Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  Trish read his face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Yesterday’s paper.’

  When he finally looked back up to Trish, it was the first time he’d ever seen her tear up. ‘Don’t worry about me, Will. I’ve been very lucky to have what I’ve had for so long. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’

  ***

  THE mezzanine office was stifling. Will looked hopelessly towards the two windows along the western side. There used to be a view of empty wasteland, now the carpark for a boutique supermarket. That view had been gone for ten years. For ten years he’d been remembering that view, while looking at the firewall of the warehouse that had gone up next door. Those windows used to open and let in the late-afternoon breeze from the sea. Now it was air con or nothing. It was nothing. He was on a wheel, and was losing slivers of himself with every revolution. This is it, he thought. The end of the line. Flame is doused. Or, as Yelena would have it, a new beginning. What choice did he have left?

  He heard his phone burp, and realised for the first time that it didn’t ring any more.

  U fancy take-ways to nite at yr place? I cld bring some smoked? x

  autumn

  ELLIE TURNED ON the gas fire, though the temperature hardly justified it. The evenings were definitely cooler, the mozzies gone, the cicadas’ mad thrashing becoming more ragged with each passing night, but the days were still hot, summer not giving up easily. She’d had enough of that, of Auckland’s cloudless grill and overcast oven. She wanted autumnal, she wanted Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. What was Keats’ second line, she wondered? She Googled it, skipped over the next few lines and landed on And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

  To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

  And still more, later flowers for the bees,

  Until they think warm days will never cease,

  For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

  She mulled them over, those beautiful words. Clammy cells o’er-brimmed. I wish. So eloquent and rhythmical. Fill all fruit with ripeness to the core. Perfect, she decided.

  The kids were finally asleep, Kristin like a lamb after one story, a Margaret Mahy that she had read for Ellie, softly, falling asleep before she’d finished. Ellie had wanted to bring her own childhood favourite, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and leave it with Kristin, but it had been lost in the fire along with the rest of their books, most of them Carol’s.

  Claudia had put Archie down before Ellie and Yelena got there, so that he wouldn’t be alerted to his mother’s impending absence. It was the first time Claudia had been out in the evening since Will left, and Ellie fervently hoped that Archie wouldn’t wake. She’d projected a confidence in front of Claudia that she didn’t feel now that she was alone in the house with two sleeping children. She daren’t watch TV or listen to music, lest the sound wake Archie. Was it wrong of her to see in a child so young, intimations of his father, to see an embryonic Will in Archie’s wilfulness and tantrums? To be so anxious about a baby waking and becoming enraged to find his mother gone? On the other hand, Archie’s responses to his father’s departure might be healthier than Kristin’s, who had become the perfectly compliant child since the separation, seemingly aware of her mother’s anguish and not wanting to add to it in any way. Was Kristin compensating? Was she feeling guilty for somehow causing her father to abandon her mother? Ellie reminded herself that she was no child psychologist: that seeing so many battered and beaten children didn’t make her one.

  What sort of parent would she make? Would she be strict, a maternal martinet? Laissez-faire would likely best describe her mothering: she’d be so grateful, she’d be a pushover. At every moment of every day she’d be conscious of the miracle of their being. How could she be anything else? Her children would have whatever they wanted, do whatever they wanted. It would be enough that they were there, that they existed.

  She had a couple of hours, probably, before Claudia and Yelena got back from Claudia’s Saturday-night date, unless it went very badly, which it easily could.

  Kath at Kook A Chew was an inveterate matchmaker. Her personality, which made very quick connections with a diverse range of people, and her engaging curiosity meant she soon, but not inquisitively, came to know her regular customers in quite intimate detail – who was new in town, who might recently have lost a partner. And then she saw the potential connections. Kath’s instincts were at least as good, and infinitely less brutal, than the various online dating apps Ellie had tried. Left swipe, who’s next?

