The Paternity Test (32 page)

“About Deb’s life, I meant. Complications with Danny. Things from way before we ever met them.”

“And that’s an excuse? Why the hell should I care?”

“Right, that’s what I’m saying, hon, that—”

“No. You said I
should
. And give your ‘hon’ a rest. It’s not helping.”

I didn’t know if I should try again, or just keep quiet. What did I owe him more: Answers? Silence?

“Know what you said before?” I said. “That this wasn’t just a hook-up? You were right, okay? This wasn’t just routine.”

“Spare me, Pat. No one thinks their own affair’s routine.”

“No, but what I’m saying . . . it wasn’t just the sex. The sex was part of something more, okay? It had a point.”

“What, to mess up everything we’ve worked for?”

“The opposite, I swear! I know this must sound mental, but . . . maybe we were trying to work things out, you know? For everyone.”

Stu asked what the fuck that meant. What in the fucking hell?

So far I’d withheld most of the details of my cheating. Stu didn’t know, for instance, that I’d slept with Deb just yesterday. Didn’t know we’d done it without a condom. I should have seen (how could I not?) how damaging those specifics were. But I was desperate to prove to him that we’d been more than rash and ruttish, that we had acted partly in good faith. That was the crumbling handhold I still clung to.

Panicked, I set off on a babbling explanation, deeper and deeper into the muck, but I couldn’t seem to quit. I hoped—I prayed—that if I kept on talking, I’d buy time to clamber back to safety. The odds of any of my sperm getting through, I said, were tiny; the cup should have acted as a barrier. But if they did get through, I said, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Hadn’t Stu said that I should try, that it should be my turn now? The
goal
was what we cared about. The outcome, not the means. Wasn’t that what he himself had told me?

I was so caught up in my rush of explanation, trying to skim across its quicksand surface, I hadn’t yet assessed his reaction. His face was pale, his neck gone limp, his gaze loose and blunted. I had never seen him look so small.

“I know this sucks. I know,” I said. “Again, I’m so, so sorry. But practically speaking, looking ahead, where are we now, okay? Either she’s still
not
pregnant, which means things stay the same, or she
is
, in which case . . . well, in which amazing case we’ll have a baby—right, hon? A baby.”

He sat trembling, hand at his own throat.

“Ninety percent—ninety-nine—the baby would be yours,” I said. “And if it isn’t, who the hell would know? Not even us!
You’re
the dad, no matter what, you see? It’s what we’ve wanted.” That was what I’d meant, I said, by “working things out for everyone.” Just like what the ancient precept taught—he knew it, right? To act for someone’s beneft, even without his say-so, is good to do. Maybe it’s even better.

So quickly, so capably, he flensed my flabby logic: “But what about the frst time? The time you fucked before?”

Earlier, in my baby-stepping start at the confession, I had said my frst “real” sex with Debora had grown from solace: the day she got her period and learned she wasn’t pregnant.

“Fucking her then,” said Stu, “the day she was
least
fertile? Was
that
about ‘working things out for everyone’?”

I loved him too much, and loathed myself too much, to say a word.

“You’re full of shit,” he said. “Trying to rewrite history just to make yourself less wretched.” He glared at me as though I were ablaze, as though he wished I were. “And worse, that you thought it maybe
would
make you less wretched. Don’t you see? Are you really so fucked-up that you can’t see it? To not care if . . . no, to actually
try
to get her pregnant? A hundred times more wretched, Pat. More wretched.

“And,” he finished, spinning away, speaking over his shoulder, “your precious little ‘precept’—you know where that crap came from? From
Richard
. From his asshole of a rabbi.”

I got the same shove-off Richard had gotten, without the grope. “Out,” said Stu. “Get out of my house. Now.”

At least, I thought, he f nally saw the cottage as being his—a rueful joke I wanted to share but couldn’t. I left without arguing (I would have lost, and should have). I didn’t bargain about how long he wanted me away.

I went to New York, to Joseph. Who else could I face? Zack and Glenn, the Good Gays? No, I didn’t think so. And not Marcie and Erin, either, the ardent lesbian moms. I would have to tell them all, if not my trip’s cause, the fact that we had still not conceived. Their sympathy would smother me:
No baby yet? It’s hard
.

Hard? They didn’t know our kind of hard. The hard part, for them, had only been logistical, finding an egg or sperm to commandeer. To make a baby, yes, that had been hard for them. But not, as it was for Stu, for me, to make a
parent
.

