James Hynes - Next

The water stops running before it gets hot, so Kevin mashes the button again with the heel of his palm. He dips his head, cups lukewarm water in both hands, and splashes his face. He knows how to read a pregnancy test — he knows he’s nobody’s dad yet — but he still doesn’t know what the discarded test really means. He found the stick five weeks ago, and Stella hasn’t said a word about it. She must have missed a period, but did she take the test because she hoped she was pregnant or because she hoped she wasn’t? He’s seen her little clamshell birth-control dispenser in the medicine cabinet, but it’s not like he keeps track, it’s not like he counts the pills to make sure she’s taking one each day. Kevin wears a condom most of the time, too, but sometimes he doesn’t. He didn’t that night in Chicago, when Stella, her eyes shining behind that goofy mask, plucked the little foil square out of his fingers and flipped it across the room, murmuring wetly in his ear, “I want it to be just us, Kevin, skin to skin.”

Where does she get this stuff? he wondered at the time, but even now, his cock stirs at the memory. He’d thought the masks were silly, he’d hated the music, but he remembers that night vividly: the shudder of her thighs around his waist, the rabbit pulse of the vein in her neck, the tremble of her lower lip under the gaudy mask. He splashes his face again and presses the soap dispenser. The milky goo in his palm looks like semen and smells like coconut, and he starts to laugh as he lathers his face, pushing his fingers up into his hairline and along his sideburns and around the back of his neck. He squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs with his fingertips, and in the reddened blackness behind his eyelids he can see Stella’s wrists straining against the leather cuffs — well, vinyl really, she isn’t as snobbish about sex gear as she is with trousers — and he can hear the rhythmic chirp of her excitement. He opens his eyes to peer through soapy eyelashes at the lather dripping off his nose and eyebrows and into the collar of his shirt, then presses the faucet again and splashes double handfuls of lukewarm water against his face, spattering the mirror and the countertop. Blinking at his reflection, he yanks a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and scrubs himself dry, vigorously rubbing his hair.

Chicago was eight months ago, so the pregnancy test wasn’t the result of their own Cirque de Drake, but they’ve gone bareback since. More frequently since then, in fact, with Stella assuring him that it’s okay, she’s got it taken care of, or that she’s just had her period, or that she’s just about to have it. He unbuckles his belt, slides it out, and coils it on the changing table, and he unbuttons his shirt slowly, pausing only to glance up at the ceiling for a security camera. Fuck it, he’s a customer, he’s dropped nearly seventy bucks here today, and anyway, there can’t be a law against changing clothes in a public restroom, not even in Texas. There’s always the possibility, of course that Stella took the test because she wanted to make sure she wasn’t pregnant. And she wasn’t, this time, anyway, which was probably just as well, because Kevin had just read of some study in the New York Times that said older men were more likely to father autistic children or kids with birth defects. Just like men, spermatozoa don’t stay young forever — they age, they break down, they decay. He didn’t actually say anything to her about the article, but he left the newspaper on the kitchen table with the article prominently displayed, and it was gone when he came home from work.

He strips off the shirt and with a twinge of midwestern guilt — what a waste, all it needs is laundering — he wads it into a ball and stuffs it in the trash. Who is he kidding? Stella’s announcement in the car coming home from Gaia, her spinning of condoms across the room like little Frisbees, supposedly in the heat of the moment — there’s only one thing on Stella’s mind. No matter how geriatric his seed is, Stella wants a child. He takes off his pricey shoes and puts the left one on the counter. He sniffs the right one and runs a dry paper towel through it, which comes out a little damp, smelling of his foot, but showing no blood. It’s all soaked into his sticky sock, which he peels off with two fingers and flings into the trash. Then he peels off the other one and tosses it, too, and then, right there in the overlit, over-air-conditioned, Muzaked men’s room, miles from home, surrounded by strangers in all directions, Kevin feels the shock of the icy tile against his bare soles like the opening of an abyss at his feet. It’s like the time he was hiking the coast of Donegal — back when he was responsible for no one but himself and could do things like that — and the red-faced warden of the slovenly youth hostel told him not to go up on the cliffs, the fog had rolled in and it wasn’t safe, and Kevin went anyway, figuring as long as he couldn’t hear the surf booming against the rocks, he probably wasn’t close to the cliff edge, and he strode happily through the mist beading on his anorak like diamonds, until a sudden shift in the wind simultaneously carried the thunder of the surf to him and blew the mist away like a veil to reveal that he was inches, inches, from a sheer, thousand-foot drop into roiling black water. His whole body convulsed in shock, nearly tipping him over the edge, and he saved himself only by dropping to his ass and scuttling crabwise back away from the edge.

Just as he scuttles crabwise now back away from the very thought of fatherhood, because he knows fatherhood would upend his life. For starters, it would cost him lots and lots of money — not just the prenatal care and the birth, but food, clothing, shelter, medicine, fees, tuition, toys — twenty years of it at least, without the kid contributing one thin dime. Thousands of dollars right off the bat, because Stella would want nothing but the best baby paraphernalia, wireless baby monitors and Baby Einstein DVDs and handcrafted wooden toys and some Swedish-engineered stroller with more safety features than a Volvo. Not to mention Kevin’s house would have to be babyproofed top to bottom: every socket capped, every cabinet latched, every blade locked away, the chemicals under Kevin’s sinks sealed up like a Superfund site. And never mind the expense — what perks of his semibachelor life would he have to give up? He has friends with kids, he knows that for years he’d have to forego movies, concerts, going to clubs. No more eating out. No more spur of the moment weekend trips. No more reading Martin Amis for hours in the bath. No more performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company. No more devoting an entire weekend to watching a whole season and all the extras of Galactica straight through on DVD. And no more HBO, if there’s a chance that little Kevin or Stella Jr. could wander into the room and glimpse a bloody murder or a pole dance, and he’d have to answer the question, “What’s that, Daddy?”

And, again, how old would he be when the kid’s graduating from high school? Kevin would never have a real retirement, he’d be working to pay for the kid’s college till he keeled over dead. He wouldn’t live long enough for the kid to take care of him. And what if he gets sick or dies when the kid’s still young? Could Stella raise a child on her own? High-strung, tense, impatient, capricious — not the most maternal qualities, if he does say so himself. Not to mention those scars on her arms and inside her thighs — old and pale, but unmistakable — and her nightmares and her periodic daylight sojourns in the Stella Continuum. What happens when little Kevin or Stella Jr. is sticking his or her finger into an electrical socket or choking on strained peas or squeezing through the railing of Kevin’s second-story deck, and Mommy’s just staring into space, gesturing and murmuring to herself? If I’m not around, the kid’s dead, and if I am around, I’m the alpha parent by default, picking up the slack while Stella freaks or zones out, with me telling the screaming kid, “Mommy needs a little time out, kiddo. Mommy loves you, but Mommy needs her space.”