The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  They were slow to get up when called in to dinner, reluctant to break the magic of the moment. After a satisfying meal of sautéed softshell crabs, wild rice with cranberries, and blistered shishito peppers, Maggie and John took a long walk on the beach. The sand was cool on their feet and the ocean blacker than the night sky. It was coming on midnight and they couldn’t see another soul on the beach. They walked along the jetty and found a ledge facing out to sea. The tide was out, the sea calm, and cloud cover shielded the light from the moon. They made love standing against the slippery rocks as the pulsing ocean splashed against their feet.

  The next morning, Maggie and John woke up famished and ran downstairs like two teenagers for breakfast. The clouds from the previous night had blown away and the day was bright and hot. By 10:00 A.M., they had lathered up with sunblock and headed for the beach.

  Holding hands, they charged the surf without toe-testing the temperature first. Maggie had loved to challenge her friends when she was a kid to do the same. The south wind from the previous day brought cold water, and, with it, a small swell had kicked up overnight making the surf rough enough to distract them from the temperature. They fought one foamy wave after another, bodysurfing for an hour before flopping down in the hot sand for a rest.

  As they lay breathing hard from exertion, Maggie laughed and said, “Uh-oh, I feel old again.” They relaxed there for a minute before she turned to John, suddenly serious. “John, I want to have another baby.”

  “What, Maggie? Are you kidding?”

  “No, of course I’m not kidding.” Maggie pushed herself up on her elbows and leaned over John, who remained silent. “Not only am I not kidding, I know that I want another child and I’d like to get pregnant as soon as I can.” Maggie didn’t mean to sound so demanding, but that’s how it came out. “I mean, Lily is already more than two years old and I want her to have a sibling close in age, and I am not getting any younger, and my father—”

  “Whoa, whoa, slow down. What are you doing?” John put his hand up to stop the tide of Maggie’s argument. “Is this something you just came up with, or have you planned on dropping this one on me this whole time?”

  “John, you don’t just come up with the thought of another child. Of course I’ve wanted this all along. What are you saying? Are you asking why we haven’t discussed it before? Because . . . I don’t know why we haven’t. But I’m telling you now that I want to have another baby. Does this really come as a surprise to you?”

  “Yes, frankly, Maggie, it does.” John said it like he meant it.

  Maggie shifted away from John on the sand. Her mind raced to make sense of the conversation they were having even as she felt her satisfaction from the weekend slipping away. As good as the last twenty-four hours were, they weren’t going to make up for what was fundamentally wrong with their marriage. John’s attention deficit when it came to his wife and kids was never going to change. He didn’t pay any more attention than he had to when it came to Maggie and Lily, or his two older children for that matter. What’s one more child you can neglect? Maggie thought, but kept quiet. It’ll just fall on me anyway. Maggie silenced this voice for the moment, focusing instead on the way the curl of a breaking wave turned a brilliant turquoise just before it crashed in on itself.

  Determined to not let this conversation ruin their weekend, Maggie tried to reframe it toward the positive in her mind. He didn’t say no; he just sounded unenthused. Maybe I ambushed him, she reasoned, and he was caught off guard. Tomorrow, on one of the stops on the way home, she would bring it up again. Now she wished they’d taken the minivan, where they could talk in comfort. The motorcycle made discussion impossible.

  DINNER NEXT TO the marina that evening was a sloppy affair, perfect for her mood. Determined to normalize the tension she’d created, Maggie turned the conversation instead to John’s childhood. She was seduced by John’s ease in the casino and encouraged him to tell stories of his father, who, she was surprised to learn only this weekend, had been a blackjack dealer in Vegas. John’s upbringing had been chaotic, and he had survived it by keeping a low profile, which Maggie thought explained his own laissez-faire approach to child rearing.

  They slurped raw clams squirted with fresh lemon juice and used mallets to smash Maryland crabs cooked with Old Bay. The spice stung their sunburned lips, which they cooled with long gulps from the icy Coronas they drank from the bottle. The fishing boats docked by the marina restaurant smelled strongly of fish and the sea. On the way into the dockside café, they had stopped to admire a large mako shark caught earlier in the day, now hanging by its tail from a massive hook on a piling in the parking lot. Maggie patted the shark and jumped back at the unexpected coarseness of its skin and density of its body. She laughed at how frightened she could be at something so dead.

  When they awoke on Sunday morning, Maggie was missing Lily terribly. Although it promised to be another perfect beach day, she suggested that they leave after breakfast, anxious to get home and spend the day with her daughter.

  Over coffee and muffins at the same table they’d had a romantic dinner Friday night, Maggie couldn’t wait another minute before blurting out, “Do you want another child, John?”

  “No, Maggie, not really. I have three already. That’s enough for me.”

  “But I only have one.” Maggie hated how pathetic her pleas were—she sounded like a child begging for another lollipop.

  “I just don’t see how we could handle it.” John’s use of “we” did it. Something flipped in Maggie.

  “‘We’? What ‘we,’ John? You don’t do a damn thing for your children—any of them. What difference could it possibly make if there was one more around for you to neglect?”

  John looked away. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. His lips quivered with hurt and rage.

