by T. C. Boyle
It was dark when I got home. Connie was sitting on the couch in the living room, watching TV with the sound muted. “Hi,” I said, feeling sheepish, feeling guilty (I’d never strayed before and didn’t know why I’d done it now, except that I’d been so furious with my wife and so strangely moved by Allison in her grief, as if that’s an excuse, and I know it isn’t), but trying, like all amateurs, to act as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Connie looked up. I couldn’t read her face, but I thought, at least by the flickering light of the TV, that she looked softer, contrite even, as if she’d reconsidered her position, or at least the way she’d laid it on me. She didn’t ask where I’d been. Instead, she said, “Where’s the glass?”
“What glass?”
“Your cocktail? The one you mixed before you stormed out the back door?”
“I don’t know—outside, I guess.” I shrugged, though most likely I’d left it next door, at Allison’s, the MacGuffin that would give me away and bring our marriage crashing to the ground. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I was upset, okay? I just went for a walk. To clear my head.”
She had nothing to say to this.
“You eat yet?” I asked, to change the subject.
She shook her head.
“Me either,” I said, feeling the weight lift, as if ritual could get us through this. “You want to go out?”
“No, I don’t want to go out,” she said. “I want a baby.”
And what did I say, from the shallow grave of my guilt that was no deeper than the layer of earth I’d flung over the shrunken and lacerated corpse of Allison’s pet? I said, “Okay, we’ll talk about it.”
“Talk about it? The appointment is Thursday, ten a.m. That’s non-negotiable.”
She was right—it was time to start a family—and she was right too about cosmetology and auto mechanics. What responsible parent wouldn’t want the best for his child, whether that meant a stable home, top-flight nutrition and the best private-school education money could buy—or tweaking the chromosomes in a test tube in a lab somewhere? Understand me: I was under duress. I could smell Allison on me still. I could smell my own fear. I didn’t want to lose my wife—I loved her. I was used to her. She was the only woman I’d known these past twelve years and more, a known quantity, my familiar. And there she was, poised on the edge of the couch, watching me, her will like some miasma seeping in under the door and through the cracks around the windows until the room was choked with it. It was like the moment in a wrestling match where the whistle blows and the grip gives way and nobody gets pinned to the mat. “Okay,” I said.
Which is not to say I gave in without a fight. The next day—Wednesday—I had to go into the office and endure the usual banalities of my coworkers till I wanted to beat the walls of my cubicle in frustration, but on the way home I stopped at a pet store and picked up an eight-week-old dogcat. (By the way, people still aren’t quite sure what to call the young, even now, fifteen years after they were first created. They’re not kittens and they’re not puppies, but something in between, as the name of the new species implies. Kitpups? Pupkits?) The sign in the window read simply Baby Dogcats On Special, and so I picked out a squirming little furball with a doggish face and tabby stripes and brought it home as a surprise for Connie, hoping it would distract her long enough to reevaluate the decision she was committing us to.
I’d tucked the thing inside my shirt for the drive home, since from the minute the girl behind the counter had put it in its cardboard carrying container it had begun alternately mewing and yipping in a tragic way, and it nestled there against my chest, warm and content, until I’d parked the car and gone up the steps and into the house. Connie was already home, moving briskly about the kitchen. There were flowers on the table next to an ice bucket with the neck of a bottle of Veuve Clicquot protruding from it and the room was redolent with the scent of my favorite meal—pipérade, Basque-style, topped with poached eggs—which, I realized, she must have made a special stop for at Maison Claude on her way home. This was a celebration and no two ways about it. In the morning, we would procreate—or take our first steps in that direction, which on my part would involve producing a sperm sample under duress (unlike, I couldn’t help thinking, the way it had been with Allison).
We didn’t hug. We didn’t kiss. I just said, “Hey,” and she said “Hey” back. “Smells great,” I said, trying to gauge her expression as we both hovered over the table.
“Perfect timing,” she said, leaning in to adjust the napkin beside her plate, though it was already precisely aligned. “I got there the minute they took it out of the oven. Claude himself brought it out to me—along with a fresh loaf of that crusty sourdough you like. Just baked this morning.”
