by Ron Carlson
I pushed the door inward and said, “Hey, come see this deer.” Cindy’s face appeared in the opening. Behind her the party seemed to rage; Ellen was singing “Satisfaction,” and the din of conversation was loud and raw and alien.
“What?”
“Look at this deer.”
“What are you talking about?”
I let the door close and stepped back out. She followed me. “What are you talking about?”
“This deer.” I turned and he was gone. I stepped to the corner of the house and was able to glimpse his gray back pass under a yard lamp two houses up.
“Right,” Cindy said, taking my arm. “The deer.” She lobbed her drink, glass and all, into the snowbank, and turned fully to me. Her mouth was warm with tequila, and I could feel the flesh of her back perfectly through the cold silk of her dress. She rose against me, ignoring the cold, or frantic against it, I couldn’t tell which. It was funny there outside the party. When she went for me, I did nothing to stop her. I had made it outside, leaving early, but that was all I could do.
LIFE BEFORE SCIENCE
“Yeah, I know about babies.”
—JOHN WAYNE in THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA
IN FEBRUARY, I drove Story to New Haven for the post-coital. It was Sunday, and if you want a definition of sterility, try downtown New Haven on the second Sunday in February. The clouds were frozen like old newspapers into the sky, and the small parking lot of the clinic was blasted with frozen litter too. I remember there were a pair of old work gloves in the ice. Looked like somebody trying to get out.
Dr. Binderwitz was meeting us on Sunday because Story had been keeping the basal charts for three months and we had to do the post-coital before Binderwitz, the most prominent fertility expert in the known world, flew off to Houston, Rio, Paris, and Frankfurt to deliver papers at conventions. It was a dark day and the doctor had all the lights in the clinic turned on. The doctor himself is one of the least healthy human beings I have ever met. He is a person who has literally spent years indoors, not grooming. When we shook hands, I was surprised at how soft his hand was, and up close, I could see that his hair was sprinkled with dandruff and larger particles I took to be bits of paper and pillow feather. So there we were with this force-ten genius, anxious to hear what he’d say.
The doctor took Story into the examination room, and I sat with a copy of Sports Afield, for a moment angry with the cover artist for making his rearing grizzly so predictable. He’d used all his light in the mouth, even spraying some white points of saliva, and that, coupled with the point of view (from below, as a victim) cancelled any real life or sympathy from the work. It was a cheap shot done in half a day by some ad illustrator. There was no setting for the portrait, except a single pine, and that had been drawn melodramatically small. It looked like a folded umbrella.
I was daydreaming. It was still early in the morning. Story had moved to me long before dawn and we’d made lost, unconscious love. It wasn’t until after I’d rolled out of bed and stood under the shower that I realized we were participating in an experiment.
Story returned, calling me back to the doctor’s office, and then Dr. Binderwitz himself shuffled in, carrying the small prepared slide. He had taken a smear from Story’s cervix, and we watched as he positioned the slide under the microscope. Dr. Binderwitz studied the slide for a minute or two and then asked Story if she wanted to have a look. He told her what knob to rotate for focus.
Then it was my turn. By slowly rotating the control, I was suddenly able to see dozens, maybe hundreds of sperm swimming around. I could see the problem right away. “They’re not all going the same way,” I said. “Which is the right direction?”
It was a little joke, but the doctor said, “They’re not supposed to. Do you see the ones with two tails?”
I bent to the eyepiece again and, after a moment I did see a couple of two-tailed sperm whipping around.
“Is that normal?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” I said, when the doctor was silent, “How does it look?”
“Normal. The sperm are alive. The medium is hospitable.” To Story he said, “Call my office Monday and schedule a histogram early next month. I’ll be back then.”
TWO
SINCE it was Sunday, there were Township Cocktails that night, this time at Annette and Hugo Ballowell’s place on the big lake, Mugacook, right across from the college. It had been a long day, but Story was mayor of the town and there would be some skating on the lake later, so we went down.
