The Paternity Test (25 page)

And so we then . . .

And so . . .

Could that be all there was?

Shouldn’t we be able to know when Stu’s cells met hers? When would life spark? Now, already? Or
now
?

“Pat,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“No, thank
you
. It’s just so amazing, you know? Amazing it’s so simple. Except it’s not. I know it’s not. But—”

“Stop.” She took my wrist. “Relax, Pat, okay? You did good.”

“Really?” I said. My fingers thrummed, authoritative, strong. I looked into the jumble of her eyes, their green-brown dare.

“Yes. You were good.” She gripped me tighter. “Very.”

I looked again, and Debora’s eyes were greener now, more true, as if the flecks were magnetized, aligned.

Did my hand start? Did hers? (She still controlled my wrist.) Either way, the outcome was the same: hands together hovering on her Ouija board of skin, tracing up her goose-bumped thigh till—

There
.

If she had flinched at all—the slightest hint of hesitancy—I would have stopped.

But she didn’t. I didn’t.

My thumb crossed the line from her outer self to inner, taking in the difference, the custardy damp give: the same stuff on either side (skin!) but so changed, as a loaf ’s doughy center is from crust.

Out again, my thumb rubbing smaller and smaller circles. She pushed it back in. We said nothing.

We had an easy excuse:
Only to help the odds
...

But whom would we be trying to convince?

This time I was seeing her—all of her, unabashed. Her softness, her raw pink skin, her faded razor burn. She squeezed from somewhere far inside and made my thumb feel small. I hadn’t been with a woman since my college days: Becky. Debora, I saw, possessed her same disarming pushy bluntness. How had I resisted that connection?

With a woman
. A euphemism, an empty shuck of speech. And yet, as I moved my hand—as I let Debora move it—
with her
was exactly how I felt. I huffed with her, sweating, vicariously hard, spellbound by her deep ferocious clenching. Her hips arched; her fingers pressed on mine to do their work. She shut her eyes—
pressing
—and arched—
pressing, pressing
—and shuddered like a sleeping dog that’s hunted down its dreams.

There had been no awkwardness, but now Debora frowned at me— the startled frown you’d give a Peeping Tom who caught you naked: exasperation interlocked with shame. I just hovered, heedful, hoping she would speak, waiting for something. Approval? Rebuke?

Eventually she did speak, but not of what we’d done. “Now I’ll lie and wait,” she said, “and listen to some music.”

Back to friendly business, the black hole of politeness, and so I followed her lead, and asked her what she needed: An extra pillow? Some water? The remote?

No, she was fine, she said. Everything was just fine. (Wasn’t that what I had said before?)

“Really?” I asked. “Nothing?”

“Nothing, no. I’m tired.” She did look tired. Depleted of her poise.

“Okay, then I’ll . . .”

What? What came after
this
?

“. . . I’ll go now,” was all I could come up with.

They say that what you see depends on where you stand, and Stu and I were bolted to the viewpoints we’d grown used to.

He was profligate, out of control, the breaker of our trust; self-destructive and
us
-destructive; the problem.

I was restrained, long-suffering, the martyr to our cause; self-aware and selfless; the solution.

I couldn’t necessarily have defended those assessments, but they were now essential to the system we’d created, the way we both made sense of our dynamic. Once the rules were set in place, we had to play accordingly: the batter couldn’t start to pitch at the pitcher. And so the same behavior that from Stu we’d score as “bad,” from myself I might account as “good.”

That was what happened, more or less, when he came home that night.

All day I had paced the house, edgy and uncertain, tasting the sweet-tart flavor of transgression. Guilty, yes, but invigorated. Tipsy with
Why not?
It seemed I had access to the thinking of a creature who’d stepped to a cliff ’s edge of change; I was curious to see what move this creature—I—would make.

Debora had said I wouldn’t tell, and I had thought her right. Still, I’d have to say something—a snippet of the truth—when Stu asked for details from the morning. Maybe I would simply say his plan had worked (true). Or tell him I had thought about him (also very true: my memory of his stacking of the plates).

