Gould

h his promises and she seemed so disappointed and pissed; well, the hell with her, who needs her? who needs any of them, just as he told her, she said “Oh no, it’s happened, the same thing when I got pregnant with John; I know you don’t want to talk to me or even look this way and think I’m nothing less than a pompous priss, but I just felt the tiniest kind of detonation inside me and several small aftershocks before it stopped; believe me, Gould, I’ve conceived,” and she touched his back and he looked at her and saw she was serious and said “Now that’s nuts, much more than anything you said or did before,” and she said “Practically what Harry said when I told him it a few weeks later about John, but I’m sure it’s happened with millions of other women and lots of them I bet even recognized what it was,” and he said “Girl or boy?” and she said “You sneer but if there’s a calculably different sensation for a girl, then it’s a boy,” and he said “Don’t spare my feelings, I want to know now: Down’s syndrome or completely free of it or anything like that?” and she said “That wouldn’t be funny to a lot of people,” and he said “That’s true, nothing to laugh about, and we should talk later about what you just felt, this is serious, but I’m feeling dozey after our sex and for the next half hour would like to be good for nothing else but a nap,” and she said “Just one or two more things if I’m right about this. As I already told you, John could use a sibling now more than later and if it’s a boy then even better for him and I think easier for me and certainly fewer clothes to buy — I’m being facetious there — and I know I want another child some day so I might as well get it over with now. And you seem, other than for a few crank shortfalls, as if you have good genes and the chances are that between us we’d produce a healthy, reasonably nice-looking intelligent human being. Of course I’ll have to tell Harry, something I’d do anyway about us — that’s the agreement we have, not to keep it a secret for more than a month, though he’s always gotten more incensed than I over the disclosure — but didn’t think there’d be a fertilization to divulge too, and by then a moderately defined embryo. He’s even said he wouldn’t mind our having another child if it resulted by accident, and if it came to it he’d have no problem with it being from someone else. He’s very fair that way,” and he said “It sure isn’t how I’d take it if you were my wife. I’d throw you the hell out,” and she said “Maybe that’s why if I were single again, something I’ll never be unless Harry dies or leaves and doesn’t return for several years or tells me he wants to remarry and actually does or suddenly begins to repeatedly beat on John or me, I wouldn’t think of marrying you or even continuing with you for any extended length of time for fear it’d wreck my marriage,” and he said “Well, that gets me off cheap, for here I was about to do the right thing, which I had no desire to, and that’s to propose to you,” and she said “Some funny joke?” They made up after he awoke. He said “I’m sorry but when I said I’d throw you the hell out I meant that if I were married to you I’d never cheat and would expect the same from you,” and she said “How do you know? And you can see how my phlegmatism and dispassionate — but you don’t want those sort of words, so my . the way I’m . . look, I can’t think of simpler ones this moment for what I usually am that can so easily nettle a man or make him feel he has the license to skirtchase and frig whomever he wants to. But since I don’t want to battle after only a day as if we’ve been married several years and also because of this new complication that I for one believe we’ll have to face eventually, I accept your apology. Now, if you want to make love again — the carnal kind — for I suspect that’s what you’re building up to and perhaps why you apologized so generously . .”—“Not so though I wouldn’t mind having sex.”—“. . then okay, but if it’s no hassle getting dressed I’d like you to go out and buy a packet of the most expensive unscented nonlubricated condoms to lessen the chances of conception in case I was wrong about what I felt before; this way will also make it easier, if you’d still like to, to come in deep as you want from behind.” He came over the next morning soon after her friend had left for work and when she thought John would still be asleep in the guest room. John walked into the living room while he was on top of her on the couch and he quickly pulled out and rolled off her and said “Oh my gosh, excuse me, this is terrible,” and tried covering his genitals with his hands and she said “What are you doing? don’t panic, keep yourself exposed and your erection erect if you still have one till the normal time it’d take for it to go down and for you to put your underpants on. He’s seen us so let him think what we’re doing is entirely natural and not something to be hidden or feel guilty or discomposed about or he can be troubled by it for years and possibly into his own sex life. And it isn’t as if he’ll be telling his father anything Harry won’t already know. I don’t keep a journal of what takes place but I will remember the main events when I inform him.” She drove to Madison the day after, he didn’t hear from her or write, and two months later . but why didn’t he? Thought if she wrote him first he’d have permission to write back or