Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Page 24

  Jim smiled. “What? What did you think? That of course it should be you? Why, Philip? Because you’re one of the ‘chosen people’?” Toothpaste dripped down his chin.

  “Maybe that’s the best reason,” I countered. “Cathy’s Catholic, or I should say, raised Catholic. Now quite horribly fallen. But still, she has the Christian gene. Surely you don’t want to quibble over allowing this child a tiny bit of Jewish D.N.A., now do you?” It felt good to lighten the argument.

  “Hmm. I might buy that.” Then he grew serious. “Does it matter to you if it’s mine genetically or yours?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Of course.”

  This was hard, and it felt like one of those discussions that could go horribly wrong. I knew it was important to me and yet I knew I would be willing to give it up if it was that important to Jim. I told him so.

  “You know what?” Jim replied. “It doesn’t really matter to me. It doesn’t. And since it seems to matter to you, I don’t have any problem with you being bio-dad. I mean that.”

  Then Jim asked the next question, the one I’d hope he’d wait to ask until at least another day.

  “How are you going to make this baby? I have a funny suspicion that Cathy would like it done au naturel, if her boyfriend allows it. And David’s cool, he just might.”

  “And what do you think about that?” I asked.

  “Honestly?” Jim rubbed the back of his neck and sat quietly on the edge of the bed. “I guess I think that’s sort of weird. I’m not saying no, but, honestly it’s kind of weird.” He went on. “Somehow, I think it’s a decision we should all make, not just Cathy.” He paused and looked up at me. “It’s not like you’re going to enjoy it that much, are you? I mean, you’re such a fag!”

  I pretended to be taken aback. “From what I remember, it’s okay,” I said, with a mock nonchalance. Of course, my memory was rather shaky in this regard. There had been scattered episodes of heterosex in my college years, my “D. H. Lawrence period,” I called it. Cathy and I had finally consummated our high school romance, albeit clumsily, one summer break from our respective colleges. I had thought of it as a kind of poetic bookend to our childhood together.

  “Well,” Jim went on, “just don’t get too used to it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Cathy. I suppose we can always do the sy-ringe method.” I pronounced sy-ringe in two distinct syllables and winced when I said it, to make it sound really awful. “It’s not very special that way. I mean, eventually the kid’s going to ask. It would be nicer to say that we made love. Don’t you think?”

  Jim shrugged. “I guess.”

  Day twelve of Cathy’s cycle, the night of The Deed, was a full moon, which all of us interpreted as a great sign. Jim and I flew to Boston and drove to Cathy’s home on Cape Cod. In order to facilitate everything, it was decided that we would take Cathy’s eight-year-old son, Hanlon, to a movie first and that Cathy and I would do it afterward, while Jim took Hanlon out for pizza at the video arcade.

  While Hanlon and Jim played Donkey Kong in town, Cathy straightened up her room and I nervously peeled off my clothes and climbed under the comforter. I watched Cathy obsessively sweeping around the edges of the rug. In her white cotton nightgown she appeared to be floating and it seemed to me that she was not all that different from how I remembered her nearly twenty years before. Her hair, still chestnut and shiny, hung halfway down her back.

  “Come to bed before I lose my courage,” I said.

  She dropped the broom, removed her nightie, and snuggled in next to me. She had lit a dozen candles. Her smell was the same as it had always been, a mixture of honeysuckle and tea rose. Her skin was like cool chiffon. We hugged for a while and laughed and kissed under the down comforter. Then I stopped and pulled away.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “You know ‘why what.’ You’re going to make me ask outright? Okay, why are you doing this amazing thing for us?”

  “No,” she said quickly, covering my mouth lightly with her hand. “We’re not going to talk about that.”

  “Not ever?”

  “Just not tonight. Besides, I think you know why.”

