How to Party with an Infant Page 3

  “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?”

&nb
sp; 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.”

  He wants to say, “You won’t be madly in love with the woman you thought you’d be madly in love with forever. And she won’t be madly in love with you. She’ll just be mad. And, one day, you’ll come home not knowing what she’s just done to you. It will make you furious and you’ll yell at the dog for no reason. You’ll gaze at your sleeping toddler for company. Your sleeping toddler will be your best friend. You’ll tell him: “I love your mother, but only because another man might.”

  “Getting old,” Henry says, looking at these boys, who can run fast, jump high, eat like shit. “It will be a shocker.” He may be upsetting the boys. They look worried as they chew their food. Tupp cleans up the fridge. The apple.

  “It’s got some perks, though,” Henry says, but he knows he doesn’t sound convincing.

  Shipley cuts in. “I hear you should go for the softball girls and tell them everyone thinks they’re lesbians and then they’ll do it with you to prove they’re not.”

  “But what if they are?” his son asks.

  “Then it’s still a score ’cause you get to do it with a lesbian.”

  Ross falls off the edge of his stool, and everyone laughs then looks around nervously, and then Henry really knows that they’ve been drinking. Ross grins and smooths his black hair back, returns to his chair.

  “You can’t drink,” Henry says. The boys all look down. His son’s face flushes—he has that same giveaway skin. “I mean, when you’re old. When I was in college I could really knock ’em back—me and my buddy, Chavez—we’d drink a case of Bud Light every night. A case each. Every single night. No way could I do that now.”

  The boys all smile except for Shipley, who opens his mouth and after a pause lets out a belch that sounds like a foghorn. His son still seems a little nervous, and Henry wonders if it’s in response to “Chavez.” Who’s Chavez? he must be wondering. The thing is, when it comes down to it, he and Chavez would have kicked his son’s ass if his son had been, say, in a McDonald’s one night and he happened to look at them the wrong way. Henry grew up in Concord. He didn’t like city boys like his son, with their private schools and preppy clothes and longish hair. His son skis and drives a brand-new Escalade. His ass would have been demolished. But he loves him now, of course, as an adult. It’s just that his kids, the way they live, it’s all just a little foreign to him. The apple fell far, far away from the tree. Then smashed into a Sub-Zero.

  He supposes his eighteen-year-old daughter isn’t as conventional. He passed her room the other day and heard her friend Jillian say, “Did you see what she was wearing? It was camouflage, but purple, and I went up to her and was all, ‘That’s cute.’ ”

  “Glamouflage,” he heard his daughter say in an annoyed voice. “That’s what it’s called. And who the fuck cares?”

  Her spirit reminded him of Kate’s when he first met her.

  His son is eyeing him, and he wonders if he knows he and his mom are having problems. If he can feel the tension between them.

  “What else, Dad?” his son asks. “What else is wrong with your life?”

  Yeah. He knows.

  “Nothing. I’m just shooting the bull.”

  “So were you a player or something?” Shipley asks.

  Henry thinks of Shipley’s mother, her rich brown hair like a desk in a banker’s office. They grew apart, he endured her more than liked her, and then she introduced him to Kate. Kate had good taste in music. That’s what he liked about her immediately. She was funny, too. Sharp. He remembers she’d get so wasted on this nasty pink wine and he’d have to carry her from the car to the bed, up those damn steps off Fillmore. She was light, though a bit heavier when she was drunk. It made him feel like she trusted him with all of her weight.

  “I guess I kind of was a player,” Henry says. “But I was a good guy.” He gives the boys a sarcastic smile. “I loved ’em all.”

  He takes another bite of his sandwich and sees Kate in the doorway looking at him. His confidence in front of the boys whittles down to a splinter. He can never be someone else in front of her.

  “You loved them all, huh?” She has her arms crossed over her chest as she always does these days. The boys look in her direction, then focus on putting the food into their mouths as soberly as possible. Except for Tupp, who says, “Hi, Mrs. Hale. Mr. Hale here was just giving us some fatherly advice.”

  “Oh?” She’s drunk as well. They’re all drunk in the kitchen. Henry can feel mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth and he decides to leave it there. Fuck it.

  “What kind of advice?” she asks.

  “Advice on girls,” Tom says.

  Kate laughs that kind of hateful laugh meant to shrink his balls. Henry wants to push her. He actually wants to harm her because of this laugh, but then he realizes what he really wants to do is take her into his arms and say, “Let’s laugh for real! Remember we used to do that?” But then he catches her eye and doesn’t want to hold her anymore. He’s right back to his abusive thoughts.

  “So, what’s the advice? What gems has my husband handed to you tonight?”

  “Stay away from the cheerleaders,” Shipley says.

  “Go for the ugly ones,” Tupp says. “They’ll put out.”

  “I did not say that.”

  “Are you eating?” Kate asks. “You just ate.”

  “I did not just eat. What we did was not called eating.”

  “The punks, the rebels,” Shipley continues. “The loners.”

  “You’re teaching them how to get laid?”

  Henry can feel his son staring at him, a sad, sharp stare. He remembers when his son was preschool age he liked to eat his dinner on Henry’s lap. This would bother him, but after a few beers he’d like it, especially if they were out with other families. A few beers would make most annoying things endearing, and he suspects that’s a parenting tool no one really gives a lot of credit to. Beer.

  “You want to know what to do?” Kate says.

  The boys laugh weakly, like an old lady has ju
st made a knock-knock joke, and then the room is silent. Henry thought it was always silent, but now that the chewing and munching has stopped, it really is. Kate walks up to Ross, the quietest of the boys, the most handsome as well. Everyone in the room knows it. He has mahogany skin and all the things girls like on boys: long lashes, water polo physique, thick head of hair, crater-size dimples, the works. Ross is basically set for life. Kate stands in front of him. She’s wearing her pajamas, which are fitted cotton pants and a matching shirt. Her hair is pulled back with a headband, and she looks girlish and confident, like a tennis player.

  “You tell her how hot she is,” Kate says. “Not beautiful, or pretty, or nice, but sexy. You tell her she’s driving you up the wall. You can even be lewd. Try to hold her, touch her. It will make her feel good, and after a while you know what will happen? She’ll fantasize about you.”

  “Yeah,” Tupp says. “Yeah, right.”

  “Listen,” Kate says. “Boys. You’re all we think about. We have grand fantasies about kissing you and walking with you and being held by you in public. You bring us flowers in front of all our girlfriends, you hold our hands, you drive our cars. We think about this when we go to bed at night, trying to force it into our dreams. We want you as much as you want us. Trust me.”

  Ross moves back on his chair, and closes his legs.

  “So,” Kate says. “When the girl walks into class, say out loud, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing to me?’ Embarrass the girl, draw attention to her.”

  Henry watches them hanging on every word. His son has stopped eating his sundae. Tupp and Shipley keep glancing at each other and grinning. Ross looks down as though being chastised.

  “Then after a week or so, slowly turn your attention away,” Kate says. “Look at another girl. Flirt with her, but don’t say the same things you said to the first girl, just turn your attention a bit, but stay friendly, stay nice. Act like you tried, but failed.”

  “But what if it works right away?” Tupp asks. “I mean what if she’s good to go?”

  “Yeah,” Henry says. He wants to tell them that he hadn’t had to do any of these things to get Kate in bed. She was in it just a few hours after meeting him. They had flirted with each other all night. When she brought him to her apartment, he tried to think of things to say that would impress her, but she just lunged at him. He didn’t have to say a word. Afterward she said she moved so swiftly because the more a guy spoke the less she liked him and she didn’t want that to happen with Henry.