What Is Missing

by Michael Frank

  The counters were just the beginning. She moved on to the bathroom, the windowsills. Even with the windows tightly closed, the cloth still came away black. New York could be filthy, invasively pestilential.

  Suddenly she felt tired, drained. She was coming off one of the worst nights of her life, and she had just used up her last grains of energy cleaning an apartment she did not even live in.

  In the kitchen cupboard was a bottle of burgundy. She knew that she was not meant to drink again until after the retrieval. She had eaten little that day and her brain was already pretty scrambled … but that pretty French label with its engraving of a château surrounded by formal gardens seemed to be beckoning her, saying, Herein lies ease. And she could do with some ease.

  She found her corkscrew, rinsed out a glass, and poured herself un’ombra, a shadow, of wine; a safe shadow. Then she picked up a rag and a can of furniture polish and sat down at her desk.

  How many hours she had sat at this desk, and how serene they had been—or seemed to have been, in retrospect. She had bought the desk at the flea market in Chelsea. The man who sold it to her said that it looked like a well-loved piece of furniture, a table with history. She had to agree. That was why she chose it. She liked to think of the desk’s former life. Someone, several someones, had sat before her at this slab of walnut, thinking, working; even writing, maybe. A softening of its edge toward the left, an indentation worn down over time, led her to believe that its previous owner had been left-handed. The top drawer—she opened it to make sure—had for the longest time retained an old scent, a combination of tobacco and lavender. It still did, faintly.

  In the drawer was a folder containing newspaper and magazine clippings on the subject of fertility that she had accumulated from around the time she and Morton were trying to become pregnant, and earlier. They went back years now. Several were yellowed and brittle. She turned them over, glancing at their headlines:

  Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF

  U.S. Panel About to Weigh In on Rules for Assisted Fertility

  The Gift of Life—and Its Price: Fertility Treatments Bring More Twins and Premature Births

  Twenty-First-Century Babies: Painful Choices with Fertility Treatment Lowering the Odds of Multiple Births

  Life After Infertility Treatments Fail

  She had to hand it to the Times: they knew how to deliver a portentous headline like no one else. Where were the happy stories, the stories of dreams answered, families built out of barrenness and despair? Where were the ten thousand babies born through Henry’s clinic alone? Ten thousand. He had reached that figure sometime before he and Costanza met. There had been a celebration in Central Park. Henry had invited all ten thousand—a whole city of Henry-fabricated lives. About fifteen percent of them had turned up, families in tow. Many of them were grown. Some had children of their own. They ate hot dogs and hamburgers, hundreds upon hundreds of them, on a balmy June day. At the end of the afternoon Leopold was given the honor of cutting a ribbon that released an enormous bouquet of pink and blue balloons into the sky. Henry told Costanza it was one of the finest days of his life.

  There had been an article on the celebration—the Times wasn’t one hundred percent doom and gloom, after all. Costanza had forgotten reading it and she had forgotten clipping it. But there it was, near the back of her folder: Ten Thousand and Counting: A Fertility Doctor Throws an Unusual Anniversary Bash.

  Before she read it, she replenished her glass of wine, pouring more than a shadow now, then returning to her desk. Her eyes shot to Henry’s answer to the reporter’s most personal question. Did reaching this milestone, he asked, make Henry feel like some kind of omnipotent power, a wizard of reproductive fertility? Henry replied:

  Come on! That’s preposterous. Nature has all the power; I’m simply nature’s student. My science is a tool, a quite clumsy means to a very important end. The means is not the point. The point is becoming a parent, making a family. When I look back on my life’s work, I’m humbled that I have been able to help so many couples to give birth.

  This didn’t sound like the talk of a demon.

  * * *

  The studio had a stale, lifeless scent; Henry’s apartment had an acrid one, as though something unnatural was burning. Costanza smelled it the moment she opened the door.

  There was a fire. In the fireplace. A fire that was built of photographs. A mass of them were smoking up the living room, souring the air with who knew what kind of toxins. The photos, all the photos, were of Henry; dozens of Henrys were being licked into oblivion by crackling orange flames.

  Andrew was sitting by the hearth, feeding in the pictures one by one with a pair of kitchen tongs. His gaze was so focused on what he was doing that Costanza’s first impression was that he was in a trance.

  “Andrew?”

  He didn’t look up or acknowledge her. He continued to watch the fire and drop in more photographs. After three or four had fallen into the pyre he said, “In answer to your question, I’ve decided that I wasn’t very good at taking pictures. I knew how to look at things, but I didn’t know how to see them.”

  She stood over him. She had not seen his face.

  “That wasn’t going to be my question—or my first question,” she said gently.

  Still he did not look at her.

  “My first question was going to be ‘Are you okay?’”

  His answer was to show her his eyes. They were red-rimmed and distant.

  After a moment she gestured at the fireplace. “Are you sure you…?”

  “I am fucking sure.”

  He stood up and walked out of the room. She followed him down the hall and into his bedroom.

  Andrew had unpacked boxes and boxes of his photographs and spilled them onto the floor. He had set aside a small group, but a much larger one made up a veritable mountain of prints, apparently earmarked for the fire.

