The Man I Love (37 page)

“Enjoy yourself,” she said, smiling, and gestured to his uneaten food with her chopsticks. “Can I eat that?”

It was a lovely night for April. The air was velvety soft. The perpetually-strung Christmas lights made the little porch into a warm, twinkling cave, and Erik sat there a long time. Deconstructing the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away,” he tried to shut his thoughts out. Tried not to let it matter Daisy hadn’t spoken his name on the radio.

The back door opened.

Stark naked, Melanie lounged against the jamb, fingers combing through her plaits.

“I have a question.”

Slowly Erik put the guitar down, got up, and followed her inside.

Sometime later, in the dark of the living room, Mrs. Fiskare lifted her face out of the couch cushions with a concerted effort, and weakly pushed her tangled cornrows out of her mouth. Her shoulder blades were heaving and slick with sweat.

“Oh my God,” she said, gasping. “What was
that?”

“A fuck,” Erik said, falling onto the floor, panting and spent. “I gave it.”

April 28, 2002

What’s up, asshole? I heard the radio show yesterday. Then arrived home to find your letter and my necklace. Mind blown. If you delivered it in person you would’ve been blown as well. But it’s allergy season and I can barely breathe through my nose. So it’s for the best.

Seriously. I’m an overwhelmed and sloppy mess from this. But I wanted to let you know I got it. And thank you. Thank you for being the kind of guy to step in and help lug a stove out. Thank you for being the kind of guy to hunt me down and send back the thing that means the world to me. I don’t have words to tell you how much I appreciate it. (Other than “suck” and “cock,” of course.)

I’m taking care of my ass. It’s not as high and tight as it used to be, but it’s in one piece. And it is sorry...

I won’t fucking call you. But I fucking thank you.

E

Melanie came to him one night, sat on the ottoman and put her hand on his outstretched legs. Erik looked up from the guitar he was stringing to see she wasn’t crying, but her eyes were bright and her mouth trembled.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I got my period,” she said.

He stared at her. He didn’t want to say “And?” out loud but he was completely confused.

Melanie sighed, closing her eyes. Her mouth was set somewhere between a smile and a grimace. The last time she had this expression was when she dropped her cell phone in the toilet.

“Mel, you look like you need a body buried. What’s the matter?”

She took her hand off his shin. “I stopped taking the pill a year ago.”

“A year?” Erik set guitar and strings aside. “A year ago you stopped?”

She picked at her fingernails. “Nothing’s happening.”

He was too shocked to put a sentence together. “All right,” he said, pulling his hair back from his forehead. “But…” He exhaled, hands open. “Mel, I had no idea you’ve been trying to get pregnant since 2002.”

“I know,” she whispered.

He barely recognized her. They had their moments of miscommunication, true, but this bit of clandestine business seemed deliberate and devious. It was almost manipulative.

“Oh, Mel, that ain’t cool,” he said, trying to let her know he was upset, but not be harsh with her. Every line of her body was already laced in misery. She was crying now.

“I’m almost thirty-seven,” she said. “I’m worried something’s wrong.”

He took his feet off the ottoman, leaned forward and gathered her to him. “Don’t cry,” he said, running his hand along her hair. She had taken her cornrows out a year ago and had it straightened. “Everything’s fine, nothing’s wrong with you. Don’t cry.”

“Do you want to have a baby?” she asked.

He opened his mouth. An unequivocal
yes
should have tumbled right out but he had nothing. “I figured we would,” he said. “Of course. But let me get used to this, honey. You’ve been kicking it around for a year. I’m just coming into the picture tonight.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just don’t want to wait too long.”

He held her away, thumbed away the tear tracks on her face. “We won’t wait too long.”

They barely waited at all.

Male plumbing is less complex than female, so Erik got tested first.

Locked in a small room at the urologist’s office, a room loaded with every kind of porn in every medium imaginable, he ought to have felt like…

“A man in a room loaded with porn,” he mumbled. “Candy store, my ass.”

He felt ridiculous.

Trying to get comfortable in one of the recliners (he felt stupid), and staring at his cup (he felt even more stupid) he spent a few minutes laughing. Then he sighed a lot. Then he picked up one of the magazines and tried.

He tried another magazine.

“Whoa,” he said, peering at a page. A naked woman with long dark hair was turned partly away from the camera, looking over her shoulder at him. She was top-heavy: giant, augmented breasts on a too-slender body. But Erik wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was looking at her legs. With keen interest his eyes trailed the length of thigh and calf, down to her feet.

