This was, as the old Latin grammar books had it, a nonne question, one which expected the answer “yes,” these being the only questions Vasilisa Golden asked, yes questions, would you like to go shopping with me, do I look okay, can you zip me up, do you think the house looks beautiful, would you like a game of chess, do you love me. It was impossible to say no, and so, of course, I said yes, but I admit I metaphorically crossed my fingers behind my back. What a young rat I was! Never mind, all writers are thieves, and in those days I was hard at work. “Of course,” I said, “what is it.”
She opened her pocketbook and took out a folded letter and passed it across the table to me. “Shh,” she said. Two sheets of paper, from a medical diagnostic laboratory on the Upper West Side, the results of various tests on both Vasilisa and Nero Golden. She took back the page about herself. “This isn’t important,” she said, “with me everything is one hundred percent good.” I looked at the remaining document in my hand. I’m not good at reading these documents and she must have seen the confusion on my face and leaned in close across the table. “Is a seminogram,” she hissed. “An examination of the seed.” Oh. I looked at the various measures and comments. The words meant nothing. Motility. Oligozoospermia. NICE vitality. “What does it say,” I murmured. She sighed an exasperated sigh: were all men this useless even when discussing material so significant to their manhood? She spoke very quietly, mouthing the words exaggeratedly so that I could understand. It means he is too old to father a child. Ninety-nine percent for sure.
Now I understood the strain she was under, which had had the effect of making her turn her volume up too high. She had made her big play and Nero had given in—and then this. “It’s like he did it on purpose,” she said in the same very low voice. “Except I know he doesn’t know. He thinks he’s a tiger, a machine, he can make babies just by looking at a woman in the wrong way. This will hit him hard.”
“What will you do?”
“Eat your Caesar,” she said. “We’ll talk after lunch.”
There was snow on the ground in the park and a homeless orator sounding off on the way to the carousel. An old-timer, he was, this gent delirious with words: white man, bushy gray beard, wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows, denim overalls, fingerless gloves, circular-lensed John Lennon rimless glasses, he looked like he should have been playing washboard in a Southern jug band. His voice, however, had not a trace of the South, and the gentleman had a thesis to expound in what was a fairly florid vocabulary. The private lives of men and women in America, he wanted to tell us, were being abolished by the public lives of guns, which had become sentient and were attempting nothing less than the decimation and eventually the conquest of the human race. Three hundred million living guns in America, equal in number to the human population, and trying to create a little lebensraum by disposing of significant quantities of human beings. Weapons had come to life! They had minds of their own now! They wanted to do what was in their nature to do, i.e. and viz. and which was to say, to shoot. Consequently these living guns were enabling gentlemen to shoot off their pizzles while they were posing for nude selfies, pow!, and they were encouraging fathers to shoot their children accidentally at one hundred percent safe firing ranges, accidentally?, he didn’t think so!, pow!, and they were enticing little children to shoot their mothers in the head while they were driving the family SUV, blam!, and he hadn’t even gotten around to talking about mass murder yet, rat-a-tat!, college campuses, rat-a-tat-tat!, shopping malls! rat-a-tat-tat-tat!, fucking Florida, rat-a-ta-rat-a-ta-tat! He hadn’t even started talking about cops’ guns coming to life and getting the cops to take black lives, or crazy vets’ guns getting those crazy vets to shoot down police officers in cold blood. No! He hadn’t even begun to talk about that. What he was telling us here today in the winter park was that we were being invaded by killer machines. The inanimate weapon had become animated, like a toy coming to life in a horror movie, as if your stuffed teddy bear could think now and what was he thinking? He wanted to rip your throat out. How could anyone even think about their little private lives when this shit was going down?
I put a couple of dollars in the can at his feet and we moved on. This was no time for the Second Amendment to enter the conversation. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do,” Vasilisa said. “I’m going to protect Nero from this information and so by the way are you. Sit down here. We are going to doctor the form.” We were at one of the tables by the carousel. Behind us the carousel itself was shuttered for the winter. She got out her pen and methodically altered the handwritten figures. “Motility I, Roman numeral,” she said, “that’s bad. That means zero motility, and without motility there is no forward movement, you understand me. But if I put a little V after the I, so now it’s Motility IV, that’s perfect, that’s A-OK. And here, sperm concentration, 5 million per milliliter, very low, but now I put a little 1 before the 5, and 15 million, this is normal according to World Health Organization, I looked it up. And so on, here, here, here. Improvement, improvement, improvement. You see? Now he’s fine. Now he is totally capable of fatherhood.”
She actually clapped her hands. The power of the smile of happiness spreading across her face was such that it could almost convince the person upon whom it was unleashed (me) that fiction was fact, that falsifying a diagnosis would actually alter that diagnosis in the real world. Almost, but not quite. “That may take care of his ego,” I said, “but the baby won’t arrive by stork, will it.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“What then, you’ll pretend to go on trying for a while and then persuade him to adopt?”
“Adoption is out of the question.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“I will find a donor.”
“A sperm donor.”
“Yes.”
“How will you get him to agree to that if he doesn’t know his own sperm isn’t working?”
“He will never agree to it.”
“You’ll get a sperm donor without telling him? How is that even possible? Aren’t there documents that have to be signed? Isn’t his consent necessary?”
“He will never consent.”
“Then how?”
She reached across the table and took my hands in hers.
“My darling René,” she said, “that is where you come in.”
Later:
“I don’t want a stranger’s child,” she said. “I don’t want to be made pregnant by a spatula. I want to do it the real way, with someone I trust, someone who is like family to me, someone who is a lovely handsome guy who could easily, don’t be embarrassed that I say this, turn me on. Take it as a compliment, please. I want to do it with you.”
“Vasilisa,” I said. “This is a terrible idea. This would not only be to deceive Nero, but to do the dirty on Suchitra also.”
“Not to deceive,” she said. “And it will not be even a little dirty, except for reasons of our personal preference. I have no wish to interfere in your love affair. This is just something you would do privately for me.”
Later.