“What do you mean?” he had said in genuine confusion. “Why dirty the toilet brush when you can pee the poop away?”
“What?” I’d choked.
“Babe, you gotta pee the poop away.” And to demonstrate, he’d gone to the toilet, lifted the seat, and right in front of me began urinating on his own shit stain, singing, to the Beatles tune, “You’ve got to peeee theeee poop awaaaaay.”
It was so stupid, and yet I thought I might cough up a lung laughing. From then on, he’d dutifully used the toilet brush, but he never stopped singing that song, and it never failed to get a rise out of me.
“There is no way,” I said to the waiter, wiping tears from my eyes, “in a million years, I could explain.”
He gave us a look like Okaaay. Jefferey winked at me, and I found it so unfair how no one ever grew any younger.
I told him about Fred, my work at the fund, trying to gloss over—just a bit—our financial situation. Jefferey lived in Oak Park on a teacher’s salary, and I wasn’t sure what his wife did, but from some internet snooping it seemed like the nonprofit sector. I definitely wasn’t about to tell him that Fred’s net worth was somewhere between $43 and $62 million, that my own had, in the last three years, climbed north of $13 million, that in the last eight months we’d vacationed or had business trips to Dubai, London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Paris, and Aspen. That we’d bought a home in London’s tony Marylebone district just because it had a residential tax haven, and we would probably spend less than two weeks a year there. That I’d spent $30,900 at Bergdorf’s the week before. “And what about the kids? Tell me about them,” I prodded.
“The kids? What a tripod of assholes! Brit’s our oldest, fifteen, and it’s devastating. She used to love me. Used to think I was the coolest, funniest, most incredible guy that ever walked the earth, and now she’s totally flipped. Can’t stand me. Thinks I’m an idiot, is embarrassed by everything I do.” He laughed. “Then Jeff Jr. hates his name, so he goes by Caspian. One day the kid just comes home from school, says he has no gender, and demands everyone call him ‘Caspian.’ He’s about to turn twelve, which we’re terrified of because that’s when Brit’s personality transplant began. But Casp is also a really talented musician and artist. He draws nonstop, really good stuff, so we send him to a special arts middle school—”
“I’m assuming that must come from your wife’s side.”
“Oh, I’m assuming she fucked the lawn guy.”
Laughing again, I chided, “Jefferey.”
“That boy could not be less like me if we’d tried to engineer it the way some of these rich-ass parents do with their designer babies. So yeah, Casp is a trip. And then the youngest is Kyle. Wonderful, sweet, beautiful Kyle. Nine years old, hardy as hell. Loves football. Loves baseball. Thinks I’m awesome. Thinks I know everything about every subject. I want to put him in a coma so he stays this way forever.”
“Sounds like you love it, though. Being a dad.” And I felt just the smallest tinge of hurt.
“It has its moments. It does come with this—” He stopped and squinted, his gaze traveling to the wall where a painting hung of Port-au-Prince under a vivid cerulean sky. “It comes with this undercurrent of always being sad. Like I understand how quickly it’s all going by. And now that Brit’s in high school, and there’s all this distance she’s put between us, I sort of realized, ‘Oh, I’m never going to be an invincible hero to her ever again.’ She might get less moody eventually, but it all just hurtles by you.”
A woman in a dress of flaky translucent sequins bumped into our table, rattling the glasses and silverware. I was grateful for the interruption.
“So you and Fred never took the plunge on kids?”
“He has a son from his first marriage, but by the time we met it was a little late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“At forty-eight it is.” And now I very much wanted to change the subject. “Do you ever see anyone else from the old days? The Wellington Brown Line years?” Referring to the L stop closest to our apartment.
“Not really. The U of Wisconsin guys all moved back home. I still see Dan Faulk, but he’s in Naperville, which is such a trek. He married this psycho Puerto Rican chick, who runs his life like a military barracks.”
“Faulk? That’s surprising.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hey, what about that crazy bartender from Matilda. Kim Fox. Remember her?” I let fly my flirtiest smile of the night. On Jefferey’s twenty-fifth birthday, wild on tequila, Kim and I had made out in front of him and his friends as an impromptu birthday present.
But Jefferey’s face fell, and I thought I’d said something wrong, that bringing up this innocent memory had made him uncomfortable. He looked at the table and then back at me.
“She was at Wrigley.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The shooting. She was one of the—she was one of the people who got killed.”
This news crawled up my arms one hair at a time, and instead of Kim’s bright smile and heavy pours for the regulars, I thought of my mom and brackish water rising higher and higher. “Oh my God. I had no idea.”
“The bar had a memorial for her. It was all pretty fucking gnarly. The whole city was shut down for a week. Everyone was freaked there were going to be more shooters, like a whole army of white supremacists was going to descend on the streets. Awful thing was, me and Meg and the kids had gone to two Cubs games already that year.” He shook his head. “It was really freaky. Really awful.”
Snared among the memories of going to Wrigley with Jefferey was the actor, who’d been wearing that blue Cubs hat. That man melted into The Pastor, preaching at a rally, his eyebrows dark cuneiforms. He’d said such massacres were Christ’s judgment, that if we didn’t elect him, there would be many more to come.
The waiter took our plates, and Jefferey ordered a whiskey, so I got another glass of wine. Yet our conversation couldn’t seem to recover from the story of Kim Fox. Jefferey tried another avenue, and he chose exactly wrong.
“How’s your family doing? Erik, Allie, your mom? I’m sorry about your dad, I heard about that.”
I smiled as brightly as I could manage. There was no way I was sharing the story of my mom right now.
“They’re all doing great—yeah. Same old, same old. Allie can still be a pill.”
“A horse pill. But it’s comforting that nothing changes.”
I tried to pivot the conversation by treading where we hadn’t gone yet.
“And you and Meg, how did you meet?”
“We were both teaching at the high school.”
“So you’re both still there? I thought I saw a picture of her working at a garden?”
“Right, she quit teaching to work for this farming cooperative. This Fierce Blue Fire thing.”
My ears might as well have twitched.
“No kidding?”
“Yeah, these agrarian community projects in the city—it’s like farming and carbon sequestration and teaching and voter organization all rolled into one.”
Of course, I was familiar. The Outposts.
“I was just watching the interview with the two families—”
“Justice for Letitia,” he said immediately.
“That’s right, yeah. That whole thing was just such a nightmare. I’ve always admired Kate Morris, but what they did… To this day, I just can’t believe it happened.”
Though I’d thought this was a safe perspective, especially since his wife worked for FBF, which had told its members not to join the illegal occupation, I could tell from the blankness of his face that this comment had not landed. So I found myself stumbling on, maybe saying things I believed, maybe parroting Fred.