False Conception Read online

  I nodded. “Top of the line.”

  “Thank you. It’s basically a matter of respect, I feel. In addition to life and death, of course.”

  “I agree.”

  Something in my tone made her cant her head and regard me with sudden detachment. “Are you really what you say you are?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean are you really a guy from Redding with a job in a warehouse and an apartment on Potrero Hill?”

  I laughed. “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “Something about the way you look at me. And at my apartment. You seem, I don’t know, analytical. Like the pathologists up on the hill.”

  “Well, I’m definitely not a pathologist. I’m just what I said I am—a guy with a nowhere job who lives in a cheap apartment on the wrong side of the hill,” I said, all of which was sort of true.

  Soothed by my lie, Greta toyed with a button on her blouse. “Well …”

  I took her hand and kissed it. “Why don’t you let me do that?”

  She stiffened. “Are you sure? I’in not … spectacular.”

  “It’s not a requirement.” I unbuttoned the very button she’d been worrying.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said nervously, her breaths quick and audible above the strains of “You Send Me.”

  I unbuttoned another button. “Name something you’d rather be doing.”

  When she didn’t answer, I regarded it as a license to proceed and freed another button. “The reasons you decided to meet me at Yancy’s still hold, don’t they?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Nothing’s happened in the interim to make the situation less tempting, has it?”

  She ran a lazy finger down my chest. “Quite the contrary.”

  Restrictions removed in compliance with the code of conduct in such encounters, I dispatched the final button. “Then let’s not play pathologist.”

  I pushed the blouse off her shoulders, then peeled it down her arms and dispatched it to the floor at her back. As I drew her toward me, I slid my hands around her and began to unhook her bra in the way men always think they are managing it—without the woman noticing. It took me longer than it used to.

  When the elastic strap was uncoupled, she leaned away from me to let the bra join the blouse on the carpet, then pressed an arm across her breasts. “Promise you’ll be responsible? About protection, I mean?”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise you’ll stop if I ask you to?”

  “Promise.”

  “Promise this isn’t some sort of … trick?”

  “Promise.”

  “Promise you won’t make any loud noises?”

  “Only if you promise not to tickle.”

  Her eyes alert to my reaction, she lowered her arm to offer me her breasts; I examined them with due diligence. They were pale and defenseless in the accusing beam of light that crossed the room from the street lamp, but plucky and willing nonetheless. The look on her face was more ambiguous. “Should I undo your belt or anything?”

  “Feel free to undo anything that needs undone.”

  I bent to kiss a breast, then stood steadfast till she had tugged loose the buckle at my waist. After she pulled down my fly and unbuttoned my button, I did the same with hers, then kicked off my shoes and took her with me to the bed. The shakes and shudders it emitted upon arrival made me worry that it would fold around us in the middle of the proceedings and we would be immersed in its innards forever, lying frozen and contorted and surprised, like the immortal corpses of Pompeii.

  As everyone knows, however, even after the belts are unbuckled and the bras are unhooked, trousers are still a problem, whether they’re worsteds, like mine, or Levi’s, like hers. But a man is never stronger than when he’s maneuvering a woman to be rid of her clothing, nor more agile than when he’s twisting to doff a piece of his own. Which was how, without excessive clumsiness or even major damage to a ligament, we managed to be naked in less than a minute.

  “I haven’t done this in a while,” she said as I caressed the curve of her hip and watched goose bumps form along her flank and the tip of her nipple elongate. “Not in real life, at least.”

  “Are you afraid you’ve forgotten how?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to enjoy it so much I’ll want to do it every night.”

  I found a familiar phrase. “That’s not the worst fate in the world, is it?”

  “It can get to be.”

  I slid down her chest and ran my tongue across her eager nipple. She shivered, then sighed, and then her skeleton decomposed and her musculature melted and she became a life-sized Raggedy Ann, all soft and supple and familiar, all warm and fuzzy and amenable, all comfortable and cuddly and compatible.

  We turned this way and that, sampled one part and then another, then went back for second helpings. The sheets grew wet from our sweat; the steel stays of the sleeper strained to contain our contortions. Once, I almost fell off the bed; another time, Greta’s head banged the sofa arm so hard I was afraid she would knock herself out. By the time I arrived at her vortex, and I began my thrusts and she began her clutches, I was as heedless as I had been in years.

  And yet, through every minute of our coupling, as we groped and groaned with what was clearly authentic passion, there was something in the air as dense as desire and as active as delight. Looming above the bed, like a thunderhead that threatened to spit out a pitiless whirlwind and a blinding flash of light, was the fact of my profession and the deceptions I had utilized in pursuit of it. Despite my hunger and regardless of my greed, as we made our way toward climax I was never not aware of fraudulence, never able to entirely evade the shame it generated, never able to drown myself in the pleasure we were jointly manufacturing.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t stop, and all too soon I couldn’t. We finished more or less in sync, and after a kiss on her nose and a pat on her hip, I rolled away and began to tidy up.

  “Why don’t you let me do that?” she said. “I’ll bring you back a towel.”

