Afterburn

Park Avenue Partners Fertility Clinic Forty-eighth Street and Park Avenue, Manhattan September 14, 1999

"Two dozen letters already," Martha Wainwright hissed at Charlie as he stepped into her office. "They're just sailing in from every other lonely woman of child-bearing age who reads your advertisement." He'd slipped away from Teknetrix early, carrying the antique cloisonne bowl for Ellie he'd had sent from Shanghai, walking through the caverns of heat and shadow around Grand Central, trying to avoid the shoeshine men, early-drunk commuters, and sweltering tourists. You could always tell the out-of-towners. They looked like Charlie's father going to Miami Beach in 1965. Cameras and white socks and floppy hats. Lost with a map in their hands. The wife with an ass like a sack of potatoes, bifocals on chains, terrified by the lanky black men loitering about, massaging their jazz-bo chins. The husband trying to snatch a thrill off the newsstand porn. Get out of my way, you respectable people, Charlie'd thought, I'm a married man trying to father a child out of wedlock with a complete stranger. Who? Who would answer such an advertisement? He wanted to read the letters himself, not only to check that Martha didn't weed out the good ones, but also to be sure she didn't messenger them over to his office, where they might be opened by Karen. Who might possibly mention something to someone-someone like Ellie, who'd called his office too many times that day, with nothing to say. Calling, he realized, with no reference to his schedule, simply to make herself feel better about something, so edgy and irritable that she did not remember phoning him an hour before. As if she knew Charlie was up to something. Probably smelled it in his sweat, saw it in the way he rattled the business page over breakfast.

He'd also gone to the trouble of walking the eight blocks to Martha's office because her private investigator, a Mr. Towers, never saw anyone outside the offices of the law firm. He would be the one who poked into the candidates' credit histories and medical files. She'd used him on dozens of insurance and divorce cases, she said, the best in the business.

"There they are," Martha announced as they entered one of the firm's conference rooms, waving her thick arm, "your pile of yearning." The stack included letters, photographs, resumes, even a few videotapes. "Told Ellie yet?"

He ignored her and eased himself into a chair.

"I'm going to leave you alone with your fantasies, Charlie." Martha put her hand on the doorknob. "Please don't make too much of a mess."

"You do this to most of your clients?"

"Most of my clients are trying to avoid trouble."

She pulled the door shut before he could respond, so he opened the file of letters. They were typewritten, handwritten, word-processed. He marked two folders maybe and no. What was he looking for? Intelligence and character, of course. Health and vigor. Something special. It was not necessary to like the woman, he told himself; more important that she be a strong person. He would choose strength over niceness any day. Niceness could go to hell. Nice people lost market share. Strength and intelligence. Give me someone healthy and intelligent and resolute, he thought. And stable, and drug-free. Pretty eyes and good teeth would be a plus. Here was a woman who was a lawyer for the poor. Here was a woman who danced in a ballet company but had recently injured her knee and saw the end of her performance career coming. Another was a counselor for battered children. Another was a lesbian who thought such an arm's-length arrangement would be best for her since she wanted a child but had "issues with men." Didn't everyone born without testicles have issues with men? Here was a woman who owned a dairy farm in upstate New York. Her young husband had been killed when his tractor tipped over, crushing him, she said, and now she had a beautiful piece of land, a dog, nice neighbors, and plenty of time, because she was renting out the acreage to another farmer. She and her husband had been planning to have a child. Charlie put her letter in the maybe folder. What next? A woman who had three children but her husband was terminally ill. Thirty-seven years old. The chance of birth defects was one in three hundred, he knew, too high. He put her letter in the no file. The next letter was from a gay man who asked that Charlie sponsor the man's adoption of a Third World child. "Of course, you may be put off by this request," said the letter. "But my partner and I, both in our late forties, have been together for eleven years. We are both HIV-negative. We are sincere and committed to each other. We are looking for a girl from China, Korea, or Malaysia. Most overseas adoption agencies are wary of gay male couples, and we may have to accept a severely damaged child. But we are willing to do this. We are frankly appalled by the behavior of many gay men, who mock straight people without really contemplating the effort it takes to raise a child. We believe we have the sufficient humility and dedication to do this. Please help."

I should, Charlie thought, I really should. But I'm not going to. He inspected the next letter, which was from a sixty-two-year-old woman who'd read Charlie's "beautiful notice" and wanted to nominate her daughter Sophia, who had been disappointed in love many times but would make a wonderful mother. The letter digressed at length about the difficulties that young women faced in finding eligible young men. The so-called sexual revolution in the sixties and women's liberation, the mother claimed, had changed male behavior for the worse. She herself had two sons whose behavior she'd watched for fifteen years. After the advent of the birth-control pill and abortion on demand, young unmarried men could have sex with many women, even accidentally impregnating them, and not be held maritally accountable. Biology and societally acceptable behavior had been uncoupled for the first time in the history of human civilization. Women, moreover, could have all the sex they wanted and, freed from pregnancy, compete for men's jobs. Although women had benefited from these changes, the mother wrote, they also didn't want to acknowledge that one of the results of the Pill was a surfeit of sexually well-traveled but somewhat discouraged women in their thirties looking for the few still-available men who had decent jobs. "I've seen this in my daughters and nieces," wrote the woman. "The basic structures have broken down. I don't know what to do about it. Perhaps nothing. But a letter like yours is remarkable. Some young woman will be very lucky, luckier than she will ever know. I showed your notice to my daughter and asked if she would mind if I wrote to you. She is shy about it. I don't think she minds, because she was intrigued. I could tell by the way she read it. I suppose I'm just an old mother worried about her daughter. But I want the best for her, and the young men who are left over after age thirty-five are really the bottom of the barrel. Losers, one way or another. All the good men get snapped up quickly. That's a harsh truth, but there it is. An arrangement like yours would set my daughter free. And give me a granddaughter!" no. Mother too involved.

