Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  But he forgot to buy a News on his way to work, and days passed, and he no longer was sure what night it was that they heard the voice crying “Help!” and felt that he ought to go through weeks of the News until he found out what happened. If it was in the News. And if something happened.

  [1974]

  JEFFREY EUGENIDES

  BASTER

  THE RECIPE CAME IN the mail:

  Mix semen of three men.

  Stir vigorously.

  Fill turkey baster.

  Recline.

  Insert nozzle.

  Squeeze.

  Ingredients:

  1 pinch Stu Wadsworth

  1 pinch Jim Freeson

  1 pinch Wally Mars

  There was no return address but Tomasina knew who had sent it: Diane, her best friend and, recently, fertility specialist. Ever since Tomasina’s latest catastrophic breakup, Diane had been promoting what they referred to as Plan B. Plan A they’d been working on for some time. It involved love and a wedding. They’d been working on Plan A for a good eight years. But in the final analysis—and this was Diane’s whole point—Plan A had proved much too idealistic. So now they were giving Plan B a look.

  Plan B was more devious and inspired, less romantic, more solitary, sadder, but braver, too. It stipulated borrowing a man with decent teeth, body, and brains, free of the major diseases, who was willing to heat himself up with private fantasies (they didn’t have to include Tomasina) in order to bring off the tiny sputter that was indispensable to the grand achievement of having a baby. Like twin Schwarzkopfs, the two friends noted how the field of battle had changed of late: the reduction in their artillery (they’d both just turned forty); the increasing guerrilla tactics of the enemy (men didn’t even come out into the open anymore); and the complete dissolution of the code of honor. The last man who’d got Tomasina pregnant—not the boutique investment banker, the one before him, the Alexander Technique instructor—hadn’t even gone through the motions of proposing marriage. His idea of honor had been to split the cost of the abortion. There was no sense denying it: the finest soldiers had quit the field, joining the peace of marriage. What was left was a ragtag gang of adulterers and losers, hit-and-run types, village-burners. Tomasina had to give up the idea of meeting someone she could spend her life with. Instead, she had to give birth to someone who would spend life with her.

  But it wasn’t until she received the recipe that Tomasina realized she was desperate enough to go ahead. She knew it before she’d even stopped laughing. She knew it when she found herself thinking, Stu Wadsworth I could maybe see. But Wally Mars?

  TOMASINA—I repeat, like a ticking clock—was forty. She had pretty much everything she wanted in life. She had a great job as an assistant producer of the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.” She had a terrific, adult-sized apartment on Hudson Street. She had good looks, mostly intact. Her breasts weren’t untouched by time, but they were holding their own. And she had new teeth. She had a set of gleaming new bonded teeth. They’d whistled at first, before she got used to them, but now they were fine. She had biceps. She had an I.R.A. kicked up to a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. But she didn’t have a baby. Not having a husband she could take. Not having a husband was, in some respects, preferable. But she wanted a baby.

  “After thirty-five,” the magazine said, “a woman begins to have trouble conceiving.” Tomasina couldn’t believe it. Just when she got her head on straight, her body started falling apart. Nature didn’t give a damn about her maturity level. Nature wanted her to marry her college boyfriend. In fact, from a purely reproductive standpoint, nature would have preferred that she marry her high-school boyfriend. While Tomasina had been going on about her life, she hadn’t noticed it: the eggs pitching themselves into oblivion, month by month. She saw it all now. While she canvassed for RIPIRG in college, her uterine walls had been thinning. While she got her journalism degree, her ovaries had cut estrogen production. And while she slept with as many men as she wanted, her fallopian tubes had begun to narrow, to clog. During her twenties. That extended period of American childhood. The time when, educated and employed, she could finally have some fun. Tomasina once had five orgasms with a cabdriver named Ignacio Veranes while parked on Gansevoort Street. He had a bent, European-style penis and smelled like flan. Tomasina was twenty-five at the time. She wouldn’t do it again, but she was glad she’d done it then. So as not to have regrets. But in eliminating some regrets you create others. She’d only been in her twenties. She’d been playing around was all. But the twenties become the thirties, and a few failed relationships put you at thirty-five, when one day you pick up Mirabella and read, “After thirty-five, a woman’s fertility begins to decrease. With each year, the proportion of miscarriages and birth defects rises.”

