by Susan Rieger
Susanna’s crying ebbed. “Do you have a tissue?” she said, catching her breath.
“We need to talk,” Sam said, handing her his handkerchief. “And we need to eat.”
—
Andrew had called Susanna the day after Sam moved out. Susanna couldn’t tell if he was looking for sympathy, for someone to blame, or for Sam. Probably all three, she decided. Susanna was kinder than she wanted to be. Almost against her will, she found herself murmuring words of support. “It’s very sad. I’m so sorry.” He was in pain. He even cried at one point. What a schmuck, she thought. Andrew wanted to know if Susanna knew anything about the breakup. “No,” Susanna said. “I haven’t seen or spoken to Sam in a few weeks.” She went on, leaking irritation, “No doubt he wanted to wrestle with this decision by himself.” Susanna never heard from or saw Andrew again. Some weeks later, she asked Sam how Andrew was doing, out of curiosity tinged with politeness. “I don’t know how he is,” Sam said, “or where he is.” Susanna winced. Sam’s cruelty had at one time come as a surprise; lately, it came only as disappointment. Had he really been like that all along, the result of growing up the middle of five boys? Or was it peculiar to his relationship with Andrew?
Andrew disappeared from all their lives, like a drowning man beneath the waters. Every so often one of them might ask Sam how he was doing. Sam would shrug and shake his head. Eleanor almost expected him to say “Andrew who?” It troubled her, as it troubled Susanna.
“If you don’t want to talk about it,” Eleanor said, “I understand, but I’m curious. What happened?” A month had passed since Sam had moved out. They were having dinner together at the Café, downstairs from Eleanor’s apartment.
“I was tired of him. I was bored with him,” Sam said. He looked tired to Eleanor, as if he hadn’t slept well in months. “The second seven-year itch, worse than the first. I’d ask you if that was someone—I mean, something—you ever experienced if I wanted to know. But I don’t.”
Eleanor thought back to year fourteen of her marriage: 1975. She looked at her middle son, her outlier. She wished Rupert were here to talk to.
“I often ask myself what Dad would say,” Sam said. Eleanor smiled. He had often seemed to her to have a direct line to her thoughts, some of her thoughts. “I remember him saying,” Sam said, “ ‘What’s most important to you? Do that. And don’t give up on it too soon or too easily.’ ”
“I can understand you wanted to leave,” Eleanor said. “I don’t understand why you’re acting as though he never mattered. He was in your life, and our lives too, for years.” She paused. “I’m on your side, whatever your reasons for leaving.”
Sam asked the waiter for a scotch. He wanted his mother on his side for his reasons, not whatever reasons. The waiter brought him a double.
Looking down at his drink, Sam spoke softly, almost as if he didn’t want his mother to hear. “Andrew was the first. Freshman year. He was my TA. We were at a party. I was drunk. So was he. So he said.”
“And?” Eleanor said.
“You don’t set up housekeeping for fourteen years with your first.” He stopped. “I’m being stupid. You married the only man you had sex with—after you were married.”
“Did I?”
Sam sat up straighter. “What?”
“You’re moving sideways,” Eleanor said.
“You never liked Andrew,” Sam said.
“Didn’t I?” Eleanor said.
“Oh, for chrissakes, Mom, answer a question,” Sam said.
Eleanor looked at him, showing no anger, no annoyance, no sympathy. Sam started to speak, then stopped. He took a swallow of scotch.
“Sorry,” he said. “You don’t like loaded questions.”
“No,” she said.
“Sometimes I think you and Dad were too respectful of our privacy, not asking questions other parents might ask,” he said.
“When was this, upper school? Earlier? Later?”
“Middle school through college,” he said.
“Would it have made a difference?” she said.
“Probably not,” he said.
“We worried sometimes,” she said. “Even after college.”
Sam looked sharply at her.
“Dad told me about running into you on Houston Street.”
Sam could feel the vein in his neck pulsing. He had been walking with a man, not Andrew, their arms around each other’s waist. His father was almost upon him by the time Sam saw him. Sam nodded and walked past. Rupert nodded back. Sam was twenty-nine then, back in New York finally, after Princeton and New Haven, chafing at domesticity.
