IX

An Excerpt from We, Adults: “Second Chances”

I baby-proofed a home with no baby. I nested with no pregnant woman barking out instructions. I purchased a tasteful crib at Babies-R-Us, solid oak painted white. I picked out brown sheets with pink and green and light blue polka dots, and although the combination sounds hideous, it worked and was cute, everything coming together with the white bumper with a thin band of pink. I fastened a white mobile with soft felt birds to the crib. I bought one of those cube shelves at IKEA, also white. I put green and pink baskets in the bottom row. I stacked blocks and books and arranged miniature Toms and Mary Janes in the other cubbies. Cheryl, from work, didn’t have children, but had a changing table/dresser, and let me borrow that. I purchased frames from a store by work, and then cut out the covers of children’s books—Madeline, Amelia Bedelia, Babar—and did my best to hang them evenly spaced and level.

But something was still missing. The obvious answer was a baby, or at least a pregnant partner, but that wasn’t it. I brought Jacob in there. We lay on the floor. He suggested the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d had in Colorado. I didn’t think this was the right touch, so I asked him if he really wanted to share this motif with his sister. He shook his head. I asked what else. He told me the carpet was scratchy and we should get a rug. So the next day we bought a white shag rug at Pottery Barn.

It still wasn’t good enough.

I spent every night cruising through Etsy. I looked at handmade decorations and contraptions designed to make your baby a genius. Posters and prints and handcrafted outlet protectors. Hours of this. Days of this. I realized it was bordering on obsession, but I couldn’t stop: I needed her room to be perfect. I needed Elliot to get out and come to this apartment and not see it as a shitty shade of mediocrity. I needed it to feel inviting. To have a certain amount of charm. To feel, if only temporarily, like home, or at least a home. We were stuck in Minnesota for the foreseeable future (she’d have at least two years of probation, the first of which couldn’t be transferred to another state). I’d contacted University of Denver, told them I needed a sabbatical, to which they reminded me I wasn’t due until year ten, but I pleaded, begged, and it was agreed upon to have a year off, a leave of absence, no pay, but keeping of position and our benefits. So, Minnesota would be our home for at least a year. And this apartment didn’t need any sense of permanence, but it needed to be good enough to make my wife smile and nestle into the nook of my arm, her bringing my hand to her stomach, our baby weeks away from being born kicking and kicking.

I purchased a thousand-dollar glider from an upscale baby boutique in the suburb of Edina. It was somehow both sleek and modern and incredibly comfortable. It was white, which seemed like a horrible idea with a projecting baby, but it was beautiful. I put the whole thing on credit. Then I purchased a small nightstand and a two-hundred-dollar lamp at Pottery Barn Kids. And the room was ready, sans any sign of a baby.

Each Sunday, I saw the progress of my child in my wife’s belly.

She started to fill out her orange jumpsuit. Her upper neck started to swell. She wasn’t glowing, per se, but she looked healthy, content. She promised me they were taking care of her and she saw a doctor once a week and they gave her extra portions plus prenatal vitamins. She told me our daughter was beautiful, she could tell from the ultrasound pictures, had my nose but her head shape. The guards became more lenient on me touching Elliot’s hands as she grew. Same with our goodbye hugs. Toward May, the one skinny Black guard even averted his eyes when Elliot pulled her orange jumpsuit down from her shoulders. I bent over and kissed her bellybutton, which she’d said had recently popped. I thought I felt a kick, but I wasn’t sure.

And things went on.

I read books to Jacob about what it meant to be a good big brother. We talked about sharing. About being gentle. About being helpful. When I asked if he was nervous about meeting his sister, he said he was more nervous about seeing his mom.

***

They threw me a baby shower at work. This was in early June, a month before Elliot got out. Stan and Judy organized the whole thing. They were old hippies, retired teachers (Stan high school English, Judy a community college civics professor). They understood my situation was anything but normal, therefore the shower should be anything but typical. They held the gathering at The Nook, a tiny bar/restaurant sandwiched between a 1920s bowling alley and a dry cleaners. Everyone from work came. We were given a back room, which really wasn’t a separate room, just the far end of the narrow bar next to three electronic dartboards. We got drunk on cheap draft beer. Stan shook his head when I was getting ready to order food. He told me my selection had been called in ahead of time. My food eventually came out. I had a plate of six sliders. I started to protest that I couldn’t possibly eat that much, but Stan was laughing, shaking his head, and I asked him what was so funny.

