The Paternity Test (28 page)

Debora shut the magazine, as if to shield its model, as if we might offend her sensibilities. “And you and Stu. You’re still . . . you are satisfed?”

“Our sex life? It’s good,” I said. “Especially lately. Yes.”

“Then why?” she said. “You still want more? I don’t understand.”

Did I want more? I guessed I must. I wasn’t sure why, either. “For gay guys, it’s different,” I said, slinging the old excuse. “We don’t necessarily expect one partner to give us everything. Know what I mean?”

Her face was like fogged glass.

“Okay, well, with two men there’s . . . without a woman’s taming—or, no, that’s not, not
taming
. . .” My tongue was in a twist. I hadn’t spouted the party line in eons. “When sex isn’t ever about babies, it sort of frees you. It doesn’t have the same sense of consequence. And that means you can sleep around—this is how the theory goes—without threatening the basis of your marriage. Improving it, even, maybe, because, you know, you’re more contented.”

Debora pinched her chin. Her eyes got small and frosty. “
This
is like that?
I
am?” she said. “I am less of ‘consequence’?” She picked up the magazine and tossed it.

“Jesus, no. Of course not, Deb. Come on,” I said. “Come on.”

The space where the magazine had lain was darker, dustless—its cleanness like a haughty accusation.

“No, the truth,” I said. I owed it to her, fnally. “The truth is that, with Stu and me, things weren’t all that easy. The theory I just told you? That was what
he
argued. But it caused lots of problems between us. Back in New York, you know?” I wanted to stop, but knew I had to abrade another layer. “Stu was hooking up with strangers, more and more—too many. It didn’t have to do with me, he said, but how could it not? I mean, he was setting our life aside, that’s what it felt like. I felt those strangers knew him more than I did. That was part of why we moved up here, you know, to work on ‘us.’ And now, ironically . . . look at
me
.” I tried to make my most forgivable face.

Debora said, “I’ve never.”

“What—had sex with a stranger?”

She shrank. “Someone other than Danny. Not since we were married.”

I couldn’t tell how much of her disquiet came from guilt, and how much from her shock at guilt’s weakness to have stopped us. Plus, I guessed, she must have felt upended by my confession, as I had been when she’d made hers, about her life with Danny. Was I supposed to follow her lead, and say I’d understand, now, if she no longer wanted to be our surro?

I reached across and cupped her hands. “Maybe this wasn’t right,” I said. “Maybe nobody else would comprehend it. I mean, do
we
?”

She took her hands back, blew into her palms. She didn’t answer.

Perhaps she expected me to make a solemn pledge. Never to sleep together again? To do it again, and soon? How could I abide by either vow?

The jab of such uncertainty had left me feeling charley-horsed. The longer we stayed, the stiffer I was getting.

“We should talk. We have to,” I said. “About what we are doing. But maybe this is enough for now. You think? Is this enough?”

She looked down at the table, as if to study something: a crystal ball, a map to safer ground.

“We
will
,” I said. “We’ll talk.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

We sat, then, silent, in the smoky, virile haze. The marsh made muffled grassy tickings.

At last I rose and paced the shack, gathering up our trash. Next I fetched the magazine, returned it to its spot. This felt like a kind of restoration.

“Should we?” I said.

“Yes,” said Debora. “I am ready now.”

We squeezed through the secret shiplap door.

The sun and sand:
too much
. After the shack, they stung. The air provided an antidote—its pure, consoling smell. A primary smell, as basic as red or blue.

The shack was quickly lost, and all we saw was wildness: sedge and sky and shadow-stippled dunes. We didn’t talk, but walking was its own conversation: one of us would drift toward the road’s unrutted center; the other would respond, stepping closer. In and out, but never quite together. I saw a scratch at her neckline (mine? could I have made it?); I didn’t know if I should point it out.

I hit a soft patch, wavered, and Debora grabbed my waist, propping me till I could gain my balance. Then she joined her hand with mine and set our arms to swinging. Recalling the couple from earlier—the woman’s struck-rich look—I wished they were here to witness us.

Soon we reached the parking lot. At Debora’s car, we lingered— technically not quite hugging, but close enough that I could smell her hair, which smelled familiar. It smelled just like . . . no, I couldn’t place it.

