(Not That You Asked) (33 page)

“Bullshit,” I said.

“It’s true. Gramps tried to set her up on a blind date with your uncle Peter.”

My cousin Karla said, “Wasn’t she also supposed be my babysitter or something?”

“That’s true,” said Aunt Susyn. “Grandma asked her if she would look after you when you were a baby.”

“It was very inappropriate,” my mother added. “She was a young academic, not a babysitter.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “She actually dated you, Pete?”

He did not look pleased to have been reminded. “We had lunch.”

“So it’s true! I almost had an Aunt Condi!”

“It was one lunch,” Pete snapped. “At the faculty club. Gabriel brokered the whole thing.”

“No chemistry?” I said.

Pete shook his head. “She was dating an NFL player or something. I wasn’t exactly her type.”

Canto XXIX

I have only one more story to tell.

It does not take place in hell, though it does take place in Salem, Massachusetts, where, at this country’s dawn, the Hateocracy enjoyed a brief and famous outburst. I had come to Salem to read in a small bookstore.

This was a few months after my resignation. I had slipped back into my normal life of private triumphs and miseries. My descent was coming to seem more and more like some strange fever dream.

After the reading, a young man named Tyler came to get his book signed. He told me he thought maybe he wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know exactly. But he felt certain things when he read books and he wanted
that,
to be able to feel those things, and maybe to make other people feel them, too.

I looked at this kid and I knew right away that he was one of those who, had I still been teaching, would have crushed my heart with hope. Other people were waiting behind him, so I signed his book and handed it back to him.

“Thanks, man.” He paused for a second and looked down at his shoes. Hair fell into his eyes. “I was supposed to be in your class next year,” he mumbled finally.

Canto XXX

I’m sorry, Tyler.

I’m sorry about the whole damn shooting match.

YOU’RE
WHAT
?

THE BEWILDERING JOYS OF THE HALF-PLANNED PREGNANCY

O
n an unseasonably warm Boston evening last January, I attended my weekly poker game, made what I often characterize as “a short-term charitable donation” to my opponents, and headed out to the car.

I had left my cell phone on the front seat and was surprised to find two messages from my fiancée, Erin, who was out in Southern California finishing up her MFA program. The first message said this: “Hey hon, it’s me. It’s nothing bad, but can you give me a call as soon as you get this message? Like, tonight. I’ll be up.” The second message said the same thing, at a slightly higher frequency.

Erin is a calm person. She is not prone to panicky phone calls, nor, somewhat regrettably, to drunk dialing. I figured maybe she had gotten a short story accepted in a magazine, or perhaps run into someone who hates me.

I looked forward to talking with her, as it would afford me the opportunity to complain about my brilliant play at the poker table, which had, for the 153rd straight week, been undermined by outrageous fortune. You know the deal.

I dialed.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me. What’s up?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

She started laughing a little.

“Pregnant,” she said.

I WILL NOW ATTEMPT
to represent my shock. Let each blank line represent 160 volts applied to some tender region of my body, such as the armpit:

“Isn’t that crazy?” Erin said.

“Honey?”

TO CLARIFY THE SITUATION,
I had just returned from a visit to Erin. On the morning she drove me to the airport, she had an upset stomach and “spotting,” which she took as a sign her period had arrived. I had not given any thought to pregnancy, mine or hers.

I was more preoccupied by the idea of being—after years of fairly disreputable male behavior—engaged. I should mention that, at the time of her phone call, we’d been engaged for a grand total of four days. I should also mention that we’d just spent the winter break together and that, yes, we’d had unprotected sex a few times.

Then again, Erin was over thirty. I was pushing forty and had smoked the equivalent of a large marijuana tree over the previous decade. Neither of us had ever been, to the best of our knowledge, involved in a conception scenario. We were both pretty sure we were going to have the opposite problem. That’s why Erin had been checking fertility websites all week. In fact, she had gone to the pharmacy intending to purchase an ovulation kit. She had picked up the pregnancy test on a lark.

I DON’T MEAN
to imply that I was anything less than tickled to hear her news. I was tickled to a deep, delighted red. I was especially thrilled to have knocked up Erin
before
we got married, because it seemed like such a bohemian arrangement. I was a writer. It was my
job
to scandalize polite society. I loved the idea of being, even briefly, a baby daddy.

Erin was delighted, too. The ensuing conversation was characterized by much giggling. We were so pleased, in fact, that we sort of forgot our original plan, which had been to hold off on the pregnancy until we were married and living on the same coast, presumably in the same house. Erin had also wanted a couple of years to work on her writing.

Instead, we had undergone a
radical paradigm shift.
In the space of a single conversation, we morphed from your-typical-self-absorbed-young-couple-eating-at-swank-restaurants-drinking-too-much-wine-and-fucking-to-the-best-of-our-abilities to parents-in-waiting.

