The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  Ultimately, squash crepes are a last-minute prep, which is both a blessing and an enormous pain in the ass. It is stressful at a dinner party to leave so much to the last minute and hard to get everything done and hot all at once. On the other hand, it is nice to have no choice but to leave someone else in charge of entertaining, conversation, and the baby. Ethan and Katie showed remarkable calm and grace though both seemed a little sad and defeated. And it seemed like forever since we’d seen Lucas or even Jason though obviously that wasn’t true. Still, class together and studying together and library time together and showing up to babysit and crashing on our couch are none of them the same as dinner and alcohol and conversation about real and varied topics (not just books, not just babies). And peeking out of the kitchen at all of them, I felt something like forgiveness for the first time in two days. Jason and Lucas helped—if they could be a family in defiance of all society’s proscriptions, surely so could we. Ethan helped too because if he didn’t think we were total freaks, maybe we weren’t. Mostly, a house full of people sounds like love. In the kitchen, Uncle Claude at my side awaiting what I dropped, I chopped and sliced, sipped sangria, listened to my friends laughing in my living room. For the first time in a while, I felt fine.

  Jill and Katie didn’t offer to help anymore because I always said no. They are inexact and careless in the kitchen. It takes longer to explain what I want than to do it myself, and help is only helpful if it’s okay with you when you say chopped but get diced, and it’s not okay with me. And it embarrasses me to cook in front of Lucas. It’s not like what you make at home for dinner for friends is supposed to be like a restaurant anyway, and he always says nice things about my cooking, but it still makes me uncomfortable. Lucas says this is a problem he encounters with everyone he knows. Not even his mother will cook for him anymore. He never gets invited to friends’ houses for dinner. If he wants a meal he didn’t make himself, he has to go out. I’ll cook for him occasionally, but not while he watches. Thus I had Jason and Ethan to sous for me. Since the former was already drunk, I put him to work setting the table. And since Ethan’s skills were as yet untried, I put him on the task of dicing herbs and removing shallots from shallot peels. Do I sound like a control freak? Only when I cook.

  Katie and Jill and Lucas watched Atlas roll over in the living room—new as of this morning—and I could hear them clapping and cheering every time he did it, Jill and Katie friends again as if nothing had happened at all. Ethan and I worked on dinner and talked about baseball. Sort of. I was cubing squash for the crepes.

  “Those look exactly like those pillbox hats the Pirates wore in the seventies,” said Ethan.

  “Worst uniform ever,” I said.

  “Bad but not worst ever. There’ve been lots of uniforms worse than those.”

  “Name one,” I challenged.

  “All those powder blue road uniforms in the eighties. Those weird camo tops the Padres have been wearing lately. The all-one-color uniforms they were doing for a while—red hat, red jersey, red pants, red shoes, red laces. The Astros in the eighties.”

  “The Astros were having a coded coming-out party,” I said. “Those uniforms weren’t ugly. Those uniforms were gay. Rainbows? Stars? It’s not even subtle.”

  “No gay man would wear a uniform that ugly,” said Ethan. “What about those shorts the White Sox wore that one game?”

  “They did not.”

  “Did so.”

  “No way. How could they slide?”

  “No idea. I guess they got a lot of dirt in their underwear.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. He Googled it on his phone to show me. I was temporarily too stunned to cook.

  “Are you guys talking about baseball?” yelled Katie from the other room. “Baseball is boring. Stop talking and make us some dinner. We’re starved.”

  “You’re missing all of this rolling over,” added Jill, full of giggles. “Bring us food and a camera.”

  Tired of his belly that morning, Atlas had rolled over while I sat with him reading aloud about the plague years in late sixteenth-century London. He’d been able to push the top of him up for a couple of weeks, but that morning, he tucked one arm under, his left, and pushed himself right up and over onto his back. “Ohmygodyouguys,” I screamed, forgetting that (1) I am not ten, (2) I was not really speaking to them, and (3) this would surely scare the crap out of them both. Jill, pale as death, was downstairs before I finished standing up, Katie not far behind her, completely breathless.

