Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

A kid would like this
, I thought. All the
different colors, the busy memory game of matching each
flag to its country. 
There’s Finland, and there’s New
Zealand
. The one-eyed smile of Mauritania. And then I
realized it wasn’t 
a
kid, but 
our
kid, mine and Amy’s, who
would like this. Our kid, sprawled on the floor with an old
encyclopedia, just like I’d done, but our kid wouldn’t be
alone, I’d be sprawled next to him. Aiding him in his
budding vexillology, which sounds less like a study of flags
than a study in annoyance, which would have suited my
father’s attitude toward me. But not mine toward my son’s. I
pictured Amy joining us on the floor, flat on her stomach, her
feet kicked up in the air, pointing out Palau, the yellow dot
just left of center on the crisp blue background, which I was
sure would be her favorite.
From then on, the boy was real (and sometimes a girl,
but mostly a boy). He was inevitable. I suffered from regular,

---

insistent paternal aches. Months after the wedding, I had a
strange moment in front of the medicine cabinet, floss
between my teeth, when I thought: 
She wants kids, right? I
should ask. Of course I should ask
. When I posed the
question – roundabout, vague – she said, 
Of course, of
course, someday
, but every morning she still perched in
front of the sink and swallowed her pill. For three years she
did this every morning, while I fluttered near the topic but
failed to actually say the words: 
I want us to have a baby
.
After the layoffs, it seemed like it might happen.
Suddenly, there was an uncontestable space in our lives,
and one day over breakfast, Amy looked up from her toast
and said, 
I’m off the pill
. Just like that. She was off the pill
three months, and nothing happened, and not long after the
move to Missouri, she made an appointment for us to start
the medical intervention. Once Amy started a project, she
didn’t like to dilly-dally: ‘We’ll tell them we’ve been trying a
year,’ she said. Foolishly I agreed – we were barely ever
touching each other by then, but we still thought a kid made
sense. Sure.
‘You’ll have to do your part too, you know,’ she said on
the drive to St. Louis. ‘You’ll have to give semen.’
‘I know. Why do you say it like that?’
‘I just figured you’d be too proud. Self-conscious and
proud.’
I was a rather nasty cocktail of both those traits, but at
the fertility center, I dutifully entered the strange small room
dedicated to self-abuse: a place where hundreds of men
had entered for no other purpose than to crank the shank,
clean the rifle, jerk the gherkin, make the bald man cry,
pound the flounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wiggle the

---

walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.
(I sometimes use humor as self-defense.)
The room contained a vinyl-covered armchair, a TV,
and a table that held a grab bag of porn and a box of
tissues. The porn was early ’90s, judging from the women’s
hair (yes: top and bottom), and the action was midcore.
(Another good essay: Who selects the porn for fertility
centers? Who judges what will get men off yet not be too
degrading to all the women outside the cum-room, the
nurses and doctors and hopeful, hormone addled wives?)
I visited the room on three separate occasions – they
like to have a lot of backup – while Amy did nothing. She
was supposed to begin taking pills, but she didn’t, and then
she didn’t some more. She was the one who’d be
pregnant, the one who’d turn over her body to the baby, so I
postponed nudging her for a few months, keeping an eye
on the pill bottle to see if the level went down. Finally, after a
few beers one winter night, I crunched up the steps of our
home, shed my snow-crusted clothes, and curled up next to
her in bed, my face near her shoulder, breathing her in,
warming the tip of my nose on her skin. I whispered the
words –