The Last Romantics(94)

Caroline began acting in small regional productions, and then Off-Off-Off-Broadway plays. She excelled. She amazed us. In Playboy of the Western World, she developed an Irish brogue that convinced us all, and the following summer she turned coquettish and sly as Blanche DuBois. The work paid nothing, of course, but Nathan supported them financially. What else could he do? This was his family. For the first years after the divorce, Caroline cycled through a supply of boyfriends, all of them without fail similar in disposition and looks to Nathan, until she met Raffi: bearded, sarcastic, a chef with a belly who one night prepared for us a plate of pappardelle with spicy sausage and mushrooms that to this day appears in my dreams. Louis went to Wesleyan, Beatrix to Berkeley, Lily to Hamden College on a faculty admission, Caroline confessed. All three of them kind, generous young people who provided their parents with a great degree of joy without ever intending to do so.

It was in the year 2022 that Renee woke one morning to a call from the fertility clinic. She was alone. It was a Monday. That semester Jonathan was teaching at RISD and spent three nights per week in Providence.

“Dr. Skinner, you’re listed as the contact for a collection of oocytes harvested from Melanie Jacobs. We check every five years to clear space and renew the storage agreement. Are you planning to use them?” The nurse’s voice was calm, routine, but it provoked in Renee a sudden heat that rose to her cheeks.

Renee was fifty-two years old. When she looked in the mirror, she greeted the lines, the bagging around the upper cheeks, the shadowed creases with a clinical eye. Yes, she was aging. Some might even call her old. There on the phone, the nurse waiting patiently on the line, Renee considered the question of Melanie’s eggs. When Carl came to see her that day, the idea of potential motherhood had shocked her. Scared her, even. A heart walking around outside your body. So soon after Joe’s death, Renee knew she could not sustain that kind of vulnerability. It would have shut her down.

But now Renee could assess the idea with distance, with a certain passivity and recognition of her own strength. The limitation problem no longer worried her; she’d already surpassed all the goals she’d set for herself. It had taken decades, but Renee no longer felt reverberations from the Pause. She no longer ached for Joe every single day. And there, as she stood in her kitchen, clutching the phone to her ear, an image of Melanie Jacobs came to Renee, shocking in its specificity. An exchange they’d had soon after Melanie had been admitted full-time to the hospital: Renee leaning in with her stethoscope to listen to Melanie’s heart, their faces nearly touching. She saw the lift of Melanie’s eyebrows, the collection of small brown hairs, plucked into thin parentheses, and there, just beneath the arch, a white scar on the left brow bone. Fell as a kid, Melanie explained, touching it with an index finger, the nail painted a cherry red. Split it wide open on the curb. My parents were so worried, but look at it, just a little thing.

Now in the kitchen, Renee saw again that stubborn scar, no longer than the white cotton end of a swab. She heard again Melanie’s cracked, husky voice.

Something inside my sister shifted: it was a tectonic, abrupt change that fell upon Renee altogether and all at once. With an urgency that defied all common sense, all rational thought, Renee wanted a baby, Melanie’s baby. Those eggs. Good from bad. Intimate recycling.

“Yes,” Renee said to the clinic nurse. “I am planning to use them. When’s your next appointment?”

*

Three months later Renee lifted groceries onto the counter. Her shoulder ached. Her muscles were strong, her body whole, but the parts did not fit as smoothly as they once had. The joints stuck, the bones complained. Renee, Caroline, and I often discussed the indignity of it, the ambush of aging. A woman’s body had so much more to it than a man’s, so many more curves and crannies where gravity did its awful work and so quickly! All at once you had fallen.

It was June. Today was a rare day, with no call shift, no meetings, no events. Renee had woken late, eaten a bagel, and walked to Citarella, where she roamed the aisles, examining each item carefully before placing it in her basket. Today Jonathan was due home from a sourcing trip to Bangkok.

Today was the day.

Jonathan had consented to the use of his sperm. Consented, after months of cajoling, counseling, discussion. He agreed, he signed the papers, he jerked off into a plastic cup. (“The porn just made me feel old,” Jonathan had said. “It was all stuff I’d already seen.”) And then, little by little, day by day, he withdrew. First from their apartment as he took on more international work, more far-flung commissions and residencies, and then from her life: fewer phone calls, e-mails, meals together, events. He was so busy with the retablo commissions. Clients flew him to summer homes on Harbour Island to take measurements. They arrived at the initial consultation with personal assistants, girlfriends or boyfriends half their age. One with a small Pomeranian that sat on the man’s lap throughout the meeting and watched Jonathan, he later recounted to Renee, as though he would soon be eating Jonathan’s face for dinner.

Renee remembered once early in their relationship watching Jonathan work on a chair, a captain’s chair made of cherrywood with curved armrests, a low broad seat, a back that carried the swoop of a wave. This had been in those first months after Joe’s death, when Renee saw herself as a walking tender bruise. But as Jonathan sanded the wood in clean, even strokes, moving in the direction of the grain, his face intent with the seriousness of the task, Renee had forgotten, for a few precious minutes, her own distress. The client was a friend of theirs, a woman Renee knew from high school in Bexley, not a close friend but someone who had talked to Noni months earlier about wanting to commission a piece, something special, she said, for her husband. The couple had come to Joe’s memorial service. Jonathan had worked for months on that chair. When the woman first saw it, she burst into tears.