The Paternity Test (2 page)

For my birthday Stu surprises me: a flight in a rented Skylane. We skim over glacial ponds and purple fallow cranberry bogs: a chain of gems along the Cape’s thin neck. Stu says, “You know, when we first started coming here, I couldn’t help but see what was missing: no decent theater or Chinese food, no
oomph
. But living here”—he swoops above a pond, whose surface shivers—“now I can see what
I
was missing.”

Next we’re at the Cape Cod Mall, a nor’easter banging away outside, the halls packed with prepubescent girls. Mrs. Rita, the fuchsia-nailed proprietress of Mrs. Rita’s Rice, bodily—almost violently— accosts us. “Write your name on a piece of rice,” she importunes redundantly (the awning above her booth bears this slogan). She offers me a magnifying glass to glimpse some samples.
World’s Best Dad. Class of 2004. Your Name Here.
I muse about how long this place would last in New York: not long. “My specialty is guessing who people are to each other,” she says. “You two guys—a couple, right? I think that’s just fantastic. Anyone tells you otherwise, then screw ’em! Newlyweds, I’m willing to bet: the both of you’ve got that glow. How about two grains that say ‘Till Death,’ one for each? Put them in glass beads, on a necklace?” Stu looks at me. What would be the point in disabusing her? She has stretched a hand across the great divide of strangerdom; better to endorse her endorsement. “Sold,” he says, and asks her to engrave the matching grains, but the glass beads? Thanks, we’ll take a pass. “Really? Just the rice?” she says. “Aren’t you going to lose them?” But here she goes, doing her nifty Lilliputian trick, as solemn as a sapper with a bomb. A minute later, finishing up the grains, she gives it one more try: “Can’t just hand them off like this—naked! Are you serious? Okay, then, you’re well and warned. The customer’s always right . . .” We thank her, and pay, and deep-kiss right in front of her: let her take some credit for our romance. And then, when she lunges for the next passing couple (sixty-somethings in matching madras slickers), we turn and, with laughter in our eyes, without the need to ask, count to three: the grains go down the hatch.

But even on the best of days, our happiness felt fragile. Every forward step, if set down wrong, could remind me of the hurt Stu’d caused, could flare that sprain again.

The day we gobbled Rita’s rice, we went next to Filene’s. I’d seen their ad in the
Cape Cod Times
: boxer shorts, all brands, two for one. I picked up some Jockey packs, but Stu splurged on Calvins. “That way,” he said, “simpler to tell, in the laundry, whose are whose.”

“Yuh,” I said, “as if
you
do the laundry.”

He pinched my butt. “Just watching out for you, my love. As always.”

After we’d paid, and browsed the bedding aisles for duvet covers (Stu was still chipping away at my mother’s old décor), I had a thought: “Hey, let’s look in Baby.”

“Now?” he said, and then, “Why not? The power of positive thinking.”

Even during these early days, adjusting to our new life—assuring each other, “Once the
house
is dealt with . . .”—I’d been getting ready for a baby. I read Dan Savage’s book
The Kid
, and pored through old issues of
Gay Parent
. I boned up on breast-milk facts, theories of early learning. Cloth or plastic? I could have penned a tome.

But still, almost three months gone, we had yet to even start to try to find a surrogate.

I tried to push Stu along, but never to push too much. He would be ready when he was ready, and not a second sooner. (I’d asked my buddy Marcie, once, how she’d known she was ready to be a mom. “Pat,” she said, “if we waited till we were
ready
for having kids, there’d never be another baby born.”)

“Ooh, look at this,” I said now, holding up a onesie, blue-striped like a French sailor’s shirt.

“Huh,” said Stu. He shrugged.

“All right, how ’bout this?” The second one was brown, and showed a tiny trumpet, below which were the words: Little Tooter.

Stu ran the fabric hypercritically through his fingers, a spoof of a Jewish garment broker. “Feh,” he said. “Not that junk. For
our
kid? Only silk!”

I wanted to be cross with him, for being so blithely pie-in-the-sky. But then, without his humor, we never would have gotten this far. And what was having kids about if not pipe-dream ambitions?

I’d moved on to baby shoes. How cute! Mini One Stars! “But Christ,” I said. “Twenty-five bucks? For shoes that’ll fit
how
long?”

Stu didn’t answer. He stared at something—or nothing—in the distance. “Hey, just thought of a thing I need at CVS,” he said. “Meet you in ten, out front? At the car?”

