Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Caviar

I ought to tell you right off I didn’t go to college. I was on the wrong rung of the socioeconomic ladder, if you know what I mean. My father was a commercial fisherman on the Hudson, till the PCBs got to him, my mother did typing and filing down’at the lumberyard, and my grandmother crocheted doilies and comforters for sale to rich people. Me, I took over my father’s trade. I inherited the shack at the end of the pier, the leaky fourteen-foot runabout with the thirty-five-horse Evinrude motor and the seine that’s been in the family for three generations. Also, I got to move into the old man’s house when he passed on, and he left me his stamp collection and the keys to his ‘62 Rambler, rusted through till it looked like a gill net hung out to dry.

Anyway, it’s a living. Almost. And if I didn’t go to college I do read a lot, magazines mostly, but books on ecology and science too. Maybe it was the science part that did me in. You see, I’m the first one around here — I mean, me and Marie are the first ones — to have a baby this new way, where you can’t have it on your own. Dr. Ziss said not to worry about it, a little experiment, think of it as a gift from heaven.

Some gift.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. What happens happens, and I’m as guilty as anybody, I admit it. It’s just that when the guys at the Flounder Inn are sniggering in their beer and Marie starts looking at me like I’m a toad or something, you’ve got to put things in perspective, you’ve got to realize that it was her all along, she’s the one that started it.

“I want a baby,” was how she put it.

It was April, raw and wet. Crocuses and dead man’s fingers were poking through the dirt along the walk, and the stripers were running. I’d just stepped in the door, beat, chilled to the teeth, when she made her announcement. I went straight for the coffeepot. “Can’t afford it,” I said.

She didn’t plead or try to reason with me. All she did was repeat herself in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she were telling me about some new drapes or a yard sale, and then she marched through the kitchen and out the back door. I sipped at my coffee and watched her through the window. She had a shovel. She was burying something. Deep. When she came back in, her nose was running a bit and her eyes were crosshatched with tiny red lines.

“What were you doing out there?” I asked.

Her chin was crumpled, her hair was wild. ’Burying something. ”

I waited while she fussed with the teapot, my eyebrows arched like question marks. Ten seconds ticked by. “Well, what?”

“My diaphragm.”

I’ve known Marie since high school. We were engaged for five years while she worked for Reader’s Digest and we’d been married for three and a half when she decided she wanted some offspring. At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but then I had to admit she was right: the time had come. Our lovemaking had always been lusty and joyful, but after she buried the diaphragm it became tender, intense, purposeful. We tried. For months we tried. I’d come in off the river, reeking of the creamy milt and silver roe that floated two inches deep in the bottom of the boat while fifty- and sixty-pound stripers gasped their last, come in like a wild bull or something, and Marie would be waiting for me upstairs in her nightie and we’d do it before dinner, and then again after. Nothing happened.

Somewhere around July or August, the sweet blueclaw crabs crawling up the riverbed like an army on maneuvers and the humid heat lying over the valley like a cupped hand, Marie went to Sister Eleazar of the Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop. Sister Eleazar was a black woman, six feet tall at least, in a professor’s gown and a fez with a red tassel. Leroy Lent’s wife swore by her. Six years Leroy and his wife had been going at it, and then they went to Sister Eleazar and had a pair of twins. Marie thought it was worth a try, so I drove her down there.

The Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop occupied a lime-green building the size of a two-car garage with a steeple and cross pinned to the roof. Sister Eleazar answered our knock scowling, a little crescent of egg yolk on her chin. “What you want?” she said.

Standing there in the street, a runny-eyed Chihuahua sniffing at my heels, I listened to Marie explain our problem and watched the crescent of egg on Sister Eleazar’s face fracture with her smile. “Ohhh,” she said, “well, why didn’t you say so? Come own in, come own in.”

There was one big room inside, poorly lit. Old bottom-burnished pews stretched along three of the four walls and there was a big shiny green table in the center of the floor. The table was heaped with religious paraphernalia — silver salvers and chalices and tinted miniatures of a black man with a crown dwarfing his head. A cot and an icebox huddled against the back wall, which was decorated with magazine clippings of Africa. “Right here, sugar,” Sister Eleazar said, leading Marie up to the table. “Now, you take off your coat and your dress, and less ex-amine them wombs.”

