He strips off the shirt and with a twinge of midwestern guilt — what a waste, all it needs is laundering — he wads it into a ball and stuffs it in the trash. Who is he kidding? Stella’s announcement in the car coming home from Gaia, her spinning of condoms across the room like little Frisbees, supposedly in the heat of the moment — there’s only one thing on Stella’s mind. No matter how geriatric his seed is, Stella wants a child. He takes off his pricey shoes and puts the left one on the counter. He sniffs the right one and runs a dry paper towel through it, which comes out a little damp, smelling of his foot, but showing no blood. It’s all soaked into his sticky sock, which he peels off with two fingers and flings into the trash. Then he peels off the other one and tosses it, too, and then, right there in the overlit, over-air-conditioned, Muzaked men’s room, miles from home, surrounded by strangers in all directions, Kevin feels the shock of the icy tile against his bare soles like the opening of an abyss at his feet. It’s like the time he was hiking the coast of Donegal — back when he was responsible for no one but himself and could do things like that — and the red-faced warden of the slovenly youth hostel told him not to go up on the cliffs, the fog had rolled in and it wasn’t safe, and Kevin went anyway, figuring as long as he couldn’t hear the surf booming against the rocks, he probably wasn’t close to the cliff edge, and he strode happily through the mist beading on his anorak like diamonds, until a sudden shift in the wind simultaneously carried the thunder of the surf to him and blew the mist away like a veil to reveal that he was inches, inches, from a sheer, thousand-foot drop into roiling black water. His whole body convulsed in shock, nearly tipping him over the edge, and he saved himself only by dropping to his ass and scuttling crabwise back away from the edge.
Just as he scuttles crabwise now back away from the very thought of fatherhood, because he knows fatherhood would upend his life. For starters, it would cost him lots and lots of money — not just the prenatal care and the birth, but food, clothing, shelter, medicine, fees, tuition, toys — twenty years of it at least, without the kid contributing one thin dime. Thousands of dollars right off the bat, because Stella would want nothing but the best baby paraphernalia, wireless baby monitors and Baby Einstein DVDs and handcrafted wooden toys and some Swedish-engineered stroller with more safety features than a Volvo. Not to mention Kevin’s house would have to be babyproofed top to bottom: every socket capped, every cabinet latched, every blade locked away, the chemicals under Kevin’s sinks sealed up like a Superfund site. And never mind the expense — what perks of his semibachelor life would he have to give up? He has friends with kids, he knows that for years he’d have to forego movies, concerts, going to clubs. No more eating out. No more spur of the moment weekend trips. No more reading Martin Amis for hours in the bath. No more performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company. No more devoting an entire weekend to watching a whole season and all the extras of Galactica straight through on DVD. And no more HBO, if there’s a chance that little Kevin or Stella Jr. could wander into the room and glimpse a bloody murder or a pole dance, and he’d have to answer the question, “What’s that, Daddy?”
And, again, how old would he be when the kid’s graduating from high school? Kevin would never have a real retirement, he’d be working to pay for the kid’s college till he keeled over dead. He wouldn’t live long enough for the kid to take care of him. And what if he gets sick or dies when the kid’s still young? Could Stella raise a child on her own? High-strung, tense, impatient, capricious — not the most maternal qualities, if he does say so himself. Not to mention those scars on her arms and inside her thighs — old and pale, but unmistakable — and her nightmares and her periodic daylight sojourns in the Stella Continuum. What happens when little Kevin or Stella Jr. is sticking his or her finger into an electrical socket or choking on strained peas or squeezing through the railing of Kevin’s second-story deck, and Mommy’s just staring into space, gesturing and murmuring to herself? If I’m not around, the kid’s dead, and if I am around, I’m the alpha parent by default, picking up the slack while Stella freaks or zones out, with me telling the screaming kid, “Mommy needs a little time out, kiddo. Mommy loves you, but Mommy needs her space.”
