Knuckleheads Page 11

  Naomi is all heat now, still gazing at me, the ice running a river over her shin. If our skins touch, we will not separate. “My back aches,” she says.

  I know what she wants.

  DROWNING SUPERMAN

  CALISTA'S IMMATURE IN SOME WAYS. I’m immature in other ways. It’s not a contest, but it’s hell when I lose.

  Often, I lose.

  Our vacation has been one putrid smoking disaster after another. Every time something new goes wrong, I calm myself with the reminder it was Calista’s idea to spend seventy-five hundred dollars to rent a cottage infested with ticks, mice and spiders for a week on Martha’s Vineyard. Her idea to endure seven straight days of over-priced restaurants, every one of which is too crowded and takes forever.

  Waiting too long for a forty-two dollar lobster and its microwaved potato companion is not the same thing as waiting for sex. The build-up, the anticipation of peeling somebody’s thong off, of watching a pair of nipples tune in like a radio signal—when these things come to fruition, the irritation of the previous delay can evaporate. Not so with food that when it arrives tastes only slightly more appetizing than truck tires.

  What exacerbates the disaster of our vacation is Jesse, our four-year-old, who’s been crying like a faucet most of the week. He’s not a bad kid. He is, in fact, a tremendous kid—commits all manner of adorable pre-school behaviors like calling Frankenstein Freakenstein when our neighbor dressed up as the spark-plugged blockhead last Halloween—but he’s also on the fast track to psychological weed addiction and years of regularly scheduled therapy because he gets far too much attention from his parents. Calista and I focus on him in order to avoid focusing on each other. We know Jesse is our best thing, both our lone successful group-project and our sole remaining chance for redemption, so we try to outdo each other during our special one-on-one times with him. If Calista takes him to the pseudo-farm where kids can pet unhealthy looking goats and llamas, I have to escort him to the balls-out zoo where the orangutans enjoy frolicking with their genitals. If I escort him to the zoo, she takes him to an amusement park and sits next to him on the kiddie rides and wins him a four-foot high stuffed aardvark.

  That’s how we wound up on Martha’s Vineyard. Calista called a truce.

  We have to put an end to this arms race, she said. We need to do something as a family.

  So we eat expensive lazily-prepared food as a family, except Jesse doesn’t eat his. He’s so damn hungry waiting, and whining, and waiting, and whining, that he invariably fills up on bread or his fingernails or some old cheese and crackers from the beach bag Calista demands I lug everywhere, and by the time his seventeen-dollar plate of buttered spaghetti arrives at the table, he has nothing to offer it but sneering disdain, which is fair. I bear no ill will toward my son for whining about how starving he is for several hours and then picking at only a couple pieces of his pasta. I am angry only at Calista who glares at me with her nefarious teacher-eyes, the ones that make her fifth-graders feel like if they leave their seats to get a tissue, razor-sharp scimitars will descend from the ceiling and shred them to confetti.

  We should’ve just told the waitress to bring the food to him in a box, she says. We’re going to have to box it up now anyway and bring it home.

  I’m not one of your students, I say. Don’t lecture me.

  Traveling to Martha’s Vineyard involves a forty-five minute ride to Detroit Metro, then a two-hour flight from Detroit to Boston, then another two hours with all our bulky luggage on a foul-smelling bus from Logan to Woods Hole, capped off with another forty-five minute ride, this time on a ferry to Vineyard Haven so congested it’s a struggle to find enough seats together and we have to schlep our luggage up and down several sets of stairs, so let’s not talk about how we could’ve just rented a cottage on Lake Michigan for a quarter of the price and driven three quick hours up north and fallen asleep immediately in a hammock. Instead, let’s just say the root of the boxing-the-food controversy is that Calista felt it necessary to formulate a strategy so Jesse would be bearable during his maiden voyage on an airplane.

  This is the difference between Calista and me. She always wants to plan for disasters because she believes in the high probability of disasters and that you can lessen their impact if you prepare for them. I believe that’s nonsense. I believe you can generally avoid disasters through blind random luck and, if they happen to strike you, you won’t know when or where or to what extent, so preparing is just a waste of energy. Plus, preparing usually encompasses some incarnation of a large bag, like the beach-bag, and though Calista stuffs it with all the lingering anxieties from her worrisome childhood, I’m the one who inevitably winds up carrying it wherever we go. There’s too much, I think whenever I’m lugging the bag like a sweaty, shoulder-aching Santa Claus, too much in the world that’s unknowable. You can’t control every damn variable.

