Happy Family (9 page)

“Am I interrupting?” Cheri says.

“Oh, Professor Matzner,” he says, putting down his papers then clasping his sausage-like fingers together.

“I wanted to check in and see how things were progressing. I know Dennis Donohue was in town last week.”

“I'm working with quite a few parties on this, as you know.”

“And is there any news on how we might proceed? Obviously, nobody is getting into Iraq at the moment, given the current politics.”

“Fits and starts, my dear. We've dealt with worse blows from UN sanctions in the past. Whatever happens this time, the prudent course is to take the long view. I believe we'll resolve the situation, just like we did in Nippur.”

“That was before 9/11. Who knows if Tony Blair has any real evidence of weapons of mass destruction, but it's pretty clear that he and Cheney are building a case for invasion.”

“Governments may enact all sorts of Sturm und Drang, but much can slip twixt the cup and the lip. One thing experience will teach you is—know enough to know when you don't know. Leave it to those who do.”

A waiter appears, bearing iced tea.

“Sugar, please,” McCall says, “the real stuff.” The waiter looks at Cheri, but before she can order a drink, Samuelson waves him off. “In any event, while nobody wants bloodshed, one could make an argument that a regime change—if it's done with the framework of an international coalition and blessed by the UN—would be in the best interests of the Iraqi people as well as archaeology.” He sits back and nods, seemingly satisfied at the wisdom he has just bestowed on Cheri.

But, to the evident annoyance of McCall, Cheri charges on. “Politics aside, I'm sure you must be considering how you'd like your team to proceed until we can get access to the tablets in Baghdad.”

“There are many moving parts to consider and, rest assured, we are considering them all.”

“I understand,” she says, trying to sound calm as she clenches her hands under the table. “I'm bringing this up because, as you know, I've cleared my teaching schedule in the fall to be fully available to you. My publisher is waiting on my second book and I'm trying to plan my time.”

Just then, a stately man walks up to the table, holding his coat in his hand. “Professor Matzner, Dr. Donohue,” McCall says. “Professor Matzner is a cuneiform scholar and one of our professors. She was just leaving.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cheri says with a too-firm handshake, and with that, she is dismissed.

Cheri presses the gas pedal of her Jeep, listening to the engine cough and then die, cough and then die. Samuelson's condescension infuriates her. Her hand trembles. It's a tic, an old hangover from her love affair with amphetamines. When the engine finally catches, she drives west on North Avenue to get to the Kennedy Expressway.

“Men can't handle women being direct. You have to appeal to his ego,” her oldest friend, Taya, had advised when she'd complained about Samuelson. “Or, better yet, make a donation. He probably chairs some archaeology foundation that needs funding. You may live like you don't have money but you inherited a boatload from Sol so fucking spend some of it to help yourself for once. Or if all else fails, you could always fuck him.” Unfortunately, Taya's only knowledge about the pressure points of academe came via an affair she had with a visiting professor from Russia when she and Cheri were undergraduates at NYU.

The direct approach with Samuelson had failed her before. Last March when Saddam Hussein held an international conference in Baghdad and invited leading Western archaeologists to attend, Cheri made it known that, if Samuelson was willing to break the U.S. sanctions, she'd be on board to join his staff. The official purpose of the conference was to mark five millennia since the advent of writing. But the gathering was a flashing yellow light to international scholars saying,
Come back in, the water's fine.
American archaeologists knew that if the U.S. didn't lift its embargo soon, they'd be the last in and lose the best sites. Going to the conference ensured McCall Samuelson and their university a place at the table. When her name didn't appear on his staff list, she confronted him. “My mistake,” Samuelson said, “I presumed you would understand the politics. The Iraqi government reviews the staff list. Do you think they won't vet and veto someone with a Jewish last name?” She pointed out that she wasn't Jewish. Her parents were registered Catholics and she was an agnostic. “If you think that matters to Saddam Hussein and his Baathist cultural committee, you have no business being involved,” he'd answered.

