by Anna Monardo
“Well, you just heard about my crazy genes.”
“Kind of a sad family life, but the genes don’t seem so bad. You said in your questionnaire that there’s no mental illness? Right?” He nodded. “No addictions. No diabetes. No heart disease.” He nodded again. “Your mom sounds unhappy, but she’s intelligent. So’s your dad. He’s just a scaredy-cat control freak.”
“Denise, cut it out. I love my family. I take them the way they are.”
“You’re right, Christopher. I’m sorry. Your loyalty is a fine thing. I will say this: it’s unusual to meet someone with your talents and good looks and all that who’s also been in a monogamous relationship since before AIDS. You’re a sperm bank’s dream date. I’ll be honest, the monogamy in your personal history really caught my attention.”
“I love my wife. I love my wife more than anything. Why would I cheat on her?”
“Is this the point when you tell me why you and Nora haven’t had babies yet?”
“Ah, Denise,” he said, yawning and stretching. “That’s a long story.”
“Yeah, and why do I think that’s why you came up here, to tell it to me?”
Outside was the clogged traffic of Nyack. How many trains back to the city had he missed? “It’s dark.” His chin pointed toward the window. “We’ve been here hours.”
She wouldn’t turn her head to look. “Am I going to have to give you some gruesome scenes from when I was a drunk? Just to get you to talk?”
“Are you manipulating me?”
“Of course.”
They smiled at each other; she gave that nice full smile.
“Let me ask you something,” Christopher said. “Does the doctor who’s doing this sperm-donor thing, does he know—”
“She.”
“Does she know that you’re going to be a single mother and you used to drink?”
“She knows everything. We’ve talked about it for years. She said it’s up to me to get to the point where I trust myself.”
“And do you?” Christopher asked Denise.
“Yes,” she said. Then added, “For the most part, yes. And where I don’t trust myself, I trust my higher power. I trust my program. I trust my sponsor.”
“I don’t know what any of that means, but do you think you can…Shit, it’s hard, what you’re trying to do, Denise. You’re going to be a single mother. You’re going to have to raise the kid, and make the money, and all of it. Can you do it?”
“That’s what I pray for every day. I pray to be able to do it.”
I don’t care about your prayers, he was thinking, What I want is a guarantee. “If I help you, Denise, don’t be offended, but—”
“I understand what you’re asking, Christopher, and I think you’re right to ask. Yes,” she told him. “I do feel ready to have a child and raise it by myself.”
“Okay,” Christopher said. “Well, then.”
“Why do I have a feeling, Christopher, that your reasons for wanting to do this with me have something to do with you and Nora not having a child? What is it? She can’t? Or she won’t? I can tell how ready you are to be a father. It’s all over your work, too.”
“It is?”
“Soft shades of color. A general tenderness. If I didn’t know, I would have thought some of those watercolors had been done by a woman.”
“Maybe I am gay.”
They laughed. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.
“I don’t, either,” he said.
“So?”
“The book you’re writing,” he asked, “what’s it about? Tell me about your work.”
She sighed. “You’re avoiding my question. But since we’re avoiding—I’m trained as a historian. I got my Ph.D. from City College. I’m writing a scholarly book on famous alcoholics in history.”
“The world’s great drunks?”
“Basically, that’s it.”
“Wow.” There was a long pause. A few families had come into the coffee shop and left. A few groups of kids talking about homework.
“Christopher,” Denise started.
So he just said it: “A long time ago, when Nora and I lived in France, this thing happened.” He had never volunteered that information to anyone, not ever.
“Yeah?”
