Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

But his voice was mild when he said, “As was yours to become the perfect organic food buying, PTA meeting attending, bake sale organizing, Stepford, private school mom. Different mother, different methods, maybe. Same message, definitely.”

  Damn. “Touché, Rick.” I forced myself to look at him.

  “See, Cass, I understand now that I don’t need any of that stuff, but thinking I did shackled me to a sterile, deadening, materialistic way of life. And you”—he was definitely not meeting my gaze now—“well, like it or not, you enabled me in those beliefs.”

  I enabled him? Was this psychobabble? Coming from Rick Martin?

  “I understand that you don’t want to believe you were complicit, Cass, but you’re fooling yourself just as much as I was when I told myself I was happy.”

  “Are you saying you’ve never been happy?” If he hadn’t been, I must have been the most insensitive person on earth, because I’d been convinced he was. It was impossible to have this conversation without flashing on all the times that seemed to make his words a lie. Our wedding day, him crying over the boys in the delivery room, nights spent walking Jared when he’d had colic. Us, on Nantucket, on the beach with the kids, making love on the kitchen floor, reading in front of the fire, playing endless games of Sorry and Go Fish. Rick, his eyes misted with tears at the preschool concert. “Never?”

  “I thought I was.”

  I felt like I’d been punched. Hard. “It’s our life, Rick.” I wasn’t doing much of a job of holding back the tears. “Maybe it is imperfect, but it’s ours.”

  “We hate it,” he said.

  Tears were sliding down my face now. “Have I ever said I hated our life?”

  “No.” He looked down, and I wondered if he was going to blame me for the $75 cashmere socks he was wearing. “But just because you’re willing to lie down and make yourself a doormat doesn’t mean the resentment doesn’t radiate off you in waves, Cass.”

  “Resentment?” I said, really surprised. I tore a paper towel off the roll I was still holding and wiped my face. “Resentment at what?”

  “You’re just as tied to it as I am. No, was,” he said, looking me straight in the eye for the first time in the past few minutes. “All the stuff, the material stuff, private schools, second houses, you either wanted it more than you told yourself, or you were willing to sacrifice your desires completely. And to be honest, I don’t respect either.”

  I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I figured I could live without respect if I had to. “Rick, if you want to make changes, we can do that. But maybe you should go see someone, to talk?” I was almost begging.

  “No,” he said, in a way that told me clearly that that discussion wasn’t going to happen. “I understand this perfectly. It’s about me having put myself, my own interests and needs, behind everyone else’s. But don’t you see, Cass?” He reached over and put his hand over mine. “It doesn’t matter what catalyzed this feeling. What matters is that I have it and there’s no denying it. But it’s for you too! Try thinking of it as me gifting you with an opportunity to find your real unshackled self!”

  I looked down at his hand on mine and had to repress the quickest flash of myself, leaning down and sinking my teeth, right into his hand. My husband’s going around the bend, and I’m channeling my mother. Shit. What if my real, unshackled self was her?

  It was like all the fight had gone. I couldn’t believe he was doing this, just couldn’t. I pulled my hand out from under his. “I don’t know, Rick. Maybe I’m projecting my own childhood here, but when adults talk about chances to find themselves, it seems like it often doesn’t work out so well for the kids involved. What about Jared and Noah?” I was hoping against everything that this would have some magical effect on him, stop him dead, because his dedication as a father was one of the things I’d always loved most about him.

  He looked at me blankly. “They’ll be fine, they’ll be great, Cass. I mean, first of all, they have you. And second, I’m doing it partly for them.” Right. Just like he was also doing it partly for me. “Don’t you think it’s better for the kids to have a father who is creatively fulfilled than one who hates his life?”

  “No.” The feeling in my stomach had coalesced to terror. I could taste the metallic tang of my own fear. He was leaving us. “Absolutely not. They’re six and eight. They don’t give a damn about your inner workings. They just want you to live with them and love them. I just want you to live with them and love them.”