  “Are you trying to ruin this weekend, Maggie? Is that what you’re doing? Because you’re doing a very good job. I’m going to go pack.” He turned and walked away.

  Maggie signed the check on the table and stood for a moment, not knowing what to do next. She’d surprised herself with the vitriol that surfaced so quickly. Was she trying to sabotage the weekend? The years of therapy Maggie had been through in her twenties made it hard for her to hide from herself. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t say and do stupid things as it was the quickness with which she realized her part in the communication breakdown with John.

  The ocean had always helped her make sense of things, so she headed for the beach. Maggie sat on the wet sand, just a few feet from the rush of the surf. Chin resting on her knees, arms wrapped around her legs, she looked out over the water. She imagined what it would feel like to let a wave sweep her away in her self-contained vessel, wondered how long she would bob above the water before slipping under.

  She stared unblinking at the glassy green waves. About fifty yards out, the color switched to an inky blue and, farther out still, to an even darker hue. She tried to focus on the lines where the colors changed, imagining the sea creatures that lived at the precipice of each increasing depth. As she sat, the motion of the waves lulled her into reverie. Like all those water molecules spinning in place as energy surged through them creating swell lines, the ocean seemed to move something inside her. Even as a young girl, the pull of the waves worked like a shaman on what ailed her. As she brought her attention to it, that pull now seemed to affect her lower abdomen and then deeper, in her ovaries.

  “Oh, great,” Maggie said into the crashing surf. “I’m ovulating.” Then she grinned ear to ear at what she already knew and felt suddenly buoyant, as if she had conspired with the ocean at that very moment to create what she longed for most of all. If the moon and the tide are linked to menstruation, why not then to conception? thought Maggie. After twenty minutes seated in private celebration, Maggie stood and headed back to the hotel. She no longer felt any anger toward John, only thankful for the gift he had bestowed on her.

  John had pulled the Harley in front
of the B&B, packed up and ready to go. She kissed him like nothing had happened, and John, not one to hold a grudge—one of his more appealing characteristics—hugged her wordlessly and handed over her helmet.

  When they arrived home three hours later, there was a message from Georgette on their voice mail. The original plan had her home for the new school year, which began in one week. Jules and Justine were to spend weekdays with their mother and every other weekend with Maggie and John. So Maggie was more than dismayed to learn that Georgette had lost so much time working with Jules and Justine visiting over the summer that she had extended her stay until December.

  “Tant fucking pis pour moi” was all Maggie could muster in response to the news.

  IT HAD TAKEN Maggie months to find the right venue for the roundtable discussion on motherhood. There was no one willing to go live with the show, but she found producers for a cable channel who were willing to tape a series of six discussions to run weekly on future airdates on topics from motherhood and marriage to divorce and family finances. Maggie would become one of the coproducers if the series was picked up by the channel.

  The day before the taping, one of the participating mothers had to cancel due to a family crisis. Maggie had been unreachable all day thanks to her malfunctioning cell phone—she really needed to get the damn thing fixed—and the show’s producers had taken it upon themselves to fill the slot. By the time Maggie picked up her messages later that night, she was relieved to learn that the show wouldn’t have to be postponed.

  Maggie had taken a pregnancy test the day before, ecstatic when the strip turned Pepto-Bismol pink. She had decided she would deal with what and how to tell John when she was a little further along. For now, she would keep it her little secret. Maggie was feeling pleasantly smug about the direction in which her life was headed until Beth opened the door to the green room.

  Clothed in a long saffron duster with a bloodred silk chiffon scarf wrapped around her swanlike neck, Georgette Fontaine was huddled close to the producer, sipping a steaming beverage out of an I ♥ NY coffee mug. The two women were chatting like old friends. It occurred to Maggie at that moment that the producer had used Georgette several times as a talking head on divorce over the past few years for news programs.

  Damn, damn, damn, Maggie silently cursed the two of them, until Georgette noticed her standing there and smiled. “Georgette, hi, I didn’t know you were back from France . . .” Maggie managed to say, her vocal cords constricting her normal voice into something squeaky and weird.

  Afterward, Maggie would have no recollection of what followed next, although she knew words had come from her mouth. The ringing in her ears had seemingly blocked all sound from reaching her brain. She turned and fled from the room, caught an elevator going downstairs, and headed out of the building. Beth followed on her heels.

  Lighting a cigarette she didn’t want—Beth handed it to her; had she asked for it?—Maggie paced the sidewalk. She took a few puffs before realizing it was making her sick and she threw it down on the sidewalk. She needed to clear her head before going back upstairs. Beth was saying something, but Maggie couldn’t hear her.

  Anna and Isabel pulled up in taxis, and moments later the producer came barreling out the door toward Maggie. Maggie threw her a furious glare.

  “Are you kidding me? Georgette Fontaine?! Of all the women in the world.” Maggie tried to keep calm but her voice shook with emotion. The producer put her arm around Maggie’s shoulders and pulled her close.

  “Listen, Maggie, I didn’t mean to ambush you,” the producer protested in an undertone. “The whole thing happened so fast. Georgette was in touch with me yesterday just an hour after we got the cancellation from Philadelphia. I invited her before I made the connection. My associate producer left you a message yesterday. Didn’t you get it?”

