Bill Wyeth has one other need, so he steals into the bedroom just to check again. But Judith is miles under, her breath faintly foul, her arm flopped out on the sheet like she's just lobbed a hand grenade against his advance. She is not the kind of woman you can wake up in the middle of the night and jump on. Judith needs preparationâon-ramps and gradual acceleration. They'd had sex before he left for San Francisco, but that was five nights ago, and he never partakes of the hotel porn, out of fear that it
will
somehow appear on the law firm's bill. Every click, every selection stored forever, a string of data trailing behind each of us like a spider's filament. He'd been hoping that getting home early might put her in the
mood. But no dice. He needs release, a little shot in the dark. He needs some comfort. Just a little. Besides, he'll sleep better, have more energy tomorrow to deal with the work that's piled up in his absence, to deal with Kirmer.
Judith rolls on her back, breasts shifting, letting go her own wet, capacious breath, and he watches her, his hand idly massaging his groin. Is he frustrated? Hard to say. Bill Wyeth has, sexually speaking, reached the Age of Acceptance. He accepts the fact that he is faithful to his wife. He accepts his desire to plunder any number of younger women and a few older ones who cross his path. He accepts that this will not happen. He accepts that it
could
happen, given sufficient prevarication, rerouting of cash, and subtle adjustment of his schedule. He accepts the fact that his wife has become rather unmotivated in bedâ“disinterested” would be clinical yet polite. “Lazy” would be inflammatory but true. He accepts the fact that it might be his fault but that it really might not be either. He accepts the idea that marriage is the best arrangement for raising children, although it's pretty tough on the parents. He accepts the fact that many, if not most, of the women he desires to plunder are, no doubt, biographically bruised, and that their intriguing neuroses would quickly become tedious, and he accepts the fact that, all things given, Judith is a rather wonderful human being and that he is enormously lucky to be married to her. She is, above all, a devoted mother to their son, still feeling guilty about not nursing, but unconflicted by the outlay of time and energy of mothering. She'd wrecked her career to be a mother, and because she's accepted this, so has he. Also finding his acceptance is the fact that Judithâsweet, loving, busty, good and nervous Judithâhas failed to understand exactly what he needs sexually, despite his patient, nonconfrontational description of what that isâand it is not a position or explicit behaviorâno, not at all (well, maybe a few behaviors), but rather a kind of emotional largesse on her part, a kind of lingering generosity he has yearned for his whole life it seems and received only rarely. He accepts that she may desire all kinds of lovers who
are not him, for it is clearâjust walk the streets of New Yorkâthat human beings are infinite in their variety. She probably thinks about women, and she
definitely
goes a little weak around older, powerful men with full heads of white hair, and
says
she doesn't find black men attractive (but she has said this a few too many times for him to believe it), and anyway, he accepts this, too. Just as he accepts that out there, in the real world, not just the thin stratum, of economic frosting where he resides, that people are fucking and boffing and sucking and humping, all shapes and sizes, and putting things into each otherâdicks, fingers, tongues, hands, fists, toys, vegetables, viruses, etc.âand that often they are made happy by these activities and often not. He accepts that there are women who require their men to be hairless, and men who desire their women to bench-press three hundred pounds. He accepts that a few radical lesbians actually inject themselves with gray-market testosterone even as certain gay men are stealing estrogen pills from their postmenopausal mothers. He accepts the “classical” feminist critique of men, male hegemony, etc. He accepts the “do me” feminist revision of those critiques. He accepts the terror that women feel at the idea of rapeâreal, mouth-covering, vagina-tearing rape. He accepts his own occasional, always unplugged desire to do so. He accepts that in certain moments in bed with Judith, he gets close to doing it himself. He accepts that this is a lot of baloney. He accepts that sometimes she loves, loves, loves this (his forceful passion! her helplessness!) and other times accepts it dutifully as a necessary chore to be endured, as transcendent as replacing empty toilet-paper rolls. He accepts that the she-males advertised in the back pages of
The Village Voice
often look better than the women. He accepts that he has wondered what it would be like to give a blow job or get fucked up the ass. He accepts that he will never know. He accepts that each one of us wants, wants
so
much, yards and miles and continents of affection and sensation and release, and that mostly we do our best to get it and our best not to get it, depending. We deal with disappointment, we sublimate,
we masturbate, we accessorize, we fantasize, we sprinkle psychosexual condiments onto our gruel. Yes, he accepts this, he accepts all of it.
