Green Earth

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. The contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.

Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to D.C. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on the road; and being the good guy that he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more. So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.

And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to get to him.

So now Charlie sat there in Gymboree, hanging with the moms and the nannies. A nice situation in theory, but in practice a diplomatic challenge of the highest order. No one wanted to be misunderstood. No one would regard it as a coincidence if he happened to end up talking to one of the more attractive women there, or to anyone in particular on a regular basis. That was fine with Charlie, but with Joe doing his thing, he could not completely control the situation. There was Joe now, doing it again—going after a black-haired little girl who had the perfect features of a model. Charlie was obliged to go over and make sure Joe didn’t mug her, as he had a wont to do with girls he liked, and yes, the little girl had an attractive mom, or in this case a nanny—a young blonde au pair from Germany to whom Charlie had spoken before. Charlie could feel the eyes of the other women on him. Not a single adult in that room believed in his innocence.

“Hi Asta.”

“Hello Charlie.”

He even began to doubt it himself. Asta was one of those lively European women of twenty or so who gave the impression of being a decade ahead of their American contemporaries in terms of adult experiences—not easy, given the way American teens were these days. Charlie felt a little surge of protest: It’s not me who goes after the babes, he wanted to shout, it’s my son! My son the hyperactive girl-chasing mugger! But of course he couldn’t do that, and now even Asta regarded him warily, perhaps because the first time they had chatted over their kids he had made some remark complimenting her on her child’s nice hair. He felt himself begin to blush again, remembering the look of amused surprise she had given him as she corrected him.

Sing-along saved him from the moment. It was designed to calm the kids down a bit before the session ended and they had to be lassoed back into their car seats for the ride home. Joe took Ally’s announcement as his cue to dive into the depths of the tube structure, where it was impossible to follow him or to coax him out. He would only emerge when Ally started “Ring Around the Rosie,” which he enjoyed. Round in circles they all went, Charlie avoiding anyone’s eye but Joe’s. Ally, who was from New Jersey, belted out the lead, and so all the kids and moms joined her loudly in the final chorus:

“Eshes, eshes, we all, fall, DOWN!”

And down they all fell.

Then it was off to the park.

Their park was a small one, located just west of Wisconsin Avenue a few blocks south of their home. A narrow grassy area held a sandpit and play structures. Tennis courts lined the south edge of the park. Out against Wisconsin stood a fire station, and to the west a field extended out to one of the many little creeks that still cut through the grid of streets.

Midday, the sandpit and the benches flanking it were almost always occupied by a few infants and toddlers, moms and nannies. Many more nannies than moms here, most of them West Indian, to judge by their appearance and voices. They sat on the benches together, resting in the steamy heat, talking. The kids wandered on their own, absorbed or bored.

Joe kept Charlie on his toes. Nick had been content to sit in one spot for long periods of time, and when playing he had been pathologically cautious; on a low wooden bouncy bridge his little fists had gone white on the chain railing. Joe however had quickly located the spot on the bridge that would launch him the highest—not at the middle, but about halfway down. He would stand right there and jump in time to the wooden oscillation until he was catching big air, his unhappy expression utterly different from Nick’s, in that it was caused by his dissatisfaction that he could not get higher. This was part of his general habit of using his body as an experimental object, including walking in front of kids on swings, etc. Countless times Charlie had been forced to jerk him out of dangerous situations, and they had become less frequent only because Joe didn’t like how loud Charlie yelled afterward. “Give me a break!” Charlie would shout. “What do you think, you’re made of steel?”

Now Joe was flying up and down on the bouncy bridge’s sweet spot. The sad little girl whose nanny talked on the phone for hours at a time wandered in slow circles around the merry-go-round. Charlie avoided meeting her eager eye, staring instead at the nanny and thinking it might be a good idea to stuff a note into the girl’s clothes. “Your daughter wanders the Earth bored and lonely at age two—SHAME!”

Whereas he was virtuous. That would have been the point of such a note, and so he never wrote it. He was virtuous, but bored. No that wasn’t really true. That was a disagreeable stereotype. He therefore tried to focus and play with his second-born. It was truly unfair how much less parental attention the second child got. With the first, although admittedly there was the huge Shock of Lost Adult Freedom to recover from, there was also the deep absorption of watching one’s own offspring—a living human being whose genes were a fifty-fifty mix of one’s own and one’s partner’s. It was frankly hard to believe that any such process could actually work, but there the kid was, out walking the world in the temporary guise of a kind of pet, a wordless little animal of surpassing fascination.

