He knew he shouldn’t have had that second glass of merlot.
It was midnight, he had fallen asleep at ten, slept soundly for two hours and was now wide awake. This always happened if he had more than one glass of wine. Which he tried never to do. It’s just that the merlot was so good. He walked into the liquor store after work and began flirting with the woman behind the counter, who was likely some middle school kid’s grandmother.
“What’s a merlot that people rave about?”
She opened the small gate that created a boundary between the employees and the customers and ventured out onto the sales floor.
“Everyone seems to love this,” she said, trying hard to match his ebullience.
“Jimmy? That’s a hilarious name for a wine.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Can you imagine someone paying $200 for a finely aged bottle of Fred’s merlot?” he laughed.
“No. But it’s called Jimmy, not Fred.”
On the way home, he couldn’t help feeling frustrated and superior. That woman in the liquor store made him feel like his sense of humor was absurd and obscure. Anyone with a halfway decent associate’s degree from a community college would’ve laughed, he thought. She was obviously someone who only laughed out loud watching the 3 Stooges. If he would’ve tripped over a broom and needed stitches, she would’ve roared.
But she was right about one thing. The merlot was great. Jimmy definitely knew what he was doing. But now that he was wide awake at midnight, with another workday bearing straight down on him, he wished that it wasn’t as great as it was. He wished he was still sleeping.
He turned the light on and reached for a book beside his bed. It was one of those 800 page historical fiction novels that told stories and legends from a southern coastal area in the United States. One of those books that would probably interest someone who lives or had once lived there, but not too many other people. It began with a Native American war story and ended up somewhere in the seventies.
He kept reading the same line over and over as his thoughts kept focusing on the sound of the rain outside his windows. It sounded like it was coming down in sheets and it was making quite a racket as it pelted the gutters and the garbage cans. At one point it gave one the impression of a soft assault rifle. Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam. Trying to force his focus back on the book just confused him more. Who is Queequeg and why is the witch doctor chasing him?
By and by, his thoughts began to meander toward more anxiety inducing areas. How the hell was he going to run the machinery at his job tomorrow (which, realistically, was now ‘later today’) if he didn’t get the proper sleep? This is probably why they had so many industrial accidents in Russia, he thought. They all drink a shit ton of vodka and sleep like crap and before long your days of having all ten fingers are over.
Can you imagine the trauma of seeing what had always been a part of your body laying bloody on the floor. That’s what probably made people go into shock. This line of thought led him to a story he had once heard about the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the eighties. It was common knowledge in the towns around Prince William Sound that otters were gouging their own eyes out because the petroleum burned so bad.
Once his thoughts became that disturbing, he decided to put the book down and pick up his phone.This act, he regarded as being just as reckless as a second glass of wine. He had read numerous articles about how the blue light from cell phones made it even more difficult to sleep. Not to mention, it wreaked all kinds of havoc on a person’s psyche. Or something like that. Maybe it only made it hard to get into deep stages of REM and that damaged a person’s psyche.
Either way, the temptation was too great. He picked it up to see what sort of notifications appeared since 10 pm–a virtual lifetime ago. There was the softcore porn star who hearted his comment. That was good for a mild shot of dopamine. There was an email from EZ Pass informing him that they just helped themselves to $35 out of his checking account. That news provided enough ballast to cancel the porn star. There was a notification from Linked In but he hardly paid attention to those.
Linked In seemed to be turning into a cesspool of life coaches and snake oil salesmen trying to nibble away at your wallet. He did a double take when he saw that “Nora Rosen” wanted to connect. God, he thought. He hadn’t heard that name in over a decade. She was cute. She used to date a guy named Ulysses. One of those high school romances. And as they usually go, he met someone with bigger boobs in college and broke her heart. That was ages ago.
He clicked on the Instagram icon and searched Nora up. He saw that she was still rather flat chested, but even more beautiful now than before. He also saw that she, too, wrote poetry. At least they had something in common. She initiated a connection with me, he thought. I’ll just drop her a quick note to say hi.