It was at Township Cocktails at the Ballowells that February night that I first had a glimpse of what the next four months would hold for us. It was that night that I first saw the solution, the radical answers to this baby thing, though I didn’t know it at the time, and it was that night when I came to understand there was a little more to the world than Dr. Binderwitz, even from his intellectual stratosphere, could see.
I don’t really know how it happened, the specific point where I left my senses for … my senses. I was in a mild funk that had been solidifying over the last year or so as my painting dried up. McOrson was still selling a few every month in New York, but they were old paintings, some of them over two years and they were the skies, the landscapes at which I had become facile, and which I had come to loathe. The reality was simple: I wasn’t painting and it hurt. So I wasn’t really in a party mood, especially with all the driving, two hours to New Haven, two hours back, and now: cocktails.
Story dressed and drove us down and we ran into Gil Manwaring, the constable, on Foundry Road along the fish pond and he and his two men were parking cars. Story said no thanks and we parked it ourselves and walked four hundred yards in the icy brown dusk, carrying our skates.
The Ballowells’ house is the biggest on Mugacook, the kind of place mistaken for an inn by forty cars every summer. Story and I immediately ran into Ruth Wellner, the county attorney, who had been a classmate of Story’s in Boston and who was now Story’s best friend in Bigville. Ruth and Billy were our age, and were in the first stages of chasing a baby down themselves. Ruth wanted children almost as much as we did, but she couldn’t admit it. She played devil’s advocate. Ruth used to challenge me: “You want children; you have them.” She’d go on: “Why do we want kids? What are we going to do with children? Every time we want kids, we ought to get in the car and drive down to K Mart in Torrington. Stay half an hour and we’ll get more parenthood than we bargained for.”
Billy, whom I liked a lot and who is living proof that insurance agents are human beings too, sat on the arm of the couch wearing an expression the most prominent feature of which was its profound sperm-loss pallor. I winked at Billy and he nodded back stiffly, a gesture he’d seen a battle-weary soldier make in some World War II movie. I admired his courage and Ruth’s. The feature of Clomid we all found most unique was the headache each dosage inspired, making intercourse impossible, an irony lost on the chemists.
There is something about women on fertility drugs, something I admire, I suppose, something that gives them an aura: larger than life. It’s hard to explain, but it would be easy to paint. I stood to the side a little as Story and Ruth fell to rapt conversation, their voices the rich female timbre that by its very sound says: hey, we’re calm here; something mature is transpiring. They could have been talking about the township or about the mysteries of estrogen; it was all music to me. I grabbed Billy’s arm. “Let the wives talk, Billy,” I said. “I’ll buy you a cocktail.”
Annette had a buffet that would have run twelve pages in Ladies’ Home Journal. It started with a salmon the size of a dog and ended forty feet later with champagne and hot buttered rum. Luckily, Hugo was down at that end of the table sipping his scotch, and when I nodded at it he took us in the kitchen and poured us coffee cups full of Chivas, saying, “I never drank a party drink in my life. It’s February and this,” he held up his glass, “is scotch. Are you two going skating?”
And we did go skating, Hugo, Bill, and I
. We had another cup of scotch and then clambored down with Hugo’s hockey equipment, sticks and pucks. The moon had come out full and throwing down a couple of sweaters on one side and two hats on the other, we had a rink. For some reason we had constructed it such that the bonfire was at center ice, and the game was full of wonderful breathers while some hero stickhandled the puck back out of the embers. Then, finally, Bill himself skated full bore into the flames. He rolled out unhurt, but he had lost the puck fully in the fire and we stood around consoling him while it melted somewhere in the inferno.
“Showboat,” Hugo said, smiling. He looked at me and said, “Remember the night Billy skated into the bonfire?” and he laughed, so sure and so happy to be on the spot as a memory was created, his party a success.
“And he did it showing off!” I said.
“And then he wanted more scotch,” Billy said, getting up. “He lost the puck and then wanted more scotch. And none of your party drinks!”