  “He rolled over,” I said, delighted, gesturing towards an on-his-back Atlas trying to put his toes in his mouth.

  “You scared me to death,” Katie scolded.

  Jill burst into tears, making me feel terrible for hating her.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” I apologized, putting an arm around her. “I was just so excited.”

  “It’s not that,” she sobbed. “I can’t believe I missed it. I should have been here. I should never have been asleep. This is why new mothers are so sleep deprived. So they don’t miss anything.” And she sat down next to her son, put her face in her hands, and cried. Atlas reached his arm out towards her, tucked it underneath him, and rolled back over onto his stomach.

  Over the next hour, we all sat together in our pajamas and watched him do this a dozen more times until he rolled all the way across the floor and under the sofa, and we dragged him back out, and he started again. Then I went running with the dog. Then I took a shower. Then Katie and I went grocery shopping. Then I called my parents and my grandmother to tell them Atlas had rolled over. Then I did some work. Then I started dinner. Jill just sat on the floor all day watching Atlas, determined not to miss anything else, exclaiming over each new roll as if it were the first (not his first, the first, the first time anyone anywhere had ever rolled over).

  Dinner was good. We all got drunk, even Katie, though not on alcohol, just on proximity to us. We were silly and laughing, passing Atlas between us so everyone had a chance to eat, but not wanting to put him to bed either, not wanting him to miss this. At some point in the whirling, after cake, after coffee, still with the sangria, Jason leaned over to Katie and asked her to have his baby. We were all cracking up. We thought it was very funny. Except, evidently, he was serious.

  “Kind of a large favor,” said Katie.

  “You’re good at favors. You let me sleep on your sofa,” said Jason. “And you owe me. I babysit. And I gave you all my notes from orals. That saved you so much work. Plus I’m very good in bed.”

  “It’s true.” Lucas nodded.

  “We’ve been talking about this for a long time. We’ve been thinking about this forever. We’re always thinking about this. We’ve always known we want to be parents together.”

  Lucas and Jason looked like love at each other. Katie started to look panicked. Jill and I exchanged glances, splitting the difference between amusement and coming down off our high. Ethan, still grinning, looked around for the hidden cameras.

  “Why me?” asked Katie.

  “You’re perfect actually,” Jason said eagerly. Clearly he had been thinking about this for a while. “Maybe uniquely among all the people I know, you understand sex just for procreation. You’d be bringing a new life into the world.”

  “A mitzvah,” said Lucas.

  “You’d be bringing a child to people who can’t have one on their own. You’d be bringing so much joy to so many people.”

  “My mother would buy you many gifts,” Lucas added.

  “Are you crazy? Why would I do this?” said Katie, at which the guys brightened, thinking she was considering it, though really I knew there were actually and truly no circumstances in no universes past or to come that could make this happen.

  “Well, we thought of that,” said Jason. “The joy of helping others. The good and godly and spiritual act of making new life—”

  “Why Jason?” I interrupted to ask Lucas. “How did you decide him and not you?”

  “Actual
ly, our first choice was for us both to have sex with Katie”—who was blushing so hard, with anger or embarrassment, I feared for her health—“so that we’d never know who the bio father was. But we don’t look alike, so we’d probably know anyway, and we thought Katie would be more comfortable with someone she knew better. Also, sex with girls grosses me out. No offense. I’m not sure I even could.”

  “Oh my gosh, I’m not having sex with anyone,” Katie blurted out. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this.”

  Lucas kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “Of course, we would buy you good health insurance, cute maternity clothes, anything else you needed. We’d also pay you thirty thousand dollars.”

  I choked on my sangria. Katie’s face drained red to white. Thirty thousand dollars was nearly three years’ salary for us. Lucas might not get that, but Jason certainly did, and we all looked at him, waiting, stunned, for his explanation. When he’d said favor, I really thought that’s how he’d imagined it.

