“Good,” Danny said. “That’s one worry out of the way. Now, my second question. Have you written up any sort of legal custody agreement?”
“Danny, I’ve only been pregnant three days! Anyway, Tom’s going to take care of it.”
“April, I know he’s your friend, and you trust him, but as a lawyer I feel obligated to warn you, you really ought to make sure you’re protected.”
Suddenly April smiled big teeth at Danny. “As a lawyer,” she said. “I can’t believe it. My little brother. As a lawyer.”
“Look, if you don’t want my advice, fine, I know plenty of people who’ll give you exactly the same advice for five thousand dollars or so. Just spare me the insults.” Dramatically he marched out of the kitchen.
“Oh, Danny,” April said, following him into the living room, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me, I just lapse into this big-sister thing, I look at you and I think, is this big, handsome lawyer really my little squirt of a brother?”
“Think whatever you like about me, April. But I am really worried about the possibility of your getting shafted in this thing.”
April sat down on the sofa. “I’m all ears,” she said.
“All right,” Danny said. “Well, first of all, this primary-caretaker stuff. I think it all has to be laid down in writing. If you want him to be the primary caretaker, I think you have to establish, from the outset, that if at any time you are not satisfied with his performance as primary caretaker, you can regain custody of your child. And I think you also have to establish that if you change your mind once the baby is born, you can nullify the agreement and raise the baby yourself. I mean, you’re not that far from surrogate parenting here.”
“Well, of course I see what you mean, Danny,” April said, “but really, Tom’s not like that. You talk as if we live in this vicious dog-eat-dog world and he and Brett are really just conspiring to use my womb and take my baby. But they’re not. These are very progressive, enlightened leftists here, two men who basically think the American justice system is fucked. They side with the victims. They wouldn’t set foot in a courtroom on principle, much less wage a lawsuit. The whole point is, I want to be the baby’s mother, and Tom wants to be the baby’s father. In fact, it’s very sexist of you to assume that just because I’ve decided I want the baby to live with Tom, I somehow don’t care about the baby or don’t plan to see it or be part of its life, and it’s unfair to assume Tom wants me out of the way. I will be very much an active participant in the raising of this child.”
“That’s fine. That’s great. And that’s why you’ve got to have a legal agreement assuring your continued involvement. Not to mention grandparents’ rights, uncles’ rights. Who’s to say—I’m not saying it, but who’s to say—that Tom might not decide he doesn’t want your family involved with the baby? I just want to make sure that’s covered in the legal agreement. Better you take care of these things before the baby’s born and spare yourself a nationally televised trial.”
“You have become so distrustful since you moved to New York,” April said. “Really, such an easterner.”
“It’s my job to look out for you, April. I always have. And talk about sexist! This baby is yours more profoundly than it’s Tom’s. It’s your body, remember. Don’t let him treat you like you’re carrying this precious thing of his, only to have him forget you once it’s safely in his house.”
“If you just knew Tom,” April said, “if you met him once, you’d see how pointless all this is.”
“I know from experience, no matter how well you think you know someone, you can never guess. You’ve got to protect yourself. Hell, if you’re afraid he’ll be insulted by a legal agreement, just bat your eyelashes and tell him your big bully lawyer of a brother is forcing you to do it all.”
“Little bully lawyer of a brother,” April said.
“You just have to get in a last dig, don’t you? Big sister to the bitter end.”
She stretched her arms luxuriously behind her head. “Oh, all this is too much,” she said. “Here I am, all alone, with no one in the world. Me and my little baby.” She spoke these words experimentally, as if trying them on for size, then laughed; they didn’t fit.
A rattling at the door announced Walter’s return. He was carrying two huge cardboard boxes, which covered his face, and when Betty, the dog, leaped to greet him, they nearly tumbled. “Betty, get off, for Christ’s sake!” Walter called from behind his boxes. “Danny, can you help me with this stuff?”
Danny hurried to relieve him. “What is this?” he asked as he took one of the boxes.
“Mangoes,” said Walter. “I bought them at the station at Hoboken.”
