When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  “You stay in my bed all night, Mommy?” he asked. “Pleeease?”

  “Yes,” she said. And they both knew she was lying, but it was enough to get him to close his eyes and surrender to sleep.

  CLARA WOKE UP, not knowing whether it was ten p.m. or four in the morning. Guillermo was in deep sleep beside her. There was no light coming in through the windows, no sound from the street outside. For a long moment, she felt like the only person awake in the world, but it did not last. Presently she heard Thomas in the nearby bathroom, brushing his teeth; she heard Deysei in the next room talking to someone on her cell phone, a mumble through the wall, indecipherable. And then she remembered the envelope. No delaying it any longer. She freed her arm from Guillermo's weight, releasing pins and needles from elbow to fingertip, and went downstairs to fetch it from the sideboard, tearing open the flap as she climbed back up the stairs. By that time, Thomas was in bed, reading a William Gibson novel. Clara slipped the X-rays out of the envelope and spread them across the bed: spectral images of her reproductive organs. Thomas put down his book and watched her lay out the blue-black sheets as if she were a fortune teller with a deck of giant tarot cards. He looked a little bleary-eyed, maybe still buzzed, or maybe just tired.

  “So here they are,” she said. The X-rays had been taken at an imaging center in Newark and she was supposed to deliver them to the doctors at the fertility clinic they were using.

  “I know you tried to explain this to me a couple of days ago, but I'm still not quite getting it,” he said. “They think you might not be able to have another child because of the shape of your uterus?”

  He sometimes pretended to be dense to avoid dealing with difficulties, sometimes hid in his box scores and science fiction novels. Many men did. Perhaps he was still mad about being laughed at during dinner. Clara smiled as though speaking to a foreign dignitary. “Well, they think I could have a T-shaped uterus, which would make it hard for eggs to implant and increase the chances of a miscarriage.”

  He was looking closely at the X-ray images, the dark spaces inside her where they were hoping to create another life.

  “What shaped uterus are you supposed to have in order to bear children?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “But not that shape. I'm barren.”

  “Hold on a minute,” he said, wincing at the last word, which even she would admit was overdramatic. “There's a five-year-old in the next room that says otherwise. If you've got a T-shaped uterus or whatever, then how do they explain Gilly?”

  “A fluke,” she said. “We got lucky.”

  “What? He's some kind of miracle child?”

  “Basically.”

  “They're sure about this?”

  She shook her head. “No, they're not sure. They can't tell for certain from these X-rays and MRI scans. They need to do a hysteroscopy.”

  “Hysteroscopy?” he asked. “What the hell is that?”

  “It sounds worse than it is,” she said. Thomas's mother had been diagnosed with uterine cancer a couple of years before. It was in remission after a course of chemo and radiation therapy. His mother's illness and Clara's own fertility troubles meant that gynecology was not her husband's favorite topic and she was sometimes wary of discussing the subject with him. “They send a little telescope into my uterus to see its shape from the inside.”

  “Wow,” he said, “a telescope.” Glancing at the X-rays, he said, “These kind of do look like galaxies, like images from the Hubble.”

  “Deepspace vagina,” she said, and they both laughed, clearing away the tension. “It's like a fiberoptic cable they use. More like a microscope, I guess. They won't even think of letting us start IVF until I've had this done. We're lucky that this clinic does both evaluation and fertility, but if they're right about the T-shaped thing, we're going to have to think about adopting, because we won't be making any more babies.” She gathered up the X-rays. When she had them all, she slipped them back into the giant manila envelope and laid it on the floor on her side of the bed.

  “Doesn't it feel like ever since you started going to this clinic, getting pregnant is getting harder and harder, not easier and easier?” Thomas asked.

  She didn't answer. She was getting undressed, aware of him watching her.

  “I mean, it's just one hoop after another—first they had to get your thyroid levels sorted out, then there was the whole mess with the insurance.”

