by Neil Hetzner
“You’re very welcome, I’m sure. Goodbye, Daddy. I’ll know if you forget.”
“Forget what?”
“My night-night kiss, silly.”
“Okay.”
Bill was still reviewing how poor his planning had been when Nita appeared in the doorway. He started to get up from her chair. She shook her head before sitting down in one of the two chairs that faced the desk.
“Quite a surprise.”
Bill wanted to switch seats. He knew he would be more comfortable if he could be looking at Nita sitting in her own chair. If she would change seats, he was sure he would know how to begin to explain what he needed her to know. If he were sitting in the other chair, the client’s chair, he was sure his throat would not be so dry and the sharp heat he was feeling at the pivot points of his jawbone would cool down enough that he could speak.
As she stared at her petrified brother-in-law, Nita remembered a phone call she had received on a Sunday morning several weeks before. A stranger had picked her name from the yellow pages. He was in jail. He needed someone to arrange bail. His father was out of town. His family had just been through bankruptcy so there wasn’t any ready cash around. However, as he assured Nita, his family would be good for the money, but he needed her to front him the ten percent to get him out. Nita had told him politely that she never handled criminal matters and then hung up. The thing that had recalled the memory was that several times in their brief conversation the stranger had said, “Look, I’ve got a situation down here.” As she looked at Bill, Nita waited for those same words to be spoken and wondered whether her answer would have to be the same.
Bill indicated the piles of paper with a small wave of his hand.
“Looks like you’re pretty busy. Am I keeping you?”
“No, it’s always this way. In fact, I’m in pretty good shape. Long hours equals small piles. I was in an office today, a huge office, three times this one, that had so many piles of paper on the floor that I needed an Astaire to dance me through. What’s up?”
“I was in the area.”
“You said.”
“I thought I’d stop in.”
“I’m glad.”
After each response Nita left the space between them remain empty. She had learned in her first year of practice that silence often was the best interrogator. She watched Bill struggle to find the catalyst he needed to begin.
“Dilly’s fine. The kids, too.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s who I called. To let them know I’d be late.”
“Do you have a meeting?”
A spasm of something Nita thought looked more like pain than guilt spread across Bill’s face and then disappeared.
“You okay?”
“Not quite. I had a procedure.”
Nita tried to keep her face balanced between a non-committal look and concern.
“Mmmmmm.”
Bill twisted in the chair to get away from some discomfort.
“Can I talk to you?”
Nita nodded
“Mmmmmm.”
“Times are tough. You know that.”
Bill was unclear how his opening was going to get him where he wanted to go. He backtracked.
“Remember three, four years ago? Dukakis. Ma$$achu$ett$ miracle. Always used dollars signs for the ss. Everybody getting rich. And now, now. It happened so quickly. I’m seeing people at work, good people, get laid off all the time. I tell Dilly, but she doesn’t seem to want to understand. I’m forty. She doesn’t work. Jessie will be in college in six more years. Then Kate. Then Roger. Then what?”
The last was said so emphatically that Nita was sure it wasn’t rhetorical, yet it wasn’t obvious what answer Bill expected.
“It goes fast.”
Bill nodded, pleased that she understood.
“I have to think of everybody. Nobody gets to have everything they want. There are limits. Things have to be planned. We have to manage things. A family’s like a business.”
Nita nodded.
Bill pushed back from the desk before slumping back down in the chair.
“Someone has to manage it. Dilly does a great job, you know that, I know that, with today and tomorrow. There’s no argument there. And she’s always thinking about everybody’s health, right?”
“Mmmmmm.”
“But you can’t have one without the other. You’ve got to have both, right?”
“The other being?”
Bill stared at Nita in disappointment. He wondered when she had drifted away from him. He shook his head at the Koster women’s inability to follow a train of thought. He had come here because he thought that Nita was different.
