Manhood for Amateurs

  It was the diaper bag that broke me. When my first child was born, the idea that a bag intended for the transport of bottles, ointment, nipples, and Huggies ought not to emasculate its male bearer was a proposition only slightly more devoid of sense than at the present time. Furthermore, it was not merely a feminine aesthetic that guided the design of available diaper bags, but the same bizarrely infantilizing principle that prevailed in maternity wear—bears and balloons and cheerily ersatz gingham—as if it were the baby herself and not her adult parents who would be schlepping the thing around. In the end I found a number in plain black nylon, disguised as a knapsack, with a zip-down changing pad. It still had the nipples and the ointment, but I hoped that in its blackness and angles, it might possess certain properties of stealth.

  I carried that diaper bag until it became so saturated and coated with dairy and excretory residue that it needed to be disposed of by a hazmat team and a federal cleanup superfund. Three children followed the first, each with his or her diaper bag, and as fatigue, inattention, and habit took over, I stopped noticing if I was carrying the Esprit or the Kate Spade or the (forgive me) Petunia Pickle Bottom in embroidered lime-green Chinese silk. I had the diaper bag over one shoulder and a kid in the opposite arm, and I was pushing a stroller full of groceries, and some other small child was dragging along behind me hanging from the back pocket of my jeans, and at that instant as I left the store, I felt like it would be a lot easier just to drop my wallet into the diaper bag with my keys, and my cell phone, and my New York Review of Books than try to shove it down into my pants.

  After that I got into the habit of carrying all my stuff around in the diaper bag. As my youngest kid got older and the need diminished for the full armamentarium—for the boxes of UHT milk, the Aquaphor, and the baby wipes—I broke down and bought a nice Jack Spade knapsack, black and slick, lined with sky blue. I tucked a couple of diapers and some wipes into it with my wallet and iPod and keys, and I set out.

  But a knapsack is such a defeated thing, sitting there slumped and baggy-assed on the floor at one’s feet. One sheds it wearily, with a beaten-down shrug of his shoulder. What’s more, I was forty, and there was something at once preposterous and dismaying about returning after so many years to the accessory of my PBR and Nietzsche days. So I tried a satchel, a messenger bag, and a couple of those outsize hybrids thereof. But whatever themed adventure these bags attempted to suggest—soldier, spy, pierce-tongued tattooed bike messenger, laptop slacker—I felt like an impostor, a boy playing dress-up. I just wanted a bag that wasn’t too big or too small or too heavy, one that would carry the things I needed—and inevitably some of the things my kids needed—without making me look too much like one of those Germano-Scandinavian tourists you see walking around New York in the summer with their zipper packs and clogs. I needed a purse. A man purse. A murse.

  One day I was telling all this to a female friend of mine, an adventuresome shopper with a taste for the fabulous in men’s clothing and a boyfriend who refused to wear anything but the most routine garb. She had already bestowed on me, because her man would not be caught dead in it, the gift of a silk multicolor-pinstriped Paul Smith muffler, and I could tell that the murse question piqued her interest; indeed, she seemed to take an almost philosophical interest in the problem.

  “You don’t want too mursy of a murse,” she said. “You don’t want to look like one of those Swedish guys.”

  “No.”

  “Next thing you’ll be wearing clogs.”

  “God forbid.”

  “It has to be sort of masculine somehow, but not goofy. Not army surplus. Not Jamaican bike messenger.”

  “You echo my thoughts exactly.”

  “I mean, the thing is, it’s a purse. You are going to be carrying a purse. I don’t think you can really get around that or try to hide it. Nor should you.”

  “Nor do I wish to hide it,” I said. “If people want to mock me or think less of me or just laugh their asses off when they see me walking around with a purse, I am prepared to face their scorn.”

  “Kind of like the Jackie Robinson of purse-wearing men,” my friend said.

  “Kind of just like that,” I said.

