Henry’s head fell to an angle.
“There are times when I quite dislike you, Henry.”
Henry nodded. “Well, Andrew has company now.”
“It’s clear to me how much time you’ve spent talking to patients, placating or handling medicated or difficult women…”
“The men aren’t always a breeze.”
“You’re making fun of me now?”
“I’m agreeing with you. I’ve had to develop a way of conducting myself with my patients. It’s true. I could tell you all about it if you like, but first may I ask one small favor?”
“What?”
“Might we have dinner? It smells so good, whatever you’re making.”
* * *
Henry did not often eat or drink to excess. It wasn’t his nature. But that evening he ate and ate, drank and drank. He wanted to alter his mind, his body, his vision. He wanted to take himself elsewhere. Mainly he wanted to silence Leopold, make him go away.
As soon as Henry hit the mattress, he passed out, but his unconsciousness was short-lived. Within an hour he was awake again, ricocheting between replaying his earlier exchange with Andrew and ripping open Leopold’s envelope. His mouth was stuffed with cotton; his bowels were rumbling; and somewhere in his head a mallet was striking—but none of this drowned out the voices of his dead father and his angry son.
Henry hoisted himself out of bed and sat on the toilet. The pee gushed out of him. He drank water, chewed Rolaids, swallowed aspirin. He fell back onto the bed like a piece of iron.
Sleep was not there waiting for him. Sleep was nowhere. Knowing that the alarm was set for three in the morning only made him more wakeful, more alert.
A mind already sharpened and troubled, then marinated in alcohol: it was a torment. But he was determined to fight back. He would take himself somewhere pleasant, somewhere nice and vacation-y. Only what, and where, was this place? He could summon no beach, no mountain or lake, that had any evocative powers that stuck. He preferred indoor attractions anyway, didn’t he? The Tate, with those smoky Turners. The Musée Marmottan, with its Monets …
The monks’ cells at San Marco: that was it. He returned to the setting where all this began. Those breathtaking annunciations, those shimmery Madonnas with their pink-kissed cheeks, mysteriously ruminative expressions, and thin translucent hands: Was anything more lovely? Yes, something was—someone. Costanza, that day. What was it about first impressions, first meetings? They were when actual life was most like novels or movies, or dreams. Or memories. They were the bold-stroke, big-picture moments before complication, before all the refinement and nuance, the slog of reality and detail, followed. Without them, life was unbearable. Or, rather, life was bearable—he had borne it, for years—but it was not much more than that. In Florence, in one burst of sensation, he woke up. He had not been so knocked out by a woman since Judith, maybe ever. And how fitting that it was such a physical moment too. He hadn’t seen Costanza; he had plowed into her. He had collided with this goldenness, and out flared astonishment, surprise, a heightened awareness that everything in his life could change.
And everything had changed too.
Now this woman was lying next to him with swollen ovaries containing eggs that, in a few hours, and with the help of ten thousand units of HCG, would be sent on their fateful journey. They would be extracted from her and injected with his sperm and then it would be all about waiting again: waiting to see if the sperm would take, waiting to see if this life would take off—and take their lives with it.
The mallet was hammering away. Henry opened one boiling eye to the face of the clock. Was it still a face, he wondered tangentially, if there were no hands, only digital numbers? And hateful numbers at that: 12:52. He felt he’d been imprisoned in that bed for a century.
Into his turmoil, a remark from across the mattress: “I know you’re not asleep.”
“How,” he said hoarsely, “do you know that?”
“Your breathing.”
Henry didn’t say anything.
“What’re you thinking about?”
“Many things.”
“Tell me one.”
“The day we met. In San Marco.”
“The day you crashed into me, you mean.”
“I was thinking how beautiful you were. I thought I’d dreamed you. I thought you were like—like one of those Madonnas come to life.”
“A Galatea fantasy. That doesn’t feel very real.”
“Well, everything becomes real with time.”
She rolled onto her back. “That sounds rather grim, Henry, I must say.”
“Real in a good way. You can’t live a dream. A dream is a fantasy. It’s a postcard, when life is made of letters, chapters. Books.”
“What made you think about that day?”
It came to him in a rush: “There’s something I need to tell you.”
He hadn’t even been thinking about it—directly. But once he said the words, he knew he had been wanting to, for a long time.
“What is it?”
“It’s about me. And the boys. I don’t feel—I feel you should know this—before.”
“Before what?”
“Tomorrow.”
She was facing him now, full on. Moonlight bathed her skin. Her eyes were focused, worried. No, concerned. Worried was too strong.
He didn’t want to think what her face would look like when he was finished speaking. He could well be at the end of a great period in his life, the last great period. It could all dissolve. With a few sounds, a few words. A few sentences could cause all the goodness to vaporize. And he’d be back to what? To less than before. To nothing. Not even the boys, possibly. Just himself—and what? A spruced-up empty apartment, an avalanche of take-out containers redux, and an awakened heart and body that he would have to try to put back to sleep. To put down, maybe, like an old dog.
