“Wow,” she said again. “This is not a conversation we should be having like this.”
“Then how should we have it?”
Marion looked at the ground. She turned and started across the street. “Come here.” She got to her car and opened the door before he followed.
“In your car?”
“Well, I am not inviting you up to my house, not right now at least!”
Marion sat behind the wheel, Alan on the passenger side. Unavoidably, he thought of the last conversation they’d had, also in a car she was driving.
“Sorry—just move those,” she said as he tried to work his feet around a jumble of notebooks and manila folders on the floor. She reached down and grabbed a handful, tossing them onto the backseat. “I’m afraid my office is basically my car.”
Should he ask her what sort of work she did, make small talk? He took three of the notebooks and twisted toward her to put them in the back. They were labeled with the names of hospitals. What had Joya told him Marion did—cancer outreach? No, he thought, do not ask. Do not allow her to seem saintly by virtue of what she does for a living.
“Oh Alan,” said Marion, and now her voice was mournful, “I’ve always been so fond of you. I don’t want to have some…awful episode here.”
“Episode! Is that what this is? Like an all-new installment of a TV show?”
With both hands, Marion clutched the top of the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t the word I meant.”
“What word is there for an agenda like the one you clearly had—to go to your high school reunion and find a sperm donor?” All at once, Alan remembered how Joya hadn’t shown up at the reunion, how supposedly there had been a strike to break. Had Joya colluded in this?
Marion stared at him. She looked sad but also determined. “Some women in my shoes would kick you out of this car, out of their lives right now.”
Alan stared back. “Just answer my question, Marion. Then go ahead and call the cops if you want.”
“My son is five years old,” said Marion. “That’s a mighty long time in a little boy’s life. Alan, he has nothing to do with you. You don’t know him, he doesn’t know you. You have to let this be about him, not you.”
“I want to meet him. Can I meet him?” He hadn’t expected to ask this.
“So you can see if he looks like you?”
“Then he is mine.”
“He is not yours!” Marion shouted.
“Are his genes—are half of his genes mine? Okay, from me?”
Marion laid her forehead on the wheel. “You are obsessed by this, aren’t you?”
“What sort of a heart would I have if I weren’t?”
Marion sat up. “I believed my doctors, Alan. They told me exactly what I told you—whatever it was I told you about not having babies. And Alan, I was honestly smitten when I saw you after all those years. I honestly was. Smitten and charmed off my feet. I did not get a hotel room to lure you or anybody else into a paternity trap. You have to believe me, Alan. You have to.”
She should have been crying, thought Alan, but she wasn’t. Or had all the turbulent experience of Marion’s life—which made his look so damn soft—hardened her enough that emotions like this were chaff?
“Listen,” she said. “I had other…there was another guy not long after, an old boyfriend. I had to—”
“Oh please. Don’t insult my intelligence.”
Marion startled him then by leaning across the emergency brake and kissing him on the cheek. “Alan, whatever mistakes I may have made, it’s me who has to ask you please. Please. My life is complicated enough.”
“Well, so is mine,” said Alan, but his tone was more resigned than angry. Now they were holding hands. He could see, from a small clock attached to the dashboard, that it was six-thirty. “Tell me about your husband.”
“He’s older. He has two kids in college,” she said slowly. She sighed.
“He’s an oncologist. I met him as a patient; he’d been divorced for years.”
Alan’s phone, in his breast pocket, trilled its irritating birdsong. Automatically, he took it from his pocket.
Marion laughed. “You are going to answer it?”
Alan stared at the phone. Still, after all these months, only Greenie had the number. No, that was no longer true; because he was looking after Treehorn, Fenno McLeod had the number. Alan let it ring out and stop.
“It could be George,” he explained. “Or Greenie.”
“George?”
“My son.”