  There is nothing brave or courageous or remotely Robinsonesque about my contemplating the carrying of a purse, any more than there is in my taste for pink shirts, though I was once informed by a mother of my acquaintance, half disapprovingly, that wearing a pink shirt was a brave thing for a man to do. It’s simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me. This is not the result of my undertaking to exercise a moral program or of increased wisdom or of any kind of willed act on my part. It just seems to be a process, a time-directed shedding, like the loss of hair or illusions. I am a husband, a father, and a son, whether or not I think, ponder, or worry about gender, sexuality, my life as a man; and maybe there’s a kind of pleasure to be taken in simple unconsciousness, an automatic way of moving and being and acting in the world. And maybe for an instant here and there, in the taking of that pleasure, I partake of a grace like the grace of Jackie Robinson.

  A week after I talked to my friend, a purse came UPS. It’s a square of fawn-colored suede, about the size of an extra-small pizza box, trimmed in brown leather with white stitching. It has a strap of cotton webbing, dark brown with a tan stripe running down the center. It’s handsome, soft and rugged at the same time the way only suede can seem. And it’s definitely a purse. It holds my essential stuff, including a book—for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one’s pocket—but no more, and so I can wear it, and my masculinity, and my contempt for those who might mock or misunderstand me, very lightly indeed.

  [ VI ]

  The second burning woman was small and dark-haired, pert, buxom, younger than my mother but not as pretty. I had never seen her. As had her predecessor a few months earlier, she sat behind the wheel of her car, an orange AMC Matador parked with the engine off at the end of our driveway, windows rolled down. She sat staring with hollow shock at the Boyfriend’s Mustang, which was in turn parked at the head of our driveway, under the basketball hoop mounted on the edge of the carport.

  “Hello,” I said, stooping to retrieve the Post.

  “Hello,” said the woman.

  It was already hot, the sky cloudless, the air dense and starry with gnats, the sun well up over the trees.

  “How are you this morning?” I said.

  The woman eyed me skeptically as if I were a consolation prize or parting gift sent out by the Boyfriend, who was at that moment sitting at our kitchen table, eating a large bowl of oatmeal that I had made for him—slightly chunky, slightly chewy, and yet smooth and pleasantly glutinous, which I served with sultana raisins, a dissolving puddle of brown sugar, and a nice thick spiral of half-and-half. One of the ongoing puzzles I posed to myself at the age of fifteen was the gap between the things that I knew or felt and the things that I did. Such as, to cite one example, the lengths to which I would go to please the Boyfriend, whom I loathed, and yet whose rough-edged, racy laugh or few words of praise for my cooking could bring tears to my eyes.

  “What’s your name?” said the burning woman. She was actually quite pretty, sloe-eyed and freckled with a snub nose and breasts that registered strongly on my tricorder’s bodacity detection array.

  “Mike,” I told her.

  “Mike.”

  “Michael. It means ‘Who is like unto God?’ It’s a question.”

  “Do you spell it with a question mark?”

  “No, but maybe I should. That could be cool.”

  “Do me a favor, Mike?”

  “Tell him that you were here?”

  She rummaged a package of Eve cigarettes from her purse and pushed in the dashboard lighter. “Done this before,” she said, “I gather.”

  “Yes. Not every day, but.”

  My mother was one of a numb
er of attractive women in the city of Columbia, Maryland, who were collectively embarked upon the bold enterprise of having their hearts broken by the Boyfriend, whose movements were like those of a guerrilla leader or rebel commander, never sleeping in the same bed longer than two or three nights running. In the interests of security, the Boyfriend apparently thought nothing of dividing one night between two or more beds. The women who loved the Boyfriend tended, like my mother, to be strangely slow on the uptake when it came to grasping the bitter truth about the man, but once they realized that he had been lying to them and running around town with several other women at once, they tended to go through a period—relatively prolonged in my mother’s case—of following him and tracking his movements. Come to think of it, very much like stealthy operatives of a conquering power bent on crushing insurrection. My mother had the Boyfriend that morning, but I knew that only two nights before, she had crept out of the house at two o’clock in the morning to go and stand in the bushes outside the house of another woman in whose driveway the Boyfriend’s Mustang sat, engine clicking.

