The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  Upstairs, a female police officer in riot gear examined a roster of all the employees at RHM as Beth’s assistant handed the officer a cup of coffee.

  “Good morning, Officer,” Anna greeted her. “Do you expect the crowd to be violent?” Her attempt to sound casual failed as “violent” caught in her throat, making it come out as “violet.”

  “Violet? Not sure what you mean . . .” the officer said.

  “No, sorry, Officer . . . I meant to say violent . . .”

  “Ah . . . Well, there’s no way to know for sure, but we need to be ready in case it does,” she replied. Anna had expected more assurance than that.

  Not ready to speak with anyone else yet, Anna retreated to her office with a cup of her favorite genmaicha tea. The day had barely started and she was ready for it to end. She couldn’t wait to get back to the safe haven of her houseful of boys.

  Before wallowing too long, Anna turned on her computer and flipped through her pile of phone messages. Beth would pop in soon, and she didn’t want to seem depressed. Anna knew she was causing concern lately with those closest to her, and she couldn’t bear to answer another question with an “Oh, I’m fine . . .” She didn’t feel fine, far from it, but she didn’t know how to ask for help either. It mortified her to complain about a life she had established for herself. She had resigned herself instead to figuring it out without burdening others. When she was honest with herself about it, Anna knew she couldn’t bear to be anything less than in control. But lately she felt the opposite of in control.

  Once she turned her attention to the first task of the day, tracking sales, she became distracted from that untethered feeling she’d been having lately. Work could always pull her out of herself. Now that she had made it to the office, the tasks in front of her were welcome distractions.

  Anna was proud of her contribution to the success of RHM. As the company CFO, she helped Beth breakeven after year two and make a profit after year three while growing the business. Taking a risk to come on board as the fledging company’s financial officer five years ago proved to be both lucrative and personally satisfying. She’d left the comforts and bureaucracy of a big corporate job where she was the US financial director for a large clothing manufacturer. She joined RHM as a start-up knowing she would be involved with almost every aspect of the business. Her role included chief operating officer, having learned the job on the ground out of sheer necessity.

  Every company culture is a palimpsest of those at the top, and RHM was no exception. Almost everyone who had started with the company and joined over the past five years was still there. Each employee received stock options and four weeks of paid vacation after year one. Supportive and flexible, RHM attracted a bright and creative staff of young people, mostly women. The only two people who left the company hadn’t been able to function under pressure and within a certain level of chaos. The flip side of RHM’s flexible and tolerant workplace was an expectation for the entrepreneurial spirit. With more work to do than people to do it all, when someone was not pulling their weight, Beth wasn’t afraid to send them packing.

  To build on RHM’s early success, Anna was now exploring various opportunities for growth outside of RHM’s line of lingerie. She had a meeting set up for ten o’clock with a start-up that developed toys by mothers for preschool children. Usually optimistic about her job, Anna wished she felt more ambitious on this particular morning. She checked her watch. “Damn, it’s too late to cancel the appointment now,” she muttered. “Oh, well . . .” Anna was sure she could fake her way to enthusiasm; it just took a bit more of the energy she felt wasn’t there to spare.

  At ten on the dot, Anna was buzzed for her meeting. A tall, attractive woman, midforties, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and stylish reading glasses perched on her nose, strode into Anna’s office wheeling a large red leather case. She held out her hand and introduced herself as Sharon Morgan. Anna took her hand and smiled: “Anna Ducci-Schwartz.” She took a liking to Sharon immediately and relaxed into a productive discussion about approaches to toy development.

  In keeping with the practical but provocative approach of RHM, Sharon presented progressive toys for newborns and toddlers meant to satisfy from a tactile point of view as well as to educate. Sharon noticed the picture of Henry and Oscar sitting inside the Hoberman sphere.

  “Now that is the perfect toy! So beautiful, and a genius work of engineering! Have you ever seen the enormous one hanging at the Smithsonian?”

