The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family Read Online Free

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    â€œSo how did it end? How did you get rid of this schmuck?” Paul was insistent once our hilarity had ebbed. After about a week, Stuart couldn’t come over one night. Maybe he had to do some studying. Maybe he was tired. His pecker was petered! Paul roared. We giggled wildly.
    We told him something about the end of Stuart, nothing about the beginning of us. I studied Monique’s exquisite, expressive, unpretty face across the table. Her mouth was no longer sensuous because it was held in place by tension, one lip stacked upon the other. In conversation, I used to prick her and console her just to see the passage of pain to pleasure on her mouth. We ushered at the campus symphony performances. She wasn’t ashamed the night I cried openly, and after awhile she set her flashlight on the floor and took my hand. It wasn’t the music that moved me, nor the grandness—coattails, chandeliers, clapping—it was the man who turned pages for the pianist, the two together. One leaning into sound, his shoulders rising with the surge till it was all he breathed, and the other uncurling the paper so tenderly, with such apprehension of disturbance and such care for continuance. We made love like that, she and I.
    I suspect Paul would still consider such emotions an indulgence. And maybe Monique lives a life too tired for them, now that she too is a full doctor. We failed finally at Christmas cards. Emotional triage. They talked about it at the table. For the parents of the malformed children who were under her charge in the hospital, she felt a vigilant pain, but the rest—colleagues, neighbors, relatives—were relegated to being abstract case histories, medical or social problems when she could get to them.
    I couldn’t do what she was doing unless emergency required that kind of courage from me. Wave upon wave of the cursed, the incurable, the maimed, the frightened, the scarred, the panicked, the undeserving. Monique had gone under, stolid as a mountain beneath the surface of the sea. All that evening, I sent signals like a sonar and when a reverberation came back to me felt relieved. But she was able to smile because I remembered her smiling. The evening together laughing was possible as a part of her past, not her future.
    I didn’t like Paul’s stupid flirting. He admired the moon and stars airbrushed onto my sweatshirt. He consulted with Monique about the planet. “Is it Jupiter or is it Venus?” She walked past with an armload of dishes. “Ah, there’s Venus,” he said, flipping up my sweatshirt. He seemed pleased that I stared hard into his eyes, haughty and assessing. I still wanted to like him. If he would have touched Monique, just once, I could have laughed and thrown an arm around him, as though we also had a nostalgia to renew between us. Monique pretended to take no notice of this flirting, or in fact didn’t. For a moment, I pitied him. He already lived in the kitchen of her life. If he slipped out the back door one night, she would bake bread not to notice. Each day he tried leaving a little more in hopes that she would notice.
    After dinner, he held Jessica in his arms and when milk foam burbled from her mouth, he tipped her back like a glass of beer he could prevent from overflowing. “Here,” I said, “she’s got to get it out,” taking her and mopping madly at the curds on his shoulder with a cloth diaper. Monique was laughing and so was I, but Paul’s face had closed on a downward glance. She called to him as he went into the other room. “It was funny, you know, don’t take it that way.” He called back from the kitchen. “I’m making a drink, anyone else?” Thereafter, he excluded himself from our conversation. His laughter was confined to wryness and sarcasm. This open-palmed pleasure was the foolishness of girls, and he’d have none of it. The nostalgic roommate would be gone soon