“Are you on good terms with your parents?” the psychiatrist asks on the phone, and Gretchen resists the urge to say, “Define good.” Clearly that would not fall under saying as little as possible. “Very good terms,” Gretchen says dutifully. “We’re a close-knit family. My parents are very involved with my son.”
It is all true. Truth floats on the surface of things, with subtext beneath, hanging off the various words like a diagramed sentence.
Very good terms.
(We lie to each other about everything and therefore everyone is comfortable and happy.)
(Happy, of course, being a euphemism for a lack of anxiety.)
(Anxiety, of course, being controlled by various prescription pills.)
(Which, of course, my husband refuses to take, and instead kicks the dog when his anxiety reaches unmanageable proportions.)
(Unmanageable proportions occurring, that is, mainly every day.)
(Including for the dog, who has taken to pissing on the carpet.)
(Which causes my husband to kick it.)
(Did you mention my parents? Oh, yes, we’re on very good terms.)
We’re a close-knit family.
(My mother is an annoying person, so her so-called friends can only tolerate her in small doses, and therefore the lion’s share of coping with her is left to the nuclear family.)
(By which I mean me, since my father is off playing golf and having martini lunches, and my brother is, despite being gay, still of the male persuasion and therefore mainly useless.)
(Every time the phone rings, my husband says, “There’s fucking Elaine, ringing her bell.” Now when the phone rings, Gray says, “There’s Grandma! Ringing her bell!”)
(Yes, we managed to eliminate the “fucking Elaine” part, after Troy washed Gray’s mouth out with soap the first time he said it, even though Gray was only repeating what he’d heard his father say.)
(Did I mention that “repeating” is a bit of an issue around here? As in, my son is a parrot. If you read him the Gettysburg Address, he’d be walking around the house reciting it from memory within half an hour.)
(Instead, most of what he repeats consists of imperatives that I should get my makeup done at Neiman’s and that the dog is a filthy animal bringing diseases into the house, even though it never ventures farther than our backyard.)
(I suppose at least Gray only got his mouth washed out with soap and didn’t get kicked.)
(Although for the remainder of the night, I thought obsessively of that movie with Farrah Fawcett, The Burning Bed, and how immensely satisfying it would be to burn the house down while Troy was asleep . . . how all I would need to do is send Gray out for a sleepover and we’d be all set . . .)
(Except Gray has no friends at whose houses he could sleep.)
(And I’d have to leave the dog inside and let it be burned to a crisp, since evacuating the pets is one of the surest signs that arson has been committed.)
(Which might not be the worst thing, except that Gray is more attached to that pissing dog than he is to us.)
My parents are very involved with my son.
(No subtext here, stupid. Don’t you recognize sarcasm?)
The interview is mostly painless. Gretchen ignores the ringing doorbell to complete the call and hangs up relatively certain she has not sabotaged Chad’s and Miguel’s hopes of parenthood. She trots to the door to see if there’s any sign of who was there and finds a package at her feet from UPS. The address label reads Troy Underwood, but this stops Gretchen not at all. Any package in the mail is a golden opportunity. Perhaps it will be an inflatable doll with a Russian flag right above its vagina! Then she could photograph it and give it to her future shark attorney to keep in her hypothetical divorce file, which is becoming, in her mind, as crowded as a hope chest. She rips open the packaging.
At first, she has no idea what the thing is. It looks like an oversized flashlight, like something you might bring on a camping trip, which makes no sense given Troy, who would probably wear Prada on a camping trip, except that he would never go on a camping trip . . . for God’s sake, even when he has been on vacation somewhere like the Four Seasons Punta Mita, he spreads all his luggage out in the garage on Hefty bags and airs it out for a full twenty-four hours to let the germs dissipate before he will permit it back inside the house.
Only when Gretchen reads the warranty information does she realize that what she’s holding is a blue light—the kind used in forensics on TV crime dramas. Instantly, a shudder runs through her. Jesus Christ. Troy must be planning to kill her for the insurance money and then use this to make sure he’s eliminated all the evidence. Frantically, she checks the receipt to see if he used his credit card—if he’s left a trail of evidence. He has. For some reason this makes Gretchen’s heart steady just a touch, though her hand is still gripping the wall. That fucktard. Just let him try and kill her. She will call Chad and tell him about the blue light so that Troy’s stupid ass will be busted and sent to prison the moment she turns up missing . . .
