Colin Harrison - Afterburn

Lady, he thought, you got the wrong guy. She might actually kill him with such excitement, even if he were capable of it, what with his back and everything else. And would she be a good mother? The letter had nothing to do with being a mother, in fact. He put it into the no pile.

Martha opened the door to the conference room. She looked like what she was-a tired lawyer, overweight, overburdened, used to hearing her own voice.

"You met Towers?"

"I did."

"And?" she asked.

"Inspires confidence."

Martha sighed. "Don't do it, Charlie."

"Come on." He handed her the maybe folder. "Some of these are pretty impressive."

"What's this?" She opened the folder.

"I want you to contact these women and set up interviews, here, as soon as you can. Next few days if possible. The rest are not right. Please tell them they've been rejected."

Martha's eyebrows lifted. "Rejected."

"Yes. Write them a nice letter. Don't put my name on it, of course."

She glared at him. "You're serious."

"Yes. Also, did you set up my appointment at the fertility clinic?"

"For tomorrow morning," she answered. "If you stop now, I won't bill you for what we've done so far."

"Martha," Charlie said, "either help me to the best of your ability and shut up about it, or tell me to find someone else. You're pushing me and I don't like it." He pulled himself to his feet. "What's it going to be?" Martha's fleshy neck reddened as she stared at him, the room silent, an air-conditioning vent rattling, telephones softly trilling in other offices. "Martha?"

He waited for an answer, and when it didn't come, he showed himself out.

I don't want to go home, Charlie thought, carrying the Shanghai bowl as he got out of the cab. I don't want to go home, but I will. Kelly, a uniformed figure of sweaty obedience, held the taxi door.

"Just saw Mrs. Ravich," Kelly observed.

"How was she?"

"She had a lot of packages, considering this heat."

"She was doing her duty for the American economy."

"Sir?"

"If nobody buys unnecessary junk, we'll plunge into a depression."

He crabbed past the mahogany paneling into the elevator, and Lionel, just starting the night shift, blinked his slo-mo recognition, an ancient mystic in an elevator man's uniform, all vitality in his being concentrated between the elbow and fingertips of his spectral left hand, which incessantly fondled the brass throttle. Where Lionel's right hand hung down against his pants leg, the material was worn shiny from the incidental graze of his unkempt fingertips.

Charlie stepped out into the foyer of his apartment. "Good evening, Lionel."

"Evening, Mr. Ravich."

He opened the front door. "Ellie?" He pushed the bowl back behind the coats and boots in the hall closet. He'd surprise her later. "Ellie?" Jolly her up, he thought, make her feel good, even though never in a million years would he be buried alive in a retirement community where men dribbled cereal onto their three-hundred-dollar sweaters and farted disconsolately through the day. Napping in their golf carts. Not me, he told himself, not the man who yanked eight million after-tax dollars from a dead man's mouth. "I'm here!" he called. "Your first husband is back. He has absolutely nothing interesting to tell you-no announcement from afar, no volatile shift in stock prices, including his beloved Teknetrix, no bulletins of world events, no private revelations, no confessional outbursts." He listened. "Ellie?" Nothing. Silence-the great roar of marriage. "What did you buy that needed the efforts of our man Kelly?"

Ellie came out of the bathroom off the kitchen, turning out the light. She kissed him quickly. "You sound like you had a drink at the office."

Bit excited here, he thought. "I didn't but I wouldn't mind one."

"Gin and tonic?"

He followed her to the bar in the dining room. "What did you get?"

"Get?"

"Shopping. Packages. Supporting the American economy."

"Nothing."

"Kelly said you came in with a bunch of packages."

She frowned. "No. I don't think I did."

He took his briefcase through their bedroom into his office. On the bed sat two large bags from Bloomingdale's, another from Saks. Don't mention it, he thought, there's no point. Her mind is just on other things. "You expect," he asked when he returned to the dining room, "that Julia and Brian will try to use another woman's egg? A surrogate?"

"I think it's an idea." Ellie handed him his glass. "They do that now frequently."

"But the child will never know who his real mother is."

"His real mother will be whoever changed his diaper and read books to him."

He tasted his drink. Terrible. Too strong by half. He poured an inch out and added tonic. "You know what I mean, Ellie, I mean the biological. Wouldn't the kid always ask himself the rest of his life?"

"It depends on how secure he is."

"But aren't you bringing a child into the world who is going to be damaged by what he or she can never know?"

Ellie took the ice back into the kitchen and he followed her. "I don't look at it that way," she said. "The child would have his biological father and an adoptive mother. Julia will be a beautiful mother."

"I know. Maybe I'm not putting it the right way." He needed to bend the question around for himself, since tomorrow he was due to whack off in a glass beaker or jar or Coke bottle or whatever they used in high-tech medical whack-off joints. "Here's what I mean. You have these women having children by themselves, and some are just going and getting sperm from any old place. I mean, how do you feel about this? Those children don't know who their fathers are."

"That's fine," Ellie said distractedly.

"Why?"

"Because if the woman went to all this trouble she wants to have a baby very much."

"But what-"

"Men never understand what it is to have a baby. Of course it is harder to raise a child by yourself. But for some women that is actually better, you know. They can love the baby and not have the distraction of the man, the competition for their time." She looked out the kitchen window toward Central Park. "I raised both kids while you were away. I was perfectly happy. I had everything I needed at the base. My only worry was if you were safe."

"You were a good mother."

Ellie shrugged. "The kids were okay. The kids knew you could be killed in the plane, and that's much worse than wondering about some father you never met."

"I thought you didn't talk to them about the plane."

"I didn't, but, Charlie, it was the base! All the kids had dads in planes. Remember Janny McNamara? And Susan Howard? They both lost their husbands, and they weren't even in Vietnam."

"That was an in-flight refueling thing." The frontseater, Howard, had misjudged his speed and flown into the jet-fuel boom sticking out of a KC-130 tanker, impaling the cockpit.

"I don't remember," Ellie went on. "What I'm saying is, I was okay and so were the kids, even though we missed you and-All I'm saying is that I don't blame these young mothers. To nurse your own child is just-well, you remember how I was. These young women want that. Why can't they have that?"

Now he was going to use Martha Wainwright's argument. "But shouldn't they adopt some other child who needs a mother?"

"Maybe, in a perfect world."

"What about the men who donate their sperm to the sperm banks? Isn't that just vanity?"

"No."

"Why?"

"They want to go on. I understand that."

They want to go on. She understood that.

After dinner, Ellie put down her spoon and looked at him. "I really want you to come visit the retirement place."

"Why?"

"Because you might like it, you know. You might actually think to yourself, Ellie has a good idea here."

"I'll visit it soon as I can."