Miracle Creek(46)

She didn’t say anything. They lay there side by side, their bodies close but not touching, naked, looking at the ceiling. After a minute, she sat up. “You’re right—let’s forget it. You need a break,” she said, and moved down. She stopped at his penis—the flaccid dough of flesh retreating into folds of skin—and took him in her mouth. The thought that this was not geared toward a child, toward the future, zapped something, switched on some previously dormant neuron. He held her head, not wanting her to take him out of the warm cavity of her mouth and throat. He came in her mouth.

Afterward, he’d wonder how the hell he didn’t see it coming, how he could’ve deluded himself into thinking she could so easily give up on the day—the whole month! But in the drowsy sweetness of the post-orgasm fog, it didn’t occur to him to wonder why Janine sprang up and positively bounded to the bathroom. He just lay there like an idiot, warm and happy, half wondering but not really caring what in God’s name she could be doing, making such a racket—cabinet doors squeaking, plastic ripping, liquid pouring and shaking, and finally, spitting. When Janine slipped into bed, Matt rolled toward her, ready to drape his arm across and pull her close.

“I need help here. Will you get those pillows and put them under my butt?” Janine spread her legs wide open and raised her hips. She held a needle-free syringe in her hand. Inside, mucous globules lay suspended in clear liquid. Of course—his sperm. The turkey-baster method, which she’d made fun of (“I’m telling you, some women actually use real turkey basters. Seriously!”). She inserted the syringe into her vagina, raised her hips, and slowly pushed the liquid into her body. “I really need the pillows now.”

Matt placed the pillows against her thighs where, just moments before, he’d thought his tongue would be about now. As he got up and slowly put his clothes back on, he thought how Janine had managed to futurize an orgasm from oral sex, the most present-based thing Matt could think of, how she’d repurposed this act of pure pleasure (“You need a break,” she’d said!) into an act of contrived conception.

Matt left early for the evening dive, muttering about traffic. As he closed their bedroom door, he caught a glimpse of Janine, lying naked with her legs straight up in the air, like some soft-porn version of a Cirque du Soleil ad. For the rest of the afternoon—driving to Miracle Creek, stopping at 7-Eleven, buying cigarettes (Camels, on sale), walking to the creek, throughout it all—he thought of his sperm, sliding down Janine’s vaginal wall toward her cervix, pulled into her uterus not by the force of their own motility but by gravity. And as he lit the cigarette and breathed in, he imagined his sperm, their whiplike tails propelling them toward the egg, but too slowly, too weakly, to penetrate its shell.

Matt was on his third cigarette when Mary came up. They’d met only once, at the dinner at Matt’s in-laws, but she plopped down next to him, none of the awkward oh-hello-what-are-you-doing-heres of near strangers. Just a “Hey,” said with the casual familiarity of kids meeting up after school.

“Hey,” he said, and eyed the tome in her hand. “SAT words. Want me to quiz you?”

Later, whenever he puzzled over what on God’s green earth could’ve made him so fucking stupid as to start this—what was it?—whatever this thing was with Mary, it always came back to this: the way she flung away that Barron’s like a Frisbee, while giving him that look—a dart of the eyes, almost an eye-roll but not quite, combined with a head shake and frown of disgust. It was Janine’s look, her patented no-fucking-way-we’re-even-discussing-this look first seen in school when he suggested taking a study break for a movie, and last seen just today when he said that maybe, just a thought, not saying they’re giving up or anything, but maybe they should get on some adoption waiting lists. Something about Mary looking like a young Janine while casting away her studies—it made him remember their first date, Janine saying how the real her didn’t care about school, how she sometimes wanted to dump her textbooks out her dorm window.

“Camels. My favorite. You mind?” Mary held up his cigarettes.

Matt opened his mouth to say yes, of course I mind, you’re a kid and I won’t supply a minor, but that strange déjà-vu-like sensation of being with the carefree, “real” Janine, his desperate longing for the pre-real-life, pre-infertility her—those formed a dam in his throat, stopping the words. Mary took his nonresponse as permission and took one.

She lit and held it between her fingers, looking at it lovingly, almost reverently (the look—yes, he knew she was a teenager and he tried not to think it but not thinking it made him think it that much more—he imagined Janine giving his penis before sliding it in her mouth) before placing it between her lips. She sucked in (he was actively not thinking it), blew out through the O of her lips, and lay back, her long black hair fanning out over the gravel. This reminded him of Janine, too, the way Janine’s hair—also long and black, an intense black that looked almost blue—fanned out over her pillow.

Matt looked away. “You shouldn’t smoke. How old are you, anyway?” he said.

“Seventeen soon.” Mary took another puff. “How old are you? What, like thirty?”

“You do this a lot? Smoking?”

She shrugged as if to say, No big deal. “I stashed away some of my dad’s cigarettes. Tons of Camels. I’ll bring some next time.”