Man of the Month Club

by Jackie Clune

  “OK,” said Amy, grateful of this lifeline. Though quite why she felt so at sea was yet to become clear to her.

  They watched in silence as Dr. Nencini’s perfect bottom receded into the distance.

  “Wedding ring,” Brendan intoned flatly.

  “Bugger,” sighed Amy.

  “Pub.”

  “Absolutely.”

  . 13 .

  Somewhere between the car park and the pub, Amy’s life path took an unexpected turn. She couldn’t say exactly which particular incident it was that prompted the extraordinary sea change she felt growing in her heart, but she had a strong, shocking, contrary awareness that she was about to undertake the most unlikely project she could have ever predicted. Caught up in her thoughts, she was barely conscious of Brendan’s babbling.

  “God, he was gorgeous! Like a cross between a young John Travolta and Enrique Iglesias. What’s he doing wasting himself on the NHS? Now I can see why you wanted to go back—baby my ass! You just wanted to check out the doctor again. Have to hand it to you, though, great excuse. And I’m sure he’s right—Dr. Handsome—she’s much better off in care.”

  Amy winced. It seemed so sudden, so cruel, that a baby should be left out in the cold, then found and taken to safety, only to be carted off again the very next morning to some strange, probably over-stretched household. Could she have done any more? She had briefly entertained the mad idea of taking Precious home herself, but she was sane enough to know that adopting or even fostering a child was the end result of a laborious screening process whereby your whole lifestyle and personality were shredded in front of your very eyes, and only then would you even be considered for adoption. Such a rigorous procedure for such desperate children. Still, she understood it had to be this way to ensure the best for the child—who had already been let down once—and the suitability of the would-be parent. She had quickly put such thoughts out of her mind, not even stopping to register her unexpectedly maternal response to a child in need. She would have to leave Precious behind and trust she would be well-looked-after. Perhaps the baby would have a happy ending and be reunited with her contrite mother, who would receive support and understanding. One thing was for sure: Beyond finding her, Amy’s contribution to Precious’s life was over. Little did Precious know that her contribution to Amy’s life had only just begun—because a new idea had planted itself firmly in Amy’s head before the first set of traffic lights. She was at once appalled and thrilled by it. If the last couple of weeks had taught her anything, it was that life conspires sometimes to push us, blindfolded, into situations we thought we would never end up in. However much we think we know what we want, however much we plan for a perfectly designed future, fate has a way of shoving the unforeseen in our faces and presenting us with a whole new set of options.

  She swerved suddenly onto the shoulder, her steering wheel and her psyche seemingly no longer under her tight control. Brendan stopped mid-sentence and swore loudly as she jolted to a halt.

  “Christ, what are you doing?”

  “Brendan, I want you to listen carefully to what I’m about to say, and when I’ve finished, I want you to fully support everything that I’ve said. Furthermore, I don’t want you to breathe a word of this to anyone, not anyone, until I say so. OK?”

  Brendan nodded in mute agreement.

  “I’m going to try for a baby. I don’t know how or even why really, but it suddenly seems essential that I see if I’m meant to have a child.”

  “But—”

  “Uh-uh! No comments, no questions, I don’t want you fogging things up, and I know what you’re going to say, and you’re probably right, but it’s just something I have to do, no matter how mad that may seem to you and me right now. Let’s just say I am now aware that there have been greater forces at work on this than you or I can feasibly argue with. OK?”

  “OK,” said Brendan, nodding slowly as if humoring a dangerous psycho.

  “OK.”

  .14.

  For two hours, she had not spoken about it with Brendan. They had proceeded with lunch as normal, all the while knowing that a huge volcano lay bubbling under the surface of their chitchat. Secretly, Amy thought of nothing else. She didn’t feel suddenly enlightened or excited by her new plan, just purposeful in a resigned kind of way. Home now, she played with the idea in the privacy of her bedroom. With an experimental thrill, Amy tested the idea out loud: “I’m going to have a baby.” The words fell like awkwardly shaped pebbles from her lips. This was someone else’s script, a line delivered to much oohing and aahing and delighted embracing. She tested it again, hoping that voicing the idea would implant it in her own reality.