It takes thirty seconds or so to realize that she—dead in this scenario—does not exactly emerge triumphant. Gretchen marches into Troy’s study—
(Study being a euphemism, since Troy does not work other than the occasional crappy product endorsements of has-been athletes, and since he has never, in their entire marriage, read a book . . .)
—she does not knock, just bursts in. Troy is at the computer, though not doing anything useful to her future divorce case like jacking off to Cold War porn; he seems to be browsing the Travel & Leisure website, and he doesn’t look up when she enters.
“What the fuck is this?” she demands, throwing the blue light half across the room at his desk, where it knocks down a photo of Gray.
Troy jumps . . . but in only a second his alarm turns to enthusiasm as he grabs for the light. “What’s the matter with you?” he says. “Why would you throw something with glass and batteries? I paid three hundred bucks for this. Do you have to run around like some parody of a hysterical woman every single minute of every single day?”
“Why are you ordering a blue light for three hundred dollars off the Internet?” Gretchen demands. “What do you need a blue light for? Are you planning to bury bodies in the basement?”
Troy is grinning. He stands, holding the light out to her like an offering, despite having just called her hysterical. “It’s for the dog!” he explains, bouncing up and down a little in his mirth. “I just know those carpet cleaners haven’t gotten everything out. Those guys were careless, you could tell by just looking at them, it was like Cheech and Chong came to clean the rugs . . . I can still smell urine hanging in the air—I know the carpets are still contaminated. So we can have them come back and show them all the spots they missed, and then we’ll have them redo it and check again with the light while they’re still here. We won’t stop until all the piss is gone.”
It is possible, Gretchen realizes, that the scenario in which Troy was planning to murder her was preferable to this. “You have totally lost your mind.”
“Why?” Troy says pleasantly. “Look, just because you don’t care anything about personal hygiene—I mean, fine, maybe that’s why you have acne like a thirteen-year-old. Excuse me if I don’t want to walk around a river of dog piss in my own house.”
“I have acne because I’m on freaking hormone shots!” Gretchen hears her voice, hysterical, just like he said. “I’m trying to help my brother have a baby! I have other things to think about besides whether the dog has an accident and some shadow of a shadow of a germ hasn’t been eliminated even though we’ve had the carpet professionally shampooed twice!”
“Fine,” Troy says. “Go ahead and eat your lunch straight off the piss-soaked carpet for all I care, but I happen to be concerned for my son’s safety and would rather he not get some disease from an outdoor animal urinating in his house.”
“Carrot is not an outdoor animal!” Gretchen screams again. “All dogs go outdoors to go to the bathr
oom! The fact that we let Carrot into the yard does not make him an outdoor animal! You don’t even make any sense! It’s like you’re just on some campaign to drive me insane.”
Troy snorts. “You don’t seem to need any help on that front.”
Gretchen feels a series of small explosions going off inside her brain. She is dimly aware of biting the insides of her cheeks so hard that she can taste a metallic pre-blood along her tongue. She and Troy are supposed to attend one of her biggest client’s weddings tonight. They will not know many people there, but it will be an outstanding opportunity to drum up new business, given that she will be introduced to everyone by her professional capacity (This is my accountant, Gretchen Underwood) . . . and Gretchen cannot show up stag. If she picks up the blue light right now and makes sure to rectify her error of not damaging it, by proceeding to beat Troy about the head and shoulders with it, she will look like: a) a pathetic old spinster at the wedding or b) a predatory woman out to have affairs with all the other women’s husbands should they hire her to do their books.
(Not that she is much of a threat, with her adolescent acne and her mannish pantsuits . . .)
