All This Life

It’s been two days since the incident on the bridge, and Jake and his father are both at Paul’s home, both glued to their respective computers. The boy in his room upstairs. The father at the kitchen table, drinking a beer; he scours the Internet, learning everything he can about fantasy football. Sports have never been something that interested him, not playing them in real life and certainly not playing pretend ones online. But the guys at work have a fantasy league and extended Paul an invitation to join. That was what made him want to do this: the invitation itself. An act of inclusion.

In ten minutes, at 7 pm, the league is set to have its draft, divvying up players on various rosters. Paul has a sip of his beer and frantically Googles things about fantasy football, about real football, anything to help him make sense of what he’s supposed to do once the draft kicks off. He has a nominal sense of the game, its rules and best-known players, what he’s gleaned from all the AM talk radio, but hopefully this crash course deepens his understanding. Hopefully, he can fool these guys at work into thinking he’s one of them.

Paul sighs at the thought, feels stupid about trying to impress his subordinates. He’s even being fraudulent with this, faking his way through fantasy football. Pathetic. Paul has another pull off the beer.

He doesn’t want to be a phony. Doesn’t want to be posing as something he’s not, but he doesn’t exactly have a full social schedule. He doesn’t want to scare these guys off because maybe it starts with fantasy football and soon there are drinks after work, happy hours, greasy appetizers. Maybe one of them has a girlfriend who has the perfect woman for Paul, and they all go out together.

He needs to have sex. Soon. It’s been over a year. He has to stop masturbating into his socks. Paul, ever a convenience freak, noticed that an argyle could make the cleanup easy, but from an emotional angle, there was nothing sadder than a grown man jerking off into a sock, day after day, and that’s not to mention the shame he felt catching his reflection off the computer’s screen, a sock on his softening penis.

So sure, this is only a fantasy football draft, but what if it’s the proverbial first step? What if this is the beginning of Paul being a little bit less alone?

Fantasy football is a subterfuge, a way for Paul to spend time with his new friends and simultaneously put off the rate at which they realize how boring he is. They work in the same office, but three out of four of them report to Paul, so it’s not like they include him or know him in any capacity other than that guy who sends too many emails and micro-manages, the miser who should order them catered lunches more often.

Or they haven’t included him until now. Now, he’s being initiated. Now, he can become one of the guys.

Paul sighs again, wants to believe this, and yet it sounds so far-fetched. It’s impossible to give himself the benefit of the doubt. Too much self-loathing: It takes every cell in his body to be average.

Paul slakes for a clean slate, no dependent, no ex. Don’t get him wrong, he loves his son, but ever since Jake entered their lives all those years ago the enjoyment got ground up, splintered — Paul too busy being a parent and a husband and an employee to focus any time on himself, his needs, his wants. Back then, he never made it to the bottom of a daily to-do list, which only made tomorrow’s longer and the next one stretch until he couldn’t even see the god-damn end of it, and weeks and months and years vanished until he looked up at that beleaguered, middle-aged stranger in the mirror and thought, Now who the hell are you?

Football, fantasy football, he knows this is dumb and yet it matters. It has to matter. It matters because of what it represents. Of what it can mean moving forward. It matters because it will give Paul something to do.

That’s what makes all this so tragic: Even Paul doesn’t buy his story, his yarn of a life wasted providing for his family. It sounds great, don’t get him wrong, but isn’t that giving him too much credit?

Of course, there was time.

Time for Paul to spend on himself.

Time for him to pursue these mysterious interests — mysterious because even he doesn’t know what they are.

Sure, the first couple years of being a parent are a fugue state, tunnel vision, a staggering lurch forward with blinkers blocking your periphery, but once Jake started school, there was time for Paul to dote on himself. Problem is, he didn’t know what to do with his free time. So he spent it working. He spent it puttering on their house. He spent it with Jake. He spent it with his ex, when she wasn’t yet his ex.

Naomi, what to say about her? For years, Paul considered them to be in a state of pre-divorce. No one left but neither of them was happy. Paul thought they’d slog on into retirement, take cruises and ignore each other, embrace every devastating cliché.