The grandest joke about the baby is who goes up to check on him. Because whoever goes up always wakes him, and no one wants him woken, not at three weeks, not ever.
We’ve started promising sexual favors to the one who goes up—the one who wakes him and therein coddles, swaddles, bottles—you see, your entire life sucked as by some insect, pest.
The stakes are not low, I might add. I have 4,027 blowjobs coming my way someday, it’s not exactly clear when; and my wife has roughly fourteen hours of French-style kissing.
These favors might accumulate without realization until the cows come home. And I hate to say it, but at a certain point the stakes climb so that the thing being wagered against tumbles into the ridiculous and you have no idea what you’re really facing or avoiding. At which point, I am confronted about my drinking.
When my wife cleans house, she’s surgical: “I think you’re drinking because if you’re drunk you know I can’t trust you to go upstairs and check on him.”
“That’s flattering,” I say.
“I also think you’re no longer interested in the sex we’ve been bartering.”
“Is it really a form of fair trade, what we’re doing there with that?”
The grandest joke about the baby isn’t the sort of joke one laughs at. But when I’m offered sex at the grocery store by a strange woman, the entire child-rearing phase of my life looks rather like a farce.
“I have a child,” I tell her, and she says she knows this, has solicited me for this very reason. “But you would never see the child,” I tell her. “Under no circumstances.”
But she just wants the smell of them. Can’t actually stand children, but she loves their smell, wants to eat the smell.
But we live in one of these new communities that orbits a single, fantastic, oversized grocery store, and I keep passing her in the aisles—Shoes and Pets and Car Gear. I smile to be kind, and she keeps saying things like, “Hey, offer’s still on the table.” Or, one time she boldly whiffs the air and says, “Three . . . no, four weeks. Right?”
I shudder, but I’m a little drunk on four vanilla bottles from Baking, so at some point I titter—
Yes, I commit adultery against my god, my wife and son, and every time the blowjobs and French-style kissing are mentioned I’m nearly vomiting, and I don’t mind saying my journeys upstairs to my silent-asleep son, just to make sure he hasn’t inexplicably stopped breathing, hurt.