Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

I numbed out. I let Andy take me out for a drink (read: five), and then I let him take me home and join me in my very own bed, surrounded by the dozens of index cards I’d put up on all four of my walls bearing the names of my sweet Triangle Shirtwaist babes. I had papered the room with them in an effort to truly live with them, those entrancing names: Yetta, Esther, Gussie, Minnie, Celia, Bess, Pearl, Rosie, Ida, Fannie. Quaint names, evocative of the old ladies those girls had not become.

Andy—“my favorite” because he is more than a man, more than a friend, more than a fuck buddy: he is my favorite of any man, any friend, any fuck buddy, and that, in a life full of men, friends, and fuck-buddies, is meaningful — blamed his subpar performance on feeling freaked out by the names, though it was more than likely that his six whiskeys were to blame. Or, come to think of it, the fact that my bed had been only semirecently vacated by that man I was supposed to have married, a man so “right” for me and yet simultaneously so heinously wrong for me that I can now hardly think of our engagement as anything more than a valiant attempt at arranged marriage.

Anyway, I didn’t mind Andy’s impotence at all. Fucking him was mostly an excuse to be just that close to him, to have him in my space, to feel his arms around me and feel momentarily understood, briefly gotten, in a way that is most rare indeed (somewhat like I feel when I read you, Philip, it must be said). When I’m with Andy I want, more or less, to wrap myself around him and crawl into a deep, dark hole with him and die with him. Have you ever been with someone like that? Amazing. The truth, anyway, is that I was too inebriated and distraught to be feeling genuinely sexual anyhow. So after that sloppy, comical effort at intercourse, Andy and I held each other (this is probably anathema to you, buddy; I apologize) and he passed out while I gazed drunkenly, dumbly around at those proliferate names, my Etta Kornbluth, my Dora Kirshenbaum, my Minnie Gluck. All still obviously long dead, but somehow even more dead now than before, snatched from me (snatched from the beautiful and infinite resurrection I was planning for them) by Alana Orenstein, by my own tardy, common inspiration. I had so wanted to breathe life into those names, Philip. I had experimented a little with their individual ghosts keeping company with my alter-ego protagonist (a twenty-five-year-old high school teacher by the name of Audrey Rubens who’s just broken it off with her immature and abusive fiancé) as she traverses the sometimes-rocky terrain of her postadolescence in Greenwich Village. Yetta-as-patron-saint-of-marijuana, Gussie-as-patron-saint-of-

alcohol, Pearl-as-patron-saint-of-career-confusion, Minnie-as-patron-saint-of-one-night-stands, Unidentified-as-patron-saint-of-the-search-for-love, and so forth.

There I was, Philip, all of twenty-six years old, my hard-won infant novel worthless, my broken engagement still haunting and heartbreaking, my parents still aging and aging and aging without the great reward of grandchildren, my cervix a ticking time-bomb, no health insurance in sight, my beloved graduate program almost over, my agent sitting on my collection until Ploughshares agreed to publish a story (read: indefinitely), temp-agency paperwork waiting for my signature. And the thought that kept me awake that entire night was simply that I could not find the strength within myself to start over on any count. Not on another novel, not on another stultifying relationship that might or might not lead to another engagement/marriage, not on any one of the many, many temp jobs lined up like dominoes as far as the eye could see. And yet I want the same things I’ve always wanted: a life of books and writing and writers, a second chance at rescuing and creating a life for those poor fucking Triangle Shirtwaist kittens, and a family of my very own. So here’s the solution to all of the above, Philip; here’s what occurred to me while I stared into the receding darkness that night, curled up on the edge of the bed to avoid the wet spot, Andy in a whiskey coma beside me, names, names, names on white index cards circulating in my peripheral vision; here’s my objective, finally, the stage set: I want to bear you a child.

I had so desperately yearned to breathe life into those names, Philip. But now I’ve figured out an even better way to do that; a way to produce something literary and lasting; a way to prove, once and for all (while we’re at it) the existence of God. I want to have your child. If I can’t be the heir to your literary throne, I’d like at least then to be the vessel for the manufacture of an actual heir, flesh-and-blood proof, once you’re gone and the books are all that’s otherwise left of you, that you were here, that I read you, and that it meant something special, something singular and personal and only between the two of us. (The overtones here of traditional groupiehood and falsely-empowering femininity are hard to outrun, but quite frankly, and I hope you can buy this, I really don’t give a shit.)

Okay, now. The practicalities. I don’t want any money. I have a small, livable trust fund courtesy of my paternal grandmother (whom I never met, and who invested cannily in the stock market, and who, it would seem, continues here the theme of long-dead would-be old ladies assuming center stage). My clueless parents, confronted with their only daughter pregnant by no man in sight, will surely help me in any way they can. Frankly, given the awful dearth of naches they’ve gotten from their three children (again: one dead, one useless, and me, trying now to make good after my spectacularly humiliating broken engagement), I expect full-on bubbe/zayde joy, the mystery of conception notwithstanding.

You can change a few diapers or you can be completely absent. You can watch her grow in monthly or annual or biannual pictures or you can take her to a Yankee game now and again (I heard about your big abandonment of the Mets) or you can have her up at your house in Connecticut summers. Or winters. We can live with you or near you or we can live across the country. I don’t care. It can be strictly our secret or you can send a press release to the New York Times . You won’t have to worry about a goddamn thing, Philip. I’ve got me some nice birthing hips (apple-shaped, like my mother’s, which she claims makes child-bearing relatively easy) and I’ll be a wonderful, loving, responsible mother. I’ll grow roses and herbs and bake delicious vegan cookies. Send her to alternative day school alongside Hebrew school, sing her “Free to Be…You and Me” when she can’t sleep, read her books and books and more books, disallow more than an hour or two of TV a week (but not in an arbitrarily authoritarian manner), teach her to be kind, generous, self-aware, inquisitive, ethical, shrewd. Laugh a lot.

The big question, though, is whether you still have the capacity for ejaculation. Did prostate cancer leave you the way Zuckerman’s left him? Has cancer (or age) made, at long last, a cuddler of you? And if so (I know I’m grasping here) did you by any lucky spot of foresight (or optimism) take the step of putting away semen in some lab/clinic/whatever? This strikes me as something you might have done, you freaky old man. We won’t get into the cosmic irony that may have wrested from the century’s most unabashedly virile writer (that was not meant pejoratively) his power to orgasm, his power, even, maybe, to get hard. Isn’t that just like the goddamn universe, though? Christ, Philip. But these technical matters we’ll discuss later. Science is still pretty far from allowing a scenario where we might simply skin your elbow for some DNA, etc. But who knows? Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.