The bus shuddered away, and she saw the driver. He raised one bony hand to the gearshift, turning to Tomasina as his face split open in a smile.
The magazine also said that miscarriages happened all the time, without a woman’s even noticing. Tiny blastulas scraped against the womb’s walls and, finding no purchase, hurtled downward through the plumbing, human and otherwise. Maybe they stayed alive in the toilet bowl for a few seconds, like goldfish. She didn’t know. But with three abortions, one official miscarriage, and who knows how many unofficial ones, Tomasina’s school bus was full. When she awoke at night, she saw it slowly pulling away from the curb, and she heard the noise of the children packed in their seats, that cry of children indistinguishable between laughter and scream.
*
Everyone knows that men objectify women. But none of our sizing up of breasts and legs can compare with the cold-blooded calculation of a woman in the market for semen. Tomasina was a little taken aback by it herself, and yet she couldn’t help it: once she made her decision, she began to see men as walking spermatozoa. At parties, over glasses of Barolo (soon to be giving it up, she drank like a fish), Tomasina examined the specimens who came out of the kitchen, or loitered in the hallways, or held forth from the armchairs. And sometimes, her eyes misting, she felt that she could discern the quality of each man’s genetic material. Some semen auras glowed with charity; others were torn with enticing holes of savagery; still others flickered and dimmed with substandard voltage. Tomasina could ascertain health by a guy’s smell or complexion. Once, to amuse Diane, she’d ordered every male party guest to stick out his tongue. The men had obliged, asking no questions. Men always oblige. Men like being objectified. They thought that their tongues were being inspected for nimbleness, toward the prospect of oral abilities. “Open up and say ah,” Tomasina kept commanding, all night long. And the tongues unfurled for display. Some had yellow spots or irritated taste buds, others were blue as spoiled beef. Some performed lewd acrobatics, flicking up and down or curling upward to reveal spikes depending from their undersides like the armor of deep-sea fish. And then there were two or three that looked perfect, opalescent as oysters and enticingly plump. These were the tongues of the married men, who’d already donated their semen—in abundance—to the lucky women taxing the sofa cushions across the room. The wives and mothers who were nursing other complaints by now, of insufficient sleep and stalled careers—complaints that to Tomasina were desperate wishes.
*
At this point, I should introduce myself. I’m Wally Mars. I’m an old friend of Tomasina’s. Actually, I’m an old boyfriend. We went out for three months and seven days in the spring of 1985. At the time, most of Tomasina’s friends were surprised that she was dating me. They said what she did when she saw my name on the ingredient list. They said, “Wally Mars?” I was considered too short (I’m only five feet four), and not athletic enough. Tomasina loved me, though. She was crazy about me for a while. Some dark hook in our brains, which no one could see, linked us up. She used to sit across the table, tapping it and saying, “What else?” She liked to hear me talk.
She still did. Every few weeks she called to invite me to lunch. And I always went. At the time all this happened, we made a date for a Friday. When I got to the restaurant, Tomasina was already there. I stood behind the hostess station for a moment, looking at her from a distance and getting ready. She was lounging back in her chair, sucking the life out of the first of the three cigarettes she allowed herself at lunch. Above her head, on a ledge, an enormous flower arrangement exploded into bloom. Have you noticed? Flowers have gone multicultural, too. Not a single rose, tulip, or daffodil lifted its head from the vase. Instead, jungle flora erupted: Amazonian orchids, Sumatran flytraps. The jaws of one flytrap trembled, stimulated by Tomasina’s perfume. Her hair was thrown back over her bare shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a top—no, she was. It was flesh-colored and skintight. Tomasina doesn’t exactly dress corporate, unless you could call a brothel a kind of corporation. What she has to display was on display. (It was on display every morning for Dan Rather, who had a variety of nicknames for Tomasina, all relating to Tabasco sauce.) Somehow, though, Tomasina got away with her chorus-girl outfits. She toned them down with her maternal attributes: her homemade lasagna, her hugs and kisses, her cold remedies.
At the table, I received both a hug and a kiss. “Hi, hon!” she said, and pressed herself against me. Her face was all lit up. Her left ear, inches from my cheek, was a flaming pink. I could feel its heat. She pulled away and we looked at each other.
“So,” I said. “Big news.”
“I’m going to do it, Wally. I’m going to have a baby.”
We sat down. Tomasina took a drag on her cigarette, then funneled her lips to the side, expelling smoke.
“I just figured, Fuck it,” she said. “I’m forty. I’m an adult. I can do this.” I wasn’t used to her new teeth. Every time she opened her mouth it was like a flashbulb going off. They looked good, though, her new teeth. “I don’t care what people think. People either get it or they don’t. I’m not going to raise it all by myself: my sister’s going to help. And Diane. You can babysit, too, Wally, if you want.”
“Me?”
“You can be an uncle.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.
“I hear you’ve got a list of candidates on a recipe,” I said.
“What?”
“Diane told me she sent you a recipe.”
“Oh, that.” She inhaled. Her cheeks hollowed out.
“And I was on it or something?”
“Old boyfriends.” Tomasina exhaled upward. “All my old boyfriends.”
Just then the waiter arrived to take our drink order.
Tomasina was still gazing up at her spreading smoke. “Martini up very dry two olives,” she said. Then she looked at the waiter. She kept looking. “It’s Friday,” she explained. She ran her hand through her hair, flipping it back. The waiter smiled.
“I’ll have a martini, too,” I said. The waiter turned and looked at me. His eyebrows rose and then he turned back to Tomasina. He smiled again and went off.
As soon as he was gone, Tomasina leaned across the table to whisper in my ear. I leaned, too. Our foreheads touched. And then she said, “What about him?”
“Who?”
“Him.”
She indicated with her head. Across the restaurant, the waiter’s tensed buns retreated, dipping and weaving.
“He’s a waiter.”
“I’m not going to marry him, Wally. I just want his sperm.”
“Maybe he’ll bring some out as a side dish.”
Tomasina sat back, stubbing out her cigarette. She pondered me from a distance, then reached for cigarette number two. “Are you going to get all hostile again?”
“I’m not being hostile.”
“Yes, you are. You were hostile when I told you about this and you’re acting hostile now.”
“I just don’t know why you want to pick the waiter.”