Well, at least the job wasn’t heating and air-conditioning. And the money wasn’t bad. It certainly impressed the old man, who’d been exasperated by every decision I’d ever made, except for marrying Alice. He’d refused to contribute a single dime for me to lounge around at Duke and read paperback novels, but he insisted on fronting the down payment on the town house, not wanting to be outdone by that blowhard, the uncrowned King, J. Curtis McDermott.
I knew my wife would have been content living in a drafty old rental on the fringes of the campus of whatever liberal-arts college might offer me a tenure-track position. I was the one who’d made the very expensive, solid cherry sleigh bed we were lying in (literally and figuratively speaking, and definitely not a Tar Heel Heritage product). And Alice? She seemed happy enough to be married to the Senior Vice President for Sales and her career introducing the young scholars of the Greensboro Friends School to the glories of Wolfgang Amadeus. She hadn’t changed much since college and still thought of me as a better-groomed edition of the obnoxious, smelly boy she’d married, with his torn flannel shirts and shaggy hair, his stupid record collection and dog-eared volumes of the literature of the South. She didn’t even seem to resent that passion and spontaneity had been replaced with a purpose-driven protocol for procreation. We copulated on a strict schedule tethered to the time of the month and body temperature. Medical science was encouraging: Millions of couples have conceived with a lower sperm count than yours, Mr. Nocera.
“Why didn’t you join the Junior League instead of that damn book club?” I teased, distracting her from her assignment. “At least we’d get a discount on the cookbooks.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she shot back, smacking my arm with her book.
“Why do all these chick writers have three names?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?” she laughed.
“Seriously. You put aside Dawn Powell to tackle the latest best-seller by Susan Moore Duncan? Look at these blurbs! ‘A Radiant Achievement!’ ‘A Marvel of a Book!’ Holy shit, Lucy Patton Kline says it’s ‘A Masterpiece!’ Why are you reading this crap?”
Alice simply pointed to the television bleating at the foot of the bed and the busty coed in her underpants being chased by a masked maniac with a chain saw.
“It’s classic morality play!” I protested. “Plus I’ll know how to defend you if a serial killer breaks into the house.”
“Andy, it wouldn’t hurt you to pick up a book.”
“I’ve read them all,” I joked. “Be prepared. The Hindenburg is about to explode.”
“If you fart in this bed I’m going to kill you.”
“But you love me, don’t you?”
“Against my better judgment.”
“Come on, Alice. You’d never read this shit on your own. Why don’t you quit that stupid book club?”
“They’re a nice group of women.”
“I thought you hated that one. I forget her name.”
“Except for her. Anyway, February is my turn to pick.”
“That’s next month. I hope Susan Moore Duncan writes fast.”
“We’re going to read Wuthering Heights.”
“Oh shit. I feel for you, sweetheart,” I said, flipping the remote and flopping on my side to sleep. “They’re going to make you pay for that!”
She’d carefully frosted a three-tier red velvet cake with my favorite cream cheese icing before coming up to bed. The sparkling wine was chilling and I promised I wouldn’t forget to pick up the chocolate-dipped strawberries on my way home from work.
“So are you really going to discuss literature, or is this book club just an excuse to throw a Valentine’s theme party? Are you serving anything other than sugar and alcohol?” I asked.
“Not now,” she said, shushing me. “I only have a few pages left to finish.”
I’d already seen the Biography Channel life of Vlad the Impaler, and nothing else on television was bloody enough to engage my interest. I flipped through a few pages of the new Reynolds Price novel and, bored to death, started making notations in Lindy’s Fantasy Baseball, boning up for the draft in my rotisserie league. Alice sighed and closed her copy of Wuthering Heights.
“So, you finish?” I asked, having been successfully distracted from my deliberation on who to select for the Hot Corner.
“Yep.”
“All prepared to lead the women of Virginia Dare Court on a safari to the heart of darkness?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, slightly unnerved by the sad, faraway look on her face.
“I’m just thinking.”
“About?”
“About a hundred years from now.”
“We’ll be dead.”
“That’s what I’m thinking about.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t you find it comforting? The thought of the two of us, buried in a quiet church yard, lying side by side for eternity?”
“Shit, Alice. Maybe the book club should stick to Susan Moore Duncan.”
“I’m serious.”
I knew it wasn’t the time for a wry aside, a sarcastic remark, an amusing joke.
“Come on, honey. Don’t be morbid. We’ve got a lot of years before we need to worry about our final resting place,” I assured her as I turned out the light. “Roll over.”
She spooned into my body and I grabbed her hand and squeezed.
“I love you, Andy.”
“I love you, too,” I said as I drifted off to sleep.
The literary lionesses had been going at it since seven o’clock. The occasional shrill laugh wafted up to my hideaway. One flight below, red velvet cake was beckoning. Or what was left of it. Cupid wouldn’t discourage sinful indulgence in empty calories on the eve of his feast day. The prospects of Alice saving me even a small, pitiful piece were dwindling. I yanked on my jeans and pulled a sweatshirt over my head. It wasn’t as if I’d been banished to the bedroom; I didn’t need a secret password to cross my own living room. I’d be damned if those harpies were going to polish off the last of my cake.
