Doxology

by Nell Zink

  “How do you know the baby is his?” Pam asked. “Did you get amniocentesis?”

  “Bull made me get it.”

  “And he was okay with it? I’d say in a case like this to let sperm donors be sperm donors. You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “It’s Aaron’s child. It’s related to Aaron and his family. How does that not matter?”

  “Well, I don’t want to sound indecent or suggestive or anything, but do you recall his precise level of involvement in creating this baby?”

  “It was more than Bull’s!”

  “Are you not over him? It’s immaterial who the biological father is. Family is not genes.”

  “It’s not that. The problem is not genes. It’s more like . . . It’s hard to explain.”

  “Give it a shot. For us.”

  Flora sat with downcast eyes, looking at her belly.

  Ginger said to Pam, “All your criticism is making her shy.”

  “I’m sorry, Flo,” Pam said. “Come on, tell us what you’re feeling.”

  Flora said, “Well, it’s like this. The baby’s in love with Aaron. I don’t know what I want, but Michael knows what he wants. That’s totally how it felt to me, when they met each other. They bonded. Aaron’s the dad, and it’s a fact, and I’m stuck with it.”

  “You’ve been under a lot of stress,” Ginger said.

  “Bull is a complicated guy,” Pam said. “Pinning it on something mechanical like genetics is simpler.”

  “That’s exactly it!” Flora said. “I don’t want to complicate my life. I don’t want to move up in the world, and throw parties in evening wear, and know politicians, and raise my son in Georgetown. I want him to have a childhood like ours. Otherwise it’s not even like having a child. And Aaron’s like us. He’s so incredibly relaxing. He reminds me of Joe.”

  “Huh?” Pam said.

  “He’s so uncritical of me, and so honest and open, no matter what.”

  “Joe Harris died when you were nine. He was a lot more like Bull than you think. He was a trust-fund meat cleaver with a mega-career.”

  “He was the sweetest ever,” Flora insisted. “He wrote songs because it was his reason for being. He was creative and intense all the time for no reason, like one of those ecosystems in the tropics that subsists for millions of years for no reason. And that’s what Aaron’s like. He just exists. So it makes sense that Aaron made our baby, because he loves being alive.”

  “For no reason,” Ginger said. She smiled approvingly to hide what she was thinking, which was that things were going straight to hell in a way she’d never thought to expect.

  Pam shook her head and frowned. “Everybody loves being alive,” she said. “Being a rock star didn’t make Joe special or not a bum. He didn’t have an altruistic bone in his body. We hired him to babysit you, and he wrote some hit songs. They’re like stupid apps where the hardware is your brain. He didn’t give a shit about the earth. He probably didn’t know it was round.”

  “I know you still hate him for killing himself,” Flora said. She had stopped crying. Her tone was defiant.

  Pam rolled her eyes and said, “Where’d you read that? Fucker didn’t kill himself.”

  “Fucker what?!” She sat upright and looked straight at her mother.

  Ginger too stiffened with alarm. The younger women seemed to her like two flamenco dancers, circling and staring each other down, now that they were finally fighting about a guy.

  “‘Joe Harris killed himself because he loved life so much,’” Pam said. “Listen to yourself. What a fucking joke.”

  “He was heartbroken!”

  “You knew Joe. Was he ever even sad?”

  Pam steeled herself to relate what she knew of the four days during which he lay unassisted and decomposing. She looked at her mother, who was shaking her head, and stopped herself. The truth was toxic. It still hurt Daniel more than he could say. Why hand it down to Flora? Why not bury it deep and break the chain?

  She said, “He overdosed by accident. Indirectly it was Gwen who killed him, by introducing him to heroin. She had a vested interest in saying it was suicide, and she’s been helped by the wisdom of crowds.”

  “And you stood by and let it happen,” Flora replied. “She got away with it, she still profits from it, and you did nothing.”

