Authors: Renee Manfredi
This was what came to him in the stranger’s car and Jack knew he couldn’t do it, couldn’t ever cheat again. There was the vow to Stuart, of course, though that wouldn’t have been enough to stop him then—or now, with the sexy carpenter—despite his great love for Stuart. It was the image of Flynn, of her passing, of her in his thoughts that made him over several brooding days formulate a theory of sorts. Every human being, he believed, must do one of three basic things during his lifetime: leave something living, create something lovely, or make something better. Jack would never father a child—biologically anyway—and he had no talent for anything artistic, so the option left to him was to make something in the world better. He had no great humanitarian instinct, didn’t, in fact, even really like most people, so he decided to start with himself. He needed to try to make himself a finer and more ethical person. From that, something else might grow. He might be able to help raise a wonderful child; someone who wouldn’t make bad or hasty decisions out of a poor sense of self-worth and the arrogance it engendered. A child who would grow up to be a kind and generous human being who would know, by Jack’s example, never to take any loving relationship for granted. And if nature had any role in personality, Stuart’s child would have a much better chance of being nice than would a child assembled out of his DNA. Jack had been bitter and miserable so long that it couldn’t help but have an effect on his gene pool. Cynicism was a terrible trait, he knew, a kind of immorality all its own.
Hours later, Stuart still wasn’t back. When Jack woke up from a nap on the couch in the study it was three-thirty, and he hadn’t heard from Stuart
all day. He peeked outside. It was raining hard. He started to dial Stuart’s cell, but cut the call when he heard a car pull up. He looked out: Greta, minus her daughter, which could only mean one thing.
“Jack!” she said, and rushed in.
“You’re ovulating,” he said.
“Stuart’s stuck in traffic, and I’m fertile.”
He took her coat, closed the front door. “What do you mean, stuck? It’s Saturday. How much traffic can there be?”
“There’s a four-car accident on Storrow Drive, and they have everything blocked off.”
Jack dialed Stuart’s number.
“I’ve gone exactly three feet, Greta,” Stuart said, without first saying hello.
“Where are you?” Jack asked loudly, above the hiss of the line and the honking horns.
Stuart groaned. “Not you, too. I’ve been harangued six times in the past hour by Greta. There is nothing, I repeat, nothing I can do about this.”
Jack heard the windshield wipers going full-speed. “I’m not calling to harangue you. Greta’s about to ovulate.”
Stuart sighed. “Oh hey, there’s something I haven’t heard twenty times.”
“And I’m asking you, once again, where are you?”
“Intersection of Beacon and Charles.”
Jack hung up. “How long is the egg viable?”
“I recently read a study that said there’s a window of just a couple of hours. Nobody knows for sure. But now’s the time. I feel it.”
“Well, maybe it’ll keep.” He was going to say maybe she should stand in a cold room to delay spoilage, but realized how ridiculous that was. “Maybe you can stay fertile for a while longer. Can you?”
Greta flashed him a look. “How would I know? You think this is something I have a say in?”
“Testy, testy,” Jack said.
“Sorry. But I haven’t ovulated like this in months. I’m disappointed. I thought this would be the shining moment.”
He thought for a minute. “Okay. I have an idea. It’s unusual, and it’s risky, but it might work.”
“Anything, yes.”
“Upstairs in the bedroom are cartons of books. Start ripping them open and look for men’s magazines, anything with naked, aroused men somewhere in their pages. Don’t ask why, just do it.”
From the downstairs bathroom, Jack got out one of the kits made up of the various apparatus to get fluids from one body to the next, without those bodies actually touching. Greta had assembled and left multiples of the kits in both bathrooms, a gesture that Jack found oddly touching, like Valentines left anonymously for strangers.
Greta came down a few minutes later with
The Joy of Gay Sex
. “This is all I could find.”
“Well, okay. Better than nothing.”
Stuart stared straight ahead, told himself not to be disappointed. They could try again next month. Or maybe if she were as fertile as she claimed the shelf life of the egg would be longer. They had been trying for the past four months, and with each cycle Stuart’s certainty that he wanted a child grew stronger. But this time, according to Greta, she was so fertile it wasn’t funny; the test strip wasn’t a pale pink like it was last month, it was the color of a Mardi Gras float, as pink as a Mary Kay Cadillac.
Stuart put the car in gear when the car horns started honking, but saw that traffic still wasn’t moving. There was a man weaving in and out of the idling cars ahead. A man who looked very much like Jack.
Stuart squinted. It was Jack.
“Christ almighty!” Stuart said, as Jack opened the passenger door. “What are you doing?”