  It was Kath who had suggested that Ellie have a drink with Richard, and her instincts had been almost right: Richard had been close to . . . What? Ellie’s ideal? She doubted she had an ideal man any more. Whatever configuration she might once have fantasised about had long since subsided under a pall of . . . Not cynicism exactly. Reality. Based on recent experience, her type might be described as pale, intellectually whimsical wastrels. There’d been Howard the Greenpeace wonk, christened by Yelena the social policy bonk, because that was his word for sex. Ellie hadn’t thought she could ever get too much intelligent discourse on ecological concerns, but Howard found her plimsoll line and damn near sank her under his endless enthusiasms for party political policy abstractions. When, at a vegan restaurant, Yelena had called him a boring wanker to his face, he had just blinked away and carried on as if she hadn’t interrupted. Later, Yelena had asked Ellie, ‘just out of interest’, where she found ‘these earnest lame-arses’.

  She had a point. Before Howard, there’d been Victor, who was a junior lecturer in film theory. He was completing his PhD and asked her to read his thesis. Ten pages in her eyes were bleeding and she never wanted to watch a movie again. Much more interestingly, she’d caught him watching porn on his laptop. He’d maintained that monitoring pornography trends was part and parcel of his research, that if she’d bothered to read further, she’d have seen the section of his thesis entitled ‘The Democratisation of Pornography’. When she asked him how that actually related to variations of White Slut Bred by BBC, he’d struggled manfully, but couldn’t really explain how devouring inter-racial mmf and mmmmmf liaisons contributed to his thesis. Ellie developed her own thesis: that sex with Victor was interminable because he masturbated so much his cock was more accustomed to his hand than a vagina. She’d left him to it.

  It hadn’t always been that way. The love of her life in her mid-twenties had been a passionate jazz saxophonist who worshipped Jah and weed (but was also, she realised, a wastrel). It did seem that the older she got, the more insipid the men she met. She wouldn’t use the term leftovers without, in fairness, applying it to herself, but sometimes wondered where all the heartbreakers had gone. She’d had her heart broken so many times in her late teens and twenties, ravaging experiences at the time, but now, perhaps warmed by nostalgia, they seemed infinitely preferable to the lingering depression engendered by the current men. She seemed to always be the one doing the rejecting, and if one more married friend said, ‘There’s someone for everyone’, she’d scream. That’s why Yelena’s adage, ‘There’s plenty for everyone!’, was so refreshing. But Yelena had limited sympathy for Ellie’s tales of woe about men. From her point of view, the more dorks out there, the more women for her.

  So Ellie had been cautiously optimistic when Richard, on first acquaintance, hadn’t conformed to what she had come to see as her doomed template. He was five years older than her, which once would have seemed quite a lot, but now seemed nothing. His manner was older than that, though. It wasn’t a physical thing. Although he was balding and his height diminished by a slight stoop, he was slim and athletic. Strong hands and forearms particularly, which, when she remarked upon them, he attributed to being a ‘carpenter of sorts’. His little joke: he was an orthopaedic surgeon, who did knees and hips – yes, ‘hammer and saw stuff’– but his speciality was
the spine. There he operated in some kind of cross-over zone with neurosurgeons, arthroscopic surgery guided by miniature cameras, discectomies and stuff – hugely delicate and precise. He’d tried to explain the demarcation – or lack of – between what he and neurosurgeons did, but Ellie ended up none the wiser. Richard’s nearly twenty-year marriage had only recently ended. Ellie convinced herself that this was a good thing, even a progression of sorts, from leftovers to recycled, though maybe she was just moving into a different age bracket.

