Fine, then: syphilis.
Miguel does not even bother, yet, reaching for the phone to call his doctor. He certainly is in no hurry to call Chad and confess to how he’s ruined everything, either. He sits in this same chair, staring at this same screen, wondering why everything—everything—seems changed.
Chad should be tested, too, of course . . .
Miguel tries, with some difficulty, to remember the various guys he fucked in the 1990s. Really, though, there is no need: he has already concluded that his former lover, Tomas, with whom he lived in states of rhapsody and heartbreak during one absurd year in Barcelona, is the clear culprit. Tomas was a slut, and his slutty ways broke Miguel’s heart into messy, humiliating pieces, and it is almost fitting that he has left Miguel this symbolic albatross to drag around for the next decade, hence sabotaging his efforts at fatherhood. Tomas would laugh wickedly could he see this. Except stupid Tomas is probably dead by now—he, Miguel would place money on it, would have found a way to contract AIDS . . . or if not, some hot-headed Spaniard would have murdered him for fucking his: a) lover, b) son. Tomas had a doomed air about him. Even as he thinks this, Miguel realizes that everyone he ever loved prior to Chad possessed a doomed air, yet most of them are still alive, and that at a certain age that air passes from romantic to fucked up to simply desperate. He finds himself hoping fervently that Tomas is dead, rather than an embarrassing old troll.
Everyone important is gone. He and Emily, who were joined by mutual friendship with a more powerful personality, are now stuck with only each other in this absurdist play that will have resulted in him having syphilis and her having wasted her time. He and Tomas once seemed capable of writing their love across the sky, except that it turned out Tomas was offering himself to half of Barcelona, and now here is Miguel, with Chad . . . sweet Chad.
Middle age: a B movie hobbled together from scenes on the cutting room floor, populated by extras who never get a billing.
Somehow, a baby was supposed to help that. Somehow, Termite Mansion was supposed to make that all right. He and Chad would become shimmering again. The numbness would go away. Life would throb with significance.
“I have syphilis,” Miguel says to the empty room, followed by a cackle. One of the bulldogs raises its sleepy head in jerky alarm. “I have syphilis, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
He knows he has calls to make. Injections to receive. News to break. He sits, unmoving, staring at the phone.
Caracas had a speed-of-light gossip grapevine, but Mami was no part of it. They would hear about Isabel only much later, from “Tía,” an elderly widow in need of caretaking, with whom they were living by then. Tía rarely left the house—her legs were too bad, swollen most days to resemble elongated watermelons—and she could not afford a telephone. She was old enough that her husband and most of her friends were dead, but somehow everyone knew her. Mami had shown up on her doorstep with Miguel half-hidden in shame behind her body, after two nights on the street.
It was not, Miguel would often remind himself later, that his mother had made no effort to reunite with Isabel: by the time they ended up with Tía they had circled back to the house twice, in an attempt to find her. Neither visit had yielded anyone at home. The house, which Mami would not let Miguel enter, was upended like a TV police search had taken place within. Mami stole scraps of food from her own kitchen, but they couldn’t stay long—“He must have taken Isabel with him, wherever he went, el perro, to make sure she didn’t run off.” For a man who abandoned so easily, Papi was terrified of being left—even Miguel remembered that the earliest fights he’d heard between his parents had concerned Mami wanting to go home to Chicago and her mother. Miguel thought they should arm themselves with kitchen knives, wait until Papi stumbled drunkenly through the door, and bring Isabel with them by force, but Mami, when he suggested this, said, “Violence is not the answer, Miguel—don’t grow up to be the kind of man your father is,” and Miguel’s body flooded with confusion. If he were the man his father was, he would leave Isabel to rot. Except Papi was not doing that, apparently, but guarding her like a secret talisman. This was how it was with Mami: when they spoke to one another, the words never seemed to hit the mark; both he and his mother fired a mix of Spanish and English back and forth, yet words fizzled out and deflated between them so that they could not seem to grasp one another’s meaning. There was a world between the man his father was and being a sobbing victim behind a red curtain, but Miguel did not know how to express this. Mami coaxed him to eat their own stolen food, under a palm tree in the shade, no longer in plain sight of the house. They waited and watched, and one of the old ladies who had bought Miguel’s bouquets eventually came to where they huddled and told Mami that Tía was no longer able to care for herself, was in a bad way, but the house was hers, Tía’s husband had paid for it.
