Fran says very attentively, “Your wife can’t be with us, Jack?”
“No, Chris is not able to come,” Jack Bail says.
“Maybe next time,” Fran says. Chris somehow catches my eye without looking at me and somehow rolls her eyes without rolling them. Or so I imagine.
“Unfortunately we’re currently separated,” Jack Bail says.
This gives everyone pause. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ed says. Jack Bail says, “Yep, it’s not an ideal situation.”
Now Chris gets up and says, “We have assorted berries, and we have—chocolate cake. Jack’s favorite.”
“Do you have children, Jack?” Fran asks, which is surely a question whose answer she can figure out by herself. “We don’t,” Jack Bail says. “A couple of years back, we tried. You know, the IVF thing. Didn’t work out.” I’m refreshing the tableware at this point. Jack Bail says, “As a matter of fact, I just got this letter from the clinic demanding nine hundred dollars for my sperm.”
This silences even the Joyces.
Jack Bail continues, “So three years ago, as part of the whole process, we froze sperm. Yeah, so anyway, we go through the whole thing, an ordeal I guess you could call it, and this and that happens, and we forget all about the frozen sperm. Now here’s this invoice for nine hundred bucks because they’ve stored it all this time—or so they say. I call them up. I speak to a lady. The lady says they’ve sent letters every year informing me that they’re holding my sample. Letters? I don’t remember any letters. But first things first, right? Destroy it, I tell her. Get rid of it right away. She tells me that they can’t do that. First they need a notarized semen disposition statement.”
“OK, here we go,” Chris says. “Jack’s cake. And berries for anyone who might be interested.”
“Now, I know their game,” Jack Bail says. “I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to mail them the notarized statement and they’re going to say they never got it. And they’re going to make me go to a notary all over again and they’re going to make me mail them another statement and they’re going to drag this thing out. And every extra day they store it, they’re going to charge more, pro rata. See? They’re literally holding my sperm hostage.”
“Corporations,” Ed says. “Fran, doesn’t that—”
“Exactly,” Jack Bail says. “It’s not that the employees are evildoers. It’s the corporate systems. When it comes to receiving mail they don’t want to get, mail that reduces their profits, their systems are chaotic. When it comes to billing you, their systems are never chaotic. And I mean: retaining my genetic material without my consent? It’s insanely wrong. So—do you ever do this?—I tell her I’m an attorney and that I’ve got a bunch of hungry young associates who’ll be all over this shakedown like a pack of wolves.”
Ed says, “That would blow up in your face in Canada. We’re—”
“In the U.S. it’s different. In the U.S., you don’t register on their systems unless you threaten a lawsuit. That’s how they operate. Human reasonableness is just seen as an opening to make more money. So I said to Chris, Do you recall us ever getting a letter about a frozen sperm sample? She’s like, I don’t know, all those letters look the same. I’m like, Wait a minute, this is important, I want you to think hard. She’s like, I can’t do this, I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball. I’m like, What ball? This is the ball. I mean, think about it. My genes are in the hands of strangers. Never mind the nine hundred bucks. We’re talking about my seed. For all I know, I could have children out there in the world right now. Offspring. It’s far from impossible, right? Mistakes happen all the time. And foul play. People think that foul play doesn’t really exist. They’re wrong. Foul play is a very real thing, especially when there’s money to be made. Believe me, I know.”
Nobody has made a start on the cake or the assorted berries. I say to Jack Bail, “You’re right to be concerned. You have to take care of this.”
“That’s what I did, Doc. Cut a long story short, I caved on the nine hundred bucks and I went to the clinic personally with the documentation. I made sure to get a receipt.”
“That was smart,” Chris says.
Jack Bail says, “I had no option: I got a letter from a debt collection agency. I had to cave. What was I going to do, risk my credit over nine hundred bucks? No, I had to cave. And I don’t even know if they’ve actually disposed of the semen. I’ve got to assume they have. But I’ll never know for sure, will I?”
Jack Bail spends the night on our sofa. In the morning, when Chris and I go down, there is a thank-you note.
Then a year passes and with it a tax season, and we are walking on the beach, and I stop and I say to Chris, “You know what? We haven’t heard from Jack Bail.”
* * *
—
Our beach is a sand and shingle beach. The sand is a common blend of quartz and feldspar. The sand emerges from the ocean, so to speak, and continues inland until quite suddenly shingle replaces it. The shingle, or gravel, consists at first of pebbles, next of a mixture of pebbles and cobbles, and finally almost only of cobbles. This progressive distribution of the beach stones, apparently methodical, is in fact natural: a storm’s waves will force rocks small and large landward, but retreating waves have less power and will move only smaller rocks seaward. The result is a graduated stranding of the rocks, which amass in a succession of steep slopes and berms. Our beach walk begins by scrambling down one berm and then a second, and I always take care to hold Chris’s hand as we go down. Countless large spiders somehow make a life among the cobbles, and my job is to help Chris to put them out of her mind. Out of my mind, too. There are no leg-bugs out here. Leg-bugs are deer ticks. Every evening from May through November, Chris and I must examine each other for ticks. Sometimes we find one.
