How to Party With an Infant (4 page)

“Doesn’t your email show up?” Mele asks.

“No, I have a fake one just for this purpose. I sign off using A.L., West Portal. Ooh this next one’s good. So this woman needs a stucco consultant, and she had to say, ‘for my three-story, seven-bedroom Gold Coast home.’ These ladies always have to slip in their square footage.”

Henry sits up on the green bench. “She went behind my back. Again.”

“Who?” Mele asks, not knowing what he’s talking about.

“Kate,” he says. “My wife. That’s who wrote that post. I told her we didn’t need a stucco consultant. We don’t need a thing for our house. It’s perfectly fine.”

Tommy, his four-year-old, jumps onto his lap, and he winces. Mele wonders what he meant by
again
. She imagines his wife sneaking into a room full of undercover consultants.

“Ouch,” his son says from his lap.

“Sorry,” Henry says, and he loosens his grip on Tommy’s thigh.

“That was your
wife’s
post?” Annie asks.

“You have a three-story, seven-bedroom home?” Georgia asks.

“It’s not what you think,” he says. “It’s way the fuck beyond. Oops. Sorry, son.”

Tommy squirms off his lap, then runs toward the tire swing. “See you later, fuckers!” he says.

“Oops,” Henry says, watching his son run off in what seems to be a wistful, desperate way, as if he has an urge to yell: “Good luck out there!” He looks over at Mele and seems to shake himself off after coming up for air.

“The other night,” he says just for Mele to hear, “I overheard my daughter saying to her brother and his friends, ‘You’ll either cry or laugh your ass off.’ Something like that. I had no idea what she was talking about, but that’s it. That sums everything up right now. I’m ready to tell you what’s on my mind.”

Mele moves closer to him, her hand near his and the graffiti that’s etched into the bench:
MY DICK
. Someone came here and took the time to write that. What a poor, lost soul.

Georgia and Annie walk away to join Barrett by the kids, and it’s nice—witnessing this migration toward their young. A hard light shoots through the fencing. She can hear the guys behind her at the
basketball court. One of them yells, “Move off me, son! That’s what I’m talking about!”

“Ready when you are,” Mele says. She has trouble looking him in the eye. She can speak boldly and candidly, but always looks ahead, a light smile on her face. He sinks down, assuming his usual position on the green bench, his legs far apart so that he looks like he’s in a dugout, waiting to hit it out of the park.

HENRY AND THE GIRL

H
enry has been drinking, but doesn’t think the boys can tell. Maybe they can. They’re sixteen, after all, and he knows they’re considered good-looking and popular. He isn’t sure what makes one popular these days—it must vary from place to place, school to school. At his son’s school, he imagines money has something to do with it. Money, yet a cool, false dismissal of it. Trendy tattered clothing, friends on scholarships, going green. He has known these boys from the time they were in preschool together. God. That was a long time ago.

Henry supposes the kids might be drunk as well. When he and Kate got back from dinner he found them all in the kitchen, devouring chips and cold pizza, quesadillas, the kinds of foods you want after drinking. Maybe they’re stoned. They’ve either stacked their potato chips on top of their pizzas or rolled them into their tortillas. His son has a huge bowl of ice cream with a jar of chocolate sauce in front of him, something he wouldn’t normally eat. He moves a chip toward the ice cream, then changes his mind and puts it in his mouth, plain. He’s so stoned.

Is Henry supposed to say something? “Are you high?” “Are you drunk?” “Do I care?” He realizes they’re
all looking up at him and remembers he’s been telling them a story.

“Where was I?” He holds the counter and looks at the one, two, three boys. He hears a toilet flush. Four boys. Four boys are waiting for him to tell them about girls.

Ross comes out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on his pants. Tim Tupper, Tupp, they call him, punches Ross in the leg, and Ross says, “What was that for?” and Tupp shrugs.

“Where was I?” Henry asks.

“You were telling us to forget about the cheerleaders,” Shipley says.

Henry wishes his name wasn’t Shipley. He’s known him the longest. He had sex with Shipley’s mother, but that was way back when she had brown hair and smoked cloves. She drank dirty martinis in public, Zima in private. Now she’s blond and always looks like she’s going to a ballet class. She probably doesn’t drink at all anymore. She probably does nothing but collect art. Unfortunate the way time ravages us, he thinks.

