Plus One (34 page)

Closing the door behind him, he splashed a handful of water on his face, then pulled out the bag and weighed his options. Stashing it here didn't seem wise. He had to dump it. He tore the bag open with his teeth and poured the contents into the toilet—the hard green pellets splashing as they hit the water, a good approximation of the sound that a man in his supposed condition should be making. Figgy had been home for two minutes and already here he was, a dope dealer ditching his goods when the cops came calling. He balled up the wet plastic and buried it in a wastebasket.

With that taken care of, he pulled down his pants and slid the jock strap down his legs to check himself. Everything looked fine—at least no bigger or more bruised than when he'd gotten home. Then he noticed it. Inside the front section, in the divot of the little pouch, were three irregularly shaped blots of brownish red.

His jock strap was bloody.

And all at once, he was back in Las Vegas on that thrifting holiday with Figgy, horrified by his gruesome bargain-bin discovery. He remembered holding up the bloody jock strap and inspecting it, baffled at what sort of circumstance could have produced such an atrocity.

Now he knew. He was the stranger his younger self could not even begin to contemplate.

He stepped out of the jock strap and sat down on the toilet seat, hanging his head and dangling the offending item from his index finger. He sat there for a while, elbows pressing down on his knees, head spinning. Outside the door, he could hear the TV back on, that same heinous sitcom laugh track booming through the house. Figgy was calling out to him—where was the shrimp
curry she'd brought home the night before? Had he eaten it? A few more minutes passed. Why wasn't the printer working? Sam needed to print out hand-cream labels—why wasn't it working? Could he finish up in there already? She really needed to talk.

Alex sat very still, his eyes clenched closed. As long as he stayed put in here, he'd be okay. Let her sort out dinner and the printer. He'd just stay here until his head stopped spinning.

“What is that?”

He lifted his head. Figgy was in the doorway, eyes cast on the elastic in his hand.

“Can't you see I'm in here?”

“I do see that. What've you
got
there?”

Alex swiped his hand to the side, stashing the strap under his armpit. “Come on!
I
leave you alone when you're in the bathroom.”

“
I
lock the door.
This
door is open. And you're sitting here
hiding
something. What are you hiding?”

Alex closed his eyes and took a moment. Then he pulled the strap from beneath his arm, looped one side around his thumb and flung it at her. She grabbed it out of the air and turned it over, her face a mix of horror and confusion.

The laugh track boomed from the TV.

“It's a jock strap,” he said. “A bloody jock strap. Isn't that
hilarious
? Just like the one in Vegas! Except this one has
my
blood on it. How hilarious is that?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What—you got snipped? When?”

“Today. And it's clipped, not snipped. Little titanium clips—like NASA uses.”

Her arms went slack at her sides. “You just… got a vasectomy? Without discussing it with me? And you were just going to keep it a… secret?”

“Yup.” He bent backward, exposing his bare thighs and mottled abdomen. “Nothing to discuss. My body. My choice.”

Her arms crossed and mouth fell open. He waited for the hollering, the screaming, the anger. Instead, she did what she never did: laughed, her shoulders heaving in deep convulsions. “Oh, you poor little shit.”

“What? What's so funny?”

She reached into her pants pocket and pulled something out, then tossed it at him. He caught it in one hand. White plastic. Purple tip. Little window. Plus sign.

“Too late, daddy.”

Thirteen

T
hey didn't have it out right away, not with the shock of the strap-stick exchange still reverberating through the house like a blast of thermonuclear energy. Alex got into some pajama bottoms and managed to rustle up some dumplings and green beans for the kids while Figgy retreated to the bedroom to pack for her trip to Baltimore in the morning.

He got the kids down and headed to bed with a fresh bag of frozen vegetables. Corn this time. Much manlier. He lay atop the covers, starfished across the king bed. Figgy stepped in from the bathroom, a froth of white foam on her lips. She pulled a toothbrush out of her mouth and twirled it like a baton. She started to say something, stopped. Recalibrated. Started again.

“Seriously, what the fuck?” she said at last. “Who does this? Who goes sneaking around behind his wife's back to get a
vasectomy
?”

Alex propped up on his elbows. “I was being responsible,” he
said. “I don't know what happened with your pills—but at least I was being responsible. Some actual family planning? Accident prevention?”

She clamped her mouth down on the toothbrush. “Who said it was an accident?” she mumbled. “We've talked about it. Over and over. We never ruled it
out
.”

“We never ruled it
in
. The last time all you said is you wanted to start trying. I never actually
agreed
. This is something you negotiate. You have good-faith negotiations.”

Figgy wiped her mouth with her sleeve and rolled her eyes. “You want to talk about good-faith negotiating? I'm supposed to negotiate with a guy who just had…
secret ball surgery
?”

Alex plopped back down on the pillow and adjusted the bag. “You just haven't thought this through. Going from two kids to three—we're outnumbered! I can barely keep a man-to-man defense going—how are we supposed to go zone? Have you forgotten everything? The pumping, the screaming, the explosive doodies? I can't do it again. I just can't.”

“I'm sorry—what
else
are you doing exactly?” she said. “I'm sorry if my pregnancy interferes with your punk-rock memoir.”

