Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “ ’Scuse me,” Gottlieb said to Lacey.

  “Where you goin’, brah?” Jed asked him.

  “Gotta sleep,” he heard himself mumble.

  “You’re just going to cut out like that?” Jed shouted from across the banquette. His voice was hostile, and his whole personality seemed different.

  “I don’t feel well,” Gottlieb said.

  “Don’t be a pussy, G,” Jed said, and turned to talk to Jason Segel. Did he just call me G? Gottlieb slid over Fakel McAdams to get out.

  “Fuck off, then!” Jed said. Gottlieb turned in surprise at his nasty tone. “Just kidding, brah,” he said, grinning. Everyone at the banquette laughed, cruelly, it seemed.

  He walked unsteadily toward the door. In the parking lot Gottlieb tried Andy on his cell but didn’t get an answer. He described Andy to the Mexican valet. The guy shook his head, not knowing who he meant. Gottlieb said, “He’s on those TV commercials? For the cell phone?”

  The guy nodded excitedly, smiling. Everyone knew who Andy was. “He took a cab,” the valet said.

  Gottlieb was relieved that Andy hadn’t driven. He reached for his own valet ticket and then decided he should take a cab, too. “What time can I get my car tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Twelve o’clock.”

  It was too late. He wanted to surf in the morning. If he could get up. Then he was behind the wheel, cruising cautiously down Sunset. The Brewer Jed had given him was in the back, snuggled up against his own board. He could taste the sweet smell of the Palmers surf wax. Something about Mrs. Palmer and her five daughters. The best grip around. Or was that Sex Wax? The wax companies all used jerk-off jokes. Why? Hattie. Where was she? Had she seen him? Watch out for the LAPD. Johnny Law. He sat up straight, playing the part of Sober White Guy.

  He got to the Sunset Tower at two. He lay on the bed and closed his eyes to try to stop the throbbing in his head. A wave of vertigo came over him. He dashed to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. Afterward he felt better. He poured himself a couple of glasses of water and drank them quickly, then ran a shower, letting the hot water relax him. He was going to try to forget what he had seen Jed do, pretend the perfect evening had ended after the show.

  He pulled off the covers and lay on the smooth sheets. Still wired from the coke, he decided to straighten up the room. At the dresser he opened the envelope of mail forwarded from Brooklyn Film School. Wedged between a camera rental bill and a form letter from ConEd was an off-white envelope with his name handwritten on it. At the top of the letter was the name “Empire Cryobank” over a Murray Hill address.

  Dear Mr. Gottlieb,

  Our records indicate that you participated in our program located at 198 Lexington Avenue in New York City from 1990 to 1993. Our name then was Eastern Cryobank. I believe you worked with Dr. Charles Alitzky at the time.

  If this is correct, it is very important that you contact our office at the number or e-mail address below.

  If we have contacted you in error, we would appreciate it if you could call or e-mail us so we can note the information as incorrect.

  We appreciate your prompt attention to this matter.

  Sincerely,

  Brian Smith

  Post-Conception Services Coordinator

  Gottlieb raced to the bathroom and vomited again. He wiped his mouth, gargled, and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked bleary and old, his skin ashen. There were crow’s-feet around his eyes.

  He remembered the bland white room where he had jerked off. Why had he done it? The money hadn’t been that good if he counted everything he’d had to do to get it. The long bus rides into the city, the endless waiting in the antiseptic inner rooms of the cryobanks. There were other jobs he could have taken, jobs without repercussions. What kind of person did that, ejaculated for money? Only freaks, men who didn’t care about the future, men who had no sense of their value.

  Those days were so distant. He’d never given it much thought at the time. It was just easy spending money, for clothes, dates, drinks, a better life. He hadn’t wanted to believe that he could have children out there. But he did. That was what the letter meant. A child had gotten in touch with the bank, wanting to reach him. It had to mean that.

  CC would be disgusted if she knew what he had done: humiliated himself for a few thousand dollars. He had made someone, something, and that person had grown up. He thought of CC in Brooklyn, alone with the boys.