He told Denise about how he’d gone to France just because somebody in New York had offered him use of a huge warehouse studio. Again, when he hesitated, his mother and sisters had urged him to go. He went. After two years of painting like crazy, and feeling, for the first time, that he’d succeeded in doing what his father had insisted he wouldn’t be able to do—finding a life in the art world, getting out of Kansas City—he’d met Nora. Just met her in a wine shop one day. My God, she was, really, the most beautiful woman he’d ever talked to. And it turned out she needed him, the way his mother and sisters needed him, only more so, because she’d lost her parents a few years earlier. She was a student in France for the year, she had no one she was really close to. But it was so much easier to give to Nora than it was to give to his sisters and mother. Giving to Nora seemed to be moving him forward into an even fuller life, not dragging him back.
Everything with Nora was great from the start. Four months went by. She’d moved in with him. And then, in June, Nora’s friend Mary wrote to say she was coming to visit. The way Nora had talked about Mary, Christopher didn’t know what to expect. Some goddess in dance shoes. Mary was already a professional dancer. She’d been Nora’s best friend since forever. And Mary was bringing her boyfriend, Ross, who’d grown up in Manhattan and had these Upper West Side parents who were editors, the whole deal. Nora couldn’t stop talking about Mary, and about Mary and Ross. And as if Mary and Ross together weren’t cool enough, they were coming with their newborn baby.
They showed up in mid-July, having hitchhiked from Rome. Mary was small with a body like iron. And Ross was like somebody on a talk show, just knew everything about everything, and he was such a likable guy. He wanted to go to medical school, he knew all kinds of science stuff. But he knew about literature, too. And then it turned out he was into contemporary art. “They were just,” Christopher told Denise, “in a different league.”
“See! Again! That’s what I said to you this morning on the phone.”
“Yeah. Weird. So you know what I’m saying. But it was like I was so afraid before they got there. And then I was so relieved, and, I don’t know, they seemed to really, you know, accept me.”
“Hey, Christopher. Why wouldn’t they?” She shook her head no to the guy behind the counter who was holding up a coffeepot.
“Yeah, but when Mary thought I was a good boyfriend for Nora, that was such a relief to me. I mean, these girlfriends were really tight, like my sisters, except they laughed together all the time. We all got along. It was—the first days they were there—was like the best time in my life. It was like I was taking care of this family, except it was a family I really fit into. For days I kept this party going in my loft. I like to cook, I’m pretty good in the kitchen.”
“Your grandmother taught you—that’s what you illustrated in your answers.” Denise’s brown eyes were still not pretty, but Christopher loved the way she locked on to his story.
“Yeah, instant family. Especially with a tiny brand-new baby there.” There was no judgment on Denise’s face, just avid listening. “Ross was doing some drugs. He was into that. He loved talking about all his acid trips. Nora and Mary wanted to smoke a couple times, and I smoked some weed with them. But I was never that into it, not like Ross. But he’s one of these guys who keep pushing the limits, and he’s incredibly fun to be with, but there’s this, I don’t know, a sort of a challenge from him? Like this dare, and if you do keep up with him, he just makes you feel so cool.”
“Sure. The opposite of your dad. Must have felt great.”
“Now you sound like Nora: she says this stuff all the time, about my dad. But all I knew was that Ross didn’t think I was a hick. And he liked my art. Even gave me n
ames of gallery people his parents knew. Mary liked me as Nora’s boyfriend. And the baby, man, she was too much. Mary and Ross were spaced out half the time, so I just decided to be the one to keep an eye on the baby. And she loved me. She goo-gooed and smiled at me and stuff. She let me feed her a bottle when even her father couldn’t do that yet. Not that he tried so hard.
“After about a week, Nora convinced Mary to go off with Ross for a couple days. They hadn’t been alone since the baby, and they were itching to go off by themselves. And so there’s me and my new girlfriend, who I’m really in love with. I’m already thinking I’m hoping she’ll marry me, and it’s like we’re playing house. We had this baby to take care of—Denise, I’m telling you, she was an amazing baby, but I didn’t know that then, I’d never spent time with a baby before—and I just decided, I’m going to show Nora what a great husband and father I’d be. So I kept getting up early every morning to go to the market and get fresh food. I’d let Nora sleep, and I’d have the baby with me. She’d be on the kitchen counter in this little drawer I fixed up for her. She’s on the counter with the vegetables and stuff from the market. Then everything,” Christopher said, “went bad.”
