by Angie Kim
Matt thought about this often. The transformation of his statement—the random joke he’d cracked for a tired nurse’s benefit—from idiotic to downright prescient a week later, when Detective Pierson said they found out a cigarette started the fire and were combing the woods for discarded butts and packs. Matt thought of the hollow tree stump by the creek he’d used for trash and panicked—not that he thought for a second he’d be implicated in the fire, but still, there’d be hell to pay with Janine, not to mention public humiliation, if the whole business with Mary came out—but when Pierson said not to worry, they’d find the culprit, fingerprints never lied, Matt remembered his joke and had to cough to cover his relief. There could be a lab-ready set of his prints on every cigarette in the woods, and no one would know. No problem.
But 7-Eleven: that could be a problem, one he hadn’t seen coming. This morning in court was the first he’d heard that both the fire-starting and Elizabeth-picnic cigarettes were Camels from 7-Eleven—the same brand and store Matt used all last summer. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but was it possible that those were his? Had he dropped them somewhere, and had Elizabeth or Pak or God knows who else found and used them to set the fire, rendering Matt the unwitting provider of the murder weapon? And now, after the way Shannon had badgered Pierson about his lame-ass “investigation,” wouldn’t the cops go to every 7-Eleven in the area flashing pictures of Pak and, for good measure, the others, maybe even Matt?
And the note—what did it mean that Elizabeth claimed she’d found what was undoubtedly his note next to the cigarettes? He’d written This needs to end. We need to meet, 8:15 tonight. By the creek on H-Mart paper and left it for Mary on her windshield the morning of the explosion. Mary had added Yes, then left it on his windshield. Matt got it after the morning dive, and he’d crumpled it up and put it in his pocket, but had he dropped it and it blew away and, in a huge coincidence, ended up near the cigarettes?
Matt turned into the 7-Eleven, parked far from the entrance, and looked at its image in the rearview mirror. The store hadn’t changed since his last time here, almost a year ago. An aura of neglect permeated this place—the 7-Eleven sign still cracked and listing to one side as if from old age, the handicapped-parking sign missing from the rusted pole, the white parking-space lines faded into ghostly dashes and dots. Across the street stood a gleaming Exxon, bustling with cars and trucks in line, people in and out, the door flapping open and shut in constant motion. The day he first bought cigarettes last summer, he’d almost gone there. He’d gotten in the left-turn lane for the Exxon behind two semis waiting to turn, and after a few minutes, Matt gave up and went to the 7-Eleven down the road. A little run-down, sure, but at least it’d be quick.
Now, sitting here squinting, trying to make out the cashier through the grimy glass, it occurred to Matt: What if he’d been patient for thirty more seconds for the trucks to turn, then gone to the Exxon? For sure, he wouldn’t be worried about the clerk identifying him now; the clerks across the street were busy, had to be, wouldn’t remember him from Adam. Not like the 7-Eleven clerk, the Santa look-alike who’d teased Matt for worrying about his hacking cough while buying cigarettes of all things, who started calling him “the Smoking Doc.” Hell, he wouldn’t have gotten cigarettes in the first place if he’d just stuck to Exxon. He’d only wanted a quick bite—a doughnut and coffee, maybe, or a corn dog and Coke. Some combination from Janine’s bad-for-fertility banned-foods list. It wasn’t until he passed the smokers outside 7-Eleven that he decided that cigarettes—probably even worse for sperm motility than junk food—were exactly what he needed. If not for that, he wouldn’t have hiked to the creek to smoke, wouldn’t have run into Mary, bought another pack and the next and God knows how many more, one of which may have ended up in a murderer’s hands. Could it be that by turning right rather than left one day a year ago—an impulse, no more a “decision” than picking which tie to wear—he’d changed everything? If he’d turned left, would Henry still be alive, head intact, and Matt at home right now, hands unmangled, taking pictures of a sleeping newborn instead of at this decrepit lot, spying to figure out if the man who could tie him to a murder weapon still worked here?