  Still, as part of the airplane strategy, Calista spent two weeks glorifying all the wonders of modern air travel, toting Jesse outside on her hip before putting him to bed and pointing at the sky. You see the stars up there, she cooed to him, you see those stars that look like they’re moving? Those are airplanes cruising through the night. They are warm on the inside, and safe. That’s where we’re going to be. Floating through the sky. And you’ll have your own seat, next to a window, and the shade for the window will be made of hard plastic and you’ll be able to pull it up and down all by yourself, and Jesse, listen, here’s the best part. When you sit in your own seat, you’ll also have your very own table. It will be attached to the seat in front of you and there will be a little latch that will be easy for you to open and then you’ll be able to unfold your table all by yourself. And, when they serve you food, guess what, Jesse, guess what? The snack will come in a box. That’s right, they’ll serve you a snack that comes in a box!

  Personally, I failed to see the thrill involved with boxed food, but Jesse was enamored so, okay, play that up, Calista, if you think it’ll make the kid happy. Except, when three days before we were scheduled to depart on our glorious airplane with its very own plastic shades and tray-tables, Calista served us a tofu and green beans stir-fry in boxes she’d bought from a restaurant supply store, I thought things were going too far. Did we run out of plates, I said, or are we boxing the tofu up to take to a restaurant and eat it there?

  Not funny, Jay, she said. Can’t you see Jesse loves this? Can’t you lighten up and have some fun?

  Jesse, I said to my son, some day you will kiss a girl in the backseat of a car. She will be chewing gum and you’ll be able to tell by how she sucks in a pull of breath right before your lips meet that she wants you to kiss her as much as you want her to kiss you, and that will be something to love. That will be something that’s fun.

  That’s not something appropriate to tell a four-year-old, Calista said.

  For three days, my wife served my son all his meals in boxes and damn if he didn’t love it, and damn if the kid wasn’t so excited on the airplane he hardly noticed his ears popping during takeoff, and damn if he didn’t whine once and practically had his first orgasm when the flight attendant at last placed the cardboard-shrouded ham-and-cheese-on-a-damp-croissant on the tray-table that Jesse had folded down all by himself, and damn if at least a half-dozen people didn’t compliment us on how well-behaved our beautiful child was and, boy, we must be wonderful parents, goodness, how do we do it?

  To this point, such triumphs constitute Calista’s happiest moments of the vacation. Here is Calista at baggage claim glowing like a fake tan as yet another prosperous-looking older woman saunters over to tell us how terrific our boy is—what a little gentleman!—and here, by way of contrast, is Calista dark and menacing when I insist that, no, we will not ask the waitress to serve Jesse’s meal to him in a box.

  Why not, she says. He’ll eat it. I guarantee if it comes in a box, he’ll eat it.

  Because I don’t care if he never eats again, I refuse to allow us to be that family that represents ever
ything that’s wrong with the world.

  What’s wrong with making the dining experience a little bit fun, a little bit special for our son? How is that everything wrong with the world?

  That’s the problem, Calista, you don’t know.

  Oh, fuck you, my wife says to me in front of my son in a crowded restaurant. Fuck you, Jay, she says. You’re not human.

  What Calista doesn’t understand is that when I say you can’t control every variable, I mean it like it’s a measure of truth that will hinder every step I take the rest of my life. I bear the mark of that truth in a scar shaped like a compressed lightning bolt, white and fat, beneath my right knee.

  Halfway through my sophomore year in college, I have a shot to be the starting varsity left fielder, but the coaches have concerns about my defense. Has trouble tracking fly balls, one of them says. Arm’s only adequate, proclaims another. These, in my opinion, are falsehoods of the highest order. When they finally put me in, I’m determined to prove them wrong. Hit me a fly ball, I chant under my breath every time an opposing batter comes to the plate. Force me to make a throw. Try to run on me, I dare you.