  “I know, Thomas. I know. But if we want to have another child, this is what we have to do.” She got into bed wearing a tank top and her panties. “I've scheduled the hysteroscopy for next week. I'll need you to give me a ride home.”

  “Of course,” he said, looking away, as if he'd been chastised.

  “They have to knock me out.”

  “I'll be there,” he said, and put his hand on her arm. “I'll be there,” he said again, soothingly. “And let's not jump to any conclusions. They obviously don't know for sure or they wouldn't be doing this hysteriaoscopy.”

  She smiled at him, liking his hand on her, the same hand that had struck Guillermo, she reminded herself, but that now seemed like an aberration, a result of this crazy day.

  “So, how did everything go at the airport?” he asked. “We haven't had a chance to talk about that yet.”

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” she said, and the image of Tito Moreno in the food court with a beautiful young child came into her mind. Tito Moreno, whose baby she had aborted when she was eighteen. Yes, what a crazy day. “We nearly missed her flight. And then Yunis started crying at the gate.”

  Thomas nodded, as if that were to be expected. “And Deysei? Do you think she's going to be all right?”

  “I don't know. To be honest, I think she's kind of glad to be away from her mother,” Clara said. She intended to keep her promise to Deysei and not tell Thomas that Raúl was the father—at least for a little while.

  “On some level I bet you're glad this happened, aren't you?” he said. “I mean, if the hysteroscopy comes back and they tell you you've got the wrong-shaped uterus, then you can just have Deysei's baby. Isn't that what you're thinking?”

  Whoa. His directness took her breath away. He wasn't hiding in his Gibson novel any longer. “If we can't have another baby, don't you think that's something worth considering?” said Clara.

  “No,” replied Thomas. “I don't want to raise someone else's child. I want to raise our child. And besides, like I said back when we first talked about Deysei coming to live with us, teenage girls are not exactly known for being stable, obedient, and cooperative. Now we've got a pregnant teenage girl living under our roof and you want to raise her child for her?”

  “I haven't even mentioned it to her. She needs to decide if she's going to keep it,” said Clara.

  “She should get rid of it,” he said.

  “Thomas! Come on!”

  “Wouldn't that make life simpler for everyone?”

  “For everyone except the unborn baby.”

  “When did you become so prolife, Clara?”

  “Maybe our problems have made me rethink a few things,” she said and sighed, thinking of Tito again. “Look, you know Deysei is basically a good kid. And she's never had a true father figure in her life. You can be that for her.”

  “I'm already a father figure to Guillermo. And right now I'm focused on trying to find another job,” he said.

  “Oh, really? You could have fooled me. How many interviews have you been on this month?”

  “Times are tough,” he said, “but I just applied for something that looks promising.” A long moment of frustrated silence followed, as Clara decided whether to believe him.

  “Thomas, I don't want to fight with you,” she said. The next thing that came out of her mouth surprised her as much as it did her husband: “In fact, what I really need you to do is fuck me.”

  Normally, she would have said something more playful: Are you feeling lucky tonight? or Want to get with some of this, big guy? But she was glad
she'd said it the way she did. That's what she needed and she was not in the mood to be subtle. Church's hadn't done it for her. Nor had putting her son to bed. She needed something more. She and Thomas had been making love with less frequency the last few months and it worried her. Thomas said that the visits to the fertility clinic, with its diagrams, its plastic scale models (plus, now, X-rays), and its clinical language of reproduction had turned him off. She didn't care. Not having sex was not going to help them conceive a child.

  Thomas took a moment to compose himself, as if remembering lines he'd memorized. “Turn off that light,” he said, at last. “And maybe we should try to keep it down. Deysei might be listening.”

  “Nothing we do will be news to her,” said Clara, reaching for the lamp.

  ASIDE FROM THE obvious sensual pleasure and the reassurance it gave her about her marriage, Clara loved sex with her husband because it returned her to the blissful early days of their relationship when they could not be in the same room without wanting to take each other's clothes off. Why, she wondered, could that passion not be sustained? Why did such irresistible attraction fade? It perplexed her. Was it merely novelty? She wanted always to feel about Thomas the way she'd felt when they had first met in library school; she wanted him always to feel that way about her.