Whereas with the second one it was as they all said: just try to make sure they don’t eat out of the cat’s dish. Not always successful in Joe’s case. But not to worry. They would survive. They might even prosper. Meanwhile there was the newspaper to read.

But now here they were at the park, Joe and Dad, so might as well make the best of it. And it was true that Joe was more fun to play with than Nick had been. He would chase Charlie for hours, ask to be chased, wrestle, fight, go down the slide and up the steps again like a perpetuum mobile. All this in the middle of a D.C. May day, the air going for a triple-triple, the sun smashing down through the wet air and diffusing until its light exploded out of a huge patch of the zenith. Sweaty gasping play, yes, but never a moment of coaxing. Never a dull moment.

After another such runaround they sprawled on the grass to eat lunch. Both of them liked this part. Fruit juices, various baby foods carefully spooned out and inserted into Joe’s baby-bird mouth, applesauce likewise, a Cheerio or two that he could choke down by himself. He was still mostly a breast milk guy.

When they were done Joe struggled up to play again.

“Oh God Joe, can’t we rest a bit.”

“No!”

Ballasted by his meal, however, he staggered as if drunk. Naptime, as sudden as a blow to the head, would soon fell him.

Charlie’s phone beeped. He slipped in an earplug and let the cord dangle under his face, clicked it on. “Hello.”

“Hi Charlie, where are you?”

“Hey Roy. I’m at the park like always. What’s up?”

“Well, I’ve read your latest draft, and I was wondering if you could discuss some things in it now, because we need to get it over to Senator Winston’s office so they can see what’s coming.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Phil thinks we have to do it.”

“Okay, what do you want to discuss?”

There was a pause while Roy found a place in the draft. “Here we go. Quote, ‘The Congress, being deeply concerned that the lack of speed in America’s conversion from a carbon to a clean fuel economy is rapidly leading to chaotic climate changes with a profoundly negative impact on the U.S. economy,’ unquote, we’ve been told that Ellington is only concerned, not deeply concerned. Should we change that?”

“No, we’re deeply concerned. He is too, he just doesn’t know it.”

“Okay, then down in the third paragraph in the operative clauses, quote, ‘The United States will peg carbon fuel reductions in a two-to-one ratio to such reductions by China and India, and will provide matching funds for all tidal and wind power plants built in those countries and in all countries that fall under a five in the UN’s prospering countries index, these plants to be operated by a joint powers agency that will include the United States as a permanent member; four, these provisions will combine with the climate-neutral power production—’”

“Wait, call that power generation.”

“Power generation, okay, ‘such that any savings in environmental mitigation in participating countries as determined by IPCC ratings will be credited equally to the U.S. rating, and not less than fifty billion dollars per year in savings is to be marked specifically for the construction of more such climate-neutral power plants; and not less than fifty billion dollars per year in savings is to be marked specifically for the construction of so-called “carbon sinks,” meaning any environmental engineering project designed to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide safely, in forests, peat beds, oceans, or other locations—’”

“Yeah hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph.”

“You think?”

“Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years’ worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. From living their whole lives on Venus.”

“Or should we say Washington, D.C.”

“Please.”

“Okay, those are flip-flopped then. So that’s that paragraph, now, hmm, that’s it for text. I guess the next question is, what can we offer Winston and his gang to get them to accept this version.”

“Get Winston’s people to give you their list of riders, and then pick the two least offensive ones and tell them they’re the most we could get Phil to accept, but only if they accept our changes first.”

“But will they go for that?”

“No, but—wait—Joe?”

Charlie didn’t see Joe anywhere. He ducked to be able to see under the climbing structure to the other side. No Joe.

“Hey Roy let me call you back okay? I gotta find Joe he’s wandered off.”

“Okay, give me a buzz.”

Charlie clicked off and yanked the earplug out of his ear, jammed it in his pocket.

“JOE!”

He looked around at the West Indian nannies—none of them were watching, none of them would meet his eye. No help there. He jogged south to be able to see farther around the back of the fire station. Aha! There was Joe, trundling full speed for Wisconsin Avenue.

“JOE! STOP!”

That was as loud as Charlie could shout. He saw that Joe had indeed heard him, and had redoubled the speed of his diaper-waddle toward the busy street.

Charlie took off in a sprint after him. “JOE!” he shouted as he pelted over the grass. “STOP! JOE! STOP RIGHT THERE!” He didn’t believe that Joe would stop, but possibly he would try to go even faster, and fall.

No such luck. Joe was in stride now, running like a duck trying to escape something without taking flight. He was on the sidewalk next to the fire station, and had a clear shot at Wisconsin, where trucks and cars zipped by as always.

