Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “You can’t throw sand at other children,” Marco said to Enrique on the blanket.

  “She said I wasn’t a princess!” Enrique was in red surf shorts, but on his head was a rhinestone tiara.

  “You’re not a princess!” Todd said.

  “Yes, I am!”

  Marco was less worried about Enrique’s cross-dressing than his behavioral problems. Enrique liked to wear his shirts as skirts and barrettes in his shaggy hair. Marco’s theory was that Enrique was merely rebelling against his circumstances: living in a house of three males. Todd was less forgiving. He became irate if he came home to find Enrique in a tutu. For Halloween, Enrique wanted to be a ballerina, but Todd bribed him into being a vampire with a two-hundred-dollar costume he’d found on the Internet.

  If other children protested that Enrique was a boy, he bit, hit, or spat. This got Marco in trouble with the nannies, who would approach with a frown and a pointed finger. Sometimes he worried that Enrique was a problem child because of his heredity. Enrique’s biological father was in jail for stealing cars, and Marco worried the boy would grow up to be a criminal, too.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Marco said, turning to Todd. “We’re not ready. Enrique’s a handful and—”

  “If we say no, it could be another year.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

  “We want a baby.”

  “I don’t. We can say we changed our minds.”

  “But we didn’t.”

  Todd had been talking about the second kid for about a year, and this was not the first time Marco had been vocal in his opposition: He didn’t see the rush, Enrique was too high-maintenance. Todd thought Enrique should have a sibling because he needed more normalcy—being an adoptee with two gay dads—and he’d put in the application on his own. Todd made more money and had better credit, so he would be the sole adoptive parent anyway; he didn’t need Marco’s signature to submit it. Months went by, and Marco began to hope he could change Todd’s mind before they got a baby, but now he had lost the race.

  Marco shook his head at Todd’s inability to listen. Todd didn’t hear what he didn’t want to. The dynamic between the two of them had been established even before Marco’s affair. Marco did Todd’s will in exchange for sex. But lately, there wasn’t as much sex, and it no longer seemed a fair trade. Todd was exhausted when he came home from his job running a Chelsea-based contracting business. Marco liked to joke that Todd was the only gay contractor in Manhattan. Todd was often too exhausted to fuck, and many nights Marco stayed up late chatting with guys on Manhunt.com, masturbating but never meeting anyone in person because that was cheating, and he didn’t want to cheat again.

  How had they gotten here, another kid on the way? In the early months of Kique’s life, they had prided themselves on being different from other gay dads. They laughed at the gay guys down Fifteenth Street with three adopted kids. One husband worked all the time and the other, the stay-at-home dad, was always shlepping them around valiantly on his back or in a double stroller, sometimes both. Marco didn’t understand why one kid wasn’t enough. Why did they have to go all UNICEF?

  Todd uncorked the bottle of Pinot Grigio he had packed in a cooler. He poured it into a plastic goblet, watered it down with Perrier, and chugged it back. In a few months it would be the three-year anniversary of Marco’s sobriety, but Todd had long ago stopped his effort to change his own drinking. When Marco left detox, he came home to find that Todd had removed all the alcohol from the house. It moved him that Todd wanted him to change, but as Marco’s sobriety lasted longer, Todd had reverted to his old habits. Now he poured himself a glass of wine as soon as he hugged Enrique hello. When they went to Brooklyn Fish Camp for brunch, he drank Bloody Marys. Marco knew the deal from the half-dozen A.A. meetings he had attended after detox, that it was the alcoholic’s job to stay sober, that the only one who could save you was HP, the Higher Power. “Anything but you,” he could still hear his burned-out sponsor saying to him. But he found it rude that Todd brought Pinot Grigio to the beach. As Marco’s teenage students would have put it, Seriously?

