Gould

by Dixon, Stephen

  He was living with a woman in California, was called to New York when his father had a life-threatening massive heart attack, or that’s the way it was put to him on the phone by his mother: “Fly in quick, you might not even have time if you got on the plane this minute; they’re all saying, or you can see and hear it in the way they’re wavering, that he might die.” His father pulled through easily, and while there Gould met a woman at a party. Nice face, intelligent and attractive, dressed simply, tall with a slim figure, quiet wry smile, pleasant educated voice, the look of someone with a good disposition and no affectation, seemed to have a young son with her and to have come with another woman, since she was always standing beside or moving around the apartment with her and occasionally stopping the boy to tend to him—“You want something more to eat? . This will be dinner, so perhaps you ought to have a second walk around the food table with me. Did you see there’s another boy here around your age? He looks nice.”—and there didn’t seem to be a man she signaled across the room to periodically and met up with every fifteen minutes or so and things like that—what he always does when he goes to a party like this with a woman—and he went over to her and said, pointing to the boy, “He yours?” and she looked warily at him and nodded and he said “Excuse me, the introductions, very rude of me to you two—Gould Bookbinder,” and held out his hand to her and she shook it and he shook her friend’s hand and the friend said “Miriam,” and he said “How do you do, Miriam, Gould Bookbinder, but I said that,” and then to the boy, while he was thinking should he ask the woman her name? Ah, she doesn’t want to offer it now, let her, “Rude to all three of you I should’ve said, right there, kid?” and put out his hand and the boy looked at it and he said “Really, and I hate using this word, but he’s adorable, and I’m not going to steal him so don’t be leery,” and the woman said “Who even said?” and he said “Of course, but you see, I just look at him and realize how much I miss the little kid I live with in California—towhead too and same height and haircut—in fact, they almost all have the same cut today, people of a certain well, just so many people with kids this age, I mean his age with people like that—got popular with the president’s son, if I’m not wrong, and before that the elite prep schools and Prince Valiant, though I think Valiant’s was a little longer and he was older,” and Miriam said “Who’s he?” and he said “A comic strip, which might not be around anymore and I never read it . . and after the president got shot and the son got older, it just kept on with boys that age and he’s not biologically mine either, I should have right away said, but I think acts like he is, whatever that’s supposed to mean—relies on me a lot, hangs on me a little—and I guess I feel like his father too after so long, as I also hang on to and rely on him for different emotional things. But what’s yours, five in a couple of months?” and she said “Three, in one, and he’s not tall for his age, far as I know—is your boy unusually short? But where in California? That’s where I’m from originally,” and said she grew up in the county just south of the one he now lived in, Miriam and she had gone to the university he’d been a grad student at, which wasn’t a coincidence, since the couple giving the party had been in their undergraduate class and he’d first met them when the man came back after a few years for a master’s in his department—but to get to it: they talked, Miriam stepped away and then called the boy to the window to see a sliver of one of the new World Trade Center towers they could just about make out through two buildings, his grad student friend came over and said “So you two need no introducing?” and he wanted to say “I still don’t know her name yet” but they both said “Yes,” and he said “Jinx,” and held up two joined fingers and she said “What’s that supposed to mean?” and he said “An East Coast thing kids used to and still might do, and maybe on the West Coast too, when two people say the same word or phrase synchronously: ‘What comes out of a chimney?’” and she said “What?” and he said “You’re supposed to say ‘smoke,’” and the host said “I don’t know it either,” and left, and he said “And then I say ‘What color is it?’—the chimney smoke. There are four to five quick questions: ladies’ pocketbooks, coins, gray and gold, and then you do the—I mean I do, the questioner—though you’re certainly questioning me now—’Do not speak till you are spoken to.’ That’s right, it’s not my fingers joined together but both parties’ in this, the index fingers at the tips, and when it’s all over, questions answered correctly, one of us breaks the fingertip conjunction with a gentle chop of his hand. You want to go through with it?—though if we go by the rules it’s already too late,” and she said “Please, no games. What am I, a child?” and he said “Sorry, it all just suddenly came back, but only having fun.” Married for five years, lived in Madison where her husband taught law at the university, only here a week to be with her best friend from college “who apparently thinks I should be talking to you alone—I must have told her last night more about my life than I should have, and which I’ve already disclosed to you, in just saying that, more than enough too,” and he said “So you’re saying I should be diplomatic, untactical and gallant,” driving back in two days with her son and he said “Why so soon?” and she said “Because I’ve been here five,” and he said “Oh jeez, what a pity, because I don’t know, I’d love seeing you again, maybe that’s it,” and she said “Excuse me, and I’m not trying to prompt you with this query nor induce you into a clumsy confession you’ll regret later, but whatever for? You have yours, I have mine, there are children involved, I’m leaving in less than two days and you’ll never see me again unless by accident and then we probably won’t recognize each other or remember this party, and we’ve only just met and spoken a few minutes together,” and she looked at her watch and said “My watch must have stopped, what time is it?” and he said “I don’t wear one,” and she said “Well, I know I have to be out of here in less than half an hour to take John to a birthday party another college chum’s having for her girl—we all seemed to have had our first babies around the same time,” and he said “‘John,’ like the president’s son with the prep cut if not even the prez himself,” and she said “Yes, it’s the boy’s father’s and grandfather’s name too, though he’s not the third,” and he said “He’s not?” and she said “After his name.” “Excuse me, but this isn’t right what I’m about to say,” and she said “Please now, I can sense what’s coming, so don’t,” and he said “Ya gonna let me continue, lady?” and she shut her eyes as if she’d just stay that way tolerating what he was going to say and then walk away and he thought Should I say it then? and said “To say it then, and this isn’t a line I’m giving you—” and she looked at him and said “You’ve used that one before,” and he said “Never—but low, though, so nobody else hears, and maybe the most important words of my life,” and she said “Jesus Christ,” and he said “I wish, and this after only ten minutes alone with you—even more than ten, but good conversation, time flew, so another solid sigh—sign, but I won’t bring that up to add to my argument,” and she said “Ha-ha, all right, enough? you got your laugh,” and he said “And I didn’t trip over that sigh-sign thing intentionally—but that you were—this is the continument; that’s not a word, I don’t think, but seemed apt—the woman I was now living with,” and tears, really just a couple of drops popped out, one from each eye, and he wiped them and said “Talk about silliness?” and she said “What are you doing?—are you a professional actor?” and looked at him in a way where he thought I think I’m winning her over, and said “No, I told you, or maybe I didn’t, but that’d be strange, since you told me what you do, but I’m in something—” and she was shaking her head and started to move off and he said “Don’t go, and notice I’m not grabbing your hand or touching your cheek or using any of those restraining actions or physical and facial tricks—moving closer, looking straight into your eyes soulfully of sorts in an attempt to engender more sympathy from you if that’s what it was and employing to me grandiloquent words like ‘engender,’ ‘emplo
ying’ and ‘grandiloquent’ to impress you and strengthen my présentation, and French aussi or aussi français and that drippy stuff with the eye sacs before which I swear I had nothing to do with except to furnish the liquid; they just sprouted, little there was, naturally, but you seem, and here it it comes, despite our respective homelife situations—I couldn’t come up with a better term for it . you know: spouses, kids and place—like at last my ideal mate: mind, body and face, soft voice and ways, interest in lit and involvement in music . that you play the viola and are in a quartet no less . for godsakes, the six Mozart quintets I bet when you add another violinist,” and she said “Violist—don’t take away one of the few breaks our underappreciated instrument gets,” and he said “Humor, skin, everything, sense of this and irony of that plus straightforwardness, the entire corpus, litany and library, that I’m panting in the pants for you, pardon me pa, he does not know what he brays, and even look at our sizes and physiques—we were cut from two different bolts for each other,” and she said “Done?” and looked miffed, and he said “I really overdid it too much, serious as I—” and she said “Please, be done, done, because whether anyone heard you or not I still feel humiliated and embarrassed—why do you think you have to b.s. so? And who knows, if you stopped slinging it I might even be a little interested,” and he said “I stopped, though it wasn’t slinging, at least I don’t think so, but I’m so relieved I haven’t killed it off completely, which your remark implied, and I haven’t with what I just said after I said I was done and had stopped, have I?” and she said “It shouldn’t be but it’s okay and I’ll accept all heretofore as an anomaly, your getting carried away for so indeterminate an end,” and he didn’t quite understand what she meant but let it pass because he knew it wasn’t too critical and she was still standing beside him and he said “I won’t say a thing; can we sit down?” and she said “I don’t know why we should; I must be lonelier than I am nuts. Uh-oh, said too much.” Lunch the next day. After they arranged it and the place he said “Could we also meet later after the birthday party? Or I can pick you and John up at whatever the time—I just want to be with you,” and she said “Tomorrow,” and he said “And of course bring John along; really, I’d love it,” and she said “I wouldn’t, and we went over this: he’s going to the shore with Miriam,” and he looked puzzled and she said “The friend I came with and you spoke to and, honestly, the sole reason I’m here—I dislike parties and huge reunions,” and he thought then the person he’s indebted to but won’t say it because she’ll think that’s just more coming-on. “One priviso though,” she said. “When we do meet tomorrow promise to have toned down and tamed to subaudible and indistinct the words and approach, for you’re much too gusty, rutty and fast,” and he said “Check.” Lunch. Kissed during it. Pushed the bud vase aside, leaned forward and she met him above the table. “Well,” she said, “for half a kiss that wasn’t half bad. But nip it; people.” Invited him back to Miriam’s apartment. At lunch talked about her husband: brilliant, could be a U.S. attorney or solicitor general, everyone thinks so, clerked for a federal judge, first in his class everywhere, could make a quarter of a million a year in five years with some big city firm but chooses to teach, a skirtchaser from the word gesundheit but the most deplorable thing he does is sleep with his students. If he only did it with his colleagues or from the secretarial pool she’d say