  “I’ll always love them, no matter what. You know that.”

  I looked at him. I did know that. It’s one of the reasons I was so confused. “Yeah, but I think the live with them part is critical in their minds, but I get the feeling not in yours. So why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Are you leaving?”

  He closed his eyes for a second and then opened them. “I don’t expect you to understand, Cass, but I’m confident you will”—I was pretty sure I was starting to—“given time. I’ve been offered a very exciting opportunity. Once in a lifetime. I haven’t done anything for myself in years, Cass. And now it’s time. My time.” He sounded like the smooth voice-over on a retirement commercial, maybe life insurance. Something I’d mute, for sure, if I had the remote in my hand.

  Was that true? That he hadn’t done anything for himself in years? I mean, yes, we had a Volvo SUV, not the Aston Martin he would have liked, but that hardly seemed like the front line in self-denial. I mean, I’d have preferred a Mercedes convertible myself, but I wasn’t making any radical life changes because of it. “Rick”—if he was leaving us, he could damn well spit it out—“I’m starting to get the psycho-emotional angle of this, but what does it mean in real life?”

  “This, it’s, well, a chance to, um, to, you know, ah, helm the production of a retrospective of the career of an American icon.”

  He said that last part really fast. Unfortunately, I was still able to decode it as “helm the production of a retrospective of the career of an American icon.” Which did not equate to spitting it out, in my opinion. Bill Gates? Scooter Libby? Tom Brady? I mean, really, what on earth was he talking about? “Rick,” I said patiently, “can you translate this into English?

  4

  Leavin’ in the Morning

  “Barry Manilow.”

  He actually said that.

  And I started to laugh.

  Who wouldn’t? I mean: there I was, taking part in possibly the most emotionally significant, life-altering conversation of my life, and Barry Manilow comes into it. Well, apparently—and I tell you this strictly for your own good, in case you’re ever in a similar situation—it was the complete wrong reaction! Who knew?

  Rick looked so seriously put out that I stopped in a hurry and went to work on trying to get his words to take on some, you know, meaning. “Barry Manilow?”

  “I—we are producing a show about him.” He looked uncomfortable enough that I suspected that if he hadn’t already done so, he’d have been reaching to loosen his tie just about now.

  “Barry Manilow!?” I repeated, yet again. You’ll have to excuse my denseness, but this was not a name that had come up in our household, um…ever.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Cass.”

  “Actually, I’m not so sure about that.”

  “No, I do!” He nodded earnestly. “You’re thinking Manilow’s awful. Right?”

  “That was more a secondary thought than a primary one.”

  “You think he’s total kitsch. But that’s just the point: That very fact makes him the new apex of American Culture. Bell bottoms are back, and so is Barry!”

  I was intimately familiar with his tone, having used it myself many times in attempts to convince the boys that if they’d just try it, they’d for sure think broccoli was yummy! Rick was equally successful with me here. “So, um, you, you, Rick, are going to wear bell bottoms instead of custom suits”—I admit I was getting pretty pissy—“and groove to ‘View by the Bay’ instead of watching the market indicat
ors?”

  “I knew you’d be dismissive, Cassie. That’s how you always are. The perfect, nurturing, can-do-everything-with-my-eyes-shut-and-one-hand-behind-my-back PTA mom is just the exterior. The real you is always looking for an excuse to say something sarcastic and cutting. Go ahead, I’m ready.” He put his hands up like he was surrendering to the cops.

  The sad truth: Never, not once in my life had I been offered a better opportunity to serve up a landslide of sarcastic and cutting remarks and I couldn’t think of a single one, not one. I settled for, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Rick leaned further toward me, looking pained. He hated swearing. “It’s OK.” His tone was almost painfully sincere. “Fire away. That’s just you. I’m used to it.”

  “Are you implying,” I asked him, “someone else would see this differently?”

  “I believe,” he said slowly, like he was giving it some thought, “that even someone more…open…would have the same knee-jerk reaction, because you haven’t really had a chance to consider the issue, which takes education you haven’t had.”