  His five-day inpatient detox program in Morningside Heights had been a weird mix of people—mostly working-class, but there had been hedge fund owners, actors, and even the son of an action movie star. They sat in groups and talked about their childhoods. Despite the talk therapy, the program seemed to view alcoholism as a medical problem to be treated with pharmaceuticals. Marco had been discharged with three prescriptions: Librium, Celexa, and Antabuse, a drug that purported to stop the urge to drink. He stopped the Celexa after a few months because it made his orgasms take forever, when they came at all. He was referred to a psychopharmacologist named Dr. Haber, a formal Jewish man in his eighties on the Upper East Side who was okay with him stopping the Celexa but said he should stay on the Antabuse. Now he saw Dr. Haber every few months or so for Antabuse refills. By day he had no urge to drink, but at night he dreamed of drinking, woke up in the morning thinking he had nipped from one of Todd’s vodka bottles in the middle of the night. He had to check his own breath to make sure he was wrong.

  He didn’t like the dullness caused by the Antabuse and he had begun splitting the pills, going down from 500 to 250 milligrams without consulting Dr. Haber. He was supposed to pick up the latest scrip at the pharmacy a month ago, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.

  Todd unpacked the sandwiches—Serrano ham with brie on ciabatta—that he had prepared and handed one to Marco, who had no appetite. “Can you believe it?” Todd said. “We’re going to have a baby again!” There were two elderly women in beach chairs next to them with weathered skin. When Todd said, “We’re going to have a baby again,” one of them looked over. She noticed Todd’s red banana-hammock bathing suit, and then she glanced at Marco and Enrique and pursed her lips. Todd was wearing a trucker cap with a decal of a rooster and the word “cock” beneath it. This was who Todd was: the kind of fag who wore a vulgar cap in Wellfleet but also insisted on adopting two children. Todd didn’t think a family of three was really a family, which, since he came from a member of a sexual minority, seemed hypocritical. His desire to conform had only gotten worse after Marco’s affair. Every year they fought over whether to have a manger at Christmas. Marco, an agnostic Puerto Rican half-Jew, hated the manger more because it was Christian than because it was religious, but Todd insisted.

  Todd handed Enrique a sandwich and some Cape Cod potato chips. “You’re going to have a brother,” he said. “A baby brother.”

  “I don’t want one.” Enrique didn’t even look up. Marco stifled a giggle. He often felt that he and the boy were unified, both iconoclasts.

  “Well, you’re going to get one,” Todd said. He turned to Marco. “We should start thinking about what to pack. We should leave around ten tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe Enrique and I should stay here,” Marco said, “and you should get him.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “It’s a long drive. It won’t be any fun for Enrique, and then to be in the car for another six hours?”

  Marco knew Todd didn’t want to make the drive by himself. If he didn’t want to be alone with a newborn for six hours in a car, did he really want him for the next eighteen years and beyond?

  Todd’s phone rang—his brother. “I’ll call you back,” Todd said. “The reception’s no good here.” He made another wine spritzer and ran up the dunes with the phone in one hand and the cup in the other.

  Enrique had gobbled his sandwich, all the potato chips, and dessert, salt-and-oatmeal cookies that Todd had bought at Hatch’s Produce. In the last year the boy had turned into a round ball of fat and anger. Marco had started to call him gordito.

  Marco grabbed his boogie board and Enrique’s, too. “Let’s go in,” he said. Maybe the water would clear his head.

  As they caught waves, he was impressed by Enrique’s dexterity and fearlessness. The boy knew when to get on and how to push himself forward without wipi
ng out. Marco had noticed that on days when Enrique got a lot of physical activity, he wasn’t as difficult.

  Todd had come back to the beach. He was hopping on the sand like it was burning his feet. He was such a pussy. He downed another cup of wine, took off his cock hat, and went running into the ocean. Marco waved to show him where they were, but Todd was down the beach and didn’t see.

  Todd swam out far. Marco hoped Todd knew what he was doing; he was naturally athletic and had played on the baseball team in high school, but he’d put on forty pounds in the time Marco had known him.

  Enrique and Marco rode a few more sets into shore, and then he noticed people staring, pointing toward the water. Two lifeguards paddled out fast on huge thick surfboards, rescue tubes dragging behind. Marco turned to look and saw a bunch of surfers clustered around a figure he knew instantly was Todd. The lifeguards arrived and helped him onto a board. For a split second Marco had the thought that if Todd was dead, then they wouldn’t have to adopt this baby, and then he felt guilty for thinking that.