Charlie closed in, cleared the fire station, saw big trucks bearing down; if Joe catapulted off the curb he would be right under their wheels. By the time Charlie caught up to him he was so close to the edge that Charlie had to grab him by the back of his shirt and lift him off his feet, whirling him around in a broad circle through the air, back onto Charlie as they both fell in a heap on the sidewalk.

“Ow!” Joe howled.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” Charlie shouted in his face. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!”

Joe, amazed, stopped howling for a moment. He stared at his father, face crimson. Then he recommenced howling.

Charlie shifted into a cross-legged position, hefted the crying boy into his lap. He was shaking, his heart was pounding; he could feel it tripping away madly in his hands and chest. In an old reflex he put his thumb to the other wrist and watched the seconds pass on his watch for fifteen seconds. Multiply by four. Impossible. One hundred and eighty beats a minute. Surely that was impossible. Sweat was pouring out of all his skin at once. He was gasping.

The parade of trucks and cars continued to roar by, inches away. Wisconsin Avenue was a major truck route from the Beltway into the city. Most of the trucks entirely filled the right lane, from curb to lane line, and most were moving at about forty miles an hour.

“Why do you do that,” Charlie whispered into his boy’s hair. Suddenly he was filled with fear, and some kind of dread or despair. “It’s just crazy.”

“Ow,” Joe said.

Big shuddering sighs racked them both.

Charlie’s phone rang. He clicked it on and held an earplug to his ear.

“Hi love.”

“Oh hi hon!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh nothing, nothing. I’ve just been chasing Joe around. We’re at the park.”

“Wow, you must be cooking. Isn’t it the hottest part of the day?”

“Yeah it is, almost, but we’ve been having fun so we stayed. We’re about to head back now.”

“Okay, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to check if we had any plans for next weekend.”

“None that I know of.”

“Okay, good. Because I had an interesting thing happen this morning, I met a bunch of people downstairs, new to the building. They’re like Tibetans, I think, only they live on an island. They’ve taken the office space downstairs that the travel agency used to have.”

“That’s nice dear.”

“Yes. I’m going to have lunch with them, and if it seems like a good idea I might ask them over for dinner sometime, if you don’t mind.”

“No, that’s fine snooks. Whatever you like. It sounds interesting.”

“Great, okay. I’m going to go meet them soon, I’ll tell you about it.”

“Okay good.”

“Okay bye dove.”

“Bye love, talk to you.”

Charlie clicked off.

After ten giant breaths he stood, lifting Joe in his arms. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s neck. Shakily Charlie retraced their course. It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards. Rivulets of sweat ran down his ribs, and off his forehead into his eyes. He wiped them against Joe’s shirt. Joe was sweaty too. When he reached their stuff Charlie swung Joe around, down into his backpack. For once Joe did not resist. “Sowy Daddy,” he said, and fell asleep as Charlie swung him onto his back.

Charlie took off walking. Joe’s head rested against his neck, a sensation that had always pleased him before. Sometimes Joe would even suckle the tendon there. Now it was like the touch of some meaning so great that Charlie couldn’t bear it, a huge cloudy aura of danger and love. He started to cry, wiped his eyes, shook it off as if shaking away a nightmare. Hostages to fortune, he thought. You get married, have kids, you give up such hostages to fortune. No avoiding it, no help for it. It’s just the price you pay for such love. His son was a complete maniac, and it only made him love him more.

He walked hard for most of an hour, through all the neighborhoods he had come to know so well in his years of lonely Mr. Momhood. The vestiges of an older way of life lay under the trees like a network of ley lines: rail beds, canal systems, Indian trails, even deer trails, all could still be discerned. Charlie walked them sightlessly. The ductile world drooped around him in the heat. Sweat lubricated his every move.

Slowly he regained his sense of normalcy. Just an ordinary day with Joe and Da.

The residential streets of Bethesda and Chevy Chase were in many ways quite beautiful. It had mostly to do with the immense trees, and the grass underfoot. Green everywhere. On a weekday afternoon like this there was almost no one to be seen. The slight hilliness was just right for walking. Tall old hardwoods gave some relief from the heat; above them the sky was an incandescent white. The trees were undoubtedly second or even third growth, there couldn’t be many old-growth hardwoods anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still they were old trees, and tall. Charlie had never shifted out of his California consciousness, in which open landscapes were the norm and the desire, so that on the one hand he found the omnipresent forest claustrophobic—he pined for a pineless view—while on the other hand it remained always exotic and compelling, even slightly ominous or spooky. The dapple of leaves at every level, from the ground to the highest canopy, was a perpetual revelation to him; nothing in his home ground or his bookish sense of forests had prepared him for this vast and delicate venation of the air. On the other hand he longed for a view of distant mountains as if for oxygen itself. On this day especially he felt stifled and gasping.