  Pam lowered her eyes, outflanked, and said, “There’s not a whole lot you can do when people choose the wrong life partner.” She didn’t believe it anymore. Her mind recalled with pain how Daniel had laughed at her pimping of Eloise. He was wrong, goddamn it. She should have locked those two in a room. Eloise would have lit up with radiant joy when Joe touched her, won his heart, and never left his side. Like a puppy that lives to be eighty-four. Like Daniel.

  “What are you saying?” Flora said.

  “I don’t know.” She tacked back. “I mean, how well do you know this Aaron guy? Is he exclusively hetero? Does he do drugs?”

  Her daughter’s face turned angry.

  “I don’t know,” Pam added, “but you might want to take romantic love out of the equation and think with your brain for a minute. Think who’s a clean, safe person you can trust.”

  “That’s what I came here to do. Bull lied to me. I love Aaron, but I don’t know him very well. That’s why I was trying to spend some time alone in neutral territory and think.”

  Ginger said to Pam, “You know, we could leave her alone and let her think.”

  “No,” Pam said with finality. “She’s the one who called us. She wants help.” She resumed her questioning of Flora. “So you’ve talked to Aaron about this?”

  “I told him I’d call him after I saw him that one time, but I didn’t.”

  “So your baby’s in love with a guy you’ve blown off twice. Radio silence since November, one chance meeting, and now you’re going to ditch Bull for him.”

  “I’ve never met Aaron,” Ginger interrupted, “and I don’t know if he loves you or what that word even means to him. But I agree that you should not be concentrating on feelings in such an important decision, especially when your feelings are not based on very much.”

  “Fuck you, Grandma,” Flora said.

  “Human beings are changeable,” Ginger continued, with emphasis. “God is love, but he’s the only one, believe me. Love is an ideal you don’t attain in this life. That’s why they build churches like this one to last forever, while the people inside them come and go.”

  “You’re completely wrong,” Flora said. “Jesus and Mary and the saints didn’t know what love is? I don’t think so!”

  “That was another little girl confused about being pregnant,” Pam said. “But for your information, it wasn’t he who is mighty. It was some random guy named Aaron.”

  “Aaron’s not random!”

  “I’m curious as to why you didn’t get an abortion.”

  “Because I thought it was Bull’s!”

  There followed a moment of silent reflection. Ginger said, “That sounds to me as if you really do love Bull. I’m so mixed up—”

  “My boyfriend, Bull,” Flora interrupted her, “did not see fit to share the results of the amniocentesis with me. I thought this was his baby, until maybe a month ago, when he finally told me he’s infertile.” She paused. “No,” she corrected herself. “What happened was this girl he was boning on the side told Aaron. When I asked Bull, he confirmed it.” Her look turned hard. “Bull is sterile. He kept it a secret, and you know why? Because I want kids. He’s in love with me and wants us to stay together, and that’s why he could never tell me his secret.”

  Ginger said, “Wait. You talked to Bull about Aaron? You talked about his affair with this other woman?”

  “That’s not what matters!”

  Ginger put her hand on Flora’s shoulder and said, “It might be a little late for you to be deciding what you want. It might be out of your hands.” She moved in for a hug. Frowning, Flora hugged her, with no idea what she was getting at.

  Pam noticed and
tugged on Ginger’s sleeve. “Come on,” she said. “Give the girl some space. Let’s go light candles for world peace.”

  Ginger wiped her eyes. The two of them picked up their bags and walked forward together.

  FLORA SAT BACK, GLAD THEY WERE GONE. THEY TRULY HAD BEEN MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE for her to think.

  She looked up, around, and forward at the sanctuary of the chapel. Outside nature was sticky and dusty and humming like a furnace, but the cathedral’s interior was cool and smooth. She had come for spiritual renewal to a haunted stone quarry. A man-made box canyon lined with martyrs, great men and women humbled. For solace, she had wanted to be dwarfed by tall rocks and see images of fortitude in the face of pain.