“What happened?”
In the various therapy sessions with Nora when he’d been asked to talk about what happened next, Christopher had poured on the drama and played for pity (“I felt so responsible for this infant”), but he knew that with Denise he would have to tell it straight.
“Well, what happened is, Nora walked in.” Christopher leaned forward over the table. He looked up at the door of the coffee shop, stared at the hardware hinging the door to the frame. “She walked into the kitchen, and I was.” Pause. “I was. I was kissing the baby. I’d been in the middle of changing her diaper.”
“What do you mean, kissing her? On the mouth?” Denise asked.
“No, not on the mouth.”
“So you weren’t—what? Was she naked?”
“It was all a mistake. Have you ever done something and not known why?”
Denise smiled wide, showed a bunch of teeth. “Christopher. I was a drinking drunk from the time I was seventeen until I turned thirty-one. Have I ever done something and not known why? What do you think?”
“I can’t say it. What I did, I can’t tell.”
They sat still for a long while. Then Denise asked him, “Could you write it?”
It seemed to Christopher that they had agreed silently at some point not to leave the coffee shop until he told his whole story.
“Let me try telling it.” He was whispering. “I was changing the baby’s diaper. I’d just cleaned her. She was clean.” Denise, leaning over, strained to hear. “And she was naked. And when Nora walked in, I was kissing her, the baby.”
“Where? Where were you kissing her?” Denise slid a paper napkin over to Christopher. She pulled a pen out of her back pocket, slid it over.
He turned sideways in the booth, away from the napkin and pen; he pulled his legs up onto the bench, stretched them out. Denise wasn’t rushing him, but she wasn’t going to let him out of this, either. He remembered that there would be a train back to the city around eleven-twenty. Maybe he could tell his secret here, give it to Denise, then go back home and never see Denise again. The city was a long way away. So was Nora. There probably was no safer place than this booth to say it, except maybe a confessional. But Christopher had tried that, and it hadn’t worked. Once, he told it in confession, and the priest began to leave his cubicle to come out to find Christopher, to sign him up for a men’s rehab group. Another time had been worse: the priest said only, “These things happen to a man.”
Such a long silence passed that, when Christopher looked over again at the napkin and pen, they seemed to be there for no reason he could remember. The guy behind the counter came and wiped the table, and asked, again, if they needed anything.
You kissed the baby where, Christopher?
So he just picked up the napkin, rested it on his knee, wrote in block letters: Down there. He handed the paper to Denise and wrote on a second napkin, With my tongue. He passed that paper across the table to her, she had time to glance down, read, and then he grabbed both napkins, tore them into shreds. On a clean napkin, he wrote, It was more taste than kiss. It never happened before, and I never ever did it again.
“Down there?” Denise whispered.
“Sssh.”
She wrote on a napkin, You mean her crotch? The baby’s vagina?
His jaw was held so tight his teeth slipped and he bit his tongue. He nodded.
Nora saw you do it? Denise wrote.
His nostrils and his lips and the skin between his nostrils and his top lip—all that was trembling. He had nothing but a small pocket of air to breathe from, a small pocket at the roof of his mouth. His bowels shifted painfully, scarily. He thought he might have to bolt. “We weren’t married yet,” he said. It seemed important to tell this to Denise. His voice broke the quiet he and Denise had created. Anyone overhearing him wouldn’t know what they were talking about, just the story of a regular troubled marriage.
Denise kept her voice low, too. “What did Nora do?”
“My worst fear possible,” Christopher said, grabbing a napkin from Denise’s hand. “She left me. For two weeks, I didn’t know where she was. I was afraid to call her brother, because he might freak. I’m telling you, those two weeks, I went out of my mind.”
