Miss November Follow story

I’m in my pajamas looking out the window, peering through the blinds like a weirdo, watching my neighbor move out of his house. He’s stretched this out over the course of the last week, showing up at ten each night, backing his douchey Land Rover into his driveway, and going about the process of leaving his wife one cardboard box at a time. I’m morbidly fascinated by this, which explains why I’m rubbernecking through mini-blinds. Why doesn’t he just get a U-Haul? He could get it over with in one fell swoop. And why does he show up so late? He’s got a normal job, just like everyone else. Maybe he did a Google search and found that it’s less traumatizing for kids if they’re asleep when their dad loads his golf clubs and diplomas into the back of a $90,000 car. 

His name is James. Not Jim—James. He’s one of those guys who wears his cell phone on a plastic clip attached to his belt. He’s talking on it now as he Tetrises another box next to some other boxes. I’ve found that there are two types of guys who clip cell phones to their belts: sweet nerds who fix your computer at work and white-collar criminals who guzzle Red Bull and swindle old ladies out of their Social Security checks. I suspect that James is among the latter. Sometimes Ellen, his wife, comes out and stands there in the drive-  way and watches him. She wears these brown clogs and her nighttime things and crosses her arms. She hardly ever says anything to him. Instead she just sort of stands there glaring either at him or out vaguely at their browning front yard. He’s smiling as he talks, standing in the driveway. His teeth are startlingly white. I can see them glowing from here. My guess is he’s talking to her—the other woman. She’s a pharmaceutical sales rep, of course. My wife and all of the other wives refer to her, simply, as “The Blonde.” Kristine comes into our bedroom. I don’t really look at her because I’m pretty busy leering at James, but I get just enough to see her drop a magazine onto our bed. 

“Do you think that asshole got his teeth whitened?” I ask. “Does that really work? Maybe I should pick up some of those white strip things at CVS next —” “I found this in Bradley’s room today,” she says, stopping me. “What?” When I look over I see my wife standing at the side of our bed next to a Playboy magazine. My first reaction is to laugh, because this is funny, but I bite my lower lip instead, like I’m being thoughtful. I’ve learned this trick slowly over the last fifteen years. I bite a little harder when I notice Kristine’s shirt. Take Me Drunk, I’m Home, it says across her chest in faded letters. It’s mine. I bought it in stupid Dewey Beach years ago to be funny. It’s too big on me—way too big—and so it’s downright cartoonish on her. I sit down on our bed and pick up the magazine. It’s all wrinkled and dog-eared, and the girl on the cover is blond and airbrushed to the point of looking like a slightly blurry computer animation. Breasts and lips and hips and a crop-top thing and a gleaming navel ring. We got rid of our movie channels last year, and so it’s been while since I’ve seen a girl dressed like this. “Well, it’s . . . good to see him reading.” Kristine is prepped for this sort of reaction, and so without pause she says, “I don’t think it’s funny, Mitch.” “It’s kind of funny?” I say. I add a question mark at the end in an attempt to lighten the mood with punctuation, but no luck. On the TV, the day’s baseball scores are running across the screen. I find myself wondering about the TV in James’s new apartment in the city. I imagine it’s the size of a foosball table, which is a thought I keep to myself. “No,” she says. “It’s pornography.” The word sounds weird. My wife has a slight speech impediment, like she’s talking with a very thin sheet of paper at the back of her tongue. You can hardly notice it, but it flares up on oddball words like cinnamon, chrysanthemum, and, apparently, pornography. 

