Theory of Bastards

by Audrey Schulman

  Frankie said, You know I think I’ve figured out how to tell when they’re ovulating. I’ve been using a thermal app to see when their sexual swellings heat up.

  Stotts grunted, busy taping down the bandage.

  She added, Of course, I’m going to need to confirm the method through urine or blood samples.

  Stella and Adele orgasmed nearly simultaneously, lips curling back as they squealed with pleasure. They dropped to the ground and knuckled away, the pink inflated balloons of their nether regions wobbling behind them.

  Irritated at their easy joy Frankie added, If they don’t want to give blood, can I tranq them?

  At that word, Goliath’s face jerked toward her.

  Stotts went very still. He said, A lot of them came from labs. Never use that word around them. Never.

  She ignored him because she was staring into Goliath’s eyes.

  His eyes filled with horror.

  She spoke quickly, I won’t do it. I won’t.

  The first time she’d addressed Goliath in English.

  She touched his hand and said, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Please excuse me.

  DAY 22

  Twenty Three

  Each morning as soon as she opened the door to the enclosure, the bonobos turned to her, delighted. At her first step in the direction of the climbing structure, their panting laugh would begin to rise. Their taste in humor clearly ran toward the slapstick. By the time she’d laboriously climbed the tire swing, Tooch and Id would be gasping for breath so hard their mothers would pull them close to their chests, protecting them from seeing more.

  Once she’d taken her seat, they’d swing up into the structure to cluster around her, staring, waiting for her next trick. While she tried to sit still, they began to play with her clothing and hair, tugging and sniffing.

  As the tourists entered the Foundation at nine, filing down the path into the viewing area, they focused on her also, as though she were the species they’d never seen before. They crowded into the area in front of the enclosure, pointing and calling, rapping their knuckles on the plexiglass, working to attract her attention, framing her with their fingers as they asked their Bindis to take video. She sat there, attempting to be the very embodiment of boring, only moving to slap away the hands of the bonobos if they got too personal.

  She reminded herself scientists couldn’t always afford dignity. She thought of Darwin during his study of earthworms, yelling loudly at a bowl full of worms to test if they could hear.

  When she talked, it was to her BodyWare, having turned on its transcription feature before she stepped into the enclosure. Each time she spoke, the bonobos looked at her, assuming she was addressing them. However she would only state the temperature of a female’s sexual swellings and then the female’s name. They’d listen, their brows raised.

  Today she added, Adele’s in estrus.

  The tourists watched her talk to herself inside an exhibit of apes.

  Later on she said, Adele mating with Rupert. No penile entry. 9:13 A.M.

  The bonobos turned to her, considering her words gravely.

  Each time she spoke, the cursor on her Lenses spun for a second or two, thinking. Her BodyWare seemed slower each day. The ampersand and other characters collecting in the corner of the screen like dust bunnies.

  Around 10 A.M., she checked over the transcript of her words on her Lenses. It looked at first like gobbledygook. Adele’s in estrus today had been recorded as A Dell in S-trust today.

  Adele mating with Rupert had become A Dell may ding with rude perp.

  So she called for an appointment at the App Store. She waited, watching her cursor spin. In the end she got the earliest appointment possible, in four days. Her Bindi put it on her calendar. For the next few days, she’d just hand correct the notes.

  Id climbed onto Frankie’s shoulder and experimented with how far she could jam her index finger into Frankie’s ear canal, especially if she wiggled it from side to side and pushed hard. When Frankie clapped her hands over her ears to stop her, Id began tugging on her hair—so much longer and easier to grab hold of than bonobo hair. She seemed to be trying to figure out how the stuff was attached. At first hesitant, she quickly became systematic, pulling and twisting like a product-tester checking for tear resistance.

  Frankie blinked, leaning into the tugging, doing her best to concentrate on Adele.

  About 10 A.M., she let her eyes wander across the viewing area and there was Stotts standing still in the crowd, several boxes on a dolly in front of him. Staring at her.

  Marge and Mr. Mister were having sex beside her. Mr. Mister’s butt sometimes bumped into Frankie’s back with the sheer exuberance of their act.

  After a moment, Stotts raised his hand and waved hi with two fingers.

  *

  After lunch, while most of the bonobos napped, Sweetie sat in the pool, squirting water out of his mouth. Adele waded in to stand near him. Frankie watched.

  Up to their waists in the dark water, Sweetie began to groom her diligently, starting with the middle of her back and moving upward. After a few minutes, he’d reached the top of her head. He glanced around, all the other bonobos dozing. He pressed his body in close against her back.

  In a species known for its loud and public sex, a secretive coupling could not be imagined. As he caressed her head, they spooned together—their hips moving slightly in the dark water. Anything that happened below their waists was invisible.

  Adele opened her mouth, her orgasm for once silent.

  Instead it was Frankie who made the noise. Aha! she said.