Well, that’s what’s going on today, everyone seems to have someone on the side, and the worst thing about it is they’re not doing it out of power on his part or wanting to get ahead on theirs but for good old sheer sensual Circean fun, or so he tells her. Imagine, at their age and when she’d like another child before John becomes too old to play with it, they now have separate beds but in the same room for the once every month he wants to sleep with her and half those times he passes out from wine or drugs before he gets the pensum done. She had a lover she admired but he went to Japan last spring to design bridges that won’t collapse during earthquakes. Before that a couple of one-night stands she met after out-of-town concerts, but she thought them too cheap and problematical with disease. Yet look at her now, in all problematicability another one to two-nighter or afternooner and he said not on her life. Did he tell her his head’s reeling and heart’s going whack whack whack whackety whack for her? She said resist that crap, she doesn’t go for it and nothing quicker will turn her off and he said okay, his heart isn’t pulsing thus, but he’d love riding back to Madison with her, she can drop him off at the airport there just before she goes the rest of the way to her place and she said that’d be too peculiar to John, even if she would relish the help with the driving, and though her husband wouldn’t begrudge her a brief fling in New York he’d resent her bringing the beau so close to home, and he said then let him off in Michigan or Illinois if either’s before she hits Wisconsin and she said what about his California woman, wouldn’t she mind? and he said that little romance is definitely on the way out and has been for two years. Not his ideal mate or even a simulacrum of one and same in spades for her with him. She wants a rich businessman or professional with a P.A. who likes camping and horseback riding and outdoor barbecuing and cars and canoes. He needed a place to stay for a week, they got along okay for a month or two and then he got so taken with her kid and too lazy to move, he’s been able to keep all her house bills paid or just a month behind, they have adequate to sometimes apotheosized sex when she’s not busting his chops to the point where he doesn’t even want to make love with her or suffering from one of her half-dozen imagined ailments or states of fatigue; the loss would be the boy; besides, she smokes. In bed after they undressed she said he should probably know beforehand she’s never had an orgasm. Oh, perhaps once or twice when she was pubescent and did it to herself. But either she’s lost that touch or something’s happened to her nervous system since to make it a near physical impossibility. She’s not saying she doesn’t participate actively and at times avidly during the act, though occasionally fakes it as much as anyone, and does most of the things normal heterosexual couples do except anal sex, but to her regret he shouldn’t expect any vociferous end-screams and yips and yaps and then postcoital sighs and later postorgasmic sleep from her, so she supposes she’s saying he should, as every man she’s been with has, after a reasonable period of time get what he can before she begins tiring of it and suddenly stops. He didn’t bring a condom, assuming she’d take care of everything, and she hadn’t brought her diaphragm to New York, having given up on one-night stands and also preferring to pack as little as she can, so they decided he’d pull out a few moments before his peak ones. He was about a minute away from ejaculation, he figured, starting that familiar climb, at least long enough away where he’d be able to hold it back if he had to and he said “I don’t think I’ll be able to pull out, nor do I really want to the first time, will it be okay?” and she said “I can be a little irregular but think I have my dates sufficiently straight where it’ll be safe, but to reduce the chance of fertilization don’t go in too deep when you discharge.” When he was about fifteen seconds away, he figured, and knew that though he couldn’t hold it back or even control the amount he ejected he could pull out in time, he thought but does he want to? He’d like getting her pregnant and having a hold on her like that and maybe even a child if she wanted it or he could persuade her to keep it or just something troublesome they went through like an abortion that would sort of seal something between them and where he could fly to Madison for it or the birth if she wanted him to and her husband didn’t object, when he came, involuntarily shoving his hands under her and grabbing her buttocks so he could get in as far as he could get. “I asked you,” she said after and he said “What?” and she said “And will you please?—I’ve been trying to get your big load off me for the past minute,” pushing him and he rolled himself off and said “The depth?” and she said “Gee whiz, all of a sudden he’s showing signs of life again—where do you go? The depth, yes; you knew, don’t tell me, even if you are sleepy and spent, so wh
y did you? and it hurt besides. Simply so you could experience the experience of experiences fuller—well darnit, haven’t you done it enough, and this isn’t out of bitterness because I never arrive there, where when someone asks you earnestly not to and for extremely important reasons, you don’t?” and he said “But you said it was okay to shoot in you,” and she said “But not so far in and hard. Do you have a tissue or handkerchief, please?” and he reached over her to the floor and felt her skin as he did and wanted to rest across her and kiss her belly and belly button and things but knew she wasn’t in the mood and got a hanky out of his pants pocket and gave it to her and said “It’s clean, or maybe at the most I used it for one nose blow but folded it over,” and she said “Where I’m putting it, who cares?” and wiped her vagina—“Even if I get fifty billion with this, there’s another fifty billion I didn’t. Probably I should flush the buggers out,” and went to the bathroom; he watched her and thought beautiful ass too but won’t say it, that’s all he needs. When she was back in bed he said “Sorry about all that, but how much would it have reduced anyway?” and she said “If you ever read a manual on conception or spoken to a specialist about it, you’d know; but it would have even been worse if you’d done it that way from behind as you first wanted to,” and he said “That helps it too?” and she said “Tell me, why are you trying so hard to be dense?” and he said “Now you’re busting my balls too; what’s going on, what’d I say?—ah, screw you and all women, at least the grown-up kind: how quick you switch,” and turned over and she said “Who did?” and he thought “Who did”? What’s she mean, “switch” or my “balls”? And what did I get myself into now with my big mouth and how do I get out of it? and she said “Gould, please, not now when we’ve just done lovemaking, and I couldn’t bear another over-super-sensitive when-there’s-something-to-gain-from-it self-centered misogynous man—I’ve had my fill,” and he said “Oh you have, huh? And ‘misogynous’; why couldn’t you have just said woman-hating? When I use them it’s always for fun or self-mockery but you’re serious about your ostentatious words.” She didn’t say anything, his back was still to her, and a few seconds later, while he was wondering if she was looking at him now, and then that he really did it this time; she’ll never trust him again with his promises and she seemed so disappointed and pissed; well, the hell with her, who needs her? who needs any of them, just as he told her, she said “Oh no, it’s happened, the same thing when I got pregnant with John; I know you don’t want to talk to me or even look this way and think I’m nothing less than a pompous priss, but I just felt the tiniest kind of detonation inside me and several small aftershocks before it stopped; believe me, Gould, I’ve conceived,” and she touched his back and he looked at her and saw she was serious and said “Now that’s nuts, much more than anything you said or did before,” and she said “Practically what Harry said when I told him it a few weeks later about John, but I’m sure it’s happened with millions of other women and lots of them I bet even recognized what it was,” and he said “Girl or boy?” and she said “You sneer but if there’s a calculably different sensation for a girl, then it’s a boy,” and he said “Don’t spare my feelings, I want to know now: Down’s syndrome or completely free of it or anything like that?” and she said “That wouldn’t be funny to a lot of people,” and he said “That’s true, nothing to laugh about, and we should talk later about what you just felt, this is serious, but I’m feeling dozey after our sex and for the next half hour would like to be good for nothing else but a nap,” and she said “Just one or two more things if I’m right about this. As I already told you, John could use a sibling now more than later and if it’s a boy then even better for him and I think easier for me and certainly fewer clothes to buy—I’m being facetious there—and I know I want another child some day so I might as well get it over with now. And you seem, other than for a few crank shortfalls, as if you have good genes and the chances are that between us we’d produce a healthy, reasonably nice-looking intelligent human being. Of course I’ll have to tell Harry, something I’d do anyway about us—that’s the agreement we have, not to keep it a secret for more than a month, though he’s always gotten more incensed than I over the disclosure—but didn’t think there’d be a fertilization to divulge too, and by then a moderately defined embryo. He’s even said he wouldn’t mind our having another child if it resulted by accident, and if it came to it he’d have no problem with it being from someone else. He’s very fair that way,” and he said “It sure isn’t how I’d take it if you were my wife. I’d throw you the hell out,” and she said “Maybe that’s why if I were single again, something I’ll never be unless Harry dies or leaves and doesn’t return for several years or tells me he wants to remarry and actually does or suddenly begins to repeatedly beat on John or me, I wouldn’t think of marrying you or even continuing with you for any extended length of time for fear it’d wreck my marriage,” and he said “Well, that gets me off cheap, for here I was about to do the right thing, which I had no desire to, and that’s to propose to you,” and she said “Some funny joke?” They made up after he awoke. He said “I’m sorry but when I said I’d throw you the hell out I meant that if I were married to you I’d never cheat and would expect the same from you,” and she said “How do you know? And you can see how my phlegmatism and dispassionate—but you don’t want those sort of words, so my . the way I’m . . look, I can’t think of simpler ones this moment for what I usually am that can so easily nettle a man or make him feel he has the license to skirtchase and frig whomever he wants to. But since I don’t want to battle after only a day as if we’ve been married several years and also because of this new complication that I for one believe we’ll have to face eventually, I accept your apology. Now, if you want to make love again—the carnal kind—for I suspect that’s what you’re building up to and perhaps why you apologized so generously . .”—“Not so though I wouldn’t mind having sex.”—“. . then okay, but if it’s no hassle getting dressed I’d like you to go out and buy a packet of the most expensive unscented nonlubricated condoms to lessen the chances of conception in case I was wrong about what I felt before; this way will also make it easier, if you’d still like to, to come in deep as you want from behind.” He came over the next morning soon after her friend had left for work and when she thought John would still be asleep in the guest room. John walked into the living room while he was on top of her on the couch and he quickly pulled out and rolled off her and said “Oh my gosh, excuse me, this is terrible,” and tried covering his genitals with his hands and she said “What are you doing? don’t panic, keep yourself exposed and your erection erect if you still have one till the normal time it’d take for it to go down and for you to put your underpants on. He’s seen us so let him think what we’re doing is entirely natural and not something to be hidden or feel guilty or discomposed about or he can be troubled by it for years and possibly into his own sex life. And it isn’t as if he’ll be telling his father anything Harry won’t already know. I don’t keep a journal of what takes place but I will remember the main events when I inform him.” She drove to Madison the day after, he didn’t hear from her or write, and two months later . but why didn’t he? Thought if she wrote him first he’d have permission to write back or she’d tell him where to write if not to her home—he had her address—and perhaps even how he should address the envelope, maybe by some other name or care of a friend or something. Maybe she wouldn’t tell her husband what happened in New York but if she did he didn’t want to make it any harder for her with him. They’d talked about it before she left. He said he likes her a lot, probably loves her, anyway, he feels very good about her, loves being with her and doesn’t want to stop seeing her, and she said “I won’t reveal my feelings for you. Obviously, they’re fairly good or I wouldn’t have slept with you. If it was just sexual frustration that motivated it, I think that would have been the end of it after the first time, as I’m satisfied easily that way and one time can hold me for a week, ev