His phone beeped again, and he pulled the earplugs out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears, clicked the set on.

“Hello.”

“Hey Charlie I don’t want to bug you, but are you and Joe okay?”

“Oh yeah, thanks Roy. Thanks for checking back in, I forgot to call you.”

“So you found him.”

“Yeah I found him, but I had to stop him running into traffic, and he was upset and I forgot to call back.”

“Hey that’s okay. It’s just that I was wondering, you know, if you could finish off this draft with me.”

“I guess.” Charlie sighed. “To tell the truth, Roy boy, I’m not so sure how well this work-at-home thing is going for me these days.”

“Oh you’re doing fine. You’re Phil’s gold standard. But look, if now isn’t a good time …”

“No no, Joe’s asleep on my back. It’s fine. I’m still just kind of freaked out.”

“Sure, I can imagine. Listen we can do it later, although I must say we do need to get this thing staffed out soon or else Phil might get caught short. Dr. Strangelove”—this was their name for the President’s science advisor—“has been asking to see our draft too.”

“I know, okay talk to me. I can tell you what I think anyway.”

So for a while as he walked he listened to Roy read sentences from his draft, and then discussed with him the whys and wherefores, and possible revisions. Roy had been Phil’s chief of staff ever since Wade Norton hit the road and became an advisor in absentia, and after years of staffing for the House Resources committee (called the Environment committee until the Gingrich Congress renamed it), he was deeply knowledgeable, and sharp too; one of Charlie’s favorite people. And Charlie himself was so steeped in the climate bill he could see it in his head, indeed it helped him now just to hear it, without the print before him to distract him. As if someone were telling him a bedtime story.

Eventually, however, some question of Roy’s couldn’t be resolved without the text before him. “Sorry. I’ll call you back when I get home.”

“Okay but don’t forget, we need to get this finished.”

“I won’t.”

They clicked off.

His walk home took him south, down the west edge of the Bethesda Metro district, an urban neighborhood of restaurants and apartment blocks, all ringing the hole in the ground out of which people and money fountained so prodigiously, changing everything: streets rerouted, neighborhoods redeveloped, a whole clutch of skyscrapers bursting up through the canopy and establishing another urban zone in the endless hardwood forest.

He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area’s several used bookstores. It was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in that sense.

Finally he gave up trying to pretend he felt normal, and walked past the auto dealer and home. There it was a tough call whether to take the baby backpack off and hope not to wake Joe prematurely, or just to keep him on his back and work from the bench he had put by his desk for this very purpose. The discomfort of Joe’s weight was more than compensated for by the quiet, and so as usual he kept Joe snoozing on his back.

When he had his material open, and had read up on tidal power generation cost/benefit figures from the UN study on same, he called Roy back, and they got the job finished. The revised draft was ready for Phil to review, and in a pinch could be shown to Senator Winston or Dr. Strangelove.

“Thanks Charlie. That looks good.”

“I like it too. It’ll be interesting to see what Phil says about it. I wonder if we’re hanging him too far out there.”

“I think he’ll be okay, but I wonder what Winston’s staff will say.”

“They’ll have a cow.”

“It’s true. They’re worse than Winston himself. A bunch of Sir Humphreys if I ever saw one.”

“I don’t know, I think they’re just fundamentalist know-nothings.”

“True, but we’ll show them.”

“I hope.”

“Charles my man, you’re sounding tired. I suppose the Joe is about to wake up.”

“Yeah.”

“Unrelenting eh?”

“Yeah.”

“But you are the man, you are the greatest Mr. Mom inside the Beltway!”

Charlie laughed. “And all that competition.”

Roy laughed too, pleased to be able to cheer Charlie up. “Well it’s an accomplishment anyway.”

“That’s nice of you to say. Most people don’t notice. It’s just something weird that I do.”

“Well that’s true too. But people don’t know what it entails.”

“No they don’t. The only ones who know are real moms, but they don’t think I count.”

“You’d think they’d be the ones who would.”

“Well, in a way they’re right. There’s no reason me doing it should be anything special. It may just be me wanting some strokes. It’s turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. A real psychic shock.”

“Because …”

“Well, I was thirty-eight when Nick arrived, and I had been doing exactly what I wanted ever since I was eighteen. Twenty years of white male American freedom, just like what you have, young man, and then Nick arrived and suddenly I was at the command of a speechless mad tyrant. I mean, think about it. Tonight you can go wherever you want to, go out and have some fun, right?”