she’d tell him where to write if not to her home — he had her address — and perhaps even how he should address the envelope, maybe by some other name or care of a friend or something. Maybe she wouldn’t tell her husband what happened in New York but if she did he didn’t want to make it any harder for her with him. They’d talked about it before she left. He said he likes her a lot, probably loves her, anyway, he feels very good about her, loves being with her and doesn’t want to stop seeing her, and she said “I won’t reveal my feelings for you. Obviously, they’re fairly good or I wouldn’t have slept with you. If it was just sexual frustration that motivated it, I think that would have been the end of it after the first time, as I’m satisfied easily that way and one time can hold me for a week, even without the end all punch. Let’s see what develops in my belly before we make any plans. If nothing does then I don’t see why we can’t hook up someplace for a few days, and without John; Harry’s done it several times with his girls and once for a month. Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?” and he said he never had any desire to: “You get up to the edge and look into it and what do you see: an enormous ditch and trickle of water winding through it and ruddy rock and dry brush and stuff and maybe some Western-garbed people on donkeys lumbering down a narrow path, and I could never afford it,” and she said “It’s much more, yours is just travelogue, but all right, then I can drive east or even fly here, but let’s wait and see. One day . .” and two months later (he’d look for a letter from her almost every time he opened his mailbox) she wrote saying everything’s been confirmed except the gender, she’s already started to show but only a bump, and rather than risk never getting pregnant again and for all the other reasons she gave she’s going to go through with it; “Harry’s more than for it, he’s delighted with the prospect and also that he isn’t the biological father. He might be an egomaniac some ways but he doesn’t think there’s anything genetically useful, especially not his narcissism and cockiness, he can pass on except his intellect, and I told him you’re his equal in that regard and you’re substantially more creative and artistic than he, which he wants more of in his progeny. He said to convey his congratulations to you and that unlike me he hopes it’s a girl,” baby’s due in March. He wrote back saying that, clubby as this insipid remark sounds, he sends his best wishes to Harry too and appreciates his temperance — how ‘bout dat for a word? Thanx, Roget — in the matter and if there’s anything he can do for them regarding the pregnancy and birth, to let him know. He doesn’t have much cash socked away and Harry, only a teacher though he hears law professors do okay, must still be in a much better financial position than he, but he’d be willing to part with a little if they needed it, and please keep him informed. He thinks of her fondly and has missed her, he’s sure she’s not interested to hear, at least a few minutes of every day of every week since. A month later she sent him a photo of herself from the side, naked from the hips up and showing mostly her slightly swollen stomach, with her arms covering her breasts and the top half of her head cropped. In a note she said “If you wish I can send you one of these Polaroid shots every month though never with my face fully shown, for obvious reasons: ‘Wife Disseminates Porno Photos, Law Prof Hubby Loses Job.’ I shoot them myself with a delayed timer, but I’m sure that clicking and running into position will become increasingly strenuous with each succeeding month, so I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it up. But this will be as close as I can get you to the experience of my gravidity other than for reporting various particulars of it, e.g., I’m nauseated daily while at the same time pining for you a little a couple of times weekly (figure out the math of that yourself). Those two, nausea and nostalgia, aren’t necessarily linked but were only written poorly here — your influence, I think, which seems to have continued with this sentence (can the father’s genes be transferred to the mother via the fetus?). Harry sends his best and wishes you were rich.” He wrote back saying he hoped her nausea had passed by now — he heard it usually lasts only a month — but if it hasn’t he’s including a recipe composed mainly of cranberries for an antidote he got out of his woman friend’s book of natural self-healing remedies. He still thinks of her fondly, maybe a minute to two more a day than a month ago and about three minutes more than when he first started to — at this rate his mind will be totally consumed by her in twenty to thirty years — hopes his genes haven’t been transferred via the route she said for that conjures up horrific incestuous possibilities that for health and moral reasons — anyway, she gets the point. Tell Harry he’d love to be better fixed but doesn’t know anyone holding down more poor-paying jobs at one time for so long as he and little appreciation from the woman he’s supporting, though for her dear son he’d work his butt off, with no thanks needed, till his father started to or he was twenty-one. He’d love a month-by-month Polaroidized pornographic account of her pregnancy — he had to go to the local university library’s biggest dictionary