A Necessary End (19 page)

T
he whole time Gabe is inside me, I just know Michael is going to start crying. I try to forget, but how can you forget your heart? I can feel that he's almost awake, almost hungry—like a sixth sense, no, a maternal sense. I hang in with Gabe as long as I can, and then I speed things along, forcing my orgasm and, in effect, his.

Not even a minute later, it happens: Michael lets out his biggest, baldest cry. I get up and go to the kitchen for a bottle of milk, only to find that all the milk is frozen. Leah must have screwed up and stuck the day's stock in the freezer instead of the refrigerator. I can't substitute formula; I learned that the hard way. I'm cursing Leah, but more than that, I'm cursing myself. If I'd finished with Gabe sooner, or if I'd never started, I would have been ready for this. Michael wouldn't have to wait.

The thing that kills me about Michael is that he doesn't understand waiting. It all feels like life and death to him; he doesn't know I'll be there in just a minute, that I'd never let anything happen to him. I have to prove myself anew every day, every hour. I have to assert my reliability in the face of what, to him, is a daily fight for survival.
He's memoryless. It's like the sequel to that Drew Barrymore movie
50 First Dates
. It's 50 First Bottles.

I hear him screaming and I'm hurrying, on the verge of tears myself, and finally,
finally,
I've got his bottle ready. I throw open the nursery door, and there's Leah, in the glider, with Michael in her arms. She's rocking slowly and stroking his hair. His face is beet red and furious, but she looks calm as can be. I stop dead in my tracks. She just looks so much like his mother.

“Since you were busy,” Leah says. A veiled reference to Gabe and me, as if I were neglecting my baby in order to have sex? Or is she referencing the frozen milk? Did she do that on purpose to buy herself this little maternal moment? “I was keeping him company for you.”

She doesn't leap up to hand him to me. She continues rocking. Obviously, it would be most expedient to simply hand her the bottle.

Michael is yowling. It's a Mexican standoff. Leah isn't reaching for the bottle, but she's not getting up either. She's going to make me ask for my own baby. It's humiliating.

“I can take it from here,” I say.

She stands up and hands him off to me without a word. Then, as he suckles the bottle with greedy desperation, she loiters nearby.

I try to focus only on Michael and the fact that I'm the one sating him. The hand that holds the bottle is the hand that rules the world. It doesn't matter that it's Leah's milk that he craves. It doesn't matter that she's started taking an interest in him. It doesn't matter that she's next to us with a self-satisfied expression on her face, one that says, “See how good my milk tastes?”

Inside, I'm roiling, but I have to play it cool.

“He's starting to look like Gabe,” she says. “Don't you think?”

“Not really.”

“I heard somewhere that newborns start out looking more like their fathers. It's like some trick to prove who the dad is, because you can always tell who the mom is, but the dad, that's, like, not so obvious.” She laughs. “Oh, right, Gabe's the one who told me that!”

I don't know why she's suddenly decided to get chatty. We've barely had a conversation since Michael was born. So I really don't know why she's talking about Michael looking like Gabe, and newborns looking like their dads. And I
really
don't know why Gabe was telling her that little fun fact. Or when.

“Trevor looks like Gabe,” she muses, “and Michael looks like Trevor, so Michael looks like Gabe.”

I rock Michael faster, trying to discharge the panic that's coming over me. I wonder how long Leah's been coming in here and sitting with him, if she's ever fed him his bottle while I slept on in the next room. Maybe she's even fed him from her breast. I'd have no way of knowing.

“I don't blame you,” I say, “for wanting to hold him sometimes. For wanting to be close to him.”

I'm lying. I totally blame her. She's the one who told me she 100 percent did not want to be a mother. She's the one who enticed me—letting me touch her stomach, giving me ultrasound pictures. She led me on. And now I love Michael so much that he's all I think about.

“It's not that I want to hold him,” Leah finally says.

“What is it then?”

“I come in here sometimes when I can't sleep,” she says, just above a whisper. “I like to watch him. It helps me relax.” She looks at me quickly. “But I don't bother him. I don't pick him up or anything.”

I didn't know Leah had insomnia. That doesn't seem to bode well for me. It suggests she might be having second thoughts. Earlier, I overhead her talking on the phone in her room. I couldn't make out the words, but her voice was low and earnest. Confidential.

