The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  Anna attacked Jason as he walked toward them on the sand, triumphantly holding his sons’ favorite trucks. “What took you so long?”

  “The shovel on the backhoe fell off of Oscar’s truck. But I found a way to fix it!”

  “Really, Jason? You had to fix it now?” she huffed. “You couldn’t have waited until we got home? The boys wanted to swim and I can’t take them both into the water alone. You were gone for over half an hour!”

  Jason didn’t take the bait. Instead, he dropped the trucks in the sand and swept both boys up in his arms as he ran with them to the water’s edge while they shrieked with delight.

  The fact of her anger made her feel even more miserable. What if all this negativity jeopardizes my baby? She wrestled her mind to focus on all the good things about their lives together.

  BEFORE ANNA MET Jason, she had given up trying to work out a conventional arrangement with a man. She no longer had faith that any man could give her the freedom she needed while supporting her in helpful ways. Anna had grown to accept that what she needed was too much to ask of the other sex. She wanted freedom from caretaking fragile egos. She wanted a partner who would encourage, not hinder, her dreams; a good father to their children, a lover, a best friend. It didn’t seem like too much to ask, yet the right man eluded her.

  When she was in her early twenties, Anna had been in love with an eccentric Australian playwright, Mick Wilkinson. The couple spoke of marriage, but Anna was only a few years out of college and wasn’t ready to settle down.

  Mick, on the other hand, was ten years older and ready to put down roots. He had traveled during his twenties, satisfying a surf obsession by seeking waves in far-flung locales. He’d surfed Indo and Japan, the Gaza Strip, and the frigid waters off Scotland. He rode tidal river bores and ship wakes in the Great Lakes and epic swells at Mavericks. Mick’s experiences offered a window into a life played out in stark contrast to Anna’s sheltered suburban upbringing. He could navigate any situation with humor and ease, and Anna couldn’t resist his laid-back approach to whatever came his way. For two years, Anna was enthralled by Mick’s free-spirited soul and ability to take whatever he wanted for himself in life. These very qualities led him to make a fatal relationship blunder.

  During a New Year’s Eve party they’d held in their Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Mick decided to surprise announce their engagement. The problem was he had yet to propose. He’d thought the surprise would flatter her. He was very wrong.

  Two weeks later, Anna broke off the engagement she’d never accepted in the first place and broke Mick’s heart by moving out soon thereafter. Anna, convinced that between lust and everlasting love, an imbalanced power dynamic threatened even the most devoted couples. She was not hopeful for a satisfying partnership.

  After, Anna entered a decade of dating and long-term affairs that ended with her unwillingness to make peace with the stubborn gender divide she encountered in each of these relationships. Determined to have a child, Anna planned to conceive with her friend Joe Ballard. Joe had never quite recovered enough to settle down with someone after the devastating loss of so many friends during the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s. Anna and Joe had been partners in their otherwise partnerless lives. They traveled together, knew each other’s families and were family to each other for years. Through Joe’s breakups and Anna’s, they were always there for each other. After a year of talking about having a child together, they consulted with an attorney to draw up the necessary paperwork for custody and childcare arrangements. Anna’s desire for children far outweighed her need for a husband. A friend for life seemed as good a partnership as any, and traveling down the path of the unconventional underpinned her protest against relationships past. This was the way to go. Anna had been sure of it.

  ANNA HAD JOINED RHM at its inception. She and Beth had camped out in Beth’s living room until they found the right space for the fledgling company. They were on a tight budget, liquidating their 401(k) funds and mining their limited cash reserves to launch the company. Just after they announced the start-up, additional working capital came from an angel investor, though the details were vague. A lawyer contacted them to let them know that an anonymous partner was giving them $5 million. In exchange, the investor expected only repayment of the capital over ten years at little interest and a minor share. When Beth investigated, she and Anna were assured that the source and the offer were legit. Anonymity was the only other imperative. Beth was close to saying no until Anna convinced her otherwise in an unusual reversal of their standard risk-averse versus risk-tolerant roles.

  “We’re protected, so why not go with it?” Anna encouraged.

  “Because what if the investor turns out to be some kind of screwball who steps in and tries to take over?” Beth insisted. “I can’t believe someone would make such a generous gesture without a catch.”

  “But the lawyers already gave the offer a thorough vetting and there’s a safety valve if they try to step in,” Anna pushed. “I say we go for it. It will give us an edge in the marketplace. Do you know how quickly we’ll be able to respond to demand with that sort of cash padding? This could make us!”

  “Okay, fine. But, Anna, you better be right . . .”

  The company green-lighted the deal with a signature and a prayer.

  It was Anna’a favorite time, professionally speaking. Working around the clock and sharing an assistant, she and Beth created the culture that would become the enormously popular—if incendiary—RHM. With some of their investor money, Beth found an expansive raw space in the Flatiron district and hired Jason Schwartz, a talented and affordably uncelebrated architect, to design RHM’s offices and flagship store and see through their construction.