Still, a husband is a vital necessity at such affairs. And if her days of having a husband are numbered, she needs to score all the clients she can—in between rushing into the bathroom to stab her leg with a needle and elevate her risk of cancer with hormones, that is, so that her brother can have the bright new start to his life that Gretchen, once upon a time, believed she was having when, in the eleventh hour of her youth, she got pregnant with Gray. She is not sure whether she pities Chad and Miguel or whether she wants to kill them with envy. Something is clearly wrong: with her, with this egg-donating master plan. Don’t think, don’t think. If you slow down to think, you are doomed . . .
Instead, she storms out of Troy’s office, poor terrorized Carrot scuttling out of her way in the kitchen as though expecting a foot to the ribs. Against the kitchen counter, Gretchen leans, gasping irrationally. She needs a glass of wine. But even as she is thinking this thought, she walks right past the wine rack to the freezer, where the old bottle of Ketel One has barely an inch left, but a new bottle rests beside it, frosty and untouched. Gray will not be out of the Day School for four hours. She has time, before she has to drive.
MIGUEL
Miguel is ordering his Paxil off the Internet, with no idea that a gun is about to be introduced into Act I that will later, more than once, attempt to shoot him in the face. He’s in a pair of boxer shorts, looking casually gorgeous to no one except his litter of drooling bulldogs, thrilled out of his mind—in his misanthropic way that doesn’t include actual giddiness—to be home alone while Chad is as usual working. He almost doesn’t pick up the ringing phone, as he tends to pick up only for Lina. Then he remembers that these days people are constantly calling to discuss Important Matters, so he relents as though Chad is watching him, saying, “Yeah?” into the receiver.
“Good morning, Miguel,” says Christine, their coordinator at the fertility clinic, as soon as she’s able to ascertain that she doesn’t have the wrong number. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but your tests came back and it seems you have syphilis.”
For a long stretch, Miguel hears himself not saying anything. He would like to hang up, but Chad would kill him if he hung up on Christine. Finally he sighs. “Of course I do.”
“You mean you already knew?” she asks.
He sighs again. She will conclude that one of the symptoms of syphilis is sighing. “No. I had no idea. I mean—you know, it’s one more thing.”
“One more thing,” Christine repeats.
“One more thing that’s gone wrong,” Miguel explains.
“Did something else go wrong?” she asks, her voice elevating in concern. “Is something wrong with the surrogate?”
Miguel sighs again. He smacks himself in the head so that his ear bangs a little against the phone.
“Well,” he quips, “at least it’s not AIDS! Syphilis—the kinder and gentler STD.” He laughs a goofy falsetto into the phone, then stops abruptly. “So, uh . . . what am I supposed to do?”
“You need to call your doctor.” Now it is Christine’s turn to lapse into silence, panic rising in Miguel’s throat so that by the time she speaks again, he is almost gagging on sudden fear. “They can treat it with antibiotics. It shouldn’t be a big deal for you. Once it’s all cleared up, you can come back and we can get things back on track.”
“Wait a second . . .” He has to cough, to speak around all the lumps. “What do you mean, once it’s all cleared up?”
“Mmm. Well. Yes . . . you can’t donate sperm with an active case of syphilis, Miguel. It’s against the law.”
“My sperm is against the law?”
“Sure. Or, what I mean to say, it’s against our policies. The FDA, strictly speaking, says it’s legal as long as the surrogate is informed and consents, but that’s a can of worms we don’t want to get into. It’s our policy not to get involved with cases like that. Anyway, the antibiotics take three to six months to take full effect. You go in for some shots, is my understanding of it. It’s simple. You’ll always have the marker for syphilis, but once you’re considered cured we can proceed.”
“God,” he says, “of course I have to be cured first, otherwise Emily could get infected, too.”
“Well, not exactly,” Christine says. “Generally speaking, in an implantation like this, there isn’t actual transmission to the surrogate. Statistically.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good—really good—so she might still . . .” My STD’d ass may not completely scare her away is what I mean, Christine. He tries, “So I need to be cured so the baby doesn’t get it.”
“Sure,” Christine says. “Nobody wants that. They say that’s not really a risk, though. Statistically again, I mean. I did some research today, before I called you.”
