The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (11 page)

I let myself laugh. I let my forehead fall onto his chest with a satisfying thunk. Nice knowing he wouldn't mind if I beat it against him for awhile. Finally I look up at him. “So you've been married?”

“Plenty,” he says. “I'm Portuguese” (he pronounces it Portugezay). “You know, put the net right in. Bring up the house payment, bring up the phone bill. Send a card: Wishing you were her. Oops. Onto my future ex-wife. I should have shot myself but it's against my religion.”

“What about with your kids.”

“Solid,” he says fiercely, “Whatever they need. Like an automatic money machine. Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. Resupply. How it should be. I love 'em. Here, let's drink to our kids. We'll cry about your daughter later.” We raise our glasses “Gallon up, baby,” he says. “Let's buff and duff.”

The parking lot smells of slough and slutch—fertility at low tide in the marsh mud. Frank drives a Cutlass Cruiser station wagon and to look at its fake wood sides I
know
she got the house, he got the car. But he's modified it with a bumper sticker that reads,
Jesus was a gillnetter
, and long tool boxes in the back. We drive north a few miles where Loomis Creek broadens to the sea. It's close to nine o'clock and the sun is setting. Our faces inside the car appear black and white against the vast pink sky. I see only the sculptural lines of his face—the way twenty years ago he would have been handsome.

I tell him how the topography on this bend of road always makes me feel like a traveler instead of someone who lives a few miles beyond. The creek runs south alongside the sea before it turns west to open its mouth. The sun setting on the ocean reflects in the creek's currents. Reflections doubling. No wonder my heart anticipates something unnamed. I'm looking for an opening, the way the creek must look for an opening to the sea. Frank pulls over on a rise and kisses me. It's very slow and deliberate and almost comical the way he slides his girth out from behind the wheel and his leather coat arms uncrease loudly, and all the while I'm watching—comical because there's a hint of parody for us both, because we did this seriously a million years ago when we were lithe and sweaty. His kiss is sweet, tentative, sucky, we take little peeks at each other before our tongues foray further. At last, having gone for the gullet in juvenile fashion, we stop to laugh, let the parody catch up with us. When he smiles he looks goofy, the way clowns do—by sustaining sincerity. I fight my mind's sarcastic asides and I don't look away when he holds my face in his hands. I feel shy suddenly, shyer than I could possibly have known about myself.

“I need to get home now.”

“Why? You afraid you're going to use up all the good time and have a shortage later?”

“I'm afraid if I have a good time, I'll know how bad it's been.”

On the way home, I tell him about Jess. He nods a lot and we smoke.

“It's true,” he says, “You've never known worry tll you've had kids.”

We pull into my motel and I try the door handle on my side. It's frozen. He's already out and piling around to my side. “I'm sorry, it's stuck.”

I yell out the wind wing. “I love it. Car comes with a doorman.”

My cottage smells like old cantaloupe rinds from breakfast simmering with cigarette butts under the kitchen sink.

“Gad” I say, going for the trash.

“Here,” he says, swinging the can away from me by its rim. “Round back, right?”

While he's doing that, I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I'm relieved that he acts his age, that he doesn't mind taking the trash out first. I simply can't imagine persevering in the performance of passion while foremost is the need to pee. It was never worth it. I come out and turn sideways in the hall as he passes me. “My turn to buff and duff,” he says, going by me and shutting the door.

Just before I switch off the standing lamp, I see Jess's picture on the mantle, her senior year in high school when she refused to smile. I'm waiting for her to come home and tell me to take it down. Tell me she can't stand it anymore. I can't stand it anymore. Frank's coming down the hall. Daughter, would this make you smile?

In the dark, I'm dismayed, afraid it's going to be the old penis polka, worrying about whether his erection is up or down, hard or soft, just as self-conscious as stepping all over each other's feet wishing the tempo weren't so maddening. And I can't help it, the thing itself, the impression it leaves on my belly is the stamp of an old memory.