  When I told her to go ahead, she rolled the condom off my penis and carried it off to the bathroom, its lifeless droop dangling from her fingertips like a mouse she’d retrieved from a trap. She didn’t return for ten minutes.

  Back in our clothing, sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, with the room reassembled and the sleeper returned to a sofa, Greta began to speak of matters other than the gifts we had just exchanged. She talked about how she’d always thought that some day there would be time to go back to school and be trained in what she had always wanted to do with her life, which was to become an interior designer, but that she knew now that it was something that would never happen. She talked about the loneliness and uncertainty that buffeted a woman alone, and about the vital support she received from her girlfriend Linda and her old pal Leo. She talked about her life being okay, all things considered, and she talked about how easily it could become a nightmare if she were laid off in the next round of staff reductions that were rumored to be imminent at the medical center.

  And finally she talked, in sly hints and oblique references, about the consulting arrangement she’d spoken of earlier, and about how it could solve a big share of her problems if it only worked out, sounding much more hopeful than she had sounded at Yancy’s. For some reason, as I looked in her eyes and listened to her muted yearning, I began to wish she hadn’t signed that contract.

  When I had stayed as long as was necessary to validate what we’d done, I bid Greta a brief good-bye, then promised to call when I got home, then told her I hoped we could see each other again. She told me she hoped so, too.

  As usual, it was far too soon to know if either of us was telling the truth.

  CHAPTER 11

  I phoned a report to Russell Jorgensen the next morning—status remains quo, all systems remained go. There were other things I could have said, of course, about Greta Hammond’s altered mood, about her impassioned lunge toward me, about
the compromise of my professional ethics in exchange for a helping of sex, but I didn’t say any of those things, in the end, because I didn’t think they were relevant.

  And that was it, or so I hoped. Although a part of me wanted to see Greta again, to probe the erotic and intellectual regions to which our attraction might take us, the major part of me advised myself to leave well enough firmly alone. Greta was, primarily, a job, and now the job was finished. So I thought about her a lot, about the swell of her breast and the curve of her hip and the lift of her laugh when she giggled, and picked up the phone and called her twice, only to hang up when she answered. Finally, and not a little reluctantly, I swore to let sleeping dogs lie.

  Days went by. I didn’t hear from Russell, and I didn’t hear from the Colberts, so I assumed the surrogate issue was over. And as far as I knew it was, except that some three weeks later, as Betty Fontaine was performing yet another autopsy on the state of our relationship, she resurrected the subject, if only indirectly.

  “Is it that you think you won’t make a good father?” Betty asked me abruptly, in the middle of an after-dinner stroll down a resurrected strip of Fillmore Street in a middle week of June.

  “I have no idea what kind of father I’d be,” I answered peevishly. “It’s like asking if I’d be brave in battle—there’s no way to know till it happens.”

  “But you were brave in battle; you’ve got medals and stuff.”

  “I did what had to be done. So what?”

  “I’m just saying you did fine then and you’d do fine as a father. You like children, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know any children. Unless you count Charley Sleet.”

  “Do you like games?”

  “Playing or watching?”

  “Playing.”

  “I make my living at hide-and-seek,” I pointed out, and not for the first time.

  She laughed. “I guess you do, don’t you? So how do you feel about pets?”

  “I don’t have any pets.”

  “I know you don’t. Why don’t you?”

  “Because the only pets that thrive in apartments are goldfish and parakeets.”

  “So?”

  “Birds shit and fish die.”

  “So do people.”

  “Not nearly as often.”

  “Which is all the more reason you should have kids.”

  We got to Geary and crossed the street and walked up the east side of Fillmore. I looked for a store window that would divert Betty from her course, a display of new shoes or designer eyewear or something, but nothing filled the bill.

  “We’re talking about having children, I take it,” I mused finally, when Betty seemed sullen at my side.

  “We certainly are.”

  “Together, or just in general?”

  “Together, you dope.”

  “If we conceived a child tonight, I’d be sixty-seven when it graduated from high school. I’m pretty sure that’s not fair.”

  “It’s not how old you are, it’s how good you are. And you’d make a great father.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because you care about people. You even care about those benighted creatures who walk in your office and ask you to keep the CIA from reading their minds or to guard their secret formula for growing hair or turning seashells into diamonds. You get all fuzzy over them and you’d go batty over a child the same way; you know you would.”

  “I didn’t know being batty was the recommended approach to parenthood. Plus, Fm not sure I have the energy to keep up with kids anymore.”

  “We could get help. We wouldn’t have to do it by ourselves.”

  “You mean day care?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t approve of day care. I approve of it for people who don’t have a choice, of course, but I don’t think it’s the optimum for kids.”

  “Optimum hasn’t been an option since the seventies; no one can afford optimum anymore.”

  “Then maybe they shouldn’t have kids.”

  “So the species gets dominated by the offspring of lawyers and investment bankers and computer nerds? Because they can afford to let their spouse stay home with the kids all day? Is that the world you want to live in?”