The next letter was from a Vietnamese-American woman who deduced from the reference in the ad to Charlie's age and military duty that he might have been involved in the Vietnam War. "We share a deep spiritual bond," her letter began, "and only by our union can we begin to create the symbolic healing between cultures." A pretty idea, he thought, but she has no idea how many of her countrymen I blew up. He kept reading. The next letter was from a talk-show producer who said she'd seen Charlie's advertisement and would like to invite him onto the show, along with several women who'd answered his ad. "I think I can get you the whole show," she wrote, "because this is the next big thing!" The show's home viewers, most of whom were married women between the ages of thirty and fifty-five, would find the situation fascinating, and she "absolutely promised" that-who cared? Into the no. The next letter read: Your letter is the latest proof that the patriarchal structures of our society remain undamaged by thirty years of the women's movement. What are women to you? You are seeking a woman to hire for breeding purposes? Do you really think women will wish to answer your advertisement? thinking women will see through your pathetic attempt to gain dominion over yet another woman's body. That is what your advertisement is about. Power over a woman, power over her womb. You, the man, pay a little money and squirt yourself for a minute and thereby gain control over a woman. How easy that must seem to you. Have you no awareness? Men like you represent a form of retrograde evil. Little do you know, however, that your advertisement is already of great interest to my students in the Womyn's Studies Department. We plan to…

Was he as bad as the lady said? Probably. Worse, even. Because of the betrayal of Ellie and Julia. He looked at the next letter, from a performance artist who asserted that she wanted to document their union, including videotaping the fertilization in the doctor's office. She'd need to follow Charlie around in his life, to his place of work, to his home, in order to know his character so that she might render it in her performance. She imagined that it would be necessary for her to take photos of him, from head to toe, including nude shots, so that she could "ingest his physicality." I don't look so hot nude, he thought, I got chewed up pretty good. Took Ellie a few years to get used to seeing me without my underwear. The baby, the performance artist went on, would be understood as the fruit of this artistic endeavor, and she imagined she would reenact the act of labor in her one-woman shows, holding the baby aloft while gigantic naked photos of Charlie flashed on a screen overhead, as well as photos of the artist's own life and childhood, while "an expository voice-over" interwove the actual life utterations of the artist on the stage with a "thematic call and response, a rhythmic dialogue of levels of consciousness." The cry of the baby (taped) would be the final, rising, overwhelming sound, "the primal voice of human life itself."

Nuts, Charlie thought, they're all nuts. Estrogen addicts. He wanted someone who actually wished to take care of a baby.

The conference room door opened. A short man with a red bow tie walked in. He stuck out his hand. "I'm Towers."

Charlie shook his hand, then nodded at the stack of letters. "This is-"

"Absolutely," Towers barked. "You don't need to say it. I understand the situation. You're going to make a short list and then I'll check them out. Turn the cookie jar upside down and see what we get."

"I'll probably pick out two or three."

"Absolutely. We'll check every record, we'll ask around, we'll measure their shadows. This is what I do, Charlie, and I always find the worm."

"Does everyone have a worm?"

"No." Towers smiled. "I don't."

He shook Charlie's hand again, handed him a business card, and left.

The next letter came from a graduate student in the NYU economics department who wanted to have a child but who also planned to finish her Ph. D. The woman expected that upon the completion of her degree she would be hired as an assistant professor at one of the country's major universities. She wanted Charlie to know that, although she was quite healthy, she had suffered a disfiguring auto accident as a child, and her face was badly scarred. "In the interests of honesty, I've included a photograph," she'd written. Indeed. It showed a woman with eyes downturned beneath a brutally bright light that revealed a thick and irregular scar that began at her temple and spiderwebbed down one cheek, across her forehead, across one eyelid, taking a tip of the nose, and crimping the lower lip. It's just a scar, Charlie thought. He had a few himself. He liked her honesty. She was his best candidate so far. He put a check at the top of the woman's letter and slipped it into the maybe file.

