“Give me the phone,” Charles said. “What time is it in New York?”
It was just before five p.m. in New York, and they managed to catch the social worker before she was out the door. Deborah read them the details off a form: the baby weighed five pounds, ten ounces and was seventeen inches long, born to a twenty-year-old African-American mother. The father was Puerto Rican, but he was out of the picture. The birth mother had chosen their letter out of the book at the agency. The baby’s name, which they would of course be welcome to change, was Alphonse.
“Are you interested in proceeding?” Deborah waited.
Charles and Lawrence held the phone between their faces, both leaning forward, so that together their bodies formed a steeple. They looked at each other, eyes wide. Lawrence spoke first.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”
Deborah explained what would happen next—they’d heard it before, but like everything important, the minute that it became a reality, they’d forgotten all the details. The birth mother could choose any number of families, and the agency would approach them all on her behalf. Once those families had said yes, the agency would go back to her with the list. The birth mother would then pick the winners, as it were. The choice was out of their hands.
“We’re in Spain,” Lawrence said. “Should we come home? Should we come home right now?” He glanced around their bedroom, calculating how long it would take them to pack and drive to the airport.
“Stay on vacation,” Deborah said. “Even if the birth mother does choose you, we’re looking at a couple of weeks before you’d be able to bring Alphonse home. If you can stay, stay. I’ll be in touch whenever I hear something, probably next week.” She hung up the phone, leaving Charles and Lawrence standing there, the precious object now silent between them.
“Do you want to go home?” Charles asked.
Flying back to New York and furiously buying cribs and bouncy seats and high chairs and then not being chosen would be even worse than staying where they were, Lawrence knew. Let Mallorca be a distraction. Let the Posts try to get him to think about anything else, when there was Alphonse, sweet Alphonse, a baby in a hospital somewhere in New York City, a boy who needed his fathers. Staying was better than rushing back and not being picked. Lawrence didn’t want to let himself get too excited or take anything for granted. He wished he knew if the birth mother had picked all gay couples, who else they were up against. He wanted to see photographs of smiling families, and then to strangle the competition.
“We can stay,” Lawrence said. “Let’s stay.”
Joan was waiting at the door. It took such self-confidence to just stand there, knowing that someone would let him in. Sylvia was sure that Joan had never worried about anything in his entire life. He probably wouldn’t have rung the bell for another ten minutes, content to breathe in the clear air, to watch packs of bicyclists zoom by, their spandex clothes blurring together. He probably would have written a poem about it in his head, just because, not even minding when it all vanished a moment later. Joan smiled when she opened the door, and kept smiling as he walked through the dark foyer. Sylvia looked at their reflection in the giant mirror hanging behind his head, and then followed him into the bright dining room. If Joan had a girlfriend, which he obviously did, she would know how to put on eyeliner. She would know how to give a perfect blowjob. She would know how to do everything.
“Tienes novia?” Sylvia asked, only half meaning to voice the question. “I mean, my mom was asking me. I told her I would ask you. She’s really nosy. What’s the word for nosy? You know, always in everyone else’s business?”
Joan sat down and crossed his legs. In New York, only the gay boys crossed their legs. The straight ones made a point (especially on the subway) to sit with their knees as far apart as possible, as if whatever was between their legs was so enormous that they couldn’t help it. Sylvia respected how little Joan seemed to care about seeming heterosexual. “Not really. When I’m in Barcelona.” Joan shrugged. It was easy for him to find girls, of course. Claro.
There was a shuffling sound, and laughter, and then Charles and Lawrence stumbled into the kitchen, one of them clearly chasing the other. Charles reached the kitchen first and stopped short when he saw Joan.
“Hola,” he said.
“Hola,” Joan said back.
“Hola, Sylvia,” Charles said again, his entire face a wink. He smoothed his forehead as if he were brushing bangs out of his eyes.
“Oh, Jesus, just leave us alone,” Sylvia said, which set them off again, giggling like prom dates. Charles and Lawrence zipped through the kitchen and out the back door, setting themselves up nicely in the sun. Charles held their books, and Lawrence held the towels. Somewhere in the pile there was some sunscreen, and a hat to protect Charles’s scalp from burning. Sylvia watched them settle in, feeling simultaneously envious and like love, in its best form, was something for comfortable adults, and something she might expect to find only decades down the road. “Let’s talk about the future,” she said to Joan, who was staring off into space, perhaps contemplating his own beautiful existence.
Even though Franny was the cook in the family, Bobby and Jim both had very particular feelings about grilling meat. If Franny had minded surrendering the tongs, or found it at all sexist that the men in her family enjoyed sticking things into the fire, as all men had since the cave, she would not have relinquished her position. As it was, she had never much liked getting a face full of smoke, and was quite happy to let someone else do the lion’s share for a change. Jim liked to make sure the grill was hot enough, to add newspaper or coals and occasionally douse the whole lot with a good squirt of lighter fluid. Bobby liked the cooking of the meat itself—the smell of the initial sear, the way the meat firmed up around his poking finger as it neared ready. Charles and Lawrence had no interest whatsoever and sat with the girls on the opposite end of the pool, Sylvia in the water doing somersaults.
They’d bought thin steaks (Franny had put a hand on her rib cage, along the diaphragm, at the butcher counter, a pantomime that seemed to have worked), and Jim had marinated them in some oily concoction all afternoon. The grill was fairly new, which made Jim grumble. It was the years of use that lent great flavor, like a cast-iron pan. He scraped the grill with a stiff metal brush he’d found, trying to generate some kind of friction that would elevate the meal. The day had started to cool—like clockwork, a western wind worked its way through the mountains every evening, forcing all but the most stubborn children out of their swimming pools and into their clothes.
The house was exactly what Franny liked: beautiful and in the middle of nowhere. It was the sort of quirk that used to be charming—they’d go to some exotic foreign land, or to a boundless state like Wyoming, but without fail, the rental Franny had chosen would always be just far enough away from everything else that it was exactly like being at home, only with a different backdrop strung behind them. Jim gave the grill another good scrape. It was nearly hot enough—the heat made the air above the slats go wavy.
“It’s ready,” Jim said. “Should be three or four minutes on each side. We don’t want to overcook them.”
Bobby appeared at Jim’s side. He peeled the first steak off the plate and lowered it onto the grill, where it let out a great hiss.
“That’s good,” Jim said. “We want that sear.” It was like talking to an invisible camera on the other side of the grill, someone doing a documentary on father-son small chat. Jim was no good at it, he knew. He wanted to ask Bobby about Carmen, about what the hell he was doing in Florida, that rancid pit of a place. He wanted to tell Bobby what he’d done, how fuzzy the future was, how he was sorry for letting them all down. Instead, Jim found he could talk only about their dinner.