“Yes, but I snuck a pound of horse tranquilizers into his sippy cup so I don’t think you’ll have any problems.” He gave Ana his cute face.
“Seriously, James. Do you really think it’s good for him? He’s attached to you. If he wakes up …”
Fully dressed now, James moved past Ana in the doorway and into the hall. She followed him downstairs.
“It could it be traumatic for him,” she continued. “More traumatic?”
“Wait a second,” said James, again brushing by Ana to the basement. She waited in the hall, chewing the meat from her thumbnail. James returned with his hockey bag.
“Are you listening to me?” asked Ana. James squatted at her feet, tying his running shoe.
“Yes, but you’re being crazy. He’s not going to wake up, and if he does, so what? He knows you. Give him a hug, change his diaper.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” Ana snapped. “That’s not what I mean.”
James let out a long, slow sigh, eyes raised to the ceiling. “What do you mean, then, Ana?”
“Don’t talk to me in your TV voice.”
“Come on—”
“You know what I’m trying to say.” She sounded panicked, invoking a tone that should be reserved for fires and accidents. “I think it might be bad to leave him so soon. How important is hockey tonight? Is it an important game?” Ana’s understanding of sports was so limited that she believed James was working toward something, a cup or a pennant.
“If I don’t play, the numbers aren’t even.” His bag began to pull uncomfortably on his shoulder. James opened the door. A gust of cool air came upon them, but Ana was still hot with anger.
“I hate it when you tell me I’m crazy,” she said, and James recognized his mistake.
“I didn’t say you were crazy. I said you were being crazy.” He leaned in and kissed the top of her head. “You’ll be fine. He never wakes up. And he likes you, Ana.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, pulling away. But even as she watched James walk down the street toward the rink, his stick bobbing above his shoulder, she could not exactly figure out what she meant. She was trying to get him to recognize some new kind of failure that was waiting for them. She closed the door.
She wanted him to feel it the way she did, the certainty that every interaction with Finn was changing the boy, altering his being in ways that could not be undone. She wanted her husband to recognize the impossible weight of that and return to shield her.
She felt that James was leaving her there as a test, that she was forever under scrutiny now, since Finn’s arrival. The expectations were smothering. For so many years, she had tried to join James in his unspoken resolution that a child would be the release of something in her. She knew that he believed she needed saving, from her drifting parents and sharp-edged youth. He was the first part of that rescue plan; the baby would be the second part. He had said it in the beginning of their life together, often stroking her hair: “My poor girl,” he said. “Let me take care of you.” That was the great unspoken switch of their relationship: Everyone thought she saved James from his slovenliness, his intellectual chaos, but in fact, up close, it was Ana who was in need of salvation. The birth of a baby, then, the small hand that would pull her over to grace.
But up rose the black and wild doubt: What if I can’t do it? She had felt uneven since Finn’s arrival, staring at walls and windows, barely able to put on her boots that morning, staring at the zipper pull in her fingers.
How is motherhood supposed to feel? Because she wasn’t sure that it should feel like this, so much like terror. And her husband was leaving her alone with that feeling, while he went to play hockey.
That was what she had meant to say.
The game was particularly cruel, and James wasn’t up for it. Doug, especially, had his elbows out and some kind of rabies bubbling up in him. James couldn’t get the puck, and after one ferocious futile burst down the ice, he lost his breath and had to stop, leaning over with his hands on his knees.
There were two women playing: Alice Mitchell, who ran a small catering company, and a tall woman James hadn’t seen before. Her blond hair sprayed like a skirt from the bottom of her helmet.
Alice skated up to him and gave him a gentle whap on the butt with her stick.
“Doug’s an asshole tonight,” she shouted.
James nodded, touched and embarrassed by the sympathy. He skated away fast but only got to the puck a few times, once on a generous pass from Alice. Doug plucked it from him within moments.
After, they went for beer. James checked his cell phone for messages from Ana, but there were none. Six of them sat in the small bar, a converted diner with Dixie music on Sunday mornings. James had been going there for years, but this time he was acutely aware that Ana could not be with him. Someone had to be at home. He felt her out there, tethered to their house, to Finn’s sleeping body.
Doug leaned in, separating him and James from the rest of the group.
“Where the hell have you been? Lee’s alclass="underline" ‘Where’s Ana? We never see you guys,’ ” he said. Doug was an old friend, but possibly not a good one. They had worked together years ago. When Doug left for a cable station, that might have been it. But somehow Doug had kept up the momentum, phone calls and birthdays and hockey. In the moments when Doug was at his crassest, James suspected he kept in touch only on the off chance that James would prove useful to him at some point. For all his hard drinking and cultivated blue-collar vulgarity, he was a ruthless independent producer with a constantly rotating staff, usually quitting because of his tantrums. In the burning desert in Jordan, working on a documentary, Doug had stayed in a broken, overheated truck while an unpaid assistant pushed it. This incident had made him famous in TV circles. His name caused fear in the twentysomethings who did his grunt work. He won an International Emmy for the Jordan documentary, which was about relics.
“I’ve been busy. The book’s coming along,” said James, quickly burying his face in the pint of beer.
“Who’s your publisher?” asked Doug.
“It’s early stages. Not sure yet.” James raised the glass again.
Doug recognized that pause and changed direction.
“We’re having a small dinner thing. You know Rachel Garland, right? She did that figure skating miniseries?” James knew them all and all of their accomplishments and failures, those who made weekly commutes to Los Angeles, taking meetings, selling themselves. James had been excused from that particular footrace. He had designed his life to be above it, in fact, by staying at the public station for fifteen years. But it gnawed at him, the mystery of the commercial world. He tried to imagine being inserted into a life where he had to buff and box and sell himself like Doug did every day. Making pitches at boardroom tables in Los Angeles; throwing out a hundred ideas and having one stick. James recoiled from such odds.
He couldn’t bear what he knew was coming: a litany of other people’s successes. Doug did this under the guise of catching up.
Off Doug went. Rachel was running a big international coproduction cop show. Lee had a new gig adapting a children’s series involving turtles. Rachel’s second husband, Bill Waters, would be at the dinner. He was back from being director of photography on a feature in New York. Many of these people had passed through James’s show at one time or another, and then moved on. James had the sensation of being a high school teacher watching his most promising students in cap and gown turn around year after year, waving good-bye or giving him the finger. And now he wasn’t even the teacher. He was the janitor.
Did any of them have children? He looked around the table, which had filled up with empty beer bottles. Alice had kids, from a first marriage. There was a period when all the women they knew were pregnant, and then, at parties, babies appeared early and disappeared later. But these babies lacked specificity; James hadn’t connected with any of them. Now those babies had become children, large and staring. James found them at the same parties when he was looking for the bathroom. They sprawled on couches in rooms with the television on, or were tucked far away, sleeping. Suddenly he felt acutely aware of all he had not been privy to; the conversations he had been excused from in his life, just by being male and having a barren wife.