The next letter read: Dear Sir, Please find, attached, my resume and photograph. (I confess, the pictures are a bit out of date; I don't model swim suits anymore and am about six pounds heavier now than when the photos were taken.) Although your advertisement specifies that no sexual contact is necessary to achieve pregnancy, I would like to suggest that, if you choose me (and if I choose you), we make this baby the old-fashioned way. Why? Simply because it's nicer. At age thirty-three, I have enjoyed perhaps eighty or ninety lovers. Although you may not believe me, all that experience has not in any way deadened my appetite for sex; on the contrary, I think I want sex and know more about it than does the average woman. I know more about pleasure, too-pleasure taken, and pleasure given. Since you invite me to be the recipient of your financial largess, I would like to invite you to be the recipient of my sexual largess. As a woman I am capable of an unusual amount of pleasure, and I have found that it is the most intelligent man who enjoys giving pleasure to a woman as much as receiving her attentions. At the risk of offending your sensibilities, let me be rather frank here: I am talking about what occurs under rare but possible circumstances: The woman (in this case, me-and I don't have much modesty left, but for the rest of this letter I'll use the third-person singular) is sufficiently comfortable with herself (with her body, with the room, with her mood) and with the man (with his face and eyes and body, his voice, his smell, his consideration of her) that she is willing to abandon herself to the open-armed, open-legged, open-mouthed state of nearly continuous orgasm. She is one of those unusual women who are able to achieve orgasm not just by clitoral stimulation but also by vaginal stimulation alone, given sufficient rigidity of the man, his control of his ejaculation, and her wetness. For his part he is able to maintain genuine hardness for up to two hours while thrusting quickly and deeply, slowly and gently, maintaining a rhythm sufficient to provoke her orgasms but not to incur his own. He also uses his fingers and his tongue in ways that she likes. Under these circumstances, which are sometimes aided by smoking a cigarette or drinking small amounts of alcohol, the woman is capable of experiencing fifteen or twenty or even more orgasms. (My record is thirty-one.) Although the size of the man's penis probably needs to be at least average, far more important-and this point is always missed by people who obsess about these things-is the size of the sex act itself. There's a big difference between ten minutes of pleasure and two hours of pleasure. In the latter case, exhaustion and satiation are reached and then overrun; a kind of hallucinatory rapture is achieved after thirty or forty minutes, a state sustained for minute upon minute onward. The man must be sufficiently healthy that he can copulate vigorously during most of the two hours. (The woman interested in maximizing her lover's stamina will suggest that he drink a large glass of orange juice beforehand. Most optimal, in fact, is drinking 16–24 ounces of a staggered glucose exercise drink one half hour ahead of time.) Properly calorically prepared, like a marathon runner, he will be able to perform thousands of thrusts over the course of the act, creating in the willing and intimately aroused woman a stimulation that cascades upon itself, becomes orgasmically undeniable. The man must know his own capacity and have abstained from sex beforehand for a period of time long enough that he achieves an erection readily; however, he must not have abstained so long prior that ejaculation simply bursts from him uncontrollably. Essential, too, is the woman's awareness of the man's passion; he must be similarly delirious with pleasure yet supremely conscious of the woman's feelings. It is not that he is subordinating his own pleasure to hers; rather, that her pleasure is his pleasure. What happens if all these conditions are right? The woman begins having orgasms without any effort at all; her body convulses ecstatically beneath, in front of, or above the man's-perhaps she is licking his neck or one of his fingers, perhaps he is sucking her breasts, and even as she completes one orgasm she is aware of the possibility of another, for the man has not stopped his motion, and the woman, though having just achieved orgasm, is desirous of another, of more; aroused by her own capacity and, with no anxiety about her lover's generosity or ability to continue, she begins to feel the same urgency as a moment before, the same flooding ripple of pleasure. In this state, she will continue to have orgasms every few minutes, the muscles of her torso clenching in contraction. She may wish to pause and catch her breath before starting again, or she may have one orgasm begin as soon as another ends, even rapid clusters of them that render her almost psychically destabilized. She is silent, she is loud, she is fierce, she is sweet, she is peaceful, she is frenzied; she cycles through these moods, then back again in no particular order. Strange things pass through her head: music and faces and sounds, she forgets herself, she remembers everything, she sees death and babies and her father; she smells a forest or an ocean. Her lover changes from one man to other men to any man to the devil to a god to an animal to a heavy, hot-breathing ghost. She loves him, now and forever, yet hates him with finality. She fears his superior strength yet knows she is stronger. She moves from waking to dream to nightmare and back. He is her master, he subjugates her, he wrecks her vagina with his great pounding force. He is her plaything that she may suck in and push out, his penis merely her toy that she controls with her wish. She is tight inside but aware of great spaces. The room is dark but full of light. She desires that he destroy her, but himself as well. Finally they have had more than they imagined, they are not just sore and exhausted but losing themselves, their consciousness. She will cry out for his climax, urge him, even wiggle her hips and squeeze him. She prefers that he exhibit his pleasure-in shivering breathlessness, perhaps, or with a straining, roaring spasm that leaves him collapsed in her arms or she in his, the two of them washed up on the shore of complete release, in emptiness that is full. Such an all-obliterating copulation, though enormously pleasurable, later becomes problematic for her, because it is unforgettable. The woman knows herself well enough to know that she is not like this with most men, few in fact. There's no good explanation for it; this man is neither this nor that, exactly; rather, it's quite complicated. This is disturbing to her and she resists knowing it, because she knows that when she leaves him or he leaves her, she may encounter disappointment in subsequent encounters with new sexual partners. She knows how she has hidden anger and disappointment in the past, and she suspects she may have to hide these feelings in the future. The woman knows something else, too: Her capacity for such immense sexual pleasure is so threatening to most men and to some women that she needs to be careful talking about it; men will anxiously resent the woman's awareness (as well as experience) of such pleasure, while, paradoxically, some women will deny that such pleasure is possible, calling it fantasy or erotica, since it requires a kind of subjugation to the man's force that is emotionally too risky or politically incorrect; other women will resent the woman if she provides an intimate description of her pleasure because they, the other women, suspect they are incapable of such enjoyment, or that, if they are capable of it, the men available to them can't provide it. She is, therefore, a kind of outlaw. The woman knows, too, that in reality only a small percentage of men and women are capable of such pleasure; when she considers that such capacity will not correlate with other areas of compatibility (interests, intelligence, education, age, etc.) as well as the difficulty that men and women generally have in achieving even reasonable sexual pleasure, she sees how truly rare is such an interaction. But she has a consolation. She is in possession of a secret. She is pleased to remember her pleasure, for it means that she may find it again. When she finds a man who she thinks can fulfill her, she is loving and patient. I would like to be that way for you. I would like to make a baby with you in a great moment of passion.

