Chapter 3: The Office

Amanda leaves at nine. You watch her walk down the brownstone steps and turn toward the subway. She looks back once. You wave from the window with Claire in your arms.

The door closes and you are alone with your daughter for the first time.

The apartment is quiet. Claire is awake but not crying. This is a temporary condition. You know this the way you know the F train will be delayed. It is simply a matter of time.

You put her in the swing. You turn on the music. Something classical that the internet promised would stimulate infant brain development. Claire watches the mobile spin above her head. She seems unconvinced about the whole arrangement.

Your laptop is on the kitchen table. You are supposed to be working on an article about the decline of independent bookstores. The deadline was last Tuesday. Your editor sent a gentle email yesterday asking if everything was okay.

You open the laptop. You read the first paragraph you wrote three weeks ago when you still believed you would be able to work and parent simultaneously. The paragraph is about a bookstore in the West Village that closed in 2008. You remember visiting it once with a woman whose name you have forgotten. You bought her a first edition of Gatsby because you thought that was the kind of thing people did.

Claire starts crying.

You close the laptop.

The next six hours have a structure that you do not control. Feed, burp, change, hold, walk, swing, bounce, feed again. The pattern repeats. Time collapses into increments measured by ounces of formula and the color of what comes out the other end.

You call your mother at two. She is in Connecticut in the house where you grew up. She answers on the third ring.

How is fatherhood, she asks.

You want to tell her that it is nothing like you imagined. That you thought you would feel capable and instead you feel like someone wearing a disguise that does not quite fit.

Good, you say. Tiring.

Your father was terrible at it, she says. The first few months. He kept trying to schedule meetings with you like you were a client.

You laugh. You had forgotten this was possible.

It gets better, your mother says.

When, you ask.

She pauses. You can hear the TV in the background. She is watching the news. She is always watching the news.

I'll let you know, she says.

After you hang up you realize Claire has been quiet for seven minutes. You check the swing. She is asleep with her fists curled against her chest. Her face is peaceful in a way that makes your throat tight.

You pick up the laptop again. You read the paragraph about the bookstore. You delete it and start over.

The decline of independent bookstores has been written about extensively. This is not that story. This is about a different kind of closing. The small territories you abandon when you become responsible for someone else.

You write six more sentences before Claire wakes up screaming. You do not save the document.

At four Amanda texts. How is it going.

Fine, you write back. We are alive.

That's the standard, she writes. Anything else is extra credit.

At six she comes home. You meet her at the door with Claire who is crying and with your shirt covered in spit-up and with an expression that you suspect reveals too much.

Oh honey, Amanda says. Not to you. To Claire.

She takes the baby and the crying stops immediately. You stand in the hallway of your own apartment feeling redundant.

How was the office, you ask.

Strange, Amanda says. Like visiting a place I used to live.

She walks into the bedroom and you hear her start the feeding routine. You go to the kitchen and open the laptop. The unsaved document is gone. You stare at the blank screen.

Outside the window the sun is setting over the brownstones. You used to think this was the best time of day. The moment when anything could happen. When the night spread out before you full of possibility.

Now you know the night holds only three-hour increments of broken sleep and the four AM feed and the question of whether you are doing any of this right.

Claire cries from the bedroom. You close the laptop and go to help even though you know Amanda does not need you.

That is not the same as not being wanted.