Matt shook his head to evict these thoughts. He needed to stop this mental masochism, the asking of unanswerable if-only questions that hurt his brain, and focus on his task. It took five minutes: one to see that the cashier was a girl, and four to call from the pay phone outside and tell the girl cashier he was looking for an employee, an older guy with white hair. The second she said no, no guy like that worked there, hadn’t for the ten months she’d been there, Matt hung up and breathed in deeply. He expected relief from the muck of dread he’d felt all day—for the pressure squeezing his lungs to lift, for the act of breathing to refresh rather than exhaust him. But none of that happened; if anything, his unease intensified, as if his worry about the 7-Eleven clerk had been covering up something else, like a bandage, and now that it was ripped away, he was having to face the bigger worry, the real worry, the thing he’d been dreading ever since he whispered, “6:30, same place, tonight,” passing by her in the courthouse: his meeting with Mary.
* * *
MATT’S FIRST MEETING with Mary last summer had been on Ovulation Day, a.k.a. As Much Sex as Possible Day. Another manifestation of Janine’s hyper-anal-retentivity, which (like snoring, burning food, and the mole below her butt) he’d found charming at first but irritating as hell now. How had that happened? He couldn’t remember making the switch; was it like falling off a cliff, and one day, he’d still loved these quirks and the next, he woke up hating them? Or did the charm wear off bit by bit, like a new car’s scent, declining linearly with each hour of the marriage’s aging until he’d crossed the line without ever noticing? One hour, the tiniest bit likable, neutral the next, the tiniest bit annoying the following, and in ten years, it’d sink to the level of repulsive, and in thirty, I’ll-take-an-ax-to-your-head-if-you-don’t-shut-the-fuck-up detestable?
It was hard to believe now, but Janine’s all-encompassing focus on future goals was one of the reasons he fell for her when they first met. Not that it was unusual. Pretty much every med-school student had a pathetic need to achieve, which peaked even higher into warp-drive levels among the Asians he knew. What was unusual about Janine was why. Unlike his Asian-American friends who told sob stories about their parents forcing them to study 24/7 and harping about Ivy League schools, Janine’s achievement orientation was born out of rebellion, because her parents hadn’t pushed her. She’d told him on their first date how she’d loved her freedom, relative to her younger brother—her parents forcing him (but not her) to go to school even when he was sick, for example, or punishing him (but not her) for getting A-minuses—until she realized: they expected more because he was a boy, their all-important firstborn male. She became determined to achieve what they expected from him (go to Harvard, become a doctor) just to spite them.
It was an interesting story, for sure, but what drew Matt in was the way Janine told it. She’d railed against the blatant, unapologetic sexism inherent in Korean culture and confided that because of it, sometimes she hated Koreans, hated being Korean, and then she’d laughed at how ironic it was that by trying to escape Asian gender stereotyping, she’d fallen into white America’s racial stereotyping and become a cliché: the overachieving Asian geek. She was fierce and funny, but also vulnerable, a little lost and sad, and it made him want to hail and protect her simultaneously. He wanted to join in her crusade to prove her parents wrong, especially after her mother said to him at their first meeting, “We prefer she marry a Korean man. But at least you are a doctor.” (And yes, it occurred to him that dating him might be part of Janine’s rebellion (but no, he didn’t let that bother him (too much.)))
Which was why, all throughout school, Matt supported Janine’s total focus on grades and fellowships, the way she set each goal and checked it off with methodical ease. It was impressive to watch. Sexy, even. Sure, it required sac
rifices in the present—canceled dinners, no movies—but he hadn’t minded. It wasn’t as if he’d expected any different from med school; after all, what was grad school but the institutionalization of a future-oriented mind-set? For the present, pull all-nighters, eat shitty food, and go into debt, but it’ll all be worth it when you arrive—when you graduate, get a job, and start living for real. The thing was, though, there was no arriving with Janine. Only delaying. Any goal reached meant setting a new one, bigger, harder. Matt thought she’d stop and declare victory when her brother dropped out of college to become an actor, but maybe the endless goal-setting had become so much a habit by then that she couldn’t stop. She kept at it, but stripped of that previous freshness of rebellion, everything she did seemed futile, like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill every day, except instead of the boulder rolling back down every night like in the myth, the hill got twice as tall every night.