  Her voice was muffled when she answered. “H’lluh?” Sleeping. Shit. He had forgotten the time difference.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I just wanted to tell you I love you.”

  “What the fuck, Gottlieb? It’s five in the morning! The boys are going to be up soon!”

  “I miss you. I’m sorry. I forgot about the time. I love you.”

  “Jesus Christ!” she said. “How can you be so selfish? What the fuck!” She hung up, and he knew better than to try her again. He swept the letter off the bed. The art deco wallpaper made his head spin.

  Rebecca

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and Rebecca was at Seed, Benny strapped to her chest in an Ergo carrier. Because it was so hot outside, it had been a slow day, just a few customers over the entire morning. Now the store was empty. Feeling peckish, Rebecca grabbed a Gala apple from the shelf beneath the counter. As she did, Benny began to squirm in the carrier. She had been trying to get him to nap for fifteen minutes, but he had no interest.

  “Walkie!” he said, trying to claw his way out of the Ergo.

  “You need to sleep,” Rebecca said. It was two, and he usually took his afternoon nap at one.

  “No!”

  “Shh,” she said. She reached down into her shirt and lowered her bra cup, then moved him to her nipple. The best thing about the Ergo was that you could nurse while wearing the baby. Benny turned his face away and bawled.

  She tried again and he began to submit, the smell of the milk too tempting for him. When she first learned to nurse, in the hospital, they told her to rub the nipple under Abbie’s nose so she became familiar with the smell. It worked on both kids. Benny began to suck, angrily at first but then more eagerly. The milk’s narcotic effect kicked in. Within a few minutes his eyes began to close.

  She moved out from the counter and bounced him gently as he drifted, then went into the storage room to start pricing a new shipment. She heard the bells on the door chime and came out. The door pushed open and she saw Stuart. “Hi,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with y—” His eyes went to Rebecca’s Ergo and then fluttered down to the two little feet splayed out beneath it.

  He came toward her, still looking at the Ergo. She lifted the head support so it shielded Benny’s hair from view. Not the hair. Benny stirred. Please don’t wake up. Do anything you want, but do not wake up. He was in the danger zone of recent sleep.

  “You didn’t tell me you had another kid,” Stuart said. His tone didn’t seem confrontational. She wasn’t sure what he was implying; men were bad with dates, and Stuart was an actor, after all, not the brightest bulb. She wondered if he could do the math from conception to gestation to approximate age based on Benny’s size. No way. You couldn’t carbon-date a baby.

  “I didn’t?” she asked. “Sure I did. I must have.”

  “Nope. Never mentioned it. Not at square-dancing or at the Montauk Club. Boy or girl?”

  “A boy. Benny.”

  “Ben-ny,” he said in his Aussie accent, which made it sound funny. “How old is he?”

  “Thirteen months,” she said quickly, lopping off a few months from his real age. She felt like she was buying wine coolers at a grocery during high school, trying to guess what year of birth would make her twenty-one.

  “So he’s the one you’re nursing,” Stuart said.

  “Yep.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that on Tuesday night?”

  “I’m nursing Abbie, too,” she sa
id. “Both of them! Am I a Park Slope mother or what?”

  “If he’s thirteen months, it means you got pregnant with him—when, exactly?”

  “Uh, October 2008, I think,” she said. “It’s hard to remember.”

  Immediately, Stuart’s smile faded, and he took on an evil-interrogator expression, just like in the George Clooney thriller where he played the deranged Irish terrorist. Rebecca felt grateful that Benny was in a back-facing carrier so Stuart couldn’t see his face. “So you must have gotten pregnant awfully quickly after . . . I mean, immediately.”

  “A woman’s very fertile after a D and C,” she said, remembering something she had heard once on the playground. There was a use for the arcana you picked up, whiling away the day with idiot mothers.

  “Is he my son?”