“Your son?” Marion squeezed his hand. Now, yes, finally, there was a hint of tears. “Oh Alan. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Marion, but that’s not the point. Or it is the point, the point being that I have…that I fathered, that I—what, sired?—another child besides the one I love like the world I walk on. I would love both of them that way, wouldn’t I? I’m not saying he’s ‘mine’ in the way you mean, Marion. Of course I’m not! I’m not saying I have rights, I’m not saying you have to…” Alan was gesturing wildly now, sitting forward in his seat, but he stopped.
“Not saying I have to what, Alan? That part is important.”
Alan looked up at Marion’s house, where motion had caught his eye. He saw a face in the front window, dark and distant. A child, his palms flat against the window above his head. The silhouette of his hands looked like an elaborate crest, as if the boy were pretending to be a cockatoo or rooster. It had grown dark while Alan sat in the car with Marion. Their faces were lit now only by streetlights.
“He’s expecting me,” Marion said, following Alan’s glance. “He knows my car. In a minute, he may just come running down.”
“So I should go.”
Marion took Alan’s hand again. “At least for now.”
“And for later? I’m only here a couple more days.”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you at Joya’s tomorrow.”
“You need to consult with the big doctor, I suppose.”
“I need to think.” She dropped his hand. “You like to be contentious, don’t you, Alan? I don’t need to tell you that’s not a good thing. Do I?”
Alan’s eyes burned. “You might have told me. Even if it’s true there was only a…possibility.”
“And then what? Break up your marriage over a maybe?”
“That would have been my problem.”
“And hers.”
“Oh, the feminist alliance.”
“Alan! Alan, stop it.” Marion clamped a hand on his shoulder hard and tight, the way a mother would, then let go. “I am sorry. What’s a word for sorry to the hundredth power? But I could not have lived with fucking up your life. I can’t now, either! And forgive me, but I thought, stupidly, that this would stay a secret. From you. Why do you think I’ve been avoiding Joy? When I found out I was pregnant, I thought of you right away. I hoped this baby was yours. Okay? But I wasn’t going to interrupt the plans I already had. I figured I had room for a child, but I didn’t have room for a big domestic, emotional grown-up mess.”
Which is exactly what I am in, thought Alan. He hadn’t even considered whether he had “room” for such a thing. “I see what you’re saying,” he said. “But I—”
“Go to Joy’s,” said Marion. “I will call you tomorrow morning. I have her number. I promise.” She got out of the car and walked around the front. She waited on the sidewalk until he got out, too. She started up the stairs to her house. She waved, but not at Alan. The boy peeled himself off the window and vanished from sight. Jacob.
Jacob. As Alan walked away, his momentum hastened by the slope of the street, he heard a familiar sound: a small boy greeting his mother as she came home from a day at work. George, he thought. Greenie, he thought. Same yearnings, new urgency. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, and watched its face light up in the dark like a greeting. George was the one who answered, a small cosmic mercy.
Since Tr
eehorn, George often asked if he could speak with her first. Alan would hold the cordless phone to the dog’s ear; if George was lucky, she might whine a bit or give a cursory bark. Tonight, Alan explained (a true lie) that he was out, so Treehorn wasn’t with him.
“I miss my dog,” George said. “When are you coming again?”
“I’ll see you at Christmas,” Alan reminded him. “That’s not so far away. I can’t wait!”
“Me either.”
“How’s school?”
“I miss Diego,” said George. “I miss Diego and Treehorn.”
“But you’re making new friends, right?”
Alan heard George make a complaining noise, a small groan. “Yeah, but they’re not the same.”
“No friends are the same,” said Alan. “Not the same as each other. That’s what makes having friends so much fun—they’re all different. But maybe you can see Diego outside school sometimes. Maybe on the weekends.”
Alan had met the beloved Diego just before leaving Santa Fe. To his astonishment, Greenie had never thought of inviting the boy into the city before then.
Together with George and Treehorn, Alan had picked up Diego on a Saturday afternoon so that the boy could have dinner with them and stay overnight. Because he was older than George by a few years, this was no big deal for him, but it was George’s first sleepover, and by the time they picked up his friend, he had nearly worn himself out with anticipation, counting hours, counting minutes, selecting the toys they would play with, wondering if his books would seem too babyish for a bigger boy.