en without the end all punch. Let’s see what develops in my belly before we make any plans. If nothing does then I don’t see why we can’t hook up someplace for a few days, and without John; Harry’s done it several times with his girls and once for a month. Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?” and he said he never had any desire to: “You get up to the edge and look into it and what do you see: an enormous ditch and trickle of water winding through it and ruddy rock and dry brush and stuff and maybe some Western-garbed people on donkeys lumbering down a narrow path, and I could never afford it,” and she said “It’s much more, yours is just travelogue, but all right, then I can drive east or even fly here, but let’s wait and see. One day . .” and two months later (he’d look for a letter from her almost every time he opened his mailbox) she wrote saying everything’s been confirmed except the gender, she’s already started to show but only a bump, and rather than risk never getting pregnant again and for all the other reasons she gave she’s going to go through with it; “Harry’s more than for it, he’s delighted with the prospect and also that he isn’t the biological father. He might be an egomaniac some ways but he doesn’t think there’s anything genetically useful, especially not his narcissism and cockiness, he can pass on except his intellect, and I told him you’re his equal in that regard and you’re substantially more creative and artistic than he, which he wants more of in his progeny. He said to convey his congratulations to you and that unlike me he hopes it’s a girl,” baby’s due in March. He wrote back saying that, clubby as this insipid remark sounds, he sends his best wishes to Harry too and appreciates his temperance—how ‘bout dat for a word? Thanx, Roget—in the matter and if there’s anything he can do for them regarding the pregnancy and birth, to let him know. He doesn’t have much cash socked away and Harry, only a teacher though he hears law professors do okay, must still be in a much better financial position than he, but he’d be willing to part with a little if they needed it, and please keep him informed. He thinks of her fondly and has missed her, he’s sure she’s not interested to hear, at least a few minutes of every day of every week since. A month later she sent him a photo of herself from the side, naked from the hips up and showing mostly her slightly swollen stomach, with her arms covering her breasts and the top half of her head cropped. In a note she said “If you wish I can send you one of these Polaroid shots every month though never with my face fully shown, for obvious reasons: ‘Wife Disseminates Porno Photos, Law Prof Hubby Loses Job.’ I shoot them myself with a delayed timer, but I’m sure that clicking and running into position will become increasingly strenuous with each succeeding month, so I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it up. But this will be as close as I can get you to the experience of my gravidity other than for reporting various particulars of it, e.g., I’m nauseated daily while at the same time pining for you a little a couple of times weekly (figure out the math of that yourself). Those two, nausea and nostalgia, aren’t necessarily linked but were only written poorly here—your influence, I think, which seems to have continued with this sentence (can the father’s genes be transferred to the mother via the fetus?). Harry sends his best and wishes you were rich.” He wrote back saying he hoped her nausea had passed by now—he heard it usually lasts only a month—but if it hasn’t he’s including a recipe composed mainly of cranberries for an antidote he got out of his woman friend’s book of natural self-healing remedies. He still thinks of her fondly, maybe a minute to two more a day than a month ago and about three minutes more than when he first started to—at this rate his mind will be totally consumed by her in twenty to thirty years—hopes his genes haven’t been transferred via the route she said for that conjures up horrific incestuous possibilities that for health and moral reasons—anyway, she gets the point. Tell Harry he’d love to be better fixed but doesn’t know anyone holding down more poor-paying jobs at one time for so long as he and little appreciation from the woman he’s supporting, though for her dear son he’d work his butt off, with no thanks needed, till his father started to or he was twenty-one. He’d love a month-by-month Polaroidized pornographic account of her pregnancy—he had to go to the local university library’s biggest dictionary for “gravidity”—if she’s still up for it. “By the way, I thought you looked fine in the photo. I was going to say ‘great’ but I know how you hate compliments of any sort. By the way two, you never asked and I never said how the woman I live with reacted to my meeting you in N.Y. and your getting gravid—I hadn’t planned on telling her but it all sort of came out in front of the washing machine when she saw the lipstick on my collar and smelled the perfume on my hanky. She said it was just what she expected from me: that my primary pursuit in life is not art nor scholarship nor the deepest things men think but ‘to sniff out the vaginas of every well-stacked and/or beautiful woman’ I meet, though if she and I are still together after the child’s born (it isn’t true about me and vaginas of any kind, by the way three, as I haven’t bedded with anyone else but her and you in a few years, though my eyes have; maybe that’s what she’s saying but since she knows that, why did she refer to my nose?) she’d like—she’s periodically fantasized having a second child but knows she’d abort the first real sign of one, since it’d put a few more wrinkles on her stomach and crimp in her noncarcer—for it to spend half the year with us once it’s around three or four. I’m just repeating her words, as she also said that probability’s probably an impossibility or the opposite, because you wouldn’t go for it—‘What non-doped-up rational mother would?’—and I’ve also told her I love you more than I do her (I actually don’t love her at all but how am I to say that?) and she wants me out of her house soon as I can cough up the next quarterly mortgage payment for it and leave enough money behind for that period’s utility bills (she thinks she’ll be ready by then to look for a job to support herself and her son). I know I sound as if I’m ridiculing her but please understand, we’ve been at the edge of that Grand Canyon’s highest precipice for a year with each of us contemplating shoving the other off. I never should have stayed out there that long since she’s much more vehement, vengeful and grievance-stricken than I. Cheers to Harry, love to you. How come, by the way four, you don’t sign off with anything resembling a ‘Ta ta,’ ‘Sec ya,’ ‘¡vaya con Dios!’ ‘Happy landing’ or ‘Write soon’?” He didn’t hear from her for a few months. By this time he was living alone in the city in a single room. He wrote asking how she was—wrote several times—wrote he was getting worried she hadn’t written back—wrote he was now even more worried she hadn’t written back after his last letter about it—wrote he was thinking of calling her but thought that’d be intrusive, was he right?—wrote that for the last time, answer him if everything’s okay, Harry, her boy, she, and yes, is the baby okay?—wrote saying he’s sure everything’s okay, as she can see from his last letter he just gets worried that way, but please write and tell him a little of what’s going on if she in fact doesn’t want him writing her anymore and he forgot to tell her in any of his letters the last two months, though assumed she guessed by his change of address, that he and the woman split up before either of them pushed the other off that canyon cliff or jumped or did both but he takes her son once a week for a night and day, something the kid’s beginning to shrink from as he’d rather be free all weekend for his friends—and she finally wrote back saying she had a miscarriage and, to be honest, Harry and she are relieved, as the baby was putting a strain on their marriage much worse than any affair or love involvement would. “Harry wanted the child to know as soon as it was able to (a year? two? for one not so comprehending, three?) the identity of its biological father (or so out of it: four? five? Though I took a new kind of amniotic-fluid prenatal test and it was a girl who was destined to be, unless there were delivery snags, healthy and learned) and, if possible, for you to see it once or twice a week for—I mean ‘twice a year for a week’ (that unpremeditated slip should in no way be interpreted as to how I occasionally feel about you, if you’ll excuse). He said yo
u could even stay with us and, if you also liked, sleep with me but not every night, or not the ones he wanted to. I wouldn’t have gone for that, thank you, being passed around like a felt hat—’Orgasms for the needy and poor!’—but I know what was on his mind: he wanted to continue to putter around outside, especially those nights you and I were supposed to be doing it here: maybe he believed it’d make his own sex more exciting or it was part of his misguided ideas of husbandly liberation. As for me, I wanted my children to grow up as bonded same-parents siblings and for the new one never to see or speak to you and surely not to know what you are to it. I thought it would have a disadvantage, being both a bastard and genetically connected to the family only by half, besides what Harry might say to it in one of his drug-or booze-or rage-induced stupors and that its brother would also from time to time make sure it knew of its liability too. If I got my way it’d mean I’d have to lie to this second child about its origins which is antithetical to the only life rule I have (and then, of course, by my husband or son, be refuted), or the only one I regard high enough to want to pass on to my children: Never lie, cheat or steal (‘cheat’ in money, swindle, defraud, violate rules deliberately, gull, betray, double-cross). And I thought it would have to eventually find out (if not by Harry & Son then someone) its parents had been lying to it about its parentage all this time and confront us with it. Harry would be his usual cavalier self. ‘Oh, it was for your sake,’ he’d say to it (if it wasn’t his blundering stupor that revealed it, then he’d be too blind to speak and think clearly), or ‘Your mother thought it best for you, and it’s been ten to fifteen to twenty years already so be cool and forget it, babe. And we brought you up well and without privations, haven’t we, so what more do you want?’