The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  During her seventeenth week, Isabel and Sam saw the baby for the first time via ultrasound. Isabel fell in love instantly. Until then, her pregnancy had felt too abstract to attach any substantial feelings to the life she was carrying. But seeing the slow-motion movement of her baby boy’s hands made him real, transforming her fetus into a child. Her child, her little boy. Isabel knew from that moment on that her heart would belong to her son, and even if she had no idea how that would manifest, she surrendered to this force of nature not her own.

  NEARLY TWO MONTHS went by after their picnic in the park before Isabel saw Christopher again. He showed up at Isabel’s office, unannounced, one afternoon in mid-August. It was testimony to Christopher’s brashness that he would come to the offices of Pink even though there was a good chance he would bump into the Turtle.

  “What are you doing here?” Isabel asked as he barged into her office.

  He held an envelope in his hand. “I have a present for you and I wanted to deliver it in person.”

  He made no outward acknowledgment of Isabel’s belly, which had popped, a softly rounded bump through the colorful and clingy Missoni dress she wore. He seemed to accept her pregnancy with a calculated nonchalance. There was no way he wasn’t affected by it, but Isabel also couldn’t guess how. She wanted to explain to him how she felt completely transformed, not so much physically, despite the obvious ways her body had changed with the demands of pregnancy. Rather, her entire being seemed to have shifted with the understanding that she was going to be a mother. What that meant was still a mystery to Isabel, but she felt Christopher looking at her differently, as if wanting to know what Isabel was feeling inside when, of course, he couldn’t. She didn’t know herself.

  Christopher handed her the envelope. Inside was a handwritten letter sealed in a glassine bag. She turned it over and immediately recognized Cocteau’s unmistakable signature and star. Her heart leaped. She pulled the letter from its protective sleeve and slowly deciphered the scratchy script. The letter was from Cocteau to his friend Coco Chanel and alluded to the child he would never have. The little-known story was that he had, in a moment of rare heterosexual activity, impregnated a girlfriend. The baby was lost—the story didn’t follow whether from termination or miscarriage, and this letter did nothing to resolve that question. He did admit that it was one of his only regrets in life.

  Isabel had mentioned to Christopher years ago the fantasy she entertained that she’d discovered Cocteau’s daughter residing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, now an old woman. She couldn’t believe that Christopher had remembered her outlandish fantasy. Giving her this gift at this particular moment in their friendship signified something she couldn’t quite fathom.

  Isabel placed the letter back into the bag and slid it inside her desk drawer, which she locked. Without a word, she took Christopher’s hand and led him out of her office, out of the building, and to his apartment.

  They exchanged no words. Ten years of foreplay ended in silence as Isabel unbuttoned Christopher’s shirt and slipped it off his slight, pale torso. She unbuckled his belt and stood back to watch as he stepped out of his trousers. She thought for a moment of the pants exchange in Christopher’s office so many years ago. How silly they had been then; they were not now. Isabel lifted off her dress and stood squarely in front of Christopher as he gazed on the fullness of her naked body. Keeping her eyes on his, she pushed Christopher down on the daybed and mounted him, her belly and breasts engorged and dense. She felt stronger than him, heavier, and she liked it.

  Isabel was touched by how tentative Christopher’s movements were, how unsure he seemed about where to place his hands and mouth. How unlike the man she’d always known. She whispered: “I’m not that fragile, Chris. Just fuck me the way you’ve imagined for the last ten years.”

  Christopher’s face grew stern for a moment before he flipped Isabel onto her back with one arm, pushed her legs up in the air, and penetrated her with more aggression than she expected. She liked that too.

  They lay in each other’s arms afterward. Tentative again, Christopher gently placed his hand on her belly. “Will I feel the baby move?”

  “You won’t be able to feel him yet. I do, just slightly. It feels like bubbles.” Isabel covered Christopher’s hand with her own hand. “You can call him ‘him.’ We know now that’s it’s a boy.”

  “Another man around to adore you. How do you feel about that?”

  “How can I complain?”