She leaned away. Tapped my chest. “You,” she said. “
You
.” Still she couldn’t seem to drop my hand.

Not that I’d have wanted her to. I wanted to hold and hold her. To stand here as the tide came up, receded, rose again.

At last, though, we had to part. She stepped into her car, and backed it out, and left without a wave.

Then I knew.
Herself
: that’s what her hair smelled of. Nothing more or less than her own scent.

Well?” Stu asked as soon as he came home.

I felt stupid. I stared at him and thickly said, “Well what?”

“What do you mean, ‘Well what’? Did she call? Any news?”

“Oh. Oh, right. Yeah. Called this morning.” As if Debora’s news had been nothing but a sidelight. Was that what she and I had turned it into?

“I guess she didn’t . . .”

“No,” I said.

“No. You would’ve told me.” He headed for the liquor shelf and poured a double Dewar’s. His feet looked like wheels in need of tightening. “Great,” he said. “Fantastic, then. This is just ideal.” He held the Scotch underneath his nose, like smelling salts. “My folks are f nally ready—starting to be ready—to think about accepting what we’re doing. They even want to come and meet Debora. And sure, I can picture it now: ‘Mom, Dad, meet the woman who still hasn’t—’”

“But Stu, come on. It’s not as if it’s
Debora’s
—”

Damn. Too late.

Stu’s humiliation pitched its black tent above us. “Oh, I see,” he said. “It’s me? Not man enough?” He chuckled but it sounded more like someone being sick. He toasted with his Scotch, tossed it back.

What had I been thinking? I had to stop. I had to. No more seeing Debora now. Not us two, alone. No more playing dumb with my own conscience.

But even in berating myself, I had to picture Debora.
Never do
x
or
y
again
brought
x
and
y
alive. Her soft mouth. The freckles on her chest.

Fantasies rose; I gouged them with the chisel of remorse. It worked . . . at least, till the next time.

She didn’t make things easy. She called. Whispered, “Can we?”

No, I told her. We shouldn’t.

No, she said. You’re right.

But three days later, she called again: “One more time? We can’t?”

The miracle was that I managed to resist. Not from being certain that to see her would be bad but from being less certain than I should have. I wanted my resistance to provide some reward—a feeling of proficiency or honor. So far, all I’d felt was more at sea.

That, and more mortifyingly lustful.

I dealt with this by masturbating, often twice a day: rushed, expunging sessions in my workroom. I understood the term
self-abuse
.

I surfed the Web, to sites I had condemned when Stu used them. On Craigslist, it wasn’t the raunchy sex dates that compelled me but the melancholic “Missed Connections” postings:

I knew I’d act on no one’s ad. Why, then, was I looking? I was appalled and comforted by all that lonely hunger.

I felt, strangely, closer to Stu. Was I now feeling what he had felt? Longing for something not much more specific than longing itself ? Well, that wasn’t wholly true; I longed for Debora, specifically. But also for the pleasures she provoked in me, apart from her: the sense that I could do and be my own thing, undefined.

I thought of Becky, my old flame, and Googled for her picture. (Was Debora just a substitute for her?) Her name was way too common: almost a million hits. I added
Manitoba
, then
bagpipes
, and there she was, her hair shorter, tinselly with gray. On either side, her sons (I presumed), in mustard plaid: toothy boys with mild blue eyes and frizzy ginger curls, inherited from a redhead dad, no doubt. Instinctively I tried to subtract his genes and add my own. Maybe then the boys would have my blonder, straighter hair; maybe they would boast my Faunce cheekbones . . .

But no, I didn’t pine for what I might have had with Becky. I didn’t want Debora as a rerun. As much as I craved a justification for what I felt for her, a grand theory to make it all make sense, maybe the truth— so commonplace, so rattlingly mundane—was simply that I wanted her, and wanted her to want me.

How could wants so simple cause such awful complications?

Meanwhile Stu, upstandingly, was facing his disappointment head-on. Instead of moping, he was giving voice to his emotions. “I know I’ve been a pain to get along with,” he admitted. “I hope you know it’s my own sadness, and nothing to do with you.”

He even called his parents for a forthright conversation. “I explained,” he told me later, “that Debora hasn’t—or, well, that
we
. . .”