“She must have been—Well, God.”
“Yeah, and I could never make her believe when she got back that it happened just that one time. That one simple act, nothing else happened.”
“It wasn’t a simple act, Christopher.”
“Don’t you start, too.”
“Christopher.” Denise reached over the table and wrapped a big unfancy hand around his wrist. What was it exactly that made Denise seem of a different generation? Her hand felt like the hands of the old relatives in the nursing homes his family had to visit on holidays when he was a kid. “Christopher, believe me, there is no judgment here. I have done things in my life I would have a hard time telling you about. But I don’t need to tell them to you. I’ve told them to my sponsors, when I’ve done my Fifth Step. But for you, for you, it’s really important you believe that what happened that day wasn’t a simple act. That should make you feel better. You can’t have simple feelings about it. I understand why you’re still confused about it all these years later. Nora, too. I understand.”
“But it was just one time. One act. Isolating occurrence, they call it—”
“You mean isolated occurrence,” Denise said gently.
“Yeah. Two minutes. Less than two minutes.”
“Was it premeditated?”
“Nora’s asked me that. A couple therapists asked that same question.”
“It’s a standard question. I used to work on a domestic-abuse hotline.”
“Why?”
“That’s another story.”
“It wasn’t premeditated. And if she believed I’m a pervert, why’d she marry me?”
“If she thought you were a pervert, I don’t think she would have married you.”
“So why’d she marry me?” If he ended up crying, he’d really have to kill himself.
“Because she was in love with you, I guess. It sounds like you two needed each other, and found each other.”
“She said she forgave me. And now she tells me she’s afraid to have kids with me. I have never hurt her. Ever. She’s thrown things at me. She threw her high-heel boots at me once. But I have never lifted a hand at her.”
“I understand now why you want so much to do this with me.”
“Why? Why do I want to do it?”
“Oh, Christopher.” Denise’s face was all different now. Everything was different. Christopher had never felt so peeled to the core, and yet so gently peeled. He loved this woman. He loved this Denise. “Well,” she said, “if you do this donor deal with me, it gives you a chance to have a child but to stay out of the l
ine of direct fire. My guess is, you’re as afraid as Nora is. You want to be a father, but you’re afraid to be. You’re as worried as Nora is that something’s wrong with you.”
He felt the tears in his eyes, then on his cheek. “I’m not a monster,” he told Denise. “I don’t have a monster inside me. Nora thinks I have a monster in me.”
“Has she said that to you?”
“I just know that’s what she thinks.”
Denise was trying to say something like “She couldn’t make you feel that if you didn’t already feel it yourself,” but the guy behind the counter said he really did have to close up the coffee shop now.
CHRISTOPHER AND DENISE went to Denise’s house. They sat at her dining-room table and had tea. So old-fashioned. As in his nonna’s house, the dining-room table was where Denise entertained. She brought out a tin of cookies, but, unlike at Nonna’s, all the cards were out on the table, no double messages. He told Denise about the legions of therapists he’d agreed to go to with Nora. He told how he always backed out.
“No wonder Nora’s mad at you,” she said, and he sat still. He heard it.
“Yeah,” he said.
They talked until after eleven. When it was time for Denise to drive Christopher to the train, they stood up from the table and hugged. It had been years since Christopher had been hugged like this, devoid of sex or the withholding of sex. A hug with nothing but acceptance in it, not asking for anything. His mother and his sisters, every time they said goodbye to him, they held on a bit longer than he wanted.
“So, do you believe me, what I’ve told you?” he asked when they let go and she went into the kitchen for her car keys.
“You have no reason to lie to me.”
“Exactly.” Christopher stood in the threshold of the kitchen and watched her drink a glass of water. Denise made it feel so easy to tell the truth.
“But I have a lot to think about now,” she said, rinsing her glass, turning it upside down on the window ledge. “I’m sure you understand. I have to decide what would be best for the baby.”