“Did you?”
Rasping.
“No.”
She held him and he held her as his penis went flaccid and fell out of her and then he rolled onto his back and pulled off the unfilled condom. She took it to throw away as she went into the bathroom to clean herself and when she came back out, she lay beside him with her head on her hand while he had his arm draped across his eyes and was breathing deeply, the way you do before crying.
She rubbed his chest as though applying ointment.
“Was it not good?”
Cordo dropped his arm and looked at her and her features were soft in the dimness but he could see her in all her beauty and tenderness.
“No. It was incredible.”
She half-smiled but retained the other half.
“What happened?”
He took a wary breath.
“I really like you. I don’t wanna fuck things up. Scare you.”
She rubbed his chest harder, a masseuse trying to work out the kinks in the deep tissue.
“You won’t.”
He was silent a moment. Then he told her about the fluoxetine, how it causes anorgasmia, the inability to have an orgasm. She asked why he was on it. So he told her about the OCD, the general anxiety, how he’d been on trazodone and sertraline in the past. Then he told her about Amelia’s night terrors, working back to her birth, then finally told her about Lourdes. As he told her everything, Lila’s face brightened with memory and she told him how she vaguely remembered hearing on the news everything he was talking about. At the end of all the stories, he wept for five minutes and she hugged him and kissed his temple. Then he told her the stuff about his parents.
“My father was the love of my mom’s life. After he died she didn’t know what the fuck to do with herself. She fell into a God-awful depression, bounced around on antidepressants, drank a lot. I was in high school, she was hard to live with, I spent more and more time with friends. Near the end of my senior year, I came home and she was dead in bed. Had taken a bottle of Vicodin with a bottle of wine.”
Lila listened quietly. Cordo sighed.
“This is the most depressed I’ve ever been, what about you?”
She smiled. There was nothing left to say. So they moved onto different topics and saw the sun rise. Then Cordo said he should get going and she walked him out to his car.
The morning was chill and gray. She had on a Seahawks sweatshirt and sweatpants. Before he left he asked if she wanted to keep going with this thing.
“Of course I do.”
He smiled, then hugged her. They kissed before Cordo left.
After consulting Amelia’s pediatrician, Cordo started taking the fluoxetine at night. If he and Lila spent the night together, he took it after sex. Thus he started cumming again. The first orgasm was mind shattering, as though he were shooting out his whole nervous system from his urethra. Lila’s self-confidence visibly grew.
Cordo introduced Lila to Tom and Mark, who had moved in together at the start of the new year, in March. They went to lunch together and thoroughly enjoyed each other. Then Lila introduced Cordo to her sister and a friend, Michelle, whom she’d met in college, on separate occasions. Lila soon told him he had their approval and Cordo reciprocated with Tom’s.
They first said, “I love you” in April. They’d both just finished a round of day sex in Lila’s bed. Lying side by side in the radiant light coming through the window, he turned to her as she lay drowsing and told her. She calmly opened her eyes, turned her head, and said it to him. They smiled and kissed.
“I guess it’s time to bring the kids into the picture,” Lila said during their next date.
Cordo nodded.
“Who first?” she asked.
Cordo glanced up as he cut his steak, chuckled.
“It’s gonna happen, Tendler,” Lila said, smiling. “Sooner or later.”
“How much later?”
“Stop it,” she slapped his wrist playfully. “I feel guilty we’ve been keeping each other from them, we have to.”
Cordo groaned.
“OK. Rachel first.”
“All right. Come to dinner Sunday?”
“Sure.”
“OK. Amelia?”
Cordo thought, tapped his fingers. He rubbed his forehead, whispered, “Fuck.”
“What are you afraid is gonna happen?”
“I…I don’t know. You don’t know her.”
“I know she’s your daughter and you love her.”
“Sometimes.”
“Stop it, you do. And I love you and I need to meet her.”
Cordo slumped his head on his hand.
“I love you,” he said.
She stroked his arm.
“Next Friday?” he suggested. “Dinner at home?”
“That’ll work.”
The dinner with Rachel went well. She was now seven and more or less understood the concept of dating, at least to the extent that when a man and a woman like each other, they go to each other’s house. She avowed, however, she would never go to a boy’s home, as she would never like boys.
Cordo made her laugh with the kind of corny jokes Amelia would have scoffed at and as the night went on, Cordo gained even more energy, as though he were a plant and Rachel’s laughter sunlight. After dinner they watched several episodes of Spongebob Squarepants as they ate the dessert of rocky-road ice cream. Rachel was flabbergasted by Cordo’s knowledge of Spongebob, the dialogue, the jokes, the opening song.
“Do you watch this with Amelia?” Lila asked.
Cordo snickered.
“Amelia would never stoop to watching something so plebeian. No, I watch it by myself—I love Spongebob.”
Rachel laughed, perhaps thinking he was joking. She went to bed at nine, hugging and kissing her mom and hugging Cordo before bolting down the hallway with Lila’s, “Brush your teeth!” chasing after her.
