Mid Life

Mid Life

We are the men. 

We are high-functioning; we are upwardly mobile. Our jobs are good, our wives are pretty. Our apartments increase in price, square footage, and number of bedrooms every five to seven years. Promotions came at regular intervals until we plateaued as VPs or partners, managing directors or COOs. Very respectable. Our pretty wives appreciate the bacon we bring home. They pay someone to cook it and clean up after it, and our year-end bonuses justify these costs. 

We are such good dads. Girl Dads, Little League Coach Dads. Dads who do the driving. Pictures of our sticky-faced kids gaze out from handmade frames that dot the shelves in our offices. Underpaid daycare teachers help our toddlers affix glitter to Popsicle sticks and glue them into the shapes of snowflakes, and we let these dangle from our desk lamps. Our wives take photos of us with our children on our shoulders in the ocean, or holding our hands on ski slopes, or asleep on our chests on the couch. They post these pictures on Instagram. They get tremendous amounts of Likes. 

When the market was good, we bought country houses. We buy chickens, we chop wood. We chop wood and we stack cords of it in a satisfying criss-cross pattern, and we post this on Instagram. Hashtag UpstateLife. Hashtag LumberJacked. Chopping wood is harder than it looks. But we enjoy the heave, the grunting thud of the split. We like how sweat collects between our shoulder blades and makes damp, scythe-shaped imprints on our Filson shirts. Smelling ourselves in strong intakes of breath through our noses, the prickle of something animal and meaty winks through our Ocean Surge deodorant. We stand with our artisan axes balanced on the crests of our shoulders and we admire our work, the labor we could have paid someone else to do but didn’t. When we make a fire, the logs will celebrate us in a shatter of sparks. 

We treat our generalized anxiety disorders with Lexapro. With weed gummies. With pick-up basketball games at the Y. We only think about what it would be like to sleep with our therapists, we don’t actually do it. These therapists are in the same practice as the ones who treat our kids and our pretty wives, who prescribe the Ritalin for our sons’ ADHD. Insurance covers most of this. It’s a good thing we have those very respectable jobs. 

Buying our country houses was invigorating. The deals we got, the barns we’d refurbish—it made us feel so male. So capable. Hearty, and horny. We buy Carhartt boots and Barbour jackets, luxury trucks with roof-mounted storage for our kayaks. The dirt floor basements of our nineteenth century farmhouses make serviceable wine cellars, and we pour two glasses of good red to let breathe while our wives put the kids to bed on those Friday nights we drive up from the city. The air smells of cold and campfire. We turn the heat up high to ease off the week’s frost and let the kids sleep in socks. The dark quiet is ours, we own it. 

By ourselves, with no outside assistance, we construct treehouses for our children. We source blueprints from the internet and watch DIY tutorials on YouTube. A circular saw costs a few hundred dollars and makes the sound equivalent of breaking a tooth on a piece of ice. Sawdust catches in the backs of our throats with our breath, our eyes water and we spit in masculine wads onto our gravel driveways. It rains, so we buy large blue plastic tarps to protect our piles of sawed-off, pressure-treated wood planks and the power tools that our wives wish we’d just keep in the garage. They ask when we’ll be finished, tell us our tarps are a blight and say what’s next, a junker up on blocks in the front yard? This isn’t exactly fair, since we’re working as fast as we can, and it’s not like the kids are even helping us like they said they would. Besides, what are country houses for, if not interminably drawn-out projects that take up the bulk of Saturday afternoons and necessitate multiple runs to the hardware store for parts that often must be special-ordered, so fingers crossed we can finish up before winter because our wives will be damned if those blue tarps will still be out there, marring the pristine beauty of the season’s first snow?

Our wives plan date nights with couple-friends at neighborhood restaurants. It is not a question of whether we will be going out with couple-friends, only which couple-friends with whom we’ll go. The cheapest babysitters charge twenty-five dollars an hour. They wear oversized sweatshirts and wide-legged jeans, their cheeks bare and their lips glossed. Their hair hangs down long and shiny-straight, or is sometimes pulled tight into ponytails that brush the backs of their necks when they lean down to look at their phones. When we get home from dinner, they go out and start their nights. We used to split bottles of Etna Rosso with our wives, or order interesting IPAs. We largely drink tequila these days.  