Lady, he thought, you got the wrong guy. She might actually kill him with such excitement, even if he were capable of it, what with his back and everything else. And would she be a good mother? The letter had nothing to do with being a mother, in fact. He put it into the no pile.

Martha opened the door to the conference room. She looked like what she was-a tired lawyer, overweight, overburdened, used to hearing her own voice.

"You met Towers?"

"I did."

"And?" she asked.

"Inspires confidence."

Martha sighed. "Don't do it, Charlie."

"Come on." He handed her the maybe folder. "Some of these are pretty impressive."

"What's this?" She opened the folder.

"I want you to contact these women and set up interviews, here, as soon as you can. Next few days if possible. The rest are not right. Please tell them they've been rejected."

Martha's eyebrows lifted. "Rejected."

"Yes. Write them a nice letter. Don't put my name on it, of course."

She glared at him. "You're serious."

"Yes. Also, did you set up my appointment at the fertility clinic?"

"For tomorrow morning," she answered. "If you stop now, I won't bill you for what we've done so far."

"Martha," Charlie said, "either help me to the best of your ability and shut up about it, or tell me to find someone else. You're pushing me and I don't like it." He pulled himself to his feet. "What's it going to be?" Martha's fleshy neck reddened as she stared at him, the room silent, an air-conditioning vent rattling, telephones softly trilling in other offices. "Martha?"

He waited for an answer, and when it didn't come, he showed himself out.

I don't want to go home, Charlie thought, carrying the Shanghai bowl as he got out of the cab. I don't want to go home, but I will. Kelly, a uniformed figure of sweaty obedience, held the taxi door.

"Just saw Mrs. Ravich," Kelly observed.

"How was she?"

"She had a lot of packages, considering this heat."

"She was doing her duty for the American economy."

"Sir?"

"If nobody buys unnecessary junk, we'll plunge into a depression."

He crabbed past the mahogany paneling into the elevator, and Lionel, just starting the night shift, blinked his slo-mo recognition, an ancient mystic in an elevator man's uniform, all vitality in his being concentrated between the elbow and fingertips of his spectral left hand, which incessantly fondled the brass throttle. Where Lionel's right hand hung down against his pants leg, the material was worn shiny from the incidental graze of his unkempt fingertips.

Charlie stepped out into the foyer of his apartment. "Good evening, Lionel."

"Evening, Mr. Ravich."

He opened the front door. "Ellie?" He pushed the bowl back behind the coats and boots in the hall closet. He'd surprise her later. "Ellie?" Jolly her up, he thought, make her feel good, even though never in a million years would he be buried alive in a retirement community where men dribbled cereal onto their three-hundred-dollar sweaters and farted disconsolately through the day. Napping in their golf carts. Not me, he told himself, not the man who yanked eight million after-tax dollars from a dead man's mouth. "I'm here!" he called. "Your first husband is back. He has absolutely nothing interesting to tell you-no announcement from afar, no volatile shift in stock prices, including his beloved Teknetrix, no bulletins of world events, no private revelations, no confessional outbursts." He listened. "Ellie?" Nothing. Silence-the great roar of marriage. "What did you buy that needed the efforts of our man Kelly?"

Ellie came out of the bathroom off the kitchen, turning out the light. She kissed him quickly. "You sound like you had a drink at the office."

Bit excited here, he thought. "I didn't but I wouldn't mind one."

"Gin and tonic?"

He followed her to the bar in the dining room. "What did you get?"

"Get?"

"Shopping. Packages. Supporting the American economy."

"Nothing."

"Kelly said you came in with a bunch of packages."

She frowned. "No. I don't think I did."

He took his briefcase through their bedroom into his office. On the bed sat two large bags from Bloomingdale's, another from Saks. Don't mention it, he thought, there's no point. Her mind is just on other things. "You expect," he asked when he returned to the dining room, "that Julia and Brian will try to use another woman's egg? A surrogate?"

"I think it's an idea." Ellie handed him his glass. "They do that now frequently."

"But the child will never know who his real mother is."

"His real mother will be whoever changed his diaper and read books to him."

He tasted his drink. Terrible. Too strong by half. He poured an inch out and added tonic. "You know what I mean, Ellie, I mean the biological. Wouldn't the kid always ask himself the rest of his life?"

"It depends on how secure he is."

"But aren't you bringing a child into the world who is going to be damaged by what he or she can never know?"

Ellie took the ice back into the kitchen and he followed her. "I don't look at it that way," she said. "The child would have his biological father and an adoptive mother. Julia will be a beautiful mother."

"I know. Maybe I'm not putting it the right way." He needed to bend the question around for himself, since tomorrow he was due to whack off in a glass beaker or jar or Coke bottle or whatever they used in high-tech medical whack-off joints. "Here's what I mean. You have these women having children by themselves, and some are just going and getting sperm from any old place. I mean, how do you feel about this? Those children don't know who their fathers are."

"That's fine," Ellie said distractedly.

"Why?"

"Because if the woman went to all this trouble she wants to have a baby very much."

"But what-"

"Men never understand what it is to have a baby. Of course it is harder to raise a child by yourself. But for some women that is actually better, you know. They can love the baby and not have the distraction of the man, the competition for their time." She looked out the kitchen window toward Central Park. "I raised both kids while you were away. I was perfectly happy. I had everything I needed at the base. My only worry was if you were safe."

"You were a good mother."

Ellie shrugged. "The kids were okay. The kids knew you could be killed in the plane, and that's much worse than wondering about some father you never met."