  *

  With JayJay, Frankie hadn’t suspected the affair. She only learned about it by returning home on a Thursday half an hour earlier than normal. JayJay was standing in the front hall, closing the door to one of the other bedrooms in the home they shared. Jerking around at her step, his eyes were caught by her gaze, his expression stricken.

  As she stepped forward, he eased backward, moving away from the door as though from a snake. Curious about why he was reacting this way, she grasped the still warm doorknob in her hand and stepped inside. A naked housemate, Nanette, lay on the bed dozing, a blue sheet tossed across her crotch. She and her boyfriend had moved into the house six months ago.

  Frankie needed a moment to absorb this, so she sat down on the bed, grunting a little from the endo pulling inside her, feeling better once her weight was settled firmly on the mattress. There was the musky odor of fresh sex. She looked at her housemate in a new way, considering her from JayJay’s perspective. The woman’s armpit caught her eye, the wispy hair in that soft pocket of flesh.

  She said, Nanette, wake up.

  This was the moment when Nanette understood the person sitting beside her was not JayJay. She bolted upward, clutching the sheet to her chest.

  Frankie asked, Why? Why JayJay?

  Nanette looked around her room like she’d never seen it before, amazed at where she’d ended up. After a moment, she answered in a small voice, It hurts when I look away from him.

  Frankie inhaled. After six years with JayJay, this was when she stopped sleeping with him. Not sleeping with him as in sex (the last time they’d managed intercourse had been at least a year before), but sleeping with him as in dozing next to him in the same bed, the rhythm of their breathing deep and slow, their bodies intimate and exposed.

  She looked at him standing in the doorway, hunched with grief. For a second, she felt the full impact of what she’d lost, this easy-going attractive man who truly loved her. If only, she thought, if only her research had discovered some way to pick who she fell in love with, some genetically engineered scent to rub on him, some pill for her to take, she’d scrub the scent all over him, she’d take a full bottle of his pills; he’d be the man she’d choose.

  Without that feeling though, without it . . . she rememb
ered the way her professor used to say that he luffed her. Each time he said this, she’d looked into his face, so hungry for this statement that she’d ignore the fact that he wasn’t looking at her, but over her shoulder to make sure no one else could hear.

  She gathered her strength, then rocked forward twice, the bedsprings squeaking—the only way she made bedsprings squeak these days—in order to get to her feet and walk away.

  She kicked JayJay out of their knee-wall closet and he began to sleep on the couch in the second floor hallway until Nanette broke up with her boyfriend so JayJay could move in with her, with the woman who could be at work 40 hours a week and so could afford a real room all on her own, not just a closet, who could wake up and stretch without pain, could have sex and give a big belly laugh, could do so much more than simply lie on her side for a while each morning concentrating on the task of breathing.

  Still, each time JayJay and Frankie bumped into each other in the hallway, heading to the bathroom or on their separate ways to bed, he watched her with those sad eyes. She realized that while she knew Nanette loved him, it was unclear if he reciprocated. Of the three of them, she considered him the most injured.

  Her own regrets, she began to purposefully funnel into a fascination with infidelity. After this, her second experience with it—albeit from different perspectives—she investigated the subject with all her strength. Working late at the library allowed her to avoid bumping into JayJay and it helped pass the time until she was able to sleep again.

  She learned many studies had tried to figure out the extent of the phenomenon through interviews or anonymous questionnaires, but she didn’t trust the answers people gave when asked how often they cheated on their partners.

  Genetic testing was a way to get at least one solid data point. These tests showed 10% of newborns were not genetically related to the ostensible father who grinned down at them. There was some variation in this result, ranging from as low as 3% to as high as 30% depending on the particular society and the study’s methods, but worldwide the average was 10%. The researchers compared this rate to a variety of other “monogamous” species—red-winged blackbirds, warblers and golden-cheeked gibbons—and didn’t find it terribly noteworthy.

  Frankie however did find it noteworthy, very noteworthy, because of course red-winged blackbirds did not have access to contraceptives or abortion. One in ten pregnancies, she discovered, were terminated during marriage by abortion. How many of these occurred because the wife was terrified her husband would take one look at the baby and know?

  She wanted to figure out how much infidelity there was in the human population in order to learn if her experience was in the realm of normal. 10% was clearly the lowest possible percentage. The question was how much higher that percentage might be if not for condoms and Planned Parenthood.

  Almost as soon as she started looking into this question, she came upon the startling fact that a woman with a lover felt an increased desire for him (rather than for her husband) when she was ovulating and, in her desperate passion, was less likely to insist on contraceptives.

  When Frankie read this fact (The American Journal of Human Biology, Vol. 36, pg. 384) she was in the library in her normal position, stretched out on the floor under her favorite table, her knapsack pillowed beneath her head. In this position, she could endure reading for several hours. She blinked at the sentence and reread it twice to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood, then flicked shut the journal on her Lenses and looked away, across the library at the forest of legs, both table legs and human legs, the human legs in all shapes and sizes, the feet propped up on chairs or crossed over knees. Nestled away behind these protective legs, hidden away under skirts or pants, were all those crotches with their mysterious goals.