  She had been twenty-five then. At the time, she was working as a paraprofessional in the law library of a large Midtown firm, filing supplements, shelving books, doing basic reference queries, acting as a translator for depositions, running down to the courts whenever needed. It was her second library job (during college, she'd worked parttime for an indexing service). Her employer offered tuition reimbursement and, with the encouragement of the head of the firm's library, Clara enrolled in Pratt's parttime program, which met evenings and weekends. Her first class, Introduction to Reference Resources, a kind of Librarianship 101 that was required of all the students in the program, was taught by a woman named Mrs. Molloy, an old-school librarian who, Clara thought, must have been chosen because she so thoroughly fit the received idea of what a librarian should look like—a drill sergeant of the Dewey Decimal System. Tall and slender, with short-cropped gray hair and half-moon glasses, she was dressed in a long beige skirt and a salmon-colored cardigan from which a high lace collar emerged. To go with this appearance, there was her demeanor: severe, proper, and responsible, with a devotion to her profession that verged on the ecclesiastic. Seeing Mrs. Molloy at the front of the room perusing a copy of Library Journal while she waited for her students to arrive, Clara was reminded of previous teachers she'd had in middle school and high school—all of them women—who had helped her overcome the difficulties of her childhood in Inwood. In fact, she viewed her library degree as the culmination of that process. In the two decades since she had been brought to the United States, Clara would have, with the help of these women, transformed herself from a terrified, picked on, barely literate, non-English-speaking immigrant to a self-sufficient, well-spoken, assimilated, professionally employed American. It was a matter of enormous pride for her.

  She got to that first class early and sat near the front. Four years removed from college, she was excited to be going back to school and excited to be learning new skills. On top of that, she held out the vague hope that she might meet someone. She'd had plenty of boyfriends in college, but it was clear from early on in each of those relationships that nothing long-lasting would come of them. Clara had been indiscriminate about her boyfriends' backgrounds, eager to experiment. There were broken hearts and hurt feelings, arguments and crying. More recently, she had gone out with one of the lawyers at the firm, a man in his late thirties who was just coming out of a divorce. He was decidedly more mature than the boys she'd been with in college but, maybe, too mature, and a little jaded. He had proposed to her after six months, a proposal she'd rejected. They broke up, and not long after that, he left the firm. She hadn't met the right person in college or at work. This is what her romantic aspirations had been reduced to—hoping she'd find a like-minded man in library school.

  By the time she got to the classroom, there were two other students already seated, a young black woman and an older guy who looked like he'd come from an off-track betting parlor. Clara inspected the rest of her classmates as they entered the room. They were a pleasingly varied group, some younger than her, but most older. The ratio seemed to be two-to-one in favor of women and two-to-one in favor of people over thirty. Some had clearly come from professional settings; they wore suits and carried briefcases. But more than a few had a just-gotten-out-of-bed-graduate-student look. Toward the end of this stream, there was a preppy guy wearing chinos, a white shirt, and a blue blazer. He had on Buddy Holly/ Clark Kent black-framed glasses and had a laptop bag on his shoulder. To Clara, he resembled one of the first-year associates at her firm, but without the cockiness. He surveyed the room and made eye contact with her—a brief moment of connection that caused her to blush—yeah, you caught me checking you out—before sitting down near the back. Clara wondered if it was as obvious to everyone else in the class as it was to her that, one way or another, she and this well-dressed young man were going to get together.

