The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (12 page)

“You look like you might be.”

His charm is evident to me. The invitation to spar, to show myself a little. How winning it is for a man to openly admire a woman for her contrary, antagonistic nature. But this isn't a subject for intellectual flirtation.

I respond sternly: “For the sake of this conversation, let's give her the benefit of the doubt.”

He watches the tiny sulfur fumes that escape from his match in the ashtray, gauging the edge in my voice. “Look,” he says, weary in his distinctly cosmopolitan fashion, “All of a sudden she's trying to make us into some major love story because she's pregnant. I was honest with her from the beginning.”

But not with yourself, I think. All these tired phrases, tired as the people who utter them, believing love and only love will change them, with the right person they can be good. Shift of responsibility. I'm glad he's not foolish enough to believe the baby will be the right person. Maybe we're all lucky for that.

“So you told her you didn't want to get involved. You're too old, too incorrigible, too dented from the last go round. Right? So tell me, how do you make love without being involved?”

“Well, you are involved, but as a friend. She accepted that. She knew I couldn't be in love with her.”

What he says sounds like recitation, as though he's said it many times before but is ashamed in front of me to infuse it with the necessary authority. He says it to the stinking daisies.

I scoff. “You're the older man here. You know better than to believe that. The heart always wants more. Her love would heal you. She's too young to be jaded.” And I think to myself, you wouldn't have been attracted to her if she were as callous as you are.

“She's more mature than you think.”

I think.… I think she hid what was youngest in her. The girl who sat at this table last week let me make her sandwiches and pour her milk. Oh, I know what he might say. A mother's love debilitates the almost grown. But lovers let each other be little. Succor and solace. She doesn't know that yet. I see his hardened air of self-preservation though I don't know its causes.

“More mature than I think, but too young to know what she's doing? How can she be both?”

“Easy, mature about some things but not about others. C'mon, you're a mother.”

“Her mother. And I trust her judgement. Maturity doesn't mean she has to come to my conclusions.”

“Well, I'm too old for her anyway. I was just trying to be a mentor of sorts.”

He has a sudden need to press the bridge of his nose. “Of sorts,” I echo. “Now you're reversing the equation. You're not right for her. Too old. You're doing us all a favor. You fail to win my empathy, though it may be there's nothing you can do about that.”

I want to tell him that lovers don't believe in reasons and some have succeeded because of it. But I feel so invalid on the subject.

“I told her I was too old for her, that she ought to move on. I tried to make it easy for her to leave.”

“But you didn't leave.”

He shrugs, looking past the kitchen wall to something far off, his own life maybe. “I get lonely. I'm human.”

“You're human,” I say, nodding. “That much I'll concede. I'm going to make coffee.”

As I scoop coffee from the cannister, I feel suddenly what a relief it is to turn my back on him. My God, I'm good at it, but I'm trying not to make the same recommendation for Jess. The coffee maker gurgles like a swimmer going down and I look at Nigel who is staring out my window, evidently as relieved as I am. It's an ugly reflection, the two of us alike in this way. He would banish the baby; I would banish the father.
You're human all right, Nigel, but you don't know much about it yet
. He's one of these men with fancy dare devil hobbies like flying gliders in Nevada, deep sea diving in the Maldives or Azores. He keeps risking his life to try and know something about it, to feel it taken and given back in the same moment. Jess will know more than the moment, but he doesn't think of that. Only if he went through labor with her, would he know. And suddenly I am remembering the first sensations of pregnancy, the blastocyst burrowing in, the cramps that feel like sand crabs scuttling, widely dispersed diggings that occur all of a sudden, vanish, reoccur elsewhere.

“When did you see her last?” I ask, turning and leaning against the counter.

“A month ago. She said she hoped we could be friends. I told her I didn't think so. I remember now those little comments she made early on about not feeling well. She thought she had the flu. Bullshit. She said her periods were irregular. I don't buy it. She didn't have to miss a second period.”

