235 PM Marco
Marco shut the door to the bedroom. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, balancing Ava’s feet on his knees so he could get a better look at her.
She was crying now—like, really crying—and as he searched for the various causes (smelling diapers, patting backs, preparing bottles), he found himself wondering what he always wondered, which was how could something so small make a sound that was so big.
She weighed all of nineteen pounds—he imagined her lungs were the size of dumplings—and yet the noise that she produced was somehow more piercing, more all-consuming than any he had ever heard.
With her feet still set on Marco’s knees, Ava screwed her face into a tight knot, hiccuping once. Pursing his lips, then frowning back at her, he stood up and gently placed his hand on the back of her head.
He had started to wonder if he was destined to be a terrible father.
Nothing was ever right—he was always doing something horribly, incorrigibly wrong.
His swaddles were too loose, he bought the cheap brand of diapers, the banana chunks were too big.
Honestly, Marco, how was an eight-month-old supposed to eat chunks of banana that big?
When he was twenty-three, he’d thought that if he worked hard enough and read the right books he would eventually learn to master something, but now that he wasn’t so young he could see that he had misunderstood: there were always going to be plenty of things that he was bad at, and parenting might be one of them.
When he walked out of the hospital with Ava he was shocked that no one handcuffed him, or at the very least asked him if he had a permit to raise a child, and that fear persisted through the first few weeks he was home.
But now that they had settled into the chaos, he wondered if the problem wasn’t him, or at least not only him, but also that he had married a doctor.
Emily treated parenthood as a constant state of triage.
It was as if everything she’d learned in medical school had resurfaced, and was being projected onto Ava.
This was frustrating on two fronts: 1) Emily was not a pediatrician—she cut out sections of diseased colons; and 2) despite not being a pediatrician, she still—obviously—knew more than Marco.
He found it impossible to contradict her when she corrected him, which happened upward of four million times a day.
The result was that he felt himself caught between two distinct roles: he was a parent; he was also being parented.
Emily acted as the attending physician, and he the lowly intern.
It was a side of his wife that he hadn’t seen before, and that he was trying to reconcile with what their marriage had looked like before their daughter arrived; it also made him feel like shit.
Because despite Emily’s constant needling, Marco was trying very hard.
And he was doing it because, even though her nose was now pouring snot all over his bare shoulder, he loved his daughter.
The milky scent of her skin, the pink bow of her mouth—sometimes he found himself staring at Ava, filled with a new, terrifying love, wondering how she’d come out so perfect.
This was the reason that Emily’s comments stung so much.
He was doing the best that he could, and yet his best never seemed to be enough.
It was impossible to say any of this, though, because Emily had actually given birth to Ava, and breastfed her, and taken more time off from work than he had, so to complain about any particular difficulty he was facing felt trivial in comparison.
So he kept his mouth shut. He simultaneously loved his life while wondering if the sum of it was worth the sacrifices that it required.
Ava wailed again.
“Hush,” Marco said. “Please.”
He brought her to the window, opening the shutters and looking down on the lawn. In a syrupy, mawkish voice he’d never thought he was capable of, he began reciting a list of everything he saw.
“And that’s a swimming pool,” he said. “And that’s Daddy’s old roommate, Richie, and that’s a tree, and that’s the grass, and that’s a cloud that looks like a sex toy, and that’s Nina Guzman, who kills teenagers.”
This—the recitation of the world around him; the pointing out of obscenely obvious facts—was but one of the many tools in his arsenal to stop Ava’s bawling.
The others included performing a sort of manic mamba with a bright-pink rattle, playing peekaboo with a box of Emily’s Kashi, and doing impressions of a fictional hippopotamus, a beast named Herbert that Marco had created one morning after a wholly sleepless night.
He jumped up and down like an orangutan on speed and made big, grotesque faces, all for the satisfaction and approval of this tiny, helpless being.
Occasionally he would reach his wit’s end with it all.