  It seemed to her an admission—an assertion even—that meaning arose in the spirit and grew in the mind. It couldn’t possibly inhere in the body, definitely not in the antics of the dumb body. Her body was cryptic as a plant, keeping its own counsel. Life itself, the biological thing, lacked meaning. It permitted—sometimes—the survival of the fittest. The fittest: that was Bull, pursuing tactical advantage by any means necessary. At this very moment he might be plotting something devious to secure health insurance for millions and save forests from logging. Aaron was not cryptic that way. It was hard to imagine him having a secret. He was all Aaron, all the way down. Made of meaning. An open book with one page. A lamb to the slaughter.

  But they were both products of the same four billion years of evolution, so both modes of life must be equally viable. Maybe the Aarons had been coming over from their parallel universe to donate sperm for the Bulls all along.

  She knew that clinical experiments said the opposite. They said that women prefer tenderness for every day and macho dudes when they’re ovulating. She wondered if she wasn’t confused about who was which. Maybe Bull was the submissive one, always working from within the establishment, tweaking a hegemonic system in his favor, while Aaron the nomad staked his arrogant claim from outside the walls.

  She imagined her son modeling himself on one and then on the other. Specifically, she daydreamed two children, genetically distinct, one able to manipulate her—always with irreproachable aims—and the other not. She imagined the guileless child growing up cowed and confused in the shadow of Bull. She saw wrongness.

  Aaron wasn’t a rock like Bull. It was the way she felt about him that was a rock, intransigent, immovable, presaging the way she would feel about Michael.

  She felt worn and chilly. Her mother and grandmother returned from the front of the chapel. She said, “Let’s go home.” She glanced at her phone. She had fifteen new messages. Twitter and Facebook were filling up with claims of radioactive smog.

  XXIX.

  As they exited the cathedral, she asked Ginger whether Edgar owned a Geiger counter. Ginger said she had no idea, but she was sure everything would be fine.

  In the car, Flora’s phone rang. It was Aaron, of all people.

  “Aaron!” she said.

  “I know I wasn’t supposed to call you ever again. I’m really sorry. But there’s some kind of radioactive plume all over the news. You need to get out of town.”

  She said, “I know. I saw. We’re in the car.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Cleveland Park.”

  “You need to go to, like, Canada.”

  “Me and Mom and Grandma are on our way home from the cathedral. Do you want to come with us to New York? Mom says the air is fine up there.”

  Aaron said, “With Bull?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t have the baby yet, right?”

  “No.”

  “I was just calling to tell you about the radioactive plume.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” she said.

  “Do what? I don’t do stuff. I’m dead inside.”

  “Then come with us to New York!”

  He paused and said, “Where are you now?”

  “Going home. We were at the National Cathedral.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed to think about what I want to do with my life.”

  “Right now, you’re kind of locked into this baby thing.”

  “I want to be with you.”

  “Hmm,” Aaron said. “I’m at work, but I’ll lie and tell them I have a meeting offsite and come and see you. Tell me the address.”

  THE WOMEN ARRIVED BACK AT PORTER STREET AND STARTED PACKING TO GO NORTH. Flora’s phone rang again. It was Bull, calling to remind her that the airborne event was nontoxic emissions from controlled blazes and no cause for alarm.

  “I don’t care if it’s pine smoke,” she said to him. “No smoke is healthy. Any wildfire fills the air with noncombustible crap, and green vegetation emits dioxins when you burn it, and people dump toxic waste in the woods. We’re packing our stuff to head up to New York.”

  “Flora,” he said. “There’s nothing happening. It’s a forest fire and a bunch of rumors. They probably launched the atom bomb story to get the liberals out of Washington once and for all.”

  “Jokes about fallout are not funny to me.”

  “Did you look at Fox News?”

  “Why would they tell the truth?”

  “Because there’s nothing a Republican cares more about than protecting his own family, at least on paper. Look at Fox and tell me what you see.”

  Flora said to Ginger, “Could you turn on Fox News?”

