“She’s wanted it and not wanted it. She’s had plenty of opportunities, men who would have settled down. Or at least wanted kids. There was Joseph—”
I made a noise that belittled Joseph.
“They were a good match in a lot of ways. I think it’s stuff around her own dad, as I’ve told her. She can’t decide if she wants her kid to have a father.” I felt my presence flicker. “I just want to make sure you guys know what you’re doing.” We didn’t, but we’d scheduled new IUIs, the next one in a few days. They believed that they could effectively wash and scrub my sperm. If they can put a man on the moon, I joked to myself, and said:
“Maybe this”—a pause—“is a fine reason.” I had thoughts about why, but just let the statement sit there. She considered it for a while.
“Maybe it is.”
Maybe it was. The hot tub had been installed in the basement where we were staying as part of a regime of hydrotherapy intended to help with the pain, but her mom never used it. Perhaps we erroneously assumed water would aid lubrication; maybe we thought it described the future we were inheriting or would obscure the boundaries of our bodies in a way that would diminish the bizarreness; but water, as we should have known, washes away natural lubricants, and silicone substitutes, even if we’d had one on hand, aren’t recommended for couples trying to conceive.
It was probably all shot on a soundstage in L.A. Or the desert, slow-motion photography simulating zero gravity.
Not that we were a couple. We withdrew from the tub into the next room, where earlier that day Rick had made up the foldout sofa bed. By the time we reached it, however, I was no longer physiologically prepared. For whatever complex of reasons, I stopped her from initiating oral stimulation and kissed her with a passion I did not feel, but which rose within me as I faked it; soon, to my relief and frankly my surprise, I was capable of going on.
Lubrication, however, still posed a problem, a problem compounded by our being under the impression, possibly erroneous, that cunnilingus can imperil conception, saliva interfering with sperm transport. Thus we relied on manual stimulation in which she assisted and, aided by whatever she was imagining behind closed eyes, eventually we were able to proceed. When I was on top of her, she opened them, dark epithelium and clear stroma, and said, no doubt trying to encourage us both, “Fuck me.” But the unmistakable affectation in the voice of the least affected person I knew caused me to smile: then we both started laughing, producing what felt like instant flaccidity. I rolled off her and we lay there together on our backs. There are identical soil formations in photos that, according to their captions, were taken miles apart.
We inhaled some more weed from the vaporizer I’d left plugged in by the wall — although who knew what that was doing to my sperm — and eventually she attempted to restart things; this time I didn’t stop her. I stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of her mother two stories above me; wasn’t this also detrimental to conception? Abetted by the image of the redheaded Marfan from the party, we were soon able to resume. She climbed on top of me. Before I could take in the view of her strong body, she pressed the heel of her palm hard into my chin and, perhaps wanting to avoid my face or gaze, pushed my head back so that my eyes were directed toward the wall behind me; I bit my tongue, mint aftertaste of vapor mixing with the ferric taste of blood.
Experts, however, discourage positions in which sperm has to compete with gravity, and so now we were lying on our sides. I was behind her, trying to figure out what to do with my hands, which felt a little numb. I was somehow too shy to reach for her breasts or genitalia as my instincts bade me, even though we were conjoined. Finally I asked her where she’d like me to place them with a polite formality so incongruous with our situation that it again caused us to laugh. But we were determined not to let hilarity derail us a second time. She turned around and faced me frankly, scissoring her legs through mine. I pulled her hair back so that her neck was exposed, pressed my face into it, and, after many months of trying, came.
Her mom’s cells were dividing uncontrollably above us. The oceans, like Judd’s boxes, expanded as they warmed. Do you know what I mean if I say that what was most powerful about the experience was how it changed nothing? The flag seems to flutter in the wind, but there’s no air on the moon. The child-Alex was sleeping in the room beside her mom’s, green plastic stars glowing on the ceiling, her breathing synchronized with the thirty-six-year-old beside me. That our relationship had not been perceptibly deepened by the event was powerful evidence of the relationship’s depth. Only that made things a little different.
After I don’t know how long I floated up the carpeted stairs to get a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge; I tiptoed even though there was no way I could have woken anyone. I was heading back down with the green glass bottle when I sensed a presence on the screened-in porch, turned my head, and saw the glow of an LED screen; it was Rick. He’d no doubt seen me; I felt I should say hello, and joined him.
“What are you reading?” I asked, sitting in a wicker chair.
“Nothing. I’m addicted to these message boards. Johns Hopkins. Mayo Clinic.” He turned it off and we were in the dark. “It’s useless. A community of desperate spouses.”
“How are you doing,” I said, “all things considered?”
“Fine as long as there’s some immediate task at hand,” he said. “But it’s horrible at night.”
It might have been too dark to see me nod, but I nodded.
“What I can’t stop thinking about — and I know this is crazy — I can’t stop thinking about Ashley,” he said.
“That makes sense,” I said. “It doesn’t sound crazy.”
“But I keep waiting for Emma to say to me, ‘I want to tell you something, but I want you to promise you won’t be mad.’”
“To confess that she’s faking.”
“Yeah. And it’s like — sometimes if I haven’t been sleeping, if it’s like four in the morning, I start to think to myself: she could be faking, I start to suspect. It’s hard to explain: I know it’s crazy, impossible, I don’t really believe it, but it’s like this embodied memory of Ashley. Of what it felt like when that reality began to dawn on me.”
“Of course you wish it were fake. I understand that.”
“But it’s more complicated than that, see. I imagine her telling me, my realizing it’s all a hoax. But it’s not like I imagine relief. What I imagine is trashing the house in a rage, leaving her, never seeing her again. If I were to learn she was faking her death, she’d be dead to me.”
I wondered if I could put Rick’s story about Ashley in a novel, if he’d feel betrayed.
“And by the way, then I find myself thinking, even though I know it’s preposterous: What if Ashley wasn’t faking? What if she lied about lying in order to release me?”
Two days later I was in another woman’s arms: with one she cradled me and with the other she ran a sonographic wand, its end anointed with a cool, colorless gel, over my chest in search of a clear image. My eyes were shut and hers were focused on the screen where my black-and-white heart was pretending to beat. Every few minutes she’d ask me to change positions, my paper gown crackling against the paper sheet, or to hold my breath, which aids the imaging. The sonographer was around my age, Dominican I guessed, gentler and much more intimate than the last one; behind closed eyes, I kept imagining her as Alex. One moment you are inhaling cannabis vapor in a finished basement in New Paltz awkwardly attempting to impregnate your best friend, and the next a lubricated transducer is emitting waves of sound into your chest. I felt pregnant: there’s no difference between this procedure and fetal echocardiography, save for placement. I pictured my heart as embryonic, except growth at the sinuses could mean death.