He empties his trouser pockets onto the counter — wallet, keys, a handful of change — and panics for a moment when he can’t find his Swiss Army knife, until he remembers he left it on the dresser at home, knowing he couldn’t take it on the plane. He’s feeling a little naked without it — and in fact, now that he’s stripping off his ruined trousers and stuffing them in the trash, he is nearly naked in the mirror, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs that have gone saggy in the heat. The semi-erection that stirred when he was thinking about Stella in Chicago has gone saggy, too, drooping down one leg of his shorts. He sniffs his armpits and hits the faucet and pulls out another fistful of paper towels. He soaks them, squeezes them out, and runs the makeshift sponge over his bare chest and down his arms and into his armpits. The water is barely lukewarm, and the AC chills his wet skin. He arches his spine and reaches as far as he can behind his back. In the mirror he’s happy to see his ribs and not to see a gut, but while he’s got a flat belly — mostly — it’s no Patrick Stewart six-pack, never was and never will be. And he can already see where his pecs and his upper arms are going to slacken and droop in the not-distant future, no matter how many bench presses he does. I’m not going to have another shot at a younger woman, he thinks. Stella’s my last chance.
He lathers up more milky soap between his palms and rubs coconut scent across his chest and under his arms and down his back. So that’s the choice, he thinks as soapy water dampens the waistband of his saggy shorts. Lose Stella and find a woman his own age who’s already had her kids. Learn to love, or at least live with, wrinkles, wattles, a thickening waist, spreading hips. Or hang on to Stella and lose his life, basically. With a kid there’d be less sleep, less sex, less time to exercise. Fatherhood would mean he’d lose what muscle tone he still has. No more hour-long runs in Gallup Park, no more lifting free weights after work, no more brisk hikes around Silver Lake, because every waking moment would be devoted to, or at least planned around, the kid, the kid, the kid. What’s the kid doing, where’d she get to, is she okay, is she safe? I thought you were watching her. Where did she go? Did somebody take her? Because it’s not like when Kevin was a child, when he could disappear with his friends for hours — playing with matches, frying ants with a magnifying glass, setting off firecrackers — or take off on his own — wandering up alleys, breaking bottles in vacant lots, gliding on his Stingray through traffic — no, these days you can’t leave them alone for an instant, every moment has to be accounted for, every contingency foreseen, which is why they carry cell phones like tracking devices, why they have to be fingerprinted and microchipped like cats, why they have to be padded and helmeted like middle linebackers just to ride a bicycle. Because the world’s full of crazed, childless women who will murder you and steal your kid for their own; pedophiles lurking on the Internet pretending to be twelve-year-olds; angry working-class white guys taking whole schoolrooms of little girls hostage. And that’s not even taking into account the kid’s peers: the distracted teenaged girl behind the wheel of daddy’s SUV with a learner’s permit and a cell phone and your daughter in the passenger seat, not buckled in; the hulking guy dropping Rohypnol in her punch at a party; the sullen little Columbine wannabe striding up a school hallway with a Mac-10 under his long black overcoat like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And terrorists — oh my God, they watch cable news, they’re not stupid, they know an opportunity when they see it. Forget Al Qaeda, there’s no central planning anymore, it’s all eager beaver freelancers now, or so Kevin understands from Frontline. It’s only a matter of time before some nasty, self-pitying little fuck takes a whole school hostage, decapitating children one by one, live on CNN. It could happen; it’s already happened elsewhere in the world. There was that massacre not so long ago in Russia, a whole cell of terrorists storming a school and killing kids; he’s forgotten the name but he remembers the video: desperate parents running under fire with limp, bloodied children in their arms. The guys who did that were Muslims, weren’t they? He’s not actually sure, but what does Kevin’s instinctive racial profiling mean anymore when some round-faced white guy like the Other Kevin could memorize a few verses of the Koran and carry out his own jerry-rigged jihad under the streets of Glasgow? It’s the worst of both worlds, adolescent rage meets religious fanaticism, Dylan Klebold meets Mohammed Atta. That’s what fatherhood gets you — your kid’s either a monster or a victim. A father is either guilty or grieving.