Alan did not know many eight-year-olds, so he had no real expectations, yet something struck him about this boy as disproportionately young and old at once. As they ate dinner together on Greenie’s small verandah, George chattered blithely on at his playmate.
“You know, we got hummingbirds here—see the feeder? It’s water in sugar—I mean sugar in water.” He giggled. “Mom makes it. They fly forever, I think. I don’t think they ever stand on their feet. Actually, maybe they don’t have feet.”
“They have to stand,” said Greenie. “They have to sleep.”
“Maybe they sleep flying. Horses sleep standing up.”
“I’ll bet their feet are tucked up neatly into their feathers,” said Greenie. “Do you have hummingbirds out at your place?” she asked Diego.
Diego shook his head. “We don’t have bird feeders,” he said. He ate well, taking seconds on corn and Greenie’s tomato salad. He said please and thank you, put his napkin in his lap. He chewed his food slowly, almost solemnly, and gazed around the room while others talked, as if he were memorizing details. After dinner, he asked to be excused. The boys went into George’s room and closed the door. Alan heard George’s voice, not speaking but whinnying.
“What a gentle boy,” Greenie had said as she watched Alan wash the dishes.
Alan looked at her in the window over the sink. “There’s something a little haunted or overly serious about him, don’t you think?”
“He only seems that way compared with George’s manic enthusiasm. I didn’t realize George was so infatuated.” She’d laughed. “I’m glad Diego likes him back. I don’t suppose it will last after George starts kindergarten next month.”
Alan had nearly forgotten that George would be entering kindergarten. This was a rite of passage—the beginning of “real” school—about which Alan had once fantasized and worried: how he and Greenie, like other New York parents, would tour the different public schools downtown, perch on elfin chairs and listen raptly to teachers who would evangelize about new ways of spelling and learning to add. Alan had looked forward to inspecting the collages and crooked compositions in the halls of these schools, going home and debating with Greenie the merits of one playground or principal over another.
But in the end, Ray—Ray, the eco-fascist!—had chosen George’s school. He had let George sit on the back of a “real” horse for the first time. He had enabled George to have a “real” bedroom all his own for the first time, too. Alan had listened to George’s admiration of this surrogate godfather and managed to hold on to a smile—but now just hearing Ray McCrae’s name could quicken Alan’s heartbeat. This spite, however, he had learned to swallow.
Now, four months later, he knew that he would also have to pick up the phone and call the contacts Ray had given him back then. He told himself he would do this after he had finished with Marion.
AS HE MADE HIS WAY FROM THE BART to Joya’s loft, Alan thought about the patients he’d left behind in New York, some of whose sessions that week he had canceled or changed. At the moment, he was seeing just seven people. There was the cellist who couldn’t get a job, the woman who couldn’t get pregnant, the man who couldn’t get over his wife’s having left him for a younger man, the couple who fought constantly because they couldn’t get out of debt. And there was Stephen, who couldn’t get past his broken heart. Recently, Alan had also started seeing a woman who claimed that her life was in fine shape (nice apartment, nice husband, nice grown children); she just wanted to know the meaning of her tangled colorful dreams. His practice bore out the theory of a cynical classmate in grad school: that psychotherapy patients were ninety percent “can’t-gets” and ten percent idle rich.
Alan had it fairly easy: no one had a terminal disease, no one was suicidal, no one had lost a child. He should be able to—as Ray put it so rudely—wean them all in the next few months.
Alan was deeply enmeshed in these thoughts as he used the key Joya had given him to open her door. Before he had even climbed the stairs, he could smell something wonderful cooking.
“Well, well, fucking well,” said Joya as he walked in.
“What?”
“It’s nearly nine o’clock.” She gestured at the table, set with linen napkins, candlesticks, flowers. She was wearing a pretty dress, and her bushy dark hair, now in disarray, looked as if it had been stylishly primped.
