The Paternity Test (3 page)

There I stood, abandoned, a hundred percent un-high. Had Stu and the Latino made a plan to go hook up? Was that why he was zipping off, without me? Or did he just want to be alone, away from me? I tried to keep dancing but my feet were like a leper’s, decomposing with every little step. I didn’t want Stu to catch me searching through the crowd for him, and so I bent my head and closed my eyes.

After fifteen minutes (time was sharp and strict again; I had checked and double-checked my watch), I went off to see if I could find him. He wasn’t at the front bar or the back bar or the balcony. Not by the columns we had sometimes used as meeting points.

I did find the other guy, the acne-scarred Latino. Leaning against the wall outside the bathroom.

Brine on my tongue, acid up my throat. Everything burned. “Remember the guy,” I said, “who you danced with? The pilot?”

He cocked his head, smiling, with a look of satiation. “Why?” he said. “You know him?”

A decent question.

What did I want to ask this fellow? If he had just had sex with Stu? And, if so, what the sex had been like? But no, what I wanted more to ask was what had
Stu
been like? The new Stu, who’d formed himself so pointedly apart.

How pathetic would that be? Asking a stranger to tell me what my lover was truly like.

What, then, could I ask?
Where is he?

The guy’s skin was shining, his sweaty nut-brown skin. Jealousy was a fuse alight within me. I battled a desperate urge to lift my hand and touch him, this creature whom my distant Stu had touched.

I didn’t think I’d ever felt such shame. I said, “Forget it.”

Could you
decide
to want kids?

Whether to have them: that was a choice. And when, and with whom. But
wanting
them? Wasn’t that just an ore you had within? At least that’s how it was for me: not chosen but discovered, uncovered. At first I saw just glimmers, gold flecks in the dross. Then, with every passing year, more glow, longer veins. The mother lode was everywhere inside me.

Was Stu’s desire for kids like mine? Doubtful, but who could say? He was so good at willing himself and making it seem like wanting.

The first time I looked at him and thought what kind of dad he’d be was during one of our early trips, to Prague. We had spent a chastening afternoon touring Josefov, the remnants of the old Jewish ghetto. In borrowed yarmulkes we padded through the hushed, haunted sites: the cemetery, where graves were jammed in groups like panicked captives; a synagogue whose walls teemed with names of slaughtered Jews.

We’d planned next to find a shop mentioned in our
Rough Guide
, where Stu hoped to buy some old posters (he coveted a Czechoslovakia State Railway placard from the ’30s that depicted Prague Castle), but now, as we walked down the hill to Old Town Square, our destination embarrassed me: too frivolous. And hell, if goyish
I
felt that way, how much more must Stu, who knew that but for God’s good grace—or probably mindless luck—one of the corpses might have been his father’s.

And yet, when you leave a place of doom and human cruelty, aren’t you also sometimes pricked by weird, euphoric wildness? A sense of
Life is short, let your hair down
.

A Czech boy beckoned Stu just then, and Stu returned his flirt. I thought,
Oh, is
this
how Stu will cope?

He wasn’t like the hustlers we had seen at night, in New Town: slicksters with their polished porno come-ons. This boy was much younger—fifteen, sixteen, tops? Grubby at the neck, dressed in ratty castoffs, so skinny that his clothes resembled rags caught on barbed wire.

“Nice,” he said. “Make feel nice, yes, yes? Okay?”—the words all diced up by his accent. He named a fee equal to the price I had seen at the airport for a carton of Camels.

Stu, without consulting me, said, “Come! Come with us.” He hooked the boy’s belt loop, pulled him close.

Telling the story later, in New York, I’d draw this moment out: my anger and confusion (
How could Stu not even
ask
me?
), my fear that the kid had hidden cronies who’d attack us. Plus, my sudden heartbreak at discovering this shady side to Stu—a man who’d exploit a teenage boy! More and more I’d lay it on, to heighten the coming twist: Stu just wanted to take the poor kid in.

His name was Mirek, and I had guessed too old: he was fourteen. After his parents died—a crash on the D5 highway—he’d lived on a beet farm with his uncle. (We pieced the tale together with a dictionary and pictograms; Mirek had already spent most of his English.) But then his uncle caught him with a boy—naked, rubbing—and kicked him out of the house, just like that. For six months he’d lived in Prague, begging, turning tricks, squatting in a vacant tool-and-die plant.