"I thought you didn't talk to them about the plane."

"I didn't, but, Charlie, it was the base! All the kids had dads in planes. Remember Janny McNamara? And Susan Howard? They both lost their husbands, and they weren't even in Vietnam."

"That was an in-flight refueling thing." The frontseater, Howard, had misjudged his speed and flown into the jet-fuel boom sticking out of a KC-130 tanker, impaling the cockpit.

"I don't remember," Ellie went on. "What I'm saying is, I was okay and so were the kids, even though we missed you and-All I'm saying is that I don't blame these young mothers. To nurse your own child is just-well, you remember how I was. These young women want that. Why can't they have that?"

Now he was going to use Martha Wainwright's argument. "But shouldn't they adopt some other child who needs a mother?"

"Maybe, in a perfect world."

"What about the men who donate their sperm to the sperm banks? Isn't that just vanity?"

"No."

"Why?"

"They want to go on. I understand that."

They want to go on. She understood that.

After dinner, Ellie put down her spoon and looked at him. "I really want you to come visit the retirement place."

"Why?"

"Because you might like it, you know. You might actually think to yourself, Ellie has a good idea here."

"I'll visit it soon as I can."

"When?"

"Let me just get by this factory stuff and I'll drive down."

"With me or by yourself?"

"We'll see." What he wanted to do, that very moment, was to slide out of the apartment and ease down the street two blocks and sit up at the bar in the Pierre, where the bartender made a damn good gin and tonic using some kind of sweetener and you sometimes saw Henry Kissinger. You sometimes saw a lot of other people, too, and most of them wore very nice dresses. He just liked to sit and watch the action. You ended up talking to a German television producer or a British real-estate man or anyone else with an hour's worth of breath. You forgot that your back had ached for ten thousand straight nights or that your wife was driving on three wheels or that you owed the Bank of Asia fifty-two million dollars in U.S. currency, the interest rate floating at three points above the prime, a sum equal to one tenth of the total capitalization of the company. You forgot that to repay that sum you would have to exploit the labor of eleven thousand semiliterate peasants in four countries, eleven thousand souls who assumed your exploitation of them and craved for it to continue, because it was the best thing going. Well, the company had tried to design humane living conditions in the dormitory next to the new factory. He needed to check on its progress, he reminded himself, he needed to sit quietly and think about the company. He could take a couple of months' worth of sales reports and raw-materials cost projections and sit at the Pierre's bar and pick through the data. You had to keep on top of the flickering indicators that the market was pressured by demand or the lack of it, rising costs or falling margins. The company's sales reps were reporting that customers were saying that Manila Telecom's salespeople were promising new products, faster manufacturing times. Maybe you forgot that, too.

But if he left now, Ellie would only become more irritated. He watched her go into the bedroom and followed her. She sat heavily on the bed, a huge one she'd had shipped from Tuscany ten years back. If I didn't know better, he thought, I'd say she is cracking up a bit. She took one of the photos of Ben off her nightstand and studied it, eyes blinking, mouth slack. There's no safety in the world, he thought, never. She'd made Ben inside of her and he'd died. End of story. She wants a safe place for herself and for her husband, and who could blame her? Trying to set up the last leg home, so to speak, and if he were a decent man, a kind man, he'd appreciate Ellie for this act of love and foresight. Instead, he felt only fear and bitterness and resentment. So here she was looking at the photo of their dead son, asking herself the unanswerable.

After Ben died, she'd lost weight and for a time started smoking again. Meanwhile, Charlie buried himself in work, trying to get Teknetrix into the design sequence of some of the large telecom manufacturers, trying to spec into their products. Chasing success to flee grief. In that year after Ben's death he'd flown almost constantly, mostly to Asia and Silicon Valley, meeting other executives, making bids, taking bids, buying dinner for everyone, ordering cars to the airport, from the airport, wake-up call at 5:00 a.m., please, I'm here today to show you what Teknetrix can do within your cost structure, that's one hell of a nice putt, ours is faster, we can engineer that ten percent smaller. The whole cha-cha-cha. A bad time in the economy, the mid-eighties, but he'd hoped that if he could just get the orders moving for Teknetrix, then eventually the company would climb the vertical face of market share. A hundred sales calls, a thousand cups of coffee, a hundred thousand miles of flying: ten large orders. They bought a smaller competitor, they hired better engineers, they scored four design wins in two months in 1985. All after Ben's death. All because Charlie went on the road. If Ben had lived, Teknetrix might have died, but because Ben perished, Teknetrix boomed, from eighty million in sales to two hundred million in three years, including the strategic acquisition. Eleven hundred employees to three thousand to nine thousand. An amazing leap. The great irony was that Charlie would have showered that prosperity down upon Ben, sent him to any graduate school in the world, helped him get married or start off on the right foot. Anything for his Ben. And now all they had were some photographs and the things in Ben's closet that Ellie could not bring herself to throw away. His high-school letter jacket, his basketball, now gone soft. He wondered if these things would also find their way down to Vista del Muerte. Probably. He'd ask Ellie to put Ben's stuff where he was unlikely to run into it. She could build a special little walk-in closet, if she wanted, a shrine. She was like that, Ellie. Needed to hang on to the relics. Still had Julia's baby teeth somewhere and pieces of hair and tiny wool mittens and Ben's soccer shoes and Julia's retainer from after she got her braces off. It was more than sentimental, it was superstitious. Primitive. He understood the impulse and it scared the hell out of him. For if you were attached to this thing and that thing, then why not everything, why not grab every last fucking fragment of life's passage? But of course you could not. Ellie had held tight to life from the very first, perhaps because she'd lost her parents early. The death of Ben had confirmed her worst fears about the unbearable nature of time and being; suffering arrived in every life, and the only question was whether you understood this sooner or later. He'd often wondered if she'd had an affair when he was in Vietnam, or while he was MIA, out of worry or grief, but her devotion to him when he returned convinced him that he didn't need to ask. If she had done so, then so be it. It was some piece of another man's flesh in her for a few minutes. Maybe it made her happy. He could take that, he really could. In the great flow of things, not such a big deal really. They'd made children together, and that was the singular fact of their union, that was the thing that bound them forever and ever, amen. And anyway, Ellie could live with the truth that for three years he'd killed human beings for a living. If two people's miseries do not overlap, then why should their happinesses?