  Over the course of those first months of planning the space, Jason and Beth spoke several times a day. When Beth wasn’t available, Anna would pick up the line. They had not yet met in person, but Anna and Jason became flirtatious phone friends. Jason’s voice was reedy and gentle, and at times, a tremulous vibrato in his speech made him sound either slightly nervous or as though he was quelling excitement. Anna couldn’t tell which. Her mental image of him was of a slight, nerdy man with a small chin. She felt soothed whenever they spoke and she came to think of him as a friend.

  On the flip side, an outrageous acquaintance had once told Anna that she sounded like a “big, fat dyke” on the phone, which she took as a compliment. Her tenor voice held traces of bass tones, and when she laughed it came as a hearty bellow. Anna assumed that Jason had formed a similar picture of her in his mind.

  When the future site of RHM was close to being finished, Anna stopped by to take a look. She found Beth engaged in conversation with an upright, eccentric-looking man. He ran his hand sensuously over the coral stone he and Beth were considering for the floors. “I love the way stone feels alive, like skin. Synthetic materials can’t replicate the sensuous—” he was saying to Beth as Anna walked in.

  “Oh, excuse me,” Anna said, “I didn’t know you were having a meeting.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Anna, you know Jason Schwartz, don’t you?”

  Anna inhaled sharply and blushed. Jason looked nothing like she expected him to. He was taller than she had envisioned and had a head of thick, copper-colored hair pointing in every direction. Gravity-defying hair. He was lithe and sturdy. Though not classically handsome, his appeal was in the plumb line of his posture, the sureness of his gaze, and the warmth of his smile, which made her knees buckle. The man was irresistible.

  “You’re Jason?”

  He nodded slowly, eyebrow cocked, almost in apology. “You’re Anna?” he asked, incredulous as well.

  They both laughed as if they shared the same joke. Beth grimaced and asked, “Hey, what’s so funny?”

  “I’m not sure I even know,” Anna said.

  “I think if I say anything at all it will be a mistake,” Jason added.

  “Is there something I should know?” Beth asked. Neither was listening.r />
  When Anna left the site, she shook off the encounter with amused indifference, knowing better than to think anything of it. She’d experienced plenty of immediate infatuations; this one would be nothing more than any other. The next day when she got to Beth’s apartment-cum-office, the phone rang and Anna picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “You shouldn’t do that to people,” Jason said without preamble.

  “Do what?”

  “You shouldn’t be smart and funny and charming on the phone without warning people that you look the way you do.” Jason’s voice was shaky. Anna was enjoying this immensely.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment and not an insult.”

  “Take it how you will. Can I take you to dinner?” Jason asked.

  Anna’s thoughts shot like lightning from Oh, shit, is he hitting on me? to heart-fluttering delight at the realization that he was, in fact, hitting on her. “Um, sure.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “It’s a date.” Anna hung up the phone, flattered, skeptical, but excited. “Oh, Anna, don’t even think about it,” she told herself aloud.

  The next morning, Anna canceled the dinner when she remembered she had a previous theater date with Isabel. She’d completely forgotten in the moment, but she wouldn’t think of standing up her little sis. Part of her was a little relieved to have a legitimate out.

  Jason called about a month later to try again.

  “You’ve been laying low,” Anna teased when she heard his voice.

  “I didn’t want to scare you off,” Jason explained with complete sincerity. “Besides, I’ve been out on a job in Connecticut for the past few weeks. So how about we try again. Dinner this week?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is Wednesday good for you?”

  “Sounds fine,” Anna said.

  “Great. I’ll call you that morning so we can decide where and when. Bye.”

  Jason and Anna met for a drink in an East Village dive bar. They never made it to dinner. They played darts, drank Guinness, and talked like old friends for four hours straight. When Anna told Jason of her plans to conceive with Joe Ballard, Jason told her, “You might want to wait on that.”

  “Um, well, thanks but no thanks for the unsolicited advice . . .” she answered with a vehemence she hoped would have the wanted effect of sending the message, Back off, buddy. They let it go at that for a while.

  When Anna asked him what he was doing for the holidays (Thanksgiving was coming up), he’d answered, inexplicably, “You are my holiday.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, I promised myself one thing for the holidays, and that was time with you,” Jason told her.

  “Isn’t that a little presumptuous?” Anna challenged, visions of Mick Wilkinson floating through her mind. Still, she realized the flirtation in her voice distinctly overrode any objection. What the hell was going on?

  Having forgone dinner, they picked up some fried chicken and a six-pack of beer and headed back to Jason’s apartment, a compact and spare flat, perfectly arranged. He’d turned a 450-square-foot L-shaped studio into a Japanese-inspired loft, with a tatami mat bedroom above his office area. A masterful use of the limited floor plan, the space, like Jason’s voice, made Anna feel calm.

  The two stayed up all night talking. Anna had grown weary of those get-to-know-you questions spent on dates: Where did you grow up? How many siblings? What drugs did you take in college? The answers rarely held Anna’s interest. After an hour or two of these exchanges, she could foresee the boredom that would set in as soon as a roll in the sack had played itself out.

