v.
My wife is planning to go off the pill soon. We want to start trying for a second child in December, and her chances of conceiving improve if she’s off for two months. She might have gone off already and not mentioned it. But I figure she’ll tell me. In any case, this is what we planned. We’re shooting for an August/September birth, and we didn’t have any problems with Sadie. Justine got pregnant right away. We hadn’t put much thought into it. I’d never gotten anyone pregnant, not by mistake, not even when I’d been reckless and forgone birth control. So, I wondered if I could. I worried we might have problems, but these concerns proved unfounded. We were happy, of course, that it happened so quick, but we didn’t tell anyone for three months, in case it didn’t take. My mind always went there: what if it didn’t? What if we had problems? What if Justine lost the baby? But nothing went wrong. There’d been spotting once in a while, and we’d worried and called the doctor, but this was normal. Sadie was born a few days after Christmas and was healthy. But I kept asking myself, why? Why was it so simple? When would our luck run out? When would something go wrong?
For the second try, the second kid, we’ve planned it out, thought it through logistically. With Sadie born in December, she wouldn’t turn five until three months after the school year began, which meant we couldn’t start her in kindergarten until another year rolled around, which meant another year paying for childcare. If we’d been thinking things through, we would have known this; we would have planned, but we hadn’t, and that had been fun. Making a baby. Without thinking.
There was something wildly erotic in the idea we were making a baby. We’d been together five years. We were married now. We’d bought a house. Yet, it seemed incredible that I’d found a woman who wanted me to get her pregnant. Beyond the vow of marriage, beyond anything else we’d done, this was the ultimate commitment. This wasn’t her saying, share a life with me. This was her saying, make one. When we weren’t trying, I would think about trying, picture it. We were making love with such ecstasy, I couldn’t help feeling we’d create a beautiful child, a loving child, a joyful one. I’d think it and picture us, picture Justine in bed, and I’d rush to her, whenever I could, wherever I was, and bring her there and strip her and make love to her. I could sense everything around us as we made love. The way the springtime sun cascaded through the shades and cast oblong patches of light on the hardwood floors. How the wind would push those shades out and suck them back toward the screens of our open windows, the fresh scent of earth and grass carried inside on the breeze. I was going to be a good father. I wanted it so much. All my life, as far back as I could remember, I’d wanted this. Now, it was going to happen. But the second won’t be the same. We’ll have to wait until Sadie goes down for her nap. Or until she goes to sleep at night. We can’t do it spur of the moment. But we’ll do it nevertheless. And I wonder, can we handle a second?
I think about this as I walk. I’ve decided to go to National Mechanics after all. The Horton email was enough to push me past the edge. I haven’t been to this bar in a year, maybe more. I’ve decided to spend the twenty in my wallet, though thoughts of a second child slow my stride. Should I be spending it? Twenty bucks. Is it worth it? This is how I weigh every decision, against the cost of a second child. I almost always find that things aren’t worth the expense. But I don’t care right now. This is the farthest I’ll go, throwing caution to the wind. It isn’t exactly reckless. I’ll forgo something else. Though I don’t know what else I’ll forgo. I don’t buy much.
I cross Walnut and enter the park behind Independence Hall. Crowds of tourists have gathered here. They sit on benches, stand against the steel barricades around the red brick building, gawking up at the whitewashed bell tower, the clock, the steeple. There are stone pathways that crisscross the park with cultivated patches of grass, trees. Elm and chestnut tower over the park and offer shade. I don’t know how old they are, how old they could be. They might have been here since the Revolution. A building of such significance, and I pass it every day without sparing a glance. I turn east, cross 5th, and head for the park behind the second National Bank,. The First is somewhere else nearby, though I only know this because of a scavenger hunt we had at work last year. We’d thought the Second was the First, and this was why we’d lost. There are large marble columns in the Greek style. The bar, National Mechanics, is on 3rd. I can take these parks almost the whole way there. The crowds thin and peter out, as I cross 4th. A group of tourists is being shouted at near the edge of the grounds by actors in colonial garb. The actors hand out fake wooden muskets to kids and drill them as though they’re Revolutionary troops. They interject facts between drilling, but I’m not close enough to hear.