  She knew she’d spend the next few years investigating why a woman would desire her lover more when fertile. For a woman, reproductive instincts during ovulation were evolution’s final exam. Any mistakes at that point could wipe her genetics right off the chalkboard. An increased desire for the lover when ovulating strongly suggested there was a benefit in having the lover’s baby rather than the husband’s—that conceiving a bastard helped in the long run.

  At first glance this seemed unlikely. For millennia in most human societies, getting caught being unfaithful, much less conceiving a child through the affair, carried many potential dangers to the wife, as well as to the conceived baby and to any pre-existing children. Historically, the woman could be put to death. In contemporary times, there was the risk of divorce. In the U.S.—a country where it was relatively easy for a woman to earn an income—the average divorced mom had an income below the poverty level, impacting her children’s health, food and life expectancy.

  How could the evolutionary benefit of conceiving a lover’s child be so large that it outweighed these risks?

  Of course there were many situations where humans were programmed to put themselves into calculated peril. Young men, for instance, had a well-known difficulty with personal risk assessment, especially in front of their peers. Watch this were the famous last words of many a lad. They were programmed to run this risk because the small possibility of death or injury was worth the more likely prize of catching a woman’s eye long enough to reproduce.

  A young man’s programmed stupidity however endangered only himself, not his progeny. Ten years later, that same man would be tightly gripping his minivan’s steering wheel because his children were in the back seat.

  If a woman conceived a child during an affair—especially if she already had children—she was risking much more than any young buck hamming it up along the edge of a cliff.

  Frankie had difficulty sleeping because of the pinching pain of breathing, so she began to watch movies each night on her Lenses, lying on her side waiting for her exhaustion to become so desperate that it took priority. At that point, she wouldn’t slide into sleep so much as click into unconsciousness, like a power cord was yanked. Three or four hours later she would snap awake. The only ways she knew time had passed were from the drool dried on the side of her face and that the movie was over, her BodyWare silent as it waited for her next command.

  Each night she’d watch two or three shows—movies, documentaries or miniseries—whatever she could find that portrayed infidelity. She was surprised by how little there was. War (another human tendency) had many more shows and movies, whole cable stations seemingly devoted to examining and re-examining the Civil War alone. Why, she wondered, were cable stations and the film industry much less interested in infidelity, an experience so common that every tenth person was the product of it? The basic story was of love and betrayal—surely rich movie-making material.

  Once she could no longer find any more shows on the subject, either narrative or documentary, she branched out into the genre of simple romance: the kind involving only one man and woman, no broken promises. Night after night she examined humanity’s portrayal of what female desire looked like. The movies from around the world: American, French, Indian, Cambodian, Nigerian. In a way, the movies with subtitles were more informative. She would be so exhausted the flickering words wouldn’t register, only the actions of the man and the woman, their movements on the screen. The similarity in these actions began to strike her, movie after movie showing the assertive and more sexually experienced actor leaning toward the actress who looked down and away, hesitant. The man stepping forward, the woman stepping back. As predictable as a waltz where the man knew the steps already and the woman wasn’t even sure she wanted to dance.

  During the day, Frankie read scientific reports on what was known about human sexuality. She learned the average heterosexual man reported having seven sexual partners in his lifetime.

  For a heterosexual woman, that average was four.

  The researchers of these studies generally reported these two numbers without commentary, didn’t discuss the inescapable problem in logic. Who exactly were all
these hetero men having sex with if it wasn’t women?

  At night, watching the movies, Frankie considered this problem. She began to wonder if these movie directors (virtually all of them male) might be sketching cinematically the mathematically impossible world that the average hetero man lived in; if the directors were coloring in this wished-for world, giving it emotional weight, running through variation after variation of the scenes until the myth felt like truth. These movies becoming something similar to propaganda, as thorough and vivid as Mao’s monolithic portrait in every public square, the kind smile on his lips lit by a saintly halo. The researchers plugging their ears, the directors humming a lovely tune, everyone scrunching their eyes tightly shut.

  Logically there were only three possible reasons for the numerical difference between the men’s and women’s answers, that gap between seven and four:

  These hetero men were having sex with each other.

  The vast majority of them were going to prostitutes (and the prostitutes weren’t getting asked by academic researchers to fill out questionnaires concerning their lifetime number of partners. Of course if this were true, it would mean no gender gap in the average number of sexual partners, but only that the distribution curve for women was highly skewed.)

  One or both genders were out-and-out lying and the entire culture nodding yes to this lie whenever they went to the movies.

  Frankie became fascinated by the culture’s unquestioning acceptance of this obvious numerical impossibility. During class, she handed out to her students a questionnaire with two simple questions on one side of the paper:

  How many sexual partners on average do you think an exclusively heterosexual man has in his lifetime?

  How many sexual partners on average do you think an exclusively heterosexual woman has in her lifetime?

  (When finished, please turn page over.)

  On the backside of the paper was the final question.