  “Actually, this saves us some expense as well as stress,” he explained. “Surrogates, adoptions, having a doctor implant our sperm in you, these things are all really expensive. Plus the emotional trauma of all that. If we keep it among friends, we save the expense and the feeling that we’re doing something really unnatural. We know who the mother is, so if we need a kidney or some medical info later—”

  “God forbid,” Lucas broke in.

  “God forbid,” Jason continued, “we’d know where to go. We know you won’t change your mind at the last minute because you’re a friend, and we know you’d never do that to us.”

  “And you’re already surrogate parenting,” Lucas added. “Atlas isn’t your son, but you care for him as if he were. This would be like that, only with more work before and much less after . . .”

  Lucas trailed off. No one said anything for a while. It would have been unbearably awkward if we weren’t all so drunk. I knew Katie was never going to go for this. It was only, it seemed to me, some kind of pure love that had enabled Jason to convince himself otherwise. Katie had a lot of planned childbearing ahead of her. She wasn’t about to start here.

  “I love you guys. You know I do. But I can’t . . . I wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe think about it a little bit,” Jason prompted.

  “Don’t rush it. Just consider it,” said Lucas. “For us.”

  “The sex would be—I’m sorry to be blunt, but I know you must be worried about this part—gentle and easy and over fast. Not gross,” said Jason.

  “I’m not going to do this,” said Katie quietly.

  “We knew your initial reaction would be no,” Lucas said. “But if you think about it a little more, it gets less weird.”

  “And you know we love each other,” said Jason.

  “You know we’d make great parents, provide a loving home.”

  Katie hesitated. Then she said, soft but steady, “Being gay is . . . not something I . . . condone—”

  “Katie!” Jill gasped.

  “What? They’re allowed to ask me something like this at the dinner table, but I have to hold my tongue out of politeness?”

  Lucas hung his head, but Jason looked ready for a fight.

  “You know this about me,” said Katie, hurt, like she was the offended party here. “Why did you even ask? What were you thinking?”

  “That loving us means acknowledging we’re not sinners?” said Jason. “That loving us meant you might think about helping us have a baby?”

  “I don’t . . . I can’t condone raising a child in that environment.”

  “We would be great parents,” said Lucas softly.

  “Families need a mother and a father,” said Katie.

  “How can you say that?” Jason demanded. “What do you think this is?” He waved his hand vaguely around at us, the room, the house.

  “What we’re doing is great,” she said. “But it’s only temporary. We won’t do this forever.”

  Not we can’t. Not we might not. We won’t. Like she already knew for sure. Like she already had an exit plan. “Why didn’t you ask Janey?” she said.

  “Janey would get too attached.” Jason shrugged. “She wouldn’t give the baby up to us.”

  “So, what, I’m just cold enough to do it?” Katie said crossly.

  “You’re just cold enough to do it,” said Jason.

  What can I tell about dinner parties like this one? They are shattering but also not so rare among friends that I really need to explain exactly what it felt like when eventually we hit lull and cramp, and anger bled into awkwardness, and everyone rose with excuses finally to go home, and those who lived there, those who stayed, felt very glad to have their house back and be alone again as if we’d been out too late and were coming home exhausted at dawn. Though always, too, dinners like this preclude return. You can’t go back after you’ve asked a friend to make love and then carry a child for you even if deep down you always knew—and were relieved that—she would say no.

  “I’m sorry, Katie. We didn’t mean to upset you. But we had to ask. Do you still love me?” Jason said on his way out the door.

  “Even though you totally embarrassed me? Even though you made me look like a horrible person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I still love you. Do you still love me?”

  “Even though you said no without even thinking about it? Even though you think I’m a sinner and are totally bigoted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I still love you.”

  This is how it is with Katie. You have to hold two things in your brain at once. She really believes in what she believes in, even the offensive bits. This is her world. If you love her, and we do, you have to accept that part too. For her, these were the rules. Katie is very good about not trying to convert us even as she deep down believes we are all going to hell. Sometimes I am offended by this. I grant her it’s a long shot, but doesn’t she love me enough to at least try? And this, clearly, had been Jason’s philosophy too. He knew she’d say no, but he loved Lucas enough to try.