But although she knew, roughly, what had happened to him as a prisoner, he'd never told her everything about it. Not about the ropes and not about the rice sacks filled with stones. How do you explain torture? Where your mind went? How you hated them but also yourself for what was being done to you? He'd told the psychiatrists at the base hospital enough anyway; they pumped it out of you before you could poison your family. Some guys even required sodium pentathol. Say it, say what happened. Tell us, young fellow. We know you need to talk about it. But they didn't want you to talk to anyone else about it. Don't tell the newspaper reporters, don't discuss it with other active pilots, try not to tell your wife too much. It was fucking political. But he'd done his best to comply. And even then, the Air Force kept him in the hospital for nine weeks, controlled access to him. No photographs, except for internal medical research purposes, no visits from family members until after his bones had been reset, tendons reattached, after he had been tube-nourished, dewormed, stepped down from the morphine, had his broken teeth fixed. In that time they got thirty pounds back on him. Shave, haircut, trimmed fingernails, new uniform, nice crutches, fifty pills a day, back brace. Then, and only then, had Ellie been allowed to see him. Greatest moment in his life, when he hugged her, felt the kids rush against his legs. As for what had happened, she'd asked, of course, begged him to tell her so that she could understand his long silences. But he'd decided talking would make it bigger, not smaller. Would pervert the perversion, lay language on it, never to be removed. She meant well, she was willing to listen, but finally the experience had been his, not hers. He wanted to get on with the raising of the children, the pursuit of the future. And so they'd never really talked about it, and in the shared history of their lives, his POW experience had become, all these years later, just an anomaly, a strange dark patch sewn into a familiar bright fabric. Moreover, the death of Ben had changed everything, recalibrated their notion of suffering. There was simply life before Ben died and after. In the subsequent years they had become so prosperous, the value of Teknetrix's stock rising so high, that it was as if their faith in the endurance of grief was being tested. Once their wealth reached a critical mass, say ten million, it burgeoned and proliferated, rooting itself and spreading, blooming in the long bull market of the nineties. Ellie would say to him sometimes, "We have so much money and it really doesn't-I mean, I like to see shows and I like our apartment, but you know I-" And then she'd stop and her blue eyes would fill and he'd nod sadly and they both would know that there was nothing they could do. Their boy was gone. Sometimes on those evenings Charlie would feel a strange strength to his erection, getting almost as stiff as he did when he was younger, and their fucking beneath the covers became an erotic communion of grief. Ellie would go back and forth between orgasms and weeping, several times, though his own final spasm contained little that was celebratory or even cathartic to it; he would just give in to necessity. Even as they held their pleasure close to themselves, they knew it was fleeting, they knew that it would only later deliver them into sadness, and that year by year they were losing hold on the things they wanted most. Ellie in these times would wrap her legs around him and beg him please to fuck her so that she could just forget everything, everything except that she was alive, and he would try not to feel his back and do his damnedest and sometimes, rarely, it would work, but usually not. When it did, she cried out and he'd bow his head and feel glad for her yet also aware that he was incapable of such deliverance. It's different if you have killed people, it's different because, although you can suffer the death of people you love, you know that you've caused that same grief in innumerable others, and the weight of that is always there, pulls at you like a stone. It didn't matter that he'd done it for his country. It didn't matter that the war was unnecessary. If he had only known then what he knew now. But that was true of everybody. He had gone to war because he'd loved to fly, and although he had been very good at understanding technical procedures and air combat strategy and the argument that he was protecting democracy and all the other monkey-brain complexity the Air Force filled you with, he had not understood time. Not understood that his actions weren't discrete and perishable but that they would become part of him, forever. He would carry them. You carry your own water around here, his father always said, and he was right. There was nothing he could do now about what he had done then.

For a few years, however, he'd hoped that he might understand his experience as a POW as some form of punishment, but now that idea was laughable, nothing more than a lie; after all, he had lived, and lived well, whereas all those people had died. The only thing that came close was Ben's death. But even that was not enough to balance the accounts. It was not enough to remember the way, in his last week in the hospital, that Ben had curled up on his left side, his hands in loose fists near his face, hunched in against the opponent. At times his crusty eyelids opened, but whatever he saw was not before him in the room. He could no longer talk then, but he seemed to be alert within himself, and his staying in the clenched position seemed his insistence on a bit of privacy while he went about the hard work of dying. His thin beard had become long, and a day or two before the end, Charlie brought his electric razor to the hospital to shave him. Ben's neck was like a baby's, too weak to support his head, so Charlie slipped his hand beneath his son's ear and carefully shaved both cheeks and his chin one last time, so that Ellie would be able to see the face of her son, see the face of the boy in the young man who was now almost ancient. Ben's eyes opened at the touch of Charlie's hand and a curl appeared at the corner of his mouth, the curl of amusement and pleasure that always signified how he felt about things. But this tremor of sweetness on Ben's face was no consolation, for its softness only signified that all things died, even a nineteen-year-old prince. Dying more quickly, in fact, because of his youth. Yes, all earthly things returned to earth, some at their appointed time, others not.