  Her voice was low and I kissed her again, softly, deeply, for a long time. I forgot then the oddness of being with a woman, and probably because I had purposefully not come for ten days—a lifetime record, I figured—it wasn’t difficult for me to get hard. I reached down to feel her wetness and was filled with the memory of the two of us back in a Chicago dorm room one hot summer night, two decades ago. I embraced the thought that we were still there, barely nineteen.

  She guided me into her, and I moved with hesitation, wondering what images flashed through her mind. When I was fully inside, she moaned, and I sensed it was not from lust but from a remembered intimacy. We moved against each other for only minutes but I didn’t worry about coming too quickly because, after all, it was about getting the stuff in the right place. As it poured out of me and into her, I clenched tight against her so not a drop would leak. It flashed through my mind that it might not be as easy two days later and a day after that, once we had all spent time together in the bright light of day. We moved apart, lying side by side, saying nothing until we heard Jim’s rental car pull into the driveway. I was relieved that this gave us a reason to get up. I pulled on pajama bottoms and went to the hallway. Something told me it was not a good idea for Jim to find us in bed together.

  He walked in carrying a sleeping Hanlon: “Pac-Man did him in.” The three of us walked together to Hanlon’s room and put the boy to sleep.

  “So,” Jim asked in the hallway, with a grin as wide as could be, “was he good, Cathy?”

  I rolled my eyes, more for effect, grateful that there would seemingly be no serious talk.

  “He was great.”

  “I bet.” Jim laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

  I pushed aside the discomfort of worrying what Jim really felt.

  We slept in one bed and spooned each other, with me, of course, in the middle.

  “Bob and Carol and Ted,” Jim muttered.

  I couldn’t sleep. Even after I was sure Cathy and Jim had drifted off, I lay awake wanting something more, bugged by the informality of it all. I knew the significance of what was happening overshadowed our inability to discuss it then and there. I pictured a hundred different conversations we might have but then I must have dozed off, for I saw Cathy sweeping all of them under the Oriental rug that covered her bedroom floor.

  We had invested a magical quality in that night, yet it took us nearly a year to get pregnant. A year of flying back and forth between Los Angeles and Boston. A year of lovemaking, inseminations, testing. A year of worry and disappointment, of huge frustration. A year of withholding ejaculatory sex from Jim so that I’d have enough of a sperm count to matter, and a year of Cathy’s boyfriend trying to understand why she was devoting herself to sleeping with her ex-, now gay, boyfriend. A year of therapy and obsession on everyone’s part.

  Eleven months from that first try, sperm met ovum. The phone rang one morning, as I was frying another kind of egg, trying hard not to think that exactly two weeks had passed since our last lovemaking episode. I was trying hard not to expect a call, trying hard not to allow myself the depression of another letdown. In any case, Jim had laid down the law for us: “No more. That was the last time. It just wasn’t meant to be, Philip. We’ll tell Cathy soon.”

  I answered the phone. “Hello?”

  No hello back. Just a young boy’s voice. It was Hanlon: “Hey guys, you’re going to be dads. Mama said it worked.”

  The day has come when Jim and I are to return to Los Angeles with our infant daughter. Cathy, Jim, and I have had a substantial amount of counseling around this moment, but as the morning arrives, the air feels thick and uncomfortable. I am queasy. We agreed that Fanny—lovingly named after the spirited tit
le character in the Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander, that Jim and I saw on our first date—should be with her mom for the first five weeks of her life, that taking her away any earlier would be detrimental to both mother and child. “An amputation,” our therapist had called it. Jim, Cathy, Fanny, Hanlon (who is now nine), and I have lived together as a kind of family on Cape Cod since a week before Fanny’s birth. It hasn’t been easy.

  The birth itself was quick, almost too quick. We arrived at the tiny hospital in Wareham, Massachusetts, just forty-five minutes before she popped out and went home a few hours later with our newborn daughter.

  The hormones raging through Cathy’s body made each subsequent day a sort of obstacle course. After one week, we felt it better to allow Cathy alone time with the baby, so she and Fanny moved back to her own house, about seven miles from the farmhouse we had recently bought as a vacation home.