“The thing is,” Shipley says. “Cheerleaders aren’t cool now anyway.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” Henry says. “The ones you’re supposed to want.” He pictures Kate and thinks of the playground she goes to (she wouldn’t dare go to the Panhandle, his favorite). Just as dogs resemble their owners, people resemble their playgrounds. Alta Plaza is freshly remodeled with a nicely manicured layout and top-of-the-line structures. It’s in an expensive neighborhood, at the top of a hill, looking down upon the city of San Francisco. It’s clean, safe, and pristine.

Kate has straight brown hair, cropped and professional as if she had a job. She has a manicured body, top-of-the-line bone structure. She carries herself easily and never has problems knowing what to do with her hands when standing in groups. She never adjusts her
clothes. She holds her head high, looking down upon the city of San Francisco. Kate is very pretty.

“The pretty girls,” Henry says. “That’s who I mean. Stay away from them. They have short shelf lives, believe me. If your purpose is to get laid, go for the rebels, the sarcastic ones. The prissy, pretty ones, they’ll tear your heart in two and it’s not worth it. The girls in black, the ones with combat boots. That’s where it’s at.”

A few of the boys chuckle. Shipley says, “Can you imagine getting with Carla? Freak show. She’d bite your pecker off.”

“You’re the only one around here with a pecker, Ship,” Tupp says. “The rest of us have dicks.”

The boys laugh, then appraise Henry’s reaction, but he’s absorbed in his own advice, which he knows would have been completely different if he were talking to these kids a year ago. Still, he decides to stay the course. So what if he says the wrong things and so what if he’s saying them because he’s angry with Kate? They shouldn’t be listening to him anyway. You’re not supposed to listen to fathers.

“I don’t care if Sophia Jagger’s shelf life is short,” Tupp says. “She’s Sophia Jagger. I don’t care what she looks like in ten years. Even five. She’s hot now. That’s all that matters.”

The boys grumble their consensus, and Henry feels his authority slipping away. “Yeah, but will Sophia Jagger sleep with you?” he asks. His question seems to put them into a philosophical and possibly erotic daydream.

“She’s going out with Austin,” his son says.

“And who was she going out with before that?” Henry asks.

Ross raises his hand. “Me.”

“For how long?” Henry asks.

“Seven months.”

“Did she sleep with you?” He really shouldn’t be talking like this.

“No,” Ross says.

“See?” Henry says. “She goes
out with boys. She has long and meaningful relationships. She’s not going to screw around. The girls you boys are neglecting—the skaters, the loners—they’ll screw around. I’m telling you.”

Henry looks at his son’s ice cream and wishes he could have a bowl, but he can feel the fat on his face when he jogs. He used to be able to eat anything he wanted to. He wishes he could slip into his son’s body for a day to eat and talk to girls in high school. They were so attentive back then! Boys were their life! Why didn’t anyone tell him it would never be like that again? He wishes he and his son could crash into each other like in the movies when the kid and the parent switch roles. His son is lithe and always tan. His son uses big words and knows what they mean. His son looks nothing like him, or at least how he looked when he was his age. When he was younger, Henry had an earring in his left ear and a beard that made him look scary. He was scary, or could be. When he shaved off the beard he noticed people started smiling at him, which in turn made him nicer.

On prom night a few months back, his son and his friends and their dates were over at the house and Henry saw his son give his date this look—his mouth sort of made this chewing motion and he winked slightly, as if by accident, and this took Henry back because it was the same sort of thing he’d do at The Shoe when he’d spot Kate across the room. They were twenty-two and had solidified their relationship quickly by sleeping together the first night they met. He liked that they went to bars and she didn’t hang all over him. She’d talk to other people, she’d flirt and dance, but their gazes would always find each other and he’d give her that look—something he didn’t even realize he did until she pointed it out to him.