You can’t look, he said, but you have to guess the special sauce on each burger.

The first bite tasted like some sort of earthy shit. I spit it out. Everybody laughed. Judy yelled for me to guess the baby food.

Cat vomit?

Laughter.

Yams?

Nope.

Beets?

Bingo, Stan yelled, giving me a high five.

I guessed four out of six. The worst was mango and acacia berry. I dry heaved three times into a paper-thin napkin.

They gave me gifts. Most of the presents were my coworker’s favorite novels with a gift card to Target or Babies-R-Us as a bookmark. I got a little drunker than I’d expected, but Jacob was having a sleepover at his grandparents, so it wasn’t the end of the world. Everything felt okay that night. We laughed. We debated the merits or lack thereof of confessional memoirs. We talked shit about publishing mergers. They always deferred to me because I’d written books for the Big Six. We compared horror stories of early parenthood. We complained about homeless customers who bombed out our bathrooms. We slapped one another on the backs. We didn’t care that our clothes and pores smelled like burgers.

Sometime around eleven, people started to leave. I felt like I should be a good sport and stick it out until the end. Or maybe I was drunk and didn’t give it two thoughts. Or maybe I wanted to be left alone with Cheryl, which it turned out I was, just the two of us sitting across from one another in a huge booth. I was slouched toward one side. I rolled the base of my glass in a circle.

Cheryl said, You realize you can’t drive home, don’t you?

Am an excellent drunk driver, have you know.

Just what Jacob needs, Cheryl said.

Two parents in jail?

Bingo.

Lucky I like you, I said.

Or else what? You’d take offense?

Bingo.

You’re lucky I like you, she said.

Or else?

I’d tell you what I really thought.

I laughed. Cheryl poured the last of the pitcher into her cup. The way she was sitting made her black cami pull downward. I stared at three quarters of her C cup. The late spring sun had caused an eruption of freckles on her cleavage.

What’s going on there?

I looked up from her breasts. I said, Huh?

Lose something down there?

I laughed. Sorry.

Free country. May be a feminist, but know damn well what I’m doing rocking this top.

Which is?

Letting these things breathe.

We laughed and drank and looked around the bar before returning to one another. I asked what she was talking about.

My tits? You try carrying two—

No, about what you really thought.

Fuck it. I’m drunk.

No, I want to hear.

Cheryl leaned back against the maroon booth cushion. She pulled the front of her cami up a bit. She said, What’s changed?

With what?

You? Her?

Everything.

Like?

The old adage don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

Ah, right, Cheryl said. Predicating a future relationship based on the fear of being alone.

Fuck you.

See, you didn’t really want me to be honest.

I shook my head. I was smiling the drunk smile of the insulted. I told her it wasn’t like that.

Then what’s it like?

It’s like that moment when all you want in the world is to be able to take back your actions. Like that’s it. Not a million dollars or eternal life or the happiness of your loved ones; just to take back what you’ve done.

A second chance.

A second chance, I said.

You realize that’s a fallacy, right? There are no second chances. In anything. Doesn’t exist.

Bullshit.

Take, I don’t know, a video game or something. You play a level of Super Mario Brothers and you get real far and then get hit and shrink and then you die.

And then you get a second chance, I said.

Okay, yes, a second chance, yes, but not a redo of your first.

I used my best Gatsby voice: What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.

Accent is fucking horrible, Cheryl said. We smiled and then we didn’t. She said, It’s not the same thing, and you know it.

You start again and beat the level. Case in point, I said.

Cheryl shook her head. She brushed her flat red bangs off her greasy forehead. She said, You get that second life knowing what lies ahead. You know about the attacking birds. You know what pipes to go down. You’re not the same player you were the first time.

Which is exactly my point, I said. It’s a second chance with the memory of the first to improve upon.

Cheryl said, You’re fundamentally changed by your first time. That’s the only pure one you get. Everything else is clouded.

So you’re saying there’s never room for making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes?

I’m saying it’s not the same. You’re a different person the second time.

Me or Mario?

I’m fucking serious, Cheryl said. You think Elliot won’t think about you fucking other students? You think she’ll handle postpartum any differently?

That’s not fair—

And more to my point, you think you won’t tiptoe around those same pitfalls with the knowledge of their impending doom, which only serves to strengthen their presence in your lives? I’m saying there are no redoes. Only a simulacrum of your first attempt.

Yeah, I read Baudrillard in undergrad too.