Back at the mansion, the party had more than half fallen apart, but Annette and Story and Ruth were in the study grinding something over, so Hugo did pour us some more scotch. We stood around the kitchen like prep school kids when Hugo said, “Let me show you something.”
Now, it’s here, I guess, where I started to see again. We were all red-faced from the cold and warm from the scotch, and when Hugo ushered me in front of the telescope, it was time to see. He had lined it up so that the full moon filled the lens, and for a moment I was flooded with vertigo, my depth perception thrown away. Then it all twisted into a focus so sharp I winced. The moon, the ocher plains, the pale blue seas, and then like something scratching across my very eyeball, the geese. Canadian geese were flying across the moon. Four clipped the bottom. Two more, sliding. Silence. My heart in my neck. And then two full tiers, a double-winged vee of geese raking the moon, swimming into the heat which rose into my eye and blurred.
I stood away from the telescope.
“Did you see them? They must be three miles high!” Hugo took my arm. It was dark in his study. Billy bent to the eyepiece. I could hear the women murmuring below us in the den. “Do you know how far, how many miles they’ll go tonight?”
And it was later, late into that Sunday night—Monday morning—that the seeing began in earnest. Story drove me home, and though it took a few minutes to rid her mind of township business, I achieved it, and we moved into the postures of lovemaking, and I saw her face, her eyes, her navel, and then just before my eyes rolled up into my head, I saw my three fingers coming over Story’s shoulder, like three old men witnessing giants at play. Story kissed me and rolled into sleep. My eyes would not quit.
I walked through my house naked for a while, as is the right of any homeowner, ending up on the small brick porch onto the backyard with my father’s Navy binoculars in my hand. The air was still and frigid, but I stood with the glasses on the moon. It was wonderfully clear to me there as the bricks froze my feet and my genitals shrank and numbed in the frosty night: sperm were swimming across the moon, and on the round world I had a lot to do.
THREE
FOR three months Story had been keeping the basal charts. When the alarm would sound, I would stumble to the bureau, shake down the thermometer and offer it to Story’s sleeping face. She slept on her stomach with no pillow and for eighty days at least, that thermometer was the first thing she saw every day. She’d lie there while I said, “Okay, now, don’t move. Two minutes and forty seconds to go. I’m watching you. You’re moving. Please. Can you please lie still for two and a half minutes! Okay. I’m telling Doctor Binderwitz that your chart is a fabrication. Two minutes. Fine, fine, squirm around; do your calisthenics; see if I care.” It would get down to 10–9–8–7–6–5 and I’d move around and find the glass tube snug in her sleeping mouth. I’d sit on her and announce: “Ninety-eight point nine. We’re talking impending ovulation. We’re moving into a period of massive fertility!”
She’d groan and say, “Get off me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Then, every other day, as part of our program, I’d throw my feet up in her side of the bed and she would pull me to her, moving from a warm sleep to the warm, insistent dreamarama lovemaking. She was always a morning person as far as sex was concerned, and it was a smooth, slow swimming which left us both wet eyed, awash, and stunned.
BIGVILLE is a small college really, and they are glad to have me because they consider me not just an art teacher, but a real painter, that is, one who has two paintings in national collections and one who from time to time has a show on some second floor in New York and a carload of deans gets to go down and drink wine for an afternoon. No one knows I’m not painting, except Story, and as always, she treats me as if I’ve simply taken some well-earned time off for coffee.
I threw myself into my teaching with an organized enthusiasm that cautioned me. I made progress charts for each of my students, making notes on approaches, even encouraging the oppressive Mary Ann Buxton, who tried too hard to make Bigville into the finishing school she never attended. Her approach to painting was simple: it was something you owned, the way rich people own France during those cocktail parties on campus in the fall. They bought the experience, as if it were a stereo system or a fine meal. I noted happily that Mary Ann was doing less copying and more “emulation” of her neighboring easels. What I am saying is that I did what I could to make the spring into a positive sojourn for myself, despite the fact that my eyes were on fire, seeing things, and I knew that meant something would come of it. But as of March, I was not painting.
