Miracle Creek(45)
Which was why, all throughout school, Matt supported Janine’s total focus on grades and fellowships, the way she set each goal and checked it off with methodical ease. It was impressive to watch. Sexy, even. Sure, it required sacrifices in the present—canceled dinners, no movies—but he hadn’t minded. It wasn’t as if he’d expected any different from med school; after all, what was grad school but the institutionalization of a future-oriented mind-set? For the present, pull all-nighters, eat shitty food, and go into debt, but it’ll all be worth it when you arrive—when you graduate, get a job, and start living for real. The thing was, though, there was no arriving with Janine. Only delaying. Any goal reached meant setting a new one, bigger, harder. Matt thought she’d stop and declare victory when her brother dropped out of college to become an actor, but maybe the endless goal-setting had become so much a habit by then that she couldn’t stop. She kept at it, but stripped of that previous freshness of rebellion, everything she did seemed futile, like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill every day, except instead of the boulder rolling back down every night like in the myth, the hill got twice as tall every night.
Sex was the one thing in their life immune from this future orientation. Even the decision to start trying for kids, unlike every other marital decision—from her taking his name (no) to type of lightbulb (LED)—hadn’t been the product of hours of discussion. Just a moment of spontaneity during foreplay one night when he reached for a condom and she said, “Do we need that?” and rolled on top, positioning her vulva just above the tip of his penis. As he shook his head no, she lowered her pelvis slowly, the delicious novelty of her impulsivity, her being in the moment, intertwining with the exquisiteness of her slippery warmth directly on his skin, engulfing him millimeter by millimeter. The next morning, the next night, and for the rest of the month, they continued with the condomless sex. Neither of them mentioned cycles or babies.
When Janine’s period came, there was no announcement, just an oh-by-the-way mention. But it was too casual, intentionally so, with a tinge of anxiety. The next month, her delivery was anxious with a tinge of desperation, and the following, desperate with a tinge of hysteria. Books on how to conceive appeared on their nightstand.
When Janine announced Ovulation Week—she’d track her cycle, and around her ovulation, they’d have as much sex as possible—Matt realized: her goal-setting, the exhausting tethering of every act to future milestones, had now infected sex. She’d said nothing about not having sex the other three weeks, but that was how it played out. And just like that, sex became something they did for no reason except conception. Clinical and schedule-based. Somewhere around the sperm viability and motility tests, Ovulation Week became Ovulation Day, a twenty-four-hour period for having sex as many times as possible, followed by twenty-seven days of “resting up.”
And then came the special-needs kids from HBOT—not only Rosa, TJ, and Henry, but also the kids he sometimes ran into from the other sessions—and even more upsetting, the mothers’ stories he was forced to hear for two hours every day. As a radiologist, he saw sick and hurt kids all the time, but witnessing the day-to-day challenges of actually raising these kids—it scared the shit out of him, and it was hard not to think that between his infertility and the HBOT patients, some higher power must be telling him (no, screaming at him) to stop, or at least wait and think things through first.
About a week into HBOT, after a morning dive when Kitt told them about TJ’s new “behavior,” fecal smearing (“Fecal, as in shit?” he’d said, and she’d said, “Yup, and smearing, as in rubbing all over walls, curtains, books, everything!”), Matt got a voice mail from Janine that according to her urine test, today was Ovulation Day and could he come home immediately? He ignored it, went to the hospital, and turned off his phone; ignored her increasingly frequent pages. He thought he’d gotten away with it when his mother-in-law barged into his office. “Janine want you home right now. She say it is day for … what is the word?” she said. Matt hurried to close the door before she could say “ovulation,” but before he could, she said in a clear, loud voice, “Orgasm. It is day for orgasm.”
When Matt got home, Janine was already naked, in bed—probably had been since her voice mail six hours ago. He started to say sorry, his phone had died, but she said, “Whatever. Just get over here. We’re running out of time. Hurry!”
He undressed, unbuttoning his shirt and unbuckling his belt methodically, slowly. He got in bed, put his lips to hers, and tried to focus on her nipples, on her fingers touching his penis, but nothing happened. “Come on,” she said, and pumped his penis, a little too hard. He saw the ovulation stick on a tissue on the nightstand, just sitting there—it seemed to be silently commanding him, Get on with it! Fuck your wife right now!—and he had to laugh at the absurdity, at the way this 99-cent pink stick from CVS had come to control and hijack what remained of his sex life.
“What is going on with you?” Janine said.
Matt lay back. What could he say? “I’m sorry, honey, but discussing orgasms with your mother has put me a bit out of the mood, and besides, I think God doesn’t want us to have kids, and also, have you heard of ‘fecal smearing’?” He said, “Maybe it’s HBOT. I haven’t been sleeping. Let’s skip this month.”