10 by Ben Lerner

Author:Ben Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711344
Publisher: Faber & Faber

Our world

The world to come

I wandered on Henry Street through Brooklyn Heights. Alex and I were meeting for a drink at a place just across Atlantic, although Alex wasn’t drinking. She had started a new job for which she was radically overqualified and underpaid; she was basically tutoring kids at an after-school program in Carroll Gardens, but she felt it would be best to apply for other jobs while employed and she wanted the structure and welcomed whatever money. I ordered something with bourbon and mint and a sparkling water for Alex and took our drinks to one of the wooden booths. The carefully selected ephemera on the walls dated from before the Civil War; there seemed to be a competition among hip bars to see who could travel back in time the furthest. We sipped our drinks under Edison bulb sconces.

“Are we going to talk about your very clumsy effort to seduce me?” I’d written Alex an e-mail about my semen analysis but we hadn’t really talked about my trying to do it all. She wanted us to go in and talk to the fertility specialist in detail about the results.

“I was amazed you could resist my charms—I even recited poetry.”

“I’m serious.”

“It was stupid and I’m sorry. I was, as you know, very drunk.”

“That was the problem. That’s what you should be sorry for.”

“Okay. But why?”

“Because if we’re going to try to make a baby, however we try to make one, I don’t want it to be one of the things you get to deny you wanted or deny ever happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“‘It was the only kind of first date he could bring himself to go on, the kind you could deny after the fact had been a date at all.’”

“That’s fiction and we’re not talking about a first date.”

“What about the part about smoothing my hair in the cab? The part that’s based on the night of the storm. The alcohol is a way of hedging. So that whatever happens only kind of happened.” I made myself not take a drink.

“Okay, but your whole plan only kind of involves me—my level of involvement to be determined, whether I’m a donor or a father. You’re asking me to be a flickering presence. I give reproductive cells and then the rest we figure out as we go along.”

“Yes, but that’s because it’s up to you. As I’ve said since the beginning, if you want to fully coparent, whatever that would mean, I would do that with you. I wouldn’t have asked you otherwise. I would prefer to do that with you, in fact. If you want to try to have sex as part of a reproduction strategy”—I involuntarily raised my eyebrows at the phrase “reproduction strategy”—“or whatever you want to call it, I’m open to that, too. We’d have to talk more about it. You would have to stop sleeping with Alena, at least during that time. That would be too strange.”

I drained my glass. “What, we’d be a couple? Are you proposing?”

“No.

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