—but it’d devastate me. Incidentally, I’m no longer nostalgic for you and this is no lie (I don’t lie!). The truth is I wish I’d never met you, or met you but said after a while ‘Enjoy the party, Gid, or Gold, or Gould—sorry, I’m bad with names—and nice to meet you and toodle-oo,’ because then none of this would have happened. And what good came of it? Did I pick up a sizzling piece of wisdom? Find my way out of a blind spot from my youth? Have my first adult orgasm, o-lay! So I pray—and I’m dead serious about that: with my back on my bed last night and eyes closed and mouth open and lips soliciting to the Lord—this letter will terminate our correspondence. I know I’ll never respond to you if you write again, and if I happen to answer the phone if you call, then immediately on knowing it’s you I’ll hang up with eardrum-damaging finality. Be a pal, as you used to say to me to get your way and said your dad did too to you, and tear up the naked photo of me. I no longer look like that—what was in is out—and it could be of no use to you now—certainly not of the masturbatory kind either—and it’s the last appeal I’ll ever make to you and I do so most genuinely. Matter of fact, not the last: tear it up and send it back noteless but agglomeratively intact. Will you do that? Thank you, Gould. Good-bye.” He kept the photo (at first, when he was still living with the other woman, around her house here and there but out of sight: in his desk or dresser drawer or favorite hardcover poetry anthology; after he moved out: faceup in his night table drawer so whenever he opened it he saw her, then facedown when he got tired of seeing it so much: her shy smile, or qualmish one, or reluctant or whatever-it-is kind of smile that’s pulling back as it’s being given—“I know I look absurd,” it seemed to say, “or the bottom of my face that’s left does, since I also know I’ll be snipping the top half of my head off this photo, and if I was going to do it right I should have stuck a Coke bottle in my cunt, but as it is it’s somehow wrong and can probably be used against me in the future or the baby—you could say ‘Look at her, she’s a whore who also poses for porno photos and I should have the child’—but I think I have to do it anyway, which makes no sense, okay?”—tiny belly bloat on her lanky frame, but it got permanently dirty and a part of it scratched across her arms over her breasts so he turned it faceup again; a short time later when he moved back to New York: in a see-through bag of most of his old photographs he kept in his shirt and sweater drawer and which included baby shots of him sitting up in a pram and on his mother’s shoulders with her holding out his hands and looking as if she’s doing a Jewish dance and as a summer camper and Boy Scout and several of him over a number of years sitting on a curb watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and pictures of old girlfriends or girls he wanted to be his girlfriends and half the photos in the bag taken on his European trip when he was nineteen and had his first camera, of girls he met and places he saw and road signs where he waited for a hitch and many of him in a sport jacket feeding pigeons in the Piazza San Marco and his folks at a table in the same piazza ten years later on their first European trip which had to be cut short because his father got very sick and also when they were young and on their parents’ laps and uncles’ and brothers’ shoulders and together when they were courting and several don’t-take-me-I-look-repulsive ones of his mother in maternity clothes; for a while in a letter envelope at the back of his socks, underwear and handkerchief drawer, keeping it hidden from some woman he might meet at a party or bar, let’s say, and invite home and her coming upon it accidentally or because she liked to snoop or was looking for a pair of socks to wear because his apartment in winter was usually cold, which is what he meant by “accidentally,” and maybe even questioning why, after explaining how she found the photo by accident, he had one of a slightly pregnant otherwise spindly meek-looking nude woman (some distinctive kind of kink?) and then lost it after a few years but doesn’t know how: he removed all the dresser drawers several times that year thinking the envelope might have slipped behind or under them, once emptied out all the clothes and unfolded them and searched through the shirts and inside the pockets of the shorts and shook every garment out and things like that. Did masturbate to it a few times, usually—after the first three or four times—when nothing better was around like a just-bought or week-old issue of a men’s magazine that was also known for its fiction and had a potentially interesting article or interview. He felt he needed a naked woman’s body or several of them in different poses to do it to, focusing his attention when he did it to her photo (to the magazines’ photos there were vaginas, clitorises later on, spread legs, raised rears, brushed bushes, nipples that had probably been rubbed with ice, he heard, just before being photo graphed or both breasts dunked in frigid water) to the little that was visible light pubic hair. Every year or so, then every two, three, three to four, but really at the most two to three he’d think something like his child would be one now two three five . seven ten . thirteen or fourteen. Would it have been a girl? Chances are, because of that test, which was new but not as reliable then and of what she felt at conception, yes. What would he have preferred? Both. Either, he means. Twins of opposite sexes he would have loved, for then he’d have it all in one. A healthy baby, that’s all, isn’t that what he’s supposed to say? And it’s true too; his father said first thing he did when he saw him after he was born was count his fingers and toes and check that his testicles had dropped. But after that: probably a girl. Easier, he’s sure, meaning less conflict, they take fewer risky chances, like to read more and play indoors, theater, dance, voice, piano, imaginative games, other things that make it easier, and they seem to get sweeter and more compassionate and tender than boys as they get older, or stay that way more, or most, or maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and she’d have her mother, much more important to her than her father, while with a boy there’s always that comparing, challenging, matching, outdoing. Would he have tried to see it, taken an interest in it? Boy or girl, he would have, as it got older, or tried, and often as it wanted or its parents let him. Would have even taken it a few weeks every summer, if permitted, car trip around part of the country, two weeks in a rented cabin in New Hampshire or Vermont, things like that if he had the money, maybe even camping—he’d learn how to do it—and he’d send presents every birthday and Christmas and books thr
oughout the year: classics, poetry, things he’d find out it was interested in. About twelve years after he last saw the woman he tried contacting her when he was going to be in Madison but neither she nor Harry was listed with information. He sent a letter to their old address, having transferred it to each new address book, thinking maybe it could still be forwarded—they might have moved only within the last year or two and the expiration date on forwarding their mail hadn’t been reached—but the post office returned it: addressee unknown. He phoned the university’s law school and the secretary there said Harry had left teaching for private practice seven or eight years ago and she didn’t know where. Could she find out? he said, and the next day she said all she could learn from personnel was that the law office he joined was in Milwaukee. He called Milwaukee information but neither was listed. Maybe they got divorced and Harry had left the state and she was still living in Madison or Milwaukee but under her maiden name or new married one. He didn’t remember her maiden name and called the law school again for any information on the woman but the secretary said she didn’t know anything and none of Harry’s former colleagues still taught here and even if she had their phone numbers and names she couldn’t give them out. He was seeing someone now, nothing very serious—dinner, movies and bed—and about once every three weeks called someone else or was called by this person for the same thing, so maybe the woman and he, if she was no longer with Harry and hadn’t remarried, could get together for a couple of days in Madison; they had been attracted to each other once, she in her way, he much more so in his, and not that many years had passed where they’d be so physically changed unless she’d gone through some major health problem or illness; some people even said he looked better than he ever had and he felt he was a more reasonable and interesting person than when she knew him and in much better physical shape: he ran and exercised vigorously every day. But he didn’t know anyone who knew her. He couldn’t remember the name of the friend she stayed with when he first met her in New York or exactly where she lived: some number Downing Street in the Village—he remembered he got off at the Christopher Street subway station and that it wasn’t the same number as the British prime minister’s residence; that, he thinks, would have stuck with him. He could go down there and maybe he’d recognize the building and then he’d look at the tenant roster or mailboxes and maybe recognize the friend’s name, but he didn’t think it worth the trip: she had probably moved by now too; in twelve years everyone he knew around his age had moved three or four times. A year later he was at a small wedding reception of a woman he’d dated for a short time that same year. They had split up amicably—she liked him and sleeping with him and thought he was intelligent and all that—he liked her too and loved her body—but she thought him unmarriageable and she wanted to get married and have children with someone who made a lot more money than he or at least whose prospects for it were better and who was readier for marriage—in other words, she said when she told him all this, and nothing that other women haven’t said to him, she was cutting off their little romance to give herself the opportunity to meet other men before she got too involved with him—and though he didn’t know why he’d been invited—they hadn’t remained friends, seeing each other for coffee or talking on the phone or anything like that—he went out of curiosity and the chance of meeting a woman. A man came over to him and said “Don’t I recognize you—were we once acquainted?” and he said “Not that I know of, I’m sorry, what’s your name?” Their names weren’t familiar to each other but the man was sure he knew him from someplace and that Gould even might have had an important impact on his life—“Something you said or did, I’m almost positive”—and Gould said “I don’t see how that could be, unless something I said related to something else and you took it the way you wanted or needed to at the time—that can happen, though I’m not claiming to be a psychologist; and believe me, nothing I’ve ever done, or I’m aware of, I don’t think could have altered anybody’s life in the kind of way you said,” and the man said “Let’s see,” and they went back where each had worked and lived and gone to school the last fifteen years and it turned out the man had studied with the host of the party Gould had met the woman at and that the man was at that party and had once been a good friend of Miriam’s. “Miriam, that’s right, I don’t know why but I’m always forgetting the name,” and the man said “Just think of the original Miriam’s place in the Bible and you’ll always have it,” and he said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to sound ignorant, but I don’t recall a Miriam in it—in the Old, anyway, and I’ve never read the New except some quotes you see on Baptist signs along the road and maybe what was read to us at public school assemblies,” and the man said “In the way you allude to them, she was in the Old T, sandwiched between Moses and Aaron, but I’ll let you guess or do the research on the rest; granted, though, Gould, she wasn’t the most significant sororial biblical figure. And I’m still wondering what it was that could have impressed me so much about you at that party, but it could be my memory of my own history’s starting to flag too,” and he said “Anyway, whatever happened to Miriam?