  In the last inning of a scoreless game, a left-handed batter lofts a medium range pop-up, a little slicer toward the foul line. It’s potentially a run-scoring double that means we will lose. But I read it from the crack of the bat, before the crack actually, read it from the pitcher’s release of the outside pitch and the lean of the batter’s weight. I’m on my horse and get to the ball in time to line up behind it and catch it running forward, face-level just like I’m supposed to, so I can generate momentum for a throw to the plate. The runner on third tags up and sprints home and, with one gracefully executed crow-hop, my throw is artwork. It even sounds right, a sniper’s bullet, low and fast, and it will shoot into the catcher’s mitt and eliminate the base-runner as efficiently as a mob-hit.

  Except here comes Cal Pulliam, dim-witted underperforming third baseman, barrel-chested, Nebraskan and soap opera handsome, who will soon be suspended for three semesters for plagiarizing an economics paper. He’s slumped all year at the plate, slept with more women on campus than anybody else on the team, and muffed nearly as many ground balls. Our coaches pretend to adore him because they don’t want to admit the mistake they made signing him to a full scholarship. It doesn’t matter how badly he plays, he’ll be in the line-up every day.

  When I unfurl my symphonic masterpiece of a throw, there’s no logical reason in the known universe to cut it off. The throw is on line and perfect and the runner streaking home will be out by five feet. The catcher, whose job it is to shout Cut Four! if he believes the throw should be intercepted, is as silent as Cal will be next month when the ethical board presents him with the evidence of his cheating and sentences him back to Nebraska for a year-and-a-half. Not a syllable escapes his mouth, yet here comes Cal Pulliam’s glove, rising unaccountably upward. Prior to Calista’s scimitar eyes, it is the most vile thing I will ever see. Cal doesn’t even properly cut the ball off, just nips it and redirects it wildly into foul territory. The winning run scores in a glide. We lose and are somber. None of the coaches say a thing to Cal about his bonehead play and my resplendent throw is forgotten, irrelevant. I still must prove my worth to the coaches and, the next day I dive after a meaningless line-drive during batting practice. My spike catches in a sprinkler drain. A harsh and prolonged tearing emanates from my leg and I leave pieces of ligament and cartilage all over the field.

  Jesse’s favorite toy is a Superman figurine. It isn’t made of plastic, but it’s not metal either. Maybe it’s metal covered with some kind of rubberized paint. The thing that’s important is that it doesn’t float. We use it to teach Jesse how to swim. Back at the kiddie pool in the municipal park in Michigan, Calista or I would sit on the edge and toss the figurine into the deepest part of the water, about two-and-a-half feet. Jesse scampered after it and had to learn how to hold his breath and dip his head underwater in order to fish around with his fingers and retrieve it. Throwing Superman into shallow water and watching our son rescue him is one of the few activities Calista and I enjoy sharing. After we do it for an hour or so, if we can get Jesse to go home and take a nap, Calista and I might even make love. We brought the Superman with us to Martha’s Vineyard with the hope of tossing it into salt water so Jesse could search for it and exhaust himself. It was our intention then, while he napped, to make love.

  Here’s the problem. The house we rented is in an old whaling-village-now-shopping-mecca called Edgartown. There’s a gorgeous public beach nearby that we can easily catch a shuttle to called Katama, also known as South Beach. It’s not exactly the kind of isolated dune-and-clay-cliff paradise you think of when you think of Martha’s Vineyard though. Not the kind of place where you can stroll with your wife and kid for an hour and run into only one recovering-alcoholic-slash-playwright perched on a lonesome rock, thinking of the denouement for his next script and how he can weave in the evaporation of his second marriage. South Beach isn’t a postcard like that. It’s towel-to-towel crowded and smells like somebody dumped a million gallons of sunscreen onto the seaweed. Popular enough to merit trendy sweatshirts trumpeting itself as a happening party spot for Ivy League kids on the island for the summer to staff gourmet ice cream shops. It’s a scene. A bright and shining landscape of kids with no homework playing hackey sack to a continuous James Taylor soundtrack.