If I’d been expecting a hearty welcome, I would have been disappointed. Melissa from next door looked up and wiggled her fingers to greet me. Two young blondes, sisters if I remembered correctly, sat on the sofa gripping their knees, tense smiles threatening to crack their faces. Carolyn, Alice’s colleague at the Friends School, was trying vainly to keep the peace. My wife didn’t even acknowledge me as I pussyfooted to the kitchen. I recognized the tightly coiled posture of Alice in combat, poised to strike. Her nemesis had sucked the air out of the room, fueling her grandiloquent gestures with infusions of stolen oxygen.
A forlorn wedge of cake awaited me in the kitchen. Six dead soldiers, twenty-four dollars a bottle, were lined up on the counter. I was rooting in the fridge for milk when I heard Alice, slightly tipsy, go on the offensive.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about! You’re confusing love with raging hormones. A good relationship is based on compatibility, companionship, not on how many orgasms you have a night!”
Her adversary was an unlikely missionary of the gospel of base animal chemistry. Short and squat, her hair cut in a limp pageboy that accentuated her bulging eyes, she resembled an officious box turtle in Donna Karan eyeglass frames.
“Well, Alice, if that were true, we should all marry our hair-dressers.”
I faked a few snores, hoping I’d fool her into thinking I was asleep when she came up to bed.
“Are you awake?” she asked, ensuring that I was.
“Did you have a good time?” I asked, rubbing my eyes as if she’d roused me from a deep slumber. “The cake was terrific.”
She was obviously agitated, unable to close her eyes and drift off to sleep.
“Do you want to watch some television?” Maybe the late-night chat fests might distract her.
“No. I think I’ll read,” she said, opening the copy of Wuthering Heights she’d brought to bed with
her.
“I thought you finished that last night?”
“I did. I’m looking for something,” she said, flipping through the pages. “Here it is. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. You believe that’s true, don’t you?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“You feel it, don’t you?”
“What’s brought this on?” I asked, feigning blissful innocence.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel you’re holding something back.”
“Like what?” I asked, as if the idea was preposterous.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not holding anything back,” I assured her, still a half-truth since all the transgressions, the infidelities, the bald-faced lies wouldn’t begin until sometime in the not-too-distant future.
The good husband I was, I knew it was the perfect moment for the cuddle, best appreciated without the necessity of a request. I sat up and banked my pillows and she snuggled against me.
“So what are the ladies reading next month?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“I’m quitting.”
“I thought you loved the book club?”
“Maybe I’ll start a new book club with women who want to talk about books instead of their pathetic sex lives.”
“You mean they have sex lives?” I asked.
“I doubt it.” She laughed. Or at least I thought she laughed. Maybe she simply snorted. “You know what tomorrow is, don’t you?”
“Of course, it will be twelve years since the day we met. Hey, look at the clock! It’s after midnight. It’s officially tomorrow now. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Andy, if you ever stopped loving me you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Alice, I will never stop loving you,” I swore, promising a celebration, dinner and a good bottle of wine, later that night.
“Andy, you’re going to break the slats if you don’t cut it out!” Alice chastised, but not too seriously. It was probably the bottle and a half of pinot noir we’d had at dinner, but she thought my ridiculous imitation of Prince performing “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” was hilarious. I cranked up the volume and strutted on the bed. Ooh-we-sha-sha-coo-coo-yeah! I loved that fucking song, a seven-minute orgasm, especially that nasty little refrain about wanting to fuck the taste out of that sweet little girl’s mouth.
“Happy Valentine’s Day! Come on, come on, dance with me, baby,” I pleaded, pulling her up by her arms, the bed finally collapsing under the weight of a grown man and woman jumping on the mattress. We did it right then and there, with the Artist Formerly Known As serenading our coupling.
Several weeks later, I sat in my pants and socks, too stunned to finish undressing for bed, and she held my hand and told me our prayers had been answered. We were crossing a bridge and on the other side was a deeper intimacy, a family, the circle complete at last. Who could have predicted that all it would take after years of careful planning was one spastic little jig and broken bed slats to inspire one intrepid little sperm to take aim, blast off, and hit the target? Alice was sure the little tadpole swimming in a pool of her amniotic fluid was going to grow into a boy. After we backdated the calendar to determine the exact date of the miracle of conception, I insisted there was only one way to appropriately honor the Raspberry Beret Sorcerer who had succeeded where a legion of obstetricians, endocrinologists, and urologists had failed. Of course, there was the added benefit of a likely fatal myocardial infarction when Curtis was introduced to his new grandson Prince Rogers Nelson Nocera. My suggestion, needless to say, was summarily rejected and Alice started making a list of names, inspired by literary or musical icons, all of which I refused to consider. Yes, I remembered I was reading Absalom, Absalom! when we met but I just couldn’t warm up to the idea of Faulkner Nocera. Dylan had become a cliché. I am being serious, I insisted: John-paulgeorgeandringo Nocera had a nice ring. Why would I ever agree to call our son Pynchon when I couldn’t finish Gravity’s Rainbow? Besides, I argued, everyone knows the rules. A boy’s name should be one syllable with more consonants than vowels. Jack was the compromise, after London or Kerouac. Both great writers and great lookers.
