Love Me (5 page)

And then everyone was obliged to clap.

I thought: God, if I have to be a nobody in St. Paul, at least let me be smarter than Katherine.

The party was at the University Club, around the pool. A big band, waiters with traps of champagne, a sit-down dinner for fifty, fricasseed squab and lobster, very fancy. The big hot dog.

“I hear you had a story in
The New Yorker,
Larry,” she said to me, not admitting to having read the thing, just that she’d heard about it, but she trembled as she said it: to Minnesota writers, getting published in
The New Yorker
was like dating Natalie Wood. It definitely set you apart.

“Frank is working on another novel,” Iris said. “Good for him,” I said. “He has such a gift,” said Katherine. “There’s something almost mythic about it.”

One night I sat bolt upright, jolted awake. A premonition. The house was still. The light on the cathedral dome was not burning. Why? Why dark? A car door closed. Voices. A woman and a man. Iris slept, curled like a cat, snoring gently, her headphones beside her on the pillow, a tinny metallic voice talking about the death of God. I picked it up. The BBC World Service. A shortage of cod. Off Newfoundland. Speculation by codologists about sun spots, radio waves.

I went to the window. A cop car cruised by. Next door, Mr. Ziegler sat at his kitchen table, a glass of whiskey in his hairy fist. He was one of those men who should never ever go around without a shirt, and there he sat, doughy, big-breasted, weeping. According to Iris, who visited him from time to time, he had retired from Woolworth and now whiled away his hours clipping newspaper articles, marching in Civil War reenactments, and caring for his dog, Susie, crippled by a stroke. His wife had left him, for fairly obvious reasons. Hope lessness, for one. People were afoot in other houses on the block, moving around in kitchens, thinking their 3 A.M. thoughts. Do I smell gas? Is there really a Trinity or are there trillions of them? Is my marriage an empty shell, obvious to everyone but me? And am I on the verge of a nervous collapse and don’t know it? Could I suddenly go berserk later today and whack off my ear with a butcher knife? Is there someone just like me in Australia thinking the exact same thoughts, and if so, what time is it there?

All the 3 A.M. regrets, for the stupid things you said, for not calling up your mother, for not giving money to cerebral palsy.

And a clear thought that
something terrible is happening.

In the morning, the big orange school bus swung up the street past the blossoming crab apples and the mommies stood on the porches and waved good-bye to the kiddos. And then the phone rang. It was Frank Frisbie. Our friend Corinne had killed herself in Seneca Falls, New York. A cheerful, hardworking, witty, loyal woman, a college teacher, an inspiration to students, and yet late the night before she had paddled a canoe out onto Cayuga lake with her jacket pockets full of rocks and tipped the canoe and sank into the cold water, fists clenched, and vanished from this world, leaving behind a crazy and tearful diary of her last thoughts, so desperate and dark, so unlike the person we knew.

Frank could hardly get the words out, he was so distraught.

We knew her at the university, the star of our little gang of writers, the host of every party, the girl every boy wanted to make laugh, and now she was cold and dead on a marble slab, those fluttering fingers, that pearly smile, that girlish voice.

“I can’t believe she would do it,” said Frank.

 

 

 

The day of Corinne’s funeral, Iris decided we should have a baby. She announced this as we left the cemetery, having laid a good woman in the ground. It was the right thing to do, to restore our losses. Death and rebirth. We could name the child Corinne. Or not. Either way, it would be Corinne’s spirit among us.

“If we have a baby, I want to start going to church again,” she said.

So Iris and I went to work making love on days when her temperature chart indicated ovulation. She read the thermometer hourly and if she seemed to be eggy, she came home on her lunch hour for a Command Performance. Load, aim, and shoot. Every night she peed in a cup and dipped the blue paper tab to see if it turned pink. Months passed. No luck. We refused to contemplate parenthood for fear of jinxing it. No baby things, no books. Just week after week of indentured copulation passed and finally, after four months with no baby in the chute, she asked, “Are you sure you want to do this? Have a baby, I mean.”

“Of course,” I said.

What else could I say? Having a kid is up to the woman. Any dope knows that.

“We’re both so busy all the time,” she said. “I don’t have time to have a kid.”

That sentence hung in the air for a minute.

“But if I don‘t, I may regret it someday. You know?”

 

 

 

So we enrolled at Dr. Wuefer’s fertility clinic in Minneapolis.

Iris was planning two babies, Hilmer and Corinne. Sometimes Hilmer was named Charles, sometimes Frederick. Sometimes there was a farm in the scenario: a log cabin in the woods with a garden of corn and squash and tomatoes, a golden retriever named Fritz, a horse whinnying in the paddock on clear fall mornings, an enormous woodpile, stacked beside the dirt road.