  “I’m going to have a baby. I’m pregnant.” The dramatic addition made her smile at its improbability. Amy Stokes pregnant? The head of an internationally successful design business reduced to a mere biological function? Surely not! It sounded as plausible as saying, “I’m Joseph Stalin.” But having opened up the possibility, she became aware now of new thoughts, new sensations beginning to flood in like grateful children from a cold playground. Yes, it was a spectacular U-turn of the highest order; yes, her friends would be horrified and overexcited by turns; and yes, irritatingly enough, it would delight her mother to no end, but despite all these pressurizing expectations and all the inevitable I told you so’s from a smug Brendan, the idea still held enough sway to create a new stillness in Amy’s heart. What if? What if? Amy tried to imagine herself heavily pregnant. With only a modicum of self-consciousness, she rolled up a cushion and stuffed it up her tight sweater, creating the immediate impression of someone about ten months gone and about to give birth to a small sofa. With a bit of artful maneuvering, she managed to reduce the bulk and mold it into a plausible shape. She turned sideways and looked in her mirror, placing one hand on her bump and practicing that beatific smile so beloved of pregnant models in baby magazines. She’d never once seen a real pregnant woman adopt this pose—mostly they huffed and complained and scowled during the last two months—but it seemed to help her connect with the idea, or at least the ideal, of pregnancy. She grinned foolishly at herself and ventured a slow, stiff-backed sit-down onto the bed. She even let out an exhausted, long-suffering sigh for good measure. It felt nice having a shelf to rest her hand on.

  But now to the matter at hand. Whether it was the Catholic in her reacting to supposed divine intervention and interpreting recent events as cosmic signs, or whether, despite her past dismissal of the Great Biological Clock bullshit, she had just succumbed to the usual late-thirties tick-tocking she had so despised in her contemporaries, Amy had made the decision to put her ovaries at the disposal of fate. If it was meant to be, then so be it. She felt like Mary at the Annunciation—the handmaiden of the Lord! But not for her the neat virgin birth—she had a feeling she would have to resort to less immaculate forms of conception than Our Lady. So how? There was no man in her life at present, although she was never short of offers. She mentally scrolled through all the men she had recently dated, trying to figure out which could have been a potential father. John had wanted kids, but she’d quickly put the kibosh on that—in fact, she was pretty sure he’d listed that as one of his splitting-up grievances. Not that he’d left her—no, he’d just stayed, whining on until she couldn’t take it anymore. Tom had been very cagey, citing his brother’s lack of life as a young dad as a lifelong reason to body-swerve any baby chat. It had suited her fine at the time. Nathan had been indifferent—it had just never come up. Maybe he sensed her disinterest, or maybe he’d moved on to some earth-mother type and was now the proud dad of a sandal-wearing brood in Cornwall. There was no one she felt able or inclined to call with the unlikely offer of her womb. So what were her options? In true businesswoman style, Amy sat down with a pencil and paper, cushion still intact, to weigh the situation. This would need careful planning. At thirty-nine, she couldn’t hang around—fate was going to need a hand at this late stage. She drew up a list of approaches, exploring the pros and co
ns of each.

  OLD BOYFRIENDS

  Pros: ease of access; quick start; know sexual history

  Cons: no one suitable, though could make do with John (for only an hour)

  IVF

  Pros: no third party necessary; choose sperm donor characteristics—Gene pick ’n mix!; medically monitored, so optimum chance of fertilization (check this)—worked for Soph (finally)

  Cons: painful; only small chance of success; expensive; intrusive; a lot of faffing about in hospital; could take ages to get screened, etc.

  SELF-INSEMINATION

  Pros: no doctors poking about; control; home service!

  Cons: sperm arriving in jam jars; finding right donor; health-screening sperm an uncertainty; yuk factor

  TRADITIONAL

  Pros: manhunt always fun; can select donor on tap; “sold as seen” rather than relying on sperm catalog; get to actually have sex; free; natural; more in the hands of fate; quicker (presuming allure still intact); less desperate-looking; more easily explainable to friends/family/colleagues

  Cons: sexual health—you can’t use condoms if you want to get pregnant; AIDS. Shit. Still, you can’t do anything without taking a risk these days. Just have to be careful, use judgment, and hope for the best. Cavalier, un-PC, and arrogant, maybe, but used to those epithets

