“I know it’s hard,” he said.
They looked at the water for a moment longer, and then he turned to her and grinned. “From the first second, huh? That’s called lust, Jessica,” he teased, and pulled her close.
He believed they’d resolved something, she knew. He believed they’d come to some sort of agreement.
Two weeks later, she pulled into their driveway after work to find his old dresser sitting there on the curb, in the dark, like a lonely child whose parents had forgotten about it. She parked and considered for a moment the fact that he was the person she knew better than anyone, but she had absolutely no inkling that this was the task he’d set for himself that day. That this was the day he’d settled on as the day all hope was lost. Nora with the scraped elbow. Dennis who liked to sing in the shower. Did he lay his hand on top of the dresser and bow his head for a moment, or did he bull forward as was his way? When she walked upstairs to look at the spot where it had been sitting, she saw that he’d opened the window a few inches to let in the fresh air.
* * *
Of course it made sense that Malcolm buy the bar. Long before Hugh told him that it was time, he often stayed up another hour after getting home from work, dawn nearly cracking the sky, just to jot down ideas, changes he’d make to bring it up to date. Sometimes when Jess picked up the iPad they shared, there were tabs open to bars in Los Angeles, Reykjavík, Tel Aviv. Photos he took screenshots of and emailed to himself. Sleek wood, chrome, leather. Against these beautifully lit images Jess always placed a thought of Malcolm’s car: balls of wax paper from deli sandwiches, wads of nicotine gum, empty soda bottles, and little threads of tobacco, like sand that gets everywhere after a day at the beach.
When she made her pitch about donor eggs, he was taken aback. “I told you, Jess. I’m done. I can’t take it anymore.”
“What do you mean you’re done? That’s not really something people say on this subject.”
“Well I’m saying it.”
“A donor egg would still be your DNA. Is that the issue?” Not that his DNA was all that award winning, she wanted to add. His father dead of a heart attack at forty-three, his mother’s recycling bin always stuffed with empty jugs of Carlo Rossi.
“No.”
“Why?”
He held up his hands as if to say he was sorry. Sorry he felt that way. Sorry he couldn’t explain why.
“Adoption then,” she suggested, without adding that she’d already done some research and learned it could take years. More years, Malcolm would say. She read an essay by a woman who fostered a child for eighteen months. He came to her as a five-month-old baby boy who lit up her life. After a few weeks with him, she submitted all the adoption paperwork and in the meantime fed him his first solid foods, watched him figure out how to crawl and then walk. It’s happening, she was told. It just takes time. He called her Mama, and also said the words “hi,” “bye,” “dog,” “ball.” And then suddenly he was taken away. The birth mother wanted him back. The writer’s heartache was raw, as was Jess’s as she read it. She knew she’d never survive that.
“No, Jess,” Malcolm said. “We tried our best.”
“But we didn’t try our best. Hello? I’m literally listing all the other things we can do.”
She made an appointment with Dr. Ianucci and though she practiced how she’d put it, what coded language she’d use, when the time came, she was blunt. She wanted to know if there was any way to do it by herself. A donor egg, fertilized with Malcolm’s sperm. “Well, yes,” the doctor said, slightly confused. “A donor egg would be a very smart next step.”
“No. I mean, is there a way to do it so that Malcolm thinks it’s ours. Both of ours. I mean can we go through the motions. You’d just slip a different egg in there.”
She waited a moment.
“Or a donor embryo if that’s easier. It must happen, right?” There were shady dealings in every corner of business, why would fertility be any different?
“Jessica,” the doctor said kindly.
“Jess.”
“Jess. If you were interested in having a child on your own, that’s one thing. But no, we’re not going to mislead Malcolm. Every couple goes through this, and you’ve been through more than most.”
* * *
By San Francisco, she’d already had a talk with herself about what exactly could be done about the deal Malcolm had made with Hugh, what could be done about them. She was so sick of every conversation finding each of them braced for the other’s reaction. When she heard his car turn in to their driveway, she made sure she was folding clothes, peeling an orange, occupying her hands so she wouldn’t have to greet him. Once, she held her phone to her ear, signaled to him to stay quiet, and then stepped into the front room and had a loud, one-sided phone conversation about liability and insurance with no one on the other end. She cut herself off mid-sentence, pretending to have been interrupted. She didn’t come out until she heard him turn on the TV. When she organized her thoughts, the top bullet was the fact that they couldn’t go on the way they were for much longer.
Her new job required so little travel there was no way to wriggle out of the conference in San Francisco. Malcolm wanted to do a few tune-ups to the bar right away, and at the top of his fix list were tiny things that had driven him nuts for an entire decade. Light fixtures that didn’t work. Certain floorboards that moved like seesaws when people walked across the ends. But one thing led to another, which led to another, as Jess knew it would, as it always did, a warning she spoke aloud and which Malcolm took as a sign of her enduring pessimism. The handyman couldn’t fix the lights, so Malcolm called an electrician, whom Jess let in on her way to the train one morning. Later, the electrician called to say he needed to show them something, he’d meet them there the next morning. Malcolm got up early, Jess called her office to tell her team she’d be late. It was so hot out, one of those days when walking one city block meant her hair would stay damp all day.
When they arrived at the bar, the electrician showed them a bundle of wires that Jess knew she was supposed to understand were dangerous, but he might as well have shown her a bunch of bananas for all she could intuit about them.
“Is it just this one spot?” Malcolm asked.
“No,” the electrician said.
“Can we get away with it for a while longer?” Jess asked, and he looked horrified, like she’d asked him to murder someone.
“What about the panel?” Malcolm asked. “It’s pretty new. I remember when Hugh had that put in.”
“Malcolm,” the guy said, and Jess realized they knew each other, he was probably a regular. “It’s not that it’s old but it’s way overloaded. AC alone and the thing is maxed. You need to update all of it if you don’t want the whole place to go up one night.”
And Malcolm said, “Okay, yeah, of course, go for it. What else can we do?”
“It’s been this long,” Jess said and turned to Malcolm. “If you didn’t look into fixing those lights, we wouldn’t even know about it.”
“But I did, and so we do know about it,” Malcolm said, and then turned to his electrician friend. “Can you work mornings? I can’t close. Show me what you’ll need to open up.”
“Wait,” Jess said. “Hang on.”
But Malcolm looked at her as he rarely did, only two or three times in their whole relationship, a look that said he was one second away from losing his temper. And if she knew him at all, being that close to revealing some deep part of himself in front of an acquaintance, a customer, meant he was at the very, very end of his rope. A muscle in his cheek was fluttering.
“Let’s talk later,” he said to her. “Don’t you have a train to catch?”
* * *