Most of the actors are anonymous, peasants, regular gentry. But there’s also a Benjamin Franklin who passes through from time-to-time and someone dressed as Jefferson or Washington, I can’t tell them apart. Tall, lanky white men in powdered wigs and frock coats, they could be any aristocrat from that time. Wealth, of course, is what this means, their garb and wigs. Or maybe it’s just that money’s on my mind. I’ve only seen them passing on the street, the big name impersonators. The actors portraying Franklin and Jefferson perform inside, in venues where you have to pay to get in, while the regular citizens, dressed in their white cotton shirts and brown vests and woolen breeches, perform the complimentary tours outside. They wear tricorn hats without wigs, deliver their orations with overexaggerated gusto.
At the park between 4th and 3rd, I pass a woman in a blue dress and bonnet, ringing a bell, with a crowd of schoolchildren following. Betsy Ross? I wait for them to pass before moving on. I kick through a large pile of leaves, creating a cloud of red and yellow around my feet. I like the feel of them against my shins, the shushing sounds they make as they crackle against one another. It sets my mind at ease, produces a wonderful sense of nostalgia. I pass another group. A few skip past and crash through the leaves too. They’re overjoyed to be outside, uncontained in the fresh air, free from the shackles of schoolrooms. They push each other, run about. I don’t like them though, crowds of kids—too rambunctious, too noisy—but I want a second one. I know it’ll be harder, but how hard? We wanted to have Sadie out of diapers by the time this second arrives, so we’ve started training. But the training isn’t going well. She’s willing to pee in the pot, but whenever she has to shit, she shits her pants, and as she grows so does the size of her shit. There’s a point at which a toddler’s shit becomes indistinguishable from an adult’s, and she’s reached it, and that irritates me. But the real problem is the cost of diapers. One or two boxes a month, forty dollars a box. Even with sales, this becomes expensive, so we need her out of them.
I also worry that with a second child, I’ll lose the minimal time I have to myself. I worry the anger and resentment I feel at not finding time to write will fester and radiate outward toward Justine and Sadie. I worry I’ll see them as impediments. This is something no one warned me about before having children—the rage they inspire; the rage that results from them needing your attention while you’re trying to do something else. It doesn’t even have to be something for me. It can be something for all of us, something beyond Sadie’s immediate needs, like cooking dinner for the family while watching her. In the two years I’ve been a father, this is the most difficult thing. If I make her immobile while cooking, I place her inside her booster seat, strap her in, she screams. It doesn’t matter how many toys I put in front of her, she reaches boiling point and I can either continue to cook with her screaming or let her down. And if I let her down, I have to go back and forth between stove and kitchen door to watch the other rooms to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.
She likes to climb the rocking chair, stand, make it move back and forth with her feet. Or she strains for objects beyond her reach, choochkies on tables, picture frames, lamps, bottles of wine. She isn’t interested in toys, never for more than a moment, and there’s some concern, in the back of my mind, that I’ll become distracted and she’ll pull a boiling pot of water onto herself. At times, I’m moved to shout at her, and if I were the only one who does this, I’d think I had problems with anger, but I’ve spoken to enough parents of children Sadie’s age to know I’m not alone. Even Justine, who has more patience than me, gets pushed to her limits and ends up screaming.
I turn left out of the park, heading north on 3rd. It’s only a block to the bar. I cross Chestnut. I haven’t bothered to change out of my dress shoes, and since there are holes in the bottoms, I can feel the sidewalk grind against my feet. I keep these shoes at work and change out of them whenever I leave the office, so it doesn’t matter that there are holes. No one can see them. But every once in a while, I leave them on outside and worry my socks will wear out. Most of the way here, I’ve been walking on grass or smooth brick pathways, and I’m too far along to go back, so I shift the weight to my heels, try to mitigate the damage.