  It had risen for five years now. Tomasina was forty years one month and fourteen days old. And panicked, and sometimes not panicked. Sometimes perfectly calm and accepting about the whole thing.

  She thought about them, the little children she never had. They were lined at the windows of a ghostly school bus, faces pressed against the glass, huge-eyed, moist-lashed. They looked out, calling, “We understand. It wasn’t the right time. We understand. We do.”

  The bus shuddered away, and she saw the driver. He raised one bony hand to the gearshift, turning to Tomasina as his face split open in a smile.

  The magazine also said that miscarriages happened all the time, without a woman’s even noticing. Tiny blastulas scraped against the womb’s walls and, finding no purchase, hurtled downward through the plumbing, human and otherwise. Maybe they stayed alive in the toilet bowl for a few seconds, like goldfish. She didn’t know. But with three abortions, one official miscarriage, and who knows how many unofficial ones, Tomasina’s school bus was full. When she awoke at night, she saw it slowly pulling away from the curb, and she heard the noise of the children packed in their seats, that cry of children indistinguishable between laughter and scream.

  EVERYONE knows that men objectify women. But none of our sizing up of breasts and legs can compare with the cold-blooded calculation of a woman in the market for semen. Tomasina was a little taken aback by it herself, and yet she couldn’t help it: once she made her decision, she began to see men as walking spermatozoa. At parties, over glasses of Barolo (soon to be giving it up, she drank like a fish), Tomasina examined the specimens who came out of the kitchen, or loitered in the hallways, or held forth from the armchairs. And sometimes, her eyes misting, she felt that she could discern the quality of each man’s genetic material. Some semen auras glowed with charity; others were torn with enticing holes of savagery; still others flickered and dimmed with substandard voltage. Tomasina could ascertain health by a guy’s smell or complexion. Once, to amuse Diane, she’d ordered every male party guest to stick out his tongue. The men had obliged, asking no questions. Men always oblige. Men like being objectified. They thought that their tongues were being inspected for nimbleness, toward the prospect of oral abilities. “Open up and say ah,” Tomasina kept commanding, all night long. And the tongues unfurled for display. Some had yellow spots or irritated taste buds, others were blue as spoiled beef. Some performed lewd acrobatics, flicking up and down or curling upward to reveal spikes depending from their undersides like the antennae of deep-sea fish. And then there were two or three that looked perfect, opalescent as oysters and enticingly plump. These were the tongues of the married men, who’d already donated their semen—in abundance—to the lucky women taxing the sofa cushions across the room. The wives and mothers who were nursing other complaints by now, of insufficient sleep and stalled careers—complaints that to Tomasina were desperate wishes.

  AT THIS point, I should introduce myself. I’m Wally Mars. I’m an old friend of Tomasina’s. Actually, I’m an old boyfriend. We went out for three months and seven days in the spring of 1985. At the time, most of Tomasina’s friends were surprised that she was dating me. They said what she did when she saw my name
on the ingredient list. They said, “Wally Mars?” I was considered too short (I’m only five feet four), and not athletic enough. Tomasina loved me, though. She was crazy about me for a while. Some dark hook in our brains, which no one could see, linked us up. She used to sit across the table, tapping it and saying, “What else?” She liked to hear me talk.

  She still did. Every few weeks she called to invite me to lunch. And I always went. At the time all this happened, we made a date for a Friday. When I got to the restaurant, Tomasina was already there. I stood behind the hostess station for a moment, looking at her from a distance and getting ready. She was lounging back in her chair, sucking the life out of the first of the three cigarettes she allowed herself at lunch. Above her head, on a ledge, an enormous flower arrangement exploded into bloom. Have you noticed? Flowers have gone multicultural, too. Not a single rose, tulip, or daffodil lifted its head from the vase. Instead, jungle flora erupted: Amazonian orchids, Sumatran flytraps. The jaws of one flytrap trembled, stimulated by Tomasina’s perfume. Her hair was thrown back over her bare shoulders.

