“You’re all in some sort of recovery group together?”
“No, but… You’re the father of our children. We need you to be okay.”
Carrie’s choice of words allowed him to imagine that he was some kind of polygamist in an isolated religious community, that Carrie was here as the elected representative of the wives. It was certainly hard to think of himself as a single man. He tried, for a moment. Hey! I’m single! I have no ties to anyone! I can do what I want! Nope. Wasn’t working, for some reason. Maybe when he was off the drip attached to his arm he’d feel a little more footloose.
“Thank you. How have you been, anyway?”
“I’m fabulous, darling, thank you. Work’s good, Jesse and Cooper are good, as you can see…” Tucker felt obliged to look, although there wasn’t too much to look at, apart from a brief flicker of animation at the sound of their own names.
“My marriage is good.”
“Great.”
“I have a fantastic social life, Doug’s business is solid…”
“Excellent.” He was working on the basis that if he threw enough approving adjectives in her direction she’d stop, but this policy showed no signs of working.
“Last year I ran a half marathon.”
He was reduced to shaking his head in speechless admiration.
“My sex life is better than it’s ever been.”
Finally the boys came out of standby. Jesse’s face creased into a mask of distaste, and Cooper crumpled as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
“Gross,” he said. “Please. Mom. Stop.”
“I’m a healthy woman in her thirties. I’m not gonna hide.”
“Good for you,” said Tucker. “I’ll bet your bowels work better than mine, too.”
“You’d better believe it,” said Carrie.
Tucker was beginning to wonder whether she had actually gone crazy at some point in the last decade. The woman he was talking to bore no resemblance to the one he used to live with: the Carrie he knew was a shy young woman who had wanted to combine her interest in sculpting with her interest in disabled children. She loved Jeff Buckley and REM and the poetry of Billy Collins. The woman in front of him wouldn’t know who Billy Collins was.
“There’s a lot to be said for being a suburban soccer mom,” Carrie said. “No matter what people like you think.”
Oh, okay. Now he got it. They were fighting some kind of culture war. He was the cool rock ’n’ roll singer- songwriter who lived in the Village somewhere and took drugs, and she was the little woman he’d left behind in Nowhere County. The fact was that they lived remarkably similar lives, except Jackson played Little League, not soccer, and Carrie had almost certainly been to NYC more recently than he had. She’d probably even smoked a little pot at some time in the last five years, too. Maybe everyone was going to come in here swinging their insecurities like baseball bats. That would certainly spice things up a little.
They were saved by the return of Jackson, who ran the length of the room in order to punch both Jesse and Cooper in the stomach. They responded with smiles and whoops: finally, somebody was speaking their language. Natalie’s entrance was a little more stately. She waved a greeting to the boys, who ignored her, and introduced herself to Carrie. Or maybe she was reintroducing herself, Tucker couldn’t remember. Who knew who had already met before? They were definitely checking each other out now. He could tell that Natalie had absorbed Carrie completely and then somehow spat her out again, and that Carrie knew she’d been spat out. Tucker accepted completely that women were the fairer and wiser sex, but they were also irredeemably vicious when the occasion demanded.
The boys were still fighting. Tucker noted gloomily that Jackson was responding to the appearance of his half brothers with enormous relief and enthusiasm; their chief attraction was that they showed no signs of being about to die, unlike their father. Kids could smell these things. The rats who left sinking ships weren’t morally culpable. They were just wired that way.
“How was the zoo, Jackson?”
“It was cool. Natalie bought me this.” It was a pen with a monkey’s head precariously attached to its cap.
“Wow. Did you say thank you?”
“He was impeccably behaved,” said Natalie. “A pleasure to be with. And he knows more or less everything there is to know about snakes.”
“I don’t know how long all of them are,” said Jackson modestly.
The boys stopped wrestling, and a silence fell on the assembled company.
“So here we all are,” said Tucker. “Now what?”
“I suppose this is where you read your last will and testament,” said Natalie. “And we find out which of your kids you love the best.”
Jackson looked at her, and then at Tucker.
“It was Natalie’s idea of a joke, son,” said Tucker.
“Oh. Okay. But I suppose you’d tell us you loved us all the same,” said Jackson, and the tone of his voice implied that this state of affairs would be unsatisfactory and possibly mendacious.
He’d be right, too, thought Tucker. How could he love them all the same? Just seeing Jackson and his ill- concealed bundle of neuroses in the same room as those two solid and, let’s face it, dull and kind of dumb boys exposed the lie for what it was. He could see that fatherhood was important when you actually were a father— when you sat with kids in the middle of the night and convinced them that their nightmares were as insubstantial as smoke, when you chose their books and their schools, when you loved them however hard they made it for you to feel anything other than irritation and occasionally fury. And he had been around for the twins during the first few years, but ever since he’d left their mother, he’d cared for them less and less. How could it be any other way? He’d tried to pretend to himself that all five of them were equally important, but these two annoyed and bored him, Lizzie was poisonous, and he didn’t really know Gracie at all. Oh, sure, most of this was his fault, and he’d like to think that, if he and Carrie had survived, Jesse and Cooper wouldn’t be quite so fucking characterless. But the truth was that they were fine. They had a perfectly serviceable dad with his own car-rental company, and they were mystified by everybody’s insistence that their relationship with a man who lived far away was somehow important to their well-being. Meanwhile, Jackson tweaked some kind of nerve in his dad’s gut simply by turning the TV on when he was still half-asleep in the morning. You couldn’t love people you didn’t know, unless you were Christ. Tucker knew enough about himself to accept that he wasn’t Christ. So who did he love, apart from Jackson? He ran through a quick mental checklist. No, Jackson was pretty much it, nowadays. With five kids and all the women, he never thought for a moment that a shortage of numbers was going to be his particular problem. Weird how things turned out.
“I’m pretty tired,” he said. “How about you all go and visit Lizzie?”
“Will Lizzie want to be visited by us, though?” Carrie asked.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s part of the point of all this. That we get to know each other as a family.” And if it all happened in somebody else’s hospital room, then so much the better.
They came back a couple of hours later, giggly and apparently melded together into a coherent unit. They had picked up an extra member, too, a young man with a ridiculous bushy beard who was carrying a guitar.
“Have you met Zak?” said Natalie. “He’s your something or other. Your common-law son-in-law.”
“Big fan,” said Zak. “I mean, really big.”
“That’s nice,” said Tucker. “Thank you.”
“
“Great. I mean, great if your life needed changing, that is. Maybe it didn’t.”
“It did.”
“So, great. Happy to have helped.”
“Zak wants to play you a couple of his songs,” said Natalie. “But he was too shy to ask, himself.”
How bad could death be, really, Tucker wondered. A quick heart attack and out, and he would have avoided hearing songs by bearded common-law sons-in-law for his entire life.