They stood in Tía’s doorway, but still Mami could not seem to find words. Tía’s house had a proper floor, though it was uneven and buckled. “I can clean,” Mami said at last, not even properly introducing herself; Miguel was uncertain whether they had ever met. “I can cook, I can sew, I am strong.” Tía had few teeth and her watermelon legs, and Miguel stood behind his mother as Tía explained that she had no money and was not looking to hire anyone—the suggestion was patently preposterous, even to Miguel, yet Tía’s voice held no mockery or malice; she explained somberly, as though Mami had come making a sensible inquiry. “I don’t need money,” Mami qualified, which seemed a gross misrepresentation. “Just my son, if there’s a place on the floor someplace out of your way where he could sleep.”
Miguel imagined Mami sleeping in the yard like a dog, and for a moment bile rose in his throat to protest that he would stay with her, wherever she went. But two nights in the park with wet grass beneath his back held his tongue. People were so easy to crack. He would sell his mother for one night in this watermelon-witch’s home. Who was he, later, to criticize Mami for saving herself instead of Isabel?
Of course Tía had not put Mami in the yard. Within the week, they were all like family, in a new world where family had the meaning it should have; where family did not come with purple knuckles. His mother’s words did not misfire to Tía. They sat late into the night drinking coffee and laughing grimly, their stories of men’s fists also teaching Miguel a narrative about his father that his mother would have gone to the grave never sharing with him directly. As an adult, he would own no photographs of his father, but through his mother’s stories to Tía he would know—in a way he had not been able to recognize as a child, when his father bore the face of a monster—that Papi had been beautiful, educated with two years of college, wrote poetry, fell prey to mysterious “black fits” that, at first, the drinking eased, enabling him to stop weeping, to get out of bed and go to work to feed his children. That somehow the fits and the drinking eventually became indistinguishable, and the rage he had once turned inward he began to direct at Mami.
Was Miguel not supposed to say, here in this house his mother kept spotlessly clean as she never had their own, that it was time to go back again for Isabel? Was he supposed to assume that one of the neighbors would tell Isabel where they’d gone, and she would get here on her own? Of course someone would tell her. Everyone would know by now that they were here. There were no mysteries, and the same old lady who had whispered in Mami’s ear would whisper in Isabel’s, wouldn’t she? Miguel said nothing. He went to school steadily for a week, nearly two, but Isabel was never in the schoolyard. For all he knew, Mami was checking their old house daily; perhaps she and Tía failed to mention it as some effort at protection. Miguel lay awake nights on Tía’s sofa—Mami slept with Tía in her old marital bed, in the house’s one bedroom. Tía and her husband had been unable to have children, “But now,” Tía said, her eyes misting over, “I am blessed with a daughter and a grandchild.”
Two, Miguel thought. Two. Days spread out on the horizon. Thirteen years old, when they had lived at home, had seemed reassuringly old and
wise to Miguel. Now, at Tía’s, he began to realize for the first time how young Isabel truly was, though he did not yet understand that with every subsequent year of his life, his missing sister would seem still younger . . .
“How did your father drive his car off a bridge?” Chad would ask him, twenty years later, in the first year of their courtship.
And it was the old rhythm of Mami’s words to Tía that made that unspoken narrative finally take shape before Miguel’s eyes—the fits, the poetry, Papi’s remorse over his family’s exodus—that for the first time made him understand.