She touches her mouth, hiding it—a reflex wired in since adolescence. “Weelllll,” I say, drawing the word out. And for a while that’s all I say, as if this, alone, is a solid argument. “Let’s keep things in perspective here. Remember that freaky kid with the vampire teeth? The one on the news—from Towson? He shot up that TJ Maxx last month with the hunting rifle. They found cat skulls in his room.” “They were squirrel skulls,” she says. “And it was a K-Mart.” I’m not sure how these details weaken my point, but somehow, strangely, they do, and so I just sit there for a moment, deflated. On the Playboy’s back cover, there’s an ad for cologne. A good-looking actor I kind of recognize from a cop show is having a pillow fight with a pretty brunette girl in her underwear. I briefly consider grabbing one of our decorative throw pillows and smacking Kristine across the face with it. I wonder what would happen. Would she laugh and strip to her underwear and forget, if just for a moment, about our pervy son down the hall? It seems doubtful. They should include a warning at the bottom of the ad in legal type: *Outcome unlikely in most situations involving wives. Outside, there’s the gentle thud of a car door closing. I can still hear James’s voice, blathering on into his cell phone. I can’t make out any words, just happy mumbling through our well-sealed windows. “I’m just saying . . . it could be worse, right?” I say. She shakes her head and sighs. I’ve found that women sometimes pretend to be more infuriated with men than they actually are in order to make larger, more general points. But I can see by the look on her face that she’s genuinely mystified “How can this not make you mad? Are you really that . . . clueless?” 40_Stories_Final.indd 300 6/18/12 5:38 PM Miss November 301 “Kris, have you heard of the Internet? Do you know what kind of stuff is on there? Compared to that, this magazine is really kind of charming. The fact that we haven’t caught him watching fetish videos on the computer represents probably our greatest achievement as parents. You didn’t have brothers. You don’t know boys like I do. Trust me . . . this is perfectly natural.” She’s prepped for this, too, and her eyes roll. I get the feeling she’s been rehearsing this conversation with a stunt husband. “Oh, right, right,” she says. “The ‘it’s natural’ argument. That’s very in-fashion right now, huh? You’re all just animals. It’s all evolutionary. There’s no way to control you or your overwhelming masculinity. We should all just get used to it, right?” This seems like something different than what I just said, and I briefly consider hiding out in the bathroom and pretending to brush my teeth. But then something dawns on me. “Wait. How did you find this thing anyway? You weren’t going through his stuff, were you? He’s not a little—” “No, I wasn’t going through his stuff. It was sitting in his underwear drawer, Mitchell.” “His underwear drawer?” “Yes. I’m his mother. I was putting away his laundry.” To articulate her point, she moves to the basket of unfolded clothes that’s been sitting on her reading chair for three days and starts angrily balling socks into haphazard pairs. This seems like a little bit of a stretch, barefoot and folding laundry. She’s a corporate lawyer who makes twice what I do. And so as she continues taking her frustration out on our clothing, I think about the Catholic-guilt-ridden Playboys of my own youth. When I was Bradley’s age, I hid five of them elaborately with Cold War paranoia in the false bottom of a giant cardboard box of baseball cards. My goal—and I’d actually thought this through—was to hide them so obsessive-compulsively that if I were to die in some freakish, crazy accident, no one, particularly my goddamn mother, would ever find them. My knuckleheaded son has been a hell of a lot less careful, and now we’re both paying for it. It doesn’t seem fair. “What if it was Ella then?” she says. “What if you found a magazine with naked guys in her room?”  I shudder at this. I know that’s usually just an expression, but I actually do. “You think men are the only ones who think about sex, Mitch? Like it’s all just Dancing with the Stars and Lifetime movies for us? Come on . . . we just know how to actually control ourselves. It’s a novel concept.” “But Ella’s not a woman, Kris. She’s nine. Thanks for the imagery, though . . . it’s every father’s dream.” And here we are, in this place we’ve been before. Right now we’re pretending that we’re actually talking about what we’re talking about. We’re pretending that this conversation about our children and a creased, six-year-old girlie magazine isn’t happening a hundred some-odd feet away from the exact spot in which Kristine’s friend is being replaced by someone younger. She sighs at the laundry and bites a cuticle. There’s a 50/50 chance this conversation is over. Some stop suddenly. Others drift on aimlessly for weeks, like British costume dramas. So I flip through the magazine. There are more ads for cologne, and some for sports cars and body spray, and then it falls open to the centerfold, Miss November. She’s prettier than the girl on the cover—seemingly less computer-generated. She’s lying on a beach chair, smiling, kind of shy—or at least pretending to be kind of shy. A tiny green bikini top lies cast aside in the sand, and she’s making a halfhearted go at covering her breasts with her hands. I’m not sure how this lovely girl and her mostly naked body are supposed to make me feel, but sitting here in my pajamas, I feel suddenly a little sad, and I think about Dewey Beach again, back before we got way too old to go there anymore. Lazing next to Kristine on towels because we we’re too broke and disorganized to get beach chairs. Dizzy and stupid from daytime drinking in the sun. The wind blowing her hair all over the place. Picking grains of sand from her navel while she laughs and swats me away. Her skin bitter from saltwater and sand and sunscreen. “Mitch,” she says. She’s given up on the laundry bit, and she’s standing in the middle of our room tugging at her lower lip in my giant T-shirt. “I want you to talk to him.” “And what am I supposed to tell him?” 