How long has it been since he’s given Kate that look? Earlier tonight he just watched her blankly as she and Nadine gossiped about their work on some committee. He found himself getting angry. She
made the same segues, the same jokes and speeches of concern. He couldn’t stand her voice, or the ways she tried to get him into the conversation; one way was by a firm kick in the shin during the first small-plates course of bitter greens. Why would anyone eat bitter greens? He can’t stand mesclun and endive or radicchio, or that spidery, throat-itching green that makes him feel he is chewing on a tumbleweed that just rolled out of a Western, but when the salad came everyone lit up and proclaimed it “gorgeous.” It had some pear in it, some kind of cheese, and some kind of nut. Big deal. Of course it wasn’t described that way. On the menu it was something like Bodega Bay arugula, Stinson goat cheese, house-cured ham made from pigs that only eat water chestnuts.

Henry thought of the salad he and Kate always got at Original Joe’s. A wedge of iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing. That’s it. She loved it then, so why is she too good for it now? He almost asked her why right there at the table in front of their friends. He also almost asked, “Why are we pretending to love each other? What happened last weekend? Just tell me,” but he knew she wouldn’t tell him. He had already asked, and she claimed there was nothing to tell.

Henry looks at the boys’ snacks. He hates small plates! He hates them! He opens the fridge and takes out the mayonnaise and turkey. He’s going to make himself a sandwich.

“What kind of girl was Mom?” his son asks.

“What do you mean?” Henry says.

“Was she a weirdo or was she like Sophia?”

Henry thinks of the party in Russian Hill they’d attended the previous weekend. He’d seen her talking to a friend of theirs, a married friend who is quite famous in the city for being the son of someone rich. He goes to parties and gets photographed. That’s his job, basically. The man’s wife and Kate are on Neighborhood Watch together, which Henry thinks is a joke. They live in a diverse, cosmopolitan city, though
in a part of the city where you may as well be in a suburb. Suspicious activity simply means a minority who doesn’t work for you is in front of your house. When he drives down Pacific he often sees the other man’s wife in the window with a phone in her hand, gazing worriedly at the construction workers in front of a neighboring home. Actually, he drives down Pacific hoping to see her in the window, hoping to see her fear.

But the party. Some party for some fashion designer. This man and Kate had been talking to one another much more frequently at other parties, group dinners, fund-raisers. But Henry wasn’t suspicious until this night, where something seemed different. They weren’t talking that much, but when they did, they did so very close, almost nervously. The entire time she looked embarrassed by whatever he was saying.

At one point in the evening Henry lost sight of them and he went on a search. He found them in a hallway. She and the man were standing close together. They both looked drunk and almost angry. During the car ride home he said, “What was that all about?” but she just said, “What was what all about? What are you talking about?”

Henry puts mayonnaise on both slices of bread.

“Dad,” his son says. “I asked what kind of girl Mom was.”

“Mom was cool,” Henry says. “She was, you know, a popular girl. I met her after college though. The categories don’t apply. All girls sleep around after college.”

The boys perk up at this.

“Didn’t you just get back from dinner?” his son asks.

“You don’t eat when you go out to dinner,” Henry says. “You order small plates. You take a bite and it’s over. I probably took seven bites the whole night.”

Henry layers chips over the turkey and cheese.

“You’ll also never have fun when you go out to eat,” he says. “Where do you guys go? To a taqueria? Or a fast-food joint? Your best times
are probably there, right? You joke around, talk about what went down, you’re loud and obnoxious, you throw shit, you maybe even get into fights.” Henry remembers wrestling in a McDonald’s with a guy named Steve-o. “Well, not anymore. Now you just sit there and eat lame food and talk about lame food and about what was in so-and-so’s chicken recipe the other weekend. And if the people you’re with happen to have had a baby recently, then forget it. You’ll just talk about the baby’s sleeping patterns and that’s it.”

“What else?” Ross asks.

“What else what?” Henry takes a bite of his amazing sandwich. “Ah,” he says.

“What else happens to you?” Ross asks.

“What else sucks when you get old?” Tupp says. He throws an apple against the fridge.

“What the hell?” Henry says.

“It was rotten,” Tupp says.

Henry looks at the boy. He’s a buff kid, though stubby, low to the ground. Henry notices dandruff in his eyebrows.

“Well,” Henry says, ignoring the apple, “the other day I picked a pillow off the floor and I grunted. Every time you get up from the couch or your chair you’ll feel it in your ankles. You don’t have sex, but you guys are used to that.”