“The money.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Where’s the money? I’m forty. I’m fifty-five, at least, before Roger graduates from college. I’m sixty-one before the mortgage is paid off. If we have a baby right now I’m sixty-two before it’s out of college.”
“Dilly wants another baby?”
Bill’s head jerked up and down in angry affirmation. At the instant he realized he was driving to Nita’s, he had been positive, despite their years of vague relations and infrequent conversation, that she would understand the situation. He was sure he had made a good decision when he discovered she used a data base and kept a clean desk. But, now, he was growing angry that she was making him take so many words. He suspected that, like Dilly, she was being consciously obtuse.
“You don’t?”
Bill nodded.
“You’ve talked?”
Again, a nod.
“No resolution?”
A slow shake of Bill’s head.
“It’s causing problems?”
As he nodded Bill felt his sense of well-being begin to return. Perhaps she did understand.
“Big or little?”
“Pretty big.”
“Divorce big?”
“Maybe. But, I don’t really think so.”
“I couldn’t represent you. Conflict of interest. Is that what we’re talking about?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Vasectomy.”
As he heard himself say the word, Bill thought it sounded like a race car speeding past him.
“Lot of my clients have had one. Easy. Simple. Pretty safe. Not too many mistakes. Take away the worry. Have you talked to Dilly about it?”
Bill shook his head sadly. Nita was completely missing the point of what he was saying. He wondered why the Koster women had so much trouble understanding him. The throbbing in his groin made him shift his legs to try to find some comfort.
“We talked for months. We got nowhere. There’s no room for compromise. There’s no mid-point between a baby and no baby. You can’t keep it for ten years and then give it away. In business there are fixed and variable costs. In the short run almost everything is fixed. In the long run everything is variable. Not a baby. It’s a fixed cost for at least twenty-two years and probably more. I don’t want that. I can’t do that. I don’t want to be sixty-five with no money but social security. That’s no way to live. In business you’re supposed to keep prudent reserves. If we have another baby that wouldn’t happen.”
“What if Dilly worked?”
“She doesn’t want to work. She wants a baby. She wants to take care of something, but for some reason, the three kids and me and the house and the yard aren’t enough. I thought the same thing. I thought a job might take up that need. If it were the right job. I’ve asked her about working a couple of times. Told her a job would be good for her. I know Lise told her she should think of going back to school. Get her degree, then, teach. Then she’d have plenty to take care of. We talked about it several times, but she kept insisting that it had to be a baby. I can’t do it.”
“So, you’re thinking you want a vasectomy?”
Bill slapped the tops of his thighs in frustration and instantly regretted it.
“No, dammit. Jesus!”
His nose began to burn as his thoughts cauterized it. Nita’s concerned stare slipped out of focus as his eyes welled with tears.
“Had one. Did it. Just had one.”
Bill patted his legs.
Nita’s silence was from wonderment rather than strategy.
“I just came from the doctor. I couldn’t go home. It’s too early. I didn’t know where to come. For some reason I thought I could come here.”
Although he had been frustrated when Nita had failed to understand him, now that her look indicated that she finally did, Bill felt more fear than relief. He tried to shrink himself around his pain better to withstand whatever attack she might make. He brushed the tears from his eyes so that he could watch hers more carefully.
After what to Bill seemed like a very long intermission, Nita finally found her voice.
“I’m glad you did. There’re tissues in the top left drawer. Are you okay in that chair? There’s the sofa in the reception room. Or you could come to my place and lie down.”
Nita looked at Bill’s body twisted tight against the potential surprise of pain, like something horrible jumping out from a closet, and thought of how many times she had sat there in the same situation. She had a strong urge to leave her chair, to go round behind her desk, and to put her arms around this strange, inarticulate, naive man.
“Do you feel okay? Does it hurt?”
“Pretty tender. A lot of swelling. They kept me iced for four hours.”
Nita laughed.
“That’s short compared to what Dilly’s probably going to do.”
Bill was too surprised at Nita’s levity to be hurt by it.