Marie handed me her coat, and then her tight blue dress with the little white clocks on it, while Sister Eleazar cleared the chalices and whatnot off the table. The Chihuahua had followed us in, and now it sprang up onto the cot with a sigh and buried its nose in its paws. The room stank of dog.

“All right,” Sister Eleazar said, turning back to Marie, “you climb up own the table now and stretch yourself out so Sister ’Leazar can listen to your insides and say a prayer over them barren wombs.” Marie complied with a nervous smile, and the black woman leaned forward to press an ear to her abdomen. I watched the tassel of Sister Eleazar’s fez splay out over Marie’s rib cage and I began to get excited: the place dark and exotic, Marie in brassiere and panties, laid out on the table like a sacrificial virgin. Then the sister was mumbling something — a prayer, I guess — in a language I’d never heard before. Marie looked embarrassed. “Don’t you worry about nothin’,” Sister Eleazar said, looking up at me and winking. “I got just the thing.”

She fumbled around underneath the cot for a minute, then came back to the table with a piece of blue chalk — the same as they use in geography class to draw rivers and lakes on the blackboard — and a big yellow can of Colman’s dry mustard. She bent over Marie like a heart surgeon, and then, after a few seconds of deliberation, made a blue X on Marie’s lower abdomen and said, “Okay, honey, you can get up now.”

I watched Marie shrug into her dress, thinking the whole thing was just a lot of superstitious mumbo jumbo and pisantry, when I felt Sister Eleazar’s fingers on my arm; she dipped her head and led me out the front door. The sky was overcast. I could smell rain in the air. “Listen,” the black woman whispered, handing me the can of mustard, “the problem ain’t with her, it’s with you. Must be you ain’t penetratin’ deep enough.” I looked into her eyes, trying to keep my face expressionless. Her voice dropped. “What you do is this: make a plaster of this here mustard and rub it on your parts before you go into her, and it’ll force out that ’jaculation like a torpedo coming out a submarine — know what I mean?” Then she winked. Marie was at the door. A man with a hoe was digging at his garden in the next yard over. “Oh yeah,” the sister said, holding out her hand, “you want to make a donation to the Brotherhood, that’ll be eleven dollars and fifty cent.”

I never told Marie about the mustard — it was too crazy. All I said was that the sister had told me to give her a mustard plaster on the stomach an hour after we had intercourse — to help the seeds take. It didn’t work, of course. Nothing worked. But the years at Reader’s Digest had made Marie a superstitious woman, and I was willing to go along with just about anything as long as it made her feel better. One night I came to bed and she was perched naked on the edge of the footstool, wound round three times with a string of garlic. “I thought that was for vampires?” I said. She just parted her lips and held out her arms.

In the next few weeks she must have tried every quack remedy in the book. She kept a toad in a clay pot under the bed, ate soup composed of fish eyes and roe, drank goat’s milk and cod-liver oil, and filled the medicine chest with elixirs made from nimble weed and rhinoceros horn. Once I caught her down in the basement, dancing in the nude round a live rooster. I was eating meat three meals a day to keep my strength up. Then one night I came across an article about test-tube babies in Science Digest. I studied the pictures for a long while, especially the one at the end of the article that showed this English couple, him with a bald dome and her fat as a sow, with their little test-tube son. Then I called Marie.

Dr. Ziss took us right away. He sympathized with our plight, he said, and would do all he could to help us. First he would have to run some tests to see just what the problem was and whether it could be corrected surgically. He led us into the examining room and looked into our eyes and ears, tapped our knees, measured our blood pressure. He drew blood, squinted at my sperm under a microscope, took X rays, did a complete pelvic exam on Marie. His nurse was Irene Goddard, lived up the street from us. She was a sour, square-headed woman in her fifties with little vertical lines etched around her lips. She prodded and poked and pricked us and then had us fill out twenty or thirty pages of forms that asked about everything from bowel movements to whether my grandmother had any facial hair. Two weeks later I got a phone call. The doctor wanted to see us.