The main thing that had to happen is that we had to make a bunch of decisions, pronto. That was fine with me. I’d spent long enough mucking about in that postadolescent haze known as the Indecisive Thirties. I had spent enough hours pondering paper or plastic, which facial cleanser to purchase, whether to splurge on dessert.

Marriage was the first thing. We had to get married. We had to get married because we didn’t want our child to be a bastard (I am already a bastard) and because we needed family health insurance. Erin had insurance, but it would last only until she graduated. In true starving artist fashion, I did not have health insurance at all. There was also the matter of making sure we were in the same room during the ceremony, which, as I understood things, was standard operating procedure.

I now hatched a plan I felt was ingenious—this should have been the first red flag—we would elope! Yes, we would elope over Spring Break, during one of those beach parties where coeds pantomime performing oral sex on stage!

Or perhaps, more manageably, Erin would fly out to visit me in Somerville and we would get hitched at City Hall.

THERE WERE OTHER
advantages to this plan, only one of which was that it would save me several thousand dollars, which I had no intention of handing over to the retail racketeering firm known collectively as the Wedding Industry.

Of even greater importance was keeping our relatives far, far away. One of the advantages of being, uh, the technical term is
old,
is that you have been witness to enough weddings to recognize that they are driven by familial guilt. You tell yourself at the outset that it will be a small ceremony, and before you know it you’re pricing circus tents and crab cakes by the gross.

I was able to convince Erin to go along with this plan. In fact, I was able to convince her that we should keep both the elopement
and
the baby a secret. My reasoning ran something like this:

• There was a significant risk the pregnancy would not come to term.

• We could break the good news to our friends and family together.

• I was totally freaked out.

I’m not sure I was completely forthright about the last factor.

THE FIRST SIGN
that Erin’s pregnancy was not going to be easy had already occurred: She had puked.

In those early, heady days, we were almost pleased: This was morning sickness! It meant the hormones were kicking in, that she really and truly was knocked up. We joked! I took to calling her Pukey Pukestein. I suggested she start a band called Pukey Pukestein and the Puke Stains. Ha ha ha!

Over the next month, her morning sickness began a steady green creep across the hours. One evening Erin called me simply to moan into the phone. On another occasion, I would have greeted this turn of events as an erotic invitation. But this moaning was different: anguished, exhausted, not really all that sexy. “Awuahuhhawawuhhh,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

IT DIDN’T REALLY SINK
in until I saw her a month later, in Santa Fe.

I’d heard all these stories about how horny women get during pregnancy, so I naturally assumed this first rendezvous would be an even randier version of our usual visits, which were enthusiastically carnal in nature. Erin arrived at our very romantic bed-and-breakfast just before midnight. She looked terrifically sexy, her belly already swelling a little.

We hugged. I nestled into her.

“Baby baby baby,” I said.

“Where’s the bathroom?” she said.

“Are you okay?”

Erin smiled queerly and slipped into the bathroom.

“What’s the matter?” I said, through the door. “You want me to come in?”

“No,” she murmured.

I stood, listening to my future wife throw up. A late-night quickie seemed pretty much out of the question.

Erin emerged twenty minutes later, flushed and apologetic.

“Why are you sorry?” I said. “Don’t be sorry.”

“That was disgusting. Could you hear me?”

“I couldn’t hear you.”

“Yes, you could!”

I tried to cheer her up with a naked rendition of Pukey Pukestein’s first and final hit single, “Save the Last Chunk for Me.” This did not work.

Erin had made reservations for us the next day at this Japanese bathhouse place, where, I assumed, we would fuck in a totally hot Buddhist-porno manner. We certainly tried. We tried to fuck in a totally hot Buddhist-porno manner. But Erin still felt sick and we couldn’t find a decent surface. So we settled for some light frottage and green tea instead. And it occurred to me later that evening, as I pressed my unrequited boner into Erin’s slumbering hip region, that her body was no longer exclusively available for my pleasure. It was now engaged in the vigorously disruptive process of gestation.

THIS WAS COOL.
I could deal with this. It was part of the broader paradigm shift. I needed to recognize that and not be one of those sexually demanding baby daddies constantly banging on the cervix door with the tip of my insatiable johnson.

Because the nausea was really just the beginning, a warning shot over the biological bow. I knew this because of my advanced age. I had lots of married dude friends. I had heard the stories about the long, anguished sex sabbaticals that awaited me. But now here’s the weird thing, the thing I’m not even sure is a good thing: My own sex drive had been dampened by news of the pregnancy.

It’s not that Erin was any less attractive. Pregnancy suited her, accentuated her shape, brought a pale glow to her cheeks. No, it was the idea that her body had more essential business to conduct than the dirty things I had in mind. She was growing an entire person inside her. All those years of hoping and groping and sweet-talking, and what was
I
after, actually? An ecstatic twinge. A bioemission. It felt kind of paltry.