  This exercise confirmed what she always knew—that she would have to go au naturel. If this was to be an experiment in offering one’s life up to the Fates, of letting nature take over, then it made sense to go the conventional route and see if her ovaries were up for it on their own. She just couldn’t face the prospect of giving over control of her body to some smarmy fertility doctor full of false promises. The endless hours she’d spent in green hospital corridors with Soph and Greg still clung to her like the smell of cabbage. No, she’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, without the aid of modern science—and fast. For lots of reasons, Amy felt that forty would have to be a cutoff point. Every experiment, however heartfelt, needed its control circumstances, and besides, all the stuff she’d read in waiting rooms was firm on the statistics for the sharp downward curve in fertility after forty—what was it, a five percent chance of conceiving? If nature had a limit, then so would she. She knew the heartache involved in hoping against all evidence to the contrary that conception might still occur after scores of failed attempts. Mrs. Cummings floated into vision and Amy shuddered. This was not to be an openended affair—this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her reproductive system to sparkle. She’d give it until forty, and if she wasn’t pregnant by then, then the gods had spoken and she’d been right all along—she wasn’t meant for motherhood after all. She could heave a huge sigh of relief and resume her life as normal.

  Logistics now. This was simply a practical problem that had to be overcome. Forty. That gave her a year. Twelve months, twelve eggs. Twelve was a good number—more generous than ten, less needy than twenty. Twelve disciples, twelve days of Christmas, the twelve that was really thirteen in the baker’s hot buns dozen. She’d heard somewhere that most healthy young couples take six months to a year to conceive. What chance did she have at her advanced age and with partners of unspecified sperm counts? She’d have to refine her search and target the virile-looking. She’d have to ruthlessly weed out the weedy semen, reject the straggling spermatozoa, and allow each swim team only one chance at the finals. The idea of trying month after month with the same hapless no-hoper was too wasteful. She’d read recently that one in six men had fertility problems. She’d instantly worked out that that was four men on every football pitch! Statistically, she would already be wasting two of her twelve months. She’d do her research, monitor her peak fertility window with nuclear precision, go for it mid-cycle, then wait. If her period arrived, then she’d simply have to move on—no offense, no hard feelings, but no time to waste on tardy, tired testes.

  She mentally prepared a shopping list. Ovulation-testing kits, thermometers (anal and oral), temperature charts, folic acid, push-up balcony bra, multivitamins.

  And man number one.

  Second Trimester

  .1.

  Stephen Marchont scanned the room with discreet expertise. Slim pickings at tonight’s MENSA singles mixer. Why was it that all the clever women were either dull salad-dodgers with silly knee-jerk feminist principles or thin, mean-looking academics with wispy hair and traffic-warden shoes? It was always like this, and yet every time he’d get dressed and spruced up for the evening with the same schoolboyish hope, that same twist of nervous excitement in his solar plexus. Not that there were many occasions in his school days when he got the opportunity to mix freely with the opposite sex. The second division public school he’d attended was, of course, single-sex, so girls had for many years been as rare a treat as seconds of chocolate pudding. Being a boarder meant he was even denied the pleasure of a weekend trawl round some urban shopping precinct in search of totty. Visits down to the local village were few and far between, and strictly monitored. Even on such afternoons, there were precious few girls to look at in the village, if you didn’t count Mrs. Gray and her three lumpy daughters at the post office, which he didn’t. They’d always come out, all three of them, grinning like flabby simpletons any time a boy from St. Bede’s came in to collect a parcel from home or post his weekly formal parental update. It wasn’t until he’d gone up to Cambridge that he’d experienced the multiple and various joys of women in all their complex and invigorating glory. Stephen had always liked women, despite the inevitable homoerotic fumblings of the rugger scrum, and that one excruciating anal experiment in year four. His mother had been a great advert for her sex—capable, strong, always perfectly turned out, as adept at the Telegraph crossword as she was at baking scones for tea, warm but alluringly distant. What they would now call a Superwoman, although she never did any of these things with the self-conscious flourish and brouhaha so depressingly common these days. When she’d died, Stephen was allowed off prep for a week. He’d spent the time mooning over an old black-and-white picture of her dressed in a cashmere twinset and a double string of pearls, smiling her fifties smile, her legs crossed neatly at the ankle. He’d cried through the night when his housemaster had confiscated it, declaring that such morbid girlishness was inappropriate for a boy of ten. When he’d asked for it back at the end of term, the housemaster lectured him angrily on how it was the duty of men to be strong for the rest of the family before sending him off empty-handed. Stephen could see in his master’s eyes that beyond the reproach lay the fear of being found out. He knew the picture had been lost, and for the rest of his school days, they had circled each other with unspoken mutual hatred, each despising the other’s weakness, each feeling the other’s critical, knowing eye. Stephen shuddered now at the memory. Why did these things spring up in his mind at such inopportune moments?