Sex was the one thing in their life immune from this future orientation. Even the decision to start trying for kids, unlike every other marital decision—from her taking his name (no) to type of lightbulb (LED)—hadn’t been the product of hours of discussion. Just a moment of spontaneity during foreplay one night when he reached for a condom and she said, “Do we need that?” and rolled on top, positioning her vulva just above the tip of his penis. As he shook his head no, she lowered her pelvis slowly, the delicious novelty of her impulsivity, her being in the moment, intertwining with the exquisiteness of her slippery warmth directly on his skin, engulfing him millimeter by millimeter. The next morning, the next night, and for the rest of the month, they continued with the condomless sex. Neither of them mentioned cycles or babies.
When Janine’s period came, there was no announcement, just an oh-by-the-way mention. But it was too casual, intentionally so, with a tinge of anxiety. The next month, her delivery was anxious with a tinge of desperation, and the following, desperate with a tinge of hysteria. Books on how to conceive appeared on their nightstand.
When Janine announced Ovulation Week—she’d track her cycle, and around her ovulation, they’d have as much sex as possible—Matt realized: her goal-setting, the exhausting tethering of every act to future milestones, had now infected sex. She’d said nothing about not having sex the other three weeks, but that was how it played out. And just like that, sex became something they did for no reason except conception. Clinical and schedule-based. Somewhere around the sperm viability and motility tests, Ovulation Week became Ovulation Day, a twenty-four-hour period for having sex as many times as possible, followed by twenty-seven days of “resting up.”
And then came the special-needs kids from HBOT—not only Rosa, TJ, and Henry, but also the kids he sometimes ran into from the other sessions—and even more upsetting, the mothers’ stories he was forced to hear for two hours every day. As a radiologist, he saw sick and hurt kids all the time, but witnessing the day-to-day challenges of actually raising these kids—it scared the shit out of him, and it was hard not to think that between his infertility and the HBOT patients, some higher power must be telling him (no, screaming at him) to stop, or at least wait and think things through first.
About a week into HBOT, after a morning dive when Kitt told them about TJ’s new “behavior,” fecal smearing (“Fecal, as in shit?” he’d said, and she’d said, “Yup, and smearing, as in rubbing all over walls, curtains, books, everything!”), Matt got a voice mail from Janine that according to her urine test, today was Ovulation Day and could he come home immediately? He ignored it, went to the hospital, and turned off his phone; ignored her increasingly frequent pages. He thought he’d gotten away with it when his mother-in-law barged into his office. “Janine want you home right now. She say it is day for … what is the word?” she said. Matt hurried to close the door before she could say “ovulation,” but before he could, she said in a clear, loud voice, “Orgasm. It is day for orgasm.”
When Matt got home, Janine was already naked, in bed—probably had been since her voice mail six hours ago. He started to say sorry, his phone had died, but she said, “Whatever. Just get over here. We’re running out of time. Hurry!”
He undressed, unbuttoning his shirt and unbuckling his belt methodically, slowly. He got in bed, put his lips to hers, and tried to focus on her nipples, on her fingers touching his penis, but nothing happened. “Come on,” she said, and pumped his penis, a little too hard. He saw the ovulation stick on a tissue on the nightstand, just sitting there—it seemed to be silently commanding him, Get on with it! Fuck your wife right now!—and he had to laugh at the absurdity, at the way this 99-cent pink stick from CVS had come to control and hijack what remained of his sex life.
“What is going on with you?” Janine said.
Matt lay back. What could he say? “I’m sorry, honey, but discussing orgasms with your mother has put me a bit out of the mood, and besides, I think God doesn’t want us to have kids, and also, have you heard of ‘fecal smearing’?” He said, “Maybe it’s HBOT. I haven’t been sleeping. Let’s skip this month.”
She didn’t say anything. They lay there side by side, their bodies close but not touching, naked, looking at the ceiling. After a minute, she sat up. “You’re right—let’s forget it. You need a break,” she said, and moved down. She stopped at his penis—the flaccid dough of flesh retreating into folds of skin—and took him in her mouth. The thought that this was not geared toward a child, toward the future, zapped something, switched on some previously dormant neuron. He held her head, not wanting her to take him out of the warm cavity of her mouth and throat. He came in her mouth.