There’s a cluster of brick apartment buildings across Chestnut, and behind one of those doors, one of the bright blue ones, is a set of stairs that leads to an apartment where my childhood friend, William Winner, was shot in the head and killed during a robbery. When was that? Two years ago? Three? I can never pass these doors without thinking of him, though I don’t know which had been his. He’d been a goofy kid, a little messed up, who’d grown into an adult who was a lot messed up. We’d parted ways in our twenties, but I’d kept tabs on him through his mom, who’s a friend of my family’s. Will had two kids out of wedlock with a girl much younger than him, a teenager. He liked drugs, mostly marijuana and hallucinogens, but sometimes harder stuff. When his kids were born, he hardly spent any time with them, and this was where we’d parted ways. When he’d been killed, it seemed few of his newer friends ever knew that he was a father. All they knew was that he liked listening to psychedelic rock, smoking weed.
Whenever I think of him, I wonder how he got like that, how he’d became so fucked up. But I kind of know. His birth had been botched, he’d told us, though the details sometimes varied. “I had a lawsuit,” he said. “And they settled out of court. When I’m eighteen, I get twenty-five hundred a month for my whole life. And then, when I’m thirty I get a cool mill’. I’ll never have to work a day in my life.” I remember his mom told him not to go around saying it. But he didn’t listen. From what he told us, he’d come out feet first, which is why he had a problem with his legs. One was longer than the other, and he walked funny. Then, he said, the umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck and cut off the oxygen, “but not enough to do any permanent damage.” Though the things he did contradicted this. He lived like he hadn’t a care in the world, like nothing could touch him, faze him, hurt him. But things did.
He limped. He spaced out. He was uncoordinated and bad at sports. On top of it, his name was Winner. Kids in the neighborhood made fun of him. And it hurt, though he learned to brush it off. At the end of high school, checks started rolling in. He bought an Infinity J-30, an eighteen-year-old who could hardly drive with a luxury car. He bought eighth after eighth of good weed, and he’d smoke it with as many people as he could, and this made him friends but not the right friends. His dad was an asshole, absent most of his life, a philandering lawyer living in Texas. Whenever Will visited and came back, he regaled us with tales of what he did without parental supervision. Growing up, we’d had a small circle of friends, but I was the only one at the hospital the day he died. Then again, I was also the only one who lived close enough to get there. My mom called and asked me to go and sit with his mom. And as I sat with her in a little cafeteria on the hospital’s mezzanine, I couldn’t help thinking that Will didn’t deserve to die, not like that. And I wonder again, as I pass these blue doors, is it all inevitable, charted out from the beginning? Had this been Will’s fate from the outset, from the time I met him as a kid? What will happen to mine? Are their fates sealed? Even the one who isn’t yet born?
“Welcome to National Mechanics,” a hostess says as I walk in. She grips the edge of a stack of menus.
“I’m just going to sit at the bar,” I tell her.
The room’s large. It puts me in mind of the mead halls of Beowulf. Some of the patrons look to have stepped straight out of its pages, too. Two men, sitting in one of the booths against the opposite wall, have thick shaggy beards. There are also a few tables with business luncheons going on toward the back—from the hip startups hereabouts, I assume, since the men are similarly bearded. A waitress scrambles among them with glasses of beer, plates of food. There are five people of various ages spread along the bar, some talking, some not. I take a spot near the taps and squeeze in next to two women, who look to be in their early-forties. I leave a buffer stool to that side so I don’t infringe on their space. The room is dimly-lit, with sunlight streaming through the front windows, which adds to its Old English charm. The tables are made of lacquered wood, the floor’s the same, and the walls are red brick, and this combination, along with the natural sun, gives it a warm, homey feel.
I sit and place my notebook on the bar. I’ve brought it along to write to Justine, to explain the epiphany I’d had while walking past the park, the one about how although we might not be in control, we have to try to take care of each other anyway. To let it all lead back to the fact I’m sorry and want to be close with her again. But how to begin? Do I begin by describing my fall? My encounter with the homeless woman and her throwing out the newspaper tie? Do I explain the sinuous pattern of thought that led from me seeing her in Washington Square to thinking of Justine’s dad and my grandmother and how that’s relevant to us? I glance at the chalkboard posted on the wall to see which beers are on tap. I don’t need a food menu. There are only two options for me: veggie burger or grilled cheese. To beer or not to beer, that is the question. I have to get Sadie at five. If I have two, I won’t get drunk, but I’ve never liked drinking, even hours before, when I know I have to drive. I want one now. Yet, I don’t.
