The Paternity Test (23 page)

Fine, then, said Rina: “convert” the
Jewish
baby! Just in case, better safe than sorry . . .

But the rabbi explained that a Jewish mother’s standing at the birth was what classified her child; no
mamzer
, no bastard born of someone who was Jewish, could ever change its status as a bastard.

“Wait,” I said, when Stu conveyed this. “Let me get this straight. Something that you
know
is fake is better than a thing with an infinitesimal
chance
of being fake?”

“According to the black hats, yeah. It’s driving my father nuts.”

At frst it had seemed Richard’s parents were the sticklers, and Richard, for his own part, might be swayed. But then Walter phoned them—his counterparts, the Feinbergs—to offer them an earful of his anger, and Richard, the protective son, cemented his position: the child must be gentile, then made Jewish. (“What?” said Walter. “More Jewish than
Jewish
?”)

All this was relayed to Stu in growingly frantic phone calls, the Nadlers in a welter of ambivalence. Should Rina hold her ground, or cave in to the Feinbergs? Was
any
child better than
no
child? And what about the household such a baby would grow up in? If Richard was unbending now, when else might he be so? At heart was he a black hat himself ?

Stu listened, consoled, devised counterarguments. He searched on the Web for rabbinical authorities with points of view to controvert the Feinbergs’. (The Yahoo Talmud listserv—from what I read, peeking— seemed a lot like Surromoms, as loony and as lovely, but I decided not to bring this up.)

How could Stu be helping his family—and so goddamn agreeably!— when they had all turned their backs on us?

“Asking for my help,” he’d said, “is how they’re saying sorry. Saying yes is how I’ll find forgiveness.”

So, then, get the phone
, I thought, returning to my notepad.
Take the call. Solve your sister’s problems.
I lay down on the sun-pummeled deck.

A squirrel made a flying leap from one tree to another, and pounced onto the bird feeder’s platform, sending a jay anxiously aflutter. The squirrel, with what looked like pubescent bravado, stuffed his small greedy mouth with seeds.

Birds
, I scribbled.
Interconnections? Lesson in globalization?

Seabirds, flying to the Arctic from Brazil—Brazil, Brazil, everywhere I turn!—stopping off on Cape coast, just at spring spawning, eating horseshoe crab eggs by the millions. If crabs disappear, then birds disappear. If birds disappear . . .

Sidebar on extinction?

If I recalled correctly, scientists had already measured losses in population. I made a note to check my book on crabs.

I’d found the book last week, when I visited the library, after my walk at Sandy Neck with Debora. (I still hadn’t been sure what I’d say to Stu, if anything, about the walk, the secrets Debora’d shared, and so I planned at least to have this token truth to hold to: I’d said I’d go to the library, and I did.) The case by the checkout desk displayed a new exhibit: a diorama of seasonal Cape ecology. Beach peas and sea tomatoes—fashioned out of silk?—“grew” from the top of a low sandy pile on which a stuffed sanderling was poised. Behind that, where blue crepe simulated water: a horseshoe crab, its spiny dome shellacked. Then I saw the book, propped up on the desk: a whole volume devoted to horseshoe crabs. Debora had asked if I had written a textbook on the subject. No, but now I could, or at least one lesson’s essay. I checked out the book and headed home.

Finding such an object, just then, had felt ordained: the cloak of fate snug, a perfect ft. And so, driving back, I’d vowed I
would
tell Stu—I’d describe the day in all its details—honoring this omen I’d been shown. It wasn’t guilt inspiring me but something like guilt’s opposite, a sense that in my sneaking off I’d done a worthy thing.

At home, as I’d reached out for the door, it swung open. I fell onto the gritty front-hall rug.

“Shit, I didn’t mean—” said Stu. “I mean, I
meant
to greet you. Didn’t mean to make you go flying.” He bent down and offered me a hand, hauled me up. “Hey, you smell . . . does
windblown
have a smell? Where’ve you been?”

“Stu,” I said, “I told you I was going to the library, but really—”

“Really what? You met your secret lover?”

“No! Jesus, no . . .”

“I’m kidding, Pat. Just kidding.” He wagged a finger, teasing at my windpipe. “Truth be told, I’m the one who had a secret meeting.”

A dirty thread of rug had somehow wound up on my tongue. “A secret—” I said. “What do you mean? With who?”