“I brought you a little reading material.” He tossed the book onto the seat. “I realize they’re just line drawings, but you’ll have to use your imagination. Here are your works. And, I know this is the wrong thing to say to a man who has to beat off in traffic, but hurry. Greta’s in the coffee shop across the street with her panties around her ankles.”
“What?”
“So to speak, of course. I told her to lock herself in the bathroom and wait.”
“What?” he said again, looking down at the book in his lap, the sterile cup. “What? You’ve got to be kidding. This will not be happening.”
Jack got in and closed the door. “You have to.”
“Are you kidding? You want me to do that here? Surrounded by minivans and soccer moms?”
“You can do it. I’ll block the view on this side.” He took off his raincoat and looped it through the handrail above the window. Jack reached over and turned up the music—The Traveling Wilburys, Anna’s music, he heard, missing her acutely now. She must have forgotten to take it out of their car.
Stuart started to speak. Jack turned the music down to tell him: “This is a golden opportunity. She might not ovulate next month. Or the month after that. None of us are all that young and fecund anymore. Get busy.” He turned the music way up, loud enough so the people in the cars around them would hear, get annoyed, and turn their own radios up. Jack rocked back and forth and sang as loud as he could to give Stuart the illusion that they were alone.
“I don’t care about the car I drive,” Jack sang, “I’m just happy to be here, happy to be alive…well, it’s ALL right!”
“Jack,” Stuart said, through clenched teeth. “Shut up.”
“Okey dokey.” He peeked around the coat: The people in the car beside them were talking and laughing, paying no attention to what was going on.
Stuart hit the jackpot just as traffic started to move.
“See you at home,” Jack said, and kissed him. He put the beaker inside his coat, under his armpit; even a minute at the wrong temperature could make the boys sluggish. “Why the hell don’t they make lids for these things?”
“Probably because most people don’t treat them as to-go cups,” Stuart said, and reached across Jack’s lap to open the door. “Don’t spill it,” he called after him.
Greta was in the front of the line at the coffee shop, which extended nearly to the door with caffeine junkies craving their afternoon fix. Jack pushed and jostled his way up to her, some people shooting him dirty, then suspicious and alarmed looks, as if they thought it was a gun he was holding inside his coat. “Why the hell aren’t you in the bathroom?” he said to her.
“Oh God, you’re here!”
“Yes, I’m here. Why aren’t you in position?”
The woman in line ahead of Greta turned around. Jack stared her down.
“I didn’t think you were coming.”
He laughed. “Well, strictly speaking, I wasn’t. It took a little longer than anticipated. He didn’t have a lot to work with, poor boy. Let’s go.”
The two of them hurried to the back where the bathrooms were and he handed her the cup and bag with the mysterious female paraphernalia. The current guidelines, he’d read, indicated it might be useful to lie flat on her back for thirty minutes with her knees drawn up. It was crucial that she follow all this now, since she was so convinced of the egg’s viability.
“Greta? How’s it going in there?”
“All the boys are safely in the visitor’s center.”
“Good. I know the floor in there must be disgusting, but you’re following the drill, right? Don’t get up.”
“Yeah, I know. Can you go get my latté and bring it in?”
Jack turned, faced a line of astonished-looking women. “The ladies’ room will be closed for the next twenty-nine minutes,” he said.
Later, Greta sat on the couch with a book of baby names while Stuart and Jack painted the living room walls.
“Don’t you think you’re, well, counting your chickens?” Stuart said.
“I’m pregnant,” Greta said.
The paint roller slipped out of his hand and landed on the coffee table. “You are? Already? I must have some strong swimmers.”
“She doesn’t know that,” Jack said. “You don’t know that, Greta.”
“I do. I felt exactly like this when I was pregnant before. With the baby I lost.”
“And how is that?”
“Like something has been plugged in and switched on.” She looked back down at the book. “I’m ninety percent sure,” she said.
“You know this within six hours?”
She nodded. “The first time, I knew immediately.”
Jack and Stuart stared at her. Jack held fast to the notion that this early belief was as crucial as biology. Without a doubt in their minds, the three of them had willed it to be true and in this way faith was as responsible as flesh. In this way, Frances Ella—whom Jack would nickname Fella, to Greta’s annoyance—was as much his as anyone’s.