  My mother was, and remains, a cool customer. Not cold, if by cold you mean unfeeling or remote, heartless, or disengaged. But not unduly given, let’s say, to bursting into flame. Big shows of emotion, tears and drama, shouting, proclamations, bold naked statements of love and hate, braggadocio and stomping around—these are not the arts of her hardheaded, soft-spoken race. The woman is considered. Deliberate. Measured. Unflappable. Skeptical and sharp-eyed. Generous with her time and attention, unstinting with sound advice, and steady in her bestowal of moral support, she has never been your Santa Claus of physical affection with the lap and the cookies and the great big sack full of hugs. Hugs when she’s happy, hugs when you’re sad, hello, goodbye, lunch, breakfast, warm soft armloads of love for everyone: not she.

  It was quite unexpected, therefore—the right word might be freakish—when my mother, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, like a leaf that chances to blow into the bright focus of somebody’s spectacles left out in the sun, set herself on fire for the Boyfriend. In the years since my parents’ separation had become final, she’d dated a lot of men, a zoo’s worth, furry and hairless as mole rats, a kitchen drawer’s worth, sharpened and dull. Line them up and they varied in form, tint, and potency like bottles on the back of a bar. Some had been handsome, fit, deep-voiced, and deep-pocketed. Some had come around too much and given her too many rash presents, and others had been aloof and trifled with her time. Some had paid heed to me and my opinions, enough so that I minted fresh opinions for them at twice my usual rate. Others had felt it wisest to proceed to my mother’s bedroom without taking note of the young man on the stairs, in the horned helmet, posing a pertinent question about runes.

  In all that time until the Boyfriend, I never saw my mother fall in love, not even a little. And lest this seem a matter of perception or simple wishful thinking on the part of a son perhaps jealous of his mother’s time and affection, looking to do what he could to drive away the likely candidates or downplay the intensity of his mother’s feelings toward them, there was my mother’s own testimony, repeated over the years with suitable variation, in conversation with her girlfriends or to me alone on a drive somewhere far enough that the conversation had time, with my little brother snoring in the backseat, to turn to her love life: He’s nice enough. A little dull. I don’t think this is really heading anywhere. If he calls, tell him I’m not in.

  The truth of the matter is that from the moment the very first suitor turned up—call him Roger, call him mustached and tweedy and festooned with an Isro—and I realized that such a thing was possible, I had been waiting for my mother to fall in love. It was something I wanted to see, something I knew was fully possible, and not just because I knew that even Vulcans went love-amok once every seven years and that, as our World Book encyclopedia informed me, under the ice of Iceland there burned fires of molten steel. No, I had seen proof of my mother’s ardor in black and white. This photograph—take a look.

  My mother and father in the summer of 1962 on a blanket in the sun. A grassy slope, a distant tree. My father, shirtless and smooth, holds my mother in his arms; he’s lying right on top of her. Her head is thrown back to expose to his mouth her throat, and her bare shoulders are in a halter top. Her hand, fingers splayed, is pressed against the flesh of his back, keeping him, playing him, holding him there. The first time I came upon this picture tucked between the pages of my father’s Modern Library edition of The Poetry of Blake, I was stunned, transfixed by this evidence that in some remote era there must have once existed, as some part of me had always known there must, a kingdom or a civilization or some kind of lost world known, to scholars of dust, as my parents’ love for each other. It was like seeing at long last some kind of theory or explanation of myself, of how I got here, and almost literally so, for printed in the bottom border of the picture were the words AUGUST 1962, and it was not quite ten months later that there came into the world, squalling and shitting, the author of these lines. And that was the reason, I think, that I wanted to see my mother in love. Not because armed with this proof of their having once loved each other I hoped that in some whistle-while-you-wish Wonderful World of Disney way it would be my father toward whom she once again would kindle her heart, but because something made sense to me, looking at the picture, that had never made sense before. In the absence of the kind of passion, of fire, to which the photograph attested, what was the point of it all? Why else had they done it—built it all up so they could then knock it all down? After a marriage breaks, there is nothing more pointless than the child, to that child, of that marriage.