  “He’s not your son!” She remembered the famous confrontation scene in Chinatown and was struck by the ridiculousness of their conversation even as she was aware that her acting was the only thing that could convince him Benny wasn’t his.

  “I think you’re lying. I think he’s my son.” He leaned over to try to get a better look. She pulled back protectively.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he’s not. He’s Theo’s.” I’m sorry to disappoint you? Where had she whipped out that one from? When your life was a soap opera, you talked like Susan Lucci.

  “Tell me the truth. My dad is dead, and I can’t stop thinking about the things I never got to say to him. If Benny’s my kid, you owe it to him to tell me.”

  There he went, pulling out the dead-dad card. It made her secret seem like a crime against his family. She thought about what he said, about how she owed it to Benny. She’d been meditating on that a lot as Benny had gotten older: what he deserved. She thought about it when he walked for the first time, when he said his first word. Plane. He was becoming a person, and he did have a right to know who his father was.

  She sat on the stool behind the counter because her legs were starting to give out. She began to cry. Stuart’s expression changed from mistrust to misty relief. “We made a baby,” he said, coming around and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Crikey.”

  “Shh,” she said. “He’s sleeping.”

  She let him move the head cover and stroke Benny’s red hair. “I always wanted to be a father. I didn’t know it would happen like this.”

  “He’s a good boy,” she said. “He didn’t deserve to have things be so complicated.”

  “Why’d you name him Benny?”

  “My grandfather was Benjamin. It was in honor of him.”

  “I always wanted to name a son something cool, like Fox. Or Jagger.”

  “He’s not a dog. You can’t just change his name!”

  “We made a baby,” he said again. “I wondered . . . I wondered whether we had.”

  “You never tried to call me. If you wondered, then why didn’t you call me? You didn’t care.”

  “I wasn’t sure. I guess I was afraid. I was a coward. What about your hubby?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He doesn’t mind raising another man’s son?” She told him Theo didn’t know. “You’re saying he thinks the boy is his?” The Australian accent had a unique ability to convey total dumbfoundedness. She nodded. “Come on! That kid’s a ginger!”

  “It only got red this summer.”

  “You have to tell him. I’m Benny’s father now.” She thought she saw him wince at the name.

  “Can’t you just—see him privately? We can meet in the park a couple times a year. We can all have lunch. No one has to know but us.”

  “I don’t do things halfway.” He kissed her. She didn’t know what she felt for Stuart—love? Tenderness? Lust? Why did he have to be so sexy? Why couldn’t she have had an affair with an ugly short guy?

  “Theo’s a good father,” she said.

  “You’ll tell him,” Stuart said, “and then you’ll move in with me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We should be together, the three of us.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I brought something for you,” he said. He pulled out a sterling silver necklace made of circles. It was just Rebecca’s style: subtle, not too flashy, and elegant.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  He went behind her to put it around her neck. Her pulse quickened as he clasped it, his fingers brushing her nape. How did he know exactly what she liked? She imagined wearing it around Chelsea, holding hands with Stuart, Benny in his arms. Stuart was nuzzling her neck. Maybe she and Stuart had been meant all along to come to each other in reverse order—first baby, then marriage. It was the making of a romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl—or two romantic comedies starring Katherine Heigl.

  Theo had changed, they had changed. Maybe the whole reason Benny had been conceived was so she and Theo could blow up the marriage, explode it, like how Lee Krasner said to Pollock, “Jackson, you’ve broken it wide open!”

  Even if she hadn’t known she wanted to get pregnant, she’d had Benny because she had wanted someone who would belong to her. Back then neither Abbie nor Theo felt like hers—Abbie belonged to Theo, and Theo belonged to himself, certainly not her. He’d been absent as a husband, he hadn’t fucked her, he had looked at her with contempt.

  She had wanted someone who would be hers, and now she had him. Her son. But he wasn’t only hers, he was Stuart’s, too. You made selfish choices, and then your selfish choices affected other people, like Benny, who hadn’t asked to be born and was a living person who would one day know the story of his conception and have to wrestle with it. It was so easy to make a baby and so complicated to raise one.