  “What are you looking at?” Enrique said.

  “Daddy.” Todd was Daddy, Marco was Papa.

  The lifeguards brought Todd back to shore. Marco and Enrique stood over him on the beach, Todd yelling, “I was fine. I wasn’t drowning! You should have left me alone!”

  “You shouldn’t have gone out that far,” Marco said.

  “You shouldn’t tell me what to do,” Todd said. He had drunk so much wine, he was slurring.

  Marco was ashamed on his behalf and ashamed to be his husband. One of the lifeguards, a hot blond boy with washboard abs, caught Marco’s look. “Everyone gets embarrassed when they have to be rescued,” he said.

  Rebecca

  “So tell him you won’t do it!” Rebecca told Marco, frustrated with him for kowtowing to his bitchy husband. They were sitting at a shiny wooden table in a New American restaurant called Sol, overlooking Wellfleet Harbor. It was sleek and wooden and had a low wraparound bar in the center. Marco had called her in a panic and begged her to come meet him.

  “I can’t,” Marco said. “Todd wants him.”

  “So? You’re half of the marriage. And you’re the one who’s going to have to take care of him the most.”

  It had always seemed to Rebecca that Marco’s marriage was dysfunctional, but every time she told him this, he said, “You don’t know Todd as well as I do. He’s only like that around other people, when he’s feeling insecure.” The few times she and Theo had invited Marco and Todd over for dinner, Todd drank too much and had only negative things to say. She once mentioned a good meal that she and Theo ate at Franny’s on Flatbush Avenue, and Todd went on a rant about how it was overrated.

  Marco and Rebecca had met at Beansprouts, the nursery school on Sixth Avenue that Abbie and Enrique attended. Rebecca knew that Marco and Todd were a couple because they showed up to school together with Enrique. Marco had an easygoing, positive energy and was better looking than most dads in the neighborhood. One day at Beansprouts, he invited her for coffee, and she said yes. He turned out to be sardonic and bright and an avid reader, and they spent a long time talking about Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jonathan Franzen. They began getting together after drop-off a few times a month. Marco always flattered her, calling her a MILF. He was solicitous in a way that Theo wasn’t. He hung on all her words, laughed at all her jokes. It was like an affair without the sex.

  Before she met Marco, Rebecca considered herself the anti–fag hag. She didn’t get the gay man/straight woman thing when she saw it portrayed in movies or TV shows—the cackling laughs, the campy sensibility, the gossip. Marco wasn’t like the gay men in movies. She craved her time with him, felt happy when she saw him.

  “He really wants the baby,” Marco said at the restaurant. His face was ashen, and she noticed the acne scars on his gaunt cheeks. Rebecca had the sensation—increasingly rare since she had become a mother—that it was possible someone else had bigger problems than she did.

  “Why? You’re gay! You don’t need to have more kids. One is plenty. One is noble.”

  Marco mumbled something. He was often impossible to understand. “What?”

  “I said I’m trapped,” he said. “He’s going to do what he wants to. It’s the way he is. I can’t leave him. I’m too committed to Enrique.”

  Theo’s theory was that Marco was a codependent recovering alcoholic trapped in a loveless marriage, dependent on Todd financially and emotionally, and too loyal to know what was best for him. She wasn’t sure it was totally loveless but agreed that Marco might be too loyal for his own good.

  “But he’s negative, and he doesn’t seem to respect you.”

  “He cares about Enrique. He’s a good father. He spends every minute he can with him when he’s not working. I’m not a good disciplinarian.”

  “That’s because you’re the one who’s always with him.”

  “I wish I had Todd’s focus. He doesn’t take Enrique for granted. Sometimes I do.”

  “What is this about?” she asked Marco. “Controlling you? Is he afraid you’re going to cheat again, so he wants to keep you close to the family?”

