The Ask

Eight

They held up the N train at Queensboro Plaza for a medical emergency, somebody maybe stroked out on the car's sticky floor, mistaking for a celestial communique the guarantees of Upper Manhattan's number one pimple doctor, or the public service announcement about condoms targeted at Spanish-speaking men who believed they were not gay. The victim's eyes might even have alighted on the new Mediocre subway campaign: Knowledge and Discovery: A Better You. A Better World, the words stenciled below a beautiful Polish exchange student in a lab coat. This could be what the admissions folks called a change-of-life opportunity. If Strokey lived he might quit his job, go back to school, become what he always wanted to be, namely, somebody standing next to a beautiful Polish exchange student in a lab coat.

Still, why stop the whole train just so paramedics could board the car and pull some poor slob back from the white light? We couldn't waste time like this. Not for an individual life. We were losing our superpower superpowers. Would they stop this train in China?

I got off and waved down a livery cab, rode out to my Astoria Boulevard stop, took the shortcut through a playground beneath the tracks. The playground was empty except for a burly man coaxing his daughter down a slide. The sight of them startled me. He looked like a man I'd known on my block, a man who was dead now but who in life boasted the same huge shoulders and shaggy dreadlocks. But really this man looked very different, his skin much lighter, and he wore jeans and construction boots powdered with drywall dust. The man I remembered favored tatty T-shirts and checkered chef pants. Whenever I thought of him I thought of those pants.

Often, out with Bernie in the stroller, I'd pass his house. His two young kids, a boy and a girl, would putter around a dirty plastic playhouse, the man on his stoop, smoking, reading the paper. I'd wave, dad to dad. Sometimes we would talk, the weather, the fish at the Greek place up the street, the dilapidation of the swings at the river park.

I liked talking to this man who could somehow pull off the role of loving and attentive parent with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He was a throwback papa, reminiscent of another time, another texture, his affection gruff, or else a bit reined in, but all the more palpable, that full-hearted but fatalistic love from before people used "parent" as a verb, when you might sit on the stoop and watch your children play in your barren rented yard and believe that life could work out. It was horseshit, of course, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.

Yet we were also, the both of us in our way, the new dads. This fellow was the real McCoy, a stay-at-home hero, but at least I was a quality-of-lifer, a knock-off-at-fiver, who would rush back for hours of child care if Maura needed to finish a project or just needed free time, a pedicure, a treadmill run. Often enough this man and I both put our kids to bed, our wives still at work, doing the work of their type in this era, the conferencing, the teleconferencing, the brainstorming, the liaisoning. Sometimes the work of their type meant drinks at the bar with other men and women. Sometimes they just needed to get away from us. Enjoy yourself, we said. Heaven knows you deserve it. We meant this and did not resent them for being better than us. New dads still respected what was best in the old ones, but had maybe abandoned the fear, the silence, or else the gabby cruelty of our fathers, grandfathers.

This is how I liked to think of us, anyway, me and this large man with his good laugh and the Marlboro Light in his teeth or between his stubby fingers, which he'd hold with such care away from his daughter's braids when she charged over to collapse in his lap and file howling grievance against her brother's style of playhouse play.

I even imagined a life for this guy, figured him for a chef, because of the checkered pants, home until he could find another high-end organic gig or else raise the cash for his own place, living off scant savings and his wife's administrative job. Then one afternoon, sitting in the playground I crossed now, while Bernie napped in his stroller, I noticed an item in the paper about an entire family wiped out by a beverage truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and studying the article and the photograph of my neighbor there beneath photographs (and diagram) of the wreck, I saw I had not been far off.

James "Jimmy" Easter had been a chef in the East Village. Probably knew his way around a pork belly tart. His wife was in sales, medical supplies. Jimmy Easter, there was the name, Jimmy Easter, the missing piece that should have connected it all, me out with the stroller, always the lighter-framed of our two Maclarens, not because it weighed less but because it was cleaner and there was something unmanly about pushing the filthier stroller, with its crumbed seams and yogurt-smeared handles and pockets stuffed with rotten apple cores (not that I ever cleaned the thing), and the friendly neighbor with his cigarette and his children and their mud-crusted playhouse. Except the name connected nothing. Easter was too much. It crowded out what mattered.

There was also the question of the car, the compact Korean-made tomb of the Easters. Had I ever seen it? Probably parked out back. Maybe Jimmy paid his landlord for a space. A monthly strain, this extra. And Jimmy with his cigarettes, even after the mayor jacked the tax, Jimmy still with his cigarettes and the smoke he tried to wave away. What kind of father would smoke around his children, or smoke at all? Not the kind of father the mayor would consider a father. Nobody committed to effective parenting. Did Jimmy have life insurance? Would his death from lung cancer at least pay out?

But these questions, these accusations in the form of questions, they really stopped being pertinent one blue afternoon in October in a southbound lane on the BQE. The semi took care of these questions, or really issues, let's call them issues, much as many of us not my mother claim to despise the word. It took care of the unemployment issue, the parking space issue, the smoking issue, and it took care of James "Jimmy" and Barbara Easter's issue, Devin and Charlene. The truck, the sleep-starved Croat at the wheel of it, took care of everything. Jimmy Easter might just as well have taught his children how to blow smoke rings, or steal cigarettes. Jimmy Easter was off the hook. He would never go down in history, or case history, as a shitty father.

Whereas me, I still had a decent shot.

Nearly every day now I passed the man's house, that yard. The playhouse was gone, but there were still some ancient cigarette butts wedged between the sidewalk and the first flagstone of the walkway, and often as I passed I whispered, "Jimmy Easter, Jimmy Easter, Jimmy Easter," until the name conjured nothing, failed to spook. But then I would very nearly see the boy and the girl in their sweatshirts, climbing through the grimed window of the playhouse, and I would feel a jangled shiver, like shaves of ice in the blood, which was maybe just my nerves trying to shield me, to throw up some farce of hauntedness, of spirits lingering, to save me from the brute fact of their oblivion.