“Joe Macy,” he said. “Two years. After the first seven years with Andrew.”
“One of Bill Macy’s boys?”
Sam nodded. “He was a class ahead of me at Trinity. I didn’t know he was gay; I should have. He starred in all the musicals. He didn’t know I existed.”
—
Susanna was limp in Sam’s arms. Briefly, he had a Rhett Butler fantasy of swooping her up in his arms and carrying her away, to safety. Where the hell did that come from? he wondered. He walked her to the sofa, settling her there with pillows and covering her with a blanket. “Rest,” he said. “I’ll get dinner on.” He laid the table, using cloth napkins and place mats. He moved a bowl of flowers from the mantel to the table. He transferred the food to serving dishes. He lit the candles. He put on music, Brahms’s Requiem. He brought her a glass of cold Arneis. “Drink this,” he said. “Slowly.” Susanna took a sip.
“How do you know to do all that?” Susanna asked.
“I watched Andrew,” he said.
“Rascal,” she said. She smiled at him for the first time, with a look of the old fondness.
“It’s the first drink I’ve had in weeks,” she said. Her smile faded; she looked stricken. “Was that it?” she asked. “All the drinking I did in college and after? Or the drugs?”
At Princeton, Susanna had very briefly tried a very narrow range of drugs: marijuana, Adderall, ecstasy. She didn’t care for any of them and had gone cold turkey by the end of freshman year. A friend of a friend had asked if she was a Mormon. Susanna preferred alcohol, sweet drinks that made her drunk in an hour, whiskey sours, margaritas, vodka punches, daiquiris. She would have liked cosmos, but by the time Sex and the City hit the airwaves she had left cocktails behind for wine.
“You didn’t miscarry because of drink or drugs,” Sam said. “There are dozens of reasons women miscarry. Often very good reasons.” He wanted to move off the topic of drink and drugs, drugs especially. He didn’t want to spook Susanna; he didn’t want her worrying about his genetic material. His drug taking, like others who would become doctors, had been catholic and irresponsible. Most of it had been at Princeton but some he kept up through his twenties. He had never injected heroin, he drew the line there, but he had tried almost everything else. He hadn’t liked meth; he had used coke only on weekends in social situations; he preferred Percocet to Oxycontin; he loved hallucinogens, especially LSD. He had smoked weed almost every day sophomore year, until his adviser said he was getting a reputation in the department as a druggie. “Does Harry know?” his adviser asked. He had been Harry’s sophomore adviser, also Will’s. Sam recognized a threat when he heard it. Harry had never used, and took a hard line against all drugs. Sam thought he would tell their parents if he knew. Sam didn’t care about his Princeton reputation, only his West Sixty-Seventh Street one. He stopped smoking during the week. He spent the weekends stoned, avoiding Will. The other boys were comparatively abstemious. Will had done a little cocaine. It was hard to close a deal in Hollywood in the ’80s and ’90s without doing a line. Jack smoked weed, one or two tokes a night. He didn’t drink. Tom had had a bad trip with marijuana brownies sophomore year. He became paranoid. He called Sam in a panic. Sam stayed on the phone with him through the night, telling him the next morning he shouldn’t do drugs. Sam was in his first year of medical school. Tom took his advice as he would a doctor’s
. Sam saw it as the dawn of his bedside manner.
“The good news is you got pregnant,” Sam said. “You’ll get pregnant again. You’re not to worry. I have a doctor friend at Mount Sinai, a top-notch fertility specialist and a class human being. He’ll make sure you get your baby, whoever the dad is.”
“I like women gynecologists,” Susanna said.
“For fertility, the best ones are men. The only ones are men. A kind of Frankenstein impulse to create life. Women already create life. They don’t have the same test-tube urges. Trust me on this.”
“I have a D and C tomorrow,” Susanna said.
“I know,” Sam said. “I’ll take you. Three thirty, right?” Susanna nodded. It had been so long, maybe forever, she thought, since someone had taken care of her. She started to cry again.