Alan closed the door quietly. “Is this a date?” He made the mistake of laughing.
“I thought you’d been mugged!” she yelled. “We agreed you would come right back, that I’d make you—” With the hand that wasn’t holding her wineglass, she made an angry sweep toward the kitchen. “Well, how about some incredibly dessicated leg of lamb?”
“Joy, I’m sorry. I lost track of time. I was walking—thinking.”
“For four hours?” She smiled meanly. “You saw her after all. Didn’t you?”
Alan felt as if he were pinned against the door. “As a matter of fact, I did see her. Briefly.”
“Who needs big sister’s advice when you’re a psychiatric prodigy, right?”
“I should have called you. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you just stay in a hotel? Why even tell me you were coming? Oh, that’s right, you’re not exactly rolling in dough these days, are you?” Her consonants were fuzzy, and she leaned dependently on the island countertop between the kitchen and the dining table, the open loft.
When Alan put his arms around her, she pushed her face into his shoulder and started to cry. A rhinestone hairclip shaped like a butterfly tumbled across Alan’s arm and onto the floor.
“Let’s eat something,” he murmured. “We should both eat something.” On the stove, he saw a covered casserole and a pan of broiled cherry tomatoes, deflated and singed, in a pool of oil. When he began to steer Joya around the island, she punched him in the chest. “Ass,” she said. “Men. Jesus.”
“You mean pig. I am a thoughtless male pig,” he said. Still holding her against his side, he opened a cupboard and took down two plates. The casserole held mashed potatoes. “Oh Joy, what a fantastic meal.” He guided her gently toward a stool. He opened the oven, took the mitts from a nearby hook, and pulled out the roasting pan. He needn’t have bothered with the mitts; the oven had clearly been off for a while. The lamb, posed on its rack, looked like a giant shriveled mushroom. Below the rack were limp snakelike forms. The scent hit him: fennel. “Oh Joya.” She had re
membered how much he loved fennel, a food that Greenie never cooked.
He turned a burner on under the tomatoes. He began carving the lamb. “Look, Joy,” he said, pointing with the knife. “Still a little pink.”
“Well, well. I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I’ll be the man from uncle.”
“Come on,” said Alan. He went to the table and held out a chair; she sat. He lit the candles with the starter for the gas burners. He shook out her napkin and laid it tenderly in her lap.
As soon as he had put down their plates, she said, “The thing is, little brother, Marion was always my friend, not yours! Who are you to barge in and ravish her like that? Get her pregnant—if that’s what you did—and go on about your life? Then run to me for help when you figure out you’ve fucked up so royally. You know, Alan—you know, I don’t really care what you do to your relationships, but this one was mine.”
“I know,” said Alan. “Eat, Joy. Eat first, then talk.”
Joya ate, but she would not meet Alan’s eyes. Suddenly she looked up and said, “You know, speaking of talking, Greenie calls.”
“What do you mean?”
“Calls to talk to me. Every couple of weeks. Or so.”
Alan focused on Joya’s tone. It was either neutral or very, very angry.
“She really thinks I should adopt.” Joya had reached over to the nearby counter and picked up the wand for lighting the stove. She flicked it on and pointed the small flame at Alan. “What do you think?”
“Is that what you want? Have you thought about it?”
“Have I thought about it? What, you think I live in medieval Estonia?”
Alan felt incredibly drained. In New York, it was past one A.M. “Foreign adoptions are tricky. You have to be careful about a lot of things,” he said slowly. “George has a classmate who was adopted from Russia, and she’s sweet, but she’s in several kinds of therapy, and the parents are worried that—”
Joya’s laugh was clearly intended to cut him off. For pure drama, she tossed her unkempt hair. “Careful! ‘Be careful’! Look who’s telling me to be careful!”
No more apologies. “Joya, I am so tired. Can we talk about this tomorrow? It’s a very, very serious thing you’re considering. If it’s what you want, I would so love to help you out. I would—”