Samuelson was part of the archaeological establishment. He had a long history of good relations with the Iraqi authorities prior to the 1990s sanctions—they protected his sites, gave him logistical support, helped him achieve professional fame. And as repulsive as it was, Cheri had to admit Samuelson was right. They wouldn't have let her in for an event at Saddam's invitation. Now, as a scholar on Samuelson's team and with the British as a key element, it was different. She felt worse than idiotic; she felt naive.

Cheri was no stranger to being mistaken for a Jew. In her prior life as a cop in the NYPD, she'd been subjected to sniggers of “bagel bitch” and worse but refused to use the “I'm not a Jew” defense, since it implied that their anti-Semitism was wrong only because they'd made an incorrect assumption about her. She had no love for the name Matzner or the man it came from, and she had considered changing it when she married Michael. But who wanted to live her life as Cheri Shoub?

Cheri gets on the expressway bound for the suburbs. The irony is that she'd never had an affinity for babies. She didn't know what to do with small, helpless creatures. As an adopted child, Cheri was intimately aware that some people should never have children and she was afraid she might have inherited the propensity to abandon her young. So it was a shock to her when, as she was heading toward forty, she started thinking,
Well, maybe.
When maybe turned into yes, she assumed reproduction was an inalienable right—you didn't need a permit to have a child like you did to have a handgun—and her body would comply.

All roads lead to donor eggs. Cheri knows Dr. Morrison will push this as the only viable option. She's tried everything else: four failed rounds of inseminations with FSH injections and two in vitro fertilizations that didn't implant. Using eggs from a twenty-something increased her risk of multiples. Giving birth to and caring for a litter? Out of the question. She likes to think she has an open mind, but does she want another woman's child taking root and growing inside her? What twisted strands of lineage and dysfunction would she nourish and would she be able to love whatever she pushed out of her vagina as much as if it had had her own faulty strands? Then again, she was genetic mystery meat and could have any number of unknown hereditary conditions to pass on to her child.

As she nears the exit for the expensive Fertility Gods, Cheri's cell phone vibrates. She steadies the wheel with her knee and fishes around in her purse for her phone, almost rear-ending an old Saturn station wagon that suddenly decides to switch lanes. From the insistent buzz, she can tell it's Cici. She finally retrieves the phone and pulls over.

Cici seems to be midsentence already by the time Cheri answers. “Where have you been,
cara
? You could be dead on the street, bleeding.
I
could have been dead and bleeding on the street.”

“Then there would be nothing either of us could do, so what's your point?”

“What if I need something, what if I need a check, or money?” Cici shouts, just in case there's a bad connection.

“That's what banks are for. Or any of your bookkeepers.”

“I do not like speaking to those people, you know this, and the pug, he have diarrhea, on the Persian rug in the hallway. And Gristedes on Park, they no want to deliver, it is impossible, they deliver for fifteen years and now they say no?”

“Mom, what do you want me to do about it from here? Ask Cookie.”

“She is so smart she can change the mind of Gristedes? Why you not pick up the phone when I call? What is wrong? You sound like you are not paying attention.”

“Nothing. I'm fine.”

“You think you may be pregnant? Is not too late. It is five in one hundred who become pregnant once they are forty, and the Down's, there is the Down's, and the retardation…but we get the best doctors for that and of course help for you.”

“I'm getting off the phone now.”

“
Aspetta,
I am with Marcella at Berg-a-dorf's: aubergine or crana-berry?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Towels. Yes, she has sheets they are a
schifo
blend, and no linens for the table, can you believe? Marcella cannot believe. Aubergine or crana-berry?” Cici
uff
s and then mock whispers:

“You and Michael, you are still trying,
sì
?”

“Thanks and hanging up now.”

As Cheri pulls the phone away from her ear to hit End Call, she hears Cici prattling on. “
Aspetta, cara,
we need to discuss your big birtha-day. For the party, I am thinking—” Cheri pushes the button before she can hear what, exactly, Cici is thinking.

