“I can’t share everything,” he said, looking up at the ceiling.
“You can, you just won’t. I’m your wife. I need to know these things.”
“And I’m your husband. You’ve got to respect what hurts me.”
“Fine. We’ll argue about donors. I don’t want to use Pete’s sperm.”
“Why, because he’s my brother or because he’s white? Or because he’s deaf? Tell me what’s going on here. Please.”
“This is my father’s name,” she said, her throat thick with suppressed crying. “I can’t help but wonder what he would think… What my mother would think if…”
Erik stared at her. “If they knew you were in an inter-racial marriage?”
Melanie looked away.
“We talked about this,” he said. “We talked about this when we started dating. We talked about it before we moved in together. After we got engaged I asked if you were sure and you got mad at me. You were insulted. I apologized and said I would never ask you again. Do you remember this, Melanie?”
“It’s different now.”
“Different how?”
“It’s different when you’re trying to have a child.”
“It wasn’t my idea.” His voice was raised. He wanted to throw something. “You went off the pill without telling me. You didn’t even instigate a conversation. A whole year, you tried to get pregnant on the sly and race wasn’t a problem. Only now, when I can’t get you pregnant, it’s a burning issue? Now we’re going to have this conversation?”
“You,” she whispered, “are the king of un-had conversations.”
“Stay on the topic,” he said. “If we use your eggs, any child of ours is going to be half black.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t use my eggs at all?”
He opened his mouth and shut it, thinking. “Maybe it’s the fairest thing,” he said.
She was shaking her head, like a girl being told she couldn’t have a pony. “No.”
“You have your eggs,” he said. “I have nothing.”
“That’s not my fault,” she said. “What happened to you isn’t my fault.”
“It’s my fault, then?”
“Do you even want to have a baby?” She shouted it. The words echoed off the walls. “Because I don’t think you want it.”
“I don’t want it?”
“No.”
“I did everything,” he said, pushing the words through the wall of his teeth. “I did everything, Mel. I subjected myself to every test, every procedure. Every needle and every goddamn way someone wanted to crawl up my works. I never said no.”
“But you never said ‘I want it.’” The tears ran down her face. “Never once did you say you wanted it more than anything and wanted it with me.”
He looked at her. Could only look.
“I’m your wife,” she whispered. “This is a marriage, not an extended playdate.”
“Mel—”
“I can’t stand this, Erik. I can’t stand your ambivalence anymore. I plan our social life. I plan our vacations. I plan this, I plan that and you just show up. I proposed because I knew you never would. I shocked you by going off the pill but you didn’t fight me. You just tottered along without an impassioned opinion either way. That’s all you do—passively go where I tell you. On auto-pilot. You can take it or leave it. You don’t have a fire in your belly for anything. What if I weren’t here planning and telling, what would you do?”
Erik turned away from her, looking out the window. Counting. Breathing.
“You keep secret the things you’re passionate about,” Melanie said. “I’m tired of trying to dig them out of you. And I can’t take the way you just follow your life around instead of leading it. All the while the best of you is stuck in Lancaster with that bitch who made you feel so—”
Bitch made Erik whip his head around so fast his neck cracked. Melanie’s sentence never ended.
“Feel so what?” he said. “What did she make me feel? Go on. Tell me what she made me feel.”