The ice on Mugacook began to rot, and sometime mid-month Fudgie Miller fell entirely through a section by the town wharf, ending the skating season for good. Fudgie, twelve, was one of the eight Miller kids who lived right across the road from us, and when Constable Manwaring drove Fudgie home wrapped in a blanket and shivering, he was received with the general joy and jumping up and down usually reserved for only children. I witnessed the crowd scene from my front porch, and I thought: that’s it. That’s what we’re after right there. All right. Now all I need is eight kids.
Because of the headaches, we abandoned Clomid, that wonderdrug, and we drove back down to New Haven on a windy, tree-tearing day in late March for the histogram. The air was thick with rushing grit as we crossed the clinic parking lot, and a copy of the Yale News blew against my leg, the headline, as always: STRIKE!
Again I scanned the covers of Sports Afield in the waiting room, while the dye was injected through Story’s uterus and up into her fallopian tubes. Each of the magazines I had selected bore covers of large fish (two trout and one bass) standing on their tails in a raw white splash. The bass was trying to spit out a salamander plug and each of the trout had an oversized Royal Coachman hooked in the corner of his mouth. I was surprised by how vital, kinetic, and primary each was, and they evoked in me sentiments usually tapped only by top forty hits from the fifties. I love art. Each painter had captured the look of death on a game fish face, and yet he left the viewer one small bright hope: the fish might get away.
Then the nurse came and took me to Story, dressed by now, and we watched the television monitor and the X-ray scan of Story’s secret chambers. It was, by far, the best program I’ve ever seen on television. Story’s tubes were clear and symmetrical, the shadow swelling at the end of each tube a bit like an antler in what the technician called the fibrililium, a word I had him spell.
We drove halfway home, up Route 8, before we understood that we felt bad. It was one of those half raw March days, the wind warm where it came around the sunny corner of a building and cold everywhere else. It blew Story’s hair in her face as we came out of DeRusso’s after a late lunch of hot Italian sausage for which they are famous. When she pulled her hair back, I could see that she was crying. In the car she said: “There’s nothing wrong with us.” She was right. She’d done the progesterone count twice and hers was slightly low, but nothing was wrong. My sperm count was slightly low, but still there w
ere millions. Story’s uterus was slightly tipped, but it shouldn’t, in the doctor’s words, present a problem. Science, I thought. Now there’s a word. Science. We stopped at Outskirts, the little package store on the edge of Winstead for a roadkit of cold Piels light.
“Here,” I said, handing Story a beer. “No ice, no twist of lemon, but a woman who is thirsty has nothing for tears.” It was an old joke of ours and she smiled. But the rest of the way home, we felt bad. There was nothing wrong with us and we felt bad.
FOUR
I HAD class the day Story went down to New Haven for her cervical biopsy. I told her I’d cancel, but she insisted on driving down alone. It was the final day of watercolors, before we went on to Life Class with pencils and acrylics, and I had to put up with Mary Ann Buxton gushing about how much she had loved the medium and ya-da, ya-da about her plans to explore it further on her own this summer at her parents’ place in Maine, the light there was so delicate and terrific, and la-di-da. I had to walk three easels away to get her to let up. I had to admit, however, she had done a fair job on the four birches that grew beside the Dean’s garden. I see the four birches that grow beside the Dean’s garden almost twenty times in a year in every possible medium, especially watercolor, and they have almost cancelled my ability to enjoy trees at all. Simply: I hate them. If I stay at Bigville, there will certainly come an evil night when I make their final rendering with a chainsaw.
By the end of class, I’d grown glum, worrying about Story, and I sulked through the easels like a panhandler. It makes you feel funny sometimes as a teaching artist to see your students march through their paces, their work not great, not bad, but work anyway: finished paintings. I went back to the four birches. I helped Mary Ann Buxton add a little more light to the upside of a dozen leaves, but I felt like a phony anyway. I needed to paint.