Our kids’ soccer teams have started having away games on weekends, which makes it tricky getting to the country houses. We try to make it up there as often as we can, but sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Friday afternoon traffic used to be tedious, but now it inspires a metallic burn of gut-wringing rage. As the sun sets on the Saw Mill Parkway and a river of red taillights dribbles into oblivion, our thoughts drag to the fingers of scotch we could be pouring and the sibling squabbles we could be ignoring. We could be ensconced in our home offices instead of in our SUVs with Drive Wise Technology™ and optional third-row seating. The kids grip their blue rubber iPad cases like life preservers and begin arguing at a maddening volume the second their battery life expires. We promise ourselves we won’t yell, but we do yell, and it doesn’t help in the slightest. Our wives crane their heads toward the back seats and say “It’s OK, Daddy’s just stressed about the traffic, here’s the charger,” and we turn our music way, way up because everyone in the car has headphones on but us.  

At the country houses, rain water has collected in brown, fetid pools in the folds of our blue tarps. When we tip it out, even though we are careful, our wood planks get wet. The tree houses are half finished, maybe a little less. No roofs, no walls. The bones are there, at least.

There are things in our lives that, if not wrong, are not great. Not ideal. The sex we’re not having. The appreciation we’re not feeling. The criticism we’re not asking for, yet seem to be receiving in abundance. We don’t say anything about this, because what is there to say? On some level, we know these thoughts are unworthy, because we don’t even voice them to our therapists, with whom we’re still not sleeping though we wouldn’t mind if they fantasized about sleeping with us. 

We are not shallow. We think mature women are beautiful. We respect our wives’ rights to do – or not do – whatever they want to their faces; we aren’t suggesting a thing. It’s not their looks we remember wistfully, it’s the way they looked at us. The way they listened, and wanted to hear. About our very respectable jobs, our tree house blueprints. About the things we tell the therapists we’re not sleeping with. Don’t they want to know? They don’t, or they don’t appear to. Plans materialize on our shared calendars – the school auction, parent/teacher conferences, the third grade class holiday party – so we can’t claim we don’t know where we need to be. We are new to no one, and nothing is new to us. 

  We go on a Guys Trip to Miami. We eat everything we want, we drink an obscene amount of tequila. No one tells us we are embarrassing, or too loud. No one says those pants don’t match, or that we’re going to a nice restaurant so we should put on different shoes. The women on the beach are not our wives. They are as tan as butter browning in a cast iron skillet. They have impossible breasts that tease from behind tiny triangles of fabric or, sometimes, nothing at all. Their confidence is brash and their laughter buoyant, they are an alien species with long, daggered nails we imagine dragging down our backs. We play golf in the afternoon and drink into the night. The women from the beach dance around us, up to us, onto us. We buy them sweet cocktails with money from our very respectable jobs. They blink up at us, these exotic aliens, with lashes like sea anemones, holding us and only us in the beams they shoot from their eyes. They smell like sun oil and appletinis. Our wives had no qualms about us taking this trip. They think it’s healthy for us to connect with our friends. “Just don’t do anything we wouldn’t do,” they told us. How are we to know what they do, or don’t? 

After Miami, we begin working out. When we watched the women-who-weren’t-our-wives go home with men whose shoulders had definition, whose lower stomachs did not lunge aggressively over their belts, we felt a jolt of something like anger and a shimmer of something like shame. We don’t enjoy this feeling. Intellectually, we know it’s not our wives’ fault we feel this way. Or look this way. But now, when we do our deadlifts and goblet squats, we imagine their faces dissolving into abject lust. And desperation. And a little bit of fear. This imagined fear is something else we don’t mention in therapy. 

Like the grooves in our country houses’ hardwood floors, gauged by feet and furniture over a century-and-change, our bodies bear the imprints of our pasts. Scars from the surgery for our torn ACLs. Pale ovals on our backs where we had suspicious moles removed. Molars tamped with metal fillings, cockeyed broken toes that never healed. With our free weights in hand, the hammer curls and overhead presses are like primer painted over old wallpaper. Each clean-and-press is a dated bathroom floor tile being chiseled free. We’re not new construction, because we have character. We’re resurfacing. Renovating. And we look fucking good. 

The expressions on our wives’ faces don’t resemble the ones we pictured. They seem tired, a little bored. They don’t ask about our Leg Day regimens, they forget to order the protein powder we specifically told them we need. Our smaller belt sizes don’t give them cause for celebration, or increased impulses toward intimacy. We stream different TV shows in different rooms. We go to sleep two hours apart. 

The noises we make in the gym are guttural, graphic. Our breathing is heavy, we groan in release. There is a shared language in these spaces. All is understood, all is preemptively absolved. Bodies will be bodies, we say to each other, as we wipe down the machines with sheets of disinfectant, mop our sweaty faces with small rectangles of terrycloth. We could shower at home, but we like to do it here, emerging from the locker room like superheroes transformed. We are clean, now, our stink zipped into our backpacks and slung across our shoulders, kept close. 

