish, I nonetheless kept on dumpster diving, adjusting my profile in between tough paragraphs at my writing space, sending texts while watching the kid attempt backbends in her courtyard.
An aging party girl kept posting shots of empty Hamptons beaches. She was couch surfing through the offseason; we had a few great chats; I thought I had a shot. In certain terms, she let me know she was looking to land a hedge fund hubby. An executive at a catering service had no problem meeting for afternoon tea. We made out around the corner from her subway stop, but she was not looking to ruin her Upper West Side family, certainly not to risk a fling. (There was no second meeting.) I had lunch with a lovely sad Yemeni woman, in her mid-thirties, whose high-powered husband was never around. During our conversation, I reached beneath the table, touched her stockinged knee, and pressed. The flash that took her, that connected us, was tangible, her desire suddenly electric. She was exotic, a platinum blonde, dark skinned. She wore a prim white jacket. Her face was just as it had been five seconds earlier; at the same time, it was transformed, near tears, simultaneously frightened and so erotic as to be paralyzing. We still had our orders coming. Neither of us knew what was next. We kept chatting. By the time our meal ended, it was clear the moment had passed, her desires were going to stay bottled—at least, with me.
A nice woman was stuck on Long Island, trapped in an open marriage. She’d rather have been locked down and happy, and she was pissed at Hubby, looking for retribution. We exchanged a few emails, ended up walking along the High Line. Oblivious to the chilled afternoon, I asked if she wanted ice cream. (A go-to move. One of my friend’s teen years had been spent pulling tourists in a rickshaw around the beaches of Oahu, Hawaii. Afterward, he’d tell the single women he knew where to get the best ice cream on the island.) Ice cream was innocent, reaching back into childhood. Ice cream also was creamy, melting on the tongue.
I bought this lovely unhappy woman a cup of chocolate mint and talked her into going to the last hourly hotel in Chelsea. Our kisses were heated. My first time having sex since my marriage. Every second felt foreign, wrong, and at the same time sacred. Afterwards, she sent an affectionate email. I replied with warmth. That was the only time we met.
LOOKING BACK, I see that I worked hard to listen to Dr. Melfi’s assurance: “You cannot ruin this child.” I tried to take value in her words, to will her truth into action, in one breath fretting, cursing, clenching my fists until my knuckles were white; in the next, believing in Lily’s strength, unclenching, breathing, letting our lives just move forward without eruption, with something that might have resembled faith.
Daddy wiped under his daughter’s fingernails to get out all of the watercolor paint. When Lily turned without a second thought, Daddy watched her trot away, toward new fun. Daddy picked up the glass of dirty water, wiped paint off the table surface.
Daddy stood outside the woman’s bathroom at the puppet show, apologized to a woman who was on her way in. “Could you do me a favor? Just check on my daughter. Her name is Lily.”
“No, Daddy cannot come and help play with your dollies right now,” I said. “He has to keep lying on the couch to keep it from flying up to the ceiling.”
Lily, delighted: “Daddy, the couch does not fly.”
Lily shouting out Muppet gibberish with me, rolling balls of cookie dough for the oven pan. Here she was, standing on my feet at the edge of our little kitchen, the two of us contradicting each other over whose turn it was to lick the remains of the frosting mix from off the bowl. (I will spare you any suspense: it was always her turn.)
Then she was in our bathroom, finishing on the potty, and was playing, unspooling the toilet paper roll, and somehow locked herself in, and I had to put my shoulder through the flimsy door, and Lily screamed and cried. Who wouldn’t?
We were in the West Village playground, near my sister’s apartment. Lily had her legs hooked on the bottom rung of some protective fence bars; she was hanging on to the top bars, and for no discernible reason decided to let go. I was sitting, like, six inches away on a bench, and actually saw this happen, her actions making no sense to me, disagreeing with all logic, I even had enough time to think, What are you— Then her head plummeted, and the rest of her body followed along, swinging as if on a hinge, the back of her skull banging against the pavement, its impact sickening. In the emergency room specifically for children, we were put through to an exam room, and as we waited for a doctor, gradually Lily’s howls petered out into whimpers, and her whimpers ebbed and then picked back up, a bit, and she swung a little bit around on the doctor’s chair, and I helped her climb up onto the exam table, and she crinkled the thin paper, and since the room was legit frigid, I found a blanket, and she wrapped herself like a little burrito. When I was done with my half-hearted attempt to eat her face, I took out whatever coins I had, explaining the value of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. An hour or so like that, minimum progress on the money front, but wasn’t that part of it, the point of these waiting rooms—especially when it’s not a life-or-death situation— the boredom, taking the edge off, seeping away at her fear? And when it came time for her sutures, Lily followed my instructions, shut her eyes, reached for the safety of my hand, gave a big, hard squeeze.
But we also had my longtime friend Terri Jay Cello dropping in, purchasing not one but two full-length puffy winter coats for Lily! We had another buddy, Kashmir, hauling his kids to our house and forcing them to act out scenes from The Sound of Music with her! That well-meaning married couple from my writing space who started popping in for Saturday night visits, doing a kind of soft rehearsal for their own attempts at parenting, whisking Lily off to a coffee shop for burgers and board games and ice cream! Another guy I’d traded sarcasms with on a long-ago part-time job welcomed us into his home for dinner! Still another writer, cleaning her closet, sent packages of clothes her daughter had outgrown! What basically amounted to reinforcements, thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for these good people, and more than I can list here: they kept me from blowing my brains out, seriously they did. And, reader, it is no exaggeration to say, I resented every single one of those motherfuckers.