  “You know that if you put all this away again, you could come back to it later, in another frame of mind. I could help you.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  She studied him for a moment. “Imagine having a conversation with a future Andrew,” she persisted. “Imagine explaining to him why you gave up on all this work—and time—and creativity. Perhaps you could—”

  Andrew cut her off. “Why do you care?”

  “Because I’m your friend.”

  Andrew snorted. “That’s fantastic. A whole new definition of friendship, based on, let’s see, dishonesty, secrecy, the withholding of information. Betrayal. No, maybe betrayal is too strong. How about perfidy? I like that word, don’t you? It was on the SATs. Perfidy. It’s so much more—biting than disloyalty, wouldn’t you say? Though disloyalty might work here too.”

  She felt weary, very, weary. “Andrew, I’m afraid I’m not following.”

  “Henry came to see me this morning at my mom’s.”

  She nodded.

  “He had a lot of interesting things to say.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you know! Everyone knows the truth about my origins—my mother, who is my mother. My father, who is not my father. My brother, who is my brother but not so much my friend. Costanza, who seemed to be my friend but isn’t really. Yeah, especially my friend Costanza.”

  He went on, “I talked to you more than once, about this feeling I’ve had, this feeling of not fitting with Henry, this feeling of not fitting with myself. And you knew. You knew and you never told me. You never got Henry to tell me.” His voice was shaking with anger. “Yeah, you’re my friend. Yeah, right.”

  It took Costanza some time to catch up—to catch on. When she did, she said, “Andrew, wait. Where did you get the idea—I have to ask you—that I knew? I only found out last night. Henry only told me for the first time last night.”

  Andrew stopped. “Henry only told you last night for the first time that he is not my genetic father.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I don’t believe y
ou!”

  “But it’s true.”

  “When you did a round of IVF with him before, you didn’t know?”

  She drew her hand through her hair. “No, I did not. Absolutely I did not.”

  “You didn’t know that he had ‘morphologically problematic’ sperm?”

  “I knew that, and I knew that he could get around that, but I didn’t know anything else.”

  “That’s not what Henry said. Henry said that you knew then. That you’ve known all along. All along, he clearly said. Since before the IVF.”

  The room went blurry before Costanza’s eyes. “But it’s not the truth, Andrew.”

  “So he lied.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “Henry appears to have lied.” Her legs went soft on her. She sat down on Andrew’s bed.

  Andrew sat down next to her. For several long moments they sat there in silence. Then Andrew said, “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Costanza said in a faraway voice.

  She looked at Andrew. His eyes reddened.

  “I suppose … I suppose he cares enough about what you think about him to want you to think that he would never have put me through IVF without first telling me what he told me far too late in this process. That was already bad enough, hard enough for me to find out last night of all nights. Now this…”

  There’s nothing else to show you, to tell you.

  You’re seeing me naked now.

  “This makes me think I don’t know your father very well at all, and that perhaps I never did.”

  “He’s not my father,” Andrew said emotionally.

  A devastating clarity seized Costanza’s mind. It was as though a chaotic room—after a move, or a rigorous cleaning—had been put into order. Only it wasn’t a room—it wasn’t a metaphor. It was her life, ordered, clarified, made logical, in a single aching vision. She saw what she had been missing, for years; perhaps forever. She saw the shape of things, their awful commonality. The pattern. First there was Morton—no, first there was her father. Because wasn’t his suicide—the depth of his anguish and suffering, his hidden intentions—the original cruelly kept secret, a betrayal of her love for him, the earliest and still the deepest love she had felt for any human being on this planet? Then Stefano: three years of fidelity, intimacy, connectivity, love—and then, just like that, another woman. Then Morton, who held back part of himself from her, part of—maybe in the end all of—his heart, and his story too. And now there was Henry.

  What was it about these men, whom she loved differently but profoundly, yet who remained closed to her, secretive, ultimately unknowable? And what was it with her that she missed all the darkest corners in the characters of the men who came into her life, the men she chose to love?

  She thought she might vomit. She thought she might faint. She thought she might beat something, or someone, to a pulp.

  She took a huge gulping breath into her hormonally juiced, angry, hurting body, with its strange, awful flares of emotion, its swollen stimulated follicles ready to release their eggs in less than a day, in hours …

  She looked at Andrew. Tears were spilling down his cheeks. And now they began to spill down hers too.

  Andrew turned and put his arm around her. She felt comforted. She let out a long heavy breath.

  In the stillness she breathed and he breathed.

  Then his grip tightened.

  She wiped her eyes. She was beginning to regret drinking that wine now. The alcohol was playing with her perceptions, slowing them down, confusing her. She thought Andrew’s tightening grip was drawing her closer. Was it drawing her closer? Was he?

  She didn’t feel so comforted now.

  He leaned his forehead on hers. And left it there.

  “Andrew…”

  He didn’t say anything. She tried to ease back. But he held on.

  “Andrew, what are you doing?”

  Forehead to forehead they sat. His eyes were closed. Hers remained open.

  “I’m holding you,” he said finally. “I’m holding on. I need to hold on.”

