Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

Lincolnesque was how a girl had described him, years ago. He supposed by that she had meant interestingly ugly, but he didn’t know that it really suited him; his face seemed to him neither that interesting nor that ugly, and certainly not that presidential. Still, he wasn’t sure but that her comment might not have prompted him to grow his first beard, back in college.

He could always grow it back now. And shave it off again if he didn’t like it. And then regrow it and buy a new car, and sell the car if he didn’t like that, and—

You could take a walk , a voice in his head said.

Clear as a bell, clear as a fucking bell, as if some little man crawled up inside his head and spoke to him. Great, he thought. Just like all those people who get messages from the CIA beamed in through the fillings in their teeth. Voices. Just what he needed.

He finished his cigarette and went back into the waiting room.

Twenty minutes later the need for a cigarette drove him outside again. By now it was raining, a light drizzle that was just enough to make him get in the car. He lit the cigarette, and, as he breathed out smoke, fatigue washed over him in a wave. He put the cigarette in the ashtray and closed his eyes for a moment.

He woke abruptly with the sensation of having dreamed vividly but no recollection of the dream, no sense at all of what it might have been. His cigarette was gone, burned to ash in the dashboard ashtray. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past four, but he didn’t know how long he’d been out because he had no idea when he’d gotten into the car.

He went back to the clinic to wait for Kit.

“Piece of cake,” she said.

“Rough, huh?”

“No,” she said. “No irony intended. It was really nothing. I’ve had worse times in the dentist’s chair.”

“I’ve had the worst times of my life in the dentist’s chair.”

“Well, this was nothing. Really.”

“Great.”

“I guess.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, this doesn’t make any sense, but I sort of feel it ought to be more unpleasant.”

“They ought to hurt you.”

“And lecture you and tell you you’re bad. Yeah. I don’t really mean that, but yeah, sort of. I figure I killed something today. I committed a sin.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m not beating myself up, I’m stating an opinion. I think it’s a sin. I don’t think it’s a crime, I don’t think it shouldn’t be legal, I’m not sorry I did it, but I think it’s a sin, I think it’s fucking wrong .”

“So you’re a bad girl.”

“I’m not a bad girl. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna sit around and feel terrific about this.”

“Okay.”

It was raining again. It had stopped, and now it had started again. She said, “It was a girl.”

“The uh—”

“The growth I had removed. I wish they didn’t tell you. It makes the whole thing a lot more personal.”

“That’s terrible. They just tell you?”

“No, you have to ask.”

“Oh.”

“Even then he didn’t want to tell me. I insisted.”

“Oh.”

“I always have to know. The first one was a girl, the second was a boy, and now this one. Girl boy girl.”

“Keep it up, Kit.”

“This is called cauterizing the wound, man. Otherwise it’ll fester later on.”

“It doesn’t sound like such a piece of cake to me.”

She sighed. “Physically it was nothing. Emotionally it was nothing at the time, but I seem to be having trouble passing the afterbirth. I’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

“Fucking diaphragms,” she said savagely. “You feel about as spontaneous as a commencement address, and you’re all gummed up with glop so that a person would have to be crazy to go down on you, and then the fucking thing doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to. Some women wear diaphragms for years and never have a problem. Maybe they don’t fuck. Maybe that’s their secret.”

“Didn’t you have an IUD?”

“You bet I did. I got it after the second abortion because I didn’t want to go through all that again. I had it for five or six years, however long it was.”

“Did you have problems with it?”

“Never.”

“Then—”

“Then I started hearing all this crap on the news about women dying because of IUDs, or giving birth to otters, or whatever was happening to them, and I went to my doctor and had him remove it and got fitted for a diaphragm, and the rest is fucking history.” She closed her eyes. “Besides,” she said quietly, “I was thinking about getting pregnant.”

“You were what?”

“I wasn’t going to mention this,” she said. “I’m thirty-two, I’ll be thirty-three in September.”

“Ah, the old biological clock.”

“Tick fucking tock. And I got to thinking. I’m nowhere near getting married. There wasn’t even anybody I wanted to have an affair with. I was with Marvin, and I didn’t even like him enough to have an affair with him, but I did because there was nobody else around I liked better. And when we broke up I knew I didn’t want to get married, and you don’t really have to get married to have a kid. So I had the IUD removed.”

“And got pregnant on purpose?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Well—”

“I had the IUD removed partly because I was scared, I already explained that, and also so that if I did decide to get pregnant, I could just do it, I wouldn’t have to make a doctor’s appointment first. ‘Hi, you’re neat, let’s have a baby together, excuse me, I gotta call my gynecologist.’ So this way I had the option of leaving the diaphragm out, but I never made that decision and I never did leave the diaphragm out, and I got pregnant anyway without intending to. Unless you’re gonna get into unconscious motivations, in which case please stop the car and let me out now, because I don’t want to have to listen to that.”

“Jesus, Kit.”

“Well, you know what I mean. ‘You must have wanted to be pregnant or you wouldn’t be pregnant. You must have wanted to get a splinter under your thumbnail or you wouldn’t have a splinter under your thumbnail.’”

“You must have wanted a hair up your ass,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have—”

“A hair up my ass,” she finished. “Well, who in her right mind wouldn’t want one? Anyway, before I could explore the possibility of getting intentionally pregnant, I got unintentionally pregnant.”

“Got it.”

She sighed. “And of course I thought about keeping the kid.” She looked at him. “But that seemed like such an ass-backwards way of doing it, you know? I mean it’s not fucking parthenogenesis, who the father is is important, you know? Even if you raise him yourself half his cells come from somebody else, and that makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“One of the guys I slept with was an Indian. American Indian. Now I don’t think I’m a racist, or at least not that much of one, and I don’t think I’d object to having a child whose father was an Indian, but the idea of not knowing. What do you do, wait and see if the kid can track game in order to figure out who his father was?”

A little later she said, “This is crazy.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“You’ll think it’s crazy.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. What would you think about the idea of having a child?”

“You and me?”

“Ain’t nobody else here, boss.”

“Jesus, Kit.”

“I’d take care of it. The financial part and all that, and you could be as much or as little of a father as you wanted. I know it’s crazy. Please remember that I said in front it was crazy.”