“Deception is never admirable, but if she didn't intend to abort, what difference does it make now? More time to argue? Surely, in all your wisdom, you can see that.”

“She's had an abortion before,” he says, lighting another cigarette, looking at me carefully to see if he's shocked me again. He hasn't.

“You think that makes it easier? It doesn't.” I'm shouting now. I want to turn on him, but all I have in my hands is the dishtowel. I feel hard against them both now, the same way Jess has felt toward her father and me at times no doubt. “It makes me understand even less about what she was doing with you. You'd think at least a woman would change after an abortion, quit dating men who can't even talk about children. I told her that in high school. Perhaps you just seemed a safe bet, a
fatherly
age.”

I'm practically sneering at him, a safe distance away at the butcher block. He jumps up from the table and I think he's going to storm out, but instead he holds himself rigidly in front of a wall covered with kitchen art as though now were the time to take in some paintings. The blue one Jessica painted years ago with her feet; I hope he can see the tiny prints. I remember her pounding against me from the inside. She always came alive in me when I was swimming, full term in the heat of summer. I spent the early evenings at Tenant Lake, when the crowds were down and before the mosquitos came out. Arms over my head for the big slow strokes. I could breathe easier and she had more room. My lugubrious body suddenly buoyant, in full motion and full of motion as she whirled and churned inside me. I was swimming with the baby swimming inside me. And as I floated in duck weed and turned slowly beneath a white and yellow sky, I felt myself too, swimming inside a creature swimming. It seems important to tell him this, but I can't think of how.

He turns toward me at last, then looks up at the ceiling as though something there were waiting to save him.

“I know what you're saying, but I'm not in love with her. Okay?”

“I bet you're in love each and every time.” My voice is venomous and I'm afraid to pour him hot coffee. “She's perfect until you know her. Then the responsibility is all hers, for changing, ruining it for you.”

“Maybe you're right, but who I am shouldn't be any surprise to her. I wasn't exactly ‘the boyfriend.'”

“Everything is a surprise to her, believe me. How real the baby is, that he commands her course even this early. Sudden fatigue like a trap door. The need to lie down. She can't will her way anymore. And how much she loves the baby is a surprise to her. So why not you too? You could have surprised her.”

“No, I can't.” He sighs. His eyes are asking me not to hate him. “I didn't want her to have any false hope.”

“Well, she didn't give you any false ideas either, did she? You blame her because she's the first to know and the last one who can do something about it. Did you expect me to recommend abortion? This is my grandchild!” I stop to draw breath. When I say the word child, we both hush, as though we had been caught fighting. I reach for coffee mugs. The cabinet door comes unstuck abruptly and all the cups within rattle. I feel the cool cupboard air along the undersides of my arms and wish for all the world I could climb in there.

“You take sugar?” I ask at last.

He comes across the room looking flushed like a boy, suddenly mindful of his manners, shadowing me as I pour. I try to open a bag of macaroons but I can't pluck the tough cellophane between my fingers because it's so tight. “Do you mind?” he takes it from me and tears it with his teeth in a flash of white. “There,” and we both start stupidly arranging cookies on the plate. “I'm sorry,” he says, “I shouldn't have come empty-handed.” The words seem to reverberate on the air for a long time, but I don't rush in to stop it. We sit back down though neither of us wants coffee or cookies by now. I decide to satisfy my own curiosity in case it's my only chance.

“Was your own family so bad that you never want one?”

“No, no. It's nothing like that. I mean I probably look ridiculous saying this, but I do want a family … eventually … when I'm ready.”

When I speak next, it's with Jessica's words and I shock myself by sounding amused. “Nobody asks to be born. It's the first thing inflicted on you. You're blaming her because you feel like something is being
done to you
meantime she's watching her body and wondering
why me?
You could be kinder,” I say.

He taps one finger on the table methodically and watches it. When he looks up, I know he's about to make an admission that will cost him. “I could be a lot of things.”