—I know she once lived on Downing Street here,” and the man said “Married a Canadian doctor whose family’s reputed to own half a province or so, and moved to Montreal.” “You know his last name?” and the man said “A French one with a le or la in it, but that’s all I know.” “Miriam’s last name then—it’s been a while,” and the man said “Hildago, but she dropped it for her hubby’s. If there are any further questions about her, all I can say is I’ve been out of touch with her for years—call it a falling out,” and he said “Miriam had a friend from college with her at the party and I’ve lost touch with her,” and gave the woman’s name and described her and the man said “She I never knew, not even by name, and I must have seen her with Miriam on and off, but can’t picture her from your description. It might help if you could give me her original name at school. But tell me about you. How have you been faring these past dozen years? Marriage, lots of squealing infants, or because of one reason or another are you a confirmed bachelor or just unsure about being one?” and seemed to be making a pass by what he said and way he said it and used his lips and eyes and Gould said “None of them,” and excused himself. Four years later, when he was married and his first child was around a year and a half, he received a letter from the woman. She’d read a book review he’d done—it was good, she said, illuminating in parts and never stodgy but didn’t go deeply enough into the reasons he disliked the book so much, which she thought he could have done with very little added effort as well as given a clearer summing up as to what the author was trying to say—and the contributor note indicated where he taught, which is why this letter’s coming to him by way of his institution. “Preface completed as to how I got to you after so many years, as well as unasked-and perhaps uncalled-for capsulized review of your review, now let me explain why I’m writing. Naturally (as you can see I’ve adopted your old irritating habit of asides, which I think is the most honest way for me to write since it’s how I think when I’m writing, though I realize the momentum and interest of what I write are often lost in these digressive interjections) I hope this letter finds you well. You’re probably married by now—I hope you are or have been married at least once (my own feeling, based on the experiences of friends and partly on my own experience, is that it takes a bad brief rancorous first marriage to make a good harmonious second one, and that most first marriages are brief because they’re rancorous, wrongheaded, misguided and destructive almost from the start and the relationships leading up to them aren’t much better) and have children or a child, and if so I congratulate you (shades of my shade Harry, if you can remember back that far) which may be the most belated and surely the most recent congratulations you’ve received on the matter, unless you were just married or remarried or had your first child yesterday and this letter arrived the day after. All foolishness aside—all, if I can manage it, asides aside—and also because (there goes that resolut
ion, made in earnest but which you should take as an exemplar of how much you can trust me regarding this, and after what I have to tell you, which I’m sure I’ll eventually come to, regarding anything, perhaps) I don’t believe any letter should extend beyond a bladderful of ink (as you can see, one habit of yours I haven’t adopted, convenient and time-saving as it would be if I wasn’t so inept with almost any kind of machine, is the typewritten letter)—but let me continue (this goes back, incidentally, to the previous page and that ‘all foolishness aside’ start) and a gold medal to you—it’s Olympics time again and my entire brood’s influenced if not, in how we use our hours, governed by it—so a gold medal in stick-to-itiveness if you’ve kept up with me in all this). About two months ago my youngest son Timothy was going through my personal library for a book—any book; he simply wanted to read something (and I’ve two sons, by the way, and no girls, and no child of mine has ever died or been taken away from me at birth or anytime after and tragedies like that, so this is all the children I’ve had and have or ever will; you’ll understand what I mean momentarily—I’m sure it’ll take a leap of faith for you with that ‘momentarily’—if you haven’t understood already) and found one that interested him because of its cover (you may not be able to tell a book by its cover but it can start you reading it—excuse me, I’m such an impoverished poor punster who’s always tripping overself in the attempt, and four or five words into that pun I regretted having begun, and same with the overself, which is more a neowart or carnage than a pun) and he opened it (the book, if you forgot, and I’m not blaming you) and an old postcard from you to me dropped out. There, I’ve finally gotten to it. Do you know what I’m going to say next? I suppose that depends on how well you remember what you used to say too publicly at the time (though now I wouldn’t care less) in your postcards, and what I just said wasn’t what I was going to say next. Now I’ve given enough hints. If you haven’t caught on yet then something, I’m afraid, and I say this lamentably, has happened to your once-snappy brain. You had drawn something on it—are you getting warmer? (And I meant the old children’s game, nothing else, and shouldn’t have even clarified it, since it looks as if I did mean it provocatively, when I didn’t, I didn’t.) And Timothy asked ‘Who’s the artist?’ I told him you weren’t an artist, or you might be now but you weren’t when you drew it, and he said ‘But he’s done a nifty caricature of you as a pregnant lady standing on a doctor’s scale with your head pressed up against the measuring stick attached to it. And he wrote underneath (this should all have been paraphrased or in indirect quotes, but permit me the license and also the pleasure in seeing how adept I am at replicating his voice): “Haven’t heard from you in a while (that, of course, should be in the direct quotes it is). How’s your confinement doing? Measuring up to scale?” So he knew you when you were pregnant with me, based on the card’s dates (meaning yours and the P.O.’s). Pretty bold of him there, Mom, as if he knew you intimately. Was he,’ he asked, “a lover or someone like that? (I inserted the ‘he asked’ because I thought I might have lost you. Did I?) A good friend who you maybe only had some good friendly sex with and nothing else when Dad was still around? (That’s right: Harry’s no longer around; he’s dead—’shades of my shade Harry,’ several pages back?—but more about that later if the pen holds out.) I mean, Ma (here I’m trying to convey it as it was spoken, to bring the scene more to life for you so you’ll be able to hear the boy, though he actually calls me Chris more than he does Ma or Mom), you say your marriage was open then, but how much so?’ (‘Nifty,’ from a previous page, I now realize, isn’t a word I’ve ever heard him use; it could have been ‘neat’ or ‘nice,’ but don’t hold me to it.) So I told him the truth: you, me, your orgasmic duplicity, my lethargy, Timothy as blastocyst, Harry as goingalongwithist, and the truth’s what I’m truthfully telling you now, truthfully. ‘Not (and I also just realized Timothy would have used ‘whom’ for ‘who’ in that ‘good friend you maybe only’ many lines ago, since it’s a discipline at school he’s recently relearned again for good and has been practicing on us without letup or remorse) even as a friend,’ I said of you. ‘And for me, at least, not for the sex or rapport or because I was piningly lonely in New York, where your roots first started to generate, or the satisfaction and intrigue in deceiving your father either. He was just there—your father elsewhere—slippery, pushy and unstoppably priapic, and after my first few puny no’s—I’m almost sure about that—I was my most typically submissive, unvocally suspicious and containable.’ Principal reason I told him is because his father died in a motorcycle accident eight years ago, if one can call it that: Harry was stoned, driving with one hand, blowing kisses with the other, his lady possessor, an obsessive confessor who miraculously survived without only a spleen, reproductive system and one eye to brag about it all, giving him a handjob with Vaseline—she even said he was approaching out-of-body trans-send-your-socks-off-into-the-void ejaculation as they crashed—and having missed out having a father for so long during most of the important years for that I finally succumbed to thinking he should know he still had a biological one, feeling that if I ever died (at forty I suddenly became mortal) before he was on his own and John (my eldest, whom you met) was too encapsulated in his own life to tender to him, he could try contacting you. All this about the aborted abortion that I never gave so much as half a thought to having must come as a surprise and shock. I apologize for that, but at the time I thought it the only way to keep you from the birth and baby and then the child being raised. You were such a gushy sentimentalist about children and blood, which might be nice if one were married to you, that I knew you’d intrude deleteriously, in addition to all the other disadvantages he’d undergo which I wrote you of but now can’t recall. Harry went along with my having the child so long as I continued to let him lay his many legal girlfriends (that was his profession almost: layman of lawyers) at any minute of the night and overdraft our savings and checking for his increasingly more exotic cars, two-wheelies and drugs. Then he died, I kept you a secret from Timothy, since I didn’t see any point in his knowing, the secret spilled out of the bookshelf and Timothy, an aspiring trial lawyer he says but only for the money, easily grilled it out of me. But now—for instance, regarding keeping you from the birth, your adamant ideas on circumcision: that a boy shouldn’t have one; he can keep his prepuce clean just by washing it and the dismemberment robs him of a sexual edge; even if his brother and both his fathers had them and preputial men are more prone to penile cancer and sometimes suffer phimosis and are also supposed to increase the chances of cervical cancer in the women they lay. You were filled with that sort of unthought-out naturalistic mischief. But now, as I was saying, Timothy would like to have a relationship of some kind with you but asked me to initiate it with this letter: flamboyant, aggressive and (no pun calculated) cocksure in the courtroom as he’s sure to be, he’s preternaturally shy outside it, something I was in every setting and still am, except when I’m writing, and you said you were once too, which amazed me because you were so fundamentally forward and backslapping. So what do you say, Gould? He’ll write back if you jot him a few lines. Just say who you are and what you do and you heard he wanted a letter from you, and if you have a wife and children or child then something about them. He loves animals so if you have a pet or two or your children do, tell him of it. Where you live and have lived and what kind of place it is: Ping-Pong table, swimming pool, little lawn where you might play ball or run around with your kids, what sports you might attend: all those things. In other words, what you’re most interested in if it’s clean, and if you mention me then simply refer to the place where we met: kids his age love hearing about parties and New York. Or write what you like—who am I to inscribe your lines? He’ll be thrilled to get any thing, though please don’t feel you’re committed to this forever. If you want to withdraw after the first letter or think your other obligations preclude any to him, even an exchange of letters, tell him so and he’ll just have to unde