But what did he ask, when he came home? Nothing. Not a thing.

I was half-asleep in front of CNN, on the couch, and Stu flopped down next to me, sending pillows flying.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Watching something good?”

I shrugged. “Is the news ever good?”

“I know, right?” His skin had a sharp, chemical smell, from hours in a plane’s reprocessed air. “So maybe I shouldn’t . . . forget it, no. Maybe I’ll tell you later?”

What could it be? Another concession at work, to fly more routes? Or Rina and Richard, another looming roadblock?

“It’s just,” he said, “I figured I would get it off my chest. I don’t want to have to dwell about it.”

I couldn’t tell if he was really remorseful or sort of gloating. “Okay, now you’ve
got
to,” I said. “What?”

“Well, the weirdest thing,” he said. “In the crew lounge, in Atlanta. Usually it’s, you know, some sandwiches, stale coffee. Otherwise you’re on your own, good luck. But here comes this guy, in a double-breasted suit, like a boy all dolled up for
The Nutcracker
. Has to be a dancer. You know that walk they have?”

“Walk?” I said.

“You know, like their ass is a nose, sniffing? So anyway, this guy goes, ‘Hello, Captain . . . ,’ and leans in close, closer than he needs to read my nametag. ‘Captain
Nadler
. Can I offer you a soda? Or something sweet?’ I ask him what he is, a concierge or something? ‘Sure, concierge,’ he says, ‘if that’s what you want to call me. My name is Kip. I’m here for
all
your needs.’ And then—”

But Stu stopped. He must have read the anguish on my face.

“Nothing like this has happened in . . . I promise you, it’s been ages,” he said. “And all we did was kiss. He wanted more, but I stopped him. I thought you’d want to hear that. To hear that I, you know, could resist.”

No, I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want to think about him doing, or resisting doing, anything with a stranger—even the barest details made me queasy. But that wasn’t the main source of my torment. The problem that had hit me as he launched into his story was how badly I was yearning to share
mine
, of me and Debora. To tell Stu, the last man I should tell.

On CNN, a correspondent leaned into a gale; she joggled her earpiece, trying to hear the anchor. My hand, in an aping reflex, drifted to my ear. The skin was dry and cool, distant-feeling. I thought of Debora’s skin, the line my thumb had crossed. How could I explain that change to Stu?

“You want to know the rest?” he said, nestling up against me.

“Stu, come on,” I said. “I mean, aren’t you even going to
ask
?”

“Ask?” he said, clueless.

“Today,” I said. “With Debora? Don’t you even care how it all went?”

What was I doing, taunting him? Challenging him to catch me? What would I now say when he
did
ask?

But no: Stu was the cheater, and I was the repairer. Neither of us would question that alignment.

“Sorry! Oh, God—sorry,” he said. “I just . . . I wasn’t thinking. Tell me, okay? I want to hear it all.”

How readily he played the bad guy; how easily I got off.

What a relief.

What a peculiar letdown.

I felt I’d broken someone’s faith, but wasn’t certain whose. Stu’s, I guessed, although I could have argued he deserved it; Debora’s, too, although she’d been as eager as I, or more. Maybe the faith I’d broken the most was mine. Wasn’t I the one who’d said (against our gay men’s dogma) that “casual sex” was necessarily a contradiction in terms? But here I’d gone and let myself get sexual with Debora—without so much as pausing to feel doubt—as if I didn’t know the repercussions would be profound.

Now my doubts were potent. More so by the hour.

Which was why, at dawn, after a night of fidgeting, I left Stu and went into my workroom. I couldn’t talk to Debora, of course. Not at this crazy hour, and not till I could think of what to say. Instead, I turned my laptop on, and signed in to Surromoms.

I worded my questions carefully, couched in hypotheticals:

Would it be really weird if . . .

Has anyone ever heard of . . .

Do IF’s ever get these kinds of feelings?