  At Cambridge, the girls had been fun. Most of them came from backgrounds very similar to his and wore their upper-middleclassness with ease, unabashedly sporting blue stockings and velvet Alice bands as if unaware of the stereotype. They were generally game gals, bright enough in an art history sort of a way but not on Stephen’s platonic level. Then there were the lower-middle-class ones who’d done good, the grammar-school girls with their brash veneer unsuccessfully masking chronic insecurity. Half of these girls were really looking only for a husband, preferably a chinless member of an almost extinct aristocratic family, so that they could marry up, get a nice house in Berkshire, and live a life of comfortable underachievement. But the ones Stephen liked best were the chippy working-class girls who snarled if they heard a posh accent. They dressed in androgynous combat gear, smoked roll-ups, and argued about neoconservatism. They dyed their hair absurd neon colors, shaved the sides, and went to all the lectures. These girls were usually extremely suspicious of him at first, but he always won them over with his wit. He’d adopted a highly successful talent for self-parody. He deliberately walked around with a tweed jacket and brogues, like a minor royal in mufti,
and accentuated his naturally clipped home counties accent. He’d say things like “Crikey,” “Hurrah,” and “Do you see?” He invented a fictional comic nanny whom he deferred to out loud in moments of crisis. “What would Nanny do?” he’d ponder if there was a problem with the bill at a restaurant, or if it looked cloudy but wasn’t actually raining. But it was the same pattern every time. He’d be at a party in someone’s room or in some townie pub or other, and he’d find himself chatting to a spiky-looking woman in cod-military clothing, and it would be difficult at first because she’d be defensive or dismissive, but after a relentless onslaught of self-deprecating banter, she’d find herself laughing. Within an hour, they’d be getting on famously. In the next week, there’d be a flurry of notes and postcards shoved in pigeonholes (these days, it was text messaging—not nearly so romantic), and the gossip would start. Finally, they’d meet again, get drunk, and smoke some weed, and the woman would make an undignified lunge at Stephen. It would always be at this point that he’d notice something about her that he didn’t like. Instinctively, he’d draw back, but later, in the quiet of his deliberately fogyish room, he’d analyze what it was . . . the set of one’s jaw, the crass laugh of another. Somehow they never lived up to their initial promise. This moment of realization always came at the crunch point, and always with a sickening twist of his gut. It was as if he had been living in a state of hypnotic delusion for the previous few days, and someone had suddenly snapped invisible fingers to bring him to. He’d make his excuses and leave the spiky woman totally disarmed and dazed. This pattern had continued through most of his adult life, apart from the one relationship he had managed, which, to the amazement and joy of his many friends, lasted two whole years before it crashed and burned. But Sarah had been special—she saw through Stephen’s jolly exterior and comforted him in a way no one else had been able to. After two years, though, Stephen had noticed how she had a habit of stabbing at her food with a fork, as if she was spearing fish or something. The more he noticed it, the more he tried not to. At about the same time, she started making noises about them moving in together. Stephen had pictured himself at an eternity of dinner tables obsessively watching her left hand jabbing in and out of her plate. He couldn’t countenance such a life of quiet irritation, so one warm spring evening he’d finished it once and for all. Better to get these things over with quickly and out of the blue, like shooting deer. Much crueler to let them see you aim. She’d been shocked and angry, told him he had commitment problems, and, a year later, married an actor. So she was better off in the long run. There had been six months of euphoria, followed by a sudden fall into deep and lasting anxiety—how could he have let her go over something so trivial and anal? He stayed up drinking all night and tuned in to Trisha on ITV. He listened to ugly people with thick regional accents mouthing platitudes about “learning to accept people for who they are” and wondered if he’d ever meet anyone perfect enough. He doubted it, but he knew he’d keep on looking.