Dear Digby by Carol Muske-Dukes Page B

kept Troy for a while, then sent him winging to Terence, who paid for expensive boarding schools. Terence also paid for Troy’s occasional holiday visits to fun-filled Afrikanerland—this Christmas, for example. Terence’s role in all this was to feel guilty a lot and Ex’s was to take her alimony checks and contribute absolutely zip to Troy’s upbringing but the occasional poison-pen letter disguised as friendly chat, telling Terence what a rotten father he was.
    “That,” I said, “was different.”
    He turned around to look at me. “Why?”
    I didn’t answer. I got up very slowly. I put the tulip glass down on a wee table. I felt nauseated. Could it be morning sickness already? Over in the corner stood a squat Christmas tree that I’d hauled in and hung with liquidy gold ornaments. Beneath its stunted boughs were stacked the gold-wrapped presents for Terence. The brightness hurt my eyes.
    I stood beside him at the window, watching the whole universe come apart, shake loose into a billion crystals.
    “Because,” I said, “you know that line in Tiresias when the gods ask him about sexual pleasure and he says that a woman’s orgasmic experience outdoes a man’s ten thousand by ten thousand?”
    “Yeah?” He looked cockily, expectantly at me.
    “Well,” I said, “my experience with you has never been like that. What I feel with you is what a homing pigeon must feel, rowing through the air, way up, some metal on its leg: I just have to make it home to you.”
    He turned away. I heard him behind me fiddling with the champagne, pulling the bottle out of the ice and pouring himself another glass.
    When he stood next to me again, he seemed almost cheerful. He put his arm around me; he kissed my neck.
    “You know what you got to do, Will.”
    I watched the lights of the bridge stuttering on and off in the snow. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no stranger to abortion. And I worked at SIS, for God’s sake, I supported the politics of choice. But somehow this was different. “Why?” he’d asked, and finally I just couldn’t say. Somebody wanted to be born, I wanted to say. But that was a little too Yeatsian. His false cheer only made me more determined.
    “I love you,” he added, an afterthought. I thought of the skewed etiquette of the late twentieth century. All those “supportive” boyfriends and husbands and lovers standing around lamely in the track-lit lounges of the posh little outpatient clinics around Manhattan, reading the Op Ed page two hundred times. Trying not to sound possessive, just the right note of concern: “How’s she doing, nurse?”
    But it wasn’t that either. This is Lily, I thought suddenly. Lily. My daughter.
    He began to talk very animatedly about his career, and I tried to listen with sympathy. Yes, he’d finally reached the point he’d longed for, he was getting close … he was getting Broadway and film and television offers. Some leading-man parts. All his life he’d fought for this. He was convincing; my heart did go out to him. I could see him at twenty, a backstage carpenter, the young struggling thespian. The guy who comes and goes in Henry IV or Richard II and announces things: gardener, keep, messenger, groom.
    Servant: “My Lord, your son was gone before I came.”
    What did he want with another kid? A set builder, supporting a family when other guys were spilling beer on each other at frat parties. I could see that imprisoned, frustrated youth. The thing was, he was also the person standing in front of me, my lover, fifteen years later, a successful actor. And all those nights I’d reached for the diaphragm and he’d pulled my hand back.
    “Listen, Terence,” I interrupted. “I love you too. I’m not going to be a millstone around your neck. I’m sorry about your former life and your shitty ex-wife. I’m not going to be a millstone around your neck, but I’m going to have this kid. On my own, if I have to.”
    I went into the bedroom and sat on the