  The lighter popped out, and the second burning woman looked into its radiant coils for a moment, then reached in and poked them with the tip of her finger. I could hear the hiss of her flesh as it singed. Actually, it was not that long since I had conducted the very same experiment with the lighter in our Impala, perhaps out of the same aimless and darkly curious urge. Would I be like her one day? Come to the same dire pass, driving around all night in the pursuit, at once brazen and furtive, of the thing that was hurting me the most? Fervently, I hoped and dreaded that it would be so.

  “Ah!” she said. “Ouch.” She held her cigarette to the heat, inhaling a savage puff to get it going, then shook out her fingers as if drying polish on her nails. Then she told me her name, which I no longer remember. “You can tell him I was here, Mike. All right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Miss.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “And tell him I had fun last night chasing him all around town.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “Not a minute,” said the burning woman, and then she drove off into the flames.

  When I was fifteen, I slept with this woman I knew. I’m not sure how old she was at the time; probably not over thirty-five. She was a friend of my mother’s, and I have never known, then or to this day, what was in it for her. I was a newly thin, undistinguished-looking kid with acne and aviator glasses. My long hair was cut and styled in the “wings” that render hilarious contemporary photographs of Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Though I was smart, verbal, and took an interest in the world around me—and had recently felt stirrings of some kind of new grasp on the nature of my life to come, derived from reading The World According to Garp and watching Annie Hall—that interest still quickened most keenly in proximity to things like Dune, Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I have devoted many passing moments over the intervening years to observing interactions between thirty-five-year-old women and fifteen-year-old boys, and I have found that all the mystery in the business lies on the older and wiser side of things.

  My mother threw a party, and there was dancing that ran late into the evening, with the tempos slowing as the night wore on until, in the end, my mother and her boyfriend went off someplace to do whatever they did, and I found myself alone in the arms of this woman—divorced, single, sweet-
smelling—subject to her languid, teasing conversation, to the pressure of her belly against my hips, and to the tender mercies of Willie Nelson singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

  Maybe the solution to all the mystery lies in the title and lyrics of that song—and in the ache of the voice that was singing it. I am certain the woman was pretty drunk.

  “Are you a virgin?” she said in an offhand tone.

  “No,” I said. I was happy to see that my reply surprised her. It was the truth, and I was hoping it would be enough to persuade her to extend the invitation that I thought she might be contemplating.

  “Does your mother know that?”

  “Well, I didn’t tell her,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think so, either,” said my mother’s friend.

  My virginity had been no particular encumbrance to me, and it had not lingered very long beyond the time that I started hankering to be rid of it. I was in the tenth grade, a year younger than most of my fellow sophomores, and the girl who had done me the favor was a senior: a sophisticate of seventeen, in possession of a keen mind and a tremendous American automobile of the period (an LTD? an Olds ’88?) that she used to drive herself responsibly to museums, film retrospectives, and concerts. She was a serious reader (I still have her paperback copy of The Wreckage of Agathon, and I plan to read it someday), a musician, an artist; an incipient adult, embarked on a history of unfolding adventure, both intellectual and physical, in which I was to rate barely a footnote. Her long-term steady boyfriend, to whose own brilliant incipience, as I was all too aware, I offered nothing in the way of competition, had left for college earlier in the fall with an exchange of vague promises of fidelity. She may have been lonely, missing him, looking for ways to strike back or strike out on her own. I didn’t care in the least. He was the first ex-boyfriend whose shade was ever invoked in the memories and pillow talk of a girl I was fucking, and just as great a fool as all who followed him.