  I thought about saying something about having cut all my Prickspeak 101 classes in college, but thought it might not be wise on account of it being possible to interpret it as sarcastic and cutting. I didn’t get the chance, anyway.

  “Just think: it’s not really clear whether postmodernism is a cultural condition or a new theoretical paradigm, is it? Does postmodernism in itself deploy irony? Or is it a post-ironic discourse of blank parody?”

  “Well, Rick,” I said carefully, the way you speak to your kids when they spend all day baking you a birthday cake that looks like a giant lump of dog poo with canned frosting on it, “you’ve certainly done your homework!”

  He just plowed on, gathering steam, “Sure, our generation considers Barry Manilow a joke, but that in and of itself is almost the uberconfirmation of the fact that he’s a veritable postmodern cultural icon. Because don’t you think that in the analysis of cultural capital, postmodernists have often confused intertextuality with the blurring of generic categories, and then gone on to read the collapse of aesthetic distinctions into the processes, as if they necessarily imply the latter?”

  I had the weirdest sensation that my role in this conversation had been eliminated. I’d gone from participant to audience. I was pretty sure that what he had said was the fact that Barry Manilow was a joke made him too serious to be a joke. Although it was also possible that he was saying nothing at all. Where had he picked this stuff up? He sounded like he’d cribbed a sociology text onto his hand.

  “Shows have been mounted on Broadway based on the music of Billy Joel, Abba, Boy George, Cass.” His eyes were shining with enthusiasm. “In London, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Queen…and that Neil Diamond tribute band is huge! We’re going to do the same for Barry.”

  He looked like the same Rick he’d been yesterday, last week, last month. Same face, same hair, same glasses; sexy in a sort of intellectual-looking way. And yet so clearly in some fundamental, invisible way not the same Rick at all. It was almost like an alien kidnapping. Maybe he’d show up in the News of the World in a few months telling about how they’d sucked his brains out his ear and forced him to listen to “Mandy” repeatedly on board their spaceship lab. That actually seemed like a comforting scenario compared to the one where he’d gone nuts of his own volition.

  It was beginning to sink in. There was no punch line here. He was serious. Well, I could be too. “So, Rick, let’s start with some specifics.” I was swollen-faced but dry-eyed now. “Like who’s this mysterious ‘we,’ and when and how did you get brainwashed into this?”

  He frowned. “And thank you for your support. I knew I could rely on you for that.”

  Now who was being sarcastic and cutting? My turn. “Sorry if I’m not being supportive enough for you. So when did this start?”

  “I don’t know.” Pause. “Six months. Give or take.”

  Give or take what? “In six months you never got around to mentioning it? I hadn’t even realized you’d switched to the Easy Listening Channel.”

  “There hasn’t really been a chance, Cass,” he said. “We never seem to have any couple time anymore.”

  I swung back from bewildered to pissed off. No, make that bewildered and pissed off. Really, why should I have to choose? “You know, Rick, even with our busy and sometimes conflicting schedules, I’m pretty sure something like a newfound purpose for living might have cropped up between us. Hi, honey, how was your day? Not bad. Made half a mill on oil futures, had lunch at Citarella, oh, and I’m completely out of my mind, you know.”

  “Sarcasm,” he pointed out and then put his hands up again. “Just trying to help.”

  Gee, thanks. “You know, this sounds like one of Katya’s crazy projects,” I said. My older sister Katya’s first husband left her with about a zillion dollars when he took off. Her second husband, Peter, is a war correspondent for a news network, having apparently deemed getting shot at on a near-daily basis preferable to life with Katya. Her only child is at boarding school. All of which leaves her time and money to run around getting involved in various insane cultural causes.

  While I have often been horrified by Katya and Peter’s parenting style (nonexistent), I generally find her lame-duck projects endearing—or I do as long as I’m not required to sit through them too frequently. They generally happen in Lower East Side “performance spaces.” You know, the ones with steel doors, broken plastic chairs, a faint smell of urine, and healthy homemade cookies wrapped in recycled Saran Wrap on sale at intermission to raise money for endangered whales?