There were no last words from Ben, no moments of redemption and grace; he simply disappeared into a soft fit of coughing, his chest rising and falling against the liquid filling his lungs-it was Ben's last race, Charlie had always thought, and it could not be won. He stood next to the hospital bed until the very end, until the nurse took her hand away from Ben's wrist and looked up at Charlie, until they straightened Ben's body while they could, pulled his legs from his chest, pushing down the knobby knees, and set his arms at his sides into the coffin position-society's last formality. As the hospital gown fell back, Charlie had glimpsed Ben's penis, gray and loose in the nest of pubic hair, the catheter tube shoved deep into the pisshole-yet another violation of Ben's youth, as if sucking the life out of him from there, too. Ben's chin was still lifted upward, his eyelids not quite closed, and for a moment his expression appeared brazen, even hostile, daring all comers, which would have been like him. The attendants unfolded the long gray plastic bag and lifted Ben into it with practiced ease, and Charlie stopped them then and asked if they would leave the room for a moment, and that was when he leaned close to Ben, shrouded by the bag, and pressed his own warm forehead against Ben's cool one and said, Goodbye, son, I will love you forever.

He looked at the news for a while, then checked his corporate E-mail while Ellie drifted around the apartment in her nightgown. Her feet looked bumpy. She set a book down by her bed table. She was going to sleep earlier and earlier, it seemed. A sign of depression? He remembered the cloisonne bowl in the front closet and wondered if he could cheer her up.

He retrieved the bowl and set it on the bed.

"Hey, wifey-girl," he called.

"What is-Oh, that is lovely, Charlie." She picked up the bowl, traced her finger around a dragon's nostrils. "This is quite nice."

"I think it's old enough to count."

"I do, too. Where did you get it?"

"There's an antiques place in Shanghai, in the old city. I had them send it."

She ran her fingers along the dragon's wings. "You know, I haven't heard from Miriam upstairs for almost two weeks. She had something terrible happen. Her son killed himself playing racquetball."

"What?"

"Yes. He ran into the wall, headfirst."

"Broke his neck?"

"He died right there on the court, Miriam said. He and his wife had three children. The wife is just devastated. Now Miriam has to help out. He didn't leave enough life insurance, I guess." She pushed her fingers along the dragon's scaled tail. "Anyway, the problem is, Miriam doesn't like the daughter-in-law. They never really-Where did you get it, anyway?"

"An antiques market in the old city." He smiled at her. That didn't mean anything, not necessarily. "I just told you."

"You did? Of course. It's very nice. Thank you, sweetie. I was just trying to-" Ellie stood there. "Charlie, I'm-I'm having some problems."

He nodded silently.

"I'm not remembering things. Little things, mostly. I was trying to remember my mother's birthday today and I couldn't. Then I thought I could look it up in the phone book. I actually put my hand on the phone book before I remembered that made no sense. It's things like that."

"We're all doing things like that."

"No, no, Charlie, don't pretend." Her eyes begged him. "I need you to see this now."

"Come here." He held her. "What else?"

"Oh, I feel like putting notes on everything, just to remember. Call Julia. Get the cleaning. Yesterday I drove the car with the emergency brake on for half an hour."

"That's not good."

He massaged her neck. She sighed, and with the exhalation, the tension seemed to pass out of her. She looked at him expectantly, eyes bright. Smiled, even. My Lord, Charlie thought, she's forgotten what she was anxious about.

"I like this a lot." She picked up the bowl and immediately touched her finger to the dragon's nostril. "Where did you get it?"

"Oh, don't, please."

"What?"

"You're joking."

She looked at him. "About what?"

"Nothing."

"What's the joke?"

"There's no joke."

She smiled hopefully. "You're teasing me about something?"

"No, no, Ellie, I'm not. I thought you were asking about the bowl."

"I was asking about the bowl."

He stared.

"You're making me feel self-conscious. You seem to be suggesting I asked about the bowl before just right now."

"Yes."

"I didn't, though."

"I thought you had, sweetie."

She wanted to be reasonable about the disagreement, he could see. "No, no, I know I didn't, Charlie."

He nodded. "You're right, Ellie. Not to worry."

He helped her to bed, where she took three of her favorite little sleeping pills-the flesh-colored ones, which seemed ominous somehow. "Everything is going to be okay, isn't it?" she asked.

He looked at her, thinking about the question.

"Just humor me, Charlie, just tell me it's all okay."

"Yes."

She searched his face to see if he meant it. "Just tell me one more time?"

"Everything is going to be fine."

"You believe that or you're just saying it to me to make me feel better?"

"I believe it." He nodded. "Okay?"

"Okay."

Ellie frowned at her book for a few minutes, then put her glasses on the table. He watched her settle against the pillow, wondering why she was so anxious, so fixated on disaster. Maybe she sensed he was up to something. Or perhaps it was Julia. He rubbed her brow, which made her sigh agreeably. Strange things pass through her head, he remembered, music and faces and sounds, she forgets herself, she remembers everything, she sees death and babies and her father; she smells a forest or an ocean. Did he know his wife, really? Even now? Her skin remained soft around her eyes and cheeks. A few women's whiskers poked from her chin-he'd never mention them. She sighed again, curled into her pillow, the pills clicking her asleep, and finally he eased up from the bed.