We’d hardly got our jackets off when Mrs. Goddard, with a look on her face like she was about to pull the switch at Sing Sing, showed us into the doctor’s office. I should tell you that Dr. Ziss is a young man — about my age, I guess — with narrow shoulders, a little clipped mustache, and a woman’s head of hair that he keeps brushing back with his hand. Anyway, he was sitting behind his desk sifting through a pile of charts and lab reports when we walked in. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Marie went pale, like she did the time the state troopers called about her mother’s accident; her ankles swayed over her high heels and she fell back into the chair as if she’d been shoved. I thought she was going to cry, but the doctor forestalled her. He smiled, showing off all those flossed and fluoridated teeth: “I’ve got some good news too.”

The bad news was that Marie’s ovaries were shot. She was suffering from the Stein-Leventhal syndrome, he said, and was unable to produce viable ova. He put it to us straight: “She’s infertile, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Even if we had the facilities and the know-how, test-tube reproduction would be out of the question.”

Marie was stunned. I stared down at the linoleum for a second and listened to her sniffling, then took her hand.

Dr. Ziss leaned across the desk and pushed back a stray lock of hair. “But there is an alternative.”

We both looked at him.

“Have you considered a surrogate mother? A young woman who’d be willing to impregnate herself artificially with the husband’s semen — for a fee, of course — and then deliver the baby to the wife at the end of the term.” He was smoothing his mustache. “It’s being done all over the country. And if Mrs. Trimpie pads herself during her ‘pregnancy’ and ‘delivers’ in the city, none of your neighbors need ever know that the child isn’t wholly and naturally yours.”

My mind was racing. I was bombarded with selfish and acquisitive thoughts, seething with scorn for Marie—she was the one, she was defective, not me — bursting to exercise my God-given right to a child and heir. It’s true, it really is — you never want something so much as when somebody tells you you can’t have it. I found myself thinking aloud: “So it would really be half ours, and… and half—”

“That’s right, Mr. Trimpie. And I have already contacted a young woman on your behalf, should you be interested.”

I looked at Marie. Her eyes were watering. She gave me a weak smile and pressed my hand.

“She’s Caucasian, of course, attractive, fit, very bright: a first-year medical student in need of funds to continue her education.”

“Um, uh,” I fumbled for the words, “how much; I mean, if we decide to go along with it, how much would it coast?”

The doctor was ready for this one. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said without hesitation, “plus hospital costs.”

Two days later there was a knock at the door. A girl in peacoat and blue jeans stood there, flanked by a pair of scuffed aquamarine suitcases held shut with masking tape. She looked to be about sixteen, stunted and bony and pale, cheap mother-of-pearl stars for earrings, her red hair short and spiky, as if she were letting a crewcut grow out. I couldn’t help thinking of those World War II movies where they shave the actresses’ heads for consorting with the Germans; I couldn’t help thinking of waifs and wanderers and runaway teen-agers. Dr. Ziss’s gunmetal Mercedes sat at the curb, clouds of exhaust tugging at the tailpipe in the chill morning air; he waved, and then ground away with a crunch of gravel. “Hi,” the girl said, extending her hand, “I’m Wendy.”

It had all been arranged. Dr. Ziss thought it would be a good idea if the mother-to-be came to stay with us two weeks or so before the “procedure,” to give us a chance to get to know one another, and then maybe stay on with us through the first couple of months so we could experience the pregnancy firsthand; when she began to show she’d move into an apartment on the other side of town, so as not to arouse any suspicion among the neighbors. He was delicate about the question of money, figuring a commercial fisherman and a part-time secretary, with no college and driving a beat-up Rambler, might not exactly be rolling in surplus capital. But the money wasn’t a problem really. There was the insurance payoff from Marie’s mother — she’d been blindsided by a semi coming off the ramp on the thruway — and the thirty-five hundred I’d got for delivering spawning stripers to Con Ed so they could hatch fish to replace the ones sucked into the screens at the nuclear plant. It was sitting in the County Trust, collecting five and a quarter percent, against the day some emergency came up. Well, this was it. I closed out the account.