  If she’d been honest, she might have called it from the start, but Richard spoke well, had a lovely deep voice, a self-deprecating humour, soft, undamaged skin and, importantly, in those hands, a tender, knowing touch. That had been enough for Ellie to start projecting. Yes, he had an ex-wife and three children, but might he not want more of the same? They’d never had that kind of conversation in the places they went together, ethnic cafes, boutique movie theatres, the art gallery – where he showed a comprehensive knowledge of modernist Polynesian painters like John Pule. At a play once, an interminable ‘update’ of an Ibsen that was, if anything, more boring than the original, Ellie had accidentally met the ex-wife, a regular theatregoer, a subscriber. Maureen, all coiled, coiffured and bejewelled, which should have sounded warning bells, had been icily courteous and it had been instantly clear, though Richard had never discussed it, who had left whom. To Ellie, that spoke volumes – that he had left his wife, but was honourable towards her and had never tried to justify what he had done by speaking badly about her, or cynically about his marriage. It was far too early to discuss commitment or children, which left Ellie free to fill the void with her own speculations, based on the clues she was only too pleased to pick up. That he loved his children, whom she’d never met, but who were old enough, at twelve, fifteen and seventeen, to be almost self-reliant, which might make him ready for more. And that when they made love, he wore condoms, religiously. It wasn’t something she’d asked for, in fact she disliked condoms and preferred skin on skin, but she’d been encouraged to believe that he was still potent, fertile and at least open to the possibility.

  It had been a huge moment, last week at his duplex apartment on the top floor of a beautifully converted 1930 Art Deco department store, when she’d told him that he needn’t wear a condom if he didn’t want to, that she could take care of herself. Richard had smiled a bit sheepishly and admitted that he’d been wearing them as a precaution against STDs, not pregnancy, that in fact he’d ‘had the snip’. At first she didn’t know whether to be reassured that he would take such care about STDs or insulted that he could possibly think she’d be a risk. But the feeling that overwhelmed both of those was dismay.

  She hadn’t seen him since. He’d rung – she hadn’t taken the call – and then left a message saying he’d be up at KAC tonight. She couldn’t face him. Now she remembered his kindness and attentiveness as more that of a doctor with a patient, than lover to lover. Had he simply been applying his bedside manner to her?

  She’d known, as he’d paused while rolling that satin sheath up his shaft, that it was over, that she’d been living a lie of her own making. It wasn’t fair on him, he’d done nothing, but there’d been a seismic slip between her romantic projections and reality. She’d leapt off his bed, crossed to her clothes, muttering some really unoriginal excuse about headaches, cramps, whatever. Her last view of him as she closed the door had been of this curiously forked creature standing, arms wide in bewilderment, like a hirsute version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but with a plastic sac hanging forlornly from the end of his wilting penis. As the lift descended, she had almost rung him, but then put the phone back in her bag. It was the end of a certain kind of hope and the beginning of a different one.

  Three years ago, when she’d given up work and returned to the house to look after her father, she’d decided to buy ‘insurance’. It was her thirty-fifth birthday and she’d had suspicions about her fertility. It was anecdotal evidence of the worst kind, sure, but she was the only woman she knew who had never had recourse to the morning-after pill or a termination. Given that she’d had the usual mishaps and passionate heat-of-the-moment accidents, it was strange that she’d never once had so much as a late period. Tests at the clinic had, to some degree, confirmed her fears. She was producing fewer eggs than normal, and at her age that could only get worse, perhaps quickly. Carol wasn’t around to ask about early menopause, and Den couldn’t remember, so Ellie made the decision, dug into her savings for eleven grand, took the prescribed drugs and went in for same-day egg extraction. The clinic had warned her that success was far from certain: she might have few or even no eggs to be harvested. Her relief that eight were recovered was huge. She’d been able to put her preoccupation with motherhood on the back burner and hope that she’d find a mate who would make the banked eggs redundant. Richard had been the end of that dream, but it had been coming for some time. The day after she’d walked out on Richard, she’d rung the clinic and told them she wanted to proceed with a sperm donor. There was usually a waiting list of nearly a year, but her frozen eggs meant she’d effectively been in the system for three years, so she was given priority.