Stu let him move in with us, the three days we had left, and sleep on a rollaway in our room. He fed (and fed and fed) the kid, and bought him a winter coat, but nothing gladdened Mirek more than the Mets cap Stu gave him, which Mirek wore rapperishly raked.

I had never seen Stu be so trusting, so patient, so willing to revise all his plans. Mirek responded touchingly, softening by the hour. Walking through the sooty streets, he loved to mother-hen us, steering us from blocks he thought too dodgy. At night he would kiss us both, chastely, on the cheeks, then dive into zealous, boyish sleep.

A three-day-long threesome, but not of sex. Of sharing. (Part of me almost might have said
salvation
.)

Maybe Stu did more harm than good, by raising Mirek’s hopes. Maybe he should have marched him to the Children’s Welfare office, and sat there till they came up with a plan. But here was the thing: Stu was not behaving based on logic; his prudent, pilot’s self was put on hold. Instead, he was guided by a fierce, blazing instinct to protect the boy—to
give
, and give
right now
.

I could remember thinking,
That’s the part of parenthood you can’t fake
.

Inevitably, though, we left Mirek and flew back to New York. Stu gave him some cash; what else could he do? For years, every Christmas, he sent more.

Occasionally, after Prague, he mused about
what ifs
. Going back and nabbing Mirek and flying him home to live with us, enrolling him in the Harvey Milk High School? Our place was already tiny enough—a coop—for just us two, especially since I’d left my in-house writing gig at Educraft and now did all my work for them from home. “But maybe,” said Stu, “we’ll build a Murphy bed inside the closet . . . or maybe we could find a bigger, cheaper place? In Brooklyn?”

He talked with great sincerity, but it was all just talk. Stu was still too married to his footloose, no-strings life, still too happy reaching for the low-hanging kind of happy.

He didn’t get serious about having a kid until his sister’s news.

Rina had bragged since toddlerhood of the huge brood she would rear, to rectify the family’s rotten fate. Their father, Walter Nadler, said the clan had been tenacious—“needlers,” as the family name suggested—but Walter’s sister and brother, his four teenaged cousins, had all been turned to ash at Treblinka.

Stu could always taste that ash (that was how he talked of it), growing up in Walter Nadler’s household: dense, smothering lungfuls of compulsion. The weight would have sunk him if it weren’t for Rina’s promise to their parents, after Stu came out as gay:
Shush, I’ll give you grandkids till they’re crawling out your ears!

Things had looked good recently: she’d married Richard Feinberg, a man who absolutely wanted kids. Three, in fact: “A triangle is the strongest shape,” he’d say. “Knock one side, the others hold it up.”

They gave themselves a year of “just us” bliss (or so I guessed), then buckled down into baby-making mode. At Labor Day, when we all shared a house at Seaside Heights, the two of them conspicuously kept heading for the bedroom, at all hours, to—wink, wink—take naps. But at the next family klatch, at New Year’s, in Manhattan, the news was that there wasn’t any news. “Can’t complain,” said Richard bravely. “A few more rolls in the hay . . .”

Six more months of nothing, though, and Rina sought a doctor, who asked if sex was painful, if lately she’d been cranky. “Trying and getting nowhere? Of course it hurts,” she told him. “Don’t you think
you’d
be cranky, too?”

The doctor ran some tests and returned a diagnosis: premature ovarian failure. “A few women with POF—5 percent?—get pregnant. With your levels? I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Rina asked if her eggs could be harvested, at least.

“Well, but see, there aren’t really eggs left to be harvested. The point is that you started with too few.”

“I wanted,” she said later, “to shove the point right up his ass.”

Stu doused his grief, as usual, with dark humor. Double whammy, he told me, for the dying-out Nadlers: one child has POF, the other is a poof.

But the humor, we both knew, was an overcompensation. And so was his ensuing bender, a flurry of online hook-ups that he plowed through with fatalistic haste—like someone in a high-speed chase who nears the cop-car barricade and wildly, for an instant, floors the gas.

This was the spree that led me to plan that awful Roxy night.