And he did.
When his alarm clock started making noise, only four hours later, he saw that she responded with a thumb. That annoyed him. In fact, there might be a better word than annoyed but not as school teacher-ish as “galled.” It wasn’t the first time a woman did this to him. Engage with him electronically and then respond by making it seem like he was being too forward. He lumbered like a zombie to the coffee pot and his inner dialogue began to transition to an inner comedic monologue.
“What was the etiquette when it comes to social media? If a woman requests a connection or a follow or a friendship, are you just supposed to accept and ignore them? Is that what cool people do?”
He poured the rich and robust smelling liquid into an oversized mug and sat down at the kitchen table. He thought about responding with a finger, also. Just not a thumb. Then he thought about un-connecting with her until he glanced up at the clock and realized that he had more consequential things to worry about. Such as, making it to work on time.
He got right into the shower and got dressed. As he did so, he noticed he had received a text from the project manager that they needed him to run the forklift that day. That was easy, he thought. He got into his five year old RAV 4 and began his commute. The traffic on the NYS Thruway seemed eerily quiet for a summer morning, but again, he was not going to complain. Everyone deserves to have days that run smoothly, he thought.
When it was finally time to break for lunch at 12, he saw the beginnings of what appeared to be an extensive message from Nora on Linked In. That was really interesting, he thought. She gave him the impression that she was kind of a bitch, but now all of that began to melt right away. This elaborate epistle changed everything:
Hey you, I’m glad you agreed to connect. I saw that your first chap book was picked up by Four Way. I must say, I was very impressed. Then I read it and I was beyond impressed. You’re like a modern day Bukowski. I’d love to grab a bite at Little Bear if you’re ever in town. I remember that you used to love that restaurant. My parents still live in Phoenicia, so I’d be super close when I came to visit them. Please, let me know.
For the remainder of the work day, he felt as if he was walking on air. He wasn’t delusional enough to think she was offering her body to him, but he was confident enough in his hunger and pluck to get things moving in that direction. She may not be giving him a kettle of fish; but he did feel like he was being given a little bait, a fishing pole and a rowboat and it would be nobody’s fault but his own if he didn’t come away with a kettle of fish after all.
He decided not to respond to the message for a few hours and then when he finally did, he sent her a thumbs up emoji. He was never one to let an opportunity for revenge go to waste. Then, as he brushed his teeth and put his pajamas on, he logged on to Linked In and wrote her back.
Hey Nora. Of course, I’d love to go to Little Bear with you. Let me know a date and time that looks decent and I will make arrangements to be there.
When the magic Friday was upon him, he asked for permission to leave work early and he rushed home and got dressed in his most expensive stuff. Nice jeans, one of those $80 dress shirts you don’t need to tuck in, Armani cologne–he pulled out all the stops. Then, he drove to Woodstock and sat waiting in the parking lot.
When it became five minutes after the time they were supposed to meet, he texted her and asked if she was still planning on coming. She responded by saying that it was, indeed, “her bad,” but she was under the impression that he would be picking her up at her parent’s. He wrote back, as politely as possible, that he would absolutely have done so if he had any idea where her parents lived.
It turned out to be an innocent enough misunderstanding. She thought that he had driven her home from an AA meeting once. He, of course, just assumed that she was dense but that didn’t seem to deter his interest in pursuing her. As Fitzgerald so eloquently put it at the beginning of The Great Gatsby, advantages were not equally parceled out to everyone at birth. He just happened to be fortunate enough to be a great poet and a shrewd thinker, he flattered himself.
He punched her address into Google Maps and accepted the fact that they’d be eating at 7, not 6. No harm, no foul. Of course, his mind kept racing as he merged onto Route 28, if she wanted me to pick her up at her folks, she might’ve mentioned it at some point.
“Maybe she just has a lot on her mind,” his childhood friend, David, proposed.