He walked directly into the dining room, carrying the bowl. He hated the fucking thing. Millions from a dead man's mouth-what did it get you? A wife who was losing her mind. He slipped out the front door to the garbage chute in the foyer. The elevator came clanking up then, its circular window rising so slowly that one of Lionel's eyeballs followed Charlie downward. Fuck you, Lionel, he thought, and your silent judgment of me. He yanked the chute door open and shoved in the bowl without hesitation and listened to it thump and slide down the long dark passage, landing with a quiet pop at the bottom, soon to be buried and ground up with the rest of the building's junk mail and toothpaste tubes and wet chicken bones. We throw away everything, Charlie thought bitterly, especially our hopes.

The next morning Teknetrix's share price was up almost two points in the first fifteen minutes of trading-as the financial soothsayers shook their magic rattles and decided that tech stocks were hot-and this was good news, good enough to ward off the spirits of evil Chinese bankers for a day or two, good enough to carry him to the Park Avenue fertility clinic whose services Martha had engaged. He slipped a hand into his pants pocket and jiggled himself a bit, as if to weigh what kind of effort he might be able to make.

In the waiting room, its walls covered with photos of children, half a dozen anxious-looking women flipped through magazines without talking to one another. So young, Charlie thought, just like Julia. Two or three glanced up at him with smiles of benign curiosity, as if he were one of their fathers, which in one sense he was and another he was not.

The nurse summoned him into the doctor's office, where he stood reading the framed professional certifications for subspecialties he didn't know existed. The doctor, a curly-haired man not even forty, came in, shook hands, waved at the chair.

"You understand this arrangement?" Charlie asked.

"Martha explained it pretty well." The doctor shrugged, merely a humble technologist, a gentle farmer of embryos, so proficient he could probably get women pregnant with his thumb. "Seems straightforward," he added.

This kid has probably created as many lives as I've destroyed, Charlie thought, and yet here we are. "You don't have any problem with it-I mean, it's a bit unusual."

The doctor shrugged again. "We get all kinds of situations. Lesbian couples, widows, you name it."

"Sort of nontraditional," said Charlie. "Inappropriate, even."

"I help people have babies," the doctor replied, not interested in judging his patients. "I like babies. I believe in babies."

"You're busy?"

"Booked for the next three years."

"How did my lawyer get us in, then?"

"Martha is my older sister."

Old Martha, working every angle. "I guess that's why I'm here," Charlie said.

"No."

"No?"

"Martha doesn't give anyone any slack, not even her little brother." He shook his head. "The reason is that we have the highest success rate of any fertility practice in the city. Granted, it's only by nine one-hundredths of a percent, but it is the highest. You'd be amazed at how important this is. First thing a lot of prospective patients want to know."

"My daughter tried with a practice on Lexington and Sixty-first."

"Oh, they're very good," he noted. "Excellent reputation."

"She went through the whole thing nine times."

The doctor shook his head. "After nine times, it's not going to work."

"I guess not."

"We'll try only six times. After that, we tell patients no go." The doctor pulled a stoppered, wide-mouth test tube from a drawer. "Now, there's only one question I need to ask you."

"Sure."

"Do you remember how to masturbate?"

He stood in a dark, safe room, not a bedroom, but a velvety dark lounge in a very good hotel, perhaps the Conrad in Hong Kong, or the Huntington in San Francisco. Maybe the Pierre. No one else was close by. The smell of cigarettes. Music. Saxophone. A woman sat on a sofa holding a silky, nearly translucent veil, bluish in the light. She pinched a corner of the veil with each hand, and it lay over her nose and fell straight down from there, not draped against her body but swelling slightly where her breasts pushed against it. He wore his best suit and approached with a fluid ease impossible in real life; he moved like a thirty-year-old. He and the woman had never seen each other before, and yet they were well known to each other. Her eyes were warm, her mouth coyly affectionate behind the veil. As he neared, he could smell her perfume, which was heavy, as he liked it. She lowered the veil a little, so that its edge dropped below the tip of her nose, and she let it fall farther, looking from the veil to his eyes and back to the veil. And now she let the veil drape against her for a moment, he could see that she was voluptuous. The saxophone held a high note, smoke spiraled. She looked into his eyes and tilted her head forward, her eyes still holding his. He nodded, as if asked a question, and she moved closer to him, nearly touching him. Now she lowered the veil to her breasts and then against her belly. Her shoulders and arms were fleshy, her breasts heavy with their size, nipples large and eyed outward, and he ran his palms lightly up over them, which made her breathe in. He had to have her, he had to-

— be sure he aimed into the test tube. Which he did, opening his eyes as his semen spat into the receptacle, a white shot that slid down the glass wall, and he squeezed out a last bead, even as his erection was falling away, shrinking back to a state of plausible deniability. He pulled the stopper of the tube out of his breast pocket, inspected its underside for any foreign element, then pressed it into the glass mouth.

A moment later, outside the bathroom, Charlie found the nurse, a happily fat woman with hair the improbable color of tiger lilies.

"All set?" she said brightly, as if to a young child.

"Yes."

"I'll take it." She looked into the tube, swirled it around. She was not impressed.

"Gave it my best shot," Charlie apologized. There was no dignity in this, of course. So what if I run a half-billion-dollar company, he thought, all they care about is how much jism I have. "Anything else I need to do here?"

"Nope," the nurse answered. She stuck a coded label on the specimen. "Your part's done."