The doctor took his fee and explained that the girl would get five thousand dollars on confirmation of pregnancy, and the balance when she delivered. Hospital costs would run about fifteen hundred dollars, barring complications. We shook hands on it, and Marie and I signed a form. I figured I could work nights at the bottling plant if I was strapped.

Now, with the girl standing there before me, I couldn’t help feeling a stab of disappointment — she was pretty enough, I guess, but I’d expected something a little more, well, substantial. And red hair. It was a letdown. Deep down I’d been hoping for a blonde, one of those Scandinavian types you see in the cigarette ads. Anyway, I told her I was glad to meet her, and then showed her up to the spare room, which I’d cleaned up and outfitted with a chest of drawers, a bed and a Salvation Army desk, and some cheery knickknacks. I asked her if I could get her a bite to eat, Marie being at work and me waiting around for the tide to go out. She was sitting on the bed, looking tired; she hadn’t even bothered to glance out the window at the view of Croton Bay. “Oh yeah,” she said after a minute, as if she’d been asleep or day-dreaming, “Yeah, that would be nice.” Her eyes were gray, the color of drift ice on the river. She called me Nathaniel, soft and formal, like a breathless young schoolteacher taking attendance. Marie never called me anything but Nat, and the guys at the marina settled for Ace. “Have you got a sandwich, maybe? And a cup of hot Nestle’s? I’d really like that, Nathaniel.”

I went down and fixed her a BLT, her soft syllables tingling in my ears like a kiss. Dr. Ziss had called her an “oh pear” girl, which I guess referred to her shape. When she’d slipped out of her coat I saw that there was more to her than I’d thought — not much across the top, maybe, but sturdy in the hips and thighs. I couldn’t help thinking it was a good sign, but then I had to check myself: I was looking at her like a horse breeder or something.

She was asleep when I stepped in with the sandwich and hot chocolate. I shook her gently and she started up with a gasp, her eyes darting round the room as if she’d forgotten where she was. “Oh yes, yes, thanks,” she said, in that maddening, out-of-breath, little girl’s voice. I sat on the edge of the desk and watched her eat, gratified to see that her teeth were strong and even, and her nose just about right. “So you’re a medical student, Dr. Ziss tells me.”

“Hm-hmm,” she murmured, chewing. “First-year. I’m going to take the spring semester off, I mean for the baby and all—”

This was the first mention of our contract, and it fell over the conversation like a lead balloon. She hesitated, and I turned red. Here I was, alone in the house with a stranger, a pretty girl, and she was going to have my baby.

She went on, skirting the embarrassment, trying to brighten her voice. “I mean, I love it and all — med school — but it’s a grind already and I really don’t see how I can afford the tuition, without, without”—she looked up at me—“without your help.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared into her eyes for a minute and felt strangely excited, powerful, like a pasha interviewing a new candidate for the harem. Then I picked up the china sturgeon on the desk and turned it over in my hands. “I didn’t go to college,” I said. And then, as if I were apologizing, “I’m a fisherman. ”

A cold rain was falling the day the three of us drove down to Dr. Ziss’s for the “procedure.” The maples were turning, the streets splashed with red and gold, slick, glistening, the whole world a cathedral. I felt humbled somehow, respectful in the face of life and the progress of the generations of man: My seed is going to take hold, I kept thinking. In half an hour I’ll be a father. Marie and Wendy, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the whole thing, chattering away like a sewing circle, talking about shoes and needlepoint and some actor’s divorce. They’d hit it off pretty well, the two of them, sitting in the kitchen over coffee at night, going to movies and thrift shops together, trading gossip, looking up at me and giggling when I stepped into the room. Though Wendy didn’t do much around the house — didn’t do much more than lie in bed and stare at textbooks — I don’t think Marie really minded. She was glad for the company, and there was something more too, of course: Wendy was making a big sacrifice for us. Both of us were deeply grateful.