He always liked to call David whenever he had a weird or interesting story to tell. As far as he was concerned, this story was both weird and interesting. He was going out with Nora Rosen and, if that wasn’t crazy enough, she seemed like she was pretty flustered or preoccupied or something.
“Okay, sure, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt,” he agreed.
“Yes, it’s the least you can do. The poor lady is pissing away an entire Friday night eating dinner with you,” David said, before breaking into a maniacal cackle.
And with that, he remembered why he was always so sparing with his calls to David. David always liked to give the impression that his sense of humor was a lot better than it was. There wasn’t another soul on this planet who would’ve laughed that hard at his response. It simply was just not that funny.
He pulled up outside of her parents house on Pantherkill Rd and saw Nora sitting in a chair on the deck. The deck seemed to be held up by these weird stilt-like structures on the side of a hill and there were trees surrounding the property, giving the house the feeling of being set back into the woods. The front fascia was painted bright red and it had a distinctly cozy feel to it. He got out of the car to be polite and greet Nora.
“Well, you look really nice,” she said, giving him a warm hug.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
He was being sincere, too. She was practically radiant. As they both got into the car and he headed toward Route 28, he allowed the fantasy of a relationship with her to do a dramatic tango in his mind. It was like a cheesy movie, but he was enjoying the hell out of it. The two of them walking hand in hand on the beach, making love long into a summer night, snowy Christmas mornings, off Broadway plays–the works. All the while, she was giving him a well curated version of what she had been doing since 2006.
“...and that’s when I started writing small human interest stories for the Shokan Gazette.”
“Well, that must’ve felt like a feather in your cap,” he said, knowing that was the kind of universal observation that most people wouldn’t argue.
“Let’s just say it was a step up from the police blotter.”
They pulled into the parking lot by The Bearsville Theater and walked into The Little Bear. The hostess swooped in and approached them with the urgency of someone trying to put out a grease fire and, as she grabbed two menus, she asked if it was just the two of them.
“Yes, two,” he said.
The hostess brought them down to the lower room that was punctuated with large bay windows and a distinctly romantic view of the Sawkill Creek.
“I’ve always loved this place,” Nora said.
“Yes, me too.”
“Tea?” the hostess asked.
“Yes, and could we have fried pork dumplings?”
Nora cleared her throat to prepare herself to speak up.
“I’d rather vegetarian, if you don’t mind.”
The hostess looked at him.
“Yes, vegetarian please.”
When she walked away, Nora clutched his hand.
“I’ve read almost all of your stuff online. You’re extremely talented.”
“Well, I appreciate you saying so.”
“And your music is incredible, too. You’re kind of…I don’t know…like a renaissance man of sorts.”
“No, I’m not,” he countered with false modesty.
“Don’t be coy. You know you are.”
“Well, I appreciate you saying so.”
This was it, he thought. As she talked, he played the reels in his head once more, but this time he interspersed them with more love-making scenes. He felt like it was obviously going in that direction, so why not?
As they ate their respective dinners, she, garlicky eggplant and he, mango chicken, things quieted down. After several moments of silence, she began to get to the gist of why she wanted to meet with him.
“I’m getting to the point where my biological clock is about to ding.”
Wow, he thought. Where the hell was this conversation going? She continued:
“I have something to ask you and it’s not very easy.”
“Just ask.”
His heart was beginning to palpitate.
“I think you’re very intelligent. I always have. I love your genes.”
He looked down at his lap.
“Your genes. With a G, silly.”
“Well, I appreciate that.”
“Well…” she hesitated, “Would you be willing to contribute sperm? So that I can be artificially inseminated?”
He nearly spit out his tea, but instead swallowed and regained composure.
“Does the insemination have to be artificial?” he asked.
She gave him a disappointed look.
“Please don’t make this situation more difficult than it feels already,” she pleaded.
“I’m serious,” he said. “I think you’re really beautiful.”
“Well, of course I appreciate your saying so. But I wasn’t looking to start anything like that.”