“But what if Jack turns out ugly?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t you want the kid to be good-looking?”
“Looks aren’t important.”
“You thought I was good-looking when we met.”
“I still do.”
Oh, Alice, my sweet Alice. At best, I’m a six out of ten. The collision of Naples and Appalachia had yielded better results in my younger sister, proof that practice makes perfect.
“So looks are important?”
“Incidental. Sort of a fringe benefit.”
“So what attracted you to me besides my beauty?”
“You were smart. You were funny. You weren’t like other boys.”
I didn’t like where this was going. My wife chose me because I was “different.”
“You were the first man I ever met who listened when I talked instead of thinking of what he was going to say next.”
Thank God she hadn’t fallen for me because I was a sissy.
“If you could change one thing about me, what would it be?”
“Ask me tomorrow. Tonight I’m perfectly happy.”
“So you hope Jack will be a chip off the old block?”
“Your block,” she said emphatically. “If he turns out anything like my father, we’re going to have to trade him in.”
The AFP was positive, “abnormal.” Her serum protein levels were low. It’s a screening, not a test, they assured us. No reason to get anxious yet. The chance of Down syndrome was one in a thousand, but an ultrasound and amniocentesis were recommended just for our peace of mind. Modern medicine ensures you’ll never be blindsided by the left jab. There are no more awful surprises, no need to cry and curse your fate and finally to resign yourself to the hand that’s been dealt you. The tests confirmed the extra chromosome.
“It’s your decision,” I told her, thinking I was saying the right thing.
She was furious, angry at me. At herself. At the world.
“Don’t put it all on me! How dare you make me take all the responsibility for this!”
“I mean I want what you want. Jesus, that’s all I’m trying to say.”
If only we hadn’t shared the happy news with the world. After trying for so long, the three-month obligatory wait, the safety net, “just in case,” seemed like an eternity. Living with your conscience, justifying, rationalizing, would be difficult enough without having to endure the judgment, silent or otherwise, of the morally absolute.
“We could tell our parents we lost the baby,” I said.
“Why?” she countered. “If that’s the decision we make, we should have the integrity to live with the consequences.”
“I was just thinking about your father.”
“If we decide to have this baby, it will be because it’s the right thing to do. My father has nothing to do with it. I don’t know why you even care what he would think.”
Frustration, maybe even disgust, was creeping into her voice.
“Look, Alice, do you have the strength to raise this baby?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t think you do.”
I didn’t. She knew it. It was an act of kindness for her to suggest that it was even a subject for discussion and debate. We left the question hanging between us, unresolved, until the calendar dictated that she couldn’t wait any longer to make the appointment. We barely spoke as we drove to the clinic the morning of the “procedure.” I asked if she was warm enough; she told me to turn left at the next light. I sat beside her as she signed the consent forms. She allowed me to kiss her on the forehead and, as the staff escorted her behind closed doors, I slumped into a chair, feeling nothing but relief.
I sat in the waiting room, a plastic bag of her personal items on my la
p, the clothes she’d worn to the clinic, her watch and handbag. I was restless as a toddler, unable to concentrate on the words of the book I was reading (The Southpaw, an annual Opening Day ritual since I was fourteen), needing Dr Pepper and cheese crackers from the vending machine to pacify me. I knew she’d have the necessary quarters and dimes in her change purse and as I shuffled through the contents of the bag I found a medal and chain, carefully wrapped in her panties. The metal was black with tarnish, the impression of the Blessed Virgin worn and barely distinguishable. It must have been a talisman from her childhood, probably draped around her neck at her First Communion and not removed until late in her rebellious adolescence.
I knew then that whatever was happening in another room of the clinic was a mistake. Not a sin. A mistake. She’d made the decision, made it alone really, not trusting me to have the fortitude and patience to persevere through the struggles ahead. I should have assured her that I was up for the challenge, that little Jack would make us even closer, that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, ever abandon her, leaving her alone to raise our child. But I didn’t. And if she had resorted to prayer, it hadn’t been to ask for forgiveness for what she was about to do. Once she’d made the decision, she would have been absolutely certain it was the right one. She would have been praying for hopeless causes, the baby and me.
I never saw that medal again. It was consigned to its secret hiding place until the next crisis or tragedy when she would retrieve it from safekeeping, seeking the comfort of feeling it resting on her chest. There was no religious awakening in our household, no sudden appearance of Mass cards or scripture tracts. Over time, life seemed to return to normal. But sex gradually became an afterthought, a ritual to mark a special occasion, a birthday or anniversary, or another stop on the carefully planned itineraries to Europe or Mexico, scheduled between breakfast and an afternoon shopping spree. I’d guiltily initiate foreplay when I suddenly realized it had been weeks, no, months, since we’d last made love.
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