“This is enough mangoes for about twenty years, Walt; they’ll rot before we eat them.”
“So I’ll give some to my mother,” Walter said. “Anyway, you just watch. They’ll get eaten. Hi, April, how was your day?”
“Fine,” April said. “How was yours, Walt?”
“Just fine.”
For a second April and Danny looked at each other.
“April has some news,” Danny said, and April turned the other way.
“News?”
There was squealing at a significant enough distance away to suggest the mutilation of small dogs by the tires of a bus. “Goddammit,” Walter said. “Betty must have slipped out the front door. I’d better get her.” He went into the kitchen and returned holding the Dustbuster. “This will get her back, it always does.” He pushed the button on the Dustbuster, and the little vacuum cleaner gave out its familiar suction roar. Betty barked more loudly, farther away. “See you soon!” Walter said gaily, and was off, calling, “Betty! Betty!” into the night.
April looked at Danny. “What’s with the vacuum cleaner?” she asked.
“Betty and the Dustbuster have a love-hate relationship. She likes to fight with it and lick it. I think she thinks it’s alive, since it’s about the size of a little dog. And as we’ve learned from hard experience, it’s the one object short of hamburger meat that will entice her back inside once she’s escaped into the world.”
“I see,” April said. They walked out onto the front porch and surveyed the early-evening suburban panorama. Across the street a young man wearing cutoffs was watering his lawn, while next door three blond children chased each other in circles, calling, “You’re it! You’re it! You’re it!” And in the middle of the street, like some absurd pied piper, was Walter, in his black lawyer’s suit. He waved the Dustbuster over his head, offering its wail to the twilight air, and, in the warm, bark-filled night, waited.
Chapter 14
March seventh came and went. Walter did not quit his job. At the office his secretary marked the advent of her fourth year in his employ with the gift of a carnation and a card which, when you opened it, sang out “Auld Lang Syne” in a tinny, computerized voice. Other than that, the only acknowledgments were a letter from a senior partner, congratulating Walter on work well done and expressing hope that his association with the firm would last another five years, and a piece of electronic mail, or e-mail, when he switched on the computer in his office early on the anniversary evening. It was from Bulstrode, one of his computer friends.
To: Hunky Lawyer
From: Bulstrode
Subject: Fifth Year Anniversary
Walter,
Congratulations! You have now passed the point of no return. You have resisted temptation, and great rewards are in store for you as a result. Welcome to the real world! Farewell, dreams of youthful wandering! Just wait till you turn forty!
Fondly,
Bullie
Walter smiled. It seemed ironic to him that of all the people in his life, only Bulstrode, who wasn’t really in his life at all, had bothered to acknowledge the passing of this pretty significant day. Bulstrode was a banker in Louisville, Kentucky, and they had “met” (if “met” was the right word) one dreary winter Sunday when Walter was scanning the roster of names logged onto the gay channel in sea
rch of some sort of flirtation or dirty conversation. (“Interactive pornography” was how he described it to friends.) Among the Willing Slaves, Sweaty Jocks, Hung Studs, and Tight Ends who were jockeying for space and attention in that strange electronic gay bar of the mind, he had been amused to see for the first time his Louisville friend’s aggressively offbeat handle, and since Bulstrode was one of his favorite characters in Middlemarch, one of his favorite books, he had dashed off a message, asking if indeed a literary allusion was intended. Bulstrode responded with a chat request; they retreated together to that little hypothetical private room, where Bulstrode acknowledged that Walter had guessed his source. He was Bulstrode because Bulstrode was, like him, a banker; also, he added, because the name had enough of a violent edge to interest the less literary. And who was this hunky lawyer, who recognized a name from Middlemarch? What was he doing in semiliterate compu-land? “Information,” Bulstrode typed, “we want information!”