And what he accepts most, now anyway, is that his wife is asleep and unavailable, if not unwilling. He's not getting any action, not tonight anywayâand he accepts
that
, yes, he does.
So, mouth still full of Thai food, nutty and chickeny and hot, he returns to his den and flicks through the cable channels, hoping for some T&A. He'll take anything. Television's standards of indecency rise quickly after midnight, the networks desperate to grab anyone not snagged by the Internet's pornucopia. Anything will do. He's not particular. He's generic. He's a minivan, remember! He has a face full of Thai food, grease on his hands and face and shirt, and is sort of nudging himself, who cares if he gets grease on his pants, just to get the feedback loop started, penis-to-head, head-to-penis. He flicks through two dozen channels with genius reflexes, identifying each show's whack-off potential in perhaps a second before moving onâand yes! Here's some kind of spring-break concert, girls in bikinis, dudes in hats spinning turntables, the girls lewdly greased up with suntan lotion, white girls, black girls, dancing around, tits jiggling, fine, this is sufficient, not porn exactly, but sufficient, he'll pay his bills afterward, just get it done with, and he unbuckles his belt, mouth burning a bit from the food, and thenâthen he hears footsteps in the hall.
“Yeah?” he calls anxiously, pulling out his shirt to cover his groin.
“I'm thirsty.”
“Okay,” he calls heartily, filled with relief he hasn't been seen.
It's one of the boys, which one he doesn't know, standing in the doorway, blinking sleepily, warmly rumpled in pajamas that recapitulate the uniform of the Jets' starting quarterback.
“I'm Timmy's dad. You want something to drink?”
“Okay. Yes, please.”
The old Bill Wyeth now jumps up and hurries to the
kitchen to pour the boy some milk. Skim? Regular? He chooses regular, which will be a little heavier in the boy's stomach and perhaps help him sleep better. He hurries back to the hall. The boy is so sleep-slumpy that Bill has to help him hold the glass, greasy from Bill's hands. The boy lifts the glass slowly. The milk is just what he wants. A darling kid, long lashes, hair fuzzed up by his pillow. He swallows the last of the milk, leaving a white mustache over his lip. “Thanks,” he says, drifting toward the bedroom. Bill follows, stepping carefully over the other boys, and helps him settle into his sleeping bag, with a few fatherly pats on the back.
Then he retreats to the den, locks the door, finds his dancing sluts on the television, and whacks offâvery economically, using the greasy Thai food carton as a receptacle. Then he pays bills for half an hour, also making a donation to an environmental group that's fighting global warming. Oceans on the rise, deserts spreading, apocalypse guaranteed. Having done this, he puts the boy's glass in the dishwasher and tidies up the kitchen. This will please Judith. Always good to please the wife a bit. At one point he is on his knees scraping green bubble gum from the slate floor that the designer insisted was low maintenance. Next he gets a garbage bag and fills it with party debris, bill notices, junk mail, the dual-purpose Thai food carton, and whatever other refuse he can find and drops it all into the building's trash chute. Then he pokes his head into the boys' room again. One of them is snoring thickly, gurgling with a stuffed nose. Then Bill Wyeth undresses and slips into bed next to his wife. The tip of his penis has a dab of residual wetness on it, a tickle, a stickum of memory, as if he and Judith have actually just had sex. He shifts his limbs, he grinds against the sheets, he eases joints and releases breath, he pushes away the work worries that quickly grow frondlike on the walls of sleep. He has done nothing wrong, he is loyal and true. He pays his taxes and doesn't sit in the handicapped seating on the subway. He has earned his rest, and now, dropping into sleep, feels something close to happiness.
