She shrugged. “He’s cute.”
“You can do better.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. A lot of places.” I picked up my soup spoon. I saw my face in it, tiny and distorted. “Go to a sperm bank. Get a Nobel Prize winner.”
“I don’t just want smart. Brains aren’t everything.” Tomasina squinted, sucking in smoke, then looked off dreamily. “I want the whole package.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. I picked up my menu. I read the words Fricassée de Lapereau nine times. What was bothering me was this: the state of nature. It was becoming clear to me—clearer than ever—what my status was in the state of nature: it was low. It was somewhere around hyena. This wasn’t the case, as far as I knew, back in civilization. I’m a catch, pragmatically speaking. I make a lot of money, for one thing. My IRA is pumped up to $254,000. But money doesn’t count, apparently, in the selection of semen. The waiter’s tight buns counted for more.
“You’re against the idea, aren’t you?” Tomasina said.
“I’m not against it. I just think, if you’re going to have a baby, it’s best if you do it with somebody else. Who you’re in love with.” I looked up at her. “And who loves you.”
“That’d be great. But it’s not happening.”
“How do you know?” I said. “You might fall in love with somebody tomorrow. You might fall in love with somebody six months from now.” I looked away, scratching my cheek. “Maybe you’ve already met the love of your life and don’t even know it.” Then I looked back into her eyes. “And then you realize it. And it’s too late. There you are. With some stranger’s baby.”
Tomasina was shaking her head. “I’m forty, Wally. I don’t have much time.”
“I’m forty, too,” I said. “What about me?”
She looked at me closely, as though detecting something in my tone, then dismissed it with a wave. “You’re a man. You’ve got time.”
*
After lunch, I walked the streets. The restaurant’s glass door launched me into the gathering Friday evening. It was four thirty and already getting dark in the caverns of Manhattan. From a striped chimney buried in the asphalt, steam shot up into the air. A few tourists were standing around it, making low Swedish sounds, amazed by our volcanic streets. I stopped to watch the steam, too. I was thinking about exhaust, anyway, smoke and exhaust. That school bus of Tomasina’s? Looking out one window was my kid’s face. Our kid’s. We’d been going out three months when Tomasina got pregnant. She went home to New Jersey to discuss it with her parents and returned three days later, having had an abortion. We broke up shortly after that. So I sometimes thought of him, or her, my only actual, snuffed-out offspring. I thought about him right then. What would the kid have looked like? Like me, with buggy eyes and potato nose? Or like Tomasina? Like her, I decided. With any luck, the kid would look like her.
*
For the next few weeks I didn’t hear anything more. I tried to put the whole subject out of my mind. But the city wouldn’t let me. Instead, the city began filling with babies. I saw them in elevators and lobbies and out on the sidewalk. I saw them straitjacketed into car seats, drooling and ranting. I saw babies in the park, on leashes. I saw them on the subway, gazing at me with sweet, gummy eyes over the shoulders of Dominican nannies. New York was no place to be having babies. So why was everybody having them? Every fifth person on the street toted a pouch containing a bonneted larva. They looked like they needed to go back inside the womb.
Mostly you saw them with their mothers. I always wondered who the fathers were. What did they look like? How big were they? Why did they have a kid and I didn’t? One night I saw a whole Mexican family camping out in a subway car. Two small children tugged at the mother’s sweatpants while the most recent arrival, a caterpillar wrapped in a leaf, suckled at the wineskin of her breast. And across from them, holding the bedding and the diaper bag, the progenitor sat with open legs. No more than thirty, small, squat, paint-spattered, with the broad flat face of an Aztec. An ancient face, a face of stone, passed down through the centuries into those overalls, this hurtling train, this moment.
The invitation came five days later. It sat quietly in my mailbox amid bills and catalogues. I noticed Tomasina’s return address and ripped the envelope open. On the front of the invitation a champagne bottle foamed out the words:
Inside, cheerful green type announced, “On Saturday, April 13, Come Celebrate Life!”
The date, I learned afterward, had been figured precisely. Tomasina had used a basal thermometer to determine her times of ovulation. Every morning before getting out of bed, she took her resting temperature and plotted the results on a graph. She also inspected her underpants on a daily basis. A clear, albumeny discharge meant that her egg had dropped. She had a calendar on the refrigerator, studded with red stars. She was leaving nothing to chance.
I thought of canceling. I toyed with fictitious business trips and tropical diseases. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want there to be parties like this. I asked myself if I was jealous or just conservative and decided both. And then, of course, in the end, I did go. I went to keep from sitting at home thinking about it.
*