  The class was scheduled to start at 7:00, and at 7:01 Mrs. Molloy stood up and introduced herself, listing the positions she'd held at public and academic libraries in her long career. The students were then invited to introduce themselves, saying their names, where they worked, and what they hoped to do with their degree. Most in the group were changing careers to accommodate marriage and children; almost everyone cited a love of reading, a comment as obvious and unnecessary, Clara thought, as a beauty contestant's wish for world peace. Around the class the introductions went (“I'm a social studies teacher and I've been feeling burned out,” “I just got laid off from a job on Wall Street”) until, at last, “Thomas Walker. I just moved here from Boston, where I went to college. I'm temping right now. I'm not really sure yet what field I want to go into. Maybe something with archives.” When her turn turn came: “Clara Lugo. I'm from Queens. I work in a law library, but I'm not sure I want to spend my career in law. Archival work might be interesting.” The last part was a complete lie, but it seemed to get Thomas Walker's attention.

  Mrs. Molloy handed out the syllabus and talked through the semester's work with them. Each week they would be given a series of reference queries that they were required to answer using the resources discussed in the class: encyclopedias, directories, indexes, databases. “You may work alone, or with a partner, as you wish,” she said. She went over the assignment for the following week and dismissed them.

  Clara couldn't help but notice that Thomas Walker did not rush to leave the classroom like almost everyone else. He carefully packed his laptop back in its case, glancing her way now and then. She stood and walked slowly, self-consciously, to the exit. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress and low heels and was aware of the air on her shins as she walked along the corridor toward the elevator. The doors were closing on carload of her classmates and she let it go. Then she waited a moment before pushing the down button, just to be sure the doors of the crowded car would not reopen. The arrow lit up and she sensed his presence beside her.

  “It's Clara, right?”

  “Yes.” Turning, she looked right at the lapels of his blazer. He was taller than she'd thought. Then she looked up at his face. He was cleanshaven, had a smile with one tooth slightly darker than the rest. No errant hairs poking from his nostrils.

  “Did you say you already work in a library?”

  “A law library, yes.”

  “Well, I wonder if you'd like to be my study partner for this class?” He smiled. “I'm new to this and I think I could use all the help I can get.”

  “Oh,” she laughed. She was surprised and charmed by the self-deprecation. Very unlawyerlike. “Um. Sure. I work up near the SIBL. Do you want to meet there sometime this weekend to do the first assignment?”

  THEY BOTH SEEMED to know that it was as much a date as
a work session. They dressed better than they needed to, and they were both edgy. Clara was already familiar with many of the reference resources on the syllabus and did most of the research. Thomas assumed the role of scribe, typing both of their names atop the document on his laptop, filling out the description of how they'd looked up the gross domestic product of Mongolia, the patent number for Amazon's one-click purchase feature, the average age at which Californians got married, and the origin of the phrase “in a pickle.” When the assignment was completed, they went to a café nearby to talk and eat. And that was how it went for the rest of the semester, the homework for the class becoming, it was increasingly obvious, just a pretense for the date afterward.

  There was a lot to like about him. He was courteous. He listened. He was careful and precise. He showed restraint, both in advancing the physical side of things and in his inquiries about her background. Most guys were nosy and blundering. “So, what are you?” they asked. “Are you black?” In her own mind, Clara thought that, save for her modestly sized backside, she looked stereotypically Dominican. But she had learned from years of interacting with people who hadn't grown up around Dominicans that her ethnicity was not so obvious to many. On train platforms, other brown-skinned, dark-haired people came up to her and spoke to her in languages she did not recognize. An Indian attorney had once asked her if she was from Madras. “Another fifty pounds and you'd look Samoan,” she'd been told at a party in college. When she finally did reveal to Thomas where she was from, he laughed. “Aha!”

  “Why, what did you think?”

  “I didn't think. I was waiting for you to tell me.”

  “Come on, really, you must have had at least a guess.”

  “When I first saw you, I thought maybe Filipino or Brazilian, but when I heard your last name I didn't know what to think.”

  He'd gone to Boston College but had somehow ended up sharing a house with a group of engineers from MIT, and from them he had learned a lot about new technologies. Unlike most people she met in the library world, he was excited about what digital innovation might do for the profession.