“Hey, girl,” he says, his thumbs at my temples stroking lightly.

“I'm not good at this, Frank,” I say, shaking my head, “not good. I was never good.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” he says. “Let's just pretend we're plants.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you're the wild rose grew round the briar. Or maybe I'm the wild rose grew round the briar.”

“You're lulu,” I say, laughing.

“No, I'm a plant. We hardly move. An inch a decade.”

Then we don't talk. His kisses are like little plush blooms. After awhile, an unrolling, a darting out, a little tendril that takes root. For now, kissing is so much better than making love—none of the banal awkwardness of old injuries and elbows in the wrong places and breasts slopping to the side and getting pinched between your body and his, or knee caps smacking together, or balls squished, all that posturing and positioning. Bodies and faces the way Braque would paint them, full of fissures, disjointed features, angular, broken up, a cheese grater for teeth, a mandolin for an ear. I've always wanted to suspend the kiss.

Frank made the transition from his imagination to my arms so gracefully. The all-night kiss, face between my legs, hands clasped over my belly, he looks up like he's praying, supplicant who will not rise off his knees until finally I've slid down to him, spent, panting, crouched inside his rounded torso, outlined by the light so that blackness pools between the nobs of our bones.

He clears his throat softly. “I wish I could have …”

“Sshh.”

“You don't mind that I …”

“Sshh. I wanted it to be like this.”

In the morning he tells me a joke. “What's the difference between twenty years of the same job and twenty years of marriage?” I stare at him groggily on my way to the bathroom. “The job still sucks.” I laugh as I go down the hall but his insecurity is beginning to wear on me and I notice things I'd rather not, like the guinea pig whorl at the crown of his head because he hasn't combed his hair yet and the fact that he's having a cigarette on an empty stomach. Well, he made his own coffee, that's something.

“You don't run out of jokes, do you?” I say.

“Not all day,” he says, leaning back in his chair so I can see him, so he can holler down the hall. “Not if I can help it.”

But at the breakfast table he keeps the verbal percussion down until I can get some coffee, and I wonder what unlovely characteristics of mine he's noticing by the morn's early light.

“So fishing is a pretty unpredictable life, isn't it?” I push down the toaster button and don't say what's on my mind. How futile any feeling would seem if last night were just a one night stand. And yet I already want him to go away. I'm itching with it. For me, nothing can last and yet I want to believe it will. It's a terrible strain to live inside the paradox: always being prepared to leave and needing to believe I won't have to. I'd just as soon boil an egg alone and I know it.

Frank shrugs. His eyes are looking inward as he speaks, not at me.

“Fishing is a life of worrying when the fish aren't there, planning and laying odds on the next week, changing your mind about leaving or staying, staying or leaving, worrying about losing more money if you stay or being absent when the fish hit. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't and when you rake in the cash, the guys think you're a shrewd motherfucker and you think you're just plain lucky.”

“Are you a shrewd motherfucker?” He's at the table and I'm leaning on the counter. My tone is tougher than I had intended. It makes us both aware that I haven't crossed the linoleum to join him again.

He stirs his coffee slowly, his stare an assessment also. “Are you going to see me again?” he asks.

“I don't know. We're still on best behavior. I don't like it when that wears off.” What I really want is for him to convince me he'll never hurt me, to shoulder the weight of my whole history, but I feel angry that my desires are so corny and impossible, and even to my own ears I simply sound spiteful.

“So, this is modern romance as in ‘Farewell, I liked you?'” He's tapping his finger to his lips, and it stings me that already I recognize the meaning of his gestures. How far will I take it?

“Romance, Frank? Or merely pathos.” My bitchiness feels so satisfying, like making a clean tear in an old sheet. I can't seem to help myself.

He gulps down the rest of his coffee standing up and makes an exaggerated Ahhh sound. “Ciao, Bella,” he says, as he puts the cup down. His eyes are bright with fury.