“She’s going to be ripped.”
Nita now understood why Bill had come to her. He had wanted to test the reception of his action upon one of the Koster sisters before presenting it to another.
“Actually I can’t guess what she’ll do. I guess I knew she wanted another kid. I think Mom told me. But I figured it was one of her passing fancies. Like with diet things. She’s pretty scattered. This is a tough one though. What you did is very confrontational. You might have been better off telling her, ‘The discussion is ended. This is what I’m going to do.’ Plus it’s tougher because of Mom. Of all of us, I think Dilly is the most upset about Mom. Having a baby, being pregnant, might have been her way of pushing back her fears.
“I hear a lot of stories sitting over there where you are. A lot of reasons why people have babies. A lot of couples start a baby to try to save a marriage. Some have one to prolong their lives or to make their lives more valuable, more meaningful. Just a few months ago I had a couple in here with a Down’s Syndrome baby that had just turned three. The parents were thinking of having a second kid so the first would have a guardian when they died. They wanted to know whether there was anything they could do legally with a will or trust to be sure the younger kid took care of the other one.
“God, Bill, what do you think she’s going to do?”
Bill looked down at the hands in his lap which were tightly clasped together as if in supplication.
“I don’t know. When I thought about the operation, I’d try to think about what her response would be, but I couldn’t get my thinking far enough along that anything became clear. Very angry?”
“Maybe, betrayed?”
“Yes, I guess, maybe, betrayed. But one of the reasons I did it secretly was I was afraid that she’d betray me.”
“How?”
“By getting pregnant. By getting off the pill and not telling me.”
“You really think Dilly would do that?”
“Yes, I do. I did. Don’t you?”
Nita knew Bill could be right. Dilly drove decisively toward those things that she considered right, which just happened, almost always, to be things that served her own interests. After a few seconds thought, it was easy for Nita to agree that Dilly might secretly stop taking her contraceptives. What was more difficult was to guess how she might respond to the vasectomy.
“Did you consider that you two might end up divorced over this?”
“A little, but I couldn’t see how she could support herself. I figured she’d have to stay, and after a while we’d work it out. We’re just making it on what I earn. Even if a judge gave her half, she couldn’t make the house payments.”
The tenderness that Nita had felt for Bill was instantly replaced with anger.
“Let me clue you in on something, Bill. A half-drunk shambly Irish lawyer could get more than half. Plus, given the MBA you’re getting and your work habits, there’s a good chance that you could be making substantially more in three to five years. Right? Isn’t that why you work so hard? Because you think it’s going to lead to something?”
“Yes.”
“I’d ballpark you’re making close to sixty. Even if the courts gave her only thirty, that’s enough to live on with a good chance there’d be more soon.”
Bill’s face expressed disbelief.
“How?”
“How? Shit, who knows how. I haven’t had to do it, so I don’t know how. What I do know is I’ve had dozens and dozens of single mothers in here with a couple of kids living on less than twenty grand a year. I said earlier Dilly is very scattered. She is. But if she decides to make something happen, it’s close to a sure bet it’s going to happen.”
Nita’s irritation pushed her out of the chair. She began to reshape the piles of paper on the credenza.
“Look, Bill. I feel for you. You work hard, very hard. You’ve tried to make a good life for Dilly and the kids. I can understand why you’d like some assurances that your hard work is going to pay off, not just for your wife and kids, but also for you. It’s easy to imagine you driving home in heavy traffic and trying to keep the aggravation away by thinking, ‘Some day.’ Some day, something. What? Who knows. A cottage on Winnepausaukee, or a place on the Cape, or bass fishing in Florida, or a trip to Europe or the islands or, maybe, just a trip down to the basement to have a quiet morning playing with a saw and drill. I know all about that.
“From fifteen to twenty-five I kept saying, ‘Someday. Something.’ You’ve already probably done it for ten years, and you seem to have accepted that you’re going to have to do it for another twenty. That’s admirable.