He moved the chicken around his plate and finally, giving up any pretense at trying to eat, he put his fork down.
“My genes may not be what you think they are. I have an older brother who I am sure has, at the very least, a touch of Asperger’s and a sister who is slightly paranoid and delusional. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to create a child who is creative. You might get a delusional weirdo.”
“I get what you’re saying, but I have my own theories about that kind of stuff.”
“Can I hear what that theory is?”
“Well, the genes are raw material. What a person does with those genes is strictly related to nurturing.”
“I’m not following.”
“In other words, somewhere along the line, you were touched by the need to create, whereas your siblings, who have the same raw material, used their rich imaginations to create their own personal hells,” she said.
“Interesting.”
The waitress came out of the kitchen and dropped the check, face down, in front of him. Nora attempted to reach for it, but he was quicker.
“Don’t be silly,” he laughed. “I got this.”
She smiled. “What do you say?”
“I say I need to sleep on it. It’s a big decision,” he said.
“Alright, well I’ll give you a few more things to consider: I will have my attorney draw up contracts that will free you from any financial obligation. I don’t want your money. I just want a baby.”
“Well, that’s thoughtful of you.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
They both stood up to leave and he dropped a ten on the table and headed to the bar to pay the cashier. The car ride back to Phoenicia was slightly odd. It felt somewhat awkward to Nora but kind of titillating for him. He kept feeling like if he peeled back a few layers of objections, there’d be sex underneath all of it. They pulled up to the house in Phoenicia and she leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Please consider my offer. This is not something I’m taking very lightly. It took a lot for me to ask you.”
“I will,” he said.
She took one last, long look at him and opened the car door. The next day, she borrowed her dad’s Camry and took a ride to the Ashokan Reservoir and looked out over the side. Cotton clouds covered a rich blue tinted sky and, as her focus zoned toward the earth, she noticed how majestic the mountains seemed to appear. She sat upon the guard rail that separated the road from the hill leading to the water and began to meditate.
She couldn’t help feeling amazed at how this body of water supplied all of Manhattan with clean, beautiful water and how so many little apartments that she had rented in this area had awful, rotten egg smelling water. She went along thinking in this direction until she couldn’t take waiting for an answer anymore and texted her long lost friend, the poet:
“Did you give my request any more consideration?”
Every two minutes or so she checked for an answer, but none came. She got back into the Camry and began to drive toward Route 28. She felt a vibration in her pocket.
“Can I call you?”
She tapped the microphone button in order to continue driving while she dictated her response, but the microphone function kept spinning around and around. She growled softly in frustration and found a safe place on the shoulder to pull over.
“Yes, please do.”
She waited for the traffic to go by and then pulled back out onto 28. The phone rang.
“Hey you!”
“Hey, Nora.”
“So?”
“Well, you know how much I care about you…”
Wherever this was going, she thought, it wasn’t going to be pleasant. He continued:
“I just bristle at the thought of the whole artificial insemination thing. It’s so unnatural and clinical.”
There was silence on the line.
“Nora?”
“Yes,” she said. “Is this your fancy way of saying that you’re only going to help me if I fuck you?”
“God, you make it sound so underhanded.”
“I’m just trying to clear away all of the decorative bullshit and get to the heart of what we’re talking about.”
“Well, do you really blame me for feeling the way I do?”
“I don’t blame you. I’m just annoyed because you’re trying to complicate things with all this other emotional stuff and I was trying really hard to avoid all of that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You broke up a little. What did you say?”
“I said that I don’t blame you–forget it. Can I call you later when I get home?”
“Sure.”
They hung up and he laid in his bed, which was neatly made up, and daydreamed about their bodies touching. He didn’t give much thought to the coercive aspect of his counteroffer. What he did give quite a bit of thought to was the reality that she did not, in fact, call him when she got home. Nor did she answer his text. Or even the second one he sent. Slowly, but surely, he was transforming into the physical embodiment of “uh oh.”
