Lyle nearly enjoyed getting tired. He sat with his father and at lunch peeled the deli paper back over the roast beef on a toasted. In the truck, Frank would scream obscenities over unmemorable traffic dramas. There should have been beauty to whitening walls, the possibility of homes afresh, nothing exceptional, a gratifying thought.
With his first paycheck, he bought fresh greens and salmon steaks, Icelandic yogurt thick with fat. At home, he readied the fish with delicate pieces of dill and chopped salad, laid out buttered slabs of bread flecked with pink salt. He turned on a Northern soul record. He had asked Ingrid for a conversation. He had specified over dinner. It’s how it’s always been done. Talk over dinner. This is his daughter’s mother.
And maybe, despite it all, there were certain unbroken rhythms. The patting of the back barely bigger than his hand. A swoop of spoon to clean the dribbling lip of puree of something rooted. Gestures of fatherhood.
An alarm sounded.
“Did you hear that?” Lyle asked Marina. “The oracle hath spoken. Bedtime.”
He swiped her mouth once, twice with a towel. Then a little flutter of terry cloth on her nose until she laughed. He picked her up and carried her, the down of her head on his cheek, into the bedroom with the mobile of extinct animals cluttering the space above the crib.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a paleontologist named Marina.”
The story-time voice in his own mouth soothed him, got the cadence of sleep and simple morals hushing down the noise of the city, the wide world of news. He was speaking, but it was the ancient communication of Fahrenheit transference from her whole small body to his chest that he heard. It had been foolish to contact Cain. Cain of course would only have denied his part in it. All Cretans lie, says the Cretan, McCreight had said. Or maybe death was a coincidence. What was left was to fold back into the daily duties, tucking in. Lyle turned the mobile so that a Jurassic swirl suspended overhead, a churning history of fallen beasts.
“Nod if you’re asleep,” Lyle whispered. “Okay, then.”
Ingrid arrived soon after, face tight and holding a six-pack of beer. She opened one and sat at the table. She turned off his music and began to play a band out of her phone.
Before they were over, he’d been proud to be introduced by Ingrid at parties. At the reception for her first film premiere, oglers futzed with lurid soft cheese spreading off the rind just to get close. People praised her. They called her a light-shedder, a truth-teller, and they were right. That night, he had asked of her forever. Ingrid had married Lyle Michaels in a dress purchased for three dollars, and it had seemed then that she corroborated his own weight, his wife with yellowing sleeves and holes at her collar who voted in local elections and worried globally in the form of films. After town hall, her friends filled a dive, drank cheap whiskey. He had wanted them all to leave so he could touch her face, but then someone bought him a shot. The music was angry young white men screaming over simple chords. He wished they had done it differently.
In the living room, he laid out mismatched bowls, individual dishes lost from other people’s sets and purchased from dusty shops. They were quiet and the apartment was stuffed with radiator heat. He thought maybe he could become a sports reporter, observe locker rooms for the rest of his life. He could memorize statistics, Cinderella stories pick-and-rolled through the paint. Start over.
Ingrid went to the kitchen, and he could hear the open and close of the refrigerator that meant she was taking another beer. Tomorrow, he would email around, say he was looking to get on the sports beat. Do grant writing. Technical copy. He could be a man who wrote manuals from home. White papers. There was supposed to be money in white papers. Or he would keep on working for his father.
He followed her to the kitchen. He put his hand on her arm, and she was very stiff, but he thought maybe there was nothing to risk in the idea, saying it. He held her elbows.
“I was wrong,” Lyle said.
“I know,” she said.
But she had chosen him once.
And so by the dirty dishes, he promised difference. He imagined she would not have to attend faculty meetings. He imagined that she would follow her muses freely. Lyle knew they’d never really tried, but they could. They could try harder, try differently. There were jobs he could do that came with health insurance. And Marina could have two parents in one home.
“I’m not sure my partner would like that,” Ingrid said.
Lyle let his hand drop. “You’re seeing someone?”
“Have been.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
Ingrid adjusted her hands around her elbows. She gazed at the stove. “That’s because you make every conversation about your book.”
He picked up the baby monitor, a precaution his daughter was no longer supposed to need, and turned it in his hand. Nothing had changed, but it felt as though it had. A closure. It was not that you could have what you’d had. It was that you’d had it. You’d had it, and that didn’t make it, whatever it is was, any closer. To think differently was to confuse being born for the possibility of being reborn. “Why did you give up?” he asked finally.
“Why ask now?” she said.
“Because I didn’t then.”
Ingrid picked up the bag and her scarf. She wound it around her neck. “You confused being impressive for loved,” she said. “I wanted the second one.”
In the weeks after, he sat in his mother’s kitchen with a newspaper and coffee. She didn’t say anything about Lyle having quit working with his father. Instead she set out a long cheese Danish in a tin, and everything was yellow beneath the overhead lamp, while the middle-aged television on the counter fuzzed on. It seemed this was the entire day, sitting with the news, the gurgling images and convenience food.
His father came home at six and had a plate. Sausage and peppers. Strong-crust bread. He complained about the president, the media. The media with their ideas and never news that was facts.
“Which media?” Lyle said. “I was the media.”
But in retrospect, he’d never been a good reporter. It was clear to Lyle now his one true skill was faith in flattery. He had trusted an anonymous tipster because he wanted to trust the blandishments. He was sure now Cain was the man who’d told him to contact McCreight, and he was sure he had not asked more questions because he wanted to trust he was a man who looked like he could write a nationally important story.
Cain had never thought much of Lyle. It was why he’d been chosen, which was to say, used. He was an easy pawn, the man without the fact-checking team, the disgraced. If the plan went wrong, who would believe the purveyor of sex video stories? To the people he’d cared about, there was no lower than the fallen tabloid reporter, and it was who he would always be in the long, permanent web of stories, linked and relinked, tagged and optimized to point out his worst work as the most relevant item to his person.