I tried to call Debora from the bus, on my way down. Tried when we were leaving the Cape, and then again near Providence, a third time when we hit the New York line. She didn’t answer: angry at my betrayal, I was sure (assuming Danny had grilled her, compelled her to confess), angry at the collateral damage my dumbness had inflicted.

I deserved the silent treatment and any other penalty. But what if something worse was going on, to force her silence? What if Danny . . .

I didn’t even know what to envision. Please, Danny, I pleaded as the bus crossed Manhattan. Prove that you’re a better man than I.

All I’d said to Joseph was that Stu and I had fought, that I could really use a couch to crash on. “Oh, poor thing. Come,” he’d said. “As long as you want. Of course.”

I still planned to tell him just the outline, or not even. Tough enough to face him when he knew that Stu had kicked me out, but if he knew the details—that I had slept with someone else, and that the someone else had been our surro—Joseph would be withering, I could bet. The more I told, the more he’d turn it into
told you so
.

But something happened when I walked in and smelled his old apartment, where I had not set foot for two full years. A sharpness like the air above an ice-cold glass of vodka, a scent of
Pay attention! Don’t miss out!
This was the smell of my twenties: my great gay education. The smell of staying up till dawn—high on booze and coke—while Joseph showed me who I was and who I someday might be.

And now, here I was again, amid the old fraught totems. The first-edition
Streetcar
on the shelf, signed by “Tenn.” The water-buckled placard from the Continental Baths. The poster saying IGNORANCE = FEAR. On the mantel, a row of photos of Joseph and Luis: bow-tied at a Met premiere, shirtless in Southampton. Also one of the younger me: my would-be poet’s shag, my wide-pupiled, idealistic eyes.

Suddenly I was pouring forth my whole dark tale to Joseph. All the stupid, reckless things I’d done behind Stu’s back, the kinks of self-delusion that allowed me to excuse them, the wanting and the wanting and the wanting. I’d wanted Stu and more than Stu; loyalty and leeway. Now each want might cancel out another.

“What a fucking mess,” I said. “Why’d I tell Stu? Why? I thought I owed him honesty, and that would be enough. Or maybe, I don’t know, did part of me want to
punish
him? For all those times he slept with other guys?”

By now we had stretched out on the couch and lay there, spooning. I felt childish, wobbly. All my strings were snapped.

Joseph stroked me. “Hey, calm down, okay? Just relax.”

His touch felt so good: a chaste, paternal warmth. But I didn’t want to feel good; that’s not why I’d come. I had come to Joseph for the comfort of discomfort, the antidote to sentimental bullshit. “You were right,” I said. “All along. I should have listened.”

He held me tighter. “Right about what part?”

“We were never cut out for this. Not Stu and I, not any of us. Maybe it’s genetic, you know? If gayness is? You think? Maybe there’s a gene for settling down, being responsible, and gay men just . . . we just aren’t
equipped
.”

“Oh?” he said. “So what about the ones who are, like Zack and Glenn? Aren’t there hundreds—thousands—of guys like them?”

“Exceptions that prove the rule?” I tried, confused by his response. Hardly the gloating smugness I’d expected.

“The rule?” he said. “The rule that, by your lights, makes gay men ‘less than’?”

“No, not that. It’s not that we’re not good enough. Just different. We have our own culture,” I said. I gestured toward his bookshelves. His placard from the baths. His whole life. “Once we’ve lived more freely, you know—once we’ve seen we can—how are we supposed to ever go back to conformity? It’s like a kind of virus or something, that gets inside your cells. Changes the way your system works. You change.”

Joseph pulled his arm away, and stood up from the couch. Glanced at all his pictures of Luis. “It’s nothing like a virus,” he said. “A virus doesn’t
choose
. A virus doesn’t have a moral choice.”

“Shit, Joseph, I didn’t mean . . . you know I didn’t mean that.”

“Stop,” he said, “before you make a bigger ass of yourself.”

He strode into the kitchen and returned with a vodka rocks. He didn’t offer me one; I didn’t ask. The couch cushions threatened to close around me.

Joseph sat cross-legged on the floor, unguarded, humble. The cocktail might have been a cup of cocoa. “I’ve told you the story of how we met?” he asked. “Luis and I?”

Of course he had. A dozen times. I always liked to hear it. “Tell me again. You managed to steal him away from . . . was it Gielgud?”