We said goodbye not long after, with a peculiar sense of collusion. He asked me to call him if I heard from her, and to tell her that he wanted to talk. I asked him to call me if he heard from her, and to let her know I wanted to talk. We didn't shake hands, just backed away from each other. I'm not used to sharing concern and neither is he. When he walked away, he nearly wrung his neck on the clothesline but at the last minute he saw it and shoved it upward with one hand.

XI.

The young nurse at my father's office has an adenoidal voice and she wears a flower barrette made out of popsicle sticks. All the way down the hall, she talks over her shoulder but not to me. She makes quips to the other staff in their little side rooms with counters, and they all laugh jovially at some running joke. I catch a glimpse of my father, his profile as he stands at a counter talking into a hand-held recorder. His hair has silvered at the sides but in back it gleams like copper. “Ah, gosh,” the nurse says to me in the room, blowing her bangs off her forehead and wrapping the blood pressure cuff on. By the time she listens to my heart, her face is serious. “You worried about something, honey?” Then she leaves me with pages of questionnaire to fill in.
Family history of congenital defects such as cleft palate or club foot; mental illness such as schizophrenia or manic depression; other as in hypertension, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis; cardiovascular diseases as in strokes, or heart attacks; chromosome abnormalities as in Down's syndrome; genetic diseases as in cystic fibrosis, hemophilia
.

I fill in what I can, then write cryptically
reason I am here
. Such a range of mortality, oddly it affirms me even as it frightens me. There are reasons I need to tether myself at this end of the lifeline. I look for something in the room to tell me more about my father. The black vinyl stool, the utility sink, pump soap, boxes of white latex gloves, tray with swabs and speculum: all standard. The walls are greenish beige covered in overstylized water-color health department posters: your circulatory system, your nervous system, your respiratory system, your internal organs. Each poster shows the same man leaping for a volleyball: Mr. Circulatory, Mr. Respiratory, Mr. Nervous, Mr. Intestine. I don't mind the cross section views where the man and woman look like their front halves fell off exposing male and female reproductive systems, but it's getting to be close quarters with the peeled clone men.

I almost want to put on the gown, let my father examine me so I can feel his hands upon me, as though there might be some similarity between how he would have touched me as a baby and how he would touch me now as a stranger. Doctor's hands have to be protective, deliberate, gentle. Yet he chose to be a doctor so those qualities are also simply the man and not the professional. I'm afraid I will close my eyes if I let him touch me and make a sound in my throat. My head rolls back at the thought and something catches my eye. Pictures on the ceiling, above the examining table. Birds—crimson cardinals and yellow finches, bright flittings across a swallowing green—somewhere to look when you lie there. A way for your mind to take flight. So he thinks of these things.…

The door opens and in he comes. His eyes are green-brown with yellow behind them, the color of an algae bloom backlit by the sun. Like my own. Introductions over with, the official ones anyway, he leans back on his heels and reads my chart. I wish his pallor were less pasty but I'm glad to see he's still lean, wiry even—he'll grow old stooped and stiff of gait but out walking, bird watching maybe. “Okay,” he says, with a dip in his voice, to alert me. I wish I could float in a small bubble behind his head for the day, simply observe him, see where our mannerisms and movements match. There's no explaining my pleasure in this. Evidently, he's asked me a question and I've completely missed it. He sets down the chart and squints at me for a moment but doesn't repeat it.

“Are you sure you haven't been in before? Maybe when you were a child?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, you look familiar anyway,” he says jocularly, as he turns on the faucets over the sink.

“I should.”

It's odd the way anger rises in me when he addresses me directly. I don't want him to alter this moment of discovery where he is all mine and doesn't know it. If I could, I would shrink him in a children's story and keep him in a glass box.

“You what?” A wry, little smile creeps to his lips. He's going to play it cool, but he's perked up with interest. Apparently, he likes oddity.