The Paternity Test (36 page)

I let no one block me as I tore away from her.

I made it through the crowd to a clear space by the wall, a small nook in front of a janitor’s closet. I squatted down, facing the door, my forehead on its steel, not sure if I’d vomit or just cry. Tears turned my vision of the scene into a drowned man’s. How could I have had so much with Stu, and thought so little of it? How could I have squandered it so fast?

He was there beside me now, also squatting down. He didn’t talk, but laid his hand squarely on my back. He left it there, making tiny pulsings.

We skipped the movie. We drove straight back home.

Stu took me out onto the deck and sat me down. The scent of pine was in the air, and also the frst hints of churned-up moisture from the tropics. The hair along my forearms felt alive. Stu said he would ask me something—ask something
of
me—only once, and I should give an answer, yes or no. Not right now; I could take my time to think it through.

“Give this up,” he said. “Debora, the baby—all of it. Let it go now. Let’s go back to us.”

I stared out, past the dunes—the water glinted sharply—thinking of a sailor’s proverb:
The farther the sight, the nearer the rain
. I remembered walking along the shore, all those months ago, the day we’d agreed to move up here. The way Stu had squinted at the pale winter sky. The way his fingers balled up with conviction.

We live now in Washington, a transfer that made sense for Stu: all those shuttle flights from DCA. Not in Dupont Circle—the gay “Fruit Loop” ghetto—but out here at the city line, a place called Friendship Heights. D.C. is a rootless town, where people’s ships arrive and leave on fckle political winds. It suits us fine, for the time being. No one really knows us.

Our place is in a complex overlooking the GEICO building, a two-bedroom, tenth-floor condominium. Sometimes I still miss having a yard to be in charge of; I wake up fretting, worried the berry bushes might need water. A crew of Salvadorans—our building’s management hires them—takes care of the hostas by the sidewalk. The condo has a balcony, onto which we’ve squeezed two lawn chairs, plus a little hibachi (in violation of the bylaws), about as big as an Easy-Bake Oven. The summers can be ghastly, though, and we have central air; only rarely do we sit outside.

Inside, we’ve left the condo mostly as it came, the walls bare, painted an inoffensive not-quite-white; I don’t think we’ve hung a single item. We haven’t talked about this, but I trace it to what happened when we ran into trouble selling the cottage. Plenty of buyers came to look, but no one placed a bid, and so, finally, the Realtor said we’d better hire a “stager”: someone to strip the cottage of what made it seem too “ours,” to let would-be buyers picture their own possessions in it. The stager took down all Stu’s travel posters, and Rina’s pendant, and stashed our subway-token-inlaid table in the basement. Also removed: our bamboo shades, our campy fisherman whirligig, the framed photo of Stu and me in Prague. It took two more months before we got a reasonable offer, and maybe, in that time, we adjusted to the emptiness. Maybe that’s why, here in D.C., we’ve kept our place so bare.

I don’t know how long we’ll stay. Almost three years we’ve lived here. We keep saying we should meet our neighbors, but we haven’t. The guy next door invited us once, when he was having a party, but Stu was flying, and I didn’t feel like showing up alone. D.C. makes a convenient base for traveling, which we do more now. New Year’s, for example, we went to Quebec City. We stayed in the Ice Hotel: an ice bed.

Recounting all this, I can use a storyteller’s tricks. Skip a space and then, with a phrase (“Almost three years . . .”), crush the rock of time into dust. In truth, when we first moved here—and even now, too often—hours and days could stymie us, immovable as boulders. The lull times were the worst—lying in bed, or breakfast—when nothing could distract us from the shame. Stu was ashamed of me, I knew, but also, I think, more pointedly, ashamed of
himself
, for still staying with me. I was lonely, and not just from the distance Stu was keeping. I had also lost another long-time, staunch companion: the vision of the father I had always hoped to be.

We did our best to isolate ourselves from our old life. We changed our phones, and left without giving the numbers to Danny; we switched our e-mail addresses and providers.

Still, of course, if Debora wanted to track us down, she could. (There are not too many Patrick Faunces.) I’ve dreamt she will, then fought that dream; its jab always leaves me feeling battered.

A dozen times I’ve Googled her name, and searched for her on Orkut, a social-networking site Brazilians use: never have I found the slightest trace. And last year—just once—I placed a call to Danny’s, standing in a phone booth behind an Exxon station. I was wanting just to hear her voice, if she was there, just to hear the way she said “Alô.”

A different woman answered. She had a Boston accent.

I said, “May I speak with Debora, please?” My voice quavered.

“There’s no Debora living here,” she said, and cut the line.

I walked around, all that day and the next, feeling wretched. I hope I don’t try to call again.

Stu has not been perfect, either, in letting go what happened. One morning, we went together to mail things at the post office; I was sending a contract off to Educraft, for a Georgia textbook, and Stu was shipping a Marimekko scarf for Rina’s birthday. A little dimpled boy— raven-haired, ravishing—was standing on the steps when we came out, slurping at an ice-cream treat as big as both his fsts. I smiled at him provisionally, and he became excited, licking so hard he almost knocked the scoop right off the cone; his small, standstill eyes filled with panic. “Here,” I said, and knelt to grab the cone, and set it right. “Hold on, now—I got it. That was close!” His smile came back, impossibly wide; I stroked his sun-warmed cheek. That was when a woman (she’d been in line behind us) gusted through the door, shouting, “Sir! Just leave my son—sir, please!” and sucked the boy up into her arms. Hot in the brow, I backed away, my tongue fat within my mouth, obscene.

