it’s different. In the U.S., you don’t register on their systems unless you threaten a lawsuit. That’s how they operate. Human reasonableness is just seen as an opening to make more money. So I said to Chris, Do you recall us ever getting a letter about a frozen sperm sample? She’s like, I don’t know, all those letters look the same. I’m like, Wait a minute, this is important, I want you to think hard. She’s like, I can’t do this, I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball. I’m like, What ball? This is the ball. I mean, think about it. My genes are in the hands of strangers. Never mind the nine hundred bucks. We’re talking about my seed. For all I know, I could have children out there in the world right now. Offspring. It’s far from impossible, right? Mistakes happen all the time. And foul play. People think that foul play doesn’t really exist. They’re wrong. Foul play is a very real thing, especially when there’s money to be made. Believe me, I know.”
Nobody has made a start on the cake or the assorted berries. I say to Jack Bail, “You’re right to be concerned. You have to take care of this.”
“That’s what I did, Doc. Cut a long story short, I caved on the nine hundred bucks and I went to the clinic personally with the documentation. I made sure to get a receipt.”
“That was smart,” Chris says.
Jack Bail says, “I had no option: I got a letter from a debt collection agency. I had to cave. What was I going to do, risk my credit over nine hundred bucks? No, I had to cave. And I don’t even know if they’ve actually disposed of the semen. I’ve got to assume they have. But I’ll never know for sure, will I?”
Jack Bail spends the night on our sofa. In the morning, when Chris and I go down, there is a thank-you note.
Then a year passes and with it a tax season, and we are walking on the beach, and I stop and I say to Chris, “You know what? We haven’t heard from Jack Bail.”
Our beach is a sand and shingle beach. The sand is a common blend of quartz and feldspar. The sand emerges from the ocean, so to speak, and continues inland until quite suddenly shingle replaces it. The shingle, or gravel, consists at first of pebbles, next of a mixture of pebbles and cobbles, and finally almost only of cobbles. This progressive distribution of the beach stones, apparently methodical, is in fact natural: a storm’s waves will force rocks small and large landward, but retreating waves have less power and will move only smaller rocks seaward. The result is a graduated stranding of the rocks, which amass in a succession of steep slopes and berms. Our beach walk begins by scrambling down one berm and then a second, and I always take care to hold Chris’s hand as we go down. Countless large spiders somehow make a life among the cobbles, and my job is to help Chris to put them out of her mind. Out of my mind, too. There are no leg-bugs out here. Leg-bugs are deer ticks. Every evening from May through November, Chris and I must examine each other for ticks. Sometimes we find one.
From the sand beach, the brown drumlin cliffs are exposed to our contemplation. The drumlins have been here since the Wisconsin glaciation. Their crosscut formation is the result of erosion by the ocean and the wind and the rain, a battering that is ongoing, I can testify after two winters here. As the hills retreat, they leave behind rock fragments that will, in due course, form part of the beach. This sort of fact is difficult for me to really understand; it must be said that much of my newly acquired geological knowledge is basically vocabularistic. I can’t recognize feldspar, for example, or a granitic boulder. The Wisconsin glaciation isn’t something I’m really on top of.
Chris and I scan the water, instinctively, I suppose. Sometimes we’ll see a seal’s head. It disappears for a while, then surfaces once more. They have large, cheerful, dog-like heads, these seals. It would feel good to see our warm-blooded kin out there today: this is one of those strolls when the up-close ocean daunts me more than a little, and as we skirt dainty rushes of water, I sense myself situated at the edge of an infinite and relentless eraser. I’m not sure that there’s much to be done about this: awe, dread, wonder, and feelings of asymmetry come with the terrain. There must be something appealing about it, or we’d be elsewhere. Where, though? It’s places that are going places. This part of Nova Scotia, the paleogeographers tell us, was once attached to Morocco.
“I hope he’s OK,” I say to Chris.
“I imagine he is,” she says. She says, “You could always call him.”
Yes, I could call him. But where would it end? I have taught, I once calculated, almost two thousand children.
No seal today. We keep walking. Chris says, “The Last Fez.”
I say, “About the Constantinople mission? We were sworn to silence about that.”
Chris says, “Remember that night we crossed the Bosporus? With that surly boatman?”
“Ali the boatman?” I say. “How could I forget?”
It had never occurred to Breda Morrissey that things might go seriously wrong between herself and her son, Patrick. But back in the fall he had declared her “persona non grata”—his actual expression—and pronounced that she was no longer permitted to have contact with her grandson, Joshua, on the grounds that she would be “an evil influence.” It was a crazy, almost unbelievable turn of events, and all about such a strange matter—a scrap of skin.
Patrick disputed this. “This is not about skin, Mom,” he said during the first session of the mother-son therapy they jointly underwent in New York. “Can’t you see? That’s not what this is about.”
Breda turned to the therapist, Dr. Goldstein—Dan, her son called him—for help. But Dr. Goldstein, whose dramatic beard and small pointy nose gave him, Breda thought, the look of a TV judge, was regarding her so severely that Breda was silenced.
Breda’s reliving of this moment, as she sat in a window seat on the flight back to California, was interrupted by a nudge—a barge, almost—from her neighbor. This person was an obese woman of Breda’s own age, mid-fifties, who from moment one had been tangling and fidgeting with carry-on luggage and safety instruction documents and in-flight entertainment gadgets. “Sorry,” the woman breathed, continuing her struggle with the wires of her earphones. At the woman’s other elbow, in the aisle seat, sat a littler person in a red sweater, a man. When drinks were served, the fat woman, as Breda thought of her, wordlessly helped herself to the little man’s mini-pretzels packet. Breda understood with revulsion that they were a couple.
She looked out the window. An immense cloud floor covered the bottom of the void. Brilliant stacks of white vapor rose here and there, and pink haze lay beneath the blue upper atmosphere. It was a glorious, otherworldly spectacle of the kind that Breda, when she was a girl, would have found suggestive of winged horses and unknown realms; but what it came down to, when you grew up and looked through it all, Breda thought, was rain, rain falling on the fields and the forests and the houses and the people.
Breda kept gazing out. Something about the bumpy spread of cloud reminded her of cottage cheese, which in turn reminded her: Patrick had developed an interest in, as he put it, the world of cheese. During her stay, her son had each evening approached the dinner table with a cheeseboard, making bugling and fanfare noises. “Try this one, Mom,” he said, pointing to one of the half-eaten, slightly stinking varieties, and Breda, who wondered whether these foodstuffs were legal, took a mouthful. “Nice,” she said, refraining from any other comment—for example, that Patrick was obviously gaining weight as a result of his new hobby—for fear of provoking another outburst on his part. (And of course his wife, Judith, would no doubt be touchy, too. Everybody was touchy these days.) One night, Patrick announced that he and Judith and baby Joshua were taking a cheesing trip to Ireland. The plan was to go to the Kinsale International Gourmet Festival and then to drive from farmhouse to farmhouse, tasting semisoft rind-washed cheeses. “I’m not interested in hard cheeses,” her son said