Purdy was from California. He was in his forties and used the word dude without irony. For this alone he couldn't be forgiven, in Hank's considered opinion.
He clenched the stick of jerky between his large white teeth— which Hank suspected were caps, incidentally — and offered Hank another one, wrapped in wax paper. “Got this baby myself,” he said, for the umpteenth time. The deer were always baby to him. “It was a large buck, a handsome animal. I had it made into partly sausage and partly jerky. Jerky's great to take to work. They make it for me in a mom-and-pop place on the East Side. You want some?”
Hank said no thanks without looking up from his monitor, which he was pretty sure constituted the international sign for leave me alone. Didn't everybody know this? For someone who studied patterns of human interaction, Purdy could be pretty oblivious.
Instead of leaving, he strolled around Hank's small office, chewing audibly on his wizened piece of meat. “Hey there, buddies,” he said to Poecilia reticulata. “You guys want some jerky?”
Hank put his hands on the sides of the chair. “You know not to feed them, right?” he said. There was, he couldn't help noticing, an undignified squeak in his voice.
“Relax, man.” Purdy tapped the stick of jerky against the glass pane of a tank. “Give me some credit.”
Hank clenched his teeth.
Purdy was the star of the department, with an endowed chair. He appeared on news shows and was the subject of feature articles in newspapers. He'd made a name for himself, in scientific circles and in larger ones, by stipulating that there was a biological basis for a lot of skanky male behavior. Men Suck: Scientific Fact was a typical headline for a piece about him. Dumping your girlfriend because she got fat, cheating on your girlfriend, lying to girls you met in bars, putting Rohypnol into their drinks — it was all just biology, Purdy said, steps on the quest to get ahead in this Darwinian world. Cultural critics said his work was a justification of the basest parts of human culture. Confronted by these remarks, Purdy smiled cagily at interviewers and said, “I just go where the science takes me.” The controversy served him well; he brought in millions of research dollars to the school and had lunch with the dean once a month.
Ordinarily, Hank dealt with Purdy like everyone else in the department — by smiling to his face and making fun of him behind his back. But today Hank was a little more on edge than usual. Okay, a lot more. The week had been a swirling mess of anxiety and tears at home, of Erica refusing to talk and then talking in the middle of the night when Hank, needless to say, was not at his best in terms of providing the listening, the holding, the reassuring that Erica wanted. In fact he hadn't had a good night's sleep since Sunday night, when she told him, in a quiet, desperate-sounding blurt, that she was pregnant. He stared at her. Under the fluorescent light of the kitchen she looked haggard. Erica had once had a perfect complexion — an English rose, her parents had called her — but it was marred now by dark circles beneath her eyes and flakes on her dry skin. Max was aging her; life was aging her.
She was waiting to see what he would say. There was no right thing to say, he knew.
“Are you sure?” he said. She rolled her eyes. They had sex rarely enough these days that he thought he remembered the night it must have happened. They'd been fighting about Max— Erica wanted to put him in a special school, with other disturbed children, and Hank thought that this would be the end of him ever turning into a normal kid — and they'd gone to bed angry and drunk and resolved the fight with sex, drunk, blotchy-faced, no-eye-contact sex. At thirty-eight, Erica didn't bother with the diaphragm. Standing there in the kitchen, Hank thought sex like that shouldn't bring a child into the world. Then he told himself, You are a scientist, and you know that has nothing to do with it. As Purdy would say, sex was sex, whatever the circumstances. “Means to an end,” he liked to say while presenting data on courtship rituals, smiling with his huge Californian teeth. Erica stood with her back to the kitchen counter, her hands clutching the marble rim of the top, and gazed emptily at the tile floor. Finally she said, “I don't want to keep it.”
This hadn't even occurred to Hank as a possibility.
“Max is enough,” she said. “He's more than enough. He's more than we can handle already.”
Hank swallowed. His mouth was dry. He and Erica had met in college, in a stats class, and now he was a biologist and she was a bank teller who'd quit her job to take care of Max. She'd given up whatever career she might have had to follow him where he got work, and then to take care of their son. He never talked to her about Poecilia reticulata. The fact that they both wanted a family was what had kept them together so far.
“But,” he said. He could see her hands tighten around the marble countertop. He wanted to say that maybe if they had another child and it was normal, that might dilute the effect Max was having on them. Which would make it sound as if he didn't love Max and was therefore the wrong thing to say. He also thought, but did not say, that he was amazed Erica didn't want to keep a child when they had a household and the opportunity to raise it. They weren't teenagers; they weren't poor. What kind of woman are you? If she could let this go so easily, he thought, there was no telling what she'd let go of next.
“But what?” Erica said.
He realized that she'd been standing there, waiting, for minutes. He opened his arms in a gesture of openness and defeat. “We'll do whatever you want,” he said. Which apparently gave the impression that he didn't care what happened and was therefore, as it turned out, also the wrong thing to say.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
For three days Erica wouldn't talk about it. When he tried to bring it up she'd just shut down, literally; she'd leave the room or put a pillow over her head. In the middle of the night he'd wake up to hear her sniffling quietly in her pillow, or sometimes whispering, a string of soft muttered syllables, although it wasn't clear what she was saying or whom she was saying it to. Herself? Him? The fetus? He was a scientist. He tried to confront the situation scientifically. The evidence suggested that the idea of giving up the baby was making her sad. So he leaned closer to her in the bed, took her hand, and said, “You know, we could do this. We could have this child.”
“Fuck you, Hank,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“You get to go to the office all day and stare at your fucking fish. You're not here getting phone calls from teachers and therapists. You're not here when your own son kicks you in the shin because you won't let him play video games for three hours straight and the kicking hurts, it really actually hurts, and you want to hit him and you almost do but then stop yourself because he's your son, but you wonder how much longer it'll be before you give in and smack him across the face.”