Monday came and went. On Tuesday, he wrote her a poem on a piece of fancy stationery he bought from Amazon during some frivolous spending whim he experienced last March. When it showed up at Nora’s parent’s house later that week, Nora’s mother had taken the time to drive up to Hudson and hand deliver it. Nora threw it unceremoniously on the kitchen counter and took her mom to lunch at an esoteric cafe on Columbia Street. Later that evening, she opened the envelope:
Your smile is roasted chestnuts in the cold near Herald Square
A soft and fuzzy sweater in the snowy Christmas air
The bells from St. Patrick’s from so many blocks away
How the distance velvets the tones as you walk along Broadway
Your smile is the rain sliding windows early June
A soft child catnap on a lazy afternoon
Like an April dew dawn bunny hopping green grass meadow
Springtime valley breeze—an unexpected hello
From a long missed lover on bright crisp day
Your smile is everything I wish that I could say
She read it a second time and then folded it up and put it back in the envelope. She thought about how nice it was to know he was sweating her, but she wanted to draw it out a little bit more. She had every intention of offering him relief, but not one moment before she jettisoned him into a world of despair. She figured it was the least she could do.Besides, there were other things to consider. Such as biology.
Ten days later, after he had gotten home from work and began to prepare dinner, there was an unexpected knock on the door. It was Nora. His immediate reaction was one of weightlessness, the way one might feel if they’d been made to carry around a thirty pound boulder for three weeks and finally put it down. He looked lovingly at her face and thought to himself that people adapt pretty well to misery when that’s what they’re dealt. Sometimes they adapt so well, they only realize how intense the misery becomes when they are relieved of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She hugged him.
“That was so wrong of me,” he continued.
“Shhhhhh…” she responded.
She led him by the hand into the living room, laid upon the couch and pulled him on top of her.
“I need to take a shower,” he whispered.
“No, you don’t,” she whispered back.
The next morning, they laid in bed together watching “Bewitched” and laughing. Sometime around midnight, when he realized that she was sleeping over, he called the sick line at his company and put in for some paid time off. There was no way that he was going to go to work and leave Nora in his bed. Talk about industrial accidents. That would’ve been a forgone conclusion.
“Want to take a shower together?” he joked.
“No way. I hate that. That’s one of those things you grow up and can’t wait to do and then realize quickly that it is nothing like the fantasy. The guy is in your way, you're getting soap in your eyes, the water splashes off their collarbone and only makes contact with you long after it becomes cold. It’s a miserable experience. Just take a shower first and then I will take one after.”
“You take one first. I want you to have the first shot at the hot water.”
“How chivalrous,” she joked
They made love again. Both times as he approached climax, she asked him to stay inside of her. It may have been the realization of a fantasy for him, but it was all business for her.
Later that afternoon, when they made love a third time, something inside of her told her that that one did the trick. She knew in some intuitive way that she was undoubtedly pregnant and when she peed on the stick the next week, she learned she was right. The magic double red line. Mission acomplie!
As summer began to draw to a close, Nora texted him that she was going to be moving to Ohio for the next year to continue working on her PhD in English Traditions and Journalism. He hinted that he’d love to fly out and visit her at Kent State, but she discouraged him as politely as she could. Something about needing to keep her mind firmly devoted to her studies.
As autumn and winter came and went, thoughts of Nora began to fade from his consciousness. Every so often, he wondered if she was pregnant and, if so, when the baby might be arriving, if it was a boy or a girl and if she’d be willing to let him meet them.
April, holding firmly to its reputation of being the cruelest month, found him at his mailbox repeating the phrase, “what the fuck?” like a mantra as he walked into his house with a series of envelopes from the Silver, Silver and Androccio law firm. One was a standard Paternity Petition, also known as a “FORM 4-5/5-1-d,” the other was a “FORM 5-1-A,” a standard summons to appear in Family Court.
He never stopped thinking about this chapter in his life as the time he was duped by a designing woman, but the rest of the world saw it as something different.
Something entirely different.