Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  I can’t really tell you the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was the first time, or the fifth, or the fiftieth that Zoe counted out the days of her menstrual cycle and crawled into bed and said, “Now!” Our sex life had become like Thanksgiving dinner with a dysfunctional family—something you have to show up for, even though you’re not really having a good time. Maybe it was when we started IVF, when I realized there was nothing Zoe wouldn’t do in her quest to get pregnant; that want had become need and then obsession. Or maybe it was when I began feeling like Zoe and this baby to be were on the same page—and that I had somehow become the outsider. There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material.

  A lot of people talk about what women go through, when they can’t have a baby. But no one ever asks about the guys. Well, let me tell you—we feel like losers. We can’t somehow do what other men manage to do without even trying . . . what other men take precautions to not do, most of the time. Whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it’s my fault—society looks at a guy differently, if he doesn’t have kids. There’s a whole book of the Old Testament devoted to who begat whom. Even the sex symbol celebrities who make women swoon, like David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman, are always in People magazine swinging one of their children onto their shoulders. (I should know; I’ve read nearly every issue in the waiting room of the IVF clinic.) This may be the twenty-first century, but being a real man is still tied to being able to procreate.

  I know I didn’t ask for this. I know I shouldn’t feel inadequate. I know it is a medical condition, and that if I suffered a cardiac arrest or a broken ankle I wouldn’t think of myself as a wimp if I needed surgery or a cast—so why should I be embarrassed about this?

  Because it’s just one more piece of evidence, in a long, long list, that I’m a failure.

  In the fall, landscaping is a hard sell. I do my fair share of leaf blowing and buzz cutting lawns, so that they’re prepped for the winter. I prune deciduous trees and shrubs that flower in the autumn. I’ve managed to talk a couple of clients into planting before the ground freezes—it’s always something you’ll be glad you did come spring—and I’m pretty sold on some red maple varieties that have spectacular color in autumn. But mostly this fall, for me, will be about laying off the guys I hired during the summer. Usually I can keep on one or two, but not this winter—I’m just too far in debt, and there isn’t enough work. My five-man landscaping business is going to morph into a one-man snowplowing service.

  I’m pruning a client’s roses when one of my summer help comes loping down the driveway. Todd—a junior in high school—stopped working last week, when classes started up again. “Max?” he says, holding his baseball cap in his hands. “You got a minute?”

  “Sure,” I say. I sit back on my heels and squint up at him. The sun is already low, and it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon. “How is school going?”

  “It’s going.” Todd hesitates. “I, um, wanted to ask you about getting my job back.”

  My knees creak as I stand up. “It’s a little early for me to start hiring for next spring.”

  “I meant for the fall and winter. I’ve got my license. I could plow for you—”

  “Todd,” I interrupt, “you’re a good kid, but business slows down a lot. I just can’t afford to take you on right now.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Call me in March, okay?”

  I start to walk back to my truck. “Max!” he calls out, and I turn. “I really need this.” His Adam’s apple bobs like a cork. “My girlfriend—she’s pregnant.”

  I vaguely remember Todd’s girlfriend driving up to the curb of a client’s house this July with a car full of giddy teens. Her long brown legs in her cutoff jean shorts, as she walked up to Todd with a thermos of lemonade. How he blushed when she kissed him and ran back to her car, her flip-flops slapping against the soles of her feet. I remember being his age, and panicking every time I had sex, certain that I’d be in the two percent of cases where Trojans failed.

  How come, Zoe used to say, the odds are that, if you’re sixteen years old and desperate to not get pregnant, you will . . . but if you’re forty and you want to get pregnant, you can’t?

  I won’t look Todd in the eye. “Sorry,” I mutter, “I can’t help.” I fiddle around with some equipment in the flatbed of my truck until I see him drive away. I still have work to do, but I make the executive decision to call it a day. I’m the boss, after all. I should know when it’s time to quit.

  I drive to a bar that I’ve passed fifty times on my way to this job. It’s called Quasimodo’s and sports a bad paint job and metal grilles across the one window, which doubles as a lit Budweiser sign. In other words, it’s the sort of place nobody ever goes in the afternoon.

  Sure enough, when I first walk inside and my eyes are adjusting to the light, I think it’s only me and the bartender. Then I notice a woman with bleached blond hair doing a crossword at the bar. Her arms are bare and ropy, with crepe paper skin; she looks strange and familiar all at once, like a T-shirt washed so often that the picture on the front is now just a blotch of color. “Irv,” she says, “what’s a five-letter loamy deposit?”

  The bartender shrugs. “Something that calls for Imodium?”

  She frowns. “The New York Times crossword’s too classy for that.”

  “Loess,” I say, climbing onto a stool.

  “Less what?” she asks, turning to me.

  “No, loess. L-O-E-S-S. It’s a kind of sediment made by layers of silt that the wind’s blown into ridges or dunes.” I point to her newspaper. “That’s your answer.”

  She writes it in, in pen. “You happen to know six across? ‘London streetcars’?”

  “Sorry.” I shake my head. “I don’t know trivia. Just a little geology.”

  “What can I get you?” the bartender asks, setting a napkin in front of me.

  I look at the row of bottles behind him. “Sprite,” I say.

  He pours the soft drink from a hose beneath the bar and sets it in front of me. From the corner of my eye, I see the woman’s drink, a martini. My mouth actually starts to water.

  There is a television above the bar. Oprah Winfrey is telling everyone about beauty secrets from around the world. Do I want to know how Japanese women keep their skin so smooth?

  “You some kind of professor at Brown?” the woman asks.

  I laugh. “Yeah,” I say. Why the hell not? I’m never going to see her again.

  The truth is, I don’t even have a college degree. I flunked out of URI a hundred years ago, when I was a junior. Unlike Reid, the golden son, who’d graduated with honors and had gone on to work as a financial analyst at Bank of Boston before starting his own investment firm, I had majored in Beer Pong and grain alcohol. At first it was parties on the weekends, and then study breaks midweek, except I wasn’t doing any studying. There is an entire semester I cannot remember, and one morning, I woke up naked on the steps of the library without any recollection of what had led up to that.

  When my dad wouldn’t let me move back home, I crashed on Reid’s couch in his Kenmore Square apartment. I got a job as a night watchman at a mall, but lost it when I kept missing work because I was sleeping off that afternoon’s bender. I started stealing cash from Reid so that I could buy bottles of cheap booze and hide them around the apartment. Then one morning, I woke up, hungover, to find a handgun pointed at my forehead.

  “Reid! What the fuck?” I yelped, scrambling upright.

  “If you’re trying to kill yourself, Max,” he said, “let’s speed it up a bit.”

  Together we dumped all the alcohol down the sink. Reid took the day off work to come with me to my first AA meeting. That was seventeen years ago. By the time I met Zoe, when I was twenty-nine, I was sober and had figured out what a guy without a college degree could do with his life. Thinking back to the only classes I’d really liked in college—geology—I figured I’d better stick to the land. I got a small business loan and bought my fi