  Isabel’s thoughts bypassed Sam and returned to the Cocteau letter. She’d been searching for years for a firsthand reference to the incident of his fatherhood. It had haunted her. Baffled by how Christopher could have found it, she began to ask him. “Christopher, that letter, how did you—”

  He put his finger to her lips. “Don’t ask me anything about it. Just accept it as a gift from one friend to another.”

  “Okay. Fair. New question—got anything to eat? I’m starving.”

  “No, but they make a wonderful turkey Reuben at the shop downstairs. I’ll order one up.”

  “No, don’t. I’ll pick one up on the way back to the office.” Isabel dressed and was headed out the door in minutes. She returned to give Christopher a lingering kiss and then left him lying naked in his bed, feeling like it was every pregnant woman’s right to have a lover.

  Isabel returned to the office disheveled and flushed from sex. The Turtle stood outside her door. “Was that Christopher Bello in your office earlier?”

  “Yes, it was,” Isabel answered, meeting his eyes in a challenge.

  “Are you two friends?” the Turtle asked, knowing full well that she and Christopher had shared a bond for years. He was digging for information and she wasn’t about to give it to him. The Turtle’s face colored as she stared him down.

  “Very good friends, yes.”

  “He’s an . . . interesting fellow.”

  “Oh, you have no idea . . .” Isabel baited him.

  “Uh-huh.” He stared at Isabel with bulging eyes. The Turtle’s unnerving habit to stay focused on someone’s face even when it was clear the conversation wasn’t going anywhere had further served to cement his place as a dickhead early on at the office.

  Isabel picked up her messages from Tina. Once she’d returned all the phone calls and answered the more urgent e-mails, she automatically called Beth. Relieved that Beth was in a meeting, Isabel thought twice about whether she wanted to share her afternoon tryst with anyone, even her best friend. Maybe this was something she wanted to own for a while.

  Later that night when she got home, Isabel curled up with a copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust. Sam was back in Chicago. A photograph from their wedding day stood in a frame next to where she laid her head. She stared at it and smiled a bit sadly. If Sam had been home, she wouldn’t have gone to Christopher’s apartment. That was certain. She wondered, in the spirit of Cocteau, if she had pushed past the limits of audacity. But her ambivalence about what she’d done was mitigated by the gratitude she felt. In the silence of the apartment she shared with her husband, Isabel solemnly acknowledged thanks to him for being away, grateful for the time with Christopher and for the time, now, alone. Like the letter Christopher had given her, her tryst with him felt like a secret gift, one she would cherish in sacrosanct privacy. She stopped herself from answering the obvious question: What if she had gone too far?

  Isabel’s mind wandered to when she and Anna were young girls, those years between her first Holy Communion, when Isabel turned seven, and then later when she was confirmed, at eleven. The sisters often played a game on a fallen tree that crossed a small stream in the wooded land just behind their suburban home. They would walk along the narrow branch, trying to balance without falling off. To one side was the rushing shallow stream; to the other, the safety of the bank. They would start out crossing it slowly. With each trip across the log, they pushed each other to go faster and faster. The game would end, inevitably, when one of them fell into the water.
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  For Isabel the game held its own secret power. She imagined that falling into the stream was a kind of forced baptism: you fell because you needed to purify your sins. If you landed on the bank, dry and secure, it was because you had earned the solidity and sanctity of the earth. Isabel’s efforts to avoid falling into the stream were not always rigorous. Didn’t she need a baptism to cleanse her? That’s what catechism had taught her. Once fallen, she would try to imagine what had prompted her need for absolution. She was too young to make any intellectual sense of her internal game, but the images accompanying it had stayed with her as a kind of silent visual rumination throughout her adolescence.

  When her cell phone rang later that night, she let her voice mail pick it up, suspecting correctly that it was Christopher calling. She didn’t want to spoil the sense of solitude she had, just her and her baby. Isabel undressed and crawled into bed. Lying naked in the dark with her hand on her belly, she waited for signs of life from her womb. As if to answer his mother’s wish, the baby moved a limb across her uterus, drawing a line from the inside. It was the first time she had distinctly felt his presence. She whispered into the darkness, “Good night, my angel, good night,” and fell fast asleep dreaming of the growing boy inside her.