rstand. He’s fifteen and quite mature and other than for his blond hair and if my memory serves me faithfully—too bad we never got to the stage in our relationship of exchanging photos, if only so he could have some idea what you looked like then and must still resemble a little now—he looks like you of sixteen years ago, minus fifteen or so (did I make my math too confusing to follow, as well as this labored sentence?). For certain he looks like no one else in his family, Harry’s included, except for his hair, which is mine though now mine is a fading blond-gray (let’s face it: I’ve aged and I swear I don’t care; it’s only a man or two who knew or screwed me fifteen-twenty years ago who do). Now he’s standing beside me, and when I asked him to move because I hate anyone looking over my shoulder, then beside me, and is reading and now has read this page and after telling me I’m being too harsh on my facial lines, corporeal spread and dehydrated hair (those are my words; his were just ‘face, body and hair’), wants to read all the previous pages. But I’m telling him and have just told him they’re private and it’s something he knows better than to ask. And he’s telling me and has just told me and, because I didn’t catch it all and it seems to be serious enough that I should, told me again to say he’ll write you first if you will only give the thumbs-up in a letter or card to me or him that you’re willing to receive (you don’t even have to be eager, he said) and that you might even answer him (though just that you’ll open his letter will be enough, he said; ‘If you want, don’t even read,’ he just yelled). He’s also saying—but let me get this straight (and fill, to be completely honest with you, and though I didn’t want to go past one and after my second, thought I was being dishonest in not telling you, my third bladderful of ink—has it been that long; can you hold out?). Now: something about law and legal things I think he was saying—yes, that’s what he was saying, he’s now saying, and that you should never fear, the junior trial lawyer says, that your personal correspondence (his words) will be used in court against you. That he will never ‘institute’ a son’s (he just told me to put quotation marks around that possessive) equivalent of a paternity suit, though for all he knows, he added, that’s what it might be called. He only wants the two of you to know something about the other: it’ll make him feel good and ‘more whole.’ Speaking personally—he wants me to strike out that last quote; says it makes him seem stupid for ‘whole is whole, like unique’s unique and pregnant’s pregnant,’ but it’s my letter, Timmy, I just told him—he hates when I call him that; has said it sounds as if he’s still a child. But, speaking pregnantly—personally (that was intentional)—‘Get out of here now, Tim,’ I just told him—he’s a great kid (but isn’t getting out. ‘Out, Tim, I said out!’), decent, sensitive, witty, gentle, polite, way-above-average intelligence and sensibility, the boy of boys and all the other standard things people say about their children. (I hate that last passage: so bourgeois.) (And that last use of ‘bourgeois’: so bourgeois.) I just wish Harry had lived (of course I also wish it for other reasons) so Timothy would never have been shoved into this stew. (Such odd word usage, a stew itself, and if I’m preternaturally anything in this letter—why did I use such an unnatural word there, a question which acts out what I was about to say? The first time to show off, the second to poke holes in myself. And why did I think I had to answer my question, which is still portraying what I was about to say and that was if I’m preternaturally anything in this letter it’s self-conscious. Meaning that I am, and not because you mean so much to me, if I can beg your pardon, because you don’t. I’m self-conscious because I feel guilty withholding his existence from you till now and also that abortion trick I did, and withholding you from Timothy too. I’ve done the absolutely wrong thing, I think, which I hope this letter will begin to correct.) A boy needs his father (this goes back to my wish that Harry had lived), and whatever Harry wasn’t to me (other than for the boys, begetting one and fathering them both, what a pointless marriage!) he (already said in the last paragraph) was always there for his sons. (So: sort of said. And John’s in sleepaway college, by the way, and indifferent that his brother is only his half brother now.) Now Timothy thinks of you often, says he’s dreamed of you, wants to go—what am I saying?—he’s gone to the local library and run a computer check on your publications in the hope there’d be a jacket or newspaper photo of you and found that you haven’t been productive the last fifteen years ago and that this seems to be only your second review in a publication that’s important enough to be on a computer readout (Timothy told me the term). If that’s so, I told him, then it could be that most of your work time goes into classroom teaching—which he immediately saw as a ‘definite plus in biodad’s favor’—or else our library hasn’t the resources it claims it has. But Gould, like facing age—oh gosh, I was about to get philosophical. What I’m saying is face it, you have at least one son who, I believe, in addition to all the other reasons he’s drawn to you (flesh and blood, a writer of at least two published reviews, etc.) secretly admires you for winning his mother over (fucking her in one night, though I told him two, and it was two, wasn’t it? Since you can’t count the first day we met; and I didn’t, of course, say ‘fuck’ to him; I think I said, stumped for the moment as to how else to put it, ‘when we were joined together as lovers’) and knocking her up that first night too (I didn’t tell him that; he just assumed). Because I think I lied—I did lie, didn’t I?—and said that was the only time we were joined together, since the next day, I told him, I drove back to Madison with John. Who knows if that admiration for you isn’t his way of getting back at his real dad—the nonbiological one—though for what, I don’t know, other than—and this would be too ironical—his treatment of me, though pummel me with pumice stones for trying to get psychological on you too. Other than that (I’m in the closing mode, I swear) if you don’t write either of us back I’ll write you again. If you don’t answer that letter (I’ll give you a few weeks with both) I’ll phone your university to make sure you’re still teaching there or not on sabbatical or leave somewhere. If you are there or on leave but not writing back (first I’ll phone your department’s secretary to make sure you’re picking up your office mail or having it sent to you and that you’re not in a foreign country where it’s rare for the mail to get through) or you write back you want nothing to do with any of this, I’ll understand, even if I can’t guarantee Timothy will; though that should be, after all I did (lying, disappearing, hitting you with this news, perhaps subconsciously inducing you to bed sixteen years ago with whatever whining and self-hurting and other unwily wiles I used to make you feel sorry enough for me to) of no concern or problem to you. You’re in the clear as people say (I can’t for the life of me, like that ‘for the life of me,’ get genuinely colloquial—maybe curtailing the adverbs and swanky verbs would help). Timothy, incidentally, is no longer in the room reading this and hasn’t been since I ordered him out that second time (I’m afraid, since Harry’s death, I’m able to get scolding, revolted and fierce). As you can see by the skipping light script in the last sentence, the pen’s running dry again. I want to leave enough ink (to be honest, this is the end of my third—all right, to be absolutely honest: fourth—bladderful) and three (since it’s a much handier if not facile number to make comparisons and analogies with and so forth) has always been enough, hasn’t it? (‘always’ meaning ‘usually’ here), if not more dramatic: on a match, three strikes and you’re out, three-time loser, Holy Trinity, is a crowd, etc., to address the envelope as well as forge a facsimile of a first-class postage stamp on the top right corner of it (naturally, not true and the end, you’ll be glad to hear, of any of my fourth-class jokemaking attempts). So thank you (why’d I say that? I suppose in my hope you’ll accept my apologies for all my wrongdoings to you) and very best, and if you do have a wife and child(ren) you’re currently living with, my humblest regards to them. (Not ‘humblest,’ but you know what I mean.)” He showed the letter to his wife and said “Something, huh? I feel like I don’t know what. Still shaking in
side and like an ice pack’s been dropped through my body to my feet. I mean, before I read it I had one kid and now I’ve two. What should I do about it?” and she said “Want me to make a joke about the ice pack or just give you a straight serious answer?” and he said “Both if you want,” and she said “Well, I’d say you have an unusually—and I ought to be careful with my jokes here after what she had to say about them and also hold back on my aggressions—digressions—and fake slips and asides—that you must have unusually clear arteries, which should be something to be thankful to find out about. And then—joke flat, for you’re not smiling,” and he said “No no, it was all right, just maybe I couldn’t find anything funny now . but what else, the serious?” and she said “To write back; I don’t see how you can avoid it. What to say to her, though, right now I don’t know. That’s for you, as to how you feel. But one question you should ask yourself is why you’re so sure the boy’s yours.” “I just know he is; the timing sixteen years ago; her pretenses during it—at the early stages, and now in this letter, meaning . . meaning what? This has also confused me. That it just seems authentic, this letter. I mean, there does seem to be something askew with her in it, the way she puts things. Or maybe I’m wrong; it’s just her way of putting things—she’s nervous, self-conscious, was always turning away, not looking at me, bashful, if you can believe it; frightened, even, though she now says she can be aggressive—I’m sure that’s what she meant—and fierce. Fooling herself there, I think. But, but, just by the way she says she kept it from me and is now revealing it. And because I doubt anyone could make up a letter like this, or if anyone could, she wasn’t among them or was the very last to all that, I’m saying, smacks the truth—of it. I’m repeating myself and also still not being clear,” and she said “No, I understand, and how could you not be? What I’m thinking now though is why you’re so sure she’s even had a second son. It’s possible she has gone a little over the who-knows-what and it isn’t simply nerves and self-consciousness, since we don’t know what’s happened to her, like drugs she’s taken or illnesses she’s gone through and relationships she’s had, in sixteen years. Or tragedies even—the loss of her first and only son, though that’s carrying it too far. But she might only be imagining it or, as she said about the boy to his alleged deceased nonbiological father, is trying to get back at you for some reason. Though why would she be, since from what you’ve told me and this letter says she was the one who cut you off. But I’d look into the letter more deeply, read it for keys. Maybe she’s getting back at you with this possible birth lie for originally getting her in bed and impregnating her when she didn’t want to, at least the pregnancy,” and he said “I don’t know, but I have to admit she wasn’t very keen on sleeping with me. More like, if I really had to or sort of insisted—her meekness again—she’d get on the bed, hike up her dress and spread her legs and I should just go ahead. But there’s more validity in what you say about the pregnancy, since I did trick her. I should have pulled out of her as we’d agreed—I’m saying, the first time. The second and third, if there was a third, I assume she was protectively prepared, or else she didn’t do anything because she already knew she was pregnant. But she wasn’t a vindictive