In his past computer-enhanced communications Walter had been reluctant about divulging any true history, but Bulstrode for some reason put him at ease. Walter admitted certain salient facts, being careful not to be too specific, then asked Bulstrode about himself, a subject on which he was less forthcoming not, Walter suspected, because he had anything to hide, but because the facts of his real life simply held no interest for him. “Bulstrode’s” biography, which he gave pieces of, was not, it quickly became clear, a thing of the real world. When Walter asked how old he was, he answered, “Bulstrode is 32,” which made him suspect the banker in Louisville to be significantly older. In the meantime, Bulstrode admitted to several other alter egos: In moments of high-campy imaginativeness he was “Rick-18,” and in moments of extreme horniness he was “Rough Master.” His real name was either George or Martin, depending on when you asked him. He said he was 6’2” and weighed 175 pounds, had brown hair, blue eyes, a beard, a medium-hairy chest, and a seven-and-a-half-inch cock. All of this was probably a lie. Why not lie, after all, when there were so many barriers between you and the person you were speaking to? What harm could it do? And anyway, these particulars, once they were dispensed, never had much bearing on Walter and Bulstrode’s conversations, even when those conversations took a decidedly sexual edge.
One cold Sunday evening Bulstrode asked Walter to call him. It seemed an inevitable progression, like sex on the third date. Walter was nervous and excited as he dialed the number, as if he were on the brink of doing something forbidden, but of course it was just ten digits, followed by a distant-sounding series of rings.
“Hello?”
“Bulstrode?” Walter asked.
“Walter? Hi!” And Bulstrode laughed. He had an appealing baritone with a slight, delicate southern lilt to it. “I’m glad to be talking to you!”
“Me too.”
“You have a nice voice. Very masculine, very sexy.”
“Thanks. So do you.”
There were a few seconds of nervous breath, and then Bulstrode said, “I can’t believe it. Finally I’m hearing your real voice. And you know what? You sound just like what I imagined you would.”
Bulstrode was, it turned out, a veteran and an aficionado of the gay channel, the denizens of which he had maintained steady relations with for almost three years. “I’ve had quite my share of adventures as a result of it too,” he told Walter. “For instance, have you noticed a guy who comes on occasionally, not too often, with the handle Barracuda?”
“I’m not sure,” Walter admitted.
“Well, he’s this kid up in Boston, a comp sci grad student at MIT. I had a pretty major love affair with him last year. We just broke it off a couple of months ago.”
“Really?” Walter said. “Wow, I’m impressed. I guess I just never imagined people could really start relationships this way.”
“I’d say this was just about the most serious gay relationship I’ve been in,” Bulstrode said. “Jimmy—that was his real name—he and I were really in love. It was the best and the hardest thing I’ve ever been in.”
“Long-distance relationships are tough,” Walter said affably. “Did you usually go up there or did he come down to visit you?”
“Oh, we never met,” Bulstrode said.
For the space of a beat, Walter was silent. “You never met?”
“Oh, no. We just talked on the phone.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Every day, sometimes two or three times. And then one day I call him up and he says to me he can’t take it anymore, it’s getting too intense. Just like that, he breaks it off. Personally I think it was his dad. His dad was putting a lot of pressure on him, about being gay. The next thing I knew, he’d changed his phone number. I left him e-mail, but he just ignored it.” Bulstrode sighed. “Too bad. I really went for him. And we were sexually in tune, you know? The way few people are in life. Jesus, I’ve never had sex like that.”
“You mean phone sex,” Walter said cautiously.
“Yes, of course. The most intense, incredible, horny, hot phone sex I have ever had. Sometimes we’d be on the phone five, six hours. He always came three or four times, but I held back. I wanted to wait until the very end and then really make it big.”
“You always like to wait a long time before you come?”
“I sure do. How about you?”
Their conversation took a different direction. Afterwards, sweaty and spent, Walter crawled into bed next to Danny, who lay rigid, facing the wall.
“Have fun with your boys?” Danny said.
“Sure,” Walter said. He tried to laugh at what had just happened to him, turn it into a joke, a light diversion, as Danny imagined it was, but all that night, Walter couldn’t get Bulstrode out of his mind. There was something irresistible about him, about the very noncorporeality of him, as if he really were that imaginary friend most children invent at some moment or another. Before Bulstrode, Walter had been resolutely anonymous over the computer, but now something in that lilting voice persuaded him to tell all. How astonishing to live like that, without ever having to touch, without ever having to show your face! A life of that sort required no care, had no accountability!