  She wasn’t wearing a top—no, she was. It was flesh-colored and skintight. Tomasina doesn’t exactly dress corporate, unless you could call a brothel a kind of corporation. What she has to display was on display. (It was on display every morning for Dan Rather, who had a variety of nicknames for Tomasina, all relating to Tabasco sauce.) Somehow, though, Tomasina got away with her chorus-girl outfits. She toned them down with her maternal attributes: her homemade lasagna, her hugs and kisses, her cold remedies.

  At the table, I received both a hug and kiss. “Hi, hon!” she said, and pressed herself against me. Her face was all lit up. Her left ear, inches from my cheek, was a flaming pink. I could feel its heat. She pulled away and we looked at each other.

  “So,” I said. “Big news.”

  “I’m going to do it, Wally. I’m going to have a baby.”

  We sat down. Tomasina took a drag on her cigarette, then funneled her lips to the side, expelling smoke.

  “I just figured, Fuck it,” she said. “I’m forty. I’m an adult. I can do this.” I wasn’t used to her new teeth. Every time she opened her mouth it was like a flashbulb going off. They looked good, though, her new teeth. “I don’t care what people think. People either get it or they don’t. I’m not going to raise it all by myself. My sister’s going to help. And Diane. You can babysit, too, Wally, if you want.”

  “Me?”

  “You can be an uncle.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

  “I hear you’ve got a list of candidates on a recipe,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Diane told me she sent you a recipe.”

  “Oh, that.” She inhaled. Her cheeks hollowed out.

  “And I was on it or something?”

  “Old boyfriends.” Tomasina exhaled upward. “All my old boyfriends.”

  Just then the waiter arrived to take our drink order.

  Tomasina was still gazing up at her spreading smoke. “Martini up very dry two olives,” she said. Then she looked at the waiter. She kept looking. “It’s Friday,” she explained. She ran her hand through her hair, flipping it back. The waiter smiled.

  “I’ll have a Martini, too,” I said.

  The waiter turned and looked at me. His eyebrows rose and then he turned back to Tomasina. He smiled again and went off.

  As soon as he was gone, Tomasina leaned across the table to whisper in my ear. I leaned, too. Our faces touched. And then she said, “What about him?”

  “Who?”

  “Him.”

  She indicated with her head. Across the restaurant, the waiter’s tensed buns retreated, dipping and weaving.

  “He’s a waiter.”

  “I’m not going to marry him, Wally. I just want his sperm.”

  “Maybe he’ll bring some out as a side dish.”

  Tomasina sat back, stubbing out her cigarette. She pondered me from a distance, then reached for cigarette No. 2. “Are you going to get all hostile again?”

  “I’m not being hostile.”

  “Yes, you are. You were hostile when I told you about this and you’re acting hostile now.”

  “I just don’t know why you want to pick the waiter.”

  She shrugged. “He’s cute.”

  “You can do better.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of places.” I picked up my soup spoon. I saw my face in it, tiny and distorted. “Go to a sperm bank. Get a Nobel Prize winner.”

  “I don’t just want smart. Brains aren’t everything.” Tomasina squinted, sucking in smoke, then looked off dreamily. “I want the whole package.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. I picked up my menu. I read the words “Fricassée de Lapereau” nine times. What was bothering me was this: the state of nature. It was becoming clear to me—clearer than ever—what my status was in the state of nature: it was low. It was somewhere around hyena. This wasn’t the case, as far as I knew, back in civilization. I’m a catch, pragmatically speaking. I make a lot of money, for one thing. My I.R.A. is pumped up to two hundred and fifty-four thousand dollars. But money doesn’t count, apparently, in the selection of semen. The waiter’s tight buns counted for more.

  “You’re against the idea, aren’t you?” Tomasina said.

  “I’m not against it. I just think, if you’re going to have a baby, it’s best if you do it with somebody else. Who you’re in love with.” I looked up at her. “And who loves you.”

  “That’d be great. But it’s not happening.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “You might fall in love with somebody tomorrow. You might fall in love with somebody six months from now.” I looked away, scratching my cheek. “Maybe you’ve already met the love of your life and don’t even know it.” Then I looked back into her eyes. “And then you realize it. And it’s too late. There you are. With some stranger’s baby.”

  Tomasina was shaking her head. “I’m forty, Wally. I don’t have much time.”

  “I’m forty, too,” I said. “What about me?”

  She looked at me closely, as though detecting something in my tone, then dismissed it with a wave. “You’re a man. You’ve got time.”