For her entire sexually active life, Cheri worried about getting pregnant. When she was sixteen she tricked Cici into taking her to the gynecologist by saying it burned when she peed, then she asked the doctor to give her a diaphragm. He had shown her a plastic vagina, wearing it like a hand puppet as if she didn't know her own anatomy. She wasn't having sex with anyone in high school, but Taya was, and Cheri wanted to be prepared. She couldn't have imagined that now she'd be worried about
not
getting pregnant.

Michael asked about birth control on their first date. They'd met at Yale; he was a rangy director with cult status and packed film-studies classes, and she was a rising postdoctoral candidate twenty years his junior. They'd met at a screening of his famous exquisite corpse documentary,
Disco, Doughnuts, and Dogma.
After the Q&A, Michael wove through the crowd of genuine acolytes and poor undergrads there for the free booze and asked Cheri out for a drink. They spent the first part of the date wrapped up in each other's words, and by the end, they'd shifted to mouths and as many body parts as they could possibly touch in public. She was on the pill, she'd told him. “Do you want kids?” he'd probed. “Not at this instant, just in general.”

“You're getting pretty personal pretty quickly.”

“You know this is not just any first date, right?” He held eye contact. She knew.

“Well, to be honest, I've never had the desire to have a baby and can't see that changing. Guess you could say I'm not a kid person.”

By the time Cheri was leaving her toothbrush on Michael's sink, they'd agreed they weren't kid people, group people, pet people, morning people, organized-religion people, suck-up-to-the-dean people, or joggers—though they didn't agree on everything. If Michael had known Cheri was a gun-toting NRA member, he'd never have dated her. But by the time he found out about her past as a cop, he was in too deep. Despite a twenty-year age difference, they were similarly independent and valued the freedom to go anywhere without the burden of dependents. They were far more interesting than couples whose lives had been swallowed whole by their kids. The kind who let Legos colonize the coffee table and yelped, “Oh, don't move that! It's Jimmy's Death Star. Isn't it amazing?” Grown-ups who moaned about how they hadn't seen a movie in a year and didn't have time to F-U-C-K.

But something happened in their marriage after the first five years of nonprocreative F-U-C-K-I-N-G. Was it their age difference, which didn't seem to matter at first? Was it because her academic career was on the rise while his career stalled in endless revisions to an already-years-in-the-making documentary? Because Michael wasn't earning any money and, unexpectedly, she had a large inheritance? She'd eschewed her parents' world of privilege and hadn't taken a penny from them since her junior year in college. She acted as if her trust fund didn't exist. But maybe it reminded Michael of what he didn't have. Whatever the cause of their estrangement, Cheri noticed Michael's age more and sought his advice less; where they used to be selfish with their time together, they became more selfish with their time alone. Cheri knew that if they didn't change something soon there would be nothing left to hold them together. She always hated it when her friends with kids felt the need to point out that having a child was the true experience of unconditional love.
You'll never get that with just you and Michael,
they might as well have said. Maybe they needed to add not subtract in their equation. “And why would I want to do that?” was Michael's reaction.

As time passed, Cheri became certain of
yes
while Michael's grasp on
no
loosened ever so slightly. As a self-described JuBu—New Age parlance for Jewish Buddhist—he tried to remain unattached to outcomes. Fine, she agreed, no birth control, no expectations. Let's just see what happens.

As soon as Cheri threw away her pill packet, things started to change. Whereas she had gotten used to inwardly recoiling from Michael's advances—how he would graze her breast with his untrimmed nails while she was in bed grading papers or sidle lazily up to her first thing in the morning—his hand tracing the curve of her spine now felt strangely arousing. Was it the sense of purpose, the thrill and fear of the unknown, the potential to perform the ultimate act of creation? The more sex they had, the more they wanted. Intimacies that were the first victims of familiarity and had long been forsaken—like making out or looking into each other's eyes—made their way back into the fold. They smoked weed together and watched porn. They were lovers again.