“I picture her near the ocean,” I said. Then I stopped, feeling like a boardwalk psychic. “No. I have no ideas. She could literally be anywhere. I don’t think we’ll see her unless she decides to come back.”
“That seems unlikely,” Tanner breathed, annoyed. “So let’s try to find Andie and see where her head is. We’re running out of wiggle room here.”
Then it was dinnertime, and then the sun set, and I was alone again in my haunted house. I was thinking about all of Amy’s lies and whether the pregnancy was one of them. I’d done the math. Amy and I had sex sporadically enough it was possible. But then she would know I’d do the math.
Truth or lie? If it was a lie, it was designed to gut me.
I’d always assumed that Amy and I would have children. It was one of the reasons I knew I would marry Amy, because I pictured us having kids together. I remember the first time I imagined it, not two months after we began dating: I was walking from my apartment in Kips Bay to a favorite pocket park along the East River, a path that took me past the giant LEGO block of the United Nations headquarters, the flags of myriad countries fluttering in the wind. A kid would like this, I thought. All the different colors, the busy memory game of matching each flag to its country. There’s Finland, and there’s New Zealand. The one-eyed smile of Mauritania. And then I realized it wasn’t a kid, but our kid, mine and Amy’s, who would like this. Our kid, sprawled on the floor with an old encyclopedia, just like I’d done, but our kid wouldn’t be alone, I’d be sprawled next to him. Aiding him in his budding vexillology, which sounds less like a study of flags than a study in annoyance, which would have suited my father’s attitude toward me. But not mine toward my son’s. I pictured Amy joining us on the floor, flat on her stomach, her feet kicked up in the air, pointing out Palau, the yellow dot just left of center on the crisp blue background, which I was sure would be her favorite.
From then on, the boy was real (and sometimes a girl, but mostly a boy). He was inevitable. I suffered from regular, insistent paternal aches. Months after the wedding, I had a strange moment in front of the medicine cabinet, floss between my teeth, when I thought: She wants kids, right? I should ask. Of course I should ask. When I posed the question—roundabout, vague—she said, Of course, of course, someday, but every morning she still perched in front of the sink and swallowed her pill. For three years she did this every morning, while I fluttered near the topic but failed to actually say the words: I want us to have a baby.
After the layoffs, it seemed like it might happen. Suddenly, there was an uncontestable space in our lives, and one day over breakfast, Amy looked up from her toast and said, I’m off the pill. Just like that. She was off the pill three months, and nothing happened, and not long after the move to Missouri, she made an appointment for us to start the medical intervention. Once Amy started a project, she didn’t like to dilly-dally: “We’ll tell them we’ve been trying a year,” she said. Foolishly I agreed—we were barely ever touching each other by then, but we still thought a kid made sense. Sure.
“You’ll have to do your part too, you know,” she said on the drive to St. Louis. “You’ll have to give semen.”
“I know. Why do you say it like that?”
“I just figured you’d be too proud. Self-conscious and proud.”
I was a rather nasty cocktail of both those traits, but at the fertility center, I dutifully entered the strange small room dedicated to self-abuse: a place where hundreds of men had entered for no other purpose than to crank the shank, clean the rifle, jerk the gherkin, make the bald man cry, pound the flounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wiggle the walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.
(I sometimes use humor as self-defense.)
The room contained a vinyl-covered armchair, a TV, and a table that held a grab bag of porn and a box of tissues. The porn was early ’90s, judging from the women’s hair (yes: top and bottom), and the action was midcore. (Another good essay: Who selects the porn for fertility centers? Who judges what will get men off yet not be too degrading to all the women outside the cum-room, the nurses and doctors and hopeful, hormone-addled wives?)
I visited the room on three separate occasions—they like to have a lot of backup—while Amy did nothing. She was supposed to begin taking pills, but she didn’t, and then she didn’t some more. She was the one who’d be pregnant, the one who’d turn over her body to the baby, so I postponed nudging her for a few months, keeping an eye on the pill bottle to see if the level went down. Finally, after a few beers one winter night, I crunched up the steps of our home, shed my snow-crusted clothes, and curled up next to her in bed, my face near her shoulder, breathing her in, warming the tip of my nose on her skin. I whispered the words—Let’s do this, Amy, let’s have a baby—and she said no. I was expecting nervousness, caution, worry—Nick, will I be a good mom?—but I got a clipped, cold no. A no without loopholes. Nothing dramatic, no big deal, just not something she was interested in anymore. “Because I realized I’d be stuck doing all the hard stuff,” she reasoned. “All the diapers and doctors’ appointments and discipline, and you’d just breeze in and be Fun Daddy. I’d do all the work to make them good people, and you’d undo it anyway, and they’d love you and hate me.”