“How much are we talking about now?”
“I can do it for two hundred thousand dollars,” he says. He’d worked out the figure before calling.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” Something strange is happening, some reversal of the natural order, in which the inheritance passes from the son to the father, and resources flow upward through the generations. I hang up the phone and return to the game, but my eyes keep slipping down to the clock on the cable box where the hours and minutes are piling up. Maya is leaving the office in her overcoat, walking the seven blocks to my house, past the yard with the pit bull and the empty lot where the mysterious planks of wood stand like soldiers in the earth. I should put down the controller, shower, hide the evidence of the wasted day, prepare myself to deceive her about where I’ve been. But when she lets herself in I am under attack by a swarm of birdlike ghosts. She comes up behind me and musses the back of my hair, then goes into the bedroom, where the console’s shots and explosions are muffled. Of course, her departure makes me anxious and I sacrifice the game and go to her.
We sit at the kitchen counter and eat Indian food. Not telling her that I met her father yesterday is surprisingly easy; I can see how people have affairs. I don’t tell her about my dad’s phone call either — maybe because, the first time he called, she asked me if he wanted money, and I’m not happy she turned out to be right. Other than deal with our fathers, all I’ve done since I saw her last is play Xbox.
“I think I’m pretty close to the end,” I say. “Finishing a game always gives me a weird fake-accomplishment feeling. It’s a lot like disappointment.” She’s bored: she doesn’t play with her fingernails or say uh-huh in a distracted way, but the spark of her interest is gone. Bored, she’s not magic anymore. For some reason I remember the imaginary dog she might have killed.
We finish eating and move to the bedroom in a state that combines vacant lust and a disinclination to keep talking. As I start to go down on her, I remember that I began that way last time; tonight I should have taken a more concupiscent approach, to demonstrate creativity and to flatter her with the suggestion of passionate desire. Ten minutes later, engaged in coitus a posteriori, I find myself watching as if from the side of the room. The perspective is cold and arousing, and I am handling the physiomechanics of the act with unusual confidence, until she says, “I need it rougher.”
So what is this? An artifact of childhood trauma? A vestigial need to revisit that dark nexus of sex and coercion, to touch some wound inside herself? Or is it the other way around: the memories of abuse at her father’s hands are masochistic fantasies, an ordinary kink misunderstood? I am not watching from the side anymore. I put my hand on the back of her head and push her face down. She makes an enthusiastic sound, or perhaps just a reflexive grunt. I am Donald now, and I give it to her, punish her for betraying me, for lying, for pretending to be a victim when she’s just a slut. And then I ejaculate, much too soon. She wants to kiss afterward, which is almost more than I can stand.
Cynthia is one of those children who, lacking some gene for adolescence, have not once worried or disappointed their parents. Her grades were never less than adequate, her demeanor never hostile, her behavior never self-destructive. Every friend was presented to Doug and Rose Gerney over the family dinner table. (They adored Danny Keach, who recognized that charming them was a station on the path into Cynthia’s heart and jeans.) She graduated college in four years and proceeded to obtain a skilled job. She flies home for major holidays and helps with the cooking. So it was a new experience for the Gerney family when Cynthia told her parents she’d decided that men just weren’t her thing.
She calls to give me the news. “I need to tell you about it,” she says. “Can I come after work?”
I make preliminary noises of regret: I’m speaking at this conference tomorrow and I’d like to go over some notes, take a bath, get an early night. But there’s an uncharacteristic insistence in Cynthia’s tone that makes me relent.
Sitting on my couch she describes the phone call, with her parents on separate extensions. Here’s what I’m afraid of: she called and said, Get Dad on the line, I need to tell you guys something, and her mother leapt willfully to the conclusion that Cynthia was getting married.
“So how did they react?” I say. Doug is a bearish, mustachioed man who writes nonfiction books on manly topics: gambling, the rural life, the history of tobacco. I picture him standing in the bedroom of their house in Denver, holding the receiver to his ear, until I remember that they’ve moved into a smaller house, one I’ve never seen. Did he take Cynthia’s homosexuality as a personal rejection? A lapse in his daughter’s love? What the hell is fatherhood about, anyway?
They didn’t disown her. Doug kept saying, It’s just such a surprise. Rose said, But don’t you want children? Cynthia explained that lesbianism doesn’t preclude children, but Rose wasn’t satisfied and Doug went to the kitchen to hold her while she sobbed into the phone.
I murmur sympathetically, but Cynthia sweeps my condolences away with the back of her hand.
“She just couldn’t get over the grandchildren thing,” she says. “I told her I could go to a sperm bank or something, and that didn’t help.” She blows the steam off her tea. “So I said you’d probably give me some if I asked.” I can’t think of anything to say to this except Ha! “And the thing is, she totally stopped crying. She made me promise to ask you about it.”
“I’m flattered that your mom holds my DNA in such high esteem.”
“No, she always liked you. And she was really impressed when you sold the company.” This remark triggers a wave of disgust, but I can’t tell where it’s directed. To feel disgusted is to feel implicated.
“It’ll never happen, obviously,” Cynthia says. “I just wanted you to be prepared if she ever says anything weird about it.”
“Color me prepared,” I say, getting up from the couch to fetch some snacks and relieve the interpersonal intensity. “No, it’s fine. Tell her whatever.” In one of the infinite possible futures that branch from every instant, Cynthia is raising twins, a boy and a girl, with her chubby face and my inability to relate to people. On the way to the pantry I pass my laptop, which is sitting on the kitchen island, and of course I glance at the screen in case Maya has emailed to say how much she loves me. Instead there’s a message from Donald Marcom with the subject Checking in.
I return to the couch with a box of chocolate marshmallow Pinwheels, but Cynthia knows something’s not right.
“What just happened?” she says.
So I have to explain everything, even though I understand so little. Cynthia has heard me say that Maya was abused, and it never occurred to her to treat that statement as anything other than a fact. She wants to see Donald’s email, so I fetch the computer from the island and set it down on the table in front of us. It reads:
Eric,
Your disinterested pursuit of the truth does you credit. Thanks to you I find myself more hopeful than at any time since this ordeal began. I hope you will keep me informed about your discussions with Maya — both for my own information and to allow me to respond to any further distortions.
DBM
This is one of those times when you have managed to be true to yourself, have obeyed unusually clear impulses, and then find yourself at the bottom of a pit, unable to explain how you got there. How did Donald Marcom and I wind up on the same side?
“He thinks you’re working for him?” Cynthia says. I shrug.