She frowned. "No. I don't think I did."
He took his briefcase through their bedroom into his office. On the bed sat two large bags from Bloomingdale's, another from Saks. Don't mention it, he thought, there's no point. Her mind is just on other things. "You expect," he asked when he returned to the dining room, "that Julia and Brian will try to use another woman's egg? A surrogate?"
"I think it's an idea." Ellie handed him his glass. "They do that now frequently."
"But the child will never know who his real mother is."
"His real mother will be whoever changed his diaper and read books to him."
He tasted his drink. Terrible. Too strong by half. He poured an inch out and added tonic. "You know what I mean, Ellie, I mean the biological. Wouldn't the kid always ask himself the rest of his life?"
"It depends on how secure he is."
"But aren't you bringing a child into the world who is going to be damaged by what he or she can never know?"
Ellie took the ice back into the kitchen and he followed her. "I don't look at it that way," she said. "The child would have his biological father and an adoptive mother. Julia will be a beautiful mother."
"I know. Maybe I'm not putting it the right way." He needed to bend the question around for himself, since tomorrow he was due to whack off in a glass beaker or jar or Coke bottle or whatever they used in high-tech medical whack-off joints. "Here's what I mean. You have these women having children by themselves, and some are just going and getting sperm from any old place. I mean, how do you feel about this? Those children don't know who their fathers are."
"That's fine," Ellie said distractedly.
"Why?"
"Because if the woman went to all this trouble she wants to have a baby very much."
"But what-"
"Men never understand what it is to have a baby. Of course it is harder to raise a child by yourself. But for some women that is actually better, you know. They can love the baby and not have the distraction of the man, the competition for their time." She looked out the kitchen window toward Central Park. "I raised both kids while you were away. I was perfectly happy. I had everything I needed at the base. My only worry was if you were safe."
"You were a good mother."
Ellie shrugged. "The kids were okay. The kids knew you could be killed in the plane, and that's much worse than wondering about some father you never met."
"I thought you didn't talk to them about the plane."
"I didn't, but, Charlie, it was the base! All the kids had dads in planes. Remember Janny McNamara? And Susan Howard? They both lost their husbands, and they weren't even in Vietnam."
"That was an in-flight refueling thing." The frontseater, Howard, had misjudged his speed and flown into the jet-fuel boom sticking out of a KC-130 tanker, impaling the cockpit.
"I don't remember," Ellie went on. "What I'm saying is, I was okay and so were the kids, even though we missed you and-All I'm saying is that I don't blame these young mothers. To nurse your own child is just-well, you remember how I was. These young women want that. Why can't they have that?"
Now he was going to use Martha Wainwright's argument. "But shouldn't they adopt some other child who needs a mother?"
"Maybe, in a perfect world."
"What about the men who donate their sperm to the sperm banks? Isn't that just vanity?"
"No."
"Why?"
"They want to go on. I understand that."
They want to go on. She understood that.
After dinner, Ellie put down her spoon and looked at him. "I really want you to come visit the retirement place."
"Why?"
"Because you might like it, you know. You might actually think to yourself, Ellie has a good idea here."
"I'll visit it soon as I can."
"When?"
"Let me just get by this factory stuff and I'll drive down."
"With me or by yourself?"
"We'll see." What he wanted to do, that very moment, was to slide out of the apartment and ease down the street two blocks and sit up at the bar in the Pierre, where the bartender made a damn good gin and tonic using some kind of sweetener and you sometimes saw Henry Kissinger. You sometimes saw a lot of other people, too, and most of them wore very nice dresses. He just liked to sit and watch the action. You ended up talking to a German television producer or a British real-estate man or anyone else with an hour's worth of breath. You forgot that your back had ached for ten thousand straight nights or that your wife was driving on three wheels or that you owed the Bank of Asia fifty-two million dollars in U.S. currency, the interest rate floating at three points above the prime, a sum equal to one tenth of the total capitalization of the company. You forgot that to repay that sum you would have to exploit the labor of eleven thousand semiliterate peasants in four countries, eleven thousand souls who assumed your exploitation of them and craved for it to continue, because it was the best thing going. Well, the company had tried to design humane living conditions in the dormitory next to the new factory. He needed to check on its progress, he reminded himself, he needed to sit quietly and think about the company. He could take a couple of months' worth of sales reports and raw-materials cost projections and sit at the Pierre's bar and pick through the data. You had to keep on top of the flickering indicators that the market was pressured by demand or the lack of it, rising costs or falling margins. The company's sales reps were reporting that customers were saying that Manila Telecom's salespeople were promising new products, faster manufacturing times. Maybe you forgot that, too.
