A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

  Love was a joke, shared.

  Even when they got wedding rings later, they could never think of inscriptions, could never quite settle on a word, a phrase, to engrave in perpetuity, not even “forever” for forever.

  What did they see in each other? he sometimes wonders. What did they have in common? Their lack of commitment!

  So maybe it hadn’t been serious until they had the boy.

  No, he amends sternly, until the first time she got pregnant.

  * * *

  It’s the Age of Tricks—magic kits, yo-yos, juggling sets. The boy gets them all for Christmas. They seem more like dirty tricks to the father. Coins refuse to vanish. Balls refuse to appear. Rings refuse to separate.

  It’s torture watching him shuffle.

  Is this your card? Is this your card? IS THIS YOUR CARD?

  But he loves practical jokes, gag gifts—whoopee cushions, snakes in cans, rubber spiders, and plastic puke. They fall for them—aargh! eww!—over and over to his undiminished delight. Just like America’s! he crows, the joke on them. Sometimes it’s okay to be tricked.

  Every few weeks that spring, there’s another birthday party at another fun venue. The whole class is invited.

  House of Bounce, with its stink of socks and vinyl.

  Sip and Slide, the caffeinated jungle gym.

  Golf of Space, the indoor, glow-in-the-dark putt-putt course, with the black-light mural of that astronaut hitting a drive on the moon.

  Fallin’ Water, with its slides like giant plumbing, its pool the temperature of warm piss.

  The Hands-on Experience—aka “The Germatorium . . . Sponsored by Purell.”

  Oh, the places you’ll go!

  * * *

  The best thing about birthday parties is that they can drop him off for two hours. It’s almost the only time they have sex anymore, the only time they’re alone in the house.

  Sneaking around like teenagers when Mom and Dad are out, they tell each other.

  Sex, yet another in that long line of secrets they keep from him. Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. All that parental sneaking. All those lengths to hide our roles. What are we ashamed of? he wonders.

  One of these days, not so very far off, there’ll be sex ed in school, she reminds him.

  Oh god, he groans, the talk.

  That’s on you.

  Why me?

  He’s a boy, isn’t he?

  Implied: the notion that she’d have had the talk with the girl.

  The birds and bees, he says.

  And then there’ll only be one secret left.

  The D and E, she whispers.

  The boy comes home spacy from cake and soda, too busy inventorying his goody bag—sucker, check! stickers, novelty eraser, bouncy ball, check!—to notice his parents’ moony languor.

  Hosting his birthday parties meanwhile is as stressful, as exhausting and ritualized as a royal wedding.

  * * *

  For his latest, he begged for a label maker, this boy they’re so afraid of labeling. “A what?” “He lurves the one at school, apparently.” So they got him one (though they gave it to him before the party), and he happily punched out labels all morning on the tiny keyboard—MY ROOM, MY CAKE, MY PRESENTS—stuck them up everywhere. They laughed uneasily, until one of the other moms pointed out, “So cute! You guys are writers, yeah?”

  Later there’ll be a neat label on his office door: BEWARE OF THE DAD!

  * * *

  For the mother’s last birthday, the father bought her a pair of noise-canceling headphones and she almost wept with gratitude. She wears them so much he’s jealous, says she looks like a Mouseketeer. What? Oh, never mind!

  * * *

  When the boy flaps his arms or bounces around, the therapist calls it “stimming,” short for self-stimulation. “He’s seeking vestibular input,” she explains. “Think of it as overflow movement,” she says, and the father finally gets it. The boy’s body is overflowing, with energy, with joy, with excitement, even as he himself often feels his own heart overflowing with sadness, the emotion ready to spill in him like a brimming cup that he has to hold steady. A cup of blood, as he pictures it, something precious and staining, dreadful and embarrassing to spill.

  He watches his son, snapping his wrists as if shaking off water, high-stepping up and down, humming to himself, and envies the purity of his happiness, his solitary self-sufficiency.

  * * *

  Sex is relaxing, restoring, rejuvenating . . . until the moment she thinks the condom might have broken. Get off me! The bright fear in her eyes.

  A friend once told him, “I used to think we got married for sex. Now I think we have sex to stay married, just so we don’t bite each other’s heads off.”

  It reminds him of that other wry couplet: Some people get married to have kids; some people have kids to stay married. He wonders which they are. If either.

  * * *

  A brief history of their relationship in birth control:

  Pulling out (the first time).

  Condoms.

  Female condoms (once).

  Diaphragm (UTIs).

  IUD (cramps).

  The pill (mood changes).

  Condoms.

  Nothing.

  Breastfeeding.

  Condoms.

  We could try anal?

  You could get a vasectomy.

  * * *

  He’s considered an affair. He has grounds: fourteen years of faithful marriage (double itchy, as the wife herself joked at their anniversary). And in return? The only occasional toleration of his desire.

  He buys her lingerie; she wears it as if it’s fancy dress. What he finds sexy, she finds eye-rollingly ironic.