The morning after learning of his status as a syphilitic, Miguel is walking from the El stop to the Federal Reserve building, wearing his winter coat for the first time this fall, and by the time he gets to the revolving glass doors every inch of his exposed skin is red and itchy. His hands, the worst, are covered in hives. He has to get through a metal detector to get in the building, even though 9/11 was seven years ago and Chicago has long since gotten over itself as the center of anything. His hands, swiping his ID badge through security, look red and vaguely elephantine. Not scratching himself in public like a monkey takes heroic effort. Every place air has touched his skin not just itches but burns. He nurses a residual fear from the 1980s that whenever he has anything resembling a lesion on his skin, people will think he has AIDS—it’s hard not to envision men in hazmat suits tackling him, taking him to some underground quarantine; panic rises in his throat, or maybe something else is happening to his throat, which feels thick, coated, plugged. He usually arrives at work early enough to hit the gym before the open, but today he didn’t—still, he races for the Fed’s gym, to which he has free access, moving straight to the locker room, mechanically undressing, careful not to appear frantic. He turns his shower as hot as it can go, which in this context is not very. Still, the tepid heat and moist, trapped air feel like a balm.
The hot water doesn’t make the hives disappear, but Miguel can feel the situation deescalating, no longer getting worse. His skin still looks wrong, but the unbearable sensations have ceased, and the steam seems to be reaching a deeper place in his lungs, his inhales hitting bottom. He leans against the wall of the shower. He is almost uncannily healthy, other than his lifelong migraines and his recent status as a syphilitic. He has never been allergic to anything. Still, suddenly he knows. In college he majored in math; he thinks in patterns; logic is his friend. The writing is on the wall, even if it is insane and written in Greek. He has suddenly become allergic to cold.
GRETCHEN
Gretchen gets her medical tests done at the Highland Park branch of the Fertility Center, so she’s the one who points out to the others how close the men’s restroom is to the sperm donation area. Lately, Gretchen thinks like a criminal. Her mind runs on a perpetual loop of plotting. If she had ordered a blue light in the mail, she would know damn well what to do with it. Instead, she finds herself meeting the usual suspects of this community-baby business at the ungodly hour of 7:00 a.m., for the very first appointment of the day, when the center will be less crowded, lessening the danger of accidental bystanders impeding their master plan. This was Nick’s—the surrogate’s Irish husband’s—idea. “See,” he says to Miguel, smacking him on the arm like a brother at the entrance to the empty men’s restroom. “What did I say? Who the fuck would come here this early? Maybe a few desperate women, sure, but no man would drag his ass here at seven to jerk off in a cup.”
“I did,” Miguel mumbles miserably, slinking inside. Nick motions enthusiastically for Chad to go into the bathroom, too. Gretchen feels her face warm like a hot pad.
“The honeymoon suite,” Nick says, bowing. “You kids have fun now.”
Chad loiters awkwardly outside the door, clearly shocked, unsure whether to join Miguel. They all stand for a moment, an unnecessarily large gaggle in the otherwise deserted hallway. Finally, Gretchen pushes her brother into the men’s john and yanks Emily and Nick forward by the arms like children. Enough already.
Inside the office, one lone patient, a woman in professional attire, perches anxiously on one of the sofas, crossing and uncrossing her ankles, awaiting whatever important fertility procedure prior to whatever important business meeting.
“You were right, honey,” Emily stage-whispers to Nick, with a tone of surprise appropriate to any man ever being right about anything.
Gretchen strides over to the receptionist. There is no appreciable age difference between herself and this couple, but she feels like she could be Emily and Nick’s mother. In part, it’s their clothing. Emily is wearing some facsimile of parachute pants, tied-dyed, and a baggy T-shirt under which she clearly sports no bra, despite the fact that she’s packing on enough extra pounds to have raised a couple of cup sizes from what her breasts must have once been, and is deflated a bit from nursing. Her blond hair is in loose, messy braids, and there is something childlike about her, like a Nordic exchange student, that makes Gretchen want to both smack her and protect her. Nick, on the other hand, looks like something you might need to protect Emily from. He’s got on a crazy purple shirt—something out of Saturday Night Fever, or later, with more irony, Pulp Fiction. It’s open to nearly the middle of his hairless chest and again at the very bottom, tails flapping, as if he literally forgot to button it, and visible through the gaping neck are a freaky assortment of necklaces, one of which seems to have an animal tooth on the end of it—Gretchen doesn’t care to look too closely. The bottoms of Nick’s pants drag on the ground so that the ends have frayed and little wisps of fabric follow him like the train of a veil. That Technicolor red hair stands on end in seventeen different directions, and he smells profoundly of smoke and man-skin. Gretchen would lay odds this guy has never owned a stick of deodorant in his life. The young receptionist is staring openly at him, and Gretchen sees both Nick and Emily notice this, and recognition churns in her gut. Although as straggly boho as she and Troy are suburban preppy, this coupleship dynamic is one she knows well. In their own hippie-dippie sphere, Gretchen can recognize that Nick would be considered devastatingly hot, just like Troy is in hers. Emily, like Gretchen, will have long since grown accustomed to other women checking him out in her presence, sizing her up as not much of a threat, and flirting with him right under his wife’s nose.