  When she awoke the next morning, Isabel listened to the message on her cell.

  “Hi, darling. It’s your lover here. When will I see you again? Say it will be soon.”

  As long as she had known him, she had never heard Christopher smitten in this way, not with anyone and certainly not with her. He seemed to have released all his strategies, exposing a neediness Isabel couldn’t believe existed in him. At another time, she wouldn’t have trusted it (though she would have been enthralled by it all the same), but she didn’t need to trust Christopher now. What happened yesterday was about her, not about her and Christopher. After their communion, what Christopher didn’t and couldn’t possibly know was how unreachable she was to him.

  BETH CALLED ISABEL at the office that day to invite her to lunch. Isabel’s meeting had been canceled earlier that morning so she was free.

  “Meet me at Tommaso at one.” Da Tommaso was always good for a table, and the food, service, and people watching were top-notch.

  “Either pregnancy has become fun or you’ve been up to something,” Beth observed the moment she sat down.

  Isabel avoided her friend’s inquisitive stare. “It must be the clothes,” Isabel remarked, and smiled coyly. She was wearing one of Beth’s creations: a nearly sheer eggshell linen-and-cotton sleeveless dress that hugged her full body. A plunging neckline boasted of her pregnancy breasts. Diverting the conversation from Beth’s comment, Isabel asked, “So, what news is there of the backlash after the protests? I see all kinds of editorials on it. It’s incredible that they haven’t grown tired of bashing a lingerie line!”

  “Maggie’s been brilliant. She’s making sure that there are pieces about the structure of the company and how we’re one of the most progressive in terms of accommodating working mothers. It sends the message we’re supportive. The whole thing is ridiculous. I mean, how do these people think we become mothers anyway? What kills me is the actual mothers who hate what we are doing. They must have missed a big part of the fun of conception or they wouldn’t be complaining so loudly.” Beth suddenly seemed distracted by something and changed tracks. “Have you talked to Anna?”

  “Yes. She seems tired. Why? Do you think it’s something more?” Isabel felt a twinge of regret that she’d been neglecting her sister lately. It was hard for her to see Anna struggle. As the younger of the two, Isabel wanted Anna to have figured out all the tough stuff already. It was an unfair expectation, and she knew it.

  “Nothing is particularly wrong, but she seems depressed to me. I think she might be angry with Jason because he gets to spend more time with the kids. She seems to blame herself for not being able to balance it all neatly. She doesn’t understand that it doesn’t get balanced neatly—it just rocks back and forth every day and the job is to try not to get too seasick. Anyway, I think she could use an ear,” Beth said.

  “I’ll call her after lunch. Maybe I’ll go home with her tonight after work. Sam won’t be back until tomorrow.” Isabel felt an unexpected loneliness at the thought of her sister’s frenetically full household contrasted with her empty one. She put her hand on her belly and the feeling disappeared. Even with Sam gone as much as he was, she rarely felt lonely. Before she was pregnant, Isabel always had friends around. After she conceived, she reveled in the companionship she felt with the baby inside her. She was never alone now. With Christopher, her life almost felt crowded.

  “How is Jessie dealing with Paul?” she asked.

  “I’m never sure from day to day what I should tell her and what I should keep from her.” Beth’s bottom lip quivered for a quick moment and then stopped.

  “Do you think she wouldn’t understand?” Isabel asked.

  “I think she understands that he’s very sick. And it feels wrong to not answer her questions honestly. But what do I tell her? ‘Jessie, your father is gay, but he can’t really accept it, and no one else knows, but he’s dying of AIDS, even though there are drugs he could take to help himself, but instead he’s committing suicide by self-loathing . . .’”

  Beth hung her head, and Isabel grabbed her hand from across the table.

  “I’m sorry, Beth. It just sucks in every way.”

