“That’s not the point,” Andrew said. “I don’t want to have a baby. I don’t want to be a parent. One of the prerogatives of being gay, I always thought, was childlessness without guilt.”
Sam and Andrew had been together more than fourteen years, time for the second seven-year itch. The ardor of their early years had faded, but their attachment to each other, their history together, their common interests, “the en-durables,” Andrew called them, made the relationship still the center of their lives. Life without the other was if not an unthinkable event then one they avoided speaking about. Until Sam wanted a baby, their only other serious bone of contention, the only heated arguments they ever had, had been over Susanna. Andrew never said outright to Sam he didn’t want him to see her; he wanted Sam on his own to give her up. He didn’t understand the relationship; he felt it excluded him. Sam never mentioned to Andrew when he had been to see her. He kept her out of their conversations.
“You never spend time with Harry’s girls,” Andrew said. “Do you even like them?”
“I don’t want Harry’s children. I want my own,” Sam said.
“Does Susanna want a baby?” Andrew asked.
“Why do you ask that? What has that to do with us?” Sam said.
“Does she?” Andrew asked.
“Yes,” Sam said.
“Don’t do that,” Andrew said.
—
Andrew wondered if their relationship would survive. He had drawn the line: no children. He hadn’t liked his parents. His parents hadn’t liked him. They hated his homosexuality. They thought it was an accusation against them: they hadn’t brought him up right.
“Didn’t they know the domineering mother/rejecting father theory had been thrown out?” Sam had asked the first time they talked about Andrew’s family.
“No,” Andrew said. “They’re Catholic. Your parents were practically Jewish in their acceptance.”
Sam shook his head. “It wasn’t Jewish, it was echt WASP. There was no struggle to understand, no discussion of feelings, no looking for causes, no guilt or shame. They never thought they were responsible for our characters or our conduct; we were who we were.” He laughed. “They ignored a lot. I suspect expediency had a part. They were outnumbered. Both of them knew parents could ruin children, by putting cigarettes out on their arms, insulting and belittling them, hovering and undermining confidence, that sort of thing. Beyond that, they didn’t think parents had much influence. I asked my mother, when I was fifteen, ‘Why was I gay, only me, not the others?’ ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Genetic roulette. Package deal. You’re also the only scientist. Don’t worry. It will work out. Everyone has an awful adolescence.’ I believed her.”
“My parents are of the lifestyle school,” Andrew said. “?‘Your choice,’ my father said when I told him I was moving to New Haven to be with you. ‘You’ll never get tenure, either of you.’ I couldn’t tell if he was prophesying or placing a curse.”
Andrew had been and remained in love with Sam. Sam wasn’t sure what he felt anymore but he knew he had never loved Andrew with the same intensity. Sam was used to being loved. And then there was Susanna. Andrew knew that Sam wasn’t sexually interested in her, but she offered a compelling alternative narrative, the possibility of traditional married life.
“I don’t mind your old boyfriends at all,” Andrew said to Sam during one of their talks about having a child, “or even your new ones.” Sam knew he meant Joe, but said nothing. “Only Susanna,” Andrew said. “What is it with her?”
“She’s the Other,” Sam said.
“Are you going hetero?” Andrew said.
“Don’t be an ass,” Sam said. “We’re not lovers, Susanna and I. We have less at stake. We let things ride. She’s like a sister.”
“Another member of Team Falkes,” Andrew said.
“Women’s Auxiliary,” Sam said, wanting to end the argument.
“I don’t want to lose you,” Andrew said. “But I couldn’t stay if you had a child with Susanna.”
Sam didn’t tell Andrew about Harry’s blowup with his mother. Andrew’s interest would verge on the prurient, another blot, after the Wolinskis, on the Falkeses’ escutcheon. Only fair, I suppose, Sam thought. We’ve been too lucky. He told Susanna, but only months later, after he had cooled off a bit. He had thought she would be angry at Harry, and Sam was angry enough at him; he didn’t need backup. He could have spoken to Lea, but that would be feeding the maw. Lea was loyal. For all he knew, she might have come around to Harry’s position. Harry was a fierce partisan, which made him a first-rate litigator but a second-rate husband. Lea regularly gave in to him because she didn’t have his thirst for combat. It was only because her parents were outraged that their daughters weren’t baptized.
“If you marry Jewish,” she said to Harry, “you have to make accommodations.”
“I could say the same thing,” he said.
“Isn’t it enough that they won’t be bat mitzvahed?” she said. “Don’t be greedy.”
Harry wanted to replicate his childhood. Church was a part of it, along with Trinity, tennis and, one day, he anticipated, Princeton. He was incredulous, almost indignant, when he learned that Lea was pregnant with a girl. He had assumed he’d have sons. “Watch it,” Lea said, as his face fell. “Fait accompli. And, it’s your fault.” When the second child was also a girl, he wondered out loud to Sam if it was divine retribution, payback for all his good luck.
“You have been lucky, we all have been,” Sam told him, “but this is about sperm. God isn’t tinkering in your scrotum; he’s off helping college basketball players make their free throws.”
—
Susanna called Sam. “This is it,” she said. “My birthday is in a month. I’ll be thirty-seven. I’ve reached the ‘now or never’ point. I want a baby and I can’t wait any longer. My eggs are decaying as we speak.”
“Andrew is adamant. I feel stuck,” Sam said.
“I know. You were on a fool’s errand thinking it would work out,” Susanna said. “It can’t work out. He doesn’t like me. I don’t like him.”
“Give me six months,” Sam said.
“No. If you and Andrew break up, you’ll never forgive me. We’ve been pretending these last months,” Susanna said.
“I want a baby too,” Sam said.
“We don’t get everything we want,” Susanna said.
“No,” Sam said.
“Have you said anything to your mother?” Susanna asked.
“Sort of. I was embarrassingly indirect, but she caught my drift,” Sam said. “She said I had to choose. She said that she had had to make a choice not so different from mine. I asked her what her choice was, what she had chosen. She laughed and said, ‘Don’t you know?’?”
“Don’t you?” Susanna asked.
“I don’t want to think about it,” Sam said. “I don’t want either of my parents to have had a life of their own, separate from us, separate from each other. They belong entirely to us.”
“Well, then, you know,” Susanna said.
“Yes,” Sam said.