Barely a minute passed before the first response appeared. (Babylovers were an early-rising bunch.) Mom2AngelSarah wrote,
Relax. You’re talking transference—at least I think that’s what the shrinks call it. Happens to almost everyone, probably, no? I wouldn’t sweat it. I mean: your sperm is *penetrating* her. *Of course* you think of her sexually. You’d hardly be a man if you didn’t. LOL
.

Totally normal
, GiftOfKids concurred.
No big deal
.

Well
, typed WannaBeMom,
as long as you don’t *act* on it!
—which prompted another burst of virtual laughter.

I hung back, declining to correct their misconceptions, wanting to retract what I had posted.

Then my old correspondent, Pray4Life, weighed in.
Wait
, she wrote.
Stop. SandyNeckDad . . . it’s you? Pardon me, and sorry if I’m getting this all wrong, but aren’t you *gay*? Isn’t that why you need to use a surro? I’m confused. If you like women, why not do it *that* way?

I was confused, too, but not about liking women; I’d known that capacity always lay within me, dormant. The trouble was my liking of this one woman, of Debora. I was worried my feelings might extend beyond mere “liking,” beyond curiosity or lust. I feared Debora offered something—what?—that I’d been missing.

I could put a positive spin on my deep bond with her: an unexpected outgrowth of my loyalty to Stu-and-me, of how much I aspired to build our family. But was it? Or was it something born of self-allegiance (a fancy way of saying it was selfish)?

Hey, still there?
wrote Pray4Life
. I’m serious. What’s the deal?

I started typing, beginning at the beginning, or somewhere near, recounting all my bedrock contradictions: my craving for belonging, my hatred of that craving; my want to break away from family, my want to make my own.

My fingers were so flubby I kept knocking the Caps Lock key, and had to go back and retype. I told of coming out but then falling in love with Becky, with all the possibilities she could offer; of breaking up, because I couldn’t limit myself to her, and then the seemingly limitless world of gay men in Manhattan; of feeling a misfit, no matter what identity I bought into.

At last I came to Stu, my oxymoronic lover: my Jewish pilot, my high-flyer who sometimes zoomed in close. I had feared so terribly the thought that I might lose him, but now I sometimes also feared the thought of staying together. What if we were trying to catch a slipstream in our hands?

That’s what I was writing when my fingers flubbed again. The ever-vigilant laptop asked:
Are you sure you want to delete?
And though I could have rescued the whole saga with one stroke, I hit Return and watched it disappear.

What did I really want when I placed the call to Debora? To hear her laugh things off and say, “We won’t being doing
that
again”? To hear her say she
burned
to do it again?

But no, when she answered with her lyrical “Alô?” I knew what I’d wanted the most was only this: her voice.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Yup. Your favorite delivery man.” I heard my phony nonchalance, as stiff as old chewed gum. “I’m just calling to find out how you’re feeling.”

“Normal, I think. It’s very early—too early, still—to tell.”

No, I said, not that; I knew she wouldn’t feel pregnant yet. How did she feel about . . . about us?

“Pat, I can’t—” she started, and let the sentence snap.

“Wait, sorry. Did Danny come back? He’s there? You can’t talk?”

“He’s here, yes, but sleeping. Tired from being with Paula.”

“Good—so, then, you
can
talk.”

But Debora still said nothing.

The silence was a whirlpool. Swirl, swirl.

Softly she said, “I don’t think that we should talk about it.”

“But Deb,” I pleaded (pleading, too, with my own inner watchdog), “don’t you think you’re making a bigger deal than maybe we have to? Don’t you think that—”

“No,” she said. “Let’s not.”

I knew she must be right: we should just move on. We had many months ahead—years, I hoped—of partnership, and couldn’t afford to mess things up now. A fluke, we’d felt. We’d kill it while we could. Starve the fire.

That was what I told myself. I promised to believe it.

The fire I should foster was the one I felt for Stu, should use its heat to cauterize our leaks.