A screech like a tea kettle sounded in Alex's head. “I told you, it's a
novel
. And yes, this
does
interfere. It does. It's bad enough that I'm trying to work with Rudolfo and Rosa and the FedEx man barging in every five minutes. Now what? I'm just supposed to put all that on hold?”

A droplet of toothpaste flew from her bottom lip. “I swear to God, Alex—you sure complain a lot for a guy with no job, a nanny, and a writer's studio in a solarium.”

The tone in Alex's ears rose to a screech. “
You
wanted this house! And now—what? Another show, another baby, more and more and more! Are you
so
fucked up about turning forty that you think getting pregnant will make everything right?”

“So what am I supposed to do, exactly? Get an abortion? And
then go back to work so I can continue supporting the family I never see?”

She wheeled around and went back into the bathroom, kicking the door with her heel as she went.

Alex sat up and craned his neck toward the doorway. “Can't we at least talk about
options
? I mean, it's not like you've got
moral
objections.”

He could hear her spit into the sink, crank on the water, and splash it on her face. “Not going to happen.”

Alex flopped back on the bed. That was it—nothing more to be said on that subject. About all things related to Figgy's uterus, Alex was entirely, ideologically irrelevant.

She came back in, face flushed and T-shirt splattered. “You think I'm having
fun
? You think I
like
working all the hours I do and trying to be a halfway decent mom? You think I
like
missing Sylvie's recital and Sam's performance thing? How do you think I feel when these Pines moms call asking about play dates I have no idea about? You think I want to go schlep off to Baltimore just so we can afford to send our kids to that ridiculous school?”

Alex straightened out and tucked his legs under the covers. She walked over to her bedside table, squirted some skin cream on her hands, and began furiously kneading her arms and neck. “You're right—I'm forty,” she said. “And this is my last shot. Bought two. Got one free. It doesn't matter how it happened. What matters is that I'm having it. I've got resources—I can handle it with or without you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Figgy wrapped herself up in the covers and turned her back. “I've got a plane to catch in the morning. I can't do this. We're done.”

Alex closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, his chest roiling.
We're done?

• • •

She was up just after six the next morning, Alex waking to the sound of the buzzer as she opened the back gate for her ride to the airport. He propped himself up on one elbow and watched her. She knelt at the side of the bed, yanking on the zipper of her suitcase. Her mouth was set in a hard line.

“Have you got Puffy?” he asked. Puffy was their name for the green, down-filled parka she complained made her look like a parade balloon. “It's freezing in Baltimore.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“I'm up. You want eggs? I'll make eggs. Like the husband in Fargo. Before Frances McDormand went out in the snowstorm?”

“Eggs—ugh.” She heaved down her on her elbow, compressing the bag as she tugged at the zipper. “Not a good idea for me right now. I'll grab a yogurt at the airport.”

He sat up and stretched, then reached over to touch her arm. “Fig, you don't have to go, do you? You hate production. Let Dani deal with it. You're always saying how great she is on set—you stay here. The timing couldn't be shittier.”

“I can't not go. The studio's already annoyed I haven't been out for pre-production—I have to be on set. I can't run it from here. And maybe we need some time.”

As she closed the bag and stood up, Alex's fingertips landed along the soft skin on the inside of her arm. The handle of her bag locked into place with a snap. She sighed and squeezed his hand, hair falling over her eyes. Her face was in shadow and featureless, impossibly distant. “It's three weeks. I'll get things running, set the tone. We can figure things out from there. I'll Skype with the kids at night. I left a list of appointments and phone numbers near the computer. Call Anne-Marie about plane tickets—I'll send for the kids in a week, when it calms down a little. Send them with Rosa.”

Alex let go of her hand and squinted up at her, trying to catch
up. “Send the kids… to Baltimore? With Rosa? What are you talking about?”

“The guy's waiting,” she said. “I gotta go.”

She swiveled around and headed out the door, the plastic wheels of her bag crackling against the hallway floor.

• • •

After a call to Rosa telling her she was on kid duty, Alex cut himself off from all contact with the outside world. With the drapes pulled tight and the house phone left off the hook, he slept for six hours, then roused to gobble another two Vicodins and a bag of mint Milanos. Before dozing off again, he summoned a gauzy image of Miranda backed up against his minivan, moving in close, the softness of her throat shadowed in the streetlight. They hadn't touched since that night, but he now imagined every inch of her, fixating on the curve of her neck and the divot at the base of her spine, a pang of shame registering in his chest as he tugged at himself, the stinging from his balls prohibiting any progress toward climax. He was curled into a ball humming an old TV jingle over and over again when he realized his cell phone had been buzzing on and off for the last hour or so. He rolled over, the soggy bag of corn thudding onto the floor, and picked up his phone. The caller ID read HUCK.

“Mhff,” Alex said.

“You don't answer my calls anymore? I've left you like eight messages.”

Alex put the phone on speaker and dropped it on his chest. “You remember that commercial for the Gap?”

“The Gap—what?”

Alex shut his eyes and sang out the melody that had been looping in his head all day. “Fall into the gap,” he sang. When Huck didn't respond, he sang it again, his voice falling into a
breathy croak on the long last note.