Her feet were in pointe shoes.

Erik’s eyes narrowed. Her feet in pointe shoes, the ribbons tied neatly around her ankles. Her legs were bare, the muscles shaped and defined. Bare feet in pointe shoes. One long curving line of leg, from her toes on the floor, up her calf and thigh to…

With one hand, he covered the woman from the waist up, so all he had were a perfect little ass, long legs and bare feet in…

Five minutes later, he put his specimen cup through the little revolving door at the nurse’s station and left the office. His pace was a little guilty. He had ripped the page out of the magazine and folded it up in his back pocket.

Two days later, the urologist called. “By chance did you ever have the mumps?”

“Excuse me?” Erik said.

“Your counts are extremely low, but what concerns me more is the motility.”

“The what?”

“Your sperm aren’t swimming,” the doctor said with patient enunciation. “For lack of a better phrase. Is there a history of male infertility in your family?”

“I’m estranged from my father, I wouldn’t know,” Erik said. “If it helps, he was an only child, but I don’t know the reason why. My paternal grandparents are deceased. I have a brother. My brother has two children, and to my knowledge, they were conceived the old-fashioned way.”

“All right, for the moment we can rule out genetic causes. Back to my original question—did you have the mumps when you were a child?”

“No,” Erik said.

“Are you sure?” Melanie said from the other extension.

“Of course I’m sure,” he said. And the next day at work, he closed his office door and called his mother down in Key West.

“Of course,” she said, as if Erik were witless. “It’s why Peter went deaf. You knew this.”

“Pete had meningitis,” Erik said, as if she were the demented one.

“That was years later. It was the mumps when he was a baby. He got it first and you hadn’t been vaccinated yet, so we whisked you out of the house to your grandfather’s. But then you came down with it too. It’s highly contagious.”

“I see,” he said, disturbed he’d gotten this wrong all these years.

“Why are you asking, what’s the matter?”

“Melanie and I can’t get pregnant, and it seems I’m the problem. Doctor asked if I’d had the mumps. I guess one of the side effects is sterility.”

“Well, yes, they told me that. But you were three years old. They said sterility was only a risk if you were past puberty. Mumps can’t be the reason.”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

“It’s not. It can’t be. Tell him you were just three.”

He reported back. The doctor agreed, given Erik’s age at the mumps onset, it was unlikely the disease had caused such testicular failure.

“Would you mind not putting ‘testicular’ and ‘failure’ into the same sentence?” Erik said.

He would need all the jokes he could muster in the next year. Erik, this man who hated to be the center of attention, was about to be scrutinized in a way that made every atom in his body howl in protest.

“I can’t tell you how many people have been touching my junk,” he said to Miles as they ran along the canal. “I think if I made a list of people who haven’t had their hand down my pants, it would be shorter.”

“Put me on the list, please,” Miles said, panting.

“It’s not enough they have to handle your balls. No. They have to measure them. Did you know this? They have a little thing of rings to measure your boys. It’s enchanting.”

“Huh. I may register a complaint at my next physical. All I get is a finger up the ass.”

Before jumping into in-vitro fertilization, the doctors were trying to boost Erik’s counts through chemistry—injections of chorionic gonadotropin three times a week. Fortunately they were small-needle subcutaneous shots and he quickly got the knack of self-administration. Melanie, wanting to participate, tried once to inject him, botched it badly and left him with an ugly bruise. Ever after, she lost her nerve as soon as the needle hovered over his skin.

“I can’t,” she said, looking a little green around the eyes.

“Pussy,” Erik said, snorting. He took the syringe away and deftly took care of business. “So much for your career as a heroin addict.”

Once Melanie would have laughed. Now her smile died halfway past her lower lip and she sighed.

Banned from Needle Park, Melanie hovered over him with various homeopathic remedies, nagging about selenium, ginkgo biloba, Asian ginseng and Vitamin C. For the latter, Erik resurrected his old pineapple juice habit.

“Orange juice has more Vitamin C,” Melanie said, comparing labels.

“Pineapple juice makes your jiz taste good.” He nudged her side playfully, but she rolled her eyes, shouldering past to put the bottles back in the fridge.

“Only one place your jiz is going, baby.”

“Yeah, in a cup,” Erik muttered.