He had no way of knowing for sure how this conversation would go, but he knew that he had to tell her. It wasn’t just for Leopold—it was for himself. It was time. He did just want to remember, to savor, her face for a little while longer, just a moment or two.
How he loved her skin.
“Henry? What is it? You’re scaring me.”
“You’re so beautiful.”
“So you said.”
Now worry began to seep into her face. “Is it about my body, something you know, something I should know about the cycle?”
Her question was a help. “It has nothing to do with the cycle—not directly.”
He pushed the pillow up under his head, but remained horizontal. It would be easier horizontal. The conversation would feel more like sleep, more like a dream. “The boys. Andrew and Justin were not conceived with my sperm. With Judith’s eggs, yes, but with another man’s sperm.”
Her lovely face, her lovely concerned face, vanished—his words simply wiped it away. The worry was replaced by confusion. He had seen it coming. He couldn’t be that surprised.
“You’re—infertile? Are you saying that you’re infertile?”
“When the boys were conceived, I had male factor infertility, which in my case meant a low sperm count. I told you that already. But that was before ICSI was developed, before we helped develop it. It’s now no longer a problem, or much of a problem, in cases like mine.”
It took Costanza some time to absorb what Henry was telling her. “That must have been very painful for you.”
He had not counted on her compassion. What he took to be her compassion. His eyes filled up. “Yes. Very.”
“Do the boys know?”
He shook his head. “Certainly not from me.”
“But why didn’t you tell me before, Henry? During the last cycle? Or yesterday? Or a month ago?”
“I wasn’t sure it was—relevant.”
Abruptly Costanza’s mood changed. She sat up—she shot up. “Oh, Henry, it is very relevant. You have misled me—deceived me.”
“I don’t see it that way. I have with
held some information, that’s all.” In his chest a fist began to clench and unclench.
“It feels like a betrayal of our trust.”
“Costanza, this is something I have been struggling with, privately, all my adult life. Imagine what it feels like for me, doing what I do, not to have been able—” He paused. “Really this is about me, not us.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.”
“You’ve withheld information about yourself from me.”
“What kind of information?”
“About your writing. About the phantom subtenant in your apartment.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “What makes you think that?”
“I saw a bill on your desk. I went downtown and checked it out.”
“You what?”
“I had a feeling. I poked around a little.”
“It’s hardly the equivalent, Henry.”
“I didn’t say it was. I just said that you withheld—”
“I would have told you about it in time. It was merely a way of giving myself—”
“An out?”
“An option. This”—she gestured at him, then at herself—“has been a rather sudden change in my life.”
“As in mine.”
It wasn’t clear whether she heard him. She was out of bed now, her hair flying. The change in eye level was disconcerting.
“There’s something else, something significant, that you never told me. About the time after your relationship with your professor—Stefano—ended. At that party. The accident.”
She stood still. “Who told you about that? My mother?”
“Of course your mother.”
“But why?”
“I think she might have been trying to—”
“Warn you? Discourage you from having a child with me? Making a life with me?”
“I think she was simply making sure I knew everything she thought I should know.”
Costanza crossed her arms. “Well, her version of what happened is not the same as mine. I’d been drinking. I misjudged the parapet.”
“To her credit she told me that you believed that too.”
“A signature move. Winning you over with candor while seeding suspicions.” Costanza pushed her hair away from her face. “I did not try to take my own life, Henry.”
In the silence that followed Henry wondered. Costanza wondered.
“My memories of that night are somewhat—clouded. This is a longer conversation, and I am willing to have it—but not now. It’s not pertinent now.” She resumed her pacing. “I must ask you the same question I asked you earlier: What are we doing here?”
“We’re doing what we were doing before I told you about this. The same exact thing.”
“But everything is different.”
“I chose not to tell you—for a time—something about myself. Now I have. And now that I have, there’s nothing left to hide.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Can you put yourself in my place, just for a moment? You know how achingly you want a baby? A baby of your own? Well, I did too—I do too. A man, you know, can also yearn. Does that make sense to you? A large part of my being, for years, has longed for this. I am like you. I too—”
“But what are you telling me? You don’t feel like the boys are yours?”
“It’s not either/or. It’s more a case of that—and this. I’ve had that experience, but now I want, I would like, to have this one.”
“You you you.”
“I want us to have this one.”
The effort of thinking all this through had seized her face. “Do you know the boys’ actual father?”
Henry winced. “Donor.”
“Well, do you? Know the donor?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
Costanza’s mind was racing. “Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. I shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter to me. To them—the boys—it matters. Hugely. You’re going to tell them?”
When Henry didn’t immediately answer, she said, “Henry, you are going to tell them. It’s not a question. If you heard a question mark at the end of that sentence, erase it. I’ll tell you right now I won’t go ahead with this cycle, I won’t have the HCG shot, the retrieval, any of it, unless you promise me that you will tell Andrew and Justin everything. They need to know. Andrew especially. He senses something is not right, in himself. And between you.”