  That’s all fine though. Even if the crowded nature of South Beach means I have to lug the plus-size bag stuffed with a dozen vials of combo UV-35-and-bug-repellent gel, numerous clothing changes for Jesse, enough towels for several extended families, and a year’s supply of cheese and crackers an extra half-mile in order to find a ten-by-ten-foot patch of sand for us to colonize, still, it’s the ocean, and we don’t have that in Michigan. I also have no problem looking at girls in bikinis playing hackey sack. Girls who like to prove their mettle to their stoned and pseudo-hippie boyfriends by sprinting toward the water and plunging into the raucous waves. That’s another thing I enjoy watching, all that sprinting and plunging, but the raucous waves also present a difficulty—Jesse’s terrified of them. He won’t dare attempt to wade into them with me, or even to let me hold him safely above the water as I walk into them, tottering on my balky knee.

  Calista’s not much for waves either. She’d rather sit on a blanket and choose from one of the fourteen novels she’s packed into the bag while Jesse eats one of the boxed snacks she prepared for him, which means that even though Calista’s more beautiful than any of the college girls, she doesn’t sprint and plunge so I can’t watch and admire. The beach is basically a bust. Jesse can only handle Katama for about an hour, which means my shoulders and back barely recover from lugging the bag from shuttle to sand before it’s time to start the return-schlep from sand to shuttle. And without Jesse rescuing Superman from the water, there’s no chance for sex with Calista. There’s only her snarl.

  This is another philosophical difference between Calista and me. She’s against having sex when we’re fighting. She won’t be intimate with me when she’s disgusted with me. I need to feel closer, she’ll say. Get to know me first. Make an effort.

  I, on the other hand, believe sex brings us closer, that when we’re physically vulnerable with each other, we can become emotionally vulnerable too. Human beings need touch, I plead. That’s why interns get paid to hold sick babies in hospital nurseries. If humans don’t get touched, we wither and die.

  Let’s not wither, I say. Let’s not die.

  But Calista’s not having it.

  One morning we hear on the radio that the surf at Katama will be relatively mild. Calista takes three hours to pack the bag and we again make the pilgrimage. The surf is not mild. It is as before, raucous and frolicking. Jesse will go nowhere near it. I spend an hour building sandcastles with him while Calista reads. I’m not good at building sandcastles. Back and hamstrings sore from lugging the bag, I don’t want to bend down or squat in the sand. I help Jesse bui
ld what amounts to a series of shapeless mounds of mud by observing, by standing with my arms crossed and boring myself to numbness. Get down in the sand with him, get your hands dirty, Calista yells at me, but I pretend not to hear her as I scout around for cute college girls diving into the waves. When I notice a particularly athletic quartet, I tell Jesse sandcastle time is over and drop him back at the towels with Calista. I need to go for a swim, I say, work the kinks out.

  I have a fantasy that I will cavort in and out of the surf like a dolphin and pop up in the midst of the college girls like a pizza guy in a porn video. I don’t have any intentions of initiating physical contact with them, but I want them to admire me, to note that even though I am fifteen years older than they are, my chest still ripples in the sun, my shoulders still represent something bronze and powerful. I do my dolphin thing and hope the tide will buffet the girls toward me but it doesn’t and they don’t come within twenty yards. I grow cold and parched and sunburned and emerge from the waves like our planet’s first ever amphibian stretching out his flippers, tired of water, dreaming of feet.

  When I look up, I see a tall slender dickhead talking to my wife. He has the exact look of a man who owns a four-million-dollar house but dresses in raggedy t-shirts and shorts to prove he still relates to the masses. Jesse’s eating cheese and crackers and Calista’s smiling at the dickhead in a way she hasn’t smiled at me for months, in a way that demonstrates more majesty than the roiling surf, more sustenance than the sun. I forget about hoping to evolve. I will beat this tall man’s ass all the way back to his Land Rover.

  Fortunately, the man drifts on to paddle his designer kayak to Nantucket or perform some other glossy exploit and I say to Calista, Who’s that dude and what was he doing by our towels? What’s he coveting in our bag?

  Just a guy who lives nearby, Calista says, clearly annoyed I’m acting like an adolescent. He was telling me about another beach, she says, a nature preserve called Long Point. He says it’s the best place on the island to take kids, the best place for swimming.