Her irritation with me is palpable, like smoke in the room. “Tell him his mother doesn’t want that thing in the house,” she says. “Think you can manage that?” For no legitimate reason, I peek in on Ella first. She’s right where she’s supposed to be, sprawled out sleeping in her bed at weird angles like a gunshot victim. If she’s currently hiding horrible penis magazines in her underwear drawer, I hope I never find out. Kristine has gone downstairs to make an unnecessary amount of noise. She’s knocking plates around and opening and closing cupboards and cabinets. The cat’s probably ditched the scene by now and curled up behind the dryer. It’s his go-to spot at the first sign of unpleasantness. Maybe later, I’ll join him. From the window in the hallway, I can see the front of James’s car next door. I wonder what his plan was. What did he take first? What has he left until the end? Standing outside Bradley’s bedroom door now, I clear my throat and fake a few coughs to give him some fair warning so he can cease and desist whatever unholy thing he’s doing in there. When I knock, he answers fast—“Yeah?” he says. I put the Playboy behind my back, which seems unnecessarily cruel, but it’s too late now. His room smells like a teenage boy and the décor he’s chosen is what a local Foot Locker might look like if it got hit by a grenade. I step over a pair of red and black Adidas basketball shoes and a largely ignored backpack filled with schoolbooks. “What’s up, Dad?” he says. “Hey,” I say, and then I pull the magazine out like it’s some sort of prize and every muscle in my son’s body tenses at once. Streaks of heat darken his face, and I wish I’d chosen a method that wasn’t so much like an ambush. “We need to talk about this, buddy.” “Oh, dude,” he says, but that’s as far as he gets. He pulls a lone earbud from his ear and hangs his head, defeated. I expected more, if I’m being honest—an escape attempt or, at the very least, a passionate denial. His little flat screen is on in mute. He’s watching the same thing I was. “It’s all right, Brad. I’m not mad. I just . . . ”

He waits for me to finish this sentence, which makes two of us. I should have had Kristine write me a script. At least some talking points. “Where’d you even get it, anyway?” I can read his mind right now and I watch as he considers the ramifications of being a snitch, like he’s a low-level mafia goon. The fact that I don’t seem to be madding is throwing him off. He’s trying to figure out my angle. “Uhhh,” he says. “Brad, I’m not gonna waterboard you. Just tell me where you go it.” “Luke Hackman,” he says, giving up. “This guy from school. I traded him an A-Rod rookie card for it.” “Wow, Luke Hackman got screwed in that deal,” I say, and then I surprise us both by laughing. Bradley just watches, a little dopeylooking, as I sit down at the side of his bed and flip through the magazine again. Apparently it’s impossible for even a reasonably intelligent grown man to hold a Playboy without looking at it. Miss November, whose name is actually Amber, has filled out one of those idiotic questionnaires. I scan her answers and wonder what infuriated my Rhodes Scholar wife more, the fact that this twenty-year-old girl has allowed herself to be so shamelessly objectified or that she’s dotted the Is and Ts in her answers with an apparently random combination of bubbly hearts and smiley faces.

Bradley sees me reading. “Her favorite movie is The Notebook,” he says. I read on and, of course, he’s right. “She likes horses, too,” I say. “That’ll come in handy if she ever fulfills her dream of becoming a . . . wow . . . large-animal surgeon? Is that even a real thing?” “Arizona State’s got a really good Pre-Vet program, Dad,” he says. “It’s, like, ranked and everything.” I’m surprised suddenly then by a drive-by hit of love for my son. It leaves me a little dizzy atop his wrinkly New York Yankees sheets. These debilitating waves of affection are more commonly directed at Ella, who wears butterfly clips in her hair and tells me that I’m the best ten times a day. But I love this skinny punk, too, and his cracking voice and his impossibly big Adam’s apple. He’s the same boy I was a hundred years ago. The same boy we all were. He studies Miss November’s loopy words at night over and over after the rest of us have gone to bed, memorizing them along with the thrilling details of her body and wonders if a girl like this—if any girl at all, really— will ever let him see her naked. “Okay,” I say. “I wish Dr. Amber here all the best. But we need to talk about your mom. She’s not exactly thrilled about this, Brad.” “What? Mom? Oh. Oh God. Does she . . . like . . . think I’m a perv?” “Well, maybe a little. Here’s the thing you gotta understand. 

They’re not like us. To your mom—to women—this isn’t just a magazine. It’s more like a . . . a worldview. She thinks that this is how you see women. As . . . sex objects?” Another question mark creeps in, but this one’s less choreographed. I’m not articulating myself very well. “Does that make sense, Brad?” “Um,” he says. “I guess so. Kinda.” That means no. I can tell by the completely blank look on his face, and now I have an overwhelming urge to slap the back of his head. A moment ago I loved him, and now I’m contemplating low-level child abuse. That, basically, is fatherhood. “Okay, let me simplify it for you, then. Playboys are going to piss your mom off. So next time maybe think about a better hiding place. Your underwear drawer, Brad? Are you kidding me? Did you think about just cutting out the middle man and duct-taping it to her steering wheel?” “Huh?” “Brad, you’re busted. Give up the stunned look. She found this thing in your underwear drawer. She told me herself.” “What? Nu-uh. It wasn’t in my underwear drawer. Seriously, I’m not stupid, Dad. I had it over there, with Grandpa’s Sports Illustrateds.” “What are you talking about?” He hops out of bed, all ropy in baggy gym shorts, and kneels down to the bottom shelf of his bookcase where he keeps my dad’s old Sports Illustrateds in three leaning piles. “See, I had it here. Middle pile, fifth one from the top.” He counts out five magazines and lifts, revealing a boozy looking baseball player from the ’70s instead of a Playboy. “She must have, like, found it or something.” “Jesus,” I say. 