Sam took her hand, the way his father had taken his mother’s, those times when his emotions got the better of him. “I’ll be the second-best father ever, if you give me a chance.”
Susanna didn’t say anything.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Is it AIDS, HIV?” he asked.
Susanna didn’t say anything.
“I was planning to get tested. I’ll show you the results.”
“OK,” she said.
“Was Charles the father?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Joe?”
She shook her head again. Sam didn’t care about Charles. He could push him out. He would have been jealous of Joe.
“Who was it?” he asked.
“Parthenogenesis,” she said.
—
Sam called a Realtor the next morning. “I want two apartments, good-sized, next to each other. A large, rambling, five- or six-bedroom apartment that could be divided in two would also work. Maybe one that belonged to Orthodox Jews. I need two kitchens, or the possibility of two. Each apartment should have at least two bedrooms, preferably three. At least two bathrooms in each and a powder room too. Washer-dryer connections in both. Dining rooms if possible; if not possible, then large living rooms. Southern exposures desirable. Doormen. Live-in super. Elevator. West Village or Gramercy or West End Avenue between Seventy-Second and Ninety-Second. Fourth to eighth floors. Decent condition preferred. Can you do it for three million? How long would it take to find this?”
After speaking with his Realtor, Sam called his lawyer, a junior partner at Maynard, Tandy. Sam asked for a brief tutorial on real estate law and child support. The partner was, as Sam expected, disapproving. Sam got annoyed, the spirit of his father coursing through his body. “I didn’t ask for advice,” he said, the way his dad might. “I asked for information.” As with Rupert, the young partner regressed. “I’m sorry, sir.” Sam wondered if he’d have to change lawyers, the humiliation this one now no doubt was feeling being almost complete. Why couldn’t he just say, “Right”? Sam thought. Sam apologized for being so short-tempered. “Thanks for your help.”
Sam next called Susanna. She was at her office. “I’ll take off tomorrow to mourn,” she said.
“Would you please meet me for lunch?” Sam said. “I mean, not for lunch. For Perrier. You can’t eat. Twelve thirty at Coogan’s Bar. I have a proposition. I’d like you to hear it.” Susanna agreed.
Sam called his internist, another old pal from medical school, to schedule a checkup. “Also an AIDS test,” he said.
“Do you need that?” his doctor asked. “I did one five years ago.”
“I need one,” Sam said.
“Shit, Sam,” his doctor said.
“No, it’s not what you think. I broke up with Andrew,” Sam said. “I want to be a sperm donor, a father really, for Susanna’s baby.”
“You both need to go for genetic counseling,” his doctor said. “Unmarried couples don’t do well with surprises.”
Sam was early at Coogan’s. Both his parents were punctual, to a fault he had often thought, and both had insisted on the boys being punctual. Even Jack learned to be on time some of the time; his parents would cancel his trumpet lesson if he was late for school more than twice in a week. If any of them was late for dinner—dinner was a command performance most nights, seven o’clock with five minutes’ grace, like the theatre—he had a cheese sandwich in the kitchen. Once, there was a palace revolution. They all tripped in at seven thirty. They found the dinner table cleared. Eleanor was in the kitchen putting out the ingredients for cheese sandwiches on the counter. “See you later,” she said. She and Rupert went downstairs to the Café. The next night she served cheese sandwiches for dinner. “If you’re going to be late,” she said, “I don’t see the point of serving a proper dinner.” The revolution was suppressed. Changing tactics, the boys would tease Eleanor for being so rigid, comparing her to her mother. “Bah. Water off a duck’s back,” Eleanor would say. “Granny is not always wrong. Some standards are worth holding to. Being on time is respectful of other people’s time. Being late is disrespectful.” Rupert backed her up. “Don’t be rude unless you intend it,” he said. “Don’t waste capital needlessly.” In his last year with Andrew, Sam had been late all the time, sometimes as much as an hour. He’d be early for Susanna.
Susanna showed up five minutes later, also early. “Mom got to you too, I see,” Sam said.