  So Anna avoided these subjects. And since she held little expectation for the outcome of this unusual date, she relaxed and let her curiosity drive the conversation. Explicit about her lack of belief in marriage, Anna made it clear that she was not looking for one. Not a typical first date topic, but Anna wanted to set the record straight. She’d long grown tired of the assumptions made by and about people of a particular age.

  The conversation was by turns serious and then silly. At a certain point Anna asked Jason one of her favorite questions, one that befuddled most: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

  “Is this a test question?” Jason asked.

  “Just answer it,” Anna insisted.

  “Okay . . . To get to the other side.”

  “Yes, but is the other side geographic or cosmic?”

  “Cosmic. At least, that’s what I always thought . . .”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Anna screamed with delight as she kicked her legs up and down on the couch. She and Jason laughed long and hard at this shared insight. Anna’s laughter brought on a mean case of hiccups, making them laugh themselves into tears.

  They sat facing each other on the couch, feet meeting in the middle, and talked until the gray dawn seeped through the long, narrow, un-curtained casement windows. At first light, Jason asked permission to kiss Anna. He rolled off the couch and onto his knees. He leaned toward her, held her face in his hands as their lips touched for a long, blessed moment before he pulled away. Jason bowed his head. He seemed lost in meditation for a moment before he raised his head and spoke.

  “Remember when I told you earlier tonight that I thought you should wait on having a baby with your friend Joe?”

  “Yes—I thought that was rather bold of you,” Anna said, trying to hide the smile forming on her face.

  “And now?” he asked.

  “And now, I’m not so sure . . .” She turned her head and gazed over her shoulder before directing her attention back to him, feeling more puzzled than cautious.

  Jason stared at Anna for a few seconds before taking Anna’s hands in his.

  “Anna, will you marry me and have our babies?”

  “What?!” Anna kicked him away. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” she said, even though she knew he was serious and she didn’t really think he was crazy at all. She’d felt it too.

  “I knew I wanted to marry you the second I saw you,” Jason confessed. “I called my best friend the afternoon I met you and told him that I’d just met the woman I was going to marry. He said I was crazy too.”

  “But I just told you a few hours ago that I have no interest in marriage,” Anna protested.

  “You mean, until you met me?” Jason said. His tone, miraculously without arrogance, held a nakedness so powerful that Anna found herself answering in a whisper.

  “Yes, until you.” Anna was seriously considering his proposal in spite of herself. “We haven’t even slept together, how do we know whether we’ll even like each other in bed?” she asked, hoping to pull them both back down to reality.

  “I’m not worried about it at all. Are you?”

  “No, not really,” Anna capitulated. She wondered if there existed a police of reason who could step in and stop them from such impetuousness. “Can we do this?” She didn’t even know whom she was asking.

  Jason shrugged and raised his eyes skyward to confirm the irrefutability of what they were considering.

  Anna fell back against the couch and closed her eyes. She’d been awake for twenty-four hours and the sudden adrenaline of the moment made her sleepy. Jason let her slip away and simply rested his head on her abdomen. She had no idea how long they stayed like that. Was it a minute or two, an hour? The light in the apartment had grown from a dusty gray to a more golden hue from the sunlight slicing across the studio floor. As if awaking from a dream, Anna found herself saying, “Okay, so how long do you give me to decide?”

  “I’ll go out and get some bagels, coffee, and orange juice. Will that give you enough time?”

  “Grapefruit juice, not orange juice.”

  “Okay, yes, of course, grapefruit juice . . .”

  “And yes, that should give me plenty of time,” Anna said, not quite disbelieving the conversation they were having.

  By the time Jason got back, Anna had showered and put on one of Jason’s shirts. She’d even use
d his toothbrush, which she’d never ever done with previous paramours.

  When he walked in the door, he gave her a boyish look. “So?”

  Anna stood with her arms at her sides and nodded. A slightly deranged smile slowly lit up her face.

  “Good” was Jason’s rather perfunctory response, as if it had all been preordained and he needed only this formal acquiescence from Anna. He’d kissed her then for the second time; this one was long and deep and delicious. He held up the bag of bagels. “So let’s have some nova to celebrate.”

  Jason defied all of Anna’s past experiences. She thought she could spend a lifetime listening to his voice. And as it was coming from the improbable physical being of Jason Schwartz, she felt humbled—humbled by the surprise that life had granted her, humbled by the challenge to her hubristic certainty that there was no man out there for her to love.

  Anna felt that the decision to be with Jason had been made for her. A joyous inevitability suffused the way she felt about him. She had a harder time getting her head around how she would explain to her family—who had finally adjusted to the fact that she was about to have a child with Joe—that she was now on the road to the one thing she’d been certain she didn’t want.

  When she called her parents the next day to tell them she was getting married the following week, they surprised her in that they were not surprised at all. Anna thought for a crazed moment that somehow they’d conspired to make this happen, even though she knew this was the first they’d ever heard of Jason Schwartz. Her mother was so calm it was unnerving.

  Anna took the case against herself since her mother wouldn’t. “But I barely know him. Don’t you think this is crazy?”