Bill Wyeth is safe.
Â
Â
In the morning the boys rushed one by one into the dining room. Judith, up early, had arranged perhaps ten different brands of cereal in the middle of the table.
“Did Wilson get up?” she said after a few minutes.
“He was asleep,” answered our son, reading the back of a cereal box.
Judith walked out of the kitchen. I returned my attention to the paper.
“Bill?” came her voice from the hall. “Come here.”
I didn't worry until I saw Judith kneeling next to the boy to whom I'd given the milk. She gently rubbed his back, trying to wake him. “Wilson?” she said. “Wilson, sweetie?” She stopped rubbing his back and waited for a reaction, for him to stir. But nothing happened.
“Wilson? We've got breakfast ready,” Judith cooed.
“I don't like the way he's just lying there,” I said.
“Wilson?” Judith tried again.
I thought the boy's face looked oddly puffy, his fingers pale.
“Wilson? Wilson?” Judith turned to me. “I can't wake him up!”
And neither could I. I knelt down and shook him. He was cold, his head too floppy. “We need an ambulance!”
As Judith raced to the phone, I rolled Wilson to his side, releasing pizza-lumpy vomit from his mouth. One of his eyes, nearly closed, showed only a slit of white; the other studied a poster of the great Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. The surfaces of both eyes were dry. The boy looked
dead
. But he couldn't be. I felt hot, stupid, sickish.
My wife returned, closing the door behind her, phone to her ear. “We have a problem,” she announced, trying to stay calm, “we need an ambulance ⦠we have an eight-year-old boy who isn't breathing ⦠What? I don't know! We just woke up! No, no,
we
just woke up, he didn't! Oh, please, comeâI don't know
how
longâ” And then our address and phone number. “Please, please hurry!”
“He was fine last night.”
The door opened. Timothy poked his head in, eyes panicked. “Mom?”
“I want you to close the door, Timmy.”
“Mom.”
“Do as I say.”
He glanced at me. “The other boysâ”
Judith growled, “Close ⦠the
door
.”
He did. He did what his mother told him, and would in the future. Now Judith knelt next to Wilson. “What did you say? He was fine?”
“Yes.”
“You checked on all the boys?”
“Wilson woke up.”
“What did you
do
?” Something twisted in Judith's voice.
“I gave him a glass of milk and put him back to bed.”
She seemed to be searching around him, lifting up the other boys' sleeping bags and pillows. “Not peanut butter?”
“I gave him milk,” I repeated.
Judith shook her head violently, in anger or frustration. “He has a severe peanut allergy, it's this crazy, crazy thing!” She grabbed Wilson's backpack and frantically pulled out underwear adorned by Jets insignias, a fresh shirt, and socks. “His mother made me swear not to give him
anything
with peanuts in it. Not the tiniest bit. Even
molecules
. It sets off a chain reaction in his immune system. She had to call the restaurant ahead of time to explain, and he carries a shot just in case.” She looked at her watch. “It's too late, it'sâI threw away all the peanut butter in the house, just in case! I threw away the eggs and the cashews! I looked at all the candy!”
“Judith, I gave him
milk.
”
She unzipped the boy's sleeping bag and pulled it back, finding a plastic case marked EPINEPHRINE INJECTIONâFOR USE IN ANAPHYLACTIC EMERGENCY. “It's empty!” she cried. She pulled the sleeping bag open further. Next to the boy's limp hand lay a yellow plastic injector device with a short needle sticking out of it. “There it is!” she said. “He was trying toâhe knew ⦠oh, he
knew
!” Weeping, she bent down to kiss the boy, as if trying to bring him back to life.
“Oh God, I
promised â¦
I promised his motherâ”She looked up and faced me sa vagely. “Was
anything
on the glass?”