  A moment passed. Another. And then—and then he raised his head. He lifted up her chin, and he kissed her, on her lips. Despite herself, she felt the kiss. Simply that. She felt it—she allowed herself to feel it.

  Her heart was racing. So was her mind. Every inch of her mind was saying, pause, consider, reflect. But her body—her soul—did not think the way her mind did. It did not think. It knew what it needed. It knew what it wanted. It knew.

  Nine Months After That

  Early one January morning on the coast of Liguria, on a winter day so temperate it could have been claimed by spring, a brief rain washed the sky of any trace of haze. The clouds, gathering quickly, deposited their shower, and then, almost as quickly, scattered over the hills. From a bend in the road near the invisible border between the towns of Recco and Camogli, a view opened up as far as Genoa, whose lighthouse winked at distant vessels. The sea was so pristine that even from the top of the cliffs, where a bench was perfectly positioned to survey the coastline, fish could be seen darting among the rocks in the water.

  Henry had never been much interested in views, but he succumbed to this one. In most every direction vividly painted old villas were tucked into steep hills and flanked by gardens that were lush even in January. Many of the surrounding slopes were terraced and planted with olives and grapes, figs and persimmons, lemons, oranges, and kumquats. But it was the sea that held Henry’s attention most closely. It had more shades of blue and green in it than he could either count or name. Its constant subtle movements were hypnotic. For long stretches he gazed with absorption at this apparently infinite shelf of shivering scallops and crescents that were interrupted, here and there, by a fishing boat or a traghetto producing a fan-shaped wake. The sea was never still, never hewed to its pattern for more than a second; looking into the water felt to Henry like looking into time itself.

  Henry was able to grasp everything up to this moment—but no further. That is, he saw himself flying from New York to Berlin, and giving a talk at a conference there, and for three days listening to talks by other physicians and researchers. He saw himself taking a flight afterward from Berlin to Milan, where he rented a car. He saw himself driving down into Liguria and along the coast and making his way to a sprawling old-fashioned hotel at the edge of Camogli. He saw himself eating a lonely hotel dinner and then falling into a hard, dreamless sleep, thickened by residual jet lag, from which he had awakened late that morning. He saw himself ordering and then eating breakfast by his window, saw himself showering, shaving, and dressing, saw himself asking the man behind the reception desk to direct him to a street or path that would lead him up into the hills. He wanted to make the last part of this journey on foot, and that is how he went, finding his way, then losing his way, and then finally coming to a cresting road that delivered him to the bench on which he was now sitting.

  He was certain it was the bench Costanza had told him about, because it so closely fit her description. As an object it was unspectacular. Its sides were made of iron, its slats of weathered wood. Its back was canted and its seat worn smooth. The notable thing about the bench was where it was set, just so in a widening alongside the road that could hardly be called a piazza. The bench anchored this small level triangle of land, which was paved with slate and planted with shrubs and trees and edged, on the water side, with a metal railing. Beyond it the level land fell away sharply and slid into the sea.

  The water had lapped against these rocks long before Henry came along to watch it, and it would go on lapping against them, shaping and reshaping them, after he went away again and long after that, when he was no more. The thought came to him easily and was a relief. A comfort, almost.

  An old woman joined him. She was wearing a gray-and-white housedress with a bulky cardigan buttoned over it. Her thick sturdy legs did not seem to go with her surprisingly stylish black pumps. She was carrying two bags of groceries, which she set down on the seat betwe
en them.

  Costanza had described the humble appearance of the bench, and its striking position, but mainly she had told him about it because it stood just outside her mother’s house, and whenever she was feeling especially claustrophobic there, and yet not so ambitious as to want to set off on one of her hikes through the hills, this is where she came to sit. She had come here to sit when she had brought home her one less than perfect grade in school and her mother’s reaction had been over-the-top. She had come here when her mother found her kissing her first boyfriend in the garden (he had joined her afterward to continue the kiss). And she had come here the day she learned about her father’s death, fleeing down the stairs her mother had just climbed, for a few moments breathing some air that her mother was not breathing with her. Her own breath, her own air, her own grief.

  Henry felt a deep cold ache as he reviewed these episodes: Costanza had entrusted him with these intimate memories of hers, and then—

  And then.

  It didn’t matter where he turned his mind: sea or no sea, the events of April and afterward followed him like a knife; like a pocketknife whose blade had sprung open in his pocket and threatened to stab his flesh if he took one step too far off the course of waking, eating, shitting, showering, working, eating, sleeping, then waking to start the cycle all over again. This was pretty much how he had endured the last nine months of his life.

  A week before he was to leave for Berlin, a card arrived in the mail. It was the first time he had heard from Costanza in all those months. The one-year anniversary of Leopold’s death was on the horizon that spring, she wrote, and she had learned from Morton how important it was to acknowledge these milestones. With distance Leopold’s truthfulness, she added, had come to resonate with her in ways that she was only now beginning to understand.

  The card arrived at the end of December. Leopold had died in early March. Wasn’t three months in advance a little too early to be remembering someone’s yahrzeit? And that remark about Leopold’s truthfulness? It felt like she was trying to communicate something to him. But what?