We trotted off to the fertility clinic thinking life-affirming thoughts, and the nurse Brianna told us about the ovaries and sent us home with powerful drugs to stimulate egg production. Every day for a month, I jabbed a hypodermic in Iris’s haunch and shot her up with chemicals, and then came the fertilization part. We went to the clinic for Iris to be seeded. I sat in the waiting room with ten other men conversing about the weather, the Twins, as I thought: I hope my sperm is clearly labeled, I do not want to raise the child of this moron next to me poring over the sports page. A challenge to a man’s sense of dignity to sit next to a guy who knows that you—and you know that he—will soon be spilling his seed in a cold office with a copy of
Playboy
open to the “Women of the Big Ten” pictorial in the other hand, attempting to beget offspring.

Brianna was smart and quite stunning in her jeans and big cable-knit sweaters and running shoes and her voice was pure Minnesota, the elongated
o in So how are we doing today?
as she led me down the long hall to the jerk-off suite. She turned on a desk lamp and pulled the blinds and set the cup on the desk. “So you know what to do,” she said. “Wash your hands and leave your deposit in the plastic cup and bring it to me at the desk. And there are magazines in the lower shelf if you need them. Okay? See you in a minute.” And smiled and left, closing the door behind her with a click, and I unzipped my pants and removed my tiny member and glanced at the magazines with their generic plastic blondes, and I tried to focus on Iris, and then I imagined Brianna whispering, “Oh my gosh, Mr. Wyler. Are you sure we should be doing this? What if your wife should come in? Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God.” And then it was 1-2-3, go-team-go, and the Gopher winger sailed over the blue line, faked left and sent the goalie sprawling, and shot into the open net,
Goal! The crowd on its feet. Rah rah rah for Ski-u-mah. V-I-C-T-OR-Y,
and I zipped up and frowned at myself in the mirror and got the idiot glaze off my face and strolled up the hall and handed Brianna my deposit and she said, “Good,” and she took it into the next room to impregnate my wife. Driving home in the car we discussed whether she should go home and lie down or go to that meeting about the drop-in center for chemically dependent single moms, and of course she went to the meeting. People depended on her. “It’s no big deal,” she said. “If it happens, it happens.” And then her friend Sandy got pregnant and entered the twilight world of daily nausea, bone-aching exhaustion, raw emotions, and weird urges, most of them unmaternal. Sandy was a woman who shared the smallest details of her life with others. She just had a childlike faith that she was an interesting person. She told Iris about every episode of retching into the toilet, every thought of infanticide, every urge to eat raw oysters and inhale bus exhaust. For Iris, this took away some of the wonder of creating new life.

“I wish Sandy would tell more to Bob and less to me,” she said. “He’s the one who did it to her, after all.”

 

 

 

It was dumb for me to get involved with Brianna.

Oh my gosh. Tell me about it.

Take
that
to a therapist and put it in his pipe and let him smoke it. Having an affair with the nurse from the fertility clinic who squirted my sperm into my wife’s vagina.

I could say in my defense that I was doggedly pursuing a novel about political organizing among Norwegian farmers in the thirties that was hopeless tripe and this makes a man desperate. And jerking off in a doctor’s office was truly weird and a sane man craves honest passion. And Iris could go for a month or two without sex. She seemed content in the service of the Lord, rescuing elderly wackos and druggy moms. So there I was with my thoughts of Brianna inspiring my specimen collection, and one day I handed her the cup and she said, “Great job.”

Huh?

She said, “This is twice what you usually get. I’m impressed.” She grinned. “Whose picture were you looking at?”

So there was some provocation on her part.

I said, “I was thinking about you, dear.” Which was the literal truth.

“Oh, go on. Get out of here. You big liar.” And she blushed. And there was so much in that blush, and the way she headed toward the basting room and turned and looked back at me and shook her head.
Men.
I stood smiling like an idiot. “You’re a one-man sperm bank is what you are.” And then she held up my specimen cup to the light and inspected it and said, “And they’re strong swimmers, too. You’ve got enough for fifty ladies in here.” Don’t tell me that wasn’t provocative behavior on her part.

And it was pure blind fate that I ran into her at the U of M choir concert at Northrop. I’d told Brianna that I met Iris in choir and perhaps I had mentioned the concert to her, but to run into her there in a crowd of four thousand people—I’d gone alone, Iris was at a meeting—and they did the Fauré
Requiem
with the melting
Sanctus
and
Pie Jesu
and the
Agnus
Dei that tears your heart out, the rousing finish and afterward, standing alone, stunned, near tears in the lobby, the beautiful Brianna, dabbing at her eyes, looking as if her life had been changed forever. She said, “I don’t know where to go or what to do.”

“Come with me,” I said.

She said she had never felt this way before. She couldn’t explain it. She just needed to be with another human being right now. People were scurrying past us toward the parking ramp, and I said, “Be with me.”

“What does this mean?” she said.

“We’ll find out together.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Neither do I. So we won’t.”

And we walked to the Gopher Motel and there in room 206 we stripped off our clothes, with Fauré’s mighty requiem for the dead in our heads, and we made love like angels, slowly and with great enthusiasm and kindness, and then rested, shared a bag of corn chips, talked about life, her life, my life, life in general, and she said, “It’s inspiring being in the business of making people happy.” We did it again and kissed good-bye, and I went home, thinking, How could you? But I had. And it was pretty miraculous.