  AFTER lunch, I walked the streets. The restaurant’s glass door launched me into the gathering Friday evening. It was four-thirty and already getting dark in the caverns of Manhattan. From a striped chimney buried in the asphalt, steam shot up into the air. A few tourists were standing around it, making low Swedish sounds, amazed by our volcanic streets. I stopped to watch the steam, too. I was thinking about exhaust, anyway, smoke and exhaust. That school bus of Tomasina’s? Looking out one window was my kid’s face. Our kid’s. We’d been going out three months when Tomasina got pregnant. She went home to New Jersey to discuss it with her parents and returned three days later, having had an abortion. We broke up shortly after that. So I sometimes thought of him, or her, my only actual, snuffed-out offspring. I thought about him right then. What would the kid have looked like? Like me, with buggy eyes and potato nose? Or like Tomasina? Like her, I decided. With any luck, the kid would look like her.

  FOR the next few weeks I didn’t hear anything more. I tried to put the whole subject out of my mind. But the city wouldn’t let me. Instead, the city began filling with babies. I saw them in elevators and lobbies and out on the sidewalk. I saw them straitjacketed into car seats, drooling and ranting. I saw babies in the park, on leashes. I saw them on the subway, gazing at me with sweet, gummy eyes over the shoulders of Dominican nannies. New York was no place to be having babies. So why was everybody having them? Every fifth person on the street toted a pouch containing a bonneted larva. They looked like they needed to go back inside the womb.

  Mostly you saw them with their mothers. I always wondered who the fathers were. What did they look like? How big were they? Why did they have a kid and I didn’t? One night I saw a whole Mexican family camping out in a subwa
y car. Two small children tugged at the mother’s sweatpants while the most recent arrival, a caterpillar wrapped in a leaf, suckled at the wineskin of her breast. And across from them, holding the bedding and the diaper bag, the progenitor sat with open legs. No more than thirty, small, squat, paint-spattered, with the broad flat face of an Aztec. An ancient face, a face of stone, passed down through the centuries into those overalls, this hurtling train, this moment.

  The invitation came five days later. It sat quietly in my mailbox amid bills and catalogs. I noticed Tomasina’s return address and ripped the envelope open.

  On the front of the invitation a champagne bottle foamed out the words:

  nant!

  preg

  ting

  get

  I’m

  Inside, cheerful green type announced, “On Saturday, April 13, Come Celebrate Life!”

  The date, I learned afterward, had been figured precisely. Tomasina had used a basal thermometer to determine her times of ovulation. Every morning before getting out of bed, she took her resting temperature and plotted the results on a graph. She also inspected her underpants on a daily basis. A clear, albumeny discharge meant that her egg had dropped. She had a calendar on the refrigerator, studded with red stars. She was leaving nothing to chance.

  I thought of canceling. I toyed with fictitious business trips and tropical diseases. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want there to be parties like this. I asked myself if I was jealous or just conservative and decided both. And then, of course, in the end, I did go. I went to keep from sitting at home thinking about it.

  TOMASINA had lived in the same apartment for eleven years. But when I got there that night it looked completely different. The familiar speckled pink carpeting, like a runner of olive loaf, led up from the lobby, past the same dying plant on the landing, to the yellow door that used to open to my key. The same mezuzah, forgotten by the previous tenants, was still tacked over the threshold. According to the brass marker, 2-A, this was still the same high-priced one-bedroom I’d spent ninety-eight consecutive nights in almost ten years ago. But when I knocked and then pushed open the door I didn’t recognize it. The only light came from candles scattered around the living room. While my eyes adjusted, I groped my way along the wall to the closet—it was right where it used to be—and hung up my coat. There was a candle burning on a nearby chest, and, taking a closer look, I began to get some idea of the direction Tomasina and Diane had gone with the party decorations. Though inhumanly large, the candle was nevertheless an exact replica of the male member in proud erection, the detailing almost hyper-realistic, right down to the tributaries of veins and the sandbar of the scrotum. The phallus’s fiery tip illuminated two other objects on the table: a clay facsimile of an ancient Canaanite fertility goddess of the type sold at feminist bookstores and New Age emporiums, her womb domed, her breasts bursting; and a package of Love incense, bearing the silhouette of an entwined couple.