But if he left now, Ellie would only become more irritated. He watched her go into the bedroom and followed her. She sat heavily on the bed, a huge one she'd had shipped from Tuscany ten years back. If I didn't know better, he thought, I'd say she is cracking up a bit. She took one of the photos of Ben off her nightstand and studied it, eyes blinking, mouth slack. There's no safety in the world, he thought, never. She'd made Ben inside of her and he'd died. End of story. She wants a safe place for herself and for her husband, and who could blame her? Trying to set up the last leg home, so to speak, and if he were a decent man, a kind man, he'd appreciate Ellie for this act of love and foresight. Instead, he felt only fear and bitterness and resentment. So here she was looking at the photo of their dead son, asking herself the unanswerable.
After Ben died, she'd lost weight and for a time started smoking again. Meanwhile, Charlie buried himself in work, trying to get Teknetrix into the design sequence of some of the large telecom manufacturers, trying to spec into their products. Chasing success to flee grief. In that year after Ben's death he'd flown almost constantly, mostly to Asia and Silicon Valley, meeting other executives, making bids, taking bids, buying dinner for everyone, ordering cars to the airport, from the airport, wake-up call at 5:00 a.m., please, I'm here today to show you what Teknetrix can do within your cost structure, that's one hell of a nice putt, ours is faster, we can engineer that ten percent smaller. The whole cha-cha-cha. A bad time in the economy, the mid-eighties, but he'd hoped that if he could just get the orders moving for Teknetrix, then eventually the company would climb the vertical face of market share. A hundred sales calls, a thousand cups of coffee, a hundred thousand miles of flying: ten large orders. They bought a smaller competitor, they hired better engineers, they scored four design wins in two months in 1985. All after Ben's death. All because Charlie went on the road. If Ben had lived, Teknetrix might have died, but because Ben perished, Teknetrix boomed, from eighty million in sales to two hundred million in three years, including the strategic acquisition. Eleven hundred employees to three thousand to nine thousand. An amazing leap. The great irony was that Charlie would have showered that prosperity down upon Ben, sent him to any graduate school in the world, helped him get married or start off on the right foot. Anything for his Ben. And now all they had were some photographs and the things in Ben's closet that Ellie could not bring herself to throw away. His high-school letter jacket, his basketball, now gone soft. He wondered if these things would also find their way down to Vista del Muerte. Probably. He'd ask Ellie to put Ben's stuff where he was unlikely to run into it. She could build a special little walk-in closet, if she wanted, a shrine. She was like that, Ellie. Needed to hang on to the relics. Still had Julia's baby teeth somewhere and pieces of hair and tiny wool mittens and Ben's soccer shoes and Julia's retainer from after she got her braces off. It was more than sentimental, it was superstitious. Primitive. He understood the impulse and it scared the hell out of him. For if you were attached to this thing and that thing, then why not everything, why not grab every last fucking fragment of life's passage? But of course you could not. Ellie had held tight to life from the very first, perhaps because she'd lost her parents early. The death of Ben had confirmed her worst fears about the unbearable nature of time and being; suffering arrived in every life, and the only question was whether you understood this sooner or later. He'd often wondered if she'd had an affair when he was in Vietnam, or while he was MIA, out of worry or grief, but her devotion to him when he returned convinced him that he didn't need to ask. If she had done so, then so be it. It was some piece of another man's flesh in her for a few minutes. Maybe it made her happy. He could take that, he really could. In the great flow of things, not such a big deal really. They'd made children together, and that was the singular fact of their union, that was the thing that bound them forever and ever, amen. And anyway, Ellie could live with the truth that for three years he'd killed human beings for a living. If two people's miseries do not overlap, then why should their happinesses?