I was grinning at her. “Great,” I said. “Really great.”
Into the silence that followed—neither of us was ready yet to address the issue hanging over us—I said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“How sweet. What is it?”
With a magician’s flourish, I whipped the new pet from the folds of my shirt and held it out triumphantly for her. Unfortunately, I seemed to have startled the thing in the process, and it reacted by digging its claws into my wrist, letting out a string of rapid-fire barks and dropping a glistening turd on the tiles of the kitchen floor. “For you,” I said.
Her face fell. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You really think I’m that easy to buy off—or what, distract?” She made no effort to take the thing from me—in fact, she clenched her hands behind her. “Take it back where you got it.”
The pupkit had softened now, retracting its claws and settling into the crook of my arm as if it recognized me, as if in the process of selecting it and secreting it in my shirt I’d imparted something essential to it—love, that is—and it was content to exist in a new world on a new basis altogether. “It’s purring,” I said.
“What do you want me to say—hallelujah? The thing’s a freak, you’re always saying so yourself every time one of those stupid commercials comes on—”
Suddenly the jingle was playing in my head, a snatch of the last lulling measures of Pachelbel’s Canon, over which the announcer croons, Dog person? Cat person? It’s all moot now. “No more a freak than that girl with the dog,” I said.
“What girl? What are you talking about?”
“The one with the dog that bit me. She must have been six-four. She had an IQ of 162. And still she let the dog out and still it bit me.”
“What are you saying? You’re not trying to back out on me, are you? We had a deal, Roy, and you know how I feel about people that renege on a deal—”
“Okay, okay, calm down. All I’m saying is maybe we ought to have a kind of trial or something before we—I mean, we’ve never even had a pet.”
“A pet is not a child, Roy.”
“No,” I said, “that’s not what I meant. It was just, I’m just—” The crowparrots started up then with one of their raucous dinnertime chants, squawking so piercingly you could hear them even with the windows shut—Big Mac, Big Mac, they crowed, Fries!—and I lost my train of thought.
“Are we going to eat?” Connie said in a fragile voice, and we both looked first to the microwave and then to the animal excreta on the kitchen floor. “Because I went out of my way,” she said, tearing up. “Because I wanted this night to be special, okay?”
So now we did hug, though the pupkit got between us, and, coward that I am, I told her everything was going to be all right. Later, after she’d gone to bed, I took the pupkit in my arms, went next door and rang the bell. Allison answered in her nightgown, a smile creeping across her lips. “Here,” I said, handing her the animal, “I got this for you.”
Fast-forward seven and a half months. I am living in a house with a pregnant woman next door to a house in which there is another pregnant woman. Connie seems to find this amusing, never suspecting the truth of the matter. We’ll glance up from the porch and see Allison emerging heavily from her car with an armloa
d of groceries and Connie will say things like “I don’t envy her,” and “I hope she doesn’t have to pee every five minutes the way I do” and “She won’t say who the father is—I just hope it’s not that A-hole from Animal Control, what was his name?”
This is problematic on a number of levels. I play dumb, of course—what else can I do? “Maybe she went to GenLab,” I say.
“Her? You’re kidding me, right? I mean, look at that string of jerks she keeps dating. If you want to know the truth, she’s lower class, Roy, and I’m sorry to have to say it—”
“I don’t see her dating anybody.”
“You know what I mean.”
I’m not about to argue the point. The fact is, I tried everything I could to talk Allison out of going through with this—finally, to my shame, falling back on the same argument about the whole Übermensch/Untermensch dynamic Connie used on me, trade school, cosmetology, self-denigration, back-of-the-classroom, the works, but Allison merely gave me a bitter smile and said, “I trust your genes, Roy. You don’t have to be involved. I just want to do this, that’s all. For myself. And for nature. You believe in nature, don’t you?”
You don’t have to be involved. But I was involved, though we’d had sex only the one time (or two, actually, counting the night I brought her the pupkit), and if she had a boy and he looked like me and grew up right next door playing with our daughter, how involved would that be?