  “Some of Katya’s things were pretty interesting,” Rick said. “If you really took the time to examine them in context.”

  Now I knew my alien brain swap conjectures were on the money, because that might seem like an innocuous enough sentence to you, but to me it was the conversational equivalent of a pipe bomb in my living room. “Rick?” I said, experimentally, to see if he still answered to the name, or whether he was going to ask me to call him Zog, since he had always been at the fore-front of the “Katya’s-a-lunatic-with-too-much-time-and-money-and-would-likely-be-better-off-institutionalized” movement. “Which ones were interesting? Nude Warhol, Off-Broadway? Or that art installation made of Cheez Whiz that had to be condemned by the Board of Health—”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? I don’t think my project is crazy, but I knew you would.”

  Um, yeah, that’s what sanity will do for you. “Just exactly how did you get involved with this? Were you helping with financing? Or—”

  “It, um…came to me,” he admitted. “Sort of on the Internet.”

  “I don’t understand—,” I started to say, and then realized. “I get it. It was spam!”

  “It was meant to be, Cass,” he said stubbornly.

  “Rick,” I said very calmly, because I have been led to understand that’s what you are supposed to do with sleepwalkers and escaped mental patients, but, really, I just had to ask the question. OK. Ask it again. “Have you lost your freaking mind?”

  “No, Cass.” He shook his head, then pushed his glasses back up his nose. This time I did not find it endearing. In fact, I couldn’t help but think about how satisfying a crack they’d make if I grabbed them and snapped them right in half. “It’s just time for me to cast off the shackles of materialism and find my creative soul.”

  “You do realize that people do not find their creative souls from spam, right, Rick? They get Viagra offers and useless stock tips. They complain about how much crap they get, they do not decide to devote themselves to bizarre”—I stopped, I’d pretty much run out of steam due to my lack of a descriptor—“um, Muzak things.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about either this production or Barry.” His jaw was rigid. “And FYI, it’s more interpretive than imitative,” he said. “It’s the man, the music, the life. Not some cheesy karaoke rehash.”

  My jaw was rigid, too. “Won’
t this affect your job? I mean, people trust you with unthinkable sums of money, are they likely to do that if you spend your nonworking hours draped over a piano in a leisure suit?”

  “I left. Today was my last day.”

  I had honestly believed there was nothing left that could have sent me reeling further, which just goes to show that you should never, ever assume you’ve hit rock bottom until you’ve felt the splat. “What?” I thought I might faint. “You’ve done what?”

  “Left already.” There it went, my last link with my old what-I’d-fiercely-believed-to-be-normal life, gone.

  Breathe, I told myself. Then the next minute, OK, forget the breathing. It was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I’d in some way understood what was going on here since the first second he’d opened his mouth tonight, but I wasn’t in a hurry to take it in. “Who is she?” I heard the words like they’d been spoken by someone else. Harsh, completely lacking in sarcasm or bravado or anything except desperation. And then it hit me, hard. They hadn’t been spoken by someone else, but by me. To my husband.

  “There’s no one else, Cass.” He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “I’m leaving you for me. Just me.”

  He looked and sounded sincere, but did I believe him? Men, in my experience, do not leave the comforts of home unless they have a replacement already in mind. “So you are, you’re really—” I closed my eyes for a second and saw our life, of parenthood and PTA meetings and dinners with friends, theater tickets, reading to the boys at night, summers at the beach, soccer matches, charity fund-raisers, family dinners. “—leaving.” The word was a whisper. “Why can’t you do it from here?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just not possible. It requires travel, commitment. I need time.”

  I tried to picture what of this life we’d built so carefully could exist without Rick, without the rhythm that his presence gave to our days, and I couldn’t. Just couldn’t. So I latched onto the practical. “What about money?”

  “Money.” He looked at me very intently. “Really it’s all about that to you.”