  “Yes, I have . . . it’s mind-blowing!” Anna smiled as she looked at the photo of her boys. “My husband is an architect, and I think he bought it more for himself than for the boys. They all play with it. Nothing makes my boys giggle more than when Jason closes the sphere around his head and pretends he can’t get it off . . .”

  Just then, Anna’s personal cell phone rang, which meant Jason was calling. Anna kept two phones, reserving one for family calls in an attempt to draw some line between her home life and work life. She excused herself and walked out of her office to answer the call.

  “Hey,” Jason said, sounding excited. “We’re calling from the park. Henry just said his first word. Hold on . . .”

  Anna heard fumbling in the background as Jason tried to get Henry to repeat the word. She could hear him saying, “Tell Mama what you just saw in the sky, go ahead, say it, Henry, what flies in the sky?”

  “Aa-plaa,” Henry whispered.

  “Airplane? Honey, did you see an airplane in the sky?” Anna encouraged him, but she heard the phone fall and figured Henry had thrown it on the ground.

  Jason recovered it. “Did you get that? He said ‘airplane.’ A two-syllable first word—not bad, huh?” He was clearly excited, and Anna grinned from ear to ear, picturing her three boys palling around together.

  Before Anna could answer, Beth walked by and pointed thumb and pinkie toward her ear and mouth, making the call me gesture before disappearing again.

  Anna nodded and then heard, “Anna, are you there? Can you hear us?” It sounded like there was quite a bit of commotion at the playground.

  “Yes, I hear you. Listen, I gotta go. I’m in the middle of a meeting. Kiss the boys for me. I’ll call you later. Bye.”

  Anna returned to her office, where the woman from the toy company was packing her samples.

  “I am so sorry for the interruption . . .” Anna told her.

  “Not at all. I understand completely.” She smiled, warm and knowing. “How old are your children?”

  “Three and one.”

  “Oh, two little ones! Busy, huh?”

  “There’s no word for what I am.” Anna sounded harsher than she intended. She smiled apologetically to make up for it.

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “You?”

  “Fourteen, eleven, and nine. It gets easier. Well, sort of . . .”

  They both laughed.

  “That’s a relief,” Anna said, not really believing it.

  Anna didn’t want to engage in one of those conversations about children, working mothers, exhaustion. Under normal circumstances she welcomed the camaraderie, but today she was afraid she might burst into tears or betray her ambivalence about working at all. She showed Sharon out of the office, and they parted with plans to continue discussions about a future partnership. When Anna returned to her desk she sat down heavily and heaved a big sigh, releasing the overwhelming urge to cry.

  Distracted by the noise building outside her window, Anna stood up from her desk to look at the crowd of protestors gathered on the street below. Their chants were incoherent but vehement, shouted with fists punching the air for emphasis. Anna felt an irrational hatred for them.

  “Go home, go home, go home,” Anna whispered through the window, her forehead pressed against the slightly cool glass. Was she talking to herself or to those screaming on the sidewalk? It was what she wanted to do more than anything in the world. She simply wanted to go home.

  “Damn, I forgot to call Beth,
” Anna said aloud as Beth appeared like magic, standing on the threshold of Anna’s office. She was clearly excited by the commotion below.

  “The fire department should be here any moment. Lucky us . . .” Beth was practically dancing in the doorway.

  “Don’t these people have anything better to do with their day?” Anna wondered aloud.

  “Thank them, Anna. They will make our year, I promise!”

  “Aren’t you scared some nutjob is going to go postal? How can you not be worried?” Anna sounded a bit unhinged, even to herself.

  “No, Anna, I really am not worried about it. And all the press about this is more promotion than we can afford to buy. I love these freaks out there doing our jobs for us.”

  Clearly exasperated by Anna’s lack of enthusiasm, Beth turned to leave. “Listen, Maggie is on her way here for a meeting in a bit. Stick around if you can so we can strategize. I’m going to watch the firemen do their thing . . .” she huffed before disappearing.