  “And Paul’s mother is still in so much denial that she blames me for making Paul sick. She doesn’t think twice that Jessie and I are healthy—how would that be possible?!” Beth’s voice had gotten louder as she went on, but then she paused and it simmered to a whisper. “I couldn’t visit him when he was in the hospital because his mother would have freaked if she saw me there. And even if I barged my way in, I couldn’t have dragged Jessie into that drama. But she kept asking to visit. The whole thing is a fucking mess.” Beth looked drawn and tired in a way that Isabel had never seen before.

  Isabel shook her head. “I don’t know . . . maybe we underestimate what children can handle. Jessie’s a smart kid. Keeping people in the dark has never helped anyone, young or old. But then, I don’t know yet what it’s like to have a kid on the other side. Ask me once this little guy is born and I might change my mind.”

  Isabel became quiet again. Beth eyed her as though she sensed there was something her friend wasn’t saying.

  “What, Is?”

  Isabel looked at Beth and opened her mouth to tell her friend about her time with Christopher, but no words came. She realized she was nervous about Beth’s response. For all of her bravado and brashness, Beth was solidly conventional when it came to her love life. It was what had attracted her to Paul, who on the surface seemed a very straight, corporate, chivalric guy. Of course, surface impressions clearly hadn’t been worth a damn. Still, Isabel knew Beth wouldn’t approve of her transgression, especially given the fact that the very good man she married deserved better.

  “Is there really something in this world you couldn’t tell me?” Beth asked, sounding offended.

  “I saw Christopher yesterday,” Isabel blurted out.

  “Is that unusual?” Beth didn’t catch on as quickly as she normally did. This wasn’t good.

  “This time it was.”

  “‘Saw’ as in ‘fucked-saw?’” Beth narrowed her eyes when she said this.

  “Maybe . . . yes.”

  “Christ, Isabel.”

  “Can we not talk about it? I’m still taking this in myself. Saying it out loud just made it real.”

  “What about Sam?”

  “This isn’t about Sam, Beth. It isn’t even about Christopher. It’s about me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Isabel felt herself growing annoyed by her friend’s implicit judgment. “Forget it, Beth. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Sorry, Isabel, but it isn’t nothing, you know . . . Maybe I was right when I called you the Black Widow . . .”

 
Isabel winced at the reference to their one falling-out, years ago when they were in their late twenties. They’d been out at a jazz club with a guy Isabel had just started dating. A few hours and several drinks into the evening, Beth had pulled the guy aside and told him, “Beware the Black Widow . . . She weaves her web and she’s been known to eat her lovers when she’s done with them.” The comment did nothing to deter her date, but Isabel saw Beth’s not-so-playful warning as a breach of their friendship and wouldn’t speak to her for weeks. Beth later claimed she was trying to be funny. They’d finally kissed and made up, but Isabel had felt stung by the comment for years, knowing there was some truth in it. Still, Beth had never again mentioned the Black Widow reference. Isabel had long ago pushed the comment and their tiff about it into the memory junk heap of low moments. That her friend was referring to it now hurt her more than she cared to admit.

  “Seriously, Beth? Can we not go back there?” Isabel asked in a sharp tone.

  “I don’t know, Is. You have a wonderful husband—there aren’t a lot of them out there, you know—and a lover. All I’ve got is a closeted, dying ex-husband.” Beth squeezed her eyes shut even before the words were completely out. “Well. That sounded as horrible as it is.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I am being selfish.” Isabel paused to consider it for a moment. “But I can live with that.” She didn’t offer any more, letting Beth choose the conversation’s direction from there.

  “Let’s skip it for now.”

  The two friends sat in silence, not uncomfortably, for a few minutes until Beth turned their attention elsewhere: “Listen, Maggie is trying to put together a panel discussion on motherhood. She is in touch with KinderCo about sponsoring it and trying to place it as part of a series of roundtable discussions on family issues. Would you be interested in doing it? All of the participants will be mothers, and she wants one to be an expecting mother. You certainly would have a lot to bring to the table.” She said this as both an offer of reconciliation and a provocation, but smiled to let Isabel know nothing had changed between them. “What do you think?”