This is the wrestling match that goes on inside me every time I’ve wanted a drink since Sadie was born. I gave it up for the first six months, and having returned to it, I only drink after she goes to bed, once or twice a week. I prefer drinking alone. I like to sit and think. I don’t want interaction. It took a while to realize, but as I headed into my thirties I discovered that if I keep to myself, I get in less trouble. I don’t wake the next morning and obsess over something I said, regret an ill-advised conversation. Rather, what I end up with are notebook scribblings, some good, some not. Whenever I drink, I sit and read a book or watch a movie with a pen and paper nearby, and I write. One or two drinks, I’m loose enough to let go, but still forming coherent thoughts; three to four, my writing gets sloppy but sometimes results in connections I wouldn’t have otherwise made; while five ventures into utter incomprehensibility.
When Sadie came along, I had to change tactics, shift my writing time from night to day, do it sober. These days I only resort to drinking in cases of writer’s block, cases where I fear the ideas might not translate from mind to page. And I know I need to be tipsy to use random thoughts I’d had during my encounter with this homeless woman as a jumping off point to explain why I’m sorry, why I want us to get along. It made sense in the moment, standing before the brick wall of Washington Square, watching her. Yet now, to my sober mind, removed from any immediacy, it’s callous, idiotic. I don’t necessarily feel guilty. I couldn’t have stopped my train of thought as it happened, couldn’t remove the woman from contemplations of what my fall and her place in it meant, but admitting this is something else entirely. It makes me blind to another’s suffering. Still, the conclusion I’ve arrived at is real, even if the means by which I’ve arrived are questionable, so I have to find a way around it. All this makes me self-conscious, the death knell for drafting. If I have any hope of recapturing what I learned in a way that doesn’t betray me as callous, I’ll need a beer.
Fuck it, I think. I’m not a good man anyway.
But I can’t bring myself to believe this. Or I can’t let myself off the hook from trying to be better. And saying this is letting myself off the hook. I want a way out, a way to say what I mean without being callous, a way to avoid separating me from this woman, so that I can explain what I feel without prevaricating. But that isn’t going to happen. We aren’t commensurate in the eyes of society. We’ll never be equals, so the guilt, if I use her, will be pervasive. Yet, she keeps coming back. Maybe it’s just that I spend so much time fretting about those above me and the injustices I believe they’ve done me that I can’t accommodate her and the injustices she might have suffered, and it puts my righteousness to shame. Whatever the case, I have to push it away if I’m going to eat. How do you justify dropping twenty dollars on lunch when you’ve got something like this in the back of your mind?
I finger the paper insert in the hard plastic casing that lists their drafts, the ones they serve year-round—Yuengling, Kenzinger, Stella Artois. I used to drink lager when I came here. It was two dollars a glass, and I’d have two or three. But if I only have one beer, I might as well spend more. They have autumn beers on tap, pumpkin-flavored. They’re more expensive. Six, seven bucks. The burger’s increased to eleven dollars, which will bring my bill to eighteen and won’t leave enough for tip. If I get a Kenzinger, I’ll only spend fourteen, and four bucks isn’t a bad tip on that, almost thirty percent. I usually tip twenty to twenty-five if the service is good. But on a cheaper meal, I’ll push it to thirty because it’ll make the server happy, and I can spare it. Even when I can’t, I can, because what’s an extra dollar?
“What’s an extra dollar,” I say aloud, whispering, which means I’m more embarrassed by my thoughts than I can handle. I keep circling back to the homeless woman. I’m trying to drown her out with speech, with nonsense. I focus on the menu, even though I know what I want. I figured I’d spend the whole twenty, but now I’m not so sure. If I get a burger, a Stella would bring it to sixteen, which is also fine. I consider forgoing beer altogether, which is a better idea. I could try to write the letter as I am, stupid and callous as I feel.
