Admission. Part 23

With the coffee descending into its carafe, she led him to the living room and sat on the too deep couch, awkwardly folding her legs alongside her on the cushion. He sat, too. He was taller, and he did not seem to share her difficulty. He looked, actually, comfortable, with his arm along the back of the sofa, his hip disappearing into one of the cushions. The house was warm now, and though the disarray remained in the room, it also felt very nearly peaceful. She did not know what would happen or what it meant, or what she wanted it to mean. She did not know what he wanted from her, at least in the long term, or if there even was a long term. Portia had reached her present age with a list of s.e.xual partners so abbreviated, it bordered on humiliating. Another counselor at soccer camp, the summer before college. Tom, who'd made off with some valuable thing she'd never been able to replace. Mark, her life partner, supposedly. And John. These men had nothing in common. They were not uniformly intelligent, attractive, even nice. They had not loved her. Or they had not loved her enough. From these few she had not gained the tools to understand casual s.e.x and was ill versed in its attendant lore. And as a result, she couldn't really glean the meaning of what had happened in Keene or what might be happening now.

"What are you thinking?" said John.

"I believe that's supposed to be the woman's line," Portia said, smiling.

"And I thought we were beyond all that in the gender-blind postfeminist utopia. So what are you thinking?"

She shrugged. She had no intention of letting him know what she was thinking. "Nothing."

He shook his head. "You are a woman who's never thought nothing in her entire life."

And indeed, she thought about this and decided it was probably true, which gave her no pleasure.

"All right. I was thinking... I'm not really sure where we're going with this."

To John's credit, he did not pretend to be confused.

"Where would you like it to go?"

"I don't know."

"Is that: I really don't know? Or: I do, actually, know, but I don't want to tell you?"

"I really don't know. I'm glad you're here. I know that."

He nodded. "I want to be here. Actually, I want to be over there." He nodded at her end of the sofa.

She reached for him. His hair was soft. His mouth, on her skin, also soft. The couch, it turned out, was the perfect size after all.

When I was a child, I was given a gift of Legos. I don't remember ever playing with another toy. Over the years, I built buildings of Legos, and ships, and bridges. Then I started building robots, and helicopters that flew. When they didn't fly very well, I would pull them apart and try to figure out what was going wrong. That was actually my favorite part. By this time, my parents knew to lock up all the mechanical devices in the house, because I had a strange habit of taking them apart, too. I was in high school before I figured out that there was a name to describe the sort of thing I was so interested in doing: engineer. When I first heard that word, I thought: that is the most interesting word in the English language. And I thought: that's what I'm going to be.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

I'M OK, YOU'RE OK

The scar was still there, just where she had left it. It gave off an air of profound imprecision, haste, and severe pain. It had a metallic taste, too, and though this might have been her imagination, a faint but identifiable smell: yeast and seawater.

"Appendectomy," he told her, his hand on her shoulder.

"It can't be," she said, looking up at him. "Appendectomy scars don't look anything like this."

"Ah," he said sardonically. "I meant appendectomy, Ugandan style."

"Jesus."

"It could have been worse. I could have died."

"John," she said, laying her cheek against it.

"It was my own fault. I should have gone to the hospital as soon as I started feeling bad, but I honestly didn't think it was anything unusual. My gut was full of exotic flora the whole time I was in Africa. I was always getting intestinal things. So of course when I finally did drag myself into the emergency room, I played doctor and told them what was wrong with me, and they just sat me in the corner with a bucket and let me get on with it. I was pretty checked out by then. Luckily, one of the nurses noticed the way I was holding my right side. When I woke up, I was minus an appendix. And all I got was this lousy scar. It's quite the turn-on, isn't it?"

"No," she said honestly. "But it isn't a turn-off."

"You're just being nice," he said.

"I'm not that nice." She lifted her head and looked at it carefully. The scar was not only long, it was ridged and clumsily made, asymmetrical in both width and depth, as if someone had gouged his flesh with a primitive tool and slipped in the process. She lay curled against him, one hand beneath his shoulder, the other stroking that ragged scar.

After a while, he said, "You didn't say anything about your father. Before."

"Mm-hmm," she agreed, closing her eyes.

"So... was he a turkey baster?"

Despite herself, she laughed, fluttering the hair on his chest. "No. Not at all."

"So your parents were together."

"No. I mean yes. But no. You and I have already been together longer than my father and mother were. Not," she said quickly, "that you and I are together."

"Are we not?" he said.

"I meant, in the physical sense. Together. As in, we are undoubtedly together right now."

"We are." He smiled. "Undoubtedly. Right now."

With that understood, she stopped, hoping he wouldn't pursue it.

"Then...," John said a moment later, "this was a one night sort of thing."

"Oh, not a whole night. Not a night at all, from what I've been told. And I was actually told everything there was to tell. My mother believed in being excruciatingly open about the whole thing. Lots of inappropriate details. Especially for an eight-year-old."

"Portia," said John, "you're being very obscure. I can't tell if this is a traumatic childhood experience or something you just like to joke about."

She frowned. "You know, I can't tell, either. I haven't thought about this in years."

Slowly, she extricated herself and sat up. There was, miraculously, ample room for this maneuver on the couch. Quite uncharacteristically, she found herself sort of willing to talk about this. But only if he really wanted to hear it.

"Do you really want to hear this?"

"Do you want me to hear it?"

"All right," she said, reluctantly, as if she did not. But she found that she did.