After the Roxy, I told Stu of my sickening beggar’s shame: wanting to ask a stranger for some scrap of who Stu was. I told him that I couldn’t afford to feel that way again, that if I did, I’d have to think of leaving.

“But Pat,” he said. “You know me better than anyone in the world. Better than maybe I know myself, I honestly think. Believe me. So please: don’t give up on me. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t want to give up. I wanted not to want to. But if I closed my eyes, the feelings all came back: alone in the club, that nausea of desertion.

Only a few weeks later, in bed, before sleep, Stu pressed close and cupped my naked shoulder. “What if,” he said. “What if
we
had a baby?”

It caught me by surprise, as did my almost immediate inclination to say yes.

“Of course there’s a million things to figure out,” he said. “And most of the burden would fall on you, I know, since you’re at home. But I’d be here as much as I could. And maybe my folks would, too. People do it. People work it out.”

Whether to have a baby together was probably not the question that I should, at that moment, have been asking. More reasonable was whether to
stay
together. But Stu seemed convincingly to have come to the end of something: not just one particular binge, but the whole phase, the frantic, fruitless search. Rina’s diagnosis seemed to change him almost physically, as if the capability that withered in his sister had somehow been transplanted into him. He looked . . . how could I say it?
More full
. His chest, his face.

Continuing the Nadler line was now, he felt, his duty. “Actually, more than a duty, though,” he told me. “More like a privilege. Same as how I felt on my bar mitzvah.”

“But Stu,” I said. “You don’t believe in Judaism. Did you ever?”

“Not the, you know . . . whatever, the stuff about God. But standing there, saying the words my father had said, and
his
father? It’s almost like I hadn’t learned the prayers:
they’d
learned
me
. Hard to describe. A bigness, you know? It’s bigger than just
my
feelings.”

He said he finally understood the word
reproduction
: he dreamed of seeing the family features reproduced again. The thick hair, the forceful Nadler nose.

Here, then, was our difference: keeping his family going was the gist, for Stu, of fatherhood; for me it meant inventing a family
separate
from my old one, showing myself (and everyone else) that I could be a parent—better at the job than my own folks.

Stu wanted to
father
a child, and I wanted to
raise
one. Couldn’t our goals happily coincide?

My friend Joseph was less sanguine: “How about an
imaginary
baby, like
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?
You could still fight about it, but no diapers.”

I’d gone to see him at Educraft, where he was the managing editor. Joseph was making espresso for a red eye in the kitchen. Keyboards in the main room clacked like hamsters’ wheeling feet.

“But I’ve been wanting kids,” I said. “I’ve told you that already.” I mentioned Zack and Glenn—my first gay-father friends—and Milo, their magnetic little son. Zack was white, Glenn was black, and they’d made Milo mixed: Glenn’s sperm plus a Caucasian donor’s egg. The boy had bewitching eyes, a sepia complexion like someone in an old family photo. “Every time I’m with him,” I said, “I crave one of my own.”

“Yes, but you and
Stu
? I wouldn’t have thought.”

Joseph and Stu, I’d had to accept, were not the best of pals. Stu complained (and not without a measure of justification) that Joseph’s sense of humor was a trick birthday candle: amusing at first, but pretty soon you’re desperate to put it out.

But Joseph had been my fairy godfather since I’d first hit New York. He’d landed me my job and my rent-controlled apartment, and took it upon himself to be my one-man homo Harvard: teaching subjects from literature (Isherwood, Capote) to geography (the city’s cruisiest corners). Joseph, who’d outlived his lover, Luis, and two-thirds of the friends in their address book, had affection to spare, and I was glad to take it.

Lately I’d confided in him my growing spousal doubts. He knew all about Stu’s extracurriculars.

“What if Stu continues with his wanton ways?” he said. “And you’re barefoot and pregnant, as it were.”

“I don’t think he will,” I said. “He’s changing. This will help.”

Joseph downed his red eye in a single shuddering gulp. “Having a baby to save the marriage? Yawn.”

Fate then gave another little nudge. This time,
my
sisters.

Sally and Brenda, with whom I’d been sharing our parents’ cottage, announced that they wanted to sell the place. They had never spent as much time there as I, and had less at stake in its upholding—maybe because they both had their own conventional families now (square holes in which they’d safely nestled their square selves), and didn’t dread the judgment of our old-guard parents’ ghosts.