“What can I get you?”
I look up to see Sari. She’s still here, and I’m glad. She’s always been my favorite bartender.
“Hey, it’s you!” she says.
She doesn’t know my name, but I’m flattered she recognizes me. Whenever I came here in the past, I brought a book, and sometimes she’d ask me about it. Maybe that’s it. She knows me as the guy who comes and reads at lunch.
“It’s been a while,” she says. “You look thinner. Have you lost weight?”
“Yeah, I dropped about twenty pounds since the last time I was here.”
“Well, you look good. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Just water for now. But I’ll take a veggie burger with cheddar.”
In my twenties, I dated a woman who looked like Sari. She had a tattoo of Cupid and Psyche across her back, a large eye right above her waistline. She had long, raven black hair. She liked Anne Sexton and Frida Kahlo, admired Salvador Dali and his wife Gala. She layered her eyelashes with dark eyeshadow, angular points at the end. She painted, wrote, made jewelry. She was perpetually clad in black jeans, tee shirts. She was tall, trim, incredibly sexy, more feline in manner than any woman I’d ever dated, and I had no idea why she was interested in me. It wasn’t that she was out of my league. At that time, I didn’t see anyone as out of my league, but we moved in different worlds, and I had trouble accessing hers. She liked that I wrote. We had mutual friends, and we connected online. The first night we went out, we ended up back at my place. We made a fort out of blankets. We drank wine out of mason jars. She wanted to go to bed and it was good, but she wouldn’t let me kiss her while we made love. She’d turn away and I’d kiss her neck, but I never found her mouth, and I accepted this because it was good.
It wasn’t that we never kissed. We’d kiss in bed right up to making love, and she’d kiss with passion, but once I’d penetrated her, her lips were off-limits, and I was hesitant to ask why. Was it something she reserved for people she was in love with? I was drunk when we were together, and she was too. We spent our nights at McGlinchey’s, a dive off Locust on 15th. She’d meet me on her ten-speed, biking to the bar, and then we’d walk back to my place or hers. She lived in a house her mother owned and had a bedroom on the top floor. I gave her a copy of the novel I’d written, but I don’t think she read it. Instead, she made me a painting that combined traces of her with traces of me. Images she’d cut out of a book about Charlie Chaplin. I was obsessed with Chaplin. I made everyone watch his movies: Modern Times. The Great Dictator. City Lights. And she’d blended these clippings with a painted image of a woman who resembled her, lying on a bed, dreaming. She’d etched lines from Anne Sexton poems into the cardboard with a felt tip pen, and she’d torn pieces from the pages of my novel and pasted them alongside this.
She purchased a painting for me, too—someone else’s work. It was a cutout, a blue bunny, and she jotted a note to the back that said, “A rabbit for my Rabbit.” “I don’t get it,” I said. She and her cousin had taken to calling me Rabbit. At work, I asked my friend Regina what she thought it meant. “It’s a popular brand of vibrator,” she said. Was this just a sex thing or something more? We’d never discussed being exclusive. I’d assumed exclusivity wasn’t something she wanted, and to make sure I didn’t damage what we had, I didn’t bring it up. But maybe she’d been waiting on me. My mind was addled. Whenever I wasn’t at work, I was drinking. I didn’t know what I wanted.
On my birthday, I went to see her. She was in bed in a black negligee. She had a cold. I undressed and laid down beside her and held her. We stayed like that, watching a small TV she’d placed at the foot of her mattress. After a while, she said, “It’s your birthday, don’t you want to have sex?” I said, “You’re not feeling well.” And she looked at me like she’d never considered this would stop me. I wondered what kind of men she dated, and when she got better, she went down on me for the first time. “I don’t do that for just anyone,” she said, and I didn’t understand what she was telling me. My confidence was thin, brittle. I could message any girl online, start chatting. If I picked the right type—artistic, literary—I could get a date, but my confidence didn’t persist beyond that. I didn’t think they’d stay for anything beyond sex. So, I didn’t hear that she was saying, through gestures and gifts, I like you. We dated for two months, and I liked her too, but anytime anyone else was around—one of her friends or her cousin or even her mom, to whom she’d introduced me—I felt like an imposter, like she required a kind of masculinity I didn’t possess. All the guys she hung around with had tattoos. They wore trucker hats, vintage jeans. And though I liked to think I could get along with anyone, I couldn’t become comfortable, and it ended.
