Middle Age (65 page)

He remembered the rumor he’d heard about Naomi Volpe: that she’d had a baby, and gave it out for adoption. To a “wealthy” couple.

“If Naomi Volpe comes with the baby, the baby’s got to be dumped in the toilet, right? That was precisely what showed in your face, Mr. C.

Every low fucking degrading crap emotion you think you’re hiding from the world shows in your face and is decipherable by anyone with half a brain. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Roger went silent. Well, it was true. Baby or no baby, he’d rather swallow poison than live with, let alone marry, a female like Naomi Volpe.

What lousy luck! If Roger Cavanagh had been fated to impregnate any woman a few months ago, why hadn’t that woman been Abigail Des Pres?

Middle Age: A Romance

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Abigail was still young enough, if barely. She was certainly a gorgeous woman. They’d come close to making love more than once. He
had
loved Abigail—to a degree. She was malleable enough, neurotic enough, to love him. By now, they’d be living together, preferably in her house on Wheatsheaf Drive. They’d be married. They’d have this baby. The Salthill circle would have rejoiced in their union as a major social event of any season. A
second chance
for both, and naturally Roger had fucked up.

The remainder of the evening at Union Square Cafe passed in a blur for Roger. He would learn from the woman who meant to bear his baby “to term” that, yes, she’d had this experience before—“It was an accident then, too. But accidents can be profitable.” They were on their second bottle of red wine. And it wasn’t inexpensive red wine. Volpe devoured her grilled smoked shell steak with a zestful appetite, grease glistened on her thin lips.

With the aplomb of a woman undressing in a locker room, not giving a damn who looked on, Volpe informed Roger that, in case he was wondering, she’d had several “successful” abortions, the first at the age of sixteen; but more recently she’d acquired a “radically different perspective” on the reproductive function of the female. “In our capitalist-consumer society, at least.” Pregnancy and childbirth were nothing more than physical experiences that had been grotesquely sentimentalized in so-called first-world countries. “I’m not a ‘mother’ in myself, only in a brief relationship. If the baby is given out immediately for adoption, that is. Through a reputable broker. Adoption is online now, and very efficient. Nobody’s ‘buying’—

that’s illegal. True, money changes hands, and we’re talking five figures here, but it’s elliptical, it’s in good taste and nobody’s ‘selling’ per se. It’s a charitable act to have a baby for someone desperately wanting a baby, yes?”

Volpe put the question to Roger as if this were a subject they’d been discussing, and Roger should know the answer. “These are educated couples, people with money, and a sense of entitlement. They do pro bono work for liberal causes. They’re generous with donations. They’re politically active.

But when they can’t have babies as they’ve planned they get crazy. They need to propagate their own kind. Civilization needs superior genes. So they’d be impressed with a pedigree like Baby’s: pure Caucasian on both sides. Smart Caucasians. One of them a hot-shit litigator. The other just a paralegal, but with an IQ measured at  when she was tested at age fifteen. (I actually have this document. I carry it in my wallet.) No chance of a crack or AIDS baby. No blind DNA lottery.” She laughed, happily.

Roger smiled wanly. “You could take orders, I guess? ‘Cavanagh.’ ”

“That’s a cynical remark. I hate cynicism.”

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“Yes, I can see that. You’re an idealist.”

“
You
could’ve used protection, friend. You knew the risk you were taking.”

Risk? He’d been dazed with sexual need. And Volpe had seemed to be, too.

(Or had it been a ruse on the woman’s part? Shrewdly plotted, executed?)

“I don’t know,” Roger muttered, meaning
I don’t know why I took the
risk
. “I assumed you were on the pill. I seem to remember you telling me.”

“So? Miscalculations happen.”

“
It
happened, improvidently.”

How like a young girl Roger sounded, knocked up as a result of naïveté and stupidity.
He
was knocked up as a result of naïveté and stupidity; and maybe, just maybe he wasn’t all that surprised that Volpe hadn’t had the abortion. Or disconcerted.

“One thing I do know,” Roger said, “no baby of mine is going to be marketed.”