So there comes a day, sometime during that eighth month, a Tuesday when I’m working at home and Connie’s at the office, and I’m so focused on the problem at hand I keep putting off my bathroom break until the morning’s nearly gone. It’s the way it always is when I’m deeply engaged with a problem, a kind of mind-body separation, but finally the body’s needs prevail and I push myself up from my desk to go down the hall to the bathroom. I’m standing there, in mid-flow, when I become aware of the sound of a dog barking on the front lawn, and I shift my torso ever so slightly so that I can glance out the window and see what the ruckus is all about. It’s the red dog, the Cherry Pit that set all this in motion, and he’s tearing around on my hybrid lawn, chasing something. My first reaction is anger—anger at the tall girl and her fixer father and all the other idiots of the world—but by the time I get down the stairs and out the front door and into the sunlight, it dissipates, because I see that the dog isn’t there to kill anything but to play. And that what it’s chasing is being chased willingly (Allison’s dogcat, now a rangy adolescent and perhaps a third the size of the dog).
For all my fretting over the lawn, I have to say that in that moment, with the light making a cathedral of the street trees and the neighborhood suspended in the grip of a lazy warm autumn afternoon, I find something wonderfully liberating in the play of those two animals, the dogcat especially. Allison named him Tiger in respect to his coloration—dark feral stripes against a kind of Pomeranian orange—and he lives up to his name, absolutely fearless and with an athleticism and elasticity that combines the best of both the species that went into making him. He runs rings around the pit bull, actually, feinting one way, dodging the next, racing up the trunk of a tree and out onto a branch before leaping to the next tree and springing back down to charge, dog-like, across the yard. “Go, Tiger!” I call out. “Good boy. Go get him!”
That’s when I become aware of Allison, in a pair of maternity shorts and an enormous top, crossing from her front lawn to ours. She’s put on a lot of weight (but not as much as Connie, because we opted for a big baby, in the eleven-pound range, wanting it—her—to have that advantage right from the start). I haven’t spoken with Allison much these past months, once it became clear that whatever we once felt for each other was over—or to put it more bluntly, whatever business we’d conducted—but I still have feelings for her, of course, beyond resentment, that is. So I lift a hand and wave and she waves back and I watch her come barefooted through the glowing grass while the sun sits in the trees and the animals frolic around her.
I’m down off the porch now and I can’t help but smile at the sight of her. She comes up to me, moving with a kind of clumsy grace, if that makes any sense, and I want to take her in my arms but can’t really do that, not under these conditions, so I take both her hands and pull her to me to peck a neighborly kiss to her cheek. For a minute, neither of us says anything, then, shading her eyes with the flat of one hand to better see the animals at play, she says, “Pretty cute, huh?”
I nod.
“You see how Tiger’s grown?”
“Yes, of course, I’ve been watching him all along . . . Is that as big as he’s going to get?”
The sun catches her eyes, which are a shade of plain everyday brown. “Nobody’s sure, but the vet thinks he won’t get much bigger. Maybe a pound or two.”
“And you?” I venture. “How are you feeling?”
“Never better. You’re going to be seeing more of me—don’t look scared, that’s not what I mean, just I’m taking my maternity leave though I’m not due for, like, six weeks.” Both her hands, pretty hands, shapely, come to rest on the bulge beneath her oversized blouse. “They’re really being nice about it at work.”
Connie’s not planning on taking off till the minute her water breaks because that’s the way Connie is and I want to tell her that by way of contrast, just to say something, but I notice that she’s looking over my shoulder and I turn my head to see the tall girl coming up the walk, leash in hand. “Sorry,” the girl calls out, “—she got loose again. Sorry, sorry.”
I don’t know what it is, but I’m feeling generous, expansive. “No problem,” I call out. “She’s just having a little fun.”