  Anna felt sick to her stomach. She needed to get away from the chaos building around RHM. With Beth gone, Anna slipped out the side of the building through the delivery entrance. She headed toward a church a block away from the office that she visited whenever she needed a few minutes of solitude. She had been raised Catholic and attended Mass every Sunday as a child. She still found churches comforting and meditative, even if she no longer bought into the dogma that came with them.

  The shouts of the protestors seemed to follow her—was there a wind carrying the voices in the direction she walked? As she stopped to track the sound, she spotted a rider getting out of a taxi right in front of her. Anna jumped in without a destination in mind, just to get away from the noise. It took a moment before she knew where she wanted to go.

  “Please take me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eighty-First and Fifth,” she told the driver.

  When Anna had first come to Manhattan, she’d lived in a cramped studio apartment and the Met had become an extension of her home. She’d found solace in its grandeur, where she could wander alone for hours through the galleries. Getting lost in the museum helped her to get lost in her thoughts. She’d worked out many conflicts over the years surrounded by the great art and artifacts of the museum. The sheer size of the collections and the histories they held helped Anna to put her conflicts in perspective. She always left the museum with a renewed sense of scale about whatever it was that ailed her.

  The fine early-summer weather kept visitors away, and Anna enjoyed the relative vacancy of the museum. She roamed the galleries, looking for the quietest parts of the building, and found herself wandering among the collections of Greek and Roman art. As Anna slowly strolled past a sculpture of the Hellenistic period, her attention was captured by a bronze of sleeping Eros. Depicted as a plump baby of twelve months or so, Eros had his right arm resting across his body. So tender and lifelike in his repose, the sculpture made Anna smile at the thought of Oscar and Henry, likely home now and napping after their playtime in the park.

  The feeling didn’t last. When she calculated the cost of her impulsive trip to the Met, it was time away from her boys. An hour spent seeking solace meant fewer moments with them, squandering the precious little time that she had. Ann’s mood darkened again. Suddenly she saw in Eros not a sleeping child but something that turned her cold with fear. In that moment, Eros seemed in permanent repose. His eyes would never open.

  Anna inhaled quickly and her breath caught in her throat, then turned to find her way out of the museum. She wanted to get back to the office, where she could complete the work of the day and return home to her boys.

  Anna stood on the sidewalk outside the museum for a few moments to regain her composure, feeling slightly dizzy. She scolded herself for succumbing to terrifying thoughts: “What is wrong with me? Am I going mad? Maybe I need some lunch before heading back to the office.” She said all this aloud to herself, suddenly feeling self-conscious and a bit kooky. She grabbed a spinach knish from the street vendor outside the museum and hailed a taxi back to the office.

  When she got back to RHM, there were three voice mails from Beth of escalating intensity. In the last, Beth sounded furious: “Where the fuck are you, Anna? I need to talk to you now! Call me back as soon as you get this.”

  Beth’s tone startled Anna back into work mode. When Anna dialed Beth’s number, she was relieved to hear from Sacha that she wasn’t at her desk. Anna didn’t want to talk to Beth—or anyone at the moment—and for some reason, this made Anna start to cry.

  Previous to Oscar’s birth, Anna had considered herself emotionally even-keeled, at least relatively speaking. But the moment Oscar emerged from her body, a dam of feelings burst open. She’d never felt the kind of paralyzing fear she now struggled to push out of her dark fantasies. Oscar’s birth pierced her heart in such a way that she understood dread for the first time. She’d called her mother the day after Oscar was born when it dawned on her that her life had changed irrevocably. She wasn’t sure she was so happy about it.

  “Mom, this is terrible. You didn’t tell me it was going to be like this.”

  “What, Anna?” her mother asked. “Going to be like what?”

  “That loving him like this would be a kind of terror. I love him so much, I’m going to spend the rest of my life worrying about him.”

  “Welcome to motherhood, honey. Do you think your father and I ever stop worrying about you and Isabel and Bobby? Never.” She could barely hide the satisfaction in her voice. “You’ll get used to it. Strange to say, but true.”