In the early mornings up at the country house, before anyone wakes, we step out onto our porches and patios and front stairs. It is a carpeted kind of quiet, muted and sheathed. Like noblemen, we survey our lands. At this hour, we greet an entire society that will soon be overtaken by the glaring oppression of day. Shining dots of dew pearled on a perfect spider’s web, spread like breath across the boxwoods. The thin chitter of a tufted titmouse, whose chirps will soon be swallowed by the kids’ cries for water! and but you said we could have donuts! and where’s the charger? A trail of tiny black ants, like ice cream sprinkles, moving single file up the railing in a determined line. These are our peers, and though we never did before, we notice them now. 

In this same way, we now recognize a substrata of women to whose presence we have only just become attuned. The ones who send us appraising looks on the subway, or stand closer than necessary on elevators. Who maintain eye contact over the salad bar, and let out low, salted laughs when we make jokes on the sidelines of our daughters’ field hockey games. They have always been there, woven into nature’s fabric, only now we see them seeing us. And we deserve to be seen. 

When does something become someone’s fault? Can’t not-doing something carry as much culpability as doing it? There is a weight to unasked questions, a density to disinterest. We have to wade through it, push past it, hold our breaths as we descend into its depths. We are fighting something, the lack of action asking for reaction. Begging for it, in fact. We are good men, good providers, good fathers. We build things and we buy things, we are not clichés. We want to be wanted, that’s just a given. It’s a right, not a privilege. It shouldn’t have to be earned. 

Certain rules are eroding. It turns out that maintaining something necessitates maintenance, and our services are required elsewhere. The blue tarps are covered with lattices of leaves, then icy gray mounds of mush, finally molding and molting into smears of indeterminate biological matter. We are not questioned when we say we have to work late. Bedtime is easier, our wives reason, when we’re not around. The kids listen better, the schedule is more diligently adhered to. What time will you be home, they don’t ask us. Nor: where will you be, and with whom?  

The circuit training combats the drinking, but the drinking undermines the gym. We lean into psychedelics, micro doses that expand our gaze. Our apertures open to the wide, wide world: there is so much to see, and we are seeing it! How narrow our vision was— a pinhole camera, a flat lens. How interesting we are, now that we take in such expanses of color and texture and landscape and life. Ask us, we shout silently, want to know! Demand the unique impressions only we can offer, and if you don’t, it will be your loss! We cancel therapy. We guzzle green juice. We Like our old girlfriends’ posts about coming into town. Don’t wait up for us, we tell our wives. We will be working late. 

Time cascades, things are done, things that should matter deeply but could just as easily never matter at all. Trees falling in forests and all that. We don’t like ourselves, and we don’t hate ourselves. The dishwasher breaks, and we replace it. We pay our mortgage, our maintenance, income tax. We consistently tip the barista twenty percent at the coffee place, willing her to see so when she flips the screen back around. At dinner, our couple-friends share two entreés, no dessert. The babysitter can’t make it this Saturday, she has plans. 

We think about selling the country house. When we say this, our wives blanch. What are you talking about, they demand, we love it here. Where is this coming from? How can you be so cavalier? They invoke memories we’ve made, traditions they claim the kids cling to. They don’t believe we’re serious. You haven’t even finished the treehouse, they say. 

Things that once seemed like they would be hard, or impossible, are startlingly, stunningly easy. Goal posts are moved, and moved again. Oaths bend before they break, are contorted and twisted into such unnatural, incongruous positions that when at last they snap, it is a relief. Were we to go back to therapy, we’d debate the definition of betrayal. Of what, in practical purpose, constitutes a lie. Truth is a squirming serpent, a slippery fish. We don’t tell because our wives don’t ask. Their complacence is complicity, we’d argue, should we ever be called to defend. 

In the spring, crocuses we forgot we planted burst from the loamy earth. They emerge in broods, like lavender locusts, cleaving our lawns. We pulled a hamstring, so we can’t work out, and our wives insist we go to the country because we’re making them insane. While the kids watch YouTube, we pull the blue tarps off our unfinished tree houses. Their open roofs gape at the sky. They are parched throats angled up to the heavens, empty amphitheaters, ancient ruins from a vanished land. We pull on work gloves and kick the tarps down sloping yards. We brandish our chainsaws, pull triggers on electric drills. We have all the tools we need; we know, because we bought them. It will get dark. It will get colder. We’ll startle at the maniacal cackling yips of coyotes that could be very close, or far away. The foundation is strong, we have to assume, because we followed the instructions. The walls will go up, we’ll flog nails into forgiving oak planks until our palms are raw. The kids will complain the WiFi signal doesn’t reach; our wives will clap for us and tell us they’re honestly impressed. We will post the pictures, and the Likes will spike tiny flares of pleasure like thrusts or sugar or almost getting caught. We’re going to finish this thing, you’d better believe it, and we’re not coming inside until we do.