The months fell away. How quickly they passed when the sole purpose of life was trying to reproduce. You were either gearing up to get pregnant or in the business-like throes of the act. Or waiting to see if you were pregnant, or trying to console your inconsolable wife when she got her period. Then you geared up again.

Erik was growing weary of scheduled and scrutinized sex, conscious of Melanie evaluating every bump and thrust for optimal conception. He once offered to videotape their lovemaking for the doctors’ critique. Melanie was not amused. Without a sense of humor to play off, Erik soon stopped making jokes, robbing himself of the only outlet for stress. He kept his mouth shut, took his shots, downed the herbal remedies and dutifully jerked off by appointment. Always taking his trusty torn-out magazine page, cropped down to just legs and pointe shoes.

“What is this?” Erik said.

Melanie was topping and tailing string beans at the kitchen table. She looked up at him, at the piece of paper in his hand.

“I was just looking around on the internet,” she said. “Throw it out if you want.”

Erik looked down at the paper, a printed list of names and addresses.

Byron Fiskare

4732 Pinnacle Peak Hwy

Phoenix, AZ

Byron E. Fiskare

49 Oak Street

Santa Monica, CA

Byron Fiskare

14975 Mann Street

Burbank, CA

“What do you think you’re doing?” The words were icy in his mouth. He felt violated. Worse—he felt pillaged. Sacked. She had trespassed in the most guarded room in his heart’s palace. A room filled with the soft white feathers of memory. A room kept quiet and still so as not to stir them. Looking down at the list of addresses, it was as though Melanie had gone into that room with a leaf blower.

“You can’t go here, Melanie.”

“Don’t you want to know?” she asked. “After all these years, isn’t it time?”

The HcG shots made him irritable. He knew it was one of the side effects and noticed both his patience and temper were easily lost these past months. Reining himself in from snapping at his students meant he often came home and snapped at his wife.

Tonight he didn’t just raise his voice, but got in her face and yelled until his voice cracked. “You try to get pregnant without telling me and now you go looking for my father without telling me. When did I become irrelevant to this marriage, Mel? When did I get thrown out of the decision making process? And when the
fuck
did you decide you know what’s best for me?”

He crumpled the paper in a shaking fist and threw it at her. “Don’t you ever go looking for my father again, do you understand? He is
dead
to me. If he ever calls here, I don’t want to know. If he ever shows up here, I don’t want to know. If you go have
coffee
with him, I don’t fucking want to know.”

He stormed out, the sound of her sobs dwindling away behind him as he swiftly clipped a leash on Harry and left. He walked for hours, muttering under his breath. He cooled off, and then he felt terrible. He still felt justified, but he felt terrible.

“I’m sorry,” he said later, carefully taking Melanie in his arms. “I’m sorry. The damn shots make me crazy but it’s no excuse. I should have walked out or…”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m like a lunatic lately. I miss my mother.” Her face crumpled and she wept in his chest. Erik slid his hand along the back of her neck, rested his cheek on her head.

“I know,” he whispered.

“I miss my mother and I hate that she’s missing everything.”

“She sees you,” he said, swaying side to side. “She sees you. She knows.”

“But I don’t see her seeing me,” she said, her voice hitching. “And I’m thinking about my dad. I’m dreaming about him and…” Melanie picked up her head, touching her fingers under her eyes. “It just bothers me our child won’t know its grandfather.”

“I know,” he said again, helping with his own fingertips to stay the tears. “Sometimes that’s just how it is with people. My mom will be the only grandparent. It’s not ideal but it’s what we have, Mel.”

She nodded, and touched her fingertips to his necklace. “They say infertility can really bring the crazy out in people,” she said. “I guess I have more crazy than I knew.”

“I love your crazy,” he said. “And you put up with mine.”

“I’m sorry, baby.”

He shushed her and pulled her close. “I know how important this is to you,” he whispered. “But please. Mel. My balls are under a microscope. Sometimes I need you to just take me to bed for…”

She picked up her head and managed a wobbly smile. “Just for your cock.”

“Well,” he said, looking up the ceiling. “Yeah. Kind of.”

She laughed then and put her hand on his face. “Come on. Upstairs. Leave your balls. Take the cannoli.”

“You’re adorable,” Erik said, pulling her by the hand.

“You can even pull out,” she said, following. “That’s how uninterested I am in your sperm tonight.”

“Oh, now you’re teasing.”

“Try me…”