At home, with Danny, Walter had been plagued by a numbness lately, a lack of sexual feeling toward his lover’s body, which he could not fathom; here, after all, was the same flesh for which he had felt incomparable lust just months before, and it might as well have been a lump of raw bread dough, for all the arousal it now mustered in him. Was it time? he wondered. Did it happen to every couple eventually? Perhaps there is only so much lust a single body can inspire in another, perhaps only so many orgasms before the loved one’s body simply becomes drained of that mysterious, pleasure-seeking juice of attraction. And yet Danny didn’t seem to have the same problem. That night, after Walter had rolled away to face the wall and sleep, Danny was suddenly on him, taking Walter in his arms and reaching his hand down toward his belly, possessed, clearly, even now, of the same old desire that had started up so many years ago, in a dorm at Yale.
“Not now,” Walter whispered. “I have to sleep.”
“What’s the matter?” Danny said. “Saving it for Hung Jock?” He laughed in what Walter thought was a sarcastic way and turned away from him.
“Bulstrode,” Walter said, but it was without breath; no sound escaped his lips.
Across hundreds of miles of telephone wire, the next evening, Walter told Bulstrode about his father and mother, his sister, his dog. He confessed his increasing sexual ambivalence toward Danny. He admitted he was addicted to pornography. All this Bulstrode absorbed, an enormous crackling silence on the other end of the telephone line. He offered close to nothing in return because he had almost nothing to offer. From what Walter could tell, over several years Bulstrode had given more and more of himself to the computer until his outer life, his life in the world, eroded, broke off, a dry husk. As for the life of the channel, that was a different matter. Here he was full of stories, anecdotes, events. One evening a group of men in or near
New York had been discussing the pleasures of sex in the aisles of the Adonis, a gay porno theater near Broadway. “I just love the Adonis,” one of the men had written. “The atmosphere there positively emulates sex.” Both Bulstrode and Walter had been on at the time, and later they laughed about it. “Can you believe it?” Walter said. “I was really tempted to type something mean, like ‘Truer words have not been spoke.’ But I didn’t. Instead, I sent him a message, saying, in effect, ‘I think you mean “emanate.”’ Then he tells me to check my dictionary program! Jesus, these guys are so arrogant!”
Bulstrode was laughing, hard. “The thing you’ve got to realize,” he said, “is that most of these guys, for all their computer wizardry, don’t know very much about the English language. Some of them are positively subliterate. What I love is when words get reduced to letters—you know, ‘What are you up to?’ with the ‘are’ and ‘you’ as letters and the ‘to’ as a number. That always gives me a chuckle.” His voice suddenly grew pensive. “Did I ever tell you about Rudy?”
“Rudy? I don’t think so.”
“Well, Rudy was this really sweet working-class kid, eighteen or so. He used to spell like that, which is why I was reminded. Anyway, I got to know him pretty well on the channel. He was a nice kid, he liked older guys, he said. We had phone sex a few times, which was hot—he got off on me calling him son and him calling me Daddy—and sometimes afterwards we’d talk seriously. That was when I started to realize he was really in trouble—you know, out of work, the father’s an alcoholic who beats him up, the mother’s gone. No wonder he wants to call me Daddy. Anyway, one evening a bunch of us, maybe ten of us, were on, when Rudy logs on, and he says, I’ve just taken thirty-seven Valium.’ Suddenly there’s this incredible panic. Everyone’s trying to keep him awake, you know, the way you’re supposed to, to distract him, but pretty soon he just stops answering our messages. Of course we can’t call him; the phone’s hooked up to his computer, and he’s still logged on. But we knew where he was from, and a couple of us had his phone number, so what we did was, this guy called Snapper, he called nine-one-one and got the emergency number for his area and told them what had happened and gave them the number. They had a book to get the address from the number, got over there, and sure enough, there he was, slumped over his desk with the machine on. A couple of weeks later he came on and told us we’d saved him. We’d saved his life.”
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