The lengthy dinner ended with Roger Cavanagh making out, to Naomi Volpe, a check for ten thousand dollars. This was “part-payment”

for services rendered, the remainder to be negotiated when the baby was born and delivered to the father. There would be a contract, Roger insisted. “Of course, Mr. C.! Everything up-front and legal,” Volpe said. “
I
don’t intend to bring up this child.” When Roger handed her the check she glanced at the figure, then quickly folded the check and slipped it into her handbag. A small portion of wine remained in the second bottle and Naomi divided it between their glasses. “Mr. C.! Let’s drink to our future—the three of us.”



The shimmering aqua pool floating in twilight
.
How he yearned to dive into it
as if diving into the sky
.
But he was ashamed
:
for what if he sank to the bottom?

The red
-
haired woman was in the water at the far end of the pool, unaware of
him
.
Nor could he see her face
.
And there was his friend Adam Berendt boldly
diving into the water, broad shoulders and scarred chest covered in graying
bronze hairs, his strong limbs pumping
.
Roger cried, Adam? Help me? Tell me
what to do
.
His tremulous voice issued from all sides
.
It was possible to ignore
such a voice, as Adam paid it not the slightest heed, swimming the length of the
Middle Age: A Romance

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pool
.
Roger forced himself into the water
.
Swimming in Adam’s wake
.
Whether
he sank to the bottom or managed to keep afloat, he never knew, for the dream
ended in a soft silent explosion
.



“ I’   . For once, I’m doing the right thing.”

Not wanting to think
The woman is blackmailing me, I’m helpless
.

Not wanting to think
What if it isn’t even my child?

And yet: how much money Roger would give to Naomi Volpe during the course of their unorthodox friendship, in outright payments and

“loans,” he would not have wished to calculate. The initial $, for the aborted abortion; $, in March, and eight thousand in June for “miscellaneous interim expenses”; and a final $, when the baby was born and “delivered” to the father in July . . . Unexpectedly, Roger’s relationship with Volpe became increasingly paternal. As if Roger himself were the young woman’s father. (And what did it matter, finally, who the father of the baby actually
was?
The profound fact was:
the baby
.) So Roger, in his new infatuation with fatherhood-to-be, told himself.

Rarely now did he and Volpe have sex, and then only when Volpe, aroused from a day of frustrations at the office, initiated it. She was yet more frustrated with Roger’s diminished libido, and one evening exploded in a fury of slaps and kicks aimed against him. “God damn you, Cavanagh!

You can’t be bothered, can you! Like every other fucking male of the fucking species, a healthy pregnant female who wants sex turns you
off
.” Roger protested, “Darling, I wouldn’t want to hurt you. Or the baby.” Volpe laughed, “Hurt me! How the hell are you going to hurt me! With that limp cock?
That?
You couldn’t poke that into a bowl of pudding, you asshole. And don’t call me ‘darling’! You don’t love me. You don’t even like me. You can’t wait to get rid of me, and have Baby all to yourself.”

Roger winced, but couldn’t deny this. How like a married couple he and Volpe had become, in the final, exhausting stages of combat.

He didn’t desire the woman, but he wanted very much to oversee her life, and the life of the baby. (For what if Volpe had a miscarriage? She still smoked, he’d caught her several times. She drank, and was physically careless. What if she fell down in the subway? Climbing out of a taxi? Roger would never forgive himself.)
My second chance
.
I don’t intend to fuck it up
.

Those evenings when Volpe was with friends in Manhattan, even when

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she spent much of the night in a lover’s flat, Roger insisted upon driving her home to Jersey City, no matter the hour. They communicated by cell phone: Roger worked late at the office, had dinner alone in the neighborhood, waited uncomplainingly in a bar or in his car parked on a side street until Volpe called. “Roger? You awake? O.K. to come pick me up now.”

The time might be midnight, one .., three-thirty .. Roger Cavanagh had become the paralegal’s private limo service! Sometimes Volpe took pity on him and told him to go home, she’d spend the night in the city, she could take care of herself, but Roger insisted, he didn’t at all mind; he hadn’t anything “more worthwhile” to do, anyway. Volpe laughed, “Mr. C.!