“Well, that’s the quippy version, the one I tell at parties. Stole him away from being Gielgud’s
dresser
, is the truth. The night before the tour of
No Man’s Land
was leaving town. I was backstage, because I had a friend who worked the lights. I saw Luis, and we made eyes; I asked him back to mine; and we both knew, just knew, that this was it. In the morning, he called Sir John and told him he was quitting.” Joseph swirled his drink and sipped. The ice cubes smartly chimed. “But he had only
worked
for Gielgud—they’d never been romantic. That was one of the frst things I had asked. Because, you know, I may have been a slut, but not a home wrecker. And also not—never once—a cheater.”

Joseph was staring hard at me now. I sat up, knowing I had to. Knowing a man should take his lashes upright.

“Sure, I slept around,” he said. “Hundreds of guys. Who knows? But after Luis, how many others? Zero, Pat. Not one. You think I didn’t sometimes want to? Or didn’t have my chances? Yes, I know you look at me and only see ‘old maid,’ but believe me I was not. I was not. No, I stayed faithful because I’d told Luis I would. One of the many, many promises we made—and kept—together. And how do I know he kept them, too? I
trust
him.”

Almost twenty years since he had laid Luis to rest—but
trust
, Joseph had said. Not trust
ed
.

“‘Oh, we gays are different,’” he mocked. “‘We get too used to freedom.’ Baloney, Pat! We’re just as free to stick by our commitments. Gayness doesn’t exempt you from being
decent
.”

“Then why,” I said, “have you been so against what Stu and I’ve been trying? Every time I brought it up, you changed the goddamn topic. You hate the thought of gay men having kids.”

“Gay men having kids,” he said, “is fine. It can be gorgeous. But not just automatically. Not just any men. You and Stu, you can’t just press some magic ‘family’ button.” Joseph set his vodka tumbler down with great precision. “‘Gay men’ aren’t the ones,” he said, “who fucked this up, Pat.
You
did.”

The bus back to Hyannis was sold-out with summer travelers; by the time I boarded only one seat was available: in the last row, up against the bathroom. If the bus had air-conditioning, it didn’t reach this far, or not enough to counteract the steamy bodily odors that escaped every time the bathroom opened. For six overheated hours, I was wedged between the wall and a slumped, dozing woman—my metaphorical sweatbox of self-blame brought to life.

From Joseph’s I had called Stu and said again how sorry I was. Told him I was ready to make things right.

“Oh?” he’d said. “Make things right? Uh-huh.”

As he spoke, I’d heard him doing something—chopping vegetables? I envisioned him cooking dinner for one.

Wouldn’t we hear from Debora soon, I asked, with test results? Shouldn’t I be home for that? Shouldn’t we be together? I hoped he was hearing something new in my voice, more honest. In Joseph’s heat, I had tried to burn off the impurities. “Stu, I want to be with you,” I said.

Thunk thunk thunk
, his knife kept coming down. A deadened sound, hard but also hollow.

At last there was a pause. Stu exhaled deliberately. “If you want, fine,” he said. “Come back.”

The bus now approached the bridge to bring us to the Cape, passing a big blue-lettered sign: “Desperate? Call the Samaritans.” As a boy, I had found this sign—its location—baffling. Why here, of all places, would anyone feel distressed? For me, the bridge to the Cape was an all-but-holy passage, the entry point to a fun, unfettered world. (My parents had instructions that if I had fallen asleep on the drive, I was to be woken when we crossed it.) Today, though, I better understood a jumper’s impulse. To stare from on high toward the dark, unjudging water; to leap into an endless end of guilt . . .

Soon we reached Hyannis. I was the last one off: clammy, bleary, mouth and muscles stale. I stumbled from the station, looking for a taxi, praying there might still be one unclaimed.

Then I heard, “You’re going the wrong direction. Over here.”

There was Stu, leaning back against the Volvo’s hood. Looking a little rumpled—unshaven, in shorts and tank top—but still, to me, as striking as he would have been in uniform. His deep, commanding eyes. His crew cut, with its recent stars of gray around the sideburns.

I was used to being the one who waited for his return. All those years of fighting off the loneliness and jealousy, trying not to fret about his absence. But now, here he was, after everything, fetching me.
Collecting me at the station
was the phrase that came to mind. As if I had been scattered into pieces, then gathered up.