I
n under a month, Anna had sorted through everything, from the attic to the basement to the storage sheds around the property. She was leaving most of the big pieces of furniture for the new owners, a young couple with a baby on the way. She watched them as they walked through with the realtor, noticed what they admired, what their eyes lingered on the longest, and left those things. The Duncan Phyffe dining room table, the Chippendale secretary’s desk upstairs, the bedstead that had been in her husband’s family for two hundred years. She’d already sent two truckloads of furniture to Jack and Stuart. Marvin didn’t want anything. Anna saved Flynn’s room for last—even after nearly a year, her granddaughter’s scent lingered. Violet had spent the morning with her, sorting through and boxing up Flynn’s meager belongings. By late afternoon, everything left in the house was either staying, or was what Anna was taking with her.
After Violet went home, Anna sat outside and called Marvin in New York. “Hi,” she said when he answered. “I’m getting ready to go, and wanted to double-check there’s nothing you want. Violet helped me go through Flynn’s room. Mostly girlish trinkets, her clothes and books.”
Marvin made a sound deep in his throat. “I don’t think I could bear it. The physical reminders, I mean. She’s still everywhere.”
“I know,” Anna said. “I guess I’ll donate what’s still usable to charity.” She stared out at the line of garbage cans she’d filled for Wednesday’s pickup.
“Where are you going, Anna?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a destination in mind. I’m just going to drive.”
“Why don’t you come here? I have plenty of room. You can figure out what you want to do. Take a little time, hang out in the city. Relax.”
“That’s very kind, but no. This is better.” A silence hung between them. Anna looked up at the sky. It was a clear, bright afternoon, not too warm. She was planning to leave tomorrow, but there was nothing holding her here, no reason she couldn’t leave at any hour of the day or night. There was still a little paperwork to take care of with the sale of the house, and the documents having to do with Poppy’s money. Marvin had finally tracked Poppy down in London. She was clean, had been through rehab just in time to go through grief, which, Anna suspected, would probably start the cycle of drug use all over again.
“Anna, I have to say we’re worried about you.”
“Don’t be. Everything will be fine. Tell me the latest about Poppy. There’s a trust fund her father left for her. I’ve signed an escrow release, but I would prefer that this inheritance not disappear into her veins. So I had my attorney name you as executor of funds. Use it at your discretion. And don’t give her a penny if she so much as smokes a joint. Is she still planning to come to New York?”
“That’s what she says. I hope so. She sounded clean on the phone, but you know.”
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Well, there’s plenty of money. Get her the best treatment available.”
“When are you leaving?”
“As soon as I’m done. The minute I’m done with things. You have my numbers.”
“I do.” He paused. “Look, I have no right to ask this—” he started.
“Ask anyway.”
“Especially, the likes of me, with the track record I have.”
“Ask,” she said again.
“You are all the real family I have left.”
“Yes,” Anna said.
“And I guess I’m hoping you won’t disappear from my life.”
“I won’t.”
“But will you promise?”
For the magic of the word itself, the faith of it and what it might open, she said, “Yes.”
She started to dial Jack and Stuart’s number next, but stopped midway, then did the same with a call to Greta. She just couldn’t right now.
Anna sipped her coffee, watched the water fringe at the shoreline. It felt good just to sit and do nothing. She’d been going nonstop since she sold the house. Which was the way it had to be; she gave herself a deadline of going through and organizing one room per day, but it had gone much faster than she’d anticipated. Most everything ended up in the discard or charity pile. Nostalgia, she began to discover as she sorted through boxes of Christmas ornaments, clay hand-print ashtrays, even most photographs, was actually a state that had nothing to do with preserving the past. It was wistfulness and imagination in equal parts, envisioning what your survivors would want. Which made it easy now. The family snapshots filled two entire trashcans. Anna kept her wedding album, one photograph of Poppy as a toddler, and one of her husband that she loved unreservedly: he was about thirty, sitting on the windowseat in the library looking out at something in the yard. She couldn’t remember if she’d taken the photo, or why, or even what year it was. But all his best expressions were in his face and his posture: one leg bent under him, the other on the floor. A book was balanced across his knees, a wine glass in one hand, the other midair, reaching for something outside the photo’s frame. His expression was delight and amusement and surprise. Hugh had been a man of great energy, with a way of fully inhabiting whatever he was feeling at the moment. This was what made her fall in love with him in the beginning and what carried through the years. Hugh had, in Anna’s eyes anyway, a charming way of not understanding irony or exaggeration. Once, her figure still padded with post-pregnancy weight, Anna said that she was swearing off desserts until she got her weight down from about one hundred and eighty pounds of baby blubber. Hugh had looked at her and said, “Darling, are you sure of your weight?” Anna, clearing dinner dishes, asked what he meant. “I just can’t fathom how you could weigh that much. You look to me like you’re not much over one forty.”