Why not ask me to come along? An innocent reason, surely. What nefarious business could be waiting at the drugstore? Maybe he thought I wanted to stay, that I wasn’t finished browsing.

I almost said, “I’ll just come with,” but couldn’t find the air, couldn’t risk the cold and stifled Stu I might then see. The old feelings of shame and abandonment knocked me windless—just like when we’d partied at the Roxy, one last time.

That had been back in New York. A foolish final try to deal with Stu’s immoderation.

I was not supposed to mind his sleeping with other men: Article 1 of the Gay Constitution. And truthfully, I’d always known, with Stu, what I was in for. After all, a
pilot
? Wasn’t that half the draw? The glamour of the uniform, the randy Right Stuff strut. Sure enough, in his line of work, he’d gathered a pile of playmates. Shane in Miami; Owen in L.A.; a bunch more whose names I’d blocked out.

“You
let
him?” asked my editor, Steve, when I’d confessed this once. “Jesus Christ, if my wife ever caught me . . .”

Well, it wasn’t like I hadn’t had my own digressions, but Steve’s amazement kept me from imparting this admission. (Educraft, the firm where we worked, produced texts for school kids, to prep them for state assessment tests. Because the books were sold in states like Georgia and Missouri, the office, despite its address, was more Mayberry than Gotham.)

I had lived so long within our orthodoxy of excess, I could forget how odd our customs must have seemed to Steve. For him and his faithful wife, sex was the wedding china: a spotless thing, saved for Sunday dinners. For us (so went the party line), the etiquette was less strict. Sure, we had the nice plates, the ones we used at home, but if sometimes, out of the house, we grabbed a snack on paper napkins, what earth-shaking calamity was that?

Actually, for me and Stu, it hadn’t been calamitous. Not at first, especially not when we had strayed together.

We’d met in the early ’90s, when AIDS was all we saw. Then came the new drugs, which nearly stopped the dying, and we were freed to take another sort of drugs, the
fun
ones. Weekends, we would pack the dance floors, licking strangers’ lips, as if to spread our own subversive joyful epidemic. Stu or I would pick a guy, or two, or they’d choose us. Once, amid the dancing throng, Stu had nuzzled my armpit; a big-eyed boy observed and stepped right up: “I’m gonna
love
you.” He did, right there in the strobe lights, on his knees, and then moved on.

It wasn’t always easy, in that rush of restitution, to keep sight of each other, and of
us
. We’d do this thing on the dance floor sometimes, locking mouths and breathing as a unit: I’d take air in through my nose and blow it from my mouth to his; he would gulp, then puff the exhalation back through mine. A Möbius strip of breath. A promise, a profession: I’m your lungs, your heart; I’m your life.

Which made it all the harder, then, to lose our perfect sync.

We blinked and it was the ’00s: the “aughts,” we awkwardly called them. I heard it as “oughts,” but not from any outside, adult force, as in
Young man, you ought to mind your manners
. My mom had died the year before, six years after Dad, and being parentless totally derailed me, even if (or maybe because) they’d often braked my progress. Eventually, though, without them, my oughts welled up within me: ought to wipe the windshield and start searching for a turn ahead, ought to dream of what I’d do or make to leave a mark.

Meanwhile, Stu was letting himself get snared in the World Wide Web. Time was, if he overnighted in Phoenix or in Charlotte, and if he had some energy to spare, he’d head out to the bars and try his luck; the nights he scored were sweetened by the many when he hadn’t. But now that he had Manhunt—and
Gay.com
, and Craigslist—Stu could scarcely take a trip without first making plans with some stranger he had ordered up like take-out. To satisfy his taste on any day he just clicked Search. A blond, green-eyed bottom between the ages of twenty and thirty, who lived within five miles of the airport Hilton?
Click
.A guy who favored dirty talk, or jockstraps?
Click, click
.

Soon he started surfing for tricks when he was in New York, disappearing for hours on every off day. The first few times I asked him where he’d been, he told the truth. After that, he lapsed into an adolescent vagueness: “Out,” he’d say, or “You know, here and there.”

How could I say this broke our rules? We’d chosen not to
have
rules. That was what we’d come to think constituted gay liberation.

In the past, my absence from the room when Stu was sleeping around had seemed to me mostly circumstantial: a matter of geography or timing. But now Stu’s adventures seemed dependent on my absence; he wanted less to be with someone else than
not
to be with me—at least that was what I felt and feared. We had sex together, still, but that was disconnected from his drive to do things, to be things, on his own. A Stu I didn’t know, a slippery, quenchless Stu, was coming to frightful life behind my back, but after years of seeing myself as part of Stu-and-Pat, I couldn’t bear to break our hyphenation.