Should have kept my mouth shut, Cheryl said.

It’s fine. I just think you’re wrong.

Okay.

In your worldview, there is only failure, with no possibility of redemption, I said.

More or less.

Kind of depressing.

Look around you, Cheryl said. These dudes here, think they’re getting lots of redemption? Think they haven’t been coming in here for the past fifteen years, trying to recreate the first Thanksgiving back from college with all their friends, which, when you think about it, was initially an attempt to recreate their high school experience in the first place. Think that second chance is working well for them? Think there’s a lot of happiness and redemption going on?

People can change, I said.

People can’t change. They think they can.

I have.

Maybe matured, but changed?

Yeah.

If I offered to suck your dick right here and now, what would you say?

I laughed.

Serious. I’ll suck your dick. You don’t even have to move. Just sit there drinking your beer and I’ll crawl under the table and do my thing.

Sounds great, but no.

Really?

Really.

Cheryl raised her eyebrows as an exaggerated challenge. She shrugged. She said, We’ll see. She ducked under the table. I felt her knee knock against my knee and then heard her laughing and her hands were on my thighs and then my dick and I ducked under the table and asked her if she had any idea how much bacteria she was rooting around in down there. I helped her up on my side of the booth. There was a smashed french fry stuck to her knee. She flicked it back underneath the table.

I said, Did I dispel your theory?

The night’s young.

Cheryl looked for her beer, and saw that mine was closer and finished the two inches in a single gulp. There was a spec of something on her lips, probably some crumb from the floor. Something about it seemed pretty.

She asked what I was staring at.

You.

This girl’s a straight-up barstool philosopher.

Bar floor philosopher.

We laughed. I thought about running my hand up her legs and feeling the warmth of a day’s work and a night’s drink between her thighs and I imagined the musty taste on my tongue and I thought about her being right—not completely, but I understood what she was getting at about trying to recreate naivety—and how stupid all of us were trying to find redemption between the legs of others.

Cheryl rested her left elbow on the table, cradling her head in her hand. This angle, like the one across the table, made everything but her nipple visible. She said, So, if you’re so much of a changed man, why are you thinking about fucking me right now?

I coughed and tried to make it into a laugh. I motioned to her chest and said, What guy wouldn’t be thinking the same thing with your full frontal?

Matured, Cheryl said. That’s what you’ve done. A matured man has mastered the art of projected self-control. But really, with all that shit, he’s gained an hour or two of self-restraint.

I quit staring at her tits. I leaned back in my booth and rested my head on the cushion. I said, Did you ever question if this little theory of yours is a form of protection?

Oh, do tell me, Dr. Freud.

If a person is unable to change, and there are no second chances, then what the fuck is the point to doing anything? You are doomed to failure. There’s no responsibility to your actions. There’s no regret.

You say that like it’s a bad thing, Cheryl said.

You put yourself in a god-like role. If you hurt someone, fuck it, can’t do anything about it. Not your problem, because even if you wanted to make amends, you couldn’t. One chance only. Game over.

Cheryl opened her mouth to counter but stopped. She started laughing. She said, Guess that about sums up my life. Would explain why every guy I’ve ever dated fucking hates me.

***

We eventually made our way out of the bar. I searched for a cab. Cheryl told me not to be stupid; it would be fifty dollars at least to my shitty suburb; I could crash on her couch; she promised not to give me head. I laughed and hugged her. It was strange pressing my body against another woman. She was shorter than Elliot. Her shoulder blades were the prominent feature I felt with my hands. It could be as easy as not saying anything. Elliot would never know. But it was never that easy; they always knew.

Cheryl spoke into my sweatshirt: You’re one of the good ones, Devon Hester.

Do what I can.

It may have been right the first time, but it’s not the second time.

Okay.

Is the baby even yours?

Goodnight.

Sorry.

You don’t get to do that, I said.

Devon, I’m sorry.

It’s fine, I said. I let my hand slip from hers as I walked toward the corner to catch a cab. I turned. I said, See that? That’s redemption. You apologized and I forgave you. Easy as that.

Cheryl flicked me off and I smiled and walked away thinking about Elliot growing the raped boy’s baby in her stomach and about Cheryl being a bitch for reinforcing this fear and about Cheryl spreadeagled with her trembling hamstrings between my grasp and about Monica States doing the same thing on my desk and about my future—at its very fucking best—being a shitty simulacrum of our life in Colorado, this time in a tiny apartment I’d overspent to decorate.