“She’s very affectionate,” Cordo commented. “Even with strangers.”
“Yeah. Counselor says it’s a nervous response to the divorce—a perceived halving in affection received results in a doubling of the affection given. Could get her in trouble in high school but for now I’m not complaining.”
Cordo laughed.
“Well don’t expect anything like that from Amelia the Ice Queen.”
“I’m sure she and I will develop our own rapport.”
“That’s a nice thought.”
That Wednesday Cordo told Amelia about the dinner on Friday night with Lila.
“You’re dating her?” she asked placidly over the dinner table, beside which Hester lay.
“Yes. And it’s rather serious.”
Amelia ate and thought.
“I would’ve told you sooner—”
“But you wanted to make sure it would last, I know, I understand, Dad, it’s fine.”
Cordo reared back in his seat, wood creaking.
“It is?”
“Of course. You’re an adult and I have the faculties, if not the anatomy, of one, you don’t need my permission or to worry about…whatever you’d worry about.”
He looked as though he’d just seen someone get hit by a semi-truck.
“Actually I’m glad you’ll have someone else in your life. Now that Tom’s living with Mark, they’ll surely start talking about marriage, maybe moving, perhaps outside the state, maybe children. And I won’t be home as much starting in the summer.”
Cordo was processing all this, so he was a moment in asking why?
“I was given the fellowship. I begin work after school lets out.”
This with no arrogance, only the serenity of a mystic prophesying.
“When did you find out?” Cordo asked.
“A few days ago, Friday, I think.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“That was the night you had Margaret babysit while you ‘worked late’ and the next morning I wanted to go to the university library. We were busy and I just forgot.”
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t think to.”
“Well neither here nor there, congratulations, baby!”
“Thanks.”
He got up and kissed her forehead.
“How do you wanna celebrate? I’m thinking a party.”
“No, definitely not.”
“Why not? I’ve never thrown a party before, it’ll be a new experience.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“So what? We’ll have an open bar, everyone and their guinea pig’ll show up.”
Amelia smirked.
“No, so—OK, we’ll have Tom and Mark—duh—then Lila and her daughter, Rachel, she’s seven and in the first grade, you’ll hate her.”
Amelia snickered.
“Then we can invite some of the people who are going to be working with you—the lead investigator? Other people who are gonna be in the lab? I know people do that sometimes, right?”
“I guess. But really, Dad, I don’t want to do that.”
“All right, well if I’m honest with myself, I don’t either. People are exhausting. All right, but at least this weekend you and I’ll go to the arboretum, deal?”
“Deal.”
“And tonight I’ll make brownies.”
He got up and proceeded into the kitchen.
“Use the glass pan, not the broiler this time.”
“You’re never gonna let me live that down.”
“I had to listen to you for three days while you soaked and scrubbed it out.”
“All right.”
He came back to the table for a second.
“Just to be clear: You’re fine with Lila and meeting her this Friday?”
She hesitated ever so briefly.
“Yes, Dad.”
He smiled at her.
“Great. I’m really proud of you, all right?”
She nodded, smiling. He went to the oven.
The dinner started well, better than Cordo probably could have hoped for. He sat on the sideline while Lila and Amelia engaged each other in conversation like two long-lost girlfriends rendezvousing for appletinis. Lila asked about Amelia’s research and understood more about it than Cordo could, so Amelia talked about it more in-depth, using words such as megasporangium, nucellus, integuement, megagametophyte, archegonia, and so on.
Then later Amelia asked Lila about her work as a nurse, which had started as an emergency-room nurse, where she cared for patients ranging from those who came in with minor asthma complaints to third-degree burn victims. Then she had graduated to gynecology and obstetrics, as well as neonatal.
“What does that involve, NT screening, PAPP-A, hCG measuring, amniocentesis?”
Lila was a little shocked.
“Yeah, among other things.”
“Do you do genetic counseling as well?”
“Uh, sometimes, if a doctor isn’t available.”
“What’s genetic counseling?” Cordo asked.
“If a pregnant woman’s fetus tests positive for certain genetic disorders, such as Patau or Down or Edwards syndrome, they’re advised of the implications and can choose to abort or carry to term,” Amelia said.
“Right,” Lila said, taking a sip of water.
“Well that’s not pleasant,” Cordo said.
“How many times have you had to advise?” Amelia asked.
“No, let’s not talk about this,” Cordo said.
“Why? Is anyone uncomfortable?”
“I am,” Cordo said.
“Why?”
Cordo chuckled, glanced at Lila.
“Because—”
“Lila, are you uncomfortable?” Amelia asked.
Lila thought, took a deep breath.
“No. And I’ve had to do it dozens of times.”
“For what disorders?”
“Mostly Down. Also spina bifida.”
“What’s the ratio of mothers who opt to abort and those who choose to carry?”
“Oh my…” Cordo muttered.
“Um…I guess one to four or five.”
“Really? Why is that?”
“I don’t know. Guilt maybe. They don’t like the idea of abortion.”