A YOUNGISH BARISTA met me at some other ice cream parlor in the West Village. Underneath slovenly clothes she hid the promise of legendary breasts. She had been a chess prodigy, competitive into her teen years, but still wasn’t recovered from flaming out, and was on so much depression medication that she could not come. I took this explanation as a challenge, and tried to conquer science by lifting her atop a chest of drawers. The wooden fixture banged repeatedly against the walls of our cheap art hotel; afterward, she asked if we could start having lunches. Eat good food. Maybe talk before our trysts.
That was it for her.
SEX WAS A significant part of what these women were searching for. I see this now. I also understand they had not been receiving emotional intimacy from their husbands, no exciting sparks from the people in their lives, no needed embraces from the outside world. Ashley Madison promised they could be wanted, mooned over, valued as womanly, sexual beings without throwing away the lives they’d built. And they also got to embark on something new, which is always a thrill—to define (or redefine) themselves for someone new, to flirt, be worthwhile in new eyes, explore new attractions: they got a secret.
Granted, recognizing all this, especially in retrospect, is not quantum physics. Still, when it was happening, if you’d read those previous sentences to me, I would have nodded, Right. Then, boom, emotional intimacy would have been one more tool, something I had to provide, promise, or feign. “The secret of success is sincerity,” goes the famed quote attributed to forgotten playwright Jean Giraudoux. “Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
A close friend once confided that, during stretches of life where she was having sex, she walked differently than if she wasn’t. Her statement acknowledges the innate. You just feel better when you’re getting off, when you’re getting someone else off.
As for responsibility for fostering those emotional attachments? Owning up to any expectations I’d nurtured? I didn’t have the emotional space. Lily dominated my radar screen.
That is what I told myself.
AS IF ON cue:
“I want to grind,” she said.
“You can’t grind,” I answered.
“But I want to grind.”
My little girl, my Lilisita Mon Amita, positioned against the corner of the small white table that acted as her desk, was thrusting without compunction or self-consciousness. Two feet away, her godmother stared, slack-jawed. Over to take Lily out for dinner, Susannah had been chitchatting with me about how much she didn’t enjoy a particular consulting job. Eyes then went wide, the conversation stopping.
A child’s sexuality is a delicate subject, obviously. But wasn’t it supposed to be her teen years that this minefield would detonate, exploding upon both Lily and me?
To have this now? Really?
Susannah mumbled something. I started punching at my phone. Parenting sites agreed: grinding was appropriate for a girl that age.
“Go in the bedroom if you need to.”
Lily dutifully dismounted, scampered off.
I looked at Susannah, shrugged. What am I supposed to do?
I WAS SUPPOSED to apply enough attention, insight, and precision to my edits of fifteen homework essays that my intermediate fiction students would be able to unlock the myriad nuclear truths that lay inside those dormant passages. I was supposed to be firm with the pesky creditor and convey that what they had labeled a generous offer—me paying thirty cents on the dollar—was mistaken, as my name, in fact, had not been on Diana’s grad school health insurance policy, meaning I was not legally responsible for the expenses on the bills they kept hounding me about, so they could go inhale a big bag of walrus asshole. I was supposed to get stamps, send out checks, keep good shit like electricity from being disconnected. I was supposed to return a weird query about teaching a graduate-level workshop online. Make up a blurb for a book I gave up on around chapter three. I was supposed to get to the Fourteenth Street Trader Joe’s for groceries during that twenty-three-minute sweet spot that exists right after the senior citizens have done their weekly shopping but before the college kids have woken up and figured out they need supplies for their weekend. Handle paperwork for Lily’s pre-K field trip on the Staten Island Ferry. Send an email to my therapist with my insurer’s out-of-network code for psychological services. I was supposed to finally check in on my parents and then call my sister back to let her know I’d done as much. Scale to level four of Laundry Mountain. Lily was at Third Street, so the onus was on me.
Whatever else I was supposed to be doing, it was also unavoidably true: if I wasn’t heading toward the page count that got me the next installment of my advance, then I was moving us toward bankruptcy, toward homelessness. It weighed on me. Even meeting friends for lunch felt sketchy.
Unless, of course, it was Terri Jay Cello.
We’d met at an arts colony—I’d been working on my first book, she’d taken a leave from her office gig to finish an orchestral composition—and through this past, Jesus, this past decade, her benevolence toward me had been, by any rational account, astonishing. It had started with her illegally subletting that Gramercy apartment to me after she’d married and moved to Brooklyn. When the management company discovered our deception and started eviction procedures, Terri Jay convinced them to transfer the lease (telling me, before we all met to sign contracts, “Don’t speak”). If this wasn’t enough, after I’d finished a final draft of my book, Terri Jay snuck me into her place of employment after business hours and we used their printers, Xeroxed the manuscript, and sent the copies off to agents. She was one of the people who helped organize a fundraiser that absorbed Diana’s medical costs, was bedside with Diana during those last days. Basically, Terri Jay Cello was my guardian angel, one of the few people I felt safe with, to whom I could confide without reservation.