  Jim and I spent most days walking around perplexed and scared. There were no rules for this. Some days Cathy would bring Fanny by or encourage us to take her for hours; other days, she guarded her closely and complained about the physical pain of being separated from her because of her nursing.

  We had always assured her that when the time came to leave, the risk would be ours; that if she could not, in fact, relinquish this baby, there would be no argument. We would simply have a child who lived three thousand miles away.

  Day thirty-five has arrived. Cathy has carefully packed up every newly washed cloth diaper, piece of clothing, and attendant bit of paraphernalia. As we pull our car up to her house, we see her through the living room bay window, speaking to the baby in her arms.

  “What do you suppose she’s saying?” I ask Jim.

  He doesn’t reply, but takes my hand.

  A half hour later, Fanny is safely buckled into the rear seat of our rented Pontiac, and I’m standing beside the car door. Jim is at the wheel. Cathy is beside me in a white T-shirt and denim jumper, clutching Fanny’s brother’s hand.

  “I’ll be okay,” she says, as she hugs me awkwardly with her other arm. “Call me when you arrive so I know you’re safe and sound.” I kiss her lightly on the cheek. I don’t have any words. I expect her to burst into tears but her eyes remain calm, waterless, just as they were the day I handed her that bouquet of consolation nearly two decades earlier. I climb into the backseat beside our already sleeping infant. The car backs up slowly over the leaves strewn on the driveway. I look back once more at mother and child side by side and notice that two huge wet spots have sprung up on Cathy’s chest where her breasts are leaking, weeping milk for her departing child.

  Fanny is now fifteen, the same age her mother was when I met her back in the high school drama club. Jim and I are taking her to New York to celebrate Cathy’s fiftieth birthday. Our unusual family has come together four or five times each year since Fanny was born—in the summers, at Christmas, over school holidays.

  When Fanny was nine months old, Cathy ceded her parental rights as planned so that Jim could be the other legal dad. Since then, Cathy has been “Mama” but really more of a fairy godmother. Jim and I agreed that she should not be burdened with the task of disciplining a child she sees only every four to five months.

  It has not all been a fairy tale. Jim and I broke up when Fanny was six years old. I have stopped trying to analyze whether this was the old cliché of pouring our love into our child rather than into each other or simply a predictable growing apart. My guilt over it has certainly cemented itself into my being. Luckily what has remained central to both our lives has been Fanny. We are laughingly referred to as the “poster couple for gay divorce.” No fights, no recriminations, little tension. We live near each other and Fan goes back and forth week by week. Sometimes we even vacation together. Mama’s visits over fifteen years have amassed a surfeit of etched memories, free-floating in our minds and hearts. They are catalogued in duplicate photographs that sit, like those of most families, in huge frantic stacks of shoe boxes in our respective hall closets, in a scattering of mismatched picture frames on pianos, bureaus, and mantels, and in wallets and albums.

  When she was not quite four years old, Fanny asked me if I knew I was gay. I was driving at the time and nearly crashed my new Infiniti into the gatehouse of Bel-Air. I recovered with aplomb, telling her I did know I was gay and asking her what gay meant. “Papa,” she replied, as if to a nitwit, “gay means handsome.” That was as good a definition as we needed at that stage.

  At her bat mitzvah, her three weepy parents watched her lay into the Torah, lashing out with great charm, intelligence, and wit at its homophobic and misogynist portions. At the end, Fanny turned directly to us and said, “From my mother, I learned the definition of unconditional love, from my dad, Jim, I learned love of the outdoors and nature, and from my papa, Philip,” and here she paused for effect, “I learned which Barbra Streisand album showed her at her peak.”

  Despite us or because of us or a combination of both, Fanny has grown to be a confident young woman who is proud and eager to tell the world about the two dads who have raised her and the mom she adores, who lives five hours away by plane.