“You're allowed to pick him up,” I say. “It's in the contract.” It comes out colder than I meant it.

Who am I kidding? That's just how I meant it. But I don't want her to know what I mean, not yet, not while she can hurt me.

The truth is, if Leah decided to take Michael away, she wouldn't just hurt me; she would kill me. There's no recovering from a love like this.

“No, that's okay,” Leah says. “It's your job.” She turns on her heel. “Good night.”

In her wake, I'm so anxious that I need to stay with Michael extra-long. But I also need to do something, so while he sleeps, I start cutting his nails. They're so small that it's painstaking work. It requires focus, and that helps, a little. At some point, I look up, thinking I caught a shaft of light or movement or some sudden barely perceptible change, but no, it's still just Michael and me.

Realizing that there's no one else it could be, that Gabe doesn't come to the nursery of his own accord, fills me with loneliness. I thought we'd be doing this together. I thought Michael would be the sun we'd both orbit, astronauts on a shared mission.

I never thought Gabe would turn out to be so selfish. I assumed that after the baby arrived, his heart would grow, inflating chamber by chamber. If the Grinch's could, surely Gabe's would, too.

That's not fair. Gabe just hasn't hit his stride as a parent. Not everyone loves the infant stage. My own father wasn't much interested in me until I was a teenager, so I know that parents can be late bloomers, just like children.

I was in fifth grade when my father moved out. My mother said what she thought was the right thing: “He didn't leave you, he left me.” But all that did was underline that I wasn't enough to keep him around. Either he didn't love me much, or he hated her incredibly.

I could understand hating her. I sort of did; with her critical remarks, there was never any pleasing my mother, not if you were me. Suddenly I was stuck with her full-time, full force. My father had muted a lot of her behaviors. She was so desperate to please him that he could tone her down with a withering stare. She'd shrink right before my eyes. I vowed that no one would ever have that kind of power over me.

Once he was gone, my mother's jabs toward me became overt cruelty. She probably resented that I hadn't been enough to retain him. Why she wanted someone whose feelings for her ranged from
benign neglect to contempt, I'll never know. I do know that I'd never get her approval again, and after she found Gabe and me in her bed, she was relieved to finally have an excuse to turn her back on me for good. But that came much later.

So I was eleven when my parents divorced, and my mother ate until she became the Michelin Man, and my father took me to his house two weekends a month, where he'd read academic journals and I'd fend for myself. I can still remember how I felt in those years—like there was no place I wanted to be and no one who truly loved me. People like Mel say that my parents probably loved me a lot, they just weren't any good at showing it. Well, what good is love like that? When it comes to love, perception is reality.

I grip Michael a little tighter. When it comes to me, there will be no doubt in his mind.

But what about Gabe?

He'll come around on Michael someday, I know he will. My father did when I was a teenager. It became easier to hold his attention once I was attractive. Not that there was anything untoward in our interactions; he just seemed more curious about me. He liked to hear about my dating life, and I warmed to the attention, embellishing my tales to make him laugh. Meanwhile, my mother seemed angry that boys were interested in me, and though she hadn't raised me with any religion at all, she was newly puritanical. Sex before marriage was a sin, she told me sternly. If she ever caught me . . . She let the sentence go unfinished.

How many times did I have sex with Gabe in her bed before we got caught? Twenty? Fifty?

I was daring her to make good on her threat. I thought she might prove she loved me more than I realized. You win some, you lose some.

My sweet Michael, he's going to be a winner.

R
aise,” I say, tossing the chips into the center. I know I look like a dick, but I don't particularly care. That guy with the goatee has been getting on my nerves for the past hour. He looks young, like he's in college, and probably a good college, like Berkeley. He thinks he's so much smarter than the rest of us. For the most part, it's a working-class crowd at the Pyramid, and Goatee is obviously going to be white-collar. But you don't need a degree to play poker. Sometimes it only slows you down, makes you get in your own head too much, in your own way.

I'm definitely not playing in my head today. I'm full of testosterone, and so far, it's worked out. I've got a mountain of chips in front of me, more than triple my starting stack. I can afford to push Goatee around.

This time, he pushes back. “Reraise.” I watch him carefully count out his chips. It's a big reraise, four times my bet.