Stu, at frst, said nothing. We turned and walked toward home. But then, as we waited for a light to go to green, he scuffed the curb, and said, “I know. I think about it, too. Ours would be exactly that same age.”

He didn’t sound angry, but only sad and stranded—and I had to accept that as improvement.

Also, he had called the baby
ours
.

Why have we stuck it out? Why does any couple? Danny and Debora have split, it seems. Rina and Richard, too. Thousands of marriages, every day, dissolve. But here we are, Stu and I, still . . .

Still a
we
.

Last week I received a long letter from Susan Blandon, my old creative-writing teacher from college. For years, we’ve traded letters— actual paper letters—hers typed on a Royal, mine in cursive. Our subject’s usually poetry (the sudden fad for ghazals; Cavafy’s unfinished drafts finally rendered into English), but personal life can poke its head in, too. Susan’s been with Ned, her archivist husband, for forty years. They renovated a succession of old homesteads in Vermont, raised three kids who have their own kids now. A foursquare man, is Ned. I’ve always liked him.

I never would have guessed what Susan wrote me in her latest, that she and Ned are getting a divorce. There isn’t any scandal, she assured me; they’re still friendly. “But, well, what can I tell you?” she wrote. “We were steering for a harbor that turned out not to be there.”

I wonder, sometimes, if Stu’s and my disaster was what saved us. Whatever happens now, we think:
It’s not as bad as
that
was
. There was no one day when we said, “Oh, thank God, it’s over.” It isn’t over, maybe. Maybe what has happened is that we have gotten past the thought that what we tore wide ever could be closed. The opening means that further pain could enter, but so could progress.

Everyone knows the riddle about the boundaries of personhood: how can I ever know if the blue you see is just like mine? With Stu I’ve learned that even if our
seeing
is not the same—and his blue, I’m sure, is two or three shades darker—it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re committed to
being
together.

The harbor we were steering for was not where we’d expected. Perhaps it never existed, in the frst place. But I’m more sure than ever, now, that Stu—Stu and no one else—is the person I will always steer with.

Today’s the Fourth of July. A difficult day for us. Especially in D.C., with its massive celebration, tourists pouring in for the parade, the Capitol show. Even out here, at Friendship Heights, our Metro stop gets swarmed: families carrying picnic baskets and opera glasses and blankets, heading to the Mall to stake out seats.

The only way to avoid all the hoopla is to stay at home, and so we do, the whole day long: just us two, in the condo. We order food from Lucky Wok and bring it to the balcony, and sit here in our lawn chairs, sharing crab rangoon, staring out at the GEICO building’s roof.

Washington, as most people know, is built upon a swamp; in summer it’s a hazy, humid fug. But once in a while, after a rain, the air goes clear and crystalline: a swift, capricious rinsing of creation. Today’s that way, the sky like a massive flag’s blue background, waiting to be endowed with sewn-on stars.

Mostly we don’t talk, just take in all that blueness, the impotent pops of cherry bombs exploding in the distance.

Stu gives me a soy sauce kiss. “Happy Independence Day.”

“Yes,” I tell him. “Happy Independence.”

I picture, as I often do on rinsed-off days like this, the lucid sky that spreads across Rio Grande do Norte: the almost-purest air on all the earth. Below its blue, the white, white dunes, like brilliant sugar mountains.
Genipabu
. I hear Deb say the name.

I’d like to share my vision with Stu, but I’m not sure I should. Maybe next year.

Next year, yes, I will.

See Deb at the summit, in the beaming new dune buggy? See the boy she’s hugging in her lap? (A boy is my unjustified assumption.) Three years old, with green-flecked eyes, a forceful Nadler nose. His mother’s arms, around him, make the world’s securest seat belt.

“With emotion, or without?” she asks.

He squeals and shivers. “With.”

She tells the driver, who hits the gas—sand spits from the tires— and oh! Here they go! They’re flying!

For support during the writing of this book, I am indebted to the MacDowell Colony, the Instituto Sacatar (especially Augusto Albuquerque, Mitch Loch, and Taylor Van Horne), and James Duggins. For help with various drafts, I thank Carrie Bjerke, Brian Bouldrey, Cathy Chung, Bernard Cooper, David Elliott, Elinor Lipman, David Long, Bill Lychack, Fiona McCrae, and Heidi Pitlor, with special gratitude to Hester Kaplan and Vestal McIntyre. Boundless thanks also to my agent, Mitchell Waters; my editor, Raphael Kadushin; and the staff of the University of Wisconsin Press. Finally, thanks and love to all my family, especially Janet Lowenthal and Jim Pines, Abraham Lowenthal and Jane Jaquette, Linda Lowenthal and Chris Johnson, and Scott Heim.