Those nights, once she returned to the bedroom, Dan would hold her. He never cried. He always had hope. He said, “It hasn’t been that long.” He said this for six months, seven months, eight.
At the year mark, they made doctors’ appointments. Lisette’s results were normal. When Dan’s came back, he was very pale. He looked as sick as she’d ever seen him; even his bushy brown beard seemed to have wilted like some underwatered plant.
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m the one letting you down.”
The test was conclusive. His sperm—the doctor, with ill-advised jocularity, kept calling them his
guys
—were unlikely to ever produce a child. He didn’t have very many, and the ones he did have were not highly motivated. His guys were underachievers. They wouldn’t get their lazy asses off the couch. If they were a sports team they’d be in last place, with no possibility of a turnaround, even with the best coaching.
So that was that. No treatment existed. Nothing could be done.
They didn’t make love for the next two weeks. When Dan came
home from work he’d go out for a long run, snaking through the curving streets of their town, and after that he’d make dinner or eat what she’d made and immediately afterward go upstairs to his office, pleading homework to correct, lesson plans to revise. On rehearsal nights, instead of waiting up for her, as he usually did, he’d be in bed by the time she got home, feigning sleep. On the weekends he went for marathon runs, returning soaked with sweat and aggravation, no tension having been released. He’d been a track star in high school, won a scholarship to college, graduated with honors. He offered free math tutoring after school to kids whose families couldn’t afford it. He’d never cheated, taken a shortcut, or quit a job because it was too hard. This was the first time he’d failed to meet his own standards.
As for Lisette, there were things she had to jettison. The vision of their children, their genetic cocktail, his brown eyes and her ash-blond hair. Of course she had already named them, kissed them, rocked them to sleep. In her mind—knowing it was dangerous, but unable and unwilling to stop—she’d dressed them up for Halloween, celebrated Christmas with them, watched them graduate from high school, wept as they left for college. She’d had months to embroider their beautiful, complicated lives. But now she had to bury them, erase their memories, throw away the notebook in which she’d kept the list of names: Evan, Veronica, Nicole, Jacob. Good-bye to their futures, good-bye to all of them whose faces she had seen so clearly.
So this is heartbreak,
she thought.
Something cracked beyond repair.
It was sad. She cried in the night, and first thing in the morning, and cried again when she gently laid the notebook in the kitchen trash and ferried the bag out to the curb. But Dan’s white, lightly
freckled back turned away from her in sleep, the blank fragility of it, was the saddest thing she’d ever seen.
At a certain point, she just couldn’t take it anymore. Losing him, his touch, their closeness, was more than she could handle, especially on top of all the other grief. So in the middle of the night she reached over, his body wakelessly responding, and by the time he opened his eyes she was on top of him, moving, kissing his neck. Also crying a little. And it was weird, but he put his hands on her, and it seemed to help.
“I’m ashamed,” he said afterward. “I can’t believe I can’t do this.”
“It’s going to be okay,” she told him, and knew as she spoke the words that it was her job to make them come true.
After that night, they discussed some possibilities. They were chastened, serious, calm, as if they’d aged twenty years between the conversation in which they’d decided to start trying and this one. Lisette, her resolve firm in spite of her heartbreak, told him that she wanted to raise a child with him, to have a family, and there were other ways of doing it. Did he still want a family? He nodded, with the same grim look on his face as when he caught a student cheating: the situation was bad, and there were no excuses, but a good teacher moved past blame to look for root causes and better solutions.
This is when they started talking about other men’s sperm. They talked about adoption too, but Lisette couldn’t get excited about this option. She wanted to have a baby inside her, to feel the
link of flesh and blood, the umbilical cord, the kick of tiny feet. Yet at the fertility specialist’s office, she balked. Looking over the sperm donor files, she couldn’t imagine this scenario, either. There just wasn’t enough information. It was like shopping online for the least returnable of all items. The data given—weight, height, education level—was wholly inadequate. She needed touch and texture, the expression in a man’s eye, the specificity of gesture. How he sits in a chair, or holds a glass in his hand.
Though she knew she had to be the strong one, to pull Dan along toward their future, she broke down after the afternoon with the donor files.