type or a conniver and nothing in the letter shows it. In fact, just the opposite comes out,” and she said “Why, where’s it say that?” looking at the letter, and he said “I thought I heard it come through, but I won’t press it; I’m not as good a reader as you. But what she says here I’m convinced is the truth, though if it really came down to it I’d want a blood test to prove it,” and she said “Do you know what they cost? There was something in the—no, a doctor acquaintance, Debby, and she was talking about it, or someone for some reason asked her, when I was with her, and the figures stuck. Maybe it was originally a newspaper article and this person wanted it explained or couldn’t believe the costs. But Debby went into it: more than a thousand; that is, if you want ninety-nine-point-nine accuracy. It’s a very complex foolproof process which no medical insurance covers, so you really have to want the tests. And you need their consent, mother and child’s, and they have to take the tests the same day as you and their blood flown to the lab air-express if the lab’s here, or yours to theirs same way, or maybe theirs is taken the day before yours so it can reach your lab the next day, but which has to be another hundred in costs: flying blood,” and he said “Then that’s another matter, which we’ll maybe come to someday, but I’m saying I believe what she says is so and that I have to deal with it. And if it isn’t so—now I mean that if she does have another child but it isn’t mine; or what she says is a bit exaggerated I don’t know what I mean by that; I know it’s something but I forget what—then I’ll find out somehow in my letters to him. But I will write her back saying the kid should write and I might even put something in the letter for him,” and she said “For no furtive purposes, believe me, or that this is the wise wife telling the obtuse spouse what a mistake she thinks he might be making, but I’m still a bit suspicious. Out of the blue, sixteen years, this boy opens a book and his papa drops out?—excuse me, but it doesn’t even seem a trace fishy to you? Maybe it’s the truth—taller tales have been—but it could also be she wants you to start kicking in for him—private school, for instance, if he has a problem academically or his public school or school district does. College—he’s getting to that age and may even be so precocious that this is his senior high school year and he’s thinking of going to Stanford or Amherst or Yale. But big bucks and the living’s high there. Or she comes upon one review, sees you’re teaching in a good school, has read that some college profs make a hundred thousand or more and thinks you were sharp and smart so maybe you’re among this elite and feels it’ll be no hardship for you to help her with some serious bills because she’s being evicted or had medical expenses she’s up to her arrears in, and so on—the last wasn’t bad, was it? and it wasn’t anything I heard,” and he said “As I told you, she wasn’t like that and nothing she wrote suggests she’s changed. She hated people who squeezed money or promises out of you. Hated advertisers, salesmen, promoters, professional handshakers, anyone pushy and aggressive and self-interested and unctuous, if I recall, is the word she used, but who wanted something from you like that. In a way, me at the time—that’s what she said about me: pushy, sexually needy, other things, and I was. Those days, nothing was going to stop me from trying to get the babe in bed and once in it or sitting on the edge of it with a piece of her clothing unbuttoned or off—even a shoe—from being even more forceful in frigging her. And once in her I sure as hell wasn’t going to pull out—except maybe to quickly stick it back in some other way—and dimish my good time. Okay, that was me then, now I don’t have to. I’m married, we can go for days without doing it if we want to, though we don’t seem to—both of us; it’s not just me. But sixteen years ago, or really since I was around eighteen, if she let me stick it in or didn’t fight me off hard enough to stop me from getting in her, then screw it—apt phrase, right?—I left it to her to take care of the rest of it, meaning her own pleasure and the birth control and aftersex wipeaway, etcetera, though I might provide the handkerchief if my pants were near. My satisfaction, once it got under way, was paramount. You don’t like what I just said, though I know I’ve said it before to you in various ways, but what can I say? Now I wouldn’t act like that for sure if I were single, and I didn’t, I think, when I first met you. I remember I’d decided to change my approach to fit my age and probably, without admitting it, my existent sex drive. But your face is saying something; what?” and she said “Nothing. You came on plenty strong with me then but it was all right. I knew what I was doing, which isn’t a criticism of her. She was about ten years younger than I when you met her, you’ve said, though with a kid, and it was a different and I think much looser time then all around and maybe people, even intelligent ones, thought like that: ‘Because I want another baby or am going to have another one some day, what’s the difference if it’s with him or someone else or e
ven with my husband again, so long as the man seems to have good genes? It still comes out of me.’ But I still think if I had been her age and without protection our first night and certainly if I was still cohabitating with my husband I would have clawed you off or grabbed your balls and squeezed them till they crunched if you had somehow got your stiff in without my permission or with my permission but I suddenly had second explicitly articulated thoughts about it and you refused to withdraw.” “Anyway,” he said, “looking at it all—and I know I didn’t answer half your questions—in the end what’s the harm? She only wants me to have a minimal relationship with him now—by mail. Maybe sometime later a phone call or a meeting, something I’d only do—the meeting—if I felt sure he was mine, and unless I get us all to take those blood tests, which I’m not about to, I don’t see how I could. I don’t know what I’ll write to her but it’ll all come out when I write it and I promise I’ll be careful with my words.” He started to write her that night, then thought he’s only writing her to get through to the kid, so just write him, and started a new letter, saying who he is—“A friend of your mother’s. We knew each other years ago, which she’s of course told you, though I never met your father, who I understand passed away and which I was very sorry to hear”—what he does for a living, his family—“We’ve a daughter who’s just started to walk and who seems quite bright, lots of clear words and a few communicated impressions: ‘Look, bird! See, squirrel!’ I’m not kidding. Early on kids talk like that, just verbs and nouns and commands, and not ‘squirrel’; ‘dog’ “—and that “I heard from your mother you’d like me to write. I’d be happy to get a letter back telling things about yourself: what you like to do, school, job if you have one—I started working two to three hours a day and all day Saturday when I was thirteen, not recommended if one wants to get good grades, which I always wanted but never got except in music and art and if spelling had been its own subject, then I also would’ve got it in that”—his interests, friends, any pets? what he likes to read—“I’m assuming you do, no problem if not”—and so on. “Please give your mother my deepest regards.” No reply from the boy. Month later he wrote the woman saying he wrote Timothy same day he got her letter and he hasn’t received an answer. “In something like this the first thing I always say is I hope everything’s all right (sometimes it can be illness and even worse, heaven forbid). That said and everyone’s in good health and neither of you is going through comparable problems in other matters (fiscal, residential, social, etc.) then maybe he’s even shyer than you thought, not that I’m saying you don’t know your own son or that I have some special insight into his behavior because of this one action. (I’m afraid I’m being extraguarded here, not wanting to step in your terrain and feeling I’ve no right to draw conclusions about him, and I don’t. I don’t pretend to know him in any way other than from what you’ve said about him, but let’s face it, as you like to say, or did a couple of times in your letter—and I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious about that; it’s really nothing. Damn, I forgot what I was going to say, so don’t look for the closed parenthesis. But something about parents, because they’re so close to their kids, often not being the best judges of them, which is an old notion but seems new to a new parent no matter how old he is and which I’m sure will be true of me too with my child (Fanny, née Francine, and it’s been suggested, for obvious reasons except the big overlooked ones [force of habit and we like it] that we go back to the née one or call her, if we insist on an abbreviated or just less formal name and one we don’t like, Franny). But have I gone too far in even saying what I just did about Timothy and you? Talk about self-consciousness (mine)! This whole thing, quite truthfully, has catapulted me into a tumultuous hazy maze (and also into blowhard overprosy writing just witnessed). So where was I? And I’m not saying you’re one of the parents unable to judge her child sometimes because you two are so close (I don’t even know how much you are but I get a feeling of it and fine, fine, why shouldn’t you be?). But if Timothy’s had a change of mind about contacting me or wanting to be contacted, that’s okay, but please let me know. That’s probably all I should have said. Most sincerely, and always my best to you and Tim.” He showed his wife what he wrote, said “You think I should’ve called him Timothy, or maybe just change the ‘Tim’ to ‘him’; I can do that with a correction tab,” and she said “Why are you diving in headfirst like this?” and he said “What do you mean?” “Listen, the boy didn’t answer you, so wait till he does,” and he said “But what do you mean about diving in headfirst?” and she said “You’re not being deliberative, prudent, patient, even the least bit skeptical; you’re being impetuous, precipitous, reckless, even foolhardy,” and he said “Adjectives, adjectives, all adjectives; fuck them and adverbs.” “Okay,” she said, “then this, since I can see what I said made you pissed: what’s the big rush? All right, not ‘big,’ but just ‘rush, rush.’ If he doesn’t answer in another month or two, he’ll still only be fifteen or at the most on the cusp of sixteen, but still young, with plenty of years left to begin to get to know you, and in the interim you can decide the next thing to do regarding him, which might be to do nothing. But you’re acting like this waiting for his letter the last month. You’ve been all hyped up and anxious about it as if it’s a fait accompli or something that he’s your son. In other words, a given, indisputable, no q’s asked, and you’re dying to hear from him. Perhaps, as you once intimated, to find some signs in his letters that he is who she says he is. Maybe by the way he writes or what he says or even his handwriting and signature, if he isn’t already on a WP, and then oh boy, wait till the photos of him come in: ‘Look, Sal, my chin, my nose, my lobes.’ But that he’s yours unequivocally. It’s as if you’re not already a father. And that you’re forty-seven but unmarried, or married to a barren woman or you’re the one at reproductive fault and you’re desperate to go down in life as having fulfilled some universal or divine purpose and that’s to leave a child behind with your seed in it, even if all this information about your fathership comes from someone you haven’t seen in sixteen years, only was with two or three days—you two will never get that one straight—and has a history of being untrustworthy or considerably unreliable and for the most part simply not there. But there’s Fanny and in a year or two we’ll probably have another child or start to and if you want three I’ll go for three. Rather, if we want a third we’ll have it, and we’ve said we do, but we’ll determine that for certain after we have two. But what can you do for this boy now that he’s fifteen or for all we know soon to be or already sixteen?” and he said “No, it would be early summer when she and I met; that’d have him born in March or April, so he’s only a few months into being fifteen.” “Money for tuition and things like sleepaway summer camp and braces we can’t afford,” she said, “and I won’t let you legally adopt him since that’ll cut into what we want to give to the children we conceive. If you want to send him a few dollars—a few hundred—and it’s from time to time, but money for his health or health insurance mostly, okay. I wouldn’t even send this letter, though I won’t do anything to stop you, and I certainly wouldn’t write another one if you don’t get one back from this one or the last. Take their not sending back as a sign, not that either of us believes in that,” and he said “Truth is, but I told you this before,” and she said “How would I know?” and he said “That I remember how much I wanted it to be true when she first said she was pregnant and then with that photo I told you she sent me and letters about her pregnancy, or maybe there was just one letter or two. And truth too is that I feel good now at the possibility of having a second kid in him. It won’t stop me from wanting a second one with you and if we want, a third too, but that should do it. But if he’s connected to me in the way she says then even at this late date in his life—fifteen’s not late but you know what I mean—I have to take whatever responsibility’s mine, all of which I’ll find out what it is.” “You don’t. She kept it from you. You’re off the hook as