“What?” Bradley doesn’t see what I see. His mother didn’t stumble randomly on this thing while perusing antique Sports Illusrateds. She was looking for it—or for something like it, at least. She probably started with me, riffling through the harmless crap in my desk and nightstand, and then moved on to Bradley, a not-so-innocent bystander. I look down at Miss November again. She’s looking back at me all pouty and oblivious, and I know exactly what my wife was thinking. If this is what men like James want—if this is what they’re willing to leave their wives standing in their driveways for—then maybe it’s what we all want. “Dad?” says Bradley. “Are you still, like, not mad at me?” “Go back to bed, Brad,” I say. “Tomorrow you’re apologizing to your mother.” “But—” “But nothing.” “I mean, what do I say?” “You’ll think of something.” I drop the stupid magazine into the recycling bin in the kitchen, but I rethink that and move it to the garbage. As the metal lid closes with a satisfying bang, it feels definitive. She’s standing in the kitchen, looking out over our dark yard and onto the street. There’s a bag of Oreos open on the counter, doublestuffed. For a while, I look at her from behind. One bare foot hooks gently around its opposing calf. In silhouette, she’s like one of those long birds at the zoo, resting on one leg and pretending no one’s looking at her. Just then, the street over her shoulder and out the window lights up and James’s Land Rover passes with a hum of European acceleration, and then it’s gone. I wonder how many other households this dickhead has disrupted this week. Maybe if he comes by tomorrow night I’ll slash his tires. That seems reasonable enough. 

“Well, Brad feels like a complete pervert now,” I say, popping an Oreo into my mouth. “You can look forward to an incredibly awkward apology tomorrow.” She bites a cookie and keeps staring, holding its remainder in her fingers like a cigarette. “If it makes you feel better,” I say, “I think he actually did read the articles.” “Where’d he get it?” she asks. “The city last week. He and his friends found it sticking out of a Dumpster. Some little creep named Luke Hackman dared him to take it.” I’m not entirely sure why I’ve told her this. I guess I’m protecting Brad. Or maybe I’m just covering for all of us. It’s probably better if they think our behavior is less calculating and more a recurring symptom of our own hopeless stupidity. The cat slinks by silently, assessing the situation in his snobby cat way. The unpleasantness in the house has passed. Just a small, domestic storm. “Do you ever feel old, Mitch?” I do, all of the time—right now, in fact—but I don’t answer her. It’s dark in the kitchen. Just a row of low lights illuminate the wineglasses in the cabinet. The green light over the oven has been blinking 7:22 for as long as I can remember. I put my hands on her hips and turn her around and kiss her on the mouth. Nothing serious. Nothing cinematic. Just a small, Oreo-flavored kiss, our tongues touching only for an instant. When we were young, I spent large sums of energy concentrating on the strawberry-like surface of Kristine’s tongue. I thought if I put my mind to it, if I really thought about it, I could identify the slight imperfection that caused the occasional word to gently slur like it did. I loved it about her, and now it’s just another thing that I don’t even really think about anymore. “You can’t kiss me,” she says. “I’m eating Oreos.” Her fingers move to her lips again, but I don’t want her to hide from me so I take her hands and pull them down to her sides. There are things I want to tell her—that I should tell her. I’m not sleeping with a pharmaceutical sales rep, and I’m not planning to. There’s no secret in my desk or my nightstand, just a bunch of ATM receipts and golf tees. I think belly button rings are kind of trashy-looking. I didn’t impregnate our foreign housekeeper and keep it a secret, even after becoming gover- nor of California. I didn’t get a blow job from an intern. I didn’t have Twitter affairs and send teenaged girls in Delaware grainy pictures of my junk. Our son is a good boy. He’s not a misogynist or a future date-rapist. He’s just a kid. I love her, and I’m not as bad as she’s gradually beginning to fear that I might be. Not even close. She’s waiting for me to say all of these things. But I don’t know where to begin. And so I say the first actual words that materialize. “Only a complete asshole would spend ninety thousand dollars on a car during a global recession.”