Dr. Ziss was all smiles that afternoon, pumping my hand, kissing the girls, ushering us into his office like an impresario on opening night. Mrs. Goddard was more restrained. She shot me an icy look, as if I was conspiring to overthrow the Pope or corrupt Girl Scouts or something. Meanwhile, the doctor leaned toward Marie and Wendy and said something I didn’t quite catch, and suddenly they were all three of them laughing like Canada geese. Were they laughing at me, I wondered, all at once feeling self conscious and vulnerable, the odd man out. Dr. Ziss, I noticed, had his arm around Wendy’s waist.

If I felt left out, I didn’t have time to brood over it. Because Mrs. Goddard had me by the elbow and she was marching me down the hallway to the men’s room, where she handed me a condom sealed in tinfoil and a couple of tattered girlie magazines. I didn’t need the magazines. Just the thought of what was going to happen in the next room — Marie had asked the doctor if she could do the insemination herself — gave me an erection like a tire iron. I pictured Wendy leaning back on the examining table in a little white smock, nothing underneath, and Marie, my big loving wife, with this syringelike thing. . that’s all it took. I was out of the bathroom in sixty seconds, the wet condom tucked safely away in a sterilized jar.

Afterward, we shared a bottle of pink champagne and a lasagna dinner at Mama’s Pasta House. My treat.

One morning, about a month later, I was lying in bed next to Marie and I heard Wendy pad down the hallway to the bathroom. The house was still, and a soft gray light clung to the window sill like a blanket. I was thinking of nothing, or maybe I was thinking of striped bass, sleek and silver, how they ride up out of the deep like pieces of a dream. Next thing I heard was the sound of gagging. Morning sickness, I thought, picking up on a phrase from one of the countless baby books scattered round the house, and suddenly, inexplicably, I was doubled over myself. “Aaaaargh,” Wendy gasped, the sound echoing through the house, “aaaargh,” and it felt like somebody was pulling my stomach inside out.

At breakfast, she was pale and haggard, her hair greasy and her eyes puffed out. She tried to eat a piece of dry toast, but wound up spitting it into her hand. I couldn’t eat, either. Same thing the next day, and the next: she was sick, I was sick. I’d pull the cord on the outboard and the first whiff of exhaust would turn my stomach and I’d have to lean over and puke in the river. Or I’d haul the gill nets up off the bottom and the exertion would nearly kill me. I called the doctor.

“Sympathetic pregnancy,” he said, his voice cracking at the far end of a bad connection. “Perfectly normal. The husband identifies with the wife’s symptoms.”

“But I’m not her husband.”

“Husband, father: what difference does it make. You’re it.”

I thought about that. Thought about it when Wendy and I began to eat like the New York Jets at the training table, thought about it nights at the bottling plant, thought about it when Wendy came into the living room in her underwear one evening and showed us the hard white bulge that was already beginning to open her navel up like a flower. Marie was watching some soppy hospital show on TV; I was reading about the dead water between Manhattan and Staten Island — nothing living there, not even eels. “Look,” Wendy said, an angels-in-heaven smile on her face, “it’s starting to show.” Marie got up and embraced her. I grinned like an idiot, thrilled at the way the panties grabbed her thighs — white nylon with dancing pink flowers — and how her little pointed breasts were beginning to strain at the brassiere. I wanted to put my tongue in her navel.

Next day, while Marie was at work, I tapped on Wendy’s door. “Come on in,” she said. She was wearing a housecoat, Japanese-y, with dragons and pagodas on it, propped up against the pillows reading an anatomy text. I told her I didn’t feel like going down to the river and wondered if she wanted anything. She put the book down and looked at me like a pat of butter sinking into a halibut steak. “Yes,” she said, stretching it to two syllables, “as a matter of fact I do.” Then she unbuttoned the robe. Later she smiled at me and said: “So what did we need the doctor for, anyway?”