This is embarrassing.”

Roger said gravely, “Not for me.”

It was about this time that Roger encountered Lionel Hoffmann on a midtown street, and went with his old Salthill friend for drinks in a Sixth Avenue hotel cigar lounge. What a change in Lionel Hoffmann! Where Lionel had long been one of Salthill’s middle-aged husbands, even as a relatively young man, he had now the air of a lone wolf; lean-faced, and vigilant; edgy, anxious, restless; as Roger spoke, Lionel continually glanced up at the scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and was continually sniffing and blowing his nose, which annoyed Roger; though Roger was forthcoming about the extraordinary development in his private life, Lionel was close-mouthed about his private life, until finally Roger told Lionel he was sorry to have heard that Lionel and Camille were separated, and Lionel blew his nose loudly and mumbled what sounded like, “Yes, I’m sorry, too.” And the subject was dropped.

Yet: not long afterward, Roger saw his Salthill friend in the company of a young woman, in an expensive Midtown restaurant, and kept his distance to observe, through a mirror, the disparity in their ages and types.

The girl was very young, stylish; a light-skinned black, or an East Indian; her hair was braided and scintillant, like a nest of snakes; and her eyes moved restlessly, even as Lionel spoke earnestly to her, clasping both her hands. For some painful minutes Roger watched, fascinated and repelled.

“Poor Lionel! What a sucker.”

E    Roger began to read of pregnancy, childbirth, infants. He bought out most of the baby shelf at the Salthill Bookstore. (“Mr. Cavanagh,” Molly Ivers said, startled, “what’s your sud-Middle Age: A Romance



den interest in babies?” “I’m going to have one, in July.”) He began to make inquiries among his Salthill acquaintances into full-time nannies.

Except when he was most absorbed in his work there wasn’t an hour when Roger didn’t brood upon the baby-to-come. On principle Volpe disliked

“intrusive medical technology” and refused to have an ultrasound to determine the baby’s sex. “You’ll just have to be surprised, like daddies through the millennia.” As her pregnancy advanced Roger fell into the habit of calling Volpe on her cell phone frequently. Always he was casual, calm.

“How are you, Naomi?” “Mr. C., I’m
fine,”
Volpe said, laughing, exasperated. “If I weren’t, you’d be the first to be informed.” Roger kept a calendar of Volpe’s medical appointments and made certain she kept them, for Volpe disliked even female doctors. The “capitalist-consumer enterprise”

of childbearing sickened her, she said. “We were meant to squat in the fields and ditches and have our babies, cut the umbilical cord with our teeth, and get on with it.”

Get on with what, Roger wondered.

Yet Volpe complained of her pregnancy, once she began to get heavy, seriously heavy, in her sixth month. She complained of bladder trouble and of “everything swollen” and she hinted that maybe she’d made a mistake, agreeing to bring the baby “to term,” maybe it wasn’t too late (in the final trimester) for an abortion, somewhere? Roger shuddered, hearing such words. He couldn’t gauge if Volpe was sincere or testing him, taunting or teasing him, if at such moments her deepest wishes emerged, or whether she was simply playing a role, carelessly improvising.
I must be
very careful how I respond
.
I must not contradict her
.
Oh, God!
He dreaded calling her one day to be told bluntly that the baby was gone, she’d changed her mind after all.

He drove her to the obstetrician’s office and waited for her in the outer room, self-conscious as any expectant father. Under Volpe’s influence he’d begun to dress “younger” when he wasn’t in a professional setting; true, his hairline was eroding, what remained of his thick, wiry hair was turning an innocuous gray; he’d become somewhat edgy, restless (like his friend Lionel?); yet he was unfailingly optimistic, youthful . . . One afternoon the obstetrician’s new receptionist asked Roger where he and his “daughter”

lived, and Roger said, stung, “My daughter is a boarder at a prep school in Maine, and I live in Salthill, New York.” The young woman stared at him with a puzzled smile, but asked no further questions. When he told Volpe about the exchange, she expressed indignation on Roger’s behalf. “Your

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daughter! That’s ridiculous. My father looks old enough to be
your
father.