  Fox was running an exposé about the thickness of spaghetti. They watched in disbelief as charismatic, excitable pundits weighed in on noodle diameter, wondering whatever happened to slenderizing angel hair. There was nothing about the miasma.

  “It’s not there,” she said to Bull. “Who am I supposed to trust?”

  “Me,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’d like to. It would be so much easier that way.”

  “Seriously consider it,” Bull said. “Are you at your grandparents’ house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell them I said hi.” He signed off and left her standing there, at the foot of the carpeted stairs, staring out the window at the luminous haze while her mother and grandmother stared at the TV.

  WHEN AARON RANG THE DOORBELL, SHE LET HIM IN. SHE GREETED HIM WITH THE WORDS “I’m paralyzed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I want from anybody. I think I might need to go into an institution.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Spaghetti is getting thicker. We eat more without knowing it.”

  “Flora,” he said. He hugged her, looking over her shoulder at Pam and Ginger, and asked, “Is she really paralyzed? Does preeclampsia cause strokes?”

  “She’s talking about the main story on Fox News at this hour,” Ginger said, pointing at it. A discussion of Lana Del Rey’s feud with Lady Gaga had started, with the volume off, but the information about spaghetti was still running across the bottom of the screen. “We’re not sure anymore whether we need to evacuate, even as a precaution.”

  “Disinterested analysis,” Pam said. “Fox would cover up an industry error, but not one made by the government. Therefore, though it might be dioxins, it wasn’t a bomb.”

  “Let me rephrase,” Aaron said. “Is this no big deal, or is the air giving us all cancer as we speak?”

  “My husband promised to keep refreshing the Centers for Disease Control homepage until the truth comes out,” Ginger said. “He’s chained to the computer.”

  Flora sat down hard on the couch and declared, “What I want is a man who always knows what’s really going on!”

  “No problem,” Aaron said. “You and Bull can still be friends. Have you talked to him?”

  “He says it’s forest fires.”

  “Then probably, knowing him—I mean, not knowing him, but from what I know about him—I would guess that it’s probably forest fires?”

  The tension faded from the room, and Pam turned off the TV.

  “Le
t me go get my husband, so I can introduce you,” Ginger said.

  Edgar was not at the computer in his den. She checked the garage, peeking through the glass-paneled door from the kitchen. Finally she stood at the head of the basement stairs and called his name. He answered, “Just a minute!”

  He came upstairs, introduced himself, and said he’d been digging through his workbench to see if he had any transistors or capacitors or circuit boards, which he didn’t. He’d had the idea of making a Geiger counter from scratch and had looked for information online. He found instructions on how to make one from a PVC tube and Styrofoam beads, and another using tinfoil you load with static electricity by pulling cellophane tape off a roll. The functional design from MIT was full of parts he didn’t own and couldn’t easily buy, since the last RadioShack had closed years before.

  He smiled throughout this jokey speech, as though detecting ionizing radiation would have made an amusing break from model railroading. In conclusion, he offered Aaron a beer.

  “No, thank you, sir,” Aaron said.

  “You sure?”

  “If I have a beer, I’ll be wanting weed.”

  Edgar’s eyes went wide, Jack Benny style, and Ginger said to him, “Honey, I’m sure Daniel wasn’t perfect at his age either.” To Aaron she said, “We have quite a powerful exhaust hood in our kitchen, if you want to smoke. I can’t in good conscience send you outside on a day like this.”

  Pam said, “Daniel was straight-edge. He had to work nights as a proofreader.”

  “I don’t need anything but some water,” Aaron said.

  “I don’t recall your being pure as the driven snow,” Edgar said to Pam.

  “But she never smoked pot,” Ginger said.

  “Too conspicuous,” Pam said.

  “Union organizing is a space where intoxicants are of value,” Aaron said. “If I talked to workers without a beer in my hand, they’d think I was coming on to them.”

  “Solidarity forever,” Edgar said.