I watch his feet make dust devils down my driveway while my daughter stares at me stonily from her high school picture, as though she expected this from me, as though she couldn't be more disgusted. Before I know it, I'm running out the door in my plaid flannel nightshirt yelling, conscious even as I do so of a million stupid movie scenes and my absurd willingness to star in this one. But when I get to the car, I don't know what to say. He hasn't started the engine yet; he's smoking a cigarette and leaning against the door. Waiting. Evidently he doesn't know how to be in the movies.

“So what is it?” he says, hunching his shoulders, “I forget my lunch?”

“No,” I say, “This isn't how it's supposed to be.”

“What is? darlin.” He looks at me and shakes his head.

“I want you to come inside, and don't believe me again if I ask you to leave.”

He lets me stand there for a long moment—disheveled, bare feet on the gravel—then he reaches out and tugs on my sleeve. I take the two strides between us and he collars me affectionately though I keep staring at the ground. “This could be a bad habit, sweetheart, asking me to get lost. Do you think you could break yourself of it?”

“I could try.”

X.

News comes to my kitchen door. I hear the screen rattle as he knocks lightly on the door frame. It's Nigel wearing a raw silk shirt of cobalt blue that brings out the color in his eyes. He has dressed to be handsome today. Surely not for me, the old lesbo mother.

“Jess isn't here,” I call out.

“May I come in anyway?”

I let him be uncomfortable for a moment as I stub out my cigarette, then I make an open-palmed gesture with my hand, acquiescing rather than welcoming. I don't want to consign him to being the bastard yet, not if he's felt an opening in himself and come here to widen it.

“Will she be back soon?” He holds his hand against the screen door so it won't slam as he comes inside.

“I doubt it. She's six states away. Gone to visit relatives in the Midwest.”

Ah,” he says gracefully, neither putting me on the spot nor revealing what he might know. I have an urge to bring him up short.

“Her father's family. Won't you sit down?” He takes a seat at the breakfast table, looking at the old fashioned silver toast holder I've got stuffed with mail and my coffee-splotched, jam-splattered table cloth; he keeps his face carefully composed.

“That must have been hard on you both, losing him when Jess was so young.”

The pause that follows is altogether too long for a woman whose husband has been dead twenty years. Of course I'm not that woman. His eyes flicker as he openly studies me. I can presume now that he knows about the insemination but is he dispensing kindness or trying to cut a deal of sorts? He will defer to me in this if I defer to him in other matters? My voice is caustic.

“Isn't consolation for the widow a bit overdue?”

“We've never really had a conversation.”

I carry the ashtray to the table and sit across from him. “What do you want to talk about?”

He laughs but it's a manufactured sort of chuckle, on the defensive.

“Well, maybe there are things we should talk about … arrangements.”

He clears his throat and looks at me levelly, as if to remind me that we're peers, closer in age certainly than he and Jess. “I'm perfectly willing to pay child support. If we can't agree on a figure then whatever sum the state sets, given my income.”

“That's decent of you.” I say this genuinely, knowing she'd resent the immediacy with which I boil down to practicalities. It's not for me to say more. I don't know what Jess wants. I told her that if she wanted to be done with him, we'd manage, but I'd like to see her finish the degree at the community college, at least.

“Of course, that's after the DNA tests determine that it's mine.”

I sit back from the table and scratch at the flower pollen that has made mustard colored explosions on the cloth. The daisies droop in their vase and the water smells of ferment. Ten days ago, Jess picked them. Nigel reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his own cigarettes. His hands are elegant: long fingers and flexible, slender thumbs that bend back as he gestures. I imagine their skill on her body.

“Do you have reason to think otherwise?” I ask.

“Possibly, but I'd rather not discuss it.” He says this with one eye shut against a match flame and a cigarette pressed between his lips.

“Too bad it doesn't happen in your body. Or you'd be suspect. Man over forty, unmarried.”

“What about yourself?” he says, laughing uneasily.

“Exactly,” I say. “In this community, I'm considered capable of anything.”