  Early the previous afternoon she’d driven out to the fertility clinic at Ascot Hospital, taken the lift to the third floor and been shown to a room facing east, a small room barely accommodating a round table and four chairs. Teresa, with a bob framing a kind face, had put three sperm donor non-identifying information sheets on the table in front of her and told her that, ideally, she should choose now, because donors were in short supply and this trio were also being made available to the network of clinics throughout the country. As Ellie, left on her own, tried to concentrate on the information in front of her, she felt a rising panic, like trying to book a motel on the internet with the ‘selling fast!’ sign flashing. Only three left! After taking a deep belly breath, she’d decided to read the sheets comparatively, and spread the opening pages across the table, side by side.

  All three men had been screened and were low risk for cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and Fragile X, whatever the hell that was. In terms of physical characteristics, none were excessively tall or short or overweight. Two were dark with brown eyes and one was blond and blue-eyed, but all had answered yes to ‘Tan easily?’. Was that a trick question? They were all heterosexual, New Zealand-born and had some tertiary education, one a master’s in anthropology. None had allergies, chronic conditions or mental health issues. None smoked or used recreational drugs, natch.

  When Ellie had enquired whether the clinic screened the information given by donors, the answer had been no, which might explain why they seemed so exemplary. She couldn’t help seeing in her mind’s eye a beauty pageant where all the unnaturally attractive contestants wanted world peace, to meet people and to travel. Overwhelmed by the choices in front of her, unable to read and understand the details properly, she’d asked Teresa if it would be okay to take the information sheets home and consider them over the weekend. If the clinics were all closed until Monday, the risk of missing out on one of the donors was pretty small, wasn’t it? Teresa, who had no doubt seen it all, had been sympathetic and encouraging and looked forward to seeing Ellie on Monday morning. When Ellie had told her she’d be working, her first day back at her old job, Teresa had reassured her that it would be fine to ring with her choice.

  Now, settled on Claudia’s sofa in front of the fake log fire, she went through the information again. The ages. One was mid-twenties. Ellie thought back to herself ten years ago and wondered whether that was too young to make such a momentous decision. Another was forty. Ellie had read somewhere that sperm was affected by age in a similar, but less drastic way, as ova. The third donor was thirty-five. Just a little bit younger, thought Ellie, but not enough to notice, then chided herself for her Cinderella complex and for what? Anthropomorphising sperm, as if it was a person she’d have to relate to? But that’s what it was, she thought, this sperm from t
his man, through his baby she would carry.

  That third one, Donor Code SD 00007982, also had the freshest sperm, donated this year. The young guy was last year, and the older guy, the anthropologist, was two years ago and he had a wife and two children, which Ellie also found unsettling. Teresa had explained that any child resulting from a sperm donor had a right to request the identifying information kept by Births, Deaths and Marriages. The donor had no rights, so any future contact would be in her hands, or her child’s hands, when he or she was eighteen. Ellie felt some discomfort she couldn’t rationalise about her child becoming part of an existing, potentially enfolding, family. Existing families had existing problems – she knew that better than anyone: Ellie wanted to create her own family, not add to an entity whose dynamics she didn’t know.

  She couldn’t help looking at her own family. Didn’t she and Will and Stan prove that genetics were entirely arbitrary, even from the same parents and brought up in the same environment? Didn’t that make this whole agonising choice thing redundant? She resolved to put aside her anxiety and concentrate on doing what she could: self-determination might be a complete fallacy, but was also a necessary self-deception. She had to be as diligent as possible in choosing her baby’s father. What happened after that would be what happened after that.

  There was another factor, which sent her back to SD 00007982. Under ethnic origins he’d identified himself as Māori, and under iwi as Tūwharetoa, which, she thought, came from the central North Island, round Lake Taupō. The tribal connection wasn’t important, but there was something fundamentally attractive to her in having a child who could be what she and the rest of her family could never be: tangata whenua.