If Marie suspected anything, she didn’t show it. I think she was too caught up in the whole thing to have an evil thought about either one of us. I mean, she doted on Wendy, hung on her every word, came home from work each night and shut herself up in Wendy’s room for an hour or more. I could hear them giggling. When I asked her what the deal was, Marie just shrugged. “You know,” she said, “the usual — girls’ talk and such.” The shared experience had made them close, closer than sisters, and sometimes I would think of us as one big happy family. But I stopped short of telling Marie what was going on when she was out of the house. Once, years ago, I’d had a fling with a girl we’d known in high school — an arrow-faced little fox with starched hair and raccoon eyes. It had been brief and strictly biological, and then the girl had moved to Ohio. Marie never forgot it. Just the mention of Ohio — even so small a thing as the TV weatherman describing a storm over the Midwest — would set her off.

I’d like to say I was torn, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to hurt Marie — she was my wife, my best friend, I loved and respected her — and yet there was Wendy, with her breathy voice and gray eyes, bearing my child. The thought of it, of my son floating around in his own little sea just behind the sweet bulge of her belly. . well, it inflamed me, got me mad with lust and passion and spiritual love too. Wasn’t Wendy as much my wife as Marie? Wasn’t marriage, at bottom, simply a tool for procreating the species? Hadn’t Sarah told Abraham to go in unto Hagar? Looking back on it, I guess Wendy let me make love to her because maybe she was bored and a little horny, lying around in a negligee day and night and studying all that anatomy. She sure didn’t feel the way I did — if I know anything, I know that now. But at the time I didn’t think of it that way, I didn’t think at all. Surrogate mother, surrogate wife. I couldn’t get enough of her.

Everything changed when Marie taped a feather bolster around her waist and our “boarder” had to move over to Depew Street. (“Don’t know what happened,” I told the guys down at the Flounder, “she just up and moved out. Low on bucks, I guess.” Nobody so much as looked up from their beer until one of the guys mentioned the Knicks game and Alex DeFazio turned to me and said, “So you got a bun in the oven, is what I hear.”) I was at a loss. What with Marie working full-time now, I found myself stuck in the house, alone, with nothing much to do except wear a path in the carpet and eat my heart out. I could walk down to the river, but it was February and nothing was happening, so I’d wind up at the Flounder Inn with my elbows on the bar, watching the mollies and swordtails bump into the sides of the aquarium, hoping somebody would give me a lift across town. Of course Marie and I would drive over to Wendy’s after dinner every couple of days or so, and I could talk to her on the telephone till my throat went dry — but it wasn’t the same. Even the few times I did get over there in the day, I could feel it. We’d make love, but she seemed shy and reluctant, as if she were performing a duty or something. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Nothing,” she said. It was as if someone had cut a neat little hole in the center of my life.

One time, a stiff windy day in early March, I couldn’t stand the sight of four walls any more and I walked the six miles across town and all the way out Depew Street. It was an ugly day. Clouds like steel wool, a dirty crust of ice underfoot, dog turds preserved like icons in the receding snowbanks. The whole way over there I kept thinking up various scenarios: Wendy and I would take the bus for California, then write Marie to come join us; we’d fly to the Virgin Islands and raise the kid on the beach; Marie would have an accident. When I got there, Dr. Ziss’s Mercedes was parked out front. I thought that was pretty funny, him being there in the middle of the day, but then I told myself he was her doctor after all. I turned around and walked home.

Nathaniel Jr. was born in New York City at the end of June, nine pounds, one ounce, with a fluff of orange hair and milky gray eyes. Wendy never looked so beautiful. The hospital bed was cranked up, her hair, grown out now, was fresh-washed and brushed, she was wearing the turquoise earrings I’d given her. Marie, meanwhile, was experiencing the raptures of the saints. She gave me a look of pride and fulfillment, rocking the baby in her arms, cooing and beaming. I stole a glance at Wendy. There were two wet circles where her nipples touched the front of her gown. When she put Nathaniel to her breast I thought I was going to faint from the beauty of it, and from something else too: jealousy. I wanted her, then and there.

