The Red Book (17 page)

She crosses herself and gives thanks to the holy trinity of Roe, the Supreme Court, and the Harvard University Health Services.

Out of habit, she has been buying and peeing on ovulation test sticks every month, without fail since her wedding, for seven-day stretches during the most fertile week of her cycle. Yesterday morning’s window had the darkest pink line of all, meaning her LH level was at its peak, meaning if ever the blessed event were to happen, it would be happening right now. Bucky has four children, in addition to the one she and he could have had together back in college, along with another cellular mass she’d heard had been eliminated from another uterus their junior year, formed from sperm that was, at least back in the day, potent enough to find its way around both the spermicide and the diaphragm worn by that girl from Lesley College.

The plumbing, in other words, works not only well but spectacularly so. (A kind of Supersperm, Clover thinks: faster than a seeping condom, able to leap small diaphragms in a single bound . . . ) And though Danny still hasn’t worked up the fortitude to ejaculate into a specimen cup—how dare he, she thinks, growing suddenly furious and self-justifying at his willful inaction—both Clover and her fertility doctor are certain it is Danny’s sperm count, or lack thereof, that is the missing ingredient in their baby batter.

“Your eggs are still good,” said Dr. Seligman, on more than one occasion. “But until we get a specimen from Danny, we don’t have the whole picture.”

She tries to envision the internal division of cells, mentally goading the mitosis projected in her mind’s eye into actual existence: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, so baffling and miraculous, those first few hours of life! No question, she mourned that amorphous, eight-week-old Clover/Bucky blastula way back when, even though she firmly believed both in her right not to play host to it and in its right not to be born to an immature mother and father.

Ironic, really, that the one responsibility she knows she could have never assumed back then—and she’s had no doubts, ever, that she made the right decision at the time to push off motherhood until she had the means and mental wherewithal to do so—is now the sole role she is desperate to play.

She and Bucky should probably have one more go of it, she thinks, just to be certain.

She kisses the back of his neck, which smells of sour sweat and gin. An old man’s odor, the kind that permeated the wood-paneled library where she once met Bucky’s father, and he was unable to hide his shock at the caramel-colored sight of her.

“Hey there, Pace,” Bucky says, waking, turning, smiling. “Jesus. Look at you.” He touches her face then pulls down the sheets to uncover the dark areolas of her breasts, whose centers immediately rigidify the minute they make contact with the cool air and Bucky’s gaze. It always amazed him, he once told Clover, the different sizes, shapes, and colors an erect nipple could take. It had made her self-conscious at first, knowing from the random locker-room subset to which she’d been privy how hyperelongated and dark hers were when erect, in comparison to others, but then Bucky had added the delicious addendum that her nipples, once touched, were the most beautiful peaks he’d ever scaled. “Holy shit, just
look at you
. They lied, you know.”

“Who lied?”

“All those people who said it’s inner beauty that counts, not outer. You wouldn’t understand. You still look like a . . . oh, man, like a friggin’ gazelle. But I know how I was treated way back when, versus how I’m treated now, as a much nicer, homelier old fart, and I tell you, life is easier for the physically blessed. It just is.”

Clover agrees with this but won’t cop to it, as she wishes it weren’t true while simultaneously understanding, from personal experience, that it is true, not to mention that admitting it would be the equivalent of praising her own beauty. There’s a viral video, “Pretty,” that keeps popping up in her Facebook feed every couple of months, posted by female friends, most of them with daughters, featuring a poet who is furious at her mother for making her get a nose job in her teens. The poet then extrapolates from her own personal experience with the pain of beauty and the indignity of maternal coercion and applies it to a universal disdain for all forms of beauty, claiming she wishes for anything
but
beauty for her future daughter, which Clover finds disingenuous at best, hypocritical at worse. All other things being equal—intelligence, creativity, the ability to love, a zest for life—why wouldn’t a mother want her child to be blessed with physical attractiveness as well, when study after study has shown that prettier people command higher pay, are given greater respect, feel more joy, and achieve more quantifiable success in life, not to mention having a larger population of potential mates from which to choose? But she doesn’t say any of this to Bucky right now. She knows he just wants to be reassured that he’s still worthy of love, despite having lost the luster of his outer plumage. “Oh, Bucky. First of all, you’re not homely. You’ve just aged a bit, that’s all.”