"The story of you?" he said, reaching up to touch... his hand lingered, uncommitted, for a moment, and then landed: the hollow between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It began, lightly, to move.

"Yes. The magical story of how egg met sperm, and my perfect self was launched in the womb of my mother, on the Amtrak Montrealer."

He burst into laughter. His thin body shook, ribs and muscles and the hair that lay flat on his chest, like gra.s.s in a riverbed. He laughed and shook, and then, quite suddenly, he stopped and looked at her. "Oh s.h.i.t," he said. "You're not kidding."

"No, not kidding. Why would I kid about such an important detail? And details are all I have, so if you're going to keep interrupting my flow..."

"All right," he told her. His hand, momentarily immobilized by the laughter and then the shock, was mobile again. "I'll do my best not to interrupt."

"Good. And now a deep, cleansing breath."

"Okay," he said gamely.

"Well," said Portia. "Thirty-nine years ago, my mother, Susannah Nathan of Northampton, Ma.s.sachusetts, via Long Island, Barnard, Berkeley, and cooperative living situations too numerous to list, was a divorced activist in need of a baby. The divorce isn't really relevant, actually. He was a gay man from Chile. Chile was not a great place to be a gay man in the mid-sixties, apparently, so he came to the States, but they were going to deport him, so my mother married him at the Springfield courthouse. They never lived together, and by the time my mother was looking to get with child, he'd moved out to San Francisco. He died there, actually."

"Let me guess. In the late 1980s."

"Yes, unfortunately. I did meet him once. He was a sweet guy. A musician. He probably would have made a great biological father. I might have gotten a little musical apt.i.tude, which wouldn't have been bad, and the exotic skin tone. But he was on the other side of the country by the time my mother needed his genetic material, so that put him out of the running. My mom had another gay friend closer to home, so they tried for a couple of months, and she tried a sperm bank in Boston. Like I told you," Portia said ruefully, "she spared me none of the details."

"It's okay. I'm not eight years old."

"No. So, anyway, a couple of years went by, maybe half a dozen attempts, and nothing. But she had this fatalistic att.i.tude. It was going to happen. She was going to be a mother, you know? And then, one day..."

"One perfect day!"

"On the Montrealer."

"Not the Empire Builder or the Heartland Flyer!"

"She was coming back from visiting her mother in New York, and there was a man in the seat across from her, reading a copy of I'm OK-You're OK."

"Oh, my G.o.d," John said, laughing again. "Please tell me you're making that part up."

"Sadly, no. If I were making it up, I'd have him reading Dostoyevsky. Though I guess Dostoyevsky wouldn't have been as much of a conversation starter. By New Haven they're rehashing their childhood angst. By Hartford, he's moved into the seat next to her."

"He'd better hurry up. Springfield is the next stop."

"Well, he did hurry up. I mean, he must have. Actually, I don't doubt my mother would happily have shared with me exactly how long he took. Like I said, she believed in total openness, but I begged her to stop. Anyway, it was truly a brief encounter."

"Well, no. Brief Encounter was a love story. This is more like Strangers on a Train."

"Which ended with murder, I seem to recall."

"Portia," said John, "are you as angry as you sound?"

She looked at him in surprise. "Do I really sound angry?"

"Vastly." His hand had now colonized her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and moved on to her abdomen.

"But I wouldn't be here if he hadn't. If they hadn't."

"No." He waited.

"I don't think I ever wished there'd been roses and dancing, let alone a wedding. I guess I'm not much of a romantic."

"Hey," he said, smiling, "you were conceived on a train! You have to be a romantic!"

"Well, but it wasn't romantic at all. That's sort of the key to the whole thing. There were never any violins, for her. She was thinking sperm from the very beginning. She was thinking, Well, why not give this way a try? He was tall and appeared to be free of physical deformities. He looked prosperous. He could read, obviously. She probably knew more about him than she knew about the sperm donor she'd tried. Anyway, she got off pregnant at Springfield and never wanted to see him again. Not even if it worked and she did have a baby. And she never thought that this baby she wanted so badly might want to know who its father was. I don't even have a name. Or a destination. You know, he might have gotten off at St. Albans or gone as far as Montreal. Maybe he was even French-Canadian, though I suppose Susannah would have picked up the accent. I struggled horribly in French, so probably not. Maybe he got off at White River Junction. Maybe he was a professor at Dartmouth. Maybe he was my professor!"

"Not if he was reading I'm OK-You're OK," said John.

"Oh, don't be a sn.o.b. Lots of people read that book."

"I know. I read it."

She laughed. "Well, there you go."

"In my defense," he said, moving to her thigh, "it was in Kampala. There was a copy in the clinic library. I was a little desperate for reading material."

"She ought to have given me 'I'm OK' as a middle name," said Portia, shifting for him. She closed her eyes.

"Portia I'm OK Nathan," he said dubiously. "Aren't you glad she didn't?"

Portia, who was now trying to concentrate on his hand, said nothing.

"What is your middle name, actually?"

"Mm? I don't have one. Susannah had this idea I would name myself. I don't know, there was some tribe somewhere she'd read about, where the girls name themselves when they reach p.u.b.erty. She was all fired up to do it. Big party, candle lighting, all her women friends in a circle, beating crescent-shaped tambourines." She opened her eyes.

He was frowning at her.

"Crescent?" she said. "Because of the moon?"

"The moon?" He seemed still more lost.

"It's a menstrual thing," she said flatly.

"Ah."

"But I wouldn't let her do it."

"No?"