  “Is it weird having two gay dads?” she is often asked.

  “No, why would it be? It’s what I know,” she replies.

  “Why didn’t you just move out to California to be near your daughter?” people ask Cathy.

  “That wasn’t the intention,” she explains to them. “The idea was for Jim and Philip to have a child of their own to raise.” She often sees the bewilderment—or is it judgment?—behind kind eyes.

  On this, our sixth or seventh New York sojourn as a family, Cathy is with Hanlon, now twenty-three, and her long-term companion, a sweet, slightly older man named Gary who has been devoted to her for more than a decade now. We go see The Light in the Piazza, a new musical at Lincoln Center. The lush, romantic story begins in Florence when Clara, a young American girl, loses her hat to a gust of wind. The hat is rescued by a handsome young Italian named Fabrizio. Their eyes lock, and they fall immediately in love.

  After the play, Cathy and Gary walk hand in hand, and Jim walks with Hanlon. I ask Fanny what she thought of the play. “I don’t buy that opening,” she says. “No one falls in love at first sight. It’s overly romantic.” She rolls her eyes.

  Her words alarm me and I look to Cathy for her reaction. How can Fanny, at fifteen, so adamantly disdain this notion, the basis of so much literature and art and music? “Surely you don’t really believe that it’s impossible to recognize one’s soul mate across a crowded room?” I ask her.

  “Papa,” she says very seriously, as if she’s the parent speaking to a child, “to really love someone, you need to know them. You can’t truly love someone you don’t know. You can feel sexual attraction for them, of course. But not love. That comes later.” I’m annoyed that she’s telling me something I cannot logically argue.

  At Café Fiorello, we order profiteroles with hot fudge sauce. Fanny goes to the ladies’ room. Jim, Hanlon, and Gary are discussing Hanlon’s life at college. Cathy takes both my hands from across the table.

  “Did you ever figure it out?” she asks me.

  “Figure out what?”

  She looks surprised. “The answer to your question.”

  I’m puzzled, but I know she isn’t being coy. There was, there is a question, but it is so wedged into my life, so much a part of me, that I have to unearth it, gently, slowly, from its resting place. The question begs at me from a candlelit room, nearly sixteen years back, and then the CD shuffle that is my mind flips back further still—to two figures awkwardly embracing in the parking lot of a suburban mall, to the reflected green glow of a dashboard. The question endures. It’s a question that has been asked of me about Cathy time and time again: Why did she do it? How could she give up her daughter?

  “I think I know that you loved me,” I tell her.

  “And I loved that you loved Jim. Giving you Fanny, giving you parenthood, I just knew it was the right th
ing.”

  “What about you?” I ask her.

  “I have a daughter,” she says. “A beautiful, amazing daughter.”

  “But I hurt you so much, back then,” I say.

  “And you also loved me so much. In your way. Before anyone else did. You were the first. That changed everything for me.”

  I let this sink in.

  There is another, a bigger question, of course, one that I ask only of myself and cannot share out loud. What part of me could have allowed Cathy to do this? What kind of man allows a friend to make that kind of sacrifice?

  This thought is interrupted by Fanny’s return from the washroom. She sits beside her mother, amidst our silence. She digs into the gooey ice cream in front of her. Perhaps the answer to my question takes me to a place where I cannot linger. Or maybe it’s a lot simpler. How could I have missed the opportunity to be this child’s father?

  To distract myself, I decide to ask Fanny a question. “So, honey, you never really said which Streisand album does show her at her peak. I’ve always meant to ask you. Ever since your bat mitzvah.”

  She looks at me blankly. “Oh, that. I don’t remember. It’s bad enough that people think you named me for her. I mean, for her character in that movie. I always have to tell them that even though I have gay dads, they weren’t queer enough to name me after some gay icon’s Oscar-winning role. And then when I tell them that my name is actually from the title of some Ingmar Bergman movie, they just look really confused.”