The Ask

Six

Once I could drink all night and, if not spend the next morning charming a potential donor over low-fat scones, or better, reinventing the color field with my best sable brush, still manage to pass the morning vaguely upright in my Aeron. Now, as I slumped across the sofa and watched my child play and my wife dress for work while I sipped my Vitamin Drink from a Bernie-deceiving coffee mug, the best I could do was suppress a decent percentage of the moister retches and wonder how long this hangover would last.

Maybe the hangover would never leave, just fade from immediate detection, hide like a deep-cover hitman, some human killbot who works the graveyard shift at American Smelter, takes his family to mass every Sunday, until the moment the baddies flip his switch. Then my hangover, "activated" by further alcohol consumption, would return, step out of the shadows in surgical galoshes, press the muzzle of its silencer-engorged Ruger to my skull.

The Milo Sanction would be complete.

I made like I was picking my teeth, dropped another of Maura's pills onto my tongue.

Bernie flew by on his wooden scooter, one of those beautiful Danish objects the Danes must foist on the world out of spite.

"Watch it," I said.

My son flung a wet wedge of fruit at the wall.

"Mango attack!"

"Bernie!"

"Togsocker! Macklegleen! Ficklesnatch!"

Nonsense words had become impromptu mantras for the boy, just pleasing bursts of Anglo-Saxon sound, though occasionally he'd hit on one with inadvertent resonance. The last word just uttered, for instance, did describe his mother at certain regrettable points in her history.

"Ficklesnatch!" he said again.

I went to fetch a rag for the wall.

"Bernie, no throwing!" said Maura.

Today was an emergency vacation at Bernie's school, another of those hasty cancellations of service we had come to expect from the dingy neighborhood basement where some young people with fancy education degrees and a tin of Tinker Toys had founded Happy Salamander. We did not understand their dense pedagogical manifesto, emailed to us upon acceptance, but had enrolled our son anyway.

"It's like a student haircut," I had said, and Maura laughed, a new, slightly apocalyptic tinge to her snicker.

So far, Bernie seemed no more miserable than he did anywhere else, and the school was close by. But the Salamander people canceled class quite often. They gathered, rumor had it, for retreats on somebody's father's farm, to debate amendments to their manifesto, snowshoe.

Now we waited for Christine, the neighborhood babysitter. Any moment she would roar up in her minivan and I would take Bernie downstairs, stuff him inside the vehicle with the other kids Christine watched, or maybe abandoned to watch each other while she scouted fiesta-mix specials at Costco. We knew the price of Christine's criminally low price, namely that under her supervision, or lack thereof, Bernie was becoming a criminal. Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for.

We hoped his school's fuzzy fervor might afford some balance. Still, even now, after so much Salamanderine propaganda about kindness and cooperation, no peer encounter began without a toy grab or a gut punch.

I would despair, thrill, each time.

A few seasons in Christine's cement yard with Queens County's puniest toughs and Bernie had the strut of an old-time dockside hustler. It was hard to imagine the boy completing kindergarten, remarkably easy to picture him in a tangle of fish knives and sailor cock under some rot-soft pier.

Now Bernie continued his mango-slickened Danish circuit. Maura did her primps, her mirror checks, her grooming despotic through the scrim of my hangover.

"What are you going to do today?" she said, whipped her wet hair, buttoned her blouse.

"I've got errands. Might try to get some stamps."

"Don't overextend yourself."

"I'll be careful."

Maura pointed to her skirt, her nearly assless habitation of it: "Does this make you look fat?"

An old joke. I mimed my old-joke chuckle. Maybe it was some version of Purdy's.

"What are you going to do today?"

"Whatever Candace tells me to do, that bitch."

Candace supervised Maura at the marketing consultancy. They were currently working on a memo about need creation for a women's magazine. I'd never met Candace but I'd often found myself with a need to create a picture of her. The picture was different each time. Sometimes Candace was a little dumpy, or knobby. Sometimes she was muscular and sleek. Sometimes she licked Maura's knees in a supply closet, though I had no idea if their office had a supply closet.

"Sorry?" said Maura.

"Nothing. I love you, that's all."

"Ficklesnatch, you bad ones!"

Bernie had more mango wedges.

"Make sure you clean the walls before that stuff dries," said Maura, kissed Bernie, ducked out the door.

It was just me and my destroyer now. I looked for signs of human feeling in his dead, wet eyes.

Let go, let go.

We both jumped at the honk. Christine's corrections wagon idled at the curb. I walked Bernie out, strapped him into a car seat just notionally fastened to the seat back. They were only going a few blocks. Why be rude? A little girl in a tank top, with a washable tattoo of a monster truck on what would someday be her bosom, put Bernie in a headlock, bit down playfully on his carotid artery.

"Young love," said Christine. "Say goodbye to Daddy, Bernie."

My son whimpered and Christine laughed, fired up a DVD for the backseat screens. It was sacrilege in these precincts to drive even a few minutes without cinematic wonders for the passengers. What played now appeared to be that movie about the crucifixion, the one everybody got so worked up about, so heavy on the blood and bones and approximated Aramaic.

"Do you think the kids are ready for this?" I said.

"Was He ready?" said Christine, shot from the curb.

"I'll pick up at four!" I called.