  Most mornings he settles for stubbing out his erection against her ass. The crack of dawn, he jokes. Fuck Dawn, she murmurs rolling away.

  He’d taken to masturbating during her pregnancy (retaken, naturally, it was like riding a bicycle), and kept it up, so to speak, ever since. Masturbation had come a long way since he was a boy, he found. All thanks to the internet, of course, but what struck him most was not the sheer volume and variety of images available—though they were astounding; less stimulating than boggling—but the realization of how many people out there were looking at this stuff. Masturbation had always seemed so lonely to him as a teenager, part of its shame being how aberrant it was. (Dimly he senses this is somehow the point of the internet: to spread shame, but so broadly, so thinly, like a light coat of varnish, that we hardly notice it anymore, until we all just glow faintly with it.) Now, judging from what he could see on his computer, the masturbators far outnumbered the couples, and were probably getting more action. Frankly, it has gotten to the point that he’s come to prefer it—quicker, more efficient, less cumbersome than intercourse—something for which he feels only an obscure sense of infidelity. Less risky, too.

  Three, four, five times a week, like some horny high schooler. His self-stimming. Sometimes he fears he’s addicted, not to the porn, not even to the act itself, but to the shame it provokes. As if it’s shame he’s coaxing from himself, his body.

  Still, every so often he weighs a real affair, albeit idly. The problem, more practical than moral, is that he can’t quite imagine sex with another woman. Marriage has rendered the act so mundanely intimate. It’s the slurp and slap of bodies coming together and apart. It’s the furtive postcoital stroke to disguise the rubbing off of bodily fluids on one another. It’s his wife’s fingers discreetly rolling the linty pills of toilet paper out of his ass hair, or the shivery quake when her cunt farts. (“Trumps,” they call these.) It’s her yelp of pain when he pins her hair under his elbows, or the little ouf (less of passion than pressure) she releases when he lowers his weight onto her. These are the things that have undermined their sex life, but they’re also what keep him bound to her. Who else would put up with such indignities, who else could he share them with? Ass lint has no place in an affair!

  Marriage, he notes
ruefully, is a terrible preparation for infidelity.

  But if intimacy is filled with shame; shame—shared and secret—is also intimacy. Shared shame seems to him as close as most of us ever come to forgiveness.

  * * *

  Just once, home alone, mother and baby at story time somewhere, he glimpses a pair of lace panties in her drawer, wraps his fist in the watery silk. He remembers this pair, kissing her through them, drawing them off with his teeth. Even remembers the hot flush of embarrassment choosing them in the store, as if he were choosing them for himself, which in a sense he was.

  Now they’re a relic. Imagining her in them as ridiculous as slipping them on himself. Which he does. The fit snug, tightening as he grows hard until they clasp him like her hand.

  He’s suddenly furious at her, ashamed and hoping to shame her, but his orgasm, when it comes, feels dismally faithful.

  * * *

  And once when he complained she was never in the mood, she told him, “Thanks! Like I don’t have enough to feel guilty about. No really, fuck you, you fucking fuck!”

  A long-singed silence. Then he whispered, “How about now?” and she burst into laughter. “I mean that’s the most action I’ve had in one sentence.” “Stop it, I’m going to pee myself!” “Was it good for you, too?”

  * * *

  All this talk of affairs. A compensation, he knows. Sure, he’d like more sex, but he doesn’t doubt her love. What he doubts is his manhood, not in bed, but on the playground, at playdates, at pickup, when he’s often the only man and the women, the mothers, eye him warily and then, once he’s established as a dad, ignore him. “Invisible Manhood,” he calls it.

  Why did the invisible man turn down the job offer? He couldn’t see himself doing it.

  There’s another father at school with a whole line of them. The only other man in the playground.

  What did the buffalo say when he dropped his boy off at school? Bison!

  If you don’t tell Dad jokes, you risk becoming one is this guy’s philosophy.

  A preemptive strike, an ironic acquiescence. The father used to think he was witty, himself, used to love making his wife laugh, used to get jealous if she laughed out loud at something she was reading. He dimly recalls some idea of Freud’s about a woman’s laughter—the spontaneous, unbidden physicality of it—and orgasm.

  Dad jokes, though, aren’t for laughs, but groans.

  A furniture store keeps calling me. All I wanted was one night stand.

  That year all the dads are dressed like kids in comic-book tees. How come all the boys want to grow up to be heroes, his wife asks, but none of the dads want to grow up? The Age of Superheroes is just another excuse to not act your age.

  Maybe, he thinks, because so many origin stories begin with a father’s death. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man (the boy’s favorite): it’s how they become men.

  And how many of them ever become fathers? Well, there’s Reed Richards, Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. Not Something-Man, but Mister. Just like a dad. He’s even graying at the temples. And this dad’s superpower? He’s stretchy, bendy, elastic. Like Gumby, or Silly Putty, or Stretch Armstrong. All arms to reach and hands to catch. Able to pack healthy lunches while emptying a loaded dishwasher! That’swho’s on the father’s shirt.