Sari returns with my burger, sets it before me.
“Did you decide on a drink?”
“I’m going to pass today.”
I watch her as she walks away. There’s a trace of ink on her lower back between her jeans and tee. I’ve noticed this before—serious ink, the type that implies dedication, forethought. Her arms are tatted up, too. I’ve seen the way most of the male clientele watch her. She’s beautiful. But I know the deal in a way I didn’t in my twenties. She’s friendly, so I’m friendly back. In the past, I mistook friendliness for attraction. I wasn’t always wrong, but I was wrong often enough. I know better now, now when it doesn’t matter. She remembers me, maybe because I read over lunch, maybe because I tip a decent percentage on what I spend and I’m not demanding.
I take the ketchup and try to shake some onto my plate. They have the old-fashioned glass bottles, and I can never get it to pour out. I smack the bottom, nothing. I hit the 57 with my fingers, a trick someone told me worked, but it doesn’t. I don’t want to be seen wrestling with a ketchup bottle, so when no one’s looking I dip my knife in and slosh it out. I slide the red onion off and cap the burger with the bun. The burger’s a mix of carrots, squash, zucchini, mushrooms. The contents are shredded and cooked back together. I take a bite and open my notebook, but I don’t know where to begin. I take another bite, dip a fry in the ketchup, eat it. I watch Sari bustling among the tables. I still want a beer but can’t bring myself to order one. I close the notebook.
I’m good in bed. At least, I think I’m good in bed. Lots of people think they’re good in bed, so I might be deluding myself. I’m attentive. I don’t suffer from hang-ups. I watch my partner for signs of pleasure and respond. I ask questions about what they enjoy. I can usually go as long as my partner needs. This hasn’t diminished with age, either. Even if I don’t have much use for it anymore. Justine and I know each other, our bodies. It doesn’t take long for us to get off. Yet, I prize this, this advantage. Virility, I suppose it is; though the word makes me think of mountain men, cowboys. Maybe I’ve lost my touch? It’s not as if, just because you were once good at something, you’ll always be good. Then, too, there are no longer instances where I sneak up behind her in the kitchen, kiss her neck, ask her to go upstairs. There’s no passing her in the living room, reaching out to caress her arms, giving her a look and falling onto the couch. I suppose I shouldn’t expect these things. There’s a child in the house. We have to pick our moments. Yet, we have lots of life in front of us. I wonder if we’ll ever get this back. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same, but we need…something.
Should I romance her more? Probably. But that’s hard, too. The flowers I buy at the produce store have come to be expected. They aren’t trimmed, and to get them ready for a vase requires work on her part, pruning. She’d prefer me to send flowers, but it’s hard to justify the cost. It’s three times as much to send a professional bouquet. And considering costs isn’t romantic, just necessary. Taking her to dinner is rare due to Sadie’s bedtime schedule. We already ask my parents to watch her two days every week. If we want to go to dinner, we need Justine’s sister to babysit, and even then, we have to have Sadie home by bedtime, to keep to her routine, which means any mood our time alone might have generated dissipates once we get her down. It’s more convenient to do brunch, to ask my parents to watch Sadie for an hour Sunday morning and slip away and have a quick meal. But bunch isn’t romantic. It doesn’t whip us into such a frenzy of longing that we have to stop home and make love before picking Sadie up.
Then, there’s another possibility as to why things have cooled off, one I’ve considered but haven’t reckoned with, and that’s that Justine fears getting pregnant at the wrong time. She’s on the pill, but it isn’t always effective. She has small window in the morning to take it and sometimes forgets, and we want to control the timing of her next pregnancy. She’s also dropped hints about what she wants to do for birth control after the second arrives, since neither of us wants a third.