“Good,” I said. “It’s good to let them in. Let them help.”

“Know what my father told me then?” he said. “That this is
his
fault.”

“What, that we can’t—”

“Me and Rina both. ‘The Nadler curse.’ Dad’s just sure it’s all because of him.”

We were in bed. Midnight. An underwater darkness.

“He thinks it’s God’s punishment,” said Stu. “For surviving.”

“But Stu, come on, that’s absolutely crazy.”

“I said that! I said why would God have spared my dad, just to make his kids a dead end?”

The wind made a sound like someone sandpapering the night. The blackness of the sky through the window screen’s web was lighter than the blackness of our room.

“You’re not, Stu,” I said. “You’re not a dead end.”

He coughed up a throaty, mirthless “Ha.”

“Seriously, hon. You don’t know. Not for sure, at least. The doc said your counts were normal, right?”

He didn’t answer.

A distant car tore past: the sound of someone hurried. Rushing away, before his sudden absence would be noted? Rushing home, to someone’s loving arms?

July third, driving back from errands in Hyannis (bags of ice, Uncle Sam napkins), I suffered another spasm of temptation. I pictured myself veering from the smoggy line of cars—a left here, another left, a right, and there I’d be—and pulling up stealthily at Debora’s. Check for Danny’s truck (gone!), call her to the door. Paula at home? (Oh please, be at preschool.)

Now would be the perfect time, my alibi impeccable: Stu himself had drafted me to head off into town, to shop for tomorrow’s holiday bash, while he would stay at home, awaiting his sister and Richard, due up from Long Island any minute.

I’d see Debora tomorrow: her surge, the next insem. Tomorrow or the fifth was what we fgured. But wouldn’t it be better if I saw her now, alone? Inoculated with pleasure, I would then come home, immunized against my in-laws’ onslaught.

I could do it.
A left, another left, a right
...

I’d passed the turn, but pulled off now and idled on the shoulder. A flag-draped Hummer’s driver—partying a day early—hurtled by, giving me thumbs up. I didn’t lift my fingers from the wheel.

I was recalling the sound of Stu, the other night:
dead end
. Recalling how that conversation had finished. I had said, “You want to get another sperm count done? Or see another specialist? Or . . . something?” Stu had slowed his breathing,
in
and two and
out
and two: someone who didn’t know him well would think he was asleep. But I had still felt him there, his straining brain, awake, telling me yes by not telling me no.

That was what I thought of now, idling on the shoulder, weighing whether to make the turn for Debora’s. Late-day sun was burning down; the ice I’d bought would melt. Another car of early revelers hollered.

A trooper stopped behind me, approached with hand on holster. “Sir, is there a problem here? Anything I can help with?”

No, I told him.

“All right, then, get moving.”

Richard’s Porsche was angled across our driveway, wasting space, its yellow sheen, in full-on sun, redundant. Someone had keyed a scratch into the hood.

I loaded my arms with grocery bags, and ambled toward the house, giving myself time to practice niceness: Ask him how his work is going. Beg to hear a joke.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” I called jauntily, going in. “A certain someone gave me twenty zillion things to do. How was your drive? Traffic is a killer.”

But here was Stu, rushing at me, panic in his eyes. “Shh, shh! Give me the—just wait, okay? Keep quiet.” He took the bags, set them on the counter.

“Why? What’s going on? I saw the car. They’re here?”

“Yes, they’re here, but—” He pantomimed an incoherent message. “The guest room. They went in, won’t come out.”

“Maybe they’re just, you know. Kissing and making up.” I thought of them at Seaside Heights, at Labor Day some years ago, stealing away incessantly to “nap.”

“No,” said Stu. “She was crying.”

“When?”

“When they got here. Her eyes were just these red, puffy
nothings
.”

“And they didn’t say . . .”

“No. Just ‘Hi,’ and ‘Please excuse us.’ And now they’ve been in there half an hour.”

Which turned into forty minutes, forty-five, fifty.

Long silent gaps would pass, and then a burst of voices: smothered shouts, like someone buried alive. Stu, after one such burst, knocked. “You guys okay?” The question was absurd—of course they weren’t okay. I could hear Stu’s hopes hissing out.