Susanna laughed. “If it wasn’t for your parents, I’d be totally uncouth, still slouching, eating with my mouth open, not standing up when I met someone, doing that silly fork-hand exchange after cutting my meat. I liked that lesson best, eating with two implements.”
Over their drinks, Sam outlined his plan for post-baby living. They’d have adjoining apartments, with an interior connection for easy movement in between them. “The little guy,” Sam said, assuming, as Harry had, that he’d have a son, “could sleep where he wanted. None of this three-nights-with-me-four-with-you nonsense.”
“Who would own ‘my’ apartment?” Susanna asked.
“I was thinking we’d both own both, a joint tenancy, the survivor getting it all. If one wanted to sell, we’d sell both and share the proceeds.”
“That’s some gift,” Susanna said.
“You’d be the mother of my child,” Sam said, “maybe children. It seems to me a mother should have what a wife would have.” He gave her a knowing look. “It’s not as if I don’t have the money.”
“Who pays the mortgage? Maintenance?” Susanna said. “Christ, I sound grasping.”
“No mortgage. The plan is to buy them outright. Cash. I assume I’d give you enough child support for the maintenance. You don’t have to pay taxes on child support.”
“I’d feel remiss if I didn’t ask about medical insurance,” Susanna said, looking Sam square in the eye.
Sam laughed. “Maybe I should just give you three million outright. Look, we’ll make a contract, get it all settled, a kind of prenup. You need to get your own lawyer and you have to pay for him, so I’m not seen as overreaching or suborning or perpetrating some such nefarious act of malfeasance. He or she should be very good. I’ve made it clear to the Maynard lawyer what I want, but he can’t help thinking I’m making a mistake. It’s his job, I suppose. My mother has the same problem with them. It’s probably the correct instinct for a Wall Street firm, but I don’t like their hovering. They want to protect me from myself.”
“I may not be an heiress, but it’s not as if I don’t have money of my own,” Susanna said. “Granny Bowles left me a small pile”—she smiled—“and my mother might still come through.”
Sam hooted. “What is Prudence planning to do with her money?”
“I’m guessing either a cat sanctuary or an ashram.” Susanna said this matter-of-factly, not even allowing herself a sigh. She wasn’t making a joke. “She asks me periodically if I need money and then sends me eleven thousand dollars, no gift tax. She said she’d double it if I got married. She might do it for a child.”
“One of the best things about college, you find out what’s out th
ere in the way of parents. We all found out how lucky we were.” Sam paused. “You were not so lucky.”
Susanna knew she was very lucky, in the great scheme of things. She was an American; she was a Princeton graduate; she had a good job, with medical insurance; she was probably in the top twenty-five percent in looks. She wished she felt lucky, luckier.
“I need to think about this,” Susanna said.
“Yes, of course. I’m just putting in my oar,” Sam said. “I don’t want you planning another pregnancy without giving me a chance to make an offer, or counteroffer.”
“ ‘Just’? It’s plainly unbeatable. You know that,” she said.
“That was the plan: to make an offer you couldn’t refuse.”
“My first reaction? It sounds like concubinage.”
“I can see that,” Sam said, “but in a good way.”
“Oh, Sam, Sam, I missed you so.”
They stirred their drinks, occasionally looking at the other and smiling. They were back together, observing the unities of time, space, and action. Sam began mentally kicking himself for his relationship with Andrew.
“Why didn’t you leave Andrew for Joe?” Susanna asked, jolting Sam. She’s on my wavelength, the way he never was, Sam thought.
“I tried,” Sam said. “Andrew kept saying it was a flash-in-the-pan romance. He said it was nostalgia for the high school prom king. He said Joe was like Jack; he called him a black hole of self-absorption. He said he’d dump me within six months. Joe had been in two relationships the year before we met. He’d move in, he’d get a new part, he’d move out.” Everyone at Trinity, not only Sam, had had a crush on Joe. He was like James Dean, the universal sex object. Sam thought back to Trinity, wondering if anyone ever recovered from high school. All the people who were fat in high school still thought of themselves as fat. A PhD from Harvard never made up for not getting into Harvard College.