  “I don’t know.” He had told her about Jason, his English student, an Irish boy who lived in Carroll Gardens. He was a senior when it started. Eighteen. They both loved Fitzgerald and began to e-mail back and forth, first about The Great Gatsby. Then it got personal. They met at a restaurant on Smith Street and wound up in Jason’s room, on the top floor of the house, which had its own entrance, while the father, a widower, slept in front of the TV.

  Marco had told her that the affair happened when his drinking got bad. He drank with the kid. He said Todd pretended not to know about the affair or the drinking, even though Marco came home late night after night, drunk and smelling of sex. Finally, he got tired of all the lying and confessed. Rebecca thought it was wrong to sleep with a high school student, but Marco described it as a love affair. The way he portrayed it, it was the beginning of all his problems, not a symptom of them.

  “I think it’s just about family, building a family,” he said. “You like having two kids, right?” Marco’s face was open and afraid. “People say that when you have two kids, you can’t imagine what it was like before.” His tone reminded her of a single girl pining for an asshole.

  “You know,” she said, “that is the biggest lie. I imagine my life without them every single day. Every hour.” She was so nervous about having a third child unintentionally that as soon as she healed from Benny’s birth, she had an IUD put in.

  “But still—you’re glad you had Benny.”

  “My situation is more complicated than yours.”

  Marco was the only one who knew the truth about Benny. CC knew of Rebecca’s affair but not the Benny part. Rebecca had lied about the chronology so CC wouldn’t figure out the truth; she was too worried that it would get back to Theo through Gottlieb. This was the problem with couples becoming friends.

  With Marco, it was different. Rebecca trusted him implicitly. They even had a running joke about it. Marco would say, “Are you going to tell Theo about Benny?” and Rebecca would answer, “I tried to, but he never listens.”

  She had told Marco the whole story one afternoon in Harmony Playground when Benny was sleeping in his stroller and Abbie and Enrique were playing. They’d been talking about Marco’s affair, and she confessed. It had been a relief to tell someone after keeping it secret for the whole pregnancy and delivery, then wondering every day whether Theo knew the truth.

  Theo’s reaction when they found out it was a boy was “I’m nervous about fathering a son,” a choice of words that made Rebecca swallow hard. But once Benny was born, they bonded beautifully. Theo got up with him in the middle of the night, helped him take his first steps, and always swiped him out of reach when Abbie tried to hit him.

  Before Benny’s hair had started to change color, it had been thick, almost black, like Theo’s. When the
y took him around the neighborhood, people would say to Theo, “No paternity test necessary!” and to Rebecca, “Does it make you feel bad that he doesn’t look like you?” She would respond lightly, “No. Because there isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that he came out of me,” and then launch into her vaginal-birth-after-cesarean story, which in Park Slope was conversational bait akin to bringing up professional hockey with a Canadian.

  Later, there had been anxiety-provoking moments, like when Benny was six months old and the New York Times magazine ran a cover story on fathers learning that their children were not their own. She threw out the magazine before bringing the paper up to the apartment. But then those moments were forgotten, and she would go months without worrying. Until this summer.

  “Today in the car Theo asked if I had any red hair in my family,” she said to Marco. “He said, ‘There must be some, because there isn’t any on my side, and Benny’s turning out to be a redhead.’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “I made a joke about how I probably had a grandmother who was raped by a red-haired Cossack.”

  A family was coming in the door of Sol. The husband looked Jewish and shlubby, and his wife WASPy and formerly athletic. The mother was carrying a baby, a girl, and the son was holding the hand of an extremely voluptuous blond girl wearing a bikini top and short white athletic shorts. She resembled Anna Kournikova. They headed for the table behind Rebecca and Marco. On the back of the girl’s shorts, right across the ass, were the words FRENCH ME.

  “Oh my God,” Rebecca said softly. “I would never hire an au pair that attractive.”

  She heard the girl say something to the little boy in an Eastern European accent. Maybe she lived with them year-round and the mother had to look at those nubile tits morning till night. The mother wasn’t unattractive, but she seemed defeated, her breasts depleted, and angry elevens between her eyebrows. Rebecca wondered whether she had ever been as cute as the nanny.