Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett Page A

son. That’s what he said to me. Of course you don’t, son. That was all Ariosto got from the good cardinal. Where did you find so many stories, Lodovico?
    Freud believed we never give up anything but only exchange one thing for another.
    What made you think of that?
    I’m not sure. I was sitting here, looking at her belly all big like that, and thinking one day one of us will be talking to our son and the other of us will be gone.
    You mean dead.
    I mean dead.
    That’s true.
    And even then, unless I want to live in a fantasy, and I’m not saying I don’t, I’ll have to give you up. Or you’ll have to give me up. But I can’t imagine exchanging you for anything.
    A younger woman?
    No.
    You realize that Freud was full of shit.
    You don’t have penis envy?
    Not in the least. And why do you think this baby is a boy?
    Let’s just say it is a boy. Do we have to name him?
    What do you mean, do we have to name him?
    Do we have to give him a name? Is there some law requiring that we give him a name? Is there a law that any of us have to have names? What will happen? Will the government come and give him a name?
    Why would you do that to a child?
    Do what? Save him the ridicule that names cause? If you name him Buck, kids will call him Fuck. If you name him Richard, they’ll call him Dickyard. If you name him Louis, they’ll call him Lois. You can’t mess up ———. I want to think that a name is like a poem. It is not like a practical message that can be considered functional only if we can infer its intended meaning. A name says something, but no one need know whether what is inferred is what was meant. Gone are the days of Cartwrights and Masons and Smiths.
    You’ve lost your mind.
    And with it, my name.
    And I’m supposed to believe you had this conversation with Mom.
    Believe what you like. Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me. You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers. Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.
    She was claiming to be my daughter and I could not refute her by simply saying I was not her father. Perhaps if she had been Chinese, but she was, in fact, racially ambiguous, as so many of us are. For all I know she was Chinese. I know only that I am not Chinese.
    The morning came with a silent treatment that I did not believe was deserved. More than that, I did not believe a word of the silent treatment. Sylvia stood in the kitchen preparing breakfast, not an odd thing for anyone else, but the woman had never prepared a breakfast in our thirteen years together. Bacon was releasing its grease into several layers of paper towel and eggs were scrambling in the skillet.
    I’ve done nothing wrong, I said.
    Of course you haven’t.
    Well, what if she is my daughter?
    The more the merrier.
    No, really, what if she is my daughter?
    Then you will be Papa and I will be Sylvia and she will be your child and my stepchild and when she has babies you will be a grandpa and I will be Sylvia. I began to understand some of Sylvia’s anxiety. I don’t mean to be silent. I simply do not know what to say. Do you want her to be your daughter?
    She’s not my daughter.
    That was not my question.
    No, I don’t want her to be my daughter.
    And if she is, how will you feel about having said that?
    Are you trying to drive me mad? I’ll feel like shit for having thought it, that’s how I feel. But it is how I feel. A person feels what a person feels.
    She favors you slightly.
    You go from not talking to this?
    I’m not attacking you.
    I know.
    If Meg