That’s when Connie’s car slashes into the driveway, going too fast, and all I can think is she’s going to hit one of the animals, but she brakes at the last minute and they flow like water round the tires to chase back across the lawn again. It’s hard to gauge the look on my wife’s face as she swings open the car door, pushes herself laboriously from behind the wheel and sets first one foot, then the other, on the pavement (I really should go help her, but it’s as if I’m frozen in place), then starts up the walk as if she hasn’t seen us. Just as she reaches the front steps, Connie swivels round. I can see she’s considering whether it’s worth the effort to come greet our neighbor and get a closer look at the tall girl who hovers behind us like the avatar she is, but she decides against it. She just stops a moment, staring, and though she’s thirty feet away I can see a kind of recognition settle into her features, and it has to do with the way Allison is standing there beside me as if for a portrait or an illustration in a book on family planning, male and female, the xy chromosome and the xx. It’s just a moment, and I can’t say for certain, but her face goes rigid and she turns her back on us, mounts the steps and slams the door behind her.
When the CRISPR technology first came to light, governments and scientists everywhere assured the public that it would only be employed selectively, to fight disease and rectify congenital deformities, editing out the mutated BRCA1 gene that predisposes women to breast cancer, for instance, or eliminating the ability of the Anopheles mosquito to carry the parasite that transmits malaria. Who could argue with that? Genome editing kits (Knock Out Any Gene!) were sold to home hobbyists, who could create their own anomalous forms of yeast and bacteria in their kitchens, and it was revolutionary—and beyond that, fun. Fun to tinker. Fun to create. The pet and meat industries gave us rainbow-colored aquarium fish, sea horses that incorporated gold dust in their cells, rabbits that glowed green under a black light, the beefed-up supercow, the micropig, the dogcat and all the rest. The Chinese were the first to renounce any sort of regulatory control and upgrade the human genome, and as if they weren’t brilliant enough already, they became still more brilliant as the first edited children began to appear, and, of course, we had to keep up . . .
In a room at GenLab, Connie and I were presented with an exhaustive menu of just how our chromosomes could be made to match up. We chose to have a da
ughter. We selected emerald eyes for her—not iridescent, not freakishly bright, but enhanced for color so that she could grow up wearing mint, olive, Kelly green, and let her eyes talk for her. We chose height too, as just about everybody did. And musical ability—we both loved music. Intellect, of course. And finer features too, like a subtly cleft chin and breasts that would be optimal, not too big but not as small as Connie’s either. It was a menu, and we placed an order.
The tall girl is right there with us now, smiling like the heroine of a Norse saga, her eyes sweeping over us like searchlights. She looks to Allison, takes in her condition. “Boy or girl?” she asks.
The softest smile plays over Allison’s lips. She ducks her head, shrugs.
The girl—the genius—looks confused for a moment. “But, but,” she stammers, “how can that be? You don’t mean you—?”
But before Allison can answer, a crowparrot sweeps out of the nearest tree, winging low to screech Fuck You! in our faces, and the smallest miracle occurs. Tiger, as casual in his own skin as anything there is or ever was, erupts from the ground in a rocketing whirl of fur to catch the thing in his jaws. As quick as that, it’s over, and the feathers, the prettiest feathers you’ll ever see, lift and dance and float away on the breeze.
THE FIVE-POUND BURRITO
He lived in a world of grease, and no matter how often he bathed, which was once a day, rigorously—and no shower but a drawn bath—he smelled of carnitas, machaca and the chopped white onion and soapy cilantro he folded each morning into his pico de gallo. The grease itself was worked up under his nails and into the folds of his skin, folds that hung looser and penetrated deeper now that he was no longer young. This was a condition of his life and his livelihood, and if it had its drawbacks—he was sixty-two and never married because what woman would want a man who smelled so inveterately of fried pork?—it had its rewards too. For one thing, he was his own boss, the little hole-in-the-wall café he’d opened back in the sixties still doing business when so many showier places had come and gone. For another, he was content, his world restricted to what he knew, the sink, the dishwasher, the griddle and the grill, and he saw his customers, the regulars and one-timers alike, as a kind of flock that had to be fed like the chickens his mother had kept when he was a boy. What did he do with himself? He scraped his griddle, took his aprons, shirts and underwear to the Chinese laundry that had been in operation nearly as long as he had and went home each evening to put his feet up and sit in front of the TV.