“Well, not a ‘meeting’ . . . but I bucked up, and talked to Danny. While you were out. I called, smoothed things over.”

“Seriously? You did?”

“We had a pleasant talk, actually. I think we’ll be fine from here on out.”

“But what did you say?” Relief was edged with rivalrous surprise: it hadn’t crossed my mind that while I was off with Debora, Stu might be contriving his own moves.

“We didn’t get all kissy-weepy. That’s not quite his style. More like:
Pretend it never happened
. He’s up at his parents’, I guess. Asked me to a Brockton Rox game.”

I was thrilled, mostly. Really, how could I not be? Still, though, a little pucker of anger persisted—why? Maybe because he’d once again made peace with someone else but me. Or maybe because I knew that if
I’d
placed the call to Danny, Stu would have asked me why I’d felt I had the right.

I hoped anger wasn’t what provoked my change of heart; I hoped I was acting in good faith. Either way, it seemed to me that telling Stu what Debora had said—telling him of our walk—was now needless. If Danny was back onboard, if all of us were happy, why do something that might again derail us?

“The Brockton
Rox
?” I asked.

“Baseball,” Stu explained. “Which interests me, to be honest, not at all.”

“But Danny asked.”

“He did.”

“Generously. So you’ll go?”

He groped my crotch. “I’d rather play our own game, here at home.”

This was his frst overture in three weeks, maybe four. I leaned into his hand, let him cup me. But could it be that simple, really, forgiving and forgetting?
All is well, and now let’s go make love
...

I pulled away. “But Danny,” I said. “And Debora. You’re really fine with them? I mean, you’re not having second thoughts?”

“Second thoughts—you’re joking?
Second
thoughts were forever ago. Now I’m on to twentieth thoughts. Two hundredth. The point is, though, I
had
those doubts, and yes, I still want this.” He blew a quick, frisky puff of air against my lips, dousing the last flicker of my worry.

Which was why, when Stu now emerged onto the deck and said it wasn’t Rina on the phone, it was Debora—she’d surged, she was ready for Round Five—I enjoyed my own surge: of certainty restored. I grabbed my pen and notepad, threw some seed to the blue jays, and dashed into the house after Stu.

Debora asked if we wanted anything. Oreos? Grape Fanta?

“Oh, poor thing,” I said. “You must be missing Paula. Are you feeling
saudade
for snack time?”

“Sow-
whatchy
?” asked Stu.

“Forget it,” I said. “Later.”

Of course Debora missed Paula—I saw it in her face, her mouth, its stung little smile. Still, there was a feeling of vacation in the house, a sense that Debora was making the most of being on her own. In the kitchen: a
People
magazine, a Burger King wrapper, a garlic press with pimply garlic mush left in its pores. A blackened iron pot of stew chuckled on the stove, sending out a fruity, foreign scent.

Stu declined the snacks and beelined to the bathroom, focused on the job he had to do. I said yes to the Fanta, and swallowed a bright gulp, but Debora, for herself, selected another brand: something in a lurid green can.

“What is
that
?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t like. It’s Brazilian.”

“But that’s not what I asked.”

“It’s guaraná. It tastes . . . different.”

“Different from what?”

“From what I think you like.”

She grinned in a sharper way than I had ever seen from her. Impudence? Intimacy? Both?

“But why?” I asked.

Before she could respond, I snatched the can. She chased me around the table, around a second time, as breathless as we’d been at Sandy Neck.

At last, I let her catch me, surrendering the can, but Debora pushed it back: “Okay. Try.”

I sipped. The taste was part vile, part electric: if neon had a taste, it would be this.

“Like?” she said.

“Hmm. Not sure ‘like’ is the right word.” I took another sip. “Compelled, maybe?”

Stu emerged from the bathroom. Already? Had he finished?

“Geez,” I said. “Wow, speedy delivery!”

Debora laughed, but Stu scoffed. “She probably doesn’t get it.”

“Huh? What’s not to get?”

“Your joke. ‘Speedy delivery.’ She didn’t grow up on Mr. Rogers, like us.”

What had happened? Where was the new, even-tempered Stu?

“I watch,” she said sharply. “With Paula. They have reruns.”

Quick, cut this off, I thought. I pointed to the Instead Cup, which Stu held, balanced in his hands. “Good job, hon,” I said, tinny with false cheer. “Shouldn’t we give those guys a good home?”