From the sand beach, the brown drumlin cliffs are exposed to our contemplation. The drumlins have been here since the Wisconsin glaciation. Their crosscut formation is the result of erosion by the ocean and the wind and the rain, a battering that is ongoing, I can testify after two winters here. As the hills retreat, they leave behind rock fragments that will, in due course, form part of the beach. This sort of fact is difficult for me to really understand; it must be said that much of my newly acquired geological knowledge is basically vocabularistic. I can’t recognize feldspar, for example, or a granitic boulder. The Wisconsin glaciation isn’t something I’m really on top of.
Chris and I scan the water, instinctively, I suppose. Sometimes we’ll see a seal’s head. It disappears for a while, then surfaces once more. They have large, cheerful, dog-like heads, these seals. It would feel good to see our warm-blooded kin out there today: this is one of those strolls when the up-close ocean daunts me more than a little, and as we skirt dainty rushes of water, I sense myself situated at the edge of an infinite and relentless eraser. I’m not sure that there’s much to be done about this: awe, dread, wonder, and feelings of asymmetry come with the terrain. There must be something appealing about it, or we’d be elsewhere. Where, though? It’s places that are going places. This part of Nova Scotia, the paleogeographers tell us, was once attached to Morocco.
“I hope he’s OK,” I say to Chris.
“I imagine he is,” she says. She says, “You could always call him.”
Yes, I could call him. But where would it end? I have taught, I once calculated, almost two thousand children.
No seal today. We keep walking. Chris says, “The Last Fez.”
I say, “About the Constantinople mission? We were sworn to silence about that.”
Chris says, “Remember that night we crossed the Bosporus? With that surly boatman?”
“Ali the boatman?” I say. “How could I forget?”
The World of Cheese
◇
It had never occurred to Breda Morrissey that things might go seriously wrong between herself and her son,
Patrick. But back in the fall he had declared her “persona non grata”—his actual expression—and pronounced that she was no longer permitted to have contact with her grandson, Joshua, on the grounds that she would be “an evil influence.” It was a crazy, almost unbelievable turn of events, and all about such a strange matter—a scrap of skin.
Patrick disputed this. “This is not about skin, Mom,” he said during the first session of the mother-son therapy they jointly underwent in New York. “Can’t you see? That’s not what this is about.”
Breda turned to the therapist, Dr. Goldstein—Dan, her son called him—for help. But Dr. Goldstein, whose dramatic beard and small pointy nose gave him, Breda thought, the look of a TV judge, was regarding her so severely that Breda was silenced.
Breda’s reliving of this moment, as she sat in a window seat on the flight back to California, was interrupted by a nudge—a barge, almost—from her neighbor. This person was an obese woman of Breda’s own age, mid-fifties, who from moment one had been tangling and fidgeting with carry-on luggage and safety instruction documents and in-flight entertainment gadgets. “Sorry,” the woman breathed, continuing her struggle with the wires of her earphones. At the woman’s other elbow, in the aisle seat, sat a littler person in a red sweater, a man. When drinks were served, the fat woman, as Breda thought of her, wordlessly helped herself to the little man’s mini-pretzels packet. Breda understood with revulsion that they were a couple.
She looked out the window. An immense cloud floor covered the bottom of the void. Brilliant stacks of white vapor rose here and there, and pink haze lay beneath the blue upper atmosphere. It was a glorious, otherworldly spectacle of the kind that Breda, when she was a girl, would have found suggestive of winged horses and unknown realms; but what it came down to, when you grew up and looked through it all, Breda thought, was rain, rain falling on the fields and the forests and the houses and the people.
Breda kept gazing out. Something about the bumpy spread of cloud reminded her of cottage cheese, which in turn reminded her: Patrick had developed an interest in, as he put it, the world of cheese. During her stay, her son had each evening approached the dinner table with a cheeseboard, making bugling and fanfare noises. “Try this one, Mom,” he said, pointing to one of the half-eaten, slightly stinking varieties, and Breda, who wondered whether these foodstuffs were legal, took a mouthful. “Nice,” she said, refraining from any other comment—for example, that Patrick was obviously gaining weight as a result of his new hobby—for fear of provoking another outburst on his part. (And of course his wife, Judith, would no doubt be touchy, too. Everybody was touchy these days.) One night, Patrick announced that he and Judith and baby Joshua were taking a cheesing trip to Ireland. The plan was to go to the Kinsale International Gourmet Festival and then to drive from farmhouse to farmhouse, tasting semisoft rind-washed cheeses. “I’m not interested in hard cheeses,” her son said importantly. If they found the time, he said, they’d drive up to County Limerick and maybe look up whoever was left of the ancestral Morrissey family.
“That’ll be nice,” Breda said.
In the early seventies, she and Patrick’s father, Tommy, had taken the kids to a wonderful-sounding but actually sour-looking village near the Shannon River, and had met remote Morrissey cousins of his, amorphous types who led unimaginable existences in cheap modern homes at the edge of the village and were nonplussed by their visitors. As she looked down at the clouds, Breda recalled two big things about that trip: it had rained the whole time, and everywhere they ran into people named Ryan. “It’s raining Ryans,” Tommy joked. “It’s Ryaning hard.”