I've always liked pocket sixes. He might just have ace-king. This is why it's called gambling. “Call.”

The dealer starts to lay out the three flop cards. I stare at them, sensing that Goatee's eyes are on me, trying to read my reaction.

Four-four-six. I want to laugh out loud. I just flopped a full house. When you're hot, you're hot. He'll think that there's no way that flop hit me. How could I have called his reraise with a four or a six in my hand? Now I have to hope he has pocket aces or pocket kings. Then I can get his whole stack.

He leads out with a bet that's more than two-thirds of the pot. He wants to take it down right now, without seeing any more cards. Smells like ace-king to me—a hand that sparkles when you first peek at it and then dims fast.

Feigning reluctance, I call. He's got to be putting me on something like pocket tens, and he's wondering if he can run me out of the hand with another bet.

The other guys at the table are paying attention. It's shaped up into a real cockfight, and everyone loves those. They can sense that I don't like Goatee, and he doesn't like me. That's part of the fun. I
like
not liking him. I like this dose of controlled aggression, aimed at someone other than the true target.

I'd hoped the other night was a turning point. Adrienne said she knew she'd been neglecting me, and we finally had sex again, finally spoke in our native tongue. I assumed that her acknowledgment of neglect was a declaration of change, but no, she's gone right back to what she was doing. That feels worst of all. Before the other night, I figured she was too preoccupied with Michael to get what was happening. Fish can't see the water they're swimming in, right? But now I know that she knows, and she doesn't actually care.

There's that old saying: Lucky in cards, unlucky in love. So I guess I'm owed this run of luck, but when put that way, I'm not sure I want it.

The next card is an ace. He's so deliberately expressionless that I'm sure he's got ace-king, and he probably thinks I've got pocket tens, or at most, pocket jacks, and now he's taken the lead.

He makes another big bet. I can play it safe and just call, let him give away his money street by street, or I can go over the top.

I'm feeling over-the-top tonight. “All-in,” I say, and begin sliding my rows of chips to the center of the felt.

Goatee looks surprised. It'll take all his chips to call. My play doesn't fit the hands he was putting me on. He glances at his chips almost mournfully, realizing he's probably beat but he's in too deep to back out now. His ego's on the line. After all, I could just have pocket queens. I could be bluffing.

He calls. The last card is a king, but it's not enough. He turns his hand over, and he's got two pair, aces and kings. I'm in no rush to reveal my hand—a real dick move, I know, the slow roll—and the table explodes. No one saw that coming.

“Lucky,” Goatee mutters, and he doesn't mean it as a compliment. He means that I had no business calling his reraise in the beginning.

“I knew you'd go all the way with your hand,” I say, “so if I hit, I'd take you for everything. Calculated risk.”

“That's how you got that big stack, huh? Through calculated risks?” Goatee gives me a twisted smile. He wants me to know he doesn't respect me, no matter how many chips I have in front of me, even if a bunch used to be his. “Fish.” He says it half under his breath, but he wants me to hear it.

Without even thinking, I'm on my feet. “What the fuck did you just say?” I've never taken poker personally in my life, but all of a sudden, I want to kill the little asshole.

Goatee doesn't move a muscle. Next to me is a short Latino whose name I've never learned, but we've played together for years. He stands up (he's all of five foot three) and puts a hand on my chest. “It's only poker,” he says. “Sit down.”

I deflate as quickly as I puffed up. The heat rises to my face. “Sorry,” I say, to no one in particular, as I take my seat. I almost got myself kicked out of here because of some jackass kid. I need to get back under control, in every way.

Goatee pulls out a wad of cash for a rebuy. He won't look at me. I've got way more chips than anyone else here, but in his mind, I'm
just a fish, an amateur coasting on luck. I want to tell him I've put in years at these tables and I'm not a lucky guy, not by a long shot. I shouldn't care what he thinks, though. He's just some college student blowing his parents' money.

Now, I wouldn't mind that kind of luck—being at the beginning of my life, not tied down, full of ideals that haven't failed me yet. I wouldn't mind a do-over.

As it is, I've got a kid I don't want (there, I said it) and a wife I love too much. Adrienne's like Chinese finger cuffs: The more I struggle to break free, the tighter the vise. It's probably always been that way, only I never knew it before. You don't dream about freedom until you realize you're trapped.