“I’m not fishing for—”

She cuts him off. “Second, we’re all going to be ugly, old ducklings soon enough. But thank you for the compliment anyway. I didn’t mean to step on it.”

“No worries, but I don’t buy it. You’ll always be a swan. Seriously, Pace, you’re going to be one of those old ladies whose eyes light up a friggin’ room. My grandmother was like that, I know.” He lies on his back now and stares up at the ceiling, his expression pinched, pained. “Why did I . . . I mean, Jesus, can you imagine how great we could have been together? What the fuck were we thinking?”

We?
Clover thinks. She doesn’t remember having had any say in the decision. It was just handed to her like the Christmas presents Mrs. Gardner offered to everyone gathered around that tree except her. She shrugs. “Don’t even go there. It’s useless. And we were right to break it off. It would never have worked. Your family would have shunned me, and I would have crumbled under the strain of trying to please them, and, worst of all, I would have never made my own way in the world.” Plus, she thinks, but does not say out loud, there was that whole other issue, which she only understood in retrospect, while in bed with her next lover—an expert, avid, hungry practitioner of clitoral stimulation—of Bucky’s lack of aptitude in that department, something he’s clearly worked on in the interim with, she has to admit, a decent degree of success, though she faked last night’s orgasm in the name of guilt reduction. Procreation she could allow herself; recreation she could not.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says. “I don’t know.”

His expression is so open and vulnerable, so steeped with regret that Clover feels a simultaneous rush of pity, lust, nostalgia, and something approximating the chemical rush of love, the latter of which she tries to counteract with reason. This is a business transaction, she reminds herself. A delinquent repayment of debt. “I have an idea,” she says. “Let’s do it one more time, for old times’ sake, and then we will never talk or think about this again.”

“Dude!” he chuckles, preppily. “I’m totally up for another round, and I would
never
think of saying anything to anyone, but come on! I’m gonna
think
about this. How can I not?”

“Okay, fine, you can think about it.”

“I wasn’t asking for your permission.” The skin around Bucky’s eyes crinkle so deeply when he smiles that his pupils appear to be swallowed amid the folds. “Jesus, feel this.” He puts her hand on his erection. “Just looking at you . . .”

“We always had good chemistry.”

“Good?
Good?
Fuck, Pace, I’ve lived long enough now and screwed enough lonely Stepford wives to know we had
unbelievable
chemistry.” Bucky reddens. “I probably shouldn’t admit that part about the other women.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“No, it’s not okay. But . . . well . . . I haven’t had sex with my wife in three years. A man has needs.”

“Three
years
?” No wonder Arabella’s schtupping the accountant, Clover thinks.

“I know. Crazy, right? I was just, I don’t know, never really that into her in that way.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Never? Not even when you first met?”

“Not even when we first met.”

“So—and please excuse me for prying—but, I mean, why did you marry her then?” If nothing else, even under the very real strain of fertility-issue-tainted procreation in the recessionary wake of a job loss, she and Danny continue to have more-than-decent sex. It’s married sex, to be sure, but it has done the trick, so far, of holding their barren dyad together. (Please, Clover thinks again. Please let this baby be forming right now. It will solve so many problems, relieve so many marital stressors.)

“I thought she’d make a good partner.”

“A good partner? That sounds so”—Clover searches for the right term—“clinical.”

“I know. I don’t know what I was thinking, other than, you know, we’re cut from the same cloth, our families have known each other forever, we’ll make cute blond babies together, blah blah blah.” (Clover winces at this last one, but Bucky’s too caught up in his admission to notice.) “Love never even came into the equation. I mean, not that I
don’t
love her. I think I actually grew to love her, but by then I was already fooling around on the side, and then she followed suit, and then, wow, what a mess we’ve made . . .” He lies on his back again and stares up at the ceiling. “I wish I could have a do-over, you know? We should all get one, like a second serve in tennis. That way if we fuck up our first shot with our idiotic notions of how things should be, we’d get to take another with full knowledge of our mistakes and actual needs. Can you imagine? How cool would that be? Down forty love? No problem! Here’s another ball.” He hands her an imaginary tennis ball.