  “Thanks for everything,” Ethan said, eyes a little dazed, hugging each of us in turn, walking out with Lucas and Jason as if they three had been friends since elementary school. “I had a great time. You guys throw a . . .”—he paused and finally settled on—“seismic dinner party. I’d love to come back.” We closed the door, marveled for a moment at the bravery of Ethan’s promise to return, left a million dirty dishes strewn throughout the house, and went to bed.

  There, alone in the dark, I tried to decide if I was offended that they’d asked Katie and not me. I wouldn’t have said yes either. They were right, I would get too attached. And though the sentiment “it’s nice to be asked” rings true, you can’t ask a question like that without truly meaning it. Committing it out loud is itself too intimate by half. Which is how I knew this wasn’t off the top of their heads, wasn’t a passing thought, wasn’t a whim to finally ask her. They’d been thinking about it and planning for it, waited for her to break up with Ethan, jumped before she found somebody else. Must have considered every woman of childbearing age they knew, settled on the one person they thought had the foundation of God or of anything to separate sex from what it feels like and childbearing from motherhood. I have never been good at the former and clearly could not abide the latter. I would have said no. And besides that, saying no would have been hard and sad. But it would have been nice to be asked.

  The next day, Katie had a plan.

  “I have figured it out,” she said happily over breakfast.

  “What’s that?”

  “I will pray for husbands for all my friends at church. And they will pray for a husband for me. That way, it won’t be me asking for something for me. It won’t be me wanting a husband so much. What I will be wanting so much is happiness and husbands for my friends. Not selfish. Not obsessing. Outside myself. Very mature I think.”

  So this was how Katie circumvented her narrative. She realized f
rom what Jill said that it couldn’t be about her wanting so badly to fall in love and get married. She realized from what Jason and Lucas said that she was being selfish worrying only about herself and had to help her friends first. So she became a Jane Austen heroine, so genuinely committed to the love and happiness of those around her that she forgot all about herself while love ripened all on its own in the background as she unknowingly readied herself. All the outcome with none of the embarrassingly obvious effort. Or all the loopholes without any real change in attitude, depending on how you looked at it.

  Twenty-one

  Atlas muddled through that semester as we all did. It must have been hard for him, passed hand to hand, sometimes in tears, by one caretaker rushing out the door only half together to another breathlessly just home, still half in the library. I thought he would become overly attached to Jill, wail only for her, or worse, for another one of us, but he didn’t. He was content equally with anyone, not just the three of us but also Jason and even Lucas and even Ethan, who still came now and again for dinner, and of course with his many grandparents—Diane and my family—who visited as often as they could but not often enough for Atlas to remember one visit to the next. He learned, I guess, I hope, that someone would always be there to love him though there was no telling who. He must have learned too though that that person would almost certainly be exhausted, often preoccupied, regularly in crisis.

  Atlas was the most stable person in the house that semester. Jill was having a crisis of faith regarding her studies and research, Katie regarding the possibilities presented by love, men, and marriage, and me by, well, the two of them. The inability of my roommates to get their lives together drove me to exhaustion. Their undoing by the printed word and the failure of The One to show up on schedule, their inability to consistently get along with each other or make their own meals or maintain their own friendships wore me down. Taking care of Atlas was my joy. But it was also my burden—the fact of it crept slowly into my consciousness and moved in. Like everyone else, it would not leave. I resented Jill’s every activity that was not the studying I had sacrificed my own for. I resented Katie’s obsession with dating, saw through it to the exit strategy it implied. I resented that Jason spent one night a week with us then got to go home. Occasionally, I still resented Daniel though it seemed also that he had dropped out of our story almost entirely. Even his absence, so glaring after he left, so looming for the first weeks after we brought Atlas home, faded almost to airy nothing.