Afterward, he’d wonder how the hell he didn’t see it coming, how he could’ve deluded himself into thinking she could so easily give up on the day—the whole month! But in the drowsy sweetness of the post-orgasm fog, it didn’t occur to him to wonder why Janine sprang up and positively bounded to the bathroom. He just lay there like an idiot, warm and happy, half wondering but not really caring what in God’s name she could be doing, making such a racket—cabinet doors squeaking, plastic ripping, liquid pouring and shaking, and finally, spitting. When Janine slipped into bed, Matt rolled toward her, ready to drape his arm across and pull her close.
“I need help here. Will you get those pillows and put them under my butt?” Janine spread her legs wide open and raised her hips. She held a needle-free syringe in her hand. Inside, mucous globules lay suspended in clear liquid. Of course—his sperm. The turkey-baster method, which she’d made fun of (“I’m telling you, some women actually use real turkey basters. Seriously!”). She inserted the syringe into her vagina, raised her hips, and slowly pushed the liquid into her body. “I really need the pillows now.”
Matt placed the pillows against her thighs where, just moments before, he’d thought his tongue would be about now. As he got up and slowly put his clothes back on, he thought how Janine had managed to futurize an orgasm from oral sex, the most present-based thing Matt could think of, how she’d repurposed this act of pure pleasure (“You need a break,” she’d said!) into an act of contrived conception.
Matt left early for the evening dive, muttering about traffic. As he closed their bedroom door, he caught a glimpse of Janine, lying naked with her legs straight up in the air, like some soft-porn version of a Cirque du Soleil ad. For the rest of the afternoon—driving to Miracle Creek, stopping at 7-Eleven, buying cigarettes (Camels, on sale), walking to the creek, throughout it all—he thought of his sperm, sliding down Janine’s vaginal wall toward her cervix, pulled into her uterus not by the force of their own motility but by gravity. And as he lit the cigarette and breathed in, he imagined his sperm, their whiplike tails propelling them toward the egg, but too slowly, too weakly, to penetrate its shell.
Matt was on his third cigarette when Mary came up. They’d met only once, at the dinner at Matt’s in-laws, but she plopped down next to him, none of the awkward oh-hello-what-are-you-doing-heres of near strangers. Just a “Hey,” said with the casual familiarity of kids meeting up
after school.
“Hey,” he said, and eyed the tome in her hand. “SAT words. Want me to quiz you?”
Later, whenever he puzzled over what on God’s green earth could’ve made him so fucking stupid as to start this—what was it?—whatever this thing was with Mary, it always came back to this: the way she flung away that Barron’s like a Frisbee, while giving him that look—a dart of the eyes, almost an eye-roll but not quite, combined with a head shake and frown of disgust. It was Janine’s look, her patented no-fucking-way-we’re-even-discussing-this look first seen in school when he suggested taking a study break for a movie, and last seen just today when he said that maybe, just a thought, not saying they’re giving up or anything, but maybe they should get on some adoption waiting lists. Something about Mary looking like a young Janine while casting away her studies—it made him remember their first date, Janine saying how the real her didn’t care about school, how she sometimes wanted to dump her textbooks out her dorm window.
“Camels. My favorite. You mind?” Mary held up his cigarettes.
Matt opened his mouth to say yes, of course I mind, you’re a kid and I won’t supply a minor, but that strange déjà-vu-like sensation of being with the carefree, “real” Janine, his desperate longing for the pre-real-life, pre-infertility her—those formed a dam in his throat, stopping the words. Mary took his nonresponse as permission and took one.
She lit and held it between her fingers, looking at it lovingly, almost reverently (the look—yes, he knew she was a teenager and he tried not to think it but not thinking it made him think it that much more—he imagined Janine giving his penis before sliding it in her mouth) before placing it between her lips. She sucked in (he was actively not thinking it), blew out through the O of her lips, and lay back, her long black hair fanning out over the gravel. This reminded him of Janine, too, the way Janine’s hair—also long and black, an intense black that looked almost blue—fanned out over her pillow.