“It isn’t this. You said it yourself. Andrew and I are having a classic—”
“You can’t definitively say what it is that he’s struggling with. You hold back on some level, in some way that Andrew feels, has felt all his life from what he has told me, and that troubles him. If you know the father—the donor—maybe you see him in Andrew, maybe you don’t like what you see of him in Andrew, maybe you don’t like—who knows what you like and don’t like.”
Henry couldn’t even allow himself to think through the layers of meaning Costanza was opening up to him. He had to stay on the surface. Only the surface was navigable.
“Andrew and I have a conflict of personality. It’s come and gone over the years, long before you appeared on the scene, Costanza. It’s normal.”
“How can you speak with such conviction? This isn’t science. This isn’t a controlled experiment being conducted in a lab. You have conflicts—you also have this unspoken thing between you. And it’s made worse—bigger—for being kept secret. Andrew is a young man struggling to figure out who he is, a young man who is aware, deeply aware, that something isn’t right between him and his ‘father.’”
“I wish you would take that word out of quotation marks. I am Andrew’s father, period.”
“You are Andrew’s father, period, but you wish to have a different experience of fathering. You are Andrew’s father, period, who has not told him a key fact of his life. The truth of his life. You will, though. You’ll tell both him and Justin. I insist.”
* * *
Henry couldn’t remember when Costanza returned to bed. But there she was, lying next to him, her head facing the ceiling.
“Leopold knew, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“What did he think?”
“He thought the boys were a gift. A miracle.”
“Yes, but what did he think about their not knowing?”
Henry paused. “He wanted me to tell them.”
“And me? Did he want you to tell me?”
“Also you.”
* * *
And again, half an hour later. “I need more of the details.”
He told her. He explained how he and Judith had been trying for two years. He told her about the insane coincidence of his life’s work coinciding with his life’s need. He and Judith tried several cycles of regular IVF with his sperm before they realized that it was not going to work. With donor sperm, it went easily. Both times Judith had easily become pregnant. She was relatively young. She was vigorous. Her pregnancies were uncomplicated. But he’d been haunted all his life. All his career he’d looked for a way to help men like himself; and now he was helping himself. Treating himself.
She asked him if he felt it had affected the way he’d been a father, to Andrew and Justin.
“No.” Then, with more candor: “I don’t know. How can I know? I’ve only lived one version of this experience, one story, not the other.”
It felt better—he felt better—to have told her. To have finally said it out loud.
* * *
An hour later:
“I don’t trust you. I don’t see how I can trust you.”
“I see why that is. But there’s nothing else to show you, to tell you. I assure you.”
“I have no way of knowing what your assurances mean.”
“They mean that you’re seeing me naked now. There’s nothing more. Nothing else.”
* * *
At three o’clock the alarm went off, finally. It was a relief. A release.
He sat up and turn
ed on the light. She looked awful—soupy eyes, mauled cheeks, hair matted with sweat.
He did not want to imagine what he looked like.
“You must give me your word that you will speak to the boys. Today.”
“I give you my word.”
She looked across the room, at the bag from the clinic that stood on the dresser, the bag with the syringe and the dose of HCG and the disinfectant soap and the jar for Henry’s specimen that he was to use thirty-six hours later.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Was it possible that she was making up her mind only in that moment? He would never know, just as he would never know if she was coming to her decision out of understanding, or desperation, or panic, or some combination of all three.
She decided. That was all he knew for sure.
“Then you may give me the shot.”
* * *
Henry walked through the park, skirting the reservoir early on a Saturday morning. A cold wind came up off the water and scraped at his cheeks. As he walked, he rehearsed:
I want to tell you about the love. I don’t know if you can dig back down, these days, to see it, to feel it. Maybe you won’t ever be able to. But I remember. I will go to my grave remembering. It tore my heart out. The way you looked up at me and said, “Dad, this is a great morning.” We were out together, just the two of us, submerging pancakes in syrup. Do you remember that diner we used to go to, the one with the mosaic of the Parthenon? Do you remember Dmitri, he always brought you extra strawberries? Sunshine was streaming through the window, lighting dust motes, a galaxy of daytime stars. It was freezing outside. The pancakes were sweet, sending up little puffs of steam. The coffee—awful, delightfully awful. Another time: “Dad, did you ever notice how you eat breakfast at one end of the table and dinner at the other, but you’re always the same distance from me?” Slayed—again. And I’d never noticed, either. “Dad, you’re a terrible drawer, let me show you. Let me be your teacher, Dad.” “Dad, let’s play Concentration. Go Fish. Mario Kart.” “Dad, can we go see the gems and minerals at the dinosaur museum?” “Hey, Dad, what about if you and me, just us, we watch some basketball on the sofa together.” Pops too, it was, for a little while, around when you were five … and Scruffy, do you remember that? It started on weekends when I got lazy about trimming my beard …
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