Tommy, who a week after Patrick’s wedding quit his biotech job and ran away to Costa Rica with the German woman. Packing his bags, he was the wronged furious one. “You make me feel like I’m vermin,” he said, scrunching into his suitcase underpants Breda had just ironed. “With Ute I can bring up anything, absolutely anything. I can be anything. Jesus, I never knew what it was to feel alive. To think I’ve wasted all these years being made to feel a jerk, a creep. You want to know what we talked about last night? We talked about cunts I have known. Cunts I have known. How they smell differently, how they’re shaped differently, how they behave differently. Including your cunt. Oh yes. Do you know how special that is? Do you realize the level of trust and intimacy that takes?” On and on he went, appalling her. He began to shout. “Remember when I was alone in the Ukraine? All alone in that goddamn hotel and I get on the phone to my wife, my fucking wife, my one and only partner till death do us fucking part, and I asked you to say something for me, something with feeling, something that might connect us, anything at all. I’m not telling you to scrub floors or stick your hand in a pile of shit. I’m not ordering you to do anything. I’m asking. I’m begging for a sentence or two, that’s all, just a few words, words a husband is entitled to expect from his wife. What do I get? Nothing! ‘You know I don’t do that kind of thing, Tommy.’ That kind of thing? I’m howling for a drink in the fucking desert and you give me that shit? Well, fuck you, you uptight daddy’s girl.”
Breda was reexperiencing this horrifying episode because something about her son’s recent harangues had put her in mind of his father.
* * *
—
As for the daddy’s girl taunt, that went back forty years, to 1967, the year Breda traveled to Notre Dame for Tommy’s graduation. Notre Dame was so Catholic and male that people on campus mistook her for a nun. After the ceremony, she and Tommy—they’d met six months before, at a wedding in Newport—set off on a cross-country drive to San Francisco. The plan was to return east in the fall so that Breda herself could start college. She started to feel sick just west of the Indiana border. At first she thought it was the weed they’d been smoking, or maybe carsickness, but by the time they reached Missouri she knew she was pregnant. To celebrate, she and Tommy drove on to Reno and got married. When Breda rang home, her father answered the phone. He was a Boston lawyer. He found the whole thing—the trip to California, the jokey shotgun wedding, the long-distance pay phone shenanigans, the premarital sex—shocking. “Goddamn punk bullshit,” he said, and hung up with a sob. When Breda tearfully redialed, her mother answered. “You’ll have to forgive your father, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s just that these things have consequences. Maybe that’s something you can’t really understand at your age.”
Breda patched things up with her parents, who came to see that she had married Tommy out of a sense of responsibility and not out of romantic whimsy. “It’s a wonderful thing,” Dad said when she became a mother. “And you’re a wonderful girl.”
Siobhan was born in the spring of 1968. Patrick came along two years later, named by Tommy for his father even though, to hear Tommy tell it, Grandpa Pat had barely acknowledged his own son. “He’d treat you like you’d treat a dog: ruffle your hair, take you for a walk in Van Cortlandt Park.” This conversation took place one night soon after her father-in-law’s death in 1975, when Tommy and she lay in the darkness of their Santa Barbara bedroom. “The best thing about Dad was he was a terrific whistler,” Tommy whispered. “Oh, Jesus, he could whistle. He’d stick a thumb or pinkie in his mouth and shoot out this real earsplitter. He stopped taxis like they do in the movies.” Tommy, shifting on his side, said, “You ever hear me whistle?”
“I think so,” Breda said. “Sure.”
“He taught me,” Tommy said in a low voice. “He taught me how, Breda.” His shoulder started to tremble, and Breda touched it.
Grandpa Pat was a New Yorker and passed his last years in a Midtown residential hotel. After his death they found his room filled with pepper shakers and salt shakers taken from the diners and bars in which he’d whiled away his days. Tommy displayed the shakers on a shelf at home. “Some families inherit sterling silver, others stolen restaurant utensils,” he said. Later he asked Breda to box away the shakers because they made him think of the sands of time
and depressed the hell out of him.
After Tommy disappeared to Costa Rica, Breda stayed put in the matrimonial home in Santa Barbara, unclear about where things stood. When it became apparent that her husband wasn’t returning, she sold up and moved into an apartment in Atherton to be near Siobhan. Siobhan had urged the move. But within a year, Siobhan and her family headed east to Alexandria, Virginia. “Well, that’s how it goes, I guess,” Breda said when her daughter broke the news. “If you have to go, you have to go.” Breda stayed in Atherton, working as an administrator for a medical practice. She took a weekly (and straightforward and pleasant) call from her son, and a biweekly (and difficult and tetchy) call from her daughter. Inevitably the latter put her through to the grandchildren. She called their names down the line and listened for a response. “Talk to Grandma,” an adult instructed in the background. Then a child’s voice, small and stubborn and distinct: “Don’t want to.”
Good Trouble Page 3