  “That’s the world we do live in.”

  She slugged me on the arm again, this time more than playfully. “It is not and you know it. Anyway, what I think is that the world could use a few more Marsh Tanners.”

  “Not to mention Betty Fontaines.”

  “So why don’t we do something about it?”

  “Now?”

  She grasped my injured arm and snuggled tightly against my side. “I’m game if you are.”

  I stopped walking. Her expression was simultaneously endearing and intimidating, which kept me in the muddle I was in already.

  “I’m flattered you want to do this, Betty,” I fumbled. “I really am. But I don’t think I’m the man for the job.”

  She sensed it was a verdict of sorts and it was a long time before she responded. By the time she did, the colors in her eyes had turned turbulent and her voice trembled with the rush of revelation. “Then I may have to find someone who is,” she murmured hollowly. “Time’s running out for me, Marsh. I’m going to have to make my move, with you or without you.”

  “I don’t think I’m up to it, Betty.”

  Her grip on my arm intensified to industrial strength. “That’s such crap, Marsh Tanner. If you want to know what I think, I don’t think kids are the problem at all. I think I’m the problem.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t think it’s kids you’re scared of; I think it’s making a commitment to me.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because we’re not getting anywhere. We’re exactly where we were twelve months ago, which is exactly where we were twelve years ago. I need to be excited. I need to be moving. I need to be making progress.”

  “So do I.”

  “Well, you don’t show much sign of it. We’re in a rut a mile deep and frankly you seem pleased as punch about it. We go out twice a week, we have pleasant chats, we laugh at miscues of the mayor and the President, we go back to my place for sex, and we do it again the next weekend. It’s not awful, I’m not saying that. You’re funny and you’re smart. I like being with you. And I love you more than any man I’ve ever known. But I need more than feelings, now. I need a life I can be proud of for the next forty years.”

  I tried to grin but didn’t make it. “This is beginning to sound like we’re breaking up.”

  She looked beyond me, at the surge of Mount Sutro toward the twisted towers that defiled its top and seemed suddenly to define our relationship. “I’m afraid maybe we are,” she said softly.

  “Can’t we retire and think about it, at least?”

  “You can do what you want. But I’m not going to see you again unless I hear some words I haven’t heard from you before.”

  “Such as?”

  “Words like love. And marriage. And family. Words like us, and we, and our. All those words that indicate you see your life as something beyond yourself, as something bigger and broader and more encompassing than it’s been for the last thirty years.”

  She took my hand and looked at me through a sheen of tears polluted with mascara. “I have to say, I don’t think you have those words in you, Marsh. I wish I did, but I don’t. I don’t think you feel them; I don’t think you’ll ever feel them; not about me, at least. And that truly breaks my heart. But I know you won’t lie—you never lie to me, that’s one thing I appreciate—so what I’m saying is, I don’t think you’ll be saying the words, so I don’t think we’ll be doing this again.”

  She began to sob, with typical restraint and decorum, which made it all the more painful to watch. “I just don’t,” she concluded dismally. She pressed her palm to her lips, then twisted away as though I was an ogre.

  “Do we need to do this now?” I
asked, with surprising distress. “Why can’t we talk about it later?”

  “Because this is later. This is the later we’ve talked about for years.” She dropped my arm and stopped walking. “I can’t do it anymore, Marsh. I just can’t.”

  She looked wildly down the block; for an instant, I thought she was going to run away. In the next instant, I was certain I would never see her again and something in my chest began to shrink and wrinkle and die. “Betty. Please. Let’s not do anything rash.”

  “I’m going to call a cab,” she said brusquely. “I’ve got all that stuff at your place, but none of it’s important except my nightgown. I like my sexy nightgown.”

  “So do I.”

  She swiped at her eye as if a bee had landed on it. “I hope very much that I’ll be needing to look sexy again, so maybe you can mail it back to me.”

  “I’d rather deliver it in person. Actually, what I’d rather do is keep it. So we can still use it.”

  She shook her head. “We’re past that, Marsh. We’re somewhere else, now. I’m sorry, I really am, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this and it’s something I have to do.”

  “That’s the problem, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Women think too damned much.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to. And it’s not a crime, you know.” She turned her back and crossed her arms.

  I flagged a cab and gave him a twenty and told him where to take her. We kissed on the lips, but coldly and without passion, then I waved good-bye to the woman I loved more than I had loved anyone since my secretary had gone out of my life four years ago, and things had gone to hell.

  CHAPTER 12

  Two weeks later, I still hadn’t seen or spoken to Betty since she’d disappeared down Fillmore Street in the back of a cab after eating at a Mediterranean restaurant. In retrospect, I blamed the food for the whole mess.

  I’d waited two days for her to change her mind, then mailed her the nightgown, squeezed into a manila envelope and plastered with too many stamps, without an accompanying message. And that had been it—no calls, no notes, no late-night visitations featuring the cascade of tears and flood of apologies that are the stuff of reconciliation. I felt bad about the situation but not bad enough to do anything about it but mope.