for “gravidity”—if she’s still up for it. “By the way, I thought you looked fine in the photo. I was going to say ‘great’ but I know how you hate compliments of any sort. By the way two, you never asked and I never said how the woman I live with reacted to my meeting you in N.Y. and your getting gravid — I hadn’t planned on telling her but it all sort of came out in front of the washing machine when she saw the lipstick on my collar and smelled the perfume on my hanky. She said it was just what she expected from me: that my primary pursuit in life is not art nor scholarship nor the deepest things men think but ‘to sniff out the vaginas of every well-stacked and/or beautiful woman’ I meet, though if she and I are still together after the child’s born (it isn’t true about me and vaginas of any kind, by the way three, as I haven’t bedded with anyone else but her and you in a few years, though my eyes have; maybe that’s what she’s saying but since she knows that, why did she refer to my nose?) she’d like — she’s periodically fantasized having a second child but knows she’d abort the first real sign of one, since it’d put a few more wrinkles on her stomach and crimp in her noncarcer — for it to spend half the year with us once it’s around three or four. I’m just repeating her words, as she also said that probability’s probably an impossibility or the opposite, because you wouldn’t go for it—‘What non-doped-up rational mother would?’—and I’ve also told her I love you more than I do her (I actually don’t love her at all but how am I to say that?) and she wants me out of her house soon as I can cough up the next quarterly mortgage payment for it and leave enough money behind for that period’s utility bills (she thinks she’ll be ready by then to look for a job to support herself and her son). I know I sound as if I’m ridiculing her but please understand, we’ve been at the edge of that Grand Canyon’s highest precipice for a year with each of us contemplating shoving the other off. I never should have stayed out there that long since she’s much more vehement, vengeful and grievance-stricken than I. Cheers to Harry, love to you. How come, by the way four, you don’t sign off with anything resembling a ‘Ta ta,’ ‘Sec ya,’ ‘¡vaya con Dios!’ ‘Happy landing’ or ‘Write soon’?” He didn’t hear from her for a few months. By this time he was living alone in the city in a single room. He wrote asking how she was — wrote several times — wrote he was getting worried she hadn’t written back — wrote he was now even more worried she hadn’t written back after his last letter about it — wrote he was thinking of calling her but thought that’d be intrusive, was he right? — wrote that for the last time, answer him if everything’s okay, Harry, her boy, she, and yes, is the baby okay? — wrote saying he’s sure everything’s okay, as she can see from his last letter he just gets worried that way, but please write and tell him a little of what’s going on if she in fact doesn’t want him writing her anymore and he forgot to tell her in any of his letters the last two months, though assumed she guessed by his change of address, that he and the woman split up before either of them pushed the other off that canyon cliff or jumped or did both but he takes her son once a week for a night and day, something the kid’s beginning to shrink from as he’d rather be free all weekend for his friends — and she finally wrote back saying she had a miscarriage and, to be honest, Harry and she are relieved, as the baby was putting a strain on their marriage much worse than any affair or love involvement would. “Harry wanted the child to know as soon as it was able to (a year? two? for one not so comprehending, three?) the identity of its biological father (or so out of it: four? five? Though I took a new kind of amniotic-fluid prenatal test and it was a girl who was destined to be, unless there were delivery snags, healthy and learned) and, if possible, for you to see it once or twice a week for — I mean ‘twice a year for a week’ (that unpremeditated slip should in no way be interpreted as to how I occasionally feel about you, if you’ll excuse). He said you could even stay with us and, if you also liked, sleep with me but not every night, or not the ones he wanted to. I wouldn’t have gone for that, thank you, being passed around like a felt hat—’Orgasms for the needy and poor!’—but I know what was on his mind: he wanted to continue to putter around outside, especially those nights you and I were supposed to be doing it here: maybe he believed it’d make his own sex more exciting or it was part of his misguided ideas of husbandly liberation. As for me, I wanted my children to grow up as bonded same-parents siblings and for the new one never to see or speak to you and surely not to know what you are to it. I thought it would have a disadvantage, being both a bastard and genetically connected to the family only by half, besides what Harry might say to it in one of his drug- or booze- or rage-induced stupors and that its brother would also from time to time make sure it knew of its liability too. If I got my way it’d mean I’d have to lie to this second child about its origins which is antithetical to the only life rule I have (and then, of course, by my husband or son, be refuted), or the only one I regard high enough to want to pass on to my children: Never lie, cheat or steal (‘cheat’ i