As Ava bawled harder, and as his efforts proved more and more futile, Marco would look at her and say, “You know, you’re really being an asshole.
” For an instant it would make things better, because she was, legitimately, being an asshole, but then Ava would cry harder, and Marco would feel guilty, and they would start the whole dance again.
“And that’s Daddy’s ex-girlfriend, Mia. And that’s her douchebag of a boyfriend, Lev.”
Ava hiccuped again, then stopped crying for long enough to let out a little laugh.
Marco pressed his nose to the top of her head.
He’d only met Lev once. Last summer he and Mia had come down to Washington, and a few days before they arrived, Mia texted Marco to ask if he and Emily wanted to get dinner.
They were back in semiregular communication by that point, though in this text her tone was buoyant, if not overly friendly, which hurt Marco in a way that he hadn’t expected.
He thought their history precluded an excessive use of exclamation points.
They’d gone to a French restaurant on Fourteenth Street that Lev had selected, and that Marco thought was overpriced.
It was loud and decorated like a Parisian bistro, with red banquettes and hard wooden chairs.
Blond women in pastel blouses and white pants gathered near the bar, sipping pink drinks from shallow champagne coupes.
At a table in the corner, a congresswoman from California sat with a man in a gray suit.
Lev excused himself to say hello to her, and when he came back he made a disparaging comment about her marriage.
Mia laughed loudly and immediately looked at Marco.
Marco said: “I think our table is ready.”
Emily was nearing the end of her first trimester, and was still occasionally getting nauseated.
Lev ordered a dozen oysters and steak tartare for the table.
Mia leaned over to whisper something to him, and in a jocular voice he said, “Well, she doesn’t have to eat any of it, then.
” Mia’s cheeks turned a light shade of red as she sipped from her water.
A waiter arrived with their drinks and a basket of thinly sliced bread.
“So whereabouts do you both live?” Lev asked.
“Over on Capitol Hill,” Emily said.
“Ah, yes. Very nice.” He put his arm around the back of Mia’s chair and sipped from his martini. “Very livable.”
Emily smiled; Marco ran butter across a piece of bread.
It was easiest to assume that Lev was being complimentary, and yet in the comment Marco heard an unmistakable undercurrent of condescension, as if livable was something a neighborhood was not supposed to be, and implied a certain degree of provincialism.
He found himself becoming defensive. He thought: What’s so fucking special about New York?
Emily said, “We like it—it’s very quiet,” at the same time Marco said, “What brings you to town?”
Mia unfolded her napkin and set it on her lap. “I’m working on a story on the administration’s plan to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. I could have done it from New York, but we figured it was a nice excuse to get out of town.”
“When was the last time you were here?” Emily asked.
“Oh God. Probably two years ago?”
“Well, it’s changed a lot since then.”
Their food arrived. Marco watched as Lev cut into his steak, red juices pooling around the edges of his plate.
After a little while Mia began to talk about people from college.
Theo was still working at the real estate company, where he was overseeing the development of a large residential building on the Upper East Side; Sasha had been promoted to director of the Barbara Golden Gallery, on Twenty-Sixth Street.
Courtney Paulson and her husband didn’t have any kids, and Mitch Reynolds had made an even more obnoxious amount of money by getting in on the ground floor of a subscription razor business and was living in Los Angeles.
“How’s the World Bank?” Mia asked.
Marco lifted his shoulders. “Demoralizing. I got an offer from a lobbying firm. We’ll see.”
A waiter circled the table to refill their glasses of water. Mia nodded, as if she were considering Marco’s options herself, which made him miss her with a specific, gnawing pain. Lev cut off another piece of steak. His phone chimed.
“Have you heard from Richie?” Mia asked.
“He called after he got back from California. It was like talking to a different person.”
“He called me too.”
“I’m really proud of him.”
“I am too. I just hope that he can—”
Lev laughed, his phone lit up in his hand.
“Oh, man,” he said. “You guys have to hear this.”