She takes it and pretends to study it in her hand. “Oh, I don’t know. I think we’d probably still hit the net sometimes, even knowing everything we know.”

“I guess.” He turns back on his side to face her, his gaze intense, needy. “But at least we’d mess up with our eyes wide open, you know? Come here, you.” Bucky pulls her torso close to his until they are once again touching, his erection, with its potent brew, smashed between them. “You sure I don’t need to run downstairs to the drugstore to get a condom? Really, I’m happy to do it.”

“No, really, it’s okay,” she says, careful to keep it vague without out-and-out repeating her drunken fib from the previous night. (“Don’t worry about it, I’m on the pill,” she’d lied, when Bucky asked, just prior to penetration, if she had a spare condom. “Oh, good,” he’d replied, mercifully too drunk himself to question why a woman with fertility issues would be in the business of taking birth control pills.)

“Perfect,” he now says. “I hate rubbers.”

“I remember,” she replies playfully, kissing his nose, pulling the base of his shaft toward her, recalling, as if it were yesterday, the first time they’d used a condom, back in 1985, when the letters HIV and AIDS were rapidly slamming the door on the two decades of sexual liberation that had preceded them. The Harvard
Crimson
had arrived at her doorstep that bright autumn morning with the thump heard ’round the campus, as it contained a condom insert attached to a shiny, black cardboard flyer heralding either the end of free love or the beginning of mass panic, depending upon its recipient’s viewpoint.
Oh my God
s escaped nearly every mouth of every unsuspecting
Crimson
-fetcher that morning, followed almost immediately by some version of,
Check THIS shit out.

Clover, who’d had a diaphragm at her mother’s insistence since the age of fourteen—though she was not actually sexually active until her senior year of high school—had never actually held a condom in her hand or placed it on a boyfriend’s penis, so for fun she’d asked Bucky to indulge her curiosity with the free sample.

“No way!” he’d said. “I hate those things.”

“Oh, come on!” she’d insisted. “I just want to see how it works.” So she opened the package with her teeth and tried to roll it on, but in her haste and embarrassment, she put it on backward, so it wouldn’t unroll. When she finally flipped it over and unfurled the sides downward, something didn’t look right, what with that small sac of extra space at the tip. “Okay, I’m hopeless,” she said. “What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing, except putting it on,” said Bucky. “Can we take it off now?”

“But what about this part?” She pointed to the reservoir at the tip.

“That’s to collect the sperm, you doofus. You’ve really never used one of these things before?” Bucky seemed flabbergasted. A tenth grader on his squash team at Andover, a shy virgin whose virile father’s third wife had been ordered to send him a care package of a thousand condoms, had hidden the Tupperware-encased stash in the crawl space above the ceiling in his dorm’s common room. Bucky told a couple of friends about the stockpile, and then those friends told others, and then the whole thing snowballed into that Fabergé organic shampoo commercial, so popular that year on TV, until by spring, when the red blush of shame on the young man’s cheeks had finally faded to a barely perceptible pink, and he was ready to embark on his awkward if sweet initiation into adulthood, the container was empty.

“Nope, never in my life,” she’d said. When Bucky entered her, encased in latex, Clover immediately envisioned the world coming to an end as a result of AIDS. “Ugh, that doesn’t feel good at all,” she said.

“No shit,” said Bucky.

“But what about AIDS?” she said.

“Don’t worry,” said Bucky. “They’ll find a cure. They always do.”

Now, with Bucky on the verge of penetration, Clover feels a new flash of concern, wondering about all those other women with whom he has been cheating on his wife these past twenty years. She knows it’s become somewhat of an unpublicized rarity for someone in Bucky’s and her socioeconomic strata to come down with HIV as a result of heterosexual sex, but still. “I probably should have asked you this last night, but . . . you’re clean?” she says.