“I can’t make a baby this way,” she said to him, tears streaking hotly down her cheeks. “I couldn’t even buy
pants
this way.”
If her baby was not to be a stranger, she needed so much more than this.
At work, things shifted once again. Whereas she’d once seen the kids with their instruments as sensual embodiments of a bright future, she now saw each and every one as a reproach, as something she might not be able to have. Everything youthful about them—their braces, their high-pitched giggles, their stupid, stammering in-jokes—made her angry. She’d always hated window-shopping, because there’s no point in looking at things you can’t buy. She snapped at them, telling them they had no talent.
“You’re lazy,” she said. “You think you can coast, but you can’t. You’re going to embarrass me, and yourselves.”
They were surprised, but rolled with it. They were used to mercurial adults. They knew that it wasn’t the people around them but the activities in which they were relentlessly enrolled—swim
team, orchestra, driver’s ed—that gave their lives structure, on which they could rely.
Packing up her bag one day after class she heard two boys talking around the corner in the hallway.
“What was up with Ms. Gilson today? She’s so bitchy. I think she hates me.”
“I bet she’s on the rag. You know how women are.”
Lisette stood there, shaking for a moment, then lost it. She dropped her stuff, her legs pulsing with adrenaline, and hurried down the hall after them. When they saw her—it was Tyler, violin, and Mark, French horn—they turned and blushed so hard that in another mood, she would’ve been compassionate. Instead she grabbed Tyler’s forearm and clenched it, hard, feeling the flesh give. If she’d been bigger and stronger, she might have broken it and flung his whole body against the wall.
“You think you know how women are? You think you know?”
“Sorry,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Do
not
let me hear you talking like that ever again. Either of you. Do you understand?”
They nodded.
“Get out of my sight.”
They weren’t going anywhere—why
wouldn’t
they go?—because, she realized, her hand was still on Tyler’s arm, her nails digging into his skin. She released him, feeling her fingers cramp. “Go,” she said.
Once they left the building she stood in the hallway with tears running down her cheeks. Angry at no one more than herself, for losing control, for embarrassing herself, for not having the life she thought she was going to. Then the janitor came, swishing his mop over the tiles, and she wiped her face and went out to the car.
Mark was gone but Tyler was still there, fiddling with his bike at the rack, his violin packed into a wire case mounted on the back. His dad had made the case for him, and when he first started with the orchestra, three years earlier, he’d asked her to come out and see it, assuring her that it secured the violin safely, with no chance of damage. Seeing him there, Lisette felt terrible. Tyler was a gentle, sensitive boy with a dry sense of humor he’d probably inherited, along with his looks, from his father, an engineer. When they first met he’d been stick-thin and given to striped polo shirts, with a strange habit of plucking the front of those shirts nervously, over and over, fraying the fabric just above his right nipple. He’d grown out of this, and filled out in general; he was a young man now, affecting a vaguely punkish look, skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors and a wallet attached by a thick silver chain to his black studded belt. She wanted to tell him that you couldn’t be punk and play in a New Jersey youth orchestra. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry.
“Tyler,” she said, walking up to him.
“It’s okay,” he said immediately. He didn’t want to have to hear the apology, which would embarrass him all over again; he wanted to go straight past it, back into normalcy.
“I’m having a rough time,” she said brusquely. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
He nodded, looking down at his bike.
“I’ll see you, okay?”
He nodded again. As she was walking to her car, he called her name, and she was so rattled that it wasn’t until later, pulling into the driveway, that she realized he’d called her not
Ms. Gilson
but
Lisette.
She turned around.
“Whatever’s, like, bothering you—you deserve better.”
This made her laugh. “How would you know?” she said.
That night she couldn’t sleep. Dan snored lightly next to her, a sound as profoundly comforting as any she’d ever known. He was her husband, and almost more than anything else she wanted him to be a father. Her pelvis ached with such emptiness that she couldn’t stop palming it, soothing it, trying to ease its pain. She knew it was psychosomatic but it felt absolutely, unequivocally real. As real as hunger, or thirst, or life and death.