“But having you say you think Dilly couldn’t leave because of money rips me. Men get so arrogant about the power of their pay. They think that check gives them carte blanche. They’re very wrong. My job is to prove that to them. Just let me warn you that regardless of what you make, it is not sufficient or insufficient enough to hold Dilly against her will. If what you’ve done today is so big a deception that she can’t absorb it, she can have you cleaned, dried and put on a shelf in less time than it takes to have a baby. Don’t blind yourself, Bill.
“There. That’s out. I’m done. Let’s go to my house. You can lie down and put some ice on it.”
Bill was too scared not to nod his head in agreement.
* * *
It was after midnight before Bill turned off the ignition and coasted the car toward the black maw beyond the open garage door. Except for the porch light, the house was dark. His groin protested as he climbed the steps to the back door. Bill stood in the rare comfort of a quiet kitchen as he tried to decide what to do next. His original plan had been to announce his actions to Dilly as they prepared for bed. He had envisioned her looking up from a book to see him walking toward the bed with a garish bruise rising over the top of his new white briefs. She would ask and he would tell her that he had taken decisive action to gain control of his, their, future. She would be shocked into silence. He would enter the bed, coolly comfort her, and go to sleep her master. That plan, which had felt so good, had been declared a fool’s dream by Nita. It was gone. It had been replaced with nothing beyond a strong, brain-constricting sense of incumbent danger.
Bill stood shoeless in the kitchen’s black wishing his mind would formulate a plan. Nothing came. Afraid to mount the stairs, he mad
e up a nest in the family room from couch, coat and coverlet. Insistent fear and persistent discomfort from both the surgery and trying to sleep on the too-short couch kept him awake. He had been awake for almost an hour when Dilly quietly padded down the stairs. Her worried look switched off as he told her where he had been and what he had done. His groin curled itself tight against her anger, but it need not have done so as she stood listening with a blank face and an inert body.
When Bill had finished his jumbled recitation, Dilly asked him three questions. Did he need ice? Did he want to come to bed? Was he planning on going to work in the morning? A confused but relieved Bill said yes to all three.
In the morning, even though Bill was careful to lock the door, as he cautiously washed his tender flesh, he wished that the shower curtain were clear so that nothing could surprise him.
Chapter 26
Ellen had just brought Bett home from the Ek’s Garden Center. After Ellen pulled away, Bett put a pot of water on for tea. She had a decision to make. The Japanese black pines, which had been planted all along the Rhode Island coast, were dying. In the same way as the blight which had destroyed the American chestnut trees at the turn of the century and the Dutch elm disease which had killed millions and millions of trees in the 1950s and 1960s, an incurable disease was wiping out the long-needled, fantastically twisted pines. Greg, the arborist at Eks, had told Bett there was a palliative treatment which would, at best, keep an infected tree alive for one more year. Three of the more than two dozen trees around the house were already showing the yellowing needles that indicated their sickness. Bett had to decide whether to nurse the sick trees or take them down and hope that that would delay the disease’s spread to the other trees.
As she stood in the kitchen waiting for her tea water to boil, Bett looked at one of the victims. The firework bursts of needles at the end of the top branches were yellow. In some of the lower branches there were patches where all of the needles were brown. Under the tree were more fallen needles than would be expected after a mild winter. Bett tried to picture the tree with all of its needles gone. The tree rose almost forty feet from four ten inch round boles. Five feet from the ground one of the boles had a limb as big as itself growing out at a right angle. That bough went straight out for fifteen feet before sending a smaller branch straight up into the air. Another trunk had an equal-sized branch loop down to the ground in a huge horseshoe, where it had rooted itself, before continuing on its erratic way. It was if the tree hadn’t been able to decide if it wanted more sunlight or earth. The third bole had matching branches extending in outstretched arms. The fourth trunk rose up twenty feet before it branched. Bett smiled as she remembered Ellen saying that she liked black pines because they did as they pleased.