  * * *

  It is the Age of Speed.

  All the other kids have those folding metal scooters. The boy shows no interest. They buy him one anyway.

  All the other kids ride skateboards. All the other kids ride bikes.

  The boy is still on training wheels.

  We should really get him tested, they tell each other.

  Instead the father hires a guy who teaches bike riding to the disabled.

  They meet once a week in a school parking lot. The father watches furtively from his car.

  And one day the boy just gets it—I’m DOING it!

  And shakily, snakily, then surely and smoothly, he is.

  A triumph for him; a failure for the father.

  * * *

  They should get him tested. But it’s starting to feel as if getting him tested is a test they’re flunking.

  Meanwhile, the occupational therapist teaches him how to tie his laces, how to button his shirt, how to hold a pencil.

  God, the mother says, what is even the point of us?

  * * *

  “Scarier than a vampire?”

  “He drives them batty?”

  “Scarier than a werewolf?”

  “He turns werewolves into were wolves!”

  “Scarier than Frankenstein?”

  “He drives him nuts . . . and makes him bolt!”

  “Scarier than a mummy?”

  The father looks at his wife.

  “He makes mummies cry Uncle!”

  * * *

  The mother blames herself for everything, though occasionally she extends the blame to the father, too. They should have done this; they should not have done that. In the back of both their minds, he knows, it’s all the same guilt. He feels it too, but not like her, not like a mother. And eventually he resents it. She is guilty, he thinks, guilty of feeling guilty. That’s her fault. It makes her despairing. It makes her say things over a glass of wine like “We should never have done this.” It makes her say things like “We ruined our lives” and “It’s never going to get any better,” after another. It is as if she thinks the boy is their punishment.

  She blames herself for everything but the wine. “I have you for that.”

  * * *

  His own vice is sugar, which he substitutes for sleep. Cookies and candy are his uppers; he hides a stash from the boy. His wife calls his favorite brand of caramel corn “crack corn.”

  * * *

  One day the boy toe-walks all the way home from school. I begged him not to, the mother wails, but when he asked me why not, I didn’t know what to say. He was so happy! She wept all the way home.

  The father calls a shrink for her, schedules a meeting. An act of love he wonders, or blame?

  I thought we were supposed to be getting him tested? she grumbles. But she goes.

  Goes, and says it helps.

  Yeah? Yeah. And . . . ? And we’ll see.

  He gets it, wants to respect her privacy. But it makes him feel alone.

  Well, I’m relieved. I bet you are.

  He’s been thinking about volunteering. As an escort. At a clinic.

  He’s been thinking about a man’s part in abortion. What he can do, what he can say.

  It’s a good thing to do, he tells his wife. A good time to do it. His college classes have ended for the year, the boy is still in school for another two months.

  You’re supposed to be writing, researching, she reminds him.

  But maybe this is his research. Maybe it’ll become writing.

  Maybe it’s his therapy, she suggests.

  Maybe it’s his test, he thinks.

  They never went to a clinic. Their procedure was at a hospital. What’s sometimes called a therapeutic abortion, as opposed to an elective one. They never had to pass any protesters.

  He makes a call, schedules a meeting.

  * * *

  We had an abortion, he thinks he might say.

  But can we have an abortion? he wonders. Or is the male use of the first-person plural in this context as suspect as saying, “We’re pregnant”? Something his wife always scorned. Yet if the phrase “we have a child” is fine, couldn’t “we had an abortion” also be viable?

  Of course, he knows the unease with that use of “we” is more complicated. If it’s a woman’s right to choose, after all, what role does that leave for the man? Agree or disagree, it’s her choice. (Though wasn’t she his choice? he thinks. And he hers?)

  I want to help, is what he says instead. I just want to help: itself a plea.

  Typically male, he understands. This desire to fix something, to protect someone. He knows his chivalric instinct is as rusty, as clanking and ungainly, as a knight�
��s armor. But aren’t other men just as backward, as atavistic? And aren’t many of those men on the other side of this fight? To speak to them, to combat them, maybe his instincts—retrograde as they are—might be some use. He hopes so.

  * * *

  “A virtuous abortion” is what the escort coordinator—a fireplug with a steel-gray perm—calls it. Her name is Barb.

  They meet at a coffee shop. She asks him why he wants to be an escort and he tells her, “My wife had an abortion” and the circumstances.

  A virtuous abortion. She says it matter-of-factly but it still shocks him, hearing this shame called virtuous. She’s trying to remind him that his story isn’t the same as others’, that theirs aren’t the same as his. That everyone has their own abortion. And yet, he feels judged, slighted even. As if their abortion were somehow lesser. He knows what Barb means, of course. They weren’t some teenagers who’d forgotten to use a condom. They weren’t underage, or high, or poor, or Black. Or even unmarried. They didn’t fit any of the usual categories of blame or bigotry. No, they were white and middle class and married and trying to have a baby. They had an abortion within the bonds of holy matrimony.