“What do you mean?”
“‘It was the only kind of first date he could bring himself to go on, the kind you could deny after the fact had been a date at all.’”
“That’s fiction and we’re not talking about a first date.”
“What about the part about smoothing my hair in the cab? The part that’s based on the night of the storm. The alcohol is a way of hedging. So that whatever happens only kind of happened.” I made myself not take a drink.
“Okay, but your whole plan only kind of involves me — my level of involvement to be determined, whether I’m a donor or a father. You’re asking me to be a flickering presence. I give reproductive cells and then the rest we figure out as we go along.”
“Yes, but that’s because it’s up to you. As I’ve said since the beginning, if you want to fully coparent, whatever that would mean, I would do that with you. I wouldn’t have asked you otherwise. I would prefer to do that with you, in fact. If you want to try to have sex as part of a reproduction strategy”—I involuntarily raised my eyebrows at the phrase “reproduction strategy”—“or whatever you want to call it, I’m open to that, too. We’d have to talk more about it. You would have to stop sleeping with Alena, at least during that time. That would be too strange.”
I drained my glass. “What, we’d be a couple? Are you proposing?”
“No. People do this. It would be like we were … amicably divorced.” We both laughed. We had no idea how it would work. But I knew how we could pay for it: I told her I’d sent off the proposal, described my plan to expand the story.
She was quiet for half a minute, then: “I don’t know.” I’d expected her to say it sounded brilliant, which was what she normally said whenever I ran a literary idea by her — an adjective she’d never applied to any of my nonliterary ideas.
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.”
“Nobody is going to give me strong six figures for a poem.”
“Especially a novel about deception. And it sounds morbid to me. I feel like you don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should be finding a way to inhabit the present.” I remembered the sensation in my chest when I’d sent off the proposal, as if that way of dilating the story was linked to the dilation of my aorta. “And anyway, you shouldn’t be writing about medical stuff.”
“Why?”
“Because you believe, even though you’ll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you’re probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“How often have you worried you have a brain tumor?”
“Not once,” I laughed, lying.
“Liar. Remember what happened with your novel and your mom.”
In my novel the protagonist tells people his mother is dead, when she’s alive and well. Halfway through writing the book, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and I felt, however insanely, that the novel was in part responsible, that having even a fictionalized version of myself producing bad karma around parental health was in some unspecifiable way to blame for the diagnosis. I stopped work on the novel and was resolved to trash it until my mom — who was doing perfectly well after a mastectomy and who, thankfully, hadn’t had to do chemo — convinced me over the course of a couple of months to finish the book.
“Do you know what I realized the other day,” I said, “while being interviewed by somebody from the Netherlands over Skype about that novel, which just came out in Dutch? I realized how the lie about his mom is really about my dad.”
“How?”
“Or about my dad’s mother, my grandma, whom I never met; she died when he was twenty. I don’t know if you want to hear a story about mothers and cancer right now.”
“I would like to hear the story.”
“My dad told me all of this when I flew home from Providence for Daniel’s funeral my freshman year of college. He picked me up at the airport and we started driving back to Topeka and I was so upset I could barely speak. I remember we were moving slowly because there was a light but freezing rain. The first part of the story I’d already heard: the day his mother died from breast cancer—‘cancer’ was never said in the family, but everybody knew, even the kids — he called up his girlfriend, Rachel, who was soon to become his first wife, a marriage that lasted all of a year, and before he could say anything, he realized that she was crying and that he could hear weeping, no, wailing in the background. Before he could share the news about his own mom, before he could even ask what happened, Rachel said: My father died. Rachel’s father, a well-known businessman in D.C., where my dad lived and was now in college, had been perfectly healthy, as far as anybody knew. But on the same morning my dad’s mom died after a multiyear struggle with a terrible illness, he just dropped dead at his office from a coronary.”
“That’s insane.”
“Or maybe he dissected, I don’t know. Rachel told my dad that the funeral would be in Albany, where her father was from, and that she hoped he would go up with her the next day and he said sure and hung up the phone without ever telling her about his mom. Meanwhile, my dad’s own mom wasn’t being mourned properly at all. My grandfather was either in denial or involved with someone else, but either way, my dad and his younger siblings were being served frozen dinners and left to watch Gunsmoke or whatever and there was no service planned of any sort. So my dad just said that Rachel’s dad had died and he was going to Albany for the funeral and my grandfather said, without asking any questions: Fine. He took the train to Albany with Rachel, who wept the whole time — he never talked about his mom — and they eventually arrived at the family home, where the more Jewish side of the family was constantly praying and would be sitting shiva for seven days after the burial. It was a giant house and he was given a guest room and he sat up all night staring at the ceiling with occasional bouts of weeping from other parts of the house still audible late into the night as he tried to imagine where his mother’s body was, although I might be making that detail up.” I raised my hand to get the waitress’s attention from across the bar and then raised my empty glass.
“Guess what his job was the next day at the funeral? They gave him smelling salts and he was supposed to go around and revive any of the women who passed out or got weak from weeping. My dad, at twenty, secretly mourning his mother, walking around a funeral, which his mother would not have, dry-eyed and holding some kind of chemical compound under the noses of people whose ululations were causing them to swoon. I had heard this part of the story before, although it had never struck me so powerfully as it did that night as we drove home through the sleet for Daniel’s funeral, but then my dad started to tell me the part he’d never told me before.” My drink had arrived and I tried it; it was sweeter this time. Alex expressed the intensity of her attention by not touching her water. She had an ability to hold herself so still that it became a form of gracefulness.
After the funeral, when I left the family to sit shiva in that giant house in Albany, my dad told me, I had to take a train to Penn Station and then another train to D.C. I arrived at Penn Station without incident, although it was snowing heavily, but then in Penn Station there was some kind of problem with the train, no doubt due to the weather. I remember how cold I was: I was wearing my one suit, which I’d worn to the funeral, but my winter coat didn’t go with a suit, so I’d left it at home. There was an enormous line for the D.C. train — I’d never seen a line that long for any train at Penn Station — and it took forever for me to work my way to the platform. When I reached the platform, it was chaos: crowds, shouting. It turned out that two previous trains had been canceled due to ice on the tracks or something so there were all of these people desperate to get on this one, the last train out. They had even added extra cars — I could see them and they looked archaic, like decommissioned cars from the nineteenth century — to try to accommodate the overflow of passengers. I could picture all of this as we drove to Topeka, I said to Alex, with unusual vividness, maybe because the windows were fogged up and so little of the landscape was visible to distract me. And maybe I could picture it so vividly across from Alex because of the bar’s anachronistic décor. I imagined the clock at Penn Station as my dad tried to get home, probably inserting an image from Marclay’s video. But even so, my dad said to me, by the time I reached one of the car doors where there was both a man collecting tickets and a police officer trying to keep everybody calm, I was told that the train was full, that there were simply no more seats, that I’d have to stay the night in New York and catch the first morning train.