“Yes,” said Debora. “Let’s start.”

“You’re set?” I asked. “Do you need help?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll call you when I’m finished.”

The kitchen, in her absence, should have seemed more spacious, but actually it felt even smaller: Stu’s gloom was flling every inch.

“Try this drink,” I said, in my pep-squad captain voice.

“No,” he said.

“But really. It’s guaraná. It’s crazy.”

“I said no thanks.”

“Party pooper. Why?”

From Debora’s plate of snacks, Stu picked up an Oreo (to eat it or to crush it into dust?). “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said.

“What
what’s
like?”

“In that bathroom. I hear you guys having a blast down here, you know, relaxing. And I’m up there, beating off for the billionth fucking time.”

“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound so lousy.”

“It is, Pat. It sucks. It absolutely sucks. I feel like a . . . a teenager or something.” He split apart his cookie, exposing its white flling, the sudden, bared whiteness somehow lewd. “And anyway,” he said darkly, “it isn’t going to work.”

“What? Why on earth would you say that?”

“Well, it hasn’t worked yet. How many times? Four? What do we think is going to be different now?” His eyes looked like little linty filters.

“With
that
attitude? No,” I said. “Nothing will be different. Jesus, Stu! She’s up there, doing all she can, and you’re already . . . Talk about bad vibes.”

“‘Bad vibes’? Is that how all your online yentas talk?” He dropped the split cookie halves, uneaten. “I’m not sure what’s worse, Pat, this touchy-feely stuff or the rah-rah business from before: ‘Shouldn’t we give those guys a good home?’”

Stu had always been adept at finding my armor’s cracks, and then: insert chisel,
tap tap
.

“Aw, is it so hard?” I said. “So
hard
to be Stu! Everyone always persecutes Stu! But try being the one who has to
listen
to it all, to stroke you and stroke you, but oops—not too much, ’cause pitying is the worst. Can’t stand to be pitied! By anyone, that is, but yourself.” I paused to breathe the keen, clanging air. “I’m sorry you’re discouraged, Stu. You think I’m not, too? But hearing you go on, like it’s some kind of torture, when you’re the one who—”

“
You
should try it.”

“Ha!” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Wait, what is
that
supposed to—”

“You? Since when do—
you
? I thought you aspired to be the mommy.”

I should have said: As if a mom is somehow something lesser?

And: Which of us has wanted all along to be a parent, has pushed us here, pushed you past your doubts? Which of us sees
parent
as a verb, not just a noun?

Most of all, though, what I should have said was: Fine, let’s talk. Maybe it
is
my time to take a turn.

Instead, I let his challenge hang, an apple of temptation. There it stayed, within my reach, so ripe.

When Debora beckoned, I carried her a fresh, cold guaraná. “Thanks,” she said. “But go home now, okay? I am fine.” Stu and I, she obviously sensed, were not.

We drove away enveloped in a carapace of silence, which, at home, was cracked by a crude, atonal melody:
whang
(the screen door),
stomp
(hallway),
chank
(a key ring, flung), the phone machine’s unforgiving
eee!

The phone machine, at least, provided a joint activity—a small goal the two of us could share: we stood together, waiting for our messages. A couple of quick hang-ups, a debt consolidation pitch, and then the voice of Cynthia, Stu’s scheduler. An unforeseen problem with the roster for tomorrow: Acuff ’s line assigned him to the Logan–Hartsfield route, but a death in the family, a funeral in Texas . . . any chance Stu could sub in?

Stu looked stoic. “I guess I’d better.”

All I said was, “Stu.”

“She needs me, Pat. Never would’ve called me if she didn’t.”

The thing that irked me most was that Stu sounded relieved. I darted him with reason after reason not to go: the chances of conception were who-knew-how-much greater with two back-to-back inseminations; how could we expect Debora to honor her commitments if
we
, at the last sec, reneged?

“
Her
commitments?” said Stu. “What about
my
commitments?”

“Hello?” I said. “Seniority! You’re not still some junior on reserve.”

He thrust his chin, throbbing with impatience. “How many goddamn duty days have I already bagged so I could jerk off into a cup? I took those days off—you know this, Pat, I know you do—by trading them for other times on call. And now
I’m
being asked to trade. I have to.”

The phone rang.