She’d made up her mind before she even knew what she was contemplating. It was like falling down a flight of stairs—no gap between the moment your foot slips and when you’re lying in a heap on the floor below.
This is what she did: at the next rehearsal, she smiled at Tyler. And he smiled back. Just like that, in the passage of one second, she knew she had him. Before a single word had been spoken, or a single gesture enacted, or a plan even hatched. And it was so easy. It turned out all the banks in the world were giving away free money, and all you had to do was ask.
Her body, now, was a cunning machine. It had its hunger and emptiness; it would be taking matters into its own hands. She let it go about its business, not stopping to ask any questions.
“What’s got you so happy?” Dan said to her that night, over dinner.
She looked at him in the candlelight, her sweetness, the love of her life. He was craggy and tired-looking, with bags beneath
his eyes. She saw his features overlaid not with the young man she’d first met in college but with the old man he would someday become.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just happy to see you.”
That night, in bed, she ran her hands through his hair, her fingertips tracing his shoulders and back, and coaxed him into sex. She had to believe that, as close as they were, as much as they meant to each other, some part of him had already entered her, was already inside.
After smiles, a little extra attention. Tyler seemed to be waiting for it, to know and accept what was happening. He stayed after rehearsal, packing up his instrument slowly, dropping his sheet music and studiously, laboriously rearranging the pages. She remembered this kind of unspoken agreement between people conspiring to be alone from the old days, so ancient now, before Dan. It had been ages since she took up a flirtation. But she still knew the deal, remembered how it was done. She, too, was slow, and they walked out together into the fall evening, and she offered him a lift. She realized that he’d purposefully stopped riding his bike to rehearsal just in case this would happen, and she felt a rush of gratitude so warm and intense that it was almost like love. He sat in the passenger seat with his long legs cramped, knees high and awkward, violin case tucked between his feet. Outside his house, he thanked her for the ride. He barely looked at her. And that was all.
But from there they built a routine together. Perfect collaborators, they brought a relationship into existence, and nursed it into the world. Soon he was the one she looked to when explaining a
concept, a beat, what she wanted, and he would nod. He was the first violinist, and she had him leading the strings in rehearsal while she worked separately with the woodwinds or percussionists. She relied on him. And he waited for a ride home and during that ride told her about his classes, his plans for college. He was a bright kid and had gotten into Princeton, so excited to be leaving home, and for all that entailed. What the other kids thought, if anything, she had no idea. If asked, she would have said he was a natural leader. She would have told his parents,
He’ll go far.
At the Christmas concert, the orchestra tackled the Tchaikovsky with shrieking abandon and labored gamely through the Hindemith in front of their families, who smiled dazedly until it was over, then started clapping a little too late. Afterward, she stood for a while chatting with Tyler and his parents. The mother was a bottle blonde, short, well preserved. The father, of whom Tyler was the spitting image, still had all his hair, had stayed trim, and seemed, when he laughed, to have good teeth.
In the car driving home, Dan wouldn’t look at her. Just before they pulled up to the house he said, “What the hell are you doing?”
She said, “Going home?”
“I mean with that father. Staring at him. Laughing your head off. Flirting.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
He parked. He still wouldn’t turn his head. “I’ve never seen you like that,” he said. “You’ve never acted like that before.”
She was defensive, angry, proud—and how perverse was that? Proud of her husband, who knew her well enough to sense, right away, that something was going on, though he couldn’t have been expected to figure out how low she’d sunk. “I was just being myself,” she said.
· · ·
There were no rehearsals over the holidays. On January 15, the first evening they came back, she slept with Tyler in the rehearsal room, on a table. There was no first kiss, only her hungry body and his teenage one, his thin biceps working, his angular hip bones cutting into her thighs, his skunky, hormonal smell mixed with the scent of Doritos and hair gel. It was so different from sex with Dan as to constitute a completely new operation, more like coaxing a squirrel out of your garage, everything jumpy, a little feral and uncontrolled. But she was patient and showed him how she wanted it done, same as conducting. The act itself was over very fast, with most of their clothes still on. To tell him not to say anything to anyone would have insulted his intelligence, so she didn’t.