Dr. Ziss was on the scene, of course, all smiles, as if he’d been responsible for the whole thing. He pecked Marie’s cheek, patted the baby’s head, shook my hand, and bent low to kiss Wendy on the lips. I handed him a cigar. Three days later Wendy had her five thousand dollars, the doctor and the hospital had been paid off; and Marie and I were back in Westchester with our son. Wendy had been dressed in a loose summer gown and sandals when I gave her the check. I remember she was sitting there on a lacquered bench, cradling the baby, the hospital corridor lit up like a clerestory with sunbeams. There were tears — mainly Marie’s — and promises to keep in touch. She handed over Nathaniel as if he was a piece of meat or a sack of potatoes, no regrets. She and Marie embraced, she rubbed her cheek against mine and made a perfunctory little kissing noise, and then she was gone.

I held out for a week. Changing diapers, heating formula, snuggling up with Marie and little Nathaniel, trying to feel whole again. But I couldn’t. Every time I looked at my son I saw Wendy, the curl of the lips, the hair, the eyes, the pout — in my distraction, I even thought I heard something of her voice in his gasping howls. Marie was asleep, the baby in her arms. I backed the car out and headed for Depew Street.

The first thing I saw when I rounded the corner onto Depew was the doctor’s Mercedes, unmistakable, gunmetal gray, gleaming at the curb like a slap in the face. I was so startled to see it there I almost ran into it. What was this, some kind of postpartum emergency or something? It was 10:00 A.M. Wendy’s curtains were drawn. As I stamped across the lawn my fingers began to tremble like they do when I’m tugging at the net and I can feel something tugging back.

The door was open. Ziss was sitting there in T-shirt and jeans, watching cartoons on TV and sipping at a glass of milk. He pushed the hair back from his brow and gave me a sheepish grin. “David?” Wendy called from the back room. “David? Are you going out?” I must have looked like the big loser on a quiz show or something, because Ziss, for once, didn’t have anything to say. He just shrugged his shoulders. Wendy’s voice, breathy as a flute, came at us again: “Because if you are, get me some sweetcakes and yogurt, and maybe a couple of corn muffins, okay? I’m hungry as a bear.”

Ziss got up and walked to the bedroom door, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, strode past me without a glance and went on out the back door. I watched him bend for a basketball, dribble around in the dirt, and then cock his arm for a shot at an imaginary basket. On the TV, Sylvester the cat reached into a trash can and pulled out a fish stripped to the bones. Wendy was standing in the doorway. She had nothing to say.

“Look, Wendy,” I began. I felt betrayed, cheated, felt as if I was the brunt of a joke between this girl in the housecoat and the curly-headed hotshot fooling around on the lawn. What was his angle, I wondered, heart pounding at my chest, what was hers? “I suppose you two had a good laugh over me, huh?”

She was pouting, the spoiled child. “I fulfilled my part of the bargain.”

She had. I got what I’d paid for. But all that had changed, couldn’t she see that? I didn’t want a son, I didn’t want Marie; I wanted her. I told her so. She said nothing. “You’ve got something going with Ziss, right?” I said, my voice rising. “All along, right?”

She looked tired, looked as if she’d been up for a hundred nights running. I watched her shuffle across the room into the kitchenette, glance into the refrigerator, and come up with ajar of jam. She made herself a sandwich, licking the goo from her fingers, and then she told me I stank of fish. She said she couldn’t have a lasting relationship with me because of Marie.

“That’s a lot of crap, and you know it. ”I was shouting. Ziss, fifty feet away, turned to look through the open door.

“All right. It’s because we’re—” She put the sandwich down, wiped a smear of jelly from her lip. “Because we move in different circles. ”

“You mean because I’m not some fancy-ass doctor, because I didn’t go to college.”

She nodded. Slow and deliberate, no room for argument, she held my eyes and nodded.

I couldn’t help it. Something just came loose in my head, and the next second I was out the door, knocking Ziss into the dirt. He kicked and scratched, tried to bite me on the wrist, but I just took hold of his hair and laid into his face while Wendy ran around in her Japanese housecoat, screeching like a cat in heat. By the time the police got there I’d pretty well closed up both his eyes and rearranged his dental work. Wendy was bending over him with a bottle of rubbing alcohol when they put the cuffs on me.