  Stuart came around and embraced her, Benny between them. “What do you say, Rebecca? You’re not happy with this guy. And Benny should be with his parents.”

  “How do you know I’d be happy with you?”

  “Because we’d have fun. You’re not having any fun.”

  “Is that really what you think this is about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You famous people, you’re all the same. You want to be normal. It’s like that Kate Winslet American Express ad, the one where she filled out the questionnaire in her own handwriting. She said her proudest moment was the birth of her children. Instead of winning an Oscar. I bet you’ve spent a lot of time in therapy saying you don’t feel real.”

  “How’d you know that?” She wondered if he knew the difference between feeling and wanting to feel.

  “You could be with anyone,” she said. “Why me?”

  “You’re smart and beautiful, and I can be myself around you. And you’re a good mother.”

  No one had ever called her a good mother. “I don’t think I am. I’m distractible and I snap at him and I drink too much wine and I stare at my phone a lot.”

  “I see the way he looks at you. He adores you.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I already love you,” he said. “I want to spend time with him. Let me take him out right now for a bit. Anything could happen to me. I could go like that—” He snapped his fingers. “Just like my father. I have to get to know my son before I die.”

  “You’re not going to die,” she said. “You do Ayurveda.”

  “I’ve fallen off the wagon. I’ve fallen off the rickshaw.”

  She finally convinced him to go. For a long time after he left, she thought about what he had said. Did he mean it, or was he trying to convince himself? Stuart Ashby could never be normal. Once you had international fame, two Oscar nominations, a multimillion-dollar salary, and groupies, you couldn’t turn around and become a garden-variety dad to a nonfamous kid.

  She went to the boys’ side of the store and rearranged the hangers according to color. She could feel Benny’s heart beating against her chest and wished for a moment that he were still inside her belly.

  Gottlieb

  Gottlieb woke up feeling a vague sense of r
egret. He looked at his face in the bathroom mirror for physical signs of the night before. Tired, bloodshot eyes, but that was it. Then he remembered the letter. It was still there on the floor. He hadn’t dreamed it.

  He needed to clear his head, think about the letter, put things in perspective. By the bed, he did fifteen push-ups, hopped up, flexed his biceps, and then did ten more. The right choice was not to respond. He ordered room service, a pot of coffee and muesli with fresh fruit, and started to write an apologetic e-mail to CC. Instead, he closed the mail window and went on Surfline. He saw the headline—HUGE SWELL ON TAP FOR SOCAL, with pictures of perfect waves—“surf porn,” as CC called it.

  “A large southwest swell to hit the Southern California coast this week and next, creating massive waves and perfect surfing conditions. Orange County’s south-facing beaches, in prime position, will receive the majority of this particular swell’s energy. Point breaks, beach breaks, and reefs can expect epic conditions during the run.”

  Although he felt cowed by the word “massive,” he decided to take a drive south to check out the waves. The ocean these days was like a mother to him, loving but stern. The water would let him think, wash away the coke and drinking, and then in the morning they would call Universal and make the deal.

  He Googled “best Orange County surf spots” and decided to drive to San Onofre and see the legendary Trestles. He had watched an ASP World Tour surfing contest on television once and had promised himself he would paddle out there one day, just to say he had.

  An hour and a half later the voice on his Cayenne’s GPS told him that he was approaching his exit. He saw barely any traffic on the trip from West Hollywood, and it felt good to be out of the city. With the sunroof open, he blasted Led Zeppelin on the car stereo the whole ride.

  He had done his homework this time and parked in the pay lot at Carl’s Jr. on the other side of the freeway. He hiked down toward the beach with his board and wet suit under his arm. The weather had turned foggy. He immediately got lost and had to ask for directions but soon found himself on a graffiti-littered asphalt trail that led to the beach. FUCK HAWAIIANS. YER GOING THE WRONG WAY, KOOKS. SURF HARD.