I had heard Stu’s scorn when he talked about a friend of ours who made his boyfriend cancel his Manhunt profile: “You shitting me? What is he, a lesbian?” I wanted Stu back, I wanted
us
back, but didn’t know how to get this, not without provoking similar salvos aimed at me.

Did that explain my mixed-up plan to go back to the Roxy, the site of our ecstatic early bonding, in hopes of finding someone for a three-way? I wanted to remind Stu of the glory days we’d shared, when we could turn the heads of any crowd we happened into—not because either of us was all that notable-looking, but because
as a unit
we gave off a fusive force: a couple so well crafted, so solidly adhered, that strangers hoped a touch of us might solder their own seams. (Maybe, like me, these strangers had grown weary of so much leeway.)

And so, with a week of off time coming up for Stu, I told him to get set for a blowout. He was spent—he’d flown through heavy weather up from Tampa—but rallied when I gave him two small pills with smiley faces. We bathed and flossed, donned our best show-off-your-pecs shirts, and sped to the club as if into our past.

(Stu had never—and wouldn’t have ever—indulged in these activities without a good four days between flights. And no, not primarily due to fear of being tested; the Feds asked for his pee in a cup just once every two, three years. Stu played things safe because safety was his calling: sobriety as its own kind of high.)

The club was packed, though more than half the crowd was bridge-and-tunnel, dudes as squat as La-Z-Boys with soft slipcover girlfriends. We did spot some solo gays: punching the air, lock-jawed, wormholes where I’d hoped for smiling eyes. That was the difference crystal meth had made. I’d tried it once and hated it: it felt like someone hammered a Swiss army knife up my nose and opened all the blades inside my brain. Stu refused to touch the stuff at all.

We kept pushing ahead, to below the starry disco ball, where all the festive fags used to clump, and there was a group of old-time happy campers. Abracadabra: our pills kicked in. Everything went ribbony. The techno picked the lock of my impatience.

“Ahhh,” said Stu. He reached around me, rubbed my sweaty neck. “It’s great the way, when I rub yours, it feels like
mine
relaxes.” He licked the honeysuckle of my ear.

“Yum,” I said. “How long is your tongue? I love it.”

Then Stu started to pollinate the group of guys around us. A peck to this one’s cheek, a squeeze of that one’s ass. “A pilot,” I could hear him answer above the trippy beat. “No, really. And don’t try any ‘joystick’ jokes, I’ve heard them!” An unconceited cockiness, a clean-state kind of glee, and under it all: boyish emancipation. My guess was, he’d looked the same in kosher days of Hebrew School, sneaking out to eat a BLT. Now, as then, what pleased him most was making people see the Stu he’d self-created, not the product of any faith or father.

He lingered by an acne-scarred Latino with smart blue eyes: jockey-small, dancing with an impish, clenched-hand focus. Stu quick-spun him, salsa style. They spoke with winking ease.

When I caught sight of his tramp stamp—Take It Easy, But Take It—I thought:
He’s the one we’re bringing home.

“How ’bout him?” I asked when Stu returned. “You want to try? Work a little bit of our old magic?” In the old days, when we would take a third into our bedroom, it always seemed the granting of an honor. We were never haughty about it, or purposely exclusive. What we were was giddy with our own good luck in love; we longed to give someone else a glimpse.

“Nah,” said Stu.

“Why not?”

“Don’t know. Not really into it.”

“You seemed into it a second ago. Have you met that guy before?”

Stu glanced at the man. “Define ‘met.’”

I felt a twinge, but the music now was stoking up my stomach, boiling through me, turning me into vapor. Stu massaged my neck again. He sucked my Adam’s apple. Then we kissed, the way we’d used to, figure-eighting air. We breathed and breathed: one big set of lungs.

A minute might have passed, or a hundred, or a half.

“Hey, I’ve got to pee,” said Stu. “I’m heading to the bathroom.”

Right—me, too; we were so in tune! “Yeah,” I said. “Wait, I’ll come with . . .”

Could eyes slump like shoulders? That was what Stu’s did. He couldn’t, or at least he didn’t, hide his irritation. “I’ll be quick, okay?” he said. “Stay right here. You’re fine.” He disappeared into the sweaty horde.