Next morning there was a story in the paper. Marie sent Alex DeFazio down with the bail money, and then she wouldn’t let me in the house. I banged on the door halfheartedly, then tried one of the windows, only to find she’d nailed it shut. When I saw that, I was just about ready to explode, but then I figured what the hell and fired up the Rambler in a cloud of blue smoke. Cops, dogs, kids, and pedestrians be damned, I ran it like a stock car eight blocks down to the dock and left it steaming in the parking lot. Five minutes later I was planing across the river, a wide brown furrow fanning out behind me.

This was my element, sun, wind, water, life pared down to the basics. Gulls hung in the air like puppets on a wire, spray flew up in my face, the shore sank back into my wake until docks and pleasure boats and clapboard houses were swallowed up and I was alone on the broad gray back of the river. After a while I eased up on the throttle and began scanning the surface for the buoys that marked my gill nets, working by rote, the tight-wound spool in my chest finally beginning to pay out. Then I spotted them, white and red, jogged by the waves. I cut the engine, coasted in and caught hold of the nearest float.

Wendy, I thought, as I hauled at the ropes, ten years, twenty-five, a lifetime: every time I look at my son I’ll see your face. Hand over hand, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, the net heaving up out of the swirling brown depths with its pounds of flesh. But then I wasn’t thinking about Wendy any more, or Marie or Nathaniel Jr. — I was thinking about the bottom of the river, I was thinking about fins and scales and cold lidless eyes. The instant I touched the lead rope I knew I was on to something. This time of year it would be sturgeon, big as logs, long-nosed and barbeled, coasting up the riverbed out of some dim watery past, anadromous, preprogrammed, homing in on their spawning grounds like guided missiles. Just then I felt a pulsing in the soles of my sneakers and turned to glance up at the Day Liner, steaming by on its way to Bear Mountain, hundreds of people with picnic baskets and coolers, waving. I jerked at the net like a penitent.

There was a single sturgeon in the net, tangled up like a ball of string. It was dead. I strained to haul the thing aboard, six feet long, two hundred pounds. Cold from the depths, still supple, it hadn’t been dead more than an hour — while I banged at my own front door, locked out, it had been thrashing in the dark, locked in. The gulls swooped low, mocking me. I had to cut it out of the net.

Back at the dock I got one of the beer drinkers to give me a hand and we dragged the fish over to the skinning pole. With sturgeon, we hang them by the gills from the top of a ten-foot pole, and then we peel back the scutes like you’d peel a banana. Four or five of the guys stood there watching me, nobody saying anything. I cut all the way round the skin just below the big stiff gill plates and then made five vertical slits the length of the fish. Flies settled on the blade of the knife. The sun beat at the back of my head. I remember there was a guy standing there, somebody I’d never seen before, a guy in a white shirt with a kid about eight or so. The kid was holding a fishing pole. They stepped back, both of them, when I tore the first strip of skin from the fish.

Sturgeon peels back with a raspy, nails-on-the-blackboard sort of sound, reminds me of tearing up sheets or ripping bark from a tree. I tossed the curling strips of leather in a pile, flies sawing away at the air, the big glistening pink carcass hanging there like a skinned deer, blood and flesh. Somebody handed me a beer: it stuck to my hand and I drained it in a gulp. Then I turned to gut the fish, me a doctor, the knife a scalpel, and suddenly I was digging into the vent like Jack the Ripper, slitting it all the way up to the gills in a single violent motion.

“How do you like that?” the man in the white shirt said. “She’s got eggs in her.”

I glanced down. There they were, wet, beaded, and gray, millions of them, the big clusters tearing free and dropping to the ground like ripe fruit. I cupped my hands and held the trembling mass of it there against the gashed belly, fifty or sixty pounds of the stuff, slippery roe running through my fingers like the silver coins from a slot machine, like a jackpot.