  “I don’t want to live this way,” Anna protested.

  “Too late, honey. Anyway, it’s worth it, you’re worth it. Oscar is worth it.”

  IN THE PREDAWN hours of the day following her visit to the Met, Anna awoke to an odd sensation. She’d slept fitfully throughout the night between Henry’s cries from teething pain. At first she thought, incomprehensibly, that she’d wet the bed, until she touched between her legs and felt the unmistakable stickiness of blood. That’s odd, she thought. She wasn’t due for her period. The boys were, miraculously, still in their bedroom. She pulled herself out of bed and into the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, drops of blood fell into the bowl.

  She’d been gone from bed for a while when Jason tapped on the door. “Hey, baby,” he whispered. “Are you okay? Can I come in?”

  “Yes,” she whispered back.

  “What’s going on?” Jason asked, leaning against the doorjamb, stifling a yawn.

  “I’m bleeding a little and my period’s not due for another ten days or so.”

  “Are you in any pain?” Jason asked, as if he would be able to diagnose the problem.

  “No, I don’t feel anything. I’ll call the doctor later this morning. Go back to bed. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Anna sat on the toilet for a few sleepy moments. She welcomed the quiet of the house and the unusual moment of peace. Oscar and Henry didn’t give her a single moment of privacy during their waking hours. They barged into the bathroom despite her entreaties for them to keep out. She could latch the door, but she couldn’t bear shutting them out so definitively.

  “Mama,” Oscar had asked once while watching her take a tampon from the box, “are you going to put that in your bagina? You don’t have a penis? You have a bagina?” She ached with love for her curious boy. Certain words she didn’t have the heart to correct.

  Later that morning, after talking to her doctor, Anna took a pregnancy test. The results were negative, much to her relief but also to her disappointment. When her period failed to arrive on schedule two weeks later, she locked herself in the bathroom and stayed seated on the toilet as she watched the test strip turn pink. Tears of both joy and sorrow streamed down Anna’s face as she decided she would keep the news to herself until she was certain she could hold on to this pregnancy.

  When she’d become pregnant with Oscar and Henry, she’d told her family right away. But now, all reason aside, Anna feared that the sch
ism she felt in her life would manifest physically somehow. Her hold over this conception felt tenuous. She decided she wouldn’t even tell Jason, as though by remaining silent she might prevent the worst from happening.

  “ANNA, ARE YOU sure you’re not pregnant?” Jason asked her a week later. “Your breasts look like your pregnant breasts.” He gently held both in his hands as she straddled him with her long, thin legs and let her hair drape across her face. “Move your hair and let me see those gorgeous eyes.”

  “Shh,” Anna quieted him as she flipped her hair to the side and put a finger to her husband’s lips.

  They didn’t get much alone time, and Anna didn’t want to lose the opportunity. The boys had been put to sleep in their own beds for a change, so Anna and Jason had theirs all to themselves. Still, their bedroom was nearby and they woke easily. Oscar especially possessed uncanny extra-human radar. Whenever his parents so much as began kissing, he would awake from his sleep and yell, “Mama, I want you!”

  Anna moved slowly up and down above Jason. She braced her weight with her arms, keeping him inside her just to the very tip and then pushing down fully against him, so he filled her completely. She rose above him again, again, again, her eyes closed in sensual meditation.

  Jason persisted. “Anna, seriously, you’ve been in a peculiar mood lately. What’s up?”

  She stopped moving and opened her eyes, looking down at him. “Yes, I am pregnant,” she said without joy. “I’m pregnant and I feel like shit and I feel like I’m going to lose the baby because my life is so screwed up right now!”

  Anna rolled off her husband and curled up on the bed next to him. She began sobbing silently. The words “my life” echoed in Anna’s ears, leaving her painfully aware that she didn’t include her husband or children in her current predicament.

  “Hey, hey, this is good news. Why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you think I’d be happy about it?” Jason was smiling broadly, and Anna could see how happy he was about it. This made her only more upset.