C Box: Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

That stopped her cold, and she stood there with a pale and dripping angel fish in a little net.

“So you want to send someone else to WTB, then?”

“Yes.”

“Whom do you suggest?”

Our department consisted of the two of us. I suggested Rita Greene-Bellardo, a new employee who served as executive assistant but seemed to have little to do.

“Pregnant,” Linda said. “I just heard. She’s gonna have her baby and take the maternity leave and quit. I heard her telling a girlfriend that was her plan. We can’t depend on her to follow up.”

I floated the name of Pete Maxfield, who headed the media-relations department. Pete sometimes worked with international journalists and might have some experience he could use at the show. Linda didn’t like Pete, though.

“Honey,” she said, “Pete is a hound dog. He’d spend the whole time drinking German beer and trying to get some deaf, dumb, and blind German girl to come to his room at the hotel, or he’d blow the entertainment bud get on prostitutes. This is our biggest and most important market. We don’t just send people for the sake of sending someone. The only choice we have is me, and you know it.”

I did, but I didn’t want to ask.

“I’ll be in Taiwan,” she said. “I can’t be both places.”

I knew where this was headed.

“You need to have that big meeting with Malcolm Harris,” she said.

Malcolm Harris was the iconic UK owner of a travel company called AmeriCan Adventures-a play on America and Canada-which sent thousands of British tourists to North America on custom-designed package tours. AmeriCan was the number one tour operator to Denver and the Mountain West, and thus a very important client. Our marching orders were to treat him like a god, despite his reputation as being quarrelsome, cantankerous, and smug about his claims that he knew more about America than practically any American he’d ever met. He expected to be fawned over, wined and dined, and he was. Any requests he made were immediately first priority in our office and across destination promotion bureaus throughout the region. Linda was infamous for attaching herself to him like Velcro when she worked the European market, hanging on his every word, laughing at his asides, and beholding him with what was described by one of her detractors as “Nancy Reagan eyes.”

She said, “As you know, he’s thinking of establishing a U.S. reservations office and call center to handle his tours.” “We’re talking hundreds of jobs. He’s looking at three cities-New York, L.A., and Denver. We’re the front-runner because of our location. If we got that office here, the mayor would love us because he could say our tourism efforts not only bring in tourists but jobs. I’m sure he’s meeting with reps from L.A. and New York. If you just don’t show up in Berlin to convince him to choose Denver, we may lose out on this.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. I said, “Does the mayor know about this, then?”

“It was in my report to him last month. His chief of staff sent me an e-mail about it last week, asking if we’d landed AmeriCan yet.”

I let her go on.

“Honey,” she said finally, “do you realize that every time the city gets a bud get hit, and they’re looking for places to cut, someone always suggests international tourism promotion? We’re the easy ones to dump because they think we have these glamorous jobs and jet all around the world. We’re easy to dump, you know? Tab Jones has no love for us, but he sees us as a means for him to travel the world, so he’s not given the department the ax. But every time there’s a budget crunch, I go to the mat and fight for us. I show them facts and figures, and this time when we were on the chopping block I told them about the possibility AmeriCan might open up a company here. Tab and the mayor got all excited about that because tourists are ghosts, but a building and jobs are something he can take credit for. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“If you don’t go, honey, we can kiss this department and your job goodbye. And I need this job.”

“I do, too.”

I wasn’t kidding. Since Melissa had quit her job to stay home with our daughter, we were literally one paycheck away from not making our mortgage payment. The loan we had was one of those bad ones, one of the worst decisions we’d made. We had no cushion. If I lost my job, Jesus, I didn’t know where we’d be. Especially given the situation we were in, possibly trying to prove in court what great parents we were. My job was everything .

She stepped back, sized me up, said, “So you understand me, then?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be going to Germany and meeting with Malcolm Harris.”

“Good man, Jack,” she said. “I knew you’d come around. Let’s get going on those leads now.”

As I gathered up the work and stuffed it into my briefcase, Linda said, “Aren’t there other babies out there?”

“Not an option,” I said back with heat. “It’s not like trading her in for a new model,” thinking: How can she not understand?

She waved dismissively, “Well, good luck with the baby thing.”

THE BABY THING.

We had tried everything to get pregnant. Melissa studied up on the medical literature, threw herself into reproductive studies with a single-minded will as only she can do, reading everything from the library, on the Internet, becoming as well versed in the subject as any doctor and better than most. Having sex became my second job. Melissa drew pink hearts on our wall calendar to chart our couplings. There were a lot of hearts. We had sex every morning for three weeks straight and every other evening in one magnificent stretch run. Once, when we were able to have lunch together downtown, she showed up with bare legs in a dress and told me over sandwiches that she wasn’t wearing underwear and that she’d rented a dayroom in a hotel next door. I could barely eat. I was equally aroused and alarmed, pointing out to her (tepidly, I admit) that with my job at the CVB it was possible someone might recognize me and assume the tryst was something it was not. She laughed and shook it off, then led me outside by the hand. In the elevator on the way to our floor, she started disrobing. I got hard, and she squeezed me through my pants. She said, “So you’re getting into it, then?”

But it was never about me not getting into it. I was. And I was, and am, wildly attracted to my wife. She’s my ideal . That she seemed to think-deep down-that she no longer did it for me and for some reason that was why we couldn’t conceive was as startling as it was desperate. I told her repeatedly she drove me wild. She said, “Then why can’t we have a baby, Jack?”

THE DOCTOR’S NAME WAS KIMMEL. He was thin, athletic, and fastidious in appearance. When we finally sat down with him at the clinic to review the tests, he confirmed what she had already determined: It was me.

“Let me put it this way,” the doctor said, turning slightly on his stool in my direction but not really facing me. “Imagine, if you will, that you are a machine gunner but not a good one. In fact, a lousy one. The worst one in the entire Corps.”

Kimmel paused to let that sink in.

“So I’m shooting blanks,” I said. “Thank you, Mr. Bedside Manner.”

He nodded, first to me, then to Melissa.

I felt Melissa’s eyes brush across the side of my face.

“There are alternatives, of course,” Kimmel said. “In this day and age, there really isn’t male infertility anymore. We can isolate a single sperm.” He explained procedures, drugs, in vitro fertilization.

We were hopeful. We tried them all, one after the other. For years. Melissa had three miscarriages. Our marriage became tense and our time together frustrating. There were long, silent meals and times we would be in the same room for hours and not look at each other. She secretly blamed me, I secretly blamed her. Her emotions were raw and increasingly close to the surface. Sometimes I caught her looking at me as if she was assessing my manhood and character, and I’d lash back with something sarcastic and cruel that I immediately regretted. I suggested once that maybe if we didn’t try so hard, maybe if we didn’t make our entire life’s mission to conceive a child, we could be happy again. She didn’t speak to me for weeks after that. I thought she might even leave me.