  “I got a message that the spot had been filled but not who was filling it.” Maggie realized now that she’d meant to call the associate producer back to ask her this very question, but then Lily had snipped her finger with scissors and, with that, the day’s details had completely slipped her mind.

  Maggie then laughed out loud at the absurdity of the whole thing, realizing she wouldn’t have felt any better knowing the night before that Georgette was on deck to join them. Until today, she and Georgette had managed to keep a civilized distance from each other. They had actually never met in person before. Instead, they maintained an abstract connection through their blended families. Things were about to change.

  “Come back to the green room,” the producer prodded. “Georgette is game . . . Just think of it as an adventure. The morning is bound to be nothing if not interesting. I’ll even let you review the edit, don’t worry . . .”

  Maggie knew then that her reaction was more surprise peppered with resentment than it was mortification. What of Georgette needing time in France to finish her work? Why did John’s ex have time to travel back and forth to France while Maggie took care of her kids? The avalanche of noise in Maggie’s head was deafening and Maggie fought to claw her way back to a place of calm certainty, that place she had occupied only an hour earlier when thinking about being pregnant with the second child she so wanted.

  She inhaled to fill her lungs—now a little stale from the goddamned cigarette—and forced herself to focus.

  “Okay, let’s go, ladies,” Maggie announced, and corralled the group back into the building.

  The women were sequestered for three hours of taping. While the first fifteen minutes were bumbling and awkward, once they each caught their stride, the discussions were heated and intelligent and often downright hilarious. By the end, Maggie was pleased as could be with the results. It looked like the series might truly work.

  But the biggest surprise of all was Georgette. Maggie found her husband’s ex appealing on so many levels, not the least of which was her sheer otherness. Where Maggie was accommodating and played the martyr, Georgette was rigid and demanding. Where Maggie was overly eager to please, Georgette didn’t need to have everyone around her think her swell. The qualities that Maggie had vilified when seen from a distance became the very ones Maggie admired most. She smiled to herself as she thought, I bet I could learn a thing or two from Georgette Fontaine. One thing had become clear during the discussion: Georgette was passionate about her children, even if she didn’t express it in ways that Maggie recognized. Maggie and Georgette were not in opposition; they were on the same side.

  “You recovered nicely. Kudos,” Beth congratulated her on the way back to the office. Anna and Isabel had gone to lunch together and Georgette had run off to a meeting with her publisher.

  “Thanks.” Maggie felt pretty satisfied herself.

  “So now that you know her a little better, how do you feel about all that crap she spread around about you?” Beth, as ever, couldn’t help herself from playing instigator.

  “You know, I think I actually might like her. You can’t blame her really. The guy she’s married to, and whom she loves, has an affair, and when she finds out about it, he doesn’t end the affair, he leaves her. It’s gotta suck.”

  Beth raised her eyebrows, encouraging Maggie to continue.

  “I can see why they were together. Maybe she’s right. Maybe they should have stayed married.” Maggie was thinking out loud to Beth, who listened with an amused smile playing across her lips. “I still could have had Lily . . .” Maggie gazed off before continuing. She was on a roll. “Did you see that article in the paper the other day? A scientist in Australia found a way to fertilize eggs without sperm. If they made this successful in humans, men would be irrelevant. Face it, Beth, men are over. It’s the end of men,” she said with a smile.

  PART THREE

  AUTUMN

  CHAPTER TEN

  Anna

  BY THE TIME Jason announced his plans for a weekend away to work on his master project on the banks of the Delaware River, Anna was barely holding it together. Over the last six months, Jason had been drawing pl
ans for a five-hundred-square-foot modernist tree house for the children of an enterprising dot-commer in the backyard of his country house. The project would make Jason little money, the price of complete freedom to design and build with no interference from the client. Jason planned to use the tree house as his calling card. Right now, the project’s least redeeming quality was that it would leave Anna alone with the boys for the weekend. She still hadn’t recovered from the D&C and her hormones were raging, and with them her intolerance for Jason’s work for posterity.

  It was a Tuesday morning and Anna should have been headed to work. Instead, she sent an e-mail telling Beth she had some urgent personal business to attend to and then she started packing a bag.

  “Well, Jason, maybe you need some quiet time this week to prepare for your fort in the woods,” she told him. “I’ll tell you what, you can have tons of it. We’re out of here!”

  “What are you talking about, Anna? What do you mean you’re ‘out of here’? Where are you going?” Jason asked, sounding like he didn’t really believe Anna would walk out. But he started to pace and yell as he watched her pack up the diaper bag and a small suitcase. “What the fuck, Anna? If it’s so important to you, I won’t go. You can’t just leave!”

  “Sure I can, Jason. I can leave, and I can take the boys. Fucking deal with it. Go build your tree house.”

  “Stop it, Anna! You’re freaking out. You can’t leave in this state.”

  But Anna pushed past him, picked up Henry, draped the two bags over her shoulder, and, with her free hand, grabbed Oscar and walked toward the front door.

  “Mama, where are we going?” Oscar asked her, his mouth twisting to repress the tears about to come.