she said, or whatever so-called so hard to come by colloquialism she used—‘out of the woods,’ ‘in the clear,’” and he said “Blood. If the kid’s blood, then that’s all there is to it, whatever’s happened and no matter how much time’s elapsed, though call me a misled sentimental sap.” “You’re full of shit,” and she left the room. “Sally?” but she didn’t answer. He mailed the letter and came back and said “I mailed it,” and she said “So?” and wouldn’t talk to him anymore that day or let him close to her that night. He woke up a few hours into sleep and wanted to put his arm around her and hold her breast and if he could hold both of them in one hand then both and fall back to sleep that way, which she knew was the easiest way he could get back to sleep, but she took his hand off and moved to her end of the bed. They didn’t talk for two days. Sure: “Good-bye,” “So long,” “Excuse me,” “Go ahead,” but nothing much more than that. The woman didn’t write back, the boy didn’t, they never did. Two months later he called information in their city and was told the woman’s phone number was unlisted. He wanted to ask her or the boy, whichever answered, and if a boy did he was prepared for that: “Hi, this Timothy? I’m Gould; I wrote you almost three months ago,” and if it was the older son he’d say “Let me speak to your mother”—but to either of the other two “What gives? You don’t want to write, then as I said in my last letter to you” or “To your mother: that’s fine, you had a change of mind” or “Your son changed his mind, but you should have done the right thing—either of you, or both, for he’s old enough and you must have some control over what he does or doesn’t do and could have squeezed a line or two out of him—and let me know where I stood. You bring me into it, you shift my life somewhat, you turn me around and around and upside down and send me into I don’t know what consternations, in addition to what it does to my family or just my wife, then you shouldn’t step away as if you never wrote” or “Your mother never contacted me to ask if I’d welcome a letter from you and you never asked her to, and which I said I would.” Two years later he was going to be in their city and wrote her, saying “This is like something from ten years ago or twelve or fourteen, I honestly forget, but closer to the latter, I believe, when I wrote saying I was going to be in Madison and would like to look you up. Well, things come back on us, don’t they, and I don’t mean anything sly or snide in that, and I will be in your city in a couple of weeks and hope to see you if you’re there and, if possible, your youngest son. I hope everything’s well with you all. It is with us, and we’ve recently had a second child: Josephine.” No reply from her. He called information there the next week, thinking maybe she’s listed now, but there was no one with her or Timothy’s names at that address or anywhere in the city. A week later, when he was there and after he’d done his business for the day, he went to their old address. He didn’t expect them to be there, though they actually could be, something he just thought of, but didn’t have a phone anymore—service could have been cut off because she hadn’t paid the bill—but he also just wanted to see where they had lived. It was a large Victorian house turned into seven or eight apartments, the tenants’ bells and mailboxes on the porch by the front door. Her name wasn’t on any of them. Maybe she married again and took the last name of her new husband, but then she also would have had hers there, he’d think, and if she was remarried they probably would have moved out: the place seemed rundown. To find out about her he rang the first tenant’s bell and when no one answered, the next bell and then the next and the man who came to the front door said the woman had moved out several months ago and he didn’t know where. One day she was there with grocery bags in her arms and the next day she was loading a rented truck by herself with her furniture and stuff. “As for the boy, he was here a long time—she had two but the eldest has been away at college for a while and you almost never saw him, not even summers, and the youngest left home for Canada more than a half year ago I’d put it and seemed unsure about what for when I asked him. ‘Work,’ he said, and I said ‘Work up there when they have a worse unemployment picture than we do down here?’, ‘Or maybe school then,’ he said, ‘or maybe nothing, just exploring, but not like up a mountain or in a hole,’ is what he said. Young for going off on his own so far alone but he said he saved up for it the last year so it was okay. I never asked his mother what happened to him. Or if I did she never answered or else by accident I had my hearing aid in wrong or turned off. I suppose nothing bad did happen since she never showed any grief or anything and I used to see her almost every day—my window’s right there and I was laid off and then retired so I had little to do but look out and snoop. But she had the same placid look, mood and voice for years. You couldn’t get a laugh out of her, even when you said something really funny but unnaughty, not that she wasn’t the nicest of ladies and also the most helpful in coming to people’s aid here and troubles and things like that in the house.” “And the boy, was he a nice kid—the youngest?” and the man said “Oh yeah, very nice, Tim, a real fine young gentleman. Civil, respectful, kept his music low. And listen to this: not the harsh angry clamor: ‘Kill me this, beat me black and blue that, rape the world and its girls, drink and drug and party and buy my harsh angry music,’ but good classical and jazz, to my ears. And no shouting matches with his mother, and when his brother was around, always a nice thing going between them. And things like after he rode his bike he parked it close to the building upright, saying good morning and hello, and helpful to the neighbors too with packages and opening doors, and errands when he was much younger, and you’d have to beg him to take a tip. That says a lot about her too, doesn’t it? I wish my boys had had more of that in them. But I’ve told you so much and I don’t even know why you want to know. They being investigated; the boy?” and he said “Far from it. I’m an old friend of the family’s, Gould Bookbinder’s my name,” and shook the man’s hand. “In town for the day and lost touch with them, so I came to the last address of theirs I had, hoping against the odds, when I couldn’t reach them by phone, to meet up with them here, and seems I didn’t miss them by much. You think anyone else in the building knows where she moved or the boy?” and he said “Nobody. I’ve spoken about it with them, the steadies. It’s become something of a mystery to us we like to wonder about, since they were here awhile, though it’s not like it’s never happened before. Tenants here are always moving in and out at the spur of the moment or their roommates or lodgers are, and after they’re gone I’ve never seen another one again, except by accident someplace, but that only happened once and I forget where.” When he got home he found the letter he sent her two weeks ago returned by the post office: addressee left, no forwarding address. “So that’s it, I guess,” he said to his wife, “and I bet the next time I hear from her, even if I’ve nothing to back this up except that one long lull before I heard from her again, will be in ten to fifteen years. Somehow she’ll find me-—well, here’s easy, but if we’re in some other place or two removed from here—and say she’s been thinking of me and my life. And also apologize for what she did to me ten to fifteen years ago and hope I’m well, family’s well, everybody and everything’s well and of course that this letter reaches me and even suggest I write her back but only if I care to—‘There have been so many false starts from me that I can see why you might not want to,’ she could say. And then something about Timothy, ‘if you’re still interested’: married, divorced, remarried, children, he’s become an undersea explorer, a real estate broker, an American folklorist, a professional coin collector, besides flying his own planes, but she won’t give any hint where he lives or what airports he lands in. I’ll almost be retired by then, or five to ten years from it. Have to wait till Josephine finishes college; that is, if we don’t have a third child in the next couple of years, which’ll make it two to three more years till retirement unless I’m somehow sacked—too befuddled to even find the classroom I would’ve been teaching in for thirty straight years; exposed myself when I thought the faculty club’s fireplace was a urinal.
Or they give me early retirement with the same tuition remission policy for my kids—I’ve never been able to figure that one out, how they save—but we’ll talk about that some other time. But I know I won’t ever be able to get in touch with her no matter how hard I try. If I called the landlord of the house she recently moved out of, what do you think he’d say? Let me tell you: No forwarding address, possibly not even one to send her rent deposit to, or if there was it’d be a General Delivery or P.O. box number in a big city. So I’ll stop trying and it’s unlikely we’ll ever be in the same place in the next fifteen years where we bump into each other. Even if we were and we did bump, so many years would have gone by since we last saw each other that we wouldn’t know who the other was except if my wallet dropped out of my pocket when we collided and a credit card or my driver’s license or something like that fell out faceup before her eyes or she accidentally kicked it and picked it up to give it back to me and saw my name on it. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she’d say, ‘Gould? Or are you another Gould Bookbinder?’ And for all I know she’d then say ‘Sorry, though, something imperative and I’ve got to run, but I’ll write you, I promise, and you can answer back if you were the right Gould.’ And I wouldn’t hear from her again, since that accident would serve as her every-fifteen-year contact with me, till I was in my eighties and on my death bed, though of course she wouldn’t know who I was, and whatever kind of communication from her, like letters, that people use then would be placed on my chest, but I’d be too blind to read it and too deaf to hear it read.” “So you tried,” she said, “and it’s over with and nothing more to be done about it now. How’d the rest of your trip go?”