“This is Nick Ryan,” Gretchen barks at the dumb receptionist. “The sperm donor. He’s here to give his sperm.”
From behind her, Emily does herself no favors by tittering.
“Nicholas Owen Ryan,” the receptionist recites, smirking. “It’s like three first names.”
“Handy for my multiple personality disorder,” Nick quips, taking the clipboard the receptionist holds out and then plonking his bony ass down in the middle of two chairs, taking them both in a way Gretchen finds incensing. Never mind that the waiting room is virtually empty.
Emily is still standing next to Gretchen. She’s made some audible snort of disgust that Gretchen assumed was directed at the salivating receptionist, but when Gretchen looks her way, Emily—as if waiting for this cue—purses her lips and whispers derisively of Nick, “That’s not even his real name.”
Gretchen has no idea what to make of this.
Nick’s cell phone rings. He answers it loudly, barking things into it like, “What do you mean?” and, “No, you’d better not choose that one, just hold on a minute,” until he finally shrugs helplessly at the receptionist, running his free hand through his deranged hair, and says, “I’m going to take this in the hall.”
Gretchen hears him in the hallway. Yep, he’s an actor all right. He doesn’t drop the charade the moment the office door is closed, but keeps conducting the makeshift conversation, one-sidedly, making sure to project his voice. “I told you last month that we needed to change this routine,” he says with agitation. “This bullshit is going to cost me a fortune!” Emily sits meekly in her chair, holding Nick’s clipboard on her lap, smiling secretly like the Mona Fucking Lisa. Her ability at deception is quieter than Nick’s,
but equally unflappable.
After some time, Nick strides back in, cell phone still in his hand but hanging loosely at his side. “Sorry about that,” he says loudly, as though the entire room has been following his predicament—which, of course, they have. “Where was I? Oh yeah, the part where I was about to say I don’t need any magazines, I’ve brought my beautiful wife with me.”
Emily snorts in her chair. “Gretchen and I will be right here, waiting.” Then, getting so into the game that Gretchen wonders if Emily has genuinely forgotten what they’re actually doing, Emily continues, “Anyway, you have an iPhone.”
“How’s the Wi-Fi in here?” Nick asks the receptionist, who stammers, “Not that great, actually . . . um . . . but we do . . . have magazines, I mean.”
An awkward beat, during which Gretchen half-expects the receptionist to offer to accompany Nick herself. Then, “What did they used to tell brides?” Nick says abruptly. “Close your eyes and think of England?”
He palms the cup and he’s off.
Gretchen and Emily sit, not speaking. If screens above their heads could translate their thoughts into pictures, then on both screens Nick would be backing up to the door of the men’s restroom while still loudly blathering on his cell phone, until he had bumped the door open just a crack, and the hand of Chad or Miguel slipped him a fat syringe, which Nick would quickly pocket in those oversized pants. Now, inside the “donation area,” he would be seen carefully opening his donation cup and then shooting the contents of Miguel’s sperm inside it, shaking the last vestiges loose. On the screen above Emily’s head, the short film might end there. On the screen above Gretchen’s head, Nick would then take a moment to flip through one of the pussy magazines.
Every Kind of Wanting Page 7