The moment reeks weirdly of Kafka. “So I have syphilis,” he recaps. “But I have no symptoms. And the surrogate can’t get it. And statistically, the fetus is safe, too. And the FDA is A-okay with my sperm. But you—you guys, the agency—you’re going to hold me up six months, because that’s the . . . policy?”
“Everyone wants to be safe here,” Christine reiterates.
“But Emily and Gretchen are almost ready. They’re stuffing themselves full of hormones now. Emily has to be pregnant by the end of October . . .”
“You know,” Christine says, “I’m surprised that a woman who’s had two children of her own thinks that things can be timed down to the precise second that way. That just isn’t the way pregnancy works.”
Miguel stares at his computer screen. Indian Paxil stares back. He watches his hand on the mouse, clicking to increase his dosage.
“You can’t always plan these things,” Christine continues. “Obstacles occur. This, for example. Syphilis is . . . an obstacle. People need to be flexible. Family planning isn’t an exact science.”
This seems a bizarre declaration from someone whose living is made scheduling desperate couples into the precise time slots in which they will be fertilized, but Miguel lets it stand.
“There has to be another solution,” he says. “I’m not sure . . . if I have to wait six months, I’m not sure they’d both still be on board.”
“Sure, sure, I understand, yes, of course. Well, clearly you could try to find another agency that will . . . work within these parameters, though I have to be honest, I’m not hopeful about that . . . I imagine most feel exactly as we do. Or”—her voice brightens—“you could simply get another sperm donor. Maybe that would even make things more equal . . . then the offspring wouldn’t be your biological child but not Chad’s. Since his sister’s the egg donor—well, do you have a brother?”
A world in which the Guerra family had another male offspring seems so far from the one he recognizes that Miguel laughs.
Silence again from Christine. Miguel has worn the welcome off this conversation, he knows. He remember
s vaguely reading somewhere that syphilis was possibly responsible for a wide array of cultural catastrophes, from cases of female “hysteria” to the witch trials. The syphilitics were mad—it drove you crazy and there was no stopping the train to crazy town back then.
“Uh, look. Do you know how long I’ve had this? Do you know . . . I mean, does it say?”
“I have no idea,” Christine says. “But Chad should be tested, too, of course. Even though he didn’t need medical screening for the surrogacy, he’ll obviously need treatment if you’ve passed this to him.” She pauses. “I’m sorry—that was insensitive. We don’t know the origins, of course. He could be the one who passed it to you.”
The moment Christine is off the phone, Miguel has already progressed from being desperate to get rid of her to wanting her back. Something horrible looms in the background of this moment, and solitude only encourages its approach. He sits, still in the same chair he’d been lounging in when the call came, the same Indian drug website up on his browser, the same dogs asleep on the same drool-ridden floor at his feet. If he can divorce the fact that his STD has apparently derailed his and Chad’s plans for parenthood, and completely inconvenienced at least one woman (Gretchen’s eggs, he supposes, can be harvested for future use, so maybe she has not gone through all this in vain), he has to admit that he does not particularly care that he has syphilis. This seems strange—strange enough that he actually does a kind of bullshit-detection test on himself, to see if he’s in some kind of denial. But no. Syphilis . . . whatever. Miguel has always half-expected to die of AIDS, and syphilis is anticlimactic and, it seems, fairly inconsequential. If the syphilis were responsible for his . . . let’s say lack of mental stability . . . then his father wouldn’t have been an abusive drunk who drove his car off a bridge in Caracas, and Isabel wouldn’t be such a religious fanatic that she converted to Eastern Orthodox and bought some apple orchard in Northern Michigan (Midwestern apple orchards being a bastion for the Latino Eastern Orthodox community? The juxtaposition of these actions seems oxymoronic to Miguel) and virtually disowned every member of their family, including Mami, who is not exactly a heathen herself. If syphilis were responsible for whatever is wrong with Miguel’s brain, then Lina wouldn’t have been a twice-divorced addict by the time she was twenty-five or now in a relationship with a stern mommy figure (not that he’s judging). Unless somehow Mami was sprinkling syphilis germs on the arepas when he was a child, STDs have nothing to do with whatever is wrong with the Family Guerra.
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