“The tests aren’t 100-percent accurate, correct?”
“In the first trimester. But if a woman tests positive in both the first and second trimester, it’s usually 100 percent.”
“But you must tell the mothers there’s a margin of error, small as it may be.”
“Yes.”
“So they cling to the hope that you’re wrong. That’s why they go to term. And how many times are you actually wrong?”
“…None that I can remember.”
“So. The futility of hope against the tyranny of science.”
“Is it wrong to hope?” Lila asked tersely.
“Is it right to bring faulty people into the world?”
“Amelia, don’t say—” Cordo began.
“It doesn’t make them lesser in the eyes of the parents.”
“Of course it does, the children will be objects of pity for all their lives in the eyes of their parents, who will also be pitied in the eyes of society. No one would ever wish for a child with a genetic disorder.”
“But for some parents, there’s no other choice.”
“Of course there is. Abort and start over.”
“What if the next child has a disorder too?”
“Then try again. Genetics are a crapshoot, eventually they’ll get the right combination.”
“Most parents aren’t and can’t be that pugnacious. It’s their child, no matter what.”
“Do you know why society pities those parents with children with genetic disorders? Because they have tougher lives than normal parents. Do you know why parents pity their children when they have genetic disorders?”
“Because they have tougher lives?”
“No. The parents pity themselves because whatever reborn elements of themselves are in their children are tainted. They despair at the realization of their own finite existences. Once they’re dead whatever vestige of them that’s in their children is hopelessly lost in the darkness of retardation or whatever other flaw the child was born with. The parents are truly dead then. Might as well have never existed in the first place.”
All three were silent. Cordo ran his finger along the rim of his water glass.
“So what’s the answer?” Lila asked stiffly. “Don’t procreate?”
Amelia thought.
“No. But what if there were a way to treat defective genes in the parents before they passed them on? Or even in the embryo itself?”
“Gene therapy.”
“And stem cells.”
Lila nodded.
“These are very ambitious ideas you have,” Lila said. “But in the meantime, parents will have to go on doing what they’ve been doing.”
Amelia nodded, thought.
“If Rachel had had an extra chromosome,” she said, “would you have aborted or carried?”
“Amelia!” Cordo scorned.
Amelia kept her eyes on Lila, waited. Lila kept her lips from snarling.
“I would have had her.”
Amelia nodded, returned to eating. Cordo aggressively changed the topic.
As Cordo walked Lila out to her car later that night, he asked if she wanted to break up.
“Of course not! You gave me plenty of warning.”
“Oh that was the worst goddamn dinner. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. She’s just flaunting her intelligence, challenge authority. Pretty routine for an 11 year old.”
“Wanna switch kids?”
Lila laughed again.
“Not on your life.”
She opened her car door and Cordo held it open.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
They kissed and hugged and then sh
e left. Back in the house, Cordo saw Amelia’s door was closed and it was dark beyond. He groaned and headed into the kitchen and poured himself some brandy to go sit out on the fragrant back porch.
Amelia finished out the school year with straight As and started working in the botany lab, of which Tom was head, the week before school let out. Cordo opened a bank account for her and deposited the fellowship money for her, as well as the numerous scholarships and grants she would receive in the near future.
Sometimes Tom brought her home, other times Margaret did—late, always after Cordo got back at around eight. Her mood drastically improved. Though she had nothing but curses and epithets for her lab mates, excluding Tom, she was ecstatic that she now had wider access to materials, microscopes, chemicals, so on.
In June Cordo and Lila started talking about introducing Amelia and Rachel to each other, which for long they had avoided discussing.
Cordo had the same misgivings he’d had before introducing Lila, who was also apprehensive. But they both agreed it was not practical not to introduce the two girls, considering the seriousness of the relationship and their joint desire for the relationship to progress.
“What’s Amelia’s favorite place?” Lila asked over coffee across the street from The Times office.
“The lab.”
“Besides?”
“The arboretum.”
“Of course.”
“Rachel’s?”
“The beach, the fish market, the arcade.”
They thought.
“What are we really afraid of?” Lila asked. “Is Amelia physically dangerous?”
Cordo shrugged.
“No. But the shit she talks about…could fuck Rachel up.”
“So what, she’s already in therapy, just pile it on.”
Cordo laughed.
“Let’s go to the arboretum,” Lila decided. “Rachel’s never been. She and Amelia can go around and Amelia can fill up her head with plant shit.”
“She won’t mind?”
“She doesn’t really have any friends, might be my fault, I don’t know. But I bet she’d love to hang out with an older girl.”
Cordo nodded, drank coffee.
“You ever feel like a bad parent?” he asked.
“Every goddamn day.”
“Me too.”
They cheered their coffee cups.
The arboretum was a success. After some begging by Cordo to get Amelia to take time off from the lab, along with some convincing that she could fill Rachel’s head with plant trivia and turn her into Amelia’s own little Igor, Amelia acquiesced.
Most Unnatural Page 9