“Have you considered vasectomy?” she’s asked.
This takes me off guard. It isn’t something I’m ready to do. What if it affects me adversely? What if I can’t get it up anymore? What if it diminishes my ability to keep an erection? What’s wrong with the pill? I can use condoms again.
“If something happened to me,” she asked, “would you want to start again?”
I thought about it, chose my words carefully. Maybe I should have said no, but that isn’t realistic.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It would be hard. I’d mourn a long time. But I wouldn’t want to be alone forever. And I wouldn’t want that for you either.”
Yet, I always assume Justine will outlive me, because I can’t imagine living without her, even with things at their worst, even when we’re at odds. Of all the people I know, hers is the one death I can’t imagine, but something could happen, she could die without me dying too. We’re together most of the time in the car where, to my mind, we’re most at risk. But sometimes, she drives alone. Her bimonthly book club meetings require a late-night highway drive, and whenever she attends, I lie awake, waiting for her to get home. I’ve pictured my life with her—her and Sadie—but what if something happens to them and not me?
Again I look up, finger the placard with the beer list. It’s almost one o’clock. I watch Sari walk past again, play with my notebook, readjust its position on the bar. This isn’t the train of thought I’d intended to follow when I came here. I pick up the pickle, eat, finish the burger, polish off the last of the fries.
If something happened to them, I’d want to die too. But I wouldn’t really. My sense of self-preservation is too strong. I might say I want to die, feel like dying, but I’d want to live. And I wouldn’t want to be alone. So what if? What if it happens, and I lose them and want a new family? The procedure is reversible. But they’d have to operate. What if I go to reverse it and it doesn’t take? “I don’t want to take a pill the rest of my life,” Justine tells me. Does she see in all this, even after all these years, a hesitation to commit? Maybe she does, and maybe it is. We bought a house together. I married her. We’ve had a child. Yet, I can’t commit to this one last thing. It isn’t like I’m going to have an affair. As much as we struggle day-to-day, I believe in the vows I made. I believe in love, marriage, family. It’s difficult, but anything in life worth doing is—getting an education, learning a craft, becoming an artist, starting a business. We acknowledge these things are hard but rewarding. So why, when it comes to commitment, do we expect any different? Why do we believe things should fall into place, be perfect and simple all the time? Remember being alone? Wondering when you’d meet someone, if you’d meet someone, someone you liked, someone you wanted to be around all the time? Remember those trips to the doctor after you’d slept with someone you weren’t sure about? The STD tests? Wondering if you’d picked up syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, AIDS? All that time worrying about whether you got someone pregnant, someone you didn’t want a kid with?
Justine and I have been together eight years, and those years have allowed me to push this from my mind. But I remember what it was like. This is better. We know each other with greater intimacy than I’ve known anyone else. I come home, at the end of the day, to a house where I live with two people I love. And sometimes, I have to remind myself of this, to remember and recognize it. I want to be with my wife. I understand what giving birth has done to her body. She had trouble breastfeeding, her nipples had cracked, bled. She got shooting pains in her back when Sadie latched on. Although having a child changed me, nothing this severe happened to my body. This is all conjecture, all these thoughts of another family, life beyond them. It’s me dragging my feet. Vasectomy isn’t off the table, but it’ll take time to process it. I’ll have to consult a doctor, do research. I’ll have to come to terms with what I’m giving up. I have to feel it’s my decision, not something she’s pushed me into.
I lift my hand, call for the check. As I walk back to work, my thoughts are swirling, but one thing’s certain: it’s time to apologize. I’ve let it go long enough. All that’s required are two words. Not a letter explaining my dedication to her. I simply need this divide to disappear. I pass through the parks, intent on this. I’ll bring up a chat window and type, and that’ll be it. My legs can’t carry me fast enough. I’m jogging as I move through the lobby. I get to my cube, throw my jacket over my chair. But as I open my email to type, I see that she’s written me. In the bottom